Far East from Bollywood

In Kolkata, I had minimal time for shopping, so the purchase of films was random and intuitive. I just grapped whatever I could. Fortunately, the two music-film stores I visited were very well equipped.

I decided to forget Bollywood this time, and focus on Bengali cinema. I was far, far away from Mumbai. Nothing about the trip made me long for honeymoon musical scenes shot at the Himalayas. I had a feeling it was time to “get real”.

I did go to the movies once, to see the latest Bollywood blockbuster Rocket Singh, a comic tale of India’s most successful salesman. Without English subtitles, it was difficult to understand the comedy. The film was more verbal than what the ads suggested. But it did portray the everyday challenges of young Indian college graduates from a viewpoint of a Sikh family living in Mumbai. There was a level of political commentary against the commercialization of everyday life, which I of course missed.

No matter how little I understood, it was a great experience to be there. The movie theatre at Salt Lake City’s posh mall was perhaps better equipped than any of the cinemas in Tampere. There were even security checks at the cinema gates. The ticket was expensive in Indian standards, 210 rupees. I understood that in the ordinary movie theatres, the tickets cost less than 100 rupees. Now Kolkata had movie theatres differentiated by the income group. It made me wonder.

The film I watched on my laptop at the guesthouse on a sleepless night hit the jackpot. Aparna Sen’s 15, Park Avenue (2005) is a story of mental illness, Westernization, family ties and modern relationships in upper-middle class professional Kolkata. It is a film about parallel worlds, so multilayered in narration that one starts to question the main character’s illness. Meethi’s schizophrenia has been diagnosed and she spends half of her time in clinics, but the film sympathizes strongly with her other world, the imaginary world she has created on Park Avenue, to the extent that the viewer cannot know for sure which one of her worlds is the dreamworld, after all.

I will need to watch this film many times to understand the underlying symbolism. A Bengali friend told me that the filmmaker uses traditional Bengali storytelling about dream worlds to complicate the narrative. This is interesting, because the film has otherwise been almost purged from everyday Indian life. The characters live in a Westernized bubble. One does not see the normal everyday mess and noise of Kolkata’s streets at all.

The other films I have not seen yet, but luckily in my pile there also seems to be another Aparnya Sen film, Sati (1989).
I got 5 Satyajit Ray films, some black-and-white, some coloured: The Middle Man, The Big City, The Stranger, The Enemy of the People and The Home and the World.

Then there is Anjan Das’ Strokes and Silhouettes, a truly artsy film about a family of painters. And a film in Bengali only by director Sab Chotitra Kalponik (without English subtitles), the name of which I cannot read yet.

Apart from Bengali films, I got Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy. Somehow, they don’t anymore seem like Indian films. I have enjoyed Earth, and followed with great interest the controversy over the film Fire. I will also watch these over time, but now I have a need to understand what Bengali movies are about.

This should provide enough entertainment over the Christmas holidays.

Into Kali's Kingdom

I have wanted to travel to India for more than a decade now. The finances being what they are, with our own expenses my family only gets to Tallinn or Stockholm for a weekend. Nevertheless, I have dreamed of India, made friends with Indians wherever the path has taken me, spoken its many languages in my dreams, worshipped its many gods and goddesses. Be it Shiva, Ganesh, Lakshmi or Kali, all Hindu gods and goddesses have a place in my inner universe. This is why I once decided to call this forum Shivani's kitchen. I wanted to be a female follower of Shiva, the neverending cycle of creation and destruction.

However, in my personal life, I am strongly approaching Christian Orthodoxy, a body of thought that in the local conditions does not accept yoga in its premises. It is hard to accept the narrow-mindedness of the local believers. Of course, if practiced mindfully, Orthodox Christianity contains most elements included in Hinduism. The attitude to food is different, but there is an idea of abstaining from earthly pleasures in both of them. There are days of abstinence and days of feast. Both belief systems allow scope on the individual, artistic, imaginary ways to worship God. Both are very physical and sensual ways of worship.

Yet in the local interpretation, somehow the two belief systems seem to be in controversy. (All Lutherans are allowed to do yoga. No such discussion two worlds as being far apart from one another. For me, they symbolize aspects of the same divinity. ) I find a more common one in Christian Orthodoxy, but doing so, I do not feel alienated from the Hindu belief system.

Last Sunday I participated in a wonderful Indian Cultural Evening with dozens of old and new friends, right here in the heart of Tampere. I have found my soul in the ragas and taal, they really communicate right through me, much more so than a decade of studies in European classical music. In my apartment stands a deserted piano, but my soul yearns for tabla or sitar. Possibly tabla. (I know my limits, and my fingers are very much keen to interact with the rhythms.)

So I am on my way to India's cultural capital, Kolkata, the city of Goddess Kali. Everybody speaks badly of the place, because of the slums, the overcrowding, the shadows of socialism (of which I am curious, not critical) so I am determined to make the most of it. There will be some teaching ahead, and hopefully some exploring. I am reminded that the narrative of my PhD started from the suburbs of Calcutta, where Shaista Suhrawardy was educated in the pressures of British colonial and ancient Muslim traditions.

I already have a tattered Bangladeshi copy of "Teach yourself Bengali" in my office. At one stage in my life, it must have been last year, I was overwhelmed by the drawing of the Bengali alphabet (tongue in the middle on my mouth) in my "Oriental languages" notebook. So far, it only contains Arabic, Urdu and Bengali.

I have the best vibes about Bengal. Please read this together with my friend Mari Korpela's (2009) PhD thesis More Vibes in India. I will miss the defence because of India. But I will write her a postcard ignoring or confirming what I saw.

Slumdog millionaire, months late

The whole world's been buzzing about Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire, and I came to Anil Kapoor fandom long before the film's European release. The love affair started by seeing the film Taal, in which Kapoor plays the role of an opportunist mogul of Mumbai music business. He is extremely cynical and entertaining in the cynicism. I have not come across any other Indian actor or actress with similar scope for the ironic. He speaks straight to me without any cultural translations. I would love to find the female equivalent of AK, someone ruthlessly bitchy, who at the same time loves the people she's with (although she would never admit it).

Curiously enough, I didn't rush to see Slumdog during its Finnish première, but waited until early July. The whole event just seemed overcrowded. Didn't feel any pressure to be there. Funnily enough, the kids insisted. It seemed to belong to their repertoire of films to see, not mine. I succumbed.

I have seen too many films with AK as the crook, or the competing older groom, or the streetwise Indian professional - it would be difficult to imagine him in another kind of role. He is Indian secular urbanity embodied, I would find it difficult to view him in the role of a village patriarch, or a spiritual authority. He is the sleek urbanite with vicious manners, who often has to go through a fierce moral battle before coming to terms with the surrounding humanity.

I smuggled an underaged child to see the film. Nobody stopped us at the gates, though he was 5 years too young. I was first afraid it might be too rough for the kids to see, but it wasn't. So good it was I got myself a copy of the DVD at Heathrow during a conference trip, with a set of fan postcards included. Now I only miss the T-shirt, and I assume it also can be easily arranged. India is not lagging behind terribly in the commodification of film stars. I plan to travel there later this year. How many kgs of Bollywood materials will I bring along?

It was curious to see a film about Indian slum children that did not automatically envoke soppiness in the corner of the eye of a middle-aged European female (I almost always cry); the economy of emotions was more complex, and the film did also appeal to the spectator's analytical skills.

That kind of alienating effect is unusual when viewing Hollywood/Bollywood films of today. I expect to actually learn something from the film after a couple of rounds of more careful screening.

The stripped maharaja - on Pearl S. Buck's fiction

Inspired by a friend, I made a one euro purchase at a flea market, the Finnish translation of Pearl S. Buck's Indian-orientalist novel Mandala (1970/1972). Approaching the novel with the prescribed irony only available through decades' afterwisdom, I was expecting the worst. Even the cover was appalling: monumental brown faces of Indian royalties on a pink marble background. Could have been a Bollywood poster of the 70s. Very appealing from the perspective of orientalist India-kitsch.

Pearl S. Buck belongs to summer cottage literature in Finland. We inherit these titles from grandparents, and if we don't have enough space in our houses, we dump them to summer cottages or flea markets. I doubt my grandmother ever read her Buck novels, but she had got them as presents from friends. She was more of the FinnLit type. All I know about the titles at our summer cottage is that they portray Chinese culture. Pearl S. Buck (b. 1892) grew up as a daughter of American missionaries in China and learnt to speak Chinese before English. But for the purposes of here and now, the later cultural jump to India puzzles me more.

Knowing that the author was nominated the Nobel prize in 1938, the reading seemed even more demanding. What literary values could there be found in an emerald-studded display of orientalist clichés?

There is a modern maharaja who has lost most of his properties after independence and is forced to convert a family palace into a posh hotel for American tourists. There is a cold wife, the maharani, and an independent-minded young American woman, who plays the piano at a hotel lobby in Delhi. There is a son who dies in a battle against the Chinese in Ladakh, whose rebirth everyone is expecting.
There even is a Catholic priest who enjoys drinking the palace's own rose wine far too much. It's known as a powerful aphrodisiac by the locals.
People measure the men's virility by looking at the growth of hair in their ears.

The mismatched love couple visit Taj Mahal at night-time, not once but TWICE.

There is a certain degree of psychological depth in the novel, especially in the character of the maharaja himself, and his torn loyalties between modernity and family tradition. His messed-up relationship to women, sexuality and his own body is more than an average romance novel could offer. Buck strips the maharaja bare of certain types of romantic expectations. She does it very nicely and politely, as a kind of honorary guest to India who is aware of the narrative limits of her genre. The romance remains, but some sugar has been cut down.

In fact, I would like to read this story re-written from the perspective of the 2000s. Perhaps the characters could be different, but I believe some of the tensions remain the same. I wonder what the tale would sound like without any sugar. Of course, a plain tale cannot exist. There are always ornaments added to stories. Probably there'd be an increase of salt and fat. In the 2000s version, sex would be explicit and ugly. (See also my reading of Upamanyu Chatterjee's Weight Loss)

There is more political history in the novel than one would automatically expect. The analysis of the Indo-Chinese relations in the border zones is quite nuanced, considering that it is a romantic novel. Americans are not portrayed through American eyes only; there is a certain level of "talking back" (even in the form of fictional characters). As a whole, the novel is an odd combination of orientalism and post-colonial critique. Buck wrote it in her late 70s, when apparently visiting his missionary son/grandson in India. She could not have produced this in an armchair, there are many cultural details she can only have picked up while living in India. We learn something about the Rajputs, caste relations and the relations between Hindus, Muslims and Christians. We learn about Tibetan Buddhist beliefs of afterlife. We even learn about tribes living outside the realm of major world religions.

I imagine Mandala would make a solid Bollywood film, with the potential of international distribution. The clichés could be played with, using all the devices of postmodern irony - Bollywood filmmakers are surely in this juncture already, knowing how to make the most of the iconicity of India. I cannot imagine a better future for an almost forgotten author, whose moldy books new generations would not otherwise touch.

Knockout Fiction: Adiga's White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), which recently won the ManBooker prize, is a novel straight from India's gutters. Its most powerful episodes smell of shit. People have important political conversation while defecating together in a row in the slums of Delhi. And the dialogues work.

I picked up The White Tiger for academic reasons. I'm trying to write something about the materiaist/realist turn in Indian postcolonial fiction (in English). I heard about Adiga's victory in the ManBooker competition in the autumn; however, I was suspicious of any Indian piece of writing with the word "tiger" in the title. There are many such titles in my shelf already. Enough of Asian tigers.

The protagonist, The White Tiger of Bangalore, is an entrepreneur with a shady past. He begins telling his story in correspondence with His Excellency Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, who is soon visiting his city. The narrative strategy is one of the innovative points in this novel: gradually, the White Tiger becomes less formal and more chummy with his addressee, engaging in direct man-to-man talk.

I enjoyed most Adiga's way to pick and mix advertisements, political slogans and other "found" items. This is not new in postcolonial writing, but not everyone knows how to do it grippingly. Adiga surely does. The most ironic borrowing is the price list from "Jackpot" English liquor shop, with separate columns for first, second and third rate whiskies (and in small print: ask for cheaper varieties at the counter). The servants often pick up the alcohol for their masters from such shops. They might learn to drink the third rate or below themselves, while carrying the first rate status symbol bottles.

The White Tiger goes through his academy of entrepreneurship while working as a driver for a returned migrant businessman and his wife, Pinkie, who is betrayed by her husband by his promises to return to the US. The couple divorces, after which the husband starts living a wild bachelor life. The White Tiger is disgusted by the boss's behaviour, observing his ways from a viewpoint of moral superiority. Most of the working days are spent waiting in front of the Parliament and luxury hotels, while Mr. Ashok Sharma delivers bribes to the politicians.

From the outset, I thought the whole story might be too crudely realist to be enjoyable. But the novel turned out to be politically informative and funny at the same time. As a reader, I enjoyed hanging out with the White Tiger and his streetwise driver colleagues outside the fancy hotels of Delhi, spitting paan on the pavements, rather than knowing what exactly happened inside the walls of the Sheraton. The upper caste, upper middle class characters are made somehow redundant, Adiga tells about them just enough. No more is necessary.

If I were to give one keyword or key concept to describe The White Tiger, it would be complicity. To tell the story solely from the servant's point of view is a knock-out strategy, because very rarely do we find university-educated authors writing in English with the imagination to cross the caste-and-class divide. The servant is fully complicit in the master's plans, desiring his lifestyle and at the same time feeling superior, every day boiling up with more rage.

This is a very plain novel with nothing frilly, nothing decorative or "extra" in it. For instance, Indian village life (named as The Darkness) is not portrayed to reveal the foreign reader its richness, but Adiga mainly discusses the corruption of the schoolmasters and doctors. Boys never get the school uniforms they are being sent in aid packages; there are several hospital grounding stones in a single village but none of them materialized.

Adiga uses the metaphor of egg shells when portraying the lives of the rich, protected in their SUVs. The eggs are cracked for short moments, then sealed again. The Westernised élites like to listen to European pop to calm down their nerves in the worst traffic jams. I can never listen to Enya or Sting with a straight face after reading The White Tiger. Not that I'd be missing out on much upon such musical erasure.

Love is a global surround system

At the age of 35, Kiran Desai was the youngest woman writer ever to win the Man Booker Prize. Her first novel, Hullabaloo at the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998; after the debut it took her eight years to publish the all-important Second Novel. This she wrote mainly in isolation in her writer mother Anita Desai's country house on the US East Coast. In many interviews she tells she had 1500 pages of "raw material" that she needed to process in solitude, in order to reduce the text mass into a novel able to carry its own weight.

Desai, born in 1971, belongs to the academic generation of writers who have received their education in a creative writing programme. This must be something that readers worldwide have begun to doubt, asking if writing is something one can learn in school. Or whether creative writing programs actually slow down talented writers' processes, as they introduce the academic criticism and literary theorizing that may seem too hard for many to handle alongside with the heavy work of making art. In Desai's case, of course, one cannot look for answers to such nihilistic questions. Perhaps writing has come to her as a birthright.

The Inheritance of Loss introduces two protagonists, Sai and Biju, living parallel lives at the hill station of Kalimpong and in New York. Sai is the educated young woman who has stayed, and Biju the little educated young man who has left, only to become an illegal immigrant without rights. Both characters examine belonging, non-belonging, the conditions of love, and increasingly its loss, in the era of speeding globalization. Sai's question sets the tone for the rest of the journey:

"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself." (Desai 2006, 2-3)

Although a tragic love story, The Inheritance of Loss is also a vivid document of post/colonial subcontinental history, and the Cold War. Sai's family life is intertwined with India's past Soviet romance, an uncritical belief in high-tech cosmonautical progress:

"Mr. and Mrs. Mistry had grown up during those times when the affection had been cemented by weapons sales, sporting competitions, visiting dance troups, and illustrated books that introduced a generation of Indian schoolchildren to Baba Yaga, who lived in her house on chicken feet in the prehistoric dark of a Russian forest..." (Desai 2006, 25)

Mr. and Mrs. Mistry perish in the snows of Moscow, and Sai is left alone to make sense of this past. The Russian dimension of the story is fascinating, as it gives us a third dimension to the common postcolonial plot. As someone who also sometimes nostalgically returns to the "Friendship, Co-operation, Mutual Help"-pact days of the 70s, I get answers to my questions about Indo-Soviet cultural ties.

The only relative Sai has left is the moody maternal grandfather, who has disowned the daughter, and lives alone with a dog at a remote hill station. Sai has no choice but to move to live with him. Luckily, Sai is also adopted by a group of retired aunties and uncles, some of them Anglo-Indian, others British who have stayed after the Raj. This loose community still clings to the fantasy of colonial verandah life, which is accentuated by piles of National Geographic magazines and everyday sherry-drinking.

The locals are very sensitive to the details in their neighbours' lifestyles. Symbols of wealth come from Europe and America. Exported goods, particularly tax free presents, draw the line between the haves and the have-nots:

"It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it did matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not." (Desai 2006, 242)

In demonstrating the vastness of differences that make up India, Desai has the taste for hyperbolic exaggeration. Here a detail at the luggage conveyor belt at Kolkata's Dum Dum Airport, one of the non-resident Indian returnees from Europe:

"The hippie who had hit on the fact that you could escape from being a drab immigrant and have a fantastic time as an Indian among the tie-dyed, spout all kinds of Hindu-mantra-Tantra-Mother-Earth-native-peoples-single-energy-organic-Shakti-ganja-crystal-shaman-intuition stuff." (Desai 2006, 296)

Like her mother's novels, The Inheritance of Loss is a novel one has to read slowly and many times over to grasp its many layers. I would expect it to have a life longer than the commercial post-Booker prize shelf life. Even Hullabaloo is still in circulation as a paperback in Finland. The two novels also make a wonderful read together, as a study of how an author can change style and tone, not sticking to once learnt mannerisms but willing to embody new houses of narrative voice and meaning.