Desicritics Author: Jai Arjun Singh

Book Review: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Amartya Sen

Jai Arjun Singh — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 07:33:05 EST

An excerpt from the prologue to Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny:

Civilisational or religious partitioning of the world population yields a 'solitarist' approach to human identity, which sees human beings as members of exactly one group...This can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world. In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups - we belong to all of them. The same person can be, without any contradiction: an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English). Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person's only identity or singular membership category.

The essential plurality of human beings, and how the undermining of this plurality lies behind most of the world's conflicts, are the central themes of this new book, which brings together nine of Sen's lectures that broadly deal with these topics. Human beings, he points out, tend to be primarily defined in terms of their religious or civilisational identities, ignoring the numerous other factors that combine to make a person what he or she is. This results in the miniaturization of people and paves the ground for those with vested interests (rabble-rousing religious leaders, for instance) to foment tensions between groups - to encourage them to see themselves and others purely in terms of a singular identity.

In times of duress, such singular classification can have murderous effects, as we all well know. The essays in this book will strike a chord with anyone who has witnessed how even the best-intentioned people can, through an insidious brainwashing process, be made to see members of another community/religion/state/country as irreconcilably different from themselves, and hence a threat to their own worldview. From here, it's a short step to the complete dehumanization of the Other - and it's precisely on such ground that tragedies like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the 1947 Partition riots and Gujarat 2002 have occurred. The Nazi guards and "Doctor Deaths" at the concentration camps could do what they did because they were no longer able to see the Jews as sentient human beings who were similar to themselves in many ways, regardless of differences in race.

Sen reminds us (though he doesn't say it in so many words) that the world's worst, most destructive conflicts occur between groups, not between individuals. Most of us don't need to step outside our own neighborhoods (or even houses) to see the truth of this. In my own house my grandmother (still haunted by memories of friends and family being brutally killed in Partition riots) speaks of the Muslim community in general with loathing, even says things like "All this is happening only because there are so many Muslims in the world" (after the bomb blasts in London) - but she never seems even slightly awkward when interacting with Muslim friends/acquaintances who visit the house.

As he often does to great effect, Sen draws on personal experience to make his point. He reserves for the book's very last chapter the story of his own first exposure to murder: as a child, during communal riots in 1944, he saw a wounded Muslim named Kader Mia staggering through the gates, asking for help. The man, a day laborer, had been knifed on his way to a nearby house where he was working, in a Hindu-majority colony; he died shortly afterwards.

The 11-year-old future Nobel Laureate was perplexed by the idea that a man could be murdered by people who probably didn't know anything about him except for this crucial, all-subsuming fact: that he was a member of a particular community - hence the Enemy. "For a bewildered child, the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp," he writes. "It is not particularly easy even for a still bewildered elderly adult."

Sen also insists on a distinction between multiculturalism (the actual integration and mingling of different cultures) and what he calls plural mono-culturalism (the phenomenon of different cultures/communities existing in the same place - say Britain - but never interacting at all, simply "passing each other like ships in the night"). He says:

The vocal defence of multiculturalism that we frequently hear these days is very often nothing more than a plea for plural monoculturalism. If a young girl in a conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy, that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by her guardians to stop her from doing this (a common occurrence) is hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures sequestered.

In this context, he discusses the importance of young people being given freedom to choose between various identities, and to assign priorities to the various groups they belong to - and it's here that the book enters slightly controversial waters. I imagine Sen's reservations about the increase in faith-based schools in Britain will raise a few hackles.

[This] reflects a particular vision of Britain as a federation of communities, rather than as a collectivity of human beings living in Britain, with diverse differences, of which religious and community-based distinctions constitute only one part. It is unfair to children who have not yet had much opportunity of reasoning and choice to be put into rigid boxes and told: 'That is your identity and this is all you're going to get'.

People who are very religious (even if they are lucky enough to have so far escaped a situation where they are required to turn fanatical) will also feel queasy about some of the content. Sen is critical of the frequent employment of "moderate" religious voices to counter "extreme" religious voices - e.g. governments calling on moderate Muslim leaders to criticize violent acts in the name of Islam. The effect of this religion-centered political approach, he believes, has been to strengthen the voice of religious authorities, and to give them disproportionate power in contexts that should fall outside the ambit of religion.

But then, what's a book by Amartya Sen if it doesn't cause a few murmurs?

Since Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny is a collection of discrete essays/speeches that have only been touched up in a minor way, there are quite a few repetitions in the text (as there were in Sen's The Argumentative Indian, published last year). However, in my view the points that are repeated are the sort that need to be stressed anyway. To be honest, I can't be as optimistic as Sen is about the possibility of attitudinal changes (I think too many people are too deeply attached to religion and community for there to be a meaningful change in the direction of tolerance in the foreseeable future). But this book deserves a wide readership.

Film Review: A History of Violence

Jai Arjun Singh — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 08:13:43 EST

Canadian director David Cronenberg has a well-documented interest in the interior workings of both the human mind and the human body, and the latter has taken a gruesomely literal form in films like Shivers (a.k.a. Orgy of the Blood Parasites), Videodrome and eXistenz. This isn't a director known for abiding by the niceties of commercial filmmaking, which require that certain things - like the internal organs of human bodies - not be depicted on screen.

But Cronenberg's latest, A History of Violence, is relatively mainstream by his standards, which is one reason it's made it to Delhi's multiplexes at all. It's still an unsettling film though, with more than one scene that will make you shift uncomfortably in your seat.

(Obligatory SPOILER ALERT here. In my view the revelation in question isn't a crucial one, and it occurs less than two-thirds of the way through anyway. But many people don't like having key plot elements revealed, and I like to discuss them at length.)

This is the story of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), a peace-loving family man running a diner in a small Indiana town, who becomes a local hero when he puts out two thugs during a hold-up. But this incident soon leads to Tom's own violent past catching up with him: it turns out that he was a mobster named Joey Cusack in Philadelphia 20 years earlier, before he reformed and settled down to live the American Dream.

At the heart of this story is a simple question: even with the best intentions, can a man ever really shrug off his past life and settle into a completely new persona? But there's nothing straightforward or simple about the film's treatment of this subject. In the first 15-20 minutes we meet Tom and his family, we see that he is a good husband, a good father and a good employer, well-liked by everyone around him. Given all this, when we do find out about the person he once was, how much does it really matter? When his wife is horrified at the thought that the name she and her children have been living with for 20 years is a "false" one - that it wasn't passed down over the generations but simply chosen, randomly, one day - is she justified? Or is she overreacting (given that she never knew Joey Cusack in the first place; that for all practical purposes the only man she ever knew was Tom Stall)? On the other hand, could there be some truth to the assertion, made by a figure from Tom's past, that "he's still the same man, the same Joey - he hasn't changed".

A History of Violence isn't a completely satisfying film - it goes slightly astray in its final 20-25 minutes (with some silliness involving William Hurt in a campy performance that got him an Oscar nomination as supporting actor). But even this last bit begins with a scene that I loved - a shot of Tom/Joey making the long drive to Philadelphia where you get the sense that he is traveling back into his own past, traveling along a route he hasn't been on in 20 years.

One of the things that's fascinating about the film's structure is the gradual escalation of violence within the Stall household as the story progresses. Initially, Tom's teenage son is a passive victim when he is bullied at high school. But after watching his dad's heroism he hits back at his own tormentors with such viciousness that we wonder if we are witnessing the uncoiling of a suppressed genetic impulse. (Crucially, we never learn much about Tom's early life, about how he became a killer, and what led him to change his ways.) Shortly afterwards, there is a confrontation between father and son that the film's idyllic first 15 minutes never prepared us for - raised voices, culminating in Tom smacking his son across his face (Cronenberg shoots scenes of violence in such a way that it seems aimed at the viewer - which is one reason I was so taken aback by the PVR crowd's reaction). Later, there's a disturbing scene where an argument between Tom and his wife ends in brutal sex - with the barest hint that she is aroused by this new side to her husband.

This continuing shift in the film's tone is very relevant to what the story has to say about our buried natures coming to the surface when circumstances allow them to. At the film's end, when Tom returns home, his wife and children are sitting stiffly at the dinner table. Eventually his little daughter gets up and lays out the cutlery for him (out of context, this would have been a "cho chweet" moment). The family is whole again but one senses they will never be the same - they've been stained not just by the violence of Tom's past but by knowledge of their own primitive impulses. At this point one isn't even sure whether it's a good idea to have all those knives and forks around.

Film Review: Capote

Jai Arjun Singh — Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:03:27 EST

In November 1959, the state of Kansas was shaken by news of the murder of the Clutters, a family of four living in a lonesome hamlet called Holcomb. Many worlds away, in Manhattan, novelist Truman Capote was soaking in the recent success of Breakfast at Tiffany's. The book had added to Capote's reputation and he was now a high-profile member of New York's upper-crust literary circles, a raconteur with a talent for becoming the central point of any room he was in. He was at a stage in his career where he could simply call up The New Yorker's editor William Shawn - a mentor to some of the finest young writers of the age - and inform him that he wished to travel to Kansas to research for his next article. This is in fact what Truman did, for the Clutter murder story had ignited something in him.

What that was and what effect it would have on his life and career is the subject of Bennett Miller's Capote, a stunning portrayal of the writer as parasite, feeding off the tragedies of others, and of the loss of humanity in the pursuit of art. Capote covers six years in the author's life - the time that went into the creation of In Cold Blood, his "non-fiction novel" which broke new ground by marrying journalism with literary fiction. This book would seal his reputation as one of America's leading writers - but it would exact a heavy toll on his life too, beginning a downward spiral that would end with his death (of a drug overdose) in 1984. He would never publish another novel.

Capote begins more or less with Truman traveling to Kansas accompanied by his childhood friend Harper Lee (a year away from achieving fame herself with the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird). They visit local residents, make notes, get themselves invited to dinner by the agent investigating the Clutter killings. Throughout, there is little sign of emotion on Truman's face - not even when he lifts the lid off one of the coffins in the funeral home and peers inside. His eyes merely dart about as he registers details and commits them to his memory ("I have 94 per cent recall value," he often boasts; he can recite the contents of an entire magazine page after having read it once).

Even so, at this stage Truman's actions aren't indicative of anything more than an author being slightly over-meticulous in his spadework. But this soon changes: the two murderers are caught and Truman finds himself becoming increasingly interested in one of them, Perry Smith, a tortured young man whose childhood closely resembled Truman's own.

Over a series of meetings they form a strange bond. Truman wins Perry's trust, helps the two men find lawyers to appeal their case. Their execution is stayed once, then again. This suits Truman - he has decided to develop the article into a full-length book and he needs Perry alive for as long as possible so he can get the full story. Later, the situation will be reversed: for In Cold Blood to get its dramatic ending, it will become necessary that the two killers be executed. For all that he has, in his own way, become attached to Perry, Truman becomes a nervous wreck at the thought that he might not get the death penalty after all.

People who knew the real Capote have hailed Philip Seymour Hoffman's imitation of the man's effete, affected charm and his ability to be an urbane upper-class New Yorker and an excited little boy all at once. But the imitation, splendid though it is, is almost secondary: this performance is entirely convincing on its own terms, even if you have no idea who Truman Capote was. Hoffman paints a picture of growing obsession but does it with incredible subtlety, without resorting to any of the usual acting tricks that go with that emotion. For the most part Truman's face is a blank mask as he absorbs the details that he can use in his writing. The first glimpse of vulnerability we see from him comes when William Shawn praises the first two chapters of his manuscript. The same deep-rooted need to be appreciated and admired also comes across in the intensity with which he reads excerpts from his novel out to a large audience in an auditorium (a scene that is chillingly intercut with shots of Perry looking out of his cell window as another inmate is taken away to be executed).

Special mention must also be made of Catherine Keener as Harper Lee; her performance provides an emotional and moral grounding to a story that has such an unlikable man as its protagonist. Watching her, it's easy to imagine that this is the woman who wrote that most graceful of books, To Kill a Mockingbird, the woman who created Atticus Finch. By default, as a close friend and confidant of Truman, she also gives us a perspective on him that the film doesn't otherwise provide.

Capote is a film that is as still on the surface as the desolate Kansas plains themselves. Except for a brief recreation of the murders near the end (arguably necessary to remind us not to feel too sympathetic towards Perry), there is scarcely even a raised voice to be heard. But there is violence beneath the film's surface: the violence that comes from the clash between literature and life, from a man pursuing his art so relentlessly that it's possible for us to see two murderers as his victims, and to wonder whether "In Cold Blood" might have been an apt title for more than one reason.

This is also a film that's more than the sum of its parts: when it's over, what you remember is the overall impact rather than specific scenes. But the final moments, the scene of Perry's hanging, with Capote forcing himself to watch the execution (is this his pathetic stab at atonement?), stay with you. Tears slide down the author's cheeks and you can't help wonder: is he crying for the young man whom he felt such a connection with and whose trust he repeatedly abused for his own gain? Or are the tears for himself, for his knowledge of what he's become, for the price he's paid to produce that one book?

P.S. Do try to read In Cold Blood before watching this film.

The Divorced Woman as Easy Prey

Jai Arjun Singh — Sun, 5 Mar 2006 00:59:41 EST

I was nine when my parents separated and my mother and I moved into a new flat. My relationship with my mom had always been very candid, and so it was that even at that early age I developed an understanding of the perceptions many men had about divorced women: that they were available, desperate for any form of companionship - and even fundamentally loose-charactered (it being a major step in our society for a woman to leave her husband's home, and therefore indicative that she was unconventional in her thinking = not a sweet, submissive Bharatiya naari = Westernised = unprincipled).

One of the first friends my mother made in the new colony was this slightly sad-faced lady (I'm not sure if she was like that from the very beginning or if I've ascribed those qualities to her retrospectively) who I'll call Ritika aunty. She would often visit, sometimes with her husband Rajiv, and mum and I would occasionally go across to their place as well. I can't recall what I thought of him back then - my memory is so clouded by what happened later - but I probably thought he was an okay sort: the adult male figures in my life up to that point hadn't exactly been paragons of normalcy, and compared to them most uncles would have seemed okay-sorts.

Ritika and Rajiv seemed the picture of a "normal" couple - well-settled, living in a decent-sized house with two small children and one large dog. Which is why it's easy to imagine how shaken my mother was when one day - a year or so into our acquaintance with them - Rajiv called her up late one evening and, after initially asking if his wife was around, started making overtures. The kind of talk that begins with "What do you do all day, it must get very dull" and progresses with surprising swiftness to "Is the kid asleep? Should I come over?"

The first thing mum did was to tell me about it. The second thing (and this is something not many women would have had the courage to do) was to call Ritika aunty over and give her the whole story as calmly and straightforwardly as possible. I think it's equally creditable (given how women in Indian society are conditioned to be fiercely loyal to their husbands just to maintain appearances, "family honour" etc) that Ritika accepted the story without fuss, admitting that she had long suspected Rajiv was up to all sorts of things behind her back, but had resigned herself to it. I imagine she confronted him about it later, and of course that was the end of any contact between him and us. They're still very much together, though I don't know what sort of a relationship it must be.

The incident had a major effect on my mother. She no longer felt as free or as comfortable talking with her friends' husbands as she had before - even with the ones she had known for many years and genuinely believed to be decent men. This most relaxed, unselfconscious of women started feeling the need to measure everything she said at get-togethers. She told me once that she didn't know anymore whether to laugh at a risqué joke told by a male friend, even if it was in his wife's presence - because if another such incident ever occurred she might be accused of having brought it on herself by being over-familiar. As tactfully as possible, she made it clear to her closest friends that she was more comfortable when they visited alone rather than with their husbands. Inevitably, the strings of some of those friendships were loosened as a result. And all because of one stupid episode.

I'd like to think things have changed since those days in terms of how men look at a divorced/separated woman - or in terms of people being more accepting of independent women in general. But every once in a while I'm reminded they haven't. A friend who recently got divorced told me about how she'd been getting strange, scarily persistent phone calls and SMSes from male acquaintances: come-ons based on the assumption that she must now be lonely or insecure. These included guys who were themselves married or in relationships, and who had never been anything more than pleasantly cordial to her when she was married. And I'm talking here about a woman with a thriving career, financial security and parents who were supportive of her all the way through. I can only imagine what it must be like for others who aren't as lucky. It makes it easier to understand why thousands of women in this country persist in sticking on in bad marriages.

P.S. I still see Ritika aunty around the colony sometimes, looking tired and careworn, usually leading a big dog listlessly around. (It's almost always a different dog - none of their pets lives very long because this isn't a family of animal-lovers, they just keep getting dogs to fill the empty spaces in their lives.) She even drops in briefly once every few months but the friendship between her and my mum has never been the same since.

Movie Review: Transamerica

Jai Arjun Singh — Wed, 1 Mar 2006 11:46:14 EST

Felicity Huffman's performance in Transamerica has already been praised to the skies, but it's worth looking again at how difficult a role this must have been. We've seen actors playing people who masquerade as members of the opposite sex (eg Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie), we've even seen actors actually playing members of the opposite sex (eg Linda Hunt, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance as a man in The Year of Living Dangerously). Both types of performances are demanding enough, but in a sense they require just one degree (albeit one huge degree) of separation between the character and the performer's real self - and the characters being portrayed are "complete men" or "complete women".

What Huffman has to do here is more complex, more layered and it must have been personally disturbing. She plays a character whose "body is a work-in-progress" - a man (Steven) who has always felt like a woman, wanted to be a woman, and who is now halfway through the process of transforming himself into a woman (Bree). At the point where the film begins, most of the hormonal changes have been set into motion and all that's left is the final surgery - which means Huffman doesn't have the actors' luxury of playing the part in drag; of hiding behind a mask. She has to be herself physically (more or less: make-up is used to make her face seem less feminine and allow us to imagine what Steven must have looked like as a man) - but at the same time she has to convey male habits and tics accumulated over decades, plus the awkwardness of a transition period where all those tics must be unlearnt. The more conventional decision would have been to have a male actor play this role (it would, among other things, allow the actor greater scope for showing off in the more obvious ways). But Huffman does a better job than I can imagine any other performer (of either sex) doing. She carries the film from beginning to end.

Transamerica is engrossing all the way through, but a bit uneven. For much of its duration it's a nicely paced road movie, built on the gradual development of a key relationship. Then it sinks briefly into The Addams Family territory, but comes gasping to the surface just in time to provide an ending that is neither too maudlin nor a cop-out. The film is hampered slightly by the inscrutability of the other main character - the 17-year-old son Bree never knew she had, a delinquent named Toby whom she bails out of jail and takes on a cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles (he doesn't know who she is). Toby is hard to get a fix on, and I'm not sure whether the fault lies in the script or in Kevin Zegers' strange, two-dimensional performance. You sense he's a little boy at heart, a kid who's had to grow up too soon - during the drive with Bree he seems to enjoys the chance to drop his defences. But when the more street-wise side to his character emerges, it seem at odds with that other personality - almost too conniving.

The introduction of Bree's crazy family -- the mother in particular a shrill, overbearing caricature - also poses a bit of a problem. One understands the point the film is trying to make here: that compared to these people, the transsexual is the one who's normal, living a life of dignity, relatively sure of her place in the world. But in another sense, by showing us that Steven/Bree came from this background in the first place, the film can also be read as suggesting that his leanings are the result of a troubled childhood.

Ultimately, however, Transamerica succeeds in showing how harmful it is to expect people to stay in their pre-defined roles for all time - to never step out of their little compartments or grow into other roles. It's a theme that shows up in a minor key through the film - as in the scene where Toby is surprised, almost offended, to see an American Indian (Graham Greene in a neat cameo) wearing a cowboy hat. ("Keeps the sun out of my eyes better than a band and two eagle feathers would," the Indian explains with Clint Eastwood-like taciturnity.) And of course it permeates the film through Huffman's performance, which helps us see Bree not as a deviant but as a completely believable human being treading the path she must follow.

One thing I haven't mentioned is how funny the film is in its own quiet way - especially in the running joke involving Bree's efforts to correct Toby's grammar ("Hustling is degrading, not degradable!") and in the (admittedly clichéd) depiction of Middle America's White Trash. Also, though there is no prolonged nudity, there are a couple of brief scenes (including one with a prosthetic) that are quite graphic and disturbing - and I find it interesting that the film is being released (presumably uncensored) in multiplexes in Delhi. I went for a preview screening where few others were present but I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall at a regular show with lots of clueless college kids in attendance!

(Crossposted at Jabberwock)

Film Review: Robert Altman's MASH

Jai Arjun Singh — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 03:25:10 EST

To see Robert Altman's acerbic 1970 film M*A*S*H, about the goings-on in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, is to be reminded of how different it was in tone to the famous TV series it inspired - a well-written, well-acted sitcom, but one that ran for 11 years (though the war itself lasted only three!) and inevitably lost much of its edge over that time. On the show, for instance, Alan Alda's Captain Hawkeye regressed from being a lean 'n mean protagonist in the early years to an avuncular gent who managed to have a twinkle in his eye even for his long-time nemesis, Major O'Hoolihan (a.k.a. "Hot Lips"). In the film on the other hand, Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye is frozen for all time just as he appeared on screen for those 110 minutes - sneer permanently in place, ever ready with a wisecrack, genuinely cruel to the foolish idealists around him.

I'm not exactly knocking the TV M*A*S*H, I enjoyed it enormously when it was telecast in India in the early years of the cable revolution. And any comparisons are bound to be unfair to the TV series, which never had the liberty to be as cruel, profane or hard-edged as the film version was. But given that the intention of the script was to highlight the absurdity of war, it has to be said that only the film version makes the grade. Not the sitcom, which eventually turned into a long-running soap about a lot of likable people living together in many tents - and oh, by the way, there's a war going on somewhere outside.

Few movies, or books for that matter, capture war's insanity as well as Altman's film, which is built on the friction between the hopelessly idealistic and the hopelessly cynical. One of the most remarkable things about the movie is that one never actually gets to see any fighting. This is war as theatre, set not on the killing fields but in the army operating rooms, where doctors have to deal with the messy aftermath. Where foolish, swaggering machismo is stripped away to reveal the blood and gore beneath, where bodies have to be stitched back together, organs put back in their right place. And where humour is the only way to deal with such horrors. ("Nurse, wheres the scalpel? Right...scratch my nose please.")

Altman's directorial style was well suited to the subject matter - the sudden zoom-ins and pull-outs and the overlapping dialogue all contributed to creating chaos out of order. The savagery with which this film lampoons the self-righteousness and gungho-ism that accompany armed conflict has rarely been matched. From the start, M*A*S*H is firmly on the side of the irreverent characters - Hawkeye, Trapper John, Duke Forrest - and never misses a chance to poke fun at the sanctimonious (read: hypocritical). When the Bible-toting Frank Burns (played by a young Robert Duvall) teaches a Korean lad to read from the Old Testament (in a scene that has proselytising implications), Duke Forrest hands the boy a porn magazine ("lots of pictures. Pictures good"). The implicit question is: in the madness and inhumanity of this setting, does the Holy Book really count for more than a skin mag? The question rears its head again a little later, when Burns and the equally lofty-minded Hot Lips succumb to lust in her tent: they can't even have consensual sex without justifying it as a divine act ("God wants us to be together; His will be done.")

Watching this film makes you wonder how the horrors of war can possibly be presented as anything but a comedy of the absurd. The question is pointless because there have been great war films in the drama genre, films that are austere and introspective, occasionally even - let's face it - thrilling. For every M*A*S*H there's a Paths of Glory, just as for every Catch-22 there's a Naked and the Dead. But at their best, movies like M*A*S*H allow us to see that war is in its essence one big comedy - as rich in farce and slapstick as anything the greatest funny men could have dreamt up, and a mirror of the human condition unlike any other.

Book Review: Upamanyu Chatterjee's Weight Loss

Jai Arjun Singh — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:14:25 EST

I believe reviews are essentially personal things and the best ones will tell you as much about the reviewer as about the thing being reviewed (never understood the "be objective" shtick dished out by editors with Buddha-like smiles). And usually I'm quite comfortable writing what I feel about a book or film, irrespective of what others have said about it. But ever so often a difficult case comes along where I have to wonder whether it might be better to take a coolly academic approach; to tiptoe around my own (undoubtedly warped) ideas about a work and try instead to imagine how it might affect the average reader/viewer. This usually happens when a book or film leaves a strong impression on me but I still can't really argue with the negative things others are saying about it.

Does that make any sense? The latest instance is Upamanyu Chatterjee's Weight Loss, which I started nearly a month ago and have only now brought myself to finish. I've been ambivalent about it all the way through: the first 70-80 pages were very promising, and funnier than anything I had read by an Indian author in at least 3-4 years (this could be the Indian Portnoy's Complaint, I was thinking excitedly at that stage). But then it started to drift and get tedious. After a couple of weeks I returned to it yesterday and to my own surprise finished the remaining 200 pages quite easily.

I know of at least 4-5 people who disliked this book intensely, and at least one (someone whose judgement I have very high regard for) who thought it was middling at best. Plus I've read three scathing reviews that made some very good points. And yet I can't shake the feeling that for all its unevenness there's much in it that's good - and that in particular it hasn't received enough credit for its subversive humour and for the way it brings a degree of believability, even poignancy, to the actions of a protagonist no reader would otherwise be able to identify with (and no mother would be able to love).

Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lustworthiness. Bhola's tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he fetishizes everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling "madly in love" with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the length of the book and most of Bhola's life - he even ends up studying at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he get expelled from school for defecating in a teacher's office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book's many manifestations of the "weight loss" motif) and engages in sundry forms of debauchery. Agastya Sen would have barfed at some of this. Portnoy would at the very least have blushed.

And many readers will understandably be disgusted. As you might have guessed, this isn't a particularly accessible book. From the first, it sets out to make things very difficult for the reader. The subject matter is unpleasant and gratuitous in places, and it's easy to be put off. (I don't have delicate sensibilities myself but I was still disturbed by some passages, and this was one reason for the two-week break in reading it.)

And yet, much as I was personally repulsed by Bhola's twisted obsessions, I thought him convincing on his own terms: given how the author sets up and defines the character for us, I found it completely believable that he would behave the way he does; that he would, for instance, make a crucial life-altering choice on the basis of a single twisted obsession. If one of the chief purposes of fiction is to provide us a window into another way of living or thinking, Weight Loss does succeed in doing that to an extent.

The more pertinent question then is, what can we possibly gain from following the misadventures of such a grossly unbalanced character, and there's no easy answer to that one. I don't want to go out on a limb defending this book, but I have to point out here that it's futile to take Weight Loss at face value. The entire premise is so extreme that the best way to approach it is to think of it as a deliberate distortion - the exaggeration of characters and situations to draw attention to the pathologies of our own lives. To this end, Chatterjee's humour is an incredibly effective device. He's better than almost any contemporary Indian writer at being irreverent about our sacred cows and showing us what comical little creatures we are at precisely those times when we are taking ourselves most seriously. The humour, admittedly over the top at times, also serves as a buffer, shielding the reader from some of the depressing things he has to say.

One criticism of the prose is that it's laborious and overdone. But this very quality often helps him achieve a very specific comic effect founded on the gradual building up of hysteria. When he uses a long string of words machine gun-style to describe something, it's done very deliberately - the effect is very different from, say, a florid writing style where adjectives are indiscriminately over-used. For instance, early in the book, when Bhola is caned by his physical education teacher, we are told that "one of his classmates, Anantaraman, a pale, sensitive, shy, nervous and complex boy, passed out". You might argue that the simultaneous use of "pale", "sensitive", "shy" and "nervous" amounts to overkill but I think it gives the sentence a hysterical effect that fits very well with the overall mood of the passage. And it nicely leads up to the knockout blow provided by the last adjective, "complex" - a relatively unspecific word but a wickedly funny one in this context, and one that perfectly fits the character of the distressed Anantaraman.

Another example - after Bhola asks his wife to do something with a vaguely sexual connotation: "Embarrassed, terribly shy, faintly excited, almost happy, uncertain, she complied." (But I'm going to stop dissecting humour now, it's no fun.)

P.S. After all that pontificating, let me stress that I'm not giving Weight Loss my highest endorsement - only suggesting that it's a more interesting book than it first appears to be, and worth reexamining.

Pontificating On The Oscars

Jai Arjun Singh — Sun, 5 Feb 2006 00:28:51 EST

I had an interesting email discussion recently with Anup Kurian, director of the film Manasarovar, who'd mailed me some of his thoughts on the Oscars. One of the points Anup made was that while the awards in general are whimsical, the winners in the foreign-language category tend to be deserving. In this context, he said that in the year Lagaan was nominated, No Man's Land (which won the award) was a better film, and so was the Brazilian movie Central Station.

I disagree with some of the specifics of Anup's mail. For instance, I don't think either Central Station or No Man's Land is a demonstrably better film than Lagaan. More to the point, in my opinion the three movies come from such different cultural backdrops/filmmaking schools that comparing them is a pointless, even impossible, task. And this is one of the problems I have with the foreign-language film category: it pretends that there is one common critical yardstick by which movies from around the world can be judged. That's a ridiculous notion, and an insult to the great variety in the medium. Why should US-centric or Euro-centric benchmarks for Good Cinema be applied to mainstream Hindi films, for instance? Sticking with just India and the US (only two among the hundreds of countries and moviemaking schools in the world), we have countless examples of top-of-the-line Indian films being dismissed or completely misunderstood by critics in the US. I saw a link recently to an American film critic's review of Sholay, which refers to the Jai-Veeru male-bonding relationship as "pure camp". Some things just do not translate across cultures.

[Conversely, of course, there are movies recognised as trash in India but extolled by Hollywood because they go so far over the top that they can at least be categorised as masterpieces of kitsch: like Bhansali's Devdas, which Time magazine's Richard Corliss put in his year-end top 10 because (among other reasons) "the flouncing frocks worn by Madhuri and Aishwarya were so pretty".]

Having said all this though, one can't ignore the fact that the foreign-language film category does exist, and that winning the award can be immensely beneficial to the movie and even to the film industry of the country it represents. So instead of making some kind of judgement on what is actually "the best Indian movie of the year" (another futile task anyway, for there are so many different filmmaking schools within the country), the practical requirement is to pick and submit something that has a chance of winning. In his mail, Anup made some valid points about the idiocy shown by the Indian Producers' Association when selecting India's submissions for the Oscars. "The 'racism' lies more in our own selection process," he wrote, "than with Americans or the Motion Picture Academy. There are excellent films happening in regional languages. But there is a collective myopia and now Indian cinema is internationally recognised only as Bollywood musicals - this gross misrepresentation is tragic."

Moving beyond the foreign-language film category to the Oscars in general: I've had a love-hate relationship with that show for over 15 years now. As a movie buff I've always enjoyed watching it, right from the pre-nomination buildup. I've speculated on possible nominees and winners, drawn up detailed lists of the permutations and combinations, exulted each time there's been an upset. But very early on I also realised that there isn't much sense in holding the Oscars up as indicators of the "best" in any category. (This is of course true of all competitive awards, even the most professionally organised ones, like the Booker Prize.) The whole thing is too much of a lottery - as anyone familiar with Oscar's history will know, even with the best intentions, there are too many factors apart from merit that go into determining the winners. And even merit is subjective anyway.

Besides, once you have five of the best contenders in any category (and to be fair to the Oscars, their nominee lists are usually quite strong), it's an incredibly silly exercise to pick out one from those five and anoint it the "best of the best". (As Henry Fonda once said, "take the finest performances of Laurence Olivier, James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen, and tell me how you can possibly pick the best among them?") Personally I'd have a lot more respect for the Oscars if they just ended the show at the five-nominees stage. But of course a commercial awards show can't work that way.

What the show definitely is, is immense fun, and I'm sure I'll be sitting with my notepad in hand, waiting for the nominees announcement, even 40 years from now. But take it seriously? Nah. (Unless I'm senile then, in which case I will.)

[Cross-posted on Jabberwock.]

Book Review: Scarless Face & Other Stories

Jai Arjun Singh — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:41:19 EST

The earliest memory I have of buying any book is of an Amar Chitra Katha obtained from the Malviya Nagar market when I was about four. It was a collection of Panchatantra tales and the cover showed a jackal with a very thoughtful expression, maintaining vigil over a dead elephant - the story I think was about the fox being unable to tear through the elephant's flesh himself, and tricking a lion or tiger into doing it for him.

As a child I spent many happy hours in the world defined by those comics - a world inhabited by sagacious monkeys, rueful snakes and scatterbrained crocodiles (drawn with zigzag lines on the sides of their faces, an illustrator's shorthand for dumbness). An improbably all-encompassing forest, with perhaps a village on its outskirts, was the usual setting, and though the savage laws of the jungle sometimes prevailed, it was essentially comforting to see so many creatures mingling in this space - forming friendships, counseling, bickering, conniving.

One of the reasons I so enjoyed Scarless Face & Other Stories is that it was a throwback to those Amar Chitra Katha days. Many of those familiar tales show up in this compilation of stories drawn from Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim traditions. A large number come from the beloved Jataka legends, about the previous lives of the Buddha. These are morality tales all right but what is sometimes forgotten is that they are also full of delicate humour - while the underlying lessons are seriously meant, the actual structure of the stories is wry and self-effacing (just as well, given that they involve talking animals). Much of the success of these retellings comes from the authors' recognition of this insight. Leading writers from Sri Lanka and Canada have, in most cases, embellished the tales with their own voices and imaginative powers, while retaining the spirit of the originals.

Graeme Macqueen's "Just like the Rest", about a king's encounter with the Boddhisatva "pre-incarnated" as a stag, is enthralling in its depiction of the bewildered animal coming to terms with what he is:

"The first time around the thicket he was afraid, for it is the nature of deer to fear those who pursue them. The second time he was confused, for it seemed to him that he was destined for something higher than to be hunted. The third time around he remembered who he was. He was the Great Being, the one who would become the Teacher, the one who would help the world to lay down its burden, the one who would dry the world's tears. And with memory came courage, for he thought, 'This is not the way I shall die."

Michael Ondaatje's lively account of a group of vultures trying to help a merchant is another of the highlights - complete with an illustration of a vulture-trap (almost certainly a modern incorporation) and a delightfully open-ended conclusion. And there are other, slightly less familiar stories - like the title one, a fine allegory, about the over-sheltered elephant Scarless Face and his king, who must step out into the world and see suffering before they can be truly happy. It's written by Griffin Ondaatje, the editor of this collection, and his retellings are among the most evocative - notably "The Camel Who Cried in the Sun", from a legend about the Prophet Mohammed, and "The Resting Hill", from a Tamil folktale.

M G Vassanji brings his trademark elegance to "The Cycle of Revenge". Ernest MacIntyre's "How the Gods and Demons Learned to Play Together", my pick for the best story in this collection, comes from the Natyasastra's myth about the birth of theatre - but it is equally about empathy and perception, about how quick we are to pass judgement on those who are different from us. And Linda Spalding's "The Great Journey" takes an oft-told story from the Mahabharata (the tortuous journey of the Pandavas and Draupadi to heaven) and gives it resonance by adding what it lacks in most translations - a sense of humour. (The passage where the dog accompanying Yudhisthira is revealed as Dharma is distinctly unlike any other translation I've seen.)

The retellings that don't work are the shortest ones (some barely two pages), which are workmanlike. It's difficult to see the sense, for instance, in including vapid, joyless versions of "The Monkey and the Crocodile" and "The Deer, the Tortoise and the Kaerala Bird" - reading these, you'll be crying out for the Amar Chitra Katha versions complete with colourful drawings. But such missteps are few and far between, and for the most part this collection demonstrates the truth of what Macqueen says in his foreword: "When we retell and read these stories we become part of a community stretching back in time and reaching forward into the future."

Kiran Desai And "The Inheritance Of Loss"

Jai Arjun Singh — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:42:10 EST

The most striking, and endearing, thing about Kiran Desai is how laid back she is. Even with an interview being conducted on limited time, it's easy to drift into a free-flowing, non-bookish conversation with her: about the very filling lunch she just had at Swagath (an ill-advised way to start an afternoon that will be spent talking with journalists); about how Delhi's food culture has changed since her childhood days, when the Punjabi-Chinese at Golden Dragon qualified as fine dining. Later, when she marvels at debutant writers getting younger and more publicity-savvy ("isn't it disgusting!" she stage-whispers in jest), it's possible to forget she's an author herself. She doesn't go to book parties or publishing events, she says; the thought of writers putting their personal email IDs on their websites makes her wide-eyed.

Besides, I never do succeed in wheedling out why it took her seven years to complete a second novel after "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" (1998) - this in an age when publishers warn authors that there must not be a long gap after the first book. Desai's faraway expression suggests she isn't quite sure herself what she was up to. "I suppose I was working and reworking the second book a lot," she says vaguely.

But that she isn't casual or laidback about her actual writing becomes obvious when we start to talk about this second book, the just-published "The Inheritance of Loss". She enthusiastically relates anecdotes, expresses her disappointment that so many characters and incidents didn't make it to the final draft. "At one point I had something like 1,500 pages of notes," she says, "and it was a real struggle to hold it all together and then pare it down."

Set in the mid-1980s in Kalimpong, high in the northeastern Himalayas, The Inheritance of Loss centres on three people and one dog living together in an ancient house named Cho Oyu. There's the embittered, reptilian judge, lost in his chessboard and in his memories: of a youth spent at Cambridge many decades earlier; of humiliation in a foreign land. Staying with him (in this order of affection received) are his beloved dog Mutt and his 17-year-old granddaughter Sai, who was orphaned as a child. The judge's cook, who manages the household, and a few neighbours scattered around the area, round off the cast. As the story unfolds, insurgency is growing in the region: the Indian Nepalese want their own country or state, a Gorkhaland where they will not be treated as servants; young boys, trying to be men, roam the mountainside looting houses, collecting ammunition. Their predicament is contrasted against that of Indians settled abroad (the cook's son Biju, stumbling from one job to the next in the US, in a humorous parallel narrative).

Reading Inheritance, one initially feels it could have been shorter - with many characters, and a narrative that leaps around in time and space, it occasionally gets unfocussed. But Desai's descriptions of the things she had to leave out (the back-stories of characters who seem shadowy in the final draft, for instance) are so vivid, it's possible to wonder instead if a longer version of the book might have been more effective.

Why did she choose Kalimpong as a setting? "I spent parts of my childhood there, at an aunt's place," she explains (in a house called Cho Oyu!), "and I wanted to capture what it means to grow up in such a fascinating environment, with such wonderfully disparate people." The first stirrings of insurgency were being felt at the time, she recollects, "but at that age I had no real understanding of the issues involved. I was concerned only with my own world." Some of this reflects in Sai's character in the book; the petulance of the lover's spats between her and Gyan (a young man readying to join the insurgents' ranks) reminds us that they are essentially children caught in events way over their head. "I wanted to depict how we never really try to understand what life is like for other people."

Desai was 15 when she left India - she lived in England for a year and has been in the US since then - and it's tempting to pigeonhole her as another NRI writer obsessed by themes like dislocation (something that certainly runs through Inheritance). In person, however, she comes across as someone who's never really felt out of place no matter where she's been. She's pleasingly unselfconscious about the topic of immigrants, joking (again from the outside, as if she isn't personally involved) about the various kinds there are: "those who throw up their hands at the difficulties - and, at the other end of the scale, those who are expert at playing the ethnic card, accentuating the character traits they are expected to have, and thereby making a success of their lives". Like Biju's worldly-wise friend Saeed Saeed, one of the many characters in Inheritance she would have liked to give a bigger stage to.

She's so fond of relating stories - about the rodent population in Harlem, for instance, which led to the formation of a "Neighbourhood Rat Committee" - that it's no surprise when she promises not to dally as much over her next book (possibly a novel set in New York) as she did with this one. "It might make more sense," she concedes with a laugh, "to spread the stories out over many books, and publish them more frequently!"

P.S. In blog-related discussions in the past I've mentioned how much scope there is for misunderstanding when you know a person only through their writing - hence the phenomenon of readers taking a post dead seriously when it was written in a facetious vein, or extrapolating a rigid, all-encompassing worldview from a single throwaway sentence. Interviewing Desai was similar in a way. I had half-expected to meet a very solemn Indian Author Settled Abroad, keen to pontificate about the plight of people who have no place to call their own. But this was a nice surprise.