Drives with a view

My Mirror column:

Two films set in taxis -- one a 2019 documentary, the other a cult classic from thirty years ago -- offer a great ride through a bumpy world.

A still from Philipp Majer's 2019 documentary World Taxi

Films take you travelling; that has always been true. In our Coronavirus era, when real travel is hard to come by, it is even more so -- magnifying the attractions of the road movie. In the ongoing digital edition of the Urban Lens film festival, I watched a documentary called World Taxi that's like five road movie snippets rolled into one. German filmmaker Philipp Majer lets you travel to five cities in five different time zones, each one with a different taxi driver as your guide.

Each segment offers insights into a particular part of the world, but also into the world of cab drivers everywhere.

“Your taxi is like your second wife,” says Tony, who drives a cab in Bangkok, Thailand. “If you don't take care them, they not going to take care you.” Majer doesn't link Tony's metaphorical comment up with it, but Mamadiou – the taxi driver he films in Dakar, Senegal – is actually thinking of getting a second wife. In one incredible sequence, Mamadiou actually mentions this flirtatiously with a carload of female passengers, suggesting that he might be interested in marrying the younger woman present. This leads into a full-fledged discussion, with gendered home truths flying right, left and centre. “If she [the first wife] senses that I am wooing another one, she might come back to normal,” says Mamadiou. “How will she sense it, though?” says one of the older women. “Some men have a bit on the side without the woman noticing.” “Ah, then the woman lacks intuition,” says the younger woman.

Connections also emerge between unexpected countries – like the USA and Kosovo, a much smaller territory that only declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008. Despite the vast gulf in their histories of democracy and economic status, health in both places appears to be a thing that people can't afford to pay for. In recently war-torn Kosovo, cab driver Destan Mjeqiki keeps a file full of newspaper cuttings of natural home remedies as possibilities “for people who don't have money”. Meanwhile, the cab driver Sergio in El Paso, Texas, operates in an economy where middle class people have no health insurance, which means they often go across the border to Mexico to get cheaper medical treatment than they can in their own -- technically much more developed – country.

In an online conversation with Indian documentary filmmaker Shabani Hassanwalia, Majer said that he was trying to make a non-fiction version of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 cult film Night on Earth. Majer's film has plenty of energy, but it's scattered, and feels almost slight in comparison to Jarmusch's. Other than Berlin (which gives us the documentary's only female cab driver, the wonderfully steady Bambi, who must often refuse come-ons from drunken post-clubbers), Majer shoots in places where the economy and politics are on some sort of edge. Jarmusch's film is shot entirely in European and American cities, and in a very different time. Perhaps 1991 felt as unstable as our own times in some ways, but from the distance of three decades it appears marvellously stable. Even the rule-less-ness of that time feels like some quasi-mythical truth: when the New York native persuades his lost immigrant driver to let him drive the cab instead, the driver balks and says it's not allowed. “Yeah, it's allowed,” drawls the passenger. “This is New York!”

And yet this is already a universe filled with immigrants, people forced to live and work in places a world away from where they grew up. Jarmusch's approach isn't overtly political, and it's certainly not woke in any tick-the-boxes sort of way. Instead, his juxtapositions provoke thought. The Black Brooklyn man, for instance, laughs loudly and long at his East German cab driver because he hears his name – Helmut -- as Helmet. “That's like being called Lampshade,” he guffaws. When Helmut asks him his name, it turns out it's YoYo.

Helmut is a clown – he actually worked as a clown in Dresden. But bemused as he is, he has something to teach us about listening. Meanwhile the cab driver who doesn't listen – Roberto Benigni in the Rome segment, which contains the broadest comedy of the five – can literally kill off a passenger.

A still from Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film Night on Earth, with five segments set in five taxis across the world

As anyone who's taken taxis knows, there are drivers who listen, and others who talk. Sometimes, rarely, they do both, turning taxi rides into that unusual intimate thing: a conversation with a stranger. Jarmusch's brilliantly written set of vignettes starts with sunset in Los Angeles, where a rather surprised older woman (the unmatchable Gena Rowlands) gets into a cab driven by a rather young Winona Ryder, and learns that it's possible to be perfectly, undisturbably happy with your perfectly ordinary life. In Paris, two pompous Cameroonians learn that mocking your taxi driver, even if he has the same colour of skin as you and you address him as your “little brother”, doesn't serve you well. But also in Paris, the taxi driver learns that being blind isn't the same as not seeing. Conversations with strangers always teach you things – usually about yourself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Dec 2020.

Shelf Life: Stitching the Past into the Future

 My Shelf Life column for November 2020:

What wartime women's fashion can tell us about the world

 

                  Christian Dior's 'New Look' was a massive departure from the clothes women wore in war-torn Europe
 

Elizabeth Gilbert's chatty doorstopper of a novel, City of Girls (2019), begins in the summer of 1940, when the narrator arrives in New York, “nineteen years old and an idiot”. Vivian Morris has just dropped out of Vassar College, judging as dull both the revolutionary young women in “serious black trousers” and the academic girls in shapeless wool skirts “that looked as if they had been constructed out of old sweaters”. While she knows nothing about the world, she knows clothes. And what makes the fashionable teenaged protagonist of 1940 different from one in 2020 is this: Vivian doesn't only wear cool clothes, she can make them.

Trained to sew by an exacting grandmother, Gilbert’s excitable heroine soon finds herself designing costumes the doddering theatre owned by her aunt Peg. It is wartime, and the Lily Playhouse is barely kept afloat by formulaic musicals: there’s really no budget for clothes. But the actors constantly need new outfits, so Vivian learns to improvise. She scours New York's cheaper garment districts and discovers the used clothes shops on Ninth Avenue, becoming a regular at a grand old shop called Lowtsky’s, owned by a Jewish family ejected from eastern Europe.

Vivian becomes adept at digging ancient dresses out of discount bins and transforming them into spectacular customised creations. From showgirls like her friend Celia, she moves on to designing for Edna Parker Watson, grand dame of British theatre stranded in New York by the war. 

 

Gilbert's narratorial preferences can try one’s patience, like addressing her novel to a young woman whose connection to Vivian is kept deliberately mysterious, to anticlimactic effect. But I enjoyed Gilbert’s enjoyment of fashion, a topic she addresses first with girly excitement and then subversive pleasure. The subversion begins with Edna who, though on first names with French couturier Coco Chanel, is no handmaiden to fashion. Her advice on how to dress—“if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person”, or “I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don't want the dress to be the star of the show”—is really advice on how to live.

 

But the book’s real subversion of fashion comes in 1950, when Vivian’s friend Marjorie Lowtksy, sharp young heir to the Lowtsky Emporium, comes up with a plan to cater to the post-war marriage boom. “[We] both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that's being imported...” says Marjorie. “I can find old silk and satin all over town–hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France, they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there–and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller.” 

 

The USP? Their dresses “wouldn't be industry; they would be custom tailored”.

Vivian and Marjorie's business makes them rich.

The same era seen from across the Atlantic, in Eric Newby's drily hilarious memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962) reveals a much more damaged continent. The family firm of Lane and Newby, begun by the writer’s father in the 1890s, is somehow carrying on against a backdrop of bombed-out cities and drastic rationing. Even the upper workrooms of its grand old London offices, writes Newby with brilliant British understatement, “went up in smoke in 1944”.

In some deep metaphorical way, the firm’s continuance into a post-war world now rests increasingly on an army of “outworkers”, elderly women in the suburbs. Meanwhile, their buyers still make orders conditional on unprofitable “Specials”: customised versions for women too misshapen or too snooty to wear the standard designs.

Like Europe itself, the continent's fashion business feels like a creaky old warhorse that can't figure out the new world. “Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited”, writes Newby. “[T]he world of fashion had ground to a standstill”. Young Newby tries to come up with new designs on his own. But just after he places his orders, in March 1947, the French designer Christian Dior shows the insanely feminine excesses of his new collection: what would make history as the New Look.

But at that moment, Newby’s creaking world isn’t quite ready. “It was thought to be absurd... a last despairing death-kick by Paris which was no longer to be the centre of the fashion world.” British wholesaler manufacturers, “[h]alf-throttled by clothes rationing”, and too afraid to implement Dior’s radical changes, just make what they have been making for seven years “with a slightly longer skirt”. Of course, nothing sells. The glossies for 1947 are filled with suggestions for women readers with wartime budget constraints, on how to drastically cut and reshape their old clothes.

European fashion, led by Dior’s bold move, slowly begins to recover. But where Europe can only move on by cutting away from its past, America—at least in Gilbert's telling—is already making money off it: repackaging the dead European past as nostalgia. The difference between alteration tailor and vintage couture is writ large onto the history of the world.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 19 Nov 2020.

Freeing Films

My Mirror column:

A delightful new online film festival to mark South Asian Women's Day defines feminism as “a politics based on principles of equity, equality, justice and peace”

A still from If You Dare Desire (2017), directed by Debalina.

Anantha Ramanan's short film Ticket Please (Sri Lanka, 2018) begins with an older woman preparing a younger man, who might be her son, on how to get to a particular part of town. “The bus conductor speaks Sinhala only,” she says, speaking from the kitchen where she is washing something at the sink. “Give ten rupees exactly. It's very difficult to get the balance from him... If the conductor asks you again whether you have paid, say “Dhunna”. Dhunna means “I have given”.” Before he leaves the house, she instructs him to carry a newspaper in English, saying it will help. I felt a mild sense of irritation. Wasn't the older lady overdoing the multiple instructions, I wondered? And why force the young fellow to pretend to be something he's not? But from the second the young man got to the bus stop, I started to realise that she had been right. Sometimes when you don't fit in, it just makes it easier to pretend that you do.

The young man in Ticket Please is marked by his inability to understand Sinhala; his being a Tamil speaker is cause for irritation. And yet the strapping young bus conductor, so impatient with him for not knowing Sinhala, is only indulgent and excited when an Indian passenger gets on – speaking bad Hindi, gushing about Salman Khan and singing 'Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam'.

Linguistic politics in Sri Lanka may not seem, on the surface, to have much to do with feminism. But what is feminism really about? Ticket Please seemed to me to make the point quietly but clearly -- it isn't our differences from each other that are the problem, it's whether we've been brought up to regard that difference as either threatening or inferior.

Organised by well-known documentarian Reena Mohan, Aanchal Kapur of the Kriti Film Club and Sangat (a network begun by veteran feminist Kamla Bhasin in 1998), the exciting new South Asian Feminist Film Festival expands the meaning of feminism to make us think about difference and equality in a variety of South Asian contexts. Among the host of wonderful films and panel discussions at the festival (streaming free on http://www.doculive.in/ until 30 November) are Prateek Vats' brilliant debut feature Eeb Allay Ooo!, Vaishali Sinha's Ask the Sexpert (2017), Saba Dewan's Sita's Family (2002), the Ektara Collective's Chanda ke Joote (2011) and Nirmal Chander's Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010).

A good film festival always lets you connect the dots in expected and unexpected ways. From linguistic differences made visible on a busride, I moved to gender difference made visible on a metro ride in Please Mind the Gap (2018), a wonderful short film directed by Mitali Trivedi and Gagandeep Singh. An affectionate documentary portrait of transman Anshuman Chauhan as he negotiates the Delhi Metro, Please Mind the Gap never rubs in its metaphors. Anshuman is an effortlessly engaging subject, though, bringing his wry, laughter-filled gaze to bear upon everything he speaks of. In one early conversation, for instance, he maps his personal sense of space onto the world of public transport with a marvellous lightness. “I instinctually create a gap and maintain it,” he tells the filmmakers, going on to describe how he keeps a distance from everyone, men and women, choosing for himself the space between metro compartments, where the wall has his back, as it were. “Kisi se touch nahi hoge”.

But no matter how much he may want not to be touched, or even just to pass unseen, it isn't always easy. Men who have mistaken him for a man jump up apologetically when they see his face and think they have accidentally touched a woman. Security queues, public toilets, the metro's own Ladies compartment -- every space seems insistent on compartmentalising by gender.

In If You Dare Desire (2017), Debalina's fictional telling of the lives of real-life couple Swapna and Sucheta, their difference is less visible on their bodies -- but that doesn't make it easier. Swapna and Sucheta committed suicide by consuming pesticide together in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, with Swapna leaving behind a six-page suicide note. As the film puts it, “Only this much is fact in the film. The rest, fiction.” The poetic urban interlude Debalina creates for the two young women is no idyll, but it allows us to see how it might have been for them if they had escaped to the city, how it probably is for the many South Asian women whose love seems invisible to the heterosexual worlds they inhabit. Until it becomes visible, is instantly interpreted as difference, and that difference as grave and present danger.

But sometimes when you don't fit in, you can no longer pretend that you do. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Nov 2020. 

Shelf Life: Out of Vaidehi's Closet

My Shelf Life column for October 2020:

The link between clothes, sexual attractiveness and power is incestuous and can be unnerving. Kannada writer Vaidehi’s stories literally disrobe it.

Vaidehi's stories shocked me when I first read them. I don't mean in the manner that the 1945-born writer has apparently “sometimes shocked Kannada intellectuals”, by publicly declaring such things as 'The kitchen is my guru, that's where I have learnt many lessons'. The incongruity there, as a critic cited by editor-translator Tejaswini Niranjana in her introduction to Vaidehi's Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006) points out, lay in one of modern Kannada's most successful writers speaking like a 'full-time grihini or housewife'. And yet, what Vaidehi was doing by adopting such a public stance was precisely why her fiction jumped out at me: she was forcing the (male-dominated, genteel, largely upper caste) world of Kannada letters to engage with the world of women as she knew it. She refused to be co-opted into literariness as they knew it. 

Since the late 19th century, women have been writing fiction about women's lives, not just in Kannada, but in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Hindi and more. So Vaidehi, also Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, born 1945, married to KL Srinivasa Murthy at 23, and mother of two daughters, wasn't the first. But her words lift the ceaseless labour of women's lives out of the domestic space and onto the page with a ringing clarity. Somehow, the closer she sticks to the materiality of these circumscribed, cyclical lives – food and rituals, weddings and babies, illness and mortality – the more starkly we see their political, even philosophical ramifications. As she puts it: “What is important to us [women] is not whether the world is truth or lie. But work, work and more work.”

A still from the film Gulabi Talkies (2008), adapted from Vaidehi's short story by the director Girish Kasaravalli.

Among the material objects that recur in Vaidehi's stories are clothes. At one end of the spectrum is what is ritually and socially prescribed for women: the red saris encumbent on shaven-headed Brahmin widows; the gold jewels to measure a bride’s status. At the other are clothes as markers of individuality, the body as a canvas on which fashion can paint new identities.

But what was fashion in this India of sleepy villages and one-street towns, where the age-old injunctions of caste and age and community controlled so much of what people wore? In the title story Gulabi Talkies the opening of a local cinema triggers new dreams: “Day by day the bangle shop began to stock various kinds of face powder and other cosmetics...the seamstress struggled to tune her skills to the new fashions and her creations were passed off as fashionable, causing a commotion in the world of clothing which crossed over into the speech and gait of women...”.

The fashions of Vaidehi's tales may seem basic to us – but oh, how women wanted them. And how willing they were to suffer the consequences, because fashion felt like freedom. In ‘Remembering Ammachi’, for instance, the child narrator helps the grown-up Ammachi pleat her sari pallu “so that both its borders could be seen”. They set out for a neighbour's puja, but are barred by Venkappaya, who has arrogated to himself a status somewhere between adoptive brother and future husband. “How coquettishly you're going to town,” he rages. “That pallu has been pleated in such a way as to show both the breasts.”

Kannada writer Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, also known as Vaidehi. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The poorer the women are, the more meagre their aspirations – and the more excruciating their non-fulfilment. In Tale of a Theft, the hungry Bachchamma thinks of the prohibitive price of glass bangles while sitting next to women covered in gold. In Vanimai, the titular central character is a woman with mottled, flat feet whose “biggest dream was to own a pair of slippers”. This is nothing short of radical in a milieu where a man called Narasimha can tell Vanimai’s elders never to buy her slippers, declaring with perfect assurance: “Those who use footwear are either the prostitutes of Bombay or the mistresses of the town. Not decent people...” 

The spectre of the whore, in fact, is ever-present in these tales. Whether it's Narasimha taunting Vanimai or Venkapayya deliberately ruining Ammachi's secretly-tailored back-button sari blouse, being fashionable makes women attractive – too attractive. 

The late Nirad C. Chaudhuri, one of our most politically incorrect writers, once speculated that Indian women have historically had so little free contact with men that they dress only to compete with each other, that is they are acquisitive and overdressed. “It follows from this tradition,” wrote Chaudhuri in 1976, that “a woman in “very smart or piquant dress”... “must be fair prey”. To prove his point he recounted two anecdotes, in both of which “lower-class” men associate being well-dressed with sluttiness. 

But of course it isn't only poorer men, or even only men, who tar women for wearing certain clothes. In Vaidehi's Chandale, watching Beena “climbing up the compound in her short skirt” makes the older Rami “want to scream”. In a stunning image, the nervous housewife suddenly imagines the carefree teenager “winking at [her son Satisha] in the style of a Mumbai prostitute”. So obvious is the link between clothes and sexual attractiveness, and between sexual attractiveness and power, that it is all we can do to suppress it in those we believe don’t deserve power. Mostly, that’s other people. Sometimes, it includes ourselves.

Banner: A book cover of Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006)' a still from the film Gulabi Talkies. (2008)

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 23 Oct 2020.

A Closer Look

My piece on a marvellous new Google Arts exhibit, for India Today:

The National Museum’s miniatures are now in augmented reality, on a screen near you.

Swami Haridasa with Tansen and Akbar at Vrindavana. Unknown, 1700 AD - 1760 AD. National Museum, New Delhi.

If you’ve ever admired a miniature painting on a museum wall, you might know the feeling of wanting to hold it in your hands for a closer look. Life in Miniature partially fulfils that desire. The latest India-centric project by Google Arts and Culture makes over 1,000 miniatures, from the National Museum’s and 24 more collections available in gloriously high resolution. “These paintings were not meant to be viewed from behind glass. You now have an experience close to that of the original patrons,” says Kavita Singh, professor of art history at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has also written an essay for the virtual show.

So, for instance, if you were to click on a painting of the Mughal emperor Akbar accompanying Tansen to meet the latter’s guru Swami Haridas in Vrindavan, the painting, at first glance, simply shows Tansen kneeling before his mentor, while the emperor stands behind him. Then you might notice Tansen’s tanpura, richly ornamented, sitting quietly by his side, while he looks reverently at the saint plucking his simple brown one. You’ll see three white-clad figures, but a closer look at their clothes reveals their social positions. The swami wears only a loincloth, while Tansen and Akbar wear jamas with a gold-edged sash. But then you might notice that Akbar is barefoot: perhaps in deference to Haridas?

The pleasure of these paintings extends beyond social analysis. As you zoom in, monkeys, squirrels and many birds become visible in the foliage. Google’s curators urge viewers to “find the parrots” or “spot the weapons”, and group images into “stories”, instead of the dryer chronological or geographical approaches. “A lot of older arcane scholarly work did not serve these paintings well. Narrative and thematic approaches are more prevalent now. This exhibition is rooted in visual delight, which was the intention of the painters,” says Singh. “Grouping images by subject or colour offers lively pathways into the art for people outside the academy. Perhaps the next step can be to make these resources available in other Indian languages. But this is a great start.”

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020