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Science & Environment
Grooming and packaging becomes vital as competition and money…
Sanjay Kapoor: a star before the launch
“It’s not easy being a hero,” says filmstar Akshay Kumar. It’s even more difficult to become one. Stardom finds one in a thousand but the odds have never deterred hopefuls, armed with endurance and a dream, from streaming into Bollywood.
Around five male debuts take place every year. Lately, however, as the competition and money stakes rise, the fashioning and launching of heroes is becoming a more sophisticated process. Grooming and packaging are fast becoming popular.
While there are still no professional image consultants, advertising agencies are being roped in to help make an impact in a crowded entertainment market. Some believe that the straggler fantasy of small-town-boy-making-good would be difficult if not impossible today. And that making a star is an art in itself.
“A hero today must be Raj Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan rolled into one,” says producer Boney Kapoor. “These are the six hero slots in Hindi cinema and an actor must be able to play all if he wants a long innings.” Boney should know. He successfully launched younger brother Anil in ’83 and is set to introduce second brother Sanjay in January.
In fact, Boney has moulded Sanjay into a saleable commodity even before his first release. Currently, Sanjay has six A-class films on the floors and has signed nine more. He is charging over Rs 30 lakh a film and is rumoured to have recently signed a movie for Rs 51 lakh. Says distributor Ramesh Sippy: “Sanjay is a star before his first release.”
Akshaye Khanna: when pedigree is a passport to success
However, Sanjay is not the only newcomer demanding and receiving established star fees. Bobby Deol, carrying forward the star legacy of father Dharmendra and elder brother Sunny, is reportedly charging over Rs 30 lakh. He was recently voted the hottest newcomer in an industry spot poll conducted byTrade Guidemagazine.
Bobby currently has four films in hand and will make his debut in mid-’95. Nineteen-year-old Akshaye Khanna, Vinod Khanna’s son, is the youngest and latest claimant to the hero stakes. Akshaye, barely a six-month-old in the business, has signed four films, reportedly receiving Rs 30 lakh for one. Says star secretary and promoter Aasif Merchant: “There is a lot of hope in these guys. They are expected to be superstars.”
Much work has gone into creating these potential stars. And though the impeccable pedigrees guarantee a market, little has been left to chance. For example, all the three-Sanjay, Bobby and Akshaye – will be launched in multi-crore home productions.
Sanjay will debut in a Rs 4-crore-plus reincarnation love story, Prem. The film, starring Tabu, was shot on 10 outdoor locations. Akshaye begins with the adventure love story, Himalaya Putra, which has a minimum budget of Rs 5 crore.
A 50-feet statue of Shiv, built at a cost of Rs 20 lakh, was recently carted to Dalhousie for shooting. Bobby’s first release will be the Rs 6-crore-plus Barsaat. The film, which also marks the debut of Dimple’s daughter Twinkle, is being sold for Rs 1 crore per major territory.
Before facing the camera, each one has gone through extensive training – acting, dancing and action classes. Sanjay learned Urdu for a year. Akshaye, who plays a mountaineer in Himalaya Putra, is undergoing gymnastic and trampoline training. He will resume acting classes soon.
Rajkumar Santoshi, who is directing Barsaat, says: “Becoming a superstar is like body-building. You have to exercise every day.” The planning goes far ahead of the carefully orchestrated debuts. Think-tanks (comprising usually immediate family and close professional friends) monitor the near future too.
Boney, a deal-maker of Donald Trump’s dimensions, has engineered an impressive post-debut line-up for Sanjay. Not only is Sanjay working with stylistically distinctive film makers on a variety of subjects, even his heroines and music directors are different in each project.
From Madhuri Dixit to Shilpa Shetty and from Anu Malik to A.R. Rahman, he is working with them all. Says Boney: “This is by design. In the initial stages, you must have a mixture because the audience doesn’t lap up a hero in one film. Only after four or five does he get into the system.”
Bobby Deol: when pedigree is a passport to success
The think-tanks are also masterminding publicity. Bobby has been off-limits to the press since theBarsaatlaunch in ’91. The film is Bollywood’s best kept secret – no photographs and little information have leaked out so far. Even Sanjay, who is open to interviews, will not allow television coverage. And Vinod personally scrutinises every photograph of Akshaye released to the press.
Besides, the son rarely attends public functions. Says Vinod: “The idea is to make sure that no unflattering pictures appear in print and also to keep curiosity at a peak.” Adds Himalaya Putra director Pankuj Parashar: “We will make sure that the right things gain prominence in the media. After all, we are launching a Mercedes, not a Fiat.”
Most significantly, professional marketeers have been hired to help. Deepak Gattani of Rapport Advertising, who worked on the launches of Raveena Tandon and Ajay Devgan, will be working on selling Akshaye. The Barsaat team has also hired advertising professionals.
While it’s too early for any strategic planning, Vinod has budgeted Rs 75 lakh for publicity. Says Gattani: “Newcomers cannot create an impact unless hype is created about the star and the product. Today, marketing is required.”
The question, of course, is why? Competition from within and outside the industry is a primary impetus. Trade experts believe that it is attracting more entrants than ever before. Says Merchant: “Every train that comes to Bombay brings 10 stragglers.” Estimates are impossible but discover-a-star competitions provide some clue.
The Movie magazine’s ‘Discover a Star Scheme’, which ran from April ’92 to April ’93, attracted over a thousand entries each month. The more recent Stardust Academy, a free training course run by the magazine, attracted 28,000 entries from India and 6,000 entries from abroad.
Says Vinod: “Things have really changed in the last 10 years. Films are no longer taboo, so more people are coming in. It’s much more competitive.” The television boom is also providing sustenance to stragglers, with Shah Rukh Khan’s example showing that a small screen to 70 mm switch is possible.
Also, as distributor Sippy points out, the audience has changed: “There is a larger teenage market than there was a decade ago. They are accepting unconventional faces and films. There is a market and naturally more people are encouraged to join.”
According to Vinod, industry politics is playing its part too: “The industry has become divided into camps and every one wants to outdo each other from the size of their muscles to the pelvic pushes.”
| Money, grooming and a splashy launch pale into insignificance before the crucial factor-luck. |
The sheer glut of entertainment is also forcing wannabes to work harder. Gattani believes that movies today must provide a hook for the audiences to come in: “It must be made exciting.”
And Merchant points out that with the profusion of new faces on television, only a splashy launch will compel a viewer to spend Rs 50 to see a film starring a newcomer: “A new hero is taken seriously only if it’s an A-grade launch. Today, anyone coming to Bombay should bring Rs 50,000 just to groom himself. And there is no guarantee of getting work.”
Money being the primary hurdle, two newcomers are believed to be financing their own projects. Today, shooting costs can range between Rs 80,000 to one lakh per day. An A-grade film budget averages Rs 2 crore. Few then are willing to risk new faces. Parashar believes that the unwillingness to launch newcomers is also related to the dismal box office performance of the 20-odd love stories that were inspired by the success of Maine Pyar Kiya.
He says: “Two new people in love became a formula but all the films flopped. So right now the trend is not toward launching newcomers. Stars insure you to a great extent.” Even the bigwigs are going for established faces – Yash Chopra’s next film will star Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit and perhaps, Juhi Chawla.
Subhash Ghai, responsible for launching the careers of Jackie Shroff, Madhuri and Manisha Koirala is looking for a new heroine for his next film Shikhar, but its heroes – the only actors who affect the sale price of a film – are Khan and Shroff.
Of course, the crores spent on planning, grooming and selling stand dwarfed beside the crucial X factor-luck. The ratio of hits to flops stands at 20:80 and until somebody stumbles upon the formula for box office success, stardom in Bollywood will be as much a matter of chance as anything else.
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Science & Environment
Science & Environment
Book review: Bulbul Sharma’s ‘The Perfect Woman: Short Stories’
The Perfect Woman: Short Stories
By
Bulbul Sharma
UBSPD
Pages:128
Price:Rs 60
This is not the witty and whimsical Bulbul of My Sainted Aunts, skimming lightly over the surface of her eccentric relatives’ lives to reveal the undercurrents of disquiet and disjunction.
The Perfect Woman is a sombre rendering of lives, fraying at the edges, lit up very occasionally by flashes of bleak humour. There’s not much to celebrate here but, for the sympathetic reader, a great deal to mull over as the author gently exposes the disarray that surrounds her protagonists.
At the centre of each story is a woman, held in suspension. Vinny, muzzled by male chauvinism and late motherhood, can bring herself to do no more than watch mutely as her young son perches precariously on the roof of a hotel, knowing he might fall off any minute.
Her relief at the end of their “holiday” is palpable because “she hated other people’s lives touching hers”.
Bulbul Sharma: Exposing fraying lives
Then, the only time Anu’s existence seems to come to life is when she is battered by her husband.
This happens every day without fail, till one day he suddenly drops dead, mid-blow, and she finds the most unexpected release – I couldn’t help wondering though, now that the cycle of abuse was broken, how she would rearrange her life.
Urmilla (a.k.a. Rita) is sanguine about her boss/lover’s benign neglect of her, till she realises that he has transferred his attention to her younger sister.
Bani tries desperately to find her own still centre in the turbulence of her estranged parents’ lives, only to find herself “locked into a soft blackness on all sides, falling into the deep hole” made by her father’s drunken assault on her young body.
Even the title story, ostensibly about a man, is actually about many women, and the Eternal or Perfect Woman that the ageing hero spends his life in search of, a chimera, whom he meets only when he meets his death.
This is violence of the daily, humdrum sorts, and not even Bulbul’s deceptively easy and undramatic telling can mask its horror or avert its dreadful predictability. And as you prepare to register its dull blows, you realise how easily, if you’re not careful, the author can make you believe that this is how most women’s lives are lived.
The most fully realised story in this sombre collection is Toofan, a wonderfully wrought tale of two older women, mother and daughter, living a faded sort of existence together, when suddenly one day a street urchin blows into their home.
He’s a car cleaner, a coolie, a petty thief, a drug conduit, perhaps, a survivor who latches on to Meena, the daughter, and makes their garage his “home whenever he chooses”.
Meena finds a focus for her maternal love in caring for this fugitive, even as her own mother ridicules her for her foolishness.
The accidental manner in which their three lives intertwine and the insecurity of Toofan‘s precarious existence underline the collection’s major preoccupation: the essential solitariness of all our lives, and the ease with which things can, and do, fall apart. Not, as I said, a celebratory book, but a book about life, and as we all know, life’s like that.
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Science & Environment
TV serials come of age as small screen mirrors…
Scenes from Junoon
It’s like one big bubble bath. Bombay, that is, with its soap opera factories working round the clock to churn out serials as if there were no tomorrow.
There are almost 500 pilots of soaps in search of a channel. About 19 soaps are being aired on Doordarshan and satellite television. Scores of others are in the pipeline.
Even TV serials such as Ajnabi, Rajani (round two) and Junoon have been transformed into soaps by throwing in sub-plots, relationships, and that tantalising hook at the end of each episode. The reason: soaps are forever, especially in the days of satellite television and a national television desperately seeking software.
Shiela
We are obviously in the Age of the Soap. And not only are the story lines similar, but many of the actors are the same. Actor Vikram Gokhale is in about nine soap operas. Anju Mahendru, every producer’s idea of the urban sophisticate and avatar of ambition, is next in ubiquity.
Even the locale is often the same: starved of studios and time, producers move from one hotel front along Juhu to another with their group of actors.
India is even exporting soap operas: UTV has dubbed two of its soaps – Shanti, its new daily soap, and Lifeline – in English for public broadcast stations in Canada and Japan and the inflight services of a number of international airlines.
But what is significant about this recent eruption of soaps is not their numbers, though we are in mega-serial land with soaps such as Pritish Nandy’s Yudh and Mahesh Bhatt’s Swabhiman, scripted by Shobha De, geared to go past 500 episodes and handled by producers who have taken over an entire floor in Film City and have another studio floor elsewhere. It’s the content.
| Extramarital affairs, women flirting with younger men and the confessions of a homosexual, that’s the stuff these soaps are made of. |
If there’s a Brave New World in India, it’s in soap opera land. There’s a quiet little revolution taking place on the small screen.
Extramarital affairs (almost all the soaps), teenaged girls slapping their father’s friends (Tara), illegitimate children (Kismet, Scandal, EL TV’s new soap); women – desi Mrs Robinsons – having affairs with lovers the ages of their sons (Asman Se Aage); even confessions of a young gay man in Tara are the stuff that soaps are made of. And accepted.
“India needs a change of attitude. And soaps are perfect vehicles to prepare people to break the walls of inhibitions and question everything,” explains screen writer Kamlesh Pandey, of Zee TV.
Pandey feels that they have to “add more shocks” to keep up the startle-level. “Tara broke lots of rules and shot dead a lot of holy cows.” But the beer-swilling Amita Nangia in Tara and the extramarital affairs in many of the other serials are now accepted as “routine”, according to him.
Popular cinema has rarely handled the subject of adultery – especially if it’s to do with a married woman. Even parallel cinema usually tiptoes round the subject with the few exceptions of Arth and Dhrishti. But women having their bit on the side on the small screen has not caused more than a few ripples.
Navneet Nishan’s open flaunting of her adulterous affair in Andaz doesn’t make her a villainous out-caste. Many viewers actually admire her guts. Life after Mills and Boon, “the sweet sixteen image has gone, it’s boring,” says Karuna Samtani of EL TV and one of the brains behind the success of Zee TV.
Rishte
One of the reasons for the differing standards on the big and small screen, producers explain, could be the fact that TV viewers are more educated and liberal than those who flock to cinema halls. It could also be that American soap operas such asThe Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbaraand, of late,Dynasty have paved the way for this volte-face.
Not only is it keeping up with those American Joneses, it’s keeping up with your own neighbours on the channel Zee TV opened the floodgates.
Even the producers of the more staid Junoon, which has recently become the most popular soap on Doordarshan, have felt the need to add some oomph. Director Sunil Mehta is bringing in actress Shashikala back from the cold to play a Joan Collins-like manipulative, bitchy figure as in Dynasty.
Tara: preaching is out as the simpering, sacrificing woman gives way to the confident woman of substance
The sea change on the small screen is, however, more than just skin-deep, or even sex-deep.
The real change is attitudinal. Many of the soaps are about the changing woman in India. The woman of the ’90s. “My Lajoji was a strong woman but she was a family-bound woman. Today, they are career-oriented,” says Ramesh Sippy, whose Buniyaad was among the first soaps.
The modern age is also the age of the woman of substance. It is an Anju Mahendru in Asman Se Aage, or in any number of soaps playing the middle-aged woman who runs a huge corporation and uses her brains and smiles to keep her empire.
In Ved Rahi’s Rishte, Sharmila Tagore plays a woman who left her poet-husband and now heads a huge group of companies, while her indulgent second husband (Saeed Jaffrey) carries on with polo and snooker.
“She has become a woman of the world and the serial shows how she deals with her juniors. With peons, or the security guys who wait for her morning and late night smiles,” says Samtani.
If most of Bollywood is about the simpering, sacrificing side of the archetypal Indian woman, men are now getting their comeuppance on the small screen. “Women are now talking eyeball to eyeball,” says Pritish Nandy, who is producing Yudh, a big serial about corporate wars in six languages with over 500 episodes planned. “The karma dharma is over. Women want to do something with their lives.”
Interestingly enough, there’s even an upbeat rural soap opera, Shiela, which subtly gets across the message of the need to educate young girls. Scripted by Vinita Nanda – who also writes Tara, has three more soaps on the anvil and is considered the Queen of Soap – the serial doesn’t preach.
Through its web of relationships and the protagonist’s use of more indirect methods to change hide-bound attitudes, it manages to advocate change. Which is the original raison d’ etre of soap operas.
Yudh
In answer to the male bonding of the big screen is the female bonding in serials such asTara orBanegi Apni Baat. One reason for the strong female characters is the fact that women comprise the largest single segment for the advertisers. In fact, the advertisements being made now project a woman who knows what she wants and gets it.
There is, however, a reversal of roles at a far more fundamental level. The young are tripping the old, the women are showing up the men, and traditional values are being offloaded to make room for the new. In the post-liberalisation era, greed is good, and the meek shall not inherit the world.
Kurukshetra: Corporate wars are in
And it is not for nothing that at least five of the soaps now being shown deal with corporate wars:Parivartan, Kurukshetra, YudhandParampara.
Pandey, who has scripted Kurukshetra, believes that the soaps are only mirroring the hugely altered social landscape in which greed is among the strongest motivating forces today. “Greed is here, and we now acknowledge it openly. Even accept it. If you are not greedy, you can’t succeed. And life is governed by success.”
Karma, then, is for the birds. And has to do with the aspirations of a growing middle class. New money is pushing out the old, and with it, old values as well.
Most of the soaps are closely monitored, and the characteristics of the protagonists changed according to the audience response. For instance, Vinita Nanda explains that when her character Tara cries a lot, “the TRP (television ratings) goes down. She is supposed to be a fighter, and if she cries, not in public”.
People also identify with the dishonest characters, if they are successful. Says Anand Mahendroo who is producing Asman Se Aage and has directed Dekh Bhai Dekh. “The honest and nice one is referred to by viewers in letters as a chhakka, impotent. In fact, one of my characters says that she is the keep of a rich man and the audience loved this kind of honesty.”
| There are almost 500 pilots of soaps in search of a channel and score of others in the pipeline. |
If soaps do mirror society more faithfully than do films and TV sitcoms, then it’s obviously the youth who are now pulling the carpets from under tradition and the older generation.
“We should accept the young as they are. We should follow the young; they are the generation of tomorrow. Not Gandhiji ne kaha tha,” says producer Raman Kumar who is behind Tara, and has several soaps in various stages. Some of the new soaps are predominantly about young people such as Labellas, revolving around a university canteen.
Soaps, in fact, seem to be the preserve of the young. And they are certainly the new schools for training TV writers, actors and directors. Kushan Nandy, who directs Yudh, for instance, is 21, and not a university graduate. Tanuja Chandra who is directing many episodes of Plus Channel’s Zameen Asman is in her early 20s. As is Imesh Reshmaiya, screen writer and one of the producers of Andaz.
The young breed may have taken over soapland and infused it with energy. But soap operas are still being churned out on a hit and miss basis, with scripts being written on location, locations being found at the last minute, and cassettes being ready moments before the flights to Delhi.
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Science & Environment
Book review: Irene Frain’s ‘Phoolan’
Phoolan
By Irene Frain
Lotus Collection, Roli Books
Pages:
404
Price:Rs 125
In one respect, at least, reconstructing Phoolan Devi’s story is a bit like trying to produce a faithful account of India: almost any claim you make about things that matter can immediately, and sometimes convincingly, be contradicted.
There are no precise, clear and well-defined outlines to Phoolan’s sensational life and career, important episodes are blurred by differing versions, and her temperament is difficult to pin down. Whereas these factors may be true of many public figures, most of them haven’t led a life like hers.
That is what exerts so powerful an attraction to her story for writers and film-makers, other than the bare facts of a low caste child bride, waylaid into a life of sexual abuse and violent crime, who fought back.
The themes of survival in the face of oppression and adversity, a woman reordering the rules laid down by men, and the outlaw becoming a cult figure – all these contain elements of the legendary embossed upon the ordinary. Until Phoolan Devi gives us the authorised version – now in the works – her story will remain open to interpretation.
And so long as her suit against the controversial film Bandit Queen unfolds in Indian courts – even while it wins plaudits around the world – those interpretations will continue to sell. For, as is well known, one of the cynical rules of the market-place is that controversies help push sales.
Phoolan Devi: A life misinterpreted?
That must be the only reason why this book by a French journalist should suddenly materialise to lure Indian readers who are otherwise quite up-to-date on the Phoolan saga. A lot of it reads like fantasy and some of it is downright sleaze.
Irene Frain claims that she interviewed Phoolan Devi in Gwalior jail (this is likely) but Phoolan says she has no memory of the meeting as she met many foreign journalists during her 11 long years there. But to cover her tracks and as a safety measure against possible legal action, Frain disguises her book as partial fiction.
It is Frain’s interpretation of Phoolan’s life, “my own perception of her reality”. This apparently provides her with free-ranging opportunities to overlook chunks of Phoolan’s life, introduce torrid love scenes, invent dialogue and situations and take liberties with elementary facts and conventions. Phoolan is referred to as “Devi” throughout and on occasion as “Madame”. Her rapists, Lal Ram and Sri Ram, are nicknamed “Boss” and “Tool Box”.
|
Excerpt Standing on one leg, her forehead wrinkled in deep concentration, she continued to pumice the inside of her thighs. A cluster of bubbles from the shirt flowed towards her. She raised her eyes towards the track. Huddled up at the bottom of the steep slope, Kailash felt her bold gaze on him. She didn’t try to hide herself. She threw down her pumice stone and turned to face him. Then she snapped in a husky voice: “Give me the soap!” Within five minutes they had made love. |
She is portrayed as a killer in the Behmai massacre (a charge Phoolan has consistently denied and one that so far remains unproven) and a man-eating seductress at other times.
Vikram Mallah, her one-time fellow gangster and lover, is turned into a lovesick Romeo and their affair into a mushy women’s magazine serial.
Phoolan’s gang-rape is ineptly handled, its horror is tinged with farce: “… all she could remember about him was his smell, that of Thakur curry mingled with the stench of perspiration”.
In such a remorseless and revolting fashion does Frain grind on, that the reader may wonder whether there is any standard at all to compare her yarn-spinning ability with.
Indeed, there is. Till such time as Phoolan Devi’s own version is published, Mala Sen’s book remains the most thorough and honourable work on Phoolan Devi’s life.
For the irony is that although Sen is now a defendant in Phoolan’s suit against Bandit Queen, it is in her role as the film’s screenplay writer and not as the author of the book on which the film is based.
The injunction exists against the film in India, not against this or any other book. In fact, one of the points Phoolan’s petition makes is that the film is not faithful to the book, thereby acknowledging the book’s authenticity.
Why then did Frain rush in where others have trodden so warily? There can only be one explanation for her going so far astray: the smell of money.
— ENDS —
Science & Environment
Science & Environment
Book review of Civil Lines: New Writing from India
Civil Lines: New Writing from India
Edited ByRukun Advani, Ivan Hutnik, Mukul Kesavan and Dharma Kumar
Ravi Dayal Publisher
Pages:
164
Price:Rs 90
I was told, when sent this new magazine, that “it was a bit likeGranta“. It is not very much likeGranta, except that it is a book length magazine and, as its role model often is, loosely thematic in its material.
There are seven prose pieces here, most of them autobiographical in one way or another. Why it should have required four editors, Rukun Advani, Ivan Hutnik, Mukul Kesavan, and Dharma Kumar, to assemble them is beyond me.
Two of the contributions are excerpts from books soon to appear: Allan Sealy writes, rather disappointingly, about travels in the American south-west and Khushwant Singh offers two fragments from his autobiography.
Amitav Ghosh muses upon the Indian short story and Bill Aitken on ecology; but for my money the three best pieces in this first issue are by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on his adolescence, Radha Kumar on her brief imprisonment – she seems to have been arrested by mistake – in Bhopal after the Union Carbide tragedy, and Ramachandra Guha on his experiences with Calcutta Marxists.
All the pieces in the magazine are workmanlike, none is badly written but none of them has the surprise element one sometimes finds in contributions to Granta. None of them could be called literature. They are journalism, all seven of them; but journalism of a much higher order than that normally found in Indian magazines.
Each is written in a low key, but also in an individual voice. Journalism only needs to be preserved when it is very good, and I think several of these pieces are. But, put together in this way, they do not add up to that delicate and subtle artefact, a literary magazine. The title is brilliant but the totality of the contents is not.
It seems a pity, particularly since this is the first issue, and the concept of the magazine is excellent and adventurous. Ravi Dayal has some claim to be called the first quality publisher in India, or perhaps more accurately, the first person who aspires to be a quality publisher. Civil Lines aspires to be a quality magazine.
The only reason that this first issue does not measure up to this aspiration is that it is unexciting. I said that the contributions are workmanlike: this implies honest labour rather than brilliance. They are readable, but there is nothing that stands out, or leaps out of the type-face to startle one.
Nobody looking for literature is likely to be greatly benefited by Civil Lines. The introduction to this issue leads off rather endearingly, “Civil Lines hopes to appear irregularly….Twice a year for a start”, and continues to say that “anything at all that the editors believe will endure” will be published.
In other words, the magazine hopes to become a miscellany, a rag-bag, which is what the better literary magazines have always been like.
This issue suffers, perhaps, from not being a rag-bag. The contributions are too even in tone and pace. What one also misses, despite there being four editors, is an editorial presence. This may in fact be because there are four editors: too many cooks, and so forth.
Good literary magazines have always been good because of their editors. The more quirky and idiosyncratic they have been, the better the magazine is, at least as a general rule. To have four editors for an issue that contains only seven contributions, not only sounds, but is, a bit silly to start with.
Furthermore, to edit by committee, as it were, would prevent any magazine from finding its own identity. And there is one other comment to be made about the first issue of this new venture. The only writer in it whose name is unfamiliar to me is Radha Kumar, and so I do not know how old she is.
But all the other writers have had time to make reputations of one kind or another. That is to say, they are not young. A literary magazine ought by its nature to provide a platform for young writers; and I have not seen many in India which do. The editors, when asked, have told me that there aren’t any, and if true this is very sad. Perhaps Civil Lines will have more luck in finding them.
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Science & Environment
Expatriates film life of Indians in US
Knowing Her Place: sensitive portrayal
It’s the success story of the Indian expatriate in the US which today hogs much of the media coverage in India. Especially in its more recent romancing-the-NRI phase. Well groomed, with their perfect Colgate smiles and hair in place, they appear the picture of confidence which comes from having arrived. East and West, the twain have met quite comfortably in their person, thank you.
Seldom does the price of getting there – more like not getting there – or what’s going on behind those sunny smiles get so much media hype. The festival of feature films and documentaries made by Americans of Indian descent being screened this fortnight in Delhi and Bombay, goes a long way in filling those gaps.
Entitled “From India to America: New Directions in Indian American Film & Video”, the festival is being presented by the Smita Patil Foundation, the Indo-US Subcommission on Education and Culture and the Whitney Museum of American Art. These films – five features, 22 documentaries and short films – were shown at the Whitney Museum in October this year.
The portrait painted of the Indian abroad, in many instances the Innocents Abroad, is riveting – even though many of the films are painfully amateurish and self-consciously experimental. Home movie-ish really.
There are, of course, works by wellknown film makers such as Ismail Merchant (early works such as Mahatma and the Mad Boy and his Courtesans of Bombay as well as the more recent In Custody] and several films by Mira Nair, before and after Salaam Bombay. In fact, her earlier films about Indians adjusting to living between two worlds are fascinating precursors of what many Indians were to do later.
There’s also a charming comedy by David Rathod, West is West, a film about a young man’s pursuit of the Green Card in San Francisco, as well as Barry Alexander Brown’s Lonely in America, a romantic comedy about an Indian student’s quest of the American dream.
| “The festival has unearthed a number of film makers who are using cinema to explore their identities.” |
But the revelation of the festival is really the large number of young and emerging independent Asian American film makers who are using cinema to explore their indentities and chart the immigrant experience. Incidentally, they also offer a different prism to see contemporary America through what has long been a European prerogative.
Taken as a whole, the films are a kind of collective autobiography of Indians abroad – whether they are fresh immigrants, first or second generation Indians, of mixed parentage, or merely Indians on the back-to-the-roots trip.
The catchy acronym A.B.C.D. – America Born Confused Desi – says it beautifully. Many of the films are rather painful explorations of the process of integration into an alien host society. Among the more accomplished and gripping films (since the feature films were not previewed, they are not included in this article) is Indu Krishnan’s Knowing Her Place.
In the 40-minute video made a couple of years ago, Krishnan sensitively explores the “cultural schizophrenia” of Vasu, a Tamil housewife in Queens who is outwardly a picture of oriental calm, but within is undergoing an identity crisis so intense that she actually tries to kill herself a few weeks after one of the first interviews in the film. What is remarkable is that without being voyeuristic the film shows us what is happening internally to the protagonist.
The film, made over a period of about three years, takes us back and forth from Madras to Queens, as Vasu shuttles between the two worlds. In Madras, with her mother and grandmother and friends, she slips easily into a heavy Tamil accent – even her body language and vocabulary change.
In the States, it’s not only the ease with which she speaks with a typically East Coast accent, it’s her thought process, and attitude which undergo a dramatic change. Vasu was born and spent the first 12 years of her life in the States, after which she returned to Madras. Married at 16, she went back to the US with her husband who is a professor of mathematics.
The am-I-Indian-or-American question, which seems to have been her undoing and is always on her mind now, began to intrude upon her external life much later. And what gives this film its moments of great drama are the family scenes, especially a thanksgiving dinner with her husband and two teenaged sons who are oblivious of what is happening to her.
Taken for granted as the silent provider, she is even looked down upon as still being concerned with tradition and yoked emotionally to the home country.
There must be hundreds of expatriate mothers of teenaged children like Vasu who somewhere in their being feel Indian and cannot reconcile themselves to their American children.
Meena Nanji’s 15-minute video, Voices of Morning, also probes what happens to an Asian woman in America. In this case, it is really the predicament of second generation Asian women caught between tradition (tyranically conservative families and religion) and the “liberal world” outside. But too self-conscious and over reliant on special effects and the unlimited possibilities of video, the film doesn’t achieve much.
Similarily, Taxivala, a 45-minute video by Vivek Renjen Bald, never really gets to its destination because of the video experiments and the eccentric camera of its maker. A fascinating subject – the lives and experiences of South Asian tax- drivers in New York city – is almost lost because of the cinematic treatment.
For long moments of the film, we only have a taxi meter’s eye view (and it’s not even turning) of the city, often without the face of the driver. Bald, like many of the other young film makers, seems to be using his camera to find out more about himself as an Indian American (his mother is Indian).
Unlike Krishnan’s film, Bald is looking at the new immigrant – those who came in the ’80s, unlike other earlier migrants who came to America as professionals. The film looks at the racism of white Americans and of the police.
Bald (above); and Rathod’s West is West pursuing the American dream
But the interesting aspect is the uneasy relationship between Indians and blacks who feel that Indians are prejudiced against them. A subject that Nair examined at length inMississippi Masala,which will also be screened.
Balvinder Dhenjan’s What Are Our Women Like in America and Keshini Kashyap and Dharini Rasiah’s A Crackin the Mannequin: South Asian Working Women in America also show the immigrant experience, though there is too much of the workshop feel to their short videos.
Dhenjan’s film is about a young Punjabi agog in the sexual jungle in an American city, but the humour is a bit forced. The other film is a potentially fascinating one about how young second generation women look at their mothers who are moulded into their roles.
Prem Kalliat emerges as one of the film makers to watch. His journey is not the inward one in America, but to India. Not quite the back-to-roots exercise though. He looks at esoteric aspects of India in two films. Injareena: Portrait of a Hijda, the camera seems to have penetrated into the very secret world of the community of transvestites and hijdas in Bangalore.
Kalliat follows Suresh, a young transvestite from his village in Trivandrum, where he is a pleasant young, jeans-clad man devoted to his family and called father by his nephews and the “Haman”, his family of hijdas in Bangalore.
What is astounding about the film is the footage, the complete lack of inhibition of the hijdas. They allow themselves to be filmed completely naked: there’s an unforgettable sequence of one of them disrobing and then dancing while explaining what it is to be a woman.
They are shown performing their initiation rites. It’s almost as if the film makers had been totally accepted in the community. There’s even a scene showing a bit of their business: giving massages and a bit of “enjoyment”.
| “Even though many of the films are quite amateurish, the overall portrait of the Indian abroad is riveting.” |
Kalliat’s other short film, Kalari Clan, is about women who practice the ancient martial art of Kalari Payattu, which was traditionally the preserve of men. Now used as a form of self-defence and a sort of feminist statement, the film also delves into the myths surrounding this and includes interesting clips from a film based on the first woman to practise Kalari Payattu.
All together, the films show the other side of the American dream, and in the end one is tempted to conclude that the twain do meet, though uncomfortably, in the Indian abroad.
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Science & Environment
Book review: Ranga Rao’s ‘The Drunk Tantra’
The Drunk Tantra
By Ranga Rao
Penguin
Pages:
240
Price:Rs 100
In the colourful spectrum of fiction offered regularly by India’s publishing houses there was always space for a campus novel. For some time one had awaited a riotous, savagely funny work a la Kingsley Amis, Tom Sharpe or David Lodge.
What was also fairly obvious was it would have to be written by a wry teacher of Eng Lit. Ranga Rao’s The Drunk Tantra was thus in most ways the novel that lovers of Lucky Jim or Changing Places were waiting for.
The setting is Janayya College (popularly nicknamed ‘St Jaans’) and the protagonist young Mohana on her first teaching assignment, a greenhorn among the hardened cynics of the college faculty. The book, in short, is a picaresque tale of her journey through the labyrinths of academia, her commentary (and Rao’s) on the dismal state of learning in this country from Patna to Palghat.
Obviously a novel like this has to be based on character stereotypes – the freshness of a Mohana set next to the repulsive Hairy, the fecund Fertility Goddess, the gentle Daash and the hard and brassy Mrs. Mocham. The plot has to similarly follow the rites of college life – exams, seminars, strikes.
Rao, like others writing campus novels before him, has to tread this territory warily – one false step and you fall into the pit of sanctimonious moralising or face the terror of a plot where the stereotypes elope with the tale.
Rao avoids both these fates. What happens is, however, quite as bizarre. The novel becomes bloodless, lapsing into pre-Rushdie English and ultimately, a dead bore. So you have people who say “Please be seated” to one another and a dying speech where the Mahatma of the campus, Dr. Daash says, “I am a theist…God is other people.”
No one speaks like that anymore, without sounding limp. So the language Rao uses actually demolishes his characters where it should have built them.
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Excerpt What a spectacle! Hairy seems to be all over the |
Any person who has taught in a University or a college, or any one who has recently attended one, would testify to a tremendous change that is taking place in the sounds emanating from the campus. Rukun Advani describes this as an extension of Kooler Talk lingo, for it is a strange, often obnoxious, version of Wimpy slang and desi ghee.
Rao’s ear is deaf to these colourful phrases and half-expressions, something that one can hear in his choosing to call a Janayya college St. Jaans. There should be a ‘laa’ against people writing campus novels without passing a language test first.
But where does all this leave young Mohana, the tender green sapling in a dying forest of ancient oaks? My last glimpse was of her re-enacting a scene out of A Suitable Boy – her mother crying quietly, saying as Rupa Mehra said in another world at another time, “What are you doing to yourself?..If only he had been alive today, he would have found a fine boy for you…”
If you want to find out what happened to the lusty Hairy or solve the mystery of Begum Pura, perhaps you might finish the book. Many would balk at the thought of wading through the opaque folds of Rao’s plot. And who can blame them?
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