Chandak Sengoopta's recent piece on the Apu Trilogy (brought to my attention courtesy Satyamshot) prompted the following:



I was struck by the fact that that the vast majority of the quotes Sengoopta cites appear to be from no later than 1961 — but things have come a long way since then, and this smattering of quotes surely does not exhaust critical reception of Satyajit Ray's trilogy in the West over the last half-century. Sengoopta's indifference to the continuing reception of Ray's work "abroad" (especially given that many of Ray's other films have only recently begun to garner a wider audience, thanks to retrospectives and DVD releases; a phenomenon Sengoopta passes over in silence even as he makes the sweeping statement that "[a]s Ray’s later films dealt in greater and greater depth with Indian history and culture, his western critics (with some honourable exceptions like Philip French or Ray’s biographers Marie Seton and Andrew Robinson) simply did not try to engage with the specifically Indian elements...."), leaves one with the impression that he is fighting a battle from long-ago.

The essence of Sengoopta's piece is contained in the following excerpt:

There’s no doubt western critics loved the trilogy—but to what extent did they comprehend its contents and contexts? Based on two classic novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the films were Bengali to the core, and often harshly realistic in portraying social change, economic malaise and individual growth. Although set in the 1930s, they were tinged, as Indian critics have rightly pointed out, with the optimistic modernism of Nehru’s India. How much of this was appreciated by viewers who knew little about India and Bengal? ... It is, no doubt, a good thing that Ray’s Indianness is no longer explained with ethnocentric stereotypes. Is it much of an advance, though, to strip away his Indian identity and regard him only as a purveyor of universalist “nuances”?

I share Sengoopta’s unease with the “local” being stripped away from Ray’s work in favor of a “universalism” that threatens to submerge identity, but the article proves too much: for instance, what does “India and Bengal” mean? Many, if not most, of the film’s non-Bengali viewers will not have intimate “insider” knowledge of rural Bengal either; indeed, how many Calcuttans would either? (Conversely, how many of Bengal's rural denizens -- themselves a diverse group -- will get the opportunity to watch Ray's films?) If the point is that one needs to be well-versed in the social and political intricacies of early twentieth century-Bengal, then Sengoopta should make that point (although, even there, the point is surely amenable to general application; does the average global reader of Jane Austen really know more about her world than the average viewer of Ray's films does about Bengal?) — rather than setting up some kind of halfway house, whereby the point is juxtaposed with the implication that a certain segment of viewers, simply by virtue of being Bengali or Indian, have unfettered and unproblematic access to the world of the film. That is, while decrying ethno-stereotyping, Sengoopta seems to have himself made the Apu Trilogy into something akin to "folk art", not only a Bengali work of art but a work of art that is nothing more nor less than its Bengaliness. Indeed, the answer to the question of just who the "outsider" is cannot be assumed. Taking just two examples, given that the Apu Trilogy is the cinematic adaptation of a Bengali novel (itself an art-form invented in Western Europe, and, arguably, assuming "Western" notions of subjectivity and narration); and that Ray was obviously very familiar with Western culture and learning (more so, perhaps, than many in his Indian audience) it is obvious that questions of access run the other way too...

My piece for OutlookIndia.com.

An interesting piece in the New York Times (by way of Chapati Mystery) on Afghanistan's (none too distant) "golden age", although I remain somewhat reticent about such rhetoric, because it can easily be used to deflect arguments against increased intervention by outside powers -- although the argument never seems to prevent involvement in any but the most humanitarian conflicts (Balkan Ghosts, anyone?). That is, it's an argument that might be deployed in Year 8 of a war, not Year 0.

Nevertheless, because it helps disturb the sanguine (and maddeningly superficial) view of Afghanistan as a country that one can 't do anything about, as a land, discussions about which are bookended by phrases like "imperial graveyard" and "fiercely ungovernable", the piece is welcome. The evocative photographs don't hurt either.

The recent publication of the United Nations' human development report and country ranks prompted me to write this op-ed for Outlookindia.com.

[For all the Mumbai theaters I am deeply indebted to Abzee and his father for taking me there]

In Delhi (February 2006) ("Suhaagan Banaa Das Sajnaa Hamaar"):


In Ajmer (February 2006):
Near Ajmer Shareef:

(full-sized image HERE)

In Rawalpindi (February 2007) :
"Aaj Da Badmaash":
(larger image HERE)

"Bebas Kaliyan":
(larger image HERE)

In Hyderabad (November 2007):

"Om Shanti Om" and "Jab We Met":


"Viyyala Vari Kayyalu" in Raitu Bazaar (Thanks Madhu for the film title!):
(larger images HERE and HERE)

In Warangal (November 2007):
"Yamadonga" giving way to "Munna":
(larger image HERE)
(larger image HERE)
(larger image HERE)

In Bhopal (December 2007):
"Qismat" and "Partner" in Bhopal's Old City:


In Mumbai (December 2007):
"Welcome" & "Dilwaale Dulhania Le Jaayenge" at Maratha Mandir:


"Sautela" and "Laadla" at Royal:
(larger image HERE)

"Judwaa" at Alfred:
(larger image HERE)

"Aandhi aur Toofan":
(larger image HERE)

"Welcome" and "Taare Zameen Par" at Eros (opposite Churchgate):



In Varanasi (March 2009):
"Delhi-6":
(larger image HERE)

"Delhi-6" and "Ek Haseen Khiladi":
(larger image HERE)

"Chandaal":
(larger image HERE)

There has been a great series of posts/photos on Satyamshot of some landmark movie theaters in various Indian cities. Many of these "single screen" cinema halls have seen better days, and seem melancholy today, symbolizing the shifting balance of the Hindi film industry in favor of neo-Hollywood and/or "multiplex" cinema, often with exorbitant ticket prices that price out large segments of the audience that was once the industry's mainstay. In the process, Hindi films are increasingly becoming associated with a particular lifestyle/mode of consumerism -- rather than the cultural phenomena they used to be.

The image below, of "The Strand" (Mumbai), was especially moving...



...This image brought to mind some passages by Bolano or Le Clezio (in the case of the latter, I am thinking of the interviews in Ailleurs) — this theater seems like a rusted, stranded space ship, a messenger from another world, continuing to transmit, but in a language no one around can understand…

For my own movie poster/theater yatra, see HERE.

Things have been quiet on the blogging front because I've been away for a few days, in Montreal...always good to be back there (next time, will make sure I make my way to Quebec City). In the meantime, some photos from Vieux Montreal (click on them for larger versions):

[Image courtesy Ballygunge Government High School Alumni Association.]

One of my great pleasures is exploring a master's minor work -- often it is only in the latter, especially when one has attained canonical status, that some vestiges of the whimsical remain. Strictly speaking, this is only partly true of Satyajit Ray's work (he actually seemed to get more whimsical with age and directorial maturity), but nevertheless, an acquaintance with the Ray of less serious subjects is highly rewarding. One isn't overawed, but most decidedly charmed.


[Image courtesy Rodney Koeneke's blog Modern Americans: Poetry, Poetics, Portland. I urge readers to check out his suggestive reading of Joi Baba Felunath.]

The two Detective Prodosh Mitra films I saw recently certainly fit the bill: Sonar Kella ("The Golden Fortress"; 1974), an odd little tale of a boy who is apparently obsessed with images from a past life, and endangered when the promise of treasure associated with that past life leads to two criminals to abscond with him; and Joi Baba Felunath (1979), a more conventional detective story about a missing idol of Lord Ganesh in Varanasi, are both as compelling as fables, but in a comforting manner. One has never any doubt that Detective Mitra (Soumitra Chatterjee) will get to the bottom of everything, and the films thoroughly partake of the pleasure of detection, the pleasure to be obtained from uncovering secrets and figuring things out -- a pleasure that almost seems anachronistic to me, inasmuch as I think of it as a quintessentially nineteenth century (and English?) sentiment; as well as of the whimsicality of a Tintin adventure. (This is especially true of the older film, and Ray acknowledges as much in a seemingly casual shot of Mitra's cousin and sidekick Topshe (Siddhartha Chatterjee) reading a Tintin comic on a train.) It is perhaps the supernatural element that makes Sonar Kella the superior film, so saturated with atmosphere one is sorry to be parted from it when the film ends. But with respect to both films, Ray effortlessly manages to convey what too few directors are capable of: the condition of being a traveler. When the characters in these films travel to an "exotic" location (Jaipur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer, all feature in Sonar Kella; the later film is set entirely in Varanasi), the audience -- no matter where it is from -- is also taken out of its comfort zone, and transported. One can only wonder how much more effective these films would be with high-quality DVD transfers: especially in Sonar Kella, the faded colors do not do justice to Ray's visuals of Rajasthan.


[Image courtesy CalcuttaWeb.]

No reflection on these films could ignore Soumitra Chatterjee, a Ray favorite. His Prodosh Mitra is a model of languidness and stylized understatement, in the process elevating dowdy dhoti kurtas and kurta pyjamas into Bengali babu chic, and generally providing both these films with the calm poise of a center. Which isn't to say other characters aren't important, especially the baddies, ranging from the pint-sized slimeball Mukul Dhar (Kushal Chakravarti) in Sonar Kella, to the fantastic villain of Joi Baba Felunath Maganlal Meghraj (Utpal Dutt) -- the latter especially welcome for Hindi film viewers who are more familiar with Dutt as the lovable presence from so many Hindi film comedies from the 1970s.


[Image courtesy the wonderful Satyajit Ray Film & Study Center, University of California, Santa Cruz.]

[Image courtesy NDTV]

The passage of time does strange things, but not even Marcel Proust could have dreamed it would have this effect. I've spent most of the last two decades disliking Salman Khan. I mean, really disliking him, and everything about him: from his wannabe vibe, his faux-Bambi eyes, his breathless dialog-delivery, his weird English accent, and his non-existent acting skills. Needless to say, I wasn't much convinced by his occasional half-assed attempts to do masala actioners; he was -- and there's no polite way to put this -- just too puny for the likes of Garv, especially given that he was playing it straight, as opposed to using the sort of explanatory gimmick Aamir Khan deployed (namely, that he was a raving lunatic) in Ghajini.

But then, a funny thing happened on the way to 2009: masala cinema went the way of the dodo, leaving adherents like me to whatever slim pickings remained (mostly by way of remakes of Southern superhits, such as the unsuccessful-but-enjoyable Run (2004), and the ultra-successful Ghajini (2008) (both remakes of Tamil films of the same names, from 2002 and 2005, respectively; and both directed by filmmakers from that industry)); and Salman Khan, after an indifferent run at the box-office, began hosting a TV game-show called Dus Ka Dum. The Salman of the latter was a revelation, funny and irreverent, and most interestingly, possessed of a new persona that almost seemed to parody "Bollywood." Certainly, there were occasional glimpses of this in Salman's oeuvre, such as in the brilliant opening scene of Jaan-e-man (2006), or in David Dhawan's underrated Trishul-spoof of sorts, Yeh Hai Jalwa (2002), but something as sustained as Salman's Dus ka Dum avatar is rare in an industry where far too many take themselves far too seriously (and with far too little justification). Wouldn't it be fun, I mused, if someone managed to cast this Salman Khan in a film, preferably a masala movie?

Had I known God was listening, I would have wished for the winning lottery ticket.

Wanted is, consistent with the trend of Bollywood's seeming inability to come up with a decent masala actioner, a remake of Pokiri (2006), reportedly Telugu cinema's then-biggest grosser -- or is it Pokkiri (2007), Prabhudeva's Tamil remake of Puri Jagannath's Telugu original? No matter: Prabhudeva apparently likes the script so much he's decided to re-re-make it, this time with Salman Khan standing in Mahesh Babu's can't-be-bettered shoes, or in Vijay's less impressive Tamil running gear.

He's not getting better at this: while Wanted is an almost-exact ersatz of Pokiri, it is a markedly lesser film. Some of this is attributable to Puri Jagannath, who managed to infuse the original with a certain fluidity that lent itself to repeat viewing (the far clunkier Wanted does not). But most can be laid at the door of Mahesh Babu,in his prime and capable of powering along the rather patchy narrative -- and make no mistake, this is the kind of film that rises or falls with its male lead.

Mercifully for Prabhudeva, his male lead -- Salman Khan -- is in possibly the best form of his life. Now well into his forties, age has begun to show as much as it has with his peers Aamir and Shah Rukh (and, for all three, to a greater extent than with Akshay Kumar), and Salman's dance and action-movements betray a marked stiffness at points in Wanted -- but, with the exception of his dignified and iconographic cameo in Saawariya (2007), Salman Khan has never looked better or more charismatic (when dressed normally, that is; Prabhudeva all too often clothes him in outlandish wear befitting an actor half his age -- it doesn't help that the female lead, Ayesha Takia, probably is half Salman's age). He certainly has never looked more convincing in action sequences (the most intense of these, the climactic one, betters the analogous sequence in Pokiri). And, given that this is the story of ruthless thug Radhe (Salman), his love interest Jhanvi (Ayesha Takia, whose effervescent persona is utterly wasted in a role that ought to be beneath her), the sleazy inspector who lusts after her (Mahesh Manjrekar), and who, like Radhe, ultimately works for underworld don Ghani Bhai (Prakashraj), himself pursued by a ruthless new assistant commissioner of police (Govind Namdeo), there are plenty of opportunities for action sequences (indeed, Wanted is markedly gorier than Pokiri). Salman handles these with gusto, if not quite aplomb. More importantly, his hyper-stylized screen persona fits right in where this film is concerned; and Salman deploys it in a bemused manner that borders on self-parody, to the point where one could be forgiven for imagining a twinkle in his eye. And Prabhudeva gives him the works, from seeti-taali inducing dialogs to fisticuffs to gunplay to smoldering face-time with Takia; heck, by film's end, he even has his shirt off. No Salman fan could possibly complain about this outing.

The above is a longwinded way of saying that the failure of this film cannot be laid at Salman's door. If one had been hoping for Prabhudeva to improve on Pokkiri's script, one would be disappointed. The original was not powered by a classic script, and although the Hindi version lops off much of the unwelcome comedy track, it feels no tighter. Nor does it have adequate substitutes for the zing of Pokkiri's one-liners, attempting to make do with more double entendres and crudity than the Telugu film had (when Jhanvi is backed into Radhe in a stalled elevator, she is jolted, and timidly asks what has happened; Radhe informs her that's his cellphone on vibrate-mode, and Jhanvi obligingly moves her ass to confirm for the audience this is indeed the case). Far from diluting the sexism that marred Pokiri, Wanted might even have ramped it up. In the context of the ultra-girlish Takia, paired with a man who looks old enough to be her father, some of these dialogs can seem positively creepy. (Not to mention the fact that just about every woman in both films is associated with some instance of sexual coercion.) I can't say I regretted seeing the film -- I'm too starved of masala cinema for that -- but it does give me pause before any recommendations are handed out. And I won't be seeing it again -- not as long as I can access the DVD of Puri Jagannath's film...

The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911-1948; by Margrit Pernau; New Delhi: Manohar, 2000 (earlier version published in German as Verfassung und politische Kultur im Wandel : der indische Fürstenstaat Hyderabad 1911-48; Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1992)


Original Photo HERE

The incredible wealth and personal oddities of Hyderabad's last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan; combined with the striking anomaly that the Deccan outpost of, and successor-state to, the Mughal empire -- it is no coincidence that the graves of Aurangzeb and the first Nizam lie very near each other, in the Burhanuddin dargah in Maharashtra’s Khuldabad -- survived until the middle of the twentieth century; not to mention the state's bizarre decision to try and cling on as a monarchy even after the departure of the British, rather than strike a reasonable accommodation with the post-1947 Indian state; have contributed to the dominant popular image of the Nizamate, and of its court culture, as one of eccentricity and anachronism. If ever a polity was in the wrong time, popular historiography seems to agree, the Mughal relic in the Deccan was it. Margrit Pernau's first achievement in The Passing of Patrimonialism, then, is in taking and representing that polity seriously for a relatively non-specialist audience. Her book (the English version is a 2000 reworking of her 1992 German-language study) attempts to take the reader through the last four decades of British rule in India from the perspective of (for the most part) the Nizam's court and Hyderabad's political elites. While the Pernau of 2000 acknowledges that her 1992 thesis' implicit conflation of "politics" with the statecraft and maneuvers of the Hyderabad political elites is a bit too narrow given the book's subtitle, she unapologetically insists upon the subject's importance. One would be hard-pressed to deny it, although Pernau's concession does mean that one cannot take the book's stated ambit, "Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911-1948", literally. The "patrimonialism" of the title refers to Max Weber's classification of the forms of "traditional " political authority in his seminal Economy and Society. Following Weber, Pernau notes:

. . . three forms within traditional authority, that is authority which derives its legitimacy 'by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules ('existing since time immemorial') and powers. The first form is gerontocracy or primary patriarchalism, which functions without an administrative staff of its own and therefore can exercise control only over a limited area. . . . If an administrative staff develops, it can be responsible to the ruler personally -- the second form. In this case Weber speaks of patrimonialism. Alternatively -- and this is the third form -- it can appropriate particular powers and economic assets, in which case it would be called estate-type domination. . . . (Passing of Patrimonialism, pg. 51)

The "passing" the book's title refers to is thus that of Hyderabad from the pre-modern "patrimonialism" of the Asaf Jahi state to the modern, impersonal bureaucratic state. But the bureaucratic state Pernau apparently has in mind is not simply the Indian Union. While Hyderabad is commonly thought of in popular discourse as stuck in a time warp until its old order was replaced by virtue of the state's absorption into the Indian Union in 1948, Pernau sees the transition as having begun much earlier, such that the ancien regime was already all but dead by the time the Indian Army walked into the state. In Pernau's view, the passage from the second to the third of Weber's forms of "traditional authority" was initiated by the last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan (r. 1911-1948), who sought to create a modern administrative state structure that would nevertheless leave undisturbed the legitimacy and symbolic order of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, a monarchy that bore the trace of its distant Mughal origins in the sovereign's own title (the "nizam" of the title referred originally to Mir Qamaruddin Khan, the eighteenth century Mughal "nizam-ul-mulk" ("administrator of the land", a title given to Mughal governors) who founded the dynasty by achieving the de facto independence of the declining Mughal state's Deccan province). But The Passing of Patrimonialism isn't very clear as to whether this bureaucratization was the result of the last Nizam's own drive for centralized power (at the expense of that of other traditional elements in the state, such as the nobility); or of the Raj's determination by the 1920s to clip Osman Ali Khan's wings, by attempting to institutionalize administrative authority in the state in order to reduce its dependence on a man the British alternately regarded as bulwark and troublemaker.


Original Photo HERE

The book's failure to explore this distinction points to a wider issue. An account of Hyderabad's broader passage from the world of the "beloved" Nizam Mahboob Ali Khan (d. 1911) (held, along with his Minister Maharajah Kishen Prashad, to typify the traditional Hyderabadi courtly ethos) to that of the modern nation-state, would unquestionably be highly significant (whether or not even pre-1911 Hyderabad conformed to Weber's notions of the "patrimonial," given the size and extent of the state, and the fact of British paramountcy and range of "impersonal" means at the colonial power's disposal to influence events within the state, is a separate question). But The Passing of Patrimonialism only intermittently concerns itself with such an account, and even less so with a study of the state's increasing bureaucratization, with the result that the book's statement of thesis, laid out in Pernau's introduction, is somewhat misleading. Pernau does engage with her book's purported subject when it comes to discrete areas -- such as her superb account of the manner in which the patrimonial (and perennial) struggle between the aristocratic Paigah family and the sovereign, with the contours of Paigah power varying over time and dependent on the nature of the family's relations with the Nizam -- became institutionalized by the end of the 1920s, the rights and privileges of Paigah seigneurial authority over the family lands becoming appropriate subjects for legal/rule-based adjudication, rather than informal politics. But for the most part, the book does not provide an overarching account of a system passing into bureaucratic modernity. Indeed, at its most persuasive, such as in the long fifth chapter on the new forms of political mobilization in the twentieth century, the resulting sharpening of linguistic and communal boundaries as well as the simultaneous fluidity of the boundaries between the Indian nationalist, Hindu revivalist, and linguistic movements; and on the extent to which even orthodox Muslim "loyalism" ultimately undermined the polity; the book's account of the passing of Hyderabad's patrimonial structure does not seem to have anything to do with the increased bureaucratization of the state. The nazar controversy of 1920 serves as a good illustration. Osman Ali Khan's re-interpretation of the Mughal concept of nazar, from a personal presentation to the sovereign as homage, or at the time of a request; to an institutionalized (and highly unpopular) revenue stream collected throughout the realm; would appear to be a perfect illustration of the book's thesis. But Pernau discusses the issue only within the context of rising tensions between the Nizam and the British, and other critics who saw the new policy as evidence of Osman Ali Khan's avarice. A study of the new nazar policy as symptomatic of the passing of patrimonialism is strangely absent.


Original Photo HERE

Fortunately, the tale Pernau does tell is no less significant. The Passing of Patrimonialism is essentially a history of Hyderabad's politics during Osman Ali Khan's reign, and, given the paucity of overarching scholarly narratives on this subject in English, it is welcome as such a history. Ultimately, the broader historical passage Pernau's title alludes to is not the subject of her history so much as it is the backdrop to her account of the efforts of the Hyderabad ruling elites to negotiate both British paramountcy and the rising tide of nationalism, all the while attempting to preserve the old order. Pernau's book, that is to say, is not a study of the last Nizam's modernization drive as symptomatic of a long structural change, but is primarily a history of his strategy to negotiate that change. That strategy was doomed to fail -- Osman Ali Khan's regime ultimately found itself on the wrong side of virtually every major political trend, with the exception of the increased bureaucratization that was one of modernity's hallmarks, or of an overtly Muslim politics, although even both of these could not help but undermine the foundations of the ancien regime that had encouraged them. However, an adequate understanding of that attempt, that is, of Osman Ali Khan's position as a crucial transitional figure -- a "modernizer," but one who sought to use modernization to try and shore up his position and to hold outsiders at bay -- is essential, not only where the political history of the Deccan is concerned, but also because it encapsulates several major themes in Indian history that resonate down to our times: the dichotomies of "tradition" and "progress"; cultural autonomy and "outside" influence; the functioning of colonialism in the context of "indirect" rule; the grand narratives of nationalism and communalism (Muslim and Hindu); the more localized narrative of a sub-national (Telugu, but also Marathi) identity; not to mention (by the end of the period) an armed peasant uprising.


Original Photo HERE

The Passing of Patrimonialism is very good in illustrating the unintended consequences of political actors pursuing their own ends within the context of the hybrid colonial system that combined directly ruled British India with a patchwork of "native ruled" states, and over which (certainly by the late nineteenth century) British authority and influence was such that their characterization in the academic literature as instances of "indirect" rule is entirely justified. Pernau lucidly shows how, step-by-step, and cognizant of his early weakness within Hyderabad vis-a-vis the nobility and the throne's Minister (given that the appointment of the latter had long been one of the principal ways in which the colonial power exercised influence at the Hyderabad court, the position was an especial interest of the British, and, over time, no Minister could be appointed without British approval) the last Nizam sought to shore up his authority by courting the British Resident and importing (or accelerating the adoption of) British bureaucratic models within the state's administration; while, simultaneously, attempting to instal his own men in significant administrative positions. (The latter move adversely impacted the traditional aristocracy, and, indirectly, British influence, given the nobility's tendency to appeal to the British Resident for support in conflicts with the court.) This double (and somewhat contradictory) move would have been fairly typical of the dance the larger princely states had to manage vis-a-vis the Raj (the double move would become a trapeze act once nationalistic politics gained ground in the twentieth century, as India's new "mass leaders" challenged the legitimacy of the "traditional" rulers in profoundly destabilizing ways), were it not for the outbreak of World War I.

Pernau underscores that the British need to "keep Muslims loyal" in the face of an enemy that included Ottoman Turkey (still ruled by a Sultan who was nominally Khalifah (Caliph) of all (Sunni) Muslims worldwide) led them to solicit the overt support of the Nizam, as the ruler of the largest Muslim(-ruled) principality in India. This need became ever more urgent once it became clear that the war's end would spell radical changes to the nature of the Ottoman state. Not to mention that complications arose from Britain's position as global -- and not just an Indian -- power: while the British had extended assurances to Indian Muslim leaders that the position of the Khalifah as custodian of the holy places of Makkah and Madinah would not be affected, these promises were simply inconsistent with the expectations of Arab nationalists (also encouraged by the British) that henceforth they would rule in the Arab lands. While the Nizam's combination of loyalty and subservience to the Raj, and championing of a specifically Muslim agenda, would pose problems once the Khilafat movement made the two courses diverge, until that break, on Pernau's account, the Nizam was able to see his position as "Muslim leader" as an opportunity to leverage his relations with the Raj in his favor. However, what neither the Nizam, nor the British (nor anyone else) foresaw was the destructive impact the Nizam's new pan-Indian Islamic identity ("new" in the sense that it was understood to transcend the borders of the state of Hyderabad; the Asaf Jahi dynasty had always seen itself as orthodox Muslim, but had not laid any claim to wider Muslim significance beyond the Deccan, and had over time celebrated the notion of a court culture where Hindu and Muslim could not be distinguished on the basis of language or dress) would have on the legitimacy of his state in the eyes of its own population, the vast majority of which was Hindu.


Original Photo HERE

What explains this blindness? One might just chalk it up to the inevitable law of unintended consequences, but Pernau links it to the ambiguous duality inherent in the position of the princely states vis-a-vis the Raj. That is, the princes were expected to maintain "traditional" rule within their borders, but at the same time had to follow the British "civilizing" lead (a ruler who stubbornly refused to implement any of the modern bureaucratic, administrative, educational, and technological methods being applied in British India, would soon find himself -- as an unfriendly reactionary -- on the wrong side of the state's British Resident). Conversely, the princely states could not go the whole hog in conforming to the British model: not only would this be suicidal for the native rulers' own position (which to a large extent depended on traditional symbols and models of patronage, few of which could survive the impersonal bureaucratization of the modern state), but it would also undermine the Raj's own rationale for why the princely states continued to be tolerated. That is, if the British were justified in letting the princely states survive despite their "backwardness", this was because "traditional authority" was better suited to Indian realities, and indeed, the Indian public was imagined to be greatly attached to the traditional forms of authority. (The cynicism of such justifications may be readily gleaned from the obvious point that this essentially relativistic argument could just as easily be used to undermine the ideological foundations of colonial rule in British India. Pernau, more charitably, refers to this unacknowledged contradiction within British imperial ideology, but that presupposes an integrity that I am not persuaded imperial policymakers possessed.) Wholesale importation of the British model would de-stabilize the traditional bond between prince and subject. The "traditional" rulers also began to serve a second ideological function once Western-educated Indians began to lead the nascent nationalistic movements: in contrast to the likes of the urban, Anglicized Indians who showed signs of making greater political demands than the Raj was prepared to grant; the nawabs and maharajahs could be held up as representatives of the "real" India. The (pre-Gandhi) Indian nationalists might have been "civilized" by means of their Western-style education and orientation, but that also made them un-Indian in the eyes of the colonial power, and hence un-representative. Progress, the Raj's message appeared to be, came at the price of political irrelevance.

In sum, the princely order was already accustomed to grappling with two systems, and even two symbolic orders; one applying to the native state's dealings with the "external" power, and the second applying to its dealings with its own people. On Pernau's telling, the Nizam (presumably in common with the other princes) did not appreciate that the second system could be profoundly affected by the vagaries of the first. Thus, the "external" approach of presenting the Asaf Jahi ruler as natural leader of India's Muslims, and custodian in some vague sense of Indian Islam, was not perceived to have any bearing on the Nizam's relationship with his own subjects. To the extent Pernau is right, the Nizam was no more wrong than the other princes about the relationship between "outside" and "inside". However, as the ruler of the largest native state, and the only one who had become implicated in pan-Indian symbolism, only the Nizam was playing such a high-stakes game. And Hyderabad was one of the handful of large states where the ruling family and the majority of the population belonged to different religions. Pernau is surely right to pinpoint the dovetailing of British and Nizam interests in Osman Ali Khan's adoption of pan-Indian Muslim garb, as setting the stage for a communal disaster within Hyderabad. The nationalistic mobilizations and communal conflicts that engulfed India in the decades after World War I would likely have made things challenging for the polity in any event, but the Nizam posing as Muslim champion made the destruction of his regime's neutrality, and, ultimately, its legitimacy, inevitable. Not to mention that the shift would also come to restrict the Nizam's room for maneuver where proponents of a specifically Muslim politics were concerned; by the 1940s the state was regularly bullied and co-opted by the fanatics of the Majlis-e-Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen (although the significance of the Nizam's own cynicism in encouraging the Majlis in order to undermine other power centers within Hyderabad; and Jinnah's opportunism in forging an alliance with the likes of Majlis leader Bahadur Yar Jung as part of the Muslim League's drive to present itself as India-wide representative of all Muslims, whether in British India or the princely states, cannot be underestimated either). By the time of Hyderabad's collision course with the post-1947 Indian state, Pernau notes that the old order had in any event become irretrievable: the Nizam still reigned, but his rule was becoming an empty shell in the face of a de facto coup d'etat by the Majlis's military wing, the Razzakars. In the wake of nationalism, while democratic politics ended up undermining the legitimacy of princely rule all over the sub-continent, the same politics also served to renovate many a prince as Member of Parliament or Minister after 1947. But Hyderabad's particular constellation of events meant there would be no re-invention for the Nizam and his descendants as modern politicians. Like that other state that lay directly across the fault-lines of the transfer of power from Britain to its successor states, namely Kashmir, the former ruling family in Hyderabad is today utterly absent from the public life of its former realm (except as the subject of news stories about ongoing litigation concerning the family fortune), in a way that would be unimaginable where the erstwhile rulers of the Rajasthan states, or Gwalior, are concerned.


Original Photo HERE

But The Passing of Patrimonialism overstates the case when it asserts that Osman Ali Khan's re-orientation of his throne as leader and symbol of India's Muslims was not intended to have any bearing on the throne's relationship with its non-Muslim subjects. That is, Pernau ascribes tactical, but not ideological, significance to this move where the Nizam was concerned. But it is difficult to square this with Pernau's own account of the last Nizam's "attitude towards the Hindu-Muslim question" within Hyderabad (pgs. 150-151): what policy could be less likely to maintain Hyderabad's internal Hindu-Muslim equilibrium than the virtually complete sidelining of Hindus from the highest echelons of the cabinet after 1924 -- especially given that the same period saw the first Hindu-Muslim riots, and the arrival of the Muslim tabligh and Hindu nationalist "re-conversion" drives to the Nizam's domains. Doubtless Osman Ali Khan was no closet Majlis ideologue, but it is hard to shake the impression that he was (or grew) susceptible to the puritanical political Islam espoused by the likes of Osmania University's Habib-ur-Rahman and (later) the Majlis. The last Nizam probably did not have any radical moves in mind, but Pernau devotes insufficient attention to his encouragement of a shift in emphasis where the bases of his rule were concerned, in favor of a more overtly Muslim garb for the state.

The final act of this communal drama was grisly indeed: Pernau estimates that "one tenth to one fifth of the male Muslim population" was massacred in the conflagration that followed the Indian army's entry into Hyderabad in September 1948, as the Razzakar oppression of Hindus during the Nizamate's last years was apparently followed by indiscriminate massacres and violence against Muslims, "primarily in the countryside and provincial towns." (Pg. 336). The claim (which Pernau mentions in passing, citing the work of Omar Khalidi, Wilfred Smith, and a few others) is startling, not just because carnage on this scale is more commonly associated with the 1947 violence (especially in Punjab and Bengal), but because attention on human rights violations during this period has tended to focus on Razzakar atrocities against the peasantry prior to the Indian army action, and on the army's own human rights violations in the wake of the "police action." The latter pale in comparison to the sort of violence Pernau mentions, and I do not know if this lacuna in so many writings on the period points to the factual unreliability of the claim that so many were killed, or to the scandal of a most under-studied example of the sort of "popular" mass killings (perpetrated not, or not simply, by the arms of the state, but by large populations) that Mahmood Mamdani discusses in his permanently useful study of Rwanda When Victims Become Killers. In such circumstances, the horror of violence -- by victims whose sense of historical grievance unmoors retributive violence from any sense of "measure" -- is shocking not just because of its brutality, but because it is experienced by perpetrators as liberation. Intriguingly, my (admittedly anecdotal) experience discussing this issue with a couple of people from Aurangabad and Hyderabad points to disbelief, even among Urdu-speaking Muslims, that the killings could have occurred on such a scale. This too is in stark contrast to the situation vis-a-vis the 1947 Partition massacres: while in both situations, notions of community honor and shame contribute to reluctance to discuss the violence (especially sexual violence), except in general terms, everyone seems ready to acknowledge its scale (even if primary responsibility is often sought to be foisted on the "other" religious group). Where Hyderabad is concerned, there is an almost complete absence of discussion of the sort of popular violence Pernau references, except in the general sense of an instance, even if extreme, of recurrent Hindu-Muslim communal violence. Nor can it be simply a question of blotting out a trauma, since my sense is that it is not difficult to solicit reports of atrocities by the Indian military. Perhaps the fact that the brunt of the violence would have been borne in villages and smaller towns, as opposed to in larger urban areas where the Indian military was able to exercise control relatively quickly and effectively, offers an explanation. The urban masses, whether elite or subaltern, Hindu or Muslim, and especially in the nerve center of Hyderabad city, would not have experienced the singularity of violence on the unprecedented scale Pernau notes; what they would have experienced might well be accountable by means of narratives of "normal" Hindu-Muslim violence, or of the end of an old order (the fall of the Nizam's regime). But the fact that Pernau seems to be one of the few authors who has even tackled the issue -- and it is hardly the main focus, even of her work -- leaves the lay reader in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide whether the silence is itself a singular historical phenomenon worthy of study (apart from, of course, the fact of such a carnage, which ought to inform a whole host of historical and political narratives; The Hindu carried one of the few popular articles on the issue in 2001); or if it raises questions about the scholarship underlying the claim of this many killed. Stated crudely, one finds oneself asking whether Pernau, Khalidi, and Smith, et al., are right as far as the number of those killed is concerned (the fact of widespread massacres is not in dispute, given the anger and concern expressed by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru upon hearing of the reports, not to mention the sources cited in the Noorani article in The Hindu), in a way one never needs to where the other, academically well-plowed massacres of India's atrocious 1940s, are concerned.


Original Photo HERE

Although The Passing of Patrimonialism doesn't quite justify its title and introduction, it is invaluable as a study of the government-level politics of Hyderabad during the reign of the last Nizam. This is so despite the fact that Pernau's book leaves the reader none the wiser on the question as to why Hyderabad's political elite pursued (at least once it became clear that the departure of the British was imminent) a policy that does not need the wisdom of hindsight to be described as suicidal. How is one to account for this blindness, right to the bloody and bitter end? Perhaps it couldn't be otherwise, given the book's focus on strategy and maneuver, and its relative indifference to the ideology of the narrative's principal figures (apart from the ethos of the traditional nobility, sketched as backdrop at the book's outset). Equally, however, the mystery might be a function not just of this study's limitations, but of the sparsity of the historical record in key respects -- unlike their rather prolific counterparts in British India, many of the prime movers in Hyderabad during this period (including the Nizam and the Razzakars) left few private papers that have been made public. Moreover, the Nizam had many policies implemented orally, and, as Pernau notes, on occasion in direct contradiction of the written policies (principally in order to satisfy the British with respect to a particular demand, while actually creating facts on the ground to opposite effect). The foregoing, and the intersection of the ritualized forms of Mughal court practice in the context of a thoroughly modern colonialism, combine to lend an air of kabuki to the proceedings that the historian is charged with deciphering. However, The Passing of Patrimonialism is superb in evoking the practice of colonial statecraft in the context of indirect rule. That practice -- conducted in an elaborate dance of letters, personal interviews, "advice" from the British Resident, appeals and counter-appeals to (and reprimands from) the Viceroy in Delhi (and even, by the 1930s, to politicians in London), and ministerial intrigues -- is masterfully recreated by Pernau's judicious marshaling of a wide range of sources, and drives home, both the reality of indirect rule and the ceaseless attempts of the princes to try and game the system, however rigged.


Original Photo HERE

Pernau memorably offers a glimpse into the true nature of that system by means of her discussion of the Nizam's attempts to call into question the nature and basis of British paramountcy, in order to regain control over the province of Berar (leased to the British under dubious circumstances since the mid-nineteenth century, the arrangement confirmed in perpetuity since the early twentieth; apparently leading Mahbub Ali Khan to joke that his G.C.B. award actually stood for "Gave Curzon Berar"). Confronted with a claim that was legally sound, the Raj was forced to articulate the naked force (as opposed to liberal conceptions of the rule of law and treaty rights) that ultimately underlay British supremacy vis-a-vis the princely states, a supremacy "not based only upon treaties and engagements, but exist[ing] independently of them”; it was, after all “the right and the privilege of the Paramount Power to decide all disputes that m[ight] arise between States, or between one of the States and itself." (March 27, 1926 letter from the Viceroy to the Nizam, quoted on pgs. 143-44). In our post-9/11 world, when nostalgia for the British empire and arguments for new imperial arrangements have become commonplace in the writings of both academics (such as Niall Ferguson) and popular writers (such as Robert Kaplan), we would do well to keep the crude honesty of Lord Reading's words in mind, both for what they teach us about the nature of imperialism, and for, as Pernau shows, the distorting effect the cloaking of the latter has on the politics of the governed. None of this predetermined the Nizam's utter lack of political realism or wisdom in the final analysis. But, as Pernau recognizes, the manufacture and maintenance of shadow sovereignties increasingly divorced from reality, and essential to effacing the nature of colonial rule in the eyes of "indirect" subjects, surely incentivized a system where reflexive conflation of form and substance, and a disastrous over-estimation of the latter based on the former (especially when the increasingly hollow form remained decked out in the iron clad regalia of solemn treaties with, and political guarantees by, a colonial power that, in the final analysis simply decided to wash its hands of the mess and leave), was a real possibility:

While in former times symbols had been an impressive language understood by both the British and the princes, a language in which the struggle for power was conducted, by 1930 the British had forgotten all they ever knew about the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Consequently they no longer regarded symbols as signs but as substitutes for real power and used them accordingly. Hyderabad remained tragically unaware of this change; part of the overestimation of its own power, which ultimately led to its downfall, can be traced back to this. (Pg. 220)

The first sequence gets you. It's aboard a train -- as so many of the best action sequences are -- and Bobby Deol, his hands bound, is being escorted to an unidentified gangster, along with a young woman supplied from Varanasi for the gangster's pleasure. Her bright-red shalwar qameez simply underscores her nervousness; not the the gangster cares, pulling her to him even as he yells at his men to kill Deol's character and throw him off the train. At that point, a cell-phone -- within the woman's brassiere -- rings, and all hell breaks loose, as the narrow passages of the train erupt in gunfire and good ol' action. Can't keep a hero down, even with his hands bound.

The hero is Bobby Deol, looking better than he ever has, and shrewdly cast in a taciturn role that doesn't feature much dialogue, namely that of Chamku, the son of a farmer from Bihar's badlands. After he is brutally orphaned by the evil thakur Mahendra Pratap Singh, little Chamku is taken in by a Naxalite commander (Danny Denzongpa), and grows up to be the latter's right-hand man. Assassinating a local politician in the midst of a lewd Holi song? No problem. Unfortunately for Chamku, arrest means encounter death for the entire cadre; Chamku himself only survives because he's the hero, and can;t possibly be felled by a few bullets. He comes to in the hospital, only to find himself face to face with the sinister Mr. Kapoor (Irfan Khan), making him an offer he can't possibly refuse: a position on a "dirty squad" being formed by the Indian government's intelligence agencies to carry out all sorts of nefarious acts within the country. While Chamku doesn't exactly throw himself into the job with glee, his world is thrown into turmoil, first by the sight of schoolteacher Shubhi (Priyanka Chopra) -- in the sort of sari-blouse that ensures full attendance by the class -- and second, by a chance encounter with the evil thakur, who seems to have made the transition from backwater oppressor to Mumbai builder with great ease. As the New York Lotto line goes: Hey, you never know.

The story is improbable -- or, more accurately, a tale that begins with a promise of a realistic depiction of some of India's seamier realities, ends up flirting a little too intensely with the sort of masala mash that needs commitment from the word go in order to be convincing -- but the director is Kabeer Kaushik (of Seher (2005) fame), which guarantees that Chamku is suffused with a seriousness of tone and purpose that belies the outlandish plot. And if the film doesn't live up to its early promise, it nevertheless remains the best Bobby Deol film you've never seen. And that's just wrong: Kaushik's sophomore effort is never less than engaging, principally because of his splicing of a routine narrative by means of several time shifts; and his superb use of Bobby Deol in what has to be the man's best action outing; and a nonchalantly evil turn by Irfan Khan, who represents a kind of bureaucratic evil. Irfan's Kapoor doesn't appear to be animated by patriotism, love, hatred, etc. -- he (and his boss, played by Rajendra Gupta) just want(s) the job done. Other Hindi films have featured corrupt government agents -- but Kaushik's film is the first to evoke a "system" that is steeped in immoral ruthlessness, that views itself as entitled to transgress its own laws in its own land. Seher was unquestionably the more gripping film, but Chamku pushes the envelope further. I wish I had seen it earlier.

A word about the cinematography: Gopal Shah's work is strongest in enclosed public places -- trains, crowded malls, alleys -- and he clearly loves focusing on his hero negotiating these spaces. It's a solid effort, but interesting enough to warrant better projects than the likes of Heroes (2008). The music director is Monty (of Saawariya (2007) fame), and while old-school Holi songs and item numbers aren't his natural element, he gamely tries, resulting in some energetic music (heck, there isn't much other Holi music to go with, so I'll certainly go with the catchy Gola Gola). The real standout is the restrained Dukh ki Badri -- while not a match for Saawariya's Daras Bina Naahi Chain, Kalpana, Shail Huda, and Parthiv Goel, infuse this folkish track with genuine feeling, and a gravitas that stays with the listener.

Outright fun, not to mention silliness, has long been a casualty of A.R. Rahman's recent Hindi oeuvre. Unlike in Tamil, Rahman simply hasn't done very many soundtracks for "ordinary" Hindi films of late. That is, the typical Rahman Hindi album this decade has been a Swades or a Jodha-Akbar, or a Delhi-6 -- not a Rangeela or a Daud. The last year might well be the beginning of a shift, with Ghajini, and now Blue. No song in either album will ever make a list of Rahman's best, but equally, no-one can doubt that at their best, these albums feature a more playful Rahman, the sort of souffle-lover one missed in the likes of Jodha-Akbar. On the down-side, at its worst, the likes of Blue do give the impression of a composer who hasn't lavished much care on his work. Luckily for us, the balance comes down on the side of buying the album.

Fiqrana began with a nod to Ghajini's Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayeen, but then, when it seemed one of the Mahesh Bhatt stable of composers had taken over the song, my heart sank -- not that there is anything wrong with those neo-Pakipop songs, it's just that such generic music is unworthy of Rahman. At the fifty-five second mark, I realized how wrong I was as Vijay Prakash's voice segued from the familiar sounds of a number filmed on Emraan Hashmi to the more rhythmic, almost drunk "Jeet te hain hum larh larh ke"; and then, after about ten seconds of the addictive loop inaugurated by those words, the song begins to soar with "Hum mehekte ... gulzaaron mein". By then, this listener was hooked, with no possibility of escape. This song doesn't soar very far in terms of complexity, and will never be a major Rahman song; but it remains a song that insinuates itself into the bloodstream, and demands to be heard dozens of times -- or not at all. That the maestro has not lost his taste for light musical confectionery after all these years in the industry is worth celebrating in itself; but the extent to which this song's edges have been smoothed out in keeping with the film's aquatic theme (in no small measure due to Rahman's effective deployment of Shreya Goshal's voice), means this sweet dish will go down easy. This track is worth the price of the album.

There is more breeziness in this album: Aaj Dil Gustakh Hai is twice as light as Fiqrana, and half as interesting; and while Sukhvinder Singh's voice is always welcome on a Rahman composition, the duo do not break much new ground here, resulting in a song that is musically faultless but quite safe. That doesn't mean you'll be skipping this song. Far from it: think of Aaj Dil Gustakh Hai as the Ocean's Eleven of this album -- smooth, suave, utterly charming, and rather pointless. Given the song's video trailer features Sanjay Dutt and bikini-clad Lara Dutta cavorting on a beach and on board a boat, this track seems like it is just what director Anthony D'Souza ordered.

Rehnuma features Goshal and Sonu Nigam at their charming best, and the somewhat portentous effect created by the juxtaposition of their old-school crooning with a relatively overwrought orchestral backdrop makes this a more interesting song than it otherwise might have been. However, there is something missing from the song, a certain fun quotient that was needed to justify a song its musical arrangement does not get all the way there. At least on a first listen: of all the tracks in this album, this one is most likely to gain by repeat listening.

No-one will ever accuse the delightfully throwback Yaar Mila Tha of lacking a fun quotient. Fittingly enough, Rahman resorts to Udit Narayan for the male vocals here, with Madhushree's faintly over-ripe voice playing the female part. The song is best thought of as Rahman's attempt to turn his gaze toward the sort of rollicking love song Hindi film music just doesn't see much of these days (replete with lyrics like "har maa kahe bete se, laa aisi dulhaniya"). That he is doing so self-consciously is indicated by the early soft-jungle beat reminiscent of a rather different vibe, namely Daud's "Shabba Shabba"; and by the decidedly contemporary hip-hop groove the song ends with. It all adds up to this album's best shot at timelessness, a song that should be as un-dated ten years from now as it is today.

Bhoola Tujhe is another relatively simple composition, elevated by a chorus that soars several notches. The song's mellow anthemic vibe is in keeping with its subject -- Rashid Ali's vocals are addressed to the Creato -- although the tune seems a bit too upbeat for the lyrics. This song has the smell of a purely situational number, and as such might well work within the context of the film, but could have been truly memorable has Rahman himself crooned in place of Ali. In the final analysis, Bhoola Tujhe is notable for hearkening to an earlier Rahman, the composer of relatively sparse numbers like Bombay's "Tu Hi Re" -- the effect is one of clean, if safe, lucidity.

The less said about the Blue Theme, the better. Or rather, I'll say enough to make clear that large chunks of Blaaze's rap are strongly reminiscent of Give It Away Now by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (or is it Ishq Bector's Dakku Daddy?). The song flows into some neo-Arabic strains and compelling incantatory passages, but these aren't good enough to rescue the track (which in fact falls apart at the very end, as it speeds up and is ultimately washed away in the sound of the surf). In Rahman's defense, I suspect this piece's function within the film will be to serve as background music rather than a conventional song. As it stands in this album, however, the Blue Theme is more a rough draft than a fully realized composition.

The real stinker in the album is the first track. Piggishly named, I Wanna Chiggy-Wiggy With You features Kylie Minogue in an utterly generic pop song, cheerfully interrupted by an equally generic Hindi/bhangra song. From the song's video trailer, the latter moment affords Akshay Kumar an opportunity to play his populist card, a gatecrasher persona the actor has perfected beyond anyone else in contemporary Hindi cinema, but it is disappointing Rahman was not inspired to come up with something more imaginative to showcase his lead star's wattage.

The late Robin Buss, in an introduction to his translation of The Count of Monte Cristo, referred to George Eliot's criticism of French novelists as "tempted to deal with the exception rather than the rule," that is, as exploring the extraordinary rather than the mundane -- presumably, on Eliot's view, freed from distraction by the sensational, only reflection upon the mundane could provide meaningful insight into us, and the world around us.

What Eliot might have made of Bala isn't hard to guess. Ever since this oddest of contemporary Indian directors first burst onto the scene a decade ago with Sethu (1999; poorly remade by Satish Kaushik in Hindi as Tere Naam (2003)), his films have relentlessly plumbed the marginal -- apparently, not due to any ethical compulsion to give voice to those who have been ignored, but in the service of what can seem a purely aesthetic attempt to represent the psychotic. Sethu centered on Vikram's character of the same name, an anti-social ruffian whose love deranges him, leading to madness and a netherworld of sorts; Surya essayed the title-role in Nandha (2001), of a young man wracked by an almost unbearable burden, namely the memory of having killed his father as a boy. Pithamagan (2003) featured both Surya and Vikram, and was in a sense Bala's most joyous film: although it stars Vikram as the wild man Chiththan, raised in a cemetery and a misfit in human society, the film offered us Surya's Sakthi as well, a lovable rogue who becomes Chiththan's only friend. But this is Bala we're talking about, and by film's end Sakthi has been murdered, leaving Chiththan to turn his back on (his) humanity and avenge his friend in a berserker rage. If, through all of this, Bala remains anchored to mainstream Tamil cinematic tradition, it is because of the fascination the mythic mode holds for him. Bala's earlier films do not seek to represent "the human condition" for the most part, and are uninterested in illuminating our world. Stated differently, his heroes are no less exceptional, no less godlike, than the beings who populate Tamil cinema's masala movies (indeed, it is no coincidence that Bala launched the masala career of Vikram as a solo hero, and has ever after sought to cast major stars as his male leads) -- it is just that his films are more sombre and less reassuring than the standard masala movies, too focused for cartoonish detours, and promising no easy catharsis or redemption.

Naan Kadavul ("I Am God") is the logical terminus of Bala's concerns, which include a concern with the history of the Tamil masala hero persona (there can be little doubt Bala has cinematic history on the brain; the descent of a godlike star into the masses' midst is a fleeting motif in Pithamagan, in the person of Simran playing herself in a medley of old film songs; in Naan Kadavul, there is another medley, with people -- all beggars, I might add -- dressed up as MGR, Sivaji Ganesan, and Rajni, not to mention an ultra-lewd man dressed in drag and cavorting to one of Nayanthara's dance numbers; for the original video of that "Yammadi" song from Vallavan (2006), feast your eyes on this) . The film's protagonist Rudra isn't just godlike, he insists that he is god. And not just any deity, but Kaal Bhairava, the Shiva who stands watch over Kashi. Nothing in the movie suggests that Rudra is deluded, or that he is anything other than the Kaal Bhairava who cut off one of Lord Brahma's heads in violent demonstration of the futility of the argument between Brahma and Vishnu as to who was the real lord of creation; the correct answer was neither the Creator (Brahma) nor the Preserver (Vishnu), but the Destroyer (Shiva). (Indeed, one of Bhairava's manifestations is even called Rudra Bhairava; and Rudra is of course also the name of the Vedic storm god, subsequently assimilated into the cult of Shiva.) Bala's creation of an ambience where the viewer simply accepts this claim as normal where Rudra is concerned, and in a context where most other characters in the film are not so sanguine, is his most creditable achievement.

Rudra does have a history, however. As a boy, he was abandoned by his Tamil parents in Varanasi after four astrologers prophesied that he would destroy his family. Fourteen years later, Rudra's father and sister travel to the holy city to track him down and bring him back, only to find that Rudra is now an aghori, the tantric sect (in?)famous in India for their embrace of all acts (on the theory that all dualisms, including the axes clean/unclean and taboo/permitted; are obstacles to true enlightenment and liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth) -- even, or so the stories say, cannibalism, necrophilia, and consumption of human waste. While aghoris are known to symbolize Bhairava in their personal dress and appearance, Rudra, as mentioned above, sees himself as quite literally divine. Nevertheless, when human bonds intrude in the form of his father and sister, Rudra's guru orders him to accompany his kin back to Tamil Nadu. An aghori should be free of all bonds, and Rudra is ordered to dissolve any that remain and return to Kashi.

The scene shifts from north to south, from Lord Shiva's city to a hellish underworld populated by beggars, and ruled by Thandavan (Rajendran), who has to be one of the most loathsome villains ever seen on film. His name is reminiscent of Shiva's tandav dance (one of Thandavan's henchmen is even called Murugan), but his motive is profit, his employees the hapless men, women, and children who are maimed to serve as effective beggars. These unfortunates are introduced to the viewer in a parade of the grotesque, and thereafter serve as the film's principal characters, remaining its most recognizably human ones even as Bala's deliberate concentration of ugliness grates on one's nerves.



There is never any doubt Rudra is going to be the instrument of Thandavan's destruction (I am surely giving no spoilers away when I say that in a memorable action sequence at film's end, he slays the vile man without ever seeming reminiscent of Lord Ram); the only question is, what does it all mean? The beggars are often dressed as Hindu deities (they even address each other in character in a funny scene early on in the film), and the entire community worships the deformed midget Maragettu, housed in a shrine and utterly indifferent to all entreaties to say something or bless his devotees -- his indifference is only shaken when he comes face to face with the real deity, namely Rudra. An early song likens all humans to beggars, with their bodies no better than begging bowls. As if this weren't enough, Bala muddies the waters by his brazen indifference to Rudra's family, who disappear halfway through the film, never to be heard from again.

The only way I can approach Naan Kadavul is as a meditation on the indifference of god. In the world of this film, the divine is not so much inhuman as un-human, lacking any bond or connection with his devotees. The Latin phrase for the divine, totaliter aliter ("totally other"), comes to mind, but the alterity is all the more unthinkable here given that the divine in this film is also the man Rudra. In his divinity, Rudra is totally other to man, i.e. himself, and is thus terrifying to those around him. "Benevolence" has no meaning to Rudra: when he helps those in need, such as the blind beggar Hamsapalli (Pooja), trying to escape being sold to a man so hideous only a blind woman can sleep with him, Rudra does so inadvertently, because his own repose has been disturbed by the goons pursuing Hamsapalli. He is oblivious to all appeals to his sympathy, and it is clear he can only offer one boon: to the wicked as well as to those for whom life cannot be borne, death.

Naan Kadavul, in short, has a fantastic premise. Equally, it cannot be denied that the film is far more interesting conceptually than it is in the execution. The absence of all but the bare rudiments of a plot doesn't hurt the film, but the rapid evocation and burial of characters and motifs, most certainly does. The viewer does not see why so much is made of Rudra's mother only for her to disappear after a couple of scenes; nor why Rudra sticks around in the village after breaking his bonds with his family, rather than returning to Kashi (by film's end, we see that the crucial bond is between Pooja and Rudra, but while it is easy to see why this is important to Pooja -- she hopes Rudra will be her savior -- there is no explanation why the final dissolution of this bond should be crucial from Rudra's perspective). Bala's mysticism has always had more than a touch of obscurantism, and in Naan Kadavul the fog threatens to swallow the movie.

The casting of Aarya as Rudra adds to some of these shortcomings. While one is loath to criticize the young actor's creditable turn, as well as his courage -- he spends much of the film half-naked, and is as careless of his form unclothed as he is when it is clothed, a rare enough trait among actors -- the role patently needed a Vikram (if media reports are to be believed, Bala and Vikram had a falling out, leading to Vikram's exit from the film; even more irritatingly, the two have reportedly patched up, making the missed opportunity of Naan Kadavul all the more tantalizing). Chiyan Vikram might not have been able to make up for the film's muddle, and with him there would always be a risk that Rudra might seem like a cousin of Pithamagan's Chiththan, but to my mind he remains contemporary Tamil cinema's most credible deity. It is hard to believe that the director who launched him on that path would disagree.

On balance, despite the rather serious problems, and despite the film's frequent unpleasantness, this film needs to be seen. For the ambience, always one of Bala's strengths. For the fact that he has thought through the mythic paradigm of masala cinema to its logical (and extreme) end, resulting in an unprecedented ending that, alas, I cannot discuss without giving too much away. And, most importantly, for the fact that Naan Kadavul is simply a film like none other one is likely to see this year, in any language.



[For an interview with Bala, see HERE; also check out Baradwaj Rangan's take on the film, although a spoiler warning accompanies that recommendation.]

A welcome piece on the inflation of test match batting averages in the current decade, as the game's historic balance between bat and ball seems to have shifted in favor of the former:

...[A]fter the exits of Walsh and Ambrose, Wasim and Waqar, Donald and Pollock, McGrath and Gillespie, life has become much easier for batsmen around the world. Some of those bowlers played well into the 2000s, but with pitches easing up and other weaker teams coming into the fray, this decade has generally been an excellent one for batting. Once upon a time, an average of 50 used to be the benchmark of batting excellence; now, it seems, that's no longer true. . . . It's clear from the numbers that the current decade has been a prolific one for batting, with an average of 38.22 runs per wicket. Only in the 1940s were the averages higher. The 1990s, on the other hand, was among the worst decades for batting - the average of 35.34 was the second-worst in the last eight decades.

One problem with the generally excellent analysis is that, while the average of most top batsmen this decade suffers once Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are excluded, minnows are not being excluded when the averages of batsmen in other eras are computed. Thus Bradman averaged 160 or 180 in the one series he played against India; if I remember correctly, 10 of Everton Weekes' 16 centuries came against India, Pakistan, or New Zealand (none of them especially strong at the time), and Freddie Trueman terrorized India. Not suggesting any of these are Zimbabwe or Bangladesh, but they were considered very weak teams. In the 1980s, Sri Lanka were a very weak team, especially on foreign soil; one could go on...

[Tendulkar's average this decade against the top eight teams is 46.73; that figure must be contextualized by reference to his numerous injuries during the 2004-2007 period, not just to a general decline -- he has performed much better in test matches over the last two years, after career-rescuing elbow surgeries -- but what is truly remarkable is his batting average of 58 in the 1990s, a decade that was among the worst for batsmen, testimony to his stature among the game's greats.]

Rahat Kazmi's Dekh Bhai Dekh (apparently re-named Dekh Re Dekh at some point; my DVD carried the older name) is a refreshing little film: it hearkens to the cinema of old, albeit in the streamlined garb of the contemporary "little" film. Refreshing because this look backward isn't by way of ironic distance or homage, and nor does it fall prey to the stale rehashing of older Bollywood tropes that is the hallmark of B-grade cinema. That is, with respect to the former, Kazmi's film isn't set in a small-town in U.P. because he wants to make a point about crime and violence in the heartland (the usual vehicle for representations of U.P. and Bihar in contemporary Hindi cinema), nor is he trying to depict a world impossibly remote from the (imagined) "us" in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, or London. Rather, his film just happens to be set in U.P., and does not purport to stage its setting. Or its Bollywood genealogy: I don't remember the last time I saw a song in praise of Radha and Krishna that was so unobtrusively part of a Hindi film (not surprising, given the industry's collective preference for Ferraris with crowds of skimpily clad European women serving as eye candy). And this one ("Kanha De Do Sharan") is picturized on that old masala staple rebooted, namely the protagonists -- Babli (Gracy Singh), Shyam (Siddharth Koirala), Charan (Vijay Raaz), and Yadav (Raghuvir Yadav), all in need of money, and acting on Babli's half-baked plan to steal a valuable idol from her own in-laws -- in disguise, singing a song to distract the audience within the film, in order to set the stage for a heist (as for what happens after the heist, well, there's a reason the film is billed as a black comedy). For such un-showy naturalness vis-a-vis his cinematic inheritance alone, Kazmi's film deserves to be seen.

Luckily, although the film has its limitations (most notably that the narrative could have been more gripping), there is more to enjoy here. Such as the earthy dialogs Mushahid Husain Pasha has written for Vijay Raaz's Charan, a smart aleck thief and generally lovable lowlife. It is rare that one has the pleasure of seeing Raaz on screen, and Pasha does not squander the opportunity -- Raaz deploys a Bollywoodized version of the bhaiyya-speak and drawl to great effect here (I would have loved to see some of the earthier dialogs amidst an appreciative audience in a cinema hall). The visuals are solid, but no more (however, Kazmi's and cinematographer Akash Deep's picturization of the heist song suggests an ability to put a bigger budget to good use). So too the music by Shadab Bhartiya, Abuzar, and Nayab Raja (Raaga.com adds Prem Anand to the list), although it surprises at points, especially when Raahat Fateh Ali Khan and Rajab Ali begin crooning "Sapne Bhaye Hain". The other good song could have been better: "Ladee re Ladee Najariya" is an utterly conventional "dancing girl" number, albeit elevated by the fact that Richa Sharma is singing it.

Dekh Bhai Dekh came and went with barely a ripple, and deserved better. One hopes it gets a wider audience courtesy of satellite/cable TV re-runs, and that Kazmi and Pasha get more opportunities to make their mark. And for God's sake, someone get Vijay Raaz more roles!

Vikram's has been an unusual career path, attaining stardom in Sethu (1999) after nearly a decade of struggle, but apparently not content to simply keep churning out the sorts of hits -- Dhill (2001); Saamy (2003); and Dhool (2003), for instance -- that had propelled the man to the summit of post-Rajnikanth Tamil stars by the time he essayed the title role in Shankar's Anniyan (2005). Since that release, over four years ago, Vikram has only had two lackluster releases until Kanthasaamy hit theaters earlier this month. Some of that sparsity can be laid at the door of producer troubles (that delayed Bheema (2008)), but not all: it has increasingly become hard to shake off the feeling that Vikram has been paralyzed by his National Award for acting in Pithamagan (2003). More accurately, the fact that his roles in films like Bala's (the maveric behind Sethu and Pithamagan) led the Tamil audience to take him seriously as an actor seems to have led to a kind of malaise, almost as if Vikram could no longer justify the triviality of a Gemini (2002) unless it was in the service of outsized projects like an Anniyan. In fact, the strange thing about Vikram's films since 2005 -- both, Majaa (2005) and Bheema (2008), relatively scaled to normal-- has been the disinterest that seems to shine through in Vikram's performances therein. These aren't bad films, but Vikram is undeniably flat in them.

Susi Ganeshan's Kanthasaamy is in the Anniyan mould, and as such, the film has had no trouble keeping Vikram's interest engaged. He owns this outsized, outlandish, and utterly fun film with the sort of cavalier ease and screen presence most actors -- even most stars -- can only dream of. And, to the credit of Ganeshan's team, he looks more dapper here, as the nattily dressed CBI agent Kanthasaamy, hot on the trail of crooks like PPP (Ashish Vidyarthi) and Rajmohan (Mukesh Tiwari), than ever before. Whether it is rowing a boat, sitting at his desk, or romancing PPP's now-she-hates-him/now-she-doesn't daughter Subbalaxmi (Shriya Saran), Ganeshan and Vikram are clearly targeting a younger, hipper audience. Based on the prior evidence of Vikram's Remo in Anniyan (in a nutshell, all misfire, all the time), I had my doubts as to whether this was the right way to go for a leading man who isn't getting any younger; I was completely wrong. Vikram underplays the CBI agent, displaying the sort of reserve more reminiscent of Samurai (2002) than Shankar's 2005 Vikram trifecta. His bemused look and guarded body language (leaving aside the songs, that is), bordering at times on stillness, underscores that while Vikram might not be an actor of great range, he is an intelligent performer, learning from and improving upon past outings and conscious of his limitations. And possessed of that je ne sais quoi that makes the camera love him, he can, and does, get away with much.

So much for the CBI agent. There is, however, the small matter of a second Vikram here, a masked vigilante who has a habit of fulfilling the petitions of desperate devotees at a Lord Muruga ("Kanthasaamy") temple. This Vikram, dressed in a black and red suit, a bird-like mask, and -- no, I am not making this up -- crowing like a rooster and bobbing his head from side to side, is the most surprising thing about the film. This Kanthasaamy passes the laugh test, his outlandishness rendered plausible by the strange derangement Vikram infuses into the role. He's crazy, but he's also disturbing because he's crazy in a way that comes across as other than human. If pressed to rank the costumed weirdos Cheeyan has played, I'd have to pick this clucker over the murderous pedant of Anniyan.

Another, more interesting, way Ganeshan renders his vigilante plausible is by showing his audience the artifices underlying every one of the superheroics: over the course of the film, we not only learn just what makes Kanthasaamy's heroics super, we see them in action in a significant, and thrilling, action sequence in some corn fields. We are vouchsafed backstage passes to a magician's show, and see the ropes and pulleys, the parlor tricks and audio-visual devices, that make the masked man who he is in the eyes of his enemies, at one stroke rendering Kanthasaamy more human, while inoculating the film against the disappointment of a generation weaned on the unmatchable special effects of Hollywood. Nevertheless, Ganeshan never forgets his masala genealogy: the plausibility referenced above does not foreshadow meaningful realism, but simply enables the film to take all liberties (having provided an "explanation" for all such license). Kanthasaamy begins and ends with the Muruga temple, and in the final analysis the film operates squarely within the realm of mythic signification common in Tamil masala cinema. Cheeyan Vikram is unconquerable, a saamy ("god") on earth -- a linkage never more explicit than in his blindfolded action sequence in Mexico. Even sightless and outnumbered 7 to 1, the outcome is never in doubt. But if this is the most operatic of the film's action sequences -- and that's saying something, given that this film seems to feature fights in every imaginable location, including a bar, a row-boat, a bus, and open prairie -- the best one is the back-to-basics first action sequence involving the CBI agent, as he thrashes half a dozen hoodlums without breaking a sweat or spoiling a crease. [One wishes Vikram would (re-)learn to have such fun in "normal" films too: every film can neither promise the accolades of a Pithamagan, nor the spectacle of a Kanthasaamy, and there isn't anything wrong with doing a few bread-and-butter films.]

But not even Vikram conquers all -- not when Shriya Saran is in her element. As Subbalaxmi, she has more footage than almost any actress does in a Tamil actioner, and justifies it: while I prefer the long-tressed, sinuous Shriya of films like Sivaji (2007), it is refreshing to see this hard-edged, sexually assertive woman, her short-haired glamor-turn a far cry from the insipidity that far too often passes for a female lead in Tamil masala cinema. The Shriya-Vikram pair sizzles, but one only wishes Devi Sri Prasad had come up with better music to showcase the actress' dancing skills: only two songs pass muster, and neither is set around Saran: the addictive "Kantha Kantha Kantha Kantha Kanthasaaaamy" and the thoroughly derivative-but-catchy "Meena Kumari/Kanyakumari" sleazefest picturized on Mumait Khan and Mukesh Tiwari's villain Rajmohan. Two veterans also feature in the film as cops: while Telegu film veteran Krishna has a small role (as Kanthasaamy's boss) principally notable for the glimpse it affords us into what his son, the Telegu superstar Mahesh, might look like decades later; Prabhu's turn as a police officer on the trail of the vigilante is depressing. One can only dimly discern the hero of Agni Nakshitharam (1988) in him, and he looks like he could give the marshmallow man a run for his money in the girth sweepstakes.

In sum, this film works, albeit despite a script with some rather large holes. In particular, Ganeshan is unable to coherently tie the worlds of the two Kanthasaamies together, and in time the costumed hero virtually drops out, leaving the entire movie to the cop playing cat-and-mouse with the vengeful Subbalaxmi, out to get even with him for foiling her father's plans (I can't say much more about the film's plot without spoiling the fun). But the director (who himself plays the part of an intelligence operative, Ganeshan, in the film) can be forgiven much for what he gives us in exchange for removing the superhero from the scene, namely, a plot twist that takes Agent Kanthasaamy and Subbalaxmi to Mexico. To, that is, a foreign sequence as transporting as any in years, and reminiscent of the likes of Sangam (1964) and The Great Gambler (1979) -- what Ganeshan's segment shares with the work of directors as diverse as Raj Kapoor and Shakti Samanta is the ability to transport the viewer to someplace in particular, not just to a generic foreign destination represented by a shopping mall or a luxury resort; but simultaneously, not to a particularity denoted solely by means of the iconic (for instance, the shots of San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge ad nauseum in the recent Love Aaj Kal). Ganeshan's Mexico might be a cliche, but it isn't a postcard. It is also striking, memorable, and shot with especial attention -- evidence of a director who has taken his film out of India for a reason, and not simply as a result of a reflex.

Through it all, and despite the foreign locales and high-end settings (the lush song sequences are typically followed by shots of contemporary urban Indian realities), Kanthasaamy preserves its populist connection, made explicit in Agent Kanthasaamy's display, to the corrupt industrialist Rajmohan, of images of the desperate poverty that is seemingly omnipresent outside the luxury bus Rajmohan seems to spend his life in, watching film songs and private dances. By film's end, Kanthasaamy has torn down the walls of the bus in a memorable sequence, literally laying the mobile palace bare to the eyes of the multitude. As a symbolic indictment of our collective indifference to the problems around us, this is, of course, heavy-handed (and par for the course where the Tamil vigilante genre is concerned) -- but it is a welcome change from the exclusion of any such considerations from most Hindi films these days, often shot in the anodyne locales of shopping malls, luxury resorts and hotels -- hardly any of them in India, of course, irrespective of whether the script demands it or not. Films like Kanthasaamy do not purport to offer realistic solutions to India's social problems -- the audience knows that -- but they do not stage the spectacle of secession from India's realities. The result is a fantasy, but one of catharsis and cleansing, not of escape.

The "controversy" over Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah underscores that the contemporary consensus in South Asian historiography is certainly not insensible of the role played by the Congress in India's partition (indeed, Jaswant Singh is very much a latecomer to a view that has become received wisdom by now in university history departments). If anything, liberal and left-of-center scholars seem almost reflexively inclined to adopt the view that Jinnah was forced into accepting partition -- a denial of agency and a determinism I find implausible. More significantly, this (essentially puerile) debate on individual responsibility for partition shows that in some ways, South Asian historiography still hasn't grown up -- far too many still seem to be thinking in terms of heroes and villains (merely the identity of these is sought to be changed). More troublingly, the role played by the colonial power is often effaced in these discussions.

Nevertheless, Sugata Bose's recent piece in the Indian Express is among the better ones to have appeared in the wake of the Jaswant Singh controversy. While Bose -- a grand-nephew of the nationalist heroes Subhash and Sarad Chandra Bose -- implicitly seems to regard the partition of Bengal as more illegitimate/tragic than the partition of India (he takes the Congress to task for adding Bengal to the March 8, 1947 resolution calling for Punjab to be partitioned; but ignores that the alternative was a Pakistan that would have included an undivided Bengal, or, less plausibly, an independent Bengal; I do not pass judgment on this notion, but merely note that Bose's piece presents the issue divorced from its proper context), and, like many contemporary historians, implicitly approaches the question of the Muslim League's Pakistan movement as purely tactical, i.e. at the expense of adequate consideration of the movement's ideology; his lucid piece is worth reading. It is more balanced and thoughtful than most commentary on the issue over the last few days; significantly, by speaking of "the Congress" rather than simply of "Nehru", Bose de-personalizes the issue, while also underscoring what the Sangh Parivar would do anything to avoid admitting, namely, that to the extent this is a question of personal responsibility, and to the extent Nehru stands in the dock, the Sangh's idol Patel stands there with him. Whatever reservations I have about the piece or the tendency among Indian historians to demonstrate their willingness to adopt a critical stance vis-a-vis the mainstream nationalist historiographical inheritance by (unwittingly) adopting a relatively uncritical stance vis-a-vis the hitherto demonized "other" of the Muslim League and the Pakistan movement, Bose's core thesis -- that "[w]hile there may still be different points of view on the relative balance of forces that led to partition, and Jinnah is by no means blameless in this regard, the role of Congress majoritarianism in shaping the final outcome of August 1947 has been well accepted in the best historical scholarship" -- seems unexceptionable to me. To the extent this is new and controversial to the public at large, whatever my reservations about Jaswant Singh's book, it will have served a valuable purpose in presenting this idea to a wide audience.

Less convincing is Bose's claim that "[t]he partition of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal at Nehru and Patel’s behest, much like the partition of the province of Ulster in Ireland, permanently skewed subcontinental politics and left a poisoned post-colonial legacy." The claim is unfair, almost suggesting that the whole thing was the brainchild of Nehru and Patel; but also ignoring that sub-continental politics would have been just as "skewed" by a partition of India that did not partition these two provinces. That partition would likely have been less bloody (although, as the grotesque violence in un-partitioned provinces demonstrates, far too bloody nonetheless), but would still have "skewed" the sub-continent's politics, albeit differently. In particular, it is highly debatable whether Pakistan could have comfortably accomodated such a large number of minorities (a larger proportion than would have existed in India) as an ideological matter. Bose presumably has an independent Bengal in mind as a solution to the 1947 deadlock, and not one that was part of Pakistan, but given the geo-political implications of such "regionalism" for both of the new nation-states, it is not surprising neither leadership was thrilled about the idea. [Indeed, the logic of Jinnah as the "sole spokesman" for India's Muslims, as Ayesha Jalal's book of the same name persuasively shows animated Jinnah's approach in the last decade of his life, should have militated against any such division].

The above notwithstanding, there can be no quarreling with Bose's conclusion:

I am not in agreement with those who say that the parties are obsessed with a non-issue, 62 years out of date. The issue which revisiting partition brings to the fore is full of contemporary relevance. It is the search for a substantive rather than procedural democracy that protects citizens from majoritarian arrogance and ensures justice in a subcontinent where people have multiple identities.

...multiple identities that the 1947 successor states have, in their own ways and to different degrees, not been able to adequately acknowledge. Sixty-two years after the tryst with destiny, that pledge is yet to be redeemed.

[Previous post HERE].

Previous post HERE.

The other thing to note -- and that has gone largely unremarked in the English-language Indian media -- is that, while Jaswant Singh holds Nehru responsible for ensuring partition by insisting on a centralized state (rather than being sympathetic to, as he put it to CNN-IBN's Karan Thapar, the Muslim desire for an adequate space within the Indian political system), he seems to have drawn the opposite lesson from this than one might have expected. In his interview with Thapar, Singh went on to express hostility towards the whole idea of reservations, warning that they might herald a further partition of the country. One would have thought that Jaswant Singh's own claims about the historical record would make precisely the opposite point, namely that resisting such demands might have grave implications for the Indian polity. Evidently, Singh's stick is only good to beat Nehru with -- not to stir the contemporary status quo pot.

[The disconnect undermines Singh's historical argument in a different way as well, by shedding light on his caste-shaped blind spots. In his interview, Singh (rightly) pointed to the aftermath of the 1937 provincial elections in British India as a watershed -- the Congress' breach of faith with the Muslim League convinced the latter that the absolutism of the former meant it was determined not to allow non-Congress political formations any space -- and suggests that this demonstrated to the Muslim League that even contesting elections would not be enough to safeguard Muslim interests. On the contrary, the Congress' short-sighted cynicism (and lack of ethics) aside, the lesson Jaswant Singh wishes to draw (and that the Muslim League did draw) has not been borne out by history. That is, the rise to power and prominence of various regional "lower-caste" formations in recent years, typically turning on electoral coalitions between Muslim voters and particular caste-groupings, offers a glimpse of the road not taken by the League, a road that might well have yielded far greater dividends in the context of an un-divided India than of the post-1947 Indian union. Of course, given the disproportionate influence of ashrafi Urdu-speaking elites in the Muslim League; not to mention of the landlord classes; that was one of the least likely roads for the Muslim League (in short, the latter countered the Congress' ambition not by attempting to subvert it -- as the Left, Periyar, the Punjab Unionist Party, wittingly and unwittingly, and in their own ways, all sought to do -- but by positing a rival totalizing principle, a rival nationalism. That sort of competitive absolutism inevitably raised the temperature, and made compromise less and less likely). Jaswant Singh's continuing blindness and insensitivity to the caste/class question -- i.e. the fact that it apparently plays no role in his study of Jinnah, and the fact that the great lesson Singh appears to have drawn is that reservations are divisive -- over six decades after 1947, shows how little he has learnt.]

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz



Mahfouz's three novels on ancient Egypt aren't especially distinguished in terms of theme or depth (the first was published in 1939; the last in 1944, when Mahfouz was not yet thirty-three). But they are marked out for genius by Mahfouz's ability to render a completely plausible Egypt for his reader, to the point where one doesn't feel one is reading historical novels, but novels set in the only time that is. These three are as close as the novel gets to the timeless art of the storyteller.

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And now it is the BJP's Jaswant Singh (ex-foreign minister and current M.P. from Darjeeling) who has apparently woken up to the greatness of Jinnah, and has joined the bandwagon of those for whom partition was, above all else, Nehru’s fault (for the complete interview, click on the following links: PART I; PART II). The merits of this argument -- or mode of discourse, concerned with affixing responsibility rather than anything else -- aside, it is quite revealing that be it Advani or Jaswant Singh, some on the Indian right find it in their hearts to be more generous to Jinnah than to Nehru. This isn’t to deny Jinnah’s qualities; but the notion (as Jaswant Singh told CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar) that all Jinnah wanted was a federal polity, and that the unacceptability of that plan to Nehru was basically responsible for partition, is ridiculously simplistic (not to mention that other Congress bigwigs, including the much-lionized-by-the-Sangh Patel, were similarly opposed to the sort of political arrangement that the Muslim League seemed prepared to accept). I would like to read Jaswant’s book on Jinnah, although, from the sounds of it the book seems like a recycled version of Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan and Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. And I am certainly curious to see how Singh's apparent acceptance of the tenuous federation (short of partition) Jinnah's League might have accepted, squares with Singh's and his party's (as well as the Congress') unwillingness to countenance something more modest than that sort of federation where the state of Jammu & Kashmir is concerned (for instance, the Cripps proposal, which the Muslim League likely would have accepted, incorporated an opt-out clause as well; Jaswant Singh himself notes that by 1947 the Muslim League's demand was "parity" between Hindus and Muslims; not to mention that the experience of Lebanon holds lessons on the stability (or lack thereof) of constitutional arrangements apportioning political power between religious communities). [None of this is to deny that the likes of Jalal and Wolpert have done valuable service in contextualizing Jinnah's life and work, and in countering the simplistic demonization of the man in mainstream Indian nationalist historiography; and to the extent Jaswant Singh can help lay to rest the idiotic notion held by some that Jinnah hated Hindus or that he was some kind of maniac bent on dividing India, all well and good -- however, in India the revisionist pendulum has swung to such an extent that many Indian liberals (e.g. the constitutional scholar H.M. Seervai) as well as some on the right subscribe to the notion that Jinnah was left with no choice but to "settle" for partition -- a notion that would be strange, until one realizes that the notion internalizes, and is entirely consistent with, how Jinnah appears to have approached his politics: as an exercise in epic advocacy, not conventional political engagement. To conduct politics as if one were litigating might prove tricky even in ordinary circumstances -- raising the specter of (court-like) "decisions" one might not be happy about, but would have to live with given the "litigation" strategy one has pursued. In the sort of hyper-communal atmosphere of 1940s India, this sort of politics could be many things -- brilliant, clever, and even heroic. But (assuming the likes of Wolpert, Seervai, and Jaswant Singh are right that Jinnah never wanted partition), not wise or advisable.]

What explains the "discovery of Jinnah" move in India today? With the right, it might just be down to hypocrisy (never spare Nehru --and, by extension, his political heirs -- a barb if one can possibly help it; for instance, Jaswant Singh's claim that India did not get Dominion status in the 1920s because Nehru "shot it down" is ludicrous -- there is simply no evidence that the British were prepared to offer India the sort of Dominion status they had accorded Canada and Australia by the early 1930s; likewise, when he says that the likes of Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad might have kept India together, citing to Gandhi's position that the British should just quit and leave the mess to Indians to sort out, he conveniently ignores the reality that that "solution" was utterly unacceptable to Jinnah, who (rightly) saw in it a ploy to present the Muslim League with a fait accompli; these sorts of attempted sleights of hand speak volumes about the aims of Singh's book), and to the fact that the Sangh Parivar's own ideological underpinnings pre-dispose adherents to greater acceptance of the Muslim League's two-nation theory (merely a mirror image, and a rather more polite one at that, of the ideology espoused by Savarkar and Golwalkar). As for more liberal-leaning journalists, I have previously written on the issue here.