Highlights, apart from the talk and the readings, included a terrific saxophone performance by Tissa Khosla (Umi’s son) of “Mack the Knife” -- a song that was composed in Germany in the 1920s, a time when Irawati Karve was working there (measuring skulls because she was expected to prove the superior reasoning skills of white people; her research led to no such conclusion, and it nearly cost her a PhD and got her into trouble).
I also enjoyed the points that Umi made about the many contradictions and complexities in her grandmother’s personality (feminist in one context, seemingly not so much in another; with traces of both irreligiosity and religiosity), her ability to change her views over time — and how each generation feels the previous generation didn’t do enough in the name of progressiveness.
Have begun reading the book and am enjoying it - fast-paced, clear and thoughtfully written even when dealing with weighty subjects (and therefore “fun” even while dealing with morbid things).
On a related note: it often happens, when you’re reading books and watching films close to each other, that unexpected little connections arise between two unrelated texts. A recent example: in my new screening space in Panchshila Park last week, I watched the Oscar-nominated Danish film The Girl with a Needle, full of stark and haunting black-and-white frames – none more so than the images of the protagonist’s husband, who has returned home after being badly mutilated in the first World War (the film is set in 1919-20). And then, yesterday, I read in the Karve biography about Karve’s daily glimpse of just such a man, during her commute in 1920s Berlin; see the text here.
(I was also reminded of the two versions -- one filmed in 1919, the other in 1938 -- of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, with the climactic sequence where real-life soldiers, many of them fearfully disfigured, play the role of dead soldiers who have arisen and march like zombies back to their homes…)
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