Indian Writing

Film researcher Praba Mahajan sent me this slim volume of tributes to Renu Saluja. It’s a lovely little book put together by friends and colleagues. But how does one “review” a set of personal memories? I’ve put together some extracts from the tributes in the collection so that they become a kind of voice-over for Saluja’s editing career. This is the first part of the post. I’ll post the next part soon.

This post is cross-posted at Naachgaana.
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Invisible: the Art of Renu Saluja is a volume of tributes brought out by GraFTII, the alumni association of the Film and Television Institute, Pune, on the occasion of a festival of Saluja’s films in June this year.

Nine feature films were chosen for the festival, including Saluja’s first major works, both pathbreaking - Ardh Satya and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, (both 1983), her first major commercial work Parinda (1989), Maya Mamsaab (1992) and Bandit Queen (1995). These nine were picked from a body of work in Saluja’s tragically brief career (she died at 48 of stomach cancer) that included over forty feature films, several documentaries, short films and television work.

Putting together a set of films for a festival is one thing; it is a harder project to get busy film people to sit down and write about their interactions with an individual. In an industry that is always busy planning its next venture, there is little time spent in taking stock and documenting. This little volume (100 pages, Rs 50) began with Praba Mahajan’s effort to bring out a monograph on the festival films. An appeal on the FTII alumni mailing list brought in more contributions. Not only was there clearly much to say about Saluja and her work – some of the film-makers who began writing about their memories of Renu Saluja were also inevitably writing about an entire, exciting period in Bombay film history. (more…)

…from Bihar, where a rape trial has been concluded in just two days in what is reportedly the shortest judicial trial of such a case in the country.

According to a report, Justice Arun Kumar Srivastava began hearing the case on July 25 and awarded the two accused in the case prison terms of seven years each on July 27.

Update: It seems that there is some concern about whether justice has indeed been done, because the news report seems to suggest that there was not sufficient investigation into the circumstances of the case. The report suggests that the judge heard the doctor, the police and the victim, but it is not clear from the report whether the accused was heard.

Such concern is always valid, and I fully believe that justice should not only be done but also be seen to be done. Yet I would say that my faith in the judicial system is greater than my faith in the way some sections of the media report such news. I have tried to find further details of this particular case, but the few reports that I have found seem to be based on the same set of inputs. News reports are often sketchy to start with; due to space constraints, they may be cut down further. On the other hand if at all due procedure, including the principle of natural justice had not been complied with, I imagine that the judgement itself would be vitiated and would not hold on appeal.

I have no problems in believing that a clear case of rape can be inquired into and a trial concluded within a reasonably short period. Speedy justice will not only act as a deterrent but also give more faith and confidence to witnesses who might come forward to testify in future. So, yes, I have enough faith in the judicial system to feel optimistic with a fast-track judgement.

Only a year ago, Swapnil got married to Swapnaja and they lived in Mumbai with his younger brother, Shreyas. ‘‘It’s sheer coincidence that they have such rhyming names. They knew each other for six years. When she came home the first time, we told her, ‘you are not coming here as a daughter-in-law but as our daughter’,’’ says Prakash.

On July 11, Swapnil was in town. Swapnaja had gone to her parents in Dahisar. Shreyas had left the day before to join his parents in Coimbatore to pursue his MBA. Prakash, a retired electronics engineer is working with Chinmaya International Residential School as a consultant while his wife (Swapnil’s mother) is a teacher there. The Okes shifted to Coimbatore a year ago to give the newly weds ‘‘some privacy’’. It was also a ‘‘career move’’ for Swapnil’s mother. ‘‘When I was working, my career was priority and she was looking after the children. Now, it’s her turn,’’ says Prakash.

Exactly a week before her death… (Hemlata) and her family had moved to the first flat in their lives: a 225-square-foot home in Jogeshwari, part of a government rehabilitation colony for those displaced by a road-widening project.

Perhaps, the prospect of a new home with a new roof— “she was very excited about living in a flat,� says her mother—got the two sisters to look to a new future and take risks. So they dropped out after Class XII and two months ago, joined the 3500-strong Home Guards corps at a salary of Rs 90 a day. That Rs 180 extra meant it was easier to pay the convent school fees for their younger brother Yogesh.

It was early May in Kashmir. It had snowed the day before we arrived, the first late-April snow in years. The tarmac was windy, and chunks of mud-fringed ice lay in the gutters around the great chinar trees. Srinagar was cold and grey; Gulmarg cold and white.

But Pahalgam was green, and blissfully sunny. Sunlight splashed colour on the cold mountains above us. As we rambled along a hilly path alongside the Lidder river, little boards informed us many times over that Chandanwari was ahead of us - and, somewhere up there, we knew, with all its mystery and icy resplendence, was Sheshnag. But for now, the crystalline air, tangy with pine, was heady enough, and we didn’t need religion. We were in Eden. We didn’t need God.

That year, tourists were coming to Pahalgam after long empty years. Pony-men looked speculatively at us as we walked up the path. They lost interest when we shrugged ruefully and said we wanted to walk; but a little Kashmiri girl befriended us. She tapped me gravely on my sleeve and offered us a kela to eat. I was touched. We had nothing to offer the girl. We took many photographs instead: such moments come rarely enough in life. I asked her age: she was eight. Her pink cheeks and bright eyes made for some pretty pictures. We slowed our pace so that her mother – who told me, in sign language with a few words scattered in between, that she had never really regained her health after her hysterectomy - could walk along with us.

As our small party walked along, the little girl walked with us, holding my hand unselfconsciously, gently touching my shirt-sleeve every now and then. I couldn’t explain to them where Mumbai was - they had never even been to Srinagar. I tried drawing a map on the ground with a stick, but it was only when my husband began to whistle “Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan” that the older woman nodded delightedly. She smiled at first, then laughed in delight, and clapped her hands; we laughed too.. When it was time for us to turn back, mother and daughter stood side by side, waving shyly, watching us as we made our way back down the road, my husband still whistling the tune that had brought us all closer for those few moments.

My husband and I had lunch at a Punjabi dhaba that afternoon, on Pahalgam’s narrow main road. The resplendently moustachioed maharaj, seated on a mud platform with the stove-pit before him, asked us many questions as we ate our hot parathas. Where were we coming from; how far away was it; was it true that Bombay was near the sea; were the parathas any good (the last question, we knew, was rhetorical).

Days after we returned to Bombay, we read about attacks in Pahalgam. People were injured; some died. The terrorists had flung grenades through the open windows of restaurants. Some tourists, they felt, brought alien and dissolute ways into the valley. I wondered whether I, with my uncovered head and loud laugh, had been one of those dissolute visitors.

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(posted in Oct 2005, when this piece won a prize in a travel writing contest)

“I was born in a dharmasala, room number one, in (the town) Beautiful, Hassana… ”

THE words caught my eye as I unwrapped the typescript of The Policeman and the Rose, Raja Rao’s first collection of short stories since The Cow of the Barricades (1947). It was also the first of Raja’s books that I had edited. “One of the disciplines that has interested me in Indian literature,” Raja told me one pleasant February morning in 1976 at Vasanta Vihar, one of those sprawling houses on the north bank of the Adyar River in Chennai that is the home of the Krishnamurti Foundation, “is its sense of sadhana — a form of spiritual growth.”

Akbar Ahmed on the Ajmer model of “Sulahkul” (universal tolerance):

Can you imagine a saint living in the middle of Rajasthan in the middle ages, surrounded by Hindus, and propagating peace and harmony through Islam? The West has to be made aware of the Ajmer model that is older and deeper.

Let not all those smug officials and social worthies, who in such cases state “let the law takes its own course�, imagine that they are being very just and even-handed in their approach, for they are actually condemning the victim to a lifetime of judicial struggle at her own financial, social, psychological, mental and physical cost. A lifetime goes by when one has to fight single-handedly against a system and societal mindset on gender-based issues, deeply ingrained in the minds of not only the Executive but also the Judiciary, who all suffer from age-old attitudes adopted by society towards women.

In a clear indication of the gender gap in treatment seeking behaviour, close to 9.7 per cent of the patients were left untreated in the case of HIV/AIDS affected women, the study found, nearly double the case of men. Also, women were more likely to get treated in health facilities run by government or non-government organisations in comparison to a greater proportion of men being treated at private nursing homes. Only 29.8 per cent of the women surveyed went to private health facilities for non-hospitalised illnesses, against 41.3 per cent in the case of men. A similar picture can be seen in the case of hospitalised illnesses.

NACO site here, and this page calling for details of incidents regarding stigma/discrimination against People Living with HIV/AIDS.

Also, NACO has supported a proposal to end the anti-homosexuality section of the IPC.

I was irritated by the insinuating, homophobic tone of this so-called “Hard Talk” in HT Tabloid, where Karan Johar is called a “victim of his own sexuality” before being quizzed on the “rumours galore about (his) manliness”.

And “You are 34 and still unmarried. Why?” Bah.

Via BitchPhD, this hilarious post at The Little Professor:

3. I’m terribly, terribly unhappy, because
- I thought life after tenure would be bliss, and it’s just the same-old, same-old
- my colleagues fail to appreciate my scintillating qualities
- there’s a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
- there isn’t a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
- there are politics! in academia!
- if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been no politics! in academia!
- if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been my kind of politics! in academia!
- academic work isn’t all about Twoo Wuv for your subject
- people are so mean to me
- students don’t appreciate all the effort I put into teaching them…

Why is it such a big deal to yield
to a woman like me
who lets others cut her off on the roads…

And meanwhile, the UN calls for a three-day truce to allow children, the elderly and the disabled to be evacuated.

Rushdie and Greer are rowing again, this time over the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

Greer had written, bizarrely, that “the community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out” - though she added, quickly enough, that they didn’t have the right to complain if the film was made on some other location presented as Brick Lane.

Here’s Rushdie’s characteristic response:

Germaine Greer’s article (G2, July 24) about the proposed filming of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane is a strange mixture of ignorance (she actually believes that this is the first novel to portray London’s Bangladeshi community, and doesn’t know that many Brick Lane Asians are in favour of the filming); pro-censorship twaddle (no, people do not have the “moral right” to prevent the making of a film simply because they have decided in advance that they will not like it); and ad-feminam sneers about Monica Ali. Her support of the attack on this film project is philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected. As I well remember, she has done this before…

To say that local residents have the right to be upset about their portrayal in the media is one thing; to say that anyone representing a “community” has the right to hinder the free speech of writers and film companies and enflame considerable tension, is quite another. There is no basis for it in philosophy or law, and it is no foundation for a healthy pluralistic society. Besides, it’s absurd to say that Monica Ali can’t tell this story because she’s not sufficiently one of them. Who hands out licences to multicultural storytellers? Not Germaine Greer, surely.

The film is an extension of that success, but for the community it is another reminder of how they are so often portrayed as a negative, narrow minded, uneducated and backward community. The fact that this is an imaginary novel does not help: the film will be seen and taken by people to reflect some elements of reality. This is where the community feels their lifestyle, their persons and their whole culture is being derided. Ms Ali has the right to freedom of expression and the film makers have the right to make a film but the community has the right to feel offended and organise protests, especially if the filming is going to be done on their doorstep….

My previous posts here and here.

The August issue of Himal is up. Much to linger over, including Sukumar Muralidharan’s essay on the ToI strategy:

..by 1994 the TOI had long since internalised the most significant rule of competition. Simply put, the advertiser was king, and the readership, no longer a burden to be borne, a distant abstraction with little immediacy to the newspaper except as a shopping entity..

The irony is that the threat to security from censorious religious groups is the threat they themselves pose. It is hard to understand why the religious groups responsible for fomenting riots against offensive works are not being prosecuted, and in their places are writers, artists and filmmakers.

It is impossible to believe that a city with real heart would allow 60 percent of its residents (that’s more than seven million people) to live in slums. If India’s most affluent city really had a soul, it would not countenance the inequalities that allow children in the shanties to grow up malnourished…

And this piece by me on some of the documentaries on the city, most recently Madhushree Datta’s “Seven Islands and a Metro”:

One image from Datta’s film comes to mind, that of small, stamp-sized photographs floating in water. Although perhaps a clunky image, it is all the more evocative after the recent train blasts in Bombay. Life seems so fragile in this city by the sea, where six million people travel in the suburban trains every day, clinging on by their fingers, occasionally falling, some dying while crossing the tracks. Inside the cars, they travel tightly packed – some become friends, singing bhajans, sharing intimate family stories, even cutting vegetables. When there is a crisis, they rush to help each other. Other days, the moment they separate, they atomise into the city, as people of different classes, genders, ethnicities, eating habits, smells and stories.

How nice, to be a tubli person:

Estonians are generally not very outspoken in offering praise or recognition of others’ achievements, but one utterly complimentary attribute can be heard from their lips almost every day: the word tubli. This adjective of wide and flexible application can express a range of positive personal qualities and behaviours - from “goodâ€?, “orderlyâ€?, “strongâ€?, “capableâ€?, “hard-workingâ€?, “persistentâ€?, and “productiveâ€?, to “setting an example or model to othersâ€?, “behaving properlyâ€?, or “having will-powerâ€?.

This small Baltic nation’s Finno-Ugric tongue has a rich folklore in which tubli features prominently. One proverb emphasises perhaps the word’s most important aspect, work: Tublidus ei tule tööta, osavus ei hooleta (Being tubli will not come without work, nor skill without care).

A forum on the case of Juan Cole. Weighing in are academic bloggers Siva Vaidyanathan, Daniel Drezner, Michael Berube,Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds, Bradford DeLong, and Erin O’Connor.

Cole’s response here:

The question is whether Web-log commentary helps or damages an academic’s career. It is a shameful question. Intellectuals should not be worrying about “careers,” the tenured among us least of all. Despite the First Amendment, which only really protects one from the government, most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. Journalists are fired all the time for taking the wrong political stance. That is why most bloggers employed in the private sector are anonymous or started out trying to be so….

I am a Middle East expert. I lived in the area for nearly 10 years, speak several of its languages, and have given my life to understanding its history and culture. Since September 11, 2001, my country has been profoundly involved with the region, both negatively and positively. Powerful economic and political forces in American society would like to monopolize the discourse on these matters for the sake of their own interests, which may not be the same as the interests of those of us in the general public. Obviously, such forces will attempt to smear and marginalize those with whom they disagree. Before the Internet, they might have had an easier time of it. Being in the middle of all this, trying to help mutual understanding, is what I trained for. Should I have been silent, published only years later in stolid academic prose in journals locked up in a handful of research libraries? And this for the sake of a “career”?…

The disparity in pay between men and women has been narrowing, but equal pay is still some time away… about 150 years, that is, according to this report by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), at the London School of Economics. It’s not only because women have babies and take time off from their careers to bring up the children (though there’s that too, and society really needs to come up with more flexible working practices as well as fairer ways of sharing home responsibilities). There’s also this:

The report on women’s salaries found that even those who worked full-time and did not take career breaks would earn 12 per cent less than their male counterparts after ten years.

Near the beginning of Vikram Chandra’s new book, someone asks Sartaj Singh, a police officer, whether he believes in God. Sacred Games, Chandra’s third book, is the answer to that question. No wonder it took over seven years to write.

Sartaj Singh is the weary, all too human Sikh police officer who first appeared in Chandra’s short story “Kama” in the collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In that story, Sartaj is tough but also thoughtful and occasionally vulnerable - the rare kind of character who seems to have many stories inside him, and whom one hopes to meet again in another book. In the story, during one of their quarrels, Sartaj’s wife tells him that his face is like that of a terrorist. “I hate the world you live in,” she says before leaving him. Sartaj thinks of replying that it’s her world too, that he lives in the parts she doesn’t see and that he lives there for her sake. But he remains silent.

In “Kama”, the police officer was dealing with the demands of a changing city. “Bombay was never like this,” says Sartaj’s boss at one point in the story. Sartaj shrugs: “It’s a new world.”

In mid-2006, it’s a new world again in Mumbai. On 11 July this year, a series of bomb explosions in the commuter trains at rush hour claimed nearly 200 lives and left the city in shock.

Sacred Games is a contemporary epic of Mumbai, a cocktail of organised crime, politics and religion. Sartaj Singh reappears in this novel. He is now in his forties, his marriage long over, his mind tired as he goes after an underworld gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde. The novel charts the individual journeys of the two men, interweaving their lives.

From Zena’s blog, Beirut Update:

already, so many people are becoming too used to this. people have stopped going to work– what’s they point? there is war! people have let go of certain commitments and responsibilities– what’s the point? there is war! cafes and restaurants have shut down. people have let go of projects, proposals, plans… people have stopped communicating. telephones don’t work!

i saw maya today. maya lived in lebanon during the civil war. we had a strange conversation.

maya: what’s wrong with you today? you look so down… so depressed…. zena, what’s wrong? did someone die?? what’s wrong???

zena (saying this out loud to maya): oh, it’s nothing.. it’s just this war. don’t worry, i’ll be fine. (insert fake smile here).

zena (saying this in her head): i have anxiety all the time. my tummy is always in a knot. i can’t sleep. i can’t eat. i am afraid all the time. i am angry too. it’s hot. my food in my fridge keeps going bad, because electricity is on and off. i’m freaking out because my internet has been going on and off…. i’m so afraid that one day it just won’t come back on again.

maya: don’t worry. you’ll get used to this. we all did back in the 80s. you have to. you have no choice. you will see, soon you will be so used to this, you won’t even realize that there is a war going on.

zena (out lout to maya): i don’t think i want to get used to this.

zena (to herself): it doesn’t have to be like this. we don’t have to accept this. maya, i’m so sorry you once had to “get used to it”. i don’t want you or i to have to “get used to it” again. it doesn’t have to be this way. this is not a way of life. don’t we still have choices as human beings? don’t we still have a chance to prove that in the end humanity prevails?

And… Time Out Beirut.

On 22 April, 2006, film singer Udit Narayan had no clue who this woman was:

“I don’t know this woman and I have never met her before. These are attempts to malign me,” he told PTI-Bhasha on phone.

Maintaining this was yet another attempt to blackmail him, Udit said, “I had received threatening calls four or five years ago but I did not pay heed to them. I was under the impression that this was common occurrence with artistes.”

Udit Narayan has re-accepted Ranjana Narayan as his wife, the Bihar Women’s Commission said on Friday. Udit, accompanied by his lawyer Majid Menon, arrived from Mumbai by flight and drove straight from the airport to depose before the Women’s Commission office. Udit and Ranjana signed a bond paper resolving their disputes.

Rockslinga posts this new Elmaz Abinader poem:

If I put one child on my shoulders
thrust myself forward scrape my feet
to clear the rubble, or water, waste or shards
If I hold the small legs in each of my hands
steady the bounce of the body
against my back, keep the child from falling
maybe the water will clear relieving the palms…

There are more than 100 malls across the country, and this figure is expected to triple by 2007. In Mumbai alone, there are 15 malls with 25 more expected to be opened up in the next few years.

Apparently even Bangalore’s no longer free of footfalls:

“In congested Indian cities, where accommodation is cramped, the mall is now a home away from home for many Indians.”

Singer Mika on the impact of forcibly molesting Rakhi Sawant:

“I feel sorry for Emraan, poor chap it took him four years to build his image of a kissing star, while it took me just five minutes!”

Mika, brother of singer Daler Mahendi, rose to fame a month ago after the infamous kissing fiasco involving item girl Rakhi Sawant, who accused him of forcibly smooching her. The five-minute kissing drama has actually made him one sought after kisser.

“I have become an overnight smooching star and now wherever I go girls come up to me and beg me for a kiss,” he says. “The other day I was at a party in Delhi and four girls came over and kissed me. Since they were all beautiful I didn’t mind it. Next an aunty came and kissed me! Nowadays whenever I see girls and aunties swooning over me, I get scared that I might develop some kind of allergy. I will have to approach a skin specialist soon.”

“How can they all do this to me?” he wonders.

He thinks he is a victim of delayed justice.

Er, I don’t agree.

Further to this post about protests at Brick Lane against the filming of Monica Ali’s book, JR emails me this profile of Ali in the Guardian.

Nothing exciting in the profile, but it has director Peter Florence saying this about Ali’s work: “In a sense if you come under fire from those conservative people, you must be doing something right.”

Ummm, not always. Look at the protests over the Da Vinci Code film. Or Deepa Mehta’s Water. People who protest against films and books etc usually have issues to sort out within themselves. Just because some people decide to take offence against a creative work doesn’t necessarily make it a great work (At the same time, just because something is an awful bit of tripe doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a right to exist).