Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last week Film at Lincoln Center screened a retrospective series of restored black-and-white films by Bengali master Ritwik Ghatak. I caught two films: A River Called Titas , an epic about the dying of a village, told in linked stories; and The Cloud-Capped Star , a more domestic film about a young woman who gave her life working for her family. Both films could be described as social realism, but I would rather call them lyrical realism, so beautifully crafted are the images and sequences.

The subtitle—An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India—provides a sober summary of the content of this memoir, but it deliberately underplays the harrowing stories told in lucid prose by the author Sujatha Gidla. The national tale is one of class-initiated and state-supported oppression of the lower castes and, in helpless response, the divisions in the Communist Party of India when it abandoned armed revolution to enter electoral politics. The family tale traces the transformation of an uncle into a famous poet and leader of a left-wing guerilla movement. The other hero of the story is a heroine, the author's mother, who comes into her own as a mother and teacher in the later part of the story. A wonderful aspect of this memoir is that it never lets you forget the impact of social upheavals on women. The author is, however, not concerned with hagiography. The different members of the family, including their circle of friends, are here depicted with warts and all. I...

On Gopika Jadeja's invitation, I attended the third IAAC Literary festival yesterday. The 3-day festival, organized by the Indo-American Arts Council, was attended mainly by South Asian Americans. It was a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between them and Indians from India. The Americans were intensely interested in social and political developments in India. They were also captivated by celebrity culture, that of Bollywood and of nationalist politics. The panels on the the first biography of film legend Shashi Kapoor and on the secret diary of Kasturba Gandhi were very well attended. I particularly enjoyed the panel "This Unquiet Land," also the title of the debut work of non-fiction by award-winning broadcast journalist Barkha Dutt. She has reported on a wide range of issues, famously on the disputed region of Kashmir. She was impressively sharp and articulate, and was well-matched by the nimble acuity of her interlocutor Suketu Mehta, the New York-based aut...

Gandhi (1982), the biopic by Richard Attenborough, was absorbing for all of its 191 minutes. It is to be expected that a film of such magnitude and with such backing would be hagiographic and would ignore all the controversies about the man, but once that reservation has been put aside, the film is an incredible piece of cinema, and well deserves its Oscar and Globe in best direction. Ben Kingsley is a very believable Gandhi, complete with Bapu's Indian-influenced English. Rohini Hattangadi is a very lovely Kasturba Gandhi. Roshan Seth brings some complexity to his portrayal of Pandit Nehru. He is the human working with the superhuman Mahatma. Oh yes, we also watched Chef's Special (2008), an okay gay comedy directed by Nacho G. Velilla, starring Javier Cámara, Lola Dueñas, and Fernando Tejero, who plays a cute ex-footballer.

My sis sent me two easy reads on India for my birthday, Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure by Sarah MacDonald, and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple. Reading the latter, and coming home yesterday, gave me this poem this morning. For All I Know When I come home, my neighbor does not bark, her dog does, short, sharp cuffings of the musty air, but she’s not home yet or else ignores my tramping up the stairs. In two years, I have seen her, maybe, three or four times. Once, with a young man her age never seen again, unlocking her door. On a Saturday, coming down the stairs with her dog, brunette terrier. Yet another time, she was alone, pushing open ahead of me the building entrance, sliding in her boyish hips. For all I know, she could be a dear votary of Yellamma, dedicated to sacred prostitution, one of the nine lives recorded by William Dalrymple in his Indian travels, or a hereditary singer of the Rajasth...

A deeply humane and beautifully written novel about India in 1975. Through the lives of four people, brought together in one household by chance, Mistry captures the ancient and modern cruelties of India and the power of ordinary Indians to endure. Living in an unnamed city by the sea, Dina, a young widow, has to struggle ceaselessly to maintain her own independence. Maneck is a college student who cannot forgive his parents for sending him away from their idyllic hill station. Ishvar and Om, uncle and nephew, are tailors fleeing from caste violence in their native village. They will move from distrust to friendship to love, only when they tell one another their stories, the same way by which the reader gets to understand them. Mistry is, however, sensitive to the limits of storytelling. Sometimes, friendship is just not enough, and the novel, having brought them together, inexorably separates them as they confront growing up, marriage, political corruption, religious violence, the E...

Just returned from a weekend with T and D who live in Kingston, near Woodstock. Friday night, after dinner at an Italian restaurant called Mint, we drove into Rhinebeck to Upstate Cinemas to watch "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." A good-fun, feel-good movie, it followed a group of British retirees who traveled to India to stay at the eponymous hotel. The ensemble acting was good though the roles hardly stretched the talents of Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith and Dev Patel. India was seen very much through the eyes of these Britishers (a recent widow, a former civil servant, a retired High Court judge, an ex-governess), but it was to the credit of the firm, directed by John Madden, that it fleshed out a few Indian characters such as Dev Patel's hapless romantic. The dialogue was sharp, and the plot provided a couple of surprises ("twist" is too strong a word). On Saturday, after eating lunch and walking about in Rhinebeck, which boasts the ...

TLS March 9 2012 from David Arnold's review of Michael J. Franklin's Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, poet, lawyer, and linguist : [Franklin] ... begins, rather than ends, with Jones's most celebrated achievement--the "world-modifying" address made to the Asiatic Society in 1786 in which he revealed the close affinity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and hence the ancient connection between India and Europe . * Franklin rejects the idea that Jones was an arch-imperialist, who used his Orientalist learning to help impose Western hegemony over India, whose command of law and language was a route to colonial mastery. Franklin argues that this misrepresents Jones, divorcing his Indian years from his earlier career, and makes a travesty of his lifelong hatred of tyranny. Jones merits recognition instead as a multiculturalist who made deep connections between cultures. *** from Rosinka Chaudhuri's review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Partial ...

Today's my birthday. I'm 42. I've just had breakfast with GH at our local diner Three Stars, talked to my mum, sister and niece on the phone, and finished a load of laundry. After typing this, I will be heading into Woodside, my old neighborhood, for a haircut and then lunch at my favorite Thai restaurant Sripraphai. On my way home I will pick up a birthday present and a bottle of wine for friends with whom we are having dinner tomorrow evening. The present is for their little girl who has the same birthday as I. I hope the afternoon stays warm enough to continue reading in the park Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique . Is there a more truthful and less man-hating book written from the perspective of American feminism? Tonight, when GH comes home, we will have dinner at Mirabelle, a French restaurant I love. This is also the birthday of Lalita Sahasranaama . Born in 1984, she is 28 today, but could pass for someone much older. She is from Chennai, the capital of Tam...

Recommended by friends, 3 Idiots is an extremely well done, extremely entertaining comic caper, with a big heart and boundless energy. After watching it last night, I wanted to watch it all over again, all 170 minutes of it. It had such life in it. Netflix plot summary: "While attending one of India's premier colleges, miserable engineering students and best friends Rancho (Aamir Khan), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) struggle to beat their school's draconian system, which, in their eyes, unfairly values grades over creativity. Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling novel Five Point Someone , this entertaining Bollywood comedy also stars Kareena Kapoor (Rancho's love interest) and Boman Irani (the tyrannical dean of the Imperial College of Engineering)." The film narrative takes the form of a search for Rancho by his two former friends, the college scenes played as flashbacks, and so ends with finding Rancho, and the fulfillment of his f...

Indian Veranda h Sister, you live in a very private place      Meena Alexander, “Red Parapet” I will visit you in New Delhi in March, when school is out. I will see your strange house, verandah closing it around, more like an old Malay palace in Singapore than any rented apartment in New York. I will ask Raymond when he’s home about managing a country’s oil market, but say little about life with Guy. I will run with Liesel and read to Hannah the books that she is fast out-growing. I will be driven by your driver through the old city, which will remind me of the four long days I was stuck in Calcutta when my plane had engine trouble. I will think that an itinerary is always also an interruption. In the relative coolness of morning, I will sit with you on the verandah, sipping tea poured by your housekeeper, both of us brightly polite to her, neither of us used to being served in our house, if not by our young mother, the tea...

TLS March 4 2011 from Wendy Doniger's review of Mark Singleton's YOGA BODY: The origins of modern posture practice : The word "yoga" occurs in this text [The Rig Veda], but only in the primary sense of "yoking" horses to chariots or draft animals to ploughs or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate, as is the English "junction"); and then, secondarily, designating the effort of "yoking" oneself to do physical labor. * Many contemporary yoga practitioners cite this text [Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra ] as the basis of their praxis. But Patanjali says nothing about the "postures" other than remarking that the adept should sit in a manner that is relaxed and conducive to meditation and breath control. On the contrary, he speaks of cultivating "aversion to one's own body". * One yogic text composed some time between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika ("Illuminat...

LW and I watched the U.S. premiere of The Manganiyar Seduction last Tuesday at the Rose Theater. Conceptualized and directed by Roysten Abel, conducted by Daevo Khan, the production was mesmerizing in its music and fabulous in its theatricality. In red-curtained boxes outlined by pulsing lightbulbs, which recalled both the red-light district of Amsterdam and the garish festival lights in India, thirty-six musicians sang and played the kamancheh  (string), dholak  (drum), murli (flute), kartal  (wooden clappers), sarangi  (string), morchang  (percussion), bapang (string-percussion), algoza  (woodwind) and dhol  (drum). A caste of Muslim musicians from the Indian state of Rajasthan, the Manganiyars are mainly settled in the districts of Jaisalmer, Barmer and Jodhpur, the heart of the Thar Desert. They played for kings, though nowadays they are far more likely to play for wealthy patrons, at births, marriages and feasts. Their repertoire encompasses se...

31. Hybrid Things xxx Not only India but Japan. Think, for a moment, of Zen. *

Acts of Faith is the biographical story of a man growing up American, (South) Indian and Muslim. Patel's Ismaili Muslim parents moved from Bombay to the United States in search of a better life, and so Patel grew up between worlds. If the coming-of-age story sounds familiar, Patel enlivens it with well-chosen anecdotes and an interesting cast of characters, including a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The book is also an argument for religious pluralism over what it calls "religious totalitarianism." Its main thesis is that behind religious terrorists, who are almost always young people, are charismatic leaders and established institutions who have reached the youths in a way that mainstream religious organizations have failed to do. While interfaith organizations have existed for a long time, they are dominated by greybeards ad so appear irrelevant to young people. Inspired by heroes in different religious traditions, and by the discovery of diversity within Islam itself, ...

I Am My Names A. I hear the drum of my father’s life most clearly when I sit at night to type my poems of love and love. His soft signal is growing soft. I strain the harder to hear the drop of ardor in the mountain air. My name is Answer. I am a son. D. A thousand rooms wait for a call that says they are a special space and not a room out of a thousand. Condoms confirm the poem’s shape the fierce cock disavows and breaks. Between the condom and the cock, my name is Double. I am a lover. F. I could not move nor take my eyes from Shiva’s magnificent butt that boasts the beauty of a face, so, when Parvati opened her eyes, she turned the naked impiety into the first flame of the forest. My name is Forever. I am a poet. M. The world is never what it seems. It is far more interesting to see the hidden affinities: the boy and girl lie side by side, the lion by the slab of lamb, the garden promise by its rot. My name is Mind. I am a homosexual. S. What burden does a birthplace lay on the shou...

TLS February 6 2009 from Michael Stanley-Baker's review of A Dictionary of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen : The roots of Chinese medicine lie in the rich textual tradition that began with the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor , or Huang Di Nei Jing , compiled over 2,000 years ago. The first organized canon of medical theory, the Inner Classic describes a range of ideas about the structure and patterns of the universe and the human body, from five-phase correlative cosmology, to yin and yang, qi and blood, acupuncture meridians and the relationship between the inner organs.  * "Heaven" and "breath," for example, form the term "weather". Thus "breath" not only animates the human body, but also storms, rainbows and hazy summer days. Small wonder then that Chinese doctors use terms for weather patterns when diagnosing the human body as well.  *** from Ronald Blythe's review of Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours : A book of hours was a...

After a long interval, I finished reading Calasso's retelling of the Indian myths. I summarized the first six chapters in this blogpost . This post will be briefer on the next nine chapters. Chapter VII describes the sacrifice of the horse, the "king of all sacrifices," Calasso writes, for he who celebrated it became king of all kings and would obtain everything he desired. Before the horse died, it was allowed to wander any land it wished, protected by four hundred armed guards. During the wait, stories ( pariplavas ) of the deeds of gods and kings were endlessly recited. Narrative thus became . . . a way of preventing the relationship with the wandering horse from being broken. The narrative wandered around like the horse. The secret thought of the narrative is the horse. The secret thought of the horse is the narrative. When the horse returned, it was strangled, and then the king's first wife lay with the dead horse, its phallus introduced into her vulva. When morn...

Calasso retells the Indian myths in this book, and makes them gripping, probing and mysterious. In the first story, Garuda, the eagle, is born to save his mother from slavery to her own sister. The method of the myths and of the retelling is described by Garuda himself: "So many things happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories . . . And I've hardly hatched from my egg." After freeing his mother, Garuda decided to devote himself to reading the Vedas in the Rauhina tree. Reading hymn one hundred and twenty-one in the tenth book of the Rig Veda, he found the question that gave the book its title: "Who (Ka) is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice?" Estuary to a hidden ocean, that syllable (Ka) would go on echoing within him as the essence of the Vedas. Garuda stopped and shut his eyes. He had never felt so uncertain, and so close to understanding. Never felt so light, in that sudden absence of names. When he op...

Moby-Dick is not a novel, but a Dramatic Poem. Its sources are Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Its spirit is not realistic, but idealistic; it sees in the things of earth shadows of things in heaven, or, as Ahab puts it, “Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” Its strategies are self-consciously dramatic: dialogues that rival for color and comedy the exchanges between Lear and the Fool; soliloquies that aim for the grandeur of Hamlet; and action that extends its import, as in Homer, through extended metaphors. Where it pauses to catch its breath, it sees analogies everywhere, in the parts of the ship, in the members of the crew, in the stages of killing and boiling down a whale. Ahab, who sets out to kill the White Whale, discovers he is the White Whale, just as Ishmael, who sets out to tell the story of Ahab, finds out, in this obsessive narrative, he is Ahab. * Chapter I Loomings—Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to per...