Sound-shadows and autobiographies - on The Essential Ved Mehta

[Did this review-profile for The Caravan, about a writer I have a lot of regard for (though I find it hard to read too much of his work at one go, for reasons mentioned in the piece). The magazine version is here]

Among the excerpts in the new anthology The Essential Ved Mehta is a passage from the 1982 memoir Vedi, where Mehta recalls his childhood in a school for the blind. The school principal, attempting to gather material on how the inner worlds of visually impaired people differed from those of the sighted, would call the children in by turn and ask them to relate their dreams. Central to the effect of the passage is the reader’s awareness that Ved, having lost his vision at age three, may have a dim memory of colours, and that his reference to a white-and-brown dog has slightly thrown off the principal. But equally vivid is the child’s incentive for “telling a dream” that might prove useful: the reward of a sweet from a jar in the office. He recalls praying that the candy that fell into his hand would be the long-lasting orange one (“if I kept the sweet in the inside of my cheek for some time, it would stamp its sugary impression there, and I could taste the orangy sweetness long after I’d finished”) rather than the lemonish one, which was nice enough but melted quickly.

This collection is a little like that jar, but with the distribution of sweets happily skewed in favour of the orange ones that have lasting value. The few pieces that make for pleasant reading without necessarily lingering in one’s mind afterward are the ones that would have been topical and urgent in their time: an account of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, another piece about the Indian media’s posthumous deification of Sanjay Gandhi, both written for the New Yorker during Mehta’s three-decade-long stint there. But there is much in The Essential Ved Mehta to remind us of what an important writer Mehta has been. The 22 excerpts here, taken from most of his 26 published books, with his introductions putting each piece in context, add up to a fine primer—no mean achievement given the length and whimsicality of a career that has seen Mehta write about such subjects as theology, politics, history and, perhaps most notably and enduringly, about himself.

Mehta turns 80 this March. Exactly 60 years ago, as a student in California, he began writing his first book Face to Face, about his life up to that point: his time at a boarding school (which turned out to be more like an orphanage) in central Bombay’s Dadar, his return to Lahore, his admission—after dozens of unsuccessful applications elsewhere —into the Arkansas School for the Blind, and his moving to the US in 1949, gradually settling into a world where towns and roads were laid out in an orderly way, traffic rules followed, and an unsighted boy had a chance of becoming self-reliant and feeling useful.

Despite the apparent limitedness of its subject, Face to Face now has sufficient heft—both on its own terms and as a drum-roll for a long and honourable career—to have just been republished in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, along with three other Mehta books. It holds up remarkably well as a coming-of-age tale, a record of a family and community affected by Partition, and an account of constantly negotiating the unfamiliar (arriving in Bombay, the barely five-year-old Ved, already disoriented and sad, is addressed first in Marathi, then in English, neither of which he understands; he lands in America 10 years later having not eaten anything on the long flight because of his embarrassment about being unable to use a knife and fork). And there is a “news peg” too, if you insist on one: before he left for the US, 15-year-old Ved was invited to the residence of Prime Minister Nehru, an episode he describes with touching matter-of-factness. “I was the first blind boy, it seemed, who had ever left home to go to America. Panditji, therefore, wanted to see me.”

A memoir begun at age 20 can still seem self-indulgent, and Mehta is upfront about this in a note in the new anthology, recalling his insecurities about his poor English during his student years and confessing that Face to Face was “more than anything, a love letter to my amanuensis while we were both at college … What kept me dictating … was a feeling of urgency to overcome my inadequacies – to prove to her that I was a man worthy of her time and attention.” His confidence would grow over the years, but it might be said that his writing life has been an extended demonstration that he is worth a reader’s time and attention.

Having temporarily got autobiography out of his system with that first book (published in 1957), Mehta moved to new pastures: over the next two decades, with the encouragement of the New Yorker editor William Shawn—who became a mentor and father figure—he wrote a travelogue (Walking the Indian Streets; 1960), a collection of conversations with British philosophers and historians (Fly and the Fly-Bottle; 1963), a book on Christian theology (The New Theologian; 1966), profiles of such literary figures as Noam Chomsky and the Urdu critic Ram Babu Saxena (collected in John is Easy to Please; 1971), a large study of Indian history and society (Portrait of India; 1970) and a book about Mahatma Gandhi told largely through the accounts of living Gandhians around the world (Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles; 1976). But he never left the terrain of memoir: his affectionate, searching books about his parents and the worlds they inhabited—Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979)—heralded what would become known as the Continents of Exile series, which so far run into 12 volumes. Since 1982, these autobiographical writings—many of which were, again, first published in the New Yorker—have formed the bulk of his output.

And this has sometimes invited criticism. A well-known artist I recently met—someone who has a distant association with Mehta, and must remain unnamed—recalled joking with relatives who, whenever they heard about his excursions into the lives of “Daddyji” or “Mamaji” or “Chachaji”, would throw up their hands and say, with good-natured Punjabi rambunctiousness, “Bas ji!” (“Enough ji!”) Other readers have probably felt the same way; charges of navel-gazing are easily directed at someone who writes extensively about his personal history and the histories of his parents and ancestors. But closer attention to the books reveals how Mehta uses the particular to illuminate the universal. His books about his parents, for instance, are also a social history of the north India of the early 20th century, chronicling a traditional Indian family’s shift from village to city—into a modern world—at a time when the country was reaching for autonomy. 

This straining for national identity is, at a micro-level, paralleled by the young Ved being encouraged to be his own man despite his disability. (His parents might easily have discouraged him from doing more than sitting about the house, with no professional prospects—which was the fate of so many unsighted people in Indian families of the time, and would almost certainly have been the case a generation or two earlier.) In this context, it is worth considering how rare it was back in 1949 for any 15-year-old Indian, not just a blind boy, to travel alone to America, a place more culturally distant than Britain.

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All the same, it is true that Mehta’s oeuvre has a circumscribed feel to it. Even if you’re a fan—as I am—of his elegant prose and his ear for conversation, it can be stifling to read many of his books over a short period of time, because they all centre around a single life. It is better to approach them at intervals. And Mehta himself seems to have been aware of this: for all the talk about Continents of Exile being a continuous autobiography, he wrote each book as a stand-alone.

Perhaps the need to explain himself and his background is why a clear, precise writing style has been a Mehta hallmark through his career. His books also bear the stamp of someone who has reached for self-sufficiency from an early age. He was not yet five when his father lifted him through the compartment window of the train that would take him to Bombay and announced “Now you are a man”. In a Dickensian setting in Dadar (“I was thrown together with adolescent boys and girls picked up by the police from the street … Abdul pulled both my hands into his, and feeling their texture, remarked they were smooth and asked if I had ever worked”), little Ved learnt his first lessons in independence, discipline and the possibility of doing “regular” things with other visually impaired boys: fighting, throwing tantrums, being petty and selfish.

The pride generated by these experiences was not undiluted—mixed with it were phases of insecurity, even despair. (“We all probably felt unwanted and inadequate,” he admits in an introduction to an excerpt in The Essential Ved Mehta, “I certainly imagined that I and the world would be better off if I disappeared into the night.”) The fierce desire to be normal ran hand in hand with the knowledge that there were certain things he couldn’t do unassisted. In Face to Face he describes furtively cycling at a distance behind his sisters—guided by their voices—as they rode to their school, but then having to wait outside until their classes were over because he knew he couldn’t find his way back alone. The incident could be a metaphor for his writing and reading life—being energetic and keen to work nonstop, but having to rely on readers, on books being available in Braille, on assistants to take notes and transcribe.

At any rate, unwillingness to be an object of sympathy or curiosity—or to telegraph his blindness to the world—led to an authorial decision that would repeatedly cause controversy: Mehta wrote as if he could see, providing detailed visual descriptions. “Any and all visual details I always set down in passive voice,” he explains in his introduction to the excerpt from Walking the Indian Streets, “so as to tacitly acknowledge that they were experienced firsthand by someone else and I was only reporting on them.” Thus, the Taj Mahal is “seen through haze from two thousand feet” when he and his friend, the poet Dom Moraes, are about to land in Agra; “there are no visible concubines” in a droll account of their stay in a palace apartment in Kathmandu. The passive voice often makes way for a more direct mode of expression in his later writing though, which can flummox the uninitiated reader. What to make of descriptions such as this one from a meeting with R K Narayan: “A neither too stout nor too lean figure, he strolled in rather boyishly. One shoulder appeared to be lower than the other, and his lilting walk recalled the end of the Bharat Natyam … a smile revealing a great many polished teeth…”

But this is another reason why The Essential Ved Mehta is such a useful anthology: it lets us see how Mehta’s writing illuminates itself, or folds back on itself, over time; how a personal story can cast fresh light on the circumstances around the writing of an earlier book. This means a degree of overlapping, but more often the effect is kaleidoscopic. In All for Love (2001), about his relationships with four women over the years, he recalls his time with another amanuensis, Lola, “the first woman – indeed, the only woman – who became an integral part of my writing life … It was only long afterward that I realised I was so connected with her that she was almost like my second self, but with an extraordinary eye and an ever-ready shorthand book”. This is an engaging relationship story on its own terms, but there is another dimension to it: since Lola was of invaluable aid to him during the writing of Portrait of India , this account of their professional and personal association, and their travels together, provides a fresh perspective on the earlier book.

So a passage in Portrait of India (where Mehta only uses “I” as if he were conducting an interview alone) begins “Mother Teresa comes in. She is tiny and slim, but imposing….”, while All for Love gives us this:

I asked Lola if she had transcribed Mother Teresa’s exact words.

“Yes, of course.” She read some of her notes to me in a whisper.

“Were you able to get down all the details of her clothes?”

“Yes. A plain white sari with the order’s blue edging […] she had a crucifix hanging where she pins the sari’s hem to her shoulder.”

“Also jot down that she is tiny but imposing, and very no-nonsense,” I said.

Now that I have her at my side, I don’t have to tax my memory to try to remember every detail, I thought. Instead, I can concentrate on general impressions.

The emphasis on visual detail is linked to a notable feature of Mehta’s work: his best writing, even when he is drawing on documentation and chronicling things that really happened, reads like good fiction (and no one would say that a blind novelist should avoid descriptions). “His imagination always tried to make everything more interesting than it actually was,” he once said of Moraes, “It was as if the worlds inside his head were more exciting than the world outside”. A similar point could be made about his own work. Between Face to Face and the later memoirs, he became a more confident writer and began experimenting with narrative technique, even while retaining his unshowy prose style—hence the use in the Continents books of devices such as flash-forwards, shifting perspectives, even stream of consciousness as in this passage in The Stolen Light (1989), about a sexual encounter on a rainy night during his college days.

I felt the same charge of electricity as when she had stroked my hand in the library. Our mouths clamped together.  I didn’t turn off the light – a real blindism. Maybe the light was never on. But what if it was? Stop worrying. I should put on my undershirt. Why? I read somewhere women like it.

Or take two accounts – first in Face to Face and then, 30 years later in Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986) – of the same event: in Little Rock, Arkansas, young Ved is allowed to travel downtown by himself for the very first time, his guide having given him detailed instructions about how to take the trolley, gauge turns and crossings, and get off at the correct stop. The adventure, a key one in Ved’s life (“this is the first real day of my independence, I thought”), is described at length in both books, but in Face to Face the emphasis is on relating things faithfully and linearly, whereas by the time he wrote Sound-Shadows Mehta had developed a flair for the dramatic moment, for expanding and compressing time in turn, so that his account reads almost like a passage from a suspense thriller. In the earlier book he says “I found that the noise of the cane made me very self-conscious and was quite distracting, so I flung it into the gutter”. In the later book this becomes “Tap-tap, here comes a blind boy from the blind school – look out! the cane seemed to shout” and this is followed by a description of his attempt to break it before discarding it. Soon afterwards, he regrets his foolhardy act and the first book says “When I unexpectedly stepped off a curb, that fraction of a second between the curb and the street was so frightening I almost wished I had my cane back” but the later account of the same fraught moment goes “The sidewalk suddenly ended in an abrupt drop. It’s a manhole, I thought. My cane, my cane!”

The flair for storytelling, for sharply observed character portraits and for setting an individual tale against a larger background, gives even the most personal books—like The Red Letters, Sound-Shadows and Up at Oxford—a novelistic timbre. The Red Letters, about Mehta’s gradual discovery of his father’s extra-marital affair, can be read as a well-observed fiction about guilt, regret and the workings of the parent-child relationship in a conservative society. Remembering Mr Shawn’s New Yorker (1998) is a record of a vital period in the real-life history of an important magazine, but as a story with broader themes—the importance of mentorship, the growth of confidence, seeking narrative patterns amidst the messiness of the real world—it should appeal even to readers who aren’t specifically interested in the New Yorker, or in Mehta’s personal life.

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Much of the journalistic work he did for the magazine between the 1960s and the 1980s, on the other hand, reads today as the sort of clinical reportage that might have been produced by any number of diligent journalists – writing that doesn’t have much personality, is about things widely covered elsewhere, and hence doesn’t date particularly well; the lemon sweets in the jar. A question hangs over Mehta’s relevance as a reporter. There are those who feel he overstayed his welcome at the New Yorker, that Shawn over-indulged him. He is often behind the curve, constrained by information not always being available in media he can access. (In an interview four years ago, he spoke to me of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance—published in 1995—as if it were a brand-new publication.) Partly because his focus in the past three decades has been on the Continents series, partly because he lost his New Yorker job in 1994, you wouldn’t turn to him for insights on very recent events.

Some of his truisms about India can seem patronising—writing in the early 1990s about the hegemony of power and the exploitation of women, he said “The travails of the Indian political establishment may well be only a reflection of the problems of contemporary India, in which a patina of modernity overlies what is essentially a medieval society”. In a mostly warm account of the friendship he struck up with RK Narayan in New York (“it was very late and over Fifty-seventh Street hung a sort of Malgudi hush, shattered only now and again by the clap of a passing truck”), he mentions that Narayan “spoke a certain sort of Indian English; he … prefixed ‘y’ and ‘w’ respectively, to words beginning with ‘e’ and ‘o’. It gave his English a soft, balmy tone” and then throughout reports the older writer’s speech with these and other inflections (“the winter breeze is yeverywhere”, “Oh Lard, what is this modernity?”). Is this a case of a writer-reporter faithfully recording what he hears, or is there a hint of pandering to a readership that expects a dose of exotica in accounts of India and Indians? The answer may be an unknowable mix of the two things. (In another passage, during a conversation with Satyajit Ray, Mehta defends the stilted English spoken by EM Forster’s Indian characters.)

I would still make the case that a sprawling work like Portrait of India, also just out in a Modern Classics edition, deserves to be revisited, rather than dismissed as a Big India Book written by someone viewing—or imagining—the country from a distance. Some passages are dry and read like compilations of basic facts and history for the lay-reader, but this is also a personal project where one sees a writer picking his subjects, focusing on things that intrigue him rather than trying, vainly, to be encyclopedic. There are chapters on such disparate things as jazz in Bombay, birth control, the “liquid gold” in the then-new Bhilai steel plant, a sound-and-light show at the Red Fort; there is a passage on Calcutta with a number of pages written as if in free verse. (“Girls in frocks and boys in knickers playing hopscotch, babies in prams, young men with books of Bengali verse, Europeans, athletes at gymnastics, masseurs giving rub-downs on the grass, sadhus … Howrah Bridge. People taking the evening air. Dramatic bore tide. Jetties bobbing, small boats hurrying to middle of river.”) Importantly, this book wasn’t an armchair project: Mehta worked hard on the book, travelling 30,000 miles “by airplane, train, boat, rickshaw, pony, mule, yak, elephant and, of course, my own two feet” in the course of writing it.

Since it puts these earlier books in context, The Essential Ved Mehta is not just a collection of writings but also an account of the nuts and bolts of a singular writing life. It provides a glimpse of the writer’s many divided selves: the boy from Punjab working within a new culture, writing for an American magazine about such topics as Western philosophy, theology and student life in Arkansas and Oxford while not letting go of the “Indian” subjects like Mahatma Gandhi and the national politics of the 1970s and 1980s; the man who may have become an Anglicised “sahib” figure after his time at Oxford (there are accounts of peremptory behaviour during his New Yorker days) but was still keen to honestly and meticulously chronicle the life of his family and the Indias they lived in; the seemingly arrogant, self-assured writer living with the knowledge that he was dependent on others for many important things.

In my view Mehta’s best books are the personal ones where the main subject is Mehta himself, or where he is a protagonist (as in Walking the Indian Streets). But other readers may disagree, and certainly there are other things worth discovering here, such as his understated sense of humour in an account of the Member of Parliament PC Sethi storming into a telephone exchange with a gun, or an anecdote about those two American subversives Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso being let loose in genteel Oxford and tormenting poor WH Auden. (“Ginsberg thereupon got hold of Auden’s tie and started shoving it into his mouth, while Corso grabbed Auden by the knees, and both men cried, “Maestro, maestro, don’t leave us! Let us be your servants and students!”) The sense one gets of Mehta is that of someone who has spent decades writing as a way of holding on to things—experiences, sounds, tactile impressions—that must otherwise seem in danger of slipping away, while also using himself as a prism to examine a larger socio-cultural universe. Given that his books have not always been easily available in India, and that he continues to have a low profile—or to be considered unfashionable—this collection comes not a moment too soon.

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[Here are two earlier pieces about Mehta - an interview-profile done for Tehelka, and this review of The Red Letters]

By the book: more thoughts on adaptation

[A version of my latest column for GQ magazine]

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This is an unusually busy time for movies based on high-profile novels. Deepa Mehta’s film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is finally ready, as is Ang Lee’s adaptation of another Booker-winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Meanwhile the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s marvellous The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been given cinematic life by one of my favourite directors Mira Nair, and Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqi are in the process of adapting Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel Sea of Poppies.

Naturally the release of each of these films will be accompanied by much hand-wringing and cries of “but...but...but...” by viewers who have read the books (and by some who haven’t read them but have mastered the enviable art of speaking knowledgeably about them nonetheless). Each of us will at some point morph into a version of the comic-strip goat who, after chewing on a roll of celluloid, says ruminatively to his companion, “The book was better.” Questions of faithfulness to the original will be raised, omitted passages will be bewailed, shock will be expressed at the casting of this actor in that role. Midnight’s Children in particular will be closely dissected, since Rushdie’s novel is nearly as much of an Unavoidable Baggy Presence for Indian Writing in English as Ulysses was for 20th century fiction; even a flawless film might easily be weighed down by unreasonable expectations.

Personally I try to judge movies based on what they achieve with their medium's techniques, rather than as slavish illustrations of literary works. But I confess to a flicker of trepidation about the adaptations mentioned above, because some of the things I most like about these books don’t seem easily translatable to film. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for instance, is marked by a distinctive first-person voice: the protagonist, a Pakistani man named Changez, addresses an unnamed American tourist in a courtly, almost ingratiating style. (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”) This narrative has a stylised, off-kilter quality that makes it difficult for the reader to know exactly what Changez’s intentions are (in an interview, Hamid told me the effect he was reaching for was “that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play”) and what effect he is having on his listener - so that even the simple description of someone putting his hand into his jacket pocket is laced with the possibility that he might be reaching for either a business card or a weapon.

With Life of Pi, the potential pitfall is one that is especially relevant to the fantasy (or part-fantasy) genre: a book lets you imagine its characters and incidents for yourself while a film gives them immutable shape. (I mostly loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but its depiction of the flaming Eye of Sauron in the final sequences was problematic; presented as a roving, Twentieth Century Fox-style flashlight, Tolkien’s bodiless villain lost the chillingly abstract quality he - it? - had in the books.) Martel’s novel – about a teenage boy adrift on a lifeboat with a fearsome Bengal Tiger – gets much of its force from the irresolvable ambiguity of the narrative: is Richard Parker the tiger a real presence or is he an invention, a wish-fulfillment device that allows young Pi to focus his thoughts and survive a difficult ordeal? But the movie, by its very nature, has to literalise the book's central voyage, and if you see a large tiger on the screen once, it is difficult to be subsequently convinced of his unreality.

The adaptation that most intrigues me though is the Sea of Poppies one. Rizvi’s film is provisionally titled Afeem (19th century opium trade being central to Ghosh’s story) and anyone familiar with her debut Peepli Live knows she can bring the required sensitivity to this tale of people from various backgrounds journeying across the ocean, driven more by despair than expectation. ("Both Peepli Live and Sea of Poppies are stories about the psychological effects of migration," she told me during a recent chat.) But the most riveting thing about Ghosh’s novel wasn’t its plot – it was its use of language. Its lascar sailors (“who came from places that had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”) speak a dynamic hybrid of tongues, made of words picked up from various countries, and the European characters who have been living in India for generations use phrases such as “He turned a ship oolter-poolter” and “It would never do to be warming the coorsey when there’s kubber like this to be heard”.

To my mind at least, such details work better on the printed page than on the screen (where, if not handled exactly right, they might too easily devolve into tedious slapstick). However this is, as always, dependent on the quality of the treatment, the casting and the performances. During our conversation, Rizvi mentioned that most of the script would be in Bhojpuri – something that is singularly appropriate for this book – and it was nice to read a blog entry by Ghosh expressing enthusiasm for the project. Authors aren’t always the best judges of movies based on their work, of course, but of the adaptations mentioned above Afeem sounds like the one that is most worth warming the multiplex coorsey for.

[Earlier posts about book-to-movie adaptations: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; notes from the Times of India lit-fest; A Kiss Before Dying; R K Narayan on a movie set]

Literary carnival notes 2: book-to-film adaptations

[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

At the Times of India Literary Carnival, I participated in a panel about books being adapted into films. Adeptly moderated though the discussion was – by author, screenwriter and all-round funny man Anuvab Pal – there’s no way an hour-long session can cover all bases on this wide-ranging topic. Still, it was a good excuse to put together some of my scattered thoughts about adaptation. Here goes:

One of my peeves as a film buff is that too many reviews these days discuss movies almost exclusively in terms of their plots. Overemphasis on story has the effect of neglecting how the story is told with the techniques that cinema has at its disposal (and which differentiate it from literature). It also fosters a culture where some reviewers (both in mainstream and online media) don’t even feel the need to be acquainted with the most rudimentary camera movements: the difference between a pan and a tracking shot, for example, or between a match cut and a jump cut.

If you even mention these things while discussing a film, you might be accused of getting “too technical”, but this is basic moviemaking grammar. It would be unthinkable for a professional book reviewer to not know the difference between active voice and passive voice, or between a first-person and third-person narrative. (Actually a good book reviewer would be expected to know much more, but I’m deliberately setting the bar very low here!) It’s a pity then that movie critics are held to much lower standards simply because cinema is such a popular and egalitarian form.

Anyway, this may be something to keep in mind while assessing the quality of an adaptation and the ways in which a film deviates from the book it was based on. One of the things that came up during our discussion was that the high quality of a literary work does not necessarily translate into high quality in the movie made from it. (If that were the case, a stationary-camera recording of a good stage production of Hamlet would automatically be a great film.) As our co-panellist Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter of such films as Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, put it: “A film mustn’t simply be an illustration of the book.”


I also liked the term Sooni used – “spiritual DNA” – to refer to the essence of a literary work, which is what an adapting screenwriter should mainly be concerned with. Thus, a good adaptation might capture the essential theme or mood of a book even if superficial details of period, setting and character names are altered. Shakespeare is a good example: there have been Japanese, Russian and Indian film versions of his work, made in languages that are arguably twice removed from the 16th century English he worked in. There have also been modernised versions, such as the 1995 Richard III which shifted the action to the pre-World War II years and included a scene where Richard speaks part of his “winter of our discontent” soliloquy while standing at a men’s urinal.

If you’re a purist, such changes might seem sensationalistic, but I think the film catches the essence of Shakespeare’s memorable protagonist: the self-loathing mixed with self-pitying, the insatiable appetite for scheming and deceiving, the need to avenge himself on everyone around him. (Another example in a similar vein: in Roman Polanski’s excellent Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does her sleepwalking scene in the nude. It has been cynically noted that the film was co-produced by Playboy, but I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous about the scene itself; it works quite well as a depiction of the sudden vulnerability of a character who has been so thoroughly in control for most of the play.)

But often, spiritual DNA isn’t easy to define, especially when adaptation involves a big change in period or setting. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novel Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, significantly updating the story – Conrad’s themes of imperialistic hegemony, exploitation and the savagery in human nature were set in a story about a man from a “civilised” country (England at the height of its powers) journeying into a “place of darkness” (the African Congo), and the film placed these ideas in the context of what America was doing to Vietnam in the 1970s. Yet the differences between the two works are just as important: Conrad’s book is full of darkness and despair, but it has a moral compass – a sense that one can visit the darkest areas of the soul and return with one’s sanity intact – whereas Apocalypse Now is a more nihilistic work – it’s very much a product of a century that had seen two world wars, nuclear destruction and the greatest horror of all, the Holocaust.

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Earlier at the festival, I spoke with the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, whose novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being made into a film by Mira Nair. “I didn’t realise writers and filmmakers were such different sorts of people,” he said jovially, relating his admiration for how attuned Nair was to the activities of every last person on her set. Working in seclusion is central to what writers do, whereas film directors – even the relatively introverted ones – have to be adept at managing groups of people. This personality conflict between writers and directors (and occasionally between writer-directors and money-minded producers) has shaped the course of movie history, providing some hugelyentertaining anecdotes along the way. (Walking through a long hotel corridor that morning before leaving for the fest venue, I had a vision of the apocalyptic, burning-hotel climax of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, a film about a hapless screenwriter coming to Hollywood and ending up, quite literally, in Hell.)

But there are also times when a serendipitous collaboration occurs between two people who might seem very different “types”. Consider Ruskin Bond and Vishal Bhardwaj. Bond’s writing style is genteel in the old-fashioned English way, the prose Spartan and direct; Bhardwaj’s films tend to be baroque, set in the Indian hinterland and peopled by rough-speaking types. The two men barely speak a common language, but I watched them in conversation at an event earlier this year and realised that in some things – notably in their shared penchant for black humour – they were on exactly the same wavelength. This helps explain their friendship and frequent collaboration, most notably on Bond’s children’s story The Blue Umbrella, which Bhardwaj made into a film that was much lusher in tone than Bond’s story (right down to the claustrophobia-inducing close-ups of Pankaj Kapoor as the greedy shopkeeper). It’s an example of a really good adaptation that doesn’t try to be slavishly faithful to its source material.

On the question of slavish faithfulness: when a literary work is being turned into a commercial or semi-commercial film, it’s almost inevitable that there will be changes that the original writer doesn’t care for; there will be a certain amount of pandering to the star system, and so on. During the audience Q&A, someone mentioned the “Dola re Dola” song in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas, which brought together Paro and Chandramukhi, two characters who have nothing to do with each other in the original story. Even defenders of Bhansali’s opulent filmmaking style would probably concede that a large part of the motivation for the scene was having Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai together on screen for a spectacular, paisa-vasool dance performance.


I wrote in this post about R K Narayan’s sardonic essay about the making of Guide. The process of “glamorising” his small-town story and its characters would have begun at the point where Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman – big stars with established screen personas – were cast in the roles of Raju the guide and Rosie the dancer. And of course, many changes were made to the story itself. But however much one admires and sympathises with Narayan the writer, the film must ultimately be judged on its own terms (and many movie buffs would agree that the Hindi version of Guide is an outstanding achievement in commercial filmmaking). There are many instances of movies that are excellent in themselves while being less than satisfying as adaptations.

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During our session Sooni spoke interestingly about how, when turning a novel into a screenplay, she had to find an exterior expression for the interiority of a character’s thoughts. This must have been especially relevant to her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, because the book had surprisingly little dialogue; mostly it took the form of an omniscient narrator telling us about the lives and thoughts of Gogol and the other characters. Sooni had to create voices for these people, who had to be depicted on screen by flesh-and-blood actors who would actually talk to each other.

Writing aside, there are thousands of instances of a seemingly minor decision by a filmmaker adding layers to the story he is adapting – from Satyajit Ray’s use of Ravi Shankar’s shehnai music at key emotional points in Aparajito (based on Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s book which, needless to say, did not use music of any sort as an accompaniment to a dramatic scene!) to Stanley Kubrick filming a frenetic orgy in fast motion (and with a fixed camera impassively recording the action) in A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess’s novel, which was widely believed to be unfilmable). I'll be putting up a few more notes on this subject in the coming weeks, with more examples. Meanwhile, here are some earlier, related posts: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; R K Narayan and Guide; The Namesake; Polanski’s Macbeth; my Yahoo column on story and storytelling.

Seen, not heard: R K Narayan on a movie set

The long relationship between literature and cinema is full of anecdotes about writers feeling demeaned, patronised or outright bullied by a medium they couldn’t relate to – from George Bernard Shaw’s crabby reaction to winning a screenplay Oscar for the filmed Pygmalion to countless stories about authors hired to adapt screenplays and then standing by as their work is butchered. But one of the best first-hand pieces I’ve read about a reticent writer’s brush with commercial cinema is R K Narayan’s essay “Misguided Guide”, now excerpted in the Jerry Pinto-edited collection The Greatest Show on Earth.

This is an account of Narayan’s association with the production crew (comprising Indians and Americans) that set out to film his novel The Guide – their initial fawning over him followed by a series of events which made it clear that his original vision was irrelevant to their needs. Here's his description of an early conversation with the director Tad Danielewski:

“He brushed aside my comments and went on with his own explanation of what I must have had in mind when I created such-and-such character. I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations. But for some obscure reason, they seemed to need my presence, though not my voice. I must be seen and not heard.”

Narayan isn’t usually thought of as a comic writer, but here he uses his characteristically dignified prose to convey an ever-escalating series of goof-ups, and the results are hysterically funny (the picture that came into my mind was that of the poker-faced Buster Keaton at the heart of a storm as things collapse all around him). Ideal locations near Narayan’s home-town Mysore are explored, heartily approved of ... and then bypassed in favour of incongruous north Indian settings. (“We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,” he is peremptorily told. “Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.”) Meetings take place on the edge of a hotel swimming pool, an unnecessarily expensive set near Delhi is washed away when the Yamuna rises, a romantic scene runs into trouble (“the hero, for his part, was willing to obey the director, but he was helpless, since kissing is a collaborative effort”), a surreal attempt is made to get Lord Mountbatten to promote the film in England, and when the author protests that a scene involving a tiger fight wasn’t in his story, he is assured that it was.

Reading all this, I wish Narayan had got his revenge by writing the script for a movie about the making of Guide. It might have been just as entertaining as any other good film about the shooting of a movie, such as Shadow of the Vampire (with its witty line “I do not think we need... the writer”). And of course, a 70-year-old Dev Anand would have been happy to play the 40-year-old Dev Anand.

P.S. The Greatest Show on Earth also carries a typically goofy-narcissistic excerpt from Dev Anand’s autobiography (I wrote about that magnificent book here and here), which presents a somewhat different account of Anand’s first Guide-related conversation with Narayan. Without comment, here is some of it:

The receiver was picked up and I heard a voice say: “R K Narayan here.”

“Dev Anand!” was my reply.

“Dev Anand!” He was curious. “Which Dev Anand?”

“Dev Anand, the actor!” I clarified.

“Are you sure?” He did not seem to believe me.

“Yes, it is me!” I assured him.

“Nice talking to you, Mr Dev Anand,” he said warmly. “Where are you calling from, Mr Dev Anand?”

“I frantically tried to get hold of your number in New York…” I said.

“You did!” he interrupted me, getting interested when he heard the word “frantically”.

“Couldn’t get it from anyone, but now I am calling from Los Angeles, California,” I finished.

“I see.”

“Hollywood,” I emphasized.

“Hollywood?” he said quizzically.

“A name associated with the best of show business!” I enthused.

“Of course, Mr Dev Anand,” he played with my name and gave a friendly laugh.

After some more of this the conversation ends, as everything must, and Mr Dev Anand wraps up his chronicle with this priceless sentence:

The receiver was put down with a bang, which seemed to indicate his excitement.

More likely, Narayan was making a wild dash for his anti-stress tablets.

Sunday Guardian snippets: on euphemisms, R K Narayan and a wordless comic book

[From my weekly books column; some earlier snippets here, here and here]

The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.

Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)

Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.

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It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.

One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.

Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:

The bathroom was a shack, roofed with corrugated sheets; the wooden frame was warped and the door never shut flush, but always left a gap through which one obtained a partial glimpse of anyone bathing. But it had been a house practice, for generations, for its members not to look through [...] A very tall coconut tree loomed over the bath, shedding enormous withered fronds and other horticultural odds and ends on the corrugated roof with a resounding thud. Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible. Jagan’s father, as everyone knew, had lived at first in a thatched hut at the very back of this ground. Jagan remembered playing in a sand heap outside the hut; the floor of the hut was paved with cool clay and one could put one’s cheek to it on a warm day and feel heavenly.

The prose here is functional, but it’s also assured and humorous, and commands the reader’s full attention (the passage is randomly selected, by the way; you can open the book almost anywhere and find another like it). One also senses a pioneering Indian writer in English trying to create a visual picture of his world for the foreign readership that he knows his books will reach - it’s ironical that many people take jingoistic pride in the idea that Narayan was a provincial man who never wrote for the West.

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“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.

Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.