When it comes to Marilyn Monroe, all of us, especially the men, will always be twenty three year olds. We long to breathe the same air as she did. And know instinctively if that had happened, we would have led a different life, deeper, more charmed, more significant somehow. That’s why our empathy is with the wide eyed young man, Colin Clark, played brilliantly by Eddie Redmayne in ‘My Week with Marilyn.’
Clark was the third assistant director for ‘The Prince and the Showgirl,’ the British film that united the acting legend Sir Lawrence Olivier with the world’s ultimate sex symbol. The book is based on his memoir. There is something about Redmayne’s performance that prevents us from mocking him for his helpless devotion to Marilyn. Instead we gawk at her with his eyes. And when she decides to make him her chosen one on the sets of the film, we don’t envy him. We only know he is not at fault for breaking young Lucy’s heart.
Lucy is portrayed by the luminously beautiful Emma Thomson. But we know her beauty, her charm, her youth and innocence is going to be no match to the Monroe magic. She is not the hero of this fairy tale. Strangely enough, for a film based on two cinema legends, the scenes that stay with you afterwards are those that have Redmayne and Watson in them. Both Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh use their craft and inherent brilliance to their interpretation of the two legends. But it’s evident they have worked hard at becoming the characters. They are not good enough to conceal the labour that has gone into their performances. Redmayne and Watson, on the other hand, just are.
‘Barfi’ is also about innocence, albeit of the special kind. There are films that let down their actors just as there are actors who fail the film. Anurag Basu’s films always fall in the former category. However the acting is always brilliant, almost undeservingly so, in Basu’s films. Right from his first film ‘Murder’ that turned Mallika Sherawat into a star for all the wrong reasons. In a sex starved country like ours, all the attention went to Sherawat’s bedroom sequences with Emran Hashmi. What got overlooked was that she had turned in a very convincing performance in that one. Afterwards, it has been all downhill for her. The same can be said about Shiny Ahuja and Kangna Ranaut in ‘Gangster.’
Barfi has three actors who compete and collaborate with each other to rescue a screenplay that is always in the danger of sinking. The car that is pushed in a lake in the film may very well be a metaphor for the writing. But the talented trio of Ranbir Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra and Illeana D’Cruz manage to salvage the film.
I didn’t think this is Kapoor’s best performance. He is very good but not as good as he was in ‘Rockstar.’ He has worked very hard on this role and his performance is well crafted rather than heartfelt. Some of the chaplinesque physicality he brings to his role has already been displayed in ‘Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani.’ We love him as long as we are watching the film. But it is not a character that stayed with me after the credits had rolled.
The female actors in the film however are top class, each notching brownie points for the consummate ease with which they play the two women in love with Barfi. Illeana D’Cruz is no newcomer. She has been around in the South Indian film scene for a while now just like Asin before she made her Hindi film debut in 'Gajini.' Ironically enough, she is likely to bag all the promising newcomer awards unless Karan Johar manages to get it for the three new actors featuring in his ‘Student of the Year.’ That one is going to be as corny as hell. As bad if not worse than ‘My Name is Khan.’ Mark my words.
Barfi ultimately belongs to Priyanka Chopra. It is not easy for the female lead of a commercial cinema to turn unattractive for a scene, let alone for the length of an entire film. Chopra is not a trained actor like Kapoor but she uses her gut and instinct to touch the inner core of Jhilmil, her character. For me, the most powerful scene in the film is when Chopra steps out to tell D’Cruz, Kapoor belongs to her in the climax of the film. Both of them manage to triumph over the lacklustre script in that moment, making it one of the most poignant moments ever in a Hindi film.
Thanks to Flipkart, I manage to procure Ruth Rendell’s latest ‘The Saint Zita Society.’ The book reminded me of the time when I was on my first writer’s residency in the University of Canterbury, Kent. In a dinner party hosted by one of the professors in the university, I made the mistake of talking about domestic helps we employ in India only to face disdainful looks by everyone present. ‘We have done away with that sort of thing many years ago,’ commented a scornful British writer, another guest.
Not if one goes by Rendell’s latest. The book is about a society formed by the drivers, gardeners and domestic helps of an affluent neighbourhood in London. Rendell is in top form here, treating her character with a healthy dose of compassion and humour. There are some innocents in the book including the victim. The man who is behind the murders is delightfully wily though. Just as the MP’s wife and daughter who take turns to bonk the good looking driver. All very vintage Rendell.
I got my American visa a couple of days before all the trouble erupted for the film that has angered a part of the Islamic world. Now that I have less than three weeks to leave, I can spend time reading books and watching plays and films with family. Also going for a short holiday this weekend. So maybe I will write about that in my next post.
Happy Ganesh Chaturti to all of you.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Mind the Gap
I was in Class VI when I chanced upon ‘Room on the Roof’ by Ruskin Bond. The book belonged to an older cousin who had it as her school text in Class X. I read it in one ecstatic gulp that lasted a little over an hour. For days afterwards, I fantasized about growing up to be this writer who lived in the hills of Dehradun, met fascinating characters and wrote about them.
A good thirty years later, my son’s English teacher was delighted to hear we had been to Bond’s home town to meet him and he was asked to work on a collage with the author and his stories as the theme. Coincidentally, my son also happened to be in Class VI at that time. I hope I am not in a minority when I say Bond is the most influential Indian writer of our times for all those who have had the privilege of being educated in English in post independent India although I have never come across any power list that features him. Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked 'Power is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.'
Power lists and the legitimacy of those who feature in it are not the only disagreement I have with Shashi’s Deshpande’s recent piece in The Hindu on the waning influence of artists and writers titled ‘The Case of the Missing Artists.’ Deshpande raises many pertinent issues. When she says ‘There are no debates about ideas, only controversies, often created by the media itself,’ we can instantly relate it to how the Jaipur Literary Festival was hijacked by the absence of Salman Rushdie this year.
However I don’t agree with Deshpande when she laments the dumbing down of language and literature in India and the gap widening between serious and popular works and their creators. This division has always existed world over. The gap is very much present between Ian Mcewan and Jeffery Archer in UK. In India, regional literature has always had this gap. I grew up in Bihar and read as many books in Hindi as in English and knew even in those early years that there was a difference between the works of a Gulshan Nanda and a Manu Bhandari. It didn’t stop me from reading both the authors just as I dug into a James Hadley Chase thriller and Gone with the Wind with equal relish.
The real issue as I see it is that for a long time Indian Writing in English was perceived to be an elitist preoccupation and protected by snobbery. The authors and the publishers colluded in this process and the works of writers like Ashok Banker who tried to negotiate the space of popular/ pulp fiction in the 80s and the 90s did not receive the attention they deserved. The emergence of a new breed of writers in the last one decade who are unapologetic about wanting to entertain the reader changed the rules of the game. Thanks to a Chetan Bhagat, an Amish Tripathi or an Advaita Kala, publishers are ready to give popular fiction its due. And if there has been a dumbing down by these writers of more serious fiction, I am afraid the first stone is inevitably cast by the writer of more serious works who is finding it difficult to share the identity with writers wanting to tell stories to entertain without bothering too much about the intricacies of the language. If by ‘badly written’ the allusion is to the language and grammar of these books, aren’t editors and the publishers as much to blame? Hemmingway may not have won the Nobel Prize in Literature if someone hadn’t fixed his spellings for him.
One should also add here that writers of popular fiction in India come from the same class as authors of literary works. Many of them are from premier management and technical institutes and gave up lucrative professions to write. If they write a particular kind of book, we have to assume they do it as much out of choice as writers of literary fiction. Yes, there has been a refreshing democracy in the Indian Writing in English space of late. But that has more to do with the fading away of feudal processes.
We don’t have palace writers and artists anymore and that may not be such a bad thing after all.
A good thirty years later, my son’s English teacher was delighted to hear we had been to Bond’s home town to meet him and he was asked to work on a collage with the author and his stories as the theme. Coincidentally, my son also happened to be in Class VI at that time. I hope I am not in a minority when I say Bond is the most influential Indian writer of our times for all those who have had the privilege of being educated in English in post independent India although I have never come across any power list that features him. Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked 'Power is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.'
Power lists and the legitimacy of those who feature in it are not the only disagreement I have with Shashi’s Deshpande’s recent piece in The Hindu on the waning influence of artists and writers titled ‘The Case of the Missing Artists.’ Deshpande raises many pertinent issues. When she says ‘There are no debates about ideas, only controversies, often created by the media itself,’ we can instantly relate it to how the Jaipur Literary Festival was hijacked by the absence of Salman Rushdie this year.
However I don’t agree with Deshpande when she laments the dumbing down of language and literature in India and the gap widening between serious and popular works and their creators. This division has always existed world over. The gap is very much present between Ian Mcewan and Jeffery Archer in UK. In India, regional literature has always had this gap. I grew up in Bihar and read as many books in Hindi as in English and knew even in those early years that there was a difference between the works of a Gulshan Nanda and a Manu Bhandari. It didn’t stop me from reading both the authors just as I dug into a James Hadley Chase thriller and Gone with the Wind with equal relish.
The real issue as I see it is that for a long time Indian Writing in English was perceived to be an elitist preoccupation and protected by snobbery. The authors and the publishers colluded in this process and the works of writers like Ashok Banker who tried to negotiate the space of popular/ pulp fiction in the 80s and the 90s did not receive the attention they deserved. The emergence of a new breed of writers in the last one decade who are unapologetic about wanting to entertain the reader changed the rules of the game. Thanks to a Chetan Bhagat, an Amish Tripathi or an Advaita Kala, publishers are ready to give popular fiction its due. And if there has been a dumbing down by these writers of more serious fiction, I am afraid the first stone is inevitably cast by the writer of more serious works who is finding it difficult to share the identity with writers wanting to tell stories to entertain without bothering too much about the intricacies of the language. If by ‘badly written’ the allusion is to the language and grammar of these books, aren’t editors and the publishers as much to blame? Hemmingway may not have won the Nobel Prize in Literature if someone hadn’t fixed his spellings for him.
One should also add here that writers of popular fiction in India come from the same class as authors of literary works. Many of them are from premier management and technical institutes and gave up lucrative professions to write. If they write a particular kind of book, we have to assume they do it as much out of choice as writers of literary fiction. Yes, there has been a refreshing democracy in the Indian Writing in English space of late. But that has more to do with the fading away of feudal processes.
We don’t have palace writers and artists anymore and that may not be such a bad thing after all.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
All About Eve
The two parts of Gangs of Wasseypur strike a strange note, odd but not discordant. The victims are all men in this testosterone navigated drama despite the significant presence of female characters in the film. Think about it. Coppola’s Godfather trilogy had wives, mothers and sisters claiming screen space but they performed to a script framed by the men in their lives. Kashyap’s magnum opus marches to an entirely different tune. Not that the women remain untouched by violence perpetuated by the men in their lives. But the interesting thing is, be it Nagma, Sardar Khan’s first wife or his second spouse Durga, both of them are more than willing to be the catalysts for the blood and gore that lashes the dusty by lanes of Wasseypur. While one happily sends her husband to his death, the other extorts her son ‘tum logon ko khana kaise hazm hota hai, after her husband gets shot in cold blood. She knows that one barb is enough to turn him into an avenging angel. She is also aware that he will end up paying with his life to humour her vengeance, but it is amply evident from the subtext that the consequence matters little to her. The male characters in the film may be busy terrorising the town they live in, but in a neat quirky turn, all of them seem to be a little afraid of the women in their lives. Right down to Definite, Durga’s remorseless progeny.
Starting with his first success, Kashyap has steadfastly refused to treat his female characters as whining victims in any of his films. His version of Devdas had only one wimp, the protagonist. It was the two women in his life, Paro and Chanda who made all the decisions for him. Whether it was the former cycling with a mattress tied at the back of her bicycle to make love to him in the mustard fields or the latter awakening his conscience in the climax. Kashyap obviously likes his women to assert themselves, however male and macho the fictional context of his cinema may be. And thankfully most of the new age film makers seem to be following on his footsteps without a trace of self consciousness permeating the feminist undertones of their films.
Be it the comic Vicky Donor or the compromised Cocktail, the female protagonist is increasingly being projected as more nuanced and ultimately more substantive than her male counterpart. After the failure of her first marriage, Ashima Roy in Vicky Donor is slow to respond to the maverick hero’s advances but once she thaws, she treats the relationship with utmost integrity, coming clean with him about her past while he conceals his ‘donor’ status from her. But it is in the treatment of the secondary female characters the director Shoojit Sircar scores. Vicky’s beautician mother and his feisty grandmother are a treat to behold in their drinking sessions late in the night. Ashima’s middle aged aunt who has remained single is another marvellous characterisation. There is no back story to her but the writing by Juhi Chaturvedi is so clever that the viewer understands why she has remained unmarried without any explanations being provided.
Critics have been disappointed with the tame ending of the Imtiaz Ali produced and Homi Adjania directed Cocktail. Gautam Kapoor opts for the more Indian Meera but there is something about the abandon with which Deepika Padukone surrenders to her portrayal of Veronica that you leave the theatre feeling she is better off without the confused Gautam and his domineering mother. We would like to believe that she is going to eventually realize all her attempts to fit into the stereotype was a big mistake. It is the spunky Veronica who ends up being the hero of the film. Cocktail is her show and knowing the strange subversive ways of Adjania from his first film Being Cyrus, this may very well have been his intention.
Of course when it comes to Vidya Balan, only a fool would try to fit her into the conventional Bhartiya Nari mould. From Ishqiya to No One Killed Jessica, from The Dirty Picture to Kahaani, Balan has managed to change all the rules pertaining to the female protagonist in Hindi cinema. When you find her doing a silly Lavani item in an entirely undeserving film, it’s not only your aesthetic sensibilities that are affronted you also get angry with the film maker for wasting her like this. Hopefully Kashyap will cast her in one of his films soon and viewers can rejoice at the coming together of the most revolutionary director and the most astounding actor of our times.
It must be a sign of our times that even Yash Raj films seems to have outgrown wallflowers who liked being courted in the snow clad only in the sheerest of chiffons. Zoya in Ishaqzaade can out curse her ruffian suitor and climb walls to aim at him with a country pistol. The only way he can get the better of her is by resorting to lies and deception. It is also amusing to note that it is the villainous Parma who is treated as an object of lust by the local courtesan Chand. We don’t know whether this was intentional on the part of director Habib Faisal, but it is a nice touch nonetheless, turning the paradigm of the ‘female item’ in commercial cinema on its head.
The portrayal of women characters is all the more interesting when the work is helmed by a female director. In Kiran Rao’s directorial debut, Dhobi Ghat, Shai one of the film’s four protagonists is not afraid to stalk the man who has a one night stand with her because she believes they have a connection. Nor does she think twice before using a young boy from the slums who is besotted by her to achieve her dubious ends. Thankfully Rao’s directorial skills ensure that the viewer continues to vouch for Shai’s vulnerability and does not condemn her.
Empowered women are increasingly making their presence felt even in the popular works of regional cinemas. Manimegalai in Engeyum Eppothum directed by newcomer M Sarvanan puts her silent admirer through many tests including getting him tested for HIV before she allows him in her life. Vazhakku Enn 18/9, another recent success in Tamil Cinema has the victim of an acid attack extracting revenge on the policeman who has exploited her tragedy to make a quick buck for himself. She refuses to remain a mute victim.
Neighbouring Kerala has not been lagging behind when it comes to a more rounded depiction of female characters rather than cubby holing them as victims or paragons of virtue. The young nurse Tessa is no saint in 22 Female Kottayam helmed by Aashiq Abu. She has no problems about going to a pub with her boyfriend to have a drink or living in with him without getting married. When he betrays her to get her brutally raped not once but twice by his boss, she waits for her bruised body and soul to recover before she goes about extracting her revenge. What is interesting are the long counselling sessions she has with him after chaining him to a bed in the climax. Veteran director Kamal, whose Perumazhakkalam was remade as Dor by Nagesh Kukunoor has made a film on the plight of women from Kerala who are sent to Saudi Arabia as domestic helps. His Khaddama could very well have been a melodramatic tear jerker but the director’s vision as well as the intelligent interpretation by the actor Kavya Madhavan vests the character with a luminous dignity.
Bengali Cinema too is no longer dependent solely on Aparna Sen and Rituparna Ghosh for sensitive depiction of women on screen. In the last one decade, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury has depicted some really complex women characters with shades of grey in films like Antaheen and Aparajita Tumi. His films usually revolve around the politics of marriage and his female protagonists are often the perpetuators of the conflict they find themselves in. But even when they are not, they come across as strong and capable individuals with clear perspectives on life and living and turn out to be much more interesting than the men in their lives.
Quite obviously, the new breed of Indian film makers are not just portraying women more realistically, but also imbuing them with their own enlightened sensibilities without bothering about the existing frameworks of the sacrificing heroine and the evil vamp. As long as Indian cinema is driven by the male superstars of the 100 Crore clubs, Chikni Chameli will continue with her shenanigans with a 100 men panting behind her. But the new age film makers are clearly not impressed. They seem to be a little bored of her just like the more discerning audience. And hopefully their enlightened take on the gender divide will sooner or later permeate down to chauvinistic males across the country. From Guwati to Mangalore.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Protagonist's Tale- Mafia Queens of Mumbai and Gangs of Wasseypur 2
I had read decent reviews so I picked it up from a book shop last year. But there was something about the cover that prevented me from reading it. For nearly a year, the book lay untouched on my study table. Last week I made a day long trip to the city and carried it with me to read on the way. That too happened more by accident than design. I tend to procrastinate a lot in the mornings and get all rushed at the last minute, laying my hands on what I can find at that moment to carry with me to read in the car. Thankfully, I didn’t have to rue my choice. ‘Mafia Queens of Mumbai- Stories of women from the ganglands’ turned out to be a page turner. Simple and compelling. One of the best works of creative nonfiction I have read by an Indian author. Rather authors. The book has been written by S.Hussain Zaidi with Jane Borges. Both of them are Mumbai based journalists.
S Hussain Zaidi needs no introduction. His earlier best seller Black Friday was translated into celluloid by none other than Anurag Kashyap. I have read somewhere that Kashyap considers Black Friday to be the best film he has made. Unfortunately Paanch and Black Friday are the only two films of Kashyap’s that I haven’t watched. But like Kashap’s direction, Zaidi’s writing too brims with energy. The narrative shifts from third person to first person from essay to essay, bringing to life a group of spunky women who are at ease being avengers and murderers rather than nurturers and victims the Indian society wants them to be. What they seem to lack in physical strength, they more than make up with their wile and cunning. It is a little difficult to believe women like these actually existed, but their photographs in the book provide the evidence.
From the matriarch of the Mumbai Mafioso Jenabai to brothel madam Gangu Bai and from the avenger Ashraf to the drug peddler Mahalaxmi Papamani, each of these feisty women take it upon themselves to make a mark in a world ravaged by the most vicious of men. For lovers of film trivia, Monica Bedi, Abu Salem’s moll who was a part of the reality show Big Boss a few years ago also features in the book. But her story is probably the only tepid piece in this otherwise riveting book. Maybe because she is the only one capable of suing the writers. Otherwise this is a brilliant book, to use the cliché, a rare gem.
It must be because I watched Gangs of Wasseypur 2 the same evening, but I found myself focusing on the female characters more. They have a lot less screen time as compared to the men in the film but that’s understandable given the gangster ethos of the film. What is interesting is how Kashyap has made the women an essential part of the narrative. They may not actually fire the bullets but it is amply clear that if it wasn’t for them, the men wouldn’t act the way they do in the film. Maybe not even be what they end up being.
It is the ‘other woman’ Durga who hastens Sardar Khan to his death, feeling no remorse for her part in his death afterwards. Though she is hardly present for most part of the film and appears in less than half a dozen scenes in the movie, her rage and frustration at her son Definite opting to be a lackey of Faizal Khan, Sardar’s legitimate son is palpable. There is a tongue in cheek tribute to the 70’s Bachchan blockbuster Trishul made by the Naseeruddin Shah of the current generation, Nawazuddin Sidique in the film so we are left in no doubt about Kashyap’s reference point, so much so that the hazy visage of Durga in the climax made me feel the Waheeda Rehman of Trishul had been vindicated once again in a film made a good three and a half decades later.
Kashyap having claimed a sort of feminist credentials in his interviews can be counted on to construct the legitimate wife with a lot more substance than Yash Chopra accorded Geeta Kak. Richa Chadda loses none of the fire that she displayed in part 1 as the ageing matriarch in the follow up. It is a bravura performance, all steel and grit as she turns her sons into gun toting devils to avenge her philandering husband’s death. I would have liked Kashyap to include a scene between her and the illegitimate offspring of Sultan, but in the absence of that, the wedding song where suddenly tears start rolling down her cheeks, qualifies as the moment of the film. The clever actor she is, she lets us know without the aid of dialogues, the suffering of her accumulating losses. First the husband and then the children. Pathos is a new emotion for Hindi film weddings.
The two daughters in law are a study in contrast. There is a lovely touch of humour to Huma Qureshi’s Mohsina. Whether it is her avid TV watching or the way she leads the way in the bustling bazaar, ragging her husband for looking much older than her. The bitter sweet song she sings to her husband is also sweet in the ears. When I was growing up in Bihar, we used to call these songs ‘ant sant gaana.’ So there was a nice unexpected touch of nostalgia to watching the film.
The other daughter in law gets a wholly undeserved bullet in her head. Of the four women in the family, she is the one who fits best the conventional mould of the traditional Indian women. She tries to reason with her husband and extends warmth to her estranged brother. When she is shot in the film, you wonder whether it is because that is what the narrative of the film demanded or Kashyap wanted to punish her for not displaying enough spunk and spirit like his other female protagonists.
S Hussain Zaidi needs no introduction. His earlier best seller Black Friday was translated into celluloid by none other than Anurag Kashyap. I have read somewhere that Kashyap considers Black Friday to be the best film he has made. Unfortunately Paanch and Black Friday are the only two films of Kashyap’s that I haven’t watched. But like Kashap’s direction, Zaidi’s writing too brims with energy. The narrative shifts from third person to first person from essay to essay, bringing to life a group of spunky women who are at ease being avengers and murderers rather than nurturers and victims the Indian society wants them to be. What they seem to lack in physical strength, they more than make up with their wile and cunning. It is a little difficult to believe women like these actually existed, but their photographs in the book provide the evidence.
From the matriarch of the Mumbai Mafioso Jenabai to brothel madam Gangu Bai and from the avenger Ashraf to the drug peddler Mahalaxmi Papamani, each of these feisty women take it upon themselves to make a mark in a world ravaged by the most vicious of men. For lovers of film trivia, Monica Bedi, Abu Salem’s moll who was a part of the reality show Big Boss a few years ago also features in the book. But her story is probably the only tepid piece in this otherwise riveting book. Maybe because she is the only one capable of suing the writers. Otherwise this is a brilliant book, to use the cliché, a rare gem.
It must be because I watched Gangs of Wasseypur 2 the same evening, but I found myself focusing on the female characters more. They have a lot less screen time as compared to the men in the film but that’s understandable given the gangster ethos of the film. What is interesting is how Kashyap has made the women an essential part of the narrative. They may not actually fire the bullets but it is amply clear that if it wasn’t for them, the men wouldn’t act the way they do in the film. Maybe not even be what they end up being.
It is the ‘other woman’ Durga who hastens Sardar Khan to his death, feeling no remorse for her part in his death afterwards. Though she is hardly present for most part of the film and appears in less than half a dozen scenes in the movie, her rage and frustration at her son Definite opting to be a lackey of Faizal Khan, Sardar’s legitimate son is palpable. There is a tongue in cheek tribute to the 70’s Bachchan blockbuster Trishul made by the Naseeruddin Shah of the current generation, Nawazuddin Sidique in the film so we are left in no doubt about Kashyap’s reference point, so much so that the hazy visage of Durga in the climax made me feel the Waheeda Rehman of Trishul had been vindicated once again in a film made a good three and a half decades later.
Kashyap having claimed a sort of feminist credentials in his interviews can be counted on to construct the legitimate wife with a lot more substance than Yash Chopra accorded Geeta Kak. Richa Chadda loses none of the fire that she displayed in part 1 as the ageing matriarch in the follow up. It is a bravura performance, all steel and grit as she turns her sons into gun toting devils to avenge her philandering husband’s death. I would have liked Kashyap to include a scene between her and the illegitimate offspring of Sultan, but in the absence of that, the wedding song where suddenly tears start rolling down her cheeks, qualifies as the moment of the film. The clever actor she is, she lets us know without the aid of dialogues, the suffering of her accumulating losses. First the husband and then the children. Pathos is a new emotion for Hindi film weddings.
The two daughters in law are a study in contrast. There is a lovely touch of humour to Huma Qureshi’s Mohsina. Whether it is her avid TV watching or the way she leads the way in the bustling bazaar, ragging her husband for looking much older than her. The bitter sweet song she sings to her husband is also sweet in the ears. When I was growing up in Bihar, we used to call these songs ‘ant sant gaana.’ So there was a nice unexpected touch of nostalgia to watching the film.
The other daughter in law gets a wholly undeserved bullet in her head. Of the four women in the family, she is the one who fits best the conventional mould of the traditional Indian women. She tries to reason with her husband and extends warmth to her estranged brother. When she is shot in the film, you wonder whether it is because that is what the narrative of the film demanded or Kashyap wanted to punish her for not displaying enough spunk and spirit like his other female protagonists.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Hard-edged vision: Margaret Atwood.
( Another of my earlier pieces in The Hindu on one of my favorite writers)
It’s difficult to unravel the primary identity of Margaret Eleanor Atwood. Is she a visionary philosopher who happens to use the twin tools of poetry and prose with effortless ease and felicity or is she a writer who happens to shape and articulate her vision with such clarity that countless readers and fans all over the world end up owning it for themselves. We have been as enriched by her prolific outpourings as we have been enlightened by her philosophical musings. We can claim with a measure of confidence that in the more than four decades of her writing, she appears to be on a mission to make the world a better place by making her readers think more and feel more.
Atwood burst into the Canadian literary firmament with her poetry in the early 1960s. She was rewarded by the Governor General’s award for her collection The Circle of Game a few years later. The fiction happened by the end of the same decade. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was a rant against sexual roles inflicted on women. The protagonist Marian appears to delight in playing a passive aggressive role with her fiancée and her lover who are two distinct entities. Her increasing inability to eat as the story progresses is based on real and explicit fears of being consumed that the reader can easily resonate with. With her very first novel, Margaret Atwood communicated to the world that her writing is going to poke roughly rather than stroke gently.
The disagreements and debates were to follow when her treatise on Canadian Literature came out in the early 1970s. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian literature is looked upon as an enduring reference text for anyone interested in the country’s literature and the country itself. It is a priceless insight on how Canadians view themselves. According to Atwood, most if not all literary works from Canada emerge in the context of survival and the protagonists take on the psychological baggage of being victims owing to the chequered history of the country. The framework espoused by Atwood has its detractors to this day who claim that she chose works that would support her hypothesis but the book endures as an academic as well as literary text.
Multi-faceted
Atwood continued to dazzle in the 80s with her prose as well as verse. She also demonstrated her full range as a writer in this decade. From penning television dramas to entertaining children with her stories, writing poetry and prose fuelled by her leanings towards civil rights, the writer in her was at the height of her prowess. Her feminist leanings were increasingly evident in the collected criticism Second Words. She appeared to be carrying the discourse further when she came out with her novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. The almost surreal tonality of some of her earlier works seem to have found a home in the matching context of the science fiction genre the novel adhered to. It is a measure of Atwood’s genius that placing her tale in an alternate reality did not rob the story of any of its literary sheen. The novel not only went to win many prestigious awards but also became a huge popular success. This phase of prolific output also saw her writing for the stage.
However, her best seems to have been reserved for the last two decades. Alias Grace, published in 1996, can easily qualify as the best fiction she has written. A fictional biography of a notorious real life murderer, Grace Marks, who lived in the mid-19th century, it expertly mixed and matched a fictional first person narrative with actual journalistic accounts that appeared during that time to weave a complex and engaging tale of perception versus actual reality. Atwood’s Grace remains enigmatic and compelling to the very end because of the shadings the author gives her protagonist. While it may be read as a great story, Atwood, never content with the obvious, uses every subversive writing trick to raise pertinent questions about the nature of truth and how it gets contaminated by issues of power, culture and identity. During this phase, grumbles were getting louder about the way the wise judges deployed by the Booker committee were repeatedly ignoring her works. It seemed to be the sole literary recognition that had eluded Atwood. Atwood had to wait for the new millennium to have the slight repaired.
The Blind Assassin not only won the hearts of readers all over the world but also the coveted prize. The novel is a lesson for all aspiring novelists about structuring their works in progress. A seeming labyrinth in its narration, each piece of puzzle fits in perfectly as you turn the pages, enchanted as much by the style it adapts as you are impressed by the intellectual rigour she places on telling the story. The book achieves the near impossible: telling a complex tale of hurt and loss through the simple device of multiple narrations that repeatedly meet and fork. The accolades flew in fast and furious but Atwood had moved onto her next, Oryx and Crake, another Sci-Fi novel that came out in 2003. She has since then come out with two prose collections and a recent announcement talked of a new novel on its way.
We look forward to that. Just like millions of readers across the world delighting in every new offering she decides to surprise us with, ranging from a reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey to a children’s Musical. In her own words: “Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it’s all in the timing.”
It’s difficult to unravel the primary identity of Margaret Eleanor Atwood. Is she a visionary philosopher who happens to use the twin tools of poetry and prose with effortless ease and felicity or is she a writer who happens to shape and articulate her vision with such clarity that countless readers and fans all over the world end up owning it for themselves. We have been as enriched by her prolific outpourings as we have been enlightened by her philosophical musings. We can claim with a measure of confidence that in the more than four decades of her writing, she appears to be on a mission to make the world a better place by making her readers think more and feel more.
Atwood burst into the Canadian literary firmament with her poetry in the early 1960s. She was rewarded by the Governor General’s award for her collection The Circle of Game a few years later. The fiction happened by the end of the same decade. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was a rant against sexual roles inflicted on women. The protagonist Marian appears to delight in playing a passive aggressive role with her fiancée and her lover who are two distinct entities. Her increasing inability to eat as the story progresses is based on real and explicit fears of being consumed that the reader can easily resonate with. With her very first novel, Margaret Atwood communicated to the world that her writing is going to poke roughly rather than stroke gently.
The disagreements and debates were to follow when her treatise on Canadian Literature came out in the early 1970s. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian literature is looked upon as an enduring reference text for anyone interested in the country’s literature and the country itself. It is a priceless insight on how Canadians view themselves. According to Atwood, most if not all literary works from Canada emerge in the context of survival and the protagonists take on the psychological baggage of being victims owing to the chequered history of the country. The framework espoused by Atwood has its detractors to this day who claim that she chose works that would support her hypothesis but the book endures as an academic as well as literary text.
Multi-faceted
Atwood continued to dazzle in the 80s with her prose as well as verse. She also demonstrated her full range as a writer in this decade. From penning television dramas to entertaining children with her stories, writing poetry and prose fuelled by her leanings towards civil rights, the writer in her was at the height of her prowess. Her feminist leanings were increasingly evident in the collected criticism Second Words. She appeared to be carrying the discourse further when she came out with her novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. The almost surreal tonality of some of her earlier works seem to have found a home in the matching context of the science fiction genre the novel adhered to. It is a measure of Atwood’s genius that placing her tale in an alternate reality did not rob the story of any of its literary sheen. The novel not only went to win many prestigious awards but also became a huge popular success. This phase of prolific output also saw her writing for the stage.
However, her best seems to have been reserved for the last two decades. Alias Grace, published in 1996, can easily qualify as the best fiction she has written. A fictional biography of a notorious real life murderer, Grace Marks, who lived in the mid-19th century, it expertly mixed and matched a fictional first person narrative with actual journalistic accounts that appeared during that time to weave a complex and engaging tale of perception versus actual reality. Atwood’s Grace remains enigmatic and compelling to the very end because of the shadings the author gives her protagonist. While it may be read as a great story, Atwood, never content with the obvious, uses every subversive writing trick to raise pertinent questions about the nature of truth and how it gets contaminated by issues of power, culture and identity. During this phase, grumbles were getting louder about the way the wise judges deployed by the Booker committee were repeatedly ignoring her works. It seemed to be the sole literary recognition that had eluded Atwood. Atwood had to wait for the new millennium to have the slight repaired.
The Blind Assassin not only won the hearts of readers all over the world but also the coveted prize. The novel is a lesson for all aspiring novelists about structuring their works in progress. A seeming labyrinth in its narration, each piece of puzzle fits in perfectly as you turn the pages, enchanted as much by the style it adapts as you are impressed by the intellectual rigour she places on telling the story. The book achieves the near impossible: telling a complex tale of hurt and loss through the simple device of multiple narrations that repeatedly meet and fork. The accolades flew in fast and furious but Atwood had moved onto her next, Oryx and Crake, another Sci-Fi novel that came out in 2003. She has since then come out with two prose collections and a recent announcement talked of a new novel on its way.
We look forward to that. Just like millions of readers across the world delighting in every new offering she decides to surprise us with, ranging from a reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey to a children’s Musical. In her own words: “Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it’s all in the timing.”
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Veteran Adolescent
( A tribute to Gulzar I wrote many years ago for Deccan Herald)
Among the honors conferred this year on the Republic Day is the Padma Bhushan awarded to Sampooran Singh Gulzar. The felicitation comes just a year after he won the Sahitya Academy Award for his short story Dhuaan. Awards at a national level are nothing new for Gulzar and he has garnered three of them for his films - Best Screenplay (Koshish), Best Director (Mausam) and Best Lyricist (Ijazat). But the Sahitya Academy Award for a short story was somewhat of a paradox. Gulzar deserved it much earlier for the poetry he has penned as film songs. In fact, poetry is intrinsic to all the work Gulzar is associated with - the films he directs are lyrical, the dialogues he pens have a flow and his lyrics contain vivid imagery appealing to our sublime senses.
Gulzar was born in 1936 in Deena, Jhelum District which is now a part of Pakistan. After the partition he came to Delhi. He started as a poet and was a part of the Progressive Writers association. Hence his literary roots are firmly grounded in poetry. He joined Bimal Roy productions much later in 1961. As a result, Gulzar appears to have imbibed the best of two rich literary traditions in India - Urdu as well as Bengali. A fact that is amply borne out by the fact that he has translated into celluloid one of Saratchandra’s novels (Khushboo) and two of Samresh Basu’s works (Namkeen and Kitaab). Ijazat is also based on a Bengali short story.
In 1988, Gulzar made the landmark television serial on Mirza Ghalib with Nasiruddin Shah essaying the role of the immortal Urdu poet. The influence of Ghalib seeped in unobtrusively when Gulzar penned a song for a film he directed - Mausam. The song resonates with the flush of falling in love and all the longing it encompasses - dil dhoondta hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din…baithe rahe tasssavure jaana kiye hue. The best one can do with a transliteration is ‘The heart longs for the days and nights of leisure. Lounging around, doing nothing, a happy emptiness within, playing with your thoughts.’
The Bengali influence is best reflected in the songs from Khushboo - ‘Oh Maaji re…apna kinara nadiya ki dhara hai’. The song succinctly captures the dilemma of the boatmen who make a living from the river. A literal translation would be ‘O Boatmen, our shores are no more than the flow of the river.’ Something that does scant justice to the essence of the song that is replete with the philosophy of life and death.
Almost as a counterfoil for the same film Gulzar penned the coy and teasing ‘Bechara dil kya kare.. sawaan jale… bhadon jale’. (What can the poor heart do, all the seasons are burning)? In fact Gulzar’s penchant to transcend from the sublime to the ludicrous is legendary. He penned a song for Thodi si Bewafai which ‘boasted’ of lyrics like ‘Pink sharara silaooing' ( I will stitch a Pink Sharara). But lest anyone take this as a criticism of Gulzar’s poetic sensibility, it would be prudent to point out that this one is a rare failure. He has often used imagery that seems absurd to etch deeply evocative pictures. Consider this priceless gem from the first film he directed Mere Apne- ‘Roz akeli aaye, Roz akeli jaaye, Chand katora liye bhikaran raat’. (She comes alone and leaves alone, this beggar woman night with her begging bowl of the moon). The deft simile transforms night into an ultimate metaphor for loneliness. The song is hauntingly rendered by Meena Kumari on screen playing an old woman deserted by her family.
Yet Gulzar is widely regarded as the thinking man’s poet lyricist. And not without reason. The very first lyrics he penned for the classic Bandini is an immortal gem: ‘Mora Gora Ang Lai Lae. Mohe saanv rang dai de’ (Take away my fair body and let me trade it for the dark shades of my lover). The song like the film was far ahead of its time and dealt with a woman’s choice to have her lover as well as the price she has to pay for this indulgence. The sensuous song went well with the theme of the film.
The lyrics of Gulzar have displayed an awesome range from being bathed in childlike glee to pathos-laden soliloquies. But what has distinguished them is that they have invariably been in blank verse. Apparently the late R D Burman with whom Gulzar had a long and fruitful association had a really tough time setting to music the award winning ‘Mera kuch saaman tumhare paas pada hai’. The song goes on to request the ex lover to return tangible as well as intangible gifts from the remnants of the spent passion. ‘Ek sau solah chand ki raatein, ek tumhare kaande ka til, gili mehendi ki khushboo, jooth mooth ke shikwe kuch, jooth mooth ke vaade sab yaad kara doon, sab bhijwa do, mera wo saaman lauta do.’ (One hundred and sixteen nights of the moon, and the solitary mole on your shoulder, the fragrance of the moist mehendi, some pet peeves and some empty promises, return all of that, return all the moments I spent with you). Even the most blasé listeners were moved!
Many of his fans believe Gulzar deserved the national award a couple of decades earlier for the most romantic lines ever penned for a film song that featured in Khamoshi - ‘Humne dhekhi hai in aankhon ki mehekti khushboo, haath se choon ke inhe rishto ka ilzaam na do, sirf ehsaas hai ye rooh se mehsoos karo, pyar ko pyar hi rehne do, koi naam na do’ (I have felt the lingering fragrance of those eyes, don’t try and touch it with your hands to brand it as a relationship, it is only a sensation, this thing they call love, feel it with your soul and let it remain at that, don’t cubbyhole it with a name).
A worthy successor to that one is ‘Katra katra milti hai, katra katra jeene do, zindagi hein behne do, pyaasi hoon mein pyaasi rehne do’ from Ijazat. (I can only quench it drop by drop, I can only live it drop by drop, there is life, let it flow, I am thirsty, let me remain thus). A song that unpretentiously sighs the longing of a woman in love. But the two most pithy and powerful lines swathed in passion happen in a song from an inconsequential film Swayamvar. ‘Tumhari nighahen bahut bolti hai, zara apni nazron par palkein gira do’. (Your eyes speak of too many things, please cover your gaze with your eye lids).
Gulzar has an extraordinary gift for capturing the maverick spirit of the wondering heart. One of his earlier songs went ‘Hawaaon pe likh do, hawaaoon ke naam, ek anjaan rahgir ka salaam’ (Write on the breeze, dedicate it to the breeze, an unknown wonderer’s salutations!) In the same vein, nearly two decades later he wrote ‘Ay Zindagi gale laga le, humne bhi har ek gam ko ghale se lagaya hain, hain na…’ ( Hey Life, please embrace me just like I have embraced all the sorrows…)
No wonder, getting the better of the restless spirit featured as the opening bhajan in Guddi, the song that introduced Jaya Bhaduri to movie goers. ‘Hum ko man ki shakti dena, man vijay kare, doosroon ke jai se pehle khud ko jai kare.’ (Give us the strength to capture this mind of ours so that before we capture others we are able to overpower our restless souls.)
Hututu, the last film Gulzar directed was a critical and commercial failure. But as poet lyricist he remains unchallenged in the Hindi film scenario as was evident from two of last year’s releases - Filhaal and Saathiyaa. In Filhaal, the man endearingly implores his beloved to ‘ungliyoon mein pehen lo ye rishta’ (Wear the relationship in your fingers) and the title track of Saathiya, an ode to the tinkling laugher of the beloved, is punctuated with classic Gulzar imagery ‘barf giri ho vaadi mein, un mein lipti simti hui, aur hansi teri goonje, un mein lipti simti hui, baat kare dhuan nikle, garam garam ujla dhuan, naram naram ujla dhuan.’ (In the snow clad valley, you are swathed in wool, your laughter echoes, and you are swathed in wool, and from your mouth emerges smoke, the warm and fair smoke, the soft and fair smoke).
Clearly at sixty-seven, Gulzar is a veteran but his lyrics still have all the passion of an adolescent in love.
Among the honors conferred this year on the Republic Day is the Padma Bhushan awarded to Sampooran Singh Gulzar. The felicitation comes just a year after he won the Sahitya Academy Award for his short story Dhuaan. Awards at a national level are nothing new for Gulzar and he has garnered three of them for his films - Best Screenplay (Koshish), Best Director (Mausam) and Best Lyricist (Ijazat). But the Sahitya Academy Award for a short story was somewhat of a paradox. Gulzar deserved it much earlier for the poetry he has penned as film songs. In fact, poetry is intrinsic to all the work Gulzar is associated with - the films he directs are lyrical, the dialogues he pens have a flow and his lyrics contain vivid imagery appealing to our sublime senses.
Gulzar was born in 1936 in Deena, Jhelum District which is now a part of Pakistan. After the partition he came to Delhi. He started as a poet and was a part of the Progressive Writers association. Hence his literary roots are firmly grounded in poetry. He joined Bimal Roy productions much later in 1961. As a result, Gulzar appears to have imbibed the best of two rich literary traditions in India - Urdu as well as Bengali. A fact that is amply borne out by the fact that he has translated into celluloid one of Saratchandra’s novels (Khushboo) and two of Samresh Basu’s works (Namkeen and Kitaab). Ijazat is also based on a Bengali short story.
In 1988, Gulzar made the landmark television serial on Mirza Ghalib with Nasiruddin Shah essaying the role of the immortal Urdu poet. The influence of Ghalib seeped in unobtrusively when Gulzar penned a song for a film he directed - Mausam. The song resonates with the flush of falling in love and all the longing it encompasses - dil dhoondta hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din…baithe rahe tasssavure jaana kiye hue. The best one can do with a transliteration is ‘The heart longs for the days and nights of leisure. Lounging around, doing nothing, a happy emptiness within, playing with your thoughts.’
The Bengali influence is best reflected in the songs from Khushboo - ‘Oh Maaji re…apna kinara nadiya ki dhara hai’. The song succinctly captures the dilemma of the boatmen who make a living from the river. A literal translation would be ‘O Boatmen, our shores are no more than the flow of the river.’ Something that does scant justice to the essence of the song that is replete with the philosophy of life and death.
Almost as a counterfoil for the same film Gulzar penned the coy and teasing ‘Bechara dil kya kare.. sawaan jale… bhadon jale’. (What can the poor heart do, all the seasons are burning)? In fact Gulzar’s penchant to transcend from the sublime to the ludicrous is legendary. He penned a song for Thodi si Bewafai which ‘boasted’ of lyrics like ‘Pink sharara silaooing' ( I will stitch a Pink Sharara). But lest anyone take this as a criticism of Gulzar’s poetic sensibility, it would be prudent to point out that this one is a rare failure. He has often used imagery that seems absurd to etch deeply evocative pictures. Consider this priceless gem from the first film he directed Mere Apne- ‘Roz akeli aaye, Roz akeli jaaye, Chand katora liye bhikaran raat’. (She comes alone and leaves alone, this beggar woman night with her begging bowl of the moon). The deft simile transforms night into an ultimate metaphor for loneliness. The song is hauntingly rendered by Meena Kumari on screen playing an old woman deserted by her family.
Yet Gulzar is widely regarded as the thinking man’s poet lyricist. And not without reason. The very first lyrics he penned for the classic Bandini is an immortal gem: ‘Mora Gora Ang Lai Lae. Mohe saanv rang dai de’ (Take away my fair body and let me trade it for the dark shades of my lover). The song like the film was far ahead of its time and dealt with a woman’s choice to have her lover as well as the price she has to pay for this indulgence. The sensuous song went well with the theme of the film.
The lyrics of Gulzar have displayed an awesome range from being bathed in childlike glee to pathos-laden soliloquies. But what has distinguished them is that they have invariably been in blank verse. Apparently the late R D Burman with whom Gulzar had a long and fruitful association had a really tough time setting to music the award winning ‘Mera kuch saaman tumhare paas pada hai’. The song goes on to request the ex lover to return tangible as well as intangible gifts from the remnants of the spent passion. ‘Ek sau solah chand ki raatein, ek tumhare kaande ka til, gili mehendi ki khushboo, jooth mooth ke shikwe kuch, jooth mooth ke vaade sab yaad kara doon, sab bhijwa do, mera wo saaman lauta do.’ (One hundred and sixteen nights of the moon, and the solitary mole on your shoulder, the fragrance of the moist mehendi, some pet peeves and some empty promises, return all of that, return all the moments I spent with you). Even the most blasé listeners were moved!
Many of his fans believe Gulzar deserved the national award a couple of decades earlier for the most romantic lines ever penned for a film song that featured in Khamoshi - ‘Humne dhekhi hai in aankhon ki mehekti khushboo, haath se choon ke inhe rishto ka ilzaam na do, sirf ehsaas hai ye rooh se mehsoos karo, pyar ko pyar hi rehne do, koi naam na do’ (I have felt the lingering fragrance of those eyes, don’t try and touch it with your hands to brand it as a relationship, it is only a sensation, this thing they call love, feel it with your soul and let it remain at that, don’t cubbyhole it with a name).
A worthy successor to that one is ‘Katra katra milti hai, katra katra jeene do, zindagi hein behne do, pyaasi hoon mein pyaasi rehne do’ from Ijazat. (I can only quench it drop by drop, I can only live it drop by drop, there is life, let it flow, I am thirsty, let me remain thus). A song that unpretentiously sighs the longing of a woman in love. But the two most pithy and powerful lines swathed in passion happen in a song from an inconsequential film Swayamvar. ‘Tumhari nighahen bahut bolti hai, zara apni nazron par palkein gira do’. (Your eyes speak of too many things, please cover your gaze with your eye lids).
Gulzar has an extraordinary gift for capturing the maverick spirit of the wondering heart. One of his earlier songs went ‘Hawaaon pe likh do, hawaaoon ke naam, ek anjaan rahgir ka salaam’ (Write on the breeze, dedicate it to the breeze, an unknown wonderer’s salutations!) In the same vein, nearly two decades later he wrote ‘Ay Zindagi gale laga le, humne bhi har ek gam ko ghale se lagaya hain, hain na…’ ( Hey Life, please embrace me just like I have embraced all the sorrows…)
No wonder, getting the better of the restless spirit featured as the opening bhajan in Guddi, the song that introduced Jaya Bhaduri to movie goers. ‘Hum ko man ki shakti dena, man vijay kare, doosroon ke jai se pehle khud ko jai kare.’ (Give us the strength to capture this mind of ours so that before we capture others we are able to overpower our restless souls.)
Hututu, the last film Gulzar directed was a critical and commercial failure. But as poet lyricist he remains unchallenged in the Hindi film scenario as was evident from two of last year’s releases - Filhaal and Saathiyaa. In Filhaal, the man endearingly implores his beloved to ‘ungliyoon mein pehen lo ye rishta’ (Wear the relationship in your fingers) and the title track of Saathiya, an ode to the tinkling laugher of the beloved, is punctuated with classic Gulzar imagery ‘barf giri ho vaadi mein, un mein lipti simti hui, aur hansi teri goonje, un mein lipti simti hui, baat kare dhuan nikle, garam garam ujla dhuan, naram naram ujla dhuan.’ (In the snow clad valley, you are swathed in wool, your laughter echoes, and you are swathed in wool, and from your mouth emerges smoke, the warm and fair smoke, the soft and fair smoke).
Clearly at sixty-seven, Gulzar is a veteran but his lyrics still have all the passion of an adolescent in love.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Celebrating the Human Spirit
(I wrote this for the Deccan Herald, way back in 2005. And now I find some site for students is charging for this essay!!)
When Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for literature a decade ago, she told yet another story. About an old lady. Wise but blind. The old lady could belong to any land, any culture. She is both the ‘law’ and the ‘transgression’ of that land. Her clairvoyance is unmatched. One day a bunch of cynical youngsters decide to expose her. They visit her and ask her whether the bird they hold in their hand is dead or alive. There is a long pause and the youngsters start feeling triumphant. Just as the sniggers begin, the old woman responds softly and sternly. ‘I don’t know’, she says. ‘But it is in your hands.’ The old woman’s wisdom wins once again. In a deft stroke she has felled the arrogance of the doubters. She has shifted the attention from the assertion of power to the instrument through which the power is asserted. The author went on to liken herself to the old woman and the bird to her writing, in her speech.
Ever since she wrote her first novel, Morrison has left seven brilliant novels in our hands. For us to cherish the beauty of the human spirit that remains unvanquished by the greatest of horrors unleashed on it. Morrison writes about the most savage and barbaric acts committed by human beings in the most luminous prose possible. The paradox in her writing makes her truly the wisest woman in the literary horizon. To say she writes about the black experience in a racist culture would be doing her a great disservice. Her characters may be localized to a particular race but the truths she speaks are universal. They may very well be about the Dalits in India or the Muslims in Bosnia.
Toni Morrison was born Chole Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents moved to the north to escape the problems of southern racism and she grew up relatively unscarred by racial prejudices. She spent her childhood in Midwest and read voraciously from Jane Austen to Tolstoy. Her father told her folktales about the black community, transferring his African American heritage to another generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington D.C. America’s most distinguished black college. She continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She wrote her thesis on Suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
A suicide sets the context for Morrison’s commercially most successful book Song of Solomon to unfold. Robert Smith, ironically an agent of the Life Insurance company, decides to ‘fly’ and liberate himself, setting the context for the hero of the tale ‘Milkman’ to come to this world and discover the truth about his identity.
Suicides and the nobility associated with them are integral to Black history in America and the Black folklores. In the inhuman conditions of the ships that carted the Africans to their destiny as slaves, the act of suicide was truly an act of liberation from the degradation and indignity of the life that awaited them. Only the truly fortunate got the opportunity to ‘fly’ into the sea and liberate themselves.
The act was perceived to be a blessing and not an act of cowardice. It is interesting to notice the parallel with Johar, the tradition of Indian women leaping into fire to save themselves from dishonor as spoils of war, as defeat loomed large and the enemy marched to claim them.
Another characteristic of the works of Morrison are that they are invariably lit with the hues of soft feminism. In Song of Solomon, Milkman and his friend Guitar are amazed by the mystical appearance of a peacock over the building of the used car lot where they stand. As the bird comes down, Milkman mistakes it for a female. Guitar corrects him “He. That’s a he. The male is the only one that got the tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch.” Milkman asks why the peacock can fly no better than a chicken and his friend answers: “Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Clearly in Morrison’s scheme of things even though it is something men all the time aspire for, it is the women oppressed in all cultures, who can truly fly and experience liberation.
Sula gets to fly in a manner of speaking. In this classic tale of exploring morality, Morrison engages with the socially correct Nell, who conforms to all the mores and her sexually promiscuous friend Sula, who lives on the fringes. Morrison cleverly colors her story with an early incident that bonds the two women to a lifetime of friendship and betrayal. They are both responsible for the death of Chicken Little by drowning. Sula simply cries while Nell’s first concern is ‘somebody saw’. Morrison manages in that passage to construct the irony of all tales with a moral. It is the girl who will be later considered evil by her community who actually mourns the loss, while her moral friend is only concerned about herself. As to what binds the two girls together despite their different temperaments, Morrison has a ready answer. “Because they had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they set about creating something else to be… daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers… they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.”
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel that was published in 1970, Pecola the protagonist is obsessed with the bluest eye - a metaphor for beauty that Pecola feels will magically transform her life if she acquires a pair of them. She never achieves this feat but in the end turns insane and liberates herself. In Jazz, Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet, kills Dorcos in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder. The city of New York is all-pervasive in its influence in the book and so is Jazz, the escape from reality it provides for the Blacks in the city.
Tar Baby is about the dilemma of breaking free of the umbilical cord. The need to wrench free from the maternal bond and create a set of values, expectations and desires for oneself independent of the maternal. Jadine Child’s mother dies when she is twelve but this does not liberate her from the aura of the mother. She encounters a ‘mother/sister/she’ in a supermarket “with eyes whose force had burnt away their lashes”. The woman in yellow with “too much hip, too much bust,” and eggs in hand makes Jadine uncomfortable and yet she also falls in love with the woman.
The conflict determines the flow of the narrative. In Paradise, her first novel since she won the Nobel prize, Morrison explores the nature of all Paradise. According to the author, all notions of paradise stem as male enclaves and the interlopers are always the women, defenceless and threatening. When women get together and get powerful is when they are attacked.
However it is in Pulitzer prize winning, Beloved that the mystical lyrical voice of the author is most clearly heard. If ever there was a song in the form of a novel, Beloved would come closest to it. The book deals with slavery and infanticide. It was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner. She escaped from a Kentucky plantation and sought refuge in Ohio. When the slave masters overcame them, she killed her baby in order to save the child from the slavery she had managed to escape. Sethe, the protagonist tries to kill her children but is successful only in murdering the unnamed infant, Beloved. Later she is rejected by her slave masters and set free. The ghost of Beloved, who reappears in their lives, years later, as old as she would have been if she had been alive, haunts the house where she lives with her teenage daughter.
The book often veers into the metaphysical and is illuminated by a prose that is both haunting as well as melodious. “For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a Crocker sack, well, maybe you’d have little love left over for the next one.”
Clearly, in the literary horizon, Morrison has ‘The Bluest Eye.’
When Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for literature a decade ago, she told yet another story. About an old lady. Wise but blind. The old lady could belong to any land, any culture. She is both the ‘law’ and the ‘transgression’ of that land. Her clairvoyance is unmatched. One day a bunch of cynical youngsters decide to expose her. They visit her and ask her whether the bird they hold in their hand is dead or alive. There is a long pause and the youngsters start feeling triumphant. Just as the sniggers begin, the old woman responds softly and sternly. ‘I don’t know’, she says. ‘But it is in your hands.’ The old woman’s wisdom wins once again. In a deft stroke she has felled the arrogance of the doubters. She has shifted the attention from the assertion of power to the instrument through which the power is asserted. The author went on to liken herself to the old woman and the bird to her writing, in her speech.
Ever since she wrote her first novel, Morrison has left seven brilliant novels in our hands. For us to cherish the beauty of the human spirit that remains unvanquished by the greatest of horrors unleashed on it. Morrison writes about the most savage and barbaric acts committed by human beings in the most luminous prose possible. The paradox in her writing makes her truly the wisest woman in the literary horizon. To say she writes about the black experience in a racist culture would be doing her a great disservice. Her characters may be localized to a particular race but the truths she speaks are universal. They may very well be about the Dalits in India or the Muslims in Bosnia.
Toni Morrison was born Chole Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents moved to the north to escape the problems of southern racism and she grew up relatively unscarred by racial prejudices. She spent her childhood in Midwest and read voraciously from Jane Austen to Tolstoy. Her father told her folktales about the black community, transferring his African American heritage to another generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington D.C. America’s most distinguished black college. She continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She wrote her thesis on Suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
A suicide sets the context for Morrison’s commercially most successful book Song of Solomon to unfold. Robert Smith, ironically an agent of the Life Insurance company, decides to ‘fly’ and liberate himself, setting the context for the hero of the tale ‘Milkman’ to come to this world and discover the truth about his identity.
Suicides and the nobility associated with them are integral to Black history in America and the Black folklores. In the inhuman conditions of the ships that carted the Africans to their destiny as slaves, the act of suicide was truly an act of liberation from the degradation and indignity of the life that awaited them. Only the truly fortunate got the opportunity to ‘fly’ into the sea and liberate themselves.
The act was perceived to be a blessing and not an act of cowardice. It is interesting to notice the parallel with Johar, the tradition of Indian women leaping into fire to save themselves from dishonor as spoils of war, as defeat loomed large and the enemy marched to claim them.
Another characteristic of the works of Morrison are that they are invariably lit with the hues of soft feminism. In Song of Solomon, Milkman and his friend Guitar are amazed by the mystical appearance of a peacock over the building of the used car lot where they stand. As the bird comes down, Milkman mistakes it for a female. Guitar corrects him “He. That’s a he. The male is the only one that got the tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch.” Milkman asks why the peacock can fly no better than a chicken and his friend answers: “Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Clearly in Morrison’s scheme of things even though it is something men all the time aspire for, it is the women oppressed in all cultures, who can truly fly and experience liberation.
Sula gets to fly in a manner of speaking. In this classic tale of exploring morality, Morrison engages with the socially correct Nell, who conforms to all the mores and her sexually promiscuous friend Sula, who lives on the fringes. Morrison cleverly colors her story with an early incident that bonds the two women to a lifetime of friendship and betrayal. They are both responsible for the death of Chicken Little by drowning. Sula simply cries while Nell’s first concern is ‘somebody saw’. Morrison manages in that passage to construct the irony of all tales with a moral. It is the girl who will be later considered evil by her community who actually mourns the loss, while her moral friend is only concerned about herself. As to what binds the two girls together despite their different temperaments, Morrison has a ready answer. “Because they had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they set about creating something else to be… daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers… they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.”
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel that was published in 1970, Pecola the protagonist is obsessed with the bluest eye - a metaphor for beauty that Pecola feels will magically transform her life if she acquires a pair of them. She never achieves this feat but in the end turns insane and liberates herself. In Jazz, Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet, kills Dorcos in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder. The city of New York is all-pervasive in its influence in the book and so is Jazz, the escape from reality it provides for the Blacks in the city.
Tar Baby is about the dilemma of breaking free of the umbilical cord. The need to wrench free from the maternal bond and create a set of values, expectations and desires for oneself independent of the maternal. Jadine Child’s mother dies when she is twelve but this does not liberate her from the aura of the mother. She encounters a ‘mother/sister/she’ in a supermarket “with eyes whose force had burnt away their lashes”. The woman in yellow with “too much hip, too much bust,” and eggs in hand makes Jadine uncomfortable and yet she also falls in love with the woman.
The conflict determines the flow of the narrative. In Paradise, her first novel since she won the Nobel prize, Morrison explores the nature of all Paradise. According to the author, all notions of paradise stem as male enclaves and the interlopers are always the women, defenceless and threatening. When women get together and get powerful is when they are attacked.
However it is in Pulitzer prize winning, Beloved that the mystical lyrical voice of the author is most clearly heard. If ever there was a song in the form of a novel, Beloved would come closest to it. The book deals with slavery and infanticide. It was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner. She escaped from a Kentucky plantation and sought refuge in Ohio. When the slave masters overcame them, she killed her baby in order to save the child from the slavery she had managed to escape. Sethe, the protagonist tries to kill her children but is successful only in murdering the unnamed infant, Beloved. Later she is rejected by her slave masters and set free. The ghost of Beloved, who reappears in their lives, years later, as old as she would have been if she had been alive, haunts the house where she lives with her teenage daughter.
The book often veers into the metaphysical and is illuminated by a prose that is both haunting as well as melodious. “For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a Crocker sack, well, maybe you’d have little love left over for the next one.”
Clearly, in the literary horizon, Morrison has ‘The Bluest Eye.’
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