सूरज का सातवाँ घोडा

It’s many years since I saw “Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda”. Shyam Benegal’s film is a story within a story of an author recalling the days of his youth, his friends and the tales of their resident storyteller Manek Mullah. I just got around to reading the novel, like with Mohan Rakesh the author (Dharamvir Bharti) was familiar to me from school lessons. With the film, I felt a disjunct between the three stories that Manek Mullah narrates but a reading of the book indicates that in fact Benegal’s film is true to the book and rarely departs from it in spirit.

I have scarce knowledge of literary criticism in Hindi but to me it seemed that like Mohan Rakesh’s Ashad Ka Ek Din, Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda is also part of a modernist movement in Hindi literature. First, the novel is about the stories we tell and has a narrator who in turn is recounting the tales of another narrator. These stories may or may not be true, your narrator may or may not be reliable. Second, the novel connects the three stories in ways that become apparent only towards the end. Third, the three stories at the core of the book are representations of Indian women, particularly those in the many small towns across the country. All of this works very well but the telling of at least two of the stories falls a little flat, weakening the novel and therefore the film.

Both novel and film are careful in establishing the recollection of a lost time and mood as the narrator remembers the carefree, aimless days of his youth with Manek Mullah and his stories at the centre of it all. The camaraderie between the friends, their attraction to the stories and the different take of each of these friends are well delineated. Manek Mullah is fascinating to his friends but he is also representative of feckless, weak, small town youth as the stories will indicate. Of these stories, Manek Mullah’s first story is about a girl in his neighbourhood, Jamuna.  She is more than a little in love with her neighbour, Tanna, and not in the least bit shy of declaring it. Tanna is a timid lad quite under the thumb of the quintessential Hindu paterfamilias. Jamuna is also saucy with Manek and he in turn is both drawn to her and recoils from such overt interest. None of this goes anywhere as expected and soon Jamuna is married off to an old sort with money. Jamuna, delightfully amoral, takes up with a lad who takes her to and fro from the temple. The desire for a child is duly granted, both gods and driver doing their duty. Eventually the old husband carks it and we are left with the idea that all has turned out well for Jamuna - respectable and profitable widowhood, an attentive lover and a child. In both book and film (with Rajeshwari Sachdev and Ravi Jhankal, excellent as Jamuna and her tangewala), Jamuna’s spirit and her desire for life dominate so that the other women seem paler in comparison.

The second story is perhaps the weakest. Lily is the educated, poetic sort who takes up with Manek. Much refined middle-class romance follows. But this too is doomed by the constraints of orthodoxy and Lily and Manek’s own weaknesses and eventually Lily marries Tanna, familiar from the first story. Lily is too milquetoast, the romance too ethereal for one to engage with this section. There is a certain kind of sterility here, the air too still to indicate any kind of life force on the part of the three protagonists. On the other hand, the segment is perhaps authentic in its depiction of the passivity of the young in a traditional, middle class milieu.

The third story has Satti, woman and salt of the earth, at its centre. Satti is the feisty, poor woman of so many Indian stories, battered on all sides, yet strong and resilient. Even if Manek Mullah is fascinated by her (and the end seems to suggest that of all the women, she is the one who makes the strongest impression on him), their social class is too disparate for anything to eventuate. What does eventuate is classic oppression with the suggestion that Tanna’s father, the tyrannical paterfamilias, is likely to have raped Satti. Satti vanishes only to turn up later with a child, a little beaten by life-though as with many parts of this novel this is open ended and subject to the question, is this real? It is clear that the author wants us to be sympathetic to Satti, in a way she is the central, morally upstanding heroine of the tales. But in spite of her feistiness, even her nobility, in some ways she is also a bit of a cliché. She is at times so much the material of myth and imagination that she is barely flesh and blood.

The weaknesses of the novel therefore are embedded in the film. Perhaps it would have been more interesting had Benegal produced a less faithful adaptation. Nevertheless it remains amongst Benegal’s better movies and part of a fairly small body of films adapted from Hindi literature And as it happens, I also know very little of the lives of regional authors. The owner of the bookshop where I bought this book had a fair few tales of wine and women amongst the Hindi literati!

Four Short Greek poems

LAST SUN IN THE TREETOPS

From her roost the water hen stretched out
her purple-green sleek neck
the kingfisher's quick glance
shook droplets from his crown
and I thought love should always be
that brilliant on the wing and wild.
Ibykos, 6th century BC

ECHO

Up and down the meadow where the sheep graze echo,
fadingly as afterthoughts, the cries of quail.
Satyrus, 2nd century BC

SINGER

She took the myrtle branch and sang in turn
another song of pleasure, in her left hand still
the flower of the rosetree, and let loose
over her naked shoulder, down her arm
and back, the darkness of her hair.
Archilocos, 7th century BC

LOVE TOKEN

I am an apple thrown to you for love. Nod yes,
Xanthippe. You and I, though sweet, are not to last.
Plato, 4th century BC

*source here*

Pretty Brooches

I have been attempting to make a couple of brooches, which are a bit of an addiction of mine. It's been a slow task. The one on the left below is a dyed crochet piece kitted out with gumnuts and guinea feathers. The gumnuts are of a common, plebian sort and from a neighbourhood tree. They were painted prior to affixing. I quite like this though it's probably best with bohemian togs. The one on the right is a rusted silver brooch that I found while walking that I gave a paint makeover. I might use it to make a larger piece but at the moment I am happy with it's coppery tones.

Of all the brooches I have, the Japanese ones that I picked up at a few art exhibitions are my favourites. On the left below is a brooch made from newspaper and dyed a powdery blue. On the right a brooch that I have had for a long time. It's soft and feathery and inspired by a peony.

The background pictures are all from the latest edition of Inside Out.

The Mango Tree

My grandfather is in his late 80s and still in fine fettle. He is a bit of a writer and sends little snippets on his life my way now and then and they are always a pleasure to read, though admittedly I am more than partial to his memoirs of the 30s to the 50s. Yesterday's was more au courant though it ties up nicely and unexpectedly and in a slightly happy-sad way with the past. So today's guest post is by the grandfather.

"The mango tree opposite our house is giving mangoes with a vengeance and has offered a lot of fun for the past one month or so. The mangoes are ripening in the tree itself and this has added to the merriment. This morning when I opened the gate, I saw a woman, a passerby, picking a fruit and then searching for more on the road. Then a shool going boy coolly entered the compound, picked up a fruit that had fallen and started to eat it before my eyes. Now our compound has become an open ground and children of all hues enter it throughout the day and Periamma is after them. You should see Arya Mama chasing them on the road. The slum children have been coming in the afternoons and with long sticks get clusters of raw mangoes and take them by the sackfull. To avoid this nuisance (in a way it is fun and a nuisance), I tried to engage some pluckers but Rajanikant vetoed this as the plucking is a common task. The price demanded was Rs.500/- and a share in the produce. To compensate he collected about 100 mangoes which he shared with us in a fifty-fifty basis. For our share, we had also got some mangoes previously. Suchitra and Radha prepared pickles out of them. Of course Surekha and the maid servant who comes in the morning to give a bath to Periamma had their share. Yesterday when I went out I got one fruit that had fallen from the tree just then. I tasted it and it was very sweet. I have kept 40 mangoes to ripen and hope to get the fruits in 2 or 3 days.

This tree has a history. In or about 1958, a small sapling came out of the ground on our fence and has grown into a mighty tree. It has been a silent witness to all the happenings in our family for the past sixty years. It used to give mangoes every alternate year, however this time we got mangoes last year too. But unfortunately over the years it bent towards the east and it is now outside our compound - we cannot claim ownership neither can anybody else! It has become common property and is treated as such."

Just Richmal

Arguably, it’s harder to write fiction for children than for adults. On the one hand, there is no particular requirement that the work be sophisticated and complex. On the other hand children are largely free of artifice and pretension with regard to reading, it’s hard for the author to sell on the basis of literary reputation alone. No child after all is about to read a book unless he or she can completely enter the world created on the page.

I shop often for young adult fiction for the sprogs of various relatives and friends. Fantasy and the supernatural predominate, no doubt due to the Lord of the Rings, Twilight and Harry Potter franchises. Besides this, mirroring the adult market, there is the requirement that the themes be dark and deal overtly with issues such as divorce, rape, incest, homosexuality – really nothing that you would not see during normal programming hours on television. And of course now books must compete with television and the Net for a child’s attention. To my mind, much young adult fiction now is badly written but these themes are probably entirely relevant to the average tween, keeping in mind that a young adult these days is simultaneously cautious of and susceptible to marketing (Twilight for e.g. is partly driven by its readers but also partly by a huge marketing machine).

Absent these days are the kinds of sunny tales that filled our childhood. Enid Blyton dominated our pre age 10 years but in our tweens the choice lay between William, Jennings, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the like. If you read William and Jennings, you didn’t read the rest. Or you did but you were quite quite sure that they were completely inferior to William and Jennings. And of the two, the William series was the supreme treat of those years. Like with much of Wodehouse’s work, the William stories are set in an idyllic, unchanging England though the war intrudes now and then. The books largely deal with William and his friends, who call themselves the Outlaws and their scrapes. William’s parents are by and large sensible folk, his older siblings, Robert and Ethel, largely see him as a pest. The Outlaws arch enemies are the Hubert Laneites and many of the stories deal with the complications that ensue from this rivalry. Rounding off the major characters are Violet Elizabeth Bott, the blonde spoilt sort with a lisp and Joan, the girl next door. The characters are familiar from many children’s stories but it is Crompton’s treatment that elevates them. They were the funniest stories we had ever read (some bits here). To my mind they have survived even better than Wodehouse (I still read them unlike Wodehouse), in that you never tire of the variations on the theme. No doubt, like Blyton, they can be subjected to a revisionist reading and one can detect various prejudices embedded in the books but as a child, it is easy to enter both William and Swami’s worlds and find no contradictions.

Apart from arming ourselves with the knowledge that Richmal Crompton was a woman, a useful fact in establishing playground superiority, we knew nothing of the author. Few children after all care about the author! In a post google word, it’s of course mainly a matter of minutes before you have a comprehensive biography of the author. It was a fascinating trawl though a little light on works other than William (though William remains an indication of her talent in that she was able to create so plausible a boy of 11). Sadly the trawl also showed how a writer may so easily fall out of literary fashion even as her work survives in some parts of the world (a pity that certain specific forms of English literature have fallen victim to both the canon of authors like Woolf and Joyce as also political attitudes in the latter half of the 20th century). Interesting too that Crompton primarily wanted to write adult fiction and as this article suggests, there is a great deal of her work waiting to be discovered. Crompton seems an interesting person, unlike the person who lay behind the Blyton empire. Surely her adult fiction must be inflected with her feminism, her experience as a teacher, her satirical impulses so clearly hinted at in the William books? Persephone, which has done much to rescue obscure authors, seem to have at least one out and I hope others follow. Anyone who wrote the William stories will always be amongst my top ten authors.

PS: Most young girls would have also read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women but these were a different category and warrant a separate post.

Rohmer's Films

I recently indulged myself with a 25 DVD set of Eric Rohmer's (all his films bar Astree and Celadon). It was quite inexpensive so I couldn't resist - though I am sure you can download it for free off a few websites. I am slowly working my way through it, I have managed three so far. A Winter's Tale was very absorbing, confirming that Rohmer's Tales of the Seasons is the best of his work. Love in the Afternoon, though interesting, was also surprisingly slightly icky in its depiction of near infidelity. Maybe the 70s appear so when viewed with a sensibility not in tune with the times (I can never appreciate Last Tango in Paris, for e.g.). It is also one of Rohmer's few films where the seemingly bad girl is the bad girl. I had seen Suzanne's Career before, but it remained as charming on a second viewing. Specifically I think the way it is shot and its themes complement and contrast other New Wave directors of the time and along with these films it is also a record of Paris at a particular time. The latter films of the directors do not seem to have such a commonality. All Rohmer's movies are essentially variations on young love and yet each time it looks wondrously fresh.

Rohmer was the film maker whose work inspired the "like watching paint dry' criticism. Possibly the criticism is helped along by the fact that Rohmer's films have a lot of talk, hardly any music and are not overly concerned with cinematic flourishes a la Godard. Of course criticism of arthouse cinema is as pointless as that of commercial cinema. Both occupy very separate spaces and are ruled by different concerns.

Plenty of New Wave films, albeit very sophisticated and influential, have a handmade feel. You get the feeling that a lot is improvised and the actors are friends and acquaintances. The New Wave directors pretty much invented the auteur theory but in their movies it functions quite differently from a mere directorial stamp or a signature style. Rather the movies are a reflection of their political, moral and philosophical concerns. It feels more or less like a cinematic monograph or essay, which is seemingly impossible in that medium. So for all their indelible images and for all their influence on cinematic techniques (not Rohmer but certainly Godard), their movies above all are about ideas. This is also why the films lend themselves so well to film criticism, completing the circle in a way, given that many of the directors started out with Cahiers du Cinema. Even viewed today, it's remarkable that they pulled it off so well in their early body of work.

Flowers & Greens

We had a long Easter break and though I had thought of leaving town for a bit, I didn't. I still have my old wanderlust on occasion but on the whole I find myself happy to be appreciating the ordinary beauty of everyday things and the daily unfurling of life around me. It's been rather warm for this time of the year but there are hints of the first chill in the air. But the summer blooms linger on as in this banana blossom and zinnias below.

But here and there are the signs of cooler weather. Though the tibouchina is tropical, it seems to bloom at slightly cooler temperatures here. The whole tree is usually in flower and its darkly purple blossoms look like lovely. The camellias won't be in full bloom until winter sets in, but a few early blooms are already around.

The seasonal changes are also reflected at the greengrocer's. It's not the season for greens but a fair few are still available. And like Popeye, I like my greens. Sauteed with onions and spices as required, they go pretty much with every cuisine. I hadn't tried Chinese boxthorn (gau gei choy, picture below) so I cooked it this weekend like the South Indian "keerai". It has a slightly bitter taste but I am a convert. Plus it's easier to remove and clean as it has sturdy stalks from which the leaves can easily be stripped.

आषाढ़ का एक दिन

In the early 70s, television had come to Delhi but not our homes. Our parents went over to the club for desultory drinks and chatter and once in a while wandered over to the room where the television held pride of place. Though transmission started in the evenings, it held little interest. As children we on the whole were innocent of the pleasures of cinema, yet some memories remain strong and indelible. And so it is that one of my few memories of television from that time is the telecast of Mohan Rakesh's Ashad ka ek Din. It was probably an NSD play, in any event I saw only a part of it but still remember the rained out woodland hamlet where Mallika’s story was played out in all it’s B&W glory. Mallika herself was one of those strong looking, make-up less lasses in the Smita Patil mould, declaiming away in excellent Hindi. I had no idea how the play ended but it was fairly certain then that at some point in my life I would read the play.

Mohan Rakesh, the author of the story, was of course well-known and part of a new generation of Hindi writers. We did a few pieces of his in school, his plays were popular with a certain crowd (I recollect my mother going to see Adhe Adhure which starred Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri and Om Puri before their brush with stardom). Ashad surfaced as a brief section in “Bharat ek Khoj” but lacked the romance of the play I had seen on television. Yet all these years it remained unread. Then I chanced on the book in its original Hindi on a visit to India. A few months ago I got around to reading the play.

Ashad ka ek Din (loosely translated “A Rainy Day”) is a fictional version of events in the life of Kalidasa, possibly the most famous of Indian playwrights. The story is the familiar trope of local prodigy makes good in the city but forgets his roots. But the play’s principal character is the fictional Mallika, a local girl who is Kalidas' first love and muse and whose story pretty much follows the arc of the sacrificing lover whose fortunes plunge as her lover’s ascend. Completing the triangle is Vilom, the local bad boy who wants Mallika but will never possess her. At the start, Rakesh has us immersed in the idylls of the poet and also establishes Mallika’s unconventionality in choosing this romantic attachment to both the poet and his poetry. Then Kalidasa leaves – with Mallika’s permission - for the prodigy cannot be contained by the tiny hamlet and has attracted the attention of the King. Predictably – and echoing the dramatist’s Shakuntala (Bharat ek Khoj’s brief episode nicely ties the two together) – he forgets his muse. Mallika remains in the half suspended state of the painful reality of loss and the hope that things will be as they once were even as her meagre circumstances become more meagre. Until Kalidasa, by now famous and a luminary of the court married to a princess, passes by and neglects to meet her. This begins Mallika’s decline and the play ends with her in a dubious relationship with Vilom and an illegitimate child. As for Kalidasa, the poet has exhausted the literary possibilities of his youth and cannot now reclaim it by reclaiming Mallika.

Reading the play in middle age and recognising that my girlhood crush on the play had less to do with its nuances and more to do with its romanticism*, I felt ambiguously about the play. On the one hand, Rakesh’s grasp of his material is certain and sure. It is not Kalidasa the genius he is interested in as much as the failed and perhaps selfish creative who let’s down the person who matters most. In his day it is likely the dismantling of heroes to reveal them as mortals with feet of clay had cachet. In our time it remains a familiar theme i.e. that the private lives of public luminaries are invariably flawed. Mallika on the other hand, seems from another time, a heroine of a Victorian morality tale where unconventional women find themselves crushed by societal norms. Perhaps this was what was most disappointing to me though for the 50s Mallika was likely a modern heroine. Mallika is, to use a cliché, a child of nature. It would perhaps have been more apt if her end was not so abject and paralleled that of another heroine identified with the earth, Sita, who is annihilated and yet triumphant. And oddly enough, though Vilom is a failed and flawed character, he comes across in a sympathetic vein.

Still Ashad ka ek Din is a thrilling piece, inflected with the enthusiasms and intellectual concerns of a post Independence writer examining our history and our heroes in a modern context. And I retain my affection for the half-glimpsed play I saw so many years ago.

*truly, a woodland hamlet still appeals to me!

Update: The episode of Bharat Ek Khoj based in part on the play is on youtube.