Warp & Weft of History: Mishal Husain's Broken Threads

I read the BBC presenter's Mishal Husain's family history and then interviewed her about it for this India Today piece:

British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a rare mix of research and storytelling, making it a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present

Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads begins with the actual frayed threads of a sari from her grandparents’ wedding. A cousin uses its brocade border on a shawl, and gives it to Husain as a wedding present. Beyond this, though, the book contains surprisingly few object histories, for a family memoir in an age of Instagrammable nostalgia. It quickly becomes clear that Husain, a well-known BBC journalist, wasn’t just looking for a place to inscribe her own memories.

She had access to her grandparents’ memories: “I had the books written by one grandparent (Shahid), an unpublished memoir left by another (Mumtaz), some audio tapes recording my grandmother Tahirah, and a 97-year-old sibling of Mary’s to talk to,” Husain says in an email interview. The book’s structure stemmed from this: Chapters 1-4 are devoted, in succession, to her grandparents Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid and Tahirah.

But the real achievement of Broken Threads lies in contextualising each grandparent’s individual trajectory. “I realised early on that I needed to begin a few decades before, going back into the 19th century and the period before and after 1857,” says Husain. “I turned it into history as well as memoir because I didn’t feel I could understand these individuals without understanding their times.”

We hear about Mary’s childhood, for instance, only after Husain has described the arrival of Europeans in India. But instead of a generic history of the East India Company, Husain focuses on what is relevant to explain Mary Quinn, daughter of Mariamma and Francis Quinn: the relationships between Indian women and European men which led to the emergence of the Anglo-Indian community.

She does something similar with each grandparent, tapping into histories of communities, professions, ways of being. Writing about her grandfathers Mumtaz and Shahid enables her — and us — to dive into the modern South Asian histories of medicine and the army. As context for her grandmother Tahirah, who grew up in Aligarh, Husain provides a deft account of Syed Ahmad Khan and his awakening to the need for Western education for Muslims, who after 1857 had fallen into a state of nostalgia for the past and resistance to the future.

What brings all these threads together is the British colonial frame. As Husain puts it, she “felt the environment into which Shahid, Tahirah, Mumtaz and Mary were born, between 1911 and 1922, had been shaped by prior events and the entrenchment of British power”. “They grew up seeing New Delhi being built as a grand capital...and I don’t think they envisaged that era ending in their lifetimes,” she tells india today. This may have been particularly true of Shahid, “who had a ringside seat to the circle of power in Delhi for the 18-month run-up to Independence and who wrote about that period, making clear his dim view of Lord Mountbatten.” There is something deeply tragic about this portrait of her grandparents as part of a colonial elite in a united South Asia, who didn’t feel at home anywhere after Independence and Partition.

Husain seems to share Shahid’s sense of disappointment. “As a journalist working primarily on the UK,” she says, writing Broken Threads made her return often to “a dispiriting reality: how did a nation with such an established democracy, developed institutions, and a system of checks and balances, not do better in its ending of Empire?”

That the book is written for a British audience is apparent in both the language — a great-grandmother’s “white dupatta scarf ”— and references —“Babur, a near contemporary of Henry VIII”. And yet, the rare mix of research and storytelling makes this a great read for anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asia’s present. The political divides of the 1930s and ’40s emerge more intimately than in most academic histories: Nehru and Jinnah being disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religious symbolism, or Mohammad Ali Jauhar, of Khilafat Movement fame, saying, “Nationalism divides, but faith binds.”

It is disturbing to see the present-day resonances, Husain agrees, “in how much of what drove decision-making in 1947 — or has happened since — remains, whether it’s the insecurity minority communities can experience, or the role of the military in governance.” 

But I felt also a great distance from the past, in ordinary people’s identification with something greater than the self. When Shahid is en route to England for military training, his cousin Shaukat writes to him: “Remember that this poor, disorganised, half-fed country is your native land.... Bring back to its shores the accumulated experience of other people.” I do not know if many ordinary South Asians today feel such idealism. 

Published in India Today magazine, 4 Nov 2024 edition, in print. Also online here.

PS Vinothraj: Filmmaker Profile

PS Vinothraj, whose last film Pebbles was selected as the Indian entry for the 94th Oscars, premiered The Adamant Girl at the Berlin Film Festival 2024. Like Pebbles, it makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals.

PS Vinothraj burst onto the indie cinema scene when his directorial debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) won the Tiger award, the top prize at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2021. Late that year, it was India' entry to the Academy Awards. In February 2024, his second feature Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and all five screenings across the city were sold out. 

When I meet Vinothraj in person, he is all smiles after a wonderfully engaged post-screening discussion with the audience at Arsenal, one of Berlin’s many thriving arthouse cinemas. At his hotel in Mitte two days later, with his co-producer Kalai Arasu as our interpreter, it becomes clear that the smiles are part of his persona.

Vinothraj wears his experience lightly, but the 35-year-old’s journey into filmmaking has taken unimaginable grit and clarity. Compelled to drop out of school in Class IV, he worked as a child labourer in a Madurai flower market and a Tiruppur singlet factory before landing a job at a Chennai DVD shop, where he started watching three world cinema DVDs a day. The aesthetic of Vinothraj’s films—long takes, minimal background music, no songs, zero melodrama—may have been shaped by this immersion.

He beams when I mention the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose 1998 Palm D’or winner Eternity and a Day he has called his favourite film. His favourite filmmaker, he says, is Tony Gatlif, French director of many films on the Roma community. A picture of Gatlif, a 70-something man with grey hair and a warm smile, is Vinothraj’s phone wallpaper. Gatlif’s films and Eternity and a Day are “travelling films”, which Vinothraj says “will always be my inspiration”. But while admiring these European masters, his cinematic material is drawn from his immediate surroundings, both physical and socio-political. Formally, too, he makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals: a stray puppy, a sacrificial rooster, a mute but recalcitrant bull.

Pebbles featured an angry alcoholic called Ganapathy (stunningly played by Karuththadaiyan) who drags his son Velu (Chellapandi) out of school, so that they can go fetch his wife from her natal village 13 km away. Vinothraj mapped their journey, much of it on foot, onto a barren landscape of searing white heat that echoed Ganapathy’s relentless rage. Nothing really ‘happens’ during the 75-minute film (too short for an interval, which prevented a theatrical release in Tamil Nadu); it is about the mundaneness of this violence. But you cannot but be gripped by the father-son dynamic, with the child’s reaction to his father swinging between fear and subversion, and often settling for a watchful silence.

Silence is also the only weapon left to Meena in The Adamant Girl—if one can call it a weapon. Malayalam actor Anna Ben brings to the titular character a sense of mental fatigue combined with the last dregs of physical resistance. Meena is often in frame, in a moving vehicle. But she stays unmoving, even in her expression—except in one shot where she walks free, in her mind’s eye. And she speaks only one sentence in 100 minutes. We learn early in the film that she is ‘promised’ in marriage to Pandi (played with scarily believable aggression by popular Tamil actor Soori) but is in love with a boy she met in college.

Having failed to talk her out of it, both families decide to take Meena to a shrine where the ghost of her lover will be exorcised out of her. Her silence, Vinothraj told me, is because “the film starts after she has tried everything else”; one imagines the arguing and yelling and weeping that went before. Thinking about it later, I wonder if having a mostly silent protagonist also aids in Vinothraj’s quest, as he put it to me, to make films “that keep you visually engaged, that keep your attention despite whatever language barrier may exist.”
In other words, pure cinema.

Kottukkaali certainly is. It begins with a woman bathing, fully-clothed, at a public tap. Before seeing her face, we have felt her tears. Walking back home in the pre-dawn light, she passes by a covered bike and a buffalo, both somehow evoking the must-always-be-clothed bodies of women. Vinothraj takes us quietly by the hand into this cloaked world of women’s sadness, from Meena’s crying mother to Meena, whose tears have run dry. Parallel to it, often its cause, is the world of men’s anger, represented here by Pandi, his throat coated with a white lime paste because he is so hoarse from shouting.

Many have read the film as feminist, and it is. But Vinothraj’s clarity about everything that’s wrong with this universe does not preclude a profound understanding of everyone in it. “The film is about the internal war between Pandi and Meena. Neither of them is bad,” he told me, going on to explain how even minor characters fit into his cinematic vision. “The small boy in the rickshaw is like Pandi in childhood, a good boy. The little girl who drags the bull away is how Meena would have been in her childhood. Meenakshi was the ancient queen of Madurai. Pandi, Pandian, is also a historical king. So in my backstory, right from childhood, they’ve been ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’. Pandi would have felt responsible for Meena.”

Fictional backstories aside, his scripts often draw on things that have happened to people he knows. For Kottukkaali, his sisters contributed a lot of what became the women’s dialogue. “Everyone is very supportive (of my process). In fact, they joke: ‘Don’t get into any other trouble, or he’ll make another film!’”

His films, too, show a close-knit community where people look out for each other. But they also reveal a deeply patriarchal society: its rituals, its alcoholism, the lack of freedom for women, verbal and physical violence by men. Does he ever worry about the critical gaze he turns on a society he knows so intimately, exposing it to an international audience? “There are positive things in each culture, but also a few (negative) things that need to be addressed. As a responsible artist, it is my job to send a message across, so that these things will stop,” says Vinothraj. “There are no heroes and villains, only the social situation that is creating the conflict.”

First published in Moneycontrol, 10 Mar 2024. 

Raam Reddy: ‘Film itself is a character’

My interview with the filmmaker Raam Reddy, as published in Mint Lounge on 3 Mar 2024.

Raam Reddy on his second feature, ‘The Fable’, and why the setting always comes early in his outline and feeds into everything.

Raam Reddy was 26 when his directorial debut Thithi (Funeral) premiered at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, winning several awards on the international film festival circuit and the national award for Best Kannada Film in 2016. A marvellously deadpan tragicomedy about three generations of men responding to the death of a patriarch, Thithi was set in co-writer Ere Gowda’s village of Nodekopplu in Karnataka’s Mandya district.

Now 34, Reddy has made a second feature strikingly different in terms of cast, language, setting and tone. The Fable features Mumbai-based actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and Tilottama Shome, has dialogues in English and Hindi, is shot on 16mm, and unfolds in the shadowy glades of a fruit orchard in Uttarakhand. Set in 1989, it’s about an English-speaking business family not dissimilar to Reddy’s own—except that the man of the house (Bajpayee) spends a lot of time surveying his surroundings, wearing a pair of wings. The Fable substitutes Thithi’s gentle philosophical realism with the surreal and mysterious, exploring the family’s transformation after fires begin to break out on their estate. 

Lounge spoke with Reddy at the recently concluded 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where The Fable had its world premiere. Edited excerpts:

The settings of both your films are very different: a chaotically busy Karnataka village and a vast, quiet Himalayan estate. What role does place play in inspiring your work?
A huge role. Place always comes early in my outline and feeds into absolutely everything. My novel It’s Raining In Maya (2011) is set in a fictitious town inspired by my years in Delhi University’s North Campus. I lived in Malkaganj. For Thithi, it was the village. Here it’s the mountains, because they have an inherent magic in the air.

In ‘Thithi’, there was a real village. But in ‘The Fable’...
It’s fictional.

So, was the germ of this film the setting?
Actually, it was genre. The magical elements I have experienced in very moving ways in literature, I wanted to translate them into cinema. Then the setting: I spent three months in the mountains. The narrative structure comes from what story the place wants me to tell. Thithi was very... humorous? This time I was excited by the challenge of holding attention through mystery.

‘The Fable’ combines a real world with the surreal. How did you decide what those magical elements would be?
I would love to clap on a pair of wings and fly. Or be able to communicate without words. I always wanted to be part of that heightened reality. It gets a little indulgent, but I wanted to abide a little in these dreams, in a very pure way.

Do your scripts start as novels?
My novels look more like films scripts: I think in cuts. But yes, this screenplay was quite literary. I used language to create moods that had to be executed in the audiovisual domain. Quite hard to do if you have a lot of specifics.

Talking of specifics: why fires?
When I was in the mountains for the first time, I went to fight a forest fire. And I like allowing life to guide my storytelling hand.

You mean, it’s like magic: the fire happening while you were there.
Exactly. Fire was also exciting at the narrative level: it’s the perfect crime (there’s no way to know where a spark fell in a pine forest) as well as the perfect capsule to see how an unknown accident affects a social ecosystem. Fire also signifies many things, like regeneration. Destruction is not always negative. It also brings forth the new.

You have two songs, which seem crucial to the mood.
Not just mood, but meaning. The lyrics move me to tears each time, even in the edit room. Shivoham says you are not your body, or your mind: you are pure consciousness. This is the deepest part of our philosophy and I connect with it deeply. As does the family. It takes them into a spontaneous meditation. The purity of that space, from which the song comes, is why the family were worthy of this story. Naiharwa is about reaching the land of the enlightened. Both have been sung by my sister-in-law (Hindola Aguvaveedi). She would sing these to us after she married my brother.

How much does the film draw on your own life?
I have spent time in a coffee estate, I have seen those relationships as a child and I wanted to question them. So the soul of the film is personal, it’s my voice as an artist. But the body—the north Indian setting, the narrative elements, those are my craft as a filmmaker. I almost don’t want to be over-familiar with the place. Like in Thithi—it wasn’t my village.

In ‘Thithi’ you worked largely with non-actors. Here you have well-known actors.
Unlike in Thithi, where we wrote roles based on real-life characters, here I wanted to write and then find actors who could inhabit those key roles, who could transform. But there are many non-actors: the villagers, the army men, the gardener, the maid. They served different purposes within this tapestry.

Was the combining of actors and non-actors ever a challenge?
These are the challenges I love. That dynamic was exciting to me: having a veteran like Manoj-ji do scenes with Ravi Bisht, who is a Pahadi villager, is talented but never acted before. Or Tilottama (Shome) going into the non-actor world and playing a villager. But mostly we had an actor schedule and a non-actor schedule.
I tried with this film to bring opposites together. So it is realistic but also magical; it is 16mm, 1980s in look and feel, but it’s also VFX-heavy. (The fires, but also a lot of the nature is VFX.)

Why did you want to shoot on film?
Multiple reasons. One, it was the medium in use in 1989. Making it look like it was shot then, that authenticity was exciting. I also believe in a kind of transference of consciousness in art; I think film carries our emotions in a tactile way, more potently than the digital medium. Film itself is a character, the grain dances from frame to frame. I do still photography on film, so that was the entry point.

Creating this visual world was a beautiful collaboration with debut cinematographer Sunil Borkar, and debut production designer Juhi Agarwal. I love working with first timers in key roles—it’s not like I am so far away from being one—because their visions are so uncoloured, coming straight from the hearts.

Would you speak a little about the film’s politics, and class in it?

First of course there’s the colonial hangover. And class has always fascinated me. It is a cross-sectional analysis of a plantation society. There is the family at the core. Then the manager who is loyal to the family but is a local himself, so he mediates between worlds. Then there are the villagers whose livelihoods are based on the estate by choice, or at least within the choices available to them. There is a loving relationship between Dev (Bajpayee) and his workers, but there is an obvious disparity. There is a shot in the film where the workers are walking home, under suspicion—and you cut to the family at a dinner party.That’s just how much of India is. And then there are the nomads: they surrender to nature, they don’t speak.

The nomads seem to represent a different sensibility from your real-world concern with class. They seem almost fictitious.
Totally, almost like elves. They had to stand apart. They are part of the questioning of our rights. Can we inhabit nature, filled with trees and creatures, without being persecuted?

Your shooting schedule was disrupted for two successive summers by the pandemic. What do you do as a filmmaker when something stops a creative process like that?
You stop, internally as well. I make one film at a time. But I am a compulsive creator. I’m into photography, music, philosophy, poetry, songs—not for an audience, yet.

Do you think of ‘The Fable’ as political allegory? 
It is part of the layers, but you can decide what you think is the core. As an artist, that’s exciting to me—to leave room for my art to be inhabited.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and critic, and professor of practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.

On the Indian documentary Nocturnes, shot in Arunachal Pradesh, which won an award at Sundance Film Festival 2024

My review of Anirban Datta and Anupama Srinivasan's documentary Nocturnes. 

Nocturnes won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at the Sundance Film Festival a few hours after my piece was published on Moneycontrol.com, on 27 January 2024.

A still from the Sundance-award-winning Indian documentary Nocturnes.

We hear them before we see them -- a faint but persistent rustling in the darkness, which turns out to be the fluttering of a million little wings. And when we first see the moths, they seem tiny, insignificant. Why, we wonder, would two human beings spend so much time and effort on them? A few moments later, though, we see the two researchers again. This time, walking along a forest path, dwarfed almost entirely by the dark green tree canopy that takes up most of the frame, it is humans who seem insignificant, just a speck on the surface of the earth. 

Of such glorious visual revelations is Nocturnes made. Directed by long-time Delhi-based non-fiction filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, the 2024 documentary which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA earlier this week was shot on location in the misty mountainous forests of Arunachal Pradesh. This is not Datta and Srinivasan’s first work in the Northeast: their previous collaboration, Flickering Lights, which won the top prize for cinematography at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2023, was about electrification -- or the lack of it -- in a village in Manipur. 

Anirban Datta, one of Nocturnes'
two directors

 Nocturnes, unlike FL, approaches science not   through pragmatics or politics but as a source of   wonder. We follow Mansi Mungee, an Indian   entomologist in her 30s, as she traverses the   forests of the Eastern Himalayas in search of the   hawk moth. She is accompanied by Gendan   “Bicki” Marphew, a young man from the local   Bugun community who works part-time as her   photographer-assistant. Sometimes other   collaborators appear, too, but the point of view   remains very much Mansi’s. As she and Bicki scout out locations, we learn about the practicalities she must keep in mind: the specific elevation or height above sea level; the presence of old-growth trees; the existence of a forest clearing to enable light from the moth screen to travel some distance -- but also some natural limits to that clearing, so that the moths that show up can be assumed to have come from a single elevation. 

Anupama Srinivasan, one of Nocturnes' 
two directors

Sukanta Majumdar’s impeccable location sound brings the forest to life, overlaid by Nainita Desai’s almost eerie musical compositions complementing our sense of visual discovery. But the work of science is not glamorous, and Yael Bitton’s editing stays close to the precision and slowness and often repetitive labour of the process: recording, measuring, comparing, evaluating. We get a real sense of the long hours spent waiting, with little control over the outcome of their labours. Night upon night, the researcher and her assistant are awake into the wee hours, their headlamps and hoods abuzz with winged visitors -- hoping that their little island of light will attract at least some of the specific creatures that they are here to study. But there are no guarantees of anything, and in these moments, scientific work begins to echo the practice of faith. 

At one point, when Mansi sketches out the route along which she intends to map the population of hawk moths, and explains to her assistants that they need to take two hundred photographs at each point on it, one of them stops her. “How long will this take?” he asks. Mansi’s reply is immediate: “However long. Four months, five months, two years -- whatever it takes, we’ll do it.” That commitment to a timeline without end feels like deep romance, especially in a world that thinks it needs everything faster and wants nothing forever. 

Several recent Indian documentaries have gained worldwide attention by training their lenses on the subcontinent’s infinitely various natural world and the relationships we have with some particular aspect of it. Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers (2022) won an Academy Award for its portrait of the man-animal bond through one couple and an elephant in Mudumalai, Rahul Jain’s Invisible Demons (2022) mapped the apocalyptic state of Delhi’s polluted air, while Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) achieved a brilliant mix of the poetic and political with its mordant portrait of two Delhi-based brothers who run a hospital for injured kites. 

Nocturnes is a quieter, smaller film than both the latter, the filmmakers having chosen a milieu with less scope for ecological handwringing or socio-political critique. But neither does it resort to crowd-pleasing appeals of the orphaned baby elephant variety. It just nudges us to slow down and look -- at gossamer spider webs trembling in the weak morning light, a caterpillar looping itself along the strength of a slender branch, the mist unfurling over a dark forested valley, and most often, at its mysterious world of whirring creatures that sometimes live only a few days, but whose ancestors have been on the planet since before the dinosaurs. Like its researcher protagonist, it hides a deep existential investment in its subject under an implacable workaday front. 

The film’s least successful moments, for me, are those when its almost meditative focus on time and labour and the eternal ‘show’ of nature is punctured by overt moments of ‘tell’: Mansi verbalising her enchantment with the species she studies, or asking existential questions to which science may not have any answers: “Why are moths so variegated in colour and pattern? Why do they thrive in these remote forests?” It would also have been interesting to see a little more of the indigenous Bugun and Shertukpen communities, who are thanked in the credits as “the guardians of this forest”. But that would have been a different film, and for now, this one is quite enough.

First published in Moneycontrol on 27 Jan, 2024.

Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'

Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023).

                                                                                   -----

Anuja Chauhan’s new novel may be a whodunnit, but its people are its pleasure, as usual

In ‘Club You To Death’, the popular writer with a perfect ear for conversation uses crime as a vehicle to portray the ‘beautiful people’ of Delhi society.

Early in Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Anuja Chauhan’s thoroughly enjoyable novel set in 1980s Delhi, there’s a scene where the retired Justice LN Thakur and family pile into the khandaani Ambassador to see off their daughter Debjani aka Dabbu for her first day as a newsreader at DeshDarpan (an obvious fictional stand-in for Doordarshan). Chauhan’s latest book, set in present-day Delhi, opens with a charming display of similar familial intimacy, squabbling but deeply affectionate: the retired Brigadier Balbir Dogra and family, four generations “stuffed into a rattling, eight-year-old Maruti Swift”, head off to play Tambola.

The similarities don’t end there. In Thakur Girls, Debjani’s glamorous job (DD newsreaders were then the acme of fashion) had the family dhobi excited to iron her sari and the Bengali Market chaatwala refusing to charge for golguppas because he had seen “Baby” on TV. In Club You To Death, the fetching young lawyer Akash “Kashi” Dogra is flaunted proudly as a customer by his Nizamuddin street barber, plays cards with the drivers parked under his house and chats affably about politics with old security guards who call him Kashi Baba.

The feudal quotient is a smidgeon less – it is 2021, after all – and Chauhan has moved a teeny tiny bit leftward in the transition from Hailey Road to Nizamuddin, making her new protagonist a jhuggi-defending lawyer. But Kashi enjoys much the same cosy relationship with the world as Dabbu did. He’s just woke enough to express some discomfort with it.

The privileged insiders

With his rented shared barsati and JNU-trained activist-architect girlfriend, Kashi Dogra may think he’s stepped away from privilege. And maybe he has travelled some distance from studying at the Doon School and dating a rich industrialist’s daughter. But Chauhan is too smart a writer to let even her likeable hero rest on such self-congratulatory laurels. When Kashi judges someone for having made up a new name and identity, Chauhan is quick to have another character reflect privately “that it is only people with great privilege who can afford to think like this”.

In this obliviousness, ironically, Kashi is following in his father’s footsteps. Brigadier Dogra belongs to that class of people that’s more than comfortably off, with their children attending the best schools (often the same schools they themselves went to), swinging the best jobs (sporting the old school tie does no harm) and generally getting a much better shot at success than 99% of the rest of the population. But they remain convinced they’re not the elite, because – as Brigadier Dogra splutters “Elite people go to five-stars and seven-stars”.

The Dogras? They go to the club.

Anuja Chauhan’s heroes and heroines have always come from the tiny sub-section of India that’s privileged enough to measure its privilege in memberships rather than money. So it’s perfectly fitting that her new novel is set in an institution emblematic of that class: a club that sounds a lot like the Delhi Gymkhana, dealing with a political milieu that sounds a lot like the present.

Speaking the language

As always, Chauhan knows her characters inside-out, turning out pitch-perfect comic set-pieces where pretty much everyone comes in for some needling, from pompous military heroes to poor little rich girls from The Vasant Valley School. But almost everyone also gets a degree of understanding. It helps that Chauhan is adept at dialogue, rendering each character in a suitably Englished version of their specific Hindi-mixed lingo, endowed with just a little extra colour and cusswords.

“It’s my own fault! I was the one who had bete-ka-bukhaar, and kept hankering for a son in spite of having such lovely daughters!” says a posh Punjabi mother berating her loser of a son. “I wanted to tell him ki listen, behenchod, we have a huge-ass CSR wing and we do a lot!” rants an heiress defending herself against the charge of being rich and oblivious. “Banerjee, apne saand ko baandh [Tie up that bull of yours],” says the friendly male who’s text-warning a woman about her boyfriend’s seductive ex.

Ever the old advertising hand, Chauhan constantly ups the linguistic absurdity quotient in delicious little ways: old Brigadier Dogra insisting on calling his wife Mala-D; a line of sculpted semi-precious stone lingams being called Shiv-Bling, or a potential scandal involving an army hero getting hashtagged as “Fauji nikla Mauji! Hawji Hawji!”

The perfect outsider
In a gleeful departure from her previous work, though, Club You To Death serves up murder as the main course – of course, with a breathy little romance to make the medicine go down. The setting offers plenty of scope for political intrigue, classist snark and just plain gossip, and Chauhan sets to work with relish, plotting the crime onto all its possible social and cultural axes. For starters, the murder is committed on the day of the club elections, one of those sorts of events that occupies mindspace in a proportion inversely related to the power at stake.

The rival candidates, both insiders, seem equally keen on winning. But could either – the retired military hero or the classy female entrepreneur – really want the job enough to kill for it? Or is the murderer just trying to pin the blame on one of them?

Second, there’s the victim, with his own secrets. Was the dead Zumba instructor a self-made Robin Hood, or a devious social climber? Was he playing his rich clients, or were they playing him?

And finally, there’s the wider socio-political context: such unsavoury news doesn’t bode well for a club already in the bad books of Delhi’s new rulers (not least for its connections to the old ones). As new rivalries and old secrets tumble out of the DTC closet, the citadel of Lutyens’ Delhi privilege begins to seem rather doddering and vulnerable. It’s a clever trick – especially when we wonder if it’s just true.

Either way, having crafted this perfect insider atmosphere, Chauhan places the case (and us) in the hands of the perfect outsider. A policeman who’s upper caste and English-speaking but not quite Club Class, ACP Bhavani Singh is somehow observant enough to imagine other people’s compulsions, be they of caste, class, gender or something else. Instead of the Singham-variety cop “who makes the criminals piss their pants”, Bhavani makes “all the crooks leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are.”

Stolidly incorruptible, staunchly non-violent and persuasively gender-sensitive, the old Delhi Police officer feels even more like a form of wish-fulfilment than Chauhan’s dishy romantic heroes. So, of course, we dearly want to believe he might exist. Much of the pleasure of Club You To Death comes from watching the amicable old policeman piece the case together quietly, his “little grey cells” keen enough not to draw attention to himself.

Under the radar, as Chauhan well knows, is the best way to fly.

Published in Scroll, 10 April 2021.

The Pain of Others: a short review essay on Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.

(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)

What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.

In Calcutta, he had begun to design posters for the Communist Party, but it was Chittagong that really put Hore on his political and artistic path. Two things happened in 1943: the Bengal famine began, and Hore met Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong, Chittaprosad was already a prolific artist documenting the lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy killed millions around them, Chittaprosad encouraged Hore to draw portraits of the hungry, sick and dying. “From morning to evening I used to accompany him on his rounds,” Hore wrote later. “He initiated me into directly sketching the people I saw on streets and hospitals.”

In 1945, Hore enrolled for formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like documentation of the massive peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between politics and art while having to make a living by teaching school students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground. It was not until 1957-58 that Hore got his diploma, and left Calcutta and politics to become a lecturer at the future Delhi College of Art.

The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its gravitas undimmed by ill-advised curatorial versifying: sample “He witnessed as a child a world not so fair,/ Disparities between rich and poor had no compare....” 

It’s clear that Hore experimented with form and material through his six decades of art-making. It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was sculpted by the tragic events of his youth. Over and over, you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope produced when these same bodies come together—to plant seeds, flags, ideas. But the stunning realism of the early woodcuts and linocuts gives way to abstraction, and a greater economy of the line. His figures are all concave stomachs, stick-like limbs and begging hands. 

They transition into the jagged, torn, blistered bodies of his bronze phase (animals, too, show effects of violence), and an almost meditative late style, using pulped paper. Here the lacerated body is conceived as texture rather than as line: white on white, paper scored, torn and moulded back into paper. The pain of others remained, forever, under his skin.  

(Birth of a White Rose is on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.)