Indian Writing

Its multiple facets - pen and ink drawings by Manohar Devadoss. Lovely, and so is the text accompanying the sketches:

When I was an adolescent, a small miscellaneous group of my school-mates and I, belonging to different castes, communities and faiths became very close friends. One of the boys in our close-knit group was Satagopan, hailing from an orthodox, middle class Iyengar Brahmin family. His parents were so old-fashioned that they solemnised the wedding of his sister, Jeyamma even before she completed her schooling. Unfortunately, her husband was drowned soon after in a railway accident caused by a swollen river. She was a teenager and was expecting when she became a widow. Back then in Tamil Nadu, Brahmin widows belonging to traditional families were made to suffer the harshest of punishments. Our group of friends was justifiably apprehensive. Would so young and beautiful a girl be forced to take on a widow’s mantle: shaven head, coarse off-white saree, isolation, ostracism et al? On the contrary, her parents moved away from these cruel customs, one step at a time. They shifted to another town and put her through college. She passed her bachelors’ degree examination, winning the first rank in the state. They returned to Madurai to enable her to pursue her master’s degree. At this stage, our friends and I were spending a fair share of our time in Satagopan’s house. His parents could perceive that we tacitly followed a code of not looking at our friends’ sisters with amorous eyes. They allowed Jeyamma to roam around with us, as long as Satagopan too was in the group. In those days it was not an everyday event for a comely well-dressed young woman to go out with a group of indifferently dressed somewhat unruly young men. People stared at us indelicately, be we happily ignored them. In this drawing, finished in February 1988 I have tried to recapture a scene belonging to the early 1960s.

Jeyamma went on to pursue her higher studies, remarried and recently retired as a professor in California University at Davis.

The whole collection of extracts from The Hindu Magazine, here.

On seeing this post about Mrinal Sen’s film Bhuvan Shome (which was also cinematographer KK Mahajan’s first film) Praba Mahajan sends me these paragraphs about KK in Mrinal Sen’s words:

In the mid-sixties, when the wind started shifting and I smelt a certain madness in the air, I like some of my colleagues and fellow travelers felt an irresistible urge for a change. I thought it was a good enough time for me to launch a breakaway from the existing convention and try my hand at creating a new one…

That was the time when I had accidentally run into a minor work by K.K. Mahajan—a diploma film of the Institute directed by his batch-mate Kumar Shahani, and photographed by K.K. I saw the class-room exercise and loved it immediately. I loved it for a different reason…for venturing to shoot in adverse conditions. Soon after, I met him. I was at the Film Institute, and the triumvirate-Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and K.K. walked in. I spoke to him, I spoke a lot as I always do, and he answered my questions, quite a few of them, mostly in
mono-syllabic yes’s and no’s. And that was our first meeting, way back in 1966.

Two years later, in 1968, I got a loan from the then Film Finance Corporation, and happily there were no strings attached. I formed a team, almost all having very little or nothing of “commercial” content and having an abundant measure of verve and courage. I asked K.K. if he would do the photography as a sort of love’s labour, so to say. K.K. readily agreed and perhaps beamed inwardly.

That was the beginning of a journey, a long one, which perhaps in just two cases, that too under unforeseen circumstances, never broke. K.K. and I, we worked together, starting from BHUVAN SHOME and continued unabated, once a year, in various places, various languages, and interestingly, in diverse situations. In the process, I learnt a lot and so, I believe, did he and we have been growing together steadily, happily, clumsily. True, we had initial problems to understand each other but neither he nor I took unreasonable time to get to know ourselves and then coming out of one film and walking into another, year after year, we became, as was expected, almost one inseparable entity.

We are still growing strong, even at my age, and he with his seventy-fifth film. The last thing about K.K: Success, till this moment, has not gone into his head, which is what has kept his body and soul together and which, every time I think of him, gives me the impression that he has remained the same, delightfully the same, as he was in 1966,the year of our first meeting, -shy but confident.

And as a postscript: K.K. is still mono-syllabic in his articulations except, however when he is made to speak on occasions such as the Convocation Address at the Film Institute of India where he, along with his batch-mates, was groomed wonderfully, deliciously, inspiringly.

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KK Mahajan went on to work on over 80 films across four decades. Praba tells me that he is very ill at present. My thoughts are with her and the family. This post is for KK, wishing him a speedy recovery.

Lesson: it’s better to be rich, of course, but if you must be poor then at least make sure you’re interning for a stockbroking job while pounding the pavements.

Bah. It may be based on a true story but this movie certainly isn’t the whole truth.

The latest issue of Frontline has this article on the plight of Kerala’s elephants. It begins with this quote from one of Basheer’s stories:

If he is displeased in any way at the manner in which the world is being run, he will kill an elephant keeper. For this reason, Kochunarayanan Namboodiripad, the head of the Chathangeri Mana, has stocked a number of elephant keepers.

Here is a translation of the Basheer story.

Here is Kipling’s story The Killing of Hatim Tai.

Image H.Vibhu/Frontline.

Rajan has some lovely pictures from Thanjavur.

(via Blogbharti)