Glimpses from a cultural and literary Quest

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

One of the pleasures of reading The Best of Quest – a collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the pages of the now-defunct quarterly magazine that was dedicated to “inquiry, criticism and ideas” – is discovering the many voices of the late Dilip Chitre. I had a passing acquaintance with Chitre’s poetry, and a memory of the film Godaam which he wrote and directed, but I hadn’t encountered his essay writing before this.

Chitre’s long association with Quest began in the 1960s and continued till the magazine's dying days during the Emergency years; he later served as an editor for its second incarnation New Quest. Consequently his writings – reviews, opinion pieces and a translation of Hamid Dalwai’s incisive piece “Mohammed Ali Jinnah: A Study in Hatred” – are well-represented in the lengthy “Essay” section of this book. But in addition to the pieces that appeared under his own name, Chitre also wrote a regular column using the pseudonym “D”.

“There is a comedian inside me who is restless to burst into the open,” he explains in “I was D”, the last piece included in this book (and written not long before his death), “I love to mark the absurdity underlying most seriously regarded things. I also love to take the comic as seriously as it deserves to be taken.”
 
Both "D" and "Dilip" consistently display wit, acumen and the ability to engage with a variety of topics. Even when one disagrees with some of Chitre’s views (among other things, he calls R K Narayan a “second-rate” Indo-Anglian writer), it’s hard not to respect the honesty and intelligence behind them. At other times, you might instinctively blench at something he says – or wonder if he’s being facetious – only to realise upon reflection that it contains a kernel of truth. In a possibly part-satirical piece titled “What has Dimple Got that Satyajit Hasn’t?” Chitre compares Raj Kapoor’s very mainstream film Bobby with Satyajit Ray’s artistically high-minded Ashani Sanket and suggests that “their moral and aesthetic import is on the same level of mediocrity... Except that Ray fails to entertain the masses, which Kapoor does”.

Raj Kapoor produces opiates for the masses, including the educated uncultured, while giving them traces of cinematic value; Ray gives the middle class its own kind of highbrow drugs, heaps of crude cinematic values coated with the sugar of a static pre-modern imagination.

Other highlights from the pen of D/Dilip include “Aspects of Pornophobia”, in which he lampoons undiscerning censorship and the general incompetence of those saddled with “preserving culture” (there's a great anecdote here involving the actress Snehaprabha Pradhan and a "seductive female dog"), and the long essay-cum-review “Nirad’s Nightmare”. The latter is an analysis of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s book The Continent of Circe as well as a psychological profile of its author “who began as an unknown Indian and, after years of striving, has virtually become perhaps one of the most authentic Englishmen of all time”.

When he is worked up to a climactic frenzy in expressing his love for England and things English, Mr Chaudhuri gives one a sense of parody by extreme perfection – a comic ability to run rapidly and unhindered on a track strewn with banana peels. Even an Englishman would find the strain of being so precisely and religiously English all the time quite unbearable.

Again, some of the views expressed here can be debated – Chaudhuri was a complex figure and the product of colliding cultural influences – but there’s little faulting the intellectual rigour of Chitre’s arguments.

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Apart from Chitre’s work, there is much of interest in The Best of Quest, including a thoughtful interview (by Adrian Rowe-Evans) of V S Naipaul. Anyone who has had trouble reconciling Naipaul’s frequently splenetic or obnoxious behaviour with the empathy in the best of his work might be intrigued by this bit:

I may sit down in enormous rage to write something; I might even begin in terms of caricature and animosity; but in the course of the writing, something will happen. That side of me, that comes out in the writing, is the better side, and better not because it’s nicer but because it’s truer; it’s the side that in one’s rage one might wish to forget. I began my recent book about Africa with a great hatred of everyone, of the entire continent; and that had to be refined away, giving place to comprehension.

Having working on the literary beat for only the last few years, I also found it illuminating to read Jyotirmoy Datta’s 1966 essay “On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots” – a sardonic, often whimsical critique of Indian writers who worked in English – followed by P Lal’s measured response. (“We do not write in English because it is a pan-Indian language of the educated; we write because we cannot write as well in any other language...There are many plots to till; English is one.”) The discussion is a reminder that the many fierce debates around Indian Writing in English did not begin in the post-Midnight’s Children world. I’m not done with The Best of Quest yet – there’s plenty to read in the Fiction section, including short stories by Kiran Nagarkar and Kamleshwar – but what I’ve read so far has offered a very agreeable glimpse of the cultural and ideological discourse of another time, much of which is still relevant today.

Ra.One mini-review

At last, a film that manages to be insulting to Chinese people, South Indians AND videogame characters. I've waited for this all my moviegoing life.

(For something much more elaborate and profound, read this great post by Samit)

On Supremo, Ajooba and other pre-Ra.One superheroes

[Did a version of this for First Post]

Watching the Ra.One trailers – so evocative of Hollywood superhero and fantasy films – and reading about the huge budget and the cutting-edge effects, I remembered a time when “Bollywood Superhero Movie” was a tautology. If a leading man already has powers well beyond mortal imagination, how does it add value to dress him in tights or a metallic suit and to have death rays or spider webs flowing from his fingers?

But as my just-excavated “Adventures of Amitabh Bachchan” comics show, movie heroes were occasionally dolled up in the distant past too. Published in the early 1980s, this series cast the superstar as “himself” and as his crime-fighting alter-ego Supremo. Supremo had no superpowers, but that didn’t stop him from wearing a tight pink suit with a purple sarong tied around his waist (wisely, the people who thought up the series decided against Superman-style outer-innerwear) and the obligatory aviator goggles to protect his identity. He travelled by helicopter, solved mysteries with his young assistants Vijay and Anthony (obvious references to two of Amitabh’s best-known screen aliases) and hung out on an island populated by wild animals. To eight-year-old eyes, all this was supremo-cool.

Hindi cinema itself made few excursions into sci-fi/fantasy at the time, notwithstanding magnificent dream sequences like the one with Govinda and Kimi Katkar as Superman and Spiderwoman (or was it the other way around?). The best of those movies was the hugely popular Mr India, with its invisible hero (Anil Kapoor never looked better!), a pink acid pool in the villain's den and a variant on the Superman-Lois Lane story (a chirpy reporter falls in love with Mr India without realising who he really is). But apart from a couple of neatly staged scenes like the one where the bad guys are seemingly knocked out by a Hanuman statue, there was nothing especially high-tech about that film.

That promise briefly came with the other signpost superhero movie of my youth – the Arabian Nights fantasy Ajooba, with Bachchan as a regular guy named Ali who doubled up as the dashing eponymous masked hero. Two years earlier, in a film set in the "real" world – Shahenshah – Amitabh had also played a bumpkin with a secret vigilante identity, but Ajooba was meant to be much more. Scanning Bollywood-related blogs today, I find that it’s now viewed as a film that was always meant to be high camp (and which therefore met its own ambitions perfectly) – its cult following rests on scenes like the one where Amitabh interrupts a conversation with a dolphin to tell an old woman “yeh machli meri ma hai”. (Somewhere Nirupa Roy was weeping tears of maternal betrayal.) But I remember the long build-up and the pre-release claims made for it in magazines; back then, everyone thought it would bring new standards of technical excellence to Hindi cinema.

The Friday afternoon when we finally saw it was a disappointment. Even to an impressionable 13-year-old, the metallic monster that showed up in the climax was a walking scrap heap with an endearingly doleful expression, the back-projection for the flying carpets was amateurish, and the sight of a miniaturised Rishi Kapoor gyrating inside Sonam’s blouse was small compensation. None of it could compare with the seamless, almost poetic special effects in the most high-profile Hollywood movies of the time, like Terminator 2.

Twenty years on, it’s safe to say that the paisa-vasool scenes in Ra.One will look like they could have dropped out of any contemporary Hollywood film. This is part of a new generation of big-budget movies that are competing with an ever more sophisticated gaming universe – one that today’s kids are so familiar with that most regular action films look unimpressive to them.

The Ra.One look – or what little has been revealed of it so far – reminds me of a much-repeated Shekhar Kapur quote from a few years ago. A time will come, Kapur said, when Spider Man takes off his mask and the face underneath will be that of an Indian or a Chinese actor. The point was to extol the increasingly global appeal of Asian cinema (and its access to the best technology), but a counter-question might be asked: actors apart, will there be anything identifiably Indian about this film? One shot in the trailer has Arjun Rampal (playing the titular villain) emerging from a fiery background that takes the shape of the ten-headed Ravana. But apart from this token reference to Indian mythology, the bad guy’s look seems to derive from films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (and, doubtless, video-game villains of whom I know nothing).

Arguably the first time we saw effects of this quality in an Indian movie was last year, in the Rajinikanth-starrer Robot/Enthiran, with its spectacular (and spectacularly overlong) climactic sequence where hundreds of evil robots arrange themselves into serpentine shapes, swallowing cars and helicopters whole. But even this CGI-fest never lost sight of Rajinikanth’s chief fan base – the ones who knew he was a superhero even when he was playing a taxi-driver. And so, Enthiran had its cheesy mass-audience moments too, its nods to the tradition of a dainty heroine having to be rescued from leering, moustached goons, and even a tacky little animated-mosquito interlude that played like a Kachua-Chaap ad. In any case the film’s eventual hero was not the high-tech robot but the nerdish professor with no superpowers (except for the important detail that he was played by you-know-who).

Back in Mumbai, as we keep hearing these days, “retro” is the rage. Salman Khan – Shah Rukh’s major rival within Bollywood – has had a line of box-office successes with Wanted, Dabangg and Bodyguard, movies that have been celebrated for their harking back to the dhishum dhishum cinema of the 1980s (and an older definition of “superhero”). Compared to the cheerful mass appeal of these films, it’s likely that Ra.One’s audience will be more niche: mainly the urban, multiplex-going youngsters. It will no doubt have a global market - which is just as well, given the costs it needs to recur - but will it be a pan-Indian success? (Remember, in the pre-multiplex age, the divide between metropolitan and small-town audiences was less pronounced than it is today. Those Amitabh comics were published in various Indian languages, and one could imagine literate children anywhere in the country reading and relating to them.)
 
Shah Rukh and his financiers have probably spent more time thinking about these things than I have, and since they are smart businessmen they will have taken whatever steps are necessary to broaden their film’s appeal. Though I haven’t followed Ra.One-related gossip too closely, one of the last things I heard was that Rajinikanth had been brought in for a cameo as well as for “blessings”. This sounds as good a move as any. If only they could have thrown in a brief animated sequence with Supremo on his island and Ajooba’s dolphin ma(one) whistling in the distance, we would have that rare thing: an ultra-slick gaming blockbuster that a nostalgic 80s child like yours truly could relate to.

[Dolphin pic courtesy Beth Loves Bollywood, whose Ajooba post you must read]

Just linking...

...to the Saffron Tree blog, which is a nice resource for children's literature. A few days ago they did this interview with my friend Radhika Chadha, the author of many fine picture books published by Tulika. And in the archives there is also this interview with another friend Anu Kumar, who has written the Myth Quest series and In the Country of Gold-Digging Ants, apart from books for older readers. All worth checking out if you want to get your child into the reading habit. 

(And why wouldn't you? It helps keep them out of trouble. That is, until they grow up, become writers and start expressing views that other people don't like.)

Propaganda with a touch of art: 49th Parallel

There is often a natural conflict of interest between explicitly message-based “propaganda” films and dynamic, imaginative cinema. Movies made with the chief aim of educating or rousing an audience will understandably emphasise content at the expense of form. When the priority is to feed ideas to viewers (rather than create a nuanced work that is open to interpretation), a script can easily become clunky and over-expository, and the camerawork might be no more than functional – there isn’t much sense using techniques that might distract or be lost on viewers.

Working on such films can be drudgery for those with creative aspirations. Writer-director Kundan Shah once told me about being commissioned by the Films Division to make a documentary titled Visions of the Blind, meant to show what blind people could achieve if given the opportunities. Noble though the cause was, there were many constraints and it wasn’t an artistically exciting assignment for someone who had studied at the FTII and dreamt of following in the footsteps of leadingavant-garde moviemakers. “It was a staid film,” Shah said, his eyes glazing over, “but I needed the work.”

This is not to say that good cinema and propaganda have to be mutually exclusive – film history has many examples to the contrary. Consider Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will (about which I wrote here), which used powerful and distinctive visual grammar to portray Hitler as a nation-rescuing deity.


However, I find it particularly interesting when directors with a real sense of cinematic style are reined in by the need to be solemn and didactic, and you can sense that tension in the work itself. One example is the British duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (jointly known as the Archers), who made a series of magnificent films in the 1940s. Their best work was assured and daring, often segueing effortlessly from the real world to a fantasy landscape: take A Matter of Life and Death (about an airman who stands trial in Heaven) or the ballet film The Red Shoes (with a stunning, highly stylised 15-minute dance performance at its centre) or Black Narcissus (about a group of nuns becoming increasingly paranoid in a beautifully recreated Himalayan setting).

During World War II, Powell also worked on more straightforward, morale-boosting films, including a poignant five-minute short titled An Airman’s Letter to His Mother. Among the best of his full-length features in this category is 49th Parallel, about a small band of Nazis coming ashore in Canada and being confronted with more courage than they had expected to find. It’s an honourable, solidly crafted movie with big-name actors such as Laurence Olivier (fresh from his first Hollywood successes in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and cast here in one of his most atypical movie roles as a garrulous French-Canadian trapper) and Leslie Howard (who himself directed a couple of WWII propaganda films such as The Gentle Sex), working at half-salary for the wartime cause. But as a contemporary viewer, distanced from the urgency of those dark days and the realness of the German threat, one is aware of how it tries to hammer home its points. In one extended scene, where the Nazi leader makes a speech extolling his ideology and is then answered by a speech by an anti-fascist, the film becomes deferentially inert, the camera staying trained on the faces of the two men as if they were talking directly to us.

And yet, this movie, which could have been an assembly-line production in other hands, has verve and moments of subtle beauty; it takes an episodic narrative structure (the dwindling group of Nazis travel across the country, encountering different sets of individuals) and forges from it an adventure tale and a travelogue while also sharply observing the many different responses to wartime; and it has a feel for characterisation, giving us a conscientious German (remember, this was 1941!) and portraying even the bad Nazis as resourceful and dedicated to their cause. It represents one of those happy moments where a top creative talent, working within limitations and on a commissioned project, managed not to completely lose his own identity. The Archers would certainly make better films in the next few years (included subtler message-oriented works), but no one can accuse 49th Parallel of being “just” a dry piece of propaganda.

[From my Business Standard film column]

Divine savages and “real” truth

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

There is no such thing as an “objective” reader or reviewer – our feelings about a book are shaped by many things working in conjunction: personal experiences, biases, genetic makeup, level of engagement with a subject, and so on. The best a reviewer can do is to admit the necessary subjectivity of his perspective and then tackle a book as honestly as possible. But even so, I had misgivings about writing on Georges Van Vrekhem’s Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God. Apart from being an atheist, I fall in that small minority of homosapiens who think Richard Dawkins’s and Christopher Hitchens’s critiques of religion are perfectly reasonable (and in Dawkins’s case at least, expressed with greater civility than I could have mustered if I had been a public figure contending daily with Young Earth Creationists and other unevolved simians). A quick look at the jacket text of Vrekhem's book told me that he feels very differently about the whole religion-vs-science shebang.

In the long tradition of attacks on Darwinism (or on evolutionary theory at a broader level), there has been a tendency to misrepresent arguments, make straw-man attacks and display ignorance about the workings of the scientific procedure. Which is why I was initially relieved to find that Vrekhem is an intelligent and well-read man, and that his book (whatever my overall reservations about it) is a probing, serious-minded work – something that can’t be said about the majority of the literature that tries to bolster religious faith by undermining science. But this also makes it harder to process some of his more whimsical ideas and his many literary detours.
 

Revisiting the complex history of evolutionary theory in his first few chapters, Vrekhem quotes liberally from other writers – so much so that the parade of inverted commas gets distracting and it isn’t always easy to separate his views from the ones he cites. One of the first times he uses strong and judgemental language of his own is when he says that “materialistic biologists” display “a kind of sick pleasure to demonstrate how much their science abases the human being”. Later, he employs words like “denigrating” for the idea that humans are “just animals among animals”, or “accidental and incidental products of the material development of the universe”.

But why is this denigrating? No Darwinist (least of all Dawkins or the other villains of this book) has denied the massive potential that humans have for the nobler emotions. If man has evolved from an animal state to a creature with a complex brain, capable of (among other things) creating and appreciating great art, reflecting on his own place in the universe, making efforts to expand his knowledge and capabilities – and yes, even mulling on the possible existence of Something higher than himself – aren’t these things to be proud of? Wouldn’t we as a species have more reason to be proud of ourselves if this were the case, rather than if we were pre-manufactured to be something special, made in the image of God and held to the highest possible standards from the outset (in which case, the continuing existence of humans of the order of Sarah Palin, for example, would cast serious aspersions on our Creator’s designing skills)?


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Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God is filled with criticisms of both Darwin the man (who, Vrekhem feels, is unduly deified today) and the nebulous building blocks of “what is nowadays labelled as Darwinism”. Vrekhem takes pains to point out that the exalting of Darwin has been at the cost of at least two other men who deserved to be similarly reputed: the French evolutionary theorist Lamarck, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of natural selection around the same time as Darwin did (and received co-credit for it) and who, more importantly in Vrekhem’s view of things, developed a belief in “spiritism”, or the validity of things that lay beyond the bounds of “scientific materialism”.

He also repeatedly accuses Darwin of guesswork without clarifying that never once did Darwin try to pass off guesswork as immutable fact (something that religious authorities, incidentally, have been doing for millennia). Living at a time when genes were still unknown, Darwin could naturally not have understood the precise workings of his own theory in the way that we understand it today. But like any scrupulous scientist, he expressed hope that future generations would debate over, expand on and modify his propositions in light of new discoveries (something that is in fact still happening).

As I read these meandering early chapters, I found myself wondering what Vrekhem was building up to. The answer is more complicated and fuzzy than can be dealt with in this space, but it involves the idea that man is a step along a chain of evolution from ape to superman and that he carries within himself the capacity to become a godlike being in his own right - presumably getting closer to God in the process. Anyone familiar with the writings of Sri Aurobindo (of whom Vrekhem has been a follower for decades) will recognise the influence of Aurobindo's "supramind" concept in these passages.

This leads Vrekhem to formulate vague-sounding sentences like “As long as what is real can only be approached from the outside, the reality cannot be known” and “Truth, to be known, has to be realised, lived, and as such is always an approach, conditioned by the earthly circumstances of the beings who dedicate their life to this kind of realisation.” And perhaps most tellingly: “If God is omniscient and omnipotent, the Divine Mind must be of a different order, it must be a supermind, which is a word, a label covering by definition something of which we can have no idea.”

Aha! Here at last we have that old sophism: God belongs to a different order of things, hence science cannot touch or understand him. “Real truth” can only be ascertained by “direct personal experience”. But what does this random prescription amount to exactly, and where might unquestioning faith in personal experience (as a foolproof universal formula for enlightenment) lead us? What if Sri Jabberwockee Singh were to sit in solitude for a period with his eyes closed, and by this process acquire the mystical realisation that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the root of all things and that the only way to gratify Him is to consume endless quantities of chilled beer until Oneness is attained? Will Vrekhem respect the veracity of my “direct personal experience”, and will he join me for that eternal drink?

I don’t mean to sound flippant – there is food for thought in Vrekhem’s book, for those who have the patience to sift it out. As he says:

If science is materialistic, it is because to us, beings incarnated in matter, only matter is directly perceptible to our senses, and only experiments with material objects are communicable and repeatable… [But] at fault is the fact that this materialism has been declared the exclusive metaphysical basis of the understanding of anything whatsoever … Our knowledge is incomplete. The knowledge of our world and ourselves is incomplete.

There is little in the above passage that any thinking person would wish to argue with. But at risk of exposing myself as a “shallow materialist”, I think good science must shoulder most of the burden of revealing further, demonstrable truths about our existence. If God does after all exist, He (or She, or It, or whatever floats your ark) can be held responsible for the fact that “only matter is directly perceptible to our senses”. Being a darned good scientist Himself, I think He would approve of His biggest-brained creations using rigorous, testable methods (while of course simultaneously trying to lead an altruistic and productive life) rather than following an approach that can be used to believe in anything they want to believe.

[Some posts on related subjects: Creationism, quotation marks and moose stew; Darwin the good novelist; Does He Know a Mother's Heart?; Down with atheist values; The God Delusion; Tales from the crematorium]

A. Revathi's A Hijra Life Story - a long journey to self-acceptance

In an essay titled “The Murderous Gays”, the academic-critic Robin Wood recalled being an adolescent in 1940s England, romantically attracted to other men and unable to fathom what he was going through – until he came across the word “homosexual” in a book about Tchaikovsky and realised with amazement that there must be others like himself in the world. But even then, the idea was so radical, so removed from his everyday life, that Wood grasped it only at a theoretical level: “It didn’t occur to me that I might ever meet (or perhaps already know) such people.”

Wood went on to discuss the obsessive identification he felt with one of the lead characters in Hitchcock’s Rope – a film that is today acknowledged as having a strong gay subtext, though the theme could not be explicitly dealt with on screen at the time. He observed: “Despite the fact that I knew I was gay myself, it never occurred to me that the characters in the film might be; it was, at that time, literally unthinkable. If I couldn’t believe, emotionally, in the existence of other homosexuals in real life, how could I believe in their existence within a Hollywood film?” Yet there was something that made him gravitate subconsciously towards the film’s vulnerable anti-hero Brandon.

People who are marginalised because of their sexuality have always had to seek mainstream acceptance to get the rights and freedoms they need for a dignified life. Anyone familiar with the history of LGBT rights knows that this is a grim struggle, marked by small victories and big setbacks. But Wood’s essay is a reminder that sexual minorities often have to come to terms with their own feelings first – they have to gain the self-confidence that they deserve respect however “different” they might be from most other people. For those living in very orthodox settings, where all manner of societal pressures and facades are constantly operating on them, this is a particularly complex process.

This is one of the many things that makes the life-story of the hijra writer-activist A Revathi so remarkable. Revathi’s memoir The Truth About Me – translated from Tamil by V Geetha – is about hard-earned wisdom that came not from exposure to books but through personal experience. It’s the story of a boy named Doraisamy who realised early in his life that he felt like a girl inside, and wanted to be female. One especially poignant passage has Dorai dressing up as a girl for a festival dance and then finding himself reluctant to shed his female clothes afterwards: “As I re-emerged in my man’s garb, I felt that I was in disguise, and that I had left my real self behind.”

But how does a child – the youngest of three brothers who are expected to quickly grow up and take on men’s responsibilities – in a small and provincial Indian village even find the language to express these feelings? It can be misleading to even use the word “conservative” to describe Doraisamy’s family’s attitude to his sexuality, because that word might imply a choice – the considering, and rejecting, of a more broad-minded outlook. But for Dorai’s parents, the idea of their son becoming a woman would have been outside the very bounds of imagination.

And so, Dorai (soon to be Revathi) ran away in despair. Even the first train ride seemed like an impassable hurdle (“Oh, my mother, the train was so long! Where was I to get in?”) but she negotiated the two-day journey from Salem to Delhi. She found people like herself, slipped into the crannies where social outcasts make their own spaces, forming private kinships and rules of conduct. Eventually she underwent the painful and potentially life-threatening operation that meant a formal break from Dorai's maleness, and changed her name.

This is a hard-hitting story, often difficult to read – and all the more so because the writing is no-frills, as if a lengthy interview with Revathi were being transcribed and translated simultaneously. She now works with the human-rights organisation Sangama, and her hardships are far from over – though she wants to be a full-time activist, sex work is almost necessary for someone in her circumstances to earn a proper living. But by the end of the book, one gets the satisfying sense of having met a protagonist who beat difficult odds and became comfortable in her own skin. That’s worth a lot of trouble.

[A version of this piece appeared in my Sunday Guardian column. Also see: this obituary I wrote of Robin Wood for Business Standard early last year]

Thoughts on being prolific (and Asimov’s middling mysteries)

[From my weekly books column]

As someone who isn’t always a happy multi-tasker (I find it difficult to properly work on a column or review until I’ve cleared the ones before it – not the ideal situation for a freelancer!), I’m envious of the really prolific writers – the ones who toggle effortlessly between projects. And when a writer working across a range of genres and subjects manages to be seriously good too, it can be infuriating. Consider Isaac Asimov. He was best known for his work in science fiction, but the 500-plus(!) books he wrote or edited included mysteries, limerick collections, writings on history and popular science, and even an 800-page-long guide to the works of Shakespeare.

In his chatty and hugely engrossing autobiography I. Asimov – written as a collection of essays on numerous topics, ranging from fellow sci-fi writers to Jewishness to acrophobia to new parents-in-law – Asimov shares some thoughts about his own prolificity. Someone once asked him how he got into the mood for a writing session: did he do a crossword puzzle, for instance, or ritually sharpen his pencils or go for a quick jog around the block? “Before I can possibly begin writing,” Asimov replied, tongue firmly in cheek, “it is always necessary for me to turn on my electric typewriter and to get close enough to it so that my fingers can reach the keys.” This ability to simply sit down and start working without any fuss or preamble is something that many writers would willingly sacrifice a finger off each hand for.

Asimov also claims that he was never afflicted by writer’s block because he wrote so many different types of books that if he ever got tired of one genre, he could switch to a different kind of writing for a while. “I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. Instead, I simply go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap.” He makes it sound straightforward, but this approach reflects professional dedication as well as love for the actual process of writing – which is something that, believe it or not, many great writers simply don’t have.

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Of course, this is not to suggest that everything Asimov wrote was of the highest order – inevitably, some of his work has an assembly-line quality to it. I was recently reading The Union Club Mysteries, a collection of the monthly mysteries he wrote for the magazine Gallery in the early 1980s. Gallery wasn’t a respectable literary journal (it was a “skin” publication, one of the many Playboy spinoffs), so these 2000-word stories can be considered Asimov Lite – it would be unfair to hold them up to the standards of his best work such as the Foundation series or the “Robot” stories and novels. But even by lower standards, these are largely pedestrian pieces, only occasionally salvaged by a clever idea.

Each story uses the framework of a conversation between elderly gents at the Union Club, with a polymath named Griswold relating a tale from his incredibly colourful past (he may have been a spy or an important government official, or perhaps he’s simply making things up; one can never tell). In every case, he was called upon to solve a mystery, which he invariably did – and at the end he has to divulge the solution to his clueless club buddies. For the reader, the payoff in each story is this ending, where a visual break in the text allows one to try and figure the answer out before Griswold drawls out the solution in his patronising way.

The format is a good one, but Asimov is definitely working at low steam overall. The “puzzles” usually centre on a trite detail, such as the differences between the British and American ways of writing a date (which means “6/8” could be either June 8 or August 6) or the fact that a library book has a little pocket in which something might be hidden, and too often the final revelation doesn’t justify the long buildup that preceded it. A couple of the riddles are entertaining (what's a reasonably common English word that you couldn’t be sure how to pronounce if you saw it written in all-caps? **), but on the whole these pieces are presumably meant for the reader who’s taking a break from ogling at the magazine photo-spreads. Me, I’m returning to Asimov’s wonderful memoir, or to his Black Widower mysteries which are more elaborate and satisfying than the Union Club trifles. (See, that’s one advantage of being a fan of a really prolific writer. If something isn't to your taste, there's plenty else to choose from.)

** Answer: POLISH

Ghosts and relics in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam

Two things prompted me to revisit the 1962 Abrar Alvi-Guru Dutt classic Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam this week. One was a viewing of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib Biwi aur Gangster, a reasonably well-made (and very well acted) film that takes some of the character types from the original and recasts them in a contemporary north Indian hinterland noir. The other appetite-whetter was an excerpt from a book that I badly want to get my hands on now – Vinod Mehta’s biography of (and unabashed fanboy tribute to) Meena Kumari, published shortly after her death in 1972. The chapter in question centres on Kumari’s iconic performance as the tormented Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, driven to alcohol (an unthinkable sin for a married Hindu woman in her milieu) in a last-ditch effort to make her husband stay at home.

(More about the Mehta book in a later post.)

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is one of Hindi cinema’s most vivid treatments of a transitional period in India’s social history – the dying days of the landed gentry, their decline (and their continuing mulish wastefulness in the face of that decline) contrasted with a working class that is making its way in the world through education and personal initiative rather than through inheritance squandered. This contrast is presented mainly through the character of Bhoothnath, a young lower-class man who becomes confidante and emotional ghulam to Chhoti Bahu, while being both fascinated and repulsed by what he sees of life in the mansion.

But the story operates on other levels too – as a reflection on the responsibilities thrust on women in traditional settings, for example. Chhoti Bahu is doubly condemned, stifled as an individual and saddled with upholding the family’s “honour” (something that doesn’t much concern the menfolk who sleep during the day and spend their nights outside with dancer-prostitutes, or otherwise pass the time getting pet cats elaborately married). The result is that when her facade breaks down, it’s intolerable for everyone around her. Her existence is necessarily one of extremes: when cast as the virtuous lady, which is her principal function, she is nothing less than Lakshmi incarnate; but when she transgresses even slightly, she becomes a creature fallen so far beyond redemption that her fate is to be murdered and buried without honour or ceremony in a secret grave.

One of the film’s saddest, and most telling, scenes for me is a little moment towards the end. Talking intently with Bhoothnath, Chhoti Bahu suddenly sees her husband’s older brother watching them from the foot of the stairs. She reflexively covers her head with her pallu and moves into a doorway out of his sight (as she has always been conditioned to do), but being drunk she staggers clumsily while doing this. No one watching her would be fooled about her condition, but appearances must be unthinkingly maintained.


There is an obvious comparison to be made between Chhoti Bahu and the film’s other main female character Jaba (Waheeda Rehman), who is allowed to have a mind of her own – and be a multifaceted person – without being judged for it. Educated, playful, moody, given to bantering and flirting with Bhoothnath but also capable of making a steely decision at a time of personal tragedy, Jaba is alive in a way that Chhoti Bahu isn’t.** And this is one reason why I can’t help thinking of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam as a ghost story, though its narrative is presented in realist terms.

One late scene links the heroine's skeletal remains with the ruins of the house she was entrapped in, but even when Chhoti Bahu and the haveli are both “alive” there is something otherworldly about them. The mansion – gloomy and claustrophobic – is like a purgatory for restive souls, from the nearly deranged badi bahu who obsessively washes her hands to the watch-keeper who yells that time no longer has any meaning in this place. Chhoti Bahu herself is a wandering spirit and her scenes with Bhoothnath seem almost to be set in a time continuum, with past and future in uneasy but sympathetic collusion. The relationship can be seen as a brief encounter between two people who belong not just to different classes but to different dimensions.

But of course, the past never really loses its grip on the present; in the film’s very last shot we see that the middle-aged Bhoothnath, though long married to the earthly Jaba, is still haunted – perhaps marked for life – by Chhoti Bahu’s memory. The scene reminds me a great deal of the closing shot of another major film made that same year in another part of the world – John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife in a train carriage together, emblems of a forward-looking world but forever beholden to a man who was a relic of a past age. Much like that film about the passing (and the simultaneous romanticising) of the Old West, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is a reminder that however much we progress or change, bygone worlds still cast a long shadow.

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** One of the achievements of Meena Kumari’s performance is that it doesn’t take much effort for us to imagine the very different sort of person Chhoti Bahu might have been – just as vivacious and independent as Jaba, perhaps – if her circumstances had been otherwise.


P.S. I had only a very dim childhood memory of this film (and it isn’t the sort of movie I would have found particularly interesting back then) - so a much better print would have been nice. If you look at the classy cover of Moser Baer’s DVD – with the words “Platinum Series” and “Collector’s Item” overlaid on crystal-clear stills from the film – you’d think this was some sort of beautiful restoration. Far from it. In addition to being scratch-ridden and jerky, with poor sound, parts of the print are so dark that you can barely tell what’s on the screen. One of my all-time favourite song sequences, “Bhanwara Bada Naadaan Hai”, with the stunningly beautiful Waheeda Rehman, is badly mangled. The picture quality in this YouTube video is good, but my DVD manages to darken almost the whole of the sequence so that all one sees of Rehman is an expanse of forehead. (It's a lovely forehead, but still.) Pitiful, really.

Murder in collaboration

(In which Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and others jointly plot a killing, or kill a plot)

It isn’t unheard of for a novel to be co-authored, but it does seem like too much of a good thing when a murder mystery is constructed, in instalments, by twelve professional crime writers. If too many cooks spoil the broth, do too many writers over-boil a plot?

Yet these were the circumstances in which a whodunit titled The Floating Admiral was put together in 1931, by members of the Detection Club comprising such British mystery writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, John Rhode and Freeman Wills Crofts. Set in a small English town named Whynmouth (on the banks of a temperamental river that keeps changing tide much to everyone’s bemusement), the story begins with the discovery of a boat containing the corpse of a new resident, an Admiral Penistone. The first few pages establish the facts of the case and introduce us to Inspector Rudge, who will conduct the investigation; but the successive chapters, each by a different writer, add new characters and subplots. It turns out that the Admiral’s death could have something to do with the wedding plans of his sour-faced niece, but it might also have a connection with 20-year-old events in the opium dens of faraway China.

While the book’s long final chapter – written by Anthony Berkeley – “officially” ties up the loose ends, there is also an Appendix featuring the solutions proposed by each writer (except the first two, who were kindly excused). These were submitted along with the chapters they wrote, which means that at the time of forming these solutions they had no knowledge of the complications that would be introduced by the later contributors. Nor would any writer be allowed to read the others’ solutions until the book was finished. **

If that sounds confusing, it jolly well is. Here’s my main reservation about The Floating Admiral: when I’m reading a cosy whodunit of this sort – whether it’s by Christie or P D James or even Alexander McCall Smith – I like knowing that it comes from a single mind; that the little twists, clues or red herrings have been strewn through the pages by an individual who charted the whole plot out in her head beforehand. The reading process then feels like an amiable battle of wits with the author (even when I’m too engrossed in the plot to stop and try to figure out the solution). With a really good mystery that has a fabulously unexpected denouement, one can go back to the beginning to work out how the deception was perpetrated; one can smile at a throwaway sentence that becomes significant in retrospect, or admire the author’s cleverness in introducing an irrelevant but blindsiding sub-plot.

With The Floating Admiral all this is possible to an extent, but the process is never as intense and personal because you’re constantly aware that this is a joint work where many of the writers were nearly as flummoxed as you are – and that the unfortunates who were saddled with the later chapters had to not just build on an existing story but also work towards a solution that was consistent with details thought up by other people. (As Sayers explains in the book’s Introduction, “Each writer was bound to deal faithfully with all the difficulties left for his consideration by his predecessors. If Elma’s attitude towards love and marriage appeared to fluctuate strangely, or if the boat was put into the boat-house wrong end first, those facts must form part of his solution. He must not dismiss them as caprice or accident, or present an explanation inconsistent with them.”)

Sayers herself does quite well (she wrote the seventh chapter, provided an elaborate solution and in general seems to have had a good time), but on the whole things get heavy-handed halfway through the enterprise. In Ronald Knox’s tedious chapter “Thirty Nine Articles of Doubt”, Inspector Rudge, retiring for the night, makes a long list of ideas he has to follow up on. This is overkill, to put it mildly – I got the impression that Knox had run out of ideas and was trying to fill space by tabulating all the information accumulated thus far. The Floating Admiral is a notable curio – a literary experiment that should be of value to the aspiring detective-story writer, or to someone with special interest in the methods and personalities of the English crime novelists of the period. (Some of the solutions are written in a pleasingly informal style, and there is light banter too. For instance, Knox speculates that Canon Victor Whitechurch, who wrote the first chapter and was known to be strongly religious, would not have approved of a vicar as murderer!) But whether it works as a murder mystery in its own right is debatable.

P.S. It’s no surprise that the book’s new reissue highlights Agatha Christie’s name on the cover, even though her contribution is barely 10 pages. But I admit to feeling tickled that Christie’s proposed solution (which is notably different from most of the others) came close to my own initial ideas about the crime. I also got some amusement from the thought that just two years after participating in this venture, she wrote a book (Murder on the Orient Express) in which the killing was jointly done by 12 people!

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

** I’m a little unsure about whether the contributing writers were completely honest about not discussing the mystery with each other. Without revealing too much: if you read the book, try comparing Freeman Wills Crofts’ account of a woman visitor arriving by car in Lingham village late one night with a very similar proposal in Sayers’ solution in the Appendix. Keep in mind that Sayers wrote chapter 7 (and submitted her solution along with it, to be opened only after the book was completed) while Crofts wrote chapter 9 – which means that according to the rules, neither would have had access to the other’s account at the time they wrote their own. I suspect blackness in the lentil soup.

Teen Behenein at IHC

Movie buffs in Delhi, please note: Kundan Shah’s little-seen feature film Teen Behenein (Three Sisters) – based on real-life cases of dowry-related suicides – is being screened at the Stein auditorium, India Habitat Centre on October 23. (Entry open to all.) The screening will be followed by an interaction with the film’s chief associate director Shekhar Hattangadi.

Teen Behenein is still unreleased (it was shown at the Cinefan festival a few years ago) but Kundan and Shekhar are trying to take it around on their own and have it screened and discussed at various venues. Details of the IHC screening here and here.