An unfathomable fury: on Bhisham Sahni's (and Govind Nihalani's) Tamas

[Did a version of this piece for Flipkart Stories]

In one of the quietest but most effective scenes in Govind Nihalani’s 1988 telefilm Tamas – adapted from Bhisham Sahni’s Partition novel about the breakdown of communal relations as a riot gathers force – a Muslim man named Shah Nawaz, having helped his Hindu friend Raghunath’s family leave their violence-ridden street, returns to the house to retrieve some jewellery for Raghunath’s wife. In the house is a slow-witted servant. Shah Nawaz speaks kindly to him, but then a view from a window – a corpse lying in a mosque’s courtyard nearby – stokes a fire within him; he lashes out and kicks the innocent servant as he is going down the stairs.

The scene is both startling and revealing of human complexities. Even after Shah Nawaz saw the dead body outside, the better part of him was considerate enough to ask the servant if he had everything he needed; it was only a few seconds later that the baser part took over. And his face remained unreadable, as if he had briefly become an automaton.

Having watched Tamas again a few weeks ago, and only then read Sahni’s novel – in the new English translation by Daisy Rockwell – I felt a tiny bit underwhelmed by the equivalent passage in the book. The scene in the movie has no expository dialogue or voiceover, the viewer is allowed to conjecture what could be going through Shah Nawaz’s mind. The book, though, elaborates: “All of a sudden he felt intensely furious. It was hard to say why: Maybe it was that glimpse of Milkhi’s pigtail […] or simply everything he’d seen and heard in the last three days – the poison of it all had been stewing inside him […] Shah Nawaz’s fury – which he himself was unable to fathom – grew and grew.”

Lest you think I am saying the film is “better”, one should note that Tamas was such a celebrated text that Nihalani may well have presumed prior knowledge in most of his viewers – and this in turn would have made it easier for him to depict episodes without underlining them. Besides, for every such scene, there are other instances of the film reaching for a neater dramatic arc than you will find in the deliberately loose, vignette-driven structure of Sahni’s novel. For instance, the film closes with the cries of a newborn baby heard over a shot of an old and bereft Sikh couple, an image of past and future in the same frame, a testament to hope in the midst of darkness; it reminded me a little of the allegorical final scene of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The low-caste tanner Nathu and his wife (played by Om Puri and Deepa Sahi) also have an extended role in the film, serving as a thread that runs through the narrative, whereas in the book Nathu – a key figure in the initial chapters – simply fades from sight.

One of the motifs of Sahni’s story – you’ll find it in that Shah Nawaz passage among others – is the malleable relationship between the personal and the political; how commonsense humanity can be lost, and occasionally regained, in high-stress situations involving big ideas like religion and caste, which people are taught to hold sacred. Tamas the book and Tamas the film both begin with a sweaty, macabre yet mildly funny scene – Nathu is trying hard to kill a large pig in a hut – that goes on to become the tinderbox for earth-shaking events (unidentified mischief-mongers place the pig’s carcass outside a mosque, escalating hostilities between Muslims and Hindus). When Nathu, trying to motivate himself for the slaying, mutters “It’s either him or me”, it could be a foreshadowing of how people think in the heated emotion of a riot, when confronted with the Other who was once a friend or neighbour.

What follows is a series of episodes chronicling the anatomy of this riot, as Rockwell puts it in her Introduction. Characters flit in and out of view: Congress workers, a British administrator and his bemused wife who doesn’t know how to tell a Hindu and Muslim apart, a reedy 15-year-old named Ranvir who is being brainwashed and recruited to the cause of a fundamentalist group that teaches youngsters to hate, to be prepared to kill, and to be jingoistic about a glorious past. ("It was from Master Dev Vrat's mouth that he heard that everything had already been written in the Vedas, such as how to build an aircraft and how to construct a bomb. He also learnt about the potency of yogic power.") 

The structure reminded me of Irene Némirovsky’s remarkable WWII novel Suite Francaise, which moves restlessly from one group of people to another as they try to make sense of the events that are overtaking them. In Tamas too, the things that stay with you are the achingly human moments: the proud old Harnam Singh bowing his head in shame when he hears his wife pleading with someone to open a door and give them shelter; Nathu’s wife initially refusing to accept the tainted money he has got for killing the pig, but then giving in, and sweeping obsessively “as if she was trying to sweep a shadow from the room”. This elegiac story may be set in a very particular time, but it has resonances for our own age, when men may be slaughtered for the nature of the meat found in their kitchens, and communal strife and paranoia about identity can still cast a shadow over our better natures.

'If a plumber said she had plumber's block, would you condone it?' - a Q&A with Jerry Pinto

[Did this interview for Scroll]

Introduction: Earlier this month, Jerry Pinto’s 2012 novel Em and the Big Hoom was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, which recognizes the work of English-language writers from around the world, across three categories: fiction, non-fiction and drama. Pinto, a journalist and professional writer for close to three decades, has written or edited many other books across categories, including the National Award-winning Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Surviving Women, Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, and the children’s books Monster Garden and Phiss Phuss Boom. He speaks about the prize, his body of work, the many challenges facing a writer, and his newfound interest in translation.

Was this prize more gratifying in a way because you didn’t know you were in the reckoning? How rare that is in a time where authors are constantly expected to be in the public eye, competing furiously, playing the double role of marketing person.

The Windham-Campbell Prize is the kindest of prizes. You don’t know you are in the running. You don’t know that you’re on the shortlist. You are protected from that opening-of-the-envelope moment. Your life goes on pretty much as it always has and suddenly someone rings you up or emails you with the good news. I think that this is one of those rare prizes that doesn’t seem to need to turn the writers into gladiators at an arena, that isn’t about betting and odds-on favourites, there’s no bitterness about not being nominated or your book not being sent for it…nothing. I understand why the other prizes do that sort of thing. Sponsors aren’t coming along handing out all that lovely lolly for the good of writing. They want the bang for their buck. No issues with that. I see what the logic is but I don’t like it. Which is why I am so honoured and so happy to have received this one.

Em and the Big Hoom has been so widely acclaimed – it is the most high-profile of the many books you’ve done – and yet it has its roots in a personal and distressing subject, your mother’s real-life illness. It had a tortuous journey too, taking years before you got it in its final shape. Is there something bittersweet or unnerving about winning a big prize for this particular book?

I have all kinds of feelings about this book even now that it has passed into my history as a writer. To begin with, I wrote it so many times, I often felt that it was some kind of burden that I was fated never to put down. Then I had to talk about it again and again because it was born into the era of literary festivals and I tried my best to go wherever I was invited because I wanted to give the book my best push. I was deeply involved with everything, including the cover, which features my artwork thanks to the kindness of Bena Sareen and Ravi Singh at Aleph.

Oddly, when I was writing it, I never thought it would become the catalyst for conversations about mental ill health. I thought it was a novel. I have no problems, may I say here, with people talking about it as if it is non-fiction. Because that seems to be an accolade, a novel that reads like it happened.

But then the readings seemed to turn into encounter groups or something very similar. People would get up and tell stories about a friend who had said he would kill himself so often that no one believed him when he was sitting alone in his apartment with a bottle of rat poison; about the girl-next-door who vanished because she liked to sing and walk about naked even though she was in her late teens; about the brother incarcerated in his own room for five years because he heard voices. I did not know what to make of these testimonies. I tried to make the space as non-judgemental as possible but then that is not always possible. Besides, I am not a trained professional and I was wary of being taken for one. And the good Lord knows I’m not a paragon of virtue.

So a friend suggested that I encourage them to tell their stories, to create a book out of these survivor accounts, of people who have someone in their world with a different mind. And Ravi Singh now has the manuscript for A Book of Light which should come out from Speaking Tiger later this year.

I have been honoured and humbled by the honesty and the self-implication that so many of the writers have shown. They are torch-bearers and they’re showing us that it isn’t six degrees of separation between people seen as normal and people seen as ‘mentally ill’. It’s often one degree away or zero degrees. For if there is a person who has not suffered a moment of imbalance, of madness of one kind or another, then you might have finally stumbled on to a rare case of fully functional normality, so normal a normality that it should be pathologised perhaps, called a normalism.

The prize must be very pleasing purely at the level of the honour and recognition involved, but the money isn’t a small part of it. You have been quite vocal – in conversations, Facebook statuses and so on – about writers not getting paid as much as they deserve (whether they are independent journalists or authors struggling for decent advances from publishers). Do you see that changing anytime soon?

I hope it will. I trust it will. I wouldn’t put money on it. Here’s the thing. Every year, the journalists of my acquaintance march into their editors’ offices and argue for raises. They cite the usual bunch of reasons: the high cost of living, the lure of better pay in other jobs and other professions, how much hard work they do. I do not think one of them ever says, ‘And when you’re budgeting my pay hike in, why do you not think about raising the rates we pay our freelance writers?’ I didn’t do it when I was a full-time journalist though I have to say that when I started a travel dotcom, we paid writers well, we insisted that every staffer should travel, we worked on equity.

But writing as a skill is hard to quantify. So the editors have to fight hard to tell the moneybags men that they need to pay X more because she writes better. The moneybags say: ‘Then get someone else, na? My chichi has a flair for writing and she won’t even charge, she’ll be so happy to have her name in print. Shall I give you her number?’ There are entire magazines run on that kind of writer and this supply and demand situation always causes a problem. Many years ago, a freelance journalist called Parag Trivedi invited a whole bunch of journalists to form a union. It didn’t work.

Right now the best way to get paid well in India is simple: you should have a non-Indian passport, preferably a foreign passport and you can ask for a dollar a word. And editors will pay it too, some of them.

The other problem is that so much of freelance writing bases itself on old friendships and old relationships. How do you tell a buddy that s/he can’t afford you? How do you say, ‘Look, why don’t you simply hire a bunch of young people and then spend the rest of your life rewriting their work, training them and then losing them to the competition?’

For the rest of us, it’s the usual four-rupees-a word to ten-rupees-a-word. I must make an honourable exception for the Malayala Manorama group that actually pays well and pays on time and does not make one jump through hoops by creating an invoice, signing it, scanning it, sending it back and then waiting.

You have been an incredibly prolific writer… poetry, fiction (for both adults and children), non-fiction (on subjects ranging from cinema to gender relations), translation, anthologies, columns, reviews. Does any one sort of writing count as “relaxed, take-a-break writing” for you – the sort of thing you find easy to do when things aren’t going too well?

Okay, secret. It’s almost always fun. It’s almost always misery. The idea is the fun thing, the movements in the head, the connections, the links, the oh-that-might-also-fit-there sensations. Then there’s the first fine flush, that lasts for the first draft, when it’s always great to start off again, to open a notebook and return to word-making and world-making. Then comes the tough bits, the pruning, the editing, the rewriting. That takes me about twice as much time as the writing. I wrote three drafts of Murder in Mahim and I thought it was done. I came to Delhi inoffensively and met Ravi and he said, ‘Just a few more things I want you to do’ and I am holding on to the myth that it’s just a few more things when it’s not, it’s another draft because you change a word and that changes a sentence and that changes a paragraph and suddenly like a chain of bicycles, everything is in a heap and you’ve got to start again.

A related question: Isaac Asimov, discussing his prolificacy, once said that it helps to be working on different projects simultaneously because it makes writer’s block less likely; if you get fatigued with one sort of writing, you move on to something else. Has your experience been similar?

Yes, it works like that for me as well. I am always working on a poem. I am always working on some non-fiction. I am always working on some fiction. I am always working on some translation. I am always editing some student assignments at the SCM department where I teach journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic. I have a manual right now to look at for MelJol (an NGO for empowering children). I have a brochure to edit for a fund-raiser at the People’s Free Reading Room and Library. If you have several things going at once, you’re less likely to get bored of one thing. But there are often times when I will take a day off and only focus on one thing, such as reading a friend’s manuscript or editing someone’s translation or reading a draft.

But even so, writers’ block is a problem for me and I get over it by writing mechanically. I berate myself constantly. I say, ‘If you had a plumber who said she had plumber’s block, would you condone it? If you had a cook who said he had cook’s block, would you accept that he should not cook and you should go hungry? And if you are not as important an artisan in the creation of civilization as a cook or a plumber, you should not be a writer.

Then I start to write mechanically putting words down. They are dry desiccated words, words without meaning or significance, words without juice, over-used words forming into armies of clichés and I am often tempted to judge myself harshly, ‘You’re no writer. You’re just another hack’ but I write on. Now I am an ice-breaker and I pushing against the icefloes and soon, soon, it’s open flowing water and the words are back and now it’s dancing. But I have found that without the robotic writing, without the heartless-faithless-spiritless writing, you don’t get out into the open.

When I first encountered your writing, a lot of it was about cinema – the short-form journalistic stuff in particular, but also the Helen book which was so detailed and for which you watched dozens of films closely. What has your relationship with cinema, especially mainstream Hindi cinema, been like? And has it had an effect on your writing?

I loved Hindi films. I loved everything about them. But I could also see what they were not. They were as much vehicles for modernism and nation-buildings as they were Trojan Horses for patriarchy and cheap sentiment. Something about this encounter with popular culture shapes us in different ways, I think. Some people look at a title like Dulhan Wohi Jo Piya Man Bhaye and think yes, yes. Some people look at it and think, patriarchal bullshit. Some people look at it and say: Oh is that so? Not the woman with the certificate but the woman who makes her lover happy? Some people say: The songs are good so let’s go see it. And then there’s us, the critics, the reviewers, the ones who stand at a distance, looking but also sighing.

I think many critics have said that Em and the Big Hoom showed I have a feel for dialogue. I think that might come out of my encounter with cinema.

Children’s writing in India used to be (possibly still is) characterized by people writing down to children – being pedantic, trying to spoonfeed them ideas and messages, undermining the value of a fun story imaginatively told. Tell us something about your own approach to writing for children.

Children are a nasty bunch. They’re completely led by their instincts. They don’t really care what’s good for them or bad for them. They want to read what amuses them. The problem is that they have no economic control over their reading. The books available to them are decided by adults, by librarians and teachers and parents and gift-giving aunties who choose improving books and pedantic books and message stories and the kids give up on reading and the cry goes up: Oh, they don’t read, children have given up reading. That’s not their fault, it’s our fault.

Next, children are monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. If they see their parents coming home to slump in front of the television, that’s what they’ll want to do when they relax. If they see their parents hunched over a smart phone, that’s what they’ll want. Don’t blame the monkeys.

Finally, I don’t write for children. I write for me. When I’m done, someone, usually a publisher says: oh this is a children’s book because it has a teddybear in it. And then they sell it to the chaps, like Mr Hall and Mr Knight in that wonderful poem about the algebra text book.

As readers – or as consumers of your work – how are children different from adults? What have your interactions with young readers been like?

I try not to interact with children too much. They do your ego no good. “Did you write this book?” a girl asked me, holding up ‘Talk of the Town’ which I wrote with Rahul Srivastava. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very boring,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said because she was a well-brought-up child.

Other great questions I have been asked: ‘Why aren’t you J K Rowling?’ and ‘Have you written any books like Captain Underpants?’ and ‘I don’t like the cover of this book. It’s too yellow. Do you have a pink book?’

As a teacher, what advice do you give to young writers who are struggling to find their own voice?

I tell them to read a lot, to be patient, to read some more, to write a lot, to rewrite a lot, to talk to people, to connect, to volunteer, to seek out experience, to try and see the virtual world as one possible source of excitement and not the entire world.

You have done a lot of translating in recent years. What stoked this interest, and what determines your choice of texts? Has translating changed you in any way as a reader and as a writer?

I always say that I wish other people would translate so that I could just sit back and enjoy what comes out in other languages around the world and in India. Now, around the globe, things seem to have sorted themselves out for the Anglophone world. Is there a book on early on-set Parkinson’s disease in German? It’s available in English. And every writer from Basho to Undset is available in English. But Baluta, a modern-day classic in Marathi, one of the first autobiographies by a Dalit? That had to wait thirty years. So we have so much writing around us but we don’t have enough translators.

So for me this is an urgency because it feeds into my view of a pluralistic diverse India, where we speak so many languages and live in so many different ways and we learn each day in the living of it how much we need to do to keep this wonderful country going. I began to translate because I was hoping to be a bridge-builder. That’s what translation does: it builds a bridge between two linguistic islands. Yes, languages are never islands; the bilingual already form footpaths at low tide between them and the sea around cross-fertilises them but permit me my metaphor.

What are the challenges in translating (especially translating a potentially controversial book like Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue), compared to doing your own writing?

Right now, Jai, it seems as if every book is potentially controversial, no? Anyone might be offended. Anyone can sue. Anyone can take offense. Anyone can rouse a community by saying, ‘S/he’s insulting us’ even when that Anyone hasn’t even read the book. So every act of bookmaking is now fraught with peril but how else will we fight the peril but with each act of civilization?

Right now the book I am translating is Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha by Swadesh Deepak. Deepak was a magnificent playwright whose Court Martial was performed across the country, in Kolkata and in Mumbai and in Delhi. He had a serious mental problem and tried to kill himself. He spent seven years in an agony of silence and fear. And then when he recovered, on the urging of his friends, he wrote Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha. When I heard of this book—his son Sukant Deepak is one of the contributors to my anthology Book of Light—I was fascinated and when I read it I was completely enthralled. There is such a strange quality to the book; it has all the hallmarks of great writing and great mental unease. I have read nothing like it in any other language. Here is a bridge, I thought, a bridge between Hindi and English, a bridge between the world of those who are seen as mentally healthy and those who are seen as mentally unwell, a multipurpose bridge beautiful and ugly and mysterious and built at great personal cost.

How great a cost? After it was published, Swadesh Deepak rose one day and went for his morning walk and never came back. He has been missing since.

You told me once that you write on paper and then get it transcribed. Is that still the case? What for you are the advantages of such an approach?

My first draft is always hand-written because this helps me in a number of ways. I can type very fast and that isn’t always a good way to write: fast. I like to think I am part of the slow writing movement as I start work with pen and paper. I like to think that this gives me time to consider the line forming in my head before it is set down on paper.

I know it has taken you forever to get a smartphone. Are you becoming more tech-savvy, in terms of writing/editing a piece on a phone or some other infernal little device?

There’s a great section in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen and Alice have been running and running and when they stop, they’re in the same place.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

All I can say is I am from a slow sort of country.

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[My review of Em and the Big Hoom is here]

Quotes from the bestseller machine

[My latest Forbes Life column, with selections from the "Craft of the Bestseller" session I moderated at JLF this January]

If you attend the Jaipur Literature Festival – in whatever capacity, as author, journalist or star-struck reader – you expect to pick up lots of quotable quotes: erudite, highbrow ones, certainly, but a few ear-popping ones too. I didn’t have to venture far this year. During a session I was moderating, the words came at me from just two feet away. The other people on the panel were saying them, and most of the audience was cheering in response.

The session was titled “The Craft of the Bestseller” and here are two quotes – both by suave, hugely popular fiction writers – that I thought particularly intriguing:

“Solitude distracts me.”
This was from Ravi Subramanian, author of a successful trilogy of thrillers about bankers and banking. It was a part-response to a question I had asked: does the new generation of “mass-market” authors follow the accepted wisdom that writing is essentially a solitary profession? Or do they see it as more of a communal endeavour?

“I have never been a reader. I hadn’t read any book before I wrote my first novel.”
This from Ravinder Singh, whose bestsellers include I Too Had a Love Story and Can Love Happen Twice? and who was one of the festival’s rock-star-like celebrities; groupies threw themselves at him, demanded selfies, and cooed away during the question-and-answer sessions.

Before returning to these two proclamations, I should mention that I was the odd man out on this session – being not just that dreaded animal, a “critic”, but also the author of books about old cinema, which don’t have a hope of selling anywhere near the numbers that Singh and Subramanian are accustomed to. For me, “bestseller” means 4,000 or 5,000 sold copies of a book; for these writers, 50,000 copies might be perceived as a letdown. So, when I was asked to anchor the conversation, I realized it would involve playing Devil’s Advocate. I’m not a literary snob: my favourite authors include many genre writers like Stephen King, Agatha Christie and Thomas Harris, all of whom have reached very large readerships; as a film critic too, I constantly defend the value of good mainstream films, and my latest book is dedicated to viewers “who are smart enough to take popular cinema seriously”. But at the same time I’m also uncomfortable about some of the narratives that have grown around mass-market writing in India – such as the inverse snobbery on view when bestselling writers scoff at “pretentious” literary types and wonder why anyone would waste six or seven years writing a “heavy” book full of “complicated” words.

And so, during the conversation, while I was genuinely interested in the thoughts and approaches of the panelists (especially Anuja Chauhan – author of The Zoya Factor and Those Pricey Thakur Girls – whose work I rate higher than Singh’s or Subramanian’s), there was some wariness too. A few days before the festival began, I had received a publisher’s press release about the session. “The creators of the hottest pop fiction and romance in recent times,” it said, “will discuss the making of best-selling authors and the transition of an author from being the ‘khadi-clad, jhola-walla’ introverts to the current stylish (sic), and socially connected with their fans.” The phrasing, with its patronising attitude to “jhola-wallah introverts”, threw me back to my childhood days and the bullying one experienced from gregarious uncles who would say things like “Arre, what is this introvert-shintrovert rubbish? A child should be outgoing and friendly.”

Which brings me to Ravi Subramianan’s quote about solitude being counter-productive for him. A lot of his best work, he says, is done while sitting at the table with his family – wife, kids – around him, talking or laughing, and maybe with the TV on in the background. Put him in a room, alone, and his creative juices would probably dry up.

Some people might scoff at this sort of admission, especially if they don’t have much regard for the work of the “mass-market” writer who is saying it. But one would also do well to remember that writing has not always been about temperamental artists residing in ivory towers and shutting the world out. The modern novelistic form, from the 19th century onwards, may lend itself to that approach, but there has been a long literary tradition – from the bards of old to the addas of more recent ages – that has involved communal interaction, creating stories through discussion, moving gradually from oral to written storytelling.

In this context, one should note that some of the “mass-market” writers of today are co-writing books (see Durjoy Datta and Nikita Singh, for instance) or otherwise mentoring younger writers – and if done with integrity, this can mean a welcome new egalitarianism in Indian publishing. Ravinder Singh has recently worn multiple hats. He has edited an anthology titled Tell me a Story, made up of stories submitted by previously unpublished writers, about a defining event in their lives. He has also started his own imprint called Black Ink, and books published by it routinely have “Ravinder Singh Presents” on the cover, above even the name of their actual authors!

This is a notable strategy – and shows business acumen – but it also raises a question that brings me back to Singh’s Jaipur quote, mentioned earlier in this piece. Shouldn’t an author, who is also now doubling up as an editor and “producer” of books, have something of a reading history?

Singh has been upfront about the fact that he had never read a book before he wrote one (his first novel was written as an outlet for his grief over his girlfriend’s death in an accident). But perhaps “upfront” is the wrong word, since it implies being confessional; the fact is that Singh, like many others of his generation, is almost boastful about becoming a “writer” without ever having been a “reader”.

And this is discomfiting, because it is inseparable from the question of a writer’s abilities. When you start reading from an early age, not only do you develop certain standards, you also realise how much good work has already been done. And it makes you humble – it might even make you diffident about your own work, which can be a problem. But at least it prevents you from being cocky and overconfident and thinking “I think I have a great story to tell, and the world is just waiting for my book; literature begins with me.”

During our session, I asked Singh the obvious question: if you don’t read yourself, on what basis do you expect others to read your books? I didn’t get a coherent response.

[Two related posts: the end of pretension in publishing? and Chetan Bhagat and the other mass-market writers]

Nitpicking about a piece on Oscar-winning actors

Happened to read this piece about "10 actors who won Oscars for the wrong movie". I know this is the sort of lightweight list thingie you’re supposed to just glance though and not analyse (and it was probably written to a brief because of the Leo DiCaprio hullabaloo this year), but being in a nitpicking mood I was amused by the contemporary-film bias on view here. (By “contemporary film" I mean pretty much anything from the 1970s onward.) Not such a big issue overall, but look at this patronising bit in the entry for Henry Fonda:

As far as performances of the time go, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad rivals the best of Brando and Dean, with 'Grapes of Wrath' acting as a cornerstone for realism in cinema and novel adaptations, the idea that Henry was robbed of the award when the winner that year’s performance has all but faded into distant memory seems shocking in the modern eye.

From this, one may gather that:

1) Brando-like “realism” is the main standard to aspire to (I’ll leave poor James Dean out of this - doesn’t seem fair to compare his truncated career with that of heavyweights like Fonda and Brando)
 
Very dubious assertion, to put it politely. Also, perceptions of realism are massively subjective and change with each decade: a case can be made that the best work of old-school actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper now looks more natural than Brando’s showy understatement in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (even though one can see why his performances were so energising and zeitgeist-defining in the early 50s).

2) This "realism”, which is so appealing to “the modern eye”, automatically makes Fonda’s Tom Joad his best performance
 
(I wonder what the writer would feel about his pratfall-and-double-take-filled turn as the dopey comic foil in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a film that was gloriously unconcerned with being “real” in the Grapes of Wrath sense.)

3) The actual best actor winner for 1940 is now practically forgotten
 
Um, no, not if you know anything about old cinema. That winner was James Stewart as the reporter in The Philadelphia Story - a super performance in an all-time classic. (Pssst: I thought Cary Grant in the same film was even better - and predictably he wasn’t even nominated - but that’s another debate.)

Speaking of which, Stewart himself should have been a frontrunner on this list, because most people felt his win for a second-lead role in The Philadelphia Story was intended as compensation for not winning for Mr Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. But it’s all about the “modern eye”…

On Aligarh, Carol, rear-window ethics, and a love that whispers its name

[My latest Mint Lounge column]

Spend a few minutes in a hall showing Todd Haynes’s Carol, then move to one where Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh is playing, and you’ll see two very different-looking films. The first, which earned an Oscar nomination for Cate Blanchett, is lush, full of soft warm colours, and is not just set in the early 1950s – being based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt – but bears a visual resemblance to the melodramas made in that decade by Douglas Sirk (a director whom Haynes has quoted before). Mehta’s film – built around the rhythms of small-town India and a tour de force performance by Manoj Bajpayee – looks much starker, apart from a lovely, languid opening sequence where a rickshaw emerges through a nighttime haze.

On the other hand, if you closed your eyes and listened to each film for a while, you’d feel the similarities in the sound design. In both, some of the most important scenes have a hushed quality and you have to strain to listen: if you are sufficiently immersed (and assuming you are not the caterwauling buffoons in my row during the Carol screening, who seemed to think they had bought tickets for Batman vs Superman), you lean forward in your seat, forget to crunch your popcorn – and this in turn makes the louder moments, the short bursts of physical or verbal violence, even more effective.

Both narratives involve homosexuality in societies where a veil is drawn over such relationships. In Carol, an affluent married woman faces allegations of improper conduct, and the possibility of losing custody of her child, because of her relationship with a young salesgirl; the lawyers’ discussions are euphemistic because they can barely bring themselves to even acknowledge this form of love, much less “speak its name”. Aligarh is about an elderly professor, Siras, being hounded and losing his job after he is caught in a compromising position with a rickshaw-driver – the codes of “propriety” and “shame” here aren’t far removed from the world of Carol 65 years earlier in another country. But equally, both stories are as much about loneliness as about love, and how the two things are linked: when you find that vital bond with another person, a bond that can encompass friendship and affection (“mera friend” is what Siras insists on calling the driver) as well as physical attraction, does it matter that the relationship isn’t convention-approved?

In each case, the transgressing lovers are subjected to a sting operation (Carol’s husband hires a detective to audio-record her trysts), a demonstration of how private spaces and actions can quickly become public, how a prurient society can bully those who don’t conform – and this contrast between private and public life is stressed visually in each film. Aligarh begins with Siras returning to his flat with the man who shares his bed, the camera lingering at a fixed distance outside the building, watching lights going on and off in windows, before the outside world bursts in on them. Carol has similar exterior shots, including one that reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, one of the great films about voyeurism and the ethics of peering into other people’s houses. (This isn’t a far-out association, by the way: the Carol scene is set in Greenwich Village, which was also the location for Rear Window’s famous building façade, many little dramas taking place behind many little windows. Besides, Hitch made a wonderful film of Patricia Highsmith’s first novel Strangers on a Train in 1951. But more on him in a bit.)

And yet, in both films the inner spaces – where people grapple with their own feelings and identities before they can participate in a larger battle for equal rights or social acceptance – are ultimately more important. In Carol, the salesgirl Therese is unable at first to process what she is getting into – are such things even possible, you can hear her asking herself, as her relationship with the more experienced woman deepens. Siras in Aligarh has a poetic-idealistic attitude – he speaks of love as a transcendental force that resists labels – but there is also a hint of a provincial conservatism, of a man who recoils from words like “gay” and questions like “Was he your lover?” or “Did your wife leave you because of your sexual preferences?” He seems to blush when confronted along these lines by a sympathetic, city-bred reporter (who is generally more comfortable talking about sex, and probably feels like his candour would be refreshing for the hounded professor), and he is not “enlightened” in the way that liberals who fight for LGBT rights might want him to be. His English is halting, he isn’t conditioned to speak politically correct language: he has to be corrected when he uses “a gay” in a sentence. He doesn’t see himself as a poster-boy for a cause, and is startled that other people – strangers! – are signing petitions supporting him.

The film includes images from a Gay Pride parade in Delhi – young people wearing their sexuality on their sleeve, two girls kissing each other for the camera – and exhilarating as these scenes are for anyone who cares about minority rights, I thought about the large gulf between the worlds of these youngsters and the world of the reticent professor. What would he make of all this? How would he feel if he had been taken to the parade and asked to make a public display of affection for a camera – the very instrument that had been the medium for his humiliation?

Watching Siras, I also thought about another academic who, being from a more permissive society, led a respected life despite being openly gay – but who had once struggled a great deal with his sexuality. In a piece titled “The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s Homophobia”, one of the finest combinations of personal essay and film analysis I have read, the critic Robin Wood discussed the self-loathing he experienced early in his life, and how he became obsessed with a character in Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) at age 17 without consciously realizing that the film had a gay subtext. (“The identification was largely masochistic, and tended to reinforce all my negative attitudes toward myself […] Yet no other film had given me a character with whom I could identify in quite that way.”) Wood ended the essay with the provocative suggestion that the act of murder jointly committed by the film’s protagonists was a sort of vicious response to the “stigma” surrounding them – and that society was ultimately responsible for the crime.

Aligarh ends with another sort of crime, a suicide that can be seen as an act of protest in the face of mounting hostility. As the screen fades to black the indelible image is that of Siras rising in his bed, disoriented, calling out “Kaun?” to the darkness around him. Perhaps he has had a nightmare where people are again bursting into his house with cameras? Or perhaps he is calling out to us, to the society that has judged and destroyed him and is now watching his story from the safe anonymity of a movie hall. Unlike Robin Wood – and unlike the two women in Carol – the idealistic professor didn’t get the happy ending he deserved.

[Related posts: Patricia Highsmith's short stories; Hansal Mehta's Shahid; and a tribute to Robin Wood]

“Venom, to thy work!” How Agatha Christie committed her murders

[Did this review for Scroll]

I don’t know what the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot would make of noisy, crowded, grimy Ludhiana, but it was in that city 27 years ago, over the course of an unforgettable summer afternoon, that I became acquainted with his skills. The occasion was a fortnight-long family reunion involving aunts and cousins, to which my main contribution was corrupting the younger children with Friday the 13th videocassettes. Then one day, while the others settled in to their siesta, I settled down with my very first Agatha Christie novel Murder in Retrospect (original title Five Little Pigs, as I learnt much later).

All these years later this still counts among my most intense reading experiences: by the time I reached the last page I was spooked, afraid to turn my head even though it was daytime and street sounds were drifting through the curtained windows (not to mention the snores from adjacent rooms). The image that most haunted me was the one of an artist painting his muse in the final hours of his life, unaware, at least at first, that he was dying; that a slow-moving poison was working its way up to his heart. At what point did awareness come, if it came at all, for poor lovelorn Amyas Crale – a few minutes before the end, when paralysis had set in, or only in the final seconds?

Vivid though my memories of Murder in Retrospect were, I didn’t remember, until I read Kathryn Harkup’s A is for Arsenic, that the poison in Christie’s novel was coniine, extracted from hemlock – the same plant that was also famously used in Socrates’s death in 399 BC. Nor did I know that Christie’s choice of killing method was a carefully thought-out one, based on the nature of the story and the time-frames involved.

If, as the cliché has it, you should write the book that only you and no one else can write, then A is for Arsenic, subtitled “The Poisons of Agatha Christie”, might be described as a near-perfect marriage of author and subject. Harkup, her profile tells us, is a chemist, an Agatha Christie fanatic, and a “freelance science communicator, specializing in the quirkier side of science”. This put her in a very good position to author a work that – whimsically and thrillingly – combines popular science and trivia with a form of literary commentary. She looks closely at fourteen of the poisons used in Christie’s novels and short stories, from well-known ones like cyanide, strychnine and phosphorus to relatively obscure ones like monkshood (a saintly name for Aconitum variegatum) and ricin (lethal in tiny doses, less than 1 mg being enough to kill an adult human). While discussing the part they play in the stories, she also casts her net wider by providing contextual information about the poisons – their history, effects, symptoms, antidotes, molecular makeups, real-life cases involving their use.

This means the book has many balls in the air: to enjoy it in its entirety, to read each page with enthusiasm – as opposed to glossing over a few pages every now and again – you have to be an Agatha Christie buff while also having some aptitude for technical explanations of biological and chemical processes. Though a keen reader of popular science, I couldn’t always keep up with some of the stuff about chemicals and alkazoids. Sentences like “Myasthenia gravis patients produce antibodies circulating in the body that block acetylcholine receptors” and “Ricin is a toxalbumin, a poisonous protein formed from two chains, A and B, which are linked by a single bond between two atoms of sulfur” are unlikely to produce a throb of excitement unless you were paying closer attention than I was during chemistry classes in school.

What helps, though, is that Harkup never dwells on the heavy stuff for long; she intersperses it with juicy trivia or speculation. How intriguing it is to hear that digitalis – an extract from the foxglove plant – might have played a part in the halo-like sheen associated with the paintings in Vincent Van Gogh’s “yellow period”. Or that the use of arsenic-based dyes in wallpaper – common in the 19th century – may have contributed to Napoleon’s death. Or that rats in lab tests had to be physically stopped from pressing levers to enjoy nicotine’s effects, because it was keeping them from eating or sleeping. There are also droll stories such as the one about a defence lawyer doomed to be known as “Apple-pips Kelly” for the rest of his career because he committed the gaffe of suggesting that a murder victim had died after accidentally ingesting cyanide from apple pips. (Thousands of such pips would have had to be eaten – and well-chewed too – for this to happen.)

Agatha Christie, with her training as an apothecary’s assistant during the First World War, was careful with the facts while detailing poison use – even in novels where much detail wasn’t required – but Harkup mentions the rare occasions where she got something wrong: for example, in the short story “The House of Lurking Death”, a victim is bumped off with a dose of ricin in a cocktail; but in reality, the high alcohol content would have led the protein to unfold, losing much of its potency. Even here, though, Christie’s mistake can be pardoned given that when she wrote the story not very much was known about this poison, and there wasn’t even a test available to identify its presence.

Harkup keeps her own book as spoiler-free as possible, but her plot discussions sometimes let slip a little too much information. Ocassionally a spoiler alert is provided: while discussing Sad Cypress (“O is for Opium”), Harkup warns us that she has to disclose the murderer’s identity, because “explaining how a poisoner can kill only one person at a lunch where three people ate the same food, without revealing the murderer, would result in some very convoluted descriptions”. Which is fine: you can easily skip the last three pages of that chapter and return to them after reading Sad Cypress. But things get a little trickier elsewhere, as in the chapter “D is for Digitalis”, which deals with another of my favourite Christie novels, Appointment with Death: there is no spoiler warning here since Harkup doesn’t actually name the murderer, but the last two paragraphs of the chapter give the reader crucial information that helps in eliminating a large number of suspects.

Which means you have to be careful while reading this book. But that’s a small price to pay for such an engaging ride. Being a true-crime buff (in addition to a Christie fan), I particularly enjoyed the references to poisonings of the past: such as the 1850 murder of Gustave Fougnies by his brother-in-law and sister (this story shows that committing and covering up a murder, even when you’re using a non-bloody method like poisoning, and even when you do it in the privacy of your large chateau, can be a messy and risky business); or the labours of psychotic Graham Young who killed his stepmother – thallium was his weapon of choice – as a 15-year-old, and after his release from psychiatric hospital dedicated himself to poisoning one person for each year that he had been incarcerated.

These nasty anecdotes are reminders that with all her attention to detail and meticulous plotting, the Queen of Crime was – at least in the gruesomeness stakes – often upstaged by real life. That apart, Harkup’s book will almost certainly deepen your appreciation for the spadework and thought that went into the breeziest Agatha Christie thriller.

[Related post: murder in collaboration]

Impossible is nothing: three wise men write a book about Amar Akbar Anthony

[Did this piece for the Hindu Literary Review]

Manmohan Desai’s 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved entertainments, can be viewed through different lenses. Many see it as pure escapism, or “great trash”, to use Pauline Kael’s phrase – a mix of all the ingredients and sauces that go into the best mainstream movies, with Desai’s zaniness adding a special flavour. Another way is to acknowledge the film’s subtexts while keeping the level of analysis very basic: one might, for instance, say that the story – about three brothers separated as children, brought up as a Hindu, Muslim and Christian, and reunited at the end – is about national integration, as much of the director’s other work was. Saying only this much though can make the “message” seem so obvious and naïve that most viewers wouldn’t even care to think about it – they would take it as a given and get on to the real business of enjoying the film as eye-popping spectacle.

But it’s also possible to go much further than a surface reading, and Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation – co-written by the academics William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke and Andy Rotman – is among the most in-depth books you’ll read about a single Hindi film. The authors’ fields of specialization include religion, anthropology and international studies, and their knowledge of Indian culture and history is evident throughout this book: arguments and analyses are supported by heaps of contextual information and references. Most notably, here is a scholarly work about a popular film that also tries to mimic something of the film’s controlled lunacy, winking at itself every now and again. The playfulness begins with the fact that it is jointly written by three men who go their own ways and (sort of) unite in the end.

Their chief structural decision is to divide the main text into four long chapters: each of the first three makes a case for a particular brother as the story’s hero, and uses the argument to suggest a worldview contained in the film, while the fourth hands the stage to their mother; Bharati (Nirupa Roy) is often seen as a pathetic figure with almost no agency or personality, but is given an intriguing new dimension here (and even a voice). In the framing that thus emerges, Amar (Vinod Khanna) the eldest, “Hindu brother” who grows up to be an upright policeman – the cop who never uses his gun; who, in fact, buries it in the ground in an early scene when he is still a child, to hide it from his younger brother – can be seen as a benevolent patriarch of sorts, the centre of Desai’s moral universe. (The director was apparently no fan of Lord Krishna, and may have needed a primmer, Rama-like figure to perform this role.)

Akbar (Rishi Kapoor), on the other hand, is presented as a lifter of veils, and not just in the specific terms offered in the “Parda hai Parda” sequence; as the authors point out, he repeatedly speaks (or sings) truth to power, and plays a part in all but one of the film’s musical numbers, being the sole singer for three of the most epiphanic ones. He also, and this can come as a surprise, appears in nearly twice as many scenes as Amar does. An aside here: for many boys of my generation, the dreamy-eyed Kapoor was the third wheel in Amar Akbar Anthony, with the more “manly” actors, Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, being closer to our image of the masala-movie hero (besides being serious rivals in the 1970s superstardom race). But I think Akbar becomes more interesting when you’re a grown-up viewer, and one of the things this book did for me personally was to convince me that he is more central to the film than my memories suggested.

Oddly enough, the case for Anthony being the real hero was the one that seemed vaguest to me – or perhaps all the talk about the character being the intermediary or “fixer” who contains multitudes (while also revealing things about the Christian community in India) seemed superfluous; surely, all you need to do is to point out that he was played by Bachchan, and end the argument there!

Apart from analyzing the heroes and their Maa, the authors examine the use of geographical spaces in a film where the word “Bombay” is never spoken, but where landmarks like the Borivali Park and Bandra’s Koliwada are central to this narrative about loss, diversity and reunion; they look at how cinema interacts with its audience, changing meaning as it moves from one demographic to another (there are references to a mass-communications professor sending students out to interview lower-class people and finding that they didn’t think Amar Akbar Anthony was “unrealistic”); and they take on critics of the time who dismissed the film without engaging with its internal logic, the “honee” within the “anhonee”. 

Not being primarily concerned with the director’s intentions (even as they do try to make sense of how the film fits into the larger canvas of Desai’s career, extending back to the 1960 Chhalia), they frequently step outside the film’s diegesis too: for example, while examining the relationship between Amar and the woman whom he “rehabilitates” and marries, Lakshmi, the characters are looked at as stand-ins for the actors – Khanna and Shabana Azmi – who play them: “It brings a Muslim woman into a Hindu family, an icon of leftist parallel cinema into mainstream Bollywood entertainment, a social activist into a proto-Hindutva world…”

Many readers would term this sort of thing “over-analysis” (and be warned, the next subhead in the “Amar” chapter is “The Buried Gun: Disciplined Celibacy and Muscular Hinduism”!) but it mostly worked for me, not just because the arguments – whether or not you agree with them – are well made, but also because the authors aren’t trying to provide confident “solutions” to the “riddle” of Amar Akbar Anthony; they are raising questions and possibilities, opening windows to new ways of looking, not just at the film but the society it emerged from. Each of them has approached the subject with “selective blinders”, as in the fable of the blind men and the elephant: “This is not a book with a single cohesive argument; it is, we hope, a book with many cohesive arguments that also happen to be contradictory”.

Needless to say, it isn’t for casual movie fans, and even serious readers are likely to encounter little spots where their eyes glaze over. (For me, it happened around the point where Bharati’s repeated ailments – from tuberculosis to blindness – are linked with goddess-possession.) Still, I would rather a book erred in that direction – reading layers of meaning into every scene, but doing it with affection and seriousness of purpose – than in the one where movies are divided into easy binaries like “meaningful” and “entertaining”, as too often happens in our criticism.

P.S. Even if you have seen the film recently, or remember it well, I recommend you start by reading the lengthy “synopsis” in the Appendix – and not just for utilitarian reasons but for the pleasure of it: this is a sharply written 45-page delight that will also prepare you for the more detailed observations in the main text of the book. Here are some samples, starting with part of the description of the “My Name is Anthony Gonsalves” sequence:

“Singing of his uniqueness and consequent aloneness, the egg-hatched foundling boy woos his lady on the dance floor […] he wields his umbrella like a magician’s prop, struts around in a state of levitation, and somehow conjures up a condition in which he and Jenny end up racing toward each other in dreamy slow motion while Zabisko stands by frozen and all the others dance on at normal speed.”

****

“On a deserted shore a line of smugglers are hard at work offloading contraband. One struggling coolie, clad in a white servant’s uniform, is tripped up by a smartly booted foot. Surprise! In the menial position is Robert, and the new chief racketeer, resplendent in the ensemble of dark suit, red waistcoat, and red Teddy Boy suit last seen on Robert, is none other than the beneficiary of his ill-gotten gains, Kishenlal himself.”

****

“Allah be praised, Brother Anthony! The folksy and unmistakably Muslim figure who approaches, marked by his skullcap and lungi wrap, is the boyish Akbar. In a pleasantry that draws on the civic rhetoric of the Indira era, he compliments the kingpin on the success of his neighborhood cleanup drive.”

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[Some other recent posts about film books: Smita Patil; V Shantaram; Gaata Rahe Mera Dil; Funky Bollywood; Bollywood and the Anglophone Nation]

A social network and a sharp knife: on Arun Krishnan's Antisocial

[Did this review for Business Line newspaper]

Early in Arun Krishnan's novel Antisocial, the narrator-protagonist Arjun Clarkson is quoting a Buddhist sermon for the edification of a woman bartender. She listens intently at first, intrigued by talk of “bodily sensations on fire”, but as Arjun drones on about more abstract things, she loses interest. “She had begun to fidget,” he tells us, with apparent relish, “She twisted her hair anxiously into knots of the hangman’s rope. I felt calm and equanimous. I enjoy watching the insides of people fill up with unease and anger, even as they are listening to the words of the Buddha. It is the most benevolent way by which one can cause pain to others.”

As it happens, Arjun – who works in an advertising agency in New York – will soon find more gruesome ways of causing pain. His first murder is committed in an unplanned burst of violence, spurred by demons from his past, but then things spiral quickly: one crime leads to (and necessitates) another, and he sets about bending the American dream of “Yes, we can” to his own purposes. Killing becomes an addiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It also becomes a way of hitting out at the impersonality and the hypocrisies of the social-media age… while working with the very tools of that age. The initial murder is an indirect result of Arjun’s ability – via the ubiquitous online network MyFace – to track the movements of an ex-colleague, a woman he has a crush on. MyFace, a barely disguised version of Facebook, is the book’s other protagonist, a Big Brother monitoring the actions and movements of hundreds of millions of people, and Arjun’s homicidal spree might be said to involve both collaboration and defiance: what could be a more intimate, more immediate way of “connecting” – reestablishing the human touch – than to thrust a real knife into the real, soft flesh of a real person?

So this thriller is, in part, a comment on a world where privacy and anonymity are always fading. But overemphasizing that aspect of the story might mean treating Arjun as a cipher and ignoring his very particular qualities. He quotes the Buddha often (not just when he wants to torture listeners) and wears T-shirts advertising his beliefs, but we can tell from the start that something is off, that a time-bomb is ticking away. He reminded me a little of the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho – a bonafide psychopath or someone with a rich inner life, using fantasy to cope with the moral decay around him? Notwithstanding his name, he also has some of the markers of a modern-day Karna, the Mahabharata anti-hero who is mentioned in the book: full of anger because of his inability to belong, lashing out at the world while simultaneously trying to fit into it, using skill with weaponry to carve out a place for himself.

This is a suspenseful narrative, its urgency growing as Arjun’s potential victims – including the one person who is genuinely sympathetic to him, a girlfriend named Michelle – drift in and out of view, and as his encounters with a sceptical detective become edgier. The prose is somewhat clunky in places (“I stepped on the staircase. It had been lying undisturbed. Now, it resented being woken up. It creaked and complained with a long, drawn-out sound”), but I couldn’t always tell if this was a shortcoming in the writing or a way of conveying Arjun’s solemn awkwardness – whichever the case, the voice does fit the character. One gets the impression he is learning the mores, manners and rituals of American society as if by rote; he offers us little observations about the world he moves in (“If you give a signal that it is all right to be politically incorrect, white businessmen feel more relaxed. They chuckle. They even chortle. They like you more”). But he is also an outsider in a wider sense: he has trouble relating to people in general, and there is something mechanical about his attempts to be warm and social – consider a scene near the end where he speaks to a little boy, or the one where he reads an email from Michelle after they spent the night together, and wonders if “Thanks for the sexual intercourse last night” would be an apt reply. “Or perhaps, this was an occasion that called for a more informal communication: ‘Thanks for the sex.” Would that be the gentlemanly thing to do? I hadn’t read anything or overheard any conversation that would help cast some light on this matter.”

Here and elsewhere, Arjun emphasises the importance of always being a gentleman, but he is not a suave, controlled killer in the league of, say, Hannibal Lecter – his calm surface seems to conceal waves of hysteria. Eventually, though, there are signs that he is feeling more comfortable in his own skin. The book has as its epigraph lyrics from the song “Mack the Knife” – lines about an underdog with a lethal concealed weapon that he uses against a formidable adversary, the “shark”. By the end, it is clear that this Mack is spreading his net wider and looking for new sharks he can – to use social-networking parlance – “poke”. No wonder all those MyFace stocks are plummeting.

Hrishi-da and Guddi at JNU

Anyone in Delhi on March 16 who is interested in watching Guddi and/or listening to me pontificate about “the world of Hrishikesh Mukherjee”, please do come for a screening + talk at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, starting at 2 pm. Here is the link to the event page on Facebook. (It says 17.00-18.30 at the top of the page, but the correct details are provided further down.)

Little heroes and other patriots - thoughts on Neerja and Airlift

[My latest Mint Lounge column]

The first two months of 2016 have brought us a surprisingly large number of films with either “Ishq” or “Love” in the title (none of which I have yet seen), as well as adult comedies (plural!) starring Tusshar Kapoor. But there have also been two tightly crafted movies based on real-life events from close to three decades ago: Ram Madhvani’s Neerja, about the courage shown by flight purser Neerja Bhanot during the 1986 Pan Am hijack, and Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift, about the mass evacuation of 1.7 lakh Indians from war-torn Kuwait in 1990. Both films did a fine job of recreating time and place and, as far as I can tell, stayed close to the broad facts (though the Airlift plot was a highly simplified one, and its businessman-turned-saviour protagonist Ranjit Katyal was a rough composite of two people).

There are differences in the specifics of the stories – one might flippantly note that Neerja is about a group of people badly wanting to get off a plane, while Airlift is about a (much larger) group of people yearning to get on one – but both involve claustrophobic spaces and fear so potent you can smell it in the air. They also contain material that could, in the hands of other writers or directors, have been manipulated in the direction of speech-making about national duty. This is truer of Airlift, in which a money-minded NRI – who had turned his eyes away from his home country – becomes, to his own surprise, a sort of Oskar Schindler, or even a Moses, for his compatriots. While watching it, I kept anticipating the big moment calculated to bring a tear to the eyes of those who wear their patriotism on their sleeve (and dreading that there would be a prolonged scene with the national anthem, requiring all of us in the hall to either stand up like obedient sheep or be made to feel like desh-drohis), but though there is a suspenseful moment involving the unfurling of the flag, it is done matter-of-factly; the intimate narrative is put before the grand one.

The Neerja story, you might think, wouldn’t have lent itself to such treatment anyway, but consider the basic plot – an Indian air-hostess helps people of multiple nationalities who are stranded on Pakistani soil – and imagine what a fictionalized version could have done with it. It’s notable then that both films, though clearly tempted at times, keep steering away from the big picture. The heroism they depict is from the Frodo Baggins school, beginning in such small ways that you barely register it: a young woman with a turbulent relationship in her past and a love for inspirational dialogues from Rajesh Khanna films develops a kinship with three nervous kids; a businessman, making hurried arrangements for his own family to escape, happens to glance at one of his employees – someone he has barely noticed before – who is asking “What will happen to us?”

In these scenes, one sees how the simple matter of connecting with another person can lead to big deeds; the films are about “ordinary” people discovering new reserves of humanity in themselves. At the time of writing this, I haven’t seen Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, but his earlier Shahid – about the lawyer-activist Shahid Azmi – was another such film, with a protagonist who fights the good fight not as a superhero but as a flesh-and-blood man who can’t always look his wife in the eye when she confronts him (much like Ranjit’s wife does in Airlift) about his responsibility to keep himself safe.

One reason I have been thinking about “small” heroes – people who had little desire in the first place to be heroic, or to be thrust into a situation that required heroism – is because we are surrounded by large-picture narratives these days. In the wake of the JNU arrests, there has been plenty of talk extolling our duties and loyalties towards this huge thing called the Nation, and the celebration of a much more exalted form of heroism, the sort that is pre-packaged and tied up to unquestioning allegiance. It includes the idea that war – if you do it in the name of country – is innately noble, almost independently of context. And that questioning the sanctity of these ideals or murats is in itself wrong. Or seditious.

Many people I know admire films like Shahid, Neerja and Airlift because they are “gritty”, “understated”, “real”, and represent another step away from the excesses of older Hindi cinema. But hyper-drama and grandstanding are vital parts of the human condition too, and if these low-key films refuse to give us that particular form of catharsis, then non-fiction TV has been taking up the role with gusto. Consider the rabble-rousing and dialogue-baazi in the parliamentary-session telecasts. Or the widely watched news-channel show where a veteran army-man wept because of the “disrespect” being shown to the national flag, after which we got to hear a solicitous audio recording in the voice of HRD minister Smriti Irani – all of this calibrated for maximum emotional effect, stoking the nationalistic sentiments of people who already subscribed to the view that physical violence in the premises of a Delhi court was a reasonable response to words spoken out loud in a university campus.

As indicated in earlier columns, I have plenty of time for the (well-made) melodramatic film which performs a very different function from the quiet, subdued one. In the current climate, though, with news anchors and politicians doing the declamatory things that Sohrab Modi and his inheritors once did on the big screen, it’s a relief to watch a film about a more tentative, even reluctant heroism that isn’t tied to the idea of one’s country being the best, just because one happened to be born in it. A heroism that grows to become something meaningful and inclusive. Who would argue that Neerja Bhanot and Ranjit Katyal, as depicted in these films, weren’t in the final analysis great patriots – if that word is to have any worth?

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[A long piece about Hansal Mehta's Shahid is here. And here's a post about one of our most celebrated filmic patriots, Manoj Kumar]