On Chaso's short-story collection Dolls' Wedding

[From my Sunday Guardian column]

Most literary critics I know would agree that a large number of mediocre books get published month after month, and that an equal number of promising writers don’t get the editorial attention they deserve. These are natural offshoots of the democratisation and expansion of publishing. Hundreds of mid-list titles come out each year: many of these don’t get noticed or reviewed; others do well on the strength of an author’s marketing savvy rather than through any initiative taken by the publishers. A cynical view of things is that publishers and editors are flailing in the dark, trying all sorts of things to find that indefinable “formula” that turns a book into a bestseller. In the resulting chaos, quality suffers.

Yet there are silver linings too, and among the brightest of them is the Penguin Modern Classics series, which includes discerning translations of important Indian writers from around the country: Yashpal, Bhisham Sahni, Fakir Mohan Senapati and Kamleshwar among them. Most of these are not mass-market titles expected to sell thousands of copies, but they are put together by knowledgeable people who care about the literature in question, and they constantly introduce me to provocative writers whom I might otherwise never have encountered.

Among the newest titles is Dolls’ Wedding, a collection of short fiction by the Telugu writer Chaso (Chaganti Somayajulu). As translators Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman tell it in their Introduction, Chaso was part of the dynamic cultural scene of Vizianagaram as a young man in the 1930s – he read literary journals from England, idolised T S Eliot and Ezra Pound and was influenced by Western ideas. But he was also sufficiently self-aware to realise that he had a better facility for writing in Telugu than in English. This pragmatism comes across in his stories, which are stunning in their deceptive unfussiness. Many of them have only threadbare “plots” (a straight answer to the question “What happens in this story?” would sound very banal), but they are composed of little observations that shed light on a character’s nature and social background. Mood is created by the accumulation of details, such as the casual chatter between students in the story “Why Would I Lose it, Dad?” about a young boy whose impoverished father can no longer afford to send him to school.

Much of Chaso’s work provides tangential entry points into people’s inner lives. A good example is “Got to Go to Eluru”, which seems at first to be a straightforward account of a man encountering a key figure from his past – an older woman with whom he had a sexual relationship when he was a student. Since this man is the narrator, we are privy to his melancholy and dreamy view of things. (“If I look back, my life has been a mess,” he tells us, “like a mulaga tree crawling with caterpillars. But those five months were like honeycombs on the tree.”) But as the story proceeds in its undramatic way, Chaso also allows us to imagine the circumstances of the middle-aged widow – we see that as a woman from a Brahmin family, who was married to a much older man, she didn’t have the luxury of wafting on cloudy romance; she had to be practical and safeguard her interests, even if it meant subverting societal norms. All this is only alluded to, which makes the story more effective than it would have been if everything had been laid bare for the reader’s easy consumption.

On a similar note, the title story “Dolls’ Wedding” – in which an ancient great-grandmother tells stories from her childhood – derives its power from what is not explicitly said; from how the old woman appears dimly aware of - and resigned to - the injustices of her life. And in one of the finest pieces here, “Choice”, a leper instructs his daughter to choose a blind man over a cripple for her husband, and much is revealed through the playful irreverence of the language (the old man’s lecture is described as a “Beggar’s Upanishad”; the blind man is overjoyed to find “a chick like Erri”). These are not people who spend a lot of time feeling sorry for themselves – they are too busy getting on with their lives and winning tiny battles. Chaso brings real vitality to them and to his many other characters, but he does it in unexpected and pleasing ways.

On "liberal extremism" (and soft oppositions to freedom)

I’ve had a cordial relationship with Chetan Bhagat for a long time; there are things I like about him, as a person and – yes – as a writer too. I once faced flak in literary circles for saying mildly nice things about his early work, and I still often have arguments with friends who make condescending remarks like “Why has Chetan Bhagat been invited to a literature festival?” But I’m deeply disturbed by the position he has adopted on the Salman Rushdie-Jaipur issue, especially his repeated endorsement of the bizarre idea that the whole mess was jointly caused by “extremists on both sides”.

Two exhibits. First, some samples from Chetan’s Twitter feed:

“When extremists on both sides turn a festival into an activist venue, there's a security risk.”

“In a fight between extreme fundamentalists and extreme liberals, the sufferer is the beautiful jaipur litfest, the gainer an appeasing govt.”

“Extreme fundamentalists. Extreme liberals. Extremely difficult to deal with either.”

“If you are truly religious, you believe in forgiveness. If you are truly liberal, you respect other points of view. Sadly, don't see it much.”

A response to that last Tweet: sure – if you’re truly liberal, you respect other points of view. (Since the meaning of “respect” is often hazy in this context, a clarification: it means that you believe people should have the freedom to peacefully express their views, no matter how strongly you disagree with them.) What you emphatically DO NOT respect – or condone – is the demonstration of those views through threats and violence, which curtails the similar rights of other people. And it’s the religious extremists who have been curtailing rights in the Rushdie case; the “liberal extremists” have been responding to the bullying with non-violent protests. This is an important distinction. Even if you find it convenient (for whatever reason) to think of strong-voiced liberals as extremists, do have the grace to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between these two forms of “extremism”.

Exhibit 2: this CNN-IBN video featuring Chetan, Ruchir Joshi (who was one of the four authors who read from The Satanic Verses in Jaipur) and Asaduddin Owaisi, who called for the arrest of the writers.

On view here is Chetan as the “balanced” diplomat-cum-moderate who is willing to listen to both points of view and who badly wants the two parties to find a middle ground – “because otherwise this whole controversy is kind of useless”. I will not comment on individual actions, he starts by saying. Then, “As an artist you have full freedom to write whatever you want to. However... Should you be exercising the right to hurt people?” And to Owaisi, “I request you to withdraw your case”, followed by this astonishing statement: “We are all Indians here – we will not let someone who is not Indian [meaning Rushdie] affect our unity.”

“This is a great issue to unite the country,” he says – apparently “uniting the country” means ensuring that no one says or does anything that might be perceived as offensive to any community’s God, be it Allah or Krishna or Saraswati. “We Indians are believers. Our value system is not the same as London or Paris or Amsterdam.” (Incidentally, Amsterdam was where Theo van Gogh was murdered by a religious fanatic not so long ago because he made a film – and it should be clear to any thinking person that no corner of the world is safe from the extremisms of the “value system” Chetan is so proud of – but let that pass for now.)

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In this piece, Chandrahas Choudhury lists three types of opposition to freedom of speech in India. The third of these, he says, is an “insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas”:

“... what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship [...] that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that ‘religious sentiments should always be respected’ and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred”

I have had dozens of encounters with “soft opposition” of this sort. These typically involve conversations with well-meaning family members or acquaintances who might very loosely be described as “liberals” (or at least as “cool” or open-minded people). When the subject of an artist offending religious sentiments comes up, they usually say: “Yes, but was it necessary to write that article/do that painting/make that cartoon? Couldn’t he have been more sensitive?” Or “I agree that he has the right to do or say this. But should he have done it?”

This type of conversation sometimes reaches a critical point if you reply: “Agreed - it might have been nicer/more sensitive to do things in another way. But what if the artist politely hears you out and then says he has chosen to disregard your advice – that he will go ahead and do this anyway? What will your response be then?” I've found that the mask of unequivocal “liberalism” can slip off very quickly in this situation.

It’s worrying that so many people in India seem not to understand what good art can be all about, and the conditions necessary for its meaningful survival. As Ruchir Joshi writes in this piece in The Hindu (bold-marks mine):

I have memories of writers, artists, film-makers being pushed into narrower and narrower pens by people who had no interest in literature, art or cinema other than to use these as excuses to expand their own illiterate, illiberal, poisonous power under the guise of identity politics...

And Amit Chaudhuri in The Hindustan Times:

In India, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a 'free speech' issue. Indians know how to talk about writers, but not about writing.

Little wonder that artistic liberty is among the first things to be held hostage (or made conditional, which is the same thing) when "sentiments" are deemed to have been hurt. A friend told me not to write a post about Chetan Bhagat because “he’s such a soft, easy target”. Well, maybe, but here it is anyway, because I think his stance tells us something about the level of discourse around us today. It’s a pity that one of India’s most popular writers seems unwilling to acknowledge that one of the oldest functions of art is to disturb people and encourage them to look with new eyes at everything they hold sacred. We already see too much of that apathy and ignorance in people who don't work in the creative field.

Putting the "act" in action: Black Friday, Sword of Doom

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations or (less often) comic setpieces. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where “understatement” rules the moment. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when the acting nominations are read out at the Oscars. Watch enough of them and you'll see definite patterns emerging (and that’s without taking into account the Motion Picture Academy’s fondness for certain types of roles – physically or mentally disadvantaged characters, for instance – rather than the performances in them).

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence: fight scenes or chases are usually perceived as fillers or tempo-raisers, and that's what they often are (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful film Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the movie’s highlights is the superbly choreographed and shot sequence where a group of cops pursue a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor Pranay Narayan – who plays Ghavate – in the “Making of” documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us, looking blasé and in control) to a snivelling wreck being bullied around by the police; by the end it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as the policemen and their quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly – by this point they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising both cop and criminal – a considerable achievement given that this is a story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. It’s also a significant step away from the traditional depiction of cops and robbers in Hindi cinema. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences. In her book Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me (which I reviewed here), Jessica Hines observes that in Bombay to Goa, made before he settled into the Angry Young Man image, Amitabh Bachchan seemed awkward during much of the film and then came alive in the fight sequences at the end. I’m not sure about this specific example (the fights in Bombay to Goa aren’t so much properly worked out action scenes as vignettes of various people knocking each other about in speeded-up motion), but not many people would disagree that Bachchan was extremely convincing in his really well-staged fight sequences in films like Sholay and Kaala Patthar.

One of my favourite “action performances” in this vein is by the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the climactic scene of the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons - it’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai (who would play King Lear for Kurosawa years later) is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword. His eyes are hollow and lifeless, he flails unthinkingly at the air, but then he comes alive again and seems briefly conscious of what is going on around him; and then again he retreats into his own private world, while his arm continues slashing away.

Nothing in this sequence (or in the Black Friday one) would make it to those smooth Oscar acting clips, but these performances are integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

In defence of the favourable (aka "dull") review

You may have heard about the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, a newly instituted prize for “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The official manifesto – which I read with much interest – says the aim is to improve the standards of professional criticism and to encourage greater honesty in book reviewing.

That sounds like a good cause: I approve of anything that seeks to raise the profile of reviewing and to remind us that good criticism must aspire towards being good literature in its own right. But I was puzzled by some of the phrasing in the manifesto and in news reports about it. Consider this quote from an editor of the Omnivore website, which instituted the prize: “We are celebrating reviews that are well written, that have a point, that are insightful and also are entertaining. There are too many reviews that are a bit bland.”

Implicit here is the idea that negative reviews are the ones most likely to be “well-written” and “entertaining”, and that positive reviews are dull. There is a sliver of truth in this. Almost anyone who has reviewed professionally for some time knows that writing a snarky negative review is usually more fun – and more satisfying as a writer – than doing a favourable one. The tools of language tend to aid the angry critic more than the benevolent critic: the former has a broader and more exciting range of adjectives and analogies at his disposal; there are more opportunities to write inventive, showy prose. For similar reasons, almost anyone will find a well-written negative review more fun to read – and more impressive – than a well-written favourable review.

More problematic, though, is the widespread tendency to think of unfavourable reviews as automatically more sincere or authoritative. In his seminal essay “Towards a Theory of Film History”, written in the 1960s, Andrew Sarris noted the popular perception that the toughest reviewers were the best reviewers. “A reputation is made and measured by the percentage of movies the reviewer pans. The more movies panned, the more ‘honest’ the reviewer. Everyone knows how assiduously the movie companies seek to corrupt the press. Hence, what better proof of critical integrity than a bad notice?” Things haven’t changed much since then. A phrase commonly used in the reports I’ve read about the Hatchet Job award is “...to promote integrity”.

I admit a slight bias when it comes to this subject. My own attitude towards reviewing doesn’t involve a perception of myself as a cultural watchdog or an arbiter of taste, sternly telling people what they should or should not read. (A good reviewer with a breadth of reading experience will inevitably help some readers set standards for themselves over a period of time, but that’s another matter.) My main “responsibility”, as I see it, is to be honest about my feelings and to express them as clearly as possible. And the books that I find it most rewarding to write about are the ones that stimulated me in a largely positive way. (When I don’t care for a book, it feels like an unconscionable waste of time to do a review of it – I’ve already squandered too many precious hours reading it. In any case, if I haven’t already committed to doing a review, I might not bother to finish a book that doesn't hold my interest.)

Just to be clear, I’m not implying that there is anything inherently worthier about a positive review. Good reviews are the ones that are honest, informed and well-written, irrespective of whether they are complimentary or scathing. But I do often get the impression that favourable reviews are underappreciated (by people other than the reviewed author and his publishers, that is!). All power to the Hatchet Award – may their shortlists provide us with much entertainment in the years ahead, and also encourage professional reviewers to look deep into their hearts before getting down to their work. But equally, I hope that the publicity attached to the prize doesn’t tempt some writers to suppress the good things they see in a book, in an overzealous effort to write a hatchet review.

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

"The freedom to say unpopular and shocking things"

Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie – a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position – has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them [...] There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture.

From the statement read out by Hari Kunzru during his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival two days ago. Also read Hari’s post about the events of that day, including the short Satanic Verses readings by him and Amitava Kumar, and the subsequent intimation that they might be in serious legal trouble if they stayed on in India.

I didn’t go to Jaipur this year, but – like everyone I know who cares about freedom of speech and worries about the increasing hegemony of the easily offended (the "bleeding-heart illiberals" as Rukun Advani cleverly put it in another context recently) – I’ve been feeling very dispirited about the events of the past few days. (This report about the police fabricating a terrorism threat was particularly mindboggling, but also completely believable.)

Earlier today in Jaipur, Nilanjana helped organise a petition to unban The Satanic Verses; I’m sure an online version of the petition will be up soon, do look out for it. Meanwhile, here are some relevant links: a fine piece in The Hindu about “the slow-motion disintegration” of a secular state; a clarification by JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple; and Salil Tripathi on India's "sepulchral silence".

Update: the online petition is here. Please sign and spread the word.

How to write about films - a workshop

Advance notice about a two-day workshop I’m conducting on film criticism at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai next month. Dates: February 11 and 12. Time: 10 AM to 5 PM each day, with an hour off for lunch. Venue: the Bombay Natural History Society auditorium.

We are looking at a maximum of 25 attendees, and one thing I’m very keen about is that the participants have a serious interest in cinema and in the many issues surrounding film-related writing (even if they don’t intend to become professional critics themselves). As far as possible, we want to avoid a situation where people saunter in for a few minutes and then saunter out again as they become bored with film-theory talk or with screenings from old or “obscure” movies. And that’s one reason I’m putting up this post: because I know this blog’s readers include many movie buffs who might be interested in a workshop of this sort. This will hopefully be an interactive process, not a one-way “lecture”.

I’m still putting together notes for the workshop (and probably will continue doing this right up to the day it begins!), but here’s a quick and incomplete list of what you can expect:

- Thoughts on different types of film writing (from short-form mainstream reviews to long-form criticism, academic writing, trade writing etc), the contexts in which each exists, and the functions that each can serve.

- The qualities of an ideal film reviewer/critic.

- The important difference between story and storytelling – the “what” and the “how”; thoughts on how to read a film.

- Discussions on various aspects of screen craft, including acting, cinematography, writing, editing and music.

- The Auteur Theory and the many arguments around it: the differences between “personal” and “commercial” cinema, and the points where the two things intersect.

- How style or technique can enhance a narrative, and the approaches of different directors to the same subject matter (e.g. cinematic treatments of Shakespeare by directors ranging from Kurosawa to Polanski to Vishal Bhardwaj).

- A couple of writing exercises.

Fuelling these discussions will be short screenings from a variety of movies – both Indian films like Sholay, Charulata, Jaane bhi do Yaaro and Maqbool as well as international films made by such directors as Hawks, Godard, Welles, Ozu, Tati and Scorsese. I’ll try to pack in as many clips as possible, because there is really no better way to discuss movies and how to write about them.

Anyone who wants more details, feel free to write to me at jaiarjun@gmail.com.

Nightmare of Ecstasy, a good book about a very bad director

There’s a lovely scene in the 1994 film Ed Wood – a romanticised biography of the legendary “bad movie” director Edward Wood Jr – where Wood meets his hero Orson Welles. The sequence is fictional but it has a poetic aptness. Here is a man who made a series of eye-poppingly terrible movies (including the one facilely called the Worst Film of All Time, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and here is one of cinema’s greatest artists, the director of some of the most influential movies ever made – and yet they are kindred spirits in some ways: they share a boyish passion for the form and its possibilities, and their personal visions are constantly being messed with by other people who lack that passion.

The differences are more revealing though. Welles once mused (perhaps in an attempt to cheer himself up) that the absence of limitations was the enemy of art; that good art usually came out of constraints, not from unlimited freedoms. In Wood’s case, the many constraints (though they never produced anything resembling art) are what gave his story a romantic sheen. If he had received big-studio funding for scripts early in his career, his incompetence would quickly have been exposed and he would probably have ended up a tiny footnote in Hollywood’s long list of has-beens and never-weres. Instead, he independently made a number of barely financed, barely written D-grade movies, and some of them developed cult followings. Unwatchable as most of them are, they remain a mighty testament to what can happen when incredible zeal meets an equally incredible lack of talent. (“I am the patron saint of the mediocrities!” cries the composer Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, painfully aware that despite his lifelong love for music he has none of Mozart’s talent. But compared to Ed Wood, even Shaffer’s Salieri was a genius.)

Last week a friend gifted me the book on which Ed Wood was based – Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D Wood Jr. It’s a remarkable biography, being entirely made up of reminiscences by people who knew Wood, and with no authorial intervention or commentary (apart from a short Introduction). These reminiscences are presented in the style of a book-length conversation – with each quote preceded by the interviewee’s name – and this patchwork structure seems to mimic the disjointedness of Wood’s films, which were full of individual scenes that had seemingly little to do with one another.

Reading the very first page, you dive headlong into his life and career: you’re exposed to a flurry of opinions by various people, some of whose identities are not obvious (an index at the end explains who all the interviewees are). But the chatty tone turns out to be very appropriate for this material. Consider this deadpan, hillbilly quote from Wood’s mother: “Junior was born October 10, 1924, at 115 Franklin Street, off the main highway. Yep.” I love the scrupulous inclusion of that “Yep” at the end.

Wood spent most of his life and career off the main highway too. A man of many fetishes – cinema and angora sweaters being just two of the major ones – he thought up outlandish scenarios involving zombies, alien invaders and cross-dressers and wrote laughably trite scripts for them (in his universe they might all be found in the same living room or cemetery, looking confusedly at each other). He shot on minuscule budgets, with discarded props and stock footage; little wonder that this book contains several matter-of-fact utterances like “The octopus had to be covered so that the broken tentacle wouldn’t show.”

The stories and perspectives vary wildly (“Ed Wood was a crazy genius, way ahead of his time,” says one interviewee. “Ed had poor taste and was undisciplined. [His movies were] dingy, third-rate, fringe-type films,” says another) and this gives the book the feel of a diabolical jigsaw puzzle that resists completion. As Grey writes in his Introduction: “Conflicting versions of biographical incident are often charged with meaning and moment. Discovering the objective ‘truth’ of an individual’s life may be impossible beyond a schematizing of life events.” I think Wood himself would have smiled approvingly at these words – not least because they might easily be from the promotional material for one of his favourite movies, Welles’ Citizen Kane, the story of a futile attempt to understand a single life.

P.S. An inside-page blurb for the book – by Phantom of the Movies – reads “The literary even of the year” instead of “The literary event of the year”. It was most disappointing to discover that this was merely a typo, not a deliberate attempt at copying the earnest ineptitude of a Wood movie!

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