OPEN Magazine 13 October 2014

THE LONE EMPRESS OF TAMIL NADU

THE MEANING OF RICHARD RAHUL VERMA 13 October 2014 / R S 40

Narendra Modi with Barack Obama at the White House

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Modi Unbound in the United States

By Tunku Varadarajan

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Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai Associate Editor (Web) Vijay K Soni assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Chinki Sinha, Sunaina Kumar, Rajni George, Kumar Anshuman Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra, Shreya Sethuraman senior copy editor Aditya Wig copy editor Sneha Bhura Assistant Art Director Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNERs Anup Banerjee, Veer Pal Singh assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Karl Mistry (West),

Krishnanand Nair (South)

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

(South), Melvin George (West), Basab Ghosh (East)

Head—production Maneesh Tyagi pre-press manager Sharad Tailang cfo Anil Bisht hEAD—it Hamendra Singh

Divaker V Vittal

This refers to ‘It Is Not About Modi’ (29 September 2014). India is not a theocratic country. It has a strong secular fabric [woven] by centuries of co-existence among different religions and cultures. The country’s Constitution upholds that virtue to protect religious minorities, social minorities, sexual minorities, etcetera. The BJP won the Lok Sabha election on the plank of development, and as a mature democracy India has voted the party to power for proactive development. This is a Only if the BJP focuses great charmer globally, on development can it and India now has all the win more elections, and right factors to catapult electoral victory can its economy to a higher convince any theorist, plane. A visit to any of ideologue or outfit our nearby villages will offer proof of rural development. In fact, rural India is now a game changer for retailers. Only if the BJP focuses on development can it win more elections, and electoral victory can convince any theorist, any ideologue, any outfit—whether it is the RSS or DSS.  letter of the week

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Volume 6 Issue 40 For the week 7—13 October 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo

Alex Wong/Pool/Corbis

Warning Bells

the signals, though not alarming, from the reverses suffered by the BJP in the recent by-polls could be ignored by the ruling party only at its peril (‘It Is Not About Modi’, 29 September 2014).

The cacophony raised by RSS leaders has left voters scared—they were reminded of the harrowing days of the Babri Masjid demolition. The recent speech of Narendra Modi that Indian Muslims are patriots portrays his bid to extend an olive branch to minorities and soothe their sentiments. It is likely that the PM may not be averse to attending Iftaar parties in future, while leaders like Yogi Adityanath will in all probability be asked by the party to go on a sabbatical.  Chandrasekaran

losing a few seats in Assembly by-polls should be acceptable 2 open

Pakistani or Afghani in Bollywood movies is not considered racist? ‘Danny Denzongpa gets mainly negative characters because of his Northeastern features,’ the author writes. Really? So, going by this logic, were popular actors in negative roles in Bollywood like Prem Chopra, Amrish Puri and Pran (all Punjabis) offered their roles on account of their ethnicity? And is this descrimination against Punjabis? In the end, please note, the film Mary Kom is made by Bollywood, an entirely profit seeking industry, and not by the cultural ministry of India.  Nikhil Ut tarakhandi

to the BJP’s core base as long as it stands by its principles of ‘zero appeasement’ and ‘best governance’. But for the absence of top level campaigners of the BJP and its inability to protect its own supporters in UP, the by-polls could have told a different story. The BJP should stick to its ideology. It will again create history in UP in 2017, wait and watch.  matridharma

Nothing Racist About It

it is quite evident that racial descrimination exists in India not only against Northeasterners but against Kashmiris, Sikhs, Tribals and Dalits as well, but the writer has taken and exaggerated only a few points (‘Culture Kombat’, 15 September 2014).

Why should the writer consider a Northeasterner playing a Chinese or Japanese racist when so many north Indians playing the role of a

Taste for Life

riyaaz amlani seems to be living his life in accordance with the Indian philosophy of life’s different stages, like grihasthya ashrama, vanaprastha, etcetera, albeit in a modern and pragmatic manner (‘Amlani and His Food Factory’, 6 October 2014). More ‘food’ to his thoughts! Hope he opens an outlet soon in Hyderabad.  sudhi kothapalli

Steer an Indian Course

a good summary of where we have been (‘The Pathology of Anti-Americanism’, 6 October 2014). India has lost a lot with its pro-Russian socialist programmes. Hopefully, with Narendra Modi at the helm, we will steer an Indian course with the support of likeminded countries like the US, Japan, Germany, etcetera.  gopi thomas

13 october 2014

Avinand Achanahally with his black beauty

Horses for Courses... Literally Meet the Mangalore student who takes an equine ride to college t r a n s p o r t Students usually demand a car or a bike of their parents on coming of age, but Avinand Achanahally had a shock in store for his: he wanted a horse. His parents agreed, and the 24-year-old, who is studying for his postgraduate Masters degree in Social Work in Roshni Nilaya, Mangalore, now rides a horse to college.

Avinand learnt horse riding while working in Bangalore two years ago, and, in equestrian terminology, can both trot and gallop. “I have dogs, 13 october 2014

cows and pigeons at home, which is a coffee plantation, 230 km from Bangalore. But, from a very young age I was fascinated by horses,” he says.

So, when his parents insisted that he study further, he laid down a condition that he would pursue a post-grad course only if they buy him a horse. His family friend, MP Ganesh, gifted him Sikandar, a seven-year-old Kathiawari breed, six months ago.

For the last month-anda-half, he has been turning heads in Mangalore as he goes

about his daily commute on a horse. Every morning at 6 am, Avinand cleans the stable. Once done, he rides Sikandar to a gym. The equine is parked outside, and after his master completes his workout, they both head to his residence to freshen up and then ride to college in peak hour traffic. “Sikandar has tremendous road sense,” according to Achanahally.

“He stops at least five feet behind any vehicle and has the sense to move only when other motor vehicles around

him move, especially at traffic signals.’’

Sikandar is given a 15-minute brush daily and kept on a high-protein diet. “It costs me less than Rs 3,000 per month to maintain him. The amount is less than what I spend on petrol for my car, and the carbon footprint too is negligible compared to motorised vehicles,” he says.

The college authorities have allowed the horse to be tethered on its six-acre campus, where there is plenty of grass. n Anil Budur Lulla

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R.K.Bhat

small world

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10

contents

cover story Modi unbound in the United States

22 18

The lone empress of Tamil Nadu

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hurried man’s guide

Ello: Facebook killer?

A brief history of colour and power

locomotif

The making of an oriental cult

publishing

28

open essay

person of the week yogeshwar dutt

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jayalalithaa

Family transitions

cancer

Puzzling numbers

Man of the Mat The grappler from Haryana wins India’s first wrestling gold medal at the Asian Games in 28 years Lhendup Bhutia

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t every multi-sport tourna-

ment like the Olympics, most countries traditionally excel in a few disciplines. The US almost always has a great show in athletics and swimming; Britain in cycling, rowing and athletics; China in gymnastics and swimming.

Such specialisation almost always assures a country a rich haul of medals. Anything apart from these is a bonus.

For India, the specialisation has to be wrestling and boxing. Every time the country heads to an international tournament, its greatest hope lies with these two disciplines.

But wrestling has often flattered to deceive. Despite the much celebrated tradition of akhadas and pehelwans in India, the country’s contestants have only on a few occasions put up the strong showing everyone seems to expect of them. They pick up a few medals, but there is never complete dominance.

The only exception in recent times has perhaps been Sushil Kumar, who is a certainty for a medal.

Also, while Indians are now beginning to excel and win medals in games like badminton, athletics and shooting, the quality of wrestling still remains the same. It is not that the wrestlers lack in technical finesse or quality, but for some reason, their promise materialises only occasionally.

How else does one explain the fact that before the present ongoing tournament, India did not win a single gold medal for wrestling in an Asian Games since 1986 in Seoul? This drought ended recently,

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when the 31-year-old grappler from Haryana, Yogeshwar Dutt, secured a gold medal in the 65 kg weight category.

What was impressive about Dutt’s performance was the manner of his win.

Sushil Kumar, the most illustrious of the Indian wrestlers, had pulled out of the tournament, and Dutt was expected to lead the Indian campaign.

But after a close encounter in the quarter-final with North Korean Jinhyok Kang, a game Dutt won 3-1, he almost lost to Yeerlanbieke Katai in the semi-finals.

The Chinese wrestler dominated the Tim Wimborne/REUTERS

proceedings throughout the game, leading 9-7. Dutt turned it around in the dying stages of the game. Doing away with his leg-locks, or ‘phitleys’, considered his stronger suit, he managed to pin down his opponent in the last few seconds of the game and secured a ‘victory by fall’ win. Had it gone to the points system, it would have meant another opportunity lost. The game was, however, physically draining and Dutt needed help to get off the mat.

In the finals—another close game— Dutt won by way of points (3-0).

Dutt has for long lived in the shadow of Kumar. The two are roughly of the same age, supposedly close friends, and have both been part of India’s wrestling contingent for several years.

Kumar has had a far better career, winning back-to-back silver and bronze medals at the London and Beijing Olympics, and a number of gold medals in the World Championships and Commonwealth Games. He is always India’s brightest medal prospect and a far better recognised face on TV. Dutt hasn’t always showcased his talent, despite being in the top league for several years. He first shot to the limelight only in 2006, during the Asian Games at Doha, where despite having lost his father days before and sustaining a knee injury, he secured a bronze medal. He then came close to winning a medal in the 2006 Beijing Olympics and finally won a bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics. With the Asian gold, he has finally emerged from the shadows. n 13 october 2014

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showbiz

The new Indian Celeb

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Arjun Rampal’s bromance

books

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Tales from sin city

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Nalini Malani: Seeker of the invisible

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f o r awarding his father an

honorary doctorate Akhilesh Singh Yadav is the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. He is also the state’s minister for higher education.

He would not have held these positions of authority if it were not for his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav. The CM likes to talk about focusing on the education of girls and also

Legacy of Begum Akhtar

how his top priority in UP is health and education. But talk, as they say, is cheap. And when it comes to action, the Yadav scion has been found wanting in pushing that noble agenda forward. The family agenda, on the other hand, suffers far less neglect. The son has now decided to award his father a doctorate. This will be on behalf of Dr Shakuntala Devi Misra Rehabilitation University, of whose general council he is currently the chairman. Why Mulayam deserves the doctorate of philosophy, it is fair to surmise, has not been discussed at any academic level. But then, it isn’t a surprise. Akhilesh is just part of a tradition that makes education subservient to family honours in the state.

The university has also instituted a couple of medals in Mulayam’s name. And when the university opened, it was dedicated to Mayawati’s grandfather because she happened to be the state’s Chief Minister at the time. n

After ruling that an applicant seeking information under the RTI Act should specify reasons for doing so, the Madras High Court suo motu corrected it righting

‘An RTI application should contain minimum details or reasons for which information is sought’

‘The error has been noticed by us after pronouncing the order... and in order to rectify the error... we directed the registry to post this matter today under ‘suo motu’ review’

—Order given out by a division bench of Madras High Court on 17 September 2014

—The division bench on 23 September 2014

turn

on able Pers n o s a e r n U ek of the We

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

around

The Party with a Selective Difference Ashok Aggarwal/Express archive

I n a d e v e l o p m e n t that is out of sync with the BJP’s claim of clean politics, the party has embraced UP’s gangster-turned-politician DP Yadav.

On a day Modi was telling his audience in the US about his plans to reform the way politics is practised in India, Yadav travelled with BJP President Amit Shah to poll-bound Haryana to attend campaign rallies.

Yadav had made an attempt to join the

Amit Shah with DP Yadav (right) in Ambala 13 october 2014

saffron camp 10 years ago, but public outrage forced the BJP to cancel his membership on the very day it was granted by then party president Venkaiah Naidu. In an interaction with the media, Yadav has said that the current BJP president is his ‘friend’ and that he would be campaigning actively for the party’s candidates in Haryana.

Yadav, according to the UP Police, is a ‘B class’ history-sheeter—someone who cannot be reformed. The BJP will have a lot of explaining to do. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Ello, the all new ‘private’ social networking website In the last one week, a relatively new and little-known social networking website, Ello, has generated a lot of interest. According to various media reports, signup requests to the website have rapidly shot up, ranging between 20,000 and 35,000 within the span of an hour. Invitations to the website (as this is an invitation-only network) are also being sold on eBay for as much as $100.

Created last year as a ‘private’ social network, Ello opened its doors in March this year. It was created by Paul Budnitz, an entrepreneur cum photographer, along with a few graphic designers. The creators describe Ello as ‘simple, beautiful, and The sudden ad-free social network’. interest in Ello Unlike Facebook, Ello is might be caused advertisement-free. by a Facebook crackdown on drag queens in San Francisco for not using real names

It claims in its ‘manifesto’ that it does not sell data gleaned from online behaviour to advertisers or data brokers.

Highlighting its ad-free philosophy, the website reads, ‘Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy… You are not a product.’

A screen grab of Ello’s webpage

Many commentators have termed the website—because of its sudden popularity and philosophy—a Facebook killer. Many reports claim that the sudden explosion of interest in the website was caused by a crackdown by Facebook on drag queens in San Francisco for not using their real names.

Facebook has recently begun enforcing the use of real names on its website. Many drag performers and others in the LGBTQ community who were using pseudonyms on Facebook were reportedly locked out of their accounts. Following the controversial enforcement of the policy, many individuals of the LGBTQ community, along with their sympathisers, have reportedly migrated to Ello. n

Co-opting the Dead Take reports of suicides following Jayalalithaa’s conviction with a pinch of salt M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

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f you remember movies of yore there would often be a scene where someone gets news of the death of someone, usually spouse or progeny, and then clutching his or her hand onto chest, the said receiver of news falls down and dies to the accompaniment of cymbals. There is a reason that as movies evolved this particular scene has disappeared from the repertoire of filmmakers. They still like a humongous amount of melodrama, but that someone should be struck dead by information is something even movies don’t find possible anymore.

And with that preface in mind, let’s come to the reports floating around that soon after the news about Jayalalithaa’s conviction, 10 people died of heart attack and 16 people committed suicide. In fact, they say ‘at least 16’. Tamilians might be a very intense people (at least we know that from their movies), but it is still difficult to swallow that so many would kill themselves for the following reasons: a) No one is saying how this number came about. A PTI report speaks about the 16 suicides with just a general vague attribution to the police. The only way to assess its credibility is by revealing who in the department collects such information and how they get it. Towards the end of the report, ironically, they add that the police are tightlipped on the number of such incidents. b) We are told one anguished AIADMK worker committed suicide by immolating himself and that is believable. Both the fact of being a party worker and the immolation signal some veracity. But then there is one man who threw himself under a bus and three apparently hanged themselves with nothing to say why it is connected to Jayalalithaa. c) Ten perished, it is said, because their hearts stopped beating. In rare

cases, a severe shock can lead to a cardiac arrest but that it should happen to 10 people is beyond rational levels of probability. d) If the loss of a chief ministership should lead to such deaths, then every time the AIADMK lost an election in Tamil Nadu, people should have been killing themselves. That has not happened.

Soon after the then CM of Andhra Pradesh YS Rajasekhara Reddy died in a helicopter crash in 2009, there came reports of a flurry of suicides. All kinds of numbers were thrown with the minimum being over a 100 Attributing killing themselves. And then a suicide to came news that loyalty to a politician also the suicides and deaths had been saves a family real enough, just from stigma that the families had changed the and even gets victim’s motive them some to Reddy’s death degree of because, in some respectability cases, Congress workers were giving them money to say so. It might not necessarily be money alone that makes such claims go around.

Attributing a suicide to loyalty to a politician also saves a family from stigma and even gets them some degree of respectability. Or it could be that the families never claimed it and it’s just the local party worker who spreads the story. The reasons could be any and many. The least probable one is what we read in the newspaper.

Most people like to live. They are far more comfortable attacking someone else when their leader is in trouble.

That doesn’t take too much effort if you are part of a mob. That is why violence is so commonly seen after such events. But directing it against oneself is slightly inconvenient. n 13 october 2014

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lo co m ot i f

S PRASANNARAJAN

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The Making of an

his moment is familiar: walking with folded

hands into the frenzied anticipation of others.

This is what he has been doing since the day he knew that it would be his lone mission to craft an alternative mythology of his own life. And this is what he will do, no matter wherever he is, to counter all those exaggerations of his own journey painted with darker hues.

Everything may have changed when a country, steeped in anger and hope, gave itself to him to be repaired, redeemed, restored.

Still, he is walking with folded hands into the minds of believers, as if the evangelism of this campaigner will not be deterred by the powers of office. This time the stage is different, and its symbolism is too obvious to be emphasised. America is where the news cycle is more defining than the spasms of history, where the pursuits and possibilities of dreams are ingrained in national identity, and where arguments about freedom are the largest selling items in the marketplace of ideas. It is the moralism and mannerisms of America that make it an international ideal— and a target of hate. Still, it is a destination most sought after and an aspiration most expressed.

So when Narendra Modi walked with folded hands towards the waiting American guests, the background music provided by the Modi-chanting, placard-waving, Indians, he knew, as he would later admit in one of his best speeches, that few tea sellers would reach this far, unless perhaps you were an American.

When in America, play it American, and Modi, a master of stagecraft, needed no reminder. The venue itself was all about pop and performance; it was mostly for mesmerisers and sorcerers of the senses, and here was a politician from a place that in the narrative of oriental kitsch, still sold in parts of the West, was inhabited by performers in some kind of a karmic circus.

In his opening sentences, he played with an oriental stereotype to make an appropriate soundbite for such an audience—hence the ‘snake charmer to the mouse charmer’ story. The speech was, in essence, about India as told by an Indian who continues to believe that biography is destiny—and not of just himself. Weaving a narrative with strands of Indianness drawn from history, geography and headlines, he built an idea of India and made himself its most desirable manifestation. When Modi tells a story, the moral of it is always Modi.

As a speaker, Modi is Obama without that authorial detachment—some may even call it emotional detachment.

The guest is anecdotal, funny, self-referential and, when the moment comes, confrontational. He begins on a slow note, builds up the tempo, detonates metaphors after those customary pauses to survey the crowd, sermonises, amuses, inspires, and makes it interactive—he knows his Cicero. Obama at his best is part evangelical, part prophetic, part professorial and never intimate or confrontational. In his first victory speech from Grant Park, Chicago, he said, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of founders are alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is our answer.” That could very well have been Modi in another context. And on the stump, circa 2008, the poetry went like this: “There are no red states and blue states but only the United States of America, there is no conservative America and there is no liberal America but only the United States of America.” Modi too, in the campaign of a lifetime, played the reconciler to perfection.

Both, in their own ways, redeemed the oldest promise—and the most unrealised as well—in politics: change.

In biography too, they were from elsewhere—from the far beyond of privilege. As a boy, in the American Embassy’s library in Jakarta, Obama once saw in an old issue of Life magazine the picture of a man whose hands had a ‘strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh.’ As the boy would later write in his memoirs, Dreams from My Father, ‘There were thousands of people like him (the man in the photograph), black men and women back in America who’d undergo the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.’ The boy had ‘no voice for my new found fear’. Forty years later, the boy himself offered, as history stood in awe, a treatment that would change the political complexion of America. Hasn’t Modi too changed the colour and contours of Indian politics? When Obama received Modi in the White House, he was face to face with a man who epitomises the Indian Dream. They share the loftiness of ambition—and a campaign that overcomes the worst instincts of realpolitik. (Still, it must be said that President Obama is a less historic figure than Candidate Obama.)

Modi’s ongoing conversation with the world provides the first draft of an Indian leader’s vision for himself as the new wise man of the Orient

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13 october 2014

Oriental Cult Narendra Modi with Barack Obama in Washington DC

Larry Downing/REUTERS

That said, Modi in America was not about the so-called personal chemistry between leaders or the sweep of partnership. It was all about himself, about a new brand of Asian leadership. Between New York and Washington, it was the gospel according to Asia’s new strongman with the most definitive mandate of democracy, and the good words ranged from the personal to the political, geopolitical to the philosophical, the tonal shift determined by the stage. The Indian diaspora provided the perfect prop; perhaps the enchanted Indian faces brought the best out of him. Unlike Obama, Modi cannot afford to stop the campaigning.

Every moment in power for him is a struggle for vindication, and a permanent mode of combat is what keeps him far ahead of his aspiring challengers. The stage has become bigger, and Indians, in spite of being force-fed on anti-Americanism, love watching Americana. The live spectacle starring Modi was the kind of show that would add to the aura of a leader larger than his office. The proverbial union of the largest and the oldest democracies could be a trite media refrain, but the bearded, Hindi-speaking leader 13 october 2014

Weaving a narrative with strands of Indianness drawn from history, geography and headlines, he built an idea of India and made himself its most desirable manifestation.

When Modi tells a story, the moral of it is always Modi

from the East, when paired with the über cool Obama, exuded the ancient calm of a savant, the humility of a villager, and the confidence of a fighter who has never tasted defeat. Modi in America borrowed the best of American political theatre and added a dash of oriental kitsch to it.

Modi has always been his own iconographer. And he is sculpting one to perfection—‘Make in India’!—not just for national idolatry but for wider extraterritorial consumption.

The maximum leader from this part of the world is usually a paranoid Chinese, and the cult of Modi, a work in progress, is likely to change the leadership hierarchy of the East. Modi’s ongoing conversation with the world provides the first draft of an Indian leader’s vision for himself as the new wise man of the Orient. There is no market better and bigger than America for testing the brand—and, being the scriptwriter of his own destiny, Modi has given us enough intimations of his tomorrow.

The erstwhile home-alone nationalist has launched his global ambition from a place that befits his style. n open www.openthemagazine.com 9

Evan Vucci/AP

modi in america

Narendra Modi’s American whirlwind was a 100most popular politician selling his idea of India and

Make it in America hour-long non-stop performance starring Asia’s his own legend to an enchanted audience...

Lucas Jackson/REUTERS

For a leader for whom politics is a permanent cam launch an Asian cult of leadership with the mandate

paign, America provided the perfect platform to of the world’s most volatile democracy

Modi and Obama in the Oval office at the White House (previous spread); Modi speaks at Madison Square Garden in New York

modi in america

By Tunku Varadarajan in new york ‘Namo’ste America. ‘Modison’ Square Garden. Washington, De-si.

O

kay, I made the last one up, but the first two were the witless puns with which we were clobbered over the head repeatedly by NDTV and others in the four-and-ahalf days that Narendra Modi spent in the United States. The Indian electronic media acquitted itself ingloriously. The accounts of the PM’s visit were breathless and gushing. Critical voices were largely written out of the script, lest viewers back home choke on bones of discord. The narrative had to be spotless.

Some print journalists were no better. At a press conference conducted by the unflappable Syed Akbaruddin, spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs, veteran Indian hacks vied with each other in their questions on the gift-giving between Modi and Barack Obama. What did Obama think of the gifts? Did the Prime Minister get anything for Michelle Obama? What did Obama give Modi in return? And the question that really took the cake for unabashed sycophancy: What was the Prime Minister wearing when he gave his gift to Obama? A bemused Akbaruddin was reduced to pointing out that Modi was wearing the same clothes that he had on before he handed over the gift. (It hardly needs recounting that Modi presented Obama with his standard party favour, the Bhagavad Gita.)

It is not my intention to be churlish about the trip, a review of which I offer here, much in the manner of a theatre critic. Modi scarcely put a foot wrong. America had not seen an Indian Prime Minister like him. America, in fact, had not seen a visiting head of government like him—from anywhere in the world—since Fidel Castro, a vastly different species of man, blustered his way through Manhattan in 1960.

Brash, cocksure, implacably convinced of the virtues of his own message, Modi went to the United Nations, to Central Park, to Madison Square Garden, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to the White House, interspersing speeches or meetings at these venues with pow-wows with America’s top CEOs, plus confabs with leaders of the Indian and Jewish communities, not to mention time out for the Clintons, for Congressional leader John Boehner, for John Kerry, for Joe Biden, and for dear old Harold Varmus, the 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, currently director of the US National Cancer Institute. Oh, and let’s not forget his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom he carved out a special tete-a-tete in New York. (The Tablet, an influential Jewish publication in the city, commented

that the ‘most important thing Netanyahu did in New York’ was to meet Modi.)

Modi didn’t rub shoulders with leaders and politicians alone. He mingled with crowds in Manhattan, shaking hands and greeting throngs outside his hotel. At a dinner at the Pierre Hotel in New York (which is now owned by the Taj Group), he spoke for barely five minutes, devoting the rest of the time to posing for photographs with each of the 700 guests invited, all of whom were IndianAmerican men and women deemed ‘distinguished’ by the Indian Embassy in Washington. I, too, was there (somewhat improbably) and met an economics professor from Tufts, the dean of a business school, a Fields Medal winner (just 38 years old), a politics professor from Brown, the lovely curator of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum, a New York Times bureau chief, and a retired Indian ambassador, all in the space of a few minutes.

These people of serious prestige queued patiently for their photo-op with the Prime Minister. The announcement made clear that each person would get six seconds of face time, but a clock is elastic in the hands of Indians, and 10 seconds was the norm. Do the Math, as they say in the US: 10 seconds times 700 = almost two hours of poseand-click, calling for remarkable stamina from a fasting man with only warm water in his belly. (I don’t need to explain this reference: all of India knows that Modi did not eat in America.) Two hours of gum-sapping smiles, two hours of fragmentary chitchat, two hours upright on his weary calves, two hours—let’s face it—of patriotic hell, even for a man like Modi.

B

y the time you read this, the dailies and TV anchors will have picked apart every detail of the trip. You will know that India and the US are (per Modi) ‘natural partners’. He said so at the White House. And he said so, with Obama, in a joint op-ed in The Washington Post. The piece, a string of high-octane platitudes, was published online, not in the print edition of the newspaper. But contrary to speculation that it didn’t make it to print because it was dull, the op-ed ran online-only because of “the timing of its arrival”, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt told me. Who did the piece come from, I asked. “We were approached,” Hiatt said, “by both the Indian Embassy and the White House. The piece actually came to us from the White House.”

The official political outcomes of the trip were pretty much as expected. Stripped of all the verbiage, and discounting such gestures as an agreement to launch

“Ideology has its limits, but philosophy is limitless. India’s philosophy is Vasud

Modi with Hugh Jackman, onstage at the 2014 Global Citizen Festival at Central Park on 27 September Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

a new US-India Climate Fellowship Program, the two countries have re-affirmed their belief that they have a Good Thing Going: lots of potential partnership and collaboration, all in the pipeline, in every field known to bilateral relations. India and the US will, it is clear, be fast friends for the foreseeable future, nothing more, nothing less. The A-word—‘alliance’—was avoided in favour of the more ambiguous, though hardly unpalatable, ‘partnership’. This is the Modi method. India will focus on its national interest unsentimentally, taking what it can from whomever it can, promising little that is concrete while recognising a civilisational consonance with such partners as the US. Washington, for its part, can live with that, for it knows that India will never be (nor ever want to be) its competitor or foe.

The crowning achievement of Modi’s trip was the deployment of America’s Indian diaspora in the service of the Motherland. Indian-Americans have always been more concerned (even obsessed) with the politics of India than have Indians in Britain, home to the other great

Indian diaspora in the West. Why this should be so is, in itself, a fascinating question. Indians in Britain have existed as a substantial community for much longer, and are, as a result, much better integrated into the politics of their adopted country. They are, in most cases, now into a third generation. Indian-Americans, by contrast, are only in the first- and second-generation stage.

Contemporary America, in addition, makes fewer integrative demands of its immigrants. It is enough to acquire the outward trappings of Americanness, and to speak passable English. Beyond that, assimilation has almost disappeared as a requirement. Immigrants are encouraged to parade through the streets on their ‘national days’, and the great push to ‘respect’ every national identity as equally valuable has meant that immigrants in America retain their culture-of-origin more strongly (and into more generations) than ever before. If you combine that reality with the fact that Indian-Americans are, on average, the wealthiest and best-educated ethnic group in America, you have a potent legion of advocates

haiva Kutumbakam” Modi at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York

TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP

for India right in the heart of American society.

But the diaspora is “a latent asset”, according to Devesh Kapur, director for the Center for Advanced Studies of India at the University of Pennsylvania (who happened to be seated at my table at the dinner at the Pierre Hotel).

“It needs some catalyst to activate and energise it. It could be an event, such as Kargil, or the nuclear deal… or, more rarely, the catalyst could be a leader, as in Modi’s case.” The diaspora has been present in the US for decades, for much of that time a great, underutilised resource. Modi has drilled deep for its support—political fracking, if you like—and appears to have hit the mother-lode.

Modi-as-catalyst: this was a point suggested to me, also, by Karthik Ramakrishnan, professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. “In our 2012 survey (the National Asian American Survey, which he directs) Indian Americans were not as engaged in home country politics as other Asian Americans, even though Indian Americans tend to be among the most recently arrived of Asians in the US.” So, the professor continues, “Forty per cent of Indian Americans closely followed politics in their home country, compared to a 54 per cent average for Asian Americans, and a high of 69 per cent for Chinese Americans.” As for US foreign policy toward the home country, only 40 per cent of Indian Americans paid heed to it, compared with 50 per cent for all Asian Americans and 64 per cent for Chinese Americans.

It is almost certain that these numbers for Indian Americans are, today, much higher than they were in

2012; and it is likely that those old numbers reflect an apathy toward Indian politics born of a fatigue with the policies and corruption of the Congress-led alliance in Delhi. It is obvious to the naked eye (unaided by pollsters) that the Indian elections of 2014 have galvanised Indian Americans. “Part of Modi’s appeal,” explains Professor Ramakrishnan, “may lie with the large Gujarati population in the US, which may feel a measure of homeregion pride. Modi also seems to project a level of energy and control that few Indian Prime Ministers have expressed recently. Some of this may stem from the decisive victory that the BJP had; but it also stems from the skilful management of Modi’s image prior to, and after, the elections.”

T

he event at Madison Square Garden—which many

Indian-Americans refer to, without irony, as a ‘show’—wasn’t just another example of this vaunted image management; it was an impressive show of strength. It was also (in spite of all the protestors outside the arena) an ecstatic ‘coming out party’ for Indians in America.

“I’m 31. I’ve been to some of the biggest Indian gatherings in New York and Washington. I’m a centrist, politically. But I’ve never felt the sort of goosebumps that I felt when I heard the Indian national anthem at Madison Square Garden. After that, it was roof-shattering enthusiasm. ‘Modi! Modi!’ all the way.” These are the

“The youth of my nation are changing the world. India’s journey has gone from

(Facing page) Modi addresses the UN General Assembly in New York; Modi and Obama at the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington DC Alex Wong/pool/Corbis

words of Karthik Rangarajan, a data warehouse test manager with Cognizant, eight years in the US on an H1-B visa, who got tickets for the event from his local Tamil Sangam for himself, his wife, his mother (“a major fan of Modi”; “she was in happy tears”); his mother-in-law; and his two kids (one of them but a few months old, “the youngest attendee, I’m sure”). There were 20,000 people like Karthik at the Garden, most of them, one has to assume, passionate Modi supporters.

That number—20,000—wasn’t as impressive as another number at Madison Square Garden: 34 (being the sum of 29 US Congressmen, four U.S. senators, and one state governor—Nikki Haley of South Carolina— all present at the very long event). That so many high elected officials felt the need to be at Modi’s bash suggests that the American political establishment has awakened to the potential clout of the Indian-American community. The unresolved question, of course, is the political trajectory of this community. Where do they want to go with their clout? As Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington-based low-taxation advocacy group, put it to me, “They have to work out what ‘winning’ would be for them.”

There is a plethora of ethnic groups in the US. Some, Norquist explains with a chuckle, have one-point programmes with which they confront all elected representatives. “The Cuban-Americans want the US to shun Castro. The Armenian-Americans want to know that you hate Turkey. The Greek-Americans also want to

know that you hate Turkey… and that you won’t call Macedonia ‘Macedonia’. What do the Indian-Americans want? What do they want their mayors, their state legislatures, their governors to do?” They need to find “consensus issues”, issues that “people feel most deeply about.” Only then will they translate their position into real clout.

Modi knows this better than anyone else, better even, it seems, than the Indian Americans do themselves. His party has deep roots in the US, and his promises of reform, not to mention his charisma, have drawn many politically agnostic Indian Americans to his side. He has at his disposal in the United States an enviable force of people, Indian by blood and spirit, American by citizenship or professional choice, who are raring to promote the interests of India. He intends to help them do so, and to ensure that they don’t fragment.

The White House has taken note of these IndianAmericans, and it has taken note, too, of Modi’s hold over them. The Indian diaspora in America could come to be India’s strongest political asset abroad. This is what Modi wants to happen. This is what his trip to America was about. n Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

He is working on a book on the political legacy of the Shah Bano case , The Divorce That Rocked India

snake charmers to mouse charmers” Modi at Madison Square Garden, New York

open essay

By SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP

A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLOUR AND POWER

What the nomination of Richard Rahul Verma as America’s ambassador to India tells us about race and the American Dream

B

arack Obama has nominated

susan walsh/ap

someone who epitomises the American Dream to be the next United States ambassador to India.

But he isn’t the first American to think this country deserves a distinctive envoy. A conference of American foreign service officials in New Delhi in 1949 recommended that as many Black diplomats as possible should Sunanda K Datta-Ray be posted here. As Larry Wilson, the is a columnist and American consul in Bombay, ‘a big, author of several books genial-looking café-au-lait-coloured Negro’, whispered awestruck to Saunders Redding, a Black writer on a State Department sponsored lecture tour, “Man, we’re dealing with coloured people in a coloured country!” It was a novel situation that Westerners, especially American Blacks, interpreted in terms of their own experience with little comprehension of the nuanced attitude to race and roots in a land whose ancient caste system—varna—means colour.

The return of the native, too, has been tried before. A Bengali woman academic who proudly wears her Oxford degree on her sari sneered that Sanjay Wadhwani—whom she didn’t know then—had “managed to cultivate a very English accent” and was disconcerted to learn he was Her Britannic Majesty’s very capable deputy high commissioner in Kolkata. Sanjay was born in the city of a Sindhi father and British mother but was whisked off as a child to London where he grew up an Englishman. Since he looks Asian, the professor lady assumed he was another social climbing native. Britain’s first full-blown Asian-origin envoy, Sylhet-born Anwar Bokth Choudhury, high commissioner to Bangladesh, also had to contend with a

similar mix of smugness, snobbishness and stupidity.

Choudhury’s appointment prompted a senior Bangladeshi diplomat to mock he had obviously passed the Tebbit test, meaning the jibe by a Conservative politician, Norman Tebbit, that Britons of South Asian origin who cheered India or Pakistan during cricket matches with England weren’t really British. The Bangladeshi didn’t know that anticipating sneers, Choudhury, whom his British colleagues regard as one of the brightest and best, had taken the bull by the horns.

Asked who he would support when England played Bangladesh, he replied boldly, “Since I am a representative of Her Majesty’s Government, I will support England. My priority is serving HMG.” The murmurs persisted. Some in Dhaka thought Choudhury stuck up because he spoke only English. Others hinted he dared not lapse into Bengali in case the Sylheti dialect came flooding out. Speech is always a complicating factor. Australians who overheard me telling a very haw-haw Australian diplomat who yearned for a New Delhi posting that Indians would take him for a member of the British mission thought I was putting him down. But the man himself was delighted. He was also convinced Indians would see him as a pukka sahib and love him for it.

Someone who has moved from the Third World to the First is envied as the one that got away. Or, he is accused of betraying his birthright. If he is black, brown or yellow and returns as diplomatic representative of a white nation, the black, brown or yellow folk to whom he is accredited may grumble about being palmed off with second best. Jawaharlal Nehru claimed in An Autobiography that Britain led the global pecking order followed after a long gap by Whites from the old dominions and Anglo-Saxon Americans, but ‘not dagoes, wops, etc’. Then came Western Europeans, the rest of Europe, Latin South Americans and, after another long gap, ‘the brown, yellow and black races

Richard Rahul Verma

13 october 2014

Obama’s ambassadorial nominee, Richard Rahul Verma, a lawyer with extensive experience in national security, symbolises the triumph of two democracies

open www.openthemagazine.com 19

of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together.’

It’s for sociologists to decide whether coy references to complexion in matrimonial ads (‘wheat-complexioned’) reflect varna or our colonial complex. Perhaps both. Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh immigrant to the United States who unsuccessfully petitioned for citizenship claiming to be ‘a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) white...’ articulated a deeply-held national belief that one also meets in Evelyn Waugh’s delightful novel Scoop. When the Daily Beast reporter assigned to cover the war between the Patriots and Traitors in a mythical African country asks if Reds are fighting Blacks, the foreign editor explains things aren’t quite so easy. ‘“You see they are all Negroes. And the Fascists won’t be called Black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say Black you mean Red, and when you mean Red you say White, and when the party who calls themselves Blacks says Traitors they mean what we call Blacks, but what we mean when we say Traitors I really couldn’t tell you.”’ It’s not unlike the Bengali ‘ujjal shyam varna’—literally ‘bright colour of the evening’—for a dark girl who might be a liability on the marriage mart.

Given Indian sensitivities, Nehru may not have been pleased to learn that Loy Henderson, the American ambassador, reported that the Prime Minister was ‘constitutionally unhappy’ unless he was leading a global union of coloured peoples.

The ‘coloured’ would have raised Nehru’s hackles. While Nehru loved the crack about never visiting America for the first time, Rabindranath Tagore paid no fewer than five visits to the land of the free.

That didn’t stop him from railing after a brush with San Francisco immigration officials that they would refuse Christ Himself admission ‘because, first of all, He would not have the necessary money and secondly He would be an Asiatic.’

Some Americans thought his fulminations ironic.

Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson tell us that since he was paid handsomely for his lectures ($700-$1,000), the Minneapolis Tribune called Rabindranath Tagore Tagore ‘the best business man

who ever came to us out of India’. He scolded Americans at ‘$700 per scold’ for being materialistic and pleaded with them ‘at $700 per plead’ for funds for Santiniketan. The New York Times dealt the unkindest cut of all when he won the Nobel Prize, saying that ‘if not exactly one of us, [he] is, as an Aryan, a distant relative of all white folk.’

That was only a small taste of what Indians had to endure.

‘The big problem was colour, pure and simple,’ recalled Amar Bose, born in Philadelphia in 1930 and a household name worldwide because of his sound system. ‘There wasn’t a restaurant in Philadelphia where I could be served. In those days you couldn’t even rent a house.’ Sikhs were called ‘ragheads.’ As chairman of the Allahabad municipal board, Nehru pushed through a resolution deploring the treatment of Indians in the United States. India didn’t then host any African students to complain of never being invited to an Indian home. Nor were there interfering foreigners to report to the United Nations that Africans were jeered at on Indian streets as hubshi.

But American politicians and press went into overdrive shrieking India was racist during PV Narasimha Rao’s 1994

After a brush with San Francisco immigration officials, Rabindranath Tagore railed that they would refuse Christ Himself admission ‘because, first of all, He would not have the necessary money and secondly He would be an Asiatic’

20 open

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visit.

Apparently fearing Khalistani, rebel Kashmiri or Tamil Tiger assassins, the Prime Minister’s security chief asked his Washington hotel not to allow South Asians near him.

One non-White was the same as another for the hotel manager who ruled that ‘no AfricanAmerican could carry (Narasimha Rao’s) bags, no Asian could clean his room, no Latinos could serve him his food.’ He ‘had to be served by whites only, American or European.’ The New York Times demanded to know ‘whether a foreign head of state has been fostering racial discrimination here.’ Michael T Duffy, chairman of the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination, thought the episode ‘too outrageous to be true.’ India explained it had not asked for discrimination ‘on the basis of race or colour’, the hotel apologised, and the 13 october 2014

doug mills/ap

Narasimha Rao with Bill Clinton

matter blew over.

This wasn’t The New York Times’s first outburst of sanctimoniousness. In 1955 it had preached to India’s ambassador, Gaganvihari Lallubhai Mehta, ‘and his fellow countrymen, and all persons of all races, tints and colours… that as the months and years go by, we in this country are trying more and more to treat individuals as the democratic tradition says we ought to—that is, on the sole basis of their qualities as human beings.’

The excuse for the sermon was the decision of the White woman manager at Houston’s airport restaurant to show Mehta and his secretary to a separate room. She took them for Negroes. Neither raised any objection but when an American reporter who witnessed the incident kicked up a fuss, the manager retorted that she realised the Indians were VIPs and gave them a private room.

Roughly three million Indian Americans (not to be confused with American Indians) celebrated Narendra Modi’s visit. There were only 136 between 1820 and 1870 when the number rose to 586. 6,000 labourers migrated to the west coast between 1898 and 1914. Political refugees, stalwarts of the Ghadar party, increased their ranks.

The 1917 Immigration Act was weighted against Indians, and in 1923 the Supreme Court declared Indians ineligible for citizenship. It wasn’t until 1965 that explicit national discrimination was abolished to attract scientists and engineers. Also, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society needed Third World doctors. Gradually, Indian Americans acquired money and position.

Congressman Dalip Singh Saund, 58, the House of Representatives’ first ethnic Indian member, who flew into Calcutta on a December day in 1957, was an outstanding symbol of success. Travelling steerage from Southampton to

New York two years after the peace of Versailles, he waited heart in mouth in the queue at dreaded Ellis Island when a police inspector took him out of the line, had his papers stamped, shook his hand, and told him proudly, “You are now a free man in a free country!” His election on the Democratic ticket was remarkable for he won from a Republican district, defeating a famous woman flier married to a wealthy industrialist. Also unusual for a novice, he was at once included in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

If Saund was one symbol of success, his fellow Punjabi, Richard Rahul Verma, Obama’s ambassadorial nominee, is another. Verma symbolises the triumph of two democracies. His father was the first literate person in his family but taught English at the University of Pittsburgh for 40 years. Himself a lawyer, with extensive experience in national security and non-proliferation issues and a former Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, Verma shouldn’t be surprised if Punjabis are possessive about his inspirational career. I can think of six other senior Indian-origin appointments during a presidency that itself made ethnic history. It invites comparison with Singapore, where a popular joke had a European dignitary wondering if he had taken the wrong flight and landed in India when he was received at Changi airport by President Devan Nair and introduced to Foreign Minister Suppiah Dhanabalan. But a word of warning: liberalism can go too far. Nirad C Chaudhuri’s dismissiveness when Amartya Sen became Master of Trinity was a reminder that elitist Indians can be like Groucho Marx who didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. n

Fearing assassins, Narasimha Rao’s security chief asked his hotel not to allow South Asians near him. The New York Times demanded to know ‘whether a foreign head of state [was] fostering racial discrimination here’

13 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 21

COMEUPPANCE

Payback time

The comeback queen of Tamil Nadu reaches a dead end by shahina KK

O

n the morning of 27 September,

a Saturday, a steady stream of AIADMK supporters flooded Avvai Shanmugam street, the site of the party’s headquarters, and Poes Garden, their leader Jayalalithaa’s home. They came bearing sweets and crackers, hoping ‘Amma’ might be acquitted in the ongoing disproportionate assets case. But as news to the contrary trickled in, this same jubilantly expectant crowd turned rough. Widespread public rage paralysed the state for hours as mobs went on the rampage with shows of bus-burning, stone-pelting and self-immolation, as AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa made Indian political history by becoming the first ruling Chief Minister to be convicted of corruption charges.

There is, so far, no official confirmation about the numbers dead following Amma’s conviction, but six suicides (and about as many unsuccessful attempts) have been reported across the state of Tamil Nadu. Party activist N Babu hanged himself in Kanchi Puram, while 48-year-old Nallayiram threw himself in front of a speeding bus at a protest march near

Tirunelveli; a 70-year old sympathiser in Singampunari near Theni took poison; and two teenage girls reportedly attempted to set themselves on fire. The press was also informed about deaths by cardiac failure of AIADMK’s party workers, office bearers and sympathisers—and more such incidents are expected. The emotional response of the people has put the rival DMK party on the back-foot, preventing it from making any statements that may provoke the wrath of the disillusioned public.

The case goes back to Jayalalithaa’s tenure as CM spanning the period between July 1991 and April 1996. A vigilance probe ordered by the DMK government in 1997 discovered that Jayalalithaa and her team—N Sasikala, her sister’s son VN Sudhakaran, and Sasikala’s brother’s wife J Elavarasi—had accumulated Rs 65.86 crore worth of assets disproportionate to any known sources of income. Ironically, Jayalalithaa who had amassed the booty in a span of five years, had been drawing only one rupee as a month’s salary as CM. The charges also stated that she had not filed any tax returns during this period.

The 15-year-long legal battle over disproportionate assets—known as the ‘DA case’ for short—is a narrative of money-laundering through land grabs, intimidation, blackmail and deception.

The chargesheet speaks volumes about 13 october 2014

DIBGYANSHU SARKAR/AFP

AIADMK supporters grieve the news of their leader Jayalalithaa being found guilty of corruption

ARUN SANKAR K./AP

the muscle-flexing and abuse of power by Sasikala, Sudhakaran and Elavarasi on behalf of their leader. The court proceedings involved the questioning of 259 prosecution witnesses and 99 defence witnesses, while 2,600 documents of evidence were examined for this landmark case. But over the years, the country witnessed embarrassing attempts to sabotage the case at different stages. Public prosecutors in charge were changed many times over as the trial shifted to Karnataka from her home state in 2003 at the request of K Anbazhagan, then general secretary of the DMK. He alleged that a fair trial would not be possible in Tamil Nadu where the accused held power.

In 2011—a later stint of Jayalalithaa’s rule—the then Chief Secretary directed Mr Sambandam, the then Deputy Superintendent of Police of Vigilance and Anti- Corruption to do a further investigation. The request to reinvestigate allegations, bypassing the Public Prosecutor’s authority, was an arrogant snub to the trial court, which does not allow investigations of a matter already under trial. Not surprisingly, the missive was dismissed by the court.

Embarassingly, the same police officer also appeared as a defence witness at court—something unprecedented in criminal law.

Among the 259 prosecution witnesses, 13 october 2014

a good number spoke of being intimidated and forced to sell their land to Jayalalithaa’s aides and associates Sasikala, Sudhakaran and Elavarasi. The scope for negotiation was limited as they were forced to sign sale deeds at prices fixed by the rogue three-member team.

Tamil music director, lyricist and filmmaker Gangai Amaran—the brother of maestro composer Ilayaraja—was among those blackmailed.

Amaran gave a chilling account of his powerlessness at being bullied by Jayalalithaa’s aides. He disclosed how 22 acres of land that he owned in Paiyanur village, Chenkalpet, was grabbed from him. According to court records, he was also told to join the politicallyaffiliated television channel, Jaya TV, by

Ilayaraja’s brother Gangai Amaran was invited to meet Jayalalithaa at her home, where he was manhandled

by Sasikala and forced to sell his land

V Bhaskaran, one of Sasikala’s nephews.

He was threatened over the phone by the CM’s wing for daring to join another channel, Eagle TV, instead. He was then invited to meet Jayalalithaa at her Poes Garden home, where he was manhandled by Sasikala, who demanded he sell his 22 acre-property—valued at ‘Rs 1.5 crore’—for a measly Rs 13.1 lakh, with a promise that the balance would ‘be taken care of later’, an assurance given by co-conspirator VN Sudhakaran.

By 1991, Jayalalithaa, who purportedly ran only three enterprising firms— Jaya Publications, Sasi Enterprises and Namadhu MGR—and earned almost nothing officially, had become the owner of 32 companies, that existed only on paper and reported no profits, in addition to acres of land across the state.

The AIADMK is a party that has little internal democracy and no second-level leadership, with Jayalalithaa as its unquestionable leader. In contrast, the DMK opposition is a divided house and too weak to fight an election at the moment. TKS Elangovan, its organising secretary, has had just this to say: “They (AIADMK) have the mandate, let another Chief Minister come and take over.”

Over at the Gopalpuram residence of DMK leader Muthuvel Karunanidhi, the gathered party workers are clueless about how to celebrate Jayalalithaa’s come uppance—whether to burst crackers or distribute laddoos—having received no directions from the leaders inside.

This judgment may be the beginning of the end of the era of Jayalalithaa, who must stay out of electoral frays for 10 years—of which four years will be spent in jail and the other six under a statutory bar from contesting polls.

It is unlikely that she will be eligible to contest the next General Election, but her ability for backseat governance while in jail is well known. After all, who can forget the time in 2001 that she ably ran a government, after being convicted by a trial court, via her trusted lieutenant O Panneerselvam, Amma’s obedient Chief Minister? n open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Ananthakrishnan/REUTERS

legacy

The Lone Em

press W

“Naalai namathe,” she had said when arrested in 1996, ‘Tomorrow is ours.’

This time, she had no words of solace for her followers by Vaasanthi

hen the crisp verdict was pronounced on 27 September before a select few in a special court in Bangalore, it came as a thunderbolt that numbed her senses. It was a return of the fear of the wages of sin that had haunted her for nearly two decades, the fear that she had managed to dodge for 18 years playing hide-and-seek in the labyrinths of the Indian legal system. She now stood convicted, sentenced to four years and fined Rs 100 crore. Four of her associates— devotees who dragged her to the abyss—stood convicted too, though with lower fines. It was a moment of irony in a political life fraught with jealousy, humiliation, malice and cruelty that she had fought alone with courage and determination. It was a moment that shattered the image of her invincibility. Amma, the redeemer. Amma, the universal. Amma, the one who looks at you with a benevolent smile, like a goddess, at every street corner of Tamil Nadu. Now she is damned.

The conviction of J Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu until the verdict forced her resignation and barred her from contesting elections for the next 10 years, is a dramatic twist in her colourful life, and it comes at a time when she had emerged as the most powerful leader in south India.

For a woman with the baggage of being a former film star, single and a Brahmin, to gain acceptance in the theatre of Dravidian politics was surely tough. What makes Jayalalithaa such a fascinating figure is the fact that she relentlessly challenged the male-dominated politics of Tamil Nadu that had tried to block her at every step of her journey. Remarkably, she rose to the top of the AIADMK, a party that was rudderless after the death of its founder MG Ramachandran. He was looked upon by his followers as a demigod, and it would not have been easy to step into his shoes, but she did, fighting single-handedly against the machinations of her enemies within and without the party. More recently, when the rival DMK—which was wracked by a power struggle between party patriarch M Karunanidhi’s sons—was routed in the 2011 Assembly polls, she dared to go for the moon, aiming to win enough parliamentary seats to have a say at the Centre, even claim Prime Ministership if possible.

Her life, she once said, was an ‘open book’, but she remains unapproachable. An enigma.

Her fits of rage, tantrums and arrogance are legendary. So are the stories of a troubled childhood, her brilliant school record in Chennai’s Church Park Convent, her love of books, her erudition and impeccable English, her intelligence, her relationship with MG Ramachandran, her sense of loss after his

death, and her relationship with her aide, Sasikala.

It is her hatred of Karunanidhi, however, that colours her political reactions. The past shapes her present. Her loneliness, her anger, the battering of court cases against her, with her wealth frozen, properties sealed and jewels seized and taken into legal custody—she was imprisoned for 28 days earlier— have all contributed to her formidable personality.

The villain of the drama has always been Karunanidhi. Her waking hours are consumed by devising plans to undo him and his progeny. Her sleeping hours are tormented by the recurring dream of a horror three decades ago. She can’t forget the humiliation that she experienced as a young entrant to the state’s Legislative Assembly at the hands of her political enemies. That day, enraged and humiliated, Jayalalithaa left, swearing like the infuriated Panchali that she would never step foot inside the House “until conditions are created under which a woman may attend the Assembly safely”. Jayalalithaa became a symbol of Draupadi. Karunanidhi did not realise that symbols could prove politically disastrous.

Jayalalithaa’s previous stints in power taught her that impulsive acts of anger and vengeance would only harm her. She learnt to wear masks. As a former actor, this came easily to her. It is amazing how she strengthened her grip over the party in spite of its humiliating defeat in 1996 and again in 2006. She returned with a stunning majority in 2001 and again in 2011. In her third term as Chief Minister, she appeared to have consolidated and understood the art of wielding power. In her first term from 1991 to 1996, corruption had been the main political issue; in her second term from 2001 to 2006, she baffled observers with her autocratic measures, which went unquestioned except by the media, with which her relations had anyway soured. Her whims assumed stunning proportions. One of her first moves after assuming power was to arrest the 79-year-old Karunanidhi in the middle of the night, an act that shocked the nation. She made a suo moto statement in the Assembly ruling out any discussion of the proposed demolition of the nearly-100-year-old Queen Mary’s College building to be replaced by a new secretariat. She had an ordinance issued against ‘forced conversion’. She banned animal sacrifice. The MDMK leader Vaiko, who was an ally of the ruling BJP, was arrested under POTA for speaking in favour of the LTTE, a banned outfit, and put behind bars. Both those laws have since been repealed and the anti-LTTE tag now lies buried.

One of her first moves after assuming power was to arrest the 79-year-old Karunanidhi in the middle of the night, an act that shocked the nation

13 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 25

KAPOOR BALDEV/SYGMA/CORBIS

J Jayalalithaa with MG Ramachandran in a film

She has been ruthless and unforgiving in other ways too. Over the past two years, she removed 17 cabinet ministers. She brooks no opposition and her word on any subject is law. She is her own master. Her own advisor.

She has survived three years without any major scandal or corruption case. She has proven a shrewd populist as well. The man in the street gets all that he needs in the name of Amma’s welfare schemes. If there is any discontent, it is offset by her largesse—20 kg of rice free for each below-poverty-line family, mixie-grinders and fans, never mind if there is no power, and bicycles for school kids.

There are Amma canteens that sell idlis at one rupee apiece and curd rice at Rs 3 a plate. She knows the Tamil psyche, the belief in that old adage: ‘Be grateful as long as you live to the person who fed you.’ And in Tamil Nadu, it has been Amma, the universal mother.

In an extraordinary life, she has had many defining moments, but perhaps the most politically significant was her massive victory in the 2011 elections, proving all poll predictions wrong. It was a victory that relieved her of the burden of her fear of the future, of the need to challenge the might of Karunanidhi. Her entire second term had been consumed by the politics of vendetta. Now there was no need. The DMK was already a finished story.

She has always managed to live in the present, preferring to cross every bridge as it comes, with no time to look back. It has been a life of turmoil. She once described it thus during an election campaign: “I stand before you, having come [to this point] swimming in the river of fire.” It was a journey that hardened the once innocent and lonely child. It turned her cynical and arrogant. Cynicism and arrogance became her masks. Every fall was a challenge, every victory intoxicating.

Ah, she had almost forgotten about the sword hanging above

her head. Or perhaps she thought she would be forgiven her lapses because of her popularity among the Tamil masses and her political power. During her first tenure, her rule became a byword for corruption at all levels, and she was naïve enough to flaunt her wealth. It shocked the people of Tamil Nadu, and she was duly punished by her constituency, which handed her a crushing defeat. Though she was imprisoned by the Karunanidhi government, she was acquitted in almost all the cases filed against her. It won her sympathy. She hoped that she would be acquitted in the disproportionate wealth case as well. Her party men had thronged the streets outside the court in Bangalore, waiting to burst crackers to celebrate yet another victory.

When Amma emerged briefly to have a word with her trusted aide and now Chief Minister, O Panneerselvam, she showed little of the emotion that had appeared on her face in 1996 on the day she was taken to prison from her Poes Garden house. Then, she had looked at those who stood before her gates and said, “Naalai namathe!” ‘Tomorrow is ours.’ And her followers knew she would be back to lead them again. This time, Amma had no word of solace for them. “You cannot write her off,” many had said then, and some still say it, though far less convincingly.

Hers has been an extraordinary life. With her gone, Tamil Nadu politics will lose its colour and verve. n

The stories about Jayalalithaa are legendary: of her troubled childhood, her intelligence, her relationship with MGR, and her sense of loss after his death

26 open

Vaasanthi is a bilingual journalist and author who has written extensively on Tamil political culture.

She is the author of Cut Outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics 13 october 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

HEALTH

interpretations of a malady New studies are telling us a lot about the distribution of cancer in India but not much about the reasons for it by Madhavankutty Pillai

I

n 2011, Indians suddenly heard that there was a new malignancy on the loose called sari cancer. Some media reports went along the lines of ‘Beware women, wearing sari may cause cancer’, others said it was a threat to women over 40. The search of that strange cancer led me at the time to JJ Hospital in Mumbai, whose doctor, according to the newspapers, was the one who discovered it. The surgeon turned out to be highly mystified and slightly disturbed.

So far, he told me, all he had come across were three cases, and that too, spread over seven or eight years. He had not coined the term ‘sari cancer’ and did not like the panic that could be created. He had published a paper in a journal about two cases where rural women had waist dermatosis—roughening and eruption of the skin—that turned malignant. Often rural women screw the sari over one side of the waist tightly to make a bundle of sorts where they store things like money. The skin there turns rough, and in the three cases, he noticed that it had become cancerous.

“I reported it as waist cancer which occurred on the flank,” said the JJ doctor.

“Chronic irritation of any sort can lead to cancer.” He had never seen it in urban women because they don’t tolerate pain.

28 open

The chance of contracting this cancer was almost zero for most women.

There was nothing called sari cancer, but like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the term came into common usage.

All ailments spread fear, but cancer is at a different league in making the human imagination cower. In How We Die, a bestselling book on death, the author Sherwin Nuland titles the chapter on the disease ‘The Malevolence of Cancer’ because there is nothing redeeming about it. He describes how the cells that turn cancerous behave like immortal juvenile delinquents feeding off the body without doing anything that contribute to the system like normal cells. The only purpose of cancer cells is to destroy life, ‘raging against the society from which it sprang’.

Complicating it is the fact that cancer is not caused by any one factor; a virus can lead to it, so can compounds in plastic bottles that your baby is feeding from and so can a piece of cloth continually rubbing against a part of the body for years. The indigent and the rich both get it but because of different reasons like poor hygiene versus eating too much. Children can get it but it is mainly a disease of the elderly. We live with the knowledge that cancer is always in wait, readier to pounce with every passing year. We take

it for granted that cancer is increasing at an alarming rate in India. That might not necessarily be true.

At one of India’s leading cancer institutes, Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, Dr Rajesh Dikshit heads the epidemiology department and his job is to crunch the numbers that cancer research throws up. Dikshit headed the working group on cancer in the Million Death Study that was initiated by the Canadian-based Center for Global Health Research to study causes of death in India.

The Registrar General of India monitors births and deaths in 1.1 million homes and for the study the surveyors were asked to ask for signs and symptoms of those who died. In 2012, a paper, ‘Cancer mortality in India: a nationally representative survey’, co-authored by Dikshit, was published and gave an all India picture of the disease. For example, a 30-year-old Indian man had a 4.7 per cent chance of dying of cancer before the age of 70, and for a 30-year-old woman it was 4.4 per cent. The most common fatal cancers in men were oral, stomach and lung, and in women it was cervical, stomach and breast. “The main cause of cancer deaths is tobacco,” says Dikshit. It accounts for 40 per cent of all cancers.

There are things like this to be worried 13 october 2014

More than 1 million new cases of cancer diagnosed in India annually

Less than 30% of Indian patients with cancer survive 5 years or more

The cancer burden will almost double in the next 20 years to more than 1.7 million by 2035

Fatalities due to cancer will rise from 680,000 in 2012 to 1.2 million by 2035

about but there is also another curious element—the number of cancer patients in India is increasing but the rate itself at which people are getting the disease is not really changing. Dikshit was part of another paper ‘Cancer Incidence Trends in India’, published in the Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology this year. They looked at cancer incidence from six population based registries going all the way back to 1988 and also reviewed studies published over the period. The incidence rate is calculated by dividing new cancer numbers with the population. Because there is a difference in age patterns between countries (India is overwhelmingly young as against ageing Western nations) and cancer affects the elderly more, researchers also take into account age adjusted rates. Once that is done, it turns

out cancer is not rising in any substantial manner in India.

The paper noted, ‘No significant increases were observed by registries for all sites combined in either sex... even though there is a rise in the cancer burden—the number of new cancer cases in both sexes over the last two decades— corresponding incidence rates for all cancer sites combined may not have increased significantly.’

Dikshit’s boss, Dr RA Badwe, director of Tata Memorial Hospital, who is a co-author of the paper, says that all cancers put together still follow more or less a straight line. In rural India, for instance, cancer affects 40 to 50 people per 100,000 per year. In urban India, it is around 100 per 100,000 per year. There is a rural-to-urban shift in the overall

“We don’t need more data to implicate tobacco as the cause of 40 per cent of cancer related deaths” Deshakalyan CHOWDHURY/ Afp

Dr Mohandas Mallath, Department of Digestive Diseases, Tata Medical Centre, Kolkata

population, so the absolute numbers will increase. But the urban cancer rate has not risen from 100 per 100,000. The disease in its totality is almost constant, only society is changing.

Then there is the fact that cancerwise India is better off when compared to other countries. A paper, ‘The growing burden of cancer in India: epidemiology and social context’, published in The Lancet Oncology this April, noted, ‘GLOBOCAN estimates that about 14 million new cancer cases were diagnosed worldwide in 2012 and slightly more than 8 million cancer deaths occurred.

1 million of these new cases and nearly 700 000 of the deaths occurred in India, which is home to about 17% of the global population. Even in age-adjusted terms the recorded incidence for India is, at 94 per 100,000 people, only slightly more than half of the world average of 182 per 100,000, and about a third of that recorded in the more developed countries (268 per 100,000).’

So we are at half of what the world is suffering; even if the numbers double, we will only catch up with the mean.

A man waits outside a Cancer hospital in Kolkata 30 open

13 october 2014

Men

The most important trend in Indian cancer is breast cancer overtaking cervical cancer among women.

It’s like a seesaw: as breast cancer goes up, cervical cancer comes down

11.3%

11.3%

9.1%

7.7%

6.6%

Women

TOP FIVE CANCERS IN INDIA

21.5%

20.7%

6.4%

6%

4.8%

Lung

Breast

There is however a flip side to this— though Indians have less of a chance to get cancer, once contracted, they are in serious trouble. Says the paper, ‘The cancer mortality rate in India is high, at 68% of the annual incidence.’ For every 10 people who get diagnosed, seven die in India. Dr Mohandas Mallath of the Department of Digestive Diseases, Tata Medical Centre, Kolkata, and the first author of the paper, says, “The reason is simple. One million cancer patients a year [and] facilities to treat only 300,000.

In my estimate only about 10 per cent of Indians have the finances to take adequate modern treatment.”

T

he man responsible for a recent

Times of India headline ‘Cancer behind 70% deaths in India’s atomic energy hubs’ is the RTI activist Chetan Kothari. The first paragraph of the news report, based on his RTI application, says that cancer caused almost ‘70% of the 3,887 health-related deaths in the atomic energy hubs across the country over the last 20 years... In all, 2,600 succumbed to cancer in 19 centres between 1995 and 2014.’

Kothari had set out to search for suicide numbers and got cancer along with it. Curious about why a number of Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) scientists were killing themselves, he had asked the DAE how many employees

13 october 2014

Lip, oral cavity Stomach

Cervix Uteri

Colorectum Other pharynx

Colorectum

died on duty, what was the cause of death and how many were suicides. Different DAE centres gave him the information separately. When I spoke to him, he seemed reluctant to take ownership of the 70 per cent figure. “I compiled [the replies to the RTI application from different centres] and gave it to the reporter. How they calculated, I don’t know. It is 300, 400 pages,” he says.

Kothari’s ambivalence was partly because The Times of India had done a follow-up story two days later in which the Tata Memorial Hospital, which is under the Department of Atomic Energy, said that they had actually gone over the data and found the figure was 16 per cent and not 70 per cent. And even that could be on the higher side.

Dr Badwe has a simple explanation for the flawed interpretation of the data—this is a fallacy that comes out of extrapolating hospital numbers to the general population. The RTI application only got numbers for admissions that happened in DAE hospitals, he says.

Cancer, being a chronic disease, will witness patients being hospitalised at some point whereas other ailments might not. If someone dies of a heart attack at home, his death wouldn’t reflect in the data. “Those numbers are gone, so the denominator is chopped off completely,” he says. “That doesn’t mean cancer is more. For diabetes, nobody gets admitted, it is OPD treated. That is where selection

Ovary

Lip, oral cavity

bias comes in. Hospital based registries will give you a fallaciously high data.”

Cancer is recorded in India in two ways—hospital based registries and population based registries. The former is important for administrators. “They are required for a person who manages the hospital. If I have a lot more patients of oral cancer then I should have a lot more facilities for treatment of oral cancer. Oral cancer may not be the most common cancer in the population, but I need to know what is coming to my hospital. If a lot more oral cancer patients are coming and I put a lot more money in colon cancer, that money is wasted,” says Badwe. A truer overall picture of cancer may be got from population based registries. But there are issues here too. The Indian Council of Medical Research has 23 population based cancer registries in India, but an overwhelming majority are in urban areas. Dr Vinod Raina, director of medical oncology and hematology, Fortis Memorial Research Institute, led the Delhi Cancer Registry for five years.

He says, “Population based data are more reliable. These are collected from household to household. Most of the registries, 80 per cent, are urban.”

All the registries combined don’t even cover 10 per cent of India’s population.

Fortunately, while they throw up regional anomalies that puzzle researchers, they also lead to agreement on many things. open www.openthemagazine.com 31

Rupak De Chowdhuri/REUTERS

A nurse prepares a breast cancer patient for a gamma-ray test at the Cancer Centre Welfare Home and Research Institute in Kolkata

“Indians used to have early multiple pregnancies.

That was protecting women against breast cancer” Dr Vinod Raina, Director, Medical Oncology, Fortis Memorial Research Institute

Dr Mallath says, “Some cancers are more common in some parts of India and some are rare. For example biliary and gall bladder cancer are very common in the north and eastern India compared to the west and south. Stomach cancer is more common in south and north eastern India. Cervix cancer is very common in all parts low in good water supply and [with scarce] private toilets. However, tobacco related cancers are common everywhere.

We don’t need more data to implicate tobacco as the cause of 40 per cent of cancer related deaths.”

T

he most important trend in Indian

cancer is breast cancer overtaking cervical cancer among women. It’s like a seesaw: as breast goes up, cervical comes down. The latter is mainly contract32 open

ed through a virus and so something as simple as personal hygiene leads to its decrease. Among Muslim women, for example, cervical cancer is at a very low level because most men of that faith are circumcised and circumcision protects them from the HPV virus whose transfer to women can lead to cancer.

Dr Sonal Puri, of the Department of Community Medicine at the Government Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, did a study of all the patients that came to the hospital over six months and found that breast cancer accounted for 23 per cent of all cases, followed by cervical.

“Earlier, cervical was number one,” she says. She is now doing a three-year study which has surveyed 4,547 patients and it too reflects the same thing.

One of the reasons for this rise in breast cancer is urbanisation and lifestyle changes. Says Raina, “Indians used

to have large families and early marriage and early multiple pregnancies. That was protecting women against breast cancer. Now that our lifestyle has become Westernised, people have fewer childrenandtheygetmarriedlateandhave children late, breast cancer incidence is increasing.”

Urbanisation leads to a direct increase in some other cancers also. Badwe says, “One is breast cancer, second is ovarian cancer. Both these cancers rise remarkably. Lung cancer is on the rise in urban areas. So is large intestine cancer.

These are all diet related or smoking related cancers.”

A striking thing about cancer numbers in India is that we know a lot about their distribution, but very little about the why of it. For example, stomach cancer is more prevalent in the south, and while all sorts of explanations including the eating of pickles is hypothesised, no one is really sure why. Likewise for the high incidence of gall bladder cancer in the Gangetic belt. But Indian research in cancer is moving into etiology or causation only now, and slowly. Till the results come and more studies are done, cancer will continue to puzzle us. n 13 october 2014

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(From left to right) Pramod, Kiran, Priya and Kapil Kapoor of Roli Books, at a monument in Delhi’s Lodhi gardens

photos ashish sharma

PUBLISHING

TURNING A NEW PAGE

It’s transition time in Indian publishing families as a new generation faces a difficult market with daring ideas by RAJNI GEORGE

I

t is lunchtime, and a family

of four is sitting down to their meal—only there are an inordinate number of books lying beside and around them. The Kapoors of Delhi’s Roli Books manage seven minutes for lunch together daily, despite a busy schedule; editorial meetings are held every week, but the discussions, as one might imagine, spill over within the routine of this all-family publishing enterprise.

Debates over thalis? “We may fight over small things like fonts, etc,” says daughter Priya, laughing.

Family businesses, that all Indian phenomenon, are the pioneers and core survivors of a book industry facing challenges it has never faced before, in the form of dwindling buyers of physical books and increasing virtual readers.

Father and son, or, often, father and daughter, is the formula that has worked for these venerable publishing institutions, many of them for three generations.

Open spoke to a few of the firms who keep the formula in the family, about traditions both inherited and continued.

Most visitors to Delhi’s bookstore-filled Khan Market gravitate towards a greenand-white striped awning at some point during their expedition; an afternoon at Full Circle Publishing’s Café Turtle offers healthful vegetarian snacks as well as full access to their well-stocked shelves.

It all began with Dinanath Malhotra’s founding of Full Circle’s Hind Pocketbooks in 1958; he pioneered the paperback revolution in India with one rupee books, and working closely with Penguin UK’s own paperback revolutionary, Allen Lane. Next came Clarion Books, dealing in illustrated books; Global Business Press, with management titles; Saraswati Vihar, publishing a Hindi list; Mainstreet Books, specialising in memoirs and personal development; and, in 1999, Full Circle, the visible face of their business, publishing books dealing with the lucrative ‘mind-body-spirit’ terrain of spirituality and natural health exemplified by authors like Osho. “[Dinanath] took books into the interiors. He started a book club, and would send newsletters to jails. People would order books as a result,” two of his succes-

sors, Priyanka and Poonam Malhotra, tell us today. Director Priyanka Malhotra, 33, inherits her grandfather’s legacy alongside her mother Poonam and father Shekhar, who continued from his father after the foundation had been built in the fifties and sixties, after coming over from Lahore post-Partition. Dinanath, now 90, watches on as the business expands; today, Full Circle publishes 20 books a year and has a backlist of 1300 odd titles (1,000 in English), with a total of 6000 titles and international authors such as Alexander McCall Smith and Francois Sagan.

“I was a little bit of a reluctant publisher, because I wanted to follow a career in music,” says Shekhar. “I took some training with two or three publishers overseas, but most of my training was peculiar to our country and industry. I learnt on the job. I was about 25 when I began and there was a very senior Hindi proofreader who laughed at the way I spoke, and said ‘come, I’ll teach you’. He taught me all about typography and Hindi language.

We had a finance guy who was 80, he was really good too. We had a Hindi author

“We always sit together and take everyone’s opinion. Even if 3 against 4, invariably we come to a consensus” Pramod Kapoor, Roli Books

who was a great author and shair (poet).”

Pocket Books was doing around 80 books a year in Hindi at the time, and around 30 to 40 books in English.

Shekhar’s first books include Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust; Colleen McCollough’s The Thornbirds; authors like Khushwant Singh, RK Narayan, Nayantara Sahgal and Manohar Palgaonkar, in Hindi and English both.

They printed in large runs, 10,000 to 20,000 copies of English and Hindi books both; in Hindi he published writers like Amrita Preetam and Shivani, Gulshan Nanda (“in the millions”).

“Things were a little different. People took the time to talk to you,” he says. His Jor Bagh office is his small piece of quiet now, in a fast-moving industry. “Once

Upendra and Divya Arora of Natraj Books

these multinationals came into the country it was rather tough for us to hang on to these authors. The game changed in the 80s and 90s, Penguin came in ’88.

Retaining authors and good staff was a challenge, they were being poached.”

Shekhar’s daughter Priyanka, who also earned a BA in publishing at the London College of Publishing, worked briefly with Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and Oxford University Press for experience, before returning to join hands with the forbears of the family enterprise. She played the piano and was musical, like her father; he encouraged her to focus on music, as he hadn’t been able to. Priyanka, however, felt publishing was her ultimate passion, what she wanted to do.

“This was my primary aim. Publishing

is a profession, like being a lawyer or doctor,” she says. “We would go to the Shahdara office as kids (Priyanka has a sister who is not in publishing), sit with the DTP manuscripts, the illustrator. It was great fun. It is an adventure we go through together.”

“The bookshops began because none of the bookshops wanted to give our wellness books space; we took it upon ourselves to do it another way,” says Poonam, who ran the company with Shekhar till Priyanka joined in. “The reader wants to feel a certain way and we attend to that.”

Hindi publications are a substantial part of business, she explains. The 10 paperbacks published in Hindi for the first time in 1959 were the beginning of their umbrella of ventures, now including Urdu, Punjabi and Malayalam.

Transitions have been organic, says Shekhar; “We sat down and decided where we’d like to go, where Priyanka wanted to go. You have to keep innovating. The biggest challenge is going to be dealing with the book trade, retailers, wholesalers. Suddenly it’s become completely a buyer’s market.”

“We split the work project wise. The bookstores I manage. Children’s books are Priyanka’s project,” says Poonam.

There are three Café Turtles in the capital now, and parallel ventures like literary tours are planned. They now employ 24 freelancers and a subsidiary ‘family’ of about 100 employees, some employed for decades. “It is very important not to lose the spirit of what we are. We think of ourselves as one big family,” says Priyanka.

E

nter Meher Chand Colony Market’s

CMYK Bookstore, founded in 2009, and you are in the presence of Delhi’s homegrown ‘Maharaja’s Press’, as well as many illustrated titles from around the world, some of them rare or difficult to find. Roli Books, which earned the epithet because of their lavishly designed titles—many worthy of the tag ‘coffee table book’ and featuring the decadent delights of the royal class and the history lover, as in Amin Jaffer’s Made for the Maharajas last year—is another

“When we discuss books, her decision is final. I’m only worried about her facing up to a man’s world” Upendra Arora, Natraj Books

photos ashish sharma

(Left to right) Poonam, Priyanka and Shekhar Malhotra at a Full Circle Cafe Turtle outlet

“It is very important not to lose the spirit of what we are. We think of ourselves as one big family” Priyanka Malhotra, Full Circle Publishing longstanding family business.

Pramod’s maternal side is related to the Rupa Publications family, he tells me, and the connection with books began there; of course, extended families are part of every family story. “The day I was going to start another job, I got a telegram from Mr Bombhal offering me a job at Macmillan.

I took the job in publishing though it was giving me less money,” he remembers.

After two and a half years, he joined a company connected with McGraw Hill in Singapore, and they soon asked him to sell, and then print, their textbooks in India. They did about 15 to 20 textbooks but Pramod’s heart was in illustrated books. Founded in 1978 , out of a home in Sarvapriya Vihar, Roli became known for printed textbooks in colour, before breaking into art and photography titles.

Lotus was created in 1992 as an imprint for non-illustrated books focusing on current affairs, history and biography, and in 2004 India Ink was created to publish literary fiction by authors like Allen Sealy and Paro Anand; in 2009, Roli Junior began to publish children’s books.

Authors range from Lord Meghnad Desai, MJ Akbar and Rita Kapur Chisti to Raghu Rai and Pushpesh Pant, and exhibitions of Mughal paintings and archival 13 october 2014

findings often accompany releases.

Projects may begin with an image or the discovery of a rare map or illustration; they often focus on a city, often the capital, as in Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s New Delhi: Making of a Capital. Roli has links with noted illustrated book publishers like Phaedon and Thames and Hudson; they distribute 60 titles of the latter. Today, it publishes 30 plus books annually, with a backlist of a 1,000, out of their Greater Kailash-III office in M Block market.

“The difficult part was making these books, there weren’t enough photographers, etc. Once the book was done it was so ahead of time it succeeded on its own,” he says. “Our aspirations have moved as things have changed.” He has introduced a ‘limited edition’ concept, wherein just 200 odd copies are printed, new to India; Delhi 360 is sold at Rs 20,000 (earlier Rs 15,000), and is their third limited edition.

Is the e-book world a challege? “We all believe there is not much of a difference in the seriousness of content of e-books and physical books.”

Kapil, 33, who handles distribution as managing director, says the firm is entering into digital publishing and Print on Demand in a big way, while the

supply chain remains as much of a problem as ever. He graduated from LSE with a degree in Accounting and Finance, then was won over by a publishing degree at Columbia University, after which he worked as a graduate trainee job in London with Phaidon Press for two years, joining Roli Books in 2003.

Kiran came into her own role in the company after dealing with her empty nest, and she manages CMYK and Designwallas, the publishers’ stationery line, using her training in art. “I had no formal training in publishing. I started learning everything from packing, dispatch, marketing to accounts. For many years I looked after the most difficult job: credit control.” The next generation joins in, while also playing the role of innovators. Daughter Priya, 35, is editorial director and the originator of many titles focusing on style, history and food, often from a contemporary perspective. The young face of a series of events and initiatives, she worked for a year at The Indian Express, went to London to study at LSE; then stayed on at Routledge for a year or so. “Kapil suggested I try working here; he had already been back for two years by then,” she says, running through a list of forthcoming books. open www.openthemagazine.com 37

T

he pioneer of the family publishing

business—and indeed Indian publishing—is Rupa Books, now in its 78th year and publishing 50 odd books a year, among them titles selling 20,000 copies a year, out of the book trade’s warm, beating heart in Daryaganj. (Offices in Noida for printing and Yusuf Sarai for editorial are its satellites.) Today, Rupa’s backlist numbers around 2,000 titles.

“From the 70s, trade in Delhi had been growing rapidly,” says RK Mehra, who left Calcutta because of the Naxal problem to move to the capital to become of Indian publishing’s most well-known figures—and not just because his author Chetan Bhagat is said to call him daily. A large, perhaps messily growing titan that long dominated the field of distribution before it began to publish its own books, Rupa began by distributing Penguin, in the late 80s, and its distribution business continues on. “In those days, during the lunch hour we would sit and talk about

books; Srikanth Verma, Jug Suraiya, Gagan Gill. They would ask questions and I got interested.” Thus began his publishing enterprise. “I met Sunil Gavaskar and we published Sunny Days.

There was The Art of Cricket, Dilip Sardesai, Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare.”

By the end of the 80s, Rupa was reprinting, and the joint venture with Penguin began in 1991. “We worked well with our partners abroad to develop our relationship. Deepak Chopra, Sheldon, who would come personally to meet us, HRF Keating, Eric Newby, Salman Rushdie.”

Those were heady days for the publisher.

Though, of course, “When the foreign companies came in, 1997 onwards, book publishing took the automatic route.”

There were many competitors, though the pie was also bigger.

In 2012, the publisher’s son and firm’s managing director Kapish Mehra launched Aleph Book Company, Rupa’s more literary imprint, which David

raul irani

“At present, I’m looking forward, thinking ahead to our next list.”

Is it difficult to have four voices in the mix, and how is this transition working?

“The main transition is in terms of internal functioning. More day to day operations are taken care of by us, whereas my father takes on more of a Chairman role to guide the company,” says Kapil. There are differences of opinion, of course, Priya says; Kapil may like a book like S Hussain Zaidi’s From Dongri to Dubai, (which sold more than a lakh copies), but will back her up on a book she really likes which may be radically different.

And what does Dad say? “We sit together, take everyone’s opinion. This has the advantages and perils of democracy. Sometimes, three out of four can vote against something. Invariably we come to a consensus.” In the end, he adds a small aside: “I suppose I get a little weightage for my age.”

(From left to right) RK and Kapish Mehra of Rupa Publications, at their Noida office

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13 october 2014

Davidar, former head of Penguin Books Canada, heads. In 2013, Red Turtle was launched, for children’s books.

“How do you take a certain book to a certain part of the social pyramid?” says Kapish, a quick study at 31. “We know how to take certain books to the middle segment, and to target a specific readership. We are here to serve the readers.”

Kapish found Chetan Bhagat, out of banker oblivion, securing the company one of their biggest steady earners—a million copies per book—and the megastar of the contemporary Indian mass market.

Connecting with their audience is indeed Rupa’s specialty, and new authors are a big focus, both Mehras agree. Mehra once, unbelievably, issued an advertisement in the 90s looking for new writers under 40.

He lists Ranjit Hoskote, Tabish Khair, Anirudha Bahal and Upamanyu Chatterjee as Rupa debuts.

The e-book market is the bogey all publishers are dealing with, and Kapish

have forty years of experience combined, and in Kapish the exuberance of youth.

Publicity and distribution are gamechanging, but we are internally strong.”

A

mong the most inventive of smaller publishers is Natraj Books, which has found a regular base of consumers in the army. The publishing house specialises in environmental books by authors ranging from Vandana Shiva to Jim Corbett, and in countless, often esoteric defence titles, making up a backlist of 1,000. Many of them are, remarkably, a component of ‘must reads’ the army stipulates as ‘golden’ books; guaranteed long-term revenue.

“In the army, a hundred golden books must have been read at a certain stage in your career. Luckily for us these books are ours,” says Upendra Arora, who lives in Dehradun, where he runs their retail outlet, The Green Bookshop, where favourite authors like Ruskin Bond, who

shop, after a division in the family. Natraj Books’s publishing began in 1967 (distribution began in 1965).

Early hits like Himalayan Blunder by Mike Dalby, Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War, classics by Churchill and Eisenhower and many others are regular hits with the soldiers, retired military men and history lovers who order them.

“They don’t go online, they order directly. Even officers who have shed their uniform still order from us, for 29 years I have kept in touch with some of them,” says Arora. “We give credit easily as we know everyone so well. The confidence of our customers—we’ve managed to survive because of their loyalty.”

This company is also diversifying.

Etch, an imprint featuring general nonfiction titles for all ages, focuses on design, and there is a coffee table book on Mahatma Gandhi as well as a travelogue from the Raj era. Divya tells of a book she conceptualised, featuring prominent

“We have 40 years of experience combined, and in Kapish the exuberance of youth” has his strategy. “There are those who will read e-books as well as the physical books,” he says. “And those who only read e-books. The key is to have the first market covered. The NRI audience is to be considered here. I only wish people would read more. There are unique challenges; how do you target the reader who only wants to read on his mobile?”

“In other businesses, there is the thrill of entrepreneurship,” says Mehra.

“Publishing is the icing on the cake. It’s a numbers game. The spirit of the gentleman’s trade has faded. But one is able to reach out to a huge audience.” He gives the example of Kalam’s book, which sold 100,000 within a year, Kishore Biyani’s, which sold 200,000, Natwar Singh’s memoir, which they say, crossed 62,000 within a month.

Father and son seem to run a tight ship, as they deal with transitions within and without. “I don’t interfere with regular work at the company, I make suggestions,” says Mehra. Do we detect a twinkle? He seems as vital and involved as ever. Serious, he continues, talking about his broad parameters of business. “We 13 october 2014

dedicated a book to him, visit. Almost all of the extended family, in fact, are veterans in the book trade, running bookshops in their respective cities all over north India, Arora’s daughter, managing director Divya Arora, tells me. “My uncles, my cousins, all of us have grown up around bookstores,” she says, the mistress of all at their Shahpurjat office at 37.

Arora’s father had a bookstore, though it all began before him, with his grandfather, who was the head of defence accounts when he began a new project, in 1925. “British officers were voracious readers and wanted books from England; WH Smith proposed he started his own shop, and they said they would cater to his needs.” In Ferozepur—Arora’s birthplace and the family home after they came over from Pakistan post Partition—20 to 25 people were recruited and put through the paces. By the 40s, the Indira Gandhi National Academy, out of which 250 officers graduate every year, Arora describes, had become regular customers.

In 1955, Arora moved to Dehradun and told him he had found a place for a bookshop there; in 1965 he began his own

RK Mehra, Rupa Publications

personalities and their dogs. And the company is also diversifying into children’s books; India: An Alphabet Ride is a colourful, glossy illustrated title priced at Rs 699, new domain for Natraj.

Divya, an LSE graduate who was selected by the Indian School of Business for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurship Programme last year, is having to bridge a lot of gaps as she inherits the new front of the book trade.

“He’s the boss,” she says of her father.

“Though I have to make the decisions here. I’m still learning.”

“In Divya we get the technical knowhow, as well as the personal,” says Arora.

“The book trade is not a soft trade, it is full of cutting edge, intellectual people. And all said and done, it is still a man’s world.

I am worried about those challenges she will face. When we discuss books, her decision is final. If I’m doubtful, if she still wants to go ahead, I tell her go ahead.

She’s not afraid of unknown waters,” says Arora. “After all, it’s her show now.”

The common theme of many a family business, transitioning to book trade 3.0 in this fast-moving industry. n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

n a i d n I w e N The sho

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B E L E C

ngly i h s e refr n real d n a ed critics i r i w high ans and MAR , e r e t th ngage f AINA KU u o s ‌ i dy to e y SUN rea time B

T

ill about a month ago, Alia Bhatt

was the up-and-coming star, with a handful of movies in which she’d displayed some decent acting chops to go with her lively screen presence. Then came an online video that changed her fortunes more effectively than two consecutive successful films had done for her. Alia Bhatt: Genius of the Year, created by the comedy outfit All India Bakchod (AIB), was seen and shared by everyone, even by those who may not have seen her movies. It created a whole lot of brouhaha, yet it’s 13 october 2014

obvious why that happened. It was a genuine instance of a celebrity acting beyond her prescribed limits. Made with no clear purpose of publicity or promotion, Alia’s video reached out and talked directly to her baiters who had created an internet meme out of her supposed dumbness. The online clip made its way to news channels that ran it endlessly in entertainment slots, and newspapers soon followed by writing lengthy odes to her coolness. The title of the video was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Alia Bhatt did turn out to be ‘the genius of the

year’. The exercise did for her image what would have otherwise taken months, probably years, with a team of publicists working full time to ensure that she’s written about and seen in all the places that matter, all of it neatly tied in and timed with the release of her movies.

With that one stroke, Alia bypassed ‘the model of very carefully managed, very carefully orchestrated celebrity image’ as described by academic Alice Marwick in her book Status Update: Celebrity and Attention in Web 2.0, to one in which ‘you know it’s supposedly more open www.openthemagazine.com 43

authentic’. She became an entrant to the league of ‘the new celebrity’—who, as Marwick writes, is someone who understands that ‘celebrity is something you do rather than something you are’.

The new celebrity is actor Ranveer Singh, whose appearances outside of his movies are a lot more captivating than on screen. He is the guy who can dance in a costume in the middle of a busy street in Mumbai (the viral video of the ‘Bang Bang dare’ he took on Hrithik Roshan’s prodding last week, which is in itself a cleverly-disguised publicity stunt) and get away with it. He used it to suffuse his aura of an actor who is not defined solely by his work, who makes news for being who he is—interesting, funny and irreverent. He is the celebrity who will not wait for fame to be bestowed on him; instead, he will create a self that will be recognisable to all. He’s the guy who will endorse a condom brand and yet make the endorsement all about himself. ‘Do the Rex’, the catchy anthem for Durex that he penned, rapped and danced joyously to, was a departure from the tradition of celebrity endorsements where celebrities always appear oddly grafted to the product, no matter what they sell, chips, cars or watches.

The new celebrity is Deepika Padukone who opened up a discussion on the perception of women in media and in society when she vented her anger at India’s biggest news daily for something that is seemingly so routine, that people could not understand her anger.

‘Since when did focussing on the body parts of an actor become objectionable?’ asked some; ‘How is it that no other actor has ever raised this before?’ asked others. Deepika took a stand, which is uncommon for young female actors, and came across as someone with a mind who can speak up on an issue that has currency, the rights of women in our society. She will take this newly empowered image up one step in a soonto-be-released video on women’s rights.

I

t’s a tenuous concept. How is the new celebrity different from, say, the erstwhile celebrity? It is someone who

How is the new celebrity different from, say, the erstwhile celebrity? It is someone who understands that the age of Greta Garbo is long gone, says photographer Atul Kasbekar

understands that the age of Greta Garbo is long gone, says photographer Atul Kasbekar who runs Bling Entertainment Solutions, a celebrity management company whose roster of celebrities include sports, fashion and film stars. Garbo had famously stated, “I want to be left alone”, turning reclusiveness into an art form, never appearing in public, never interacting with fans, never giving interviews. These days, the relationship between celebrities and the public is defined by extreme parasocial (a sociological term for one-sided relationships in which one party knows a lot about the other but the other does not) interactions. We need to feel like we know our celebrities, be involved in their everyday lives, to know exactly what they think about issues that consume us. We need to consume them as much as we consume everything else, from television shows and movies to listicles and cat memes.

“Nobody gives a damn anymore,” says Kasbekar. “It’s simple. I must find you an intriguing prospect outside of your movies. I must find you interesting and relevant.

You need to turn me on, or I have a lot else to entertain me.” It makes the job of the celebrity manager that much more challenging.

Kasbekar’s agency handles Farhan Akhtar’s campaign —

another celebrity attempt to engage society on a hot button issue—MARD (Men Against Rape and Discrimination), which aims to sensitise men and create awareness of women’s rights (although its formulation on what a ‘Real Man’ should be is tricky in itself). He recently released an anthem for women’s emancipation, Chhulein Aasman (literally, ‘Let’s touch the sky’), with musicians Salim Sulaiman, which has been receiving a fair amount of airtime on television and radio.

Not that any of this is extraordinarily inventive. Indian celebrities (in India celebs are severely limited to the world of movies) are merely following their Western counterparts. A survey that appeared in Variety in September found that the youth in America is more enamoured of social media stars than mainstream celebrities. The survey gets to the heart of the Justin Bieber celebrity conundrum; the singer’s fan base values qualities like ‘relatable’, ‘accessible’ and ‘communicative’ over ‘talent’. It makes him one of the biggest—and certainly the most talentless—celebrities in the world.

Social media has forced mainstream celebrities to adapt to this new idiom and digital language. It is not enough to be on social media websites to plug your work and put up endless streams of pictures, the way a lot of film stars in India tend to. On Web 2.0,

the public demands constant engagement and entertainment from celebrities.

There was a time when it was possible to view celebrities only through the lens of the media; now the media is everywhere and people are the media. They are the ones who share and disseminate information. As media has changed, so have celebrities. Rohan Joshi, Mumbaibased stand-up comic and member of AIB, says that celebrities can no longer fake it.

“As a celebrity, you can no longer be manufactured by your publicists, or control your image with generic bytes. Everyone can and does poke holes at celebrities. For example, there was no point in Alia pretending to be a rocket scientist when she’s not. So, she just owned up to who she is and had fun with it.”

A

IB seems to run a regular celebrity

image makeover project. Their advertisement could read as follows: ‘Need to appear cool, ironic and new to appeal to a wide and fickle audience? Collaborate with us.’ One of AIB’s first popular celebrity collaborations was a bitingly sarcastic video with Kalki Koechlin on rape and the culture of blaming women.

It tapped into Koechlin’s image of freespirited but politically conscious celebrity. Koechlin, who does offbeat films from time to time (her next, Margarita, with a Straw, is gathering rave reviews at festivals), is someone whose celebrity comes not so much

Farhan Akhtar’s campaign MARD is yet another celebrity attempt to engage society on a hot button issue—aiming to sensitise men and create awareness of women’s rights

from her movies as all the other things she does. Earlier this year, she transfixed fans with a video of a performance on Women’s Day, a poetic rumination on being a woman.

Last year, after the Supreme Court upheld homosexuality as a criminal offence, AIB went to Imran Khan, who had already proven himself an early adapter to the new form of celebrity when he campaigned against Maharashtra’s decision to raise the legal drinking age to 25 about a year earlier. In AIB’s video on Section 377, Imran Khan with his usual earnestness laced with irony, answers questions put to him by homophobic people, such as, ‘Why can’t gay people be un-gay?’ and ‘Is it true that AIDS was invented by gay people?’ What is the purpose of such a video? It gives the comics, who are purveyors of opinions in the new world order material that is sure to be viral, it burnishes the image of the cool celeb who speaks for a cause, and if a few people can take home the message along the way, then it works out to be an excellent bargain.

“The conventions of celebrityhood are different from what they were,” says Prabhat Choudhary of Spice PR in Mumbai, which handles publicity for Aamir Khan and Yash Raj Productions.

“At one time, all interactions with celebrities would have a reason and an occasion. Now, with the younger lot of actors, the grammar of engagement is changing, it’s instinctive and natural. As the celebrity culture evolves in India, we will see more celebrities who stand up for something, who represent values that are identifiable. If you do not modify yourself to the new rules, you will be lost in a crowd.”

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he

successful

new

celebrity is the one who is the most social of all celebrities, one who can mine the power of social networks and new media to project an alternative image. This is often confused with a mere presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Instagram.

The case of Priyanka

Chopra shows us the difference. Priyanka Chopra was one of the earliest stars to take to Twitter, and is hyperactive on it.

With her large number of followers, she regularly makes it to the lists of ‘the most influential stars’ on the site. Priyanka has never once used Twitter for anything other than to promote her films and her music albums. The one time she decided to veer off script was when she agreed for a live chat on Reddit that backfired on her. The ‘ask me anything’ format of the chat soon turned into her worst nightmare. She was asked discomfiting questions like, why she chooses to promote fairness creams, if beauty pageants are a bad influence on society and her frequent use of Auto-Tune to enhance her singing.

Priyanka quickly exited the chat without answering any of these. A case of don’t enter the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat.

As the new celebrity has evolved, the relationship between celebrities and the public has dramatically altered. It is only in the digital world, with its anonymity and sense of equality, that people can pose the sort of hard-hitting questions that Priyanka Chopra was faced with in her Reddit chat. In this space, the heroworship that film stars (like Rajinikanth and Bachchan and to an extent the Khans) have traditionally inspired in India is a thing of the past.

Gul Panag, the actor and politician who has built her image as the thinking person’s celebrity largely on social media where she has a spirited take on everything, says that she is a beneficiary of the new rules, but that it works in mysterious ways. “I was someone who existed in the alternative fringes of the film world, but social media made me mainstream.

But, what it also does is that it devalues mainstream celebrities. People don’t take autographs anymore, they take selfies with celebs at airports and restaurants which they share on social media. We know everything to know about celebrities. People will never take celebrities as seriously as they did 10 years ago.”

A common theory about celebrities is that they are empty spaces or screens on which we project our fantasies. If we now have celebrities selling condoms, dancing on crowded streets, spoofing themselves in comedy videos and standing up for women’s rights, it is perhaps exactly what we desire. n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

music

The measure of a man

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o p e n s pa c e

Shahid Kapoor Arjun Rampal

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Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya Deliver Us From Evil

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cinema review

Nikon D750 Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra Sony Xperia T3

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tech & style

Female dominance Putting an end to rabies deaths Less sleep makes teens moody

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science

Necropolis by Avtar Singh Fire under ash by Saskya Jain Indians at Herod’s gate: A Jerusalem tale by Navtej Sarna The death of Sheherzad

by Intizar Husain Picture Abhi Baaki Hai: Bollywood as a Guide to Modern India

by Rachel Dwyer

books

The legacy of Begum Akhtar

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Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

a rt

mindspace Nalini Malani

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Painting the Profane The art of Nalini Malani 48

ART

Palette of the Profane Nalini Malani enters the third and final chapter of her year-long retrospective in India, continuing to resist tags and seek out the invisible RAJNI GEORGE

T

he first time I encountered artist Nalini Malani was

last year at an exhibition at Vadehra Gallery in New Delhi which included her The Tables Have Turned, a hypnotic, 20 minute-long giant prayer wheel of a shadow play installation using 30 turn tables with reverse painted cylinders and a parallel soundtrack which kept us there for an hour. She was making her way down the stairs, we were wondering aloud where her work was. She smiled, and kept walking, slipping away before we’d grasped who she was. A favourite trick of the woman who won’t be pinned down.

Four women, significant artists of their generation, began to send postcards to each other in the 70s, with an idea of a movement in their heads, and one of them was Malani, today one of India and indeed Asia’s leading contemporary artists. She who dreamt of a movement of 4,000 women. The others, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh, laughed at her and asked her if they might try for four, at least. This kind of big, bad itch is particular to Malani.

“I want to make the invisible visible,” she says. “My concern

is with bringing back the profane.”

Creating warm, messy, abundant works of ‘spatial art’, Malani has quietly electrified viewers around the world for more than four decades. A small, elegant woman, hair cut short, neat black handbag crossed over her chest so it hangs practically in front, she looks like any of the people who might come to see her work as she stands by it. Then she speaks, and turns into the powerful artist who has authored titanic works and shows around the world; last month, her largest public presentation at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where she had been selected to create a special commemoration project for World War One and used In Search of Vanished Blood in a new form, over 10,000 square feet; Cassandra at the Galerie Lelong in Paris (2009), Listening to the Shades at the Arario Gallery in New York City (2008) and major shows at the Walsh Gallery in Chicago and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Last month, she was awarded the St Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award, and she has just had a show at the Engadin Museum in the Swiss Alps.

I want to make the invisible visible. My concern is with bringing back the profane raul irani

Now, the 68-year-old artist is launching the third chapter of Today, of course, Malani’s works are widely exhibited in her major retrospective, You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, a those same spaces, often bought by museums; after starting year-long show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) out as a painter, she became a new media artist in the 90s, curated by Roobina Karode, which looks at her work from entering the scene with works like Remembering Toba Tek 1969 to 2014 for the first time in India (retrospectives have run Singh, which speaks of Partition and is seen as one of the most in other countries). significant Indian art works of the late 90s. How does she “A red line goes through the work, from the age of 18 to 26 measure her success? “As long as I can get along,” she says. “I till today,” says Malani. “It’s important to have retrospectives make whatever I need. More money ends up calling for more while the artist is around. And it’s very important to me to infrastructure, work and people involved with your work. I’m show in India.The response here is crucial, this is a knowledge- a loner, I can’t have people around me all the time.” able audience.” It is our reality, ultimately, that she is dealing with. More than four decades of practice have led to this hat has mesmerised viewers for so long? “She took moment, after which, she tells me, she will be resting for a few risks. At one point, she abandoned oil paintings to months and won’t be showing for a couple of years. (A project do watercolours which she sold for Rs 700,” recalls Ashish is in the works, hinted at but not to be talked about yet.)

Rajadhyaksha, senior fellow at the Centre for Study of Culture How did it all begin? At school, Malani was influenced by and Society and a fond admirer and friend. He still has one, her botany teachers to look at systems of nature; the circulahe tells us, in a conversation with the artist organised for the tion of blood for example, and organs, which are embellished launch of Acid’s third chapter. Therein, the two begin to talk of in her work even today. She began to want to study art the old days, of the 90s, after the Wall came down in Germany properly, and enrolled at the Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy (or JJ) and in India, in a different way; of 1992 in Bombay and how School of Art in Mumbai. “What was a woman artist in those friends like Rajadhyaksha went missing for a day (“For one days?” she asks. “You could do it before getting married.

Women joined art schools only if the family allowed the girl to day, there was no Ashish,” says Malani); of the beginning of a presence for women in the world of come out. ” Amrita Sher-Gil was mostly art. “There were shows where women abroad, in those days, as was Nasreen didn’t talk; where we went on the trains Mohamedi. Malani was the only girl in her Amrita Sher-Gil Bombay with our babies on our hips. class, at her time. “Fun?” I ask. She laughs. was mostly abroad, in We could be our own audience,” says Malani’s family had come from Hyderabad, Malani. She remembers how she first Sindh, where they were landed gentry, and in those days, struck out. “I had to avert my eyes to lost a lot in the crossing. “What was imporas was Nasreen the hierarchy of the street. How to tant was what was between your ears,” says draw them without being voyeuristic, Malani. “Getting a diploma at art school Mohamedi. Malani without a camera or sitting and sketchwas vocational training; in the same way a was the only girl in ing them? I used memory, I would put plumber got experience on the job. But my down the figure and get the fall of the family was not convinced till Cowasji saw my her class, at figure in this way. When you are drawwork. He then took a bunch of books out and her time ing something and looking at it, you gave them to me. In the 60s, there weren’t don’t get that.” many books like that available.” She lists “People said, ‘When are you going to other mentors like the JJ Dean Palsikar. stop experimenting, when are you going to make art?’”

Importantly, Malani had a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial In City of Desires, a film depicts the wall-drawing Malani Institute, the heart of the Mumbai cultural scene, where, of an created in 1992 for Mumbai’s Gallery Chemould, erased after evening, Ravi Shankar might be seen doing his riyaz, the 15 days as ‘ephemeral’ work created to protest the neglected Jhaveri sisters might be dancing, Alkazi would be staging his and disappearing murals of the akhadas of Nathdwara. What plays on the lawns. A fertile crucible. “I’d been as a girl, and asked the trustees if I could have a studio,” Malani remembers. was crucial was the memory of the work, says Malani; of course some of her strongest memories, of Partition’s ravages, “I got mine because B Prabha and her husband had eloped. I are the most indelible, while the most invisible. Lying in a shared it with an artist working with batik.” glass case which seems almost besides the point is a Malani also got involved with the Alkazi theatre unit. “The concurrent display of the Hieroglyph series (1991), 30 notelanguage was very strongly Hindi, Satyadev Dube was books full of gorgeous Malani-esque swirls of form and colour involved.” Gaitonde, Tyabji, all of the greats would jump into around Mumbai’s Lonar Chawl, where she worked then; taxis and go together to view cinema from Europe; films with monoprints which were photocopied and then rendered in links to the Eastern bloc, Cuba, the Czech Republic. “That was watercolour, charcoal. Malani kept a photocopy machine to what I cut my teeth on,” says Malani.

At JJ, she won a scholarship to go to Paris, where she received ‘clone’ work on archive paper she tells me, and to reproduce it for parallel exhibitions.This reproducible beauty is a focal her first sense of international perspective; being an Indian, aspect of the contagion of her work. I tell her I love the way and an Indian artist, in Europe was a difficult business. “It’s photocopies smell, redolent of chemical and ink. “You know very fashionable now, but then, who was I, in France?”

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Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Transgressions II features an eightminute loop accompanied by videos projected onto three reverse painted mylar cylinders

that stuff gets you high,” she laughs.

In the adjoining room, reverse printed mylar cylinders are literal and metaphorical lanterns, whirling in a theatre of shadow on the wall as a narrative runs, for eight minutes.

‘Mamma take me to English school’ says a little girl’s voice on the loop in Transgressions II; the voice turns into a litany of ‘the best of times’ when ‘nimbu pani cost only 1 rupee, vada pav 1.49’, referring to an advertisement for international telecommunications company Orange, which compared talktime to nimbu pani in terms of purchasing power parity. The ridiculousness of choice against the backdrop of choicelessness echoes through the multi-sensory installation. Three videos projected onto the cylinders demonstrate a typically plural chorus of perspective.

A drawing of Medea and another one which will be erased in a performance, shortly, take up a spot on one of each of the walls that frame the room; these are part of a series of ‘global parasites’ which comment on the new kind of indentured labour that props up the global economy. Next door, in Twice Upon a Time, a reverse painted 11 panel series portrays a series of men, women, creatures and wombs, ending with a quote from feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, from Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous. Patriarchy and the need for a balance of male -female perspective is the obvious focus.

The three part structure of the show was intended to draw out attention to Malani’s work and bring viewers in at repeated instances. “This show is meant to be for the year.

People will come back for each chapter, is the idea.” She recounts what she says is her most delightful experience; being recognised by two admirers while out at a mall.

H

ow did one of her trademark techniques come about?

Erotic paintings which were sold like naughty postcards captivated her, and this became the beginning of a huge mural. With Vivan Sundaram and Bhupen Khakar, she began to experiment with material. “Let’s do glass paintings, we

13 october 2014

decided. They will work like a mirror.” Thus came reverse painted mylar cylinders. The glass paintings were influenced

by KG Subramanyan. “Using glass we could do acrylics as well.

I started with these erotic pictures that were made sacred by the Tanjore painters; bringing back the profane.”

Do tags like these and that of ‘feminist’, often applied to her work, bother her? “Tags can mean that something is put away in a drawer,” says Malani. “There should be more male feminists. Patriarchy ties down men too, in many ways, so they are forced to conform to expectations of performance in everything including the sexual. Sufferance goes on. These are often the root of attacks at home, at the workplace. It’s about time concerns were voiced by men.”

As for erotica, the playing field seems level. “It can be erotic even to look at a landscape. Eroticism and sensuousness can be found there. Sculpture, the way forms are drawn—half man, half woman, lingams. We have to bring these principles together, to make a balance.”

Psychoanalysis has been an important influence as young Malani researched and began to weave her themes together.

Stories, plays and Hindu myths combined to shape her narratives, in what she calls a “conduit”. This can be seen today, as she connects figures like Medea and Sita.

“One grows older and one grows wiser, one hopes. You start to research other work which enriches your own. I’m not a theoretician myself, but my interests are broad.” She laments genetically modified foods and speaks of the BT brinjal, which aims to homogenise the wonderfully various vegetable.

Meanwhile, she plans a retrospective for that original group of four. “Our daughters—we all have daughters—have been asking us to do one,” she says. Myth and morbidity; disappearing and new traditions; strange, disembodied voices against the visceral: enough to explode any box, any bag. n Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag – Chapter III runs till 30 November at the KNMA, 145 DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi open www.openthemagazine.com 51

music The Voice That Broke Hearts The ghazals of Begum Akhtar retain their res

M

y sister USed to narrate an

amusing incident from her hostel days at the medical college. As she and her fellow young doctors broke the tedium of mindless swotting by listening to music from her rackety old tape recorder, one girl who was from the South and knew little Urdu would often ask her to play that song where ‘the woman is having uncontrolled vomiting and the medicines are not working’. She was referring to Begum Akhtar’s Ulti ho gayin sab tadbeerein/Kuchh na dawa ne kaam kiya…

Looking back, I see this incident as illustrative: more than the truism that music builds bridges across languages and cultures, it shows how different people at different times have ‘taken’ different things from Begum Akhtar’s music. A sociologist might view her journey from Akhtari Bai Faizabadi to Begum Akhtar as an Indian woman’s search for respectability and the casting away of her former life as a courtesan who sang for the pleasure of her wealthy patrons and refashioning her life after marriage into a sharif khandan. For present-day musicians, especially women performers, there are valuable lessons in walking the tightrope of being a woman and being a concert performer. Begum Akhtar’s severely elegant saris, the hair pulled back in a bun, the shunning of flashy jewellery save the diamond that twinkled in her nose, the instant rapport with her audience through the constant eye contact and the flashing of a somewhat toothsome smile made her startlingly different from women musicians who had come from the courtesan tradition, and was therefore reckoned to be a worthy example to emulate. For lovers of Urdu poetry, there is her eclectic choice from the vast reservoir of both contemporary and classical poetry by established as well as lesser-known poets. For the musician, there is of course her inimitable voice and her training in classical music that infused every note of her preferred choice of the light-classical genres such as the ghazal, the dadra and the thumri

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with the rigour of tradition. And for the music historian and biographer, there is her life—with its rich lode of gossip and innuendo, fame and tragedy, truths and half-truths.

Like Mehndi Hasan, who came after her and took the ghazal to the masses, Begum Akhtar chose simple lyrics, enunciated each word with a bell-like clarity and built a repertoire that was a seamless blend of the classic and the contemporary, the pastoral and the urbane. If she sang Woh jo hum mein tum mein qarar thha/Tumhe yaad ho ke na yaad ho by Momin Khan Momin or Ibn-e Mariam hua kare koi/Mere dukh kii dawa kare koi by Ghalib, she is also remembered for Ai mohabbat tere anjaam pe rona aaya by Shakeel Badayuni, Deewana banana hai to deewana bana de

by Behzaad Lucknowi or Sakht hai ishq ki raahguzar by Shamim Jaipuri—who were lesser-known poets till they were immortalised by her voice.

If she brought a rare lilt to her ragabased compositions of the ghazal, it was in the thumri that Begum Akhtar infused a new life. Wrenching it from its moorings in the salons of the rasik rajas and talukdars of Upper India, she brought it to the public stage as a thing of tremulous beauty and throbbing pain. Popularised by the nawabs of Awadh and sung for gramophone companies by pioneering artistes such as Gauhar Jan, the thumri as well as the dadra, hori, kajri dwell on the theme of viraha and rely on largely pastoral images to convey the sense of unsated longing for the beloved. While Begum Akhtar sang several classical compositions such as Laagi beriya piya ke aawan kii, or Koyaliya mat kar pukaar, karejwa laage kataar, she can be credited with enlarging the range with new ones written by new writers such as Dekha dekhi balam hui jaaye by Sudarshan Faakir.

No mention of Begum Akhtar’s music is considered complete without some reference to the many apocryphal stories about her less-than-orthodox choice of poetry and her generosity towards unknown poets. A young Kaifi

Azmi wrote Itna toh zindagi mein kisi ki khalal pade/Hansne se ho sukun na rone se kal pade and recited it at a mushaira when he was all of 11 years old. Begum Akhtar set the ghazal to music and turned it into a nationwide phenomenon in pre-partition India. But the best of the many mythic stories about her is 13 october 2014

onance even today. A tribute on her birth centenary

Rakhshanda Jalil

express archive

Begum Akhtar

the one about Sudarshan Faakir. During a visit to the Jallundhar radio station of All India Radio, the poet, who then worked at the radio station, offered her his ghazal; she not only accepted it but promptly set it to music and sang it within a few hours.

The ghazal was: 13 october 2014

Kuchh toh duniya ki inayat ne dil tod diya Aur kuch talkhiye haalat ne dil tod diya Hum to samjhe ke barsaat mein barse ki sharab Aaayi barsaat toh barsaat ne dil tod diya The characteristic catch in Begum Akhtar’s voice—as much as Sudarshan

Faakir’s verses—made this ghazal an anthem of heartbreak and despair decades after it was first recorded. n Rakhshanda Jalil writes on literature, culture and society. She is the author of A Rebel & Her Cause: The Life & Work of Rashid Jahan (Women Unlimited, 2014) open www.openthemagazine.com 53

books Tales from Sin City Two Delhi debuts take on questions of ownership and identity in the city that is never fully awake. One does better than the other Shahnaz Habib

W

Fire Under Ash

necropolis

Saskya Jain

Avtar Singh

Random House India | 284 pages | Rs 499

HarperCollins India | 276 pages | Rs 499

hom does Delhi belong to? The question is as old as the city itself. Does it belong to the politicians, to the industrialists who make deals over squash or golf, or to the city’s notoriously corrupt policemen? Does it belong to the cool kids who practically grew up in the city’s nightclubs, or to the ones who arrive in the city by train, VIP suitcases and the dream of entire families in tow?

Saskya Jain’s Fire Under Ash is peopled with all these usual suspects. The plot twists itself fast and furiously into a predictable love triangle: pretty girl, rich boy, poor boy. The latter, Lallan, is a history student from Patna, which is used as shorthand for the provinces, or, more accurately, what Delhi thinks of the provinces. The rich suitor is Ashwin, son of a Delhi industrialist; Mallika is from Jaipur, making her sympathetic to the Patna boy’s rawness (though somehow devoid of any naivety herself.) There are cars, nightclubs, bratty friends, the sister who works in downtown Manhattan,

Saskya Jain

the socialite mother planning her anniversary garden party on her way back from the hospital with her injured son.

The author tries to make Ashwin disaffected and charming, an insider-outsider in this wealthy milieu, but rarely succeeds. The novel begins with his grand bid for independence. Instead of going to Columbia University, he chooses to go to a local college and moves out of his parent’s house—to his parent’s guesthouse, a ‘shed’ on the edge of their compound. More rebellions follow and sympathies start to veer towards the beleaguered parents; the arc of Ashwin’s transformation ends with a melodramatic speech delivered at his parents’ anniversary party. Surely a young man’s quest for self-determination does not have to be this banal.

What is a little less predictable, a little more stimulating, is the unusual friendship that forms between Lallan, Ashwin and Mallika. Not realising that he is in love with her, Mallika begins to harbour an affection for Lallan, who identifies it as a form of tolerance: ‘He knew that when Mallika looked at him, he saw a fleeting recognition, an acknowledgement, of their shared background that lay beyond Delhi... he knew that this feeling was rooted in their shared secret: she repulsed herself, too, just like he repulsed himself.’ Though Lallan and Ashwin are rivals in love, they bond, if a mixture of condescension and curiosity can be called that. The novel finally comes into its own when this bond gets tested; a hedonistic party is busted by cops, Lallan and Ashwin end up in jail, the latter is rescued by his rich dad, Lallan is stuck inside.

Briefly, we get a glimpse of the author’s fierceness and empathy as Lallan veers maniacally from hope to misery; Delhi will be nothing more to him than the city on his Azad College diploma, he resolves. By the time Ashwin’s driver comes with the money that will rescue Lallan and send him hurtling back to Patna, it is too late, he has suffered too much.

The epiphany that follows feels earned: ‘There was no such thing as a life-changing event. There was merely a culmination of something that had taken root and gained momentum over a period of time, the long, flickering trigger that ultimately set off the explosive.’ Several pages later, Ashwin reaches a similar conclusion. At his parents’ anniversary party, his mother invites him to deejay: ‘ “The last time I refused to let my son DJ a party, he decided to turn down 13 october 2014

Avtar Singh

his admission at Columbia University.” The crowd tittered.

Everyone knew the story. Ashwin felt the familiar sourness in his stomach. What he had thought of as the defining act of his adult life had already become a party anecdote.’ A character who does not know the difference between a defining act and a party anecdote in a novel that teeters on the edge of that gulf between drama and melodrama.

When Lallan goes back to Patna and meets the young woman he cannot marry now and tells her his story, she dismisses it and him: “Delhi is like that. Crazy without being interesting.” Despite the occasionally lyrical writing, the judgment could well apply to this ‘Delhi book’ as well.

T

here are policemen in Avtar Singh’s Necropolis as well.

But they are not the bored, sadistic monsters in Fire Under Ash. DCP Dayal from the Crime Branch, his subordinate Kapoor and Smita Dhingra, an IPS officer on loan from the cyber crimes unit are, to put it mildly, incorruptible.

When an author asks boldly for such an extreme suspension of disbelief, he had better deliver. And Avtar Singh delivers—a rich, intriguing noir collection of stories that casts an eye that is both poetic and sardonic over Delhi. To begin with, the crime itself is unusual; a ‘digital’ monster of the night collects fingers. And Singh is not afraid to take the story in an even more surreal direction—a fashionable woman at a nightclub transforms inexplicably into an ageless muse.

It helps that DCP Dayal has a very melancholic sense of Delhi’s history. In an early story, he wonders why no one heard a rickshaw driver scream when his finger was amputated. “It was ever thus,” he muttered. “Mir noted it when Nadir Shah and Abdali sacked Delhi. The refugees were harassed by their own countrymen. Nobody listens, nobody cares.” He knows djinns have walked in Feroz Shah Kotla, that there are tree spirits in Mehrauli, that the city was built on graveyards and cremation grounds. And when he encounters Razia, a mysterious, ageless creature of the night, the poet in

13 october 2014

the police officer knows not to ask too many questions.

In Singh’s writing, we see Delhi not just in the sweep of its imperial history or the glamour of its nouveau riche but also in the quotidian micro-behaviours of its middle-class. When DCP Dayal wends his way through an alley in one of Delhi’s urban villages to Razia’s house: ‘A north-eastern woman hurried past in the opposite direction, her mobile phone at her lips, urgently telling a driver at the mouth of the lane to wait for her... There were eyes on him from balconies and from windows, even from a little set of young men taking it easy on the street. He felt how anonymity and communality could coexist in the same place and time, and knew what it was to be both naked and secure.’ In another story, Smita observes those around the scene of a crime: ‘They were confused, delighted to be in the limelight and hoping to be asked what they thought by a wandering reporter, but saddened that their fifteen minutes were to be forever so tainted.’

My favourite story is about a preschooler kidnapping; a wave of crime overtakes the city in April as kindergartens unveil their admission lists. And while the crime is serious, Singh has fun with the milieu. So, for instance, when Smita is talking to the teachers of the kidnapped child: ‘Just shows you, doesn’t it, said one of the teachers quietly. You can have everything in this world. And it still isn’t enough. The others looked at her as if she’d been caught giving the gardener a hand job behind the children’s toilet. Then they noted the absence of an interlocutor who would judge such an utterance, shrugged, nodded and returned to their tea.’

For those who like their crime fiction meaty with police procedural detail, this book will disappoint. There are no clever twists of logic and forensic evidence; instead, allies are pitted against each other. In the typical detective novel, the crime is an aberration that has to be resolved so the world can be restored to pre-lapsarian innocence. But in Singh’s noir vision, the crimes are symptoms of a marvellous, diseased society. Solving one does not solve anything. This is both literally and metaphorically true; a kidnapper escapes an intercepted police van taking him to court, but that’s the least of Dayal’s problems. He has committed ‘the solecism of pursuing a case nobody wanted solved’. It’s a valiant, losing battle and it is not innocence at stake but knowledge; knowledge of the city. The honour of manipulating its history.

So who does Delhi belong to? Singh would have us believe that it belongs to Razia, to the eternal spirits that watch over the city, nourishing its heroes with love, luring its villains to their punishment. I wish I could believe that. My vote goes instead to Kapoor, the subordinate officer ‘heavy of manner and midriff’, who has family in Lajpat Nagar and Model Town; whose ‘nephews’ work in a nightclub in south Delhi and in police stations in the outskirts of Delhi, in Kapashera and Mandi and Kundli and Kanjhawla, where crime takes the shape of cattle-stealing; whose niece he loves dearly but ‘made a wrong turn. Got mixed up with the wrong man’. Delhi belongs to the Kapoors, the uncles, the ‘good men of India’. And some day soon, to the Smitas as well. n Shahnaz Habib writes for The New Yorker’s ‘Briefly Noted’ open www.openthemagazine.com 55

books A Curious Tale from the Promised Land The charming story of a family of Indians who went to Jerusalem to mind an Indian hospice and stayed RAJNI GEORGE

Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem Tale

Navtej Sarna Rupa Publications | 192 pages | Rs 500

A

s the author walks the historical lanes of Jerusalem,

bound to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, a story within stories is called forth; a veritable Russian doll that somehow no one else has stumbled across. It begins with Sarna in Jerusalem, a flâneur who ruminates on the words of Amos Oz and the old American Colony Hotel, that ‘gathering hole, as a newspaper article colourfully put it, of spies, diplomats, authors and romantics’, visited by everyone from Bob Dylan to Peter O’Toole. Then, it moves to Baba Farid, the great Sufi saint of the Chisti order, who visited Jerusalem from his native Punjab and meditated underground for 40 days. And then the tale of the Ansari family, from the village of Ambheta near Saharanpur, who came to Jerusalem to look after an Indian hospice,by Herod’s gate.

Sarna traces how this came to be; the Indian Khilafat Movement, expressing support for the Ottoman Caliphate, was led by a group of leaders who deputed Sheikh Nazir Hasan Ansari, a police inspector’s son, from Saharanpur to Jerusalem in 1924. Leaving behind one Indian wife, he then marries one Palestinian and another Indian wife, in his new home: ‘[A]s a sheikh he could not be seen to be living like a bachelor. That would not be acceptable. He had to bring his wife from India or marry a local girl’, his eldest son Sheikh Munir recounts.

Already, the space between two worlds has encouraged radical change. And as for the ‘pile of stones’ Nazir finds upon his arrival, grinding along, soon, wealthy Muslim princes in India help it along.

A series of conversations begin betwen the men, accompanied by tabbouleh and biryani and memories, as well as the family’s stylish daughters, Najam, Nourjahan and Wafa, who like to hang out at the King David Hotel for larks. A treasury of old documents is hunted up, stored in a shiny brocade shawl, and the old lore is brought out.

For, the Ansaris, who trace ancestors back to Abu Ayyub al-Ansari of Medina,

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a supporter of the Prophet, have a truly unusual story; annexed, supplanted by history.

Sarna, the author of two novels—The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That—and two works of non-fiction—The Book of Nanak and Folk Tales of Poland—is a career diplomat, currently Indian Ambassador to Israel. More than three decades in the Indian Foreign Service have taken him around the world, evident in this slight, elegant volume, as is a shining curiosity. He ought to write more non-fiction.

His eye snags on all the right details. There is a strange return home in 1998, described by Nazeer and his son in puzzled detail; the government has invited a party of four Ansari men ‘home’. But it is too late; the party cannot even spend the night in the village of their origins, fleeing Ambheta, where there is no electricity and lots of snakes—for Saharanpur proper. And Sarna discovers, through his single-minded pursuit of this lost historical moment, that in 1340 a Sufi saint of Baba Farid’s Chisti order, Shah Harun, gave ‘Saharanpur’ (morphed over time) its name; fitting that a son of Saharanpur minds the hospice of Baba Farid, he reasons, thrilling at chance.

His is a hungry eye, if the exposition is a little clunky at times; the efforts of the storyteller are more apparent than they ought to be in places as he picks out ‘the large jigsaw puzzle called the past’. The description of lavender bushes, for example, that seems added in almost incidentally, as fragrant as they sound. Yet, this little pocket of history charms in the telling; Sarna, earnestly chasing down history, is almost as quixotic as the men whose chronicle he bears.

This is a book for an invested reader; perhaps too much for someone expecting a lightish read. Yet, there is enough Navtej Sarna to charm even the novice; panoramas featuring the Mount of Olives,the Dome of the Rock, Herod’s Gate and the Old City; Father Jayaseelan, described as ‘the first Indian priest at the Holy Sepulchre church in 2,000 years’.

‘Stone, fruit and flesh all flaming with love’, goes the last line of Indian Hospice, the Meena Alexander poem which makes up the Prologue. Sarna, channelling Chatwin and Theroux, sought to rescue the past— ‘Herod’s Ascent’ replaces ‘Herod’s Gate’ on a ceramic plate, and he remarks, ‘Another nibble at history’—but it is Kapus´cin´ski who comes to mind. n 13 october 2014

books Urdu Immortal A newly translated selection of stories finds irony, poetry and wasted opportunity in the troubled history of the Subcontinent SHOUGAT DASGUPTA The Death of Sheherzad

Intizar Husain Translated by Rakhshanda Jalil Harper Perennial | 184 pages | Rs 299

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ntizar Husain, the great Urdu short story writer, novelist and journalist, evokes in his work a paradise—a syncretic, coherent, aromatic and, above all, harmonious Subcontinent—that has been irreparably damaged. His characters, tormented, exhausted by loss, carry that paradise in their heads, unable to reconcile their memories (or imagined memories) with the desolation of their present.

It is the storyteller’s condition: to imagine, to dream a world so much more compelling than that which is ‘real’.

As Husain writes in ‘Circle’, the opening story of The Death of Sheherzad, a slim compilation of 15 stories newly translated by the scholar Rakhshanda Jalil: ‘When will I see that one dream, the hope of which has been sustaining me all along?

When will that dream be united with my wakeful self?

When will I write my story? Or will I forever circle round and round in a gyre?’

In this way, both oblique and plain, Husain, born in 1923, deals with the ur-trauma of the Subcontinent—Partition.

Basti (1979), which some critics have declared the best novel about Partition, made Husain’s name as a writer, sophisticated enough to invoke the storytelling traditions of Hindus and Muslims and European modernism, all of it— Kafka, Woolf, Turgenev, Hindu folk tales, Abrahamic parables—grist for a writer mourning the tragedy of his nation. That nation, Pakistan, is the imagined paradise lost, the dream soured by reality. It is not just Partition that stains these pages, but, more significantly, 1971 when Pakistan lost, Husain suggests, not just its Eastern appendage but its hope.

What is the correct response to your nation unravelling? Experience renders many of Husain’s characters mute, bewildered by what they have seen, unable to explain or, more appropriately, explain away. In ‘Sleep’, Salman returns ‘from there’, to the astonishment of his friends.

“Tell us what happened there,” they demand. “Yes,” he replies, “that I can tell you... If I begin to describe all that I have seen, you will break out in goose pimples.”

Salman’s friends wait, ‘rapt in attention.’

Finally, annoyed by Salman’s silence, a friend points out, “Yaar, you haven’t told us anything yet.” “Yaar, yaar,” Salman says, casting about for his words like an incompetent angler for fish, “I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember anything.” Silence, confusion, black laughter are the only responses Husain’s characters can muster in the face of reality. In ‘The Wall’, men clamber over to the other side, never to return, until one decides to see what there is to see on the other side while having his friends hold him with a rope so he is not lost. He is split in two, his ‘bloodied torso’ torn in two: ‘Amasa laughed. “Mandaris has turned himself into an object of ridicule over a pointless exercise... look at him... half his body if lying here and half on the other side.”’

Ghosts haunt Husain’s characters, handcuffed to their dreams like the characters in Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘Kew Gardens’. There, Woolf writes of a character, ‘He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.’ This old man is like one of Husain’s lost men, maddened by a vast, ultimately unknowable grief, attuned to the spirits, unprepared, unable to forget.

In ‘Circle’, quasi-autobiographical and essayistic like ‘Between Me and the Story’, also included in this collection, Husain revisits his first short story ever, ‘Qayyuma ki Dukan’ (Qayyuma’s Shop), first published in 1952, wanting to write it over again because it should have been about the person who ‘stayed behind... rooted in that land; he did not budge when the rest of us were leaving’ (from ‘Circle’).

There is, Husain warns, ridiculousness in man’s pointless exercises but also great harm, even evil. In ‘Between Me and the Story’, about Pakistan and India becoming nuclear ‘powers’, he writes, ‘If anything, life’s dark night has become even darker... Man has poisoned not just the air in the garden, but the entire world.’ This is not mere hand-wringing. Writing, telling stories, when the world around you is tearing itself asunder, is an act not just of defiance but of faith. Husain sets for himself Sisyphus’ task of rolling the boulder again and again to the top of the hill; or, to borrow from one of his own stories, the task of the tribes of Yajooj and Majooj, to lick at a wall all night, to pare it down with nothing but their tongues, leaving the remainder of the task for the next day only to see, when dawn breaks, the wall restored to its previous thickness. n

What is the correct response to your nation unravelling?

Experience renders many of Husain’s characters mute, bewildered by what they have seen, unable to explain

13 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 57

books Big Screen, Small Dreams A study of Indian cinema post-liberalisation uses Bollywood’s subtexts to examine the great Indian middle class SUNAINA KUMAR Picture Abhi Baaki Hai: Bollywood as a Guide to Modern India

Rachel Dwyer Hachette India | 295 pages | Rs 499

I

f there was one song we (and here I mean anyone who looks at movies as more than just ‘timepass’) had to pick to serenade Bollywood, it would be this one from Delhi Belly: ‘I hate you, like I love you, I hate you, like I love you, love you, love you’. As much as we adore Hindi cinema and its cultural influence, we also love to scoff at its excesses and foibles, to dismiss it as escapist, or, apply to it that catch-all word: entertainment. It doesn’t help that Bollywood cops out at the first sign of seriousness, throwing the word ‘entertainment’ back at us. Like petulant but lovable Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Bollywood has a propensity to brush off everything, including itself, as ‘phony’.

This may explain why there exists little serious analysis of Hindi cinema. Rachel Dwyer, the author of Picture Abhi Baaki Hai, describes herself as an “acafan”; an academic and a fan of Hindi cinema. She teaches Indian cultures and cinema at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has written widely on the subject (100 Bollywood Films, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema, Cinema India: the Visual Culture of Hindi Film), with a serious voice that never loses the elemental joy that comes of watching movies.

Here, Dwyer sets out to analyse the movies of post-liberalisation India. As everything changed in India after the reforms of 1991, so did our movies. The new middle-class of India are the primary consumers of movies, and the author, with the eye of an anthropologist, looks at their lifestyle, their politics, their belief systems and their attitudes to love and family—to see how these are reflected on the big screen. Dwyer posits that Bollywood is a major source of India’s dreams, a space where Indian men and women can imagine how they may live their lives: ‘Although there is a huge market in self-help books in India, films remain a guide to life and lifestyle, from what to wear and how to speak to how to fall in love and live a family life.’

Over the last twenty years, one man has taught us how to fall in love, of course: Shah Rukh Khan, Rachel Dwyer 58 open

who ‘represents a modern Indian emotionality, appealing to his audience as a gentle, suffering person who responds with tears and only occasionally with anger.

Indeed, in many films, Shah Rukh’s emotions are opposed to those of Amitabh’.

Dwyer looks at some of the biggest movies of our times, which become texts and develop meaning that the makers probably did not intend. Great fun especially when she turns her eye to Karan Johar (the master of weepies) entertainers.

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, that ode to ‘HFV’ or Hindu Family Values, is reinterpreted as a story from the Ramayana, where the adopted son is sent into exile, only to be brought back by his younger brother. The love between Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan is no less than the devotion shared by Ram and Lakshman. And Kancha Cheena, the villain from the recycled version of the Hrithik Roshan-starrer Agneepath, lives in the island of Mandwa, a modern-day Lanka. While reading new meaning into the movies of modern India, she constantly connects the dots within the history of Indian cinema. Her enquiry, for instance, into the issue of caste in Lagaan, references Bimal Roy’s Sujata.

The author is at her most effective when looking at the intrusion and absolute exclusion of certain subtexts in Hindi cinema: the absence of caste, the stereotyping of regions (the Everyman is the North Indian male, everyone else is a source of ridicule), the omnipresence of Hindu religion through the celebration of festivals and rituals.

At the very outset, Dwyer says that her understanding of Hindi cinema and Indian society is shaped by the movies she has watched and loved. These are the big banner productions made by Yash Raj Films and Karan Johar, giving the book a definite tilt toward blockbuster family entertainment. This focus becomes problematic, though Dwyer explains her reasons for leaving out multiplex, middle-of-the-road, indie cinema, which she sees as not embodying the true spirit of Bollywood. It seems a bit dated to say that Bollywood is defined by song-anddance-filled, larger-than-life spectacles, when Karan Johar himself has taken to producing indies. The last two decades of Bollywood have been as much about big films as they have been about small big films, and any study of contemporary Indian imagination is incomplete without looking at those.

Here could be Dwyer’s next project; to borrow her use of that ubiquitous phrase, ‘picture abhi baaki hai’. n 13 october 2014

science

rabies This dreaded disease is spread primarily through the saliva of infected dogs. Once a person develops symptoms, the chance that he or she will die is nearly 100 per cent

Female Dominance How women outnumbered men and contributed more to the genetic structure of modern humans

Putting an End to Rabies Deaths

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new study has found that

throughout human history, before humans began to move out of Africa some 70,000 years ago, and throughout subsequent migrations, the female population has far outnumbered the males. Women have also made a far larger contribution to the human gene pool than men.

The study, published by a group of German researchers in the journal Investigative Genetics, analysed the demographic history of males and females in worldwide populations by comparing the paternally-inherited Y chromosome (NRY) with maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The genome structure of a total of 623 men from 51 populations was analysed for this research.

Apart from discovering that women outnumbered men in the past, the researchers also found that more women have passed on their DNA than men. According to the researchers, cultural trends like polygyny, where one man mates with many women, and practices where women moved in to live with their husbands, have resulted in women making a larger genetic contribution to the global population than men.

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The researchers also used computer models to show how more women have contributed to genetic diversity than men. According to one such simulation, around 60 women and 30 men were breeding in Africa before humans migrated from the continent. During the time of the migration, which is estimated to have occurred some 70,000 years ago, only 25 women and 15 men were mating. In another 25,000 years, when modern humans are believed to have migrated to Europe, there were around 100 women mating with around 30 men. The researchers point out that there were more humans at these points in time, but they were not contributing to the gene pool.

‘Our new sequencing technique removes previous biases, giving us a richer source of information about our genetic history,’ one of the authors of the study, Dr Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, says in a press release. ‘It allows us to take a closer look at the regional differences in populations, providing insights into the impact of sex-biased processes on human genetic variation.’ n

Ridding the world of rabies in humans is costeffective and achievable through mass dog vaccination programmes, according to a study published in Science. A rabies vaccine has long existed. Even so, the disease kills an estimated 69,000 people worldwide every year—that’s 189 each day. Forty per cent of them are children, mostly in Africa and Asia. Scientists cite the success of mass dog vaccination clinics held in Tanzania, where as many as 1,000 dogs were vaccinated in a single day. Since the programme began in 2003, the number of people killed by rabies has dropped from an average of 50 each year to almost zero. Vaccinating 70 per cent of the dogs in the region broke the transmission rate. n

Less Sleep Makes Teens Moody

According to a new study published in Learning, teen irritability and laziness aren’t down to attitude problems but lack of sleep. This paper exposes the negative consequences of sleep deprivation caused by early school bells, and shows that altering education times not only perks up teen mood, but also enhances learning and health. In puberty, shifts in our body clocks push optimal sleep later into the evening, making it extremely difficult for most teenagers to fall asleep before 11.00 pm. This, coupled with early school classes in the morning, results in chronically sleepdeprived and cranky teens as well as academic and health problems. n 13 october 2014

camera formats In digital SLR cameras, the camera’s format refers to the size of its image sensor.

Nikon makes DX-format and FX-format sensors. The DX-format is the smaller sensor, at 24x16mm; the larger FX-format sensor measures 36x24mm, which is approximately the same size as 35mm film

tech&style

Omega Seamaster w Aqua Terra

Nikon D750 The smallest and lightest Nikon FX-format DSLR to feature a monocoque body gagandeep Singh Sapra

Price on request

Rs 134,450 (body only)

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the James Bond thriller, Goldfinger, Omega has created a one-of-a-kind Seamaster Aqua Terra in an explosion of 18K yellow gold. This Seamaster Aqua Terra has a discreet 38.5 mm 18K yellow gold case and is presented on a matching bracelet. The dial has also been created from 18K yellow gold. The 18K yellow gold hands are coated with Super-LumiNova, making them legible in all lighting conditions. It is powered by the Omega Master Co-Axial calibre 8501, revealed through its transparent crystal caseback. n

T

he Nikon D600 and D800

changed the world of full-frame photography; while they have been upgraded to their latest releases, the 610 and the 810, the 750 sits somewhere in between, combining performance, manoeuvrability and agility in a powerful, compact package with a design that is largely aimed at midrange DSLR users keen on upgrading to a full-frame camera.

The D750 features a 24.3 megapixel sensor, high-speed shooting rate of approximately 6.5 frames per second, and an Expeed 4 image processing engine all packed into a monocoque structure framed by carbon-fibre reinforced thermoplastics and a magnesium alloy to provide durability.

The camera also comes with Wi-Fi on board that lets you control the camera via your iPad or Android tablet.

The D750 also gets a mapped ok button on the back D-pad, which gives you a magnified view to help in focusing. The camera also has a 51-point AF system, very similar to the D800, but with Nikon’s second 13 october 2014

generation multi-cam module, granting you an exposure compensation of ÷ 3EV. The sensor also has an effective ISO range from 100 to 12,800, expandable from Lo 1 (ISO 50 equivalent) right up to Hi 2 (ISO 51,200 equivalent).

The ergonomics of the D750 are designed for someone who is moving up from a prosumer DSLR. The grip and weight are easily adaptable if you are upgrading. There is also a nice 3.2inch 1,229k-dot LCD at the back with a 3-axis hinge that tilts easily, allowing you to frame both low and high angle shots. The D750 also shoots full HD 1080/60p movies with minimal jaggies and reduced moiré, and you can add an external microphone for better sound capture.

The D750’s enhanced body is both dust and water resistant, thus making it an all-weather companion.

With an attractive price point, a light-weight construction and some great features, the Nikon D750 is a great option to switch to for fullframe photography. n

Sony Xperia T3

Rs 27,990

In a lovely stainless steel frame and eyecatching colours, the Xperia T3 stands out like all the other Sony phones. It features a large 5.3-inch screen and runs on a Quad Core processor. The Xperia T3 is designed for people who love to take pictures as well as watch videos on the go. With its 8 megapixel Exmor RS sensor, the phone’s camera catches some great shots. You can shoot up to 31 frames in two seconds. Not all is good with the T3, though. Its volume rocker is tiny and you end up confusing it for the Lock/Unlock button. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

the bra zilian belle Gabriela Bertante, who marked her Bollywood debut in Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya, used to be a professional football player. The Brazilian beauty was first seen in an item number of a Telugu film and is said to be keen on starring opposite Salman Khan

Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya Morally vacuous and riddled with asinine scenes, this film is best avoided ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Deliver Us From Evil Director Scott Derrickson cast Eric Bana, Édgar Ramírez,

Olivia Munn

Score ★★★★★

a bertant , shaan, gabriel Cast Mika singh ri ot nih ag Director Sunil

A

s with bees, the lure of Hindi

e

cinema brings singers to the nectar. Mika Singh and Shaan, professionals from the music world, make perfect fools of themselves in this ridiculous movie. In one scene they are rushing down a hospital corridor in drag, together with comedian Rajpal Yadav and villain Vindu Dara Singh, also in drag. In all probability, the creative inspiration for this situation comes from the ‘gang drag’ scenes in Humshakals. Suddenly, hairy men in skirts and falsies are all the rage.

Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya has a corny plot. Two guys, both called Balwinder Singh (Mika Singh and Shaan), both survivors and aspiring to success in Mumbai, are forced to share a room. One day, a well-known millionaire (Anupam Kher) puts an advertisement in the newspapers saying that he is looking for his long-lost grandson, also called Balwinder. Over a hundred Balwinders turn up for the audition at the millionaire’s mansion, so he devises

62 open

a tricky questionnaire to eliminate the counterfeits. Finally, a shortlist of four aspiring grandsons is drawn up.

The film has no interest in discussing greed and the depths to which a person will sink—debasing all human values—to acquire unearned wealth.

Instead, it looks at the scenario as a career opportunity for young men. It presents itself as a management training workshop for people who want to dupe sentimental old men longing for an heir. In such a situation, what is the best approach?

One Balwinder tries to impress by doing ‘surya namaskar’ early in the morning, the other talks about his childhood in Ludhiana, where he figures the grandson was lost. The least one would have expected of the movie is that the songs, sung by the lead actors themselves, would be catchy.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. A saving grace is the female lead: Brazilian actress Gabriela Bertante is pleasant.

Avoid this film. n

‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ (Matthew 6:13) is how the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ ends. At one stage in this movie, a Catholic priest (Édgar Ramírez) intellectualises this evil by dividing it into two categories—primary and secondary. Secondary evil, he says, is the kind the police force sees every day— murders, rape, child molestation and the like. Primary evil, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish and involves the direct intervention of Satan.

Ralph Sarchie was a New York police officer who apparently saw events and situations he could only explain as paranormal activity. He retired and wrote a book. This movie is based on that book and details the conversion of Sarchie (Eric Bana) from scepticism to faith.

The film is shot almost entirely at night, but unlike the usual films about possession, does not get the audience to scream at every sudden camera movement.

Instead, it uses a documentary style to examine how a few American soldiers deployed in Iraq got possessed by a devil and brought it to New York.

The film is well cast and acted, but the possession scenes, particularly the symbolism used in them, is a rehash of films from The Exorcist (1973) onwards.

You get that déjà vu feeling of ‘been there, possessed that’. n AD

13 october 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Crafty Hairdressers of Bollywood

First Shahid Kapoor went bald for Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, and now Ranveer Singh is expected to get his head tonsured for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani.

Neither Bhardwaj nor Bhansali are the sort of filmmakers to do something just because it’s ‘different’; both actors have said that going bald was key to the characters they play in their respective films, but you can’t help wondering if this was the one way both filmmakers ensured they had their leads exclusively to themselves.

Bhardwaj, you might remember, had famously sniped after Kaminey that Shahid had the bad habit of spending too much time fixing his hair. “He’d be a much better actor if he concentrated less on his hair and more on his performance,” the director has been quoted as having said at the time. When they signed up to work together again in Haider, the first thing the director made clear to his leading man was that some portions in the movie required that his locks go.

Ranveer recently posted a picture on Twitter saying his ‘mundan’ (hair tonsuring ceremony) was just around the corner. Bhansali, who got into a war of sorts with Karan Johar over casting Ranveer in Bajirao, reportedly wants to ensure that his star cannot shoot any other film or make public appearances while he’s on the filmmaker’s clock.

Blooming Bromance

Okay, so Arjun Rampal may no longer be part of Shah Rukh Khan’s inner circle, and his friendship with Hrithik Roshan is also clearly strained. But the actor still appears to be thick with his Raajneeti co-star Ranbir Kapoor, with whom he recently filmed scenes for their new movie Roy in Malaysia.

Unit members reveal that the two men hung out together when they weren’t shooting, and often caught dinner at local restaurants after packup. They were, reportedly, joined on two occasions by Jacqueline Fernandez, the film’s leading lady, who, it turns out, couldn’t match the drinking capacity of her two leading men.

Arjun Rampal and Ranbir Kapoor first hit it off while shooting Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti in Bhopal a few years ago, and their easy-going camaraderie became evident while they spent nearly a 13 october 2014

month after that travelling together to promote the film.

Ranbir, who neither belongs to Shah Rukh’s coterie of close friends, nor appears particularly close to Hrithik Roshan, is clearly unaffected by Arjun’s falling out with those superstars. To be fair, it’s not like the former supermodel himself is sulking over the fact that he’s not getting to hang out with SRK or Hrithik anymore. Arjun, his friends insist, clearly stands by his wife Mehr’s decision to stay in Sussanne Roshan’s corner after her split with Hrithik. And don’t even bring up those pesky rumours about his closeness to Sussanne… apparently that’s the one thing the famously chilled-out supermodel has no patience for.

The Terrifying Evil Twin

Filmmakers swear by her professionalism and the hard work she puts into her films, but when it comes to advertising shoots, it’s as if her evil twin shows up… This top actress has a reputation for being cranky and difficult when filming advertising campaigns for the many brands she endorses.

There have been instances when she’s simply upped and left a shoot incomplete because she had somewhere urgent to go. Other times she has struck lines off the script, refusing to say what she’s not convinced about. In both cases, the agency and filmmakers involved have had to salvage what they could from the portions that she did complete.

Because clients tend to invariably hold the agency responsible for any snafus on set, the mood is usually tense when this particular actress is on the job. Before an ad shoot with Lil Ms Difficult recently, one agency representative who’d had a bad experience working with the actress on an earlier occasion dashed off an email to the client as a forewarning about the actress’ tantrums and her general bad behaviour. The client, in turn, reportedly forwarded that email to the actress’ manager and on the day of the shoot, only minutes after she’d checked into her make-up van, a printout of the email was produced, the author of the note was summoned and ordered thrown off the set if the director wanted the actress to film the campaign. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

The Measure of a Man

by r au l i r a n i

An employee walks past an advertisement hoarding at the entrance of a garment factory on the outskirts of Delhi. This unit belongs to a company that exports apparel, a business sector in India that has been gaining a competitive edge in recent years over its counterparts in countries such as Bangladesh 64 open

13 october 2014

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