A Wizard of Song

My Mirror column:

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99th birthday it is today, brought remarkable sophistication to the Hindi film lyric, yet never lost the simplicity of the popular. The first of a two-part column.

A collage of Sahir Ludhianvi's letters, poetry and photographs recovered from a scrap shop in Juhu by archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2019.

Sometime in 1937, a young man who had just taken his matriculation examination in Ludhiana read the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal bemoaning the loss of the 19^th century poet Daagh Dehlvi, and found in them the pen-name by which he would be known forever. The words were these: “Is chaman mein honge paida bulbul-e-shiraz bhi,/ Sainkdon sahir bhi honge, sahib-e-ijaaz bhi... /Hubahu kheenchega lekin ishq ki tasveer kaun?/ Uth gaya nawak fagan, maarega dil pe teer kaun?” [“There will be many nightingales born in this garden/ Countless magicians, men who work miracles as well... But who will sketch such a vivid portrait of love, Who will enchant the heart, now that the marksman is gone?”]

Young Abdul Hayee decided that he would henceforth be ‘Sahir’, and in the well-worn tradition of Urdu poets, he took the town of his birth as the second part of his name.

Akshay Manwani’s book on Sahir Ludhianvi, from which the above anecdote is taken, cites the poet’s reasons for this decision from Naresh Kumar Shaad’s ‘Sahir Ke Saath Ek Shaam’ – “Since I never had much of an opinion about my poetry and always considered myself one amongst several poets, the word “sahir” and its use in the poem immediately caught my attention and I chose it as my takhallus”.

The story seems to me to reveal a great deal about Sahir, his personality and his politics. In drawing his pen-name from the words of one great Urdu poet about another, Sahir placed himself squarely within a grand literary tradition. And calling himself a magician was a lofty claim to make. Yet he simultaneously undercut the claim to uniqueness, because Iqbal had spoken of “sainkdon sahir”. That self-deprecation suggests a political position: a man who holds that poets, too, are a class: a class of those who do magic with words. It is also an early glimpse of a man who could make himself immortal with a song about being a poet of the moment. “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon, pal do pal meri kahaani hai”, picturised on Amitabh Bachchan’s poet hero in Yash Chopra’s ‘Kabhie Kabhie’, became one of Sahir’s most popularly sung lyrics: “Kal aur aayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale,/ Mujhse behtar kehnewale, tumse behtar sunnewale,/ Kal koi mujhko yaad kare, kyun koi mujhko yaad kare?/Masroof zamana mere liye, kyon vaqt apna barbaad kare? [Tomorrow there will be more who can pick buds that bloom into songs/ Speakers better than me, Listeners better than you,/ Tomorrow if someone remembers me, why would someone remember me,/ The future will be too busy to waste its time on me.”

There was something of the romantic hero about Sahir, and very occasionally, that quality seeped through into the films that used his verse. That this happened even in an industry that rarely gives writers their due speaks to the power of Sahir’s words as much as his persona, his close – if often fraught – relationships with colleagues. Much before Kabhi Kabhie – a film whose very title comes from a poem from Sahir’s hugely successful book ‘Talkhiyan’ that director Yash Chopra had read as a young man in Jalandhar – there was ‘Pyaasa’, in which Guru Dutt’s hero Vijay is a young poet who goes from youthful romantic idealism to bitter disillusionment with the world around him. Sahir’s own trajectory as a Progressive poet – his critique of feudalism and capitalism, his attacks on social hypocrisy, especially around prostitution – gave Vijay his poetic voice.

Sahir’s songs for ‘Pyaasa’ also displayed his unrivalled range. “Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke pyaar ko pyaar mila” is an anthem to unrequited love that could make anyone feel sorry for themselves. “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe woh kahan hain” and “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai” are two of the most trenchantly critical songs ever written for the Indian screen. But ‘Pyaasa’ also contains the immortal “Sar jo tera chakraye”, a tel maalish song which manages to be socially sharp, and “Aaj sajan mohe ang laga le”, a love song in the form of a Vaishnava lyric, allowing us to see the sex worker Gulab’s (Waheeda Rehman) longing for Vijay as Radha’s for Krishna.

There were many things that made Sahir Ludhianvi unusual, and certainly this was true of the songs he sometimes put into the mouths of female characters. Poetry everywhere, and Urdu poetry especially, is filled to the brim with paeans to the physical beauty of women, and Sahir wrote many such love lyrics, often sung by Mohammad Rafi.

But only Sahir could make the heroine sing in praise of the hero’s beauty. So Vyjayanthimala could sing with perfectly believable abandon about Dilip Kumar’s hair “Ude jab jab zulfein teri,/ Kunwaariyon ka dil machle, jind meriye”. Or Reena Roy could describe herself as lost in Rakesh Roshan’s eyes in ‘Dhanwan’ (1981): “Yeh aankhein dekh kar hum/ Saari duniya bhool jaate hain,/ Inhein paane ki dhun mein/ Har tamanna bhool jaate hain”. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Mar 2020. (Second part follows.)

From English to Kannada to Kannada to English: Tejaswini Niranjana’s mirrored path to translation

My interview with a polyglot cultural theorist on the practice of translation. Published in Scroll.

Tejaswini Niranjana is a well-known academic and cultural theorist who occasionally doubles up as a translator. Her deeply attentive translations from Kannada to English include the works of two eminent Kannada writers: Vaidehi and Jayant Kaikini. Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories, a collection of Vaidehi’s short stories which Niranjana edited and translated in collaboration with three other translators, came out in 2006, while No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories – a collection of stories by Jayant Kaikini – was published in 2017. Niranjana spoke to me about her relationship with Kannada, bilingualism in India, and how she got into translation. Excerpts from the interview:

As an academic and as a translator, too, your work is in English. But I’d like to hear more about your relationship with Kannada. With your parents (Niranjana and Anupama Niranjana) both being writers in Kannada, I imagine that it was not just a language of domesticity, but a literary language that you grew up around. Did you ever yourself write in Kannada?

My mother was not so fluent in English, she went to medical college and later in life she was able to manage in English, but she always spoke to us in Kannada. My father was a journalist in both English and Kannada. He was a tenth standard dropout – because of the freedom struggle he walked out. So he was completely self-taught, prided himself on his English and so on. So he often ended up speaking to me and my younger sister (who is no more) in English. But it was something that was common in the world around us: people just kept switching back and forth between these languages.

This is while you were growing up, in Bangalore?
Yes, I was born in Dharwar but when I was two, we moved to Bangalore. Being nationalists and communists, my parents had some idea that children should know English. There was no huge politics around English, because independence was political, not about culture: that only came to me much later. At the same time they didn’t want us to forget Kannada. From the very beginning, they put me and my sister in an English medium school: a very quaint school called The Home School in Basavangudi. It had a Kannada language option which my parents forced me to take (everyone else was taking Sanskrit, because you could score 95 even without knowing the language as opposed to 60-65, if you were lucky, in Kannada).

[While I was] in primary school, there was no great engagement with Kannada, except that a lot of writers used to come home all the time. I didn’t really read a lot of Kannada literature. To this day I haven’t even read all of my father’s and mother’s works...I’ve read some.

They were very prolific, weren’t they?

Very prolific: [they wrote] dozens and dozens of books. But I knew all the writers, by name and by face. Then, when I was twelve or so, I started to write poetry in English. My parents were uncertain about the quality of this, and when I was 14 or so they decided they needed to figure out whether it was good enough. Actually I was helped by very well-known Kannada poets, like Nisar Ahmad. I remember him very fondly; he gave me my first modernist poetry – Eliot, Auden, stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise because my parents were not poets and not in English.

Anyway, my father decided to send off some of my poems to some of the well-known names in the Indo-Anglian world, without saying how old I was. Professor P Lal, of Writers’ Workshop in Calcutta, and Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who used to run a translation journal, both published some of my work. My parents felt reassured, so they offered to finance my first book.

That first collection of poetry in English, when I was sixteen, got sent to the Commonwealth Poetry Competition. A little afterwards, I started translating my own poetry into Kannada. Because I couldn’t produce it in Kannada...But at the same time, in translation, it became a different poem.

So at this point, would you say you were quite bilingual?

I would read my Kannada poems in competitions and win prizes for them, so I became known as a bilingual poet. That was also the time that I first met Jayant [Kaikini], he was in college, around three years older than me. I really liked his poetry, and said that I would translate it, and I sent it to him. Then we didn’t meet for some twenty years. But my introduction to him is also part of the bilingualism story.

Until my BA, I was still trying to write in both languages. That was also the time when I first got into translating fiction. My father’s novel Chirasmarane, about the Kayur peasant struggle in Kerala, which he had covered as a young journalist, had not been one of his more popular novels in Kannada. Twenty years later, for the anniversary of the struggle, someone translated it into Malayalam and then it suddenly found a huge audience. EMS Namboodiripad reviewed it...So then my father and I did many tours.

You had translated your father’s novel into English?

Yes. But I had also translated Pablo Neruda into Kannada. And Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I still hear of my translation of Julius Caesar being performed, but after the fact, because no one asks for permissions in Kannada [laughs]. But it means it’s still in circulation, which is nice.

Today, I think I’d be a little more uncertain about translating into Kannada. At the time I was living there and Kannada was part of my daily life, which it hasn’t been for a long time. Because when I was 23-24, I went off to the US to study at UCLA. I continued writing in English. I think when I wound up my US life and got a job in Hyderabad in the English department, I was still sort of writing poetry.

But I also wrote an academic book on translation, about the politics of colonialism. And somehow after all the years of thinking through that, I felt I couldn’t write in English any more. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I just stopped writing poetry in English. Even to this day, people ask me, why did you stop writing? And I say, I still write lots of books. But I stopped writing poetry.

I used to have arguments with people like the great UR Ananthamurthy, who was a friend of my father’s. He said, the kinds of things that you say should be in Kannada, why don’t you write in Kannada? I said, I engage with Kannada all the time; people have different modes of engagement with a language. But he was an indigenist of a particular kind, I am not an indigenist. I think that I am constantly in and out of languages.

You also continue to learn other languages, don’t you? You mentioned learning Spanish...

Oh, I just learnt it a little bit, when I was studying in California. I did two courses in French and two in Spanish. I did five years of German, that stuck a little more. When I was in Hyderabad, I learnt Telugu – more [a case of] speaking [it], but I can read because it’s similar to Kannada. Tamil you absorb living in Bangalore, though not very well. And I can follow the movies. And Hindi one is compelled to learn. About twelve years ago, I started learning Hindustani classical music, and I think that’s made me more open to Hindi.

I’ve kept in touch with Kannada through all my travels – living five and a half years in the US, then ten years in Hyderabad. I did come back to Bangalore in 1998, and stayed there until 2016, when I moved to Hong Kong with a full-time position at Lingnan University. More recently, I’ve been working on learning Cantonese and Mandarin for a project studying digital intimacy.

Starting out by translating poetry, some might say, is to begin with the impossible. There is a 2002 Paris Review interview in which William Weaver says that he started translating poetry from Italian as part of the process of learning the language. But that when he had actually learned Italian, he “stopped translating poetry immediately because I realised what I was doing to it.” Was translating poetry for you also imbued with a kind of beginner’s confidence, since you seem to have shifted to translating prose? Is poetry harder?

It is harder, but I still translate poetry. More on commission, or when someone asks me – so I did some of the Kannada works for the anthology of Dalit literature that Susie Tharu and K Satyanarayana edited recently.

Do you think translation alters the original more in poetry than in prose. That thing you said earlier, about it becoming a different poem...

I don’t know the answer to that. It takes me too deep into something that I am probably not paying attention to.

I guess I’m pushing here at the question of untranslatability. In your translation of Vaidehi’s work (Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories) I remember your introduction mentioned that you and the other translators had discussions about which stories would “work” in English and which wouldn’t. What for you are the reasons some texts might be harder to translate?

I think it’s about disparate experiences. Vaidehi’s work deals with a kind of village life that I am not familiar with, even though I am ancestrally from there. The west coast of Karnataka, particular forms of upper caste family life, which I have no experience of, because my father was an illegitimate and an only child with no contact with any families whatsoever. While Jayant [Kaikini]’s characters are deeply singular, right? I think I imagined that something from an urban setting would be easier to translate for me, because it’s my life as well. But at the same time, I felt deeply connected to Vaidehi’s style, which is very oblique, almost like poetry.

What about language, specifically dialect? Did you approach the Kundapur dialect in Vaidehi’s work very differently from the speech in Kaikini’s work? You’ve written of how his deliberate “plain Kannada” is sometimes interrupted by the hybrid Hindi-Urdu-Dakhani that is Bombay’s urban vernacular. As a translator, would you ever choose to use English slang to represent a dialect of Kannada?

I think the parallels don’t hold in our context, because a place like Bombay is a multilingual space. And I don’t think Jayant, in his Kannada, is trying to establish dialectical difference. You can see that characters are Gujarati or Maharashtrian or Bengali. But I wouldn’t pick out some slang that you associate with Gujaratis who speaks English and stick it in there for a Gujarati character!

Is there anything in Kaikini’s Kannada that identifies these characters in terms of their communities or language?

No. He just does it by naming them. It’s usually through other details, experiences, that he builds the profile. I don’t think he dwells too much on it; it’s in brushstrokes, passing that you figure where they’re from. Vaidehi’s stories, on the other hand, are so completely provincial that you don’t have the outside seeping in...

So there is no need to distinguish her characters by their language.

Exactly. Though she does also have some autobiographical stories which are in standard Kannada.

To return to poetry, from a different angle: do you think a translator needs to be a writer? Do you think writers would have trusted you less with their work if they didn’t think of you as a poet?

I don’t think so. People are just so happy that you’re translating their work. I don’t write fiction but I translate it. I was translating Dalit poetry, Siddalingaiah and so on, and the stories of Devanuru Mahadeva when I was very young. I enjoy different kinds of translation. One of my most fun experiences was doing subtitles for Girish Kasaravalli’s second film, Akramana (1980). That was a different kind of discipline, almost like writing metered verse: you couldn’t just write what you wanted, so many characters in celluloid, and you had to fit the dialogue on screen. He approached me, knowing about my bilingual facility – there weren’t too many people then who were literary and bilingual, then. Or if they were, they did it in very old-fashioned language...

You don’t feel like bilinguality is decreasing? That there is a growing number of monolingual English-speakers in India who’re oblivious to other languages?

If you read social media, and the amount of journalism that’s being produced, you’d think everyone is only writing in English. But I don’t think that’s everyday reality for most people. Obviously, there are thousands more Indians writing in English than there were say, thirty or forty years ago. But using the example of my own niece, I kept worrying about this. But she consciously cultivates other languages: Telugu and Hindi, and she can speak in Kannada quite easily after moving to Bangalore. She texts friends in Hindi. I think Hindi often becomes the default language for young people even when it isn’t the default language for either person. I don’t think there’s an only-English setting for kids in their twenties who’re not seriously upper class...this is the sense I get, I could be wrong.

You’ve also thought a lot about the politics of translation in your academic work. In 1992, you authored a volume titled Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. I know this is an impossible request, but could you tell us what the argument of that book was?

Very very broadly, the book was among the first to point out that though it is often seen as a transparent medium by which you transport one culture into another, translation is mobilised as a way of enforcing colonial domination. I look in detail at some major texts and at the ideas of translation that were circulating in colonial times, how it worked through the missionary activity and through administrators like William Jones. In the 1780s, in the early colonial period, there was a great curiosity and romanticism about the East – and the whole understanding of translation was informed by that, by a desire not to interfere in the lives of the natives. But by the 1820s, under the East India Company, with the Utilitarian influence, the whole understanding of India changed – from seeing it as an advanced civilisation to a barbaric place. What kind of conceptual and political labour did translation do, to help colonial domination? In a literal way, too: even someone like John Mill’s understanding of India is informed by translations.

I end the book by looking at an 18th century translation of a 12th century vachana, a very Orientalist translation, and at AK Ramanujan’s translation of the same text, which is a very modernist translation. My point was not that they were good or bad, but that the discursive space they came from informed the actual translations that they did. And I offered my own translation of the vachana.

The book is 25 years old, and I don’t talk about it any more. But without my having been a translator, I would not have written that book.

Do you think in any way, that the converse is true? Did your critical focus on the politics of translation ever cripple you as a practitioner? A feeling that “I can’t be that person who translates into English in India...”

No. I don’t think any of us is so coherent as an individual. I feel like I can do both!

...

This interview continues. Read the whole thing on Scroll, here.

Gurvinder Singh Interview: "Writing and cinema are completely different"

An edited version of this interview was published in Vantage, the web section of The Caravan on 11 August 2016.

Gurvinder Singh, who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India, is best known for his two feature films. Anhe Ghore Da Daan (Alms for the Blind Horse, 2011) and Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction, 2015). Anhe Ghore Da Daan premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the special jury award at Abu Dhabi. It also received the National Awards for best direction, cinematography, and best Punjabi film. Singh’s second film has won awards at festivals in Belgrade, Singapore and Mumbai, as well as the National Award for best Punjabi film. A powerfully atmospheric portrait of Punjab in 1984, Chauthi Koot is an adaptation of the short stories ‘Chauthi Koot’ and ‘Main Hun Thik Thak Haan’ by Punjabi writer Waryam Singh Sandhu from his short story collection Chauthi Koot. The film released in cinemas across India last Friday, with English subtitles.

On 5 August 2016, the writer and critic Trisha Gupta met Singh at his parents’ home in Noida. During the conversation, they discussed his interest in Punjab, adapting literature into film, and learning from the late avant garde filmmaker Mani Kaul, the face of parallel cinema in India.

Trisha Gupta: Did you always want to make films set in Punjab? Is that where you grew up?

Gurvinder Singh: When I went to FTII, Punjab was nowhere in the picture for me, though I knew the [spoken] language well. The Punjab I had heard about was the Punjab of Partition. My [paternal] grandfather used to be the manager of a rice mill near Rawalpindi, but he had moved his family to Amritsar. They happened to live in a largely Muslim neighbourhood, and when the riots broke out in 1947, my grandmother escaped with my father—he was two, and took shelter in the Golden Temple. My grandfather returned from Rawalpindi and found the house burnt. Finally he went to the Golden Temple and found his family. There was nothing left, so they kept moving. His brother was in Shimla, so they went there. Then Gwalior, Ganganagar, Assam—wherever, for a job. For five years or so after Partition, they were very unsettled. Finally they came to Delhi and managed to set up a business here.

My maternal grandmother was from Kasur, she used to go to Bulla Shah’s mazaar every day. And my maternal grandfather was from Patti. Kasur and Patti are like Lahore and Amritsar, across the border. Luckily he got a job in Delhi before the Partition, and moved here.

I was born in Rajouri Garden, a gadh of migrant Punjabis. Everybody’s stories were of pre-Partition Punjab. They never lived in East Punjab. We never visited Punjab. I could not even read Punjabi. My reading until FTII had been in English, and literature translated into English from other languages. But then I thought ki film banana hai toh Hindi mein banana hai—If I have to make a film, it has to be in Hindi--and so I should read in Hindi. I had some friends from a Hindi literature background. I started with [the writer] Mohan Rakesh, then a lot of [Saadat Hasan] Manto, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Agyeya, [Gajanan Madhav] Muktibodh.

Then in the library I came across the name Gurdial Singh, and [his book] Anhey Ghore Da Daan. Punjabi toh mujhe aati nahi thhi [laughs]—I didn’t know Punjabi. I read five-six books of his in Hindi. Gurdial Singh is the most translated Punjabi writer. Suddenly, I thought, this nobody has touched. I have not seen this side of Punjab at all. This kind of character, this kind of issue, this kind of rural Punjab. His descriptions were very Chekhovian: the atmosphere, the mood, the landscape—with great feeling. Anhe Ghore stayed at the back of my mind. I thought if there is one book I want to make a film of, it is this… and I’d never been to Punjab!

TG: Do you think the book’s Punjabi-ness was what struck a chord?

GS: Of course, there was that desire to connect with Punjab—where your roots are, but you’ve never lived. When I met Gurdial Singh, he told me he was teaching in a college in Bhatinda in the [19]70s. And he basically wrote about what he was observing at that time: the thermal power plant was being built, the railway lines, the canals—they had just come up. It was the end of the Nehruvian era of infrastructure.

My other connection to Punjab was music.

TG: Are you a musician as well?

GS: No, no. But music took me to Punjab. As a child I had heard artistes like Asha Singh Mastana, Surinder Kaur (she even sang in Bollywood) who sang jugni, jindwa and heer. The texts are folk, but they were popular radio artistes. They used newer instruments like the harmonium.

Soon after I graduated from FTII, somebody had brought some cassettes from Pakistan, of qissa. And I found a book by Alka Pande on Punjabi folk instruments. After reading it, and doing some more research, I realized there were qissa singers in Indian Punjab, too. So I applied to the India Foundation for the Arts, for a two-year grant to travel with these singers, and document their work.

I followed these dhadis [singers]. When my money ran out, I asked the IFA, and they gave me some more money, so I actually travelled for over four or five years. I was living in Delhi. I was shooting myself. I would just pick up a sound recordist and take my car and go. Sometimes we would go to a mela, or a dargah, or a wedding—they would start at sunset and then go on till sunrise. They take breaks in between, they have tea, they drink also.
One arrangement is of three or four people: the lead singer is the Agu, he always has a tumba or the smaller tumbi; the accompanying singer is the Pichhu; one person on the drum, the dhad; and sometimes one on the algoza. 

TG: The algoza! I've only heard the Manganiyars use it.

GS: Yes. The one these dhadis use is somewhat different. Another arrangement is of sarangi and dhad.
Sufi dhadis are Muslim, and they either tell tales of the Sufi saints, or things like Heer, which are part of the Sufi tradition. Sikh dhadis were also [originally] Muslim, but they converted and now sing about the Sikh warriors.

All the people I was connecting with were from the lower castes. All the qissa walas were Balmikis, Mazhabis. Listeners were mostly peasantry, mostly Sikhs. You know, after the Partition, all the dargahs of Punjab have been managed and kept alive by Hindus and Sikhs.   

TG: So did you make the documentary?

GS: The material was so much that I really didn't know how to compile it. [Laughs] So I decided to focus on one person I was really fond of, with whom I'd spent the most time. His name was Pala, so that's what I called the film.

This is how I discovered Punjab. Suddenly the characters from Anhe Ghore Da Daan started coming alive for me: their anxiety, their relation to caste status.

TG: Caste is the thing that jumps out at you watching the film. We're supposed to think of Punjab as casteless.

GS: Yes, I was also brought face-to- face with caste: the distinction was so strong. The fact that the lower castes have their houses on the periphery of the village and live in dirty conditions, whereas the upper castes live in big mansions... And then the gurdwaras, which one thought were these casteless places— but most villages, had two. The lower castes were technically not prevented from coming into the upper caste gurdwara, but they were second-hand worshippers there. They had no power there. So, they would make a gurdwara of their own.

I read the novel [Anhey Ghore Da Daan] in 1999. And in 2009, I wrote the script. I explored other options in between, but in the end I knew it was this. Although I knew it would be very difficult to find a commercial financier for it: this subject, and that too in Punjabi.

TG: Did you ever think of making it in Hindi?

GS: No. You've seen the film. Can you make those people talk in Hindi!

Eventually it was financed by the NFDC [National Film Development Corporation]. They also partially funded my second film.

TG: What was the reaction to Anhe Ghore Da Daan in Punjab?

GS: I got very diverse reactions: one person saying “I had heard so much about it, but I didn't understand anything; what are you trying to say.” And another person saying, “It is so beautiful, I have seen it five times.” I think the young have been more open to it. Especially for those who want to make films, it has become a learning text. I have received a hundred requests from young aspiring filmmakers in Punjab to assist me. And they are making things inspired by the film. Sometimes copying something from it. Just on their own... some of them are very young, not even out of school yet. 

TG: Are there any film schools in Punjab?

GS: No! Not one. 

TG: Are you in conversation with other filmmakers in Punjab?

GS: No.

TG: Where does the commercial Punjabi film industry operate out of?

GS: Chandigarh and Toronto. And Vancouver. They have approached me now, to fund my films. I might consider, so long as there is no interference.

TG: Your entry into Punjab was music. And that's also part of the Bollywood version of Punjab. Do you think Punjab still has that vibrant culture of music and performance?

GS: The kind of people I was documenting have passed away. It was an oral tradition, and their children did not carry it on. Who wants to learn a qissa by heart to perform for twelve hours? Now the only songs are about daaru and guns.

Earlier the upper castes were not the performers—they were the listeners. But after independence, the industry has been dominated by Jatts: Gurdas Mann, Harbhaja Mann, Babbu Mann, Amarinder Gill, now Diljeet Dosanjh, who is actually very talented. There are one or two exceptions to this Jatt domination, like one singer called Miss Pooja. She is very popular, but little known outside Punjab -- you wouldn't have heard of her. 

Also now, the only way to enter the Punjabi film industry is to establish yourself as a singer.

TG: That is unique, true. Talking of Diljit Dosanjh, did you watch Udta Punjab?

GS: No, not yet. I will take my time and watch it. (grins)

TG: Anhe Ghore dealt with caste, and Chauthi Koot also has a political subject, the Sikh militancy. 

GS: I did not ever want the subject to weigh heavy on the cinematic form. For me the first thing when I was travelling was a childlike desire, that these faces will speak for themselves. I had not heard the kind of Punjabi they spoke, not personally, and not in cinema. It's different – it's more rustic, more rough. There are a lot of puns. Anhe Ghore is set in the south, the cotton growing belt, near Bhatinda.

TG: Malwa.

GS: Yes. Malwa stretches right from Ferozepur to Patiala, it touches Rajasthan. And Chauthi Koot is set on the border, the Manjha, down till Ferozepur and up till Gurdaspur. My Punjabi is more close to the Manjha.

TG: How did you come to make Chauthi Koot?

GS: I knew I wanted to make a film about the insurgency. I had earlier thought of another story of Waryam Singh Sandhu's. It was called 'Bhajjian Baahein' (Broken Arms). It was also very beautiful, about a Hindu grain trader family, and how one member is gunned down by a terrorist. I had taken his permission to make that, in fact. But then he said, I have written more about that period. So, I went and purchased this book [of his stories] from Sahitya Akademi, and immediately I was bowled over by these two stories.

TG: How did you bring the two -- ‘Chauthi Koot’ and ‘Main Hun Thik Thak Haan’ -- together? That is the most striking thing, structurally.

GS: First I thought ki ek hi ka banana hai—just make one. And there was
something very modern about the train story: it was almost like a thriller. You don't know where they are going, who they are.

TG: That is the dominant feel of that section of the film. Was that true of the text as well?

GS: In the text, they are schoolteachers who have been assigned some duty in a school near Amritsar. I felt there was no need to say that. Writing and cinema are completely different—giving information that way in cinema will work against the film.

Anyway, this would have been a half-an- hour film. Then, I thought I would make the story of Joginder and the dog [A character from 'Chauthi Koot' who is told by militants to forcibly silence his dog lest it draw attention to them]. But then it struck me, why not both? Once it came to me, to enclose the Joginder story in the train story, I was thrilled. Because the device also breaks linearity. Anhe Ghore is also non-linear, moving between the city and village. Here, I constructed the connection between the two stories: the man in the train, remembering himself and the woman walking in the dark, and arriving at Joginder's house.

TG: Why did you move away from making documentaries? What is at stake for you in making fiction?

GS: I was not making films about big political issues, which is what documentary is in popular perception. It can be done in documentary, but somehow I felt that in fiction I could foreground the form better. The way the story is being told is an equal knowledge-giver, an equal source of entertainment as what is being told. In documentary, I felt I was painting over a given surface. Fiction allowed me the feeling of an empty canvas.

TG: The fact that you're adapting from literature doesn't limit you?

GS: No. I had complete freedom to remove and add things. For example, in the story, there was no storm. Joginder is taken away by the police, the villagers gather to protest: I had that in the script. But while shooting, the storm happened, and I immediately knew I wanted to use it. The producer asked me, “You really don't want to shoot that section?” I said, “No, I have an alternative, which is more poetic, more cinematic.”  

TG: I had actually put that down as a question about Chauthi Koot: "Was the coming of the monsoon part of the original story?"! Changing something like this while shooting, that takes courage.

GS: Yes, these are bold decisions.

TG: What are your thoughts on the independent cinema movement in India?

GS: It is still in a very nascent stage. I like parts of Court, I like Ship of Theseus. But we have to create a community. Anand Gandhi [who made Ship of Theseus and has founded his own production company] is trying, through his own company, inviting people to make films. He says he wants to change the ecosystem of this industry. It's great that somebody is thinking big. Because others are just struggling. It's not easy to do the second film, even after the first. And I don't even live in Bombay.

TG: I believe you live in Bir, in Himachal.

GS: Yes, a year and a half now. I lived in Bombay for three years, when Mani Kaul was there.  

TG:  What would you say is the most important thing you learnt from him?

GS: Image ka bhoot unhone mere dimaag se nikaal diya—He got me to stop being possessed by the image. Cinema is not a visual medium, he insisted, it is a temporal medium. It is like music, it is time. It may unfold in space, but it is time.The normal way of editing is that as soon as the information is grasped, you cut. But if you make people look at things longer, make them reflect on things after they have grasped the information, they suddenly become aware of the passing time. It works in reverse, too—if you cut before the information has been fully absorbed, then also people become conscious of time: ki dekhne nahi diya poora, samajh mein nahi aaya kya hua—we weren’t able to watch it completely, we didn’t understand what happened. He altered my way of looking through the camera.

And then, sound. The source of the sound image need not be on the screen. You have to create the world beyond the edges of the frame. Anhe Ghore was a complete exercise in that. Now, when I write the script, I think more about the sounds that will layer each shot: from a distance, close by, or something disturbing. Because you can have only one image on screen at a time, but you can have a hundred tracks of sound.

Book Review: Shashi Deshpande's Strangers to Ourselves

A review I wrote for Scroll: 

Shashi Deshpande's new novel is a dignified investigation of that thing called love.

The cover of Shashi Deshpande's novel has an overly familiar picture-postcard quality: the sun rising (or is it setting?) over a gleaming gray sea, with a youthful-looking couple in silhouette, somewhere between water and sky. Call me a cynic, but between that photographic cliché and the rather doleful title, I was more than a little wary of a book that described itself as telling “the story of an unlikely love between two unusual people.” Having never read any of Deshpande's books before, perhaps I might be forgiven for thinking that a book so keen to advertise itself as romance would feature at least some heaving sighs and paltry life lessons.

But Strangers to Ourselves has a certain gravitas. Life lessons it does contain, but those are after all, part of why we read fiction. And Deshpande's life lessons are never paltry. They may not be as universal as she seems to think – the book begins, for example, with a particularly heavyweight passage that threatens to throw things off-kilter before they've even begun: “There are two passions that govern human life: one is the desire for progeny, the other for a place of one's own.”

Thankfully, however, Deshpande quickly abandons this dispensing-of-wisdom mode to plunge us into her story. Aparna Dandekar, who works as a cancer specialist at a Mumbai hospital, happens to attend a private classical musical baithak held in her boss's apartment, and finds herself hurtling into a relationship with the singer, Shree Hari Pandit.

Strange attractions

The book’s emotional centre is Aparna. It is through her eyes that we see Hari: a passionate, impulsive man who takes no time at all to decide that she is the one for him. His pursuit of her is both overwhelming and vulnerable, full of insurmountable conviction one minute and grave foreboding the next. Meanwhile Aparna, having been carefully single for many years, tries to keep her emotional upheaval in check, or at least out of sight. Deshpande is wonderful at capturing her conflictedness as she is catapulted out of her comfort zone into a slippery space of excitement and fear: the banter that goes deeper than flirtation, the constant stepping back, the refusal to believe that such strong emotions can possibly be true.

What develops between Aparna and Hari is a “mature” romance, conducted with just the right amount of immaturity. Both the oncologist and the musician are relative newbies when it comes to love. They are deeply involved in the work they do, and used to giving it topmost priority. And although, as Deshpande writes, “[h]is world fascinates her as much as hers interests him,” love demands a dramatic reorganising of their lives.

It is not in these practicalities that the problem lies. But the practicalities point to deeper things. The differences between them – as Deshpande manages to suggest without actually stating – are the source of attraction, but also potential sources of friction. Aparna is charmed by Hari's beautiful shuddh Marathi, his felicity with Sanskrit and even his Marathi-accented English; Hari teases her about speaking English even in bed. But his having grown up in a less Westernised, “old-fashioned” milieu is also key to Hari's notions of marriage, domesticity and sex.

Marriage seems to him to sanctify sex; without it, sex is something that signifies a loss of control, a cheapening. For Aparna, in contrast, her faith in marriage has been shaken both by her parents’ broken relationship and by her own. To her, in Deshpande's affecting phrase, “Marriage is a site of possible betrayal”. Aparna also typifies a sociological category increasingly encountered in urban India – the working woman plagued by constant anxiety that she is not “a proper wife”.

And other stories
To this central narrative, Deshpande adds two subplots. The first of these involves Aparna's unexpected personal involvement with a patient called Jyoti, a relationship that surmounts the careful barriers usually erected between doctors and those they treat. The second is a fictitious text, a Marathi memoir by Aparna’s ancestress, a woman who came of age in the late nineteenth century. This latter thread, while not uninteresting, is not successfully woven into the present: it is never quite clear why we are reading Ahalya's story, not even at the end when Deshpande tries to tie up the loose ends, rather too neatly.

Aparna's connection with her patient, on the other hand, allows Deshpande to range a little wider across her chosen milieu – upper middle class Mumbai. But even so, this is an exceptionally narrow slice of the city: the doctor, her lover and her patient, as well as almost all their friends and acquaintances, seem to be Marathi and upper caste.

Deshpande's complete immersion in this tiny subculture betrays a certain lack of reflexiveness about both its class and caste privilege. She thinks nothing, for instance, of having her middle-aged protagonist be the owner of a flat in Mumbai, yet not live in it, for reasons of sentiment – and having lived all her working life in the city, baulk at the idea of renting a house through an agent: her class networks, she seems to assume, ought to be enough.

An upper caste universe
Meanwhile, for all Deshpande's efforts to separate Aparna's rule-flouting upbringing from Hari's traditional one, I was constantly accosted by the shared, unspoken vocabulary of a common Brahminical milieu. Note, for instance, the frequency with which her characters – no matter what their professions – act as patrons of Hindustani classical music: Aparna's boss Dr Bhagat, her aunt Taimavshi, Jyoti's venerable old uncle. Or how often Aparna equates cleanliness with inner purity, and unshavenness or unbathedness with indignity.

Here is Aparna remembering her father’s last days: “This is not my father, she had thought, this man in unwashed clothes and with an unbathed body is not my father. This man has no dignity left.” And here she is stopping Hari from helping her sort through her father's old books: “No, don't! You've had a bath,” she exclaims. Deshpande carries on: “His clean body emanates the fragrance of soap, the pleasing aroma of washed and ironed clothes.”

But Deshpande's vision of this world is fully realised. She etches its concerns and its joys with a quiet observational eye, and it is clear that she is not writing for the outsider. No explanations are provided for the use of Indian language conventions. For instance, Aparna's playwright father is referred to as Gavi Dandekar and also as Gaja or Gajanan; we must figure out for ourselves that “Gavi” is a conjoining of his initials in the Marathi literary style.

Cultural references, too, are made with an innate confidence. The many musical performances in the book do not come with annotations for what is being sung, as happens in another book about music in Mumbai, Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals. Deshpande’s descriptions are atmospheric, conveying even to the non-specialist reader the pleasure and power of a shared cultural universe, in which a Natya Sangeet classic can be remembered as a signal between spouses.

Strangers to Ourselves is not a perfect novel. It has its immersive moments, but it also has a self-indulgent quality: a meandering air that suggests a conversation with oneself. But through all this there is a seriousness of purpose that makes it a particularly dignified investigation of that thing called love.

Published in Scroll, 23rd April 2016

Post Facto: Bharatanatyam, ‘sleeveless’ and a threatened museum

My Sunday Guardian column this month: Last month, the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum had to abandon its plans to host the grand finale of the Lakme Fashion Week, after alleged threats from a Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) leader. The tie-up with a fashion event was part of managing trustee and honorary museum director Tasneem Zakaria Mehta›s attempts to raise money (a fee of Rs. 2 lakh was to be paid for the use of the venue), while giving the museum›s visibility a fillip. Whether one thinks that the idea of a museum being given over to a fashion show for an evening is an exciting innovation or a bizarre mismatch, it is clear that those who actively opposed the event did not see it in the Mumbai Mirror's neutral terms — as "an alternative public space being used for an international event." A museum trustee told the Mirror that the event had to be shifted elsewhere at the last minute because Byculla corporator Samita Naik's husband, Sanjay Naik (also an MNS leader) went to the museum premises and threatened to take another 300 people there to protest against the show. The fashion show episode is only the most recent in the battles between the BMC and Mehta, who have earlier crossed swords over ambitious plans for the museum›s expansion. Last week, things came to head when the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, which partially funds the museum) unanimously passed a proposal to revoke the agreement between the BMC, Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). The current management, which is responsible for creating one of India›s very few exciting museum spaces, was meant to last another five years. It has now been put on six months' notice. Reports quoted Sandeep Deshpande, an MNS group leader who presented the proposal to oust Mehta, as saying: "What culture does she intend to show? Our culture is Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Lavni and Kathak; this is what we should be showing to the foreigners, not the culture that these people talk about." When I posted that quote on Twitter, one response I got was "our culture is Bharatanatyam? Who›d have thunk the Hindu right would admit to sexual slavery as its culture." The tweet was referring, snarkily, to the fact that Bharatanatyam as a dance form emerged out of the centuries-old devadasi system, in which young girls were married off to a deity or a temple, effectively becoming bound to provide sexual services for upper-caste men in the community. Snark aside, the ironies of Deshpande's remark are inescapable — and several. First, Bharatanatyam's origin really is tied to what can honestly be described as a Hindu way of life — just not in a way the Hindu right would like to admit. Second, what's on display here from the MNS and its ilk is an incredible historical amnesia, an erasure of the decades of struggle that went into reclaiming Bharatanatyam and sanitising it into an art form that girls "from good families" could practice. Third, that sanitising was a deeply controversial thing, with voices like that of Balasaraswati publicly criticising the way the dance form was stripped of its erotic gestures. And finally, while Bharatanatyam as practiced in the wake of Rukmini Devi Arundale and Kala Kshetra might be de-eroticised, lavani certainly is not. The erotic charge of lavani is integral, both in its lyrics and its dance steps. At one level, I'm glad that the MNS wants to claim these dance forms, or any dance forms, as part of "our culture". But given that this "support" is so uninformed by history, and so kneejerk and hypocritical in its sense of morality, it seems possible that the tables could turn at any moment. Lavani and tamasha were once beyond the pale of Brahminical culture; now they have been appropriated as Maharashtrian culture, so much so that they were made exempt from the ban on bar dancing. Right now, the world of fashion is tagged as Western and upper class, thus immoral. Tomorrow, "our culture" could co-opt it, and label something else immoral. Meanwhile, when pushed to the wall by the moral police, we can end up defending things in their terms. "Anamika's collection was celebrating Indian garments and was not immoral," Mehta was quoted as saying — if it had been Western wear, would it have been less morally upright? Chaitanya Tamhane's unmissable debut feature, Court, trains its steady gaze upon a Mumbai courtroom in which similar culture wars are being played out just below the surface. The charge is one of abetment to suicide, but what is really on trial is a man's refusal to toe the hegemonic cultural line. If a man claims to be a folk singer, a lok shahir, then it is terribly suspicious that he should be a member of any social and political organisations — and oh, downright fraud that he should voice political or economic dissent "in the guise of cultural workshops". Culture here is what a majority endorses — it seems almost its job to mock the minority, whether that be a Catholic lady publicly punished for wearing a "sleeveless" top, or the North Indian migrant who is a figure of fun because he dares propose marriage to a Marathi girl. Culture, in this view, is only culture if it challenges nothing. It must laugh foolishly at its master's jokes, and roll over and die when told to. It must bark at outsiders, but it must never bite its own. Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Actor, auteur and the bhadralok’s fearless agent provocateur: Rituparno Ghosh

An obituary I wrote for the Sunday Guardian: Rituparno Ghosh’s films might have been derided by some as “middle-class”, but he was exceptional in the sensitivity and attentiveness with which he depicted domesticity, relationships and gender politics, writes Trisha Gupta

TRISHA GUPTA  1st Jun 2013

	Rituparno Ghosh with Deepti Naval in a still from Memories of March ituparno Ghosh's cinematic oeuvre — he made a remarkable 19 features and one short in a career of 21 years, as well as totting up four acting credits – was never credited with greatness. Serious film aficionados, in Bengal and outside, were in any case unwilling to grant that label easily to any Bengali filmmaker after the end of the Ray-Ghatak-Sen era. Also, his films, at least until the mid-2000s, were perceived as being middle class, and thus somehow automatically middlebrow. Later, of course, there was his so-called "lobh" (greed) for Bollywood, casting Aishwarya Rai in Chokher Bali, Abhishek Bacchan in Antarmahal, Amitabh in The Last Lear and even Bipasha in Shob Charitro Kalpanik, a fact which made his artistic credentials suspect (with some reason), while giving him unprecedented leverage in the national media. There was also the additional criticism that his films weren't 'cinematic', that they seemed like 'filmed plays'. In a telephone interview I did with him in 2008, he responded to this criticism with typical fair-mindedness: neither delusional nor self-deprecatory, outspoken but not defensive. "People have this simplistic idea that if you shoot outdoors it becomes cinema, and if you stay indoors, it's a play. By that criteria, only Kurosawa is cinema, not Bergman. I'm not saying I'm Bergman, or that Raincoat is great cinema, but I do find it a little undemocratic to not acknowledge my kind of cinema as an equally legitimate form." Thinking about his films now, I feel as if the closed-door chamber dramas, the 'talky' films set in middle-class Bengali milieus that he made with such consummate ease, share more with television than theatre. Rituparno never actually made films for television (though he hosted two popular chat shows on Bengali channels: Ebong Rituparno on ETV Bangla and later Ghosh and Company on Star Jalsha), and in fact the one thing his films have been credited with is bringing back middle class Bengali audiences to theatres in an era when the lowbrow kitsch on offer had driven them away. But unlike a lot of filmmakers, Rituparno never turned his nose up at the television format. In the 2008 interview with me, he spoke twice of being grateful to Doordarshan, crediting its wide-ranging Hindi and Bangla programming for his not having grown up "judgemental about cinema", and for opening up Ray's repertoire to him in a way that it had not been available before. But it seems to me that television for Rituparno was not just about access to cinema, but about a viewing experience, a sensibility. In a recent interview, he has said "television facilitates a more intimate viewing, and a more intimate connection with the characters". It was watching Jalsaghar on television that foregrounded for him the decaying zamindar's relationship to his mansion, and became the kernel that led to Unishe April's central focus on an ageing dancer (Aparna Sen) and her house. (The daughter (Debashree Roy) "came much later", and though the film was read as an adaptation of Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Rituparno always said he had not watched it then and never managed to watch it later because "a sort of mental block developed".) { The truly remarkable thing about Rituparno's films for me has always been his ability to create layers of empathy, to see why people are where they are, and not to mock them for it. It was no accident that so many of Ghosh's films unfold within the four walls of a house. The large zamindari mansion appears over and over, a crumbling hard-to-maintain remnant in Bariwali (The Lady of the House), a just-surviving symbolic thing that might still come in useful by being mortgaged in Utsab (The Festival), a stifling patriarchal space in its supposed glory days in Antarmahal. But the space of the home is something he was attentive to in every film, and attentive in a way that few men are: the gulf between the interior and the exterior, the joys of domesticity as well as its possibility for suffocation — these are themes that Ghosh seemed effortlessly to understand and gravitate to. Perhaps they came to him along with the women he created on screen, whose relationships to space he was able to delineate with such precision and sensitivity. I think of Rituparna Sengupta's Romi in Dahan, discovering to her dismay how vast the social distance was between her Anglophone parental home in Sunny Park and her in-laws' home on Golf Club Road, finding that one "accident" means that she is no longer to go beyond her balcony, that her right to the city has been taken away. Or of Mamata Shankar in Utsab, listening anxiously for the sounds of conversation between her son and her niece, constantly watching out for the casual slide into intimacy that the secret spaces of the ancestral house she knows can enable. Or even Aishwarya Rai in Raincoat, somehow managing to be half-convincing as the stuck-at-home housewife, with Rituparno's ever-attentive detailing — a bra-strap peeking out from Rai's sari blouse — creating the sense of somehow domestic deshabille.
	s a filmmaker in India today, Rituparno was remarkable for having written every single one of his films (barring the few that he adapted from Tagore – Chokher Bali, the rather lovelyNoukadubi, or from other people's novels, like Dahan), and for me it was his writing, his ability to capture conversation – especially conversations between women, unfailingly attentive to the nuances of generation, class and educational divides — that made the best of his films such a joy. Several obituaries now have described Rituparno as having travelled from respectful conformism to blatant transgressiveness, and certainly in recent years, he made a deliberate attempt to open up the questions of gender and sexuality that he had allowed to remain dormant earlier, not just as a filmmaker (Chitrangada) and actor (Aar Ekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March) but also in his stunning personal appearances in female attire. These films often seemed self-indulgent, especially because one knew he was playing some version of himself, but perhaps it was a phase he had to work through. But sex had always been a presence in his films, challenging a deep-rooted Bengali middle class hypocrisy where sex and money must never be mentioned, though everyone knows they're operating everything behind the scenes. Sex as negotiation tactic (Dahan), as patriarchal imposition (Antarmahal), as youthful frisson or remembered yearning or security (Utsab), sex as bridge or breakdown (Dosar), even sex as thoughtless indiscriminate surrender to your body: sex in Rituparno's films was never "just sex". And yet it was not soppily covered over by romance, it was allowed to be messy and dangerous and spilling beyond the boundaries of propriety. The presence of real sex — even if heterosexual — made his films non-conformist long before this last phase. The truly remarkable thing about Rituparno's films for me has always been his ability to create layers of empathy, to see why people are where they are, and not to mock them for it. Even a Dahan, with its clear narrative contrast between different kinds of women, cannot become in Rituparno's hands a linear, liberation narrative like Dor. There is a lucid call for the pleasures of going it alone, but there is also an understanding that everyone makes compromises, and that sometimes compromises are the only way to live and love. His non-judgemental style could extend even to crime. "In an ordinary detective story, it is the hunter and the hunted – there's no relationship between them except of wit," he once said. "But how can you be so unemotional about a person you are practically obsessed with?" For long my favourite Rituparno film was Shubho Mahurat, an Agatha Christie adaptation with a superbly twinkly Rakhee as a Bengali Miss Marple. I'm glad there's a Byomkesh Bakshi film to look forward to.