Beti aur bus

Thinking – in light of the latest Delhi gang-rape – about the many subtle ways in which misogyny is perpetuated and absorbed into a culture, I remembered a passage I recently read in an interview of the filmmaker Onir (this is from Anna MM Vetticad’s book Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, which I reviewed here). The back-story is that Onir’s sensitive film I Am had run into censorship problems simply for touching on such subjects as child abuse and homosexuality. Here he is on the double standards in what is seen as acceptable for a mass audience and what isn’t:

Recently I was watching this so-called, feel-good, keep-your-brains-at-home, fun big film, and I was thinking that I’m facing so much trouble with the Censor Board over I Am, yet in this film I was watching, the Board cleared a scene in which a young boy is crying and the mother says: “Maine toh beta maanga tha, beti mil gayee.” (“I asked for a son, but got a daughter instead.”) In a country like India, you pass that uncensored?

Cut to the next dialogue, friend explaining the art of how to get the right person in your life: “Har ladki ek bus ki tarah hoti hai. Chadh jaao, utar jaao, chadh jaao, uttar jaao. Ek toh aisa bus hai jo ghar le jaayega, ussko miss mat karo.” (“Girls are like buses. Get on, get off, get on, get off. Just make sure you don’t miss that one bus that gets you home.”) I wanted to throw up. And this gets a U certificate?

I think it's safe to assume that both scenes Onir mentions above were played for laughs, and that they probably did draw unthinking chuckles from a large number of the people who watched them. But even if it was a “keep-your-brains-at-home” film, such dialogue has a way of creeping, meme-like, into the reptile brains of some of those viewers and informing - or confirming - their worldviews. Perhaps we should expect nothing less in a country where senior members of a Censor Board (apparently educated men and women among them) dole U-certificates to such scenes even as they excise a mere hint of consensual gay sex on the grounds that “Oh my God, the look between those two men will make viewers uncomfortable.”

Cinema session at the Apeejay Kolkata lit-fest

Having just been rude about literature festivals in a column, I attempt to make amends with this early shout-out for the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (January 9-13). The website is here - it hasn't been updated yet but the schedule of events will be up in a couple of days. I’m moderating a session titled "Transgressions: Essaying the New in Indian Film" on the morning of January 10 (Shyam Benegal and others will be on the panel), so if you’re interested and in/around Kolkata at the time, do drop in.

(Here is a PDF of the festival's press release, with more information.)

Exactly six months today...

...since Foxie went. Hard to believe. Life has been a very strange, dense haze since then, and about the only thing that has kept me sane (to whatever extent it has) is the writing and the long walks. Everything else has been a blur.

I have been defensive about writing too much about this in a public space (most of the thousands of words I have written about Fox in the past few months have been for myself) or even speaking about it with “friends”. But I do feel the need to put this down for my little girl without letting self-consciousness/awkwardness get in the way: no power on earth will convince me that what I have been feeling every day in the last few months is qualitatively different from what the parents of a human child would feel in the same situation. This has been a life-altering time in ways that I’m not close to being able to fully process or understand yet.

There, I said it (and if it sounds like grief porn, so be it). Do I feel better? Yes, and it may even last for a few minutes.

Quiet surfaces, fissured lives in Annie Zaidi's Love Stories #1 to 14

[A version of this review appeared in the Sunday Guardian]

So warm and attentive is the writing in Annie Zaidi’s new short-story collection that it comes as a little shock when you think about what some of her characters are really going through. This book’s tone is consistently hushed, reflective, shorn of hysteria – even in a description of two people arguing, with a lifetime of companionship on the line – but beneath its still surfaces lies much emotional turbulence.

You sense this when you learn that a middle-aged woman has been taking the 8.22 train to her office even though it means a difficult commute, because she has become deeply attached to the voice of the announcer for that train (she has never seen him, but constantly imagines and re-imagines what he must look like). Or reading about the chill felt by a man alone on a beach (“the very sand seemed to turn cold at his approach”) as he watches couples walking around, a cluster of shells looking to him like “abandoned homes, tombstones without memory”. Or when a young girl ponders the meaning of the term “love child” and likens her father, returned after a long absence, to a wedding guest who isn’t particularly close to either bride or groom. (“They feel no anxiety, no envy, no real curiosity. They just sit by themselves, smile abstractly, eat and are content to have been invited.”) The tumult even cuts through the mildly comical tone of a story titled “The One that Came Limping Back”, in which a woman, after breaking off her engagement, travels in a haze from town to town while her befuddled mother pores over an atlas.

These 14 stories are about people in various stages of longing – whether framed by an actual, present relationship, or a remembered or illusory one, or one that never quite tips over into a conventional romance – and they deliver kaleidoscopic views of love and its effects. Thus, “The One that Badly Wanted” has a girl being fixated on a boy she never summons the courage to talk to, and later attempting to remake a boyfriend in the image of a dead man; the story’s final sentence is a reminder that what sometimes gets called love can be a selfish, or at least a self-replenishing, emotion. A subtler feeling stirs in “The One from Radheshyam (B) Cooperative Housing Society” when a middle-aged painter is moved by the solicitousness of an old man who she initially feared was stalking her (later, falling into a hesitant, self-conscious friendship, “they spoke staccato, like engines in very old cars”). And one of my favourite stories – the compact, skilfully constructed “The One that Climbed out of a Bucket” – has a woman experiencing a rush of memories at a most unexpected time. As she watches a gecko trapped in a bucket during her bath, one thought segues into another: she goes from reflecting on the absurdity of a typical Hindi-film scene, to thinking about cleaning the spots where the lizard has been, to recalling her own illicit presence in an ex-boyfriend’s life and house.

Elsewhere, there is the underlying knowledge that love as an ideal can be more powerful and seductive than the real thing. A man whose wife was once a narcotics addict frets that since he never knew the things she had struggled against, perhaps he didn’t really know her. A woman wonders what might happen if her husband showed up one night and “his smile wasn’t real”, a married couple finds that their eyes “no longer dance around each other”, a conversation between former lovers seems at first calm and measured, but tension builds as we realise that the two people are not carrying the same weight of emotional baggage; that one of them is more damaged than the other.

Most of these narratives are in the subjective third person, with perspectives sometimes shifting within a story, and none of the characters are named. The recurrent use of “she” and “he” might have become precious, but it works because of the universality of the feelings involved. In any case, what really matters is what is going on in these people’s inner spaces, how they are dealing with distress or elation or hopefulness; conferring superficial identities on them seems almost unnecessary. (Or even counter-productive: in “The One that was Fulfilled”, the arguments between a husband and wife run together in a single long, stream-of-consciousness paragraph, with no quote-marks or breaks to separate who is saying what, so that the effect is unnervingly like that of a single personality in conflict with itself.)

The one anomaly, I thought, was the last story, “The One that Stepped off a Broken-down Bus”, which can be viewed as a sort of summarising coda for the book. Here, two sensitive young people meet on a bus, tease each other for a bit and then discuss the complexities of love: what being connected to another life really means, what it means at different ages, practicality versus spontaneity, and so on. The story is readable enough on its own terms, but for me its weight of expository talk went against the subtler mood established by the earlier stories. That mood hinges on things being revealed through delicate observations of human behaviour in specific situations, so that – for example – a husband perplexed by his wife’s aloofness might be described thus: “He was a steady sort. He could outlast his woman’s moods, he told himself. There was the question of zero sex. But he was a patient man. He would not look at another woman. Well, perhaps he would look. But he was careful not to be caught looking. Sex, anyway, was just sex. True, it wasn’t healthy to go without for too long. But what man cheated on his wife on health grounds? He was stern with himself.”

Apart from the psychological acuity of such passages and their sense of a character’s interiority, they also let us see how, given time and a worsening state of affairs, a well-meaning person might cross a line. Consistently clear-sighted about love and its attendant frailties and pitfalls, these stories suggest many possible futures awaiting these people – so that even one that closes with “I love you, I always did, I always will” (the nearest thing the book has to a cheesy romantic declaration, spoken, ironically, by a woman who dislikes cheese) doesn’t invite the reader to take a fairy-tale ending for granted; it carries a sense that the relationship constantly needs to be worked on, that more ruptures may lie ahead. The marvel of this book is that this clear-sightedness – which could so easily have become bleak or cynical – goes hand in hand with genuine tenderness and empathy.

Moth grass film living: on watching Stan Brakhage's cinema bizarro

“Alternate cinema” or “experimental cinema” are conditional terms, one man’s “alternate” often being another man’s “practically mainstream”. (Some feedback I got for this story said that the people profiled weren't non-mainstream enough.) But there are some filmmakers whose position on the scale is beyond argument, and one of them is the American Stan Brakhage, whose work I have recently been watching with a mix of trepidation, fascination and (on occasion) despair.

Brakhage, who made well over 300 films (most of them under 10 minutes long), is routinely described as an avant-garde, non-narrative director, but that doesn’t begin to convey some of the things he did – how he set out to overturn conventional ideas about how a film should be watched, and even what a film is. To take just one example, his three-minute-long “Mothlight” was not made by recording things with a camera; it was created by manually sticking grass, stems, petals and dozens of moth wings (from insects that had burnt to death by flying towards candles) between two strips of clear film and then running the thing through an optical printer. That may seem a random, self-indulgent thing to do (and indeed, “self-indulgent” is a lazily accurate way of describing much of Brakhage’s work), but he put into the process all the care and thought of a painter adorning an immensely long canvas – he wanted a very specific effect on the screen when the film would be projected at 24 frames per second.

I settled down to watch “Mothlight” (and a few other Brakhage films, including the similarly constructed “The Garden of Earthly Delights”) with only very basic background information, but I did read Fred Camper’s notes on how to ideally watch a Brakhage film. “Try to approximate the conditions of a cinema as much as possible,” Camper writes, “One should sit fairly close to, and perhaps at eye level with or even lower than, the screen. The projected film image has, in its clarity and colours and light, a kind of iconic power that is key to Brakhage’s work, and it’s important to try to see whatever monitor one is viewing these films on in a similar way.” He points out that Brakhage made most of his films silent because “visual rhythms are crucial to his work” – and so, it’s important, while viewing them, not to be interrupted by talk, the phone ringing, and other distracting sounds nearby.

Feeling very much like a student going through pre-examination rituals, I darkened my room, sat on the ground at a distance of around three feet from my 36-inch plasma screen and reached for my notebook – before realising how idiotic it is to try and scribble notes while watching a three-minute movie made up of hundreds of subliminal images, none of which is on screen for more than a fraction of a second. (You have to see the whole thing through, then try – with hindsight – to make sense of the experience in words. Perhaps see it a second and third time. And resist the impulse to keep pausing frames.)

Watching, it became obvious why this eerie, hypnotic film would lose much of its effect if seen on (say) a computer screen with many visual and aural distractions around. Trying to describe the experience is daunting. The first images are extreme close-ups of translucent brown objects: if you know the back-story, you can tell that these are moth wings, but even with no prior information it is soon possible to guess that the many dark shapes flickering on and off the screen represent insect forms and motifs. Shades of brown give way to splotches of green - for the odd second or two you can see reasonably vivid images of stems and grass, their green almost filling the screen. The rhythms of the images change constantly: at times they rush by (appearing to race at the camera, like moths hurtling towards a light) so fast you feel breathless and disoriented; at other times you can make out identifiable patterns (mainly leaves) that merge into each other, and this can be reassuring.

What is the purpose of all this? Some viewers might say it is a form of visual gibberish. After a first viewing I felt that way too, but watching the film a further three or four times – having become more accustomed to its weirdness of form – I found it strangely moving. Unfolding on the screen is an impression of relentless organic activity (and it is identifiably organic, even though there isn’t a single held shot of a whole insect or plant). “Mothlight” may be constructed entirely of dead matter coldly pressed between film strips, but the projection and the speed gives these elements a dazzling, otherworldly life, and the extreme close-ups can even create the illusion that the veins in the insects' wings are pulsing with blood. Besides, if the human mind is incapable of making precise, ordered sense of what is happening on the screen, well, that’s only appropriate: how many of us know what a moth’s life or a leaf's life is like?

(Yes, that probably sounds like a cop-out - in the sense that one can probably make a similar observation about ANY random jumble of images - but I'm being honest about my impressions and how they changed over a few viewings. And I have no problem admitting that I found at least a couple of Brakhage's other films utterly incomprehensible or boring or both.)

Another of Brakhage’s best-known works, “Window Water Baby Moving” – an 11-minute filming of the birth of his first child – is more explicitly about the creation and emergence of life; it’s a lush, lyrical film, and more narrative-driven. (The plot being: “A baby is born.”) But I thought “Mothlight” was equally poignant in its own way. When the dead moths and the dead flora dance on the screen for those few minutes, it is a testament to the regenerating power of film (very old movies are, after all, made up of long-dead people brought achingly alive in front of our eyes). I was also  reminded of those beautiful six or seven seconds in Chris Marker’s short film La jetée (made almost entirely of still images) when we see movement for the only time: a woman waking and looking straight at the camera, “coming alive” for a few precious moments.

[Will be watching a few more Brakhage films soon - but not TOO soon. First, Ek tha Tiger and Khiladi 786]

Notes on Suniti Namjoshi and The Fabulous Feminist

In her short Introduction to a section of the just-published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, Namjoshi writes:

It’s true the fable is a didactic form, but I don’t sit down and say, “I am now going to write a fable making this point or pointing to that moral.” More often than not – for me anyway – a fable starts with an image. The creature looking out is so eloquent that the fable begins to write itself. And once the creature starts to speak, the fable develops its own logic. The conventions of the traditional storytelling form and its powerful rhythm generate a momentum...

For a good example of what she means, consider her little story “Lost Species”, which was inspired by a Henri Rousseau painting of two unidentifiable beasts peering out of a jungle. They must be poets, Namjoshi thought when she saw the painting, and went on to write her piece about a naturalist coming across a tribe of exotic creatures (“they looked a bit like rabbits and a bit like piglets, but they might have been apes or possibly hyenas”) and wondering what they were good for. “Is your flesh good to eat?” he asks them, and “Is your fur warm?” and other such questions. Eventually they tell him that they are poets and do nothing useful, so he returns disappointed.

Not having read Namjoshi before, this collection has been a good introduction to her work, and I’ve particularly being enjoying the extracts from her 1981 book Feminist Fables and from Saint Suniti and the Dragon. These fables (most of them under a page long) are sharp inversions or re-workings of folktales and myths, done to emphasise the workings of social dominance and to sometimes facilitate small victories for underdogs. Inevitably, then, much of their content is didactic, but it is also very entertaining – Namjoshi compresses a lot of irony or sarcasm into a few pithy lines. In one fable a Brahmin who wanted a son is given a daughter instead. “Though only a woman, she was a Brahmin, so she learned very fast, and then they both sat down and meditated hard.” (Of course, the father’s purpose in meditating is to ask again for a son, and Vishnu grants him this wish but not quite in the way he had expected.) In another story a woman who is all Heart spends her life serving others wholeheartedly but when she goes to the government to ask for a pension she doesn’t get it. (“The problem was that she had no head and couldn’t ask.”) In a Beauty and the Beast retelling, the lovelorn Beast is not a nobleman but a lesbian; since the books she reads make it clear that men love women and women love men, she decides that she can’t be human. Questions of what is socially permissible are discussed elsewhere too. “A plant with feet is not natural,” says the mother of a plant (or a human girl?) that has had the temerity to pull out its roots and prance about, instead of remaining a docile little shrub.

Namjoshi’s original manuscript title for Feminist Fables was “The Monkey and the Crocodiles”, and I can see why; the story by that name is one of her most representative works. In it, a monkey who has grown up with two crocodile friends near a riverbank decides she wants to explore the world, or at least to follow the river to its source. The crocs try to warn her of malignant beasts that are “long and narrow with scaly hides and powerful jaws”, but the monkey goes anyway and returns years later, having lost her tail, six teeth and an eye. “Did you encounter the beasts?” her friends ask, “What did they look like?”

“They looked like you,” she answered slowly. “When you warned me long ago, did you know that?”

“Yes,” said her friends, and avoided her eye.

The story can be seen as a straightforward allegory for parents warning a daughter of a world populated by other humans who could turn out to be predators. (When the crocodiles describe the “dangerous beasts”, the monkey is bemused – understandably, for the only creatures she knows who look like that are her friends; to her there is nothing intrinsically threatening about the description.) But as Namjoshi has pointed out herself, most of her fables can be read not just as being about gender discrimination but in terms of any power imbalance. “It’s not possible to grow up in India without seeing the different kinds of disparities in power all around unless, of course, we choose to blind ourselves deliberately... But to vie with one another about which kind of oppression is the most oppressive is, in my opinion, a bad mistake.”

Incidentally the one-eyed monkey, having survived the world, reappears in some of Namjoshi’s subsequent writings, such as “The One-Eyed Monkey Goes into Print”, a droll account of her own experience of getting published. The monkey is variously told by publishers that her book needs more human interest, that it is lacking in clarity ("the vision is monocular") and could she help pay for the printing?

In the end the book achieved a moderate success under the title The Amorous Adventures of a One-Eyed Minx. “Is it autobiographical?” the reviewers wondered. “No,” declared the monkey quite truthfully, “I do not recognise myself in it.” But her publishers beamed. They patted her back. “Art transforms,” they murmured kindly.

Now doesn't that sound like a fable about the encouragement of bland homogeneity in a process that should open windows to new worlds?

(More on The Fabulous Feminist soon. Meanwhile do look out for the book, especially since much of Namjoshi’s earlier work appears to be out of print these days)

On Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down (and a cinematic “what if”)

Now up on that fine website The Big Indian Picture, a piece I wrote about the 1973 film 27 Down, the only feature directed by the talented Awtar Krishna Kaul, who died tragically just before the film was released.

A favourite parlour game for the nerdish movie buff is the contemplation of great cinematic years. Internationally, obvious frontrunners include 1939 – when a breathtaking number of high-quality films competed for hall space before the disruptive theatre of WWII took over – and 1959-60, when at least half a dozen countries seemed to have New Waves in progress and such varied directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Kon Ichikawa, Otto Preminger and Georges Franju made magnificent films. But looking at Hindi cinema through the lens of hindsight, it seems to me that something special was in the air in 1973...

[Read the full piece here]