Emotional palettes: Vikram Chandra on mixed rasa in ancient literature and popular cinema

There are so many stimulating things in Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code that I won’t try listing them all – or doing a consolidated review – but one passage that struck a chord was a reference from the Mahabharata’s Stree Parva, the book about the women on the post-war battlefield. In the original text, Gandhari’s extraordinary monologue includes a description of the slain warrior Bhurishravas’s wives finding his severed arm, then holding and caressing it. The imagery haunted me for a long time when I first read it (in the Kamala Subramanian version, I think; the more literal and dreary Kisara Mohan Ganguli translation is on this page) and I was reminded of it when I read Mirrored Mind. Chandra quotes a rendition by the ninth century scholar Anandavardhana wherein one of the wives, gently stroking the gory limb she has placed on her lap, says:

“This is the hand that took off my girdle,
That fondled my full breasts,
That caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,
And loosened my skirt.”**

Here is, as Chandra points out, an example (one of countless in the Mahabharata) of the mixing of rasas. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different – some might even say inappropriate – mood.

Concepts like rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance), dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader) and vyanjan (suggestion) have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, and Chandra writes about them at some length, drawing on the work of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, and discussing the function of rasa and dhvani in old literature. But he also mentions a more modern medium.

The urge to savour is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song.

According to Anandavardhana: “While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant… [But there is] no obstruction to a single rasa by its being mixed with others…Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work.”

Chandra continues:

A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasas that will strengthen the predominant rasa of the whole.

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I had a nice session with Chandra the other day (two sessions actually, a private conversation followed by a public one), and part of our discussion was about the often-uninformed, kneejerk denigrating of works that are deemed “unrealistic” or “melodramatic”. When I interviewed him in 2006, he had said:

I feel very strongly about this notion of what is "too filmi" as opposed to what is realistic. In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we've had an education that's trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the tradition of psychological realism. So when we see the other kind of representation – of mainline cinema – we deny its reality. But the idea that the novelistic/psychological-realism form can transparently give us what is "real" is very naïve. It's a distressing aspect of critical talk, and given the history of colonialism, we should be more suspicious of this idea.

(Full interview here)

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. In a chapter titled “Histories and Mythologies”, Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver). And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven; how entire modes of artistic expression get labelled inferior and “premodern” as a result; and what effect that has had on how we continue to view our art and culture even in post-colonial times. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he says:

The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble”, the frightening “throb of drums” that he refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into ‘tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours’ […]

These parts of Mirrored Mind particularly appealed to me because I can relate – to a degree – with Chandra’s ambivalence. My own informal “education” in cinema – taking the medium seriously, as something that could be analysed and written about – really began when I exited the world of Hindi films in my early teens, became obsessed with old American films, and began reading criticism by V F Perkins, Robin Wood and others; criticism that was very much rooted in the models of psychological realism, and in a limited worldview where an Indian director worthy of being held up as a major creative force would have to have the particular sensibility and method of a Satyajit Ray. 

It is only in the past few years that I have rediscovered the creative energies of the really good popular Hindi films, and attempted – as a viewer and writer – to understand their “language” and the assumptions underlying it. And so, even while I have written posts like this one in response to sweepingly condescending pieces about Indian cinema – or this one about Hindi-movie songs – there’s a tiny part of me that still feels a bit embarrassed about the tropes of our popular movies; still reluctant to fully embrace the best of them as art (as opposed to “enjoyable entertainment, but nothing more”). There is some irony here, because when it comes to old Hollywood, I have always found it easy to reject Pauline Kael’s simplistic Art vs Trash formulation. I have no trouble placing popular or genre films like Hawks’ Monkey Business in the same circle of artistic merit as more obviously serious-intentioned films. But it feels like a greater leap to put a popular Hindi movie – even one that is extremely well made and has a fully realised “emotional palette” – in that circle. It’s an aspect of my conditioning that I struggle with.

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Like I said, there is much else of interest in Mirrored Mind, though it is a difficult book in places: an honest report of the reading experience might be “Stirred, then daunted, even stupefied, then stirred again”. It isn’t easy to get into it – if you know nothing about the world of code and computer programming, you might back gingerly away on seeing the first page with its List of Figures that goes “CIL for Hello, world! program in C#” and “Subtraction operator with inputs 4.2 and 2.2” and suchlike.

When I last encountered Chandra’s work, it was in the form of Sacred Games, that epic novel about cops and gangsters in Mumbai – a fast-paced, accessible thriller as well as a thoughtful look at human lives and destinies colliding in a dynamic city, with the reverberations of the distant past constantly running through those lives. So coming to Mirrored Mind, all this talk about algorithms and logic gates and computer programming was a bit scary. But a couple of things happened as I continued reading. First, Chandra’s writing made the world of code and software immediate and interesting. Second, the book morphed gradually into other things. It became a memoir of a reading life and a writing life – of Chandra’s coming of age as a writer, his parallel life in programming, and how the two pursuits have intersected, diverged, or complemented each other (“the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative”). And eventually, a wide-ranging history of Sanskrit grammar and theory.

That might seem a quirky range of topics for a single book, but they come together very well here, and there are all sorts of little ideas and revelations. For instance, it was news to me that good code can aspire not just to functionality but to elegance and beauty as well; that an ambitious programmer can be like a writer who wants to polish his sentences and express himself as well as possible, rather than simply relay information. At one point Chandra quotes Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who was underwhelmed by a particular code: “It was plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.” 

Which almost suggests that a version of the form-and-content debate may exist even in this seemingly cold, mechanical world! Perhaps future editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival can have sessions with titles like “Visual Basic, C# and FORTRAN: three celebrated programming languages discuss what aesthetic transcendence means to them."

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** The Stree Parva excerpt above is from Luther Obrock’s English translation of Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka