An essay on Indian comics

Away for a few days, but here’s a link before I go: an essay I did for Caravan magazine on the indigenous comics scene, with Comic Con 2 as a peg. I like the way they have alternated the piece with four pages of illustrations by the very talented Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, who has worked on The Hyderabad Graphic Novel, The Rabhas Incident and Widhwa Ma Andhi Behen, among other projects (and whom I met at Comic Con).

Long though the piece is, it isn’t meant to be comprehensive – more like an experiential account by an outsider who knows very little about this world and is trying to understand how it works and the many issues facing it. There is so much happening in the field of Indian comics (though much of it hasn’t made it to mainstream publishing yet) that one feels quite overwhelmed – very exciting times ahead, I’m sure. There are many artists, writers and publishers whom I haven’t been able to cover here, but I hope to remedy that in the future.


Here's the link again. (Single-page version here. Next week I might put up a version of the full piece on the blog, with images from some of the comics mentioned in it. Many of them are easy to find online.)

[A few earlier posts on Indian comics and graphic novels: Kashmir Pending, Amruta Patil’s Kari, Ambedkar’s life in Gond art, Gautam Bhatia’s Lies, A Gardener in the Wasteland. Also this column I did two weeks ago]

Ending a column (and a Sunday Guardian plug)

As many of you know, I’ve been doing a weekly books column for the Sunday Guardian for over two years now – ever since the paper’s launch in January 2010. It’s been very fulfilling; the column began at a time when I had been writing much more about cinema (including the two books) and it gave me a pretext to stay in touch with the literary world. So it’s with some sadness that I’ve decided to end it, mainly because I need to make small alterations to my weekly routine. Too much column-writing can become a grind: it eats at the time and energy I have for one-off projects (reportage, essays, reviews etc), creating a situation where I find myself saying no to assignments far more often than I say yes.

This definitely isn’t the end of my association with the SG though – it’s a dynamic young publication run by one of the most generous editors I’ve known, Prayaag Akbar, and I’ll continue to do occasional pieces for them. (Coming up in the April 1 issue: a piece about a little-known Hrishikesh Mukherjee film starring Rajesh Khanna as a zombie.) Though initially slow to get its website started, the paper now has a neat and efficient online version - on this page you’ll find a part-archive of my columns and other pieces. (I have put up longer versions of many of these on the blog over the months, but it’s nice to have them accessible like this on a single link.) The side-bar also has links to other terrific SG columns, including Left of Cool (written alternately by Aishwarya Subramanian and Aadisht Khanna), Culture Mulcher (Deepanjana Pal), Techno Babel (Krish Ashok), Perfect on Paper (Isha Singh Sawhney) and Video Drome (Abhimanyu Das). Plenty of good stuff there – if you don’t get the print edition of the paper, do subscribe to the website feed.

Literary heroes, fathers and ghosts: Pico Iyer on Graham Greene

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

We run and run from who we are – this was Greene’s theme from the beginning – only to discover that this is precisely what we can never put behind us.

The title of Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head seems straightforward if you know beforehand that this book is about Iyer’s longtime obsession with the English writer Graham Greene. Almost from the first page, we learn that Iyer feels constantly haunted by the author – not just because of the themes of self-discovery and foreignness in Greene's work but also the little coincidences that seem to link their lives together: watching a fire burn his house down, just as Greene had done decades earlier; discovering that Greene’s son had gone to the same elementary school as he, Iyer, did. “I began to feel I was just a compound ghost that someone else had dreamed up,” he writes.

But continue reading and it becomes clear that the man Iyer is searching for – the man within his head – isn’t just Greene. This book, written by one of the major travel writers of our time, is in many ways a voyage of self-discovery.

At one point Iyer quotes from Edward Thomas’s poem “The Other”, about a man following someone like himself. The lines go: “I pursued / To prove the likeness, and, if true / To watch until myself I knew.” This seems an obvious reference to Iyer as a Greene-stalker, but there’s a deeper layer: the poem was a favourite of Greene’s himself, and in the epilogue to his ambiguous memoir Ways of Escape he described a mysterious doppelganger – someone he never met – who passed himself off to people as “Graham Greene the writer”.

If all this sounds a little complicated, it is. Real life and fiction continually inform each other in Iyer’s book, and the narrative contains many sets of doubles. (Early on, we learn that Greene’s maternal uncle was Robert Louis Stevenson, who created Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) One remarkable passage is an account of an “Englishman always on the move”, who is referred to from one sentence to the next only as “he”. (“His travels seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery ... Hollywood continues to make films out of even his lesser works, and suspicion attaches to him because of all the work he did for British Inelligence; he wrote spy novels as well as exotic entertainments.”) The natural assumption is that it is Greene being discussed; only after two pages does one realise that the passage is about Somerset Maugham, whose life was uncannily similar to Greene’s in many ways.

But this isn’t just a playful connecting of dots. Iyer uses the similarity to comment on Greene’s own stated disavowal of Maugham’s influence, “the way some of us stress how different – how very different – we are from our fathers, the ones we’ve spent our lifetimes defining ourselves in opposition to.” The relationship between fathers and sons (real and notional, biological and literary) soon emerges as another major theme, with Iyer’s reflections on his “adopted father” (Greene) moving alongside his attempts to understand his own real father.

Real parents have lives to attend to, lives beyond our understanding, and they commit, most of all, the sin of being real; they’re human and distractible and fallible ... But the parents we construct in our minds – the ones we enlist for our purposes – are more like the people we want to be ... Someone says you look like your father and you wince, or recoil; the great project of self-creation has clearly failed. Someone says you sound like that eminent novelist, and you’re flattered. You’ve followed intuition, or yourself.

Mesmerising in parts but also, by its very nature, uneven, self-indulgent and meandering, The Man Within My Head is many books in one. It is a tribute to (even a part-biography of) an enigmatic writer. It is an affectionate work of literary criticism, full of observations like this: “What makes one weep and what makes one break out laughing are identical twins in Greene’s work, and it sometimes seems almost a freak of fate, pure randomness, whether a character picks one or the other.” It is a travelogue – as all Iyer’s earlier books have, to some degree or other, been – as well as a contemplation of the relationship between readers and their cherished writers, and between writers and the world. [“The man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they’ve met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.”]

But it is also, alongside all these, a sort of autobiography written by a man who can only approach the subject of himself tangentially. “I’d never had much time for memoir,” Iyer writes in a telling passage, “It was too easy to make yourself the centre – even the hero – of your story and to use recollection to forgive yourself for everything.” By making someone else the ostensible hero of his story, he has written one of the most unusual memoirs you’ll read.

Age-fudging, revisited

My dad is older than he claims, reveals Sonam Kapoor in today's HT City. I liked this excerpt from the story:

So, what is his real age? "I am not going to tell that. He is 1956 born."

How vividly I remember a time when it was possible to (gasp!) compute a person's age if you knew their birth-year. How much we've lost as a species. But that isn't what I'm leading up to. My point is, I feel vindicated. This post was clearly years ahead of its time.

Murder by criticism

Okay, this is completely random and inconsequential, but it’s been interfering with my sleep for over a week now – so I thought I’d put it up here and get it over with.

Exhibit 1: Bob Biswas, the cuddly hitman from Kahaani

Exhibit 2: the young Roger Ebert

Goddess, prisoner – on Satyajit Ray’s Devi

In interviews about Kahaani, director Sujoy Ghosh has spoken with much affection about his love for Satyajit Ray’s cinema, and about the little ways in which he was influenced by Aranyer Dinratri and other Ray films. Coincidentally I saw Kahaani just a few days after watching Ray’s 1960 film Devi, with the barely 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore as a young bride who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Mother Goddess. There is a strikingly similar shot in the two films, a close-up of the immersion of the goddess’s statue, her head sinking into the water. In Kahaani it’s the very last shot, one that parallels the heroine Vidya disappearing from our sight, her work completed; the film’s climax has already made a statement about feminine power by linking Vidya (who, for much of the story, was seen as vulnerable and manipulated) with Shakti, the vanquisher of evil.

There is similar deification in Devi – in fact, the plot centres on it – but the repercussions here are very different; a young woman (girl, really) named Dayamoyee is suffocated by an image she is unable – and eventually unwilling – to break out of, resulting in tragedy for her family.

This film was made just a year or so after Ray’s Apur Sansar, which ended the Apu Trilogy, and I felt an echo of Apur Sansar in the first glimpse of Dayamoyee and her husband Umaprasad: Soumitro Chatterjee (who played the adult Apu) and Sharmila Tagore (who was Apu’s child-bride) are reunited in this scene, and their nephew is perched on Umaprasad’s shoulder, much as little Kajal sat on Apu’s shoulder at the end of Apur Sansar. It’s almost as if the family that had been left incomplete in the earlier film is here made whole.

That picture is deceptive though, and the happiness short-lived. While Umaprasad is away in the city, his pious father (played by the wonderful Chhabi Biswas who was so good as the zamindar in Jalsaghar), already deeply fond of and dependent on his daughter-in-law, has a dream that she is Kali incarnate. In no time at all Dayamoyee goes from being a girl playing with her little nephew to a distant figure closeted off from the rest of the house, an object of veneration to be brought out for public display only when devotees come asking for blessings and miracles.

Devi’s simple but mesmerising opening-credits sequence begins with the titles over a shot of a blank, unadorned, pale-white statue. As the sequence proceeds and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s music becomes lusher, faster, more devotional – its tempo suggesting the frenzy of worship – this tabula rasa of a face will be transformed into a familiar goddess idol through the accoutrements of makeup, jewellery and hair. This transformation pre-echoes Dayamoyee’s progression from being a relatively anonymous member of her household to something of a tourist attraction.

What follows is a depiction of prayer and rituals that I thought disturbing on more than one count (as some readers of this blog will know, I find prayers and rituals disturbing at the best of times). Most of the worshippers we see are men, and throughout this film one senses the dominance of the male gaze, a gaze that determines how a woman is to be categorised – goddess or demoness, mother, wife or servant. (“I don’t appreciate these modern young people, do you?” the father-in-law tells Dayamoyee early in the film. It’s a lighthearted remark, but even before he has his dream, one feels that the old man has fixated on this 17-year-old child as a mother figure.) The story is a constant reminder of how women in conservative societies can simultaneously be the repositories of a house’s honour and prisoners within it; reverence and subjugation run hand in hand.

(Incidentally this aspect of Devi reminded me of another favourite film, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, in which a young woman in 17th century Denmark is accused of being a witch and eventually comes to believe it herself. In both stories, the control exercised by religious authority becomes indistinguishable from the control exercised by elderly men in patriarchal societies.)

Devi isn't a consistently engaging work - my attention drifted during a couple of the pedantic scenes involving Soumitro, who has to play one of the most thankless of all roles, the Voice of Reason. Some of the speechifying in the second half is superfluous: so much is conveyed more effectively through the simple unfolding of the narrative, and through the delicately shifting expressions on Sharmila Tagore’s face. The adolescent Sharmila in this film is miles removed from the confident movie star who would, later in the decade, play such varied parts as the condescending magazine editor in Ray’s Nayak, the shy flower-seller in Kashmir ki Kali and the modish rich girl in An Evening in Paris. There is an artlessness in her performance here that could arguably have been achieved only at this point in her career, and only with such a director – and it works especially well for the part of a childlike girl who is defined by what other people think of her.

Thanks to the brilliant Criterion Collection print of Jalsaghar, I now find it irksome to watch Ray’s films on Indian DVDs, but even in a mediocre print one can appreciate the many delicate touches in Subrata Mitra’s cinematography. Particular noteworthy are some of the dimly lit indoor compositions, with the many shots of beds covered with mosquito nets. This creates an otherworldly, shroud-like effect, almost a visual representation of the idea of a girl wrapped in a cocoon. In some scenes, Dayamoyee’s bedroom resembles a pupa from which a grotesque, mutant butterfly will emerge.

But the single image that stays with me is a much more simply staged shot. It’s the image of Dayamoyee sobbing quietly, her face turned towards the wall, traumatised by the behaviour of her father-in-law who has just done something unthinkable in the context of the norms of their society – he has placed his head on her feet. The shot recalls the words sung by an old beggar elsewhere in the film: “I’ll never call you Mother again / You gave me too much sorrow /I called You but You turned away.” Here, sorrow will be the lot of both the worshipper and the worshipped.

On Kahaani and the dhokebaaz flashback

I’ve written a few times about the trickiness of book-to-film adaptations, including problems that arise from basic differences in the mediums – the written word vs the visual representation. One example is Ira Levin’s superb thriller A Kiss Before Dying (see this post) where the method of the suspense hinges on the fact that Levin’s medium does not require him to show us his murderer’s face (whereas a conventional narrative film doesn’t have this luxury). Another is Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani, which overturns all the reader’s assumptions by making a key revelation about its narrator-protagonist on the very last page (it’s hard to see how this book could be faithfully filmed).

Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani isn’t an adaptation of a book, but watching the film it struck me that one of its major plot-holes derives from a limitation of visual suspense – and that the effect would have been very different if presented in the form of a written story.

(Spoiler Alert – avoid reading on if you haven’t seen the film and are planning to go for it)

In general, I thought Kahaani was a gripping, skilfully constructed movie with many strong points – good pacing, attention to detail, an eye for character. It makes excellent use of Kolkata as a setting (one that has clearly been underutilised by Hindi cinema) and contains good performances, not just by Vidya Balan (whose role is trickier than it might at first appear) but also by Parambrata Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who play two very different sorts of men who become involved with the central character’s quest. The relationship between Balan’s character Vidya Bagchi and her “saarthi”, the bashful policeman Rana (played by Chatterjee), includes some very charming, not-quite-romantic-but-who-knows interplay. And no one who sees the film will ever forget Bob Biswas, a pudgy, unfit hitman who is a tangle of contradictions: a life-insurance agent moonlighting as a killer; a sweet-looking Bengali babu who sometimes resembles a creepy bogeyman from a Hollywood slasher series (looked at up close, his face appears almost to be crumbling; when he isn’t busy making house visits, one imagines he lives alone with his long-dead, stuffed mother in some forgotten cranny of this old city).

There is little to fault in the creation of mood, but as the narrative builds towards an increasingly complicated climax with revelations and counter-revelations, plot-holes emerge – the sorts of things a compliant viewer is presumably expected to gloss over (or perhaps not notice in all the confusion). Midway through, there is an instance of visual cheating in the railway-platform scene that heralds the Intermission (anyone who watched the trailers will have seen it beforehand) – not only is this scene misleading, it’s also inconsistent with Kahaani’s overall tone. (As the wife pointed out, it belongs more in a Dabangg action sequence.) But the biggest glitch - in a movie that makes recurring use of the phrase “system error” - involves dishonest flashbacks.

When Vidya arrives in Kolkata from London in search of her husband Arnab, she goes to the police station and passes around a photo of the two of them together, taken on their wedding day; as she talks and reminisces, short flashbacks show her memory of him. In one, we see the photo being clicked; a later one shows her persuading him to go to Kolkata for his assignment. The flashbacks are presented in such a way – they are bookended by close-ups of Vidya looking contemplative and misty-eyed – that it’s reasonable to see them as genuine recollections. (If these scenes had been framed differently, it may have been possible to think these weren’t her memories but the mental images of the people who are hearing her story.)

Late in the film, we discover that though the broad outline of Vidya’s story was true (at some point in the past, she was married and pregnant, and her husband did leave London for Kolkata, never to return), the photograph she has been passing around is a doctored one – the man in it (let’s call him M) isn’t her husband but another man whom she is now on the trail of (and whom she doesn’t exactly harbour positive feelings for). This disclosure raises an obvious question: when we are shown Vidya’s memories, why is M playing the role of her husband in them? And the obvious answer is: to blindside the viewer at the cost of the film’s internal credibility.

More than 60 years ago Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright got some flak for a flashback scene that turned out to be a complete lie. Defenders of the film argued that the device was a legitimate one in the given context – being a visual representation of a murderer’s version of events – but the scene continued to make some viewers uncomfortable even decades later when narrative experimentation in cinema had become more common; it felt like a forced way of creating a barrier between the viewer and the story.

The lying flashbacks in Kahaani are even more problematic because they aren’t just a visualisation of a lie being told by one person to another – they are expressions of a character’s interiority. The only way they can be justified is by assuming that Vidya Bagchi is delusional (or that she has so thoroughly internalised her made-up story that she can no longer distinguish it from her reality) – but nothing else in the film supports this reading.

One can argue that, given the premise, there wasn't much else that could have been done. Much of the tension in Kahaani comes from the viewer’s ambivalence about Vidya; as seasoned viewers of suspense films, we are constantly aware that her version of events might only be a kahaani, a made-up story. (In discussions before the film released, I heard all sorts of theories, including the one that she is really a terrorist carrying around bombs for a huge attack during Durga Puja week.) But much of the film's emotional effectiveness comes from the way in which it makes us empathise with the character. As the narrative develops, as we get to know her better and appreciate her resourcefulness, persistence and the gentleness of her relationship with Rana (and with Bishnu, the kid who provides “running hot water”), we start rooting for her.

Not showing those flashbacks would have been a barrier to this empathy – it would have had the effect of making her a remote figure, giving us little sense of her inner world and her past. And showing them in such a way that we don’t get to see the husband’s face would have given the game away immediately.

For anyone who has seen the film, I’d be interested in knowing what you think about these scenes. Did you see them as deal-breakers or as minor flaws that you were happy not to dwell on? (I didn’t think they were deal-breakers myself, but they made Kahaani a less-than-convincing thriller for me – I thought its strengths lay elsewhere.) Also: was there any way these scenes could have been done differently without radically affecting the viewer’s connect with Vidya? Inputs welcome.