(This was a blogs-for-beginners story, written in a hurry for The Kolkata Telegraph; published on Saturday, July 9, 2005).
"More than the newspapers, more than the many films shot every year in Calcutta, it’s the blogs that bring me the real news, of a city that is shifting shape in strange and interesting ways, home to expatriates from Cambridge and diehard Mohun Bagan fans, activists and passionate poets, sad old Bongs with a flair for the language and brash new Tolkien-obsessed gamesters. The adda never died; it just moved online."
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Speaking Volumes: Five ideas of India
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, July 5, 2005)
The problem with telling history as though it were a story is that some stories always end up being more influential than others. I can think of four in particular that are told about contemporary India in Rashomon style; all four, in varying degrees, are inaccurate, and all four have caused lasting damage.
The first is the sanitized history of India told by textbooks, sanctified by official approval, and given the blessings of the people in power. In this version, historical figures have as much reality as the smudged images on those pictorial charts we used to cut-and-paste into our schoolbooks, and no more freedom of movement. Netaji is caught for posterity with his arm upraised, calling an army of idealists to action; but that is all his story.
In the official version, it cannot be admitted that Netaji Bose is dead, or that he may have died years ago, just as nothing can be admitted of Gandhi's odder experiments and the cracks in his vision of India lest it tarnish the image of him on the Dandi March. In this version, it is not possible to allow a leader like Advani to express his real views on Jinnah without rebuttal and censorship from the members of his own party, and tremendous discomfort and confusion from members of other political organisations. This is a tin-whistle history, a cartoon history that has no room for nuance or ambiguity, where India's shining past must be appealed to even as its great future is invoked, without regard to the reality of one or the other.
The second is the history of historians, a nuanced, detailed story told with footnotes and references that suffers from being largely inaccessible to the people whose history it is supposed to be. When it comes to explaining India and delving into the country's past, or even exploring the question of when an entity like India actually came into being, the historians have the answers. But these are not easily shared with even students and the reading public, the two relatively privileged sections of society for whom these stories might be accessible. It takes eons for "news" from the world of history to leak into official textbooks, and glacial ages for new developments to become part of the general story Indians tell themselves about their country.
The third is the history that the Hindutva rightwing parties so recently tried to superimpose on the official narrative of modern India, which is a shrunken, simplified, often glaringly inaccurate history of a Hindu country ravaged by Muslim invaders, now seeking to rebuild itself from the ashes and return to the shining glories of a nebulous past. This is a tempting history because it is so accessible, so easily told; its lack of reliance on a basis of fact and its ability to press myths and legends into service as though they were fact makes it a racy, colourful narrative. This history relies on simplifications, where the past becomes a battleground between Us and Them, where the future is always glorious, if we only keep faith in the story and the storytellers. It can be very seductive--once you dispense with the facts, all that's left is a story and a promise—but with stories like this, someone, somewhere down the line, will eventually pay for what has been omitted, fabricated or glossed over.
The fourth is the version that authors like V S Naipaul have been so successful in putting forward before the world and buttressing with apparent scholarship. Naipaul's writings on India have often been so prescient, compelling and incisive that he is much harder to refute than the average ill-informed roadside demagogue. His vision of India is of a wounded civilization, irrevocably, terribly damaged by succeeding waves of invasion, now seeking refuge in a denial of the past.
Last year, William Dalrymple took apart the Vijayanagara moment, a key emotional passage in Naipaul's work where he describes standing amid the ruins of Hampi. Naipaul's views on the fall of Vijayanagar have been widely reported; he saw it as an emblem of the destruction of "Ancient Hindu India", a scar caused by multiple invasions on the psyche of India. Dalrymple's argument was scholarly and carefully deliberated, and he drew attention to the manner in which Naipaul's black-and-white view of the past was itself a distortion of medieval India.
Vijayanagar had a history where Hindu and Muslim culture fused in complex and intertwined ways, but this history, Dalrymple regretted, was not the history Naipaul wanted to see: "This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term)…"
Dalrymple's argument was hysterically received by some of Naipaul's supporters; but it was founded on solid fact, unlike Naipaul's moving, but ultimately inaccurate, epiphany at Hampi. But Dalrymple set out to produce a viable argument, not an alternate history that was neither official and sanitized nor populist and incorrect.
That history has been written by several historians, but few have got to the point as rapidly and as incisively as Professor Amartya Sen in his collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian. Speaking of the initial, devastating wave of invasions, he observes dispassionately: "It would be as silly to deny the barbarities of the invasive history as it would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim presence in India." Later, in the same essay, he analyses the Hindutva movement's attempt to invent a plausible past: "This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India—proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present—and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism." The India that Sen offers to us, instead, is an India founded on a series of argumentative encounters, an India with room for a thousand conversations on the idea of India, with a home-grown democracy that was in place long before the British arrived.
This is a fifth story, told brilliantly and with the true intellectual's genuine blend of an insatiable curiosity—Sen's explorations of the idea of India take him through an examination of Ray, Tagore, gender and calendars, among other things—and an absolute respect for facts, for what really happened as opposed to what we would like to have happened. This is how history should be written, not as a dry narrative about dead kings or a hysterical diatribe pushing a certain agenda, but as an account of ideas and arguments that have been passed from hand to hand for years and that remain relevant even today. It's a strange reflection, but India might have found its most accessible, most intellectually stimulating historian in the person of a Nobel-Prize winning economist.
The problem with telling history as though it were a story is that some stories always end up being more influential than others. I can think of four in particular that are told about contemporary India in Rashomon style; all four, in varying degrees, are inaccurate, and all four have caused lasting damage.
The first is the sanitized history of India told by textbooks, sanctified by official approval, and given the blessings of the people in power. In this version, historical figures have as much reality as the smudged images on those pictorial charts we used to cut-and-paste into our schoolbooks, and no more freedom of movement. Netaji is caught for posterity with his arm upraised, calling an army of idealists to action; but that is all his story.
In the official version, it cannot be admitted that Netaji Bose is dead, or that he may have died years ago, just as nothing can be admitted of Gandhi's odder experiments and the cracks in his vision of India lest it tarnish the image of him on the Dandi March. In this version, it is not possible to allow a leader like Advani to express his real views on Jinnah without rebuttal and censorship from the members of his own party, and tremendous discomfort and confusion from members of other political organisations. This is a tin-whistle history, a cartoon history that has no room for nuance or ambiguity, where India's shining past must be appealed to even as its great future is invoked, without regard to the reality of one or the other.
The second is the history of historians, a nuanced, detailed story told with footnotes and references that suffers from being largely inaccessible to the people whose history it is supposed to be. When it comes to explaining India and delving into the country's past, or even exploring the question of when an entity like India actually came into being, the historians have the answers. But these are not easily shared with even students and the reading public, the two relatively privileged sections of society for whom these stories might be accessible. It takes eons for "news" from the world of history to leak into official textbooks, and glacial ages for new developments to become part of the general story Indians tell themselves about their country.
The third is the history that the Hindutva rightwing parties so recently tried to superimpose on the official narrative of modern India, which is a shrunken, simplified, often glaringly inaccurate history of a Hindu country ravaged by Muslim invaders, now seeking to rebuild itself from the ashes and return to the shining glories of a nebulous past. This is a tempting history because it is so accessible, so easily told; its lack of reliance on a basis of fact and its ability to press myths and legends into service as though they were fact makes it a racy, colourful narrative. This history relies on simplifications, where the past becomes a battleground between Us and Them, where the future is always glorious, if we only keep faith in the story and the storytellers. It can be very seductive--once you dispense with the facts, all that's left is a story and a promise—but with stories like this, someone, somewhere down the line, will eventually pay for what has been omitted, fabricated or glossed over.
The fourth is the version that authors like V S Naipaul have been so successful in putting forward before the world and buttressing with apparent scholarship. Naipaul's writings on India have often been so prescient, compelling and incisive that he is much harder to refute than the average ill-informed roadside demagogue. His vision of India is of a wounded civilization, irrevocably, terribly damaged by succeeding waves of invasion, now seeking refuge in a denial of the past.
Last year, William Dalrymple took apart the Vijayanagara moment, a key emotional passage in Naipaul's work where he describes standing amid the ruins of Hampi. Naipaul's views on the fall of Vijayanagar have been widely reported; he saw it as an emblem of the destruction of "Ancient Hindu India", a scar caused by multiple invasions on the psyche of India. Dalrymple's argument was scholarly and carefully deliberated, and he drew attention to the manner in which Naipaul's black-and-white view of the past was itself a distortion of medieval India.
Vijayanagar had a history where Hindu and Muslim culture fused in complex and intertwined ways, but this history, Dalrymple regretted, was not the history Naipaul wanted to see: "This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term)…"
Dalrymple's argument was hysterically received by some of Naipaul's supporters; but it was founded on solid fact, unlike Naipaul's moving, but ultimately inaccurate, epiphany at Hampi. But Dalrymple set out to produce a viable argument, not an alternate history that was neither official and sanitized nor populist and incorrect.
That history has been written by several historians, but few have got to the point as rapidly and as incisively as Professor Amartya Sen in his collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian. Speaking of the initial, devastating wave of invasions, he observes dispassionately: "It would be as silly to deny the barbarities of the invasive history as it would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim presence in India." Later, in the same essay, he analyses the Hindutva movement's attempt to invent a plausible past: "This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India—proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present—and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism." The India that Sen offers to us, instead, is an India founded on a series of argumentative encounters, an India with room for a thousand conversations on the idea of India, with a home-grown democracy that was in place long before the British arrived.
This is a fifth story, told brilliantly and with the true intellectual's genuine blend of an insatiable curiosity—Sen's explorations of the idea of India take him through an examination of Ray, Tagore, gender and calendars, among other things—and an absolute respect for facts, for what really happened as opposed to what we would like to have happened. This is how history should be written, not as a dry narrative about dead kings or a hysterical diatribe pushing a certain agenda, but as an account of ideas and arguments that have been passed from hand to hand for years and that remain relevant even today. It's a strange reflection, but India might have found its most accessible, most intellectually stimulating historian in the person of a Nobel-Prize winning economist.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Business Standard column: Books Do Furnish a City
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, June 28, 2005)
Somewhere on my bookshelves, there's a collection of modern verse that cost me Rs 15, three plates of papri chaat, one back massage and a paper on Jane Austen. It's a thick volume, dense with marginalia in four different sets of handwriting. It started with Eliot and Yeats, which was where the Eng. Lit. syllabus of a decade ago stopped, and took us into what was then new, wildly exciting, uncharted territory with the poetry of Symborska, Brodsky, Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish.
The four of us were regular visitors to the Sunday book bazaar held at Daryaganj: we were too broke to have more than a passing acquaintance with proper bookstores, but too hungry for books, in that pre- Amazon.com, pre-liberalisation era, to withstand the siren call of the pavement booksellers.
When our pockets were to let, we browsed hungrily and wistfully (and became extremely proficient speedreaders as a consequence). When we had the money, we greedily weighed the merits of Faulkner versus Nabokov, Faiz versus Ghalib, an Asimov compendium in tatters versus a single Arthur C Clarke novel in good condition. We met friends doing the rounds; some only in search of calendar art pictures with which to decorate their rooms (now considered high kitsch art, but in our day they were just garish wallpaper), some in search of a Ludlum or Richard Bach, some penniless seekers after the truth according to Pinker or Chomsky. We cultivated professors who might be induced to point us to rare finds and curiosities, most of these culled from the decaying libraries of the Raj. There was usually enough left over for us to end the morning's outing with a visit to Old and Famous Jalebiwala or Parathewala Galli, relics of a pre-Barista age.
The compendium of verse was expensive, and we were ten rupees short. R and J shrugged and suggested that we come back next week. S and I argued that we'd spent the month's allowance anyway; next week we'd be even more broke. Then the bookseller, a dour man who had watched unmoved as we scrabbled for loose change, said gruffly, "Poetry ke liye discount hai."
He took our money; we took the book and hitched a ride back home, because we had spent even the bus fare. It took me three months to buy out my co-owners, but it was a soft deal: we agreed that they could borrow the book back at need. J consulted it for love poetry he could crib and pass off as his own to impressionable girlfriends, R read the three poems by Rilke included in the collection and then saved up for four months until he could afford an entire Rilke compendium, S discovered a love of feminist poetry through Plath and others that eventually impelled her to apply to the US for further studies in feminist writings.
It's hard to convey what the Sunday book bazaar, and the pavement booksellers in Connaught Place meant to us. There were no mass-market chains like Crossword or the Corner Bookstore; the Bookshop and the Bookworm were landmarks in a city that lacked quality bookshops, but were too expensive for us to patronise in those days. Some of us had come from other cities—Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore. We knew the pavement booksellers there, whether "there" was College Street or Flora Fountain. Even today, when many markets in Delhi have at least one bookshop, and Café Coffee Day sells books along with its lattes and frappes, those pavement sellers are often a student's first lessons in paper-and-print love.
Last month, Bombay's pavement booksellers were turfed out of the Flora Fountain area by an administration that sees no difference between them and illegal encroachers on public space. They have since been relocated, but not in Flora Fountain itself. This week, Delhi's Sunday book bazaar came under threat and there's still confusion over what will happen to the bazaar—the system of issuing tokens to regular booksellers isn't working and the new space they have been allocated may not be adequate. It seems, at the time of writing, that they will be allowed to stay. In both Delhi and Bombay, the argument for throwing out the booksellers has been the one about "public space". The Sunday book bazaar was under threat of closure because a "beautification drive" was in progress.
And I'm thinking, what better use of public space could you have than to use it as a vast and mobile library? Neither Bombay nor Delhi has decent public libraries; Bombay, for all its size, sprawl and energy, doesn't have the number of bookshops it needs to encourage a reading public.
A visit to a bookshop is a deliberate, planned affair; a stroll down sidewalks covered with books is serendipity at work. A book bazaar is for readers who might be too intimidated or too broke or too busy to step into a bookshop: it doesn't just belong in public space, it is in the best sense of the term, the public's very own space. We shouldn't be reduced to defending pavement booksellers; we should be demanding more areas, in this mall-ridden city, where you can buy jalebis and hankies alongside ideas and excitement.
Somewhere on my bookshelves, there's a collection of modern verse that cost me Rs 15, three plates of papri chaat, one back massage and a paper on Jane Austen. It's a thick volume, dense with marginalia in four different sets of handwriting. It started with Eliot and Yeats, which was where the Eng. Lit. syllabus of a decade ago stopped, and took us into what was then new, wildly exciting, uncharted territory with the poetry of Symborska, Brodsky, Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish.
The four of us were regular visitors to the Sunday book bazaar held at Daryaganj: we were too broke to have more than a passing acquaintance with proper bookstores, but too hungry for books, in that pre- Amazon.com, pre-liberalisation era, to withstand the siren call of the pavement booksellers.
When our pockets were to let, we browsed hungrily and wistfully (and became extremely proficient speedreaders as a consequence). When we had the money, we greedily weighed the merits of Faulkner versus Nabokov, Faiz versus Ghalib, an Asimov compendium in tatters versus a single Arthur C Clarke novel in good condition. We met friends doing the rounds; some only in search of calendar art pictures with which to decorate their rooms (now considered high kitsch art, but in our day they were just garish wallpaper), some in search of a Ludlum or Richard Bach, some penniless seekers after the truth according to Pinker or Chomsky. We cultivated professors who might be induced to point us to rare finds and curiosities, most of these culled from the decaying libraries of the Raj. There was usually enough left over for us to end the morning's outing with a visit to Old and Famous Jalebiwala or Parathewala Galli, relics of a pre-Barista age.
The compendium of verse was expensive, and we were ten rupees short. R and J shrugged and suggested that we come back next week. S and I argued that we'd spent the month's allowance anyway; next week we'd be even more broke. Then the bookseller, a dour man who had watched unmoved as we scrabbled for loose change, said gruffly, "Poetry ke liye discount hai."
He took our money; we took the book and hitched a ride back home, because we had spent even the bus fare. It took me three months to buy out my co-owners, but it was a soft deal: we agreed that they could borrow the book back at need. J consulted it for love poetry he could crib and pass off as his own to impressionable girlfriends, R read the three poems by Rilke included in the collection and then saved up for four months until he could afford an entire Rilke compendium, S discovered a love of feminist poetry through Plath and others that eventually impelled her to apply to the US for further studies in feminist writings.
It's hard to convey what the Sunday book bazaar, and the pavement booksellers in Connaught Place meant to us. There were no mass-market chains like Crossword or the Corner Bookstore; the Bookshop and the Bookworm were landmarks in a city that lacked quality bookshops, but were too expensive for us to patronise in those days. Some of us had come from other cities—Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore. We knew the pavement booksellers there, whether "there" was College Street or Flora Fountain. Even today, when many markets in Delhi have at least one bookshop, and Café Coffee Day sells books along with its lattes and frappes, those pavement sellers are often a student's first lessons in paper-and-print love.
Last month, Bombay's pavement booksellers were turfed out of the Flora Fountain area by an administration that sees no difference between them and illegal encroachers on public space. They have since been relocated, but not in Flora Fountain itself. This week, Delhi's Sunday book bazaar came under threat and there's still confusion over what will happen to the bazaar—the system of issuing tokens to regular booksellers isn't working and the new space they have been allocated may not be adequate. It seems, at the time of writing, that they will be allowed to stay. In both Delhi and Bombay, the argument for throwing out the booksellers has been the one about "public space". The Sunday book bazaar was under threat of closure because a "beautification drive" was in progress.
And I'm thinking, what better use of public space could you have than to use it as a vast and mobile library? Neither Bombay nor Delhi has decent public libraries; Bombay, for all its size, sprawl and energy, doesn't have the number of bookshops it needs to encourage a reading public.
A visit to a bookshop is a deliberate, planned affair; a stroll down sidewalks covered with books is serendipity at work. A book bazaar is for readers who might be too intimidated or too broke or too busy to step into a bookshop: it doesn't just belong in public space, it is in the best sense of the term, the public's very own space. We shouldn't be reduced to defending pavement booksellers; we should be demanding more areas, in this mall-ridden city, where you can buy jalebis and hankies alongside ideas and excitement.
Business Standard column: The authorised version
(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, June 21, 2005)
One way of reading the two great epics of this country is to see the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as piercingly, ferociously honest family autobiographies. With the Ramayana , there are many versions, so many that the true story is impossible to lose permanently: some versions might choose to portray Sita as a pliant, silent wife, but others have unchained her voice, choosing to retain her anger as well as her obedience, castigation of Rama when he asks her to submit to a test of purity. You might privilege one reading or one version above another, but the true story is there for those who wish to look for it.
In both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , little is omitted of the secret sins, sorrows and vices of the many members of the clans, from the weakness of kings to the greed of queens, from the mistake made by a young girl that will separate the sixth Pandava from his brothers to Yudhisthira’s fatal flaw to the complex blend of wisdom, arrogance and acquisitiveness in Ravana’s character. You read the epics for their indelible literary qualities, for the debates over the nature of dharma and wisdom; but you also read them, in part, as the wrenching, true story of families torn apart by complex forces. No character’s virtues are omitted, no vices glossed over.
The epics are still read in a way that few of their literary counterparts can match: Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales aren’t woven into the fabric of contemporary England, the great Norse sagas are still read but they are not part of the common memory in the way of our epics. Given that they are still so much part of our everyday life, our stock of metaphor and wisdom, it’s strange that we don’t follow the honesty of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana when we write in an autobiographical vein.
Business biographies usually gloss over the true histories; the memoirs of politicians and bureaucrats are often a trifle more honest about the working lives of their writers, but usually reticent about the personal life. The autobiographies of well-known Indians in the sphere of the arts have, by contrast, an appearance of frankness: but the candour is usually not complete. The careful reader can see the omissions; the knowledgeable reader can often supply the truth—there are few biographies and memoirs, though, where the reader doesn’t have to read between the lines.
There are strong social and cultural prohibitions on speaking out, on letting the skeletons, the mad cousins and the molesting uncles, out of the closet. Even authors who feel they have earned the freedom to speak openly of their own lives find it difficult, in the Indian context, to tell the true stories of their families. Perhaps this is because we balance a general disregard for the privacy of the individual with an obsessive concern for the privacy of the clan, unlike the tellers of the true and unexpurgated family history of the Pandavas and the Bharatas.
Two recent exercises in biography, one Indian, one Turkish, made me explore the idea of what makes up a memoir more thoroughly. The first, Diddi , was planned by Ira Pande as a memoir of her mother, the well-known writer Shivani. Instead of writing a conventional biography, she blended her translations of her mother’s writings with personal memoir to create a book that is almost more honest than a straightforward memoir might have been.
One of Pande’s biggest problems was created by an apparent abundance of material, in Shivani’s writings about her life, which were compellingly honest but told only a fraction of the truth.
In Ira Pande’s words: “Diddi’s vivid childhood memories are as deeply frustrating as they are compelling. The wall she erected around her life and fears is impenetrable and guards a kingdom where she will grant entry very reluctantly, if at all. In contrast to her evocative pictures of Lohaniji, Henry Pant, Alakh Mai and Rajula is Diddi’s stubborn refusal to confront the dark history of her own family, or indeed her own life. Her sharp eyes saw the shadows, yet she resolutely refused to expose the people she loved the most to ridicule or criticism. I think she sincerely hoped she could transform the nature of her past with the power of selective recall and that if she did not remember the unhappiness and doubts of her past, they would simply disappear. So she blotted out the sun by holding up a thumb…”
Pande’s response was to go back to Shivani’s writings—and to re-read them with the knowledge she now has of the family history, to identify not just characters who were familiar but the connections between a story and the period in which it was written. Because she fills in the context for the reader without pretending to tell the whole truth, we’re free to re-interpret Shivani’s life in a way that would have been denied us if Ira Pande had set down the same story as the absolute and the only truth. It’s an intelligent way of getting around the Indian discomfort with sharing family histories, and a way that’s just as respectful of the reader as it is of the subject.
Shortly after reading Diddi , I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul , which is a memoir of a city, a culture, a history and a childhood. Istanbul is a strange narrative, where Pamuk casts himself alternately as an unreliable narrator and as the perfect guide. But early on, he has a passage that might be read as a warning against expecting any autobiography of a person, a place, an era, to be the true and authentic version.
“...I feel compelled to add ‘or so I’ve been told’. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale that happened to concern some other person… Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.”
Perhaps another generation will rediscover the urgent candour of the narrators of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , who knew that the stories they were telling were too important to be told any other way but truthfully. Or more narrators, caught between loyalty and honesty, faced with the inevitable silences of families and the lack of records, will choose to use Ira Pande’s method of re-reading the old tales for new meanings. Until then, Indian memoirists might want to rework their book titles slightly, to read: “The Authorised Version (Or So I’ve Been Told)”.
One way of reading the two great epics of this country is to see the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as piercingly, ferociously honest family autobiographies. With the Ramayana , there are many versions, so many that the true story is impossible to lose permanently: some versions might choose to portray Sita as a pliant, silent wife, but others have unchained her voice, choosing to retain her anger as well as her obedience, castigation of Rama when he asks her to submit to a test of purity. You might privilege one reading or one version above another, but the true story is there for those who wish to look for it.
In both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , little is omitted of the secret sins, sorrows and vices of the many members of the clans, from the weakness of kings to the greed of queens, from the mistake made by a young girl that will separate the sixth Pandava from his brothers to Yudhisthira’s fatal flaw to the complex blend of wisdom, arrogance and acquisitiveness in Ravana’s character. You read the epics for their indelible literary qualities, for the debates over the nature of dharma and wisdom; but you also read them, in part, as the wrenching, true story of families torn apart by complex forces. No character’s virtues are omitted, no vices glossed over.
The epics are still read in a way that few of their literary counterparts can match: Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales aren’t woven into the fabric of contemporary England, the great Norse sagas are still read but they are not part of the common memory in the way of our epics. Given that they are still so much part of our everyday life, our stock of metaphor and wisdom, it’s strange that we don’t follow the honesty of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana when we write in an autobiographical vein.
Business biographies usually gloss over the true histories; the memoirs of politicians and bureaucrats are often a trifle more honest about the working lives of their writers, but usually reticent about the personal life. The autobiographies of well-known Indians in the sphere of the arts have, by contrast, an appearance of frankness: but the candour is usually not complete. The careful reader can see the omissions; the knowledgeable reader can often supply the truth—there are few biographies and memoirs, though, where the reader doesn’t have to read between the lines.
There are strong social and cultural prohibitions on speaking out, on letting the skeletons, the mad cousins and the molesting uncles, out of the closet. Even authors who feel they have earned the freedom to speak openly of their own lives find it difficult, in the Indian context, to tell the true stories of their families. Perhaps this is because we balance a general disregard for the privacy of the individual with an obsessive concern for the privacy of the clan, unlike the tellers of the true and unexpurgated family history of the Pandavas and the Bharatas.
Two recent exercises in biography, one Indian, one Turkish, made me explore the idea of what makes up a memoir more thoroughly. The first, Diddi , was planned by Ira Pande as a memoir of her mother, the well-known writer Shivani. Instead of writing a conventional biography, she blended her translations of her mother’s writings with personal memoir to create a book that is almost more honest than a straightforward memoir might have been.
One of Pande’s biggest problems was created by an apparent abundance of material, in Shivani’s writings about her life, which were compellingly honest but told only a fraction of the truth.
In Ira Pande’s words: “Diddi’s vivid childhood memories are as deeply frustrating as they are compelling. The wall she erected around her life and fears is impenetrable and guards a kingdom where she will grant entry very reluctantly, if at all. In contrast to her evocative pictures of Lohaniji, Henry Pant, Alakh Mai and Rajula is Diddi’s stubborn refusal to confront the dark history of her own family, or indeed her own life. Her sharp eyes saw the shadows, yet she resolutely refused to expose the people she loved the most to ridicule or criticism. I think she sincerely hoped she could transform the nature of her past with the power of selective recall and that if she did not remember the unhappiness and doubts of her past, they would simply disappear. So she blotted out the sun by holding up a thumb…”
Pande’s response was to go back to Shivani’s writings—and to re-read them with the knowledge she now has of the family history, to identify not just characters who were familiar but the connections between a story and the period in which it was written. Because she fills in the context for the reader without pretending to tell the whole truth, we’re free to re-interpret Shivani’s life in a way that would have been denied us if Ira Pande had set down the same story as the absolute and the only truth. It’s an intelligent way of getting around the Indian discomfort with sharing family histories, and a way that’s just as respectful of the reader as it is of the subject.
Shortly after reading Diddi , I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul , which is a memoir of a city, a culture, a history and a childhood. Istanbul is a strange narrative, where Pamuk casts himself alternately as an unreliable narrator and as the perfect guide. But early on, he has a passage that might be read as a warning against expecting any autobiography of a person, a place, an era, to be the true and authentic version.
“...I feel compelled to add ‘or so I’ve been told’. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale that happened to concern some other person… Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.”
Perhaps another generation will rediscover the urgent candour of the narrators of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , who knew that the stories they were telling were too important to be told any other way but truthfully. Or more narrators, caught between loyalty and honesty, faced with the inevitable silences of families and the lack of records, will choose to use Ira Pande’s method of re-reading the old tales for new meanings. Until then, Indian memoirists might want to rework their book titles slightly, to read: “The Authorised Version (Or So I’ve Been Told)”.
Play 'Honky Tonk Women' when it's my turn, ok?
At funerals, inevitably someone will look at the body laid out and whisper, “He looks so peaceful.” Or, “She looks as though she’s sleeping.” But this is not true, even when the dearly departed has died peacefully, of natural causes, in his sleep, whatever euphemism you want to use. Once you’ve seen the body of someone you loved, or liked, or perhaps just knew, laid out on the floor, covered with a white sheet, propped up on a bed of ice in summer, the jaw sometimes tied to hold it in place, the nostrils plugged with cotton wool, you know that it isn’t inhabited any longer. Most corpses look like newly vacant houses. Whoever was in there has moved, address undisclosed.
I find a kind of peace in this idea, along with the regret and the grief and the rest of it.
Placing an obituary in the newspaper is a distasteful experience. First there’s the compression of a person’s life into a few words: “retired” or “beloved teacher” or “obedient son”, none of which capture the really important stuff, that her eyes crinkle up at the edges when she laughs or he could remember every lyric The Sex Pistols wrote, or that he came back from office and told funny stories about the monkeys who throw government into disarray by stealing files from the building. Then there’s the few stilted phrases for grief: “deeply mourned”, “shall be missed”, “life will not be the same”, none of which capture what this really means, the number of times you start dialing a number and stop because the person you want to speak to will not be there at the other end, the devastation of the small, unimportant routines of the day that involved three people and now involve just two, the cupboard space now available after you’ve donated the clothes that you always needed and no longer want. None of this can go into the ad.
Then there’s the reduction of all of it to column inches and money. Rs 2,000 approx for a photograph and a few lines in a paper that doesn’t have all that much circulation in Delhi; so a second ad, hovering between Rs 8,000 (without photo) and Rs 10,000 (with photo) in a better-circulated paper. If you cut out the three lines from her favourite poem, the one her mother wanted you to include, it will fit within the budget, but then something else will have to be trimmed: the wreaths, perhaps. No one will notice the absence of a wreath.
Some families use death in the same way as they use weddings, as an occasion on which you show off your wealth, your status, your ability to spend Rs 50,000 or above on a quarter-page or half-page notice. The dead are good revenue-earners for newspapers. Not quite as good as the To-Let section, not half as good as the Matrimonials, but they pull in more every day than Missing Persons or Miscellaneous, though Massage Parlours do significantly better.
There’s the etiquette, at which we agnostic-atheists are sadly deficient. We take the rice that you’re supposed to sprinkle on the face of the departed in one hand, the right, not both; next time we’ll remember. We discuss the merits of Nigam Bodh versus Lodhi in terms of crematoriums. Nigam Bodh has the Yamuna running alongside, but the hall is gloomy, like a third-rate school auditorium with the stage awkwardly placed so that it’s always difficult bringing the body in on its bier. Lodhi has a neem tree outside, and stone benches on which you can sit and contemplate the sign that says “Moksha Marg” and then, slightly unnervingly: “Doorbhasha” and gives the phone number. I know it’s the number of the crematorium, but it feels like an invitation; make your last call to The Departed here, before he’s progressed all the way along Moksha Marg.
As we leave, someone opens a door in the wall and I see the plots laid out like empty flower beds, containing the ashes of the day, spread out to cool. On some days there are the ashes of several bodies in adjacent plots; today there’s a breeze, and some of the ashes from one plot dance in the air and are carried over to the next. I like that, the idea that in death we might finally live up to the creaky, pious hopes of a hundred stiff school tableaux promoting national integration; I like the idea that the ashes of the dead might get a little mixed up, without regard to gender or caste or class, just as those boring hum sab ek hai songs we sang in school had it.
I find a kind of peace in this idea, along with the regret and the grief and the rest of it.
Placing an obituary in the newspaper is a distasteful experience. First there’s the compression of a person’s life into a few words: “retired” or “beloved teacher” or “obedient son”, none of which capture the really important stuff, that her eyes crinkle up at the edges when she laughs or he could remember every lyric The Sex Pistols wrote, or that he came back from office and told funny stories about the monkeys who throw government into disarray by stealing files from the building. Then there’s the few stilted phrases for grief: “deeply mourned”, “shall be missed”, “life will not be the same”, none of which capture what this really means, the number of times you start dialing a number and stop because the person you want to speak to will not be there at the other end, the devastation of the small, unimportant routines of the day that involved three people and now involve just two, the cupboard space now available after you’ve donated the clothes that you always needed and no longer want. None of this can go into the ad.
Then there’s the reduction of all of it to column inches and money. Rs 2,000 approx for a photograph and a few lines in a paper that doesn’t have all that much circulation in Delhi; so a second ad, hovering between Rs 8,000 (without photo) and Rs 10,000 (with photo) in a better-circulated paper. If you cut out the three lines from her favourite poem, the one her mother wanted you to include, it will fit within the budget, but then something else will have to be trimmed: the wreaths, perhaps. No one will notice the absence of a wreath.
Some families use death in the same way as they use weddings, as an occasion on which you show off your wealth, your status, your ability to spend Rs 50,000 or above on a quarter-page or half-page notice. The dead are good revenue-earners for newspapers. Not quite as good as the To-Let section, not half as good as the Matrimonials, but they pull in more every day than Missing Persons or Miscellaneous, though Massage Parlours do significantly better.
There’s the etiquette, at which we agnostic-atheists are sadly deficient. We take the rice that you’re supposed to sprinkle on the face of the departed in one hand, the right, not both; next time we’ll remember. We discuss the merits of Nigam Bodh versus Lodhi in terms of crematoriums. Nigam Bodh has the Yamuna running alongside, but the hall is gloomy, like a third-rate school auditorium with the stage awkwardly placed so that it’s always difficult bringing the body in on its bier. Lodhi has a neem tree outside, and stone benches on which you can sit and contemplate the sign that says “Moksha Marg” and then, slightly unnervingly: “Doorbhasha” and gives the phone number. I know it’s the number of the crematorium, but it feels like an invitation; make your last call to The Departed here, before he’s progressed all the way along Moksha Marg.
As we leave, someone opens a door in the wall and I see the plots laid out like empty flower beds, containing the ashes of the day, spread out to cool. On some days there are the ashes of several bodies in adjacent plots; today there’s a breeze, and some of the ashes from one plot dance in the air and are carried over to the next. I like that, the idea that in death we might finally live up to the creaky, pious hopes of a hundred stiff school tableaux promoting national integration; I like the idea that the ashes of the dead might get a little mixed up, without regard to gender or caste or class, just as those boring hum sab ek hai songs we sang in school had it.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Book review: Surface
(Published in Outlook, June 2005)
[I admire people who can compress everything they want to say about a book like Surface into 300-odd words and walk away satisfied that they've addressed all the issues neatly and tidily. Me? I get five paragraphs, each worth their weight in gold in these days of shrinking print, and it still isn't enough: there was a lot about Surface that needed to be placed in context, queried, held up for closer scrutiny, etc etc, and no, this review didn't get the whole job done. Something tells me there's a reason why I'd never make it as an ad copywriter...]
Surface
Siddhartha Deb
Picador India
Rs 495, 262 pages
In his first novel, The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb wrote: "History, dragged so far from the metropolitan centres, from the rustic mainlands, will tell you nothing. In the North-East, the way I remember it, history lies defeated…"
The only possible protagonist for a novel set in a region where the past has no meaning is a man for whom the future holds no promise. Amrit, the narrator of Surface, is a journalist who has passed beyond discontentment to indifference. A stray "foreign contact" offers him a faint glimpse of redemption, if he can write "a portrait of the mystery and sorrow of India". It's an improvement on the first assignment he was offered, the story of shit in Calcutta: "a wonderful reduction of the city I lived in to one choice epithet". Now, more nobly, Amrit has to uncover the truth behind the photograph of a woman identified as a porn actress and paraded by an insurgent group in Imphal as a warning against immorality.
His journey is briefly interrupted by the tale, preserved in an old journal, of the suicide of Jim, a British soldier who saw action in Burma. Jim doesn't survive his discovery of the great secret of empire, how it's "wonderfully arranged, all straight lines and precise rules and stiff spines, and how that all becomes a big lie when you move to the edge of the empire and run loose in the jungle with guns and knives".
It's the only truth that Amrit will surface with, as he moves through a dismembered world of betrayals and lies: "…[The] region had been forgotten by the world, and in the absence of connections with what lay beyond, an entire society was trying to recreate itself from selected memories and incomplete knowledge."
Nothing is as it seems; the motives of the rebels, the story of the woman in the photograph, the promising foreign contact, even the shining hope held out by a mysterious effort called the Prosperity Project. There are no easy conclusions in Surface , just the dwindling prospect of redemption. And in the heart of this darkness, Deb finds a new set of horsemen for the apocalypse: dereliction, amnesia, corruption and apathy.
[I admire people who can compress everything they want to say about a book like Surface into 300-odd words and walk away satisfied that they've addressed all the issues neatly and tidily. Me? I get five paragraphs, each worth their weight in gold in these days of shrinking print, and it still isn't enough: there was a lot about Surface that needed to be placed in context, queried, held up for closer scrutiny, etc etc, and no, this review didn't get the whole job done. Something tells me there's a reason why I'd never make it as an ad copywriter...]
Surface
Siddhartha Deb
Picador India
Rs 495, 262 pages
In his first novel, The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb wrote: "History, dragged so far from the metropolitan centres, from the rustic mainlands, will tell you nothing. In the North-East, the way I remember it, history lies defeated…"
The only possible protagonist for a novel set in a region where the past has no meaning is a man for whom the future holds no promise. Amrit, the narrator of Surface, is a journalist who has passed beyond discontentment to indifference. A stray "foreign contact" offers him a faint glimpse of redemption, if he can write "a portrait of the mystery and sorrow of India". It's an improvement on the first assignment he was offered, the story of shit in Calcutta: "a wonderful reduction of the city I lived in to one choice epithet". Now, more nobly, Amrit has to uncover the truth behind the photograph of a woman identified as a porn actress and paraded by an insurgent group in Imphal as a warning against immorality.
His journey is briefly interrupted by the tale, preserved in an old journal, of the suicide of Jim, a British soldier who saw action in Burma. Jim doesn't survive his discovery of the great secret of empire, how it's "wonderfully arranged, all straight lines and precise rules and stiff spines, and how that all becomes a big lie when you move to the edge of the empire and run loose in the jungle with guns and knives".
It's the only truth that Amrit will surface with, as he moves through a dismembered world of betrayals and lies: "…[The] region had been forgotten by the world, and in the absence of connections with what lay beyond, an entire society was trying to recreate itself from selected memories and incomplete knowledge."
Nothing is as it seems; the motives of the rebels, the story of the woman in the photograph, the promising foreign contact, even the shining hope held out by a mysterious effort called the Prosperity Project. There are no easy conclusions in Surface , just the dwindling prospect of redemption. And in the heart of this darkness, Deb finds a new set of horsemen for the apocalypse: dereliction, amnesia, corruption and apathy.
Speaking Volumes: Adaptations
(First published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, June 14, 2005
Most book purists would agree with Charlie Kaufman on the subject of turning a book into a film: "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't."
But as most film lovers know, Charlie Kaufman, who struggles so hard to turn a novel about flowers, heavy with interior monologues, into a film is a character who wasn't even in the original book that was turned into Adaptation. It's this way: Adaptation was meta enough to satisfy the most carping of critics, being a film called Adaptation about turning a (genuine) book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans into a (never made, except in the film about the film of the book) film called The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman was an invention of film, if you like: the tormented screenwriter whose desperate search for a way to turn an internally driven, beautifully written novel into 120 pages of screenplay while avoiding action-packed cinematic clichés leads him to pursue the novelist into an action-packed final sequence. Nicely ironic, and three years after it was made, Adaptation is still something of a cult favourite on the circuit.
Kaufman's grumble--"The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't"—may be voiced by a character of the cinematic world, but it's the book lover's grouse against film adaptations to a tee. What happens when book meets film? And why do we care so much?
Let's start with the assumption that there are two kinds of book purists. The first kind is more puritan than purist, the sort who has "Do not tamper with the text" written on his heart. If you love books, shun the book puritan: his mind is closed to the idea that every reader brings her own interpretation to any great work of fiction, and that sometimes the best readers are the most creative interpreters. Anthony Minghella's English Patient is not Michael Ondaatje's English Patient ; it doesn't follow the book slavishly, but neither does it distort the book. Because Minghella read and understood the book so well, he was free to translate his notion of it onto celluloid.
As the director of the film, he worked roughly on the same lines that Gregory Rabassa does when he's translating the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rabassa doesn't reproduce Garcia Marquez's text in another language; his method is to internalise the novel and then to virtually rewrite the book all over again.
To some extent, this is what directors as different as Kurosawa and, at another level, Vishal Bhardwaj have done with Shakespeare's Macbeth . I've seen some productions—chiefly theatrical, not film--of Macbeth that suffer because they're obsessed with the need to be faithful to the text to the point where they stifle the play. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood works in part because he saw clearly how bringing the Scottish play to medieval Japan might deepen his personal reading of the play. And Bhardwaj's Maqbool is a brilliant reinterpretation because he understood how easily a play about kingship, treachery and hubris could be adapted if it was set in the Mumbai underworld.
Fidelity to the text can only take you so far. There's a reason why recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons played as it would have been on the instruments of the time are curiosities. The "original, authentic" way grates on our modern ears, now that we've grown used to a different reading of the music. Some theatres do performances of Shakespeare, Marlowe and company in the style of the era in which they wrote the plays; again, these are far more satisfying as literary history than as theatre. For works to remain classic, each generation needs to continue interpreting them in different ways.
That disposes of the book puritan: but the purist is a different matter. The book purist is usually open to wide-ranging, even iconoclastic, interpretations of the books that matter to him—and the emphasis here is firmly on books that do matter in themselves, and how well the interpretation works. Gurinder Chaddha, for instance, had a good thing going when she decided to remake Pride and Prejudice and set it in contemporary India, where Austen's interest in the politics of arranged marriages and property settlements is keenly shared by thousands of families. It's another matter that she didn't do it very well, producing a film that was deeply tedious by both Bollywood and Hollywood standards.
On the other hand, Coppola did Mario Puzo a favour with The Godfather trilogy, by lifting a decent, fast-paced, unusual bestseller into the ranks of art with his cinematic interpretation—his frames packed far more punch, frankly, than Puzo's workmanlike prose.
Some books lend themselves more easily to film because they carry relatively little baggage. What if the film versions of The Namesake , based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, and The Mistress of Spices , based on Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee's book, aren't "good" adaptations? I probably wouldn't carp much: neither book means as much to me as The Hours , Michael Cunningham's novel. I watched the film version with enjoyment—and great relief because I loved both The Hours and the book that inspired it, Mrs Dalloway , so a bad adaptation could have wrecked two books for me.
But Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas was soap opera going for baroque with a vengeance, held together by torn shreds of Sharatchandra's plot. Like many fans of the book and at least one of the previous film versions of Devdas , I was incensed at Bhansali's production because the book he claimed to have based his film on had all but vanished under the weight of his lavish sets and his larger-than-life melodrama.
With Sharatchandra's Parineeta, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's adaptation takes sweeping liberties with text and time, filling out one character's story in intricate detail where the text had nothing but silence, and shifting the scene from turn-of-century Bengal to 1960s Bengal. But Sharatchandra's original novel was a relatively slight, mannered work, one of those books that still enjoys a readership without inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that a work like Srikanta or Devdas does. It's a novel where so much is implied in so many absences that it offers a blank canvas to the right director, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra's retelling is refreshing in its own right. The book isn't like that: but it might have been.
Most book purists would agree with Charlie Kaufman on the subject of turning a book into a film: "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't."
But as most film lovers know, Charlie Kaufman, who struggles so hard to turn a novel about flowers, heavy with interior monologues, into a film is a character who wasn't even in the original book that was turned into Adaptation. It's this way: Adaptation was meta enough to satisfy the most carping of critics, being a film called Adaptation about turning a (genuine) book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans into a (never made, except in the film about the film of the book) film called The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman was an invention of film, if you like: the tormented screenwriter whose desperate search for a way to turn an internally driven, beautifully written novel into 120 pages of screenplay while avoiding action-packed cinematic clichés leads him to pursue the novelist into an action-packed final sequence. Nicely ironic, and three years after it was made, Adaptation is still something of a cult favourite on the circuit.
Kaufman's grumble--"The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't"—may be voiced by a character of the cinematic world, but it's the book lover's grouse against film adaptations to a tee. What happens when book meets film? And why do we care so much?
Let's start with the assumption that there are two kinds of book purists. The first kind is more puritan than purist, the sort who has "Do not tamper with the text" written on his heart. If you love books, shun the book puritan: his mind is closed to the idea that every reader brings her own interpretation to any great work of fiction, and that sometimes the best readers are the most creative interpreters. Anthony Minghella's English Patient is not Michael Ondaatje's English Patient ; it doesn't follow the book slavishly, but neither does it distort the book. Because Minghella read and understood the book so well, he was free to translate his notion of it onto celluloid.
As the director of the film, he worked roughly on the same lines that Gregory Rabassa does when he's translating the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rabassa doesn't reproduce Garcia Marquez's text in another language; his method is to internalise the novel and then to virtually rewrite the book all over again.
To some extent, this is what directors as different as Kurosawa and, at another level, Vishal Bhardwaj have done with Shakespeare's Macbeth . I've seen some productions—chiefly theatrical, not film--of Macbeth that suffer because they're obsessed with the need to be faithful to the text to the point where they stifle the play. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood works in part because he saw clearly how bringing the Scottish play to medieval Japan might deepen his personal reading of the play. And Bhardwaj's Maqbool is a brilliant reinterpretation because he understood how easily a play about kingship, treachery and hubris could be adapted if it was set in the Mumbai underworld.
Fidelity to the text can only take you so far. There's a reason why recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons played as it would have been on the instruments of the time are curiosities. The "original, authentic" way grates on our modern ears, now that we've grown used to a different reading of the music. Some theatres do performances of Shakespeare, Marlowe and company in the style of the era in which they wrote the plays; again, these are far more satisfying as literary history than as theatre. For works to remain classic, each generation needs to continue interpreting them in different ways.
That disposes of the book puritan: but the purist is a different matter. The book purist is usually open to wide-ranging, even iconoclastic, interpretations of the books that matter to him—and the emphasis here is firmly on books that do matter in themselves, and how well the interpretation works. Gurinder Chaddha, for instance, had a good thing going when she decided to remake Pride and Prejudice and set it in contemporary India, where Austen's interest in the politics of arranged marriages and property settlements is keenly shared by thousands of families. It's another matter that she didn't do it very well, producing a film that was deeply tedious by both Bollywood and Hollywood standards.
On the other hand, Coppola did Mario Puzo a favour with The Godfather trilogy, by lifting a decent, fast-paced, unusual bestseller into the ranks of art with his cinematic interpretation—his frames packed far more punch, frankly, than Puzo's workmanlike prose.
Some books lend themselves more easily to film because they carry relatively little baggage. What if the film versions of The Namesake , based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, and The Mistress of Spices , based on Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee's book, aren't "good" adaptations? I probably wouldn't carp much: neither book means as much to me as The Hours , Michael Cunningham's novel. I watched the film version with enjoyment—and great relief because I loved both The Hours and the book that inspired it, Mrs Dalloway , so a bad adaptation could have wrecked two books for me.
But Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas was soap opera going for baroque with a vengeance, held together by torn shreds of Sharatchandra's plot. Like many fans of the book and at least one of the previous film versions of Devdas , I was incensed at Bhansali's production because the book he claimed to have based his film on had all but vanished under the weight of his lavish sets and his larger-than-life melodrama.
With Sharatchandra's Parineeta, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's adaptation takes sweeping liberties with text and time, filling out one character's story in intricate detail where the text had nothing but silence, and shifting the scene from turn-of-century Bengal to 1960s Bengal. But Sharatchandra's original novel was a relatively slight, mannered work, one of those books that still enjoys a readership without inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that a work like Srikanta or Devdas does. It's a novel where so much is implied in so many absences that it offers a blank canvas to the right director, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra's retelling is refreshing in its own right. The book isn't like that: but it might have been.
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