Glossing over it

My Mirror column:

The real-life story of Anand Kumar and his free coaching is incredible, but Super 30 feels like a missed opportunity.

A still from Super 30, directed by Vikas Bahl. 

“Kya baat hai bhai, ki film hamaari aa rahi hai toh sab log lag jaate hain? [What's going on, bhai: is everyone piling on to me because a film is coming out?]” asked the renowned engineering coach Anand Kumar during a video interview to BBC's Hindi correspondent Saroj Singh in January this year. The biopic he was referring to released last week, but it answers few questions -- not even Kumar's own.

Directed by Vikas Bahl (known for Queen and for the serious #MeToo charges against him that led to the dissolution of Phantom Pictures in 2018), Super 30 stars Hrithik Roshan as the Patna-based Kumar, who shot to national fame a decade ago, when all thirty students in his Super 30 class 'cracked' what might be the world's most competitive entrance examination: the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT JEE).

Every year since 2002, Anand Kumar has selected thirty students from underprivileged families for his free coaching, also providing them free lodging in Patna and home-cooked meals. How Kumar arrived at this vocation is a fascinating tale. In the early 1990s, Kumar's handwritten submission to a UK journal of mathematics was followed by an offer of admission from the University of Cambridge. The backward caste son of a poor postal clerk, Kumar couldn't arrange the money. Then his father died, and he spent some years in penury before finally hitting his stride as a teacher. The idea of using his abilities to improve the lives of talented poor students like himself came later, and their continued success has been his, too.

It isn't unusual for Bollywood (or for that matter, any commercial film industry) to pick a big star to play a real-life hero. Many recent biopics have done it: Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh, Priyanka Chopra as the boxer Mary Kom. Others have cast a known face who's also a good actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui has appeared as Urdu writer Manto, Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray and everyman road-building hero Dashrath Manjhi, while Irrfan Khan was superb as the runner-turned-dacoit Paan Singh Tomar.

But there seems to me something about Super 30 that outdoes these previous instances. I do not refer only to the blackface that Bollywood unabashedly carries out in the name of make-up, literally covering the taller, more muscular Roshan's fair skin and light eyes with an artistic tan. I mean also the way that Bahl's film covers over the facts of Anand Kumar's life.

What's strange is that the facts of Kumar's life are already full of drama. Interviewing Anand Kumar for his 2013 book A Matter of Rats: A short biography of Patna, the US-based writer Amitava Kumar wrote, “When Anand describes the events... you watch his tale of woe unfold as if in a black-and-white Hindi film possibly made by Raj Kapoor.” The fact that his father's sudden death took place by choking, that the streets around their house were flooded by rain, that he had to put his unconscious father on an abandoned vegetable cart to wheel him to a clinic – all this is in Amitava Kumar's book. But in the film, there is no choking, no flooding, and Anand has a bicycle. The film depicts the papad-selling business that his mother and he supported themselves on, but there is no mention of the fact that the postal department sent Anand 50,000 rupees after his father's death, or the fact that he needed to stay on in Patna to support a family that included a grandmother and a disabled uncle. It almost feels like the facts are too extreme for the film.

Instead, Bahl's version wishes to distract us with not one but all of the following: a youthful love interest who marries another man (Mrunal Thakur, from Love Sonia); a hard-drinking journalist who makes confusing interventions; an overly villainous coaching competitor (Aditya Shrivastava); a buffoonish politician (Pankaj Tripathi). Worse, it gives us a whole first batch of Super 30 students, some with 30-second backstories that could be potentially devastating – the manual scavenger, the construction labourer, the girl with the alcoholic father -- but not one gets a real personality. The camera is so focused on Roshan's as-ever exaggerated performance that the kids don't have a chance.

Attempts have, in fact, been made on Anand Kumar's life. But the film makes these about overly chatty hitmen, and the last episode – where his coaching competitor plans to blow up an entire hospital in order to wipe out the Super 30 – has the students turning Kumar's science formulae into a bizarre combination of religion and magic. A Vedic chant about vidya is the aural backdrop to an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors to outwit armed goons. Meanwhile the villain warns: “It should look like a Naxal attack, no-one should suspect that it is meant to kill Anand Kumar, otherwise he'll become a martyr.”

The BBC interview is filled with allegations it thinks are controversial. How many students does Kumar take on in his (paid) Ramanujan classes? What fees do those students pay? Why does he not reveal the names of each year's Super 30 students until the IIT JEE list is out? Kumar answers them all, though he sounds victimised.

The film, meanwhile, refuses to even engage with the last decade of Kumar's life, involving the complexities that come after the Happy Ever After. We dearly want our heroes to be saints, and we are happy to erase their real selves to achieve that.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 July 2019.

Book Review: A Matter of Rats

My review of Amitava Kumar's most recent book, in Biblio.

A Matter of Rats—A Short Biography of Patna
Aleph Book Company,
144 pages, Rs 295

The first book I read by Amitava Kumar was Bombay-London-New York (2002). I read it in New York, where I spent nearly four years as a graduate student: a Bombay-born Dilliwali wondering if it was possible to turn oneself into a New Yorker. My conclusion: it was possible, but not what I wanted. I thrilled every day to the unmatchable urban sparkle of New York, but it wasn't home. And I had long ago made a subconscious decision that I would go back home.

Perhaps it is easier to go home to Delhi than to Patna.

In Bombay-London-New York, Amitava Kumar described his journey out of Patna, and the journeys of other Indian writers in English, such as VS Naipaul. These literary journeys provided the occasion for a series of watchful autobiographical vignettes. It is an acutely perceptive book about books, but also a deeply affecting meditation on place: on leaving home and coming back, trying to belong and refusing to belong. And yet, though it traverses the three cities of its title and more, the subtitle -- “A literary journey” -- made clear that it was really about travelling (or staying put) in one's head.

A Matter of Rats, Kumar's most recent book, comes with the beguiling subtitle 'A Short Biography of Patna', leading one to expect a book about place. But this is more a book about people: those who live in Patna, and those, like Kumar, in whom Patna lives.

As a writer, Kumar has always been an attentive listener, and yet also put himself into his narratives in ways that risk our judgement. I think, for instance, of his description (in BLNY) of his first meeting with Mausaji and Saras Aunty, an uncle and aunt who had left Patna for the US when he was two. When they first show up at his door in an American university campus, he is “delighted”; he seems to mark how young and elegant they look, how foreign. Later, he realizes that they have spent a 'successful' life in America by freezing themselves and India at the moment that they left it: they have never been back in two decades, and yet they only watch Hindi films from the 1950s and 60s. He describes Saras Aunty saying that when she closed her eyes, she could see India. Writing about this, Kumar confesses he had the unkind desire to say to his aunt, “You need to open your eyes.”

In A Matter of Rats (henceforth AMOR), Kumar has properly become the NRI. A very different sort from his aunt and uncle, no doubt – a successful writer in a post-liberalisation world, whose work and connections bring him back to India oftener than they could have dared imagine. But an occasional returnee nonetheless. If in BLNY, Patna is remembered with astonishing candour as the site and shaper of a sexually-repressed male adolescence, in AMOR it is almost entirely a place that has been left behind. Even when he does place himself in the narrative now, as for instance in a school reunion of Patna old boys held in Delhi, he seems to want to displace his presence amid the scandalous reminiscences and “the luxury that surrounded us” by constantly looking at the face of the waiter behind the bar, “the only one not drinking”. The waiter remains impassive. The past seems dimmer, and the shape of the present is difficult to discern.

It is a strangely tentative book, and somehow the less satisfying for it. To provide just one example: in 2002, when Kumar described “the paltry evidence in my life of the aesthetic”, or “[T]he absence of all matters literary”, he was characterising not just his own childhood in Patna, but something of the city itself. In 2013, even though he zeroes in (quite rightly) on “the explosion of coaching institute culture” as “one of the true stories of Patna”, Kumar allows himself a mere line of speculation on whether it marks “the end of education”. He does not take this further. Instead, his narrative leapfrogs across a whole city full of ordinarily desperate tuition centres and lands on a much-feted Patna success story – IIT coach Anand Kumar and his Super 30: thirty students handpicked from poor, rural families whom he provides with free board and tuition. As Kumar himself points out, the amazing IIT enrolment levels of Anand's Super 30 are well known in Patna and beyond, a story has even appeared in the New York Times. This does not by any means make it ineligible for comment. But I would have liked to hear more about the teaching space beyond a one-line reference to the legendary “shed with a corrugated roof”. I would like more about Anand's teaching style, and much more from the students themselves. We do hear brief tales of struggle from two or three students. But barring the unforgettable phrase “meow-meow English”, which Anand uses to caricature the sort of IIT aspirant who might ordinarily make his poorer, more Hindi-speaking students feel insecure, we get no sense of their inner lives. Later, Kumar closes off his own incipient criticism of rote learning by blandly quoting Muslim students at a Super 30 spin-off called Rahmani Super 30 on their desire to represent their community.

But why end the story as it always ends, with the imagined 'fulfilment' of the IIT dream? What about the experience of those who have actually gone on to the IITs? Has life had for them the rosy afterglow promised by “the flag of fulfilment” on which Kumar closes his tale? If this sort of reporting is an unfair demand, I would at least have liked to hear what Kumar, an avid Hindi film watcher, made of Aarakshan, a big-budget 2011 Bollywood film about SC/ST reservation and the commercialisation of education, centred around a fictionalised version of Anand Kumar played by Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan reportedly learned “teaching skills in mathematics” from Anand for this film directed by Prakash Jha. Jha is a Bihar-born filmmaker who is indubitably among the state's most influential cultural representatives, having made several star-studded Bollywood films, most dealing with the crises of a non-specified Bihari present. The fact that he only gets a mention in AMOR for his earliest work, Damul, other than being dismissed by a leftwing poet for having built “Patna's first and only mall”, makes me wonder. Especially from Kumar, who has written so astutely of the relationship between cinema and life in India in his novel Home Products, this sort of absence feels like a deliberate cop-out.

Sadly, this is a book full of absences.

Caste, which whether we like it or not is the engine of most social, political and economic life in Bihar, is foregrounded only in the first chapter about the Musahars, an 'untouchable' caste whose very name marks them out for disdain as 'rat-eaters'. Kumar's earliest memory of meeting a Musahar does involve the recognition that his upper-caste grandmother would not allow a Musahar child into the house in Patna even as a servant. But we hear almost nothing of the upper-caste consciousness of caste – which is, if anything, likely to be stronger than among the Musahars who would like nothing better than to shed it. There are two moments when we get a glimmer of how real conversation in Patna is imbricated in caste – one where the aforementioned left-wing poet is described disparagingly by an unnamed sociologist friend as “an upper caste Bhumihar poet who has only written two-and-a-half poems”, and another when a doctor at Patna Medical College laughingly explained a patient's injury as the result of the doctor concerned being Scheduled Caste. But Kumar chooses to move on quickly. There is nothing in this book to indicate how caste networks now operate at the high and middle levels of the system, driving everything from marriage and jobs to political alliances and the cash-flows of corruption.

For a book about a city, we get alarmingly little sense of neighbourhoods, or even how the broad geographical contours of the city map onto the social. Names like Gandhi Maidan and Boring Road appear and disappear, but there is no neighbourhood that comes to life. The only time the reader experiences the street life of Patna, it is via a Hindi short story called 'Ath Miss Tapna Katha' in which we see a young woman's journey to college through the eyes of a character called Nimmo. It feels ironic when Kumar writes, however accurately, of “[h]ow many mohallas and how many lives disappear inside one wretched column written by an outsider in The Daily Telegraph.” And somehow Kumar's awareness of “his outsider's eye” does not help matters. The crazy excesses of Bihar's present appear in parenthesis, as if they are cruel jokes: the invigilating nun asked how she can call herself a Christian if she doesn't show compassion for the cheat, or the book about Patna's antiquity which, translated into Hindi, becomes 'authored' by senior bureaucrats. A whole chapter about the leftwing poet's marital life is perhaps meant to gesture to a Patna masculinity, but one aches for something less glancing, less oblique.

It is not necessary to inhabit a place to understand it. But unlike Home Products or BLNY, where Kumar's thoughts from afar were embedded in a richly developed compost of the past, AMOR (even while often drawing on passages from BLNY) offers thin pickings. Where Kumar does succeed occasionally is in giving us some sense of his changing relationship to his own past. “I told stories about Patna because they were part of my shame at having come from nowhere,” he writes. “It took me time to learn that what I thought of as honesty, the honesty required of a writer, was also a rejection of who I was.” In a superb discussion of the Naipaul brothers and their “wilful negation” of their imagined Indian past, Kumar writes, “Such an act of complete rejection, sparing no one, can be life-giving... You are free to speak your mind.”

One wishes, then, that Kumar had decided to stop hanging on to quasi-insider status. Some day, perhaps, there will be another Patna book in which he will feel free to speak his mind.

Published in Biblio (Sep-Oct 2013).

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No-one responded.

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