On Habib Tanvir, Shyam Benegal, and a truthful thief

Given that Shyam Benegal is one of our most respected directors, I’m a little surprised by the under-the-radar status of his second feature film, the 1975 Charandas Chor. This version of Habib Tanvir’s famous play about an honest thief was done in collaboration with Tanvir – before the play itself had acquired its final shape – and I think it is one of Benegal's most enjoyable movies and one of Hindi cinema’s sharpest satires. But it is often overlooked, perhaps because it was made for the Children's Film Society and therefore seen as being geared to a non-adult audience. I have read Benegal profiles that refer to Ankur, Nishant and Manthan – cornerstones of the Indian New Wave – as his first three films, with no mention of Charandas Chor. (See the second sentence of this Wikipedia entry, for starters, and the “Feature Films” subhead.) Even Dibakar Banerjee – a voracious movie-watcher and a big Benegal fan – had not seen the film when I spoke with him last year, though he was certainly familiar with Tanvir’s play. (Banerjee noted that the play contained a precedent for the Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! theme of a thief’s career becoming a comment on the society around him.)

The neglect notwithstanding, Charandas Chor is a notable film on many levels. It represents a rare meeting between cinema and folk theatre (with vital contributions by musicians and actors of the Chhatisgarhi Nacha troupes who worked with Tanvir) and is a document of one of our most significant modern plays in a nascent, transitional form – but it is also recognisably a film, cinematically imaginative and dynamic. It was one of Govind Nihalani’s most impressive early outings as a cinematographer, as well as the feature debut of the young Smita Patil, as a beautiful princess who is besotted by the bumpkin Charandas.

Despite the seriousness of its themes, its form is that of a playful entertainment from the very first image, a medium shot of a doleful-looking donkey, its tail apparently wagging in tune to the folk-song on the soundtrack. While this animal plays a functional part in the narrative (it belongs to a dhobi who will become Charandas Chor’s sidekick), the ass motif is integral in a wider sense: many of the side-characters, including a “chatur vakeel” (clever lawyer), are depicted in illustrations as donkeys that Charandas will get the better of (or expose as hypocrites). The film's episodic structure is quickly established too, with Charandas (Lalu Ram) encountering the dhobi Buddhu (Madan Lal), who wishes to become his chela. The scene employs the language of an enlightened guru addressing his disciples: asked to impart his gyaan of thievery, Charandas replies, "यह कला है, बेटा - बड़ी साधना से मिलती है।" (“This is an art, son – it requires practice and rigour.”)

But this being a parable about the duplicities of social structures – including the ones rooted in class and religion – we also meet a “real” guru who, as Charandas observes, has an even more efficient money-making gig going. “आपका धंदा बैठे बैठे, और आमदनी ज़्यादा" (“You sit and do nothing, but earn more than me”) he tells the sadhu with genuine reverence in his eyes. This lampooning of authority figures extends across hierarchies: for instance, a view of temple idols shorn of their ornaments (making them look bald, comical and most un-Godly) is echoed by a shot of three unclothed policemen drying their uniforms by the riverbank. Through most of these episodes, the chor maintains his essential dignity and his moral compass while the “law-abiding” world is revealed as hollow, rotting or plain naked.

There is so much to enjoy here, for children and adults alike. There is Nihalani’s black-and-white photography (inferior Orwo film had to be used due to import constraints of the time, but the occasional graininess goes well with the subject matter and the bucolic setting) and his imaginative use of zooms, particularly effective in chase sequences that evoke the silent cinema's Keystone Kops. Also the Nacha music, which continually comments on the action, and wonderful lead performances by village actors from Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, including the emaciated Madan Lal – one of Tanvir’s favourite actors – who played Charandas on stage but plays Buddhu in the film.

Inter-titles are used like chapter heads, and Tanvir himself reads them out in his nasal voice, fumbling over big words the way a child might. ("बुद्धू का चोरी के दाव... दावपेंच सीखना।") In a funny little cameo, he also appears as an absent-minded judge who might have dropped in from Alice in Wonderland, holding large scissors and a walking stick instead of a gavel***. And there is the casual drollness of such exchanges as the one where Charandas, miffed by the princess’s show of largesse, proudly tells her “मैं चोरी करता हूँ, दान नहीं लेता" (“I steal, I don’t accept alms”) while the sadhu standing behind her pipes up "दान लेना तो मेरा काम है, बेटी" ("Taking alms is what I do").

*****

A few months ago I briefly spoke with Benegal about Charandas Chor, particularly the divergence between his version and the one that Tanvir finalised for the stage. One important difference was the ending: in both film and play Charandas is put to death, but in the film a humorous epilogue shows him plying his roguery in the afterlife, where he steals Yamraj’s buffalo and presumably sets off on a fresh round of adventures. (This narrative circularity is of course common to many myths or fables; one might also recall the last scene of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, with the rake coolly strolling into the far distance as a TV news reporter blathers on.) But Tanvir’s later modifications to the play made it bleaker and more hard-hitting, with a conclusion that allowed his hero to maintain his integrity – to die for the truth he holds so dear, while the world around him continues on its merry path. “He turned it into a sophisticated tragedy,” Benegal told me, “whereas my film was a moral story done as a comedy for children.” The playwright also opted for a sparer, more minimalist idiom, removing the part of Buddhu along with other extraneous elements, including that zany courtroom scene.

But film and play have one important thing in common: Tanvir and Benegal were both influenced by Brechtian alienation, wherein the audience is asked to be intellectually aware of the issues raised in a story, rather than becoming emotionally immersed in it or “forgetting” the constructed nature of what they are watching. In her book Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre, Anjum Katyal observes that Tanvir made atypical use of Indian folk music: while our folk theatre tends to use songs in a didactic way (explicitly telling the audience what is good or bad), Charandas Chor follows the Brechtian technique of having two songs express contradictory ideas (e.g. one might say “Charandas is not really a thief, he is a good man, there are bigger thieves in society” while another goes “he is a dangerous thief, protect yourself from him”) and letting the viewer weigh each stance and consciously work out his own attitudes.

Many of Benegal’s later films, notably Arohan (which begins with Om Puri directly addressing the camera, speaking about the subject of the film and introducing the other actors) and Samar, would use similar distancing techniques. One sees it also in Nihalani’s directorial ventures such as Party or Aghaat, where self-conscious, expository dialogue takes the place of naturalistic conversation. The film of Charandas Chor doesn’t do this to the same degree (it was, after all, made for children and needed something resembling a conventional narrative flow) but it does draw attention to the storytelling process through its titles, illustrations and voiceovers. At one point the images on the screen even shake and rupture – as if there were an error in the projection – and Tanvir’s sharp voice asks “Kahin film poori toh nahin ho gayi?” In its own way, this entertaining “children’s movie” is very much a companion piece to the meta-films in the new art cinema of the 70s and 80s.

P.S. For anyone interested in Tanvir, the English version of his unfinished memoirs (translated by the multi-talented writer, historian and dastangoi Mahmood Farooqui) has just been published. I haven’t yet read it, though I intend to (it only covers Tanvir’s life up to the 1950s, I think). Anjum Katyal’s study of his life and career, mentioned above, is strongly recommended too.

P.P.S. A few months ago I discovered that Charandas Chor was on YouTube in a good print, and despite my reservations about watching movies on a computer screen I grabbed this available option. Unfortunately the YouTube video was removed a few weeks ago. But perhaps this indicates that a fresh print of the film will soon be made available on DVD. One can hope.

*** The stammering judge in Charandas Chor is probably an extension of the role Tanvir played in the 1948 IPTA comedy play Jadu ki Kursi, which also had Balraj Sahni in an acclaimed lead performance.

Colours of funny - a column about satires

[Here's my latest column for Forbes Life, on some favourite literary satires and black comedies]

Humour at its core is accuracy, the novelist Manu Joseph said in a recent interview – when you’re uncompromisingly precise about something, it becomes funny. The best satirists have always known this, but it is also one reason why satire itself can be such an imprecise category in art. There will always be books and films that you can immediately identify as satirical because their tone is unmistakeable: even the most naïve readers and viewers will “get” it. But there are equally cases of understated works where one is not always sure of the line between plain realism and tongue-in-cheek comedy – or if such a line even exists.

Besides, real life usually stays a step ahead of the most acerbic spoofs; even when a satirical work is intended to be over the top, a time may come a few decades or even just a few years later when some of its content appears relatively commonplace. Discussing his 1968 novel Raag Darbari – a modern classic of Hindi literature, about corruption and factionalism in a small village named Shivpalganj – the writer-bureaucrat Shrilal Shukla noted that one of the criticisms directed at the book was that “it didn’t say anything new – it just described what everybody knew already”.

Even if this were true, it would take nothing away from Shukla’s incisive yet good-natured account of life in a place that the narrator likens to the all-encompassing Mahabharata: “What was to be found nowhere else was there, and what was not there could be found nowhere else.” Gillian Wright’s 1992 translation of the novel captures its many droll sentences and throwaway observations (“the theory of reincarnation was invented in the civil courts so that neither plaintiff nor defendant should die regretting that his case had been left unfinished”), of which there are so many, in fact, that it seems a waste to read this book over just one or two sittings. The experience has to be savoured, stretched out.

The story, filtered partly through the gaze of a visiting city boy named Rangnath, gradually reveals the self-deception in nearly every aspect of Shivpalganj’s life. A slothful sub-inspector mulls the great burden of his responsibilities: “There was so much work that all work had come to a standstill.” Doctors and engineers are in short supply, we are told, because “Indians are traditionally poets”. When politicians come to the village to make speeches, we learn that “a speech is really enjoyable only when both sides know that the speaker is talking absolute nonsense” – when some overenthusiastic speakers begin taking themselves seriously, the audience develops indigestion.

Two decades after Raag Darbari was published, another bureaucrat wrote a novel about a young civil servant posted in “a tiny dot” somewhere in the Indian hinterland. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August was rightly hailed as a milestone in modern Indian-English writing, but true satire fans – especially those with high tolerance for scatological content – should set themselves the task of rediscovering his other work. None of them are as consistently funny as August, but they all have passages that measure up to its heights. Consider the opening of his 2010 novel Way to Go where a man named Jamun comes to a police station to report that his 85-year-old father has vanished, the local constable interrogates him, and what ensues is funny not so much in a laugh-out-loud way but in a chuckle-hopelessly-to-yourself-until-you-choke-on-your-own-phlegm way. As bureaucratic procedure takes centre-stage (a recurring theme in Chatterjee and in much Indian satire), time and common sense are suspended. The conversation is shaped by the bizarre order in which the questions are printed on the form; there is no indication that the constable is capable of making a sensate connection between what he is asking and the information that has been supplied to him. Soon Jamun is in a practically comatose state, reeling off sentences mechanically. When he replies “Such was not the case in the present instance” to a question, the constable nods approvingly – at last they are speaking the same language.

In fact, satire often thrives on a premise where two people discuss an urgent matter but fail to get anywhere because, for all their eagerness to understand each other, the gap between their beliefs and cultural reference points is unbridgeable. Aubrey Menen’s extraordinary 1947 novel The Prevalence of Witches contains just such a conversation between a village headman and an English administrator named Catullus. The former is patiently trying to explain how a witch goes about her spiteful work (witches being an accepted fact of life in the imaginary British Indian region of Limbo, populated by people who have no use for modern education or scientific thought), why she must be interrogated in a very precise fashion – by hanging her upside down and beating her – and why she may “choose” to be either alive or dead; the latter is making an honest effort to understand what is being said.

One might think Menen’s intention is to mock easy targets: the superstitions of “primitive” people. But The Prevalence of Witches is equally mindful of the hypocrisies of those who think of themselves as modern, and the often-dubious building blocks of what we call civilisation. Reading it, one understands why Menen’s equally forthright retelling of the Ramayana (“Despite following his moral and political preceptors with devotion, Rama finally managed to recover his kingdom, his wife, and his common sense”) has been one of India’s most high-profile banned books for decades.

****

Humour is most effective, it is often said, when its shafts are pointed upwards: its targets should be those who are more powerful and privileged than the humorist. It is in this context that one must consider the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule’s scathing attacks on the caste system and on the Brahmin way of life. Phule’s tract Gulamgiri (Slavery) reveals him as an abrasive, first-strike radical, not above expressing strident views if it made a larger point about social hypocrisy.

The graphic novel A Gardener in the Wasteland, written by Srividya Natarajan and drawn by Aparajita Ninan, tells the story of Phule’s life and work with a panache that the man himself would have approved of, beginning with a passage that likens 1840s Poona to the lawless American Old West: “it was a hellhole of a town. A mob runs it: a Brahman mob”. Decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lord it over the “lower castes”. Subtlety is beside the point here: this is satire that sets out to wound and shock, as a way of getting its back on centuries of oppression. Righteous anger fuelled Phule’s skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, was his sarcastic response) and his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars.

In any case the line between “cutting” and “outright nasty” can be as thin as the line between those classic categories Horatian and Juvenal satire – what matters more is the execution. It is also worth noting that the best judges of such works are not those with weak stomachs or an easily offended aesthetic sense. When Jonathan Swift wrote his famous essay “A Modest Proposal”, proposing that poor people might sell their infants to serve as food for society’s rich (“a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”), some readers were outraged because they took the suggestion at face value; others were offended because, though they understood Swift’s intent, they didn’t much care for the tastelessness (pun unintended) of the thought.

Among modern works, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho turned many readers off with the grisliness of its narrative about an attractive young investment banker who is also a psychopath (or deeply delusional), but the book was a startling indictment of a consumerist society, and its narrative form was vital to its effect (it’s another matter that barely 20 years after its publication, parts of it already seem dated!). This is equally true of some of the work of Chuck Palahniuk, notably Fight Club, which uses unsettlingly staccato language and narrative misdirection to comment on such aspects of modern life as hyper-masculinity and the inability of people to connect with one another, or with themselves.

At the same time, mere shocking isn’t enough. Another graphic novel, Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India – written by Gautam Bhatia and drawn by the Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa – has much going for it: it is an unremittingly dark work that satirises many aspects of modern Indian life, notably the class divide and the apathy of politicians towards their constituencies. The many little vignettes include a just-born baby girl being deposited into a movie-hall’s trash can with the family-size popcorn bag, and a state chief minister flying over a drought-ravaged area in an aircraft that has been retrofitted with a swimming pool and a shopping arcade. But the book is often heavy-handed and there is a disconnect between content and form; the drawings are barely given the space they need.

Too much anger can also undermine the effect of a good literary satire. “I sat down to pass moral judgement. I was not wise enough then,” Mahesh Elkunchwar noted several years after writing his play Party, a coruscating satire of Bombay’s intellectual circles. The play is about a party held at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane, the guests including writers and poets at various stages of their career: fat cats made complacent by fame, lean hangers-on desperately aspiring for it, sermonising faux-liberals. Over the evening details of character emerge, epiphanies are experienced and the conversation converges on an absent figure, a poet named Amrit, who is fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic man becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers – their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to contempt – and for a penetrating examination of the artist-human being divide.

The play (which was also the source material for one of our cinema’s most skilfully crafted chamber dramas, Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film) was born out of Elkunchwar’s reflexive response to encounters with famous people who were all talk and little action. It remains a hard-hitting work in some ways, its central theme still very relevant, but one can see why he thought it was facile in its judgements. It might be said that one characteristic of good satire is that rather than taking the easy way out by deriding individuals, it allows us to see the conditions and systems that can make well-intentioned people pathetic or loathsome. And so, to two of my favourite political satires that achieve this.

To say that Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a novelised treatment of the final days of Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq would be to convey little of its skill and comic richness. The dictator’s story – told in the third person – alternates with the voice of a junior officer named Ali Shigri, which, in its irreverence and blithe disregard for the supposed dignity of the Army, resembles that emblematic modern satire, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. But the most engaging sections of Hanif’s book are the ones that deal with Zia’s growing paranoia and childlike dependence on his inner circle. Though placed at the centre of some lowbrow comedy, Zia is also, in a strange way, humanised: there is something poignant about his desperate need for attention and his speculating that he might be ruling a ghost country. It would be a stretch to say that he becomes a sympathetic figure, but there is some ambivalence in our response to him.

If Hanif’s book is political satire with elements of magic realism, the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1936 novel War with the Newts belongs partly to the still-nascent genre of science fiction (Capek coined the term “robot”). This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways. Secret temples for worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches bathe in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work – this in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; and there are references to the political and social realities of the time, such as Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

This funny, far-reaching novel of ideas is a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others and the whimsical, often ludicrous ways in which our civilisation has been organised. Čapek doesn’t single out any system for attack (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for instance), but his book is a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become. It carries within it a view of the very long picture, vindicating the idea that no other genre does clear-sightedness in quite the way that satire does.

[Two earlier Forbes columns: true crime and popular science]

The artist, the ivory tower and the world: on Govind Nihalani’s restored Party

The old man on stage is performing a scene from the play Natasamrat, about a once-great artiste now living in his inner world. “All the greats are within me!” he declaims, lurching about the stage, “Caesar, Othello, Ganpatrao Belwalkar.” A woman – clearly a fan of the actor – watches from behind a curtain, deeply moved. "Caesar" is stabbed – “Brutus, tum bhi?” – and falls to the ground. The scene ends, the audience applauds.

Backstage, the woman meets the actor and voices her admiration. “Kitni vedna hoti hogi, na?” she asks (“There must be so much suffering involved in this performance?”) “Vedna mujhe nahin hoti, jo character mujh mein hai, usse hoti hai,” he replies politely. The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me. Then he returns to the dressing room and removes his heavy makeup to reveal a much younger (and dare one say it, blander, less interesting) face beneath it.

Watching this scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party, I did a double take. The face beneath the mask is that of Shafi Inamdar, whom I mainly remember for his role as the husband in the 1980s comedy show Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, and for a series of workmanlike character parts in movies. It was one of those moments that give you a fresh perspective on a performer whom you have taken for granted.

But this is just one of many startling scenes in an extraordinary film. Party has been a holy grail for many of the movie-lovers I know, its long-time unavailability on DVD one of our abiding cinematic puzzles. Apart from being a cutting social satire, this is the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. And yet it has been out of circulation for years. (I heard from an acquaintance some time ago that Nihalani himself had been searching for a decent print; this is not difficult to believe.)

Well, it’s here now, in an excellent print – one of the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs, which are restorations of NFDC films made in the 1980s and 90s. These discs represent a very important step in film preservation in India and I’ll be writing a longer piece about them soon, but for now here are some thoughts on Party.

****

The sequence mentioned above is one of the establishing scenes of Nihalani’s film, but it also touches on a key theme: the divide between an artist’s work and his life. Is it possible for a character on stage to feel intense vedna while the actor playing that character claims to be untouched by the emotions (and afterwards peels off his makeup, puts on a shiny red kurta and leaves for a cocktail party)? Is it similarly possible for a writer to express a powerful social conscience and sympathy for the downtrodden in his work while otherwise leading a privileged life at a vast remove from the subjects of his writing?

Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, Party raises these questions from many different perspectives. In its opening minutes we meet the people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who is constantly “performing” – even in private moments with her husband – and seems incapable of distinguishing between art and life. (No wonder she interprets a line in Barve’s work about “khokhla pyaar” – hollow love – as a personal jibe.) Other guests include Inamdar’s theatre actor Ravindra, who is more adept at separating himself from his roles; the ostentatiously radical Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others; Damayanti’s melancholy daughter Sona (Deepa Sahi), who has a child out of wedlock; and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly even a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly). Meanwhile a group of young partygoers – led by Damayanti’s son Rahul – take over an upstairs room and dance to popular American music, mostly unconcerned with the goings-on downstairs.

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced, confessions made and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but caught in the images they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the talk converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure (whose simultaneous absence from and centrality to the proceedings is reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz) becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to mild annoyance (“This so-called social commitment has become fashionable”) to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world? “Hum likhte hain kyonke humein likhna hai” (“We write because we must”) Barve says, but Avinash insists that every work of art is a weapon and that art and politics are inseparable. “Do we want to live as artists or as human beings?”

Party is a startlingly fresh film both in these big discussions and in its casual chatter about the literary world. Two people debate the relative merits of Rushdie and Naipaul (and I admit to being amused to find that Naipaul had a reputation for being "bitter" even three decades ago). A minor character named Ila (played by Ila Arun) asks Barve why there is so little of the female perspective in his work, and though his reply is an apparently sensible one (he can only convincingly write about the things he knows), we are reminded of his distant, condescending attitude towards his wife. “You English speakers think too much of yourselves,” one person says, provoking the retort that there is such a thing as “vernacular snobbery” too. (Yet this party itself is clearly an aspirational setting where anyone not comfortable in English would be out of place. Bharat awkwardly says things like “She is drunken” just to make small talk and to fit in.) Opposing views are expressed on nearly every major topic. Damayanti (who basks in the reflected glory of artists without being one herself) is called a parasite, but the word becomes equally significant in another context – it can refer to a smug artist living off his early work and reputation, becoming fattened on fame without ever feeling impelled to seek fresh ground or question his own assumptions.

By now it should be clear that this is (like nearly all of Nihalani’s work) an explicitly idea-driven film: politically charged, full of reflection and counter-reflection. Being adapted from a major play in close collaboration with the playwright, it has the discipline and rigour of good theatre (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it). But these things perhaps make it important to clarify that this is definitely not just a static filming of a stage production. There is a strong cinematic sense in the use of space, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them. And there are splendidly orchestrated scenes such as the one where, during a conversation between Barve and Damayanti, the camera repeatedly cuts outside the room to watch the drunk Mohini moving around silently on the porch. Barve will make a key confession about himself at around the same time his wife is shocked by her own image in the mirror.

****

Driven though it is by conversation, Party ends with a harrowing wordless sequence where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life; another who is in danger of doing so) share a nightmare vision and face their consciences. The scene ties in with a motif in Nihalani’s early cinema: the voiceless person, someone who is either unable or reluctant to speak up. (See Om Puri’s Lahanya Bhiku in Aakrosh or the silent, suffering wife played by Deepa Sahi in Aaghat.) But it also takes us back to the very beginning of Party – to a lovely shot of Sona reading a letter written by Amrit, so focused on the text that she barely moves, the camera drawing tentatively towards her. (Watching the film a second time, one might consider the light gently streaming in through the silk curtains in the background and think about the irony of this poet-activist’s letter being read in such a refined, unthreatened bourgeoisie setting.)

“Bheenche huye jabre dard kar rahe hain,” says the voiceover (“My clenched jaws are aching”). “Kitni der tak dabaaya jaa sakta hai khaulte laave ko. Kisi bhi pal khopri crater mein badal jaaye.” (“How long can I stay silent and keep this lava inside me? My head feels like it could turn into a crater.”)

[This may be a good time to point out that the shuddh Hindi used in this screenplay is occasionally so dense and layered that you might need to watch some scenes a second time just to fully process what is being said.]

The voice is the familiar one of Naseeruddin Shah and a tinge of amusement enters it when he says “khopri crater mein badal jaaye”, as if to acknowledge the corniness of such an analogy in an otherwise austere monologue. But when the writer of this letter makes his brief appearance in the final seconds of Party, the words will be given a morbidly literal form. It is one of many times in this film where something said in a light vein subsequently acquires a much darker shade. In brightly lit, elegantly furnished rooms people clink glasses and make small talk, but there are storms raging, both in their hearts and in the world outside.

Party isn’t a movie that you can appreciate in just about any mood, but those who open themselves to it will be driven back to it a few times. It is so well written, constructed and performed that it should stimulate even those (I include myself here) who are ambivalent about its ideological position. Wary though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among Hindi cinema's great achievements. And now it has the print it deserves.

P.S. For anyone interested in recurring visual motifs in a director’s work, especially from one film to the next, here’s a little exercise: watch the very last scene of Party, note how a shuffling walk creates the sense of someone weighed down by heavy chains, and then watch the opening shot of the film Nihalani made immediately after it – Aghaat. (I wrote about Aghaat in this post.) The little "link" between the two scenes reminded me of other prominent inter-film connections, such as the similarity between the closing shot of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the opening shot of his next film A Clockwork Orange.

No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

The rules of Limbo: Aubrey Menen's The Prevalence of Witches

I hadn’t read anything by Aubrey Menen – a writer of Irish-Indian ancestry, noted for his satirical works – until I opened Penguin India’s just-published anthology of four of his novels, and then his rich, descriptive comic prose put me in mind of Saki. The first book in this collection is the witty The Prevalence of Witches, first published in 1947 and set in Limbo, an imaginary region comprising “650 miles of clumsy hills and jungle”, and populated by singularly backward people who have no understanding of (or need for) modern education or scientific thought, and who take things like witchcraft and devilry entirely for granted.

“Once a year,” we are told by the narrator, an unnamed Education Officer, “one Englishman visits Limbo, surrounded by clouds of insecticide through which can just be discovered the Union Jack. During this visit, Limbo is a part of the British Empire in India.” Essentially, however, Limbo follows its own rules. Anything good or bad that takes place can be quite easily explained by invoking the supernatural. “The headman was perfectly satisfied with being a Limbodian. He could explain everything in Limbodian terms. He had no use for any other. His society was closed, whole and eminently satisfactory.” No one here ever tells a lie, or even contemplates it, “because there was always a witch or a magician who could talk to the dead and find out the truth in no time”.

One of the richest premises for comedy is a situation where two people discuss a very serious and urgent subject but fail to get anywhere because, for all their eagerness to understand each other, they are talking at cross-purposes. The gap between their backgrounds, beliefs and cultural reference points is so large that there is no way of finding common ground. (One might say they are suspended in limbo.)

The Prevalence of Witches contains an extraordinary passage of black humour involving just such a conversation. The participants are a Limbodian village headman and an English administrator named Catullus; the former is patiently trying to explain how a witch goes about her spiteful work, why she must be interrogated by hanging her upside down and beating her, and why she may “choose” to be either alive or dead (not that there’s much difference between these two states of being, as far as witches are concerned – they are very troublesome creatures either way). The funniness of this passage comes from the growing perplexity and frustration of both parties, and Menen’s ability to make us empathize (to a degree) with both. We are not privy to Catullus’s inner thoughts, though we can imagine what they must be. Instead, our perspective throughout is that of the headman. From the time he sits down to tell his story, he is conscious that these strange, overdressed men might not properly understand him, so he tries to anticipate their reactions and speak in terms that would be clear to them – as if he were explaining the facts of life to children.

“Our village has a witch,” he began. “She is not one of the ordinary dirty witches that you meet anywhere. She is a very clever woman and always wears as many clothes as she can. She keeps the top half of her body covered even in the hottest weather.” He was immensely pleased with this beginning, and paused to admire the way he could adapt himself to any company.

“What is her name?” Catullus asked him.

“Gangabai.”

“Have you brought her with you?”

“Oh no.”

“Where is she?”

“That is not easy to say.”

“Has she run away?”

“Oh no, not run away.”

“Very well, has she gone away?”

“No, in a sense, and then, yes, in a sense,” said the headman.

“Which? Yes or no?” asked Catullus.

“Both. She has been dead three years.”

“Please begin again, and at the beginning of your story,” said Catullus.

“Our village has a witch called Gangabai,” said the headman politely.

“Has? You mean your village had a witch,” Catullus corrected him.

“You are quite right,” said the headman, “Our village had a witch and she died, and now our village has a witch.”

“Another witch?”

“The same witch,” said the headman gravely, shaking his head.

Catullus leaned back in his chair.

“Perhaps you had better tell me the story in your own words.”

The headman agreed, but he privately told himself that he had no intention of doing so. It would be much too gross for these delicate (and, he was beginning to suspect, not very keen-witted) persons. He had to make the whole thing sound whimsical and gay, although it had really been very far from that. He wished these people could face the crude facts of living, but it was so clear that they could not.

And the conversation goes on, becoming more and more complicated. I wish I could transcribe the whole chapter here – it’s a masterpiece of deadpan humour. The headman is convinced his listeners will be sympathetic to the idea that he and his men had severely beaten a woman until she “got annoyed” and “decided” to die just to teach everyone a lesson (and wreak even more mischief). Or that they held another woman’s head under the river until she “abandoned” her current body and enter the body of a dog sitting nearby. These are, after all, basic concepts – why do these white men look so confused when they hear about them?

Reading this passage and others like it, one might think that Menen’s intention is to poke fun at the superstitions of “primitive” people. But The Prevalence of Witches is consistently mindful of the hypocrisies of those who think of themselves as modern or progressive, and the often-dubious building blocks of what we call civilisation. (“When you come to the durbar,” the village headman tells Catullus, using an analogy to explain that some things are simply meant to be done in a certain way, “you wear gold and all the rest of us do not wear gold. When we examine a witch, she is upside down and all the rest of us are the right way up.”) Midway through the book, there’s a strange conversation between the headman and an American missionary named Small, who tries to explain concepts like the Christian God and church chandeliers in Limbodian terms, with funny – but also moving – results, so that by the end you're not sure which of the two men is more confident about his belief system.

Later, when the villagers are told that their children must go to school to learn to read, and that the Englishmen will provide them with books to read, the response is a reasonable, “Is that not like the man who gave a village a tiger and then gave the village a gun to shoot it with?” By the time a fake Swami arrives, dressed in a flowing white blouse tucked into a pair of khaki shorts (so that “he gave the appearance of a Boy Scout carrying a stained-glass window adorned with a picture of an Old Testament prophet, in such a manner that the scout was visible only from the waist downwards”), we begin to wonder if it isn’t best to leave Limbo to its own devices.

Menen isn’t exactly quick reading – his humour demands full concentration if you really want to savour it. Also, my attention wandered during a chapter where Catullus, the narrator and a couple of others indulge in long-winded philosophizing about matters of theology, authority and art. This bit read like something out of a much-too-explicit Novel of Ideas – it reminded me of the duller stretches of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But mostly, The Prevalence of Witches is a very pleasing reminder of the lush, literate and merciless black comedy of an earlier time.

P.S. I also enjoyed Menen’s The Fig Tree, about a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who inadvertently grows a tree bearing figs that have strongly aphrodisiacal properties. It’s set in Italy and makes fun of cardinals, dictators, ministers, and people generally. Can’t complain about that.

Peepli [Live]: quick notes

I thought Anusha Rizvi’s film was a really good black comedy. Very irreverent and caustic about many things while remaining basically sympathetic towards the tragedy of the people at the centre of the storm (the unfathomably helpless villagers who find a media circus descending on them after word gets around that one of them has decided to commit suicide in protest). This is a difficult balance to get right. When I spoke with Jaane bhi do Yaaro's dialogue-writer Ranjit Kapoor last year, he pointed out that throughout the creation of the many lunatic scenes in that script, he was careful to preserve the essential integrity of Vinod and Sudhir, the movie’s idealistic photographers/fall guys. The audience could laugh all they liked at the situations that these two guys find themselves in, but it was important that they took Vinod and Sudhir seriously.

- Peepli [Live]’s beleaguered protagonist Natha spends most of the film dazed by all the attention he is getting, uncomprehending of the fact that he has been turned into a Cause and a Symbol, perpetually fearful that having made an offhand statement during a private conversation with his brother, he will now be forced to follow through on his promise to kill himself. (Once his story get publicised, his life is no longer his own anyway: he's a pawn in a game that he can't begin to understand.) A little something to chew on: try comparing this reluctant Everyman with the rabble-rousing messiah figure played by Amitabh Bachchan in Main Azaad Hoon (itself a remake of Capra’s Meet John Doe). Consider that Main Azaad Hoon was hailed as a courageous, non-mainstream (or semi-non-mainstream) attempt to address the plight of the common man.

- I disagree with the common reaction that the film was too over-the-top in its satirising of TV journalism. A couple of the gags might have been obvious (such as the scene where a round-up of national news prioritises an item about Shilpa Shetty and Prince William, with farmer suicides coming third on the list) but try sitting down to watch our real news channels – Hindi and English – for a couple of days and you’ll find that the blackest satire is inadequate as a lampooning force; real life is always a few steps ahead. The many good vignettes in this film include throwaway shots of city journos brandishing the villagers' possessions in front of their cameras like spoilt brats who have found an artillery of new toys to play with, or milking every moment for its potential emotional impact, even when the villagers themselves are being stoical and dignified. (Something I’ve been wondering generally after watching this and other depictions of electronic media in our recent films: are there young journalists who have quit their jobs and opted for alternate careers, out of sheer embarrassment if nothing else? Or do skins in this profession get rhino-thick at a very early age?)

- In our media-saturated age, films like Peepli [Live] are begging to be made, but for an uncannily prescient portrayal of a personal tragedy being turned into a carnival by cynical journalists, do watch Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole. Nearly six decades old, and that film looks fresher each year.

P.S. Here's a feature story done by the wife for Mint newspaper, about one of the country's many Peepli villages - this one in Aligarh on the UP-Haryana border.

Coming Soon, the end of good writing

In recent years Indian television has given us exploitative reality shows, tacky and regressive soaps, sensationalist news coverage and, for a brief period, Ekta Kapoor's Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki. I’m sure there are many insightful behind-the-scenes books waiting to be written about the TV industry and what it tells us about the voyeurism and exhibitionism in our society. Unfortunately, Omkar Sane’s Coming Soon. The End is not one of those books.

Sane’s allegorical premise has four friends, each of whom works for a different TV channel: Bass is the girl from the music channel, Crass is the guy in general entertainment...you get the drift. They meet in a bar to catch up and a stranger named Mass (a stand-in for the average viewer) joins them to learn about how the industry functions. He’s so naïve that his jaw drops when he learns that Kareena Kapoor says things in an Airtel ad because Airtel pays her to say them. In other words he has a lot to learn, and it’s going to be a long night.

Simple-minded though this set-up is, it could still have been executed better than it is here. Reading Coming Soon. The End, one senses a deep-rooted bitterness, an anger, that might have been very effective if it were filtered through wit or dark satire. Instead, Sane expresses his contempt for the dumbing down of TV through dumbed-down writing: a never-ending parade of poor jokes, bad puns and non sequiturs. Here’s the sort of banal exchange you might find by simply opening a page at random:

“Oh, you guys work in television?” the fat man interrupted, waiting for his bill.
“No, we’re whores,” Bass replied.
“Oh, I thought I heard you say Television,” the fat man said apologetically.
“It’s the same thing.”

Or this:

“This is the story of the West?”
“Yes.”
“You know that almost rhymes with the West – Yes.”
“I didn’t mean to rhyme.”
“It’s no crime.”
“Now that rhymes.”
“Let’s not waste our time.”

And so on. On the few occasions that the PJs dry up, we get pedantic explanations of technical terms and processes, interspersed with mini-chapters that exist for little reason other than to make up the book’s word-count. Like the random two-page chapter “Anchors Aren’t Anchors”, comprising a list of phrases commonly used by TV-news anchors. (This material would have seemed trite even in an email forward doing the rounds in 1997.) Or the pseudo-philosophising in “Cool. Or Uncool. TV’s Like That”:

In a nutshell, cool is what is not cool according to the uncool.
But who decides who is cool and uncool?
The uncool call the cool uncool, the cool call the uncool, uncool.
The thing is, uncool isn’t even a real word. Just like cool isn’t a real state of being.

For some time now, Indian publishers have been increasing their lists of accessible, fast-paced books for the “metro” reader, which in itself is no bad thing. But if the writing on display in Coming Soon. The End (a book that will take you no more than 40 excruciating minutes to finish) is in any way representative of the future of publishing, we’re all better off watching bad television.

On Lies and satire: a chat with Gautam Bhatia

A state chief minister flies over a drought-ravaged area in an aircraft that has been retrofitted with a swimming pool, a golf course, a bowling alley and a shopping arcade, so he can “view the horrible disaster with some detachment”. (“Drought can be quite painful,” he observes from high up in the clouds. “Why do you get so involved?” his wife asks sympathetically.) Movie-stars step out of the screen to assist a pregnant woman who has gone into labour in the theatre’s aisles, but when she gives birth to a baby girl the infant is deposited into the trash can with the family-size popcorn bag. At a conference to discuss poverty in a developing country, the pampered delegates mull what brand of expensive wine goes best with what topic: is Chablis especially good for a rural latrine seminar, does Bordeaux go with illiteracy?

You’ll find many such eye-popping passages in Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, a graphic novel written by Gautam Bhatia and drawn by the Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa. This is an unremittingly dark work that satirises many aspects of modern Indian life, notably the class divide and the apathy of politicians towards their constituencies - it’s funny and shocking in turn, with hardly any light at the end of the tunnel, and capable of leaving most readers with a nasty taste in the mouth.

I wasn’t taken by the drawings – a few are good, but overall they are rushed and amateurish, and one often senses a disconnect between what the writer intended and how the artist interpreted it. At any rate the focus is on Bhatia’s text, which deliberately exaggerates situations, compresses time and space, and revels in absurdity, such as in the passage where the life-story of a corrupt businessman is rewritten to make it echo Mahatma Gandhi’s. The narrative moves between a number of characters, and back and forth in time, but the key figures are a politician named Bhola (formerly Rocky the smuggler), a poor farmer named Alibaba and a prostitute named Rekha who rises through the ranks to become the prime minister of India (eventually bearing a suspicious resemblance to Indira Gandhi). Their paths intersect every now and again, but that’s almost beside the point: this book is best treated as a series of discrete episodes, some of which work, some of which don’t.

I had this email exchange with Gautam Bhatia a few days ago:

In addition to being an architect, you’re an acerbic social commenter and a prolific writer. How do you find the time to juggle these disciplines?

Writing for me was an activity that grew out of architecture. Seeing how some clients had strange fetishes and dreams – demanding baroque villas and Venetian mansions in south Delhi’s Greater Kailash, for example – it was much easier to write about architecture than build it! But the time is always there. Luckily buildings go on forever, people run out of money during construction, or projects don’t get approved because the building agency has not received the bribe...Anyway, most of my writing is a reflection on the visible state of things. It can be done at bus stops and railway stations.

How did Lie come about? Did you conceptualise and write the narrative first, and subsequently work with the artists, or was it a collaborative exchange of ideas from the start?

Lie was initially an unwieldy 600 page book called An Indian Story. It was written with the idea of being used as the story for the project Desh Ki Awaaz, which was an arts collaboration between traditional, popular and graphic artists. I was the odd man architect in the group. This bigger story weaved together elements and themes from contemporary life, including politics, film, religion, cricket and family life. By using subjects to which everyone could react, the idea was to explore the moral, and social dilemmas that dominate Indian life: corruption, dowry, dysfunctional families, gender inequality, caste prejudice, communalism and other areas of conflict. Real and fictitious characters – ministers, movie stars, bureaucrats, underworld dons, migrant workers, child labourers, government teachers, cricket players, business executives and a range of other personalities - moved in and out of the story.

Lie was the shortened version of An Indian Story. Here the collaboration was on unequal terms. The storyline had to be followed by the miniaturists. It took a lot of free hand sketches and verbal exchange to convince them of the plot, its insane and outlandish characters. For people who have spent a lifetime painting Gods in reverential poses, the idea of portraying a minor being raped in a police station wasn’t easy.

Why did you and (graphic artist) Orijit Sen decide on Rajasthani miniaturists to draw the story?

The miniature form of painting most effectively lends itself to the size of a book. Miniaturists can cram a great level of detail in a small area. They are like watch makers, very comfortable with a square inch of canvas and extremely confident that the entire battle of Kurukshetra can be depicted on it. I was also intrigued by the complete and uninhibited use of the most brilliant colours. Sometimes the entire colour palette of Rajasthan is visible on a single page.

The book’s structure is non-linear and fragmented. Is this intended to reflect the chaos of the modern Indian experience?

It was not intended that way but certainly the Indian urban experience is so chaotic it defies any structure. The interweaving was the result of two parallel stories that connect briefly in the end. On the one hand, there’s Alibaba, a farmer in a small Bihar village, whose physical world is destroyed by famine. And Bhola Mishra, born to privilege, is the urban stereotype. Corrupt, greedy and loaded with the symbols of success, his life is a parody of India’s urban rich. The rest of the moving back and forth in time, across characters and terrains reflects the standard divisions of India – between urban and rural, poor and rich, corrupt and evil, rotten and really rotten.

There’s a lot of deliberate exaggeration here. Do you find this mode especially useful for writing satire?

Exaggeration and subversion are all intentional, to make the point more effectively. Real life itself is an exaggeration. In India when things are bleak they are really bleak; when things are good they are sublime. Sometimes you write an exaggeration of a real-life situation, thinking it is so absurd and outlandish it can only be read as farcical; then you read the same piece as a news story in the papers the next day. The absurd and the farcical are ordinary news. Compression of time, and using the familiar – as in fashioning a character’s biography from Mahatma Gandhi’s, or making another character look like Laloo Yadav – makes identification easier.

Is it easy to be a satirist in a society where many realities are already so twisted?

There is no satire in India. Satire really has no role to play in places that are wracked by fear. Freedom of exaggerated expression is central to satire. If each time you write something you are looking over your shoulder to see if a mob is going to lynch you because you thought you could write freely about religion or cricket or caste...well...

The book’s perspective is very cynical. Do you believe there’s any hope for the common man in India?

I think the common man is the only hope for India. But unfortunately he too will sooner or later be afflicted by middle-class addictions. The privileged classes have been granted far too big a stake in running the country. Owning industries and land is no eligibility for leadership.

I am hardly in a position to comment on what the country’s biggest problems are – I live a privileged and pretentious life, like others of the middle class. But I think our most serious cultural flaw is the inability to think for ourselves and work out our own future. I am forever designing buildings already built in Europe and America. Left to the present lot of decision makers, we will be a smaller, poorer America within the next decade.

Are you working on any more graphic novels?

No, it isn’t a medium that I can control. I am not entirely comfortable in elaborate collaborations. I am working with a few others on a small film script on the Uselessness of Religion, but given its content I doubt it’ll get beyond a word file on the computer.

[Bhatia famously invented the term "Punjabi Baroque", which is also the title of one of his earlier books. You'll find links to some of his magazine and newspaper columns here]