Epic fictions: the Rashomon-like world of the Mahabharata

[This is the “extended mix” of an essay I wrote for the August issue of Caravan magazine – a look at perspective tellings of a very complex epic, with Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s book The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata as the focal point. In the magazine version - which you can read here - we left out the bits about Lidchi-Grassi’s comparison of the Kurukshetra battle to the Second World War, since we thought that slightly diluted the focus of the piece. But I’ve included it here] 

My first stab at literary censorship came at an early age. I was barely 10 when I took it upon myself to read out C Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata to my mother. For days on end, as she did her housework, I followed her about with the book in my hand, omitting not a sentence — with one exception: I would bowdlerise any passages that presented my personal hero, Karna, in an unfavourable light. Thus, the command to disrobe the Pandavas and Draupadi was transferred from his mouth to Duryodhana’s. The Kauravas’ disastrous expedition to the forest to mock their exiled cousins — an adventure stirred up by Karna — found no mention in my selective retelling. And the Abhimanyu killing was toned down somewhat.

By that age I had devoured at least three other Mahabharata translations (the ones by RK Narayan, P Lal and William Buck) along with uncounted Amar Chitra Katha comics, and much of my interest was centred on Karna’s unhappy life. This is not an uncommon reaction among young Mahabharata readers who are introverted by nature and whose literary heroes tend to be loners and outsiders: the Pandavas’ illegitimate elder brother is one of ancient literature’s major tragic figures, and some of the most stirring episodes in the final third of the narrative are built around him. But I may have taken the hero worship too far. Perhaps I had subconsciously linked Karna with the social outcasts played by another childhood idol, Amitabh Bachchan, in films like Deewaar and Kaala Patthar.

The adoration and the attendant defensiveness reached proportions that are easy to smile about today. I felt a sense of vindication while reading passages that stressed Karna’s virtues — such as an introduction to Shanta Rameshwar Rao’s translation, which proclaimed that he could be viewed as the “real hero” of the epic. Later, I would revel in Kamala Subramaniam’s gentle, humanist retelling (still a personal favourite) that emphasised the nobler qualities not just of Karna— – or Radheya, as she refers to him throughout— – but of most figures in the epic (Subramaniam even cast Duryodhana as a Shakespearean hero doomed by a single fatal flaw). When BR Chopra’s TV version premiered in late 1988, I spent much time fuming about the show’s simplifications to anyone who would listen. Sharing my seat on the school bus was a friend who disapproved of Karna (because he was on the side of the bad guys); our Monday-morning discussions about the previous day’s episode were frequently heated.

Even as a child I resisted grandparental attempts to paint the story as a simple good-versus-evil treatise. But it took a few more years — and deeper engagement with the Mahabharata as well as with scholarly literature on it — to appreciate that this epic is bigger than the sum of its parts. Karna’s struggles are stirring, no doubt; but so too — if perhaps less dramatically — are the predicaments of other characters like Arjuna and Drona, Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, Kunti and Vidura.

For the Mahabharata junkie, one of the best ways of appreciating the epic’s complexities is to read “perspective retellings” centred on the lives and experiences of specific characters. Such works (whether narrated in the first or the third person) affix us to the consciousness of a single protagonist and can be very effective when the reader is already familiar with the story as told in the conventional way. It’s possible, then, for retellings to open new doors — allowing us to grasp a range of motivations and compulsions.

Versions of the Mahabharata told from the perspective of individual characters can be traced back nearly 2,000 years, when the legendary playwright Bhasa portrayed Duryodhana as a generous prince, mindful of family honour, in "Urubhanga". In more recent times, dozens of notable books have appeared in all the major Indian languages (though unfortunately for the English-language reader, few have been translated well). Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi) is a powerful account of Karna’s tribulations, while Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and PK Balakrishnan’s Ini Nhan Urangatte (“And Now Let me Sleep”; Malayalam) leave the stage to the Pandavas’ queen Draupadi. Even non-Indian writers who possess only a passing acquaintance with Hindu mythology have been tempted by the epic’s possibilities, often with amusing results — a couple of decades ago an American writer named Elaine Aron produced a florid work titled Samraj, which emphasised the roles of Yudhisthira and Draupadi as emperor and empress of a new world (along with much eyebrow-raising sexual imagery involving plough-and-furrow metaphors, and even a small part for a slave-girl imported from Egypt!).

For me, the value of a really good perspective retelling was demonstrated by Prem Panicker’s ‘Bhimsen’ — an excellent transcreation in English of MT Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam Randamoozham, written in the voice of the second Pandava, Bhima. In mainstream renderings Bhima is frequently depicted as a gluttonous oaf or a comic foil, but Nair turned him into a sensitive, thoughtful figure — a large-hearted and brutally frank man with a minor complex about being in the shadow of his brothers Yudhisthira and Arjuna.

Reading this narrative, one must constantly remember that each incident is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s biases and prejudices. This isn’t always an easy idea to process. On his blog, where his transcreation was initially serialised, Panicker has often been asked to elaborate on events that Bhima has no firsthand knowledge of. (If I had read "Bhimsen" at age 10, I would have been incensed by it, for Karna is portrayed almost throughout as an arrogant, mean-spirited man constantly trying to rise above his station in life. But then, Bhima has no reason to view “the suta” in any other terms.) It’s easy to see that if you gather together enough retellings of the calibre of Randamoozham and Mrityunjay, you get a tantalising, Rashomon-like collection of conflicting perspectives on the same events.

Such retellings are also important reminders of how malleable old stories are, especially in a country as culturally and socially diverse as India. As you travel from one region to another, plot specifics vary, as do people’s perceptions of different characters. Duryodhana might be the villain-in-chief in any conventional version of the Mahabharata, but there are temples in Kerala and Uttaranchal where he is worshipped as a just ruler. And not all Mahabharata traditions subscribe to a misty-eyed view of the Pandavas as heroes. Tribal communities who revere Ekalavya as a folk-hero — cruelly denied the status of the world’s greatest archer — are likely to think of Arjuna and Drona as privileged schemers.

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Now we have Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata, which is described as a “reinterpretation of Vyasa’s epic from Arjuna’s point of view”. This is misleading on two fronts. First, Arjuna isn’t the book’s only narrator: the initial hundred or so pages of the story are narrated in the voice of Drona’s son Ashwatthama, who is a relatively peripheral character until the end of the war (when he puts the finishing touches to the macabre ritual sacrifice of Kurukshetra). And second, for most of their narratives, Arjuna and Ashwatthama serve the function of all-knowing storytellers rather than individuals with limited perspectives.

Lidchi-Grassi’s Ashwatthama begins on a genuinely personal note: in the very first sentence, he wonders if his childhood yearning for the taste of milk — and the effect this had on his father’s life — directly caused the war. This is a pertinent thought in a story where the competing desires and weaknesses of different characters build towards a cataclysm. But the intimate tone doesn’t last long; Ashwatthama soon becomes a practically omniscient narrator. He knows the secret of Karna’s birth from the outset, because Kunti had conveniently confided in Ashwatthama’s mother Kripi (and Kripi had passed the story on to her son). He knows that the Pandavas did not perish in the house of lac because he chances to overhear Vidura whisper the truth to Bheeshma. More improbably, after Draupadi’s swayamvara, when Krishna and Balarama follow the five Pandavas (dressed as Brahmins) back to their hut, Ashwatthama simply tags along — thus witnessing firsthand a historic meeting between cousins as well as the consequence of Kunti asking her sons to share their “alms”.

Thus, a straightforward retelling (and one that is often very good on its own terms) masquerades as something it isn’t. An effective perspective telling must have immediacy — the narrator should focus on relating his own reaction to each event as it occurs — but this one often refuses to stay in the moment, because the storytellers are too conscious of how well-known their story already is. “Uncle Vidura came from Hastinapura with Duryodhana’s now-famous invitation,” (italics mine) says Arjuna. In Nair’s Randaamoozham, Bhima too occasionally breaks the fourth wall between himself and the reader, but it’s done for a good reason: to de-mythologise some of the stories that have been told about the Pandavas. (The bards who sang about us had colourful imaginations, he often says wryly — we weren’t really that glamorous.) But when Arjuna in Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling begins narrating episodes with “Everybody knows the story of how...”, this serves no useful purpose, and even has the effect of diluting the value of his perspective. Some episodes are also strangely inert and passionless — when Arjuna goes to fetch water in the forest and discovers Nakula and Sahadeva lying dead near the lake, we don’t get a real sense of his grief at the sight.

That said, there is much to appreciate in Lidchi-Grassi’s book. I thought it particularly noteworthy that nearly half of its 900 pages deal with the period after the war, as the Pandavas come to terms with their pyrrhic victory, and face the ambiguous consequences of having performed their dharma. Her prose is elegant and vivid — comparable to that of Ramesh Menon’s fine two-part The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering — and there are little moments of creative inspiration that humanise the characters (as when Yudhisthira wryly tells his dog Raja to consider himself lucky: “you don’t even know who your cousins are”). There are also many fine character sketches, such as this one of the self-deceiving king Dhritarashtra welcoming the Pandavas to Hastinapura for the ruinous game of dice:

“He played the overjoyed uncle — and he was overjoyed. There were tears in his eyes as he fumbled to embrace us and ceremoniously take the perfume from our hair. Yes, real tears, and I doubt not that one in three ran in affection and remorse, the other two in joyful foresight of grabbing all we had for Duryodhana. Uncle Dhritarashtra was the most muddled old fool in the world, and never had his mixture of sentimentality and guile been so grotesque.”

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What I found most provocative about this book, however, is the Preface where Lidchi-Grassi allows herself a personal aside. Recalling her youth in post-WWII Paris, having recently learnt about the horrors of the concentration camps, she mentions her discovery of Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita – a source of comfort in a world gone insane. Describing Arjuna’s famous dilemma as the Pandava and Kaurava armies face each other on the battlefield, she writes, “What finally releases him is something from another dimension, a vision in which the terrifying ambiguities of morality are somehow resolved. I cannot begin to describe the catharsis this passage produced in me [...] I became convinced that the answers I sought could only come from another plane.”

To the irreligious mind this is a vague-sounding passage (contrast it with Amartya Sen’s thesis that the Gita can be read as a conversation between equals and that Arjuna’s pacifist argument is never lost), but it can at least be understood in terms of one person’s spiritual epiphany. However, Lidchi-Grassi then goes on to draw whimsical parallels between Kurukshetra and the Second World War, saying that the events leading up to the latter represented “a tremendous clash between the forces of darkness and the forces of light such as takes place in a time of changing Dharma”.

To an extent such hyperbole is understandable coming from someone who was at an impressionable age in post-war Europe and had a second-hand brush with the Holocaust (one of Lidchi-Grassi’s cousins was an Auschwitz survivor). But when she casts Winston Churchill in the role of the “champion of the Light” (with Hitler as the “Asura’s agent”) and remarks that his war speeches “had the unmistakeable ring of an inspired mystic” – implying that he was guided by an otherworldly power much the same way Arjuna was guided by Krishna – it’s possible to wonder if an analogy has been stretched too far.

This is not to gloss over the dangers posed by fascist Germany. You don’t have to be a moral absolutist to see that Nazism was a tremendous evil that had to be fought to preserve ideals of equality and freedom, and there is a certain poetic sense in which it can be said, with hindsight, that the things we most value in human civilisation were on the brink in the 1930s – that a German victory might have ushered in something resembling a Kaliyug. But simplistic talk about “light and darkness” is never a useful way of examining the vicissitudes of history, and on another level it’s a disservice to the Mahabharata too. It’s also typical of the many attempts to make ancient texts relevant to our own lives and times in very specific – and occasionally contrived – ways.

It’s no secret that religious leaders around the world constantly reinterpret their texts to bring them in line with modern thought. (A venerable old book has a passage recommending that a husband horse-whip his wife for a transgression like mismanaging the household funds? How embarrassing – but never mind. What it can mean is that he make the symbolic gesture of whipping, perhaps by lightly brushing her with a feather or whatever useful implement is at hand.)

But the Mahabharata presents a special case study: its mercilessly questioning tone is very different from that of most other ancient literature, and it has a bleak sense of humour – which is one reason why much of the contemporary reference-making is done in a playful, tongue-in-cheek vein. The day after Baba Ramdev was arrested while disguised in a woman’s salwar-kameez, a leading newspaper offered a humorous edit quoting the epic on the subject of cross-dressing. (“Arjuna wearing red silk, long hair and bangles as Brihannala hid his ‘masculine glory’ without eclipsing it ‘like Ketu covering the full moon’.”) Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (literally “The Maha Bharat Novel”) invented characters who were amalgams of Bheeshma and Mahatma Gandhi, Karna and Jinnah, Duryodhana and Indira Gandhi, but it didn’t feign a direct connection between the epic and contemporary politics; the tone was ironic rather than pedantic.

There are, of course, more solemn, scholarly attempts such as Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good, which brings the lessons of Vyasa’s epic to bear on such aspects of modern life as corporate governance and ethics (even likening Anil Ambani’s feelings about his elder brother to Duryodhana’s envy). But even Das’s book does acknowledge the many moral ambiguities of the epic. “[The concept of] Dharma is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but the Mahabharata’s characters are still trying to figure it out at the end.”

The contemporary reader would do well to remember that the Mahabharata can be read as a work completely shorn of supernatural elements; in fact, it’s highly probable that that’s how it was first read. There are references in medieval literature to a much shorter critical text called the Jaya, which made no mention of such miracles as the vastra haran incident, and in which Krishna is a shrewd Yadav chieftain, not the Vishnu avatar with a beatific smile. Bhasa’s plays and contemporary books like Randamoozham draw on this text, fleshing out the quotidian aspects of the story, stressing the human conflicts.

Read in this way, the Mahabharata is a fluid work of literature, with interpretations that can range from Kamala Subramaniam’s sentimental-idealistic view of the characters to Iravati Karve’s anthropological take in Yuganta, which analyses the ulterior motives of the most revered figures, placing even Krishna under the microscope. Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling repeatedly informs us that Krishna is “beyond Dharma”, but I think he becomes much more interesting if one sees him not as a smug God — forever in control, a puppet-master — but as a man with godlike qualities and a powerful understanding of the hearts and minds of other people; or even an avatar who has only a dim view of the role he must play in the larger picture, and who is frequently swayed by the human dramas around him. (Ramesh Menon’s retelling portrays a lonely, almost frightened Krishna preparing to impart the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna, knowing that this is the test his whole life has led up to.)

There’s an intriguing passage in The Great Golden Sacrifice where Arjuna, sulking because Krishna perceives Karna to be a serious threat (and possibly a greater warrior than himself), wonders:

“For if Arjuna was not the greatest archer in the world, who was he?”

This question — and the related questions of identity, self-doubt and affirmation implicit in it — cuts very close to the true heart of the epic. This is a story about people discovering their potential for good and bad, grappling with duty and conscience. Celestial voices may herald Yudhisthira as the son of Dharma (and hence the embodiment of truth and righteousness) at the moment of his birth, but for the man himself this oppressive responsibility is something he must struggle with all his life. Eventually, he becomes a worthy king — even something resembling a “Dharmaraj” — not by divine right but by slowly, painfully accepting the many weaknesses in his character and finding ways to overcome them.

This makes it possible to read the Mahabharata as the first great literary novel, relevant to us not in a facile, connect-the-dots sense but in a more general, abstract way: for the glimpses it offers into the hearts, minds and personal conflicts of an array of very different individuals – their encounters with their circumstances and how they transcend or succumb to them.

It’s precisely because these characters are so fresh and modern that fine academicians like Karve and Krishna Chaitanya have been able to bring the rigour of contemporary literary criticism to their studies. In The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, Chaitanya treats the epic as a poem where “heterogenous material accumulating over a long time-span was given an unmistakable unity, a focal thrust of meaning” by an editor (or vyasa), and points out that it uses sophisticated literary devices such as foreshadowing and recurring imagery. Karve similarly views the original Jaya as one of the last examples of a pragmatism in Indian literature that was subsequently lost; in later years, she writes, Indian literature became more sentimental, more centered around “the dreamy escapism of the Bhakti tradition”.

This is not to say that a "realist" Mahabharata is inherently superior to the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. (Many such tellings, including the ones by Subramaniam, Menon and Lidchi-Grassi, offer powerful insights into the human condition even as they stick with the God-as-charioteer theme.) Both approaches have different strengths and both tell us valuable things about the processes by which stories are generated and acquire new meanings. But at a time when fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when people take chauvinistic pride in sacred texts that pontificate and preach, it’s important not to undermine the worth of an old story that follows the “show, don’t tell” principle and provides more questions than answers.

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A few years ago I wrote a facetious blog post quoting from Kisara Mohan Ganguli’s translation of an episode where Karna, angry with his charioteer Shalya, launches a surreal attack on the morals of the women of Shalya’s kingdom Madra. Among other things, he denounces the Madraka ladies for “eating beef with garlic and boiled rice”, “singing while drunk obscene songs of diverse kinds” and “in intercourse being absolutely without any restraint”.

Someone commented on the post, expressing deep disappointment that the noble Karna would insult women in this fashion. Whereupon I began a reply: “There are many instances of Karna saying provocative things not because he really believes in them but because it provides an outlet for the anger and resentment that he carries inside him. In any case, don’t make sweeping judgements based on things said in the heat of battle.”

Halfway through the comment, I smiled to myself; here I was, in my thirties, still mounting a defence of a childhood hero! But I also realised that this was the sort of analysis I wouldn’t have been able to conduct at age nine (when I would have been more likely to turn a blind eye to the passage) – as an adult, I had a better understanding of the idea that being a “good” person doesn’t mean that you always say and do “good” things. Time and age do alter the perspective tellings we carry around in our heads, and the Mahabharata is a vast enough work to accommodate them all.

Dreamer's factory: Dadasaheb Phalke as a silent-movie hero

[From my Business Standard film column]

Around a hundred years, a Bombay-based lithographer and amateur magician named Dhundiraj Govind Phalke developed an interest in moving pictures, which eventually led him to make India’s first feature film Raja Harishchandra. Watching Paresh Mokashi’s 2009 biopic Harishchandrachi Factory, I realised how little we know about the details of Dadasaheb Phalke’s life – and about his landmark film, only fragments of which still exist.

Apart from teaching himself the craft of filmmaking, Phalke had to overcome the many prejudices of his time, such as the disdain for the idea that anyone would ever want to watch images moving on a screen when they could see live actors on a stage. His story invites some romanticising, and one thing to understand about Harishchandrachi Factory is that it isn’t a strictly realist telling of Phalke's life (in any case, it covers a period of only around two years). Instead, it has the mood of a picaresque tale about an underdog sallying from one adventure to the next, triumphing over major and minor obstacles – most of which (even the possibility of his losing his eyesight) are presented in lighthearted terms, as if to reassure the viewer that everything will turn out okay.

On the Wikipedia page for Phalke, there is an old photo of him looking vaguely Chaplinesque as he examines a strip of film, his head cocked in concentration. Though it’s a still image, it evokes the jerkiness of silent-movie footage – you can almost imagine it coming to life as part of a speeded-up sequence that shows an intrepid director tinkering about in his studio.

I think this is the spirit that the makers of Harishchandrachi Factory were trying to capture. Everything about their depiction of Phalke (very nicely played by Nandu Madhav) points to it: his own unflagging optimism, the support of his equally sanguine wife, their cheerful children and emotionally secure family life (there is no reference to Phalke’s first wife and child, who had died long before the events of 1911-1913 took place). The difficulties – the selling of an insurance policy and his wife’s jewellery, the social ostracising from those who believe he is dabbling in black magic – are glossed over.

Sailing to London despite having no contacts in England, Phalke discovers that the world is his oyster (and the lilting background music seems almost to goad him on). He immediately meets a fellow Marathi who helps him procure vegetarian food; sauntering into an editor's office, he is welcomed and given the help he needs. In barely the blink of an eye, we see his wife suddenly waking up to discover that her husband is back home, coochie-cooing at their new baby – it’s as if she had been dreaming, and he had never left at all. (I was reminded of how cinema can “magically” transport us to distant places and back within seconds.)

Later, the little problems surrounding the shoot (such as the impossibility of getting women to play women’s roles – and the near-impossibility of getting male actors whose fathers are still alive to shave off their moustaches!) are presented as a series of jolly episodes. Even the penultimate scene, where Phalke is applauded by a London audience after the screening of his film, suggest the self-effacing Little Tramp, blinking at the limelight. The subtext here is that Phalke quietly turns down an offer to practice his art in England, choosing instead to help set up this new industry in his homeland; we see that he is practicing his own, modest version of swaraj. But the tone of this scene isn’t didactic – it’s the tone of comic whimsy.

In other words, Harishchandrachi Factory is not what anyone could call a gritty, hard-edged film – it may be open to the criticism that it isn’t a “serious” biography. But I think its tone has a poetic aptness: when you consider how Phalke’s factory paved the way for the creation of so many dream-scapes over the decades, it’s fun to see his own life-story being given the texture of a very pleasant dream.

P.S. Watching Harishchandrachi Factory, I was reminded of another affectionate (and romanticised) depiction of a real-life director – Tim Burton’s 1994 movie Ed Wood. One of the most stirring scenes in this film has Edward Wood Jr, legendary bad-movie director, running into his idol Orson Welles at a bar. Talent-wise, the two men stand at opposite ends of the creative spectrum (if Welles directed “the greatest film ever made”, Wood directed “the worst film ever made”), but they are kindred spirits in one sense: they are forever being pushed around by others and expected to make compromises. “Visions are worth fighting for,” Welles (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) tells Wood in his baritone voice. "Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

The rub is that this sequence (which you can see here) is wholly fictional - there is no record of Wood ever meeting Welles in real life. But it feels right; it’s a scene of which you can say, “It should have happened this way.” Harishchandrachi Factory contains a few such moments.

The grammatically suspect comedy of Damon Runyon's Broadway stories

[From my Sunday Guardian column]

As a reader, it can be very rewarding to visit a wholly imagined universe: I can’t recall how many hours I’ve spent immersed in the mythological back-stories of Tolkien’s Arda – and years before that, thinking about the many possible lands atop Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree. But there are also writers who, while setting their stories in the real world – with recognisable human characters and geographical or anthropological detail – still create a mood that can properly exist only within their pages. Consider P G Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle (which, as Evelyn Waugh suggested, is just as inaccessible to us as the Garden of Eden, even though it’s located in the English countryside) and Gerald Durrell’s Corfu (the three books set there are technically memoirs, but Durrell’s account of the island and his sunshine-filled childhood are highly idealised and even a little unreliable).

Damon Runyon’s Broadway – the Broadway of the post-Prohibition years – is another example of a real place and period being refashioned into a literary milieu that belongs solely to its author. Runyon is one of my favourite humour writers (I’d seat him in the pew just behind Wodehouse and S J Perelman) and his stories are populated by rogues of various stripes, from small-time gamblers, loan-sharks and their “dolls” to kidnappers and mobsters who aren’t averse to having their enemies “plugged”. Such people certainly did exist in New York City in the 1920s and 30s (the colourful names – The Lemon Drop Kid, Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse and dozens of others – are drawn from real figures of the time), but Runyon defines them so sharply that you can’t tell how much of the writing is poetic exaggeration and how much is true to life.

In his day job, Runyon dealt with cold facts; he was a well-regarded newspaperman. But the reporter’s ear for the cadences of speech must have served him well in his fiction writing. The unnamed narrator of the Broadway stories is a mild-mannered, somewhat nervous man whose own calling we never learn, but who seems to be confidante and (reluctant) associate to all the lowlifes you can imagine. His tone is amusingly deferential and mannered, but also sprinkled with colloquialisms and period slang (“puppies” for feet, “Judy” for woman) as well as deliberately awkward phrases (“She was no one but his own adoring mother”).

The distinctive use of language in these stories helps create a self-contained world. In an introduction to the anthology On Broadway, the English humorist E C Bentley says of Runyon’s writing style: “There is a sort of ungrammatical purity about it that, to me at least, has the strongest appeal.” Read a few pages of any Runyon story and you’ll agree. The most noticeable quality is that he never uses the past tense. (“Mindy remarks that he does not see Nicely-Nicely Jones for a month of Sundays, and then everybody present remembers that they do not see Nicely-Nicely around lately, either.”) Less obvious – to the first-time reader – is that he rarely uses conditional tenses either. For instance, when a Runyon character intends to say “I would have laughed much more heartily if Joe the Joker had dropped dead in front of me”, he will say: “I will laugh much more heartily if Joe the Joker drops dead in front of me.” Isolated from context, this might be confusing, but once you get into the spirit of the stories, the writing develops its own rhythm and internal logic.

I can’t think of a Runyon story that isn’t worth reading, but I particularly enjoyed the collections More Than Somewhat (which is also an oft-used Runyon phrase) and Furthermore. The story "A Piece of Pie", about a spectacular eating contest, contains some of my favourite vignettes ("...the doctors at the Clinic Hospital are greatly baffled to receive, from the same address at the same time, one patient who is suffering from undernourishment, and another patient who is unconscious from over-eating") while "Butch Minds the Baby" has the delightful premise of an expert safe-opener taking his infant out one night on a burgling assignment. ("Butch starts pawing through his satchel looking for something and it seems what he is looking for is a little bottle of some kind of explosive with which to shake the lock on the safe up some, and at first he cannot find this bottle, but finally he discovers that John Ignatius Junior has it and is gnawing at the cork.")

In other stories like “The Old Doll’s House” (where a young man, on the run from extortionists, hides out in the home of an elderly, Miss Havisham-like woman late at night), "The Brain Goes Home" and “Lillian” – about a no-gooder and his alcoholic cat – the characteristic Runyon humour is laced with a tenderness that is all the more effective in this crime-ridden, cut-throat setting. I think some of his work could even be described as humanist noir comedy!

A plug for good writing on popular films

As a reviewer – and before that, as a reader of literary and film criticism – one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s more challenging to write intelligently about a popular work (whose artistic merits are forever under question, or rarely discussed at all) than to write about a book or film that has already found a place in the canon of Cultural Respectability. You need a highly original mindset to begin with. (There’s bound to be so much existing criticism on the “respectable” works that it’s easy to fall into the trap of subconsciously borrowing ideas from other writers, or simply going with the accepted wisdom.) You also need the courage to disregard the bullying of people who think certain types of films or books can only ever be endorsed as mindless entertainment – that it’s a waste of time to engage deeply with them. ***

This is one reason why I have so much admiration for writers like Danny Peary, whose wonderful Cult Movies books are marked by accessible, open-minded yet always insightful writing on a huge range of films – including popular movies like The Terminator and Where the Boys Are, and “disreputable” underground hits like Cafe Flesh and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And this is also why I encourage you to read Abhimanyu Das's fine weekly columns in The Sunday Guardian. Among other subjects, Das has written about the glory days of Eddie Murphy, an early Kathryn Bigelow film that reveals the "action director as auteur”, the TV series Friday Night Lights, a Sid Vicious biopic, and thoughts on the art-vs-entertainment debate. There’s a consistently interesting sensibility on view here, and I look forward to seeing more film writing – including long-form writing – by him.

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*** Consider Pauline Kael berating younger critics like Peter Bogdanovich, V F Perkins and Andrew Sarris in her seminal essay “Circles and Squares”:

If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?

Now I love Kael, but such views – and, more generally, her airtight distinctions between “great trash” and “art” – have not dated well, to put it mildly. Though she remains the standard for film criticism today, I think her refusal to acknowledge the deeper resonances of popular cinema slightly undermines her legacy.

“A decent sophomore effort”

The main character of this book is an insane, genocidal sociopath. First he creates people that have no knowledge of good and evil. Then he requires that they follow rules that can only be followed if they had knowledge of good and evil? What kind of sick, sadistic jerk does that?

Much fun comes from reading these Amazon.com customer reviews of The Holy Bible: King James Version – a good demonstration of what happens when you don't give a “holy” text the unthinking respect that most religions arrogantly demand for themselves, and actually read and analyse the thing instead. Some of the review headers are funny in themselves (“Epic gore-flick spoiled by weird ending”; “Poorly written horror book about an awful dictator called God”; “NOT for children”). And as an acolyte of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I endorse this review titled “Blasphemy!”:

King James has taken some of his inspiration from Pastafarianism, but corrupted its message beyond all recognition. There is no mention of Pirates, or the Heavenly beer volcano, or His Divine Noodliness, the FSM.

RAmen to that. And looking forward to more such matter-of-fact literary criticism of texts from other traditions.

P.S. On a more serious note, I'm currently working on a review of Arun Shourie's new book Does He Know a Mother's Heart?, large chunks of which are dedicated to scriptural analysis. More on that soon.

Spirit and flesh: on Urmilla Deshpande's carnal prose

[Did a version of this for the Sunday Guardian]

It's often said that Indian authors aren’t good at writing about sex – that they get self-conscious, or struggle to find the balance between biological descriptiveness and subtle, feather-touch erotica. Actually, the existence of the international Bad Sex Award – which has been thrown at such notable writers as John Updike, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe – suggests that awkward sex writing is a universal phenomenon. (The sole Indian winner of the prize so far is Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13, with its analogies involving Bugattis and Volkswagens: “She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high.”) But I admit that my initial reaction on coming across Urmilla Deshpande’s Slither was to be impressed that an Indian writer has even attempted a collection of “carnal prose” (as the subtitle puts it).

Once I began reading the book, I was pleased to find that not only is much of the sex writing here quite good, but also that the stories show imagination and variety. Sexual passion, in its many forms, plays a central role throughout, but these are also searching narratives about other aspects of the human experience: loss, insecurity, nostalgia, generational and cultural gaps. One of Deshpande’s strengths is that she can bring a strong – and unexpected – charge even to seemingly mundane incidents, such as a woman and her mother-in-law chatting with each other while being measured for blouses by an old, half-blind family tailor. Or the same mother-in-law matter-of-factly saying that her aged husband acquires a temporary libido once a year, “usually after a wedding, when he has seen all you girls and your raw-mango breasts, and imagined everything that is going on in the nuptial bed”.

Like many short-story collections, Slither has its hits and misses, but the high points are very strong. In one of the best pieces, “Isis”, a young writer becomes infatuated with a long-retired movie siren; as his loins are stirred by a woman old enough to be his grandmother (and by talk of the effect she used to have on men in her heyday), we are reminded that sexual desire is as much a matter of imagination as of naked flesh. At the same time, other stories provide counterpoints to Isis’s feral, age-defying sexuality. Suman, the protagonist of “Slight Return”, is barely forty but she has never really had a sexual life at all - even her visits to her (male) gynecologist, she reflects, were warmer and more fulfilling than her emotionless trysts with her husband. When she accidentally sees her 16-year-old daughter making love with a boyfriend, she thinks about her own life and the many taboos she grew up with. But she has also accumulated life experiences that allow her to be accepting of her daughter’s sexuality: having done social work with rape victims-turned-prostitutes, she knows about women who never even had a choice in these matters. I thought the contrast between Suman's wisdom and her private sense of desolation and discomfort was very well expressed.

The stories that didn’t work for me are the ones – like the stream-of-consciousness narrative “dUI” – where the prose becomes overly turgid and self-indulgent. (“What purpose has coincidence? To dam two streams into a single flow, to stroke an eager cock, suck a succulent nipple, arch the long back of a long torso in the moment of the end of the scene?”) But it feels churlish to criticise a writer for taking risks or for reaching beyond the confines of straightforward narrative storytelling, and I admired at least the intent and ambition behind some of the more experimental pieces such as “Goblin Market”, which is a revisiting of Christina Rosetti’s controversial, symbolism-laden 19th century poem. (Writing this story appears to have been a form of catharsis for Deshpande, who says she was haunted by Rosetti’s work for years.)

I was also amused by Deshpande mentioning, in her acknowledgements, that much of this book was written in a decidedly unsexy setting – during a family Christmas in Canada. “I often found myself in a roomful of nieces and nephews and in-laws and sisters, typing carnal prose into my laptop while eating and drinking whatever was handed to me … tea or coffee, turkey-and-cranberry sauce, bhel, chicken curry.” It reminded me of the caricature of the phone-sex worker who is really a slovenly, middle-aged housewife in a low-rent apartment, going about her daily chores even as her husky voice inflames her callers' imaginations. As they say, it's mostly between the ears.

Fragrant flower 1, mushroom cloud 0: the wondrous meeting of Rajendra Kumar and Bertrand Russell

This week sees the anniversary of a defining event in the atomic age – on July 16, 1945 the first nuclear weapons test was conducted in New Mexico. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would follow less than a month later.

Now flash-forward 22 years to 1967. In the climactic scene of the Hindi film Aman, Dr Gautamdas – played by the intrepid Rajendra Kumar – single-handedly wrestles a mushroom cloud to the ground and ends the nuclear threat for good.

Okay, I’m exaggerating (but only slightly). I’m also being a little mean, because Aman is a very well-intentioned film about a young Indian doctor’s resolution to work with the Japanese victims of nuclear radiation and to simultaneously spread the message of world peace and brotherhood. This subject is handled mostly with restraint, but a few surreal moments do slip through the cracks. For example, when Gautamdas’s father sulks about his son leaving him to go and work in a distant country, we get the unusual spectre of Rajendra Kumar likening himself to a fragrant phool. A flower’s “sugandh” isn’t only meant for the maali who tended it, he says – it belongs to the whole world.

"Oh well, as long as they remember to water you every day"

Aman contains many noble sentiments like the above, but the film is probably best remembered today for one of the most unusual cameos in movie history: the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell playing himself in a three-minute scene where Gautamdas goes to seek his blessings in London.

You have to feel a little sorry for Russell. For one thing, he is referred to in highly mystical terms throughout the build-up to his guest appearance – as a devtaa, a mahapurush who blesses us with his presence only once every century, and so on. When Gautamdas receives the letter saying that the great man has granted him an appointment, he calls it a teerth-yatra or pilgrimage. I’m not sure the well-known agnostic would have approved of all this.

Besides, even a film as high-minded as Aman deserves some criticism for visiting the torment of Rajendra Kumar’s English upon a 94-year-old man. Given that the Japanese people in the story speak in Hindi (which is completely acceptable as cinematic licence), I wish they had hired AK Hangal or someone to dub Russell’s voice. Why not Raaj Kumar? It would have made the scene an all-time classic. Imagine: “Jaani, tum mushroom cloud se jaake lado. Main oopar waale se prarthana karoonga ke tumhaari vijay ho.”
 

Sadly, then, the existing Russell scene is a pale shadow of what it could have been. But it's still pretty good. Here's the video (Youtube link here).

Two Swedish novellas: Manolis' Mopeds, The Legend of the Plague King

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

The bilingual literary journal Pratilipi has done some notable work in the field of translation in the past few years. Recent titles by its publishing arm Pratilipi Books include Home from a Distance, which is an anthology of Hindi poets translated into English, and Prabhat Ranjan’s Marquez ki Kahani, a study (in Hindi) of the life and work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, as part of a project to introduce voices from around the world to India, they have published English translations of three very interesting contemporary Swedish novels.

Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular here in recent times - with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy giving Indian readers a pretext to discover earlier classics like the Martin Beck series - but of course the region has a rich body of literature in other genres too. The slim books published by Pratilipi tell offbeat stories that combine melancholia with dry humour, and the settings range from medieval Sweden to the post-war Balkans to a sleepy village facing the advent of modernity.

I particularly enjoyed Jan Henrik Swahn’s Manolis’ Mopeds, which has been translated from Swedish to English by the author himself. The book’s fragmented narrative and whimsical tone take a while to get used to, but it soon resolves itself into a devastating portrait of an old man who has become irrelevant – even to himself. A mason by profession, Manolis lives in a Greek village, growing tomatoes and eggplants, occasionally meeting his estranged wife (she has remarried the TV, we are drolly told) and riding about on his precious moped; it’s the fifth he has owned. At times he imagines that there’s an alternate Manolis living somewhere nearby, one who opted to ride donkeys instead of mopeds. But things are changing in the village anyway: there are no donkeys around now, the quaint old buildings may soon be torn down and replaced by shiny modern ones, and even the tavern that Manolis spends most of his best moments in could be under threat. An old way of life is quietly passing.

Nothing of all he knows about the island and the islanders has he managed to pass down. He will take it all with him to the grave. He'll take the donkeys, the tobacco factory, the old chairs, the smoke house, the coffins, the barrels, the wheelbarrows, the days when the village reeked of retsina, he will take it all with him.

The strength of Swahn’s book lies not so much in the plot as in its detailing of vignettes – the tragedies and small pleasures – from a life; in the way, for instance, that it almost unobtrusively discloses that Manolis’s young son died in a car his father had saved up to buy (“at a bend in the road where no one else during one hundred years of automobile history had ever succeeded in killing himself before”). This is one of the strangest, most moving novellas I’ve read in a while.

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Reading Manolis’ Mopeds is a bit like watching the deadpan films of the Kaurismaki brothers, but Lars Andersson’s The Legend of the Plague King made me think of the indelible images of spiritual despair in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Andersson’s book is set in the same place and period as Bergman’s film – the mid-14th century, shortly after the Black Death had devastated Sweden – and centres on a meeting between King Magnus Eriksson and a hunter named Tormod Gopa. The encounter doesn’t begin on an agreeable note (the king – already burdened by an insurgency launched against him by his son – is trapped in the hunter’s throwing net and strung up on a tree), but soon the two men recognise their affinities. “It is right that I free you,” Gopa tells the ruler, “for you once freed me.” Magnus’s law outlawing slavery had saved Gopa, then just three years old, from a life of serfdom. Ironically, Magnus was also three when he first became king (effectively losing his own freedom).

This becomes the starting point for a tentative conversation that draws on Nordic and Icelandic myths, touches on the relationship between a ruler and his subjects, and encourages us to wonder what manmade laws and authority might mean in a world that has been ravaged beyond imagining. Gopa’s account of the horrors he witnessed in plague-devastated villages amount to a vision of hell, and reminded me of scenes from The Seventh Seal: a procession of groaning self-flagellators; a young “witch” being burnt at the stake; Death standing on the beach, a scythe over his shoulder. But as in Bergman’s film, there is also a note of grace and affirmation at the end.

(The third book in the series – which I’ve just started – is Agneta Pleijel’s A Winter in Stockholm. Pratilipi is also planning a series of Spanish novels translated into Hindi)

The movie star as platitude-dispenser, and other thoughts on the celebrity circus

[Did this opinion piece for Elle magazine a few months ago, though it came out only in the July issue. In hindsight I wish I had kept clippings of Priyanka Chopra’s HT City columns – could easily do a book-length commentary on them sometime]

One of the highest-profile events at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year was the announcement of the winner of the DSC South Asian Literature Prize. As a crowd of authors, media-persons and book-lovers watched, the chief guest began his speech. “Writers are fountains of ideas,” said Kabir Bedi. A short, ponderous silence. “Their role in our lives is indispensable.”

Now this is a reasonable statement in a school-level sort of way, but consider the context. At one of the world’s largest book events – where far more nuanced thoughts about writers and writing were being expressed in discussions hour upon hour – here was a former movie and television star (and not someone who had occupied the highest rungs of his profession for that matter) as the cynosure of all eyes. Present on the dais was one of India’s best literary critics; in the audience were dozens of well-known writers, including Nobel laureates and Man Booker winners from India and elsewhere. Any of these people would have been a more appropriate choice to make this keynote speech.

To be fair to Bedi, he took the occasion seriously (even quoting Saul Bellow and alluding to Francis Bacon!) and refrained from playing to the gallery. I don’t know if the same can be said for other filmi performers who have been the plat du jour at book events in recent years – Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan at earlier editions of the Jaipur fest, for instance, or Goldie Hawn at the Kitab festival in Delhi a few years ago.

But as we know, movie stars – or movie have-beens – shine ever so brightly even when they are far outside their spheres of expertise. They take centrestage on TV shows that have nothing to do with acting, their sheen drowning out the efforts of “ordinary” people who deserve a brief moment in the spotlight. Thus, Akshay Kumar’s dubious culinary skills take pride of place on what is meant to be a serious cooking show. On song and dance contests, participants spend less time performing and more time gushing about what a privilege it is to meet their idol. Tushhar Kapoor appears on a pet-lovers' show and displays his empathy for other species by wondering aloud if gender differences even apply to animals. “I mean, a dog is a dog, right?”

For the ultimate testimony of our eagerness to cling to Bollywood’s coattails, consider how smoothly movie stars have turned into all-purpose columnists and advice gurus. Having given up on the main sections of newspapers a long time ago, much of my weekly dose of unintended humour in the past year came from a Priyanka Chopra column, full of unselfconscious banalities about “embracing the universe”, "just being yourself" and “going with the flow”. It is both amusing and in poor taste when people who owe a large part of their own fame and fortune to good luck – being in the right place at the right time – narcissistically inform their readers that “you can achieve anything if you seize the moment, like I did”. (News for you, Ms Chopra and others: the vast majority of us will never come close to achieving everything we desire, no matter how lovingly we scrutinise your platitudes.)

Of course, this ranting puts me in a tiny minority: these columns were more than justified by the market for them. They inspired hundreds of thousands of fan letters by devotees asking for advice on relationships or insights into the burning political topics of the days, or perhaps just sharing salacious gossip about a rival actor. Star-worshippers do tend to have a lot of free time on their hands.

Incidentally, one of the star columns I thought had promise was the one by Imran Khan, who – we kept being told – has a wacky sense of humour. Until something strange happened: every time Khan was about to write something even vaguely irreverent, he would preface it with a few lines asking that people shouldn’t get offended. More space was devoted to the pre-emptive apology than to the supposed cheekiness, and this brings us to another point about Bollywood stars: when you have to be constantly mindful about the views you hold on sensitive or potentially controversial subjects, how can you not settle into a bland public face, even if your default mode is to be blasé?

In India, movie stars quickly become spokespersons for safe, middle-of-the-road ideologies. Thus, even if their lifestyles are deemed racy by middle-class standards, they must be seen as upholders of tradition and culture in the areas where it Really Matters. For example, they must be photographed entering temples on special occasions. (In an interview a few years ago, the normally-diplomatic Bachchan was brusque with an interviewer who mentioned that his late father Harivanshrai had been an atheist – the tone of the superstar’s response almost suggested that his dad had been insulted.) When a star bride celebrates her first karva chauth, TV channels must park themselves outside the house for that precious exclusive shot of her sighting the moon from her window.

Frankly, much of this obsessing is unavoidable given the huge hold commercial cinema has on us. In a media-saturated time, you expect these hotties to be all over the place, gazing out of newspapers, wearing their carefully rehearsed “spontaneous” smiles or the tiny frowns that their public relations staff have told them are photogenic. It’s annoying, but one must live with it. Nor am I suggesting that all movie stars are unqualified to hold forth on subjects outside their immediate field – much less that they should be stopped from doing so. However, when disproportionate importance is attached to their views, when their frequently trite views are canonised as inspirational words of wisdom, when they are indiscriminately felicitated as youth icons even though some of them have records of law-breaking and cases pending against them – well, then it may be time to wonder why we are so starved of role models from other walks of life.

Sholay – notes on an establishing scene

Some movies have been so thoroughly analysed – in books, mainstream media and academic literature – that you feel almost silly writing about them. What more can a cineaste of my generation possibly say about Sholay, for example?

As the cliché has it, any true movie-lover has seen it at least 30 times (I won’t make such claims for the entire film, but I’ve certainly seen some of my favourite scenes dozens of times). Most Sholay buffs know every line by heart. (One of the first audio-cassettes I owned was the two-tape set of the dialogues.) We have deified the film and in some cases, as our cinematic horizons have broadened (or over-familiarity has bred tedium), we have deconstructed, undervalued and perhaps even scoffed at it. Responses have run the gamut from blind adoration to “Huh! Seven Samurai was better.” Pedants (I’ve been one in my time) enjoy telling less informed viewers that the Sholay look – so much more sophisticated than other Hindi films of its time – was inspired by the work of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and others; that the family-massacre scene – complete with the ominous sound of the wind blowing, and the shot of a gun pointed at a child cutting to a piercing train whistle – derives from Once Upon a Time in the West; and even that the Holi attack includes what might be a small homage to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin!

In the Internet age, the film has been further scrutinised and demythologised: we now know, for example, that R D Burman’s classic gypsy tune for “Mehbooba Mehbooba” was lifted from a song by the Greek musician Demis Roussos. On YouTube, you can see the videos of two scenes that didn't make it to the final cut, and which once had near-mythical status for Sholay buffs: an extended version of the morbid scene where Gabbar Singh prepares to kill the young village boy Ahmed; and more importantly, the original ending, which had Gabbar being killed by the Thakur.

Like every other Sholay fan, I had convinced myself that the film couldn’t possibly hold further surprises for me. But a few weeks ago I saw it on DVD and realised that all these years there was a crucial link missing in my viewing experience: I had no memory of most of the opening-credits sequence, where the Thakur’s manservant Ramlal leads a policeman – on horseback – from the railway station to the Thakur’s haveli.

The back-story is that throughout my childhood, my Sholay-watching was done on a videocassette specially brought for me by a Lagos-based uncle on one of his India trips. Bits of the film, including the opening sequence, had been snipped to fit into the cassette's 180 minutes. The first shot – the railway station and the camera gliding down slowly to meet the train – was intact and so were the first few credits (accompanied by Burman’s lilting music and the shots of a sunbaked landscape that might have come from a classic Hollywood Western). But only the names of the six principal actors appeared in this print; there was an abrupt cut from the title "And Introducing Amjad Khan" to the post-credits scene where the Thakur is speaking with his visitor.

Whoever cut out the rest of the scene must have figured that opening credits are superfluous – as they indeed were in many films of the time. But watching the full sequence on DVD, I realised that here was one of the best establishing scenes I'd come across in any Hindi film.

As Ramlal and the policeman make their long ride, we are taken through the entire setting where the main action of the film will occur. First they pass the talaab where villagers and dacoits alike presumably get their water from (this is also where Gabbar’s men will accost Basanti as she waits for Veeru). As the two riders approach the village itself, the camera draws back to give us an aerial view of the houses as well as the temple, the mosque - and in the far distance, the water tank where the comical "suicide" scene will take place. Long before the film’s central narrative brings Veeru and Jai to Ramgarh, we become acquainted with this self-contained little community. We see the village centre and its people as they go about their daily routines: shopkeepers preparing for the day's business, children playing, women carrying water-pots, a goatherd driving his animals down a rough path.
 

This lively setting is left behind; they cross more barren land and finally, as the music reaches its crescendo and the title “Directed by Ramesh Sippy” appears, there is a pan to the haveli – symbolically cut off from the rest of the village – where the Thakur and his widowed daughter-in-law lead solitary lives. (Before we know about the Thakur’s tragedy, we see that the size of the house is incongruous with the number of people staying in it. Surely a whole family should be living here.)

Taken as a whole, the sequence is beautifully staged. (Also note the changing motifs in the score, from a guitar-dominated tune to a more Indian sound as they pass through the village.) Many Hindi movies of the time leapt straight into a narrative without spending much time on creating a mood, but Sholay is an exception. The film's visual power – its economy of storytelling, its assured shot composition and framing – begins right here, with this almost dialogue-less opening.

You can see most of the scene here, or in the video below: 

On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]