There’s a scene in Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions where Chris Carver, a young member of the counter-cultural revolutionary movement in late 1960s/early 1970s Britain, is in a graveyard looking for an identity he can steal. His eyes fall on a tombstone bearing the name Michael Frame - a child who was born in the same year as Chris but died as an infant. “Resting where no shadows fall” reads the epitaph.
It’s a nicely ironic touch, for though “Michael Frame” is the alias under which Chris will live an inconspicuous suburban family-man life for nearly two decades, he will never quite escape the shadow of the past. Years later, as he turns 50 in the England of the late 1990s, he regards the two people he is closest to - his partner of 16 years, Miranda, and his step-daughter Sam - with a bemused detachment. “Unlike me, Miranda has the knack of living in the world,” he reflects - a busy entrepreneur, very much a creature of a capitalist world, she increasingly stands for everything he was once opposed to, or thought he was opposed to, and she doesn’t know much about his past. On another occasion, he marvels at Sam’s lack of imagination, “the unbroken borders of her world”, and wonders if her ambition of becoming a corporate lawyer can be properly considered a dream. Back in his own youth, dreams were far more radical, concerned more with bringing alive a Utopian world of the imagination than coming to terms with the imperfect real one.
If a restive interior life was all Michael had to deal with, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but as Kunzru’s book opens, ghosts from the past are taking corporeal shape. First, during a holiday in France, he glimpses a woman who is a dead ringer for Anna Addison, a comrade and sometime lover from his revolutionary days, supposedly killed while participating in an act of terrorism. Shortly after this, an old acquaintance named Miles Bridgeman reenters his life and subtly blackmails him for reasons that are not immediately clear, and Michael/Chris knows he must escape all over again.
From the story’s present - located in 1998 - numerous carefully woven flashbacks take us to Chris’s youth in the 1960s as he is drawn into the movement protesting the Vietnam War. Here, Kunzru’s writing is at its most vivid, bringing alive a time when it was possible to believe, honestly and unselfconsciously, that the world could be made a better place - so what if the process would require enormous sacrifices (Mao’s quote that you have to make war in order to permanently end war is referred to more than once), and so what if it was hard for anyone to describe what this “better world” would actually look like.
But as in any revolution, ideologies collide and lines get blurred. Initially, the group of radicals Chris belongs to resolve never to hurt people, only damage property - he takes active part in their plot to bomb the Post Office Tower - but this slowly changes. By the time some of his friends have become involved with the People’s Front for Liberation of Palestine, Chris knows that he lacks their zeal and commitment. “We’re damaged people,” Anna tells him at one point, summing up the position of the true anarchist, “there would be no place for us in the world we’re trying to build.” (This is typical of the tragic romanticism of the revolutionary stance: on the one hand you’re hopelessly idealistic about making a Utopian world for others to live in, but on the other hand you’re cynical about your own place in it.) However, Chris doesn’t share this purity of purpose and must eventually go his own way.
My Revolutions is a poignant story about a lifelong struggle between idealism and pragmatism. A key to the book lies in its title, in Kunzru’s clever use of the word “revolution” - it comes up in different contexts (including a revolving restaurant where a key scene takes place, and Chris’s perambulations in a prison courtyard and around a monastery stupa in Thailand), but especially notable is the suggestion that all ideologies eventually amount to going around in circles; that being too fixated on change can result in never changing anything at all. There’s a moving passage where Chris speaks of seeing a NASA image of the earth for the first time; of the protective tenderness he feels towards “the green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness”. “We were on the world’s side, on the side of life,” he says, and one feels for him here, but it’s worth considering that the blue-green disc is, after all, an endlessly and meaninglessly revolving body of gaseous matter, indifferent to human causes and conflicts. As the pragmatic Miles cuttingly tells Chris/Michael, “Let’s say I don’t believe in anything. Well, one great advantage of that is not wanting to blow anything up...that’s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by.”
However, Miles underestimates the persistence of the radical stance, for he says during the same conversation, “In a couple of years it will be a new millennium and with luck nothing will happen anywhere.” Kunzru doesn’t underline the point, but it’s impossible not to think here of 9/11 and of a different kind of terrorism, also built on the principle of eliminating anything that doesn’t fit one’s vision of “a perfect world”. Despite the specificity of its time and setting, My Revolutions has much to say about the forces acting on our world today.
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"Jack Straw was a radical!"
(Kunzru answered a few questions about the book on email)
You’ve captured the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s with such intensity, it’s easy to forget that you didn’t experience the period firsthand. What kind of research was required for this book?
My Revolutions is a strange mixture of personal experience and library research. I’ve been on many demonstrations, including some which have turned violent. I’ve participated in political meetings and the culture of British dissent, which stretches back to the sixties and beyond. But most of my research consisted of an attempt to familiarise myself with the various political currents around at that time. I read widely - Herbert Marcuse, biographies of activists, leaflets put out by groups and sects at the time. I also went to Thailand, to write the scenes set there.
Have you personally been interested in 1960s radicalism for a long time?
I have always been interested in that period - probably since I first heard the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP as a child! For some years I’ve been more interested in the currents of political thought than the music and fashion. I think we’re living in a very conservative time, where alternatives to the current world order aren’t being seriously explored. So it’s instructive to look back at a time when many people were convinced the world was on the cusp of radical change.
Did you speak to people who were part of the counterculture? Have many lives seen the kind of trajectory that Pat Ellis’s does in your book - from being a revolutionary to becoming a cog in the state machinery?
I’ve met many people who played their part. They range from those whose lives have been entirely defined by actions they took in their twenties - people who have served prison sentences, or have “enjoyed the attentions of the security services” - to those for whom their 1960s activities had few consequences.
In the UK, several government ministers were once young radicals. An amusing moment came when I found a yellowing Leftist newspaper with an article by a young writer “In Praise of Mao”. That writer, Jack Straw, became Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair!
You don’t make any overt connections, but in the activities of Chris’s group there are hints of the fundamentalist terrorism facing the world today. Do you believe there is a natural progression from idealism to terrorism?
I deliberately set the “present day” of the novel before 9/11, because I preferred to allow readers to make their own connections with the current situation. I do think that idealism is dangerous, whether it’s political or religious. Trying to make the world fit the shape of an idea is always a mistake. I think good politics always arises out of an appreciation of the real material conditions, the actual problems and possibilities.
Does the word “revolutions” also imply moving in circles? Is a revolution doomed to disappointment?
The book is full of thoughts about circularity, you’re right. I don’t think history is doomed to repeat itself exactly, but then neither is it a linear, progressive thing. One of the undercurrents in the novel is the contrast between a Buddhist perspective and a political revolutionary one. Renunciation versus engagement, repetition vs progression.
When your first book came out, there was a rush in the Indian media to categorise you as an NRI writer. Was My Revolutions a deliberate decision to write a novel with no Indian connection?
I probably would have done it anyway, but it is also a way of stating my intention to write about whatever I feel like. I think the publishing industry in the UK is beginning to accept that “Asian” writers are exploring territory that has nothing to do with race, culture or tradition - but I think we could go further with that. Similarly, I think it’s too simple to categorise writers from the Indian diaspora as “NRI” or proper desi or whatever. India is resonating throughout the world, in different ways for each person.
The Booker longlist this year has been described as a giant-killer. Does this suggest a changing literary scene in Britain?
There are some good new names on the list, and I just read two surveys – one saying that being a novelist is the favourite “dream career” of British people, the other saying that most novelists earn much less than the average wage! I think there’s a great future for fiction in both Britain and India.
What are you working on next?
I’m writing short stories and cooking up a couple of novel ideas, one of which is a large historical novel set in India, the other which is perhaps a piece of science fiction. I’m not sure if either will come to fruition.
(An earlier post about Kunzru at the 2006 Jaipur literature festival here, and my review of Noise, a collection of his early short stories, here.)
Almost inevitably, Professor Richard Dawkins' bestselling The God Delusion has caused a large measure of discomfort since it was published late last year. But what's interesting is that much of this discomfort has been felt by people who consider themselves atheists - or at least non-believers, for many people think of "atheist" as a daunting word, suggestive of someone who wears his denial like a badge and saunters about beating others over the head with it (at any rate, does one really need a specific word to denote a lack of belief in something?). Their argument is that Dawkins, so insistent on ranting against religion, is in danger of developing into an "atheist fundamentalist", just as shrill, intolerant and closed to other people's perspectives and needs as his religious counterparts are.
To many genuine liberals, the Dawkins approach is a problematic one. Why not leave believers – the harmless, moderate ones – alone, even if they are deluded? After all, faith in a higher power, with its attendant sense that our lives have a definite purpose and should therefore follow certain moral codes, has provided an important crutch for human beings over several centuries. Besides, isn't nihilism the logical alternative to belief?
As Dawkins persuasively argues here, no, it isn't. Delving into evolution and the genetic codes that define our behaviour, he points out that our moral sense has little to do with religiosity. We don't need the spectre of a supernatural creator in order to be good, or to lead fulfilling lives. In a throwaway but moving passage, he quotes Human Genome Project founder James Watson: "I don't think we're here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose.' But I'm anticipating having a good lunch and conversation."
Much of the criticism of The God Delusion owes to the demands of political correctness in today's world, the kowtowing to an unsaid rule that religious sentiments automatically demand respect over most other things. This idea is one of the first things Dawkins tackles in his book. "I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it," he writes, "but I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion, even when it directly conflicts with basic human rights, in our otherwise secular societies."
Making it obvious that he won't pull punches, he goes on: "I am attacking all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." This is calculated to discomfit readers, but Dawkins spells out the reasons for his vehemence. He is alarmed by the widespread lack of knowledge, even the insidious suppression of information (about Darwinism and the concept of natural selection, for instance) that allows a vast chunk of the world's population to believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the Koran (the Old Testament and its fire-and-brimstone supporters come in for especially severe but well-deserved mockery). It's farcical, he points out, that a majority of the world's population still lead their lives by tenets set down in ancient literature that was written (and repeatedly modified over the centuries) to fill gaps in people's lives that could not at the time be filled by science. Most of all, he deplores the way religion is used to manipulate young minds ("I want everyone to flinch when they hear a phrase like 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'," he writes).
Dawkins also makes the point that when beliefs are founded on something that has no scientific basis in the first place, it makes little sense to complain that an extremist's interpretation of a holy book is a "corruption" of the real thing. "How can there be a perversion of faith if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert?" His view is that for all our attempts to distinguish moderate belief from fanaticism, the line separating the two is much thinner than we realise. "For good people to do evil, it takes religion."
Anyone who's seen how ordinary people can behave during riots, or even heard a sweet old grandmother rallying furiously against members of another faith while watching the news on TV, will find it hard to disagree with this observation. Whether or not you agree with Dawkins' approach or his stridency, The God Delusion is more than a one-dimensional polemic. It's a passionately argued, fiercely rational work built on genuine concern for a world bent on erecting narrow walls for itself.
[Did this for the Sunday Business Standard]
Inspired by Alok (who in turn was inspired by this), here’s an exercise in pointless fun: a list of 50 of my favourite foreign-language films. Note: 1) I’ve defined foreign-language as non-English, non-Hindi, 2) This is not a definitive, sealed list of my 50 favourites, because such a list just isn’t possible (by the time I’ve finished compiling this one, I’ll have thought of at least 30 other films that should have gone in), 3) Maximum two films per director (with a few honorary mentions), 4) Silent films excluded – they are too universal and too special to be restricted by these petty classifications, 5) The list is skewed towards French cinema because at least 40 per cent of the foreign-language films I’ve seen are French (simple question of accessibility: the video-turned-DVD library at the French Cultural Centre in Delhi, with its large range of titles, was a favourite haunt for years) and 6) These are all films that mean a great deal to me, but it goes without saying that if I were to redo the list tomorrow, it would be completely different.
I’m going to be lazy and not link to the IMDB/Wikipedia entries for each film, but where one of them has been written about on the blog (or even mentioned in passing), I’m linking to the relevant post.
Here goes, in no particular order:
The Phantom of Liberty and The Exterminating Angel – Luis Bunuel
(Honorary mentions: Simon of the Desert, Un Chien Andalou, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire)
Night and Fog – Alain Resnais
Contempt and Bande a part – Jean-Luc Godard
(Honorary mentions: Breathless, Pierrot le Fou)
Yojimbo and Throne of Blood – Akira Kurosawa
(Honorary mentions: The Seven Samurai, Ikuru, The Hidden Fortress, The Lower Depths, The Bad Sleep Well, Stray Dog, Ran)
Charulata and Sonar Kella – Satyajit Ray
(Honorary mentions: Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Nayak, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne)
8 ½ and Juliet of the Spirits – Federico Fellini
(Honorary mention: the short film “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”, included in the feature Spirits of the Dead)
The Seventh Seal and Shame – Ingmar Bergman
(Honorary mentions: The Silence, Wild Strawberries, Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage)
Beauty and the Beast – Jean Cocteau
Eyes Without a Face – Georges Franju
M – Fritz Lang
Cleo from 5 to 7 – Agnes Varda
Au Revoir Les Enfants – Louis Malle
La Belle Noiseuse – Jacques Rivette
Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
Blue and The Double Life of Veronique – Krzysztof Kieslowski
Subarnarekha – Ritwik Ghatak
Bicycle Thieves and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow – Vittorio De Sica
Stolen Kisses and Shoot the Piano Player – Francois Truffaut
(Honorary mentions: The 400 Blows, Day for Night)
The Leopard and The Innocent – Luchino Visconti
Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August – Lina Wertmuller
Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) – Rene Clement
Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (treated as one film) – Claude Berri
Les Valseuses (Going Places) – Bertrand Blier
A Heart in Winter (Un Coeur en Hiver) – Claude Sautet
Grand Illusion – Jean Renoir
Pepe le Moko – Julien Duvivier
Knife in the Water – Roman Polanski
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Jacques Demy
My Night at Maud’s – Eric Rohmer
Ten – Abbas Kiarostami
La Notte and Blow-Up – Michelangelo Antonioni
Closely Watched Trains – Jiří Menzel
The Earrings of Madame De... – Max Ophuls
Aguirre, the Wrath of God and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser – Werner Herzog
Stromboli – Roberto Rossellini
D’Artagnan’s Daughter – Bertrand Tavernier
Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday - Jacques Tati
Solaris – Andrei Tarkovsky
Also, some highly acclaimed films that I somehow haven’t been able to work up too much affection for at a personal level (which means that I couldn’t put them on a list like this one – even though it’s easy for me to admire them from a distance, or to acknowledge their influence):
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
Ajantrik (Ghatak)
Rules of the Game (Renoir)
Belle de Jour (Bunuel)
Rashomon (Kurosawa)
I enjoyed the film a lot (it helped that I watched it in PVR's über-luxurious Gold Class, with its Lazy Boy chairs that can recline to 180 degrees – but more on that some other time). Thought it was very efficiently directed and edited, with some sharp characterisations and solidly executed action scenes. (Take a bow, Rob Miller.) I'm sure there are flaws but I'll have to go and see it a second time, critical faculties switched on, to make a list of them. There's a certain type of film that's easy to dissect once you've stepped out of the theatre and lost sight of how completely it held you while you were actually watching it. I think Chak De India is one of those films; though it's been almost universally liked in its first run, I wouldn’t be surprised if it suffers an eventual decline in reputation.
Okay, the notes (this is NOT a review, don't expect a plot summary):
- Going in, I was a bit wary about the film. I've written before about my ambivalence towards team sports: the constant rah-rahing about doing it for the country, the need to put group interests above individual interests at all times – things that go against the natural instinct for self-preservation that surfaces in an explosive situation (and there are so many such situations, on and off the field, in the politics-driven labyrinth of Indian sport). Also, I'm irritated by the automatic assumption that patriotism is a supreme virtue, so it was good that the film didn't overdo the jingoism act. The coach, Kabir Khan, does stress the need to be a Team Player, and makes a captain out of the girl who describes herself in terms of her national (rather than state) identity, but you can see that there’s a practical, sporting context to all this; we aren’t fed the self-important spiel about India being morally and culturally superior to the rest of the world. (This would have been difficult to do anyway in a movie about women struggling to assert themselves in the face of chauvinistic sports officials/boyfriends and traditional-bahu-demanding families.)
- It's interesting that a film which stresses the group dynamic is bookended by a story about the fall from grace and eventual redemption of an individual who has been shunned by an often-insensitive, unthinking society. That this individual is played by the country’s most popular actor (even though Shah Rukh’s superstar persona is never allowed to overwhelm the film) gives the viewer an immediate stake in his redemption.
I liked the shots of Kabir Khan and his mother framed in their doorway at the beginning (when they are condemned as Muslims who have betrayed the country and have to move out of their home and neighbourhood) and again at the end (when they return to acceptance and honour) – these reminded me of similar bookend shots in John Ford's The Searchers, which was also about the loss of home, honour and identity. I also liked the glimpses of “Khan” on the India jersey worn by Shah Rukh in the early scenes. (Incidentally SRK went to the same school as I did and the earliest issue of the school magazine I have is the one where he was in the 12th; he was captain of all the major sports teams and there’s a good action shot of him playing hockey on the school ground.)
- Yes, there are generalisations and some stereotyping, as Baradwaj points out in his review, but nothing that seriously affects the film's credibility. For instance, the depiction of the girl from Punjab as a robust, short-fused but golden-hearted type who proves invaluable in a match against an aggressive team (Argentina): this IS a bit lazy and amounts to indulging the audience's expectations, but you can’t exactly call it inauthentic. (Question: Is it credible that a member of the Punjabi women's hockey team might look and sound like Balbir Kaur? Answer: Yes.) It could just as easily be argued that the scene in which two roadside Romeos check out the Manipuri girls is a cliché/generalisation, as are the early scenes showing the irresponsible, knee-jerk reactions of the sports fan on the street, but these are also truths about the society we live in, and they add to the film’s effect.
Anyway, it’s equally important to acknowledge the clichés that Chak De manages to sidestep. How easy it would have been, for instance, to slightly expand the role of the team's chaperone (the stout, dark-complexioned lady who watches quietly from the sidelines during practice and with whom Kabir Khan shares dinner and conversation), have her played by a popular young actress and turn her into a love interest (or a therapist/confidante) for Kabir. Thankfully, the screen time that could have been thus wasted is given instead to the talented cast of unknown youngsters.
- I thought one of the best things about the film was Shilpa Shukla's very expressive performance as a character who doesn't express much emotion at all – the team's most experienced player, Bindiya Naik, seemingly driven by ego about her senior status, and constantly at odds with Kabir Khan, who tries to cut her down to size. Shukla's performance (and, to an extent, the we-know-each-other-very-well friction between Bindiya and Kabir) suggests still waters that run deep. It struck me that the world-weariness, the perpetually guarded look on her face, could be a stand-in for the faces of many Indian sportspersons over the years (especially outside cricket) – people who have had to contend with inefficient or apathetic management, lack of funds and facilities, years of compromising to get their five seconds in the limelight. (I don't know whether Shukla based her performance on any real-life personalities, but Bindiya Naik's studied indifference reminded me of some of the press photographs and TV footage I've seen of Dhanraj Pillay during controversial/strife-filled times.)
The scene where she makes a sexual proposition to Kabir Khan was quite telling. Treated differently, this could have been a standard, vixen-out-to-get-what-she-wants moment, but you get the impression here that Bindiya has been through this grind before, that she's had to make similar compromises in the past and has come to see it as part of a go-getting Indian sportswoman's life. In this context, it’s very effective that the film refuses to give her a back-story or to provide an emotional scene where her attitude is "explained". Early on, when she tries to turn the other girls against Kabir by spreading gossip about his past disgrace, you get a sense of someone who's simultaneously part of a corrupt system and an outsider who's been deeply wounded by it. Bindiya is a genuinely complex character by the standards of mainstream Hindi cinema.
- Very little sugar-coating at the end. Sure, we have drumrolls and the improbable triumph, but there’s no pretence that something has changed permanently for the better, that the protagonists' lives henceforth will be wine and roses. In his pep talk to the team just before the final, Kabir tells them that whatever else might happen in the rest of their lives, no one can take the next 70 minutes away from them. It's a statement laced with pragmatism and an understanding of the hard realities of these girls' lives. Despite Chak De's cheerful ending and the upbeat clips that play while the titles roll, it's possible to see that for most if not all of these girls, those 70 minutes probably will remain the high point of their lives by a long way; that nothing else that follows will be anywhere near as good. Has the Indian sports film grown up and smelled the coffee?
“...later, assembling the various strands of his narrative, splicing them together with other related stories, I often had a feeling of vertigo, of falling into the past and ascending into the future at the same time, of moving in different directions…the story that I assembled over the years appeared to have a different beginning every time I looked into it.”
The above passage from Tabish Khair’s Filming (subtitled “A Love Story”) is a good summary of the book itself, which constantly toys with narrative conventions – like a Godard movie, one is tempted to say, but that might not be an appropriate analogy for a work so steeped in the Bombay film culture. The story told in Filming is relatively straightforward, but Khair constructs it like a jigsaw puzzle: frequently changing camera angles, so to speak, giving us first one character’s viewpoint, then another’s, jumping around in time and including reminiscences by two people whose identities we are not initially sure about.
The tale essentially begins in early 1929 with a dreamer named Harihar bringing his treasured bioscope (“the future of the world”) to a mansion near Anjangarh village to set up a tent and show films to the locals. Here, he meets another man with stars in his eyes – the haveli’s Chotte Thakur, whose artistic sensibilities (along with a fondness for cross-dressing) were crushed in his youth by an authoritarian father. Aspirations are shared and a proposition made that will alter the lives of both men as well as those of Harihar’s wife Durga and their little son Ashok. When we meet these people again, it is – to use Hindi-movie parlance – “Bees Saal Baad”, and Harihar, Durga and Chotte Thakur have new names and move in very different circles. Smokescreens are vital to the plot, as we soon learn: look at the cleverly supplied “title credits” and you’ll see that more than one player has a double role. (Much later, there will be a moment of epiphany regarding a character’s real identity, though one that owes more to The Usual Suspects than anything from Bombay filmdom.)
Today, Hindi cinema is seen as a unifying force in a country that can otherwise be divided along many lines. This is a simplified view, but the fact that some of our biggest male stars are from a minority community does mark a progression from the late 1940s when Yusuf Khan had to change his name to Dilip Kumar before he could make a bid for stardom. Filming takes us to the heat of Partition, when studios that employed Muslims were attacked, but it also brings alive an era when people of different backgrounds and faiths could worship together at the altar of Film; when lives and dreams were driven by the possibilities of an exciting young medium.
Anyone interested in those days should find the first few chapters – or “reels”, for Khair presents his book like a movie – very compelling. Some of the early passages reminded me of the British film The Magic Box, a biography of motion-picture pioneer William Friese Greene, who dragged people off the street and into his studio to demonstrate the “persistence of vision” phenomenon. However, post-“Intermission”, Filming starts to drag a bit, its focus shifting to the story of a has-been star named Saleem Lahori and a political subtext involving plans to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi.
Even when it’s good, this isn’t always an easy read. Apart from the narrative shifts (indicated by several italicised and bold-marked passages) and the healthy disregard for chronology, there are stream-of-consciousness asides (in mini-chapters named for the eight rasas in drama) and the occasional convoluted prose. (“One day we discovered that time was vitriscent and the fused light of our dream struck the prism of 1947 and refracted into the orange and yellow of Hinduism, the green of Islam, the red of violence, the blue of a disappointed hope, and into the indigo and violet of subtle, unredeemable differences,” says a character at one point, and even though he is a writer by profession, this is a bit much). Some bits are annoyingly repetitive – a young scholar mentions at least thrice how surprised he was about someone not conforming to his prejudiced ideas about Pakistanis, and a character’s plans for the creation of a true Hindu nation get tediously over-expository.
But there’s much to commend too. Khair gives us some strikingly visual passages, such as an account of a high-profile film party where the stars in the middle of the room seem drab, ordinary and bored while the hangers-on “were boisterous, glittering, starlike...it was as if dreams had crowded out reality”. I also liked many of the descriptions (starting with a Munshi who “looked so brittle that every bout of coughing seemed about to crumble his body to bits and pieces, leaving in his place not bone and skin but other odds and ends – papers slips, pencil nub, withered green cardamoms, eye-piece, caste thread”) and some of the droll, throwaway details that crop up now and again. At one point, for instance, we are told that members of a household refer to a huge kettle as “Katlu Khan”. This is incidental information – it never comes up again and is hardly integral to the narrative – but the impression it provides is of an enthusiastic storyteller stopping to tell his listeners, “oh, and did I mention that...”. This adds to the flavour of the book, though the frequent use of parentheses can get distracting.
Something else I found intriguing was the little suggestion that many of the stock scenes, clichés and character names in Hindi films may have had their origins in the personal experiences of early performers and crew members – like in the passage where Durga thinks she sees her little son and reaches out to pick him up, only to find another face staring at her. One thinks of how Raj Kapoor famously transferred his first meeting with Nargis – opening the door, brushing her hair back, a piece of flour sticking in her hair – to celluloid 25 years later, in Bobby. Or possibly, Khair is making a point about how real lives often contain elements of what we would disparagingly call “filmy”. Either way, these connections (and others, such as characters named Amar and Akbar/Anthony, and the tiny nod at Pather Panchali through the names Harihar/Durga, and the bioscope scenes) are effectively made.
I can’t give Filming an unqualified endorsement – it’s turgid in places and the editing could have been better – but it’s a book that dares to take stylistic risks and often pulls them off. At its best this is a fine portrayal of a time when early cameras could be likened to Aladdin’s lamp, creating magic and changing fortunes, and of how cinema and life continue to feed off each other.
[Did a shorter version of this review for Tehelka]
I’ve written about my admiration for M G Vassanji’s work in these posts. He was in India for his book launch last week and I got to meet him for a Q&A session that lasted only 15-20 minutes. Would’ve liked a longer interaction but his schedule was packed – in fact, 10 minutes into our conversation, we were interrupted by a journalist from another newspaper who had been given a similar time slot. She agreed to wait at a nearby table for us to finish, but I get distracted and self-conscious when this sort of thing happens, so the rest of the interview wasn’t too satisfying.
As if this weren’t enough, I returned home to find that the tape recorder had malfunctioned – so had to rely on memory and on the few words I had scribbled in my notepad during the interview. Here’s what I could salvage of the Q&A. (It should preferably be read as an appendage to the earlier post about The Assassin’s Song.)
Why is your work so low-profile in India?
Well, I've always fallen between places – first as an Indian growing up in a colonised Africa, later as an Indian in Canada. And I write about real people in ordinary situations, which is not necessarily the most fashionable sort of writing. Some high-profile writers of Indian origin cater to the idea of an exotic India – I’m not saying that the use of stylistic devices is bad in itself, but it can lead to a certain type of posturing, which detracts from what you’re trying to say. I’ve observed that this is true of some African writers also: sometimes there is a pressure to play games because we don't automatically have a market in the West.
So you believe some writers just give Western readers what they want?
Possibly. Of course, you have to consider the reader – you can't say "I'm writing only for myself", which is a line you often hear from writers who are just starting out; perhaps this attitude is a defence mechanism, in case their work doesn’t get appreciated. But at the same time, you can't let the audience dictate to you. Every writer must be honest to himself.
The Assassin's Song is your first novel to be set largely in India. Do you visit the country often?
My first real visit here was in 1993, though I could have come here as a youngster when the "spiritual India" was very much in fashion in the West. The longest I've stayed here was three-and-a-half months – in Shimla – but it takes me very little time to feel at ease in this country. It's like the bond I still have with Africa, despite not having lived there for decades.
At your book launch you spoke about being influenced as a youngster by the revolutionary movements in Africa. Could you elaborate on this?
I was influenced by the politics of equality and colonialism. The early 1960s were a heady time for a young, impressionable boy to be growing up in – lots of businesses had just started, there was hope for a glorious future. I didn’t know much about world politics at first, but gradually we heard about these international leaders like Nehru and Nasser, and the policies of non-alignment, and there was a feeling of optimism in the air.
Incidentally, the language of the media in Africa then was not unlike the way it is in India today – there was similar sloganeering about the country's potential, etc. [Note: This interview took place on August 15, marking 60 years of India’s independence.] I'm not making any absolute comparisons, simply talking about the mood. But the Africa we had such hope for was eventually betrayed by bad politics and other social factors. I don't believe India will go that way – it's a more dynamic country, there is more energy here, and if there's corruption there are lots of hard-working people too.
A theme that figures prominently in your work is that of the individual constantly being dwarfed by larger forces…about the suppressing of personal choices and dreams.
Yes, and in The Assassin's Song this takes the form of the protagonist Karsan carrying the burden of events that occurred 700 years before he was born. These themes are important to me. But you have to see that there is also a progression here: the crushing of the individual voice can be extended to the suppressing of small communities, and then even to the suppressing of small countries. When I was growing up in Tanzania, the country was being bullied by everyone, even West Germany!
In Karsan’s case, of course, it’s more complicated. He is being bullied by the burden of tradition, by a force he has no control over. But turning his back on that tradition means that he has to betray his own parents, and that’s an equally heavy burden.
There is a powerful passage where he goes to the US to study and feels liberated by his newfound ordinariness on the MIT campus. Back home in his little village, he was revered as the future Pir, an avatar of God, but here in this foreign university he’s just another student – and it’s even possible for him to joke with friends about his “divinity”.
Yes, it’s a freedom to discover yourself – to step out into the world and find that you and your background are a very small part of the larger picture; that the world doesn’t revolve around a single tradition, or community, or village. It can make you feel very small and uncertain, but it can also liberate you. In Karsan’s case, it liberates him enough to make his own choice at the end. And he does return to his roots, because he has to consider his family, his people.
I sometimes feel that way with respect to my community: over the years I've moved away from them intellectually (I'm more interested in history than in spirituality), but they are after all my people and I can't turn away from them. There's a continuous process of self-discovery at work here.
Who are your literary influences?
As a child I was nourished by ginans – verses and songs from the Sufi tradition – and learnt about music and mythology from them. Otherwise, there was the usual childhood garbage – Enid Blyton and such. Later in life, Western writers like Conrad, whose moral ambiguities I have high regard for, as well as Grass and Coetzee. I also admire Philip Roth – he over-writes and lot and it’s difficult to read too much by him at one stretch, but he has a great sense of human complexities.
[I write occasional pieces about old films on DVD for the New Sunday Express, but I haven't really been posting them here, mainly because the 600-word format isn't too satisfying. But I'm putting some of the earlier ones up.]
In her essay on Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter, Pauline Kael said the film suffered from a unique flaw: it had too much (inappropriate) integrity. The James Goldman play about the succession intrigues between King Henry II, his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and their children over an eventful Christmas weekend in 1183 was a cheerfully bawdy production, but Kael felt the film version, with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn in the lead roles, had turned it into an earnest, seriously meant melodrama: “they’re playing a camp historical play as if it were the real thing.”
I don't agree with this criticism, though I'll admit a bias: I first saw The Lion in Winter at age 14, when I was a sucker for grand-looking epics with florid posturing (and even more of a sucker for anything that starred the incomparable Hepburn). But even at the time, I sensed that this wasn't your standard historical film: it was homelier, more accessible than, say, Anne of the Thousand Days, and the first film in its genre that didn't make me feel like I had to watch it standing at attention. It seemed to come from a recognisable world, the squabbling between Henry and Eleanor not that much different from the ones I'd seen between various sets of uncles and aunts, even if the language was an odd mix of Medievalese and locker-room. (The only other medieval epic I'd seen that created a similar mood was The Private Life of Henry VIII, with Charles Laughton hamming it up magnificently in the title role – but that was a creaky black-and-white film, not really comparable to the Technicolor opuses of the 1950s and 1960s.)
As the title suggests, The Lion in Winter is a dramatisation of Henry's mid-life (or, as it would turn out, late-life) crisis, his attempt to pick the right heir from amongst three sons (including the prince who would later be known as Richard the Lionheart) and his banter, alternately acerbic and tender, with his ex-wife. Also thrown into this right regal soap opera is Eleanor's stepson, the petulant Prince Philip of France. While turkeys wait to be spread out for the banquet table, these royals feed on each other – conniving, recriminating, digging up past grievances.
There isn't a weak link in the performances. Hepburn, who won the third of her record four Oscars for this role, perfectly mixes poise and vulnerability (her real-life struggle with Parkinson's Disease adds to the poignancy of her performance as a woman who has been cut off from her family for too long) and Peter O'Toole is an astonishingly energetic Henry (the scene where he baits Richard and then makes as if to bring his sword down on his son's neck is a heart-stopper, even though you know all this is High Farce). Anthony Hopkins, more than 20 years before achieving fava-bean-and-chianti stardom in Silence of the Lambs, makes a fine Richard, and the callow, much-too-young Timothy Dalton is perfectly cast as the callow, much-too-young Philip.
Watching the film again as an adult, I'm not entirely sure what James Goldman had in mind when he wrote exchanges such as these:
Henry: The day those stout hearts band together is the day that pigs get wings.
Eleanor: There'll be pork in the treetops come morning.
and
Henry: You're like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.
Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.
But it's easy to guess the overall effect he was reaching for. He was trying to de-mythologise an important period; to rescue it from the sterility of school textbooks and bring it to joyous, rambunctious life, linking the political and the personal in a way that modern audiences could relate to. It works. The Lion in Winter is a cheeky thumb-wag in the face of any delusions we might have about the dignity of royal houses (admittedly, recent events have made it hard to sustain those delusions anyhow) and the grandeur and purposefulness we associate with key historical events. It reminds us that much of history has been built on individual hubris, quirks and whimsies, and that the fates of nations might be decided by a wrong word spoken here, a telling glance there. As one character says, frat-boy style, to another, "If you're a prince, there's hope for every ape in Africa."
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Trivia: Having also played Henry II in Becket a few years earlier, O'Toole became the first actor to be Oscar-nominated for playing the same role in two unrelated movies. (A year later, with Goodbye, Mr Chips, he was nominated for a role that another actor - Robert Donat - had already won an Oscar for.)
DVD Extras: Audio commentary by director Anthony Harvey and an interview with Anthony Hopkins
[Some earlier posts on old films: Yojimbo, 8 1/2, Fearless Vampire Killers, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Badlands, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fiddler on the Roof, Peeping Tom, Eraserhead, Closely Watched Trains]
I’ve felt the presence of the Lord in some famous personalities and saints. It is written in the Bhagwad Gita – I reside where there is beauty, wisdom, strength and power. When Clinton, the American president, was in power, I felt God was in him. The kind of power and charisma he had was simply amazing.
(Actress Hema Malini explaining her religious beliefs in the Times of India’s glossy supplement. With a flash of insight, the reader recalls the memorable Puranic scene where Agni “takes Lord Shiva’s seed in his mouth”. )
From the above quote, we learn that: 1) Hema Malini has the hots for Bill Clinton [“I reside where there is beauty...”], 2) Monica Lewinsky is a reincarnation of the Fire-God, and 3) Sometimes a cigar is just a lingam.
Also, a gem that is guaranteed to make you giggle:
“Giggle genre is the best it can get at escapist cinema”
(An unattributed quote from a story about comedies doing well at the box-office, in the same ToI supplement)
Friday evening. Long queue. Your blogger host finds himself behind a very animated girl, chatting away with her friends; the way they go on, you’d be forgiven for thinking they had already decided what film they were going to watch. But no. After all the time in the world (okay, 10 minutes) to make up their minds, these princesses wait until they are actually at the ticket window before pulling out a schedule and perusing it with the instantly identifiable wide-eyed, moving-lipped slowness of people who have never had occasion to read anything in their entire lives. Then our heroine pulls out her cellphone, dials lackadaisically, speaks thus:
"Hiiii, listen, what should we watch, Chak De or Partner?"
(Pause)
"Okay-dokey, byeee!" (Turns to friends) "He’s saying to watch Chak De because it got four stars and Partner only got three-and-a-half stars."
As a onetime/sometime film reviewer, maybe I should be glad about this demonstration that a review can influence viewing decisions. But I’m just depressed.
(What men want; and other thoughts on daily soaps)
Looking for ideas for my weekly Metro Now column on the foibles of mankind, I saw a feature story about how increasing numbers of Indian men want their brides to be like the women they see on TV soaps. Apparently, in matrimonial ads around the country, eager young bachelors are putting in specifications that read: “She should be like Tulsi in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi or Saloni in Saat Phere” (this is of course in addition to the usual “traditional yet modern, fair but homely, virgin yet whore” litany).
Given that India has one-sixth of the world's population, this new trend carries huge implications for the future of the family unit. Based on what little I've seen of the Ekta Kapoor variety of daily soaps, these are the qualities I imagine the average Indian male now looks for in his life-partner:
– Her range of facial expressions must include Pursed-Lip Discontentment (when the saas-ji is praising another daughter-in-law), Simpering Complicity (the innocent girl being bullied around by more dominant family members), Evil-Vixen Smirk (when a nasty plot has succeeded) and Frantic Eye-Roll (when a plot is being unmasked).
– She must wear twice her own weight in jewellery at all times, even in the kitchen and the bedroom. Laden with family heirlooms passed down over 20 generations (most of whom are still living characters on the show), arms covered with gleaming bangles, she should resemble the robot in Metropolis, or at least an extra from a 1950s cult sci-fi movie. This means that in addition to carrying cups of tea hither and thither on trays, she can double up as a security guard: if a burglar enters the house, all she has to do is stun him senseless with the reflective glare from her 7,000-carat necklace.
– She should be able to walk in slow-motion, like the heroines (and all other characters, for that matter) of these shows.
There are two reasons why everyone on a daily soap must walk in slow motion. First, because it creates a Dramatic Effect (though people with IQs above 8 might disagree with this idea), and second, because when a new episode has to be produced every day, you need to stretch things out. It would be too much to expect the poor writers to actually work on a 25-minute script daily (what are they, bloggers?), so other dramatic devices must be used. Thus, whenever a character says anything spectacular on a soap (and of course, these people only ever say spectacular things; you'll never hear an uncomplicated "saaso-ji, pass the garlic prawns please"), it will be said in a room containing 20 others, and we will be shown elaborate reaction shots of each of these people (Evil-Vixen Smirk, Frantic Eye-Roll, etc). Or a reaction shot of a single person replayed five times, with the camera twirling drunkenly around the room, and thunder-claps on the soundtrack. This is an efficient way of prolonging a five-minute scene for a week and thus cutting down on extraneous costs (because all the money must go on the really important things – the clothes, hairstyles and bangles).
Come to think of it, maybe the new lot of bride-seekers have the right idea. If we all modeled our family lives on daily soaps, world problems would end immediately – everyone would be too busy simpering at each other in slow motion to worry about the big issues.
P.S. This business of slow-motion brings me to some general observations about the Indian daily soap, which differs markedly from its western equivalent. In the US too, daytime soap operas are generally regarded as the nadir of human achievement, but if you go beyond knee-jerk snobbery it’s possible to appreciate the professionalism with which they are made. For instance, key roles are usually played by actors with some experience in theatre (even if it isn’t Grade-A theatre), each scene is rehearsed as a scene in a play would be, and then shot in a continuous take, with the action simultaneously captured from different angles so that the footage can later be edited for maximum dramatic effect.
In Indian soaps on the other hand, I doubt that actors have to ever memorise more than a couple of sentences at any one point (which is just as well, because in most cases their previous acting experience has been restricted to saying “After using Fair & Lovely, I found a wealthy and loving husband who will only beat me twice a week”). Scenes appear to be filmed not in lengthy takes but in five-second installments and the emphasis is on reaction shots, which are probably put together separately. (I imagine that when the actors come in to work each day, they are clothed, made up and then asked to stand in front of a stationary camera and twist their faces and roll their eyes in as many different ways as possible. This stock footage can later be interspersed with the freshly filmed material whenever required.)
P.P.S. One of the many things you don’t know about me is that I’m something of an expert on the history of American daytime television, so expect more posts of this sort.
[Did this for the New Sunday Express]
In the early 1960s director Stanley Kubrick bought the rights to a Cold War thriller titled Red Alert, about mutually assured nuclear destruction between the US and the USSR. The film was originally meant to be shot from a straight script, but after a couple of reads and some reflection, it occurred to Kubrick that only a pitch-black comedy could do justice to such a horrific premise. This epiphany resulted in the creation of one of the funniest, most mordant films ever.
Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is such a fully realised movie, its nihilistic humour so organic to its effect, that it's now hard to imagine how it could ever have been conceptualised differently. Or how it could have been made without Peter Sellers, that master improviser who played three roles here and took them so far beyond the ambit of the original script that he must be seen as a near-equal collaborator along with Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern.
The plot is simple and frighteningly believable, even if the character names come from the broad slapstick tradition: Commie-phobic General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden), paranoid about a supposed Soviet plot to "sap the precious bodily fluids of the American people", uses a loophole in the normal chain of command required for nuclear attack and despatches military planes to destroy most of the USSR. A meeting is urgently called at the Pentagon War Room, but there's little the colourless and ineffectual American President Muffley can do to avert disaster – especially after the revelation that the Russians have a "Doomsday Device" that will destroy the earth in the event of a first strike by the US.
If any film can be a collection of setpieces stacked side by side, this is it. I have too many favourite scenes to list here, but I particularly love the ones where Muffley (the most subdued of Sellers' roles, and probably the most difficult) struggles to control his rising panic: the look of barely suppressed alarm mixed with embarrassment on his face when Ripper's letter is read out in the War Room (making it obvious that the general is off his rocker) is worth the price of admission.
Muffley's blandness is in stark contrast to the war-mongering buffoonery of General Buck Turgidson (George C Scott), obsessed with one-upmanning the Commies even in the face of universal catastrophe. ("Mr President, we cannot allow a mine-shaft gap!" are his memorable last words, in response to the proposal that selected individuals be sent to live underground to propagate the species; he can't even bear the thought that a hundred years hence, when it's safe for people to resurface, the "mine-shaft Soviets" might be in better shape than the "mine-shaft Yanks".) Scott is superb, but credit for the final effect of his performance goes equally to Kubrick, who cleverly edited the Turgidson scenes, abruptly cutting here and there, to make him seem like a cartoon character (perhaps the bulldog in Tom and Jerry?). He could be a stand-in for every jingoistic military man or politician who's ever had a finger poised near the nuclear button.
I don't think I'm spoiling anything by revealing that Dr Strangelove ends with a cowboy-pilot riding a bomb down to its target, and a chilling final montage of mushroom clouds over the earth, accompanied by Vera Lynn's mellifluous voice singing "We'll Meet Again". This is the moment the film's sustained lunacy has been heading for all along, and anything less would have been anti-climactic. It's tempting to call Dr Strangelove a cautionary work that is more relevant than ever in today's polarised world – but at its heart it might simply be a great film that has a lot of fun watching the world blow itself up.
DVD Extras
The sumptuous 40th Anniversary two-disc edition has the documentaries "Inside the Making of Dr Strangelove", "No Fighting in the War Room" and "The Art of Stanley Kubrick", as well as split-screen interviews with Peter Sellers and George C Scott (with the actors in character, pretending to answer questions on the phone)
The sweet little creatures that lurk on Rediff.com’s message-boards** have infested my site! A new comment on an old Kiran Nagarkar post:
hey mister kiran com on now grow up, you also know if cows are not used for eating than they will increase and after words u will only complait to the municipaly and government that the cows are blocking the roads, are man, do u know that what ur ancestors use to eat? the blood which u have in ur body is it of true vegiterian? just grow up and think and dont waist ur life dear, i think u also know the truth but u hide for ur profit wont u? this all tress, food earth, sun, animals are for humans dear,
Apologies to Delhi Times and HT City for all the mean things I’ve said about them. The above paragraph is arguably worse than anything that appeared on the front pages of those estimable publications today.
** For reassurance that human stupidity is alive and well, head over to Rediff and check the comments on ANY of their news items about Sania Mirza or Indian cricket. Great entertainment.
Rafael Nadal vs Marat Safin at the Canada Masters at 5 AM India time tomorrow (order of play in PDF format here). On Star Sports. It’s the first time these two are playing each other in an ATP match and it could be delicious (yes yes, even the quality of tennis).
The Booker longlist is out and it’s a “low-key”, “giant-felling” one. I hadn’t even heard of three of the books on the list, and the only ones I've read are Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (my review and author interview here and here) and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Have also just started Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted.
On another note, though I don’t usually think much of competitive awards, here’s one that's applause-worthy: many congratulations to Baradwaj Rangan for winning the National Award for the best film critic. Agree with every word (or nearly every word) of the citation, which reads: “…for intelligent and reader-friendly reviews of popular cinema with a depth of understanding of the form, a discernible passion for the medium bulwarked consistently by a knowledge of the trends and touchstones of global cinema”.
Like many of the commenters on Baradwaj’s blog, I stumble over “bulwarked”, but the rest is spot on. The general quality of "movie-reviewing" in our papers makes his writing stand out even more, but I think he'd hold his own against the top rung of reviewers anywhere in the world. (I also have high regard for his open-ended, non-instructive attitude towards reviewing, which he touches on in this post.)
Having been a big fan of M G Vassanji’s writing ever since I read The In-Between World of Vikram Lall a few years ago (review here), I’m surprised that his name rarely features in discussions of the top contemporary Indian writers. This could partly be because Vassanji has never lived in India and his genealogy is a complicated one (described by Wikipedia as "an African-Indian-Canadian novelist", he was born in Kenya, grew up in Tanzania and has been a resident of Canada since 1978) – though really, when you remember the rush to claim V S Naipaul ("Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity") as an Indian after he won the Nobel, you have to wonder about this.
Vassanji is highly respected in literary circles in Canada, with many accolades, including (twice) the Giller Prize, but unlike another Canadian resident, Rohinton Mistry, he doesn't have the sort of following in India that would place him even in Tier II of High-Profile Authors. His books aren't widely available here: offhand, I don't recall seeing any of his early novels (The Gunny Sack, No New Land, The Book of Secrets) in a Delhi bookstore. This is strange, for his work – marked by elegant, lucid writing and movingly restrained characterisations – can be a very satisfying alternative for readers who complain about common irritants in Indian writing in English (IWE): exoticisation, recycled plots that deal in the most hackneyed ways with problems faced by immigrants, the Rushdie influence taken to tiresome extremes, resulting in a stream of overwrought prose (by writers who don't have the control over the language, or the understanding of its basic rules, that Rushdie does). To be fair, these allegations are not as relevant now as they were a few years ago, for IWE in general has become more dynamic, wide-ranging and less self-conscious, but they still hold some water.
Nor is it the case that Vassanji deals with themes you won't usually find in Indian writing in English. In fact, the phrase "the burden of exile", so often used in the context of the work of diaspora writers, applies to the predicament of some of his characters. But his handling of these themes is careful and nuanced, and he never oversimplifies people or situations. Ambivalence is key to his work – running through his stories is the delicate (and inconvenient) question: What can we ever really know about ourselves, our motivations, our choices, the accumulation of incidents and influences that define us over a lifetime? And if we can't know ourselves, what hope then of understanding anyone else, even the people we are closest to? This also means that elements of his writing can be frustrating, especially when some threads are deliberately left untied (as they would be in real life) – an important character disappearing, for instance, and the reader never learning anything about him again, outside of conjecture.
I've just finished his latest novel The Assassin's Song, which is the first of his books to be set principally in India (though its protagonist spends more than 30 years in the US in an attempt to cut himself off from his roots). Unlike The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, which had a chronological narrative, this one moves around in time. The novel’s present is 2002, which is when the narrator, Karsan Dargawalla, returns to the village of his childhood following the terrible communal riots in Gujarat, but we are also taken as far back as the early 1960s when Karsan, still a child but heir to the Pirbaag shrine in Gujarat, begins to grasp his responsibilities as Lord and Keeper of the shrine after his father (therefore, an avatar of God).
Growing up, he struggles with this burden of divinity. After losing the opportunity to be coached by a former first-class cricketer because his position as the “gaadi-varas” must come first, it’s understandable that he is deeply affected by the Biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac to the Almighty: glumly, he refuses to participate in a wishing ritual because “Isaac didn’t matter. He couldn't wish for anything.” Karsan’s parents are constant reminders of the path he is expected to follow, but other adult figures play equally important, and perhaps longer-lasting, roles: the companionable truck driver who brings him stacks of newspapers and magazines, a constant flow of news about the outside world; a Christian teacher with African antecedents, whom Karsan briefly hero-worships; an agent of the National Patriotic Youth Party, obsessed with restoring the glories, real and imagined, of the Vedic Civilization. Here as in his other novels, Vassanji is a wonderfully perceptive chronicler of how childhood events and impressions can continue to influence character long after they have been forgotten at a conscious level.
More than halfway through the book comes Karsan’s big decision to go to the US to study at Harvard on a scholarship, effectively turning his back on his parents and the Pirbaag shrine. Tellingly, his life in America – including college, a decade spent as a family man living in an idyllic suburb, followed by tragedy and a subsequent hermitlike existence – takes less than 100 pages to get through: the effect here is akin to the story about Vishnu instructing Narada in the ways of Maya/illusion through a firsthand experience of the impermanence of the material world. Eventually Karsan does return to fulfil his spiritual calling, but there is no easy resolution, or even a sense of a story coming full circle.
Among other things, The Assassin’s Song is about the danger of taking a neutral position in a world that demands certainties. The faith followed by Karsan’s family, the keepers of the Pir’s flame, is neither Hindu nor Muslim, but this doesn’t count for much in the heat of communal riots, when convenient labels have to be put on everything. And the friction between Karsan and his younger brother Mansoor (who has become an orthodox Muslim and is wanted by police for questioning) recalls a similar clash of ideologies between two brothers in Kiran Nagarkar’s God’s Little Soldier, but the lines are not as clearly drawn in this case. (The Assassin’s Song is sparer and more compact in every way than Nagarkar’s opus, which it resembles in places.)
Intermittently, the book also visits the late 13th century, when a mysterious Sufi named Nur Fazal arrived at the gates of Patan and came to be worshipped as a holy man – becoming the Pir Bawa whose legacy would, centuries later, fall on Karsan's shoulders. We never learn enough about this figure, which is part of the point: history repeats itself in strange ways and the contours of a life may be determined by nebulous, barely understood events that took place hundreds of years ago. What we are finally left with is a portrait of a life wasted by the struggle between duty and individuality, between faith and pragmatism. Karsan is as much a hollow man, swept along by forces outside his control, as the protagonist of Vassanji’s last book.
(Some interesting notes here and here about a documentary titled The In-Between World of M G Vassanji.)
There’s a scene in Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions where Chris Carver, a young member of the counter-cultural revolutionary movement in late 1960s/early 1970s Britain, is in a graveyard looking for an identity he can steal. His eyes fall on a tombstone bearing the name Michael Frame - a child who was born in the same year as Chris but died as an infant. “Resting where no shadows fall” reads the epitaph.
My Revolutions is a strange mixture of personal experience and library research. I’ve been on many demonstrations, including some which have turned violent. I’ve participated in political meetings and the culture of British dissent, which stretches back to the sixties and beyond. But most of my research consisted of an attempt to familiarise myself with the various political currents around at that time. I read widely - Herbert Marcuse, biographies of activists, leaflets put out by groups and sects at the time. I also went to Thailand, to write the scenes set there.
