Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller

Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s mythological matrix 

Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande,
Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499

The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the uninterrupted lifespan of its beliefs. Most Hindu gods and goddesses were already being worshipped in South Asia when the Greeks were building temples to Zeus and Athena, or when Jupiter and Diana ruled ancient Roman hearts. But while the Greek and Roman gods have been long superseded by the Semitic religions, ours live on. Deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Karthik and Durga, and divine epic heroes like Ram and Krishna remain a vivid presence for religious Hindus. Mythology is still the matrix for modern Indian life.

But as a cynical politics digs its claws into people's beliefs, that matrix is turned into a never-ending maelstrom of offense-taking and offense-giving. On Saraswati Puja this February, for instance, right-wing Indian Twitter trended demands for the arrest of a Dalit activist for having insulting the Hindu goddess of learning by referring to her as 'exploited' by Brahma. According to the myth, Lord Brahma, creator of the universe, fell in love with Saraswati after he made her. Philosophical-metaphorical readings (an artist besotted with his own creation), or anthropological ones (the fact that incest figures in most ancient creation myths) stand no chance in belligerent social media battles, where the dominant narrative frame is men avenging women's 'honour'.

Of course, such 'dishonouring' drives both our epics: the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, the stripping of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. But while the plots may turn on women, the male characters receive greater attention. Relationships between them—Krishna and Sudama, Krishna and Arjun, Arjun and Karna, Ram and Lakshman, even Ram and Hanuman—have formed popular models of friendship, fraternal love and loyalty. Most literary retellings, too, have been through the eyes of a male character: Bhima in MT Vasudevan Nair’s famous Malayalam novel Randaamoozham, Karna in Shivaji Sawant's Marathi classic Mrintyunjay, and Yudhishtira, Bhishma and Abhimanyu in Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day (2015).

A female perspective on our epics has only begun to appear in recent decades, mostly in fiction by women. Draupadi got pride of place in Pratibha Ray's award-winning 1993 Oriya novel Yajnaseni and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions. Sita got some play in the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana and Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues. Lesser female characters are now getting their due in popular English-language fiction: for example, Aditi Banerjee's The Curse of Gandhari, and Kavita Kane's series of books centred on Ahalya, Surpanakha, Sita's sister and Karna's wife.

Kaajal Oza Vaidya's hugely popular novel Krishnayan, which has sold over 200,000 copies in Gujarati since its publication in 2006, is an important addition to this literature, using the figure of Krishna to explore aspects of the man-woman relationship.

Recently translated into English by Subha Pande, Vaidya's narrative starts where the usual telling of Krishna's life stops. What is traditionally called Krishna Leela, literally Krishna's play, is a set of stories about the birth, childhood and adolescence of the Yadava chieftain, with such set themes as the naughty baby Krishna stealing butter from the milkmaids of Gokul, or his youthful flute-playing assignations with Radha.

Krishnayan, by contrast, opens with Krishna awaiting death, reminiscing about his life. And in Vaidya's unusually frank telling, what emerges as significant as he waits for Gandhari's curse to take effect are his bonds with women. There are four primary ones: Rukmini, his intelligent, stately senior queen, his consort in the administration of Dwarka; Satyabhama, his younger queen, childish but captivating; Draupadi, loyal wife to the five Pandava brothers, but still carrying a special attachment to Krishna—and Radha, the childhood sweetheart he hasn't seen in decades, now not just a married woman and a mother, but a mother-in-law.

Vaidya's narrative can feel laboured, and her dialogue borders on florid, at least in Pande's translation. Here, for instance, is Rukmini, “The fire raging in my heart is trying to tell me that he is waiting to answer all my questions.” And here is Arjun on the eve of the war: “I have a lot to say and yet nothing to say. I am dumbfounded. I am hit by thousands of thoughts at times and sometimes, I just can't think. I am going through a strange period of indecision.”

But Krishnayan's fictional premise is as layered as any present-day polyamorous situation, and Vaidya has all the depth of the Mahabharata behind her as she moves deftly across characters and revisits familiar dramatic situations: the ethics of game of dice, or how the five Pandavas deal with their shared connection to Draupadi. She explores each of Krishna's loves for what makes it unique – intellectual partnership, sexual allure, emotional understanding, a shared history – and goes refreshingly beyond him, to these women's relationships with each other.

But for all the empathy with which she writes about women, Vaidya remains staunchly invested in an essential separation of the genders. The Krishna of Krishnayan is an adept lover, loving husband and devoted friend—but he remains a man. In some of Vaidya's most emotional scenes, Krishna claims limitations in gendered terms, applauding women for their greater capacity for selflessness. “While I have only been contemplating seeking moksha and preparing myself for it, these two dearly loved women [Draupadi and Rukmini] have... come forward to liberate me from the cycle of life. Only women can do this. Only a woman can control heart and mind and fulfil her moral duties... And only she has the magnanimity to accept a co-wife and give true meaning to the word life-partner, Krishna thought...”.

It probably helps that Vaidya's Krishna isn't a god in the way we usually understand gods. He may know what is predestined—the Mahabharata war, the end of the Yadava race, or his own death—but he is powerless in the face of it. Rather than an uber-manipulator who's playing everyone else, this is a Krishna almost surprised to find that he, too, is caught in in a web of expectations and desires. “Why is everyone surrendering their selves to me? Unacceptance would be immoral, but where would I take them with me even if I accept? I will have to break these shackles of attachment.”

Full of intense exchanges on desire and ownership, mind and body, attachment and the atma, Krishnayan is a sort of manual for letting go. And if you can deal with its somewhat repetitive melodramatic style, it helps thicken the most famous Indian plot of all. It adds some real women to our mythological matrix.

Published in Mint Lounge, 29 Mar 2021.

A love that breaks class barriers

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unlikely relationship reaches across social boundaries in Rohena Gera's understated romance Sir.

It may seem difficult to recall in the cold light of the present, but cross-class romance once warmed the hearts of Hindi film audiences. The poor boy who won the heart of the rich girl (and the wrath of her family), was a staple of the single-screen era. Even then, the rich hero-poor heroine equation was less frequent -- and for that fantasy to extend to the master-servant relationship was rarer still. Rohena Gera's lovely film Sir, completed in 2018 and released online earlier this month, tries to turn that dream into reality.

Ratna (Tilottama Shome) works as the live-in domestic help for Ashwin (Vivek Gomber), who is due to get married to his girlfriend Sabina. When the wedding – and the relationship – suddenly falls through, the quiet Ashwin finds himself being hectored from all quarters. His overweening mother wants him to reconsider, his father seems to assume he can't handle his part in the family business and his friends want to steer him into dating again. Increasingly isolated, he begins to notice the unobtrusive warmth of Ratna's presence. She comes from a space of experience far removed from Ashwin's upper class Mumbai universe – a poor rural family, a hurried marriage, early widowhood with its attendant social and economic fallout -- but her halting words are both genuine and wise. The gulf between them is huge, but Sir manages to make us believe in the possibility that it might just be bridgeable.

The America-returned Ashwin has never been anything but polite to Ratna. But as his appreciation of her grows, he baulks more and more at the rudeness of those around him. Gera's deft script and direction is aided by the wonderful understated performances she draws from both Shome and Gomber, Shome in particular delivering scenes of great devastation with a quiet wallop – such as when a boutique manager responds to Ratna's entry by yelling for the watchman, or Ashwin's party guest makes a scene over her spilt wine. Gera makes clear that nothing said or done to Ratna is out of the ordinary; it is what the servant-keeping classes in India mete out unthinkingly. From Ashwin's businessman father dissing his construction workers to the neighbour who insults her child's ayah (Geetanjali Kulkarni in a great supporting role) rather than chastise the child, the film throws into relief Indians' constant othering of those less privileged than us. It is upper middle class common sense to think of servants as 'lazy' or 'cheats' or inept, 'morons' who need to be kept in check with low salaries, stark boundaries and harsh punishments. The more we want to exploit the poor, the more it suits us to think of them as less than human.

 

It is against this usual wall of invisibility that Ashwin's gestures – that would be common courtesy if Ratna were not a servant – stand out as excessive. It isn't just in his class that they attract attention, but also in hers. Offering to wait for a servant to finish eating, asking if she needs a ride home -- these are acts so unthinkable on an employer's part that they arouse the mockery and suspicion of other servants. And for Ratna, made vulnerable by both class and gender, they can lead to social extinction.

 

And yet, it is in Ashwin's spontaneous crossing of that wall, his apparently unconscious transcendence of the very boundaries society wishes us to guard, that the possibility of any real relationship lies. Because even as Ratna fears the weight of social censure, she demands the respect of social acknowledgement. “Main ganwaar hoon [I may be a country bumpkin],” she tells Ashwin, “Lekin main aapki rakhail ban ke nahi rahoongi [But I won't live here as your mistress].”

 

In Zoya Akhtar's powerful segment of the 2018 anthology film Lust Stories, another quietly efficient domestic help (Bhumi Pednekar) finds herself taking care of her young male employer (Neil Bhoopalam). The intimacy between them feels far from furtive, and the banter that accompanies such frank, lusty sex holds at least the glimmer of equality. But that distant promise is shattered when Bhoopalam's middle-class parents arrive, with a suitable girl in tow. In front of his parents and prospective in-laws, the good middle-class boy behaves impeccably – which is to say he betrays not the barest hint of his real relationship with the maid.

But perhaps that's the point. When something only exists behind closed doors, is it ever really real?

 

In contrast, it is Ashwin's insistence that he isn't afraid of what people might say that makes his attraction to Ratna so heartwarming. It may seem utopian, but that's why it feels like love.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jan 2021.

A Reel Holiday

My Mirror column:

The grand tradition of the holiday movie, from Eric Rohmer to Luca Guadagnino, spins wisdom out of sun-kissed beach breaks.

There used to be many ways to take a year-end vacation. But with sightseeing, parties and travel all deemed dangerous post-pandemic, more and more people have had to be content with a movie-watching staycation. And when you can't escape dreary city life in reality, there is much pleasure to be derived from movies about other people's holidays.

So my vicarious vacation was centred on the late French director Eric Rohmer, who was a kind of patron saint of the holiday film. As central to the French New Wave as more flamboyant members like Truffaut and Godard, Rohmer was a film critic first. He edited the pioneering journal Cahiers du Cinema for years, before making his feature debut with The Sign of Leo in 1959. By the time of his death at 89, on January 11, 2010, he had over 50 films to his credit. One of cinema's gentlest, most perspicacious commentators on the vagaries of courtship and romance, Rohmer often placed his characters, usually young to middle-aged, and bourgeois, in a classic French summer vacation locale where connections and cross-connections could unfold at leisure. A quiet beachside country house is the setting for several of Rohmer's finest films in this vein: La Collectionneuse (1967), Pauline at the Beach (1983) and The Green Ray (1986), all beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros and all currently streaming on a well-known online platform.

In La Collectionneuse, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) decides to spend a month alone after his girlfriend (Brigitte Bardot's sister Mijanou, to whom Bauchau was married in real life) leaves for London. Arriving at a friend's cottage, he vows to rise early every day, go for a swim, spend his time without any conscious purpose other than to enjoy his leisure. He is intent upon doing nothing, and doing it well.

But his plans of what we would call ‘me-time’ are easily disrupted, primarily by lustful thoughts of the charming younger woman with whom he happens to be sharing the summer house. The more studiously Adrien declares his lack of interest, calling Haydée ugly or ordinary or common, the more apparent it becomes that she's on his mind. In the wonderful tradition of Rohmer romances, our attention is directed as much to what happens as what does not, with Adrien's actions coinciding less and less with the claims of his self-examinatory voice-over. As an article in the French Review put in 1993, “Rohmer's prideful heroes charge into the summer with dreams of lush beauty and luxurious freedoms, only to be chastened by the heat, the boredom, and, above all, the aimlessness and acute self-preoccupation that are the dubious rewards of those who gain as much freedom as they desire.”

It isn't just Rohmer's heroes whose attempted holiday resets only reveal their confused mental states. In Pauline at the Beach Rohmer cast the delicately blonde Ariella Dombasle as the soon-to-be-divorced Marion, who is spending her vacation with her fifteen-year-old niece Pauline. On paper, Marion is the adult, and she does try to think of Pauline's needs -- as she imagines them. But as with Adrien, so with Marion. The more we hear about her romantic hopes for herself and her cousin, the more apparent it is that she has no idea what she's doing. Extricating herself from her mistake of a marriage, she is now so in love with le grand amour that she imagines it with the first man who seems vaguely interested – blissfully blind to the fact that he's only in it for sex with a pretty girl.

There are other echoes between the two films, like the way this form of vacationing throws together people of different backgrounds and ages, allowing for conversations that wouldn't happen in everyday life. And in both, the younger people emerge as the less confused ones. Both Haydee and Pauline, who volunteer their views a lot less than the others in their respective settings, seem much more clear-eyed about who is and who isn't a good match. While Marion throws herself at her pretentious older lover and tries to matchmake Pauline similarly (with Marion's own ex-boyfriend!), Pauline finds herself a more age-appropriate summer fling. Both she and Haydée in La Collectionneuse also emerge as perfectly capable of handling the unwanted attentions of dodgy older men.

Other filmmakers have followed Rohmer in depicting the vacation as a time to establish a new kind of routine, even discipline. In the British indie filmmaker Joanna Hoggs' meditative 2007 debut Unrelated, Anna (Kathryn Worth) joins an old friend's family on their Italian vacation, giving herself a break not just from work but also from a faltering marriage. Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015) has its rockstar heroine (Tilda Swinton) fully silent on her Italian vacation, to help her voice recuperate after an operation. Hoggs' camera lingers tenderly as an often distraught Anna jogs virtuously up and down a local hillock, and teeters on the brink of an affair with her friend's much younger son (Tom Hiddleston). Guadagnino's tone is even less Rohmeresque than Hoggs' melancholia, with his characters going straight for the jugular rather than circling gently around their issues. But there's something that these very different films all share: the realisation that holidays never achieve what we hope they will.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Jan 2021.

The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

The smells of others

My Mirror column:

Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set dramedy Axone traces some of the fault lines that mark the urban Indian melting pot.

Growing up between cultures, I learnt long ago that smell was most people’s strongest, most intimate sense – and thus the one that lent itself most easily to kneejerk reactions, especially with relation to food. Members of my family’s staunchly vegetarian side, North Indian Jains of the not-even-egg variety, have sat me down as a child to tell me how difficult they found it to keep their own food down while having their nostrils assailed by the fried fish smells wafting down from a tenant’s house.

Nicholas Kharkongor’s film Axone, recently released on an online platform, is named for the strong-smelling fermented soya bean paste that forms a necessary ingredient in many traditional northeastern dishes. Often spelled akhuni, axone has a distinctive smell that you can’t ignore – which makes it a useful metaphorical marker of difference. And differences that cannot be ignored make for a strange but potent cocktail of attraction and repulsion.

That mixture of attraction and repulsion appears sharply in the film, in the alternately lascivious and judgemental gaze that Delhi folk turn upon the young northeasterners in their midst – being judged by the women for wearing ‘Western’ clothes and having boyfriends, while being the object of the men’s unsolicited attentions. But that attraction and repulsion also plays out, perhaps unintendedly, in Axone’s own cinematic form. The film plays out the food/smell motif against a tenant-landlord scenario in one of those urban villages in Delhi that thrum with the sounds of many languages, focusing on a group of friends from the Northeast who have to make an akhuni-flavoured pork curry for a last-minute wedding feast. That food-and-wedding narrative, though, feels like a mere sweetener, an attractive hook on which to hang a script full of bitter – abeit necessary – pills. Kharkongor's central concern is the racism, sexual predatoriness and aggression that migrants from the Northeast are forced to suffer in Delhi (and most other Indian cities). But what he does is to take that disturbing narrative and plonk it down in a Delhi-set middle class comedy that has become a Bollywood subgenre from Do Dooni Chaar and Vicky Donor to Queen to Badhaai Ho.

So alongside the central group of friends, we get a fairly detailed glimpse of the landlord's family: the hard-nosed landlady (Dolly Ahluwalia doing a version of her alcohol-swigging Punjabi grandmother from Vicky Donor), her layabout son-in-law (Vinay Pathak) and her overenthusiastic grandson, the curly-haired Shiv (Rohan Joshi). Shiv's multiple machinations and largely well-meaning mistakes form some of the film's warmer bits of comedy, but his father and grandmother's characters feel derivative and ungrounded. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that the homogenous lower-middle-class Punjabi milieu, a staple of so many previous Delhi films, has finally been extended to a whistle-stop tour of the very real admixture of so many Delhi neighbourhoods like Humayunpur, where locals rent out parts of their properties to people from across India and beyond.

Axone gently impresses upon us that everyone judges each other, using community and skin colour and language to make easy categorisations. If the Hindi-speaking landlords claim not to be able to tell northeastern faces apart, or remember their names, then the Nepali girl, too, can't get her head around her African neighbour's name – and the African neighbour, in turn, makes an assumption about her based on her looks. And the whole group of northeastern friends keep their distance from the landlord’s son, whose interest in them is very much a curious fascination with the coolness their clothes, their English-speaking-ness, their music represent for him.

Kharkongor’s real sympathies, though, lie with Chanbi, Upasana, Zorem and Bendang (played by Lin Laishram, Sayani Gupta, Tenzing Dalha and Lanuakum Ao), each of whom is dealing with their own troubles. Even here, however, his script constantly points out how their relationships with each other, and with themselves, are inflected by the politics of identity and belonging. These include some small observations that shape the plot – like the perceived difference between being Nepali and being northeastern, and other observations that don’t quite go the distance – like the fake American accent or the Bollywood lyrics that are needed to get by in a world in which those languages have bigger markets. But whether it be the northeastern man who feels emasculated by racist North Indian violence, or the northeastern woman exhausted by nonstop sexual slurs and harassment, Axone brings home the trauma and injustice of the migrant northeastern experience as perhaps no Hindi film has before.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jun 2020.

Shelf Life: The Hand-Me-Downs

My Shelf Life column for May 2020.

Other people’s clothes can be prickly things, fulfilling neither the wearer’s desire nor the giver’s expectation of gratitude.

In Vinod Kumar Shukla's magnificent 1979 novel Naukar ki Kameez, a low-level desk employee in a government office is forced to do duty at the big boss's home. In his spare, masterful style, Shukla condenses his narrator's class-ridden predicament into a single object: a shirt. The sahib's first servant, we are told, wore ill-fitting clothes, obviously belonging to someone larger than him. So a thick white shirt was stitched for him. But the servant didn't last. His replacement, too, was fired soon. The shirt, like the position, now lies empty, awaiting someone who can fit into it. “Naukar ki kameez ek saancha tha, jisse adarsh naukaron ki pehchaan hoti,” writes Shukla: 'The servant's shirt was a mould, which would help identify the ideal servant'.

In an unsettling episode, Shukla's naive young narrator Santu is tricked into visiting the big boss's home, and physically held down until his own “bush-shirt” has been exchanged for the servant's waiting white kameez. Forced to wear it home, Santu returns the next day in his own clothes. When made to take his boss's wife shopping or conduct other semi-domestic duties, he goes along reluctantly. He doesn't see how else to keep his job. His resistance condenses into not wearing the servant's shirt.

The attempt to preserve one's self while being compelled to wear someone else's clothes is also the theme of the Hyderabadi writer Wajida Tabassum's famous story 'Utran' ('Cast-Offs'), translated by Sayeeda S. Hameed and Sughra Mehdi for Parwaaz, a now-classic volume of Urdu short stories by women. 'Utran' features a servant, too – but Chamki is the epitome of insubordination from the very first scene in which we meet her, as a seven-year-old who wants to exchange dupattas with her much richer playmate and 'become sisters'.
Her mother Anna Bi is wet-nurse to an aristocratic family, and so Chamki receives all of Shahzadi Pasha's innumerable cast-offs. But where Shahzadi's hand-me-downs leave Anna Bi thrilled and grateful, the one-way traffic only makes Chamki angrier: “Ammini! I am prettier than Bi Pasha. Then why doesn't she wear my cast-offs?”

 It is no surprise that the single saffron-coloured outfit that the mistress has tailored for Chamki, though it is of cheaper material than Shahzadi would ever wear, becomes the girl's favourite. Those clothes “elevate her to the heavens”, giving her a heady confidence that leads to the story's denouement.

And yet, there can also be confidence in wearing someone's old clothes. Upendranath Ashk's 1961 Hindi story 'The Ambassador' demonstrates this perfectly. It begins with a man arriving at the narrator's well-appointed bungalow in “a dirty shirt with no buttons, a loose coat full of holes, baggy trousers patched and torn, and boots that seemed worn down by centuries of use.” The houseboy is chasing the stranger away when he stretches out his hand, says “Hello, Bakshi” and advises the narrator, in perfect English, to fire his impolite servant.

By the end of Ashk's tale, the narrator's old roommate – for that is who he is – has eaten a sumptuous meal, wiped his dirty hands on his tattered clothes and demanded a set of clean old ones. As he walks away with them thrown casually over his arm, the narrator is struck that he hasn't even said 'thank you'.

Is this what makes old clothes so fraught? Those who receive them might use them, they might even be glad to have them. But the giver's demand for gratitude, wanting to be thanked for a 'gift' that the receiver knows to be mere surplus: that can cause heartburn.

And yet, clothes are often so powerfully desired that someone else's clothes can also become fetishised, objects of illicit passion. In Saadat Hasan Manto's story 'Kali Shalwar', a prostitute down on her luck tells her new lover that she really wants a new black shalwar for Muharram. When he actually brings her one, Sultana is very happy. It is just like the satin one her friend Anwari recently got made. Then she realises it is the same one.

Published in 1942 in the Lahore-based journal Adab-i-Latif, its frank portrayal of the margins of polite society got it banned for obscenity. But in fact the story displays Manto's characteristic combination of deceptively casual plotting and rare emotional subtlety.

If coveting a black shalwar brings Sultana quiet sorrow, coveting a dead sister's wedding trousseau brings grand gothic tragedy in Henry James' 1868 story 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes'. Two New England sisters find themselves, as the daughters of 19th century gentry apparently often did, vying for the same man. One marries him, but dies soon after giving birth. The second, Rosalind, promptly inveigles herself into the widower's life, becoming the new Mrs. Lloyd. It is interesting that James seems to judge her less for wanting her dead sister's husband than for desiring her locked-away wardrobe. Of course, like a good gothic tale, when Rosalind opens the forbidden trunk, her sister's spirit finds a way to punish her. 

Aspiring for more can seem ungrateful. The sahib of Shukla's novel knew what he was doing: scotching desire. “I would never give my own shirt to the servant,” he tells his head clerk. “The tastes we know, they should never know. If they do, they will be ungrateful.”

Seen through the eyes of those who rule, even old clothes can disrupt status quo.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 21 May 2020.

"You Maid Me Better"

Forgot to put this up earlier: my Shelf Life column for April. (Shelf Life is a monthly column I write for the website 'The Voice of Fashion', on clothes seen through the prism of literature.)

Doris Lessing, who debuted with the great novel The Grass is Singing

As the national COVID-19 lockdown enters its third week, privileged Indians are being forced to acknowledge how many of our comforts are enabled by the labour of those we euphemistically call 'help'. Servants are the invisible glue that keeps the Indian family together, taking up the physical and emotional burdens of domesticity that most middle class men dump so blithely on their wives. But if dependence is one aspect of our unacknowledged relationships with servants, the other is intimacy.

In 1765, British judge Sir William Blackstone listed the master-servant relationship as the first of three “great relations of private life” (the other two were between husband and wife, and parent and child). He saw something many are still loath to admit. The greater the ubiquity of domestic staff, the more the social distance between employers and servants is policed. In her wonderfully readable Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain, Lucy Lethbridge remarks on the separation of social spaces enforced by the British aristocracy, “whose most intimate secrets, paradoxically, had long been shared with the valet or the ladies' maid who undressed and bathed them”.

Clothes have been central to this relationship. For centuries, the personal servant took care of the employer's clothes, laid out their outfits – and often actually dressed them. The servant's role in the master's or mistress's toilette has been at the centre of many literary depictions. One such relationship is between PG Wodehouse's bumbling young aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his valet. Jeeves rules Bertie's wardrobe with an iron hand, perpetually giving away clothes that he thinks inappropriate for a true scion of the upper classes, scotching Bertie's attempts at fashion. Under Jeeves' stiff upper lip lie unutterable depths of emotion: Bertie's one-time decision to grow a moustache creates a rift between him and Jeeves that feels almost lover-like.

That “almost” ripens to fullness in Sarah Waters' marvellous thriller Fingersmith (2002), in which a petty thief sets herself up as ladies' maid to an heiress. The orphaned Sue Trinder is a perfect Dickensian character. Her version of Fagin is called Gentleman, a trickster swell who teaches her the ins and outs of clothes she has never had occasion to wear. Beginning with the delicious double entendres of Gentleman's first lesson (“Are you ready for it now, miss? Do you like it drawn tight?...Oh! Forgive me if I pinch.”), Waters imbues the Victorian lady's wardrobe with frisson. The layers of garments are secret links between mistress and maid: the chemise, camisole, corset, the stays that hold the body close, while the nine-hoop crinoline floats, unwitting, above it all. Sure enough, Sue's pleasure in the keeping of Maud's gowns and silken petticoats blooms slowly into a sensual attachment to the keeping of Maud herself—a secret love that will not be suppressed.

Sue's relationship with Maud's clothes reminded me of the chilling scene in Daphne Du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel Rebecca, when the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers insists on making the book's unnamed young heroine caress the late Rebecca's nightgown, laid out on her bed as if she might walk in any minute. “'Feel it, hold it,' [Mrs. Danvers] said, 'how soft and light it is, isn't it? I haven't washed it since she wore it for the last time... I did everything for her, you know... We tried maid after maid but not one of them suited. “You maid me better than anyone, Danny,” she used to say. “I won't have anyone but you.’”

The fictional Rebecca's inability to find a single maid that “suited” was probably Mrs. Danvers' wishful imagination, but it may have also reflected an upper class predicament that grew more widespread, as the First World War and then the Second altered the social aspirations of the working class in Europe. In the colonies, of course, there was an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour only too grateful to find work in the white man's household. The friction in the early years of empire resulted from attempts to train domestic staff across the vast gulf not just of class, but of cultural knowledge–and racial suspicion. Emma Roberts was likely fairly representative of the colonial memsahib in India when she complained in 1835 that native ayahs did not take the “slightest pains to make themselves acquainted with the mysteries of the European toilette; they dress their ladies all awry, and martyrdom is endured whenever they take a pin in hand: they have no notion of lacing, buttoning, or hook-and-eyeing...”That clueless privileged voice, complaining of the 'uncultured' servant, can still be heard all around us.

But a class of colonial servants was gradually trained, and as Lethbridge points out, the domestic life of the British in India grew to levels of display unmatched in world history. In the more remote outposts, in Africa for instance, English-style formalities could be impossibly tough to keep up. Among the great depictions of such fraught intimacy between black servant and white mistress is in Doris Lessing's stunning debut novel The Grass is Singing (1950). Towards the end, a white visitor is shocked to find the native servant Moses buttoning up his mistress Mary's dress. He attempts to joke about it, telling Mary about an empress of Russia who “thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress in front of them”. Lessing is astute as always, commenting: “It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.”

Anthropologist Raka Ray's fieldwork in Kolkata poses a similar question: how do people reconcile having male servants with a highly sex-segregated society like India's? Male servants walk in and out of bedrooms, are present at intimate moments when other men wouldn't be and handle women's clothes. One elderly lady says to Ray, “A servant isn't really a man; a servant is a servant.”

Among the subtlest fictional portrayals of this space of unsettling intimacy is Manto's short story 'Blouse'. When Shakeela Bibi flings off her vest for the teenaged Momin to take to the shop, he finds himself rubbing it between his fingers. “[I]t was soft as a kitten”, “the smell of her body still resided in it”, and “all this was very pleasing to him,” writes Manto. Shakeela's newly stitched purple satin blouse triggers a dreamscape whose eroticism is not even part of Momin's conscious mind. The deputy saab's wife and daughters remain oblivious, like saabs and memsaabs too often are: “Who could play that much attention to the lives of servants? They covered all of life's journeys on foot, from infancy to old age, and those around them never knew anything of it.”

As our unacknowledged intimates, servants have too long been treated as shock absorbers for our inner lives, our troubles. It is high time we recognise that they have their own.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 13 April 2020.

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

Thappad's single slap shakes the foundations of one marriage, but exposes the imbalances upon which most Indian families are built

Pavail Gulati and Taapsee Pannu play husband and wife in Anubhav Sinha’s thought-provoking film Thappad

Described in a sentence, the premise of Thappad seems rather all or nothing: a man slaps his wife once, and she decides to leave him. “Will a slap decide whether a couple can stay together or not?” was the response from the director of Baaghi 3. The actions of Thappad's heroine Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) look particularly outré in a country where domestic violence is not. Our last National Family Health Survey (2015-16) indicates that 31 per cent of India’s married women experience physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses - and 52 per cent women think it’s all right for a man to hit his wife.


Anubhav Sinha is that rare Indian filmmaker who’s gone from crafting money-spinners to slapping audiences in the face with ugly reflections of ourselves. His recent subjects of choice are all ones that New India would rather keep ‘in the family’ – i.e. things we don't like to talk about until people actually die, and even then the problem isn't us. In Mulk, it was the nationally normalised injustice of treating the Muslim community as guilty until proven innocent. In Article 15, it was the unconscionable continuance of caste hierarchies. In Thappad, Sinha targets the misuse of power often found closest home: gender. The aimed-for confrontation with the self here takes place within a two-person context: a marriage. But Sinha and his co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo display a keen awareness that in this country even more than others, heterosexual domestic partnerships are part of an intricate web of familial, social and professional relationships. And that web is suspended in a matrix that’s invariably patriarchal.

With that in mind, let me re-describe the premise of Thappad. Confronted with a professional crisis while hosting a private party at his home, Vikram (Pavail Gulati) loses his temper at his wife Amrita and slaps her, in front of the assembled guests: his bosses as well as the couple’s family, friends and neighbours. Amrita, an educated upper middle class woman who has chosen not to pursue a career in favour of being a devoted wife to Vikram, finds herself unable to forget, forgive, ‘move on’. It doesn’t help that Vikram is entirely unable to see Amrita’s shock and humiliation – and unable to comprehend what he does see. It definitely doesn’t help that he assumes his wife’s forgiveness, even as he explains instead of apologising. “Saara gussa tum hi pe nikal gaya [All the anger tumbled out onto you],” is all he can manage before turning the marital conversation back to his only real preoccupation: himself.

The film is largely well cast and acted, with adeptly-written scenes that prevent characters from seeming like ideological messengers, even when delivering that usually bludgeoning thing: a climactic monologue. There are clever little touches, like Vikram complaining unendingly about feeling hard done by at work - “Vahan rehna hi nahi jahan value nahi hai [Who wants to stay on where you have no value?]” - while remaining tone-deaf to Amrita’s silences. What emerges, with empathy and without drama, is the patriarchal context that normalises the ‘working’ husband’s dependence on the ‘non-working’ wife - while invisibilising her labour, both physical and emotional. The wife is a full-time companion, hostess and cheerleader; manager of their upper middle class household, primary caregiver to him and his ageing mother and any potential children. But her husband doesn’t notice when her foot is hurt – so of course he doesn’t notice when her heart is.

Demanding empathy, support and sacrifice from their female partners while giving none back is simply the norm for men, and women have previously had no choice but to live with it. “Thoda bardaasht karna seekhna chahiye auraton ko,” says Amrita’s mother-in-law, not unkindly. “Aap khush hain bardaasht kar ke?” is Amrita’s counter-question. “Mere bachche khush hain,” the older woman replies.

Subjugating personal desires to the ‘larger’ cause of “family” is something women learn subliminally, becoming agents of our own submission. It is this acceptance that Thappad pushes back against: the notion that women should be content to derive satisfaction from satisfying others, not set out to find their own. “We know how to keep our families together,” says Vikram. “Hamare yahan ladkiyan chhoti chhoti baaton pe nahi jaati ghar chhod ke.” The totemic power of “ghar” is also the binding agent in the film's other relationships. Amrita's father (a superb Kumud Mishra) seems the gentle, supportive dad every girl needs, and a considerate husband. But the film makes him – and therefore us – come to see that his wife never had the freedom he did. She may not have been barred from pursuing her musical talents, as Amrita isn’t from dancing, but the household always took precedence over self-development. In other marriages, coupledom takes precedence over self-respect.

Divorce remains stigmatised in India (think Mohan Bhagwat), and so Amrita’s unshakeable resolve, however quiet, has raised hackles. As the film lets one of its own characters point out, if all women who’ve been slapped once by their husbands started leaving their marriages, the majority of Indian families would not be ‘together’. But like a before-her-time Preity Zinta insisting on being able to respect her man in Kya Kehna, Amrita isn’t most women. And Thappad is powerful because it isn’t programmatic. It doesn’t lay down the law about what you as a woman should do. It only lays out the possibilities for what you could.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

With clipped wings

My Mirror column:

A damaged young woman discovers her strengths in the recent Malayalam film Uyare (Rise).

The new Malayalam film Uyare begins at a college fest somewhere in Kerala. Four or five young women in matching long skirts and kurtis are dancing on stage with unbridled enthusiasm. One in particular catches the eye, her enjoyment is infectious. A young man looks pointedly in her direction, but refuses to catch her eye. Instead he turns from her to the largely male college-going audience, some of whom are taking phone videos of the performance. Lip curled in disdain, he walks out. When she comes out to meet him afterwards, he has nothing to say about her performance, or the prize her group has just won. All he can get out is: “Weren’t you supposed to be wearing something else? Why didn’t you tell me when it changed?”

The boyfriend who can take no pleasure in his girlfriend’s dancing because he is too busy imagining the pleasure other men might derive from it is, unsurprisingly, also the boyfriend who when told she has qualified for pilot training in Mumbai, can only speculate about the girls’ and boys’ hostels being on the same floor at the academy – and the prevalence of late-night parties.

Too many women in India, sadly, will recognise men they know in the suspicious, sour-faced Govind – brothers, fathers, uncles, but also boyfriends and husbands. What makes the film’s internal landscape so effective is its baseline assumption: that the controlling, insecure lover is so common a figure as to be normalised. It doesn’t take long for Pallavi’s friends at the academy to cotton on to the power dynamic of the relationship: a female friend scrolling through Pallavi’s photographs asks if she’s sent Govind the one with a male instructor’s arm around her. “All that power you feel in the sky nosedives when it comes to Govind,” she says to Pallavi – but the acuteness of the observation is somehow blunted into a joke.

Pallavi’s father, too, wonders what she sees in him. But she convinces him otherwise with the story of the adolescent origins of their relationship, when Govind rescued her 14-year-old self from public humiliation. The fact that he was then her school senior seems crucial to his ‘niceness’: he could automatically assume a superior, guiding role. That dynamic is one we have all encountered before, most recently in the much-discussed Kabir Singh, where Kabir’s relationship with his medical college junior Preeti is grounded in a very similar experience of his ‘choosing’ her as the recipient of his attentions.

Unlike Kabir in Kabir Singh, though, Govind is not heroic, or even good at what he does. By making him a loser who can’t find a decent job, Uyare turns audiences against him, while Pallavi, following her dreams, has the author-backed role. Her ambitiousness and positivity are a glaring contrast to his unrelenting pessimism: “No miracles happened,” he says dourly when she asks him how a job interview went. Pallavi’s successes and joys are things that threaten Govind. It seems understandable when she begins to keep her real life from him – and one wants to applaud when she finally speaks up – and wants out. (Spoilers ahead.) Of course, Govind will not give her her freedom. When his suicide threats fail to elicit a reaction, he decides to wound her rather than himself.

Both before and after the acid attack, Manu Ashokan keeps the directorial focus on his aspiring pilot heroine (Parvathy Thiruvothu). But the film is also conscious of the skewed gender dynamics of its Indian middle class universe, from boardroom to courtroom: the ‘humour’ lined with casual sexism, the deeply non-egalitarian assumptions about men and women. The women’s toilet in the pilot-training academy is labelled “Bla bla bla ba bla bla” – in contrast to the men’s toilet’s strong and silent “Bla”. A visitor to the academy, confronted by a pretty woman on the reception committee, assumes she is not a pilot-in-training but a PR woman – and further, that he is free to criticise her outfit for being “cheap”. The judge in the acid attack case is less moved by Pallavi’s present than Govind’s potential future – especially once he offers to marry her. “Why would he offer to marry her if he had committed this crime?” asks Govind's lawyer. In a discursive variation of something notoriously frequent in rape trials, the accused – merely because he is a man – is still imagined as being able to take the survivor “back under his wing” – merely because she is a woman.

The film’s resolution of Pallavi’s pilot dreams – scotched because her vision no longer holds up to the medical standards required – is to make her an air hostess. There’s something fascinating and full-frontal about the acid attack victim claiming a job traditionally defined by physical attractiveness. It doesn’t come easy. When spoilt brat airline  owner Vishal suggests a new role, an angry Pallavi responds with her air hostess ambition, yelling: “You should think twice about making promises to people who lack beauty!” Her anger spurs him to actually examine his thoughtless offer. In some ways, Vishal’s capacity for change is also a reflection of Pallavi’s power.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Oct 2019.

The dream machine - II

My Mirror column:

What might we learn about our relationship with machines from Ritwik Ghatak’s classic Ajantrik and Buddhadev Dasgupta’s recent Urojahaj – with a detour through Naya Daur? The second of a two-part column

In last week’s column, I suggested that there might be something to be learnt from comparing two Indian films made 60 years apart, each about a man besotted with a machine – Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s most recent feature, Urojahaj (The Flight), and Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 arthouse classic Ajantrik. 

In Urojahaj, the protagonist is a happily married man with a child, and his attachment to the broken-down Second World War plane he finds in the forest comes across as selfish. The mechanic’s quest for something so impractical can only be individualistic. The plane is an obsession that takes Bachhu Mondol away from those he loves. And as he hears more tales from ghosts of betrayed humans, he begins to be suspicious of those that love him: in one sadly revealing moment, when his wife tells him the police are looking for him, he actually asks her if it is she who has reported his discovery of the plane.


In Ajantrik, in contrast, the taxi driver hero Bimal has no-one else to love. The battered taxi seems to fill up the space in Bimal's heart where a person might have been. When Bimal speaks of Jagaddal, it is as a trusty companion – and when the car collapses, he sees it as betrayal.(“Even if I give you my all, I can't win your favour?”) His hunger for human company may be inarticulate, but when he encounters a young woman who has been cheated by her lover, something buried deep within the usually misanthropic Bimal bubbles up to the surface. When Jagaddal appears not to cooperate in his mission to help her, Bimal delivers a well-aimed kick to its engine. That unprecedented moment of anger kickstarts the process that will eventually bring the machine to its knees – and it might be said to stem from Bimal's frustrated effort to assist another human being.

Despite their differences, the close relationship between man and machine in both films seems to turn on excluding the rest of humanity. The same year as Ghatak made Ajantrik, the Hindi film industry also produced a hugely popular narrative about man and machine. Released on August 15, 1957, BR Chopra’s Naya Daur ('The New Age') starred Dilip Kumar as Shankar, a tangawalla who becomes the focal point of a battle between the horse-cart drivers of his village and the evil capitalist son of the village’s feudal landlord. The legendary climactic race between Shankar, straining at the reins of his horse-drawn cart, and the villainous Kundan at the wheel of his bus was staged such that the underdog would win. 

But even within Naya Daur’s wishful dream universe, laced with the labour-capitalist bhai-bhai rhetoric that was often as far as Hindi cinema socialism went, Shankar’s victory could only be presented as a one-time thing, a reprieve. The film was intended only to give us pause as we hurtled into the machine age, to consider the fate of the masses who would be left behind if we were not careful.

Ajantrik seems to occupy a mindspace so different that is scarcely recognisable as belonging to the same cultural landscape. Instead of a race between a tanga and a bus, Ghatak has his taxi compete with a train. The creaky, decrepit Jagaddal cannot win. But that does not lead us to anything so simple as a win or a loss for technology. Driving too fast on a curving hilly road to catch up with the train, Bimal must draw back from the edge in the nick of time – and the moment when he does is also the moment when he finally sees the world in which both taxi and train have arrived: disruptions, but here to stay.

What Ghatak shows us through Bimal’s eyes is a festive gathering of the Oraons: women singing with flowers in their hair, bare-chested men with drums, dancing in unison. There is something about Bimal’s gaze that seems to see but not see, the marvellous sight of the human body moving to a rhythm that has existed long before the rhythm of the machine. And yet, as the Oraon man who pushes the broken-down jalopy to Ranchi Station says to his sweetheart, it is the train from this station that takes “our people to Assam and Bhutan, to work in the tea gardens”. A single machine may die, Ghatak seems to suggest, but the machine is here to stay. 

Ajantrik extended the concept of pathetic fallacy from nature to the machine. But the human hero of 1957 still saw his favourite machine in human terms, giving his car a name and human attributes; a sense of life and death; even a kind of burial, at the scrap dealer’s. Sixty years later, at the end of Urojahaj, it is the human hero whose life and death are in balance. Bachhu Mondol, running from the irrationality of a tyrannical state, speeds through the forest and out onto what looks like a runway, and the camera pans over the ground, rising higher as if looking on from high. What Bachhu sees is what a plane would see, if it could. The man in search of freedom now models himself on the machine.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Sep 2019

The dream machine

My Mirror column:
In Buddhadev Dasgupta’s thought-provoking new film, a man obsessed with a plane starts talking to ghosts, making one think of another machine-loving madman in Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 classic, Ajantrik

In Buddhadev Dasgupta's evocative new film Urojahaj (The Flight), a motor mechanic called Bachhu Mondol (Chandan Roy Sanyal) discovers an old plane abandoned in a forest near his village, and becomes obsessed with the idea of making it fly. He spends hours with the plane, repairing and repainting and dreaming. And most of all, talking to ghosts – the only other human beings to frequent the clearing where it lies hidden.

When it turns out to be a Japanese fighter plane that may have crashed there during the Second World War, one of the ghosts asks Bachhu, does he intend to go to war with the plane?

“I'm rebuilding this plane. I'm making it a new thing. It won’t remember killing people, or war,” says Bachhu immediately.

“Then what will it remember?” asks the she-ghost.

“The sky,” says Bachhu.

The mechanic’s idea of the plane as having a memory – and also being able to forget – is one of the gorgeously poetic ways in which the filmmaker conveys to us that at least for Bachhu, the machine is half-human. There are many other occasions in Urojahaj when the plane’s power over Bachhu is coded this way. “You’re dressing up the plane so much,” another ghost giggles. “Are you going to marry it?” Decrepit though it is, the machine has so completely captured Bachhu’s attention that even his wife starts to wonder if it is her soutan, the rival love of her husband’s life. Bachhu keeps assuring her of his love, but she is not convinced. “You don’t love me any more, else why would you go to the plane every night?” she asks him. And later, “What does the plane give you that I don’t?”

Urojahaj (2018) is Dasgupta's 17th feature film, the latest in a long and distinguished career that has established him as one of India’s internationally known auteurs, his films regularly screened and awarded at top-tier festivals like Venice and Cannes. Sadly, we live in a country in which films like Dasgupta’s barely make it to cinemas. But Urojahaj is a film well worth your time, and worth thinking about at many levels.

For one, the depth of Bachhu’s preoccupation with the plane instantly brings to mind another film about a man’s attachment to a machine directed by a Bengali filmmaker: Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik, made an astounding six decades ago. Released in 1957, Ajantrik was the second film made by Ghatak, maverick member of the trio of great Bengali auteurs along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. Known in the West alternately as The Mechanical Man and The Pathetic Fallacy, the film starred the well-known Bengali actor Kali Banerjee as a taxi driver who treats his dilapidated Chevrolet jalopy more lovingly than a human companion. Banerjee’s Bimal names the car Jagaddal, and talks to it at opportune moments.

“Thirsty, Jagaddal? Yes, you're panting, wait,” he might say, pouring water into the radiator on a hot day. Or “Sorry, Jagaddal, you'll have to make do with patches for now. I’ll buy you a shiny new hood when I’ve saved some money, I promise.”

Friends and acquaintances snigger about Bimal's excessive attachment to the car – “Private matter? Is the car your lady?” – but he is unperturbed, even turning up in a starched white dhuti-panjabi the day he decides to get Jaggadal photographed. But having shown us Bimal dressed as a coy bridegroom, Ghatak joyfully juggles the car’s imagined gender and age. “Amar Jagaddal baagher bachcha (My Jagaddal is a tiger cub),” announces Bimal proudly in the very next scene. “They envy him, naturally. What young man wouldn’t envy an old man with such stamina?” Soon enough, we also see Jagaddal's number plate, which reads ‘BRO 117’.

In contrast to Urojahaj’s fairly even fable-like quality, Ajantrik alternates between physical comedy, meditative observation and a surprising emotional heft. There is early laughter when Jagaddal splutters and bubbles and honks in response to Bimal, making the film a precursor of such Hollywood creations as Herbie, the Volkswagen Beetle of The Love Bug (1968). But for the lonely Bimal, Jagaddal is his most constant companion, about whom he is quite openly sentimental. “He earns me two rupees a day, no matter what. He’s been with me since my mother died,” he tells the little boy who works in the garage.

On another level, Bimal’s trips with Jagaddal are a way for us to travel through rural Chhotanagpur, a 1950s landscape in which female faces are disproportionately limited to line-drawn advertisements for Baidyanath and Dabur Amla Kesh Tel. It is no wonder that a bejewelled Bengali bride who boards the taxi draws Bimal’s attention. He does not chastise her even when she switches from a romantic, almost aesthetic appreciation of the ruin – how lovely the sky looks through a hole in Jagaddal’s canopy – to a pragmatic, modernist disdain for it: “What a rotten car!”

Ghatak may seem merely to be gesturing to what Urojahaj makes explicit: that a man’s attentions cannot be successfully divided between a machine and a woman. But perhaps there is much more there.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Sep 2019.

Page-turner from the past

My Mirror column:

Thinking about Dilip Kumar, who turned 96 last week, as I leaf through a book of Urdu film memoirs now translated into English

Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, who played Salim and Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam

Last week, I started to read a new book called Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends, a collection of pieces from Urdu film magazines that have been selected and translated into English by Yasir Abbasi. Also last week, on December 11, actor Dilip Kumar turned 96. 

Dilip Kumar, born Yusuf Khan in Peshawar in 1922, has long been known as an Urdu aficionado, so I was hopeful that he might feature in the book. I was thrilled to find that there was actually a piece by him. Published in the Delhi-based Shama, it was a thoughtful reflection on his ‘King of Tragedy’ image. “I was declared a ‘tragedian’ at a time when I was still in the process of refining my skills,” he writes.

For Abbasi, a cinematographer and “lifelong film buff”, the book is clearly a labour of love, combining a nostalgic appreciation of Bombay filmdom with a desire to archive a lost world of Urdu journalism. By following each translation with a sample paragraph from the original essay, transcribed in Roman, the book offers a delightful little bonus to many readers like myself, who cannot read the Urdu script but are perfectly capable of understanding the words. 

But this also means opening up the translation to rather wider scrutiny than usual. To return to the Dilip Kumar reminiscence, for instance, it slips up in that single sample paragraph. “I believe real tragedy leads to a kind of sadness that permeates a person’s soul, making the individual stand out in a crowd,” reads Abbasi’s translation. But here is Dilip Kumar’s original Urdu: “Ya’ani andarooni wajood mein kucch aisi udaasiyan taari hon ki aadmi bharay mele mein bhi akela nazar aaye.” I’d say that “bharay mele mein bhi akela nazar aaye” here was meant to suggest that the tragic individual would have a profound air of solitude: he would appear alone even in a crowd.

Despite this, I was glad to read Dilip Kumar’s brief account, which revealed a man able to step away and scrutinise himself, both as an actor and a human being, in a way that would be rare in any era. He begins by pulling up those who equate tragedy with sentimentality. Tragedy, he says, goes beyond “superficial catastrophe” (though again, this is not how I’d render his “satahi qism ke haadsaat ki bharmaar”). His list of emotional markers is fascinating, because it maps a whole social -- and cinematic -- universe: “parting with the beloved, going bankrupt, betrayal of friends, or being disowned by the family”. (Again, the original ends with “makaan-jaaydaad se waalid ka be-dakhal kar dena”, which I’d have translated as “being disinherited from family property by a father”).

I was also struck by the remarkable honesty with which he spoke of his depressive tendencies — we must remember that he was writing for a mass Indian readership in 1973. He says he consulted psychologists in England, who suggested he take a break from melancholic roles. Taking on SMS Naidu’s comedy Azaad (a remake of the director's 1954 Tamil film Malaikkallan, starring MGR) upon his return to India, he says, was a professional decision made for psychological reasons.

But while Dilip Kumar straddled Hindi cinema like a colossus (others in the book make many references to his aura, his linguistic skills and professionalism), what Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai makes clear is that his personal life also remained grist for the gossip mill. It comes up in all kinds of ways: as sly rumour, as tragedy, as professional hazard. An amusing instance of this is Dharmendra in Shama in 1977, where he cites Dilip Kumar’s affairs with co-stars as part of his aspirations: “Before I stepped into the world of films, I had heard a lot about the Raj Kapoor-Nargis and Dilip Kumar-Kamini Kaushal pairings. I too would fancy forming a similar duo with someone.”

His affair with Madhubala had a more tragic aftertaste because they separated on an acrimonious note (her father was, according to Dilip Kumar’s 2014 autobiography, not opposed to the wedding as much as keen to add Kumar to his money-making assets) — and because Madhubala died young. Madhubala seems to have other admirers: Nadira’s account here informs us that Premnath’s only true love was Madhubala, and the character-actor and later villain Ajit describes her after she dropped out of Naya Daur as “the wilted Anarkali who had been abandoned by Salim”. But other actresses could remain unsympathetic: the actress Veena’s version has Madhubala telling her during Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi that Dilip Kumar was her husband, and later, that she only married Kishore Kumar “[t]o annoy Dilip Kumar”. 

Among the last references to the thespian in the book is about how Ruby magazine went after the story of Dilip Kumar’s second marriage in 1982, when his vehement denials turned out to be false. But while it did not shy away from salacious or critical commentary, the Urdu magazine seems to also have offered a space for film folk to present themselves in their own words. Dilip Kumar's gift for words, of course, gave him an advantage here. Even in that tiny piece, he managed to suggest his perfectionism: “A misra [line of a poem] by Firaq saheb sums it up aptly for me: Akseer ban chala hoon, ki aanch ki kasar hai [I’d turn into an elixir, if only I could simmer a little more]." He may well have fulfilled that hope.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Dec 2018.