Cinemascope: Zokkomon; Dum Maro Dum

The first instalment of my weekly film column for the Sunday Guardian: reviews of Zokkomon and Dum Maro Dum (24th Apr, 2011).


Safary shines as the rationalist superhero

ZOKKOMON
Director: Satyajit Bhatkal
Starring: Anupam Kher, Darsheel Safary, Manjari Fadnis, Sheeba Chaddha

Disney Pictures has made a children's superhero movie that's deeply rationalist at its core – a superhero who doesn't have magical powers, and who's out to kill superstition. The orphaned Kunal (Darsheel Safary) is withdrawn from his beloved boarding school by his Chacha, his official guardian, who runs his own school. After a tearful farewell with his principal (which plays like the reverse of the Masoom scene in which Jugal Hansraj tugged at our collective heartstrings with "Main aap ke saath kyon nai reh sakta?"), Kunal is put on his way.

From the basketball-playing school with sensitive teachers – the evolved modern-day world, apparently – we arrive in Jhunjhunmaakadstrama, where people are either evil schemers or innocent victims. Kunal's Chacha (a smarmy Anupam Kher) and Chachi (marvelous Sheeba Chaddha) fit the former category, while most of the village is the latter. Realists may gripe about caricature, but the broad-brush characterisations work as they do in fairytales or pantomime, establishing our loyalties quickly, and often playing successfully for laughs. Chacha tries to get hold of Kunal's inheritance by declaring him dead, but Kunal reappears and befriends a misanthropic scientist (Kher again). Together they set out to reform the village through Kunal's appearances as a masked hero called Zokkomon.

The film has good things in it: the sequences where Kunal and his newfound friends wander the village, especially their discovery of the 'haunted house', are charming and Safary's combination of gravity and glee in his superhero avatar makes him fun to watch. With its refrain of 'Jab man mein ho vishwaas, to har dar hai bakwaas' and its vision of rural revolution led by fearless kids, it clearly has its heart in the right place.

But Zokkomon plays on the villagers' belief that Kunal is an avenging spirit, and the 'science' behind Zokkomon is never quite explained. It's also telling that all that's needed to proclaim the school a cesspit of ignorance is the teacher's incorrect English. Some caricatures can be harmful.


B-movie in (not very good) disguise



DUM MARO DUM
Director: Rohan Sippy
Starring: Abhishek Bachchan, Prateik Babbar, Bipasha Basu, Rana Daggubati

Everything you've heard or seen of Dum Maro Dum has led you to believe it's fairly brimming with youthful coolth. But gorgeous Goa beaches packed with bronzed bodies, psychedelic cinematography, the revamped Dum Maro Dum song with Jaideep Sahni's out-to-shock lyrics ("Oonche se ooncha banda, Potty pe baithe nanga...") – none of these can quite disguise the '80s B movie that lies beneath.

You begin to sense it early on, when Prateik Babbar does a version of the classic hero-drowns-his-sorrows-in-alcohol song. By the time you get to pasty-faced Aditya Pancholi as the white-suited villain Lorsa Biscuita, who is both benevolent industrialist and secret druglord, things begin to seem very familiar indeed. With cocaine instead of gold biscuits and rave parties in lieu of cabarets, this could have still been fun homage.

But unlike Farhan Akhtar's Don remake, or even Milan Luthria's Once Upon A Time in Mumbai, there's not a whiff of self-conscious retro-coolness here. When there is, it's awful, like Bachchan Junior murdering one of his father's iconic songs in a clunky faux-torture scene. But for the most part, the throwback to the '80s is dreadfully in earnest, with dreadful, unconvincing backstories to boot. The druglord's moll – Bipasha Basu in yet another lacklustre outing as the golden-hearted girl stuck in the wrong life – must die as soon as she's helped nail him; the corrupt drugbusting cop, Abhishek, turns clean when his wife and child die in a car crash ostensibly caused by a driver on drugs; the susegad (Goan for laidback) singer – Rana Daggubati – having failed his girlfriend, decides to risk everything to save a boy he barely knows (Prateik). Characters were clearly not what the filmmaker was focusing on.

And the leads don't help: Pancholi hams horribly; Prateik starts out believably vulnerable, but gradually gets so squeaky that you wonder why anyone would want to save him from anything. As for Abhishek, one can only watch him and wonder: where is the spry, stylishly funny Bluffmaster of Rohan Sippy's film, the goofy conman of Bunty Aur Babli, the hotheaded Lallan of Yuva? We want him back.

The bauxite battle

On Simon Chambers' thoughtful and surprisingly entertaining film on Vedanta's mining ambitions in Kalahandi - a review that I did for Himal Southasian magazine.


(DVD cover designed by Samia Singh)

Cowboys in India
directed by Simon Chambers
Channel 4, 2010

To the viewer expecting a comprehensive treatise on the Vedanta Resources’ proposed mining of bauxite in Kalahandi district of Orissa, Cowboys in India might feel slight, unsatisfactory, even vaguely incoherent. On the other hand, if one is willing to suspend deeply entrenched notions of what a documentary about an ‘evil mining corporation’ ought to be like – or, happily, if one is the sort of viewer who has no such notions to begin with – Simon Chambers’s film is both entertaining and moving.

The director’s first feature-length film, Every Good Marriage Begins With Tears (2006), was a delightfully un-solemn take on the usually ‘serious’ matter of Southasian arranged marriage. Once again, Chambers manages to take another old-fashioned ‘documentary subject’ – a multinational mining corporation, a poor state government hungry for development projects, a mountain rich in minerals and a ‘primitive tribe’ for whom it is both sacred and life-enabling – and build around it today’s more popular sort of documentary: about the filmmaker and the journey on which the film takes him.

The film opens with a bleak set of images: a poor woman, hunched over with age, hobbles towards a railway track; poor men sleep on stone benches; a herd of goats gathers outside an uninhabited-looking government building. The viewer can see the empty plain stretching into the distance, and almost feel the unrelenting heat. The flies buzz ominously. Yet the opening bars of music and the titling shot of the train – both drawing on Sergio Leone’s classic western Once Upon a Time in the West – make it clear that this is not going to be a bleak film. By the time we get shown around the filmmaker’s rather dank hotel bathroom – equipped with a resident cockroach and the previous occupant’s toiletries – the film’s tone is firmly established: slightly tongue-in-cheek, occasionally bemused.

Charming as Chambers’s self-deprecatory good humour is, the film’s real focus is the evolution of his relationship with Satya and Daya, his Oriya assistants. It is through them that Chambers – and we – slowly start to get a sense of the kind of clout a project like Vedanta has in a place like Kalahandi. The chubby-cheeked, even-tempered Satya has been recommended to Chambers as a kind of local informant-cum-organiser, while the moodier Daya comes recommended by Satya as ‘the best driver in all of Orissa’. The trio set off in a hired white Ambassador, part-echoing the director’s self-conscious evocation of ‘rid[ing] into town on a white horse’. They hope to meet representatives of Vedanta as well as locals, but doing so is not easy. They read glowing reports of development projects, but no one from the company seems willing to talk to them. Instead, they see villagers blocking roads to stop the passage of Vedanta’s trucks, and hear stories of Adivasi leaders killed off because they opposed the company’s actions. Yet nothing seems quite clear. The overwhelming feeling is one of confusion: rumours and counter-rumours criss-cross each other like chaotic gunshots.

Satya suggests that they must go to the top of the mountain, from where the bauxite is to be mined. He also says that they must take a gun. In the next scene, however, the gun is found to be unworkable, and Daya has refused to take the car further along the dirt track. What we see instead is several men plodding through a forest, one of whom is reciting a list of wild animals that exist on the mountain to an increasingly incredulous Chambers: ‘Tigers, bears, lions’ – wink, wink – ‘no, no lions’.

Ominous silence
Misunderstandings abound. Food is the first occasion for mutual cultural bafflement. Chambers is somewhat taken aback by Satya and Daya’s seemingly unending appetites; while for them, the white man’s seeming lack of attention to food is mystifying. He does not appear to need proper meals – the daal and fish and mounds of rice that everyone else does – subsisting instead on cup after cup of tea and what Satya calls ‘snacks’: two puris, two idlis. Confusion is also caused by assumptions about status. Satya introduces the filmmaker everywhere – even in the smallest tea shop – as being from the BBC. Chambers first balks, then gently contradicts Satya, and finally asks him why he persisted in doing so. ‘BBC reporter means respect,’ says Satya knowingly. ‘They respect you. And me.’ Satya’s answer is both honest and revealing, but it sends Chambers off into a train of thought about whether Satya thinks of him as more important than he actually is.

Later, his guides’ enthusiasm seems to wane after several aborted attempts to interview Vedanta officials or enter difficult locations. Chambers begins to wonder whether Satya and Daya have finally figured out that he is not ‘the big shot they’ve been telling all their friends about’. Indeed, everything they try to do seems fated not to work out.

In the meanwhile, though, almost imperceptibly, the images begin to pile up, bringing home to the viewer the impossibly huge changes that Vedanta’s actions are likely to bring about. The vast tracts of old-growth forest atop the Niyamgiri mountain contrast sharply with the miles of dusty road created by Vedanta to transport the bauxite to its factory. Gigantic trucks rumble along these roads, an alien species from a distant planet. Meanwhile, poor women carry water in earthen pots, manually sprinkling the roads twice a day to keep the dust down. The film crew meets an irate woman who is unhappy that the company has built a road through her land; and an old Dongria Kond woman who tells them, ‘Money is no use to us. We have always lived in the forest. We have everything we need.’

They hear of about 30 Vedanta health-care centres, but cannot find them. One functioning health post and a 10-bed hospital are eventually discovered, but the door is locked – it has never been opened, they are told, due to a lack of doctors. A young man laughs scornfully at the filmmaker’s claim that Kalahandi is the poorest place in India, but the evidence he cites of the region’s transformation is the presence of SUVs like his own – ‘which is not available even in metro cities’. They are escorted to a ‘model village’, where some of those whose homes were destroyed to build the factory have been rehabilitated, and given a rather unconvincing three-minute tour: ‘You can see over here … the plantation, the water-supply system, the community hall, the villages, the happiness on their face … so these are the things,’ announces the Vedanta PR man. Chambers receives footage from a local filmmaker showing Adivasis protesting the factory in large numbers and gheraoing a local politician who is seen as pro-Vedanta, as well as gruesome images of an accident that suggest that the factory’s safety guarantees are a sham.

Satya and Daya, meanwhile, seem to Chambers to have lost interest in the film – though they plead illness. He tries to woo them back to work by buying a second-hand jeep for Daya, but the film simply trundles along at the same pace as before. They do some more travelling and interviews, discussing the toxic water that is being pumped from the factory into a local river. But they are now being followed by a plainclothes policeman, and cannot shoot the incriminating evidence.

Quiet details
Chambers shot from June 2007 to February 2008. Since his film has been released, the ‘bauxite battle’ has gone forward. On 16 August 2010, the Supreme Court of India ruled that mining atop Niyamgiri should not be allowed. The Ministry of Environment and Forests sent a four-member committee to investigate, and a week later denied Vedanta (and its subsidiary Sterlite) final clearance to mine for bauxite. In October 2010, the Environment Ministry further rejected Vedanta’s plan to significantly expand its Lanjigarh refinery, and directed the state government to take legal action against the company for illegally beginning the expansion without permission. The bauxite refinery, however, is still operational, and Vedanta, having already spent USD 900 million, seems to believe that it is only a matter of time before it gets the requisite clearances. In January, the Vedanta Group’s chairman, Anil Agarwal, met Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to request him to reconsider his decision. Meanwhile, with multiple court cases continuing to go forward, the legal battle clearly is far from over.

When Chambers was in Orissa, of course, none of this had taken place yet. During the filming, he seems unable to understand the severity of the matter in which he has gotten himself and his assistants embroiled. It is only much later, as he begins to assemble his footage and has the conversations between Satya and Daya translated, that he realises that their ‘reduced enthusiasm’ had to do with threats they were receiving for assisting him.

Somehow, though, even this chilling revelation cannot turn this gentle, ambling film into a dramatic one. This is not a failing – far from it. The power of Cowboys in India is contained in more ineffable things: in the quiet interstices between seemingly failed expeditions, the long periods of waiting in the car, the seemingly endless obfuscations by state officials and corporate public-relations personnel. There are also the scenes of Dongria Kond youngsters rhythmically threshing grain, before collapsing in a heap in joyful horseplay; or of Satya gathering succulent little ‘tribal mangoes’ (as he calls them) in the dark of an unknown village, or being moved by the hurdles they face to go off on an uncharacteristic rant about how only ‘hi-fi’ people matter in Orissa. Or Daya and his wife misunderstanding Chambers’s announcement that he’s ‘full-up’ as a demand for pulao. These are the moments when the film manages to convey a profound sense of both the pleasures and the poverty of Kalahandi.

In all this, Chambers’s gift is to leave well enough alone. He does not seek to override what he is seeing with heavy-handed editorialising, but instead just leaves it there – for us to notice what we will, and imagine the voices in our heads. Pulao: just the kind of fancy party dish that the silly, ungrateful Englishman would want instead of the hearty home-cooked meal he has just had, Daya and his wife seemed to me to be thinking. But you might hear them think other things.

~ Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer, critic and editor with a background in cultural anthropology.

Published in Himal Southasian magazine, April 2011.

Book Review: The Life's Too Short Literary Review 01

The Life's Too Short Literary Review 01

edited by Faiza S. Khan & Aysha Raja 

Hachette 124 pp; Rs. 395

Sandwiches and tuitions

This Pakistani anthology presents lives concurrently private, steamy and violent.

"THE LATEST edition of the prestigious Granta magazine encourages readers to look to Pakistan for more than violence, religious extremism and abject desolation. It chooses to do this with a collection dominated by pieces about violence, religious extremism and abject desolation.” Thus began Faiza S Khan’s superbly caustic review of Granta 112: Pakistan, published in November 2010. Khan, with collaborator Aysha Raja, has since brought out her answer to Granta: The Life’s Too Short Literary Review 01. Published in Pakistan by Raja and Khan’s Siren Publications, the volume available from Hachette India (in “slightly altered form”, it says mysteriously) contains 14 contributions. The juiciest is Mohammad Hanif’s translation of an excerpt from Challawa, a serialised Urdu fiction featuring a lesbian detective called Sabiha Bano. Though barely four-and-a-half pages, it makes clear why Bano’s exploits were so popular in 1970s Pakistan (and frankly, why Jaipur Literature Festival organiser Namita Gokhale baulked at Khan reading it aloud at a festival gathering that included schoolchildren). Here is Bano eyeing the possibilities on a bus: “…the daughter — about 12 or 13 — was still too young for purdah. I looked at her small breasts and could feel the taste of guavas on my tongue, a taste I hate. I prefer oranges, fresh, round oranges.”

The rest of the volume, sadly, contains nothing half as steamy as Challawa. But there are many fine stories by talented new writers. Sadaf Halai’s marvellously understated 'Lucky People' deftly evokes a milieu of hunter beef sandwiches and maths tuitions and its distance from the world of spinach quiche. A much grimmer urban world emerges from Sarwat Azeem’s tale of a doll’s wedding. Childhood and the loss of innocence are also the subject of Aziz A Sheikh’s consummate 'The Six- Fingered Man', set in a strife-torn but still magical Kashmir. Despite the editors’ understandable (and nearly successful) effort to avoid self-conscious takes on the ‘big issues’, violence hovers often in the background. In 'To Live', a couple on a romantic assignation is shaken up by a bomb blast, while in Madiha Sattar’s 'Ruth and Richard' (perhaps my favourite), an ageing Pakistan columnist watches another blast unfold on a Manhattan television screen. Even so, it can only be described as deeply ironic that a long New York Times piece about Khan’s discovery of Challawa and its publication in this book is filed not under Books, or even Travel, but in NYT’s ‘At War’ blog.

TWO SUGGESTIONS: Ahmad Rafay Alam’s 'The Last Moghul of Shalimar' is a superb piece of writing, spare yet atmospheric, which makes one wish there was more non-fiction here. And could the next volume contain more translations?

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 12, Dated 26 Mar 2011

Konkan: Gold Coast

A quiet haven on the Maharashtra coast.

The first time I went to Tarkarli, it was June. The auto we hired from Kudal station took us through miles of shrubland, the red earth soaked from the last downpour, gleaming wetly in the sun as it waited for the next one. I spent three days there, on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra: quiet days, mostly waiting for the rain to start again. The downpours were unlike anything I had seen before, great sheets of water that seemed to merge sky with sea. But what I remembered most vividly from that time was the red soil all along the road, magically transformed into near-white sand along the water’s edge.

This time, it is December. The earth is still red, but there is no rain. The sun is mild, the sky a cloudless blue. The auto ride from Kudal is still rather lovely, but nothing feels as elemental. I am ready to be underwhelmed.

Then the road begins to wind its way slowly out of the plateau, past mango trees covered with new yellow-green leaves, down to the coast. Now there are coconut palms. And banana trees. The houses of Tarkarli began to appear. Many of the houses are still tiled in the traditional way, but their old-style red roofs sit atop the most funkily painted walls. It isn’t quite rainbow town (I never see a true blue, or a proper green) but there are oranges and yellows and reds and pinks and purples, in the most remarkable combinations. Banana-yellow walls with a fuchsia door, a red house with a purple well, a white temple with orange eaves and green trellises. Why don’t I remember these colours from the last time around? Had the monsoon lashed the colours into submission before I got there? Or was I so preoccupied with red earth and pouring rain that I never noticed all the brilliant ways in which people had added to that palette?

I’m still contemplating my oddly selective memory when we reach Devbagh, the next village along the coast after Tarkarli. Devbagh is where we’re staying this time round. The road has somehow managed to run alongside the coast while keeping the beach firmly out of sight, so that when we draw up in front of Siddhivinayak Beach Resort, the sea is like a surprise present. The Khobrekars live in the old house, closer to the road, and they’ve built a series of rooms for guests closer to the beach. In the large open area are several palm trees and a big thatched umbrella.

I’m just slightly anxious because our mobile phones have refused to work on the way here and the last time I called was three weeks ago. But everyone seems to know who we are. Yes, yes, our train reached on time. Yes, we’re from Delhi. Yes, we’d like our rooms. While our rooms are readied, we settle down in the shade of the thatched umbrella-roof. The benches are rough-hewn slabs of cool black granite, balanced on stumps of local reddish stone. The tables are covered with red plastic tablecloths. It is New Year’s Eve, and the Maharashtrian family there looks curiously at us. But there is white sand between my toes. There is a cat. There is cold Kingfisher. And there, with not even a palm tree standing between me and it, is the sea.

It is no time to be underwhelmed.


Fishermen buying ice to store their evening catch

For lunch, we eat the first of the vast meals that are to characterise this holiday. Each thali consists of rice and fish and chapattis and a vegetable — and sol kadi, a digestive drink that’s served in small steel katoris but should ideally be drunk by the gallon. There are four of us, so we’ve asked for two bangda (mackerel) thalis and two surmai (seer fish) thalis. Surmai is not available, so they suggest something called sawandara instead. It’s the local fish, we’re told, the fish that’s caught in Devbagh village. What we’re not told is that it is the tastiest fish in the world.

Suffice it to say, we eat a lot. We take naps. Then we do nothing at all, unless you count watching the sun go down. The evening brings a few more revellers, mostly families. We watch the men drink lots of beer while the women don’t. There are a few young men, too—a college gang on holiday. The resort guys decide they must please the crowds and put on ‘Sheila ki Jawani’. Thankfully, they soon run out of Hindi film songs, and start to play raunchy Marathi lavani hits: the only one I recognise is ‘Apsara Aali Re’ from the film Natrang. The songs are filmi, but the mood is real. The boys have brought fireworks. We sip our wine and watch the display. It’s a happy new year.

* * *

The next day we take a bus to Malvan, the nearest town (and the place which gives its name to the gorgeous food we’ve been eating). From Malvan jetty, we catch a boat to Sindhudurg — literally, the Sea Fort. It’s a massive stone fortress on an island called Kurte. There are crowds of tourists, including hordes of schoolchildren who spontaneously seem to break into chants of "Shivaji maharaj ki jai". I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since this is Maharashtra and the fort was built by Shivaji.

Our boat contains a group centred around a curly-haired man in sunglasses and white kurta-pajama, who I decide is a local politician. We are ferried through somewhat choppy sea, only to be told to get off far from an entrance. We descend into knee-high water and clamber stoically across a tricky stretch of rocks, gazing up at the impregnable stone walls above us, feeling like medieval invaders (or Crystal Maze participants, depending on your authenticity quotient). Stragglers (i.e. those who display reluctance to leap into seaweedy water) are exhorted to be more manly by Sunglasses. Thankfully, no battles ensue.

The inside of the fort is remarkably bare. There are trees, some houses, a temple to Shivaji. There seems to be nothing to do except climb up to the highest point like dutiful tourists. The view is spectacular. The land spread out below: dull brown, barren and bone-dry and, all around it, as far as the eye can see, an expanse of blues. And as I look out at the massive stone walls that we were so recently on the outside of, I suddenly recognise the space for what it is: territory. I’m reluctant to go but Sunglasses will be in a hurry. Sure enough, there he is, watching the children yell "Jai Maharashtra" as he waits to hustle us back to shore.

It is almost lunchtime. We head straight to Chaitanya, a restaurant I remember fondly. It’s packed. I’m just thinking about how much more Malvan locals are eating out these days when I realise it’s New Year’s Day. We eat a thali each, as we should, and add two new items to our Malvani repertoire—mutton and ‘mori mutton’, which turns out to be shark meat. (I prefer the mutton.) We wander around the town, admiring wooden houses and roadside churches, and window grills with Queen Elizabeth’s head in the pattern. We drink kokam soda. Then we catch an auto back to Devbagh.

The next morning we have arranged to go see the dolphins. Even though we’ve been shown pictures of a wounded dolphin that washed up on Devbagh beach just days ago, I am not hopeful.

The last time I was here, the sea was too choppy to go out to the spot where dolphins apparently gather, where the Karli river meets the sea. Since then I have been to the Sundarbans, clutching my copy of Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide and (bookish tourist that I am) hoping to see dolphins almost more than tigers. But to no avail. Still, we wake at six and scramble out to discover that the boatman has forgotten about the plan. He has to be woken, as do the others apparently coming with us. We crossly refuse placatory offers of tea. When we set out, it is nearly seven.

But no grumpiness can hold out against a dawn sky and a grey sea slowly turning translucent blue. When we reach the river’s mouth, there are already two boats biding their time. We wait and watch. Then there’s a flutter of activity—someone has spotted something. It’s like the classic moment when the guide whips out his walkie-talkie and all the jeeps congregate next to the nala near which someone has just reported the sharp barking call of the chital.

Except we’re at sea and there’s nothing to mark the terrain. But there is also nothing to distract us. So that when the first gleaming silver snout appears, there’s a collective gasp. Then there’s another snout, then a fin, then a tail. There seems to be a pair of them, diving in and out in a kind of playful dance for several minutes before they vanish below the waves. For a minute there is silence. Then someone spies another, in the opposite direction. The boats jump to attention, revving up their motors to move as close as possible. There are more dolphins now and we watch in delight as they somersault. But they know we’re there and gradually they move away from us, swimming further out to sea.

* * *

We return to Devbagh via what is known as Tsunami Island, a sandbank created during the tsunami in 2004. Boats are parked there, and we wander around barefoot in knee-deep water, happy to discover a stall selling tea and—to our joy—fluffy homemade dosas and the wonderful Maharashtrian sweet called modak: plump parcels of rice flour filled with coconut and jaggery. It’s a thoroughly charming breakfast in a thoroughly charming place, but once we’ve boated and walked our way back to Siddhivinayak, we’re not unwilling to eat another one kept ready for us. It’s poha, light and lemony, with a sprinkling of grated coconut and the super-fine bhujiya that I am told goes by the super-fine name of nylon sev.

But it’s not just double breakfast day. It’s double marine-life expedition day, too. After a quick swim, we head to Malvan again—to snorkel. Two of our party are not-quite-swimmers—they can stay afloat but don’t know if they like the idea of going underwater. It’s only after our exceptional instructor explains that snorkelling doesn’t involve going underwater at all that they look a little more convinced. By this time we’re behind Sindhudurg—that rocky stretch of sea from yesterday turns out to be a coral bed too—and once we see the people already snorkelling, with float tubes around their waists and only their faces in the water, there’s no more tentativeness.

The coral reef is magical. None of us have ever seen one before and the multi-hued world that suddenly opens up before our eyes is indescribable. Jewel-like fish dart about in the shadows, their swiftness in stark contrast to the slow-motion quality of everything else underwater: the tendrils of various plants, the vast cabbage-like corals and us, slowly circling the area, our flippered feet trying their best to follow instructions not to splash.


A couple floats in the waters near the Sindhudurg fort

The afternoon meal feels much-deserved and we eat pretty much every kind of seafood on the menu. Then we wander through the backstreets, looking for a way back to the jetty that goes along the sea. There isn’t one, but we do find a rock garden, and a sunset point, and a cricket club on the beach. Eventually we reach the jetty and find the municipal fish market. We get back to Siddhivinayak, where we seem to be the only people for dinner. We eat and talk of various things. But, from time to time, one of us looks up and catches a dreamy look in the other’s eye and we both know it’s the coral we’re thinking of. Nearly two months later, the sea still haunts my dreams.

THE INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
The nearest railway station to Tarkarli is Kudal, approximately 45km away. The most convenient train from Mumbai is the overnight Konkan Kanya Express (`910 on 2A). Autos are easily available from Kudal to Tarkarli (`400). From Delhi, the Trivandrum Raj-dhani (`2,495) takes 24 hours to Sawantwadi Road, a station 54km from Tarkarli. If you choose to fly, the nearest airport is Dabolim in Goa, from where Tarkarli is 100km (a two-and-a-half hour drive). There are flights to Dabolim from all major Indian cities (from `3,000 one way ex-Delhi; `1,800 ex-Mumbai; `2,300 ex- Bengaluru; `4,000 ex-Kolkata). Maharashtra State Transport buses (msrtc.gov.in) ply from Mumbai (`375) and Pune (`415) to Malvan.

GETTING AROUND
The local bus from Devbagh to Malvan (`9) is fairly regular during the daytime. Autos from Malvan to Tarkarli or Devbagh will charge `125–150. The ferry from Malvan to Sindhudurg costs `33.

WHERE TO STAY
The MTDC Resort, Tarkarli (from `1,800; 02365-252390, maharash tratourism.gov.in) cannot be beaten for location. Each ‘Konkani hut’ (all non-AC) has an almost unobstructed view of the beach. There are dozens of homestays and ‘resorts’ in Tarkarli. Most involve a few extra rooms added on to an existing house, with food supplied by the family kitchen. Rooms are basic and usually non-AC. Try the well-regarded Ghar Mithbavkaranche (from `1,400; 02365-252941, gharmith bavkaranche.co.nr). In the adjacent village of Devbagh too, more and more families have opened up their homes to tourists. Among the more organised are Swami Samarth (`800; 9404170104, swamisamarthbeachresort.com). We stayed at the well-managed Siddhivinayak Beach Resort (`700 non-AC and `1,200 AC; 02365-248407, 9404448687), run by the marvellously hospitable Khobrekar brothers. Rooms are basic, but clean (some have AC). Whatever else you do, do not leave without having eaten ghavan (a soft pancake made from ground soaked unfermented rice, close to Karnataka’s neer dosa) here.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
If you like seafood, Malvan is heaven—on a budget. Malvani cuisine centres around rice and fish, but chapattis are served with every thali, and in a restaurant, you can usually take your pick of prawn, crab, shark, chicken or mutton. Bangda (mackerel), surmai (kingfish) and pomfret (the most expensive) are all of high quality, and local varieties like sawandara are well worth trying too. The famous Malvani fish curry looks more fiery than it actually is, because the masala—a combination of whole dry red chillies, coriander, peppercorns, fennel, cumin, asafoetida, cloves, cinnamon and star anise—is tempered with the sweetness of coconut and the sourness of kokam. The best part of the thali, though, is sol kadi, which combines coconut milk with kokam to magical effect. Do not be put off by the pinkness of it; that’s the natural colour of kokam. The most well-known eatery in Malvan is the conveniently located Chaitanya (Dr Ballav Marg, Bharad Naka; 11am–10.30pm; 02365-242172), a five-minute walk from the bus stand. The bangda thali (`75), bangda fry (`25) and the mutton thali (`120) here are particularly good. Atithi Bamboo (Maghi Ganesh Chowk, Rosary Church Shejari; noon–3pm and 8–11pm; 9423304327) is further away, but worth the trek. The charming Yeshashri Coldrinks (a few minutes down the road from Chaitanya; 02365-252637) is a great place to shelter from the afternoon sun and offers a variety of lassis, flavoured sodas, amrakhand, shrikhand and homemade ice cream in such innovative flavours as ale-limbu-mirchi (ginger-lemon-chilli). I recommend the mango lassi: a rich, divine mixture of tartness and sweetness (and this is in winter, when it’s made not with fresh mangoes but with the mango extract popularly available in these alphonso-growing regions).

WHAT TO SEE & DO
The beaches of Tarkarli and Devbagh are stunningly beautiful. You may want to do nothing but swim, sunbathe and walk along the seashore. But if you’re interested, there is no dearth of activities—although these are largely weather-dependent. A boat-ride (`800 per boat) can be arranged from Devbagh to view dolphins, which tend to congregate at the point where the Karli river meets the sea. The seventeenth-century Sindhudurg fort, built by Shivaji on an island just off the coast of Malvan, is worth visiting. Ferries from Malvan Jetty depart every half an hour (`37 per person). (Not all boats can take you all the way up to the entrance, so if you’re reluctant to clamber across the final rocky stretch before the fort, inquire before getting on.) Snorkelling services are advertised in various places in Malvan—just make sure to insist on a trained instructor. `400 per person will include the cost of the boat-ride from Malvan Jetty, the snorkelling equipment and the services of the instructor. During the monsoon months—May to September—the sea is too rough to go swimming or for boats to go out to Sindhudurg fort. On a previous visit, we found a boatman who took us to Bhogwe (`800 for an hour there, more if you stay longer), which turned out to be a rather lovely neighbouring village, with mango and jackfruit trees and a small, gorgeous stretch of beach. The town of Malvan is worth exploring. The further away you go from the jetty and the bus stand, the quieter it gets. There is a rather charming Sunset Point and Rock Garden, both looking out over the sea. The Municipal Fish Market is most active in the mornings and evenings, when the fresh catch comes in. There are plenty of shops selling jewellery (real and imitation—my friend acquired a fetching nose ring). You can also shop for cashew nuts, kokam juice, Malvani masalas, papads, and sweet and sour concoctions made from mango, jackfruit, tamarind and other local fruit.

Published in Outlook Traveller magazine, March 2011. (Photos courtesy Outlook Traveller)

WHY INDIAN THEATRE NEEDS META

A still from Akvarious Productions' The Interview

It’s garnered immense goodwill over the years among the theatre fraternity. But what has the Mahindra Theatre Festival actually achieved? TRISHA GUPTA finds out

AMONG THE PLAYS showcased at the sixth Mahindra Theatre Festival, just held in Delhi, was a production in English called Dancing on Glass. Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham, Dancing... is a scathing take on the IT world in Bengaluru. It also contains what the festival website describes as “some explicit language”. A few months ago, Kamatham’s play caught the eye of The Guardian’s theatre blog. Having excitedly described its expletive-laden dialogue as “drawing gasps” from Delhi’s Habitat Centre audience, the blog went on to heap praises on Kamatham for placing a “darker and angrier vision of India on stage” than is done “in the West and by its own film industry”.

Much might be said for the play’s brutal energy and unabashed language. But The Guardian blogger hangs his appreciation on the idea that in “a cultural climate dominated by escapist Bollywood narratives [and] song-and-dance routine[s]... realism can be every bit as shocking as the swearing.” The lazy, catch-all Bollywood bashing apart, this is precisely the sort of polemical argument that often gets made about theatre in India — sometimes, sadly, by theatrewalas themselves. But it is a tiresome and inaccurate stance, one that only does disservice to the thing it wants to promote — because while realist, outspoken, angry, unmusical plays are part of the contemporary Indian theatre scene, there are as many that are fantastical or myth-inspired, tender, thoughtful or riotously musical. The brilliance of Indian theatre — if such a thing can be assumed — lies in its capaciousness.

It is this capacious spirit that the Mahindra Theatre Festival, instituted in 2006 in conjunction with the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), seeks to embody. Plays staged have ranged from marvellous amalgams of literature, dance and music like Sangit Giribala (2008), Chetan Datar’s Marathi production based on Tagore’s short story Manabhanjan, to the affecting mime play Mirel Masingkha from Manipur, which won awards for Best Original Script and Best Sound Design in 2010. Plays that apply can be non-verbal and can include physical theatre, puppetry, multimedia and dance. Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Films, whose team has been organising META since its inception, remembers an entry from Odisha last year that was taken from village to village by bicycle. While it didn’t make the final shortlist, the instance reveals an organisational vision inclusive and egalitarian enough to pit a practically unknown production from Kerala against a Girish Karnad play. After the inaugural year, when competing plays were first divided into “established” and “emerging” theatre, META has also done away with the seniority-based hierarchy that leads to competitions being limited to playwrights or directors under a certain age — like Mumbai’s Thespo. “The sifting process tries to showcase the best theatre and largely it succeeds,” says Mahesh Elkunchwar, Marathi playwright and META jury member for 2011.

META’s “sifting process” is also unusual. Unlike most theatre festivals, including the National School of Drama’s (NSD) Bharat Rang Mahotsav in Delhi, the Prithvi Festival in Mumbai, or the Ranga Shankara Festival in Bengaluru, it is not based on invitations. “We started in 2006 by asking our selectors to send their recommendations, but since then, it’s been a democratic process, where any group can apply,” says Roy. Ten productions are shortlisted from hundreds of DVD recordings by a committee of theatre experts to perform at the festival in Delhi, where they are viewed by the public and by a special jury. Plays compete for honours in 13 categories, from Stage Design to Best Ensemble.

OF COURSE, not having a ‘quota system’ that ensures equitable regional representation means that states and cities with a thriving theatre scene send in more entries and are likely to get more plays in. Over the past six years, Kerala, Assam and Manipur have all been regularly represented, as have Meghalaya, Delhi, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The most consistently successful state, though, is Maharashtra, with plays from Mumbai and Pune often dominating the festival. The 2011 selection was particularly skewed, with five productions from Mumbai and two from Pune. “With seven plays from Maharashtra, people were joking the festival this year should be held in Mumbai,” laughs Mumbai-based director Akarsh Khurana, whose dark satire The Interview is one of the seven. “But really, Mumbai audiences have had a chance to see them, so it’s great that it’s in Delhi.”

Maharashtra’s dominance at the META awards is perhaps not surprising. Apart from having successful commercial theatre in Marathi and Gujarati (and in Hindi and English, if in lesser numbers), Maharashtra regularly holds districtand state-level theatre competitions with state-sponsored awards. Though some other state governments like West Bengal and Manipur do give away theatre awards, as do corporations and smaller bodies devoted to the arts in some states, recognition and financial support for theatre in India is less than negligible. “Normally theatrepeople live in penury,” says Elkunchwar matterof- factly. In the contemporary Indian scenario, where non-commercial theatre survives largely as a labour of love, the power of the financial reward cannot be underestimated. Though the sums are by no means large if you place them in the context of the contemporary cost of living in urban India — Best Production gets Rs. 1 lakh, Best Original Playwright, Rs. 75,000, and the 11 other awards Rs. 35,000 each — the money is a bounty for most Indian practitioners. “META is the only thing that has given the experimental theatrewala some money,” says a grateful Manav Kaul, whose remarkable plays have won awards almost every year.

FOR LESSER-KNOWN groups, it is the prestige of competing at the national level that makes META a lifealtering experience. The excitement of performing to a full house at Delhi’s Kamani or Shri Ram Center auditorium is palpable, especially in those who do not work in urban metropolitan contexts — even if, like Bidyawati Phukan, director of last year’s award-winning Guti Phulor Gamosa, their performances regularly gather crowds of thousands. Phukan, whose group UTSA lives and works out of Namaithang, a village near Assam’s border with Arunachal, remembers the META experience warmly. “It was wonderful to meet other groups, and people like Boman Irani and MS Sathyu. And the awards inspired our group to work harder.” For Dr Yumnam Sadananda Singh of Manipur’s Kanglei Mime Theatre Company, META brought rare exposure. “We were invited to the NSD festival in January. It was packed. Many couldn’t get tickets. Now we are doing shows in Kolkata and Kerala.”

In great measure, the immense tide of goodwill generated by META and the Mahindra festival over the past six years is an index of how starved theatre, like the arts in India in general, is for both funding and recognition. “Any form of support for theatre can only be lauded,” says Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury, who runs the critically-acclaimed Chandigarh- based theatre group The Company and is a META jury member for 2011. Theatrepeople seem almost resigned to the fact that there is little space for critical (or any) coverage of theatre in a media culture so dominated by popular cinema. “There seems even less coverage than 10 years ago,” muses Mansingh. “But the play in the context of the festival gets covered at least.” “Theatre may or may not draw large audiences, may not have any visible returns in terms of a spotlight on the sponsors,” concurs Anuradha Kapur, director of NSD and co-jury member. But while most theatrepeople are deeply grateful for the existence of a META, it is far from filling the enormous and urgent need that exists. “There is absolutely no reason to be apologetic in demanding State support,” says Kapur. “The world’s best, most cutting-edge theatre, German or British, subsists on State funding.” Sanjoy Roy points out that the arts in India function despite — not because of — government policies. “It is not handing out money for charity, but an investment in the wealth of the nation, in creativity. And creative arts like theatre also provide a platform for the discontented voice: we see it in plays from the Northeast every year.” Clearly there is a great deal more that needs to be done, and no shortage of ideas about directions from which change can come. And almost every theatreperson you ask has tens of them — taking theatre festivals to smaller towns, instituting permanent repertory companies that might afford a viable livelihood to theatre practitioners, building affordable theatres in every Indian city. What makes META special is that it has had the gumption to go beyond the small-scale ambitions with which theatre in this country is taught to be content. Perhaps what is needed is to think even bigger. Arundhati Nag, 2011 jury member and founder of Bengaluru’s remarkable theatre hub, Ranga Shankara, is not being facetious when she says corporates have a duty to patronise theatre: “Earlier, you had kings, now you have corporations. Why should there be an IPL only in cricket? Why not in theatre?”

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 11, Dated 19 Mar 2011

A world framed by language: A report on the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2011

This report was written for Biblio's Jan-Feb 2011 issue. Do register on the Biblio website to read it and many other wonderful pieces in pdf.


Geeta Hariharan, JM Coetzee, Adam Zagajewski, Ahdaf Soueif and Mrinal Pande at a session called 'Imperial English' during JLF 2011

The Jaipur Literature Festival, whose sixth instalment ended on 25th January 2011, is undoubtedly the most talked-about book event in India. This year especially, miles of newsprint — not to mention many megabytes worth of facebook and twitter updates — have been expended upon it by celebrity watchers, enthusiastic revellers and irascible critics alike.While much of the gushing national-level coverage tended to focus on the number of award-winning writers in attendance (seven Booker- and five Pulitzer-winners), the local Jaipur papers seemed more interested in splashing their front pages with pictures of an anonymous white couple kissing on the Diggi Palace lawns. Last year’s prize kissing-at-JLF photograph involved known writers: the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the British-born-and-bred Niall Fergusson. This year’s favourite celebrity couple, novelists Orhan Pamuk and Kiran Desai, did not quite deliver on their tabloid promise.

This year’s festival has probably also fielded more flak than ever before: being accused — variously — of being beholden to British writers (and being run as a fiefdom by one of them); of having dubious corporate sponsors (Shell and Rio Tinto, in particular, have been singled out as companies that stand publicly accused of unethical practices); and most frequently, of having surrendered claims to literary gravitas by being too much of a social event: the descriptive terms bandied about range from “mela”, “circus” and “tamasha” to “fashion show” and “Page Three Party”. Let me skirt the first two charges for the moment to address the last one. There is no doubt that reading and writing are both such solitary activities that a literature festival, to begin with, seems almost an oxymoron. Yet there is something to be said for being able to see, listen (and just possibly have a conversation with) a writer whose work you love, or just to be in a space where reading, writing and conversation about books seems absolutely normal. Suddenly, literature seems to afford the possibility of community. As the festival drew to a close, amid the reluctantly-departing revellers were large numbers of writers and readers excited and grateful to have met other writers and readers. Of course, complaints abound: about how it is no longer an intimate meeting of bookish minds, how it is overrun by celebrity-seeking crowds who are there only to catch a glimpse of Gulzar, or worse, of Om Puri. Yes, large numbers of people who don’t really read books do show up, particularly on the weekends—because the music is rather good, entry is free and “everyone’s going”. Yes, there are plenty of people (even readers and writers) who are in Jaipur to socialise (or less delicately, schmooze) and who barely attend a session or two. Yes, it is crowded enough that you will often find no space to sit in a session you really really want to attend. From the three-day gathering to which 14 guests turned up in 2005, the festival has grown into a massive five-day affair with four parallel sessions going on at any point in time—touted by Tina Brown of the Daily Beast (not without reason) as “the greatest literary show on earth”. Since 2006, it has also grown out of the single-session confines of the charmingly yellow painted Durbar Hall, gradually colonising more and more of the seemingly inexhaustible grounds of Diggi Palace, the haveli-turned-hotel where the event has been held since its inception.

But these ostensibly non-literary crowds only really take over in the evenings, when the day’s sessions have ended, the bar has opened and the atmosphere is more Chhattarpur farmhouse party than anything else. During the day, however, the festival is thronged by all manner of listeners, of whom one assumes a generous proportion are also readers — some avid, some occasional, some potential. You would be hard put to find so large and varied a selection of people engaged in such attentive head-nodding (or such vociferous and articulate opposition) at any university seminar. In 2009, among the people I met were three enthusiastic schoolteachers from Ajmer, a yoga trainer who had just taken a class with the visiting Julia Roberts and a psychic healer (and potential writer) who invited me to come visit her in the hills to sort out all my problems. This year, as every year, sessions involving Javed Akhtar or Gulzar or Prasoon Joshi (or, calamitously, all three) were nearly impossible to get into because there were large numbers of college students from all over Rajasthan who had come all the way just to see them. There was the carefully made-up Jaipur dowager in the audience who greeted several of Junot Diaz’s declarations with a heartfelt “That’s right!”— whether she had ever read or would ever read Diaz’s Dominican-New Jersey fiction didn’t seem the point. My favourite encounter this year was with two Bengali sisters in their 60s, one based in Bangalore and the other in Australia, who had decided to make the lit-fest their ‘together’ vacation and when I left them, were rushing excitedly to the Mughal Tent to hear Atiq Rahimi, a Franco-Afghan novelist whose Stone of Patience one of them had fallen in love with.

The other primary accusation levelled at the lit-fest this year was that it is dominated by British writers and only has any significance because it ties us in India to the British literary establishment.The first thing to say is what one of the directors of the festival, British-born William Dalrymple, has already pointed out in a post-festival interview: that the figures ought to speak for themselves. There were 224 authors at Jaipur this year, of whom precisely seven were British. He also counted 162 writers of Indian origin and 64 from 32 other countries. But the larger question, it would seem, is not one of the nationality of writers, but of the skewedness of the publishing scene, and even more broadly, of the English language and its clout. Even those who disagree with the “British dominance” argument grant that the Indian publishing scene in English depends on approval from the western establishment, located in the UK and the US. Being feted in the West, by a big advance from a firang publisher, or even better, by a Booker Prize, is necessary for an Indian writer in English to be seen as important here. Within India, however, it is only if you write a book in English (and not in Bengali or Malayalam or Hindi) that you have a chance at getting hold of a piece of the new publishing pie: a book launch (hopefully with free alcohol), reviews and interviews in a few national dailies and magazines, a stab at a handful of book prizes. It is another matter that the number of books actually sold is abysmally low — 3000 copies is a normal print run for literary fiction; 10,000 is a coup — when compared to the numbers that anoint a book as bestseller in any of the regional language markets.

The Jaipur Literature Festival is not what ails the Indian book scene — it just exhibits symptoms of the malaise. The 64 non-UK writers, whether from the US, Turkey, Australia, Nigeria, China, Egypt or Sri Lanka, either write in English themselves, or come to us filtered through English translations. There may have been 162 “desis” at the festival, as Dalrymple puts it, but the number of those who write in one of the bhashas was very few indeed. And these Indian language sessions, too, were largely either in Rajasthani or Hindi — for the obvious reason that these were the languages in which local Jaipur audiences could be expected to be fluent, and therefore, interested. A bit more complicated is the issue of why the bhasha writers who do get invited tend to get put on panels of their own, speaking almost entirely to each other, quite separate from the sessions in which the “international” writers and Indian writers in English get to mingle, backslap and disagree. Partly, this is a function of the assumptions that underlie the festival’s programming, i.e. that audiences for these authors are neatly dividable: that those who want to hear Pavan Varma and Gulzar don’t want to hear Orhan Pamuk, or that those who might be curious about the Hindi blogosphere have no interest in non-fiction about Afghanistan and Pakistan. More importantly, of course, it’s about the limitations of language: the “international” lingua franca, whether we like it or not, is English, and so a writer who is not entirely articulate in English doesn’t usually get to be on a panel discussing something with four others who are.

Simultaneous translation is theoretically possible, of course, but it would double the time taken for any session (and potentially double the number of speakers). It is not as if translation is not an integral feature of the festival. In 2009, for example, there were at least two sessions devoted to discussing the act of translation: the astoundingly resonant Writers’ Chain session, the culmination of a workshop with eight British and Indian poets working in eight languages, and a slightly more academic session with Alok Rai and Arshia Sattar among others.

In 2010 there was a lively discussion with translators Gillian Wright and Arunava Sinha (the latter was present this year as well). There is also, at the JLF, a constant sense of translation on the fly, with spontaneous, provisional versions of things said being provided both off-stage and on—most often for international visitors by bilingual Indians, but sometimes also for a whole audience: among the highlights of JLF 2009 was the experience of hearing Nalini Jamila’s fluid Malayalam descriptions of her life as a sex worker in Kerala instantaneously rendered into perfectly idiomatic English by K. Satchidanandan and Paul Zacharia. Among the unexpected delights of 2011 was a morning session on Bhojpuri cinema where the (admittedly rare) foreigner present had the pleasure of hearing Avijit Ghosh and Amitava Kumar read, recite and banter in a joyful mixture of English, Hindi and Bhojpuri, with Kumar translating the important bits quickly into English.

But on the whole, of course, it is impossible for non-English speakers to have derived much pleasure from listening to J.M. Coetzee’s grave and sonorous (and practically unannotated) reading of a story on the Front Lawns, or conversely, for a non-Hindustani speaker to have been moved by Javed Akhtar’s heartfelt exhortation not to surrender the North Indian heritage of Urdu to a fictitious association with a religious community. Which is why the presence of someone like Mrinal Pande, fluent and thoughtful in both Hindi and English, felt both rare and wonderful. Pande was among the most considered speakers in an animated panel called ‘Aisi Hindi Kaisi Hindi’, which otherwise seemed to swing between an old sense of beleaguerment and anxiety about linguistic purity and a new puffing-up-of-the-chest based on the explosion in Hindi media and cinema. She was also the sole bilingual Indian writer on a superb session called Imperial English, which perhaps more than any other session, provided clues to the complex linguistic universe, both political and personal, with which the festival — and we as readers and writers in English—must grapple. Pande spoke of growing up in many languages (Kumaoni, Hindi, even Gujarati and Bengali to some extent) and said that though English had “expanded the circumference of [her] experience”, it would never be the language in which she was at her best. Yet, English was a “survival tactic” that allowed her to speak of things that Hindi often didn’t: sex, for example. Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif said she could only write fiction in English, but that if she were forced to live in one language, it would have to be Arabic. The most surprising thought came from South African writer J.M. Coetzee — whose mother tongue is Afrikaans, but who has only ever written in English and has won a Nobel Prize for his efforts — that he has never felt at home in English. Bilingual people, said Coetzee, lead “dual lives”, a mode of living on which two perspectives are possible. One way of looking at such people is that they have always known that the world is not simply what it is; it is always a world framed by language. Language, in other words, makes the world what it is. The other perspective on bilingual people, writers who write in a language that is not their mother tongue, is that they have been divorced forever from the language natural to them and to what they write about, and will therefore always be at a disadvantage. The first view is probably that of most people at this festival, Coetzee said quietly, because people who hold the second opinion are not invited here.

No-one responded.

Published in BIBLIO: A REVIEW OF BOOKS, VOL. XV NOS. 1 & 2, JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2011