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

Not quite the belly of Delhi: No One Killed Jessica review

THERE’S A MOMENT in No One Killed Jessica when a girl — someone we’ve never seen — watches the candlelight vigil scene in Rang De Basanti, comes out of the cinema and sends out an SMS calling for a similar vigil for ‘Justice for Jessica’. The scene is spot-on. Without saying a word, it shows you how the news media, cinema and mobile phone technology came together to create a new kind of middle-class activist public, the outrage of its thousands of SMSes amplified by the power of television, leading to the eventual reopening of the Jessica Lall murder case.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t often manage such verbal economy. It opens with a scene we know well from newspaper accounts: the late-night party at which the feisty young bartender, Jessica, is shot by a loutish customer who doesn’t like the idea of a do take ki model having the gall to refuse him a drink. But the quiet tension of this sequence — displaying some of the taut pacing of director Rajkumar Gupta’s controversial previous film, Aamir — swiftly disintegrates as Gupta decides to milk the idea of the decadence (and hypocrisy) of Delhi’s Page Three elite for all its worth, teetering dangerously over Madhur Bhandarkar territory and finally falling into a morass of easy lecturebaazi (“Sabrinaji, yeh kaise logon ke saath uthti-baithti hain aap?”).


NOKJ also fails miserably as a Delhi film. Every film set in Delhi doesn’t have to devote itself to the city. But we’re told constantly this is a story about Delhi. Sadly, it never goes beyond the clichés — Mumbai = paisa, Delhi = power; “Everybody is a somebody here” — and even these are lamely served up in a voiceover. There is the intermittent well-done cameo — example Bubbles Sabharwal as the socialite restaurant-owner swinging between self-absorption and hand-wringing helplessness. But Mumbai high society cannot pass off as Delhi’s: clothes, accents and intonations betray most characters. Worse still, none of the three principals — newcomer Myra as pretty Delhi girl Jessica who doesn’t take shit from men, Vidya Balan as her supposedly dowdy, stoic sister Sabrina, or Rani Mukherjee as hard-boiled star reporter Meera — look or sound like Delhi women. Balan puts in an admirable performance (largely wordless, thus easier in the context of this film) while Mukherjee struggles to give her shrieky, sloppily-written character something like a graph. The only thing Delhi about this film is Amit Trivedi’s zippy Dilli anthem.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 3, Dated Jan 22, 2011

Twist in the Wedding

Why the shaadi is still a staple of Bollywood romance

Bittoo Sharma first meets Shruti Kakkar at a wedding. She’s rude to him, but he’s quite taken with her. He borrows his friend’s video camera to shoot her dancing, turns up in her U-special the next day to present her with a DVD exclusively devoted to her performance. The opening of Band Baaja Baraat makes one think you know exactly where it’s going. The girl seen by the boy at a shaadi, the wooing that ensues, leading up to the couple’s own wedding — it’s among the oldest tropes in the Hindi movie universe. And Band Baaja Baaraat’s opening scene is a clear tribute to Yash Chopra’s own contribution to the genre: Chandni (1989), where Rishi Kapoor first sees Sridevi at a wedding, starts photographing her in secret, and later, in one of the dramatic high points of the 1980s filmi romance, reveals a roomful of pictures he has taken of her.

The Indian wedding has always been a traditional mating ground. It was a rare, socially sanctioned space where young women of marriageable age were on display, for matchmaking aunts — and potential husbands. (Ask around in any north Indian family and you’ll find at least one uncle and aunt who got married because he saw her at his brother/ cousin/ friend’s wedding and set his heart on her.) The shaadi ka ghar, with its dressing-up and dancing and suggestive songs, was the natural setting for romance, a place where banter between young men and women was laughingly condoned and flirtation was almost traditional.

These days, one might think, urban young people don’t need the socially sanctioned space of the shaadi to meet a potential partner, either on screen or off it. The CCD-mall-multiplex generation should have no time for wedding movies. The days of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...! (1994) are over.

Yet it seems that the 2000s — after Karan Johar’s K3G (2001) — were when the choreographed Bollywood sangeet really became de rigueur, first in movies and then in weddings across the country and the diaspora, and I can think, off the cuff, of three Hindi films in the past few years where the hero first properly sees the heroine at a wedding: Saathiya (2002), Love Aaj Kal (2009) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008). And at least three 2010 films derive much of their energy from weddings — Aisha, Do Dooni Chaar and Band Baaja Baraat.

Do Dooni Chaar is least obviously preoccupied with the wedding — it serves mainly to kick-start the plot, which is really about the middle-class family’s desire for a car. And yet there is a way in which, despite all their travails and tribulations in getting to it — the borrowing of the car, the cost of the wedding present, the potential theft, the potential exposure — the wedding itself has the power to create a generally celebratory mood, successfully drawing in the glum father and the teenage cynic alike.

Aisha — which sets Jane Austen’s Emma in contemporary Delhi — is possibly the most traditional of the three, in that it opens with a shaadi where we first see the heroine, Aisha, and ends with Aisha’s own wedding. But the hero already knows the heroine, so the wedding is not the setting for their romance. On the other hand, it sets in motion a definite trail of matchmaking — only the matchmaker in question is the heroine herself. Almost the whole of the film is taken up with pairing off young people who appear in the original wedding scene, culminating in the final wedding, where we have the pleasure of seeing them all matched up (in more ways than one, since this is the most alarmingly colour-coordinated wedding you’ll ever see).

The film that really takes the wedding movie theme and runs with it, though, is Band Baaja Baaraat. It seems to play by the old rules — introducing the heroine and the hero at a wedding, following their relationship and culminating in their own wedding — but, in fact, it brilliantly subverts both the genre and our expectations by making them wedding planners. Shruti refuses Bittoo’s romantic overtures. She accepts his DVD and, later, his partnership, only on condition that he isn’t going to line maaro her. She arranges weddings, and she’s going to have an arranged match herself. She has Plans — and love isn’t part of them.

Yet, as we watch the two of them lean laughingly into each other at wedding after wedding, complementing each other perfectly in the exaggeratedly comic flirtation-rejection of the wedding song, we know that the shaadi movie will have its way. It’s as if the well-done north Indian wedding — with its glitter, its banter, and, crucially, the zippy song that gets the whole family on its feet — casts a kind of spell, temporarily erasing the rules of the ordinary world and making romance seem somehow inevitable. Much like the well-done Hindi film.

The writer is a Delhi-based writer and anthropologist.

Published in the Indian Express, Friday Jan 14, 2011.

The Dark Knight: Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa's cinema may seem to be about heroic action, but heroes, in the end, are merely human.

One of my most vivid cinematic memories involves a stocky little Asian man and a suited-booted white man frantically cutting wild grass, while the sun threatens to set behind them. I was six or seven, and understood nothing of the film. But the elemental power of that single scene never left me: the vast, bleak grassland, the eerie light, the wind beginning to howl, and the knowledge – somehow contained wordlessly in the furious cutting of the grass – that life depended on it.

Fifteen years later, I learnt that the film was called Dersu Uzala (1975), which was also the name of its memorable protagonist: an old Goldi hunter who knows the cold forests of the Russian Far East like the back of his hand, but loses his eyesight and is forced to go live in a town. Its world-renowned Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, had been offered the project by the Soviet studio Mosfilm in 1973. It was a time of great tumult in Kurosawa’s life: his attempt to break into Hollywood with Tora Tora Tora had gone horribly wrong, his experimental venture Dodesukaden (1970) had received a lukewarm reception in Japan and he was unable to get funding. In Dersu’s profound bewilderment – that he, who was so attuned to the wilderness, can no longer survive in it – one senses an echo of Kurosawa’s own feelings about cinema in those years.

In 1973, Kurosawa had already been directing films for thirty years. Identified in the West with his superlative samurai films – Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Sanjuro and The Hidden Fortress (which inspired Star Wars), he was seen as a master of the dramatic action narrative. Dersu Uzala is, by comparison, a slow film. But it contains many long-term Kurosawa preoccupations: the individual striving to surmount all odds (seen most powerfully in Ikiru (To Live, 1952), where a minor bureaucrat’s life is transformed by the discovery that he is going to die); relationships between younger and older men (Seven Samurai (1954), where a newbie samurai apprentices himself to an older one, and Red Beard (1965), about an old doctor and an arrogant intern); and the connection between man and nature.

Kurosawa was deeply concerned about human hubris. He once said, “People today have forgotten they’re really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better...” There is something magical about his rendition of the landscape in Dersu; the wind, the rain, the sun seem almost to conspire to make the two men lose their way. Then you watch the two warriors befuddled by the forest in Throne of Blood (1957), and you realize that Kurosawa has thought of nature in this way for a long, long time. Transposing Macbeth to medieval Japan, he takes the Birnam Wood of the prophecy (“I shall not be afraid of death or bane, till Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane”) and makes of it an eerie presence more powerful than the strongest warrior: the Cobweb Forest. Even in Seven Samurai, the heroism of the samurai is ephemeral – it is the land and the peasant’s link to it that is forever. Kurosawa was known for his larger-than-life dramas. But what makes his cinema truly epic is the profound sense that there is something larger than the heroic human life.

Published in UTV World Movies magazine, Dec 2010.

Delhi: Postcards from the Last Century

On a photography exhibition:


Images courtesy of Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

The Alkazi Foundation’s newest exhibition of vintage photographs is an ambitious one: it takes as its subject a much-photographed city, while limiting itself to images from a time that ensures that very few visitors to the show will recognize that city as one they know. 'Historic Delhi: Early Explorations of the Camera c. 1860-1950', showing at the National Gallery of Modern Art, consists almost entirely of photographs from the last century of colonial rule. But under that broad rubric is a variety of pictures.

There are memorable – if strangely empty – images of Delhi’s monuments after 1857 for example, created by pioneering photographers like Samuel Bourne and Felice Beato, and there are high-quality photographs, often of the same monuments, taken for documentary purposes by the Archaeological Survey of India. There are photographs by the famous pre-independence studios, like Lala Deen Dayal, documenting with aplomb such grand affairs as the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911, or showing troops being dispatched along the Grand Trunk Road, a cloud of dust rising around the horses’ feet. There are a few lovely, carefully chosen pictures from the 1940s and 1950s, mostly taken by the news photographer couple Maneckshaw and Homai Vyarawalla – these include some haunting images of Ramlila performers. And finally, there are the anonymous images – annotated, if we’re lucky, with a year and a subject.

In some ways, it is these last that are the most interesting, because they fit less easily into any preconceived category in our heads. Looking at an image like ‘Miss Azijan of Delhi, c.1905’ – a young and pretty woman, photographed without purdah and alone, in 1905 – one imagines she must be a courtesan. But not knowing the photographer or his purpose – British or Indian, old or young, official or tourist, admirer or anthropologist – sharpens our interest. One’s eyes linger longer on Miss Azijan’s carefully arranged pose: one knee placed perfectly upon another, the self-possessed finger on her chin, and the face that remains somehow towards the camera – even as her gaze turns intriguingly away.

Sometimes, of course, a mere caption is enough to slot the image: a shy looking young girl with large earrings, dressed in gypsy fashion, can never escape the words, ‘Delhi Dancing Girl, c. 1905’. It was Jean-Luc Godard who once pointed out that the photograph is “physically mute”. “It talks,” he said, “through the mouth of the text beneath it.” Sometimes, I suppose, that can be a good thing. There are certainly moments when this exhibition comes to life through the inscriptions. Not contemporary curatorial ones (though those are informative enough), but old inscriptions that mark the image, conjuring up with great immediacy the past that lies congealed within it. A postcard with an image of the Mutiny Memorial that bears an exceptionally clear Leighton Buzzard postmark for May 23, 3pm (though the year was illegible to me) – and this laconic message: “Dear Flo, This place was put up by comrades of the men who died in the mutiny.” Closer to the bone is the image of Bara Hindu Rao, with a handwritten inscription as follows: “Our main picquet during the siege. Very hard fighting all round this place.”

Whether the past you’re looking for lies in the stately and studiously composed archival image, or in the postcard accidentally discovered, this is an exhibition worth visiting.

(Published in The India Tube)