Pen, Ink, Action

An example of Satyajit Ray's artwork for Seemabaddha (Company Limited), 1974

A long review essay I did on the graphic art of Satyajit Ray, in the November issue of Caravan:

"NOT TO HAVE SEEN THE CINEMA OF RAY means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon,” Akira Kurosawa once said—rather an overblown compliment, but my adult self would end up agreeing. However, to the Bengali child—or even a half-Bengali one like me, who grew up between cities and languages—Satyajit Ray meant much more than his films. His prolific output as a writer and illustrator, targeted largely at children and young adults, forged a very different connection with young Bangla readers than the ‘serious’ cinema for which he is known worldwide. And though I read Bangla slowly, my father, patiently reading aloud to me through family holidays and long train journeys, made sure I was introduced to Ray through his stories—and, because I would first hungrily flip through the books that were going to be read to me—through his illustrations.

These black-and-white illustrations spanned the whole range of his popular literary creations—the detective Pradosh C Mitter, whose crisply Anglicised surname is the perfect foil for the informal Bengali daaknaam by which he is better known, Feluda; the eccentric scientist Professor Shonku, whose unbelievable globetrotting sci-fi adventures come to us via a diary discovered after he’s taken off in a space rocket; and old Tarini Khuro (uncle), whose fantastic tales, traversing romantic historical settings from colonial Lucknow to the palaces of penurious Maharajas, are invariably told over a steaming cup of tea, with his younger self cast in a starring role. Illustrations also appeared alongside the many independent short stories, published 12 at a time in anthologies bearing names like Aaro Baaro (Twelve More) and Aaro Ek Dojon (And Another Dozen).

As a child who did not otherwise read Bangla fiction, I was captivated by Ray’s universe. It gave me access to a Bengali cultural landscape that was familiar, yet one I could never be part of. One reason for that was simply that I was a girl—whether it was Feluda and his companions, the middle-aged mystery writer Lalmohan Babu and the teenaged Topshe, or Uncle Tarini, or Professor Shonku, the action in Ray’s stories centred exclusively around men and boys. (The one-off stories, too, almost without exception, featured male protagonists. A Ratan Babu or Sadhan Babu or Barin Babu, invariably a single Bengali man with a middle-class job, would encounter something out of the ordinary, usually while on a trip to some smallish town not far from Calcutta, often located in what is now Jharkhand: Netarhat, Ranchi, Madhupur.) But with these very different fictional men as guides (not to mention my father, who functioned as a sort of supra-guide), I could glide in and out of a very particular Bengali masculine world in which adda and sightseeing holidays—arguably the two favourite Bengali pastimes— became actual take-off points for adventure.

Ray invariably illustrated all his stories himself. His illustrations ranged from the simplest, most basic line drawings to more elaborate sketches with a lot of cross-hatching. In the latter type of drawing, Ray’s dramatic—or perhaps we should say cinematic—sensibility emerged in his frequent use of light and shade techniques: his illustrated characters are constantly being lit up or thrown into shadow. His style was cinematic in another way, too. He loved drawing a scene like a point-of-view shot: one character barely seen, either in profile or from behind-the-shoulder, while the focus is on the character he (and it was always a he) was speaking to or looking at or spying on.

(Piece continues...)

Read the whole essay here.

Film Review: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana

In an industry so stuffed to the gills with Punjabi families and NRI homecomings, a film like Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana could easily have felt stale or repetitive. But debutante director Sameer Sharma manages to create a version of rural Punjab that is somehow quieter, gentler, sadder and yet funnier than those that have gone before. 

Family black sheep Omi (Kunal Kapoor in a quiet, largely winsome role) who’d stolen the family jewels and run away to England as a teenager, comes back after a decade to the family home in Lalton village, Punjab – not because he misses it, but because he needs money to pay back dangerous London gangster Shanty (Munish Makhija). His grandfather Daarji (Vinod Nagpal), the strong family patriarch Omi once drugged to allow Omi to make his getaway, is now a pale shadow of his former self: an old man who doesn’t recognise anyone around him, spending his days in a haze of memories where all he sees is his beloved long-dead wife and more recently deceased but equally beloved dhaba. 

The dhaba—and its legendary Chicken Khurana—were the source of the family’s fortunes, but Daarji’s secret recipe seems destined to go to the grave with him. No amount of pleading or haranguing from the family’s resident nutter Titu Mama (an absolutely marvelous Rajesh Sharma) (“Kucch toh yaad hoga, darling?”) can apparently bring the old man to wake up and hand it over. 

A secret recipe, like the secret papers in a spy story or the secret formula in a sci fi thriller, is a plot device that could make for a grand food-and-family mystery. But Luv Shuv isn’t really aiming to be either a mystery or a family drama, so what surrounds the Macguffin of Daarji’s recipe is neither a tightly-written thriller, nor a solidly weepy sarson-da-saga but a slice of life in which the most serious things – love, sex, age, loneliness, failure, death – are served up warmly leavened by a layer of absurdity. 

The film might be joyfully irreverent about most things – the middle-aged chachi (a perfect Seema Kaushal) assembles an on-the-spot family conference to discuss the underwear sizes of the men in her household, a deranged old man who sits around staring into space evokes the comment “Dekh le silent picture”, a suicidal young chap is saved from death by a crow – but it never feels flippant. There’s an unspoken affection that tempers our laughter, making everything – from the loony Titu Mama’s peeing contests and sex obsession, to the almost sugary sentimentality of Omi’s cousin Jeet (Rahul Bagga), even the ostensibly murderous hitman Manty who shows up to reclaim his boss’s debts – seem simultaneously ridiculous and moving. 

This is a film that is realist enough to want to justify why the doctor heroine – the radiant Huma Qureishi in an affecting performance as Omi’s childhood flame, Harman – has her hair cascading down her shoulders on a particular day, when it’s tied into a sober, tidy plait the rest of the time. But it is also a film which revels in the fortuitous, the accidental, the almost miraculous. 

Disease and death are not kept wholly at bay, but they arrive when they are meant to—and we know that untimely threats will be staved off in time, not so much by wit or wisdom as by the air of magical well-being hanging over the proceedings. (There’s that life-saving crow, for instance, who is incorporated into this vision of the world via an explanation you don’t need to believe to be charmed by.) 

It is, admittedly, a little slow. The threat meant to be hanging over Omi’s life seems unconvincing in its menace and repetitive in its execution; the faux-documentary format in which Daarji’s old associates are asked for clues to his Chicken Khurana doesn’t have enough spark; Omi’s self-imposed cooking lessons with Harman are a little tamer than they could have been. Kunal Kapoor, though he tries hard and does fairly well, is not quite talented enough to pull off a role as layered as this. As the good-for-nothing scoundrel who’s only slowly coming to see the error of his ways, Kapoor manages to convey a whiff of the requisite kameenapan occasionally, but at other times his good-boy persona is too overwhelming. 

Still, the rest of the performances are pitch-perfect, with Rajesh Sharma’s Titu Mama leading from the front. Mention must also be made of Dolly Ahluwalia (the beauty-parlour-owning mother from Vicky donor), who puts in a superb turn as the dhongi buaji who eloped as a girl and is now a canny television guru with a secret or two of her own. But the real star of this film is the writing: Sumit Batheja has crafted a screenplay that’s original and heartfelt, with dialogue that is both pungent and hilarious. The Chicken Khurana may seem a little lost as the film meanders homewards – but there’s definitely enough luv-shuv to make up for it.

This review was published on Firstpost.

Book Review: Sunlight on the Garden

A short review I did for Time Out:

Beteille's French grandmother with his father, Maurice.

André Béteille: Sunlight on the Garden  

Penguin Viking, Rs. 499

André Béteille, the distinguished sociologist, has written a rare and delightful memoir. By limiting the book to his “childhood and youth”, Béteille frees himself to explore the first 26 years of his life in wonderfully observant detail. He begins with a memorable description of his two grandmothers, one Bengali and the other French. Both were widows “in straitened circumstances” who lived in the small French-Bengali town of Chandannagar – but they never met. His paternal grandmother was the child of French indigo planters. She married a French colonial official who died of cholera, leaving her with a young son and no money. She spent a lifetime keeping up appearances, and felt shamed by her son’s marriage to “a native woman”. Béteille and his siblings were not welcome in her house; he describes with acuity their childhood fascination with this mysterious place, which they passed every day, but did not enter.

But even here, remembering things that must have been profoundly affecting, Béteille is his restrained, observant self: “Perhaps my peculiar childhood has made me unusually sensitive to the processes of social exclusion...”, he writes, before moving on to his other grandmother, a Bengali Brahmin widow who was as close as the other was distant. His portrait of her is deeply affectionate, but never shies away from the uncomfortable detail. His fond memories of her morning Ganga snaan and her simple, wholesome cooking do not prevent him from a clear-eyed recounting of her “pride of caste”, embedded in such tiny things as her calling his childish temper “the rage of a Chandala”.

It is this sort of constant, quiet contextualising that makes this book so enlightening, even when speaking of the most commonplace things. And yet Béteille’s sociological eye never swamps the individual. The temperamental mismatch between his parents, for instance, is given cultural heft by contrasting their different attitudes to privacy – “My mother, like most Indians, did not distinguish between privacy and secrecy, regarding them both as evils of the same kind” – but not explained away by it.

In general – whether discussing his own family or the middle class Bengali families of his friends, whether analysing the institutions of his formal education or the ’40s North Calcutta neighbourhood where he gained an informal one – Beteille turns upon the world a gaze that is thorough and unsentimental, unsparing yet always sympathetic. He is, in the best possible way, a participant observer in his own life.

Film Review: Chakravyuh

My review of Prakash Jha's new film, for Firstpost. 

Prakash Jha’s filmmaking career, right from the village-level caste politics of Damul (Bonded Until Death, 1984) to the caste reservation-based drama Aarakshan (2011), has been driven by his interest in Indian politics. His most recent film is no different.

With Chakravyuh, however, Jha moves away from his two long-term preoccupations – the politics of post-1970s Bihar and the changing role of caste in Indian socio-political life – to a different space, both in geographical and social terms.

Set in the tribal-dominated interior regions of Madhya Pradesh where Maoist insurgents are waging a guerrilla war against the forces of the Indian state, Chakravyuh is Jha’s effort to place a rather complex contemporary problem before Hindi film viewers.

Jha and his long-time screenplay writer Anjum Rajabali have chosen a classic way in which to do this: by creating characters who represent and personify the different viewpoints. So there is Arjun Rampal as a fiery and honest young police officer called Adil Khan, who upsets his also-police-officer wife Riya (Esha Gupta) by volunteering for a posting to a hardcore Naxal area which he is determined to “clean up”.

When the film opens, Khan has just successfully arrested an old Naxal ideologue called Govind Suryavanshi (Om Puri). But his biggest challenge is a Naxal leader called Rajan (Manoj Bajpayee), under whose leadership the Naxals have managed to capture significant areas of forest. Raja has two lieutenants, of whom one is female: a woman named Juhi (Anjali Patil, seen earlier this year in Delhi in a Day).

Surrounding this central core of characters is a raft of politicians and bureaucrats and businessmen – including Kabir Bedi as a bearded NRI industrialist called Mahanta who is clearly meant to be a stand-in for Vedanta.

The acting is decent on the whole (barring Esha Gupta’s impossibly fake urbanity), but none of these characters come wholly to life. As with so many “issue-based” films, they end up being mere pegs to hang an ideology on. They aren’t exactly caricatures, but their absolute consistency makes them flat. Their political positions are so clearly laid out – and they seem so utterly inflexible – that they come across as types than fully fleshed-out human beings.

Where the narrative does show some spark is in putting at its core not a relationship of enmity – the almost personal confrontation between Adil Khan and Rajan, for instance – but a friendship. The friendship in question is admittedly a fraught one: between Adil and his closest college buddy, Kabir (Abhay Deol) who left the police academy in disgrace, and has made no contact with his old friend in the intervening years.

But the complicated push and pull of a friendship, as anyone who has ever watched Namak Haram knows, makes for a far more engaging ground on which to stage a battle than the all-out war that is waged between enemies.

As in Namak Haram, where Rajesh Khanna infiltrated a trade union to help out his friend the industrialist (Amitabh Bachchan), Abhay Deol’s Kabir infiltrates the Naxal camp to help his friend Adil the police officer. Deol has the most interesting role in the film, and he more or less does justice to it. The filmmakers seem to deliberately keep his character a blank slate: seven years ago, we’re told, he was a close friend of Adil’s, but all we know about the present-day Kabir is what he tells us himself. And he doesn’t tell us much – not even his last name.

All we have by way of back-story is the event that led to his dismissal from the police academy, which gives us a character whose primary identifying traits are an inchoate sense of rebellion against injustice and a refusal to kowtow to authority. These, as should be apparent even without spoilers, fit exactly into the role Kabir will perform in this film.

In other words, there are no surprises, even here. But then perhaps Jha’s aim is neither nuance nor surprise. What he wants to do is to set up the broad contours of the debate: to show us why vast numbers of poor people in this country have felt it necessary to take up a violent path that leads to a stand-off with the state.

Jha’s films have always displayed a keen grasp of how the worlds of politics, business and crime intersect in the Hindi heartland, and Chakravyuh does a very competent job of showing us how this sort of unholy alliance, in the country’s most mineral-rich and least ‘developed’ regions, is leading inexorably to popular alienation and increasingly, bloodshed.

Jha’s usually unerring ear for dialogue – especially for the cadences of Bihari speech, with the occasional English word thrown in – falters here, with Esha Gupta given such sterling lines as “Jesus Christ, ek monster create kar diya tumne” and Manoj Bajpai and Anjali Patil’s excessive accents distracting unhelpfully from their performances.

The Sameera Reddy item song – Kunda Khol – feels tagged on and therefore terribly tacky, but Jha’s talent for dramatically-shot set pieces is very much in place. From picturesque marches through the jungle to aerial machine gun attacks conducted from a helicopter, Chakravyuh is full of nicely plotted, superbly-realized big screen action.

Considering the enormously bumpy terrain it takes on, Chakravyuh is a surprisingly smooth ride. Perhaps it is sometimes too smooth – but at least its simplifications are never cringe-worthy.

Published in Firstpost.

Post Facto: His Story - Narayanbhai’s katha brings Gandhi to life

My Sunday Guardian column this week:

The thin old man in a white kurta is seated on an elevated platform with a white sheet stretched over it. Behind him is a single white bolster; in front of him sprouts a bunch of microphones. He is reading, but in a marvellous informal manner that makes it seem he is speaking extempore. His voice is comforting, but thin. It is, after all, the voice of an 87-year-old. But it does not quiver. When he pauses for breath between passages, the small mandli to his left begins to sing. Now his lips are pursed gently in concentration, eyes closed beneath his spectacles. He sways gently to the music, and his narrow, bald head gleams when it catches the light. To his right, in a large wooden frame, is the familiar painted image of another old man: also bald, and with his eyes closed behind his round spectacles.

The resonance is unintended, but unmistakeable.

Narayanbhai Desai is the son of Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's longtime personal secretary. He spent the first 23 years of his life at Sabarmati and Sewagram, both ashrams established by Gandhi. For the last few years, he has been the Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapeeth, the university started by Gandhi in 1920. The highly respected Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud considers Desai's four volume work Maru Jivan Ej Mari Vani the most complete biography of Gandhi in Gujarati, and translated it into English under the title My Life is My Message.

At the age of 77, having published a four-volume work of repute, one might think that a man would feel he had done the work he had to. And it is possible that Narayanbhai would have settled into quiet retirement if Godhra had not happened. But Godhra happened, and Narayanbhai felt that he had to do something in response. His sense of what he should do was clear: to recharge the memory of Gandhi's message in a Gujarat which seemed to have turned sharply away from it. This was also his aim in writing the biography, but he had come to recognise that most people would not pick up a four volume work. It was then that he arrived at the idea of storytelling.

He held his first Gandhi Katha in 2004. Since then, he has travelled with it across 12 Indian states, as well as Canada, the USA and the UK. The katha I attended was the 106th, held from 4th to 8th October 2012 at Birla House in Delhi, the site of Gandhi's assassination. The 107th katha will be held at Vadodara Central Jail. The 108th, with which he plans to bring the process to a close in January 2013, will be at Sadra, a village in Gandhinagar district of Gujarat, where the Mahadev Desai College of Social Work, run by Gujarat Vidyapeeth, is located.

Each katha is held over five days, with Narayanbhai speaking for three hours every evening, recounting the events of Gandhi's life, broadly in chronological sequence. His anecdotes give the audience the privilege of hearing directly from someone who knew the Mahatma – of hearing history live. He does not leave out anything that would be considered major in the history books – so everything from Champaran to Direct Action Day gets its due. But it is his ability to weave in the smallest of incidents and characters that makes his katha come alive. It is ordinary people who are at the centre of this narrative – ordinary people who made Gandhi what he was.

So we hear the story of Kasturba's encounter with a family in an Andhra village who refused to open the door of their hut, finally agreeing to speak to her from inside. Aren't you coming to the sabha, she asked? Don't you want to hear Bapu? We would come, they answered, but there are three of us and only one proper dhoti between us. "Bapu did not say anything when Kasturba told him this story," says Narayanbhai. "But later he took to wearing just a dhoti. He said, 'How can I speak, wearing all these clothes, to people who don't even have a single garment to call their own?'"

When we hear how lawyers who came to assist him in Champaran with their individual caste cooks were persuaded to eat from a common rasoi, or how the potential rioter in pre-Partition Calcutta laid down his grenade at Gandhi's feet because his ginni (wife) was refusing to eat until Gandhi did, perhaps we are hearing the kind of exemplary moral tale that might usually be told about an epic hero, like Ram. The portrait with a garland around it, the large brass diya, the musicians' yellow saris and white kurtas: these certainly have all the familiarity of our Hindu style of national ritual. The stage is decorated, as stages are, with strings of marigold.

But there is a simplicity here, a quiet refusal of plushness. The marigolds from the first day remain until the fifth, transforming slowly from fiery goldenness to a muted ochre. Desai has taken a traditional form of subcontinental storytelling and made of it an informative, affecting form of remembrance, a form that perfectly fits the man at its centre. The final evening, after a brief reference to Gandhi's death, ends with a song, followed by a request for silence and no jaijaikaar. One wishes we had more rituals like these.

Read the whole column here. 

Film Review: Student of the Year

Karan Johar’s Student of the Year (2012) is a love triangle set in a completely unreal boarding school called St. Teresa’s. His debut film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) was a love triangle set in a completely unreal college called St. Xavier’s.

Not much has changed in the intervening 14 years. Karan Johar’s candyfloss aesthetic is certainly pretty much the same as it was when he began to make films. The American-style basketball courts and the branded clothes with which he sought to seduce his audiences in 1998 have simply been amplified several-fold to match our now much higher standards of consumption and display. So the young people at St. Teresa’s prance about in a haze of fast cars, discotheques and Louis Vuitton handbags, where they don’t need to bother their pretty little heads about such things as exams – and remember this is meant to be a boarding school, not a college.

Even though you can’t tell the difference by looking at them, the St. Teresa’s demographic is supposedly divided into the Tata bachche and the Bata bachche – Tata note de ke admission lete hain, aur Bata notes ratt ke. Joining St. Teresa’s, it seems, quickly needs you to pick one of the two camps: either you join the ABCs – Ameer bachche aur unke chamche (Rich kids and their sycophants) – or else you relegate yourself to the so-called ‘Pappu bachche’. And therein lies this film’s bare sliver of a plot: the arrival of a sports scholarship student called Abhimanyu (Siddharth Malhotra) who ought to be a Pappu or a chamcha, but refuses to be either. Which catapults him into battle with the school’s existing hero, wannabe rockstar Rohan (Varun Dhawan): a bade baap ke beta who drives a Ferrari and has managed to reserve both the school’s most prized parking space and its most sought-after girl.

Johar’s notion of what’s appealing in young women hasn’t changed much either: he’s still into spoilt, head-tossing brats obsessed with their looks. It isn’t a long trek from the impossibly annoying ‘Poo’ of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham to the designer-obsessed Shanaya of Student of the Year. Only, in retrospect, Kareena made Poo kind of memorable. As for Alia Bhatt’s Shanaya, one might not remember her at all but for the red lipstick mouth that jumps out from her alarmingly white face.

But Bhatt can’t entirely be blamed, saddled as she is with a role as tragically muddled as this. The basketball court of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in which Kajol played her ‘tomboy’ part has made way for a football field in which a girl has no role but to watch while the boys battle it out for the trophy. And if she’s lucky, the trophy might be hers. Shanaya’s teary outburst about not being the prize in some competition rings utterly false—because the whole of the rest of the film is set up to make us see her as exactly that. Girls in SOTY are allowed to compete, but mostly all they’re competing for is the boys.

What has changed from Kuch Kuch to Hota Hai to Student of the Year is Karan Johar’s idea of time. In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, eight years after college was enough time for a marriage, a death, an eight-year-old child. The Shahrukh and Kajol who met after eight years were altered versions of themselves—more mature, transformed by life, whether in happy or unhappy ways.

In SOTY, the schoolmates who reunite ten years after school still seem frozen in their old school avatars. Everyone is just a slightly older version of who they were then. The hierarchies that propped up that artificial universe are entirely in place in the real world: the nerdy fat boy is still nerdy and fat – and single, the philanderer-brat and wannabe rockstar is now a philanderer-brat and actual rockstar, the uber-competitive middle class boy has become an investment banker, the trophy girlfriend has become a trophy wife. (The sole smart competitive girl in school, though, has had her comeuppance: she is now ‘merely’ a housewife and mother.)

But perhaps there’s nothing to be surprised about. In a world in which Yash Johar’s son creates a star vehicle for Mahesh Bhatt’s daughter and David Dhawan’s son, it’s probably natural for life to seem preordained. I wish another world were possible.

Read this review on the Firstpost site, here.