Pop goes the epic: Draupadi in High Heels, Karna’s Wife and other new-age retellings

[Yes, here I go obsessing about you-know-what again, this time for the Indian Quarterly, and with a focus on two new novels with Karna in a starring part. This is a slightly different version of the piece that appeared in the magazine]

-----------

In the glossy new TV version of the Mahabharata, there is a scene where the princess Gandhari blindfolds herself so she can join her soon-to-be-husband Dhritarashtra in the world of the unsighted. This is among the most dramatic early moments in Vyasa's epic, and is usually presented in exalted terms - the princess proclaiming her resolution; the flamboyant, and decisive, binding of the cloth around her eyes - which is why I was intrigued by the new show’s handling of the scene. Much of the shot is filmed as point of view: we see Gandhari holding the blindfold, but then we watch it through her eyes as it comes closer and closer to them, eventually blurring the whole screen. The effect is akin to a handheld-camera horror film, complete with scary music and agitated breathing on the soundtrack. An earlier episode has established that the princess is afraid of the dark and awakens in a cold sweat if the wind blows out the dozens of diyas in her room. What she is now doing to herself feels much more immediate.

One doesn’t have to read too much into this, of course. High production values and reasonably thoughtful script notwithstanding, this Mahabharata, telecast five days a week, is very much aimed at viewers of daily soaps – which means presenting incidents in mundane, homely terms, stretching scenes out endlessly, and setting up episode-closing cliffhangers. The blindfold scene is a set-up for the next, hyper-dramatic sequence where Gandhari enters the Kuru sabha for her wedding, and viewers – along with the other characters in the story – get to see her with her eyes covered for the first time.

But the scene works on another level too, by showing a majestic act in human terms. Rather than a self-assured princess reaching for the Grand Gesture with her thoughts on posterity, this is a scared, impetuous girl who may have made a decision without realising its implications (and of course, there will be major implications for the story). It makes Gandhari easier to relate to, sympathise with or chastise, and it also ties in with what a number of recently published books have been trying to do – to make these old stories more accessible, with results that are inventive and facile in equal measure.

Such retellings of epics are not in themselves a new phenomenon. There have been countless “perspective” versions across the Indian languages, some notable ones being from major writers such as MT Vasudevan Nair (Randaamoozham, translated from Malayalam into English by Prem Panicker for his blog, and then by Gita Krishnankutty for Harper Collins) and Shivaji Sawant (the Marathi classic Mrityunjay). But a majority of those works were in the realm of literary fiction, and aimed at readers who had a deep enough knowledge of the epic to want to explore alternate narrative possibilities. What has been happening recently is a little different: stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana are being revisited in ways that would appeal to a wider range of readers, and in the garb of fast-paced genre fiction.

And inevitably, certain characters have special appeal for the new generation of bards. Prominent among them is Karna, half-brother of the Pandavas, who is abandoned as an infant, raised by low-caste foster parents and discovers his true identity too late. One of ancient literature’s most compelling tragic heroes, Karna is a notably "modern" figure even in straightforward Mahabharata translations. His presence continually runs against the very assumptions of the period – such as the “God-granted” division of people into social hierarchies by their birth rather than their capabilities – and raises uncomfortable questions for the other characters as well as for the reader. (What happens when a person comes up against consistently hostile circumstances, or when personal dharma collides with what is perceived as the greater good?) The new TV show gives Karna rousing speeches where, apparently addressing the camera directly, he punctures the hubris of the high-born people around him, including one where he sharply tells the Brahmin teacher Drona that there is no such thing as a divine or magical birth, because every birth is a wondrous event for the parents concerned.

An earlier issue of this magazine carried an essay about literary crushes. As a child, traversing the vast landscape of the Mahabharata, I was obsessed with Karna, and could see him as the template for the angry young men played by Amitabh Bachchan in films like Trishul. Reading C Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata aloud to my mother, I would sometimes excise sentences that showed Karna in a poor light. In my defence, I was all of ten years old; but it means I can relate to the many attempts now being made to turn Karna into an almost conventional, vanilla hero rather than a deeply complex person capable of extremes of anger and spite.

My literary crush was a platonic one, but two new books, both written by women who clearly feel strongly about Karna, explore his possibilities as a romantic hero. In these novels, Karna – about whose love life we learn almost nothing in the original Mahabharata – has transformed into an irresistible, golden-eyed (or blue-eyed) hunk, a sensitive new-age metrosexual, a darkly mysterious stranger who is essentially good-hearted and who might be saved by the love of the right woman. Both books begin with the heroine’s first glimpse of this man, whose physical features and personality are described in near-fetishistic terms. A strong strain of wish-fulfillment runs through them, and both are roughly classifiable (if you like classifying books) as “commercial” or “mass-market” fiction, though in my view they are very different in quality.

The less interesting of the two, Aditi Kotwal’s Draupadi in High Heels – an entry in Penguin India’s Metro Reads imprint for popular fiction – centres on a poor little rich girl named Deeya Panchal who, in the midst of jet-setting around the world, socialising with the likes of Sonam Kapoor at fashion shows and brooding about ex-boyfriends, discovers that her life has uncanny parallels with the mythological Draupadi's. For one thing, she is in degrees of romantic or potentially romantic entanglements with three suave, business-family brothers, the modern-day versions of the Pandavas (“Uggh. I suddenly felt like a doll which was being passed around from one brother to the other”). She also confides important matters to a close friend named Krish Gopinathan (Krishna), and is drawn to a handsome social outsider named Karan, whose origins are “shrouded in mystery”.

Though the framework here is the genre often derisively called chick-lit (“brat-lit” might be more accurate for this novel), the central idea has been explored before. The possibility of an unarticulated connection between Karna and Draupadi – both fiery, headstrong people – has persisted for a while in folklore and in regional extrapolations of the epic; it was there in Pratibha Ray’s celebrated Oriya novel Yagnaseni, in P K Balakrishnan’s Malayalam Ini Njan Urangatte (translated into English as “Now Let me Sleep”) and more recently in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, which ended in a bohemian post-war Heaven where Draupadi is finally free to express her real feelings for Karna.

In contrast, the Deeya of Draupadi in High Heels goes about her work on terra firma. She not only chooses Karan to be her life partner, but also helps him discover his real identity. (He was the product of a hushed pre-marital affair involving a socialite and her German boyfriend in England!) The book’s final two sentences – “As I looked into his light-brown eyes which glowed with abundant love, I realized that a man with a golden heart like his deserved all the happiness and acceptance in this world. And I was so glad that I got to share these moments with him!” – should tell you everything you need to know about the mawkishness of the prose, as should the supposedly descriptive passages (“What fascinated and captivated me the most was his face – which was the most perfect that I had ever seen!” and “Some strong, indefinable feeling swept through my body and found its place at the bottom of my stomach”). 

But they will also tell you that this is an attempt to give Karna a happy ending, to retrospectively correct the wrongs done to this anti-hero – and in fact, this impulse is common to many Mahabharata-retellers. In 1991, the acclaimed film director Mani Rathnam made Thalapathi, with Rajnikanth as a modern-day Karna, which ends with the protagonist achieving validation and self-worth. “[As a reader] I’ve always wished that he lived on,” Rathnam told Baradwaj Rangan in one of the interviews in the book Conversations with Mani Ratnam, “So much has gone wrong. There’s so much stacked against him. Maybe there’s a bit of hope, a bit of optimism in this, but I felt that his death would look too doomed, too tragic.”

The other new Karna-as-romantic-hero book is Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife, redundantly sub-titled “The Outcast’s Queen”. Despite its weak points – flat dialogue, for one – this is unquestionably a more serious-intentioned work than Kotwal’s, and founded on a closer psychological understanding of the epic. (Kane has probably read her Mrityunjay too.) The protagonist here is a freshly created character, a princess named Uruvi who becomes Karna’s second wife after performing an action that is exactly the opposite of Draupadi’s: she rejects Arjuna, whom everyone expected her to marry, in favour of the intense social outcast.

A problem with some “perspective” versions of the Mahabharata is that they turn their protagonists into near-omniscient narrators – The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata, for instance, is part-narrated by an Ashwatthama who seems blessed with a panoramic view of everything that is happening to all the other characters. The same charge could be leveled at Karna’s Queen: the fictional Uruvi conveniently happens to have grown up around the elders of Hastinapura and is even the foster-daughter of Kunti (mother of Karna and the Pandavas), which means she is privy to all sorts of information. The very opening page is a description of her first view of Karna when he challenges the Kuru princes during their competition; Uruvi has a ringside seat here, right next to Kunti, and she chirps on in modern slang, providing such commentary as “Bhima is downright mean!” and “Ma, please, it’s fair enough!”

At this stage I was ready to dismiss Karna’s Wife as another facile retelling, but reading on I found points of interest in it. Uruvi – even though she is part of Karna’s life and is affected by his actions– can be viewed as a sutradhaar figure who is essentially outside the narrative, a stand-in for the author. It is almost as if Kane traveled in a time machine to Hastinapura (think of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) and then set about confronting major characters like Bheeshma, Kunti, Duryodhana, and Karna himself, and either telling them off or getting a clearer understanding of their feelings. If one were to be really generous to this book, one might say that what she has attempted (consciously or otherwise) is a form of literary and social criticism – revisiting the story as a 21st century person, bringing modern morality to it, and doing this not from a safe distance but as an insider. (In an interview, Kane was asked which character from the Mahabharata she would like to meet and speak with. “Karna, of course!” she replied, “And I would have done exactly what Uruvi did.”)

If Karna is a dashing lover in these books, the new TV show also presents him in terms that resemble the Western comic-book superhero. Poetic licence has been taken with the impenetrable armour and earrings attached to his body, gifts from his divine father, the Sun God. In a touch that may remind you of Clark Kent turning into Superman in the phone booth, the new serial has the protective armour making its appearance only in specific moments of crisis; it then spreads across Karna’s muscular abdomen, which, seen in close up, resembles that of modern superheroes in full gear. The parallel with Superman, who is encased as a baby in a protective bubble by his father Jor-El, is hard to resist. And of course, the armour will also turn out to be Karna’s Kryptonite when he has to give it away. All of which may be a way of reminding oneself that the Superman story is itself a modern myth that is derivative of ancient ones. The circle completes itself here.

****

It’s worth asking why the epics are such an endlessly replenishing mine for contemporary writers. One obvious answer is that these are rich stories with multiple strands, forever open to new interpretations and psychological analyses. A more cynical answer would be that they provide lazy or unimaginative authors with a ready-made template: the plot, structure and character types are largely in place, and the embellishments (or twists, as in Draupadi choosing Karna over Arjuna) are all that are needed.

Everything hinges then on the quality of execution, on what new ideas are introduced, and how convincingly they are injected into an existing palimpsest. One of the more notable (in theory at least) attempts to shift the epic to a modern setting was in Sandipan Deb’s gangster novel The Last War, which set the Mahabharat in the Mumbai underworld, casting Arjuna and Karna as Jeet and Karl, two expert hitmen primed for a final showdown. It was a good idea to move the story to the Bombay of the last 60 years, letting the many familiar dramatic episodes play out against the backdrop of a fast-changing city, with occasional references to such real-life events as cricket match-fixing. (In this version, Yudhisthira goes to jail when he is tricked and implicated in a cricket-betting controversy.) And there is an irreverence built into the book's very fabric: the very first chapter has the modern versions of Krishna and Arjuna faux-philosophising over glasses of Scotch, and all the characters are basically thugs.

But this also raises questions about Deb’s decision to lift plot details and even dialogues wholesale, and to clumsily stick them into situations where they become anachronistic. For instance, the episode of Arjuna seeing only the eye of the wooden bird he has to shoot at is presented exactly as it is in the original, except that of course he is using a rifle. After Draupadi (called Jahn here) is nearly raped, she swears that she won't tie or oil her hair until she has soaked it in her assailant’s blood. Besides, the prose includes several pretentious references to “dharma” or duty. Deeply ambiguous as this concept already is in the original Mahabharata, it is rendered meaningless in a situation where everyone is operating outside the law.

However, one might note that even in this amoral version – where there are no real standards of “good” and “evil” – the Karna character is the one who secretly makes the phone call that helps preserve Draupadi’s honour. It seems that even the author of a hard-boiled underworld rendition of the epic can’t resist whitewashing Karna, almost to the point where his complexities are siphoned away.

That’s another feature common to contemporary retellings though: the need to subvert conventional ideas about the “bad guys”, or to reveal the shaky moral foundations of the “good guys”. Among recent books, there are Anand Neelakantan’s Asura and Ajaya, which eschew the history-as-told-by-the-victors narrative to present the Ramayana and Mahabharata through the eyes of Ravana and the Kauravas respectively. The Rama-Sita relationship has been thoughtfully dealt with in such modern-lens retellings as Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen (a “speculative thriller” about a journalist’s search for Rama’s missing wife after the war with Lanka) and Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by the American Nina Paley, who intersperses episodes from the Ramayana with the story of Paley’s own estrangement from her husband.

And always, there is the story of Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister who becomes the catalyst for events in the Ramayana after she is rebuffed and disfigured by Rama and Lakshmana. The incident – though presented in terms of the good guys giving a demoness her just desserts – is an inherently ambiguous one, and can be interpreted in terms of gender-directed or caste-directed violence. This has been done many times in modern fiction (an example being Amit Chaudhuri’s spare, uncompromising short story “An Infatuation”), but one of the most enjoyable Surpanakha retellings I have read is a piece in the anthology Breaking the Bow, which collects speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. Kuzhali Manickavel’s “The Ramayana as an American Reality Television Show” is a clever account of how the Surpanakha episode may have unfolded in the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic cyber-age, with statements from the aggrieved rakshasi’s blog, the hysterical social-media reactions by her fans and detractors, and Twitter ripostes by the “Real Rama”. It adds up to a commentary not just on the ancient epic (it is easy for contemporary writers to poke holes into the social mores and pomposities of an earlier era) but also on the vagaries of our own time.

In any case, the past few months alone have brought us romantic Karnas, a gangster Mahabharata and the Ramayana as science fiction and thriller, along with prolonged daytime soaps where one might conceivably, in future episodes, get to see Duryodhana helping his son with his Algebra homework. And all this in addition to the ever-growing corpus of books by Amish Tripathi, Krishna Udayashankar, Ashok Banker and others, where Indian mythology is retold in a style resembling 20th century Western fantasy from Tolkien onwards. Or Amruta Patil's beautifully illustrated visual retelling, Adi Parva. But why stop there? Other genres and tropes are yet to be explored. Personally I am toying with the idea of getting onto the bandwagon and fashioning two of my personal obsessions – tennis and irreverent humour – into Mahabharata novellas. One of them would stage the Kurukshetra war as a series of Grand Slam matches, with the Karna-Arjuna battle played out in the manner of a Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal epic in a Wimbledon final. (As Orwell said, sport is war minus the shooting. Such a story would require no “arrows can be injurious to health” signs.) The other would cast Groucho Marx as a non-sequitur-spewing Krishna, confounding Arjuna and everyone else on the battlefield with a modern Gita that begins “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Like Groucho, the epic is whatever you want it to be.

-------------------

[Some related posts: the Rashomon-like world of the Mahabharata; Iravati Karve's Yuganta; The Palace of Illusions; The Last War. The PDF of Prem Panicker's Bhimsen is here. And something about the Karna-as-Rafa illustration that went with the piece.]

A guide for aspiring freelance journalists

A shout-out for Everything You Wanted to Know about Freelance Journalism, co-written by Kavitha Rao and Charukesi Ramadurai. Plenty of useful information in here for writers trying to break into the world of journalism and get their features and stories published. The official launch is in Bangalore on March 7 (Landmark, Forum Mall, Koramangala at 6.30 pm) and the book can be bought online here and elsewhere.

I answered a few questions about my freelancing career for an appendix at the end of the book, and allowed myself to get a bit crabby when asked how lucrative it is to write book reviews. Here's part of the relevant answer.

Making book reviews pay: that’s a laugh! One of my biggest peeves is that one usually gets paid a pittance for something that requires so much time and energy and discipline (if you do it honestly). To me, reviewing a book properly means reading it from cover to cover, and reading it well (these are things that some “reviewers” I know don’t bother to do, by the way; and little wonder, given the ridiculously short deadlines they get). It means making lots of notes along the way, working out what you want to say, trying to bring in personal insights, and expressing them as well as possible. All this takes time and effort, and yet one rarely gets paid more than Rs 5 a word for a book review.**

Having been both a reviewer constantly waiting for his (meagre) cheques and a books-page editor for a magazine that took months or years to send cheques out, I have had firsthand experience – from two vantage points – of the pariah treatment given to reviews. During a conversation with a magazine editor – a respected journalist of long standing, who was once a books-page editor – I was startled to hear her say “Oh come on, it’s just a book review - why do we need to pay more than 3K for it?” I think this is representative of a wider attitude in mainstream media: an inability to really understand the function or scope of criticism (whether on books or films). I can’t count the number of times I have heard variants on that self-serving statement “Critics are eunuchs in a harem – watching but unable to participate”, or the idea that writing a review is something that anyone can easily do, it doesn’t require rigour and skill. This also creates a vicious cycle: there isn’t much space for reviews in mainstream publications, so even potentially good writers end up doing sketchy, 400-word pieces; youngsters reading these pieces get a very limited picture of what a review can be, and set their own standards low; and editors don’t think of review-writing as a specialised discipline that needs to be worked on and encouraged.

 ** On reflection, that "Rs 5 a word" was optimistic - a miscalculation on my part.

Pink Saris and Gulabi Gang: two films about Sampat Pal and her movement

Nishtha Jain’s documentary Gulabi Gang, completed in 2012 and released in theatres this week, has many aesthetically pleasing scenes. The first few minutes give us beautiful nature shots, vistas of the fields surrounding Bundelkhand, and the vivid fuchsia of the saris worn by the Gulabi Gang group, founded by Sampat Pal Devi to tackle injustice against women. Sampat banters with other members, the newer recruits joke amongst themselves, a little awkward at first but slowly opening up; the mood is convivial. Yet ugliness is soon revealed beneath the surface of this setting, and the film doesn’t flinch from it.

The camera follows Sampat into a hut containing the charred body of a young girl, limbs spread out in rigor mortis, and then we see the first steps in an amateur investigation as Sampat questions the victim’s in-laws, picks holes in their account, wonders how roof and walls have remained undamaged after such a fierce “accidental” fire. Other viscerally disturbing scenes follow: a conversation with the dead girl’s husband, who might be a murderer; the faces of men standing outside a car, looking in through the window, offering explanations and rationalisations, changing stories as per convenience; children at the scene of the crime, staring at the camera, primed to grow into adults who will keep this cycle of violence and concealment going. The contrast between how the film began and the bleakness of these scenes is telling – here is a “simple”, “God-fearing” community that closes ranks in the face of a terrible crime.

At this point Gulabi Gang also has the texture of a busy investigative thriller, driven by Sampat’s determination to see justice done. But as if to remind us of the true pace of life in this setting, and that this isn’t a story where loose ends will neatly be tied together, things slow down. The case becomes entangled in local politics and taken over by apathetic policemen, the justice-seekers have to make numerous trips on rough roads to courts and police stations, the girl’s own family invokes divine inscrutability (“Kya hua Ishwar hee jaanat”), one gets the sense that nothing can ever really change in a place so mired in patriarchy and feudalism. (Indeed, Jain mentioned after a preview screening yesterday that this particular case was never satisfactorily resolved.)

And yet, this group has been an agent of change in the past decade – its influence has spread, it has won small battles and the woman at its centre is a strong, magnetic presence. Gulabi Gang makes for a good double bill with another documentary, Kim Longinotto’s 2010 Pink Saris – together they present a well-rounded picture of Sampat Pal and her movement. Jain's film examines the larger picture – the promotional campaigns, the participation in grassroots politics, the work being done by the group’s other leaders such as the robustly likable Suman Singh – while Pink Saris employs an intimate, worm’s eye perspective, focuses on relatively common problems (a pregnant girl being deserted by her husband, a married woman wanting to run off with another man) and uses the particular to illuminate the general, by setting the facts of Sampat Pal’s life against the situations of the people she is helping. We are told that Sampat left her husband, whom she was forcibly married to at age 12, and shortly afterwards we see a young girl who looks into the camera and asks, how can I stay at my parents’ house? That isn’t what girls are born for. What choice do I have?

****

Though Sampat is more of a central figure in Pink Saris – present in every scene – in both films the camera seems drawn to her, and who can fault it. Whether she is yelling at people who cross her with religious mumbo-jumbo (“Main devtaa ko nahin maanti hoon, insaan ko maanti hoon […] Aisi ki taisi ho devtaa ki. Naari se badhke koi shakti nahin hoti”) or softly consoling a weeping man who says his brothers were killed for trying to do social service, she has the poise of a minor-key movie star who knows the precise emotional register required in each scene. The qualities that got her where she is – strength mingled with empathy, the ability to be caring yet profane yet practical – often shine through. Young girls today won’t unquestioningly do all the house-work “jaise hum karte thay”, she tells another middle-aged woman, showing a rare quality – the ability to rise above the resentment that comes with knowing that the next generation has more freedoms than you did.

Some of the most interesting bits in Pink Saris are about her personal life, including things that aren’t clearly spelled out. She lives and works with her “partner” Babuji, an educated man who was originally employed to do the group’s paperwork – but one of his first appearances here has him massaging her back as she lies on a table. Soon after this she is shown in conversation with her estranged, “angootha-chaap” husband, who is dependent on her (“Main tumhaar thekedaar hoon,” she tells him [“I’m your provider”]), and then arguing with Babuji, who accuses her of being “ghamandi” (I am just a small scorpion, he says sullenly, while you get famous in the three worlds).

In these latter scenes two things are in evidence: the insecure man unable to deal with challenges to an order that he has taken for granted all his life, uncomfortable about being dependent on, or second-in-command to, a woman; but we are also reminded that anyone who acquires power and respect, no matter how well-intentioned to begin with, might walk a tightrope between genuine philanthropy and self-righteousness of the sort that goes “I am doing so much good, living not for myself but for others – therefore I am above the law and answerable to no one.”

Without casting aspersions on Sampat’s motives, it is possible to feel ambivalent about her as an individual. There are traces of hubris in her behaviour. “Main police se zyaada hoon,” she often says, and refers to herself in the third person. (“Log Sampat Pal ko auraton ki messiyah bulaate hain.”) Her Bigg Boss appearance can be seen as an effort to draw wider public attention to a worthy cause, but can also be interpreted in terms of a personal need for publicity. That she is very conscious of the need to control her image can be seen in her reaction when she learnt about the fictional film Gulaab Gang (to be released next month). Her autobiography, as told to a French journalist, was published in 2008 with the delightful title Moi Sampat Pal: Chef de Gang en Sari Rose, and only translated into English a few years later; in the Introduction, Zubaan’s Shweta Vachani writes of travelling with Sampat as an interpreter to Stockholm and there finding that “she would expect us to do everything for her, including make her tea, clear up after her and wash her dishes. It wasn’t hard to infer that she was unused to doing anything in her own house or village.”

None of this lessens the value of the work done by the Gulabi Gang over the years, shaking up the status quo and striking fear, even encouraging introspection, in the hearts of people who were used to having everything their own way. At one point in Pink Saris someone suggests that things have really worsened since the group was formed, but one can conjecture that this is only because many ugly things – hitherto hidden behind closed doors and given social sanction – are now coming into public view. And an achievement of both these films is that despite Sampat’s forcefulness, we never lose sight of just how hard it is for real change to happen. Looked at from a distance, the Gulabi Gang may seem like laathi-wielding avengers, efficiently cleaning up the world, but up close things are more complicated and murky. Compromises are necessary: the shock of a casually spoken sentence like “Sasur isski izzat loot raha hai, aur yeh isse pasand nahin hai” (“This girl’s father-in-law has been raping her, and she doesn’t like it”) is augmented by the realisation that Sampat is arranging for the girl to return to her husband’s home (and for her in-laws’ actions to be closely monitored and reported on), because that is the only realistic solution in the given circumstances.

Jain’s film offers a bitter pill near the end, through a woman named Husna who has been asked to temporarily disassociate herself from the group because she is trying to shield her brother, a murderer. Sampat and Suman tell Husna – in a friendly, sympathetic tone – that she should stay away for her own safety. But after they leave, in a long, unbroken shot, Husna – who prides herself on having worked with the Gulabi Gang for years – speaks to the filmmaker, defiantly justifying the “honour killing” and revealing an attitude that is the very antithesis of “Change begins at home”. On the one hand, she says it is her duty to protect her brothers and sons no matter what, even if they do something wrong; on the other hand, she insists that brothers are entitled to kill their sisters if they feel they have transgressed. It is a chilling scene, made more so by Husna’s self-assuredness, and our realisation that she isn’t the stereotype of the illiterate woman hopelessly insulated from the outside world; that she has been out there, seen terrible things, even battled some of them…and then returned home to preserve “tradition”. It is such betrayals from within that, more than anything else, point to the magnitude of the challenges facing Sampat Pal and her group.

A writer’s hell – Ann Patchett on killing her butterfly

Enjoyed this excerpt from Ann Patchett’s new book This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, about her struggles with writing each new novel:

The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its colour, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
 

And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page… Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the colour, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.

When I tell this story in front of an audience it tends to get a laugh. People think I’m being charmingly self-deprecating, when really it is the closest thing to the truth about my writing process that I know. The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies.

All this might sound precious to those who think artists agonise too much about their “process”, or romanticise their work needlessly rather than just sitting down and “getting it done” - but I think this is something nearly any serious writer has experienced at some point, and to some degree. A reader may love a book because it transports them into a different world, and opens new avenues in their imagination, but for the author the published version may be a vapid, colourless facsimile of the far more brilliant thing they had (and still have) in their heads.

Patchett's sadness about the necessity of making her butterfly "two-dimensional" was also a reminder of what Naseeruddin Shah once told me, about wishing he could rehearse a play endlessly, adding new things to it, discovering fresh nuances in a line, without ever actually staging it for an audience. A permanent work in progress, with no pretence that it can reach “finished” form.

And  a couple of related quotes from Vikram Chandra’s Mirrored Mind:

Most certainly there are writers in the world (Bradbury? Borowski?) who smile while they work, who create fiction and poetry in an ecstatic flow. I’ve never met a single one. Mostly, as far as I can tell, writing is not pleasurable. An interviewer once asked William Styron, ‘Do you enjoy writing?’ and the great man said, ‘I certainly don’t. I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started every day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.’

[…] Here’s Abe Kobe on the subject: ‘The most enjoyable time is when I suddenly get the idea for my work. But when I start writing it is very, very painful…To write or to commit suicide. Which will it be?’ Norman Mailer: ‘I think nobody knows how much damage a book does to you except another writer. It’s hell writing a novel; you really poison your body doing it…it is self-destruction, it’s quiet self-destruction, civilized self-destruction.’

[…] And the poet Robert Hass once said, ‘It’s hell writing, but it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written.'

Sound-shadows and autobiographies - on The Essential Ved Mehta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

---------------

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

Quick thoughts on the pulping of The Hindus (and the benevolent bully)

Some thoughts in connection with the depressing - but not, in our times, very surprising - news about the “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus by Penguin India (after a petition that, among other things, alleges that Doniger’s “approach is that of a woman hungry of sex”, that a Shiva linga can only be a cigar, so to speak, and that the idea of Krishna having an erotic life is unthinkable and un-Hindu).

I have written before about the smug certitudes that so often accompany religious belief, and the sophistry/cherry-picking inherent in the thought process that goes: “THIS is what the scriptures really meant, and it’s all good and clean and pure and exactly as I want it to be. Anything else – anything that makes me uncomfortable, or doesn’t fit the accepted moralities of today, or makes the Gods seem imperfect, or even vaguely suggests that those old books may have been a product of their age rather than containing unassailable wisdom and truth for all time – any such thing HAS to be a flawed reading, or a later corruption of the text. Or, wait, it can be interpreted THIS way, which makes everything okay again.”

This thought process isn’t limited to those whom we can conveniently label “fanatics”. Some generally intelligent people I know, including some who aren't especially religious, often bring up that beautiful, soothing – and nonsensical – idea that all religions “in essence” or “in their original form” teach love, universal brotherhood, tolerance and non-violence. A cursory reading of the major works of ancient literature shows how bizarre this claim is. But of course, once you know, with absolute certainty, that they really are all divine texts, that so-and-so really WAS a God, and that Gods by definition are good and all-knowing and so on, it becomes easy to rationalise anything.

I had an email conversation with a friend today – it touched briefly on the Doniger episode, but it began as a discussion of the new TV Mahabharat, which (no surprise) depicts Krishna as a forever-in-control avatar, constantly manipulating events towards the Greater Good, interfering in every scene to such a degree that you feel all the other characters could easily have been played by mannequins with little strings attached to them. Compared to this beacon in man-shape, even the Krishna of the B R Chopra serial – a fairly populist show in its time – was a flawed, sometimes conflicted, likably human character.

Anyway, I was telling my friend about the new show’s whitewashing of nearly every dubious action performed by the “good guys”, the Pandavas and Draupadi, how it glibly stacks the cards in their favour, and against those who are on the side of “adharma”. There is a scene at Draupadi’s swayamvara where Krishna meets Karna for the first time and tells him something like, “If you don't get respect – sammaan – it means you have not followed the path of dharma.” Karna asks “But what about someone who has never known respect, right from his earliest days?” and to this Krishna smiles sweetly and wags his finger and says “Oh, in that case, you must strive all your life for respect. But don't do it by siding with adharma.”

One gets the gist of what is being said, and even buys into it to a degree if one is hung up on the Bhakti Tradition Krishna and the Mahabharata-as-Morality-Tale. And I’m not suggesting that the injustices done to Karna be used to justify or even gloss over the wrongs he participates in. But this scene (and there are others like it) presents such a simple-minded view of what is good and what is bad, and such an undermining of lived experience. As I told my friend on email, if this Krishna travelled to modern-day Delhi and met an autorickshaw driver who had just been smacked hard by a rich kid in a BMW because their vehicles had grazed each other, he'd probably say the same thing with the same expression.

She replied: “That is what I find so fearfully disturbing about the […] discourses of today: they all conspire (consciously or otherwise) to vindicate a certain hierarchy by transforming it into benevolent, enlightened patriarchy, striving to achieve everyone's well-being. Poppycock.” Well said. There are so many versions of this benevolent patriarchy. (“Yes, yes, we believe in freedom of speech too,” they say with indulgent smiles, “But, you know, this will hurt so many feelings. Couldn't you avoid writing it?”) And we see a form of it in the objections to books like Doniger’s, by people who want a single, standardised, comforting version of things, with nothing that will rock any boats.

[Related thoughts in these posts: Arun Shourie on innocents in a Godless world; divine savages and “real” truth; tales from a crematorium; Chetan Bhagat and “liberal extremism”]

United we shoot - quotes from a few good men in movies

[This is a piece I did for Elle magazine last year. It was done to a clearly specified brief: here’s a list of eight men who are doing interesting, behind-the-scenes work in Hindi cinema, and whom we have gathered for a photo shoot; speak to them and weave their quotes into an essay. As such, it wasn’t much of a challenge writing-wise – apart from the fact that there were a disproportionate number of cinematographers in the list, which made it tricky to divided up the quotes – but the conversations were nice. I have other bytes that I hope to use in a column sometime]

“There is usually a sound in my head when I am writing a scene,” says director Bejoy Nambiar, “and when the time comes to score the film, I look for musical possibilities to match that sound.” In one of the best scenes in Nambiar’s stylish film Shaitan, a brilliantly reworked, trippy version of the old romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

It also suggests a couple of things about contemporary movie-making: that a director with a strong vision can bring his stamp to every aspect of the process (“My films must have me in them,” Nambiar says, “they have to be expressions of my personal tastes and interests”), and that there is a greater willingness to experiment, to do things that would once have been considered very radical. Music producer and composer Mikey McCleary, who reworked “Khoya Khoya Chand”, points out that filmmakers are no longer hung up on having a single composer doing the music for their movies, and that they often choose pre-existing tunes from the independent scene, rather than commissioning scores from a familiar set of insiders. “This brings in more variety and opens up fresh possibilities for a film.”

More generally too, today’s Hindi cinema has shown a willingness to step outside traditional comfort zones. Thanks to a combination of the Internet, the DVD culture and greater dissemination of information, a generation of young writers and directors have been absorbing the best of other cinemas and bringing their own sensibilities to them. There are offbeat stories, newer settings, more realism in language, and greater emphasis on background detailing and production design – things that are vital for capturing a sense of place and time. The industry’s newfound confidence about being part of a larger filmic universe is also reflected in the growing participation of non-Indians – such as McCleary or the cinematographers Nikos Andritzakis and Carlos Catalan – who are now key contributors to major films.

“Earlier, our films were largely about escapism, such as showing Switzerland to an audience who would never go there,” lensman Kartik Vijay points out, “but today directors are making films about things they have firsthand experience of.” Naturally, to realise their visions, these directors need high standards of craftsmanship in every field. Speaking with some of our leading technicians, one is reminded that the best films represent a smooth synthesis of different elements, aimed at maintaining the reality of the world depicted in the movie. Vijay – who has worked with such major directors as Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee – relates how he used bright colours to capture the vibrancy of the West Delhi Punjabi culture in Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and how subtle alterations in lighting can signal a narrative shift from a warm, happy mood to something more hard-edged. For Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola, he tried to reflect the character Mandola’s darker shades by gradually letting the colours go out as the story progresses. While shooting Banerjee’s Shanghai, the Greek-born Andritzakis converted his first-time impressions (as a foreigner) of Mumbai busy street-life into images that matched the grim mood of the story, and also worked closely with the art designers to get the right look. McCleary, who did the soundtrack for the same film, embellished the sound of Mumbai street-drums with dark, ambient music to achieve an effect that would be familiar and sinister at the same time.

“The entire team needs to work in tandem from the very beginning – you can’t have a situation where two departments don’t know what the other is doing,” says costume designer Kunal Rawal, pointing out that a well-conceptualised wardrobe can help an actor get into the skin of a character long before shooting begins. Rawal recalls once designing a shirt with subtle off-white stripes that he thought would work very well for a scene, but then the lighting rendered the stripes invisible. On another occasion, carefully chosen shoes were wasted in a scene that only had close-ups and medium-shots. Little wonder then that he now wants to be present even at a DoP meeting, to understand the shot breakdown and the quality of light for a particular scene.

Those of us on the outside make simple distinctions between “commercial” and “art” cinema, or grumble that financial considerations always undermine artistic integrity, but things aren’t so cut-and-dried – big production houses are more open to fresh, edgy films. Director Shakun Batra, who is a big fan of Woody Allen and Wes Anderson and has a taste for quirky, character-driven stories himself, speaks of his producer Karan Johar being happy to finance the kinds of films that most viewers would never associate him with. “He is very supportive, never interferes or pushes you to do things in a particular way.” As Batra points out, the film world today is more balanced, allowing creative helmsmen with an indie sensibility to get the budgets for what they want to do. “You have to be good enough to win your producers’ confidence and trust.”

But as Andritzakis points out, even mainstream films are becoming better crafted, and there is less self-consciousness now about categories. Cinematographer Ayananka Bose, who has worked on a number of very high-profile, big-budget movies, says every film presents its own special challenge: for instance, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom required a flamboyant, colourful, big-musical feel, but Kites had to be suffused with the heat of the desert and the Las Vegas setting. “I don’t think much about the ‘big-budget’ or ‘glamorous’ tags,” he says, “What matters is quality of execution. The camera is the same, the lens is the same – you are in control of your craft.”

Speaking of which, changes in technology have been levelling the playing field and making filmmaking much more democratic than it once was. “Technology has put a movie camera in the hands of anyone who has a smart-phone,” says Vijay, and this means young talents have an early outlet for their imagination. Simultaneously, social media has made filmmakers more accessible: Nambiar speaks of musicians sending him their tunes online, which he can listen to instantly. Naturally this can cause clutter, but the best work does tend to stand out; as Bose points out, ultimately, the mind behind the equipment is what matters. “You can always identify someone who is a pseudo-intellectual imitator of Godard or Truffaut vs someone who has originality.”

Communication can flow in the opposite direction too. There have been cases of directors and writers getting their films financed by reaching out to like-minded people on Facebook or Twitter: one such film, Onir’s I Am, even went on to win a National Award. Meanwhile, viewers too are more aware and sophisticated than before, which means they are open to new forms and idioms. “Audiences are exposed to more, and willing to accept more,” Rawal says, “Animation for grown-ups is a field that I am very excited about – I think Indian cinema is going to go places in it.”

What all this adds up to is a scenario where people with a passion for cinema are pulling each other up, showing a collaborative generosity that represents the opposite of the crabs-in- a-well mentality. It comes out of a genuine sense that everyone can be part of the change. No wonder the enthusiastic statements made by these young talents don’t seem glib or facile. When Batra says “It is the beginning of a golden age in Hindi cinema”, or Andritzakis says “I’m very lucky to have arrived at a time when things are starting to explode”, it sounds like an accurate response to working in an increasingly vibrant industry. “Every time I am at a film festival,” says Carlos Catalan, “I realise that there is a talented wave of Indian directors telling different stories in different ways. World audiences are hungry to watch those films.” With these good men working away behind the scenes, that appetite should increase.

[A related piece: short profiles of 10 trailblazers of the new Indian cinema, across categories]