In Light Of India

A review on In Light of India: Octavio Paz.

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
Enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come,
Joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

As a reader I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had had its parallel in ancient Indian philosophies. Isn’t he now being rediscovered for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed?

Having seen him establish how *Mexican civilization has come to a stasis, forgo a glorious culture to withdraw into oneself and self-deprecatingly look up to its neighbor in the north, it was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’ affinities and opinions on India in his book – In Light of India. (* from Labyrinth of Solitude)

As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before brain begins to register all your pre-conceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

“I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorean London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red beetel saints on the side walk,

Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half opened flower,

Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles lying on the side walks: men and women who had no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.

Paz goes back to his hotel, but decides to take another walk towards the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he had seen, heard, smelled and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a young barbarian poet.

If we chop and change some images here and there, I guess the contemporary India despite the double digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. You don’t read Octavio Paz for your academic exercise, do you? You read for his insights and sometimes opinions which you may or may not agree.

Even in the opening chapter we can see Paz’s sense of history and his uncanny ability to glean valid archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott or Alexander Dumas and that it was the most ancient of cities - Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also of the serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky, only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

Paz returns as an ambassador to India when he would travel around the country and write East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. He gave Lecture on India upon Rajiv Gandhi’s behest and eight years later he would revisit the paper to write In Light of India although he makes no claim of anything in particular. And yet the book is a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest.

Rama and Allah

Paz is incisive when he speaks about the coexistence of the two religions that are strikingly at extremes as one being the richest and most varied form of polytheism and other, the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism. He observes how the two communities retained their identities without any fusion and that the Muslim invasion happened in India long after the decline of Islamic civilization. He further observes that Sufi mysticism triggered a literary tradition in northern India. Similarly there was a Bhakti movement which sought to imbibe some of the radical patterns from Sufism and anti-orthodox Hindus.

Kabir is the son of Allah and Rama. He is my Guru, he is my pir…Tagore translated Kabir’s poems because in Kabir’s Unitarian vision he had seen a failed promise of what India could have become.

Paz doesn’t miss out on the contributions of Akbar and Dara Shikoh, especially to think that Darah Shikoh’s translation of Upanishads into Persian eventually ended up in Schopenhauer’s desk which in turn sparked the evolved minds of Nietzsche and Emerson! However the period of enlightenment was followed by dark years of Aurangzeb who single-handedly was responsible for the fault lines between Hindus and Muslims which had repercussions for ages and still echoing. Paz had noticed that the East India Company had never interfered with the social fabric or religious identities of Indians, they in fact exploited the conditions to their advantage. However the notion of nationhood was an idea given to the Indians by their former rulers.

Another aspect of the book is Paz’s interesting take on Caste system in India. This much derided Indian artefact and often times confused with racism is seen in a different light. Paz uses it to understand the social fabric of Hindu community in tune with their philosophy based on Karma. He acknowledges the critics of caste system in India and the dogma of untouchablity, but he warns the gentle souls out there who are horror-stricken by the word caste to not to miss the ancient hypotheses of cosmic order and how time is an illusion (maya) that eventually delivers those suffering in the cycles of birth and death.

Modern Indian History

Paz pays attention to all the regular names from the recent history of India: Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Subhash Bose, Gandhi, Nehru, V.K.Krishna Menon, M.N. Roy. Of these V.K.Krishna Menon and M.N.Roy need special mention. V.K. Krishna Menon, according to Paz was a malignant influence on Nehru who ultimately proved to be a fatal union for Nehru.

Menon was an arrogant and intelligent man, but, as so often happens with the proud, he was not the master of his own ideas: he was possessed by them. Nehru was never able to recuperate from the disaster of his foreign policy.

Reading Paz’s chronological account of M.N. Roy’s many political volte-face especially with the benefit of hindsight that we have when seen from this far in time, I couldn’t but be spellbound by Paz’s understanding of political history and ability to recognize probably the only genuine political mind to have emerged from India ever to make any impact on International political history.

M.N. Roy, an extreme nationalist inspired by Marx, was pursued closely by the British Intelligence, traveled to Chicago and later during First World War sought asylum in Mexica where he was instrumental in founding the communist party. Impressed by Roy’s activities and skill, Lenin invited him to participate in the third International and made him its agent in Central Asia and China. He broke up with Comintern and Marxism itself. He returned to India and fought for Indeopendence, spent years in Jail, however during Second World War supported allied force having realized the threat Nazism posed rather than being a cohort of Gandhi or Subhash Bose. After the war, convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and Bolsheviks was a disaster, he invented Radical humanism as a revolutionary response to the crisis of socialism.

M.N. Roy’s philosophy may have been inadequate, yet Paz’s brilliant sketch of his political genius in a few strokes might not be found in Kosambi’s tomes.

The project of nationhood

You can also find that Paz is aware of the emergence of right wing Hindu nationalist party B.J.P and the re-ignition of Hindu-Muslim divide. Although Paz acknowledges the inherent secular and moderate nature of Hindus, he observes how the radicalization of Hidnus started with Tilak and later consolidated by Savarkar which resulted in the bye-product of neo-Hinduism (Hinduthva) that envisions a monolithic concept of Hinduism united territorially and devoid of caste barriers hitherto unknown to the history-less Hindu culture. Drawing from his own history of Mexican nationalism, Paz has words of caution for the nationalists for their penchant for straight jacketing the identity of the acceptable and the abominable:

All this would be funny were it not frightening. Nationalism is not a jovial god: it is Moloch drunk with blood…In India many nationalisms live together and they are all fighting with one another. One of them, Hindu nationalism, wants to dominate the others and subject them to its law – like an aurengazeb in reverse. Another, in Kashmir wants the state to unite with a hostile nation, Pakistan – thus ignoring the lesson of Bangladesh.

Citing Shabano case to describe the weakness of secular politics when when Rajiv Gandhi overturned court order to defy constitution and earlier when Indira Gandhi showed how excessive polarization of power at the center could corrupt, Paz believes that the quest for Indian political and national identity should still be that of secularism and democracy with a constant vigil against disruptive tendencies and political expediency. Having seen the disasters of socialists’ totalitarian regimes in South America and the fate of nations built on military triumphs, Paz could not have suggested otherwise.

Contraptions of Time

Paz delves into the medieval and Vedic literature at length to point out the extent of erotic art, its strict adherence to structure (meter) and the absence of the notions of sin unlike their western equivalents. He ponders on the four branches of Vedic thoughts and attempts to find parallels in western thoughts and traditions. For e.g Genesis and the Rig Vedic postulation on the origin of the world and of humanity, or like the stanza from Atharva Veda which said: “Time Created the Lord of Creatures, Parajapati.” Further from Atharva Veda: “Desire (Kama) was the first to be born. Desire arose in the beginning which was the first seed of thought.” Sex is regarded as a vital force in Indian thought which looks at Life as energy which possessed the power to regenerate (a major school of ritual oriented vision of life – Tantric philosophy). However the enlightened man understands that while pleasure is a goal, is finite and it does not save us from death or free us from future incarnations. He seeks the path of abstinence and solitary meditation. Chastity gives strength for the great battle: breaking the chain of rebirths.

Paz expounds the teachings of Bhagavat Gita and Buddha in order to explain the two differing yet eventually unifying concepts on purpose of Life and living. However I was looking forward to the last segment of the chapter patently titled: Contraptions of time where he famously stated (from Nobel lecture): Every Civilization is a vision of time. Consequently the seeming staticity of Indian life is explained by the concept of time where it rejects the linear reality as Maya and the real reality is Brahman (Absolute Being) and at its depth, Atman (Self). Thus man is simultaneously impermanent as cosmos and unreal as an apparition. Paz looks at this as a metaphysical and social negation of time. According to him the first prevented the birth of literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history, while the second gave birth to the institution of castes, immobilized society. He extends this theory to reason why the Hindu societies have viewed the European invasions as mere dissonances in the larger scheme of cyclical passage of time. However this century old equilibrium has been disturbed with the advent of modernity among the elites and now the ever pervasive middleclass in India.

Paz ends his book with his quest of answers for the questions India posed to him, midway with a scathing attack on the capitalist’s model of development and the now forgotten solution put forward by Gandhi. Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj envisioned a billion small villages of farmers and artisans armed with non-violence and Dharma as the contract between civilizations. But population explosion had long thwarted the dream. Every village became a pit of misery and despair. Paz is now seeking a new politics and suggests that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time.

I would have never known how personal India been for Paz and how she inspired the finest thinker and writer of our time to tell us what we, the people of India clearly and seemed to me, irrevocably lost!

On Writing

Ironically words are the last thing that comes to mind when thought happens to be on writing. I’ll end up thinking about everything but how it was written. May be this explains why books originally written in languages I can’t hope to learn in a lifetime have a fascination for me.

How can Borges speak through a language he didn’t write while lending that eye to see the constructs of mind of matter in a new light? How about reading Calvino leave a half-begun chuckle on me as I attempt to surmise my own impressions of the cities I thought I’ve lived? How much Russian was Fyodor’s English which I read and found myself aghast at the ways of human mind? How about V.K.N who wrote about contemporary decadent living and politics in India steeped in dynasty and feudal order in the subtext of linguistic and culture setting similar to the baroque of seventeenth century?

Writer as a reader

Derrida while speaking about the analogy between structuralist obsession and the anxiety of language not being accidental, unleashed the force within the act of reading a book. The anxiety of writer is recreated as an event every time when his or her book is read, which is why the readership of creative writers and their take on others’ writings reveal very special and unique sensibilities. Calvino’s ‘Literature machine’ and ‘Why read classics’? come to mind. M.T.Vasudevan Nair’s literary jottings on writers reveal an acquired sensibility that are out there waiting for the seeker. A well read writer carries the spirit of past, present and future, notwithstanding the clever ones who have their hands and designs on the forces of market and socialites.

Insights

“But there is more to Art than the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is as large as the entire idea… we have too many things and not enough forms.” – Flaubert.

The most important thing for a writer is to have something to write. Cliched as it sounds, there are any number of us simply love the idea of being a writer. Sometimes one may even find what he could write in the process. But we are talking about the intangible in the act of writing. We’ve had too many instances of losing it in style and pop genres while the most unconventional writer who is the toast of the time being forgotten in a few years. James Joyce and Faulkner infuriated unsuspecting readers no end, yet those who persisted with them had their personal epiphanies. Hermann Hesse’s prose was simple and as clear as a flowing stream, yet he made deep impact on readers world over. Mobydick and Don Quixote were discovered in a new light much later. What makes the books and their writers matter and alive, long after they were all gone?

The stylists among writers may enjoy immediate success. But time will test the real worth of their work eventually. The ones that stood the test underline the fact that craft would be invariably get dated, but not the insights.

Vision

Vision is that rare occurrence in writing. However the visionary writer is not an anomaly or an accident. He or she is but an inheritor of his ancestors’ collective consciousness and pointer to the direction of our future. One can easily delineate the thoughts of Thoreau taking shape in Lawrence Durrell’s art which is outgrown by the Indian writer O.V. Vijayan to write his eco-science fiction ‘Madhuram Gayati’.

Durrell wrote - "Hellenic worlds are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body - for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying - I think he was quoting - that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets - I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex."
(from Justine, part one of the Alexandria Quartet)”

Written during the fag end of eighties, Madhuram Gayati’s germinal could be unmistakably found in Durrell. Vijayan’s book spoke about the earth in an apocalyptical conflict between a submissive feminine hemisphere and a predatory androgynous hemisphere . The references of multinational companies as the only functioning entities, while states were all withered and the greed and fatal spasms of the northern hemisphere seething in unbearable hot weather resonated on many levels as some of them have become much more obvious to us than it was in ealry nineties.

True visionaries are those who care and fear for us, the thoughtless lot.

Writer’s contrivances

If Derrida’s biggest contribution was extending the writer’s paradigm in interpretational and philosophical reading of the text, the next big thing was OULIPO writers’ foray into forms that were nothing but a literary response to the google world of our times. They tore into the everyday and exotic realms alike - architecture, cosmology, word plays (lipograms, crosswords, anagrams, travel notes etc) statistical physics, tarot card reading etc while acutely aware of the vocation of literature. The wild successes of George Perec and Italo Calvino as the rightful inheritors of Borges underline the fact that being clever could never be an option but be and that the knowledgebase of humankind has exploded the average reader’s sensibilities. These new writers have waded in and out of genre writing and experimenation with gay abandon as they mischievously led the unsuspecting readers into grander spectacles. The façade of adapting constraints to build their artifacts didn’t faze their readers’ from recognizing their value.

Perec wrote an 300 page novel devoid of the letter 'e'. His magnum opus, Life A users's manual adapted the literary form's equivalent of the art and science of creating and solving jigsaw puzzles. Italo Calvino wrote If On a Winter's nithgt a traveller artfully crushed and recast the very structure of novel where plot, style, author, ambience, tone and even the reader undergo several mutations that one could easily see that this single book was out to trigger multiple neural response from its reader.

Any or a combination or all of the above strengths may be found in a writer. I would however think that the real strength of a writer shows when he or she stays away while his or her book is read. And When as a writer, you've shed your inhibitions and the clever, egotist and erudite 'You' break the flimsy coordinates of your time and space and appeal to the universal sensibility of a reader, then you will have exercised your strength as a writer.

* On a prod by Amit, I ended up writing a bit of haphazard thoughts. Now, I would hope to see Sunil's take :)

On heart's call

“None of my family members ever had the ability to speak from their heart. The dwellers of that home were like Chinese jars the lids of which were shut tight – they lived without ever letting the other know of their scent or taste”
- Kamala Das (Memoirs)

Women writers in India usually are generally treated as a work in progress or agents-provocateur for things unpopular. They don’t count unless their sexuality is out in the open and its salacity is ridiculed in public and enjoyed in private. The writers’ gender creates an instant compromise of “aesthetic” setting for their readers.

Arundhathi Roy is an unwelcome name in many literary and other quarters. Although there are tons of left leaning activists like her, she invites special attention for having been a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction. Her predecessor, Kamala Das is another writer who courted controversies like night gowns and scythed the vulnerable gender sensitivity of Indian readers. Besides selective residue of her writings in public memory, her public and private uttering blitzed media and social circles.

That her private life being debated threadbare even after she had turned seventy three should give us enough insight into the iron cast template for an Indian writer who happens to be a woman. However if you stick to her writings, especially her poems, short stories and the memoirs from Childhood and later, you would be amazed at her uncanny ability to capture the subtle and nuanced social hierarchy and personal relationships among women and the disarming honesty in portraying human condition in general.

“When we returned from the royal palace, Ammamma (grand mother) told me, that we didn’t have the right to touch any of the residents over there. Ammamma explained to me that their caste and ours were different.

‘What will happen if I touch her highness?’

‘If you did, she would have to undergo ablutions. Aren’t we Nair? Folks belonging to the caste Nair can’t touch them’

Ammamma explained to me about the differences in Hindu castes. Most prominent in the pantheon are Nampoothiri, followed by Thamburan; under them Nair, Thiya, Vettuvar, Pariah, Nayadi (tribes). Poor Nayadi, they could only address us from far away across the rice field without ever making themselves seen: ‘Oh! Her Highness from Nalappat!’

Nayadi were like those unseen birds singing among the wide branches of tall trees. I wanted to see them. However our maidservant of the Thiya caste wouldn’t take me to them as she walked out to dole out rice for charity on our behalf.

‘Little mistress, you’ll shriek in terror if you see them. They look like the crow pheasant, the one that cries out loud all the time. Little mistress, Atiyan (me-the-lowly-one) would never do that.’

Once while serving dinner, when Ammamma leaned over to put poppadum in my plate, I said: ‘Atiyan doesn’t need poppadum.’

Ammamma broke into laughter.

‘Kamala, why do you say Atiyan? You should say ‘I’’

‘But didn’t Valli call herself Atiyan?’

‘Isn’t she of Thiya caste? Kamala is not a Thiya girl.’

‘What is Kamala’s caste?’

‘Haven’t you learned what your caste yet? Well, if you haven’t understood what your caste is, no one would ever be able to make you aware of it.’

I do realize the meaning of her statement now.”

- A childhood in Malabar – A Memoir.

Anyone who could write about untouchables and yet let one’s craft and humanity shine through deserves serious reading. Although Kamala Das has been writing a lot of poems and short stories mostly in English, it was her provoking and controversial autobiography ‘My Story’ took the reading public by storm and probably for the first time, Indian consciousness was needled by feminine assertiveness. Gender politics began to color perception and writer’s personal trivia and utterances took center stage.

That she shocked readers with her bare-it-all amorous adventures and went on to write fiction on lesbian lovers, parallels had been drawn from Kate Chopin to Anais Nin. Kamala Das herself made much of her personal account of own life fictional that it was difficult for a layman to notice the disconnect between a volatile and smoldering personality and the jigsaw of the same writer as a lady of aristocratic and literary lineage, wife of a high official and mother of accomplished professionals. It is also worth knowing that her great uncle Nalappattu Narayana Menon was a renowned Malayalam poet who happened to write a well researched book on sex. Another usual folly is to have been misjudged her to be a feminist writer. It’s rather easy to find how she ingenuously picked her genre and succeeded. Given how fragmented and localized feminism as a movement, imposing activism on gender-specific writing on Kamala Das is missing her sources of creativity and spontaneity of her responses.

Kamala’s memoir on her childhood spent in Calcutta and the traditional and idyllic ancestral home in Malabar – A childhood in Malabar was a book that revealed a rare voice. It spoke about adults’ world through the eyes of a child as it retained the magical frills around the everyday reality of life and living in rural and urban India. One could almost feel the palpable warmth and anxiety of a troubled mind exploring channels to communicate. In that sense, Das wrote with a lot of heart and never shied away from being heart-broken.

She is a rare breed of writer who rode on her heart’s call and boy! weren’t the risks worth taking for the sake of her readers!

Philosophizing Faces

Sometimes I have this intense yearning for a time when I had a vision of things. I could feel that I took off from a certain mental stimulus created in empty space without even a gentle prod. The power of cinema and its instant gratification of such serendipities have given great joy and fortitude to bide the pettiness of everyday life.

The news of Bergman and Antonioni passing away had me thinking about the times when I’d watched their movies and the impact they had on me. And I wondered how many other directors wielded such magic? Tarkovsky, Aravindan..? Incidentally they are all dead. They took high risks for unknown returns, hesitantly like Van Gogh did when he approached color in fear and respect, to discover the splendor of creation, one’s own absorption in what he created; the absorption of his being and of his reason.

As directors, Bergman and Antonioni established communication with the audience not with any sleight of hand with preconceived notions of their forte or market (so to speak), but it happened while they were responding to their own inspiring as well as discouraging stimuli.

Antonioni’s treatment of color and space to push the limits and his accent towards the de-peopled empty shot provided us a glimpse into his penchant for abstraction where he obliterates his characters and eclipses their faces. Or his vision of poetic consciousness revealed through the characters who watch themselves in detachment to sustain a free indirect discourse, or the ‘low language’ of the present day world. Even a non-neurotic character like the director in “Beyond the clouds” was created in a similar cast. The free indirect discourse is the essential form of literature, which Antonioni had successfully achieved through his constructs of cinematographic images.

In Blow Up, Antonioni toyed with viewers and scholars of semiotic studies as he constructed a heavily interpretational and subjective value of reality and how camera is essentially a sensory tool which in the end makes Thomas, the camera wielder and our interpreter of perceived reality to disappear and ends up in the closer still of the corpse. Art of Illusion, as any magician would call it.

Bergman’s obsessive framing of faces is well known. He spoke of Close-Up and human face thus: “Our work begins with human face...The possibility of drawing near to the human face is the primary originality and the distinctive quality of the cinema.”

The visages linger in the ambit of camera to a point where they lose their individual sense of being and begin to resemble the other – resemble by default or by the absence of perceived qualities. Such acts of dissolution and disappearance invariably remind us of Bergman. The incessant train of human faces in Silence, Persona, Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers and many other films pass us and vanish into the void where the photogram burns with fear as its only effect. The facial close-up is about both the face and its effacement. Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest, which is its relationship in fear to the void or the absence, the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness ala Beckett.

Antonioni and Bergman were the original thinkers who processed and exhibited their thoughts through the medium of cinema. They had more than their fair share of hurdles, baiters and failures – personal and professional. Yet their works had unprecedented impact on philosophical thought and made us aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps what we yearn ever more and in nostalgia would be for a time which allowed such genius to be among us - the living dead.

Note: I have used Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 - the movement images freely to drive home my pointless point. Since this is "just" a blog and me being lazy, I have not annotated the text - with all due respect to Deleuze.

*

Sven Nykvist

A perennial late Latif that I am, a visit to doctor’s office would not normally permit me to leaf through the magazines neatly stacked on the table in the middle of the visitors’ waiting room. However this time I picked up a magazine though I knew the nurse would walk in anytime, had time to turn to page three and read an obituary in the obscure corner of news round up. It read – Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist died (Dec, 1922 – Sept, 2006).

It took a while to infer what it meant to me. It certainly was not about personal bereavement, but something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.

Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromo metrics of lighting and the whirring descends and ascends of tripods, to lead you to an atmosphere ethereal and tactile and you are weary that the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss out on this world of its blinding beauty and the color of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything that he captured on camera, including tragedy.

I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of Ernakulam public library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If soul had color, it had to be a dragon’s red. The tortured, poignant and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty of fall and traditional European set and period, Sven’s art stood out. The last scene where after her funeral Karin read to the audience from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters clothed in silken white, strolled about in a sunlit park. They sat beside each other on a swing. Karin reminisced that as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.

Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world. I took the last bus home that night as a believer.

Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter in the exterior and interior of pastor Tomas, and the longest close up on Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johann along the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In passion of Anna, Sven deconstructed the colors and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break ice. Sven’s provoking use of deconstructionist contrivances of post modern art and the incredible of implosion of visuals to its photonic sources in the end were unparalleled in their originality and creativity.

Human face was as wide a canvass for as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of movie camera as ‘an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face’. Despite the open ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays great control and simultaneous sweep of Brechtian alienation techniques, deconstructionist devices and sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient in a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie is one of the post modern marvels.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of memory and perceptivity of adulthood. Child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, a home theatre which was the playground of dreams, the lantern lit nights in the dormitory where children peeped into the kaleidoscope, the fun and frolic of festive times at the family dinner, the sudden demise of the children’s father marking the end of an era, escapades into the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation of authority in step father, the terror of growing up, the realization of anguish in wisdom were all taken part while observed through the eyes of a child. Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain and wisdom.

Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of living a camera man’s life during Sacrifice’s shoot. The long shots which were Tarkovsky’s wont, achieved grace in Sven’s camera, even when the Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world out of nuclear holocaust. That was when the single camera Sven had at his disposal jammed while the house was being charred. And when the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway the blaze, camera had run through an entire reel breaking down the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where human kind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged leading to the repentance and ultimate offer of sacrifice. The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leanordo Davinci’s chiaroscuro painting of the Adoration of the Magi were all pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.

Sven, like Tarkovsky should be known for his spectacular failure as well as many stellar accomplishments which came just as easy.

Ophelia - death by water

One of the most tragic and haunting images from Shakespeare plays that you ever read would be that of Ophelia lying drowned in the still water. She lay in the glassy stream weighed down by the viscous gravity of her tunic, unable to wade through the whirlpool of worldly woes. An image that is so earthy, erotic, deathly and saintly gleaned effortlessly from Gertrude’s soliloquy (from Act 4 Scene 7):

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook.

Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

She is the alter life of Hamlet and a possibility of the other side of the reluctant nihilist. She died opening her arms and gazing upwards as if she sought redemption for the lives ravaged by revenges. The flowers floating about the stream and leaning on the bank garlanded the shining body of Ophelia. The symbol of death by water has never looked as enchanting anywhere in literature ever.

Water symbolizes the cauldron where human propensities for passion, envy, love, hate and revenge submerge, drown and flow far and wide into a timeless insignificance. Hamlet’s spiritual agony and his quarrel with the ghost of his father (an archetype for mankind’s alter ego and hunger for legacy that go beyond physical death), preponderances on existential values and the eventual gory end inexorably gravitate towards the lyrical and unforgettable image of Ophelia’s death by water.

In the world of Nietzsche, triumphs were nothing but a series of fratricides where Claudius kills his brother, King Hamlet; Hamlet kills his school mates and Ophelia’s brother Laertus. Nietzsche marked the similarities between his Dionysian man and Hamlet as those who have a real glimpse of the essence of things:

“They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.”

“In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia. It disgusts him.”

Nietzsche held out a remedy for this.

“Here the will is in the highest danger. Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue.”

The madness that Hamlet dallied with takes a grandiloquent expression in Ophelia’s death by water. Though she appears only for brief period in the play, the torments and fragility of Ophelia are the perpetual source for art and redemption.


Notes:

The metaphor of Ophelia also provided a psychoanalytical artifact to analyze and represent adolescent girls’ state of mind for right or wrong reasons. Link

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land which has a well known section titled Death by Water. Nonchalantly it points to the Upanishad-ic references of elemental water carrying death even in the throes of regeneration.

Nietzche Text. Link

A beautiful confusion

There are a few artistes who have this uncanny ability to disarm you of your ever conscious egotistic self. You are instantly drawn right into the whirlpool of their craft while you are not given anytime to conjure up your defenses, intellectual or visceral.

The absurdist and obscurantist among modernist writers though sincere in their efforts, used their craft to communicate their primarily reductionist and nihilist philosophies, albeit with world wars in the background. They managed to drive away vast sections of readers. That was when a few post modern writers and artists unveiled a middle stage where they sought to push the contexts of art to the backdrop and engaged the reader directly.

The result has been a delightful entrée of literature and art bringing in the full force of physical, philosophical and life sciences to the table. Anything that a symbol, alphabet or word can construct are adapted to create a context for the dialogue between the writer (artist) and the reader (viewer). The historical aberrations from painting schools such as Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism etc where formalists applied their reductionist view of structuralism where considered by these writers to enfranchise the readers by providing resources to catch up or ride past.


The master craftsmen:

Italo Calvino addresses “you” the reader in his book “If on a winters night a traveler...”. He engages you straightaway, cleverly suggests the circumstances in which you picked up this fashionable book to flaunt an image you have given yourself or you’ve just found it from the chaotic township library. What follows is Calvino’s craftsmanship of story telling while revealing a delightful discourse about the semantics of reading, author-reader relationship and deconstruction of social and political dynamics of reading and eventually a realization of what’s important in everyone’s life. The tone of the book is satire.

His experiments took him to write another book titled The Castle of crossed destinies. It is a semiotic fantasy novel where you find the characters attempting to communicate through tarot cards. A narrator is interpreting them since the characters have become mutes due to past traumas. The structure of the book is laid out after crossword puzzles with horizontal and vertical progressions while any given order of the tarot cards defy the patterns you think you understood. The gimmicks Calvino employs go beyond its natural confines.

George Perec is another wonderful writer who messed with structure and content like Calvino. He wrote a fiction titled “A void” that spanned about 300 pages celebrates the banishment of the alphabet “e”. His magnum opus Life: A user’s manual is a visual and conventional literary master class built around the physical and narrative probabilities of written forms. If you read the book you would know that the book is not just clever but a deeper attempt to quantify the history of literary forms and genres while revealing a beguiling charm of whimsical life.


Predecessors:

Luigi Pirandello’s play “Six characters in Search of an Author” was the prototype for all the meta-fictions to come. Borges is another meta-fiction powerhouse who took on and toyed with readers’ comprehension of reality and fiction. He brought forth the concept of collaborative reading and equipped readers to learn the rules of engagement as the act of reading progresses. He adapted all kinds of structural inventions at the time and beyond.


Fellini’s craft:

There is no better practitioner of post-modernism than Federico Fellini. His absolute command of the medium led him to deconstruct the creative and thought processes in making cinema while establishing a parallel channel of communication with the viewer.

His 8½, originally titled as “A beautiful confusion” is a riot where he peels off each layer in the process of movie making while unreservedly displaying the other side of self indulgence and dysfunctional routines of an artiste who at the moment is in a creative crisis after past successes.

Camera is an active member of his films. It hovers right above the shoulder of the protagonist’s (Guido - Marcello Mastroinni) to signify his point of view in no uncertain terms. Guido’s dreams, inspirations, infidelity, fantasies, debauchery, self promotion, vision, confusion and eventual reconciliation to be among his actors/characters for redemption are perhaps just the threadbare view of his art. Fellini is ever aware of viewer’s presence. He unveils not just the ambience of film making but idiosyncrasies and ego of actors, producer and critic.

In the film, Once the French (of course) critic savaged Fellini on his bid on catholic theme as naïve and inadequate attempt to counter the cultural apparatus of Catholicism with childhood memories and unintelligible dreams. Another instance when the critic began his monologue, Guido nodded his crew to hang him.

Fellini like Calvino, Perec, Borges and others wanted share his beautiful confusion with the viewer, no holds barred.

Notes:

Italo Calvino: Italian Writer
George Perec: French Writer
Federico Fellini: Italian director
Links: Metafiction primer , 81/2 Review in Guardian

Kochi Chronicles

N.S. Madhavan had been away from his habitat. He did not write or publish anything for the longest time ever since he won a major literary award for up and coming writers. Then one day he half-heartedly sent a short story from his IAS hideout in Patna with a stamped envelope to M.T.Vasudevan Nair tantalizingly titled Higuita. The rousing reception of this story was legendary. Higuita was the measured metaphor for Father Geevarghese who in order to save Lucy faced the pimp bully Jabbar. He re-enacted the karma of an erstwhile sevens soccer player when he landed goals with an uncanny array of scorpion kicks on Jabber's bleeding snout to the thunderous applause from gallery. Fr. Varghese emulated the famed Colombian soccer player Rene Higuita who broke all conventional coordinates of his position with flair and take the attack to the opponent to etch a spectacular moment in time while bordering on absurd risks.

Readers too woke up to the unprecedented sensibility that Madhavan unleashed. He wrote quite a number of remarkable short stories since then. He was born and spent most of his early life in Kochi. But curiously Kochi never featured in any of his stories. He preserved it for his first fiction.

Madhavan reminisced on the Kochi beneath his times. In it subconsciously he unearthed bits of conversation, faces, friendships, missed schedules and reunions, news of birth and deaths, tapered monsoon rains at night and the rides on bare-boned suburb roads in the city of Kochi. Everything went away in a series of montage and I was slowly beginning to comprehend the pattern of things to come. When you see things this close, judging them would be an utterly wasteful affair.

Reading N.S. Madhavan's "Litanies of Dutch Battery" (in Malayalam: Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal) leaves you in one such corridor of existence and time. It is a fiction that attempts to weave a short period from the life of Edvina Jessica. She was born and lived as an islander who watched the victories, failures and redemptions of mainland occupants.

Madhavan suggests the make belief constructs of Kochiites history and their idiosyncratic yet disarmingly self-deprecating view of living while sliding in layers of legends, fantasies, myths, facts and images. Latin Catholics in Kochi live by the sea. They derive their biblical identity from carpentry and fishing just like Jesus and Peter were believed to have been doing. Jessica's great grandfather Louis stole the calculus of ship building from a British architect Cornelius Gusler. Her uncle learned the art of making Biriyani from his father who learnt it from a Persian chef from Shiraz. Her neighbor Santiago was on a mission to resurrect the now defunct Christian musical drama known as "Chavittu Natakam" (Tap Dance Musical Drama)1. There are any numbers of keepsakes that sea and wind brought to Kochi.

Native Christians with the advent of Portuguese filled their cultural void by adopting the troubradors songs, European costumes and eastern theatre formats like Kathakali. The long and winding songs were created in pidgin mix of Tamil and Malayalam and orally passed through generations. It carried the ethos of native Christian identity and its ironic disposition of middle age crusades' scrambled history.

Madhavan weaves a shiny yarn of 50s political history of Kerala as it unfurls some of the major events in Kochi - Christian and Nair communities’ struggle for redemption from “regressive” communist government who were in fact democratically elected being the most important. The religious and community leaders organized massive rallies to thwart the education bill intended to disengage the influence of religious institutions on education. The unrest ended with congress party’s federal government dismissing communist state rule. Ironically the communist government in the state is doing a phase II with their current education bill being challenged in the courts all over the country.

Jessica and many others were influenced by Father Vadakkan, padre and influential leader of the struggle and his placement of himself as the true Marxian proponent to counter the ideological warfare. She enacted Father Vadakkan’s fiery speech when she played with her cousins and defecated in the church premise to protest against the punishment meted out to her by the catechism teacher who took exception of her impertinence to question him.

The general deprivation and rebellious nature of Kochiites have had channels to express their self. They have this streak of flaunting their artistic indulgence in music, painting, carpentry, murals, drama, cooking etc. You have the singer Peter inspired by Saigal and his alter ego Mehbub from Mattanchery began Kundan Music club, Santiago egging on the septuagenarians to reinvent Chavittu Nadakam and lament that Communist party lost its innocence that inspired the downtrodden, carpenter Mathaeus cherishing his reputation and sleight of hand in boat building while readapting himself after he was saved from deep sea and taken to Nigeria, Edwin uncle’s measure and feel of recipes, Pushpangadan master’s unrelenting tug at Fermat’s last theorem on prime numbers and then most of all their naïve but endearing acceptance of conflicted identities (Santiago assures Shenoy not to reveal his commie identity while Shenoy himself ruminates on his cultural identity of a south west (Konkan) migrant who is ridiculed and rendered insignificant) and camaraderie would impart a lightness of your being in Kochi and more so at Lanthan Batheri.

There is an interesting school of art in Kochi, called Orthic. The word is derived from the Malayalam equivalent for memory, Orma and glass as the medium to paint. Consequently the artist has to paint in reverse since it’s going to be the reflection of the image he conjured up in his mind. This recollection of artist’s Orma and his stand point on the other side of viewers is unique and reveals a mirthful flamboyance. Jessica remains a non-intrusive observer and let the awareness come to her and reflects back to the reader when it does. Her litanies2 for the necessities of the island and redemption from minor calamities have been chronicled with a microcosmic vision of life and times in Kochi.

The mosaic Madhavan created when he inversed Jessica’s itsy bitsy memories through a glass has been a joy. I have traveled the places he narrated. I have studied in the school where Raghavan and Pushpangadan master taught in the book, I have watched the orange sunsets beyond the slender strip of Vypin behind Lanthan Batheri and I think I have met all the characters in person if I let go on this anachronistic time, really!


Notes:
1. Chavittu Natakam featured a native reproduction of western European legends of romanticized crusades with peculiar tamil-malayalam equivalent names for characters. The most important drama was known to be “Karalmann Charitham” (Karalmann’s legends) which was nothing but a collage of history and fantasy where Charlemagne’s Basque opponents were replaced by Muslims and his crusades to win the love of his lady. Troubadors created these romanticized legends with historical aberrations to fill in religious undertones where possible.

2. Litanies: A litany is a well-known and much appreciated form of responsive petition, used in public liturgical services, and in private devotions, for common necessities of the Church, or in calamities — to implore god's aid or to appease His just wrath. (from catholic encyclopedia)

Listening to Salilda

Salilda descended along the shores of Kerala when Chemmeen (The wrath of the sea, literally The shrimp) was released in 1965. The heart rending ditties in the movie caught the imagination of an entire generation and many that followed. Ramu Kariat took quite a risk bringing Salilda over, however I guess the shared love for music, spirit of Spartan life and ackowledgement of genius brought them close. The songs from Chemmeen is now an acquired heritage of keralites.

That was when a few of us realized that there was more to him that met the eyes and ears. His music spoke more than just the notes. It pervaded the artist's state of mind and the process of creativity in the most effortless of means while looking to sublimate awareness of lives around oneself. That was when we learnt about his father who whacked the white colonialist when the latter addressed him "dirty nigger", the large collection of western classical music and folk songs gathered from Bengal and Assam, we learnt further how IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) and Indian communist party provided the right backdrop for an evolving artist, harmonizing the wave of turmoil Bengal and the rest of the nation was going through with his songs of social consciousness and awakening and the last phase that began when Salilda traveled to Bombay to remake his story Rikshawalla in Hindi (Do Bigha Zameen). His work in Madhumati was the high point in popularity.

However a lot of us were attracted to his creativity and the traits of possibly the last of renaissance men from Bengal. Aravindan invited da to compose music for his final film Vaasthuhaara, another non-descript director had a call from olden days to invite Da which was to be Da's final film as well. Besides late eighties and early nineties had a lot of meaningful television films and serials blessed with his title and background scores. You may recall the title and background music for Darpan, Alag, Charitraheen and a few others. Long after the half hour magic was over, the music lingered and it still does. Who would agree now that television could be that good!

Salilda's music has a haunting quality. It opens up an ethereal vision painted with elusive colors gleaned from a dying twilight and all that was good from Victorian and Tagore era. The prelude of his songs engulfs your being momentarily and the poetry is given a chance to catch up the lofty skies of imagination and then the interludes build a bridge between vision and memory. More often than not you recognize the musical notes transcending the mortality of lyrics and elevate aficionados to another plane.

Sometimes his music stood out to the discomfort of lesser artists who happened to be the directors and writers. We don't have too many outstanding musical films from Salilda because there were not too many to exploit his core genius. Instead it appears that he was given a free hand to fill the gaps with compositions that were apparently not really appropriate or relevant. His music rendered every other expression redundant: the longings of a lover, dance of monsoon rains, grief of a Vasthuhaara (dispossessed), introspecting on life and renunciation, freedom of a Baul singer on a distant country road, riding boat on a bending river...

His legacy is golden treasure of images drawn in musical notes.

Traveling in Time's Labyrinth

Octavio Paz was a traveler. He knew quite a bit about mankind's solitary voyage in time's labyrinth and the many struggles to defy it. Legends, rituals, myths and sometimes even history are contrivances devised to counter the onslaught.

His impressions as an urbanite traveling across cities that endure afflictions of memory have a deeper and personal resonance with a displaced reader like me. The poem "Last Dawn" says more than the few words it ever needed to take shape, with its interludes of broken images from the elements of nature and an imaginary alter life into the loveless entanglement of urban living. It draws a starkly surreal but evocative and intimate visual. The personal rituals and myths in cities germinate and perish momentarily leaving the quest for another day:

Last Dawn

Your hair lost in the forest
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night
but your dream fits within this room.

How much we are who are so little!
Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by
is always
running back.

Will tomorrow be another day?

________________________________________

Cochin is a port where distant seafarers could get a short respite. St.Thomas came, and then came Nestorians from the east, Jews, Portuguese and then the colonial buccaneers - a microcosm of genome trails traveled by the sea and lagoons.

Paz trekked in Travancore as a poet and a heretic who happened to be the ambassador of the Aztecs (Mexico) to India. Notice Paz's sketch of Syrian Christian ladies decked in ancient splendor shuffle down the street to 6 o' clock mass when his heretic heart beat furiously and Shivaite cows seemed to take it in their stride:

Cochin

Standing on tiptoe
to watch us go by,
among the coco-palms
tiny and white,
the Portugues church

Cinnamon-colored sails.
The wind picks up:
breasts in breath.

With shawls of foam,
jasmine in their hair
and earrings of gold,
they go off to six o'clock mass
not in Mexico City or Cadiz:
in Travancore.

Beating more furiously
before the Nestorean patriarch
my heretical heart.

In the Christian cemetery graze
dogmatic
probably Shivaite
cows.

Note:
Octavio Paz: Mexican Poet and Nobel prize winner. Two of his poems featured.

Art of Cinema: Beyond plotlines

Near the end of his writings on the cinema, *Gilles Deleuze almost regresses from his intellectual rigor over the new cinema of time, and mourns the passing of the silent cinema. He saw that, with the emergence of the talkie, we lost a kind of naturalness . . . the secret and beauty of the silent image, which presented us with the natural being of man in history or society.¹

Towards the end of his book Our Films, Their Films Satyajit Ray dedicates an entire chapter to share a few thoughts with his reader on Silent Films and dynamics of film art. He remembers how powerful was the single scene of Chaplin eating a Shoe for Thanksgiving dinner in his film, The Gold Rush (1925). Deprived of human voice, Chaplin brought out the visual and aural rendition of classic comedy out of a rank absurd situation with Big Mac in ensemble.

Another instance of metaphorical indulgence in the power of silent film was Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) which was adapted from Pierre Louys novel. Bunuel interspersed the confrontational sequences between Mathieu and Conchita with the parallel scenes from the silent version filmed four decades ago. The narrative possibilities of Conchita's playful but bordering on brutal denying of Mathieu's pleas to consummate his desire never troubled Bunuel. He was reminding the viewer that cinema is not an act of reading a book or listening to a narration on the radio - that words have replaced the real need to create cinema in a native language that was evolved during the silent film era.


Ray wrote about his epiphany when he watched Bicycle Thief, not just for its neorealist attributes of amateur actors, simplistic plot and the overarching humanist vision, but the manner in which De Sica treated the space, concept of time, actors, shot selection and angles and the process of building up of an experience that can be delivered only in the medium of cinema. In the penultimate scene in Bicycle Thief Antonio stood outside the soccer stadium, torn between his helplessness at the treachery of the thief and the partisan mob and the ethical battle inside his mind whether to steal a bicycle. His son who accompanied him through out the tragicomic chase could read his twitching mind while the noise from the stadium rose to a crescendo and finally the crowd disbursed into a thousand bicycle riders.

Similarly Satyajit Ray displayed equally accomplished skill and sleight of hand when he portrayed the meanderings of Apu and Durga to the outskirts of village and watch the train go by and Apu drowning the stolen necklace after Durga's death in Pather Panchali. The innumerable sketches Ray made while preparing for his first movie was in a sense his intrinsic affinity for the idiom and an understanding of the language of cinema. Any lesser gifted director's attempts would be to dramatize the poverty and displacement of Harihar's family instead of bringing the entire gamut of Apu's non-descript village and the lives around it. Ray's genius found its pinnacle in Aparajito when he portrayed the death of Harihar with superimposed images from the ghat's of the quiet flowing Ganga. Ray drew his inspiration from the visual challenges of silent film to unravel the layers that would have been otherwise lost in mere linear narrative schemes.

Malayalam director Aravindan made notable contributions to the creative process of movie making while breaking the common narrative patterns. His Pokkuveyil(Twilight, 1981) was a major experiment to manifest music into visual experience and open the possibilities of unraveling deeper visions to the audience. The story of a sensitive artist's (poet) view of the world and his mental disintegration were composed in music (Rajeev Taranath and Hariprasad Chaurasia), without a script.

Aravindan further experimented on his craft in another film Marattam (Changing acts) which has a distant resemblance of Kurosava's Rashomon. Marattam stands for rendering multiple acts by an actor. Based on Kavalam Narayanapanickar's² play the film features the murder of the lead actor towards the end of the play. Three different versions of the same event would be played and the mystery relating to the death remains unresolved, even though we seem to gain better understanding of the people and their environment. Each version adopted different classical art forms in Kerala which has distinct and interesting insights to share with us. Another level the film engages us in a deeper and frank discussion of Indian aesthetics (Rasa, Aharya, Aangika, Vachika etc) and the identification of actors with their roles and the relationship with the audience, patron of art and the regenerative aspects and angst of community living in general.

The movie was a tour de force and unprecedented act of experimenting Indian classical art forms within the ambit of cinema. It was done without ever being didactic or following a formal script. That we don't find anymore Godards amongst us is hopefully a passing phase and there will soon be more original thinkers of the moving image...

1 Gilles Deleuze: French Philosopher and thinker of Cinema. Quote taken from here

2 Kavalam Narayanapanicker: Noted malayalam playright and poet. Known for his pathbreaking adaptation of native art forms into theatre.

Remembering John - Adoor Gopalakrishnan

A memoir on late *John Abraham, malayalam movie director by another renowned director, *Adoor Gopalakrishnan in his book Cinema, Literature and Life.

It's been a long while since our beloved John Abraham left all of us. Any attempts to confine his exceptional genius, who left us in unusual circumstance in adjectives or clichés are bound to fail. John never had friends or foes in the extremes. If anyone claims otherwise, it would have to be treated with suspicion. If someone describes him as a prophet who belonged to an extraordinarily lofty plane, I would tend to agree.

Though older, he was three years junior to me at Pune Film Institute which he joined after resigning his job in L.I.C at Kumbhakonam, Tamil Nadu. Typically, first year students would be ignored as novices by their seniors in any educational institution. However, probably for his captivating personality, John attracted our attention and affection. There would always be a bunch of mates around the articulate John. Drama, Painting, Music, literature - be it anything, he had an uncommon grasp and enthusiasm. Sporting a playful smile he was a natural hitting punch line in any debate.

This was a period when all the students at the Institute were struck by the magical spell of Ritwik Ghatak, who was the vice-principal and Professor of Direction. I remember John's arrival at the institute with some fascination for the period. Naturally they got along quite well. I've heard people say Ghatak expected John to have the brightest future of all his students.

If anyone asks for the most important aspect of John's cinema, I would have to mention at the outset, their engrossing black humor. The protagonist riding a motorcycle by pedaling on the starter (Students, this way, 1972), milkman attempting to fool the cow to yield milk by propping up a calf with straws (Donkey in the Brahmin ghetto, 1977), towards the end in the movie, Cruelties of Cheriyachan (1979) the scene is titled "Ascent" with a long shot of the actor perched on top of a coconut tree, and in the same movie you might as well remember Cheriachan's mother narrate her story in monologue in the burial ground right after her death - like soul inside a body all these stood for a universal vision embodied in unique narrative techniques. Artists who cherished the dead and the living, the exciting and the lifeless with the same intensity of indulgence and affection are not to be found anywhere except John. The scene in the Brahmin Ghetto where the lid of a coffin is opened repeatedly revealing the dead body in a mortuary and the still born child in "To Mother" (1986) clearly underline the above.

His unbridled and uninhibited lifestyle and the art that sucked its blood and sweat were merged irretrievably and inevitably by destiny for sure. His life was like a puzzle in a surreal scenario where a theatrical enactment of tragedy rumored, forewarned, accepted and inexorably took place in the end. We realize that with a jolt now. How can we ever say that the scenes from his own life when he lay unrecognized in the Calicut medical college mortuary like a vagabond for days were not adapted by John as he did in "To Mother"? The intellect that distilled the puzzles of life into art and then life itself and even death left a lot of unknowns in the dark.

John was a compulsive traveler, without any belongings, mostly without even another pair of clothing. John can be anywhere-in conscious or unconscious state; inebriate or sober; in groups or alone. We were together when the only time John traveled abroad, to Italy for Pessaro film festival.

The new pair of shoes that *Odessa organizers bought for him did not fit his feet. Nevertheless he was wearing it in the Bombay airport. It was only a few minutes for the flight to depart before we realized John had not done emigration clearance and he was disheartened to be retreating and finally higher authorities intervened to walk alongside to help him fly are not quite the scenes to forget. When everyone took refuge in woolen clothes from the bone chilling cold in Pessaro, John wore cotton clothing on top of another refusing the sweater I offered. After the shows and dinner when everyone else withdrew back into the warmth of their bedrooms, this man was wide awake and walked along the city to conjure the rhythm, sound and material from its nightlife. While our stay in Pessaro was for seven days, John had spent almost fourteen days. Within a few days
We were convinced that John was the most popular, famous and liked participant among us in this Italian city. He did not need to speak Italian to achieve this.

Italy is known for the numerous film festivals conducted every year. Every city conducts one more festivals. As far I know John was invited for at least a dozen of them. The youthful and enthusiastic organizers wanted John to attend them even if his films were not available. The picture of the radiant face of a middle aged bartender who tucked his hand upon his chest and held his breath and deep admiration for John who was stepping on to the stage to answer cineastes’ questions after Brahmin's Ghetto was screened in Pessaro was incredible. I can never forget or erase the magical moment.

We were given a car to visit Rome on the last day of the festival. I had obtained permission to keep the car for the whole day so that I could show the city to John. I took this responsibility upon myself since I had been there three times already. I kept the following vignette in memory. Inside St.Peter's Basilica in Vatican and inhaling the enchanting, resplendent and holy majesty that condensed over centuries, John confessed with pride and a mischievous tinkle in his eyes:

"Standing here if a Christian bloke felt a bit cocky, you can't really blame him".

The journey's triumph and the serene hallow of fulfillment and satisfaction passed on his smile to me.

I understood later that Pessaro was a major reinforcement for John. He afterwards completed "To Mother". He spoke of each step in production with a lot of excitement. How many of them including Rossellini’s son Jill, John promised to come back with the new film? Everyone who cared for him including myself truly believed he had just entered a new phase of artistic endeavor. Unfortunately for Malayalam films, the thing called fate that some believe and others don’t did not let it happen.

Once after a long interval, John visited my home. He asked my daughter:
"Who asked you to grow up?"

I would like to ask him in return:
"Dear John, who asked you to die?"

* * *

* Adoor Gopalakrsihnan: One of the major malayalam movie directors. This is an excerpt from his book Cinema, Literature and Life written in Malayalam. I did the translation of a small segment from the book.

* John Abraham: John was one of the major avant-garde directors in Malayalam cinema. With only four films to his credit he had a major impact on the medium. He had an enigmatic persona who defied all the conventional norms of social codes. Even his death had a stamp of his world vision and seemed to invoke a black humor on society's conducts upon celebrity death. He fell off a multi-storey building and was kept in the mortuary for days before being identified. You can find more about John here.

* Odessa: Odessa was an avant-garde movement who organized resources for meaningful cinema and spread film societies across the country.

Kunhunni maash

Kunhunni maash was an archetypal teacher of children and adults who have an open and earnest mind of a child to learn. No one has distilled knowledge and enlightenment to the degree of simplicity that he so effortlessly achieved. It spread like sunshine for decades over many generations of young kids who not only soared in their imagination about the open sky he unleashed, but learned the secrets of goodness and being kind and appreciative of mother earth.

For the twenty years I who read his(Kuttettan) editorial notes and advice to budding writers in the Children's Section (Baala-Pankthi) of Mathrubhumi magazine and having met him under a tree along with other students at school, felt the irrevocable loss of his long shadow. It's not just the charm of old world that is lost; I believe it is more than that. I doubt if we can ever find such fine folks anymore who can clear the gloom and guide your spirit to all that is worthy of life and living.

He was a short man. His poems were short. It took the world quite a while to read through the silly word play in his poems to understand the genius. The big and tall truths in small and short words, the nimble sketches of native life in Kerala and the gentle social and political satire have found their way through his poems which bordered on absurdism thematically and a distant similarity on Haiku in style. It is impossible to translate his poems since he used the oral and traditional words and expressions quite liberally. Once taken out of context, they simply wither away. You would feel like you have uprooted a healthy tree. However here is a sample, with due apologies to maash:

"Read or not
You will grow up.
You will reap
If you do,
You will trip
If you don't"

- as an ardent campaigner for library and reading, he has words of wisdom for children and adults.

"I am kunhunni.
My mother? Narayani.
Grand mother? Parukkutti.
Grand mother's mother?
That is the limit of my grasp."

- reveals his humble self even though he is a scholar in Malayalam literature and linguistics besides an accomplished teacher.

"My son must learn English
from the moment he is born.
Hence I had my wife
deliver in England"

- a taunt on the craze of English that began to threaten the existence of Malayalam.

I wish all my readers know how to read Malayalam so that Kunhunni maash could unveil the verdant language and the sprightly spirit of rural Kerala.

He called himself children's poet. There had been numerous child prodigies he nurtured through his writings and otherwise. He traveled for a long time campaigning for the need of libraries and literary activities. The throngs of children visiting his house and playing in the yard must have recognized maash and hopefully one of them would go on to lead his kindly light.

Note: maash is the endearing way of addressing a (school) Teacher.

A case for Portrait - Revisiting James Joyce Part 2

Continued from Part 1 ...

Stephen grows restless with his decadent life. Father Arnall's hellfire sermon draws his sensibilities on the incursions into the realms of sin and redemption. The contemplations on sin, death, confession and deliverance reveal a quest for a personal god who can restore the beauty and purity of his world. Here he is ruminating on God's majesty and its manifestation in the imagery of Emma, his partner in sin and a vision of biblical deluge:

"-- Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other.

The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battle-worn mail armor of angels.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, and children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the face of the earth."

The prose unleashes scores of images as if they were musical notes with spatial awareness of the landscape, chapel's damp light, clouds that gathered above and the rain. I read somewhere that Joyce was a tenor of rare talent.

Noticing the piety and talents in Stephen, the director of the school suggests him to take up priesthood. Caught between the choice and a growing awareness of his true self, Stephen begins to recognise his desire for freedom and the craving for aesthetics of life. He recollects how repulsive the stale odor in the corridors of Clongowes for him and unbearable, the unyielding and obscure questions of catholic doctrines. He accepts the life of imperfection and the smaller joys that are denied in the rigors of religious regimen and canonical penances.

"The faint dour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul."

Stephen passes a turning point a little while before joining the university. He sets off to the seashore and witnesses the mirth of school chums swimming and then the vision of the winged Greek god Dedalus escaping from his prison island. His imagination soared at the spectacular sight of a girl wading in the ocean and his soul cried in an outburst of "profane" joy. For a moment he defied the strangleholds of faith and touched the freedom of spirit. He acquires great faith in the power of creativity and the eternal beauty of seemingly ephemeral objects.

"Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep..."

Joyce introduced the imagery of Greek myth to suggest Stephen’s premonitions of Ireland as the Prison Island and exile. This is followed by the revelation of his artistic self and the freedom that came along with it when he felt the exhilaration of watching the girl swim and being engrossed in the beauty and harmony of the moment. He is no longer holding back on the profanity of such joys anymore

We will see a sober and determined Stephen later on. He does not let himself hurt when his father refers to him as "lazy bitch of a brother”. He would not be cowed down by McCann over his petition or swayed by Irish nationalism and politics. He finds college insipid and uninspiring. He explains his theory on the aesthetics that delineates some of the major thoughts in the modern age such as definitions of Kinetic and static arts; lyrical, epic and dramatic forms of art and his views on dramatic art as the most uplifting, rhythm of beauty etc. It is not just Lynch who benefited; it must be the reader who is following Stephen’s intellectual tour-de-force avidly.
The consummation of Stephen's persona and self-expression soon follows when he meets Emma and settles down to write the poem that he couldn't write ten years ago. But he never shows it to anyone. Stephen develops friendship with Cranley and confides everything to him and asks Cranly's advice. Stephen and Cranly have a long conversation about religion, politics, family, and Ireland. Stephen admits, under Cranly's intelligent questioning, that sometimes he fears that the Catholic Church is right and he'll be damned and sent to hell. But he still must choose as he will choose. He realizes with sadness that after he leaves Ireland his friendship with Cranly will come to an end; he accepts that he may be alone. He must be independent. He is not afraid to be alone. He is not afraid of making a mistake, even if that mistake sends him to hell.

We follow Stephen in exile through his diary:

"April 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said.

...

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Dublin, 1904

Trieste, 1914"

You cannot read the book in one go, even though it is relatively skinny. You would have to revisit midway or on a random imagery or a composition that Joyce indulged you in. In all these you would realize the brave and firm convictions of Stephen Dedalus who grew up to become James Joyce. He lived in exile somewhere in Trieste which is no more than a windswept crossroad in Europe.

I chanced upon this book and the charmed world of Stephen. Revisiting after so long is like recreating the life and times with hope and innocence.

A case for Portrait – Revisiting James Joyce Part 1

Reading Portrait while I'd just begun hobnobbing with literature left me with vague stirrings of the inner workings of a mind. A mind flourished in the throes of awakening into the grace of wisdom and anguish.

I remember the sunshine in those evenings and creaky window of my cousin’s attic overlooking the cemetery of the church sharing the fence. I was captivated by some of those dreamy passages in the book and I knew Stephen Dedalus was here to stay. The seductive power of Joycean language weaved a bit of magic tangle for me, even when I wasn't aware or never curious for Irish politics, his specifics of catholic dogmas and the morals of the Irish society in general.

However what was palpable at the time was an instant recognition of Joyce's genius and how tactile was Stephen Dedalus' mind that worked its way through an evolving awareness from his childhood. The autobiographical signposts in the book were as misleading as seemingly direct and simple literary techniques employed. Stephen narrated his own life in various phases and evolution of his consciousness built up on a masterful control of words. What set Joyce apart from most was the unprecedented ability to combine his rebellious experiments in form and content.

Joyce lived in exile and in attempts to ward off impoverishment. In many ways the self imposed exile left him living on the edge. The crossroads in Trieste where he stayed, inhabited by people of multiple nationalities provided him a linguistic melting pot and the psyche of an exile. The Portrait to Ulysses and culminating in Finnegan’s Wake provide ample evidences of this progression.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) is special not in the least it pioneered stream of consciousness form, not even the brilliance of language but the fact the book has a lot of heart in it. You would find the spirit and its mellowing of consciousness in the transitory stages of childhood, adolescence and youth. You would imbibe as much as you revel in the sensitivity applied in his imageries and the narrative.

Stephen's childhood goes through the bittersweet experiences surrounding his parents, governess Dante, Catholicism and Conglowes School. His impressionable mind responded to the seemingly overwhelming and insecure life and times. His fascination for the innocence of Eileen who is a protestant is disapproved, the induction of church, nationalism and politics at the dinner table with him as witness, his sense of punishment and justice when he complains to the rector about Father Dolan as the latter pandied him for the broken glasses which he was falsely accused for having done it deliberately - You could find Stephen grow up fast and developing a sensitive but tenacious mind. This evolution is drawn in a metaphor as given below:

"He (Stephen) turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe"

Stephen's run-ins into the charms of romanticism and sexuality are the next phase of his life. He would be on a journey to come into terms with his perceptions which are in conflict with his immediate world. The reveries about the girl in the tram and his urges to talk to her, his amorous melancholic visions of Mercedes from Count of Monte Cristo, the unconventional views of writers (the boys attacked him for defending the heretic poet, Byron), his dispassionate realization of his father's failures, his longings and first sexual encounter with a prostitute reveal the growth of an artist's psyche. Joyce employs the metaphor of walking to imply Stephen’s awakenings and you would see him do at different stages of narrative:

"He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the vapory sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries."

The torments of Stephen walking alongside the vagaries of lust and loss of innocence after the brief spells of romance, and the burgeoning of his artistic self finds expression in Joyce's imageries and word play.

Continued...

Chronicling Travels

I have been thinking about travels. The journeys mapped in physical and metaphysical coordinates of my own life as I know them. There is no blinking of the eye, no claim of righteousness and an awareness of the triviality of it all - of ignorance and of wisdom against the abyss of time.

One travels through his age, through relationships and through one's own egocentric paths. His inability to relate and establish channels of communication leads him to a state of pervasive conflict. This holds true when the search for self-identity is constrained and defined by external objects and ideas. The inverse of this defines another state of suffocation by one’s own unnamable and unborn identity too.

Irishman ¹Becket's seekers found Raison d'etre in the act of waiting or electing not to wait endlessly for a certain Godot. In Unnamable, Becket described a state long before the search for identity when a fetus goes through suffocation and suffering in the womb:

I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. I know I am seated, by hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don't know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. (the UnNameable)

Becket reminds the reader all the while that man is an isolated, decaying, self-deluding, un-self-knowing, death-sentenced, rotting, body and mind.

Becket meant to understate a whole bunch of things.

I turn back to ²Vijayan and the travels he chronicled in his Legends of Kazakh. Ravi, the traveller in his book took a ride in the last bus to Kazakh. He left a whole lot of identity symbols behind to take up the job of a single instructor school in this forgotten hamlet.

Ravi once retold the story of karmic travels to his students:

Once upon a time, before reptiles and long before dinosaurs, two cells went for a walk in an evening. They came upon a sunlit valley.

Wonder what lies beyond this? Younger cell asked the bigger one.
This is an emerald valley. Let me linger in here.
I want to go. Younger sister insisted. She looked at the galactic paths that lay ahead.
Will you forget me? Elder sister asked.
I won't. She said.

You will. Elder sister said.
This is a loveless story of karmic cycles. This has separation and grief, nothing else.

I will conclude this with a montage from the same book.

Ravi is alone in the evening at his barn house. He would look through the window...there are no cows grazing outside. Night fell like grief and consolation. Fire flies wafted in the darkness. The shimmering lights along the country roads appeared like distant travelers. The house is now a coach on a railway track. Suddenly he remembered the gloom outside. Where am I? Lamps sped past and vanished on the two sides across the crystalline night. Another train flashed in. Yet another transit. A moment's acquaintance of karma, only for a moment between the wheels. Again it whistled by.

Becket and Vijayan must have been kindred spirits except perhaps for their faith in karma.

Note:
1. Samuel Becket: Irish Writer. Books referred to here are Waiting for Godot and the UnNameable.
2. O.V.Vijayan: Indian/Malayalam Writer. Book referred to here is Legends of Kazakh.