Final notes on the Amir Hamza epic, and a conversation with the translator

[Warning: very long post. But no more on the Hamza epic after this]

I don’t think much of phrases like “important/essential book” or “one of the year’s most significant publishing events” (pompous, best reserved for jacket descriptions written by the marketing divisions of publishing houses), but more than once I’ve been tempted to use them for The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s outstanding 950-page rendition of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza (an earlier post here). As the first complete English translation of a medieval classic that has been in danger of neglect, this is a landmark work in its very conception – invaluable to students of Islamic heritage and Arabic literature – but the excellence of its execution makes it a fantasy-adventure that can be relished by readers from all backgrounds.


The Hamza tales, which evolved over hundreds of years through a tradition of oral narratives, are about the exploits of the eponymous hero, who was based on a real-life figure. The story proper begins with the wise Buzurjmehr, a vizier to the Persian emperor Naushervan, discovering that the latter’s life and throne will be protected by a young man hailing from the city of Mecca. Using his clairvoyant powers, Buzurjmehr (who is a Vidura/Merlin/Gandalf figure in this book) determines the identity of this infant and has him raised under his supervision. On growing up, Hamza achieves everything that he has been prophesised to do, and a lot more besides; but when he falls in love with Naushervan’s daughter Mehr-Nigar, things begin to get complicated. Further, much to the frustration of Hamza’s friends and his beloved, there is a long, enforced separation when he must travel alone to the magical land of Qaf to help defeat a rebellious band of demons. In the meantime, his companions (led by the irrepressible Amar Ayyar, prince of tricksters and the epic’s most colourful character), stay behind on earth and pit their arms (and wits) against numerous enemy forces.

But these are just the bare bones of the plot, and they don't convey the sweeping vibrancy of this epic, its Arabian Nights-style richness of characters and incidents, and the bawdy humour that runs through it. Nor do they suggest the consistently high quality of the prose in Farooqi’s translation. In a disarming Preface, he describes escaping into the world of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza as a child, his reacquaintance with it years later, and the peculiar dream that led to his taking up the intimidating task of translation. His passion for the work, and his personal stake in it, are on view throughout.

Farooqi never compromises on the dastaan flavour, which is so crucial to the effect of a story that has come down over many generations. Each chapter has a florid opening that supplies a metaphor for the story-telling process (“The fingers of ancient scribes straddle the provident dark reed, galloping their mount in the sphere of rhetoric...the dove of the stylus trills its notes inside the vestibule of the page”). A shift in the narrative is typically marked by a sentence like “Now let me tell you of Amar Ayyar...” or “Hear a few words about Bahram Gurd...” and you can almost hear the storyteller at a Mughal-era campfire saying the equivalent lines in Urdu. When a Prophet or some other venerated figure is mentioned, there is a phrase of exaltation in parentheses (“peace be upon him!”), and numerous other stylistic devices simulate the oral storytelling tradition. And yet, despite all these devices, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is consistently engaging for a modern reader – it’s exciting, funny, heroic, irreverent and moving in turn – though reading it with little prior knowledge of context is a bit like being introduced to the Mahabharata through a full-blown translation rather than a gentler medium like an Amar Chitra Katha comic or a granny’s tale.

Scattered notes

– There are passages where the principal characters demonstrate their essential natures over and over again, or participate in encounters that read like repeats of earlier incidents (this is especially true of the first two-thirds). Book Two, for instance, features the running motif of Amar using some trick or the other to foil the enemy’s plans; when provisions dry up, he looks around for a new fort to which his army can move, uses his ayyar disguise to secure this fort, and then resumes the defence against Naushervan’s troops. This carries on for some time, creating a minor sense of déjà vu, though there is enough new in each episode to maintain one’s interest.

– There is similar repetition (and no great subtlety) in the many passages where Hamza, facing a mighty foe in single combat, invites him to deal the first blow and then, after dodging it, slashes the enemy in two (“like a raw cucumber, with not a single fibre connecting the two parts”) with his sword – thus “freeing the avis of his soul from its corporeal prison” and sending him to Hell. (Note: anyone who dies fighting Hamza or his men necessarily goes to Hell.)

– At one point a frustrated Bakhtiarak, one of Hamza’s many enemies, says, “Verily Amar spoke the truth when he claimed that the chosen of God can neither be killed nor imprisoned. Each time heavenly succour comes to their aid, the Creator of this Universe sends them relief, and none may torment them.” It’s easy to understand his frustration. Only rarely (at least until the final few chapters) does one get the sense that Hamza or Amar Ayyar are in genuine danger. On the occasions that they don’t succeed in using their own prowess to get out of trouble, they receive divine help: Prophets appear to forewarn them, or to bestow magic stone tablets that will advise them what to do at every step during a particularly hazardous mission; when Hamza’s sword uncharacteristically fails to cut through a monster’s hide, the Prophet Khizr materializes and blithely kills the creature himself; and several times, Ayyar is saved by the deus ex machina of a Naqabdar (“Veiled One”) who appears out of nowhere. Really, when you add this wealth of celestial aid to the fact that Hamza is already the greatest warrior of the age (and Ayyar the greatest trickster of the age, capable of fooling people by assuming any shape or appearance), you find that the dice is heavily loaded against the bad guys (or the infidels as they are more properly known). No fair fight, this.

But Bakhtiarak’s speech is also interesting because it highlights the lack of complexity in the negative characters. The impression one gets is that the villains (that is, Hamza’s antagonists) know that they are the bad guys and that God Almighty is firmly on the other chap’s side; but they continue trying to defeat him because, well, that’s what they are around for. This is a reminder that the Dastan-e Amir Hamza is a snowballing oral myth passed down through the generations by people who are convinced of the supreme rightness of Hamza’s cause and the unquestioned villainy of anyone who opposes him. Naturally, this means that there is little scope for nuance in the portrayals of Hamza’s adversaries (except, of course, the ones who realise their folly in time, convert to the True Faith and join his camp). After all, even the conversations between the villains have been made up by Hamza groupies, so to speak.

– As I’ve mentioned before, the epic is extremely ribald in places, and doesn’t shy away from cheerful references to human excrement and bodily functions in general.

– William Dalrymple has a review of The Adventures of Amir Hamza here. While I agree that the epic is “a reminder of an Islamic world the West seems to have forgotten, one that is imaginative and heterodox”, I’m not so sure about it “mocking male misogyny”. In my view the tone is sometimes misogynist in a more straightforward way. There’s a disturbing scene where Aadi, one of Hamza’s companions, a gluttonous and lustful general, rapes a 12-year-old virgin from the enemy camp, inadvertently killing her in the process. Though Hamza initially rages about the crime and threatens to have Aadi put to death, he forgets about the whole matter surprisingly fast when told, “Just imagine that in the same way Your Honour took a fortress by storm, he too forced open a citadel of virtue!” (Aadi, though never a likable character and often an object of ridicule, continues to be described as a “dear companion of Hamza” till the very end.) I suppose it’s possible for a modern mind to imagine that the episode is some sort of commentary on the evils of conflict, or military conquest-as-rape, but this would be another case of imposing the moralities of our own “enlightened age” on a work that was very much the product of its own time. I don’t think this passage holds up to being interpreted as ironical or tongue-in-cheek.

However, a few other passages do. One character I found interesting in this context is Aasman Peri, whom Hamza marries after he travels to Qaf. When she asks him how she compares in beauty with Mehr Nigar, his beloved on earth, he unthinkingly replies, “You cannot even hold a candle to the charm of Mehr Nigar’s maids”. Whereupon she gets angry and yells that he shouldn’t think too highly of himself just because he’s the Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, the progeny of Prophet Ibrahim and what have you, and they start battling each other with daggers right there in the bedroom, in a scene that makes Hrithik and Aishwarya’s sword-fight in Jodha Akbar look like the nuzzling of a pair of lovebirds.

Eventually Aasman Peri’s father appears and berates her for fighting her husband thus, but she doesn’t give in: she repeatedly uses her powers and influence to delay Hamza’s return to earth, eventually stretching his stay in Qaf to 18 years, and causing him much anguish. She’s certainly an example in this book of a powerful, strong-willed woman, and despite her constant hindering of Hamza’s mission, she isn’t an unsympathetic figure; the eventual meeting between her and Mehr-Nigar is a gentle, affecting one. (Incidentally, the Hamza-Aasman Peri story also reminded me of Arjuna’s trysts with the lovelorn princesses Chitrangada and Ulupi during his yearlong exile in the Mahabharata.) Hamza’s mourning for Mehr-Nigar late in the book is equally affecting, and as the story draws to a close it gets progressively darker, the jingoistic heroism of the earlier chapters being replaced by a slightly more measured, even melancholic tone.

A conversation with Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Farooqi is based in Canada and is currently working on a novel and a picture book, as well as on The Urdu Project, an online resource for the study of the Urdu language and literature.

In India, epics like the Mahabharata are not just available in a huge variety of translations but there are also several modern revisionist tellings. Why have Islamic epics like the Dastan-e Amir Hamza not been similarly preserved?

There is no excuse for us not to have worked on this very important classic. Forget about translations, even a proper, annotated Urdu version of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza is not available. Recently, Indian scholar, author and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi published three volumes of his monumental study of this dastan, which I acknowledge in my book. He addresses both the single-volume version, the one that I have translated, and the larger, 46-volume version which was published by the Naval Kishore Press between 1883-1917. It is the first time in the history of this dastan that a proper, informed, and methodical study has been made of its various facets. We cannot be thankful enough to him for this work. Until recently, Gian Chand Jain's Urdu Ki Nasri Dastanen was the only book of substance that documented many of these dastans and their writers and story-tellers.

As far as India is concerned, there's also a political dimension to this neglect. Along with the geographical divide of 1947, a communal divide of the joint Indo-Muslim cultural heritage also came about. A mindset was allowed to develop which slowly distanced young Indians from those aspects of their culture that reinforced an integrated Indo-Muslim identity. But it would be reckless to assume that this policy alone was responsible for killing these dastans. What have all the Pakistani state-funded learned bodies done to preserve this literature in the 60 years they have been in existence? In the end it boils down to one thing: whether we are comfortable with and proud of our cultural identity. Our intellectual inquiries are informed by it. Without knowing – or making an effort to know – who we are, there will be no intellectual and scholarly effort to reclaim our joint heritage.

But if such an effort is made, we would find that the "sanitised" versions of our cultural identity thrust upon the people of the Indian subcontinent, first by their colonial rulers and then by their own governments, do not hold up to close scrutiny. That would be the first step in any renaissance of our literary classics.

Are there other similar Islamic epics that are waiting to be rediscovered or translated?

I prefer to use the term "Indo-Islamic epics." There are scores of these dastans that have never been translated. Gian Chand Jain's book has a detailed list of this literature and its history in the Indian subcontinent. I am currently working on the translation of the magical fantasy Tilism-e Hoshruba, which was recently made into a TV serial by the Sagar Arts in India. Bostan-e Khayal is another book that is equally important. Both these were the favourites of Mirza Ghalib, too.

I'm curious about the orthodox, strident tone of the passages where Hamza and his friends subjugate various people and make them convert to the "True Faith". This seems at odds with the large doses of iconoclasm that runs though the book. How would you explain these seemingly contradictory aspects?

Every adventurer and conqueror out to win renown has the same concerns and preoccupations as Amir Hamza. His goal is to subdue enemies and triumph against the threats and challenges that face him. It is true that Hamza and his companions do wholesale conversions, but what is also very obvious is that Hamza is doing this in the service of Naushervan, the Persian emperor who is himself a fire-worshipper and an infidel, and who does not convert.

When we look at Hamza's complete situation, we see that these conversions are clearly a medieval warrior's attempts to win allegiance. Once an adversary converts, the threat is neutralised, Hamza can leave him behind and move on to meet his next challenge knowing that his back will be secure. Looked at in this way, there is no real discrepancy between these passages and, say, the unholy pranks played by Amar Ayyar.

The tone is very bawdy in places – is that partly because of the way these stories have been passed down through the generations, through the oral-narrative tradition?

I believe the Hindu epics also had an oral component, but as far as The Adventures of Amir Hamza is concerned, some of its tone could well be a function of the oral storytelling tradition as you suggest. The Urdu language is itself replete with humorous expressions, which have also been celebrated in our poetic tradition.

In paintings from the Hamzanama, there is repeated mention of Hamza's arch-enemy Zumurrud Shah. Why is this character not included in your translation?

The Dastan-e Amir Hamza had many variants. The story of Amir Hamza's arch-fiend, Zamarraud Shah or Laqa, was part of the longer, 46-volume Hamza epic. You can think of the longer Hamza version as a collection of many independent fantasy adventures, which employ the main characters from the basic Hamza legend. The fantasy component in that book is much larger and more detailed than in the single-volume version by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, which I have translated. Adventures and characters were incorporated into the oral legend, both before and after the book came out.

Islam tends to be seen globally as a restrictive, conservative religion. Do you believe epics like this one can help expose readers to a more dynamic aspect of the medieval Islamic world, and thus help bridge the cultural divide between East and West?

Some people read the Foreign Affairs. I keep myself politically updated by watching Hollywood action movies. They used to have Russian villains. Then for a short while I saw Japanese villains because their cars were selling better than the US autos. Now we have beareded Arabs waving kashnikovs. I am not too worried. If the Chinese do not adjust their currency, soon the bearded Arabs will be replaced by the evil Chinese businessman. And if India maintains its annual growth rate an Indian villain would not be too far behind. The role of the global villain keeps changing according to the political agendas and motivations of the major powers, and it is silly to think that the current western political narratives on Islam will have a long life. You cannot fool everyone all the time, I firmly believe in that.

A book like The Adventures of Amir Hamza can certainly be used in building bridges, because it is as fat as a brick! But jokes aside, I don't think we can throw books at people in any kind of cultural dialogue just to prove that we are liberal. Any kind of dialogue or consensus between peoples and cultures should be built on mutual respect and the traditions of tolerance and co-existence. Once that atmosphere is created books like The Adventures of Amir Hamza would certainly have a positive influence, and would be read for the right reasons.

What would those reasons be?

For its value as a great example of storytelling, a vibrant part of world literature, and as a cultural record. A book can be a part of the composite picture of a culture, but I do not believe that a single book, or merely books, can represent it. I think in the 20th century we grew increasingly distant from our literary culture. That is why we have produced so few good works of literature. It is precisely because of this atmosphere that the publication of The Adventures of Amir Hamza in English translation sounds like a big deal. In a vibrant literary culture, these occurrences are routine. This was the case in the late 19th and early 20th century in India, when the Naval Kishore Press and many independent presses published important literary titles in the thousands.

[A version of this interview appears in this Sunday’s Business Standard]

The Coens on Oscar Street

I haven't really been watching the Oscars the last three or four years - the ceremony, famously described by George C Scott as a meat parade, keeps finding new ways to get more boring each year - but just caught some of today's show. What I enjoyed most was the almost resigned, "ya, well" expression on the faces of the Coen Brothers as they went up to collect their three awards for No Country for Old Men. (The two of them are such non-Oscar types in nearly every way that it feels strange even seeing them up on the stage - they belong in a parallel universe.) Also liked Joel Coen's wisecrack after they won for best adapted screenplay - "We're very selective - we've only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy so far", which was a dig at the boo-boo made by the Academy a few years ago when it nominated them in the adapted screenplay category for O Brother, Where Art Thou (which was only very loosely inspired by The Odyssey). Predictably, hardly anyone in the audience laughed.

Otherwise, dull ceremony as usual. But now is a good time to point you towards the Coens' magnificent body of work. My favourites among their films, in no particular order, are Barton Fink, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Fargo and The Man Who Wasn't There, but nearly everything they've done is more original and refreshing than most Hollywood studio productions. Yes, even the less-known works like The Hudsucker Proxy, which features the funniest scene you'll ever see that involves a man leaping to his death from the top floor of a skyscraper.

Heck, go watch all their films. Meanwhile, I'll try to fill the gap in my fan resume by buying a pirated DVD of No Country for Old Men.

Enemy positions

(PARENTAL GUIDANCE ALERT)

I’m pleased to report that raunchy passages aren’t the exclusive preserve of Hindu mythology. Here’s more on the adventures of Amar Ayyar, prince of tricksters (first mentioned in this post), from a passage in the Hamza epic where Amar has sneaked into the enemy camp and rendered everyone unconscious by drugging their wine. He then sets about having fun with their supine bodies:

...Amar shaved Bakhtak and Bakhtiarak’s beards and whiskers as well, and made seven plaits in their hair. Then he lined Bakhtiarak’s hair with minium, fastened his legs around Bakhtak’s waist, and after oiling the latter’s penis pushed it a little way inside Bakhtiarak’s ass. Amar then played the same trick on Zhopin and Bechin, leaving them similarly positioned. In short, nobody escaped disgrace at his mischievous hands...

In the morning the unconscious men regained awareness and those who had been drugged came out of its effects. Because Bakhtak’s eyes were still shut in stupor, when he felt his member hardening, he began pushing it deeper and taking his pleasure, thinking he was inside a woman. Bakhtiarak began shouting and wailing, “For shame! For shame! You act thus toward me even though you are my father!” Upon hearing his cries, people gathered and saw this marvel of marvels: a father sodomizing his own son and carrying on like a beast.

I love the “marvel of marvels” in the last sentence. At any rate, when you add such passages in the Dastan-e Amir Hamza to the many fruity episodes in the Puranas (Brahma lusting after his own daughter and getting a hard-on when he sees Sati at her wedding, Agni swallowing Shiva’s seed, Indra seducing a rishi’s daughter and acquiring thousands of vaginas all over his body, sages spilling their jism in pots and such) as well as the Old Testament, it’s safe to agree that myth-writers across religions have generally been a naughty group of people. Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast? A "with a stylus in my hand I felt like a man" sort of thing.

(Note: most of my reading of late has been around The Adventures of Amir Hamza, so be prepared for more posts in this vein - cleaner ones, though.)

Amruta Patil and Kari: a short Q&A

A quick word about Amruta Patil’s dark, intense graphic novel Kari: it’s the story of an alienated young woman working in an ad agency in Mumbai while dealing with acute loneliness and the heartache of separation from her soulmate Ruth. (The book opens with a dreamlike scene where Kari and Ruth attempt suicide together. Both survive – or do they? – but while Ruth leaves Smog City for a place where “the palette was pure and bright”, Kari stays behind.) The drawings often reflect Kari’s tortured state of mind and restless imagination, and there’s some ambiguity in her version of events. In fact, it’s possible to wonder – as indeed another character in the book does at one point – if Ruth ever really existed.

Patil has an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and now lives in Delhi. I attended part of the Kari book launch/discussion a few days ago and then did a short Q&A with her.

Many graphic novels are writer-artist collaborations, but you wear both hats. As a child, were you more inclined towards drawing or writing?

There has always been a definite keel towards the written word. I like to draw, but my applied art training makes me see illustration from a versatile, do-what's-needed slant. My writing is more careful, more uncompromised.

When I was a child, my mother illustrated every story that she told me. It was a lot of fun. I remember sitting atop a full newsprint sheet on the terrace as we drew, so that the paper would not fly away! They were growing stories – I'd add to where she left off, in word as on paper. We took great pains to draw out the houses and hills and cats and people that formed our stories!

At the launch, you mentioned working as a museum security guard in Boston, and how it helped you observe people and pick subjects for your drawings. Can you elaborate on this experience?

It was the penury of being an art student in the US that led to the museum security guard experience. Besides, being around mummies and medieval Madonnas seemed like a more interesting job than waitressing or working in a photocopy place. The feeling was not just that of being invisible, but of being almost subhuman. It's amazing how hundred upon hundreds of human beings can pass you by without making eye contact. When they did make eye contact, it was to get directions to the restroom. It made for a great vantage point for eavesdropping and watching.

How did you first become interested in the graphic novel form? What are your favourite works in the medium?

Write, and draw – that's what I know how to do. Working in a medium that combined both the disciplines seemed like an obvious way to go. Some of the graphic novels I have enjoyed include - Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Mother Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier, Tragical Comedy Or Comical Tragedy Of Mister Punch by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean, Blankets by Craig Thompson, The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar.

What’s the story behind Kari? You drew the first of these drawings in 1999. What was the progression from then till its publication in book form eight years later?

Kari is a child of chance, she was never meant to be the great big debut book. The only thing that has remained consistent from 1999 to 2008 is the physical form of the character – none of the early illustrations form part of this work, nor does any early writing. It was too fragmented to be useful. As for planning storylines, writing and artwork go hand in hand. Just as the writing gets more refined, so too does the illustration. For example, the book I’m working on now, Parva/The Epic, is being planned in page upon page of small thumbnail sketches, rather like the storyboard of a film.

Your drawings show a range of styles. I liked the use of colour, and the ironical touches, such as the poster of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (a film that stands for tradition values and societal approval) in the background when Kari and Ruth – lesbian lovers – first meet. Who are your artistic influences?

I was very keen to capture the grey, the claustrophobic busy-ness, the dreamscapes, and the subsequent release. One style seemed very inadequate. So, instead, Kari has experiments in ink, marker, charcoal and oilbar, crayon and found images. Some, admittedly, work better than others. My illustrative style in Parva/The Epic is very different from this. Visual influences are eclectic: Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Dave McKean. Then there are Mughal miniatures, Islamic decorative patterns, Japanese woodcuts.

Parva has been billed as a mytho-historical graphic novel. Tell us something more about it.

Parva/The Epic is the Mahabharata tale told from the viewpoint of three characters who intrigue me very much – Kunti, Draupadi, and Ashwatthama. My MFA thesis show consisted of 200 images from this body of work, and it's time to start working on it again. This project is going to take a lot, it is epic in both volume and in theme – full colour, and visual-led. I am excited about starting work on it.

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Incidentally, I’m also interested in Ashwatthama, who was the protagonist of Dharamvir Bharati’s wonderful play Andha Yug; the role was played by Naseeruddin Shah in Ebrahim Alkazi’s famous production. Parva sounds very promising. Here are a few drawings from it (and from Kari) on Patil’s website. And here’s her blog, Umbilical.

[A few earlier posts on graphic novels: Maus, Watchmen, Blankets, the Buddha series, Embroideries, Kashmir Pending]

Amar Ayyar, prince of tricksters

I think I have a new favourite literary character. Meet Amar Ayyar:

In Amir Hamza’s cortege marched the Father of Racers, the Lord of Mischief-Mongers of the World, the Clipper of Infidels’ Whiskers, the King of Dagger-Throwing Tricksters, Khvaja Amar Ayyar, sporting his headdress of brocaded silk, brocade singlet, broadcloth tasseled shoes, and trickster’s sling, and bedecked with many such contrivances. He was accompanied by his pupils and continuously sang in six high-key notes, twelve musical styles, and twenty-four melodies in twenty-eight manners of improvisation.

I’m halfway through Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s excellent The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the first complete English translation of the great Islamic epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza. The story, which evolved over hundreds of years through a rich oral tradition, is about the many conquests of the adventurer-hero Hamza, an uncle of the prophet Muhammed. One of Hamza’s companions is the mercenary rogue Amar Ayyar (ayyar being the word for trickster or spy), the most colourful character in a book populated with them. Many of the funniest passages in the epic are the ones about his incessant mischief-making. When he is born, the wise vizier Buzurjmehr studies his face and pronounces:

“This boy will be the prince of all tricksters, unsurpassed in cunning, guile, and deceit. Great and mighty kings and champions will tremble at his mention and soil their pants in fright upon hearing his name. He will be excessively greedy, most insidious and a consummate perjurer...yet he shall prove a trustworthy confidant to Hamza, remaining staunch and steadfast in his fellowship!”

(Shortly after this little speech is made, the infant Amar commences his long career in crime by sucking the ring off Buzurjmehr’s finger.)

During this conversation I had with filmmaker-writer Saeed Mirza last month, he spoke about the spirit of iconoclasm and irreverence in medieval Islamic literature, which is something that doesn’t get much press nowadays; and about characters like Mulla Nasruddin, “the classic Fool, who poked fun at royalty, protocol, mindless ritual and orthodoxy”. Amar Ayyar seems to belong to this tradition too. He appears largely exempt from the conventional dictates of morality: he schemes, deceives and robs his way through life, mostly with an eye on gathering as many purses of gold as possible; he plays several pranks on an unfortunate mulla, including lacing his food with a strong laxative; and he even speaks cheekily to Allah’s prophet Khizr, who has made a divine visitation. His pranks are sometimes excessive and you can’t help cringing at the fate of some of his victims. And yet no one seriously takes him to task. Hamza, the epic’s protagonist and general object of adoration, is Amar’s friend for life and fondly indulgent of everything he does, and Amar’s status as a heroic figure is never in doubt - in fact he’s often the prime mover in the story, using his bag of tricks to rescue his friends from seemingly hopeless situations. At times, Hamza himself seems almost passive in comparison!

Characters like Amar, and the general bawdiness that runs through the epic, give the Dastan-e Amir Hamza a subversive quality. Which is why I’m curious about the conservative, seemingly strident tone of some of the passages, especially the ones where Hamza and his friends subjugate various people and make them convert to the “True Faith”. Even if you look at the epic as an exciting Arabian Nights-style fantasy, some of these passages can be disturbing. (After Hamza conquers Landhoor bin Saadan Shah, the Khusrau of India, we are told that “Landhoor then ennobled himself by converting to the True Faith, renouncing idol worship”.)

Not sure how this sort of thing coexists with the more iconoclastic side of the book, but I’m hoping for a few inputs from Musharraf Ali Farooqi, with whom I’ll be having an email discussion soon. Watch this space for more on The Adventures of Amir Hamza.

(Also see this blog about the dastangoi tradition of storytelling, which has helped keep many of these tales alive for modern audiences. And this online exhibition of some of the works in the Hamzanama, a series of 1,400 paintings commissioned by Emperor Akbar to illustrate Hamza's adventures.)

Jodhaa Akbar: notes and an unreliable synopsis

[Statutory warning: I can’t promise that everything described here is an accurate reflection of what happens in Jodhaa Akbar. Parts of this review are as authentic a representation of the film as the film itself is of the Mughal era.]

It turns out that the controversy about historical authenticity in Jodha Akbar has been such a waste of everyone’s time. This film is really at its most authentic when it abandons all pretence that it was made for any reason other than to bring together Bollywood’s two most beautiful people (and a lot of shiny jewellery). Take the magnificently show-offish moment where a shirtless Akbar (Hrithik Roshan) displays his swordsmanship while Jodha (Aishwarya Rai) watches in womanly awe. The scene exists completely independent of context – it’s about Hrithik as the ultimate alpha-male preening like a peacock (an inordinately muscular peacock) for Aishwarya; it’s about sending vicarious thrills through star-struck moviegoers of both sexes. With just a minor alteration in setting and costume, it could easily have come out of Dhoom 2, a film that was a fine showcase for this same couple.

As it happens, this is one of the most assured scenes in Jodhaa Akbar. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the film makes a half-hearted stab at telling us about various things that may or may not have occurred in the mid-16th century. Yawn. Completely beside the point. Anyway, this is roughly what happens, or what I could make out as I drifted in and out of sleep:

(An unreliable summary)

The first few minutes give us the background on the many political intrigues of the time, in the stentorian but much-too-familiar voice of Amitabh Bachchan. (Like a stern father-in-law keeping a watchful eye on Aishwarya after that kiss in Dhoom 2, Bachchan’s presence looms large here: not only does he do these ponderous voiceovers but Sonu Sood, the actor who plays Jodha’s protective brother Sujamal, strongly resembles the young Amitabh – the moustached Amitabh of Reshma aur Shera, for example, or even Ganga ki Saugandh - from many angles.) Most of the historical information is tedious and complicated, though there’s a certain fun to be had in seeing the kings of Hindustan depicted as petulant little boys, sulking, whimpering and clinging to their thrones when faced with the prospect of being made vassals. (As the maharajah of Amer, Kulbhushan Kharbanda looks and sounds like he has serious breathing problems, and little wonder given the number of heavy necklaces weighing him down at all times.)

Meanwhile, on the Mughal side of things, there is Bairam Khan, a good old-fashioned medieval psychopath who uses his official status as guardian for the boy-prince Akbar to nurture a very personal fetish for lopping off enemy heads. Unfortunately for Bairam, the boy-prince soon grows up and dispenses with his services. To prove that he is worthy of ruling the country, Akbar then takes on a wild elephant in a scene that is reminiscent of Hrithik’s superhero-racing-the-horse in Krrish. But what really puts his courage to the test is when he agrees to wed the Hindu princess Jodha to complete a political alliance: her long list of demands includes the right to sing bhajans loudly in the next room while he is discussing matters of state with his viziers.

Sadly the marriage remains unconsummated because by the time J and A have finished removing all those layers of jewellery they are no longer horny and only wish to sleep. This puts the future of the Empire in jeopardy. Also, there are culture shocks that must be dealt with. The newlywed Jodha, wholly unaccustomed to the brutal ways of the Mughals, watches aghast as her husband has a traitor thrown to his death from the roof (cue bone-crunching sound) and then has him thrown off again when the job isn’t finished. (Aishwarya’s eyes widen: she never got to see such gory things in the Bachchan household except when Amar Singh and Shah Rukh came visiting at the same time.)

Anyway, after watching Akbar’s topless swashbuckling, Jodha decides that the way to a man’s eight-pack abs is through his stomach. So she takes over the royal kitchen and sets about preparing a large vegetarian meal for him with her own hands. However, things nearly go perilously wrong when she misinterprets an order for a “24-carrot salad” and slips some of her rubies and emeralds into the dish, causing the emperor’s courtiers to suffer from indigestion for days afterward. In a delicate and affecting scene, the crafty Ila Arun (playing Akbar’s wet-nurse) enters the kitchen grounds where countless heaps of vegetables are scattered about, and bursts into a rendition of “Mooli ke peeche kya hai”. This highly dramatic sequence ends with Jodha falling out of favour; however, after a timely reconciliation, our leads start making out on the floor of the chamber (as chronicled in a lost volume of the Akbarnama) before realising that they should move to the bed in the interests of royal decorum.

Meanwhile the political intrigues continue apace, but thankfully they are punctuated by some nice quiet moments between Akbar and Jodha – like the one where she bends down to touch his feet and he catches her mid-dive, in the manner of every traditional Indian husband in a Bollywood film (in other words: make sure the woman genuflects, but also make a token gesture that will show how modern-thinking you are). There are an equal number of scenes where the characters simply wander about languorously, admiring the gardens, reclining on bolsters, playing with rabbits and pigeons and looking a little bored, like they wish television had been invented.

Despite all the gloss, this is a static film, full of scenes that carry on long past their sell-by date. Ashutosh Gowrikar said in an interview that his movies are as long as the story requires them to be, but even someone who knows very little about the technical aspects of filmmaking will see that Jodhaa Akbar could easily have been shorter and more compact. (The number of reaction shots alone made me think that some bits could have been produced almost as competently by the Ekta Kapoor factory.) The battle scenes are indifferently put together and it's hard to work up much interest in which general's elephant is crushing which foot-soldier's head; I was immensely disappointed even by the final one-on-one combat, which I’d hoped would at least give the film a rousing ending. And when computer effects are pressed into service (as in the aerial shot of discharging cannons, with one of them shooting its flaming iron ball straight into the camera), the effect is still flat and uninspired.

Diamonds last forever; so does this film

I was forewarned that the only reason to watch Jodhaa Akbar was to feast one’s eyes on the extravagant jewellery adorning the persons of nearly every member of the cast. After seeing it, I have to agree that the experience was rather like four hours spent in a gold souk that has two large and handsome posters of Hrithik and Aishwarya on the walls, and some soulful A R Rahman music playing somewhere in the background. If you love jewellery that much, good for you – if not, you may feel that this film goes on for nearly as long as the Mughal Empire did.

A lament

Not enough serious foodies reading Jabberwock! The version of the Bombay post that went up on Ultrabrown has over 30 comments, mostly about the varieties of food available in Mumbai and Delhi. But out here, people are discussing the weather instead. Gah. What will become of the sub-blog dedicated to food that I've been thinking about starting?

A conversation with Manil Suri

[This is most of the text of my talk with Manil Suri at his book launch a few weeks ago – it took me some time to transcribe the thing after I received the DVD of the event from Penguin Books, and then there was the Mumbai trip in between. A version of this appeared in last Sunday's Business Standard]

Manil Suri’s second novel The Age of Shiva follows one woman – the book’s narrator-protagonist Meera – over nearly three decades, portraying the various facets of her life: as a supportive but often unhappy wife, a rebellious daughter and most crucially as a single mother raising a son through the awkward phase of adolescence and becoming increasingly dependent on him. Suri, whose day job is teaching Mathematics at the University of Maryland, was in fine fettle at the book launch despite his concern that his voice wouldn’t hold up through the reading (he’s been giving a lot of interviews, talking and reading constantly: “I was told it would be madness to do a book tour in India without a cellphone”). He read out a couple of passages, including the startlingly sensual description of breastfeeding that opens the book, and was eloquent throughout the question-and-answer session that followed.

On your website, you’ve mentioned that The Age of Shiva is the second book in a trilogy of contemporary stories that evoke the three major Hindu Gods. In your first novel The Death of Vishnu, Vishnu was the name of the central character (a man slowly dying on the stairway of an apartment block in Mumbai), but here the protagonist is a woman. How does Shiva fit into this work?

The book was originally called The Life of Shiva and my intention was to have a central Shiva character. But then I thought it would be formulaic to exactly repeat the structure of the first novel – to have a Vishnu character there, a Shiva character here. Also, Shiva means so many things to so many people that if I had tried to deal with all those things it would have taken me 21 years to finish the book instead of seven! So I decided to focus on the aspect of Shiva that attracted me most – the fact that he is an ascetic – rather than the cliché of Shiva as Destroyer, or the Shiva-lingam thing which has also been done a lot.

As an ascetic, Shiva withdraws from the world (which also connects to his role as Destroyer because without his participation, the universe starts to wind down). This withdrawal creates a vacuum and people start to yearn for him – that longing was the central idea of the book, and it still is in there. Originally, Meera’s son Ashvin was to be the Shiva character: I thought of it as the story of a mother trying to become intensely close to her son, but there are all these barriers between them. But what happened as I started writing was that Meera took over and the book became more and more about her.

Shiva is still there of course, as an abstract concept, not just as a figure of longing but also as a symbol of religious upheaval.

Meera is such a fully realised character, it’s hard to believe she wasn’t originally the focus.

Originally, there was to be only a chapter or so about her back-history – I wanted her family to be from Rawalpindi, where some of my own relatives come from – but then I started researching, reading up on Indian history post-Partition. History was always my weaker subject in school – I would memorise it all and get through it somehow – but here I found myself in raptures reading books like India After Independence, by Bipin Chandra. There were characters like Nehru and Indira who were shown as real, flesh-and-blood people with good points and faults; there were insights about how one political development leads to another.

I became so fascinated that before I knew it I had written 200 pages about Meera, and Ashvin still wasn’t born! So I said okay, it’s time to have her as the lead and forget about all these things I initially wanted to do.

Meera’s interior life is very convincingly portrayed, and in general this book is so driven by the woman’s experience of the world. You have these vivid descriptions of Karwa Chauth, female bonding, Meera’s possessiveness towards her son. As a male author, how difficult was it to make this imaginative leap? Did you get many inputs from female relatives or friends?

I didn’t, actually – there were no inputs. The only person I asked was my mother when I was dealing with the scenes between Meera and her son, but she wasn’t much help either! I knew I wanted to start with the breast-feeding scene at the beginning, so I spent about a month reading up on the various things women feel when they have newborn children. I read classic feminist texts like Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, I read all sorts of things. But after a while I said that’s enough reading, that can only take you so far, you have to feel.

When I finally sat down at the computer, the first thing that came through was Meera’s voice. The challenge was to sustain this voice, to follow this character, over a book. It was a gradual process. I was stepping into her mind in tiny steps, feeling my way in her, looking at the world through her eyes – how she would look at her child, her husband, how the sexual act would be to such a woman; not just intellectualizing, but also trying to feel those things.

It was scary, because all this while I wasn’t showing the manuscript to people – I could have been completely wrong, and you would be telling me what a fool I was, and women would be rising in protest! But it was also very challenging and quite intense.

The Age of Shiva is a much larger book than The Death of Vishnu, not just in size but in scale – it moves between Delhi and Bombay, there’s plenty of political activity in the background, including the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars, and the Emergency. Did you see Meera’s personal development as paralleling the changes in modern India?

About the two books: it was my intention to make this one as different as possible from the first one. I wanted the challenge – this was only my second book, and at this point I don’t even know how many I’ll manage to write! While The Death of Vishnu had strong male characters, this one has a strong female protagonist. Vishnu was set in one building over 24 hours and was a very concise, scaled-down piece of work – I was very much a mathematician at work, clipping wherever something was not necessary. Here, it was the opposite: I forced myself to follow some of the side-stories (like Zayida, Meera’s Muslim neighbour in Bombay, or Sandhya, her sister-in-law) and to branch out.

About the parallel story of India...yes, that was very much the intention. I always thought Meera was going to be the action that happens in the foreground, while in the background the country is coming of age. Meera is making her way through a very male-dominated, patriarchal society – she’s vacillating between factions, like her father who’s a liberal, progressive person, and her brother-in-law Arya, who’s conservative, and she gets close to both of them at various times, much like India has flirted with all sorts of different things in its history.

Also, Meera is always reacting – remember, there were limited choices available to women in this period, and the only way she can take control of her fate is to react. Her father says do this, she reacts and does the opposite. Now think about India’s progress, think about the Non-Aligned Movement and Nehru’s policies – which were not necessarily the best in terms of feeding people and so on, just like Meera’s choices aren’t always the best for herself, but the overriding idea behind most of those decisions was that we should be independent, that we should have a say in our own destiny. It’s similar to Meera’s life in that sense.

You work as a professor of Mathematics in Baltimore. How do you divide time between your two lives? Does it ever happen that in the middle of a lecture on differential equations, you’re suddenly struck by a flash of writerly inspiration...

...and I yank people’s books out and start writing on them and tell them, shut up, I’m composing? (Laughs) Author at work! No, it’s pretty much compartmentalised. It’s like when you’re swallowing your windpipe gets cut off – it’s something like that. I can’t switch back and forth so easily. On days that I’m teaching, I have to get up and write at least a paragraph before breakfast – if I eat first, I’m too contented and I can’t write anymore. I can still do mathematics though, that’s different!

I balance my time very poorly, obviously, since I took seven years to write this book! But I get a lot out of it too. For a while everyone was asking will you quit Math and do this full-time, and now I know that I won’t. It’s nice to have a profession, to actually see real people – it’s a good balance. If I were writing full-time and someone asked me at the end of the day “What did you do?”, I’d have to say “Well, I wrote a paragraph and then I deleted it.”

But more seriously, since this topic has come up, I’d like to touch on something that’s very prevalent in academia – the idea that you are expected to do one thing, and if you don’t do that one thing you aren’t taken seriously. In my first year as a professor, another professor came and gave us a talk – and he was a famous bridge player as well – and after the talk one of my senior colleagues came up and said, “That was a terrible talk.” I said, “You’re a statistician, that was on Applied Math, how do you know?” He said, “Well he spends all his time playing bridge, he can’t possibly be a good Mathematician.”

I’ve seen that attitude a lot. Consequently, when I started writing I kept it a secret – I wanted to get tenure. So I would disappear and lead a James Bond-like existence. But interestingly, when the first book came out, two people from my department came up to me and confessed that they were both actors – one of them said he wanted a part if a movie got made!

How long till the next book?

According to my calculations, it can’t be less than four years. I’ve written 150 pages already, and thrown away 100 of them. But I’m still optimistic.

Postscript: there was some light banter after the discussion. When someone in the audience asked Suri how he could write about India despite being based in the US for 27 years, he replied that when you’re sitting on the moon, looking at the earth, you can see the complete picture. “You can only see one side,” replied the questioner, to which Suri said “Yes, but the earth turns around!” Of course, none of this gives us any sort of insight into the complex questions about authenticity in Diaspora writing, but it was a fun way to end a solemn evening. Later, asked about his own religiosity, Suri replied that he did think of himself as religious – in the spiritual sense – but would on the whole categorise himself as agnostic. “When I was a teenager I turned atheist because it was the rebellious thing to do,” he said, “but later, when I became a Mathematician, I became very concerned about the need to have proofs for everything – so I’m on the fence now.”

[An earlier post about The Age of Shiva here. And some earlier conversations with authors: Anita Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Vikram Chandra, Rajorshi Chakraborty, Raj Kamal Jha, Amitava Kumar, Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru]

Where's Sandra? telecast

Paromita Vohra, filmmaker, screenwriter and friend, gave me a mild scolding in Mumbai the other day, the context being that reviewers are not paying adequate attention to independent/alternative cinema and instead going on about the new developments (overstated, in her opinion) taking place within the mainstream. I plead guilty; in weak defence, my official beat continues to be literature - apart from a couple of infrequent film columns I write for newspapers, and the sometime review for Tehelka - and for a long time watching movies, much less writing about them, has been done on very limited time. Seeking out low-profile films (and hoping that some of them will be good enough to justify the time and energy spent - something that doesn't always happen at festivals like Cinefan) just hasn't been much of an option lately.

Still, it's always a pleasure to discover alternative treasures wherever available, and what better place to start than one of Paromita's own films. Her short documentary Where's Sandra? - a snappy look at the "Sandra from Bandra" stereotype - is being telecast on NDTV 24x7's new Documentary 24x7 slot on Thursday, Feb 14 at 9.30 PM and on Sunday, Feb 17 at 1.30 PM. Do look out for it, and for future telecasts on this slot, which will hopefully help dispel the fallacy that the words "boring" and "documentary" belong together.

(More on Where's Sandra? here)

Baboon alert

So I get back online after being away for four days and log on to my favourite Net destination, the messageboard on Rediff.com. The first thing I see is a story about Mallika Sherawat acting in a film about Christ's travels in India, and here are just three among dozens of learned comments:

This is utter non-sense. It is being done only to influence minds of already brain washed convent educated boys & girls of India and also to have them converted slowly in to christian folds

and

Mallika can work in this movie as she fits into the culture of christianity of exposure, nudity, black magicks (dark ages of europe), immorality, high headness, diva, etc.

and

Minakumari, Madhubala etc was superb. now new series is big nasty.Cheepst way of popuraty they always finding.

(Sic) (Sic) (Sic)

I think the "new series" in the last one is a way of saying "modern-day actresses". But it's impossible to say for sure, and it doesn't begin to explain the "big nasty" that follows. This is why the comments on Rediff.com are always so thought-provoking and make for such valuable clues to the human condition. We should forget about preserving our heritage sites and instead bury these words of wisdom in time-capsules when civilization is about to end. (Which it probably is right about now.)

Bombay notes (emphasis: food)

Had an even better time in Bombay than I did last year – spent more time getting to know south Bombay really well, imagining how charming the place must have been like decades ago when my mom and her family lived there (more on the nostalgia angle in this post). After a few last-minute uncertainties, Abhilasha managed to come along too, which was good. We walked a lot – from the Radio Club, where we were staying, to the Colaba Causeway, to Kala Ghoda and around Churchgate. Visited the Haji Ali shrine too. Met old and new friends including Amit, Chandrahas, Sonia, Peter, Rahul, Soumik, Praba and Paromita.

The two panels I was on went off as well as could be expected, given my fear of these things, and the David Sassoon Library garden was a friendly setting. The first panel, on online writing, was enlivened by Time Out editor Naresh Fernandes’s snarky and ungenerous views about blogs, especially the ones that “amount merely to public diaries”. Naturally, this meant lots of tiresome generalisation. Naresh did sweetly admit that he liked a couple of blogs, including mine, but he made the all-too-easy mistake of referring to my blog as simply an extension of my journalism. Whereupon I pointed out that the posts that are extensions of the journalism are usually more indepth and more personally satisfying than the versions that appear in print (a reflection on the many limitations of mainstream media in India – inadequate word-counts for reviews, incompetent sub-editors, etc) and that I’m more proprietorial about them than most of the stuff I’ve written for official publication. Also, that I do write “personal diary posts” as well; wonder what he’ll think of this one, for instance!

Technically speaking, I was the “moderator” of the second panel, about banned books, but my task was made very easy by my fellow panelists. Manjula Padmanabhan, whose dark and subversive writings I’ve long admired (and who included me in this Suki comic strip a couple of years ago), wrote a short script that enabled us to begin things on a strong note. Devangshu Datta, Amit and Chandrahas managed the rest, with erudite views on a number of topics (including the availability of gay porn at the Ahmedabad railway station, which DD was surprisingly knowledgeable about).

Most importantly, food tourism happened. Here’s the list:

- Mahesh Lunch Home and the revolving restaurant Pearl of the Orient, repeated from last year. Discovered sumptuous crab claws at the latter (the name is misleading; the meat of the dish is what I assume to be the crustacean’s forearm or calf region, or maybe the biceps – though given the size of each chunk, it would have had to be the sumo-wrestling champion of crabs).

- At one point we were greedy enough to have a 12 PM brunch at Café Leopold (yes yes, the Shantaram one) on the Colaba Causeway, only an hour or so before meeting someone for lunch. Abhi had Akuri, the Parsi preparation of scrambled eggs, while I settled for something so boring that I’m embarrassed to mention it here.

- Mutton dhansak at one of the Kala Ghoda stalls. This was – ahem – at 7 PM, a couple of hours before a lavish dinner at a maasi’s house: home-made tandoori pomfret and around eight other superb dishes, including a versatile salad made by Dayal uncle, who is a true artist in the kitchen and will make us many fine meals in the future (and who is hopefully reading this post).

- Excellent beef steak-and-fried egg sandwich at Café Churchill. Perfectly done – none of the ingredients was excessive relative to the others – and just the right size. And the thing was priced at just Rs 110! In a Delhi café (say, The Big Chill), something of comparable quality would have been Rs 200 at the very least. (In general, food prices were to die for. I also can’t believe that it’s possible to take a cab a short distance and pay a fare of Rs 13. I’m assuming that all this talk about Mumbai being expensive to live in is entirely because of the rents.)

- The best fish-and-chips I’ve ever had – light, tender, not too strong – at the Cricket Club of India. With an outstanding Orange Nougat for dessert.

- But the pick of the foodie experiences was probably our lunchtime visit to the Irani café Britannia, which has been around since the mid-1920s and is among the few surviving Irani joints in the city. It’s a ramshackle sort of place to look at (the “High Class Restaurant” written in fading letters on an old and rusty signboard seemed ironical when we first saw it) and we were told it runs on the whimsies of its octogenarian owner – opening for only a few hours at lunchtime, staying closed on Sundays, and if two people show up early when they’ve booked a table for four, they might not be allowed to sit down until the others arrive. Despite this, it has a huge and loyal clientele, and the food made it easy to see why. We had two of the staple Irani dishes – Sali boti, which is mutton topped with lots of potato straws and best had with a warm, soft roti, and the berry pulao, both delicious. (Couldn’t figure out the provenance of the little berries sprinkled on the rice, but were told later that they are still specially imported from Iran.) I’m not a big fan of caramel custards, but experts in this field claim that the ones served here are incomparable.

Eighty-five-year-old Boman Kohinoor still takes every order himself, being nervous about entrusting this delicate task to anyone else, even the younger family members who also work here. It was fascinating to see him doing the rounds. When he took our orders, every sentence was preceded by a businesslike “Now!” or “Listen!” When we ordered the fizzy Pallonji raspberry drink instead of the fresh lime water he had suggested, he gave us a faux-suspicious look. “You guys Parsi or what?!” he croaked, “Parsi means raspberry.” After he was finished, he beamed round at us all, called us “good girls” and “good boys” (one of my uncles is over 60) and tottered off to the next table.

One last thing that has to be mentioned, because it was a motif of the trip and because I’m still shaking my head about it: this utterly bizarre rumour spread by shivering Mumbaiites that their city is in the throes of winter. They should have been in Delhi on the night of February 1 when my brother-in-law’s wedding ceremony was held outdoors and guests were dropping like Bedouin in Greenland. People, I accept that your city (the southern tip of it anyway) is the greatest in the world, but your definition of cold weather merits you the appellation “Wuss”. And no, this isn’t Delhi-chauvinism. The moment we stepped out of the plane at the Indira Gandhi airport, I commenced a sneezing fit that still hasn’t fully ended. These things can't be faked. (The idea that Mumbai had a meaningful winter this year will be debunked at greater length in a subsequent post.)

P.S. Turns out even sophisticated cities have unintentionally funny signboards. Like this one:

Away for a few days...

...in Mumbai. Will be at the Kala Ghoda festival on the 7th and 8th evenings, doing my finest imitation of Panelist Who Wishes to be Anywhere but Here. Won’t have Net access for a while, so regular service should resume sometime next week. Till then.

Notes on Pankaj Kapur and Dharm

I’ve been amazed by the quality of Pankaj Kapur’s performances in two very different roles – in Vishal Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella (a post about that film here) and Bhavna Talwar’s Dharm. In both films, he achieves something that very few actors can aspire towards: when he’s on screen, it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off him. The characters he plays are about as varied as it’s possible for two people to be. In The Blue Umbrella, he’s a covetous, wheedling Himachali shopkeeper who becomes obsessed with a little girl’s pretty umbrella; in Dharm he’s an orthodox Hindu pandit, the head priest of a temple in Benaras, who lives by the strictest interpretation of his faith, and who finds that faith severely tested when it turns out that the little boy he has raised is Muslim by birth.

The one thing Nandkishor and Pandit Chaturvedi do have in common is that it’s difficult as a viewer to take either of them to one’s heart. (It’s possible to admire Pandit Chaturvedi – to respect the fact that he’s a sincere man, not someone who uses religion for his own cynical ends, and that he is dismissive of the jingoistic local Hindutva organisation – but it’s hard to like him. Even if you’re sold on the virtues of the caste system, you might be discomfited by scenes like the one where the pandit’s devotees beat up a lower-caste man for accidentally brushing against him and he quietly goes off to cleanse himself in the Ganga without intervening.) And yet the measure of Kapur’s performance is that he humanises both these characters brilliantly, which is something that not many other actors – working with the same script – would have been able to do. By the end of The Blue Umbrella, Nandkishor is a sympathetic figure, easier to care about than the villagers who have ostracized him. And in Dharm, when we see the hint of a knowing (almost worldly) smile on Pandit Chaturvedi’s face during a conversation with his wife (Supriya Pathak) and daughter, we see the human side of a man who can be unflinchingly harsh, even inhuman, in his role as an authority figure (such as when he refuses to bless a disconsolate girl who has fallen out of favour with her family because of her association with a tourist).

The character of the pandit, and many other things about Dharm, reminded me of one of the best films I saw last year – David Volach’s My Father, My Lord, about an orthodox Rabbi who sacrifices his son at the altar of literalist faith. Like that film, Dharm is a quietly powerful work. It’s beautifully shot (by Nalla Muthu) and manages, for most of its running time, to be thought-provoking without being strident. However, I had a problem with the ending where a rampaging mob driven by religious fervour is stopped in its tracks by the force of one man’s righteousness (complete with the annoying cliché of the righteous man taking the chief assailant’s hand in his iron grip). It’s possible that this scene was meant to be seen metaphorically rather than literally (Dharm as humanity trumping it over fanaticism; or, how it should be in a perfect world), but if that was the intention, the scene was too closely aligned to the realist narrative, and it didn’t work for me. It also caused an abrupt shift in the film’s tone, which up to this point seemed to be leading to tragedy.

I also thought the scenes between the pandit and the little boy could have been expanded a little - and simultaneously, the subplot about the girl and the tourist could have been shortened. But Dharm is still strongly recommended, especially if you’re in the mood for a gentle, slow-paced film powered by a superb lead performance. Or if you need a reminder about the dangers of unquestioning faith.