They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands,
which divide the scales’
radiant sections

like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.

Read the rest here.

My own attitude toward cooking is as erratic as everything else in my life. I hate it, I love it, I don’t know what I want to do with it. I’m probably the equivalent of people who love poetry and badly want to be a poet but don’t really have the discipline for it. I’m impatient with measurements for one, which is really a no-deal thing if you want to be a cook of any seriousness. And I can’t poach an egg. I tried really hard some time back and ended up with a lot of makeshift egg drop soup. Well, it probably wasn’t really. But that’s what I’m calling it. I like chicken though. I can do nice things with chicken.

More food poetry — Persimmons by Li-Young Lee,  Yam by Bruce Guernsey, and of course this famous poem about plums by William Carlos Williams.

The Toto Annual Awards happened earlier this month and the English creative writing awards  went to Deepika Arwind and Ishita Basu Mallik. Both received the awards for their poetry so despite all the lamentations about poetry being dead, people continue to write it. Some damn good poetry too. Also, read Eunice D’Souza’s piece in Mumbai Mirror on an Audience of One.

Several centuries ago, the classical Sanskrit poet Bhavabhuti understood the concept of an audience of one.  He wrote, “If learned critics publicly deride/My verse, well, let them. Not for them I wrought/. One day a man shall live to share my thought:/For time is endless and the world is wide.”

I find all this moaning about the “decline of audiences for poetry” a little mystifying. I don’t believe it is true because there are so many people creating an interest in poetry: through workshops in schools, writing workshops, the internet, festivals, and so on.  I feel that those who do the moaning don’t see the contradictions in what they are doing. Instead of using endless words and newsprint to moan about decline, they could write about a poem or poet in a way that draws in readers.

And Kent Johnson in Almost Island on ’33 Rules of Poetry for poets under 23′:

5. Ask yourself constantly: What is the worth of poetry? When you answer, “It is nothing,” you have climbed the first step. Prepare, without presumption, to take the next one.

This year, they also introduced a Kannada creative writing award which I think is super. Full results here.

East Bangalore finally got its own full-fledged theatre with Jagriti opening its doors. I feel sentimental about this because I lived in east Bangalore for a decade and had to make a two-hour drive every time I wanted to watch a play. So even though I was quite meh about the opening play — Anita Nair’s adaptation of her own novel, Mistress (yes, good grief) — I am happy that Jagriti is there and that my mother and other people who live that side will be able to watch plays easily. It’s funny living in a growing city. Every now and then, something happens that makes you jump and squeal. A theatre in the eastern suburbs is definitely one of those moments.

I went for an evening around the Kabir Project at the Suchitra Film and Drama Academy. Writer Linda Hess talked about her book Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir (Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2009). I’ll try to write more about the book later but what was striking about the event was the importance of the music — there was a lot of lovely singing — and how easily Kabir’s work gives itself to music. How much of today’s poetry would, I wonder. I’m not talking about concrete poetry and other types of poetry that are clearly not written to be musical. But even lyric poetry.

Hess talked about the concept of singing from a place of formlessness, ‘shunya’ or emptiness. More about this later, if I understand it a little better, and if newfound blog-zeal doesn’t disappear. UR Ananthamurthy, who was in conversation with Hess, read a poem he wrote after meeting Kumar Gandharva for the first time. The poem was about the singer eating a hearty meal right after singing. Watching him, the poet  realises that he needs to do this to ‘come down’ to normal state. This implies that he is in a transcendent state while singing. There are references to divinity as well in the poem. URA talks about God having become a ‘tenant’ in KG for that time. Some people have a problem with this general idea of creativity being attached to God or being divine in some way. What do you think about it?

Okay, and the Attakalari Biennial 2011 is here. Full schedule here.

Boland wrote this essay in 1986-7, twenty years ago and she was speaking very specifically about conditions in Ireland. Some of it may be relevant even now, and even in other places where British poetry is an influence. Or the specific force fields may differ but the general notion may still be relevant.

For example, I can think of two different force fields that affect me, and possibly, other IE poets–what the British and Americans say English poetry should be and what people who write in other Indian languages say poetry should be. The feminist identity does not affect me as much, or not that I’m aware of. I do write about women a lot but that’s never been agenda-driven, more a natural outcome of preoccupations at the time.

The way Boland confronted the dilemma was to look at other art forms that provided a different way of looking. And she found a way to break through in painting:

The precedents for this were in painting rather than poetry…In the genre painters of the French eighteenth century — in Jean Baptiste Chardin in particular — I saw what I was looking for. Chardin’s paintings were ordinary in the accepted sense of the word. They were unglamorous, workaday, authentic. Yet in his work, these objects were not merely described; they were revealed. The hare in its muslin bag, the crusty loaf, the woman fixed between menial tasks and human dreams — these stood out, a commanding text.

This part resonated with me. I love the way Chardin builds tension, even menace, into a collection of mundane things. The cat looks poised to jump in both these pictures and one imagines the chaos that will follow–the kitchen disordered, people screaming, perhaps the meal for a party or big event ruined, fights as a result, domestic squalor. The possibility of so much noise and living in this ordinary kitchen moment.

By the time I started writing, we were no longer mired in romantic heresy (thank god). I think there was a happy mix of ‘poetic’ subjects and the ordinary in our English poetry which meant that I never felt that kind of constraint. The equivalent force field I can think of would be political or socially engaged poetry. As I was telling someone yesterday, I burden under quite a bit of guilt. How can one not bear witness to terrible things? Isn’t that self-indulgent? At the same time, I recently trashed three different poems — on the Gujarat riots, the Bhopal tragedy, and on Kashmiri widows respectively — because I felt they were just not working as art. I was not being able to get into the situations enough to bear witness with any integrity. It’s okay to write shallow poems sometimes. Less okay to write them on the backs of other people’s tragedies.

Another bit that resonated with me:

From painting, I learned something else of infinite value to me. Most young poets have bad working habits. They write their poems in fits and starts, by feast or famine. But painters follow the light. They wait for it and do their work by it. They combine artisan practicality with vision.

The way she uses that is to find a time in her daily routine that would amount to her ‘best light’, and make the most of that time. This is relevant for a lot of people who have to balance day jobs or children with writing. I don’t really have to do that at the moment but I think it’s a good principle to work by in any case. Painterly habits also makes me think of Monet’s painting of the Rouen Cathedral which he did in different lights at different times of the day, to see how it changed. One of the things I’ve been trying is to read / edit a poem at different times in a day and see how that works.

She ends with saying that the ‘dilemma persists; the cross-currents continue.’

What I wished most ardently for myself at a certain stage of my work was that I might find my voice where I had found my vision….Artistic forms are not static. Nor are they radicalised by aesthetes and intellectuals. They are changed, shifted, detonated into deeper patterns only by the sufferings and self-deceptions of those who use them.

I like that last line a lot. Sufferings, but especially self-deceptions.

*

My computer was down for six days and I suffered. I had to use computers in a common room and write by hand the rest of the time. I survived. But I’m glad it’s over.

*

I went to see Ron Arad: Restless at the Barbican. Arad is an industrial designer, artist and architect. I don’t know anything about design or architecture really but I found some of it really fascinating / amusing including a strangely-shaped ping pong table which one could actually try out. Some pictures here.

*

Before that, Patience Agbabi came to read at the university. She was warm, vibrant, very lovely. Her next collection is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales in poetry. Quite a challenge, I’m guessing. She’s blogged a little bit about it here. She’s also Canterbury Laureate for the year and the audience was quite large. The questions were similar to the ones asked back home — do you write for the page or the stage? what kind of research are you doing for this book? Patricia Debney who is a poet and writer herself and a senior lecture here asked about the fact that she often uses form and whether she finds this restricting. Agbabi said that using form makes things more interesting / challenging because it sets parameters that she has to work within, makes it less amorphous.

*

Somebody read my horoscope and it was full of some troubling stuff. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before and I was all shrugs and smiles about it. But I was surprised at how it played on my mind all the way back in the bus from London to Canterbury. Nothing some wine and sleep couldn’t fix. But still.

*

I was only reading poetry (and poetry-related essays / criticism) for the first month simply because there’s so much of it available here that I don’t get back home. I started missing prose though so have picked up a novel, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow. It’s quite gripping and very funny in bits. The protagonist is a conman who pretends to be a healer and diviner. I thought this was interesting:

As a novelist, Ngugi says he is very influenced by the “trickster” tradition. “The trickster character appears in tales all over the world,” he explained. “In West Africa it is Anansi the spider. Elsewhere it is Hare or Tortoise.

“The trickster is very interesting because he is always changing. He always questions the stability of a word or a narrative or an event. He is continually inventing and reinventing himself. He challenges the prevailing wisdom of who is strong and who is weak.”

Among other poets, I’ve been reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Some of her poems here.

Given my current situation (and seductions) in life, I thought this was appropriate. It’s been a month since I got to England and barring one week of illness and a few days of being snowed in, it’s been exciting. Actually, the illness and the being snowed in were probably useful because I got some work done.

*

Serendipity: A was in Berlin three weeks back and we met at Paris for a very hectic four days. The Louvre is overwhelming in a way that leads to despair. After walking around for about ten hours, we accepted that at least a month was required to see everything. We didn’t have a month. We had just a day and we had to concede defeat. There was so much to love but discovery-wise, Chardin was interesting. The Musee D’Orsay is much more manageable than the Louvre and one of the things I liked most there was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Four Parts of the World. I also loved The Orangerie, which has a much smaller collection but is beautifully located inside the Jardin des Tuileries. The rooms full of Monet’s Nympheas or Water Lilies are exciting and serene at the same time.

Okay, I’m not going into what else we did (the Eiffel, a river tour, walks along the Seine etc) and ate (scallops, escargots, crepes, cheese, pain au chocolat) because this is not a travel guide and Paris is not little talked about. There was also an embarrassing episode at a strip-show where we got conned but I won’t get into that either. I did feel a sort of helplessness about all the things we couldn’t find time for.  Every now and then, we had to remind ourselves that this was Paris, a city that can’t really be enjoyed in a guided-tour, monument-hopping way. We prioritised leisurely walks and meals over one or two important sights and adopted Indian fatalism about visiting again soon.

*

British poet Drew Milne came to read at the university. You can see his work here and here. What do you think? I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. Frankly, my first reaction was not intense. But maybe, I’ll change my mind. I don’t know.

*

There was a guest lecture about ecopoetries in America. The speaker went on a bit about Americans and their special relationship to their land. It made me think about our relationship to our land. Especially now that we see it disappearing under construction rubble in cities like Bangalore. It also made me think about some of Ramanujan’s poems, especially A River which has these lovely lines:

People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

And these…

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year

*

I haven’t taken too many pictures in London yet, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things like being completely turned on, obsessed and orgasmic — to continue with the seduction trope — about the Poetry Library. I can’t really explain how moving it is to be in a library devoted to poetry. And they allow you to read and borrow books for free. I know I sound like I want to squeal with joy. But I felt like Gretel finding that magic house made of chocolate and candy in the woods. Minus the witch.

I’ve also been busy visiting more museums, spending time with an old friend and watching movies. Also, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour made my birthday pretty special.

But here is a gull looking at the Thames. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking hard?

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/02/the-seductive-snowball/feed/ 7 http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/12/cheer/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/12/cheer/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:53:07 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=1899 So we are continuing with the cheer. Look, I even changed to a Christmassy theme! I thought this was nice, sort of subtle, unlike the ones which had holly all over them. I heart WordPress more and more for making it so easy to change look. I dabbled in web design a few years back, even made money from it which qualifies it as a previous profession, and I used to enjoy playing around with typeface and colour. I don’t do that anymore so this is my consolation.

Anyway, over the weekend I watched Cheri, Stephen Frears’ film of Colette’s novella Cheri. I have a weakness for lush period movies and this one is certainly both lush and period — 19th C France and the life of the rich and infamous. Lea, an aging courtesan takes Cheri, the decadent and disaffected son of a friend, under her wing and into her bed. The relationship starts off as a transaction of sorts, the age-old exchange of wisdom and youth, and the two are so cynical about love that they don’t imagine it could happen to them. Against all expectations, they stay together for six years. When he goes off to get married in keeping with his mother’s wishes, they realise they love each other.

The movie has lavish sets and costumes. Rupert Friend looks both callous and vulnerable. Michelle Pfeiffer makes up in style what she lacks in substance, and is patently well-cast as the aging beauty. But it’s no Dangerous Liaisons so don’t expect a huge deal. It feels rushed in the beginning and abrupt at the end because they’ve crammed the entire story of the sequel, The Last of Cheri, into a four-line voiced narration. The lovers are unconvincing in bits and there’s something incomplete about the whole venture. Still, if you have an afternoon to spare and and like period movies, it’s a relaxing sort of watch.

I was struck and a little amused by something while watching the movie. Much of it is about the lovers’ suffering. And because they’re rich, they have the means to ‘cope’ rather well. So here is evidence of my flawed heart: I was finding it hard to sympathise with people who can check into luxurious hotels for weeks to get over someone. I had to remind myself of the debilitating nature of heartbreak, its sapping of colour from everyday things, its dulling. Most likely, the brilliant blue of the Atlantic seemed pale to Lea in her post-love blues. It’s unfair to not extend the same level of human compassion to everyone (including the rich) but I think it does happen sometimes.

***

Movies often speed up the pace of books. In one of the essays in Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson talks about how each book has its own pace and good reading means finding the pace of a book and settling into it. Because pace is integral to any text, its deeply unsettling when it’s manipulated too much for adaptation. I think that’s why the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was one of the more satisfying ones because at least they gave the story enough time. Also Jane Eyre, which I watched twice for its gothic mood and for Timothy Dalton as Rochester.

***

Speaking of hot men, have you seen Captain Kirk make beat poetry of Palin’s speech? Some of my happiest memories of childhood include ‘Captain Curd’ as I inexplicably called him. I was always torn about who I wanted to grow up and marry more: him or Mr Spock. Twenty years and the Star Trek movie later, I’ve decided on Spock but it was real close.

Last week, Mridula Koshy launched her book If It Is Sweet in Bangalore. Mridula was as delightful as her book and I much enjoyed her infectious chatter at the launch and afterward at dinner. The audience was larger than usual, about 60-70 people, which is rather good for a book event. Mridula read bits from her story POP and in between, she was in conversation with novelist KR Usha. Some interesting things — she compartmentalises strictly between writing and life, taking chunks of time off from one to attend to the other; she never starts a new story before finishing one; and she writes in cafes.

It was a bit of a shame that the audience was so muted during the Q&A. Of course, I’m hardly one to talk since I suffer from atrophied vocal chords at such times but Mridula is one of those writers who really has a lot to say and is not pompous or boring while at it. In fact, there was a strangely honest, intimate, even vulnerable, air about her when she talked about what drives her to sit at cafes, watching people outside plate-glass windows, collecting details. So it would have been nice if the audience had asked more questions.

***

I watched Kaminey over the weekend and enjoyed it. Somebody asked me if I found the stuttering and lisping distracting. I didn’t. The plot was gripping, the action was slick and everybody was very hot — Priyanka, both versions of Shahid Kapoor, and the Bong villains. Heh. Not sure about the last actually. But I was just thrilled to see Bong villains at all.

***

A friend has asked me to compile a list of must-read poets for his edification and entertainment. I also have to put down three poems under each poet. I feel like TIME magazine (100 poems you must read before you die…). But seriously, I think it’ll be a fun way to remember favourites and familiars. Poem suggestions most welcome.

***

I recently read Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, which is all the rage just about everywhere for its bold content and sexual freedom. I wasn’t terribly thrilled. The book sort of leaps from one sex-filled, gunk-filled detail to another. It left me wondering why I should be so interested in someone’s propensity to eat her nose boogers.

I’ve also been reading Kay Ryan. I like the way she packs in a tight, focused thought in such a compact space. Some examples: ‘Carrying a Ladder‘, ‘Flamingo Watching‘ and ‘Repetition‘.

And finally, I got very smashed after ages last weekend. It was a friend’s farewell party. There were disco lights and a guy dressed as Mallika Sherawat with fake butterfly wings pinned to his back. There was Shahrukh Khan cavorting on the ceiling via a projected screen. There was lots of drink and some other things. The next day, I could hardly move. I’m getting old.

Will blog about other things when I have more energy but in the meantime, here is Jane Hirshfield reading ‘For What Binds Us’.

But of course there’s much more to this than sexual shenanigans. The book is really about power and information, how closely the two are related, how they are exchanged between humans, and how quickly, surreptitiously and unexpectedly these exchanges can flip lives around. There are also huge Freudian subtexts with Oedipal instincts and incest forming an important part of the relationships. The book’s also extremely funny in bits.  Murdoch uses irony and farce to deal with Martin’s predicaments and despite the fact that she touches on infidelity, childlessness, depression and suicide, the book is quite entertaining. I would recommend it for a lazy afternoon. It’s quite a romp.

***

Phyllis Bose did an incredible job bringing Gertrude Stein alive yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Her dramatic monologue Gertrude ran for nearly two hours. It had a simple set dominated by reproductions of famous paintings done by Bose herself and there was little movement. Yet she managed to hold interest. Part of the credit must go to the script, carefully woven together from Stein’s own texts and notes but a lot of it was the energy and intimacy she brought to the telling. The focus of the script was Gertrude’s famous friendship with Picasso but there was lots of other stuff in there–insights into Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) and Alice Toklas (her partner), anecdotes about the Saturday Salons, and Stein’s views on life and art. Bose was funny and convincing and, quite often, transporting. It was a pleasure.

***

Afterward, some of us went to Koshy’s where among other things, we talked of how the place elicits such extreme reactions from people. Some love it and others just don’t take to it at all. Often, the same things about it bring out such diverse reactions — the ancient and faintly dingy air of the place, the lacklustre furnishings, the lack of general hipness, the sense that someone built it a long, long time ago and then forgot to do anything for it ever again. This time-warped air is exactly what some of us love about it. It lets us feel we’ve stepped into a different world, a world where things never change. It makes us feel secure. Also, the sheer variety of human type and activity at these tables — people talking, staring, drinking, gorging, playing some board game, having meetings, sharing quizzes, discussing art — is terribly interesting. Some people like these things. Others don’t. Everyone likes the potato smileys though.

As an aside, Gertrude talked about identity and memory and what happens to them in the face of eternity. I think Koshy’s was rather apt in the circumstances.

This is a picture I took some time back of the place.

Etiquette is not, these days, a growth industry. The Internet is inundated with bile in the name of free expression. Television reality shows encourage a thumbs-up, thumbs-down mentality. The allure of instantaneous reaction makes Twitter the talk of the town. Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is melting down manners: More than ever, people who pay good money to see a show feel they have every right to express righteous anger.

Art isn’t easy, but booing is. A mind-closing activity, it tends to be the expression of rigidity in the face of invention. Artists are almost never booed for incompetence (no one can deny the craft of Freyer’s stagecraft). They are booed for intent and out of partisanship. I don’t necessarily advocate acclaim for nothing more than mindless effort, but in a lifetime of attending the performing arts, I have encountered an insignificant number of truly insincere artists.

Not everything works, but at least in the noncommercial realm of the concert stage and the opera house, I credit nearly everyone with trying to say something. And when they actually manage to, the meaning may not immediately sink in.

Booing may be pointless but I’m all for honest panning. Art isn’t easy, true. It’s not meant to be. But is sincerity enough to merit applause, let alone money? I don’t see why I should credit “nearly everyone with trying to say something”. In poetry, we are repeatedly told that it is clearly not enough to just say something. What matters is how you say it. Why should this be different for the performing arts?

In Bangalore, I’ve seen disastrous plays that were touted as good. There are times when I’ve cared less about the money spent and more about how I’m going to make it through the next hour or so before they open the doors and let me out. (It’s difficult to walk out midway at Ranga Shankara though in situations of extreme boredom, I’ve even done that.) Few things are as tortuous as a play with banal lines, flat humour or terrible acting. Being stung to death by bees, for instance.

If the state of literary reviews is not top notch, the state of theatre reviewing in the English language newspapers is even worse. Most feature supplements in the city have degenerated to celebrity-obsessed rags. There are few play reviews and most are written by rookie reporters who know little about art or performance or performing arts. Under these circumstances honest audience reaction is not only healthy, it’s necessary.

Having said this, I must raise a thumb (in typical trigger-happy fashion) for Butter and Mashed Bananas, which I finally managed to catch. They had a clear premise and they managed to communicate it. Their funny lines were actually funny. There was movement and energy. And oh yes, a script that actually seemed to have some thought behind it. All good things.

But my favourite is Gulliver. I love how they’ve managed to make his face so expressive.

***

Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nayara Noor with ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein’.

***

And the World Digital Library recently went online, which “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world”. Basically, lots of gorgeous manuscripts and maps and other ancient things.

- I like that there is very little gore in the movie. Riots have been done so often in movies that many of the images have come to be, awful as this may sound, hackneyed. The screaming mobs, the fire, the puddles of blood. Here, she makes a much stronger statement by staying away from that and tackling the aftermath. The quiet devastation wreaked in individual lives has a stronger impact. In the opening scene, the pile of bodies mechanically dumped by a truck (whose driver you can’t see) underlines the dehumanization that takes place during a riot.

- I also liked the scene in which Munira (Shahana Goswami) is gathering up burnt vessels from her kitchen and methodically throwing them out. Her house has been burned and what choice does she have but to clean up? But this simple act of cleaning up, familiar to so many women, now carries so much loss.

- In one scene, a character is killed just when you thought he would be safe. The act of killing is so deliberate and yet so casual, so happenstance in a way. The death almost seems like a grotesque mistake. You want him to step back a few paces, choose a different place to hide, be somewhere else. As if he is an ant and what one is looking at is the simple, un-meditated act of someone stepping on him in error. Except that this is not the case. Firstly, he is not an ant. He is a man who has been made into an ant, forced to fear the boot at every step. And secondly, the boot is actively looking for him. So his chances are nil in any case. He cannot run simply because there is no place to go.

- I think she’s explored well the issue of confinement or the sense of being trapped inside or outside of systems (or in anarchy) not of your making. Confinement takes many forms. Munira has to stay holed up in her friend’s room, unable to go home because the police are outside her home. People must stay indoors during curfew or risk being hunted down by the cops. But more subtly, Sameer (Sanjay Suri) must keep his mouth shut about his surname and hope his first name gets him through. A Hindu housewife (Deepti Naval) must suffer the guilt of letting a Muslim woman die because she couldn’t let her into her house. Mohsin, a Muslim child who’s been orphaned by the riots, must choose between the freedom to look for his parents and the rehab camp.

- The Hindu housewife is also caught between her own conscience which she assuages by burning herself with driblets of oil, and her crude husband’s violence. In multiple scenes, she is shown looking out of the grills of a window, her helplessness and her failure circumscribed by the bars.  When she meets Mohsin, he represents a chance at redemption. She gently brings him into the house, lingering at the threshold, easing him in. But he is frightened when he witnesses her husband’s violence and leaves. He would rather flee violence, and the fragile love that he receives is not enough to keep him. Besides, he wants his real parents. Not that easy to replace.

- I like that there was no neat, hopeful message. Mohsin walks into the rehab camp, walks through masses of people. Some children are playing with marbles. They invite him to join them. I cringed wondering if she was going to tie it up with a kitschy picture of kids playing. But he refuses. He walks to a corner and sits down by himself. He is still lost and grieving. And it will take more than a bunch of marbles to distract him. Yes, eventually he will probably move on. But not yet. Not just yet.

Slumdog Millionaire is another matter. I can’t pretend to be surprised considering opinion polls all over the Internet predicted its win. But at a certain level, I am astonished. It’s beautifully shot and I loved the soundtrack. Some of the scenes were memorable. But an Oscar? Really?

Most people who’ve had a problem with Slumdog seem to parrot the same boring (and to my mind, ridiculous), pseudo-patriotic argument of ‘how dare anyone show our dirty underbelly’. The one we carefully keep layered up in all seasons. I have no problems with anyone showing anyone else’s underbelly. What I do have a problem with is weak story and bad acting. And then there’s the small matter of realism.

Now, clearly, there’s ‘reality’ and there’s reality. Slumdog specialises in one kind. There are the mutilated beggars, the prostitution, the evil mafia but it’s all so nicely sugarcoated with the big story of Redemption and Hope that in the end, all one walks away with is a happy song and visions of them dancing beside empty trains. The mutilated beggars, the prostitution, the domestic violence, police cruelty — all of it forgotten with a humming tune.

Because the movie cleverly skirts around the other reality. The one that happens to real people as opposed to movie people. The one in which poor boys do not know the answers to all the quiz questions because, well, the lack of education? — it’s a bit of a hindrance. The one in which it takes more to rescue a trafficked girl than two teenage boys with one gun. The one in which the simpering heroine is not saved by the love of a good man and has to either cope with the mess — or find her own way out.

Now, I’d be okay with all this skirting around reality (after all, I’m an avid Bollywood consumer) if the movie wasn’t being talked about as ‘realistic’. The fact that it is being talked about as realistic makes me think that many people are seriously delusional. Or there are two kinds of reality and people like one kind but not the other.

Bring on the slums, dude, but throw in a good ol’ love story, will ya? And make it, you know, hopeful?

Okay, so let’s move on to what’s worse about the movie. What’s worse about the movie is its hollow messaging as Mitu Sengupta at Alternet points out:

The film’s real problem is that it grossly minimizes the capabilities and even the basic humanity of those it so piously claims to speak for. It is no secret that much of “Slumdog” is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the 213-hectare spread of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film’s depiction of the legendary Dharavi, which is home to some one million people, is that of a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the “slumdogs,” no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers, thieves, and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher, a thin, bespectacled man who introduces him to the Three Musketeers, is inexplicably callous. This is a place of evil and decay; of a raw, chaotic tribalism.

Read the full thing.

I tend to believe I’m a bit aurally challenged. Hearing tests have said that my hearing is perfectly sound but what do they know? Gah. In any case, I usually prefer to read rather than listen. Which is why I was faintly skeptical about a Dastangoi performance. I mean, I had heard only good things but would they really hold my attention with two hours of story-telling? I was happily gobsmacked to find that they did indeed.

The stories Hussain and Farooqui perform are mainly from the Dastan-e-Amir-Hamza and the first episode was a story in which Amar Ayyar cleverly tricks a jadugar and gets into his palace by pretending to be a woman. Early on, Farooqui told us not to balk if we didn’t get all the words. A necessary warning in Bangalore where many people don’t know Hindi, and therefore would find it harder to understand Urdu. ‘Hold the thread of the story’ and you’ll be fine, he said. At least, that’s what I understood. And going by the post-performance discussion, that seemed to have worked well for most people. With my limited exposure to Hindustani, I missed some of the more poetic descriptions. But I found that it didn’t matter too much. Urdu is such a mellifluous language; I just let the words wash over me, enjoying their warm soothe, trying to hold on to the thread like he said.

When the Amir Hamza story ended in a little more than an hour, I wondered if attention would flag. It may have if they had continued on a similar tack. I like clever con artists and stupid, vain villains just as much as the next person, but I need to close the book on them at intervals. But they quickly launched into a very different type of story — a script they have written themselves about the Partition. Using an ancient art form to communicate something with so much contextual relevance is clever and, if not done well, can fall flat on its face. But they did it well. So well in fact that I found myself moved anew by their narrative on corpse-filled trains, lost houses, abducted women. These are stories one has heard before and there is the danger of feeling jaded. But there was an intensity they brought to the telling, an authenticity to the characters they spoke about that was engaging. I saw many women surreptitiously wiping their eyes when they talked about how abducted women chose the protection of the rapists and kidnappers because things could be so much worse.

Farooqui says in this interview:

The Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, which runs into 46 volumes, is ostensibly about the life of Hamza, the paternal uncle of the Holy Prophet Mohammad. At one level, it purports to be an account of the triumph of Islamic armies over infidels and worshippers of other Gods. But in its essence, it is a highly secular narrative. Its modern day equivalent would be Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or even Hindi cinema. Its world is fascinating, full of magic and sorcery and tricksters, tilisms governed by fantastical characters and qualities. It is an unstoppable riot of names, places, scenes, descriptions, battles, love-making, seduction. It is really about letting go.

There was a sense of this ‘letting go’ that they brought to their Dastangoi performance. They used plenty of tonal shifts to ensure that the telling did not become a drone, but in places they were also frankly loud or emotive. In one scene, they did a hammy crying routine. Quite over-the-top and utterly hilarious. Yet, in places, they were restrained. And it was this careful control over the tension between emotional spill and subtlety that gave the performance texture. Dastangoi itself, as an art form, lies somewhere in between recitation and theatre, and stepping stealthily in between these lines is something that probably defines its success.

The duo worked well together. At a very obvious level, their voices complemented each other. When one picked up from where the other left off, there was a pleasing shift, not jarring but clear. There was something underlying as well. They were dressed alike and there was no conscious effort to delineate themselves but each had a strong, distinctive personality, which made for nice interplay. For instance, Dan (or his dastan-goh persona) seemed more self-assuredly aware of his own cunning and it made sense when he impersonated a beautiful woman to get into the jadugar’s palace. Farooqui’s quiet thoughtfulness was excellent for the second part when he read out the correspondence between a Hindu in India and a Muslim in Pakistan on the insurance papers one has left behind.

On an entirely separate note, ITC Windsor had set up a cute, little stage with bolsters and all but I couldn’t help imagining how a more baithak-style gathering would have felt. Of course, it would be hard to fit as many people in. But maybe, next time. Anyway, afterwards, I did what I normally do when I’ve enjoyed a performance. I retreated into a corner with my drink. And refused to socialise like other nice people do. And had to apologise for my rudeness to Dan on FB. But all that’s another self-indulgent story and I will get into it in another post.

Then, in Murphyesque style, she loses her belongings on the coach and is rendered penniless and destitute. She sleeps in the open, hunts for a job in vain and is finally reduced to wandering the streets and begging for food and shelter. This sequence underlines Jane’s almost manic refusal to let go of her independence, her refusal to depend on the man she loves and signifies the strong (for those times) gender statement that Bronte was making.

But interdependence is a natural state of humankind. When in dire circumstances such as destitution and illness, it is natural to turn to somebody one considers close. The will Jane exercises in not turning to Rochester, who she knows would do everything to help her, is quite phenomenal — and in my view, somewhat unnecessary in real life. But of course, it’s not real life. It’s a novel and Bronte is using it to further the narrative, and more importantly, as a device for character growth.

It is necessary to the novel that Jane is finally forced to depend, ironically, on strangers for her very survival. Some twists and turns and much soul-searching later when she finally returns to Rochester, it is with an altered viewpoint, a somewhat more mellow approach to independence. And in a cruelly mischievous flip of the coin, Bronte switches the power balance. Jane finds that not only is she Rochester’s equal (which makes her feel better about the relationship) but his better. Having unexpectedly inherited money, she is rich while he has lost his house in a fire. She is healthy and he is blind and crippled.

Although Rochester regains sight in one eye a few years later, he never fully recovers and this makes him a very interesting study in ‘taming’ a man. For Rochester is a lot like the male version of Shakespeare’s ‘sweet Kate’, isn’t he? In the early part of their relationship, he is moody and haughty, even cruel or sadistic in bits, certainly willful. By the end, he is a broken man forced to depend on Jane for even the basics, symbolically castrated as this article talks about.

Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near–that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature–he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam–of the landscape before us; of the weather round us–and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.

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The Byronic hero’s serrated edges have been smoothed and softened by this dependence. He has dropped his mind games and is meek as a lamb. Almost as consolation, Jane has also changed. She has grown to realise that interdependence is not such a bad thing and she expresses this in the last chapter when she talks about her marriage to Rochester.

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest–blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully is he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

But I can’t help wondering how she would have handled it if the circumstances had been different. If she had arrived in Thornfield to find the mansion intact and him entertaining people in his parlour, a beautiful woman at the piano, a retinue of servants. This is how he lived before she left, after all, and none of this served to diminish his need for her. But his need for her (emotional) was not enough then. Does it help her to discover a more stark and palpable need (physical, practical), something that will affect the two of them every minute of every day? And what does this say about her as a woman? That she needs to feel needed? Merely being loved is not enough. That she can overcome the tremendous insecurities of being a poor orphan girl only when the person she loves also has wounds that are demonstrably as grave?

Why did Bronte find it necessary to add physical torment to Rochester’s already burdened soul? Except that it would establish Jane as the powerful one in the relationship more firmly. And this then is the foundation for lasting happiness? Bronte seems to leave no room for doubt because Jane writes a retrospective of ten years of their marriage in the last chapter–and by her account, all is glorious. I wonder what Rochester would have said.

The power balance in relationships is a delicate thing, constantly kept in line by both partners dancing around each other, playing the same games, fitting into accepted scripts. The overlapping spaces between need and control, dependence and demand are many and shifting. In this context, Jane Eyre is extremely interesting and lends itself to endless discussion and speculation. No wonder it has spawned such marvelous offshoots as Wide Sargasso Sea. It would be fun to read one that explores Jane’s darker side — the other mad woman in the book.