Returning to My Fascination with Kerala (After the Deluge)

Close to eleven years ago, I wrote a post on this blog (before the blog even completely became what it has been for the past decade) about my Fascination with Kerala. Here, I elaborated on a preoccupation with one Indian state that even preceded my deep interest in all the films made in Bombay/Mumbai. In other words, even before I was a fan of classic “Bollywood,” I was a fan of Kerala. There are a few reasons for that and I spelled them out way-back-when. And people have been seeing this post (with those reasons given) ever since, mainly via searches. I am glad that people are still reading it, because all the feelings that I expressed in that post still apply today. But the post could use a few minor revisions and maybe a few amendments, coming from the perspective of what I know now, a decade later. I have therefore decided that I am going to revise it. I won’t change the content much, but I’ll add and edit a few things. This is going to happen within a number of days of the post that you’re reading now (as time permits).

I thought of holding the present post up until I had finished everything I wanted to do with the old one, but I am feeling a little impatient to get something new up on this blog. I also am feeling a little impatient in my desire to inform people about some interesting sites and links related to the event that brought Kerala back to the front of my mind – and to lots of people’s minds, actually – within the past couple of months. And that subject is the floods – the biggest ones that Kerala experienced in a century. Of course, this disaster caused much destruction and hardship. But it also led to some great stories showing the resilience, creativity, and general social goodness of the people who have coped with it.

I have seen quite a few fascinating posts on blogs and Facebook documenting the floods and their aftermath through writings and photos. But there is one site that I especially wanted to mention here, not only because it contains excellent writing and photos about the floods in Kerala, but because it is a marvelous site in general, one that everyone who is interested in the people and culture of India should know about. And that site is the People’s Archive of Rural India.

The article in this site related to the floods in Kerala that grabbed my attention most was Kerala’s Women Farmers Rise Above the Flood. As I originally said in Fascination with Kerala, one of the first things that caused me to have a strong interest in this state was the “social systems.” As I put it, I found out that Kerala had “developed a kind of decentralized, democratic socialism that didn’t exist in much of the world.” And as I look back on that statement now, I feel it is definitely an understatement. The movements in Kerala gave rise to a number of fascinating and highly progressive groups, a trend that continues to this day (which is impressive, considering many other, quite regressive, trends that have taken place throughout India in recent memory). This article is about one such group, Kudumbashree, a “massive women’s community network,” which, as the article’s author, P. Sainath (who is also the editor of PARI) points out, “could well be the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world.” And here, I am tempted to elaborate much more on Mr. Sainath’s discussion of the details of Kudumbashree’s work, but such elaboration should probably be saved for a separate, longer post sometime in the future. Let’s just say that it is very interesting to see how – and how much – such a group deals with the aftermath of the floods. As Mr. Sainath says, “Restoring cultivation in this situation could dishearten the most determined… But not the women farmers of Kudumbashree.”

And there are a couple of other pieces about the Kerala floods – also written by P. Sainaith – that are definitely worth a vist: Saving Photos and Memories of a Flood – a good, short article about a woman’s efforts to do exactly that – and The Bank that Went Under – Almost, which is not simply about the bank of a river but a bank on the bank of a river – specifically, The Kuttamangalam Service Cooperative Bank, and its great efforts to recover records, etc. (This post, by the way, includes some very nice pictures, too.)

Before PARI published all these excellent articles on the aftermath of the floods, this site actually introduced us to a new song about the subject, “Song for Kerala: Rhythm of the calamity.” As the article’s author, Chittoor Gopi, explains, “A popular song in Malayalam, once sung by Usha Uthup to celebrate the riches of Kerala, has now been reworked to honour the lives lost and to mark the destruction caused by the massive floods last month.” The article contains a good video for the song, with a lot of fantastic pictures of Kerala – both with and without floods.

Of course, it was nice to know that a number of people who were in Kerala at the time of the floods made it out safely as well. That list includes two bloggers who have commented here a number of times, Madhulika Liddle and Anuradha Warrier. Anu visited Kerala, as she does periodically, because that is her home state (though she presently lives in Massachusetts), and Madhu (who lives in Delhi) “tagged along” with Anu for a visit to Kerala, right before the floods.

Curiously, this is something I once at least vaguely considered doing as well. If you go back to comments on my original post about my Fascination with Kerala, you’ll see an amusing conversation between Anu and me that occurred in 2012. To sum it up, here are the key lines in that exchange:

Anu: And if you ever want to visit Kerala, I offer you my parents’ or my husband’s home as your base. My husband and I visit every year if possible, so you’re welcome to tag along if you so desire.

Me: That is very nice of you and this is very intriguing… What time of year do you usually go? :)

Anu: Usually during the summer, Richard. This year, it’ll be August.

Me: Hmm, August in Kerala… That’s OK, I don’t mind a little rain. :)

Actually, as it turned out, when Madhu tagged along with Anu, she really did encounter only a little rain, getting out before the floods. During this time, she apparently had a pleasant tourist’s adventure with Anu, who was on her way to celebrate a large birthday celebration being planned for her father. In Blogland, this resulted in two very pleasant posts about the same trip (with a lot of focus on temples and food). Madhu wrote this part up in her post From Kumbhakarna to Baahubali In A Day, and Anu’s perspective appears in My Indian Adventures – Kerala. Both are good writers, so these are nice posts to read if you want to enjoy some very pleasant travelogues. But in Anu’s next post, More Adventures…and Some Misadventures, she tells a different kind of story, about seeing something she had not at all expected and unlike anything she’d seen before. And she gets pretty descriptive about that; for example:

The road (yes, that was a road) was now a river and they were struggling to evacuate over 750 families from the farmlands behind.

My initial reaction was astonishment. In all my years living and visiting, I’d never seen the roads flooded. When I went downstairs, I realised that our backyard was under water almost two-thirds of the way…

And then she had the hair-raising experience of having to get from the floods to one airport and then another (how many airports were there?) until finally, much later, settling back down in the U.S.

After reading all this, I had to ask myself, would I be willing to go through all that craziness in order to, finally, spend some time in Kerala? Maybe I would! But I doubt that if and when I do make my trip, I will face such an ordeal, given that this was the first time that Kerala had experienced a flood of that magnitude in 100 years. Though, on the other hand, this sort of thing might actually become more commonplace now that we’re going through climate change. And by the time I ever get the money together to make such a journey, we probably will have experienced a lot more climate change.

But in the meantime… If you can’t visit a place, the next best thing, I think, is to continue reading about it. The things that you read might turn out to be more interesting than any experiences that you’ll actually have if and when you ever make it over there.

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Happy 92nd Birthday, Noor Jehan!

Noor Jehan was born on September 21, 1926. As many people know, in this blog, though I may mention birthdays now and then, the one birthday I really try never to miss is Madam Noor Jehan’s.

For this year’s Noor Jehan birthday post, here’s a nice new playlist. Once again, I am referring to one of Tom Daniel’s channels, because he just recently put this one together, basing the list mainly on the Noor Jehan songs that have earned the most views. Curiously, they come from just a few films that came out in Pakistan in the 1950s and early ’60s, but they are wonderful songs in which her voice sounds as beautiful as it does anywhere else. And in these films, Noor Jehan was still singing for herself, so the videos are beautiful to watch, too.

At the end of his list, Tom added a half-hour clip of a live Noor Jehan performance broadcast by the BBC in the early ’80s, which is actually from my mostly neglected YouTube channel (though the video was originally prepared by Tom as well, just like most of the clips over there).

And here I am going to embed the whole list, so if you like, you can keep watching the videos, one after another, without leaving this post.

By the way, as I have just remembered, the performance at the end of Tom’s playlist was also the subject of my Noor Jehan birthday post of 2016. There, in addition to the half-hour clip, I posted two separate songs from the same show, which the main clip had omitted.

If you look at my Noor Jehan post of 2015, you’ll see a list of links to my Noor Jehan posts from prior years, going back to 2009. Obviously, I have devoted a lot of time and energy to celebrating Noor Jehan, whom I can still call my favorite among singers in the history of films from both India and Pakistan.

(Actually, last year was a little different, because that post was about people covering songs that had been made famous by Noor Jehan. But I wanted to show that I am positively delighted even when other singers cover material that makes me think of Noor Jehan.)

Once again, happy birthday to the Malika-e-Tarannum, Madam Noor Jehan!
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P.S. Unfortunately, as usual, my posts from past years contain quite a few missing clips. But I intend to replace most of those very soon!

Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948) – Restored, with English Subtitles

1. In Search of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (Now You See It, Now You Don’t)

[Note: As of September 29, the first part of this post has been revised from the one that went up earlier this month – out of necessity, not just for stylistic improvement, as you’ll see a few paragraphs down.]

At the end of my last post (a little over a month ago), I talked about how Pritha2000 found a link to the restored version of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana at Indiancine.ma. She informed us of this recently at the end of a long string of comments under a post about being In Search of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana that I had put up almost ten years ago. For a long time, no copy of the film could be found anywhere. Then some apparently not-so-restored versions started to show up.Minai aka Cassidy informed us of one at Pad.ma in 2013. It was good to know that there was a version somewhere, but it was not very watchable (at least I didn’t think it was) and it had no English subtitles. (It did have some nice annotations, again mainly thanks to Minai.)

There was so much talk about a newly restored version coming out (thanks to various entities) and it did come out, but it ran into some mishaps, and it still hasn’t even been granted public showings (except at a random film festival, I think). So the Inidancine.ma link was the first time I – and a few other people, at least – were able to see the restored Kalpana anywhere.

In another fairly recent comment under my old post (this one dated June 18), a commenter named Sreekanth said, “We just hope to find it on YouTube soon…waiting for that day.” And then for a couple of weeks at the beginning of September, we actually did see an excellent copy of the restored version, with English subtitles that were more complete than in the Indiancine.ma version. This post was thanks to Tom Daniel (who else?) and also Anuradha Warrier (of the blog Conversations Over Chai), who filled in some subtitles that had been missing from the Indiancine.ma version. This made some of us very happy, and it inspired me to write the original version of this blog post.

Unfortunately, within the past ten or so days, Tom’s version of Kalpana was taken down. This happened because of objections from someone who had fought for rights to the film a while back and has been very protective of them. But according to at least a few sources, this film is no longer protected under copyright and should be considered as being in the public domain. Also, curiously, there are a couple of other versions of the restored film available on YouTube (though without subtitles). We’re hoping that some day Tom will win this film back, but given the nature of the other person in the dispute, we’re not feeling too optimistic about that. Thankfully, as of now, the songs that Tom selected to post are still up, and I included a couple of them in the last part of this post. For those who want to watch the entire restored version of Kalpana with English subtitles, Indiancine.ma is the place you’ll have to go.

THE MOVIE IS HERE.

2. Some Good Things to Know Before Watching Kalpana

Uday Shankar’s Kalpana was in many ways a breakthrough film, with unprecedented qualities. One such quality was a new innovation in cinema choreography. Below the copy that he put on YouTube, Tom quoted a section from the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, which points out that “The choreography was specifically designed for the camera, with semi-expressionist angles and chiaroscuro effects…” This fact is further elaborated on – and without any art school terms – in an interesting video that was part of the Indiavideodotorg series 100 Years of Bollywood.

As the narrator Pali Chandra (who is herself an acclaimed kathak dancer and choreographer) explains:

For the first time, numbers were created to suit the camera. If it was abhinaya or the expression of the eyes, the focus was on the eyes. If it was the hands, so was the focus on the hands. So as we see, the entire concept of choreography has changed here for this particular film. Now why would that happen? Simply because Uday Shankar – the great Uday Shankar – was the artistic director of this film.

A few minutes later in this video, the film historian Vijay Kumar Balakrishna talks about seeing the film three decades ago and being extremely impressed by the diversity of Indian dances. As he points out, in addition to seeing most of the major classical dances, he also noticed a fine range of tribal dances. But even though so many classical and folk dances are represented, few are shown strictly in their pure form, because Uday Shankar integrates all these influences into his own unique modern choreography.

By the way, when you watch the Indiavideodotorg video, you’ll notice right away that the film is being talked about as a treasure that can’t be found. As of the making of this video – just six years ago – even the narrator had no idea where to find it. That shows how remarkable it is that we now can have access to this restored version.

3. Notes About Watching Kalpana

When I started to watch Kalpana, myself, at first I found it to be a bit slow, arty, and grim. I thought to myself, I can understand why this was not a blockbuster movie (as I had learned earlier that its box office returns were far from great). But the expressionist visual style, combined with the socialist messages being conveyed, did actually make me think of a favorite film that was made in 1942 by a very popular director – that is, Mehboob Khan’s Roti. But Roti also revolved around a conventionally told adventure story, and though there is a story that Kalpana revolves around, it is only one small aspect of the film, and the main story isn’t really the full story anyway. The entry in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema sums it up pretty well:

The narrative of the surreal fantasy is embedded within a framing story of a writer telling a story to a film producer, who eventually declines to make the movie. The writer tells of Udayan (Shankar) and Kamini (Kanta) and the young man’s dream of establishing an art centre, Kalakendra (a fictional equivalent of Shankar’s India Cultural Centre at Almora) in the Himalayas.

Yet every time we think we are able to follow the core story – that is, the story within the story – this gets interrupted by surreal sequences (often introduced as dream sequences or visions of someone who is unconscious from being injured or sick), and it becomes more and more difficult to tell where the fantastic visions stop and the core story (within the story) begins again.

On the other hand, the fantasy element and the confusion regarding dreams vs. narrated “reality” help to enhance a magical quality that increasingly takes hold. It’s obvious that surrealism was a strong influence throughout the movie, and the best of these scenes are at least as good as the best dream sequences in some of our favorite (more conventional) Hindi films. (The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema mentions that Kalpana influenced the famous dream sequence in Awara, but I can certainly think of a few more. For instance, I started to think about the fantasy scenes in Nagin (1954), starring Vyjayanthimala. But the scenes in Uday Shankar’s Kalpana are more gracefully put together, and though they are sometimes amusing, they’re less inevitably comical.)

4. A Couple of Great Clips

Although Kalpana is highly original, not everything within the film is unique. In fact, if you have already watched a lot of old Indian cinema, you should be able to recognize some familiar themes. And with this in mind, I decided to provide two particular videos (from several that Tom posted on his song channel) which show Kalpana exploring themes that I’ve actually discussed in this blog before.

The first theme that I noticed here was the puppet/kathputli theme. Within this song, “Sadion Ki Behoshi Mein,”  I also heard a message that I’d found in song sequences from a couple of Golden Age Hindi films: the people of India have been in a slumber and need to be woken up. Although it is less than two minutes long, this song and dance combine both themes in a truly fantastic way!

And the other song I had to bring up here is “Hindustan Ka Bal Hai Hal,” which would have fit very well in my list of sickle songs. (In fact, I’m thinking of writing a new, revised list, just to include this song.) It also contains a strong socialist message about the farmers of India and the “fruits of labor,” so there should be no doubt that Uday Shankar was as intentional with his use of the sickle as a political symbol as Mehboob Khan ever was.

And these are just tiny slices of the film. The quality and quantity of the dances and spectacles here are almost overwhelming. While I would not say that this film is exactly gripping in its linear narrative (nor was it meant to be), it certainly is mesmerizing, and watching it was an experience that made the long wait seem totally worthwhile.
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P.S. I mentioned that aspects of Kalpana reminded me of the earlier film, Roti. In the quote from the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, there is a reference to Kalpana strongly influencing Chandralekha (also from 1948), which was a very popular film. Unfortunately, I can recall only a few songs from Chandralekha and I don’t even remember if I ever watched the entire film. So for now, I will have to leave it to other people to notice the similarities (and differences). Of course, I may return to this subject at another time.

P.P.S. When I posted about my search for this film 10 years ago, I was very interested in the fact that it was the first film that featured Padmini. (Actually, I think there was at least one Tamil film featuring Padmini that was released earlier, but this was the first film in which she was asked to act.) A point was made about this in the Indiavideodotorg video also (where there is some attention paid to the inclusion of both Padmini and Lalitha), and it is a generally well valued piece of trivia. However, though I recognized Padmini and Lalitha in one of the first dances in the film, I wasn’t able to pick Padmini out of the crowd so easily elsewhere.

There is a series of pictures of actors from this film that can be found on Surjit Singh’s Hindi Movies… site. An actor is shown and labeled in each of several screen caps from Kalpana, and I did not recognize Padmini in the scene that appears here. I had, however, spotted Usha Kiran correctly, and she actually has a pretty good role.

The real stars of the film are Uday Shankar (of course), Amala Shankar, and Lakshmi Kanta, and they are all excellent here.

Some thoughts upon the death of Zarina Begum (and a few other notes updating past posts)

I almost typed a little about Zarina Begum in the P.S. to my last post – the one on the Dalrymple books. I had said that a few references from songs and films had made me think about Zafar, and this was why I grabbed Dalrymple’s book The Last Mughal. I had thought a lot about Zafar, actually, after writing my post about the ghazal (and thumri) singer Zarina Begum and her performance of the song Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par. Zarina Begum (and a few others) had attributed this song to Zafar, though most people attribute it to the people given the credit in the 1958 film Kala Pani. Given what I have learned about Zarina Begum, I strongly suspect that her claim was correct.

As I said in that post from last December, there were a few articles and documentaries about Zarina floating around in 2015 and 2016 but, unfortunately, they all focused more than anything on the facts that she had fallen into obscurity and poverty, that her family was living in poverty, and that she was very ill but could not afford all the healthcare that she needed. I found out that a little after all this news came out, she did get some help from arts organizations and some money from the government as well, but I could not find anything in terms of updates on her condition, and I said in my post, “Now that a couple of years have passed since all this information came out, I hope that she is still alive.” And that was where everything stood at the end of 2017.

As it turned out, she did last longer than we might have expected, but she passed on May 12, 2018. Per a report in the blogs section of the Times of India dated May 16:

Zarina Begum, the last disciple of ‘Mallika-e-ghazal’ Begum Akhtar, and the only torch-bearer of Baithak Gana, died of a chronic kidney disease at a private city hospital at around 8 am on Saturday.

This is sad, but I’m glad she had a little more time than people expected and lived to the age of 88 (which seems pretty good, considering what she went through).

I have to stress here that I was really impressed with her singing in the clips that I shared in my post last December. I actually enjoyed her performance much more than Asha Bhosle’s playback performance for Nalini Jaywant in Kala Pani. According to a documentary that I viewed, Zarina was 82 when she sang the version of “Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” that I posted. I think some people insist that she had to be a little younger, but in any event, even if she was in her 70s, that was still very impressive.

While looking for more information on Zarina Begum, I found a great tribute to her from 2007 at Last.fm. This short tribute is actually a preface to contents that are linked to at MySpace which I cannot access (I don’t know whether it’s because they’re outdated, because I’m not a member of MySpace or because of other, technical problems). Nonetheless, the preface, all by itself, made the visit to Last.fm more than worthwhile.

Nusrat Durrani wrote:

Bessie Smith is eternal. I am a big fan of Odetta and Nina Simone. For many months in 2003-2005 all I heard was Mazzy Star because Hope Sandoval is a cure for pain. But there is a singer from my hometown of Lucknow, India that is right up there with all of them. Her name is Zarina Begum and you will never hear her songs or her story. She is a master of the “ghazal,” the traditional love song sung in Urdu, a north Indian language. It might be an unfamiliar sound to you but anyone even casually conversant with the technicalities of singing can tell she is a gifted, poetic, songstress. Once a star in the 60s and 70s, a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.

As someone else who comes from a western environment in which people are not aware of ghazal singers and the like, I enjoyed that this writer drew comparisons to contemporary western singers that many of us are more familiar with – including Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, who were generally considered an “alternative rock” group in the 1990s. I like Mazzy Star, too, and Hope Sandoval. I would not say that Hope Sandoval is one of my absolute favorites from ‘90s “alternative rock,” but this is a respectable opinion, and Nusrat Durrani drew the seemingly strange kind of comparison that I might very well draw, myself. Yet I would go further and say that you do not necessarily need to know “technicalities” to appreciate a singer like Zarina Begum – or her mentor Begum Akhtar. I did not come from India and I had no classical Indian music influences in my childhood (well, outside of records and TV clips of Ravi Shankar and George Harrison and an occasional live classical performance at an Indian restaurant that my parents took me to), yet I ended up taking to different kinds of Indian music quite a bit several decades into my life. Maybe I could name a number of pertinent influences that I encountered during my adulthood, but the point I’d like to make here is that the love of great singing and music from any place is not dependent on learning technicalities or learning anything complex, for that matter. When people are encouraged to open their minds, they do learn to appreciate music from different places and different traditional cultures. I think that if anything has prevented people from doing so (especially during an age when everyone can have access to music all over the globe), it is the limits of the marketplace, in which sellers of culture have, for a long time, categorized everything, separating different kinds of music or other entertainment into different little boxes for the sake of niche marketing. That sort of fragmentation of taste is finally breaking down somewhat exactly because people have access to music all around the world with just a click on YouTube or some other streaming forum (and that has helped me to greatly expand my knowledge of Indian music as well). But the obstacles from niche marketing and the like certainly still do exist, as do the prejudices drummed into people’s heads that they should not or cannot enjoy – or work with – music or art coming from cultures that are supposedly not “their own.”

And with regard to damage done by the marketplace, I love a point at the end of the paragraph, where Nusrat Durrani says, “a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.” But is it really that a particular “bourgeois citizenry” was unappreciative, or isn’t this just the natural consequence of a certain system that is always run by the bourgeoisie? As long as we live under a system through which everyone’s ability to live decently and stay healthy is greatly determined by money, we’re always going to see stories about artists who had at one time brought great joy to people falling into terrible states of poverty and ruin. From my perspective, the stories seem particularly, jarringly frequent in the history of film stars and musicians from India and Pakistan (ironically, as best illustrated in the lives of some people who had their peak at a time when India was supposed to be socialist and many of the popular films preached against the evils of capitalism), but they are not unheard of in the U.S., either. I think that here in the U.S., the system somehow established greater economic safeguards for people who became successful in the entertainment world (though many are obviously subjected to terrible social pressures until they end up killing themselves in one way or another – also not an unusual story in India). But the U.S. is also a place where people who have slipped a few times for one reason or another might end up homeless and often can’t pay their medical bills.

I was glad to see that Zarina Begum survived a few years beyond the dire messages that were circulating in 2015 and she did live until a decent old age. But since being exposed to the story that was circulated a few years ago, I so much wish that she could have lived a better life.

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Part II: Regarding Some Other (Lighter) Matters:

I wanted to add a few short notes as follow-up to some other, older posts that have come back into focus for me. The reason these older posts have come back into focus is because of extremely helpful comments, especially by a fairly new commenter to this blog identified as Pritha2000. (By the way, I always tell everyone to look at the new comment links on the right side of the blog – sometimes they will lead you to new information that is at least as interesting as anything that I’ve posted on the front page.)

First Pritha revived the conversation about the magnificent Sitara Devi “snake dance” in the film Anjali (1957). In a comment on June 14, she identified this film as an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chandalika. This inspired me to look for (and post) a good description of the whole plot line of Chandalika as well as guess where in the plot the dance had to have fit, and Pritha confirmed my guess and elaborated upon it. And so, thanks to this exchange that occurred in June of 2018, we greatly improved upon a post that originally went up in April of 2010.

Pritha also sent an invaluable comment to my nearly ten-year-old post on Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948). Apparently, over at Indiancine.ma, they have posted the Scorcese-restored version of the film, with English subtitles. This isn’t the copy that I saw there – or on YouTube – before. All prior copies that I could find online (after a long time of not being able to find any) were far less easy to look at and didn’t have subtitles. And I have now watched pieces of the restored version (here and there), and the dances look beautiful, indeed. Maybe I’ll find a way to write this film up soon. Thank you again, Pritha!

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P.S. The fantastic picture of Zarina above appeared in several places, including an article announcing a concert in 2014. Because it’s been used a few times, I am assuming nobody is going to get very possessive about it if they see it here. (There were other pictures that I saw that were more specific to particular articles which I decided not to use for that reason – and also because I like this one more.)

Delving Into Dalrymple (The Last Mughal and, especially, White Mughals)

During the past month, I’ve had the very interesting experience of delving into two works by the man from the UK who is probably the best-known writer of Indian history in the English language today (and for good reason), William Dalrymple.

The first Dalrymple book that I delved into was The Last Mughal, which anyone familiar with the subject will recognize from its title as being about Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II. I had become very curious about this subject because of references to Zafar (as he is fondly known to many) and his poetry in Hindi films and related song performances. So, when I picked up this large book (445-plus pages in pretty small print, not including notes and other chapters outside of the main body), I looked forward to reading a whole lot about Zafar and his poetry. Actually, though, I found that most of the book was not really specifically devoted to either.

I think the book is better described by its subtitle, “The fall of a dynasty: Delhi, 1857.” The bulk of this book is devoted to the details of war and the fall of Delhi. In the earlier part of the book, there are some interesting descriptions of a Mughal court that tries for some time to ignore its impending doom, with great amounts of time and energy being spent on art, poetry, music, dancing, and assorted decadent indulgences that the aristocracy actually can no longer afford, considering the peril that it’s in. That part is the most interesting to me. Much more of the book, though, is devoted to the details of battle. This includes some interesting information about strategic successes and failures on both sides, but ultimately, we end up reading much more about atrocities. (Originally, there are some atrocities committed by the mutineering Sepoys, but those, of course, are far outweighed by the ones dealt out by the British at the end.)

I have to admit that I was not looking so much for a long war story, but, on the other hand, I must commend Dalrymple for the obviously voluminous research that he did, sometimes extending into incredibly minute details, and for his skill at conveying all these details so clearly that his writing seems very close to flawless. Most importantly, after reading The Last Mughal, I felt far more educated about historical circumstances that I have seen so often referred to in classic Indian films.

The Dalrymple book that I really enjoyed was the second one I read, but the earlier-written of the two, White Mughals. In The Last Mughal, Dalrymple often refers back to the era that White Mughals covers (that is, the late 18th century and early 19th) because it included a time when many British occupants of India were much more receptive to Indian culture, and the self-superior racist attitudes often associated with the British colonization of India were not as prevalent. In the Introduction to White Mughals, Dalrymple also points out that this is a fact of history that needs to be more widely revealed:

The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national, and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India, or for that matter by the post-colonial work coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow the path opened by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering Orientalism. It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

(By the way, that passage also reminded me a lot of a passage from another book by a different writer, which I discussed somewhat a year and a half ago. Interestingly, in both cases, the writers found fault with popular writings by Edward Said. I will add more about that in a P.S. below.)

Broadly speaking, especially in the first few chapters, White Mughals is devoted to men who moved to India in service to the British East India Company but who ended up eagerly adopting Mughal styles of dress and living because they admired the culture.

There also is a point frequently made that some of these British men were attracted to such a lifestyle because they could indulge their more sensual cravings in ways that they would have missed out on completely if they’d stayed at home. These sensual pleasures included great indulgent dining, leisurely enjoyment of sublime poetry and music, and the ability to keep several or a dozen Indian women in a harem. (Of course, for the most part, these were men who found a place among the aristocracy.)

But the heart of White Mughals is the romance between two people, an officer in the army of the British East India Company named James Kirkpatrick and an Indian Muslim noblewoman (or noblegirl, really) named Khair-un-Nissa. With great skill, Dalrymple relates all the joy and sorrows, victory and (most of all) heartbreaks involved before, during, and after this affair (and marriage). That is why White Mughals also is better described by its subtitle: “Love and betrayal in 18th century India.”

James Kirkpatrick evidently had had some indulgences with women before he met his great love in this tale and he even had some kind of harem (though not a large one). But these experiences were insignificant compared to his one-to-one romance with Khair. The girl whom he fell in love with was only 14 when he met her, which would certainly raise some questions in the present day, but Dalrymple spends very little time discussing the notion that Kirkpatrick might have in some way taken advantage of her. In fact, he stresses the evidence showing that Khair was the one who started the relationship. Actually, if anyone conducted any manipulation here, it was her mother, grandmother, and other female members of her family, who helped to engineer the meeting and encouraged the romance in part to find a way to get Khair out of an undesired arranged marriage. (Obviously, in 18th century India, 14 was a perfectly marriageable age, at least for a girl.) James does end up marrying her, himself, after a short while, and in the process, he causes great scandal to himself and risks a lot of hardship. Part of the reason for this is that the White Mughal era is actually beginning to wind down as the more typically colonialist and racist attitudes are starting to take over with the increase of British power in India. In James’ own immediate situation, certain officials enter the picture who cause him greater trouble and he is left to do one thing or another to negotiate around these hurdles although, for a while, he manages to maintain and even increase his professional status. Unfortunately, he does not do as well at maintaining his personal health, and Dalrymple strongly suggests that this deterioration in health was directly related to the social stress. Later in the book, we are also provided with information about how the deteriorating social relationships of the era harmed Khair-un-Nissa, who actually had to face a lot more heartbreak in her life years after James was out of the picture. (By the way, I hope that I have not just written too much of a spoiler, but there are plenty of hints from the beginning that life for these two lovers will not end up happily-ever-after.)

The connections that Dalrymple makes between the affairs of his main subjects and the social changes that he is eager to write about are very intriguing and quite ambitious. But by the end of White Mughals, I felt that the writing shone most in the conveyance of emotional drama, and I found the drama here to be more moving than many that I’ve read in fiction.

I would like to find some passages to show how well Dalrymple builds up this drama, but this is a little difficult because he is not the kind of writer who seeks to dazzle a reader with one or another showy paragraph. The effect of the good writing in this book is cumulative. Certainly, Dalrymple is not averse to dropping a little sentence at the end of a chapter to create a cliffhanger that will keep you turning pages (an obvious trick but fun nonetheless), e.g.: “Yet even here the story does not quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final, extraordinary coda.” But the real reason I kept turning the pages was that I enjoyed the way the facts and circumstances slowly built up and progressed, with one good layer of information following the other, all related in a crafty and skillful way. I think it also became clear in this book that William Dalrymple absolutely loves writing detailed histories centered on solidly fleshed out individual subjects and I believe I caught some of that relish too. For me, this turned out to be a highly enjoyable reading experience in addition to being very educational.
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P.S. The passage that I thought about after reading the one that I quoted from Dalrymple was from Wendy Buonaventura’s Serpent of the Nile, which I reviewed as part of a more wandering post back on December 23, 2016. I typed out the passage back then, too, but here it is again, for comparison with Dalrymple’s:

The current, widely held view of Orientalism derives from Edward Said’s thesis that the West has exploited, misunderstood and even invented the East for its own sinister purposes. From the wealth of material available, it is easy to select examples to suit this theory and ignore those which do not. However, Orientalist attitudes to the Middle East are as varied as human beings. An obsession with European colonialism has unfortunately blinded many critics to the complex interrelationship which has existed between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world for hundreds of years. This obsession has merely served to prolong the misunderstanding which exists between them. Many Europeans who went to the Arab world compared the life they found there favorably with that of Europe.

Dhanak (2015)

A couple of years ago, within a post about the song  “Lal Meri Pat,” I included a delightful version from a then-upcoming film Dhanak (which had not yet been released widely although it had won some awards in festivals). This version consisted of a duet between a small Indian boy (who appeared to be blind) impressively belting out “Lal Meri Pat” and what appeared to be a stereotypical American hippie singing “Let’s Give Love A Chance,” which obviously was John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” with just slightly different lyrics. The clip (which I have posted again above) was not strictly a video of the scene where this song occurred – although it included some of that – but also a trailer that contained some other vivid moments from the film. When I wrote about this song and video before, I said that the film looked very sweet. And now that I have finally gotten to see the whole movie, I can say that I was absolutely right. It’s the sweetest movie that I have seen in quite a while.

Dhanak is a heartwarming and lively tale of a journey taken by two children, ten-year-old Pari and her eight-year-old brother, Chotu, who are played superbly by actors Hetal Gada and Krrish Chhabria. We can assume, from looking at these actors (and from an interview I glimpsed) that they are just about the same age as the characters, but, remarkably, the performance by these two children is widely agreed to be the best aspect of the film. But Dhanak is also carried along well by good writing and very smooth direction on the part of Nagesh Kukunoor, a lot of magnificent-looking scenery shots in Rajasthan (cinematography by Chirantan Das) and some wonderful music (by music director Tapas Relia, who also wrote the lyrics for “Let’s Give Love A Chance”).

The plot of this movie may at first seem somewhat familiar, but in ways it also turns out to be highly original…

Chotu is blind from an (unspecified) illness that he suffered at the age of four. Pari desperately wants her brother to be able to see again, but everyone knows that the aunt and uncle who are raising them will never pay for the necessary operation. Part of the reason is that the uncle is unemployed and they are poor, but also, the aunt has always deprived the children and probably wouldn’t want to pay for the operation even if they had the money, because she never wanted to inherit these children from her husband’s brother. The real parents died in an accident several years ago (apparently, shortly before Chotu went blind). And since their present guardians aren’t going to help, the children have to find another way, and Pari is the one who comes up with that other way (peculiar though her idea might be)…

Their plan (which I’ll get to in a minute) certainly is different, but I’m sure everyone reading this post who is familiar with Hindi films has been reminded by this point of the basic plot of something else. Speaking for myself, I instantly thought about Nanda’s first movie, Toofan Aur Diya (1956). In that film, it is the older sister (played by Nanda) who is blind (or rapidly on the way to becoming blind) and the younger, child brother (played by Satish Vyas) who takes on the task of getting money to pay for the operation that will cure her. (Mainly, he does this through a ridiculous amount of work and sacrifice.) And these children are orphans too. I seem to recall that in this film there was also an evil aunt who didn’t want to be burdened by them…or it could be that my mind is now drifting to Boot Polish. As I was saying, there are a few old films that Dhanak could bring to mind, but for me, Toofan Aur Diya seems like the closest – which isn’t such a bad thing, actually.

But I think Dhanak does have better actors and more nuanced characters, and it features a strange twist of plot that couldn’t have been seen in such an old movie, because it involves Shah Rukh Kahn… Not, that is to say, a character played by Shah Rukh Khan, but Shah Rukh Khan as a character in the film (whom we never actually see) who provides motivation for the journey.

Shah Rukh Khan is Pari’s favorite cinema hero (while Chotu prefers Salman Khan). And one day, after the siblings attend a movie, Pari spots a poster of Shah Rukh Khan asking for people to donate their eyes (which I would assume – though it’s never specified – is for some charity for the blind that enlisted him as a representative). Pari takes the poster off the wall, contemplates it, and decides that she will write letters to Shah Rukh Khan, asking him to help cure her brother’s blindness. She cannot afford stamps, so she asks someone else in the village to stamp and mail them, and of course, most of the letters are never mailed but actually end up in her uncle’s possession – which she discovers eventually. Other bad things happen in her household – e.g., her aunt tells her to stop going to school because her help is needed at home. Meanwhile, word gets around that SRK is filming somewhere a few hundred miles away from them, so given everything else that is going on, Pari decides to run away with Chotu in tow, in order to reach Shah Rukh Khan and talk to him directly. And so the journey begins…

I don’t feel a need to go into the progression of the journey in too much detail, because it is basically just a road trip – via a few different people’s vehicles and lots of walking – in which they meet various people, most of whom are a bit crazy, and suffer various setbacks, all of which are overcome in one way or another.  They do finally reach their destination, where things do and don’t turn out exactly as they had hoped – though whether SRK actually helps them remains something of a mystery. (And let’s leave it at that, because I don’t want to spoil the ending too much.)

Most of the journey is fun and sometimes it is enchanting. It is also refreshing for its lack grimness – especially considering that they are two children wandering across a big area all by themselves and this is the 21st century. There is a moment during the film when they are briefly kidnapped by a child trafficker (who has actually been told by a contact to focus more on the blind boy because he could be a “gold mine” – maybe via lucrative begging?). We in the audience know that this bad thing is going to happen a bit before the main characters do, and when this information came out, I thought it would ruin the film, because the suspense about the impending peril could be dragged out, and then we might have to suffer through a depiction of the peril, itself, and its consequences. There are reasons why, at this point, it brought to mind another somewhat contemporary film – only a British one – called Slumdog Millionaire. But thank goodness, none of that happens. The children are rescued from the trafficker in a very amusing scene involving a woman from a nomadic Rajasthani tribe, who stops the trafficker’s car in high dacoit style by pulling a shotgun out from under the side of her dupatta. And then the two children end up sleeping in a Rajasthani nomads’ camp, get some helpful minor prophecy from an interesting old blind woman (who of course understands Chotu in a special way), and then embark on another leg of the journey.

By the way, there is also another scene in the film in which the children end up interacting with a matriarchal figure who has somewhat religious or spiritual significance to a surrounding community. This makes for an interesting side theme in this movie regarding local matriarchal cult leaders (who perhaps also function briefly as maternal figures that substitute a little for the motherly love and/or guidance that the children have been deprived of). More generally speaking, Dhanak does seem to focus at least somewhat on India’s impressive variety of religions. And of course, not all the religions covered by this film are matriarchal, considering that the best scene involves a popular prayer to the great Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.

Let’s rewind now and look at that song scene again… The “Lal Meri Pat” scene occurs shortly before the trafficking incident and basically exists apart from every other phase of the plot. It doesn’t really progress the journey aspect of the plot much; it could almost be an item song. But it also happens to be (at least from my perspective) the most enjoyable scene in the film.

And unlike the first time when I posted that song on this blog, now I have a little more information to give about it. The hippie is played by a Louisiana-born actor named Chet Dixon. He is a comedian who does some singing too, and  in Dhanak, he sings for himself. The impressive playback singing for the boy’s part comes from Devu Khan – formally known as Devu Khan Manganiyar because he is from the Manganiyar community of traditional folk singers in Rajasthan. He learned all of his singing skills from his parents, who were also folk singers. He probably comes from a very long tradition. But because he has gained praise for his role in a Bollywood film, he most likely will end up with a following well beyond his traditional audience. So, that makes three children whose lives have probably been changed – at least for a while – thanks to the well-deserved praise they received from their roles in this film.

Dhanak is known and praised as a children’s film. It has won several international awards in the children’s film category. But while watching it, I never thought to myself, “Oh, this is pretty good for a children’s film.”  Curiously, judging by what I’ve seen, this film displays more maturity in terms of acting, writing, and direction that one might find in many contemporary films made for grownups. I would give it an award for being a very good film, period.

[Above is a complete version of the song “Let’s Give Love A Chance”/”Dam Mast Qalandar” (“Lal Meri Pat”) and the corresponding scene, separate from the other material shown in the trailer. The video is defective, as it includes the entire scene twice, the second time around without sound. Of course, you can stop it in the middle. Or, you can play it again if you want to look at the splendid picturization again and re-read the lyrics. At some point or other, all of the lyrics are subtitled in English, including the English ones.]

The Tragedy Queen and the “Nautch Queen of New Jersey” (thoughts after reading two very informative articles)

1. Meena

As of the time I am beginning this post (though it won’t be by the time I post it), it is the anniversary of Meena Kumari’s death. She died on March 31, 1972, just two months after the debut of her best film, Pakeezah. And, by the way, I do really feel – as many others do also – that this was her best. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam was very good (albeit awfully depressing), but it was not her best. Baiju Bawra was not her best. Pakeezah was the real classic out of everything she did. And that fact begins to seem quite remarkable when we consider all the obstacles that had to be overcome in order for her to complete it. Of course, the director, Kamal Amrohi, deserves a lot of credit for this too. (And though I love his film Mahal, I think Pakeezah truly was his best also.)

But unfortunately, for any of us who know a little background, the drama surrounding Meena’s demise behind the scenes sometimes takes precedence in our minds over the drama of the film, itself. Speaking for myself, sometimes I can’t help looking for more tidbits regarding how Kamal and Meena together managed to make something great out of a situation that was in many ways dreadful, because of the illness that she suffered as a result of the alcoholism that he, her longtime-estranged husband, probably emotionally influenced (and to no small extent). And every time I decide to take a peek at another article on the subject, I find myself discovering some new detail that I didn’t see before.

In an article that I recently discovered that is mostly by Kamal’s son, Tajdar Amrohi, I actually found all those tidbits put together and then some. So, in honor of Meena Kumari on her death anniversary, but also in acknowledgment of the morbid fascination that I am sure many possible readers of this post share with me, I decided to spread some word about the article here.

The article was posted at Filmfare.com on June 8, 2017; it is The Truth Behind Pakeezah Unveiled. The byline goes to Farhana Farook, who writes the introduction, but the bulk of the article consists of the words of Tajdar Amrohi, who obviously had as much inside knowledge on this subject as anyone. I do think he is a bit too worshipful of his father here and too eager to dismiss common knowledge about his father’s awful treatment of Meena Kumari. Nonetheless, he offers some innovative insights into symbols and other ingredients within the Pakeezah (e.g., “the train is the hero of the film”), as well as relating a lot of details regarding how the film was made. With regard to the grim tidbits that I mentioned above, well, here are the pertinent paragraphs:

They resumed shooting in 1968 by first filming the song Mausam hai aashiqana, which Baba had written. Due to her liver ailment, her stomach had bloated. To camouflage that, Baba made her wear a kurta and lungi. And that became a trend! The tent was set up in Filmalaya and later the shots were matched with the outdoor scenes. Though she’d feel tired, she’d perk up before the camera. After every shot, a unit hand would rush to her with a chair. 

Actress and dancer Padma Khanna was used as her body double as Baba believed her body dimensions and face structure matched Choti Ammi’s. Padma’s make-up was done by Joshi Dada. Her eyebrows and lips were made to look like Choti Ammi’s. One of the background dancers in the song Chalte chalte… was also used as a body double in the scene when Sahibjaan runs away from her nikah with Salim (Raaj Kumar). As also in the scene where she runs on the railway tracks. During the last song Aaj hum apni duaon ka asar, Choti Amma had to twirl around and drop in Veenaji’s arms. That was strenuous for her. Her close-ups were taken in sitting position. The song Chalo dildar chalo didn’t focus on her face even once but yet had a surreal quality.

And speaking of Padma Khanna, that brings me to the second part of the post.

2. Padma

On March 10, I saw some notices on Facebook (from one of the enlightening groups or pages that I’m subscribed to) that it was Padma Khanna’s birthday. For a little while, I thought of writing a post entirely about Padma Khanna, but I felt that I was not as knowledgeable about all her dancing vamp performances as many other people might be, partly because the ‘70s isn’t my specialty. But I did do a little research about her, and that’s when I stumbled upon an article from just two years ago by Mayukh Sen about Padma Khanna as the Nautch Queen of New Jersey (Roads & Kingdoms, March 1, 2016).  This article provided me with a good brush-up about the highlights of Padma’s career in Bollywood (beyond being Meena’s body double) and it includes a clip of one of her famous dances in Johny Mera Naam. But this article is most interesting because it also tells about Padma Khanna’s experiences running a dance school in New Jersey, in current times.

As some people know, I am basically a lifelong New Yorker, and since I am also such a fan of old Hindi movies, I take delight in stories about old-time “Bollywood” dancing stars who left India to teach dance in one of my city’s suburbs. Of course, Padma Khanna was far from the first one. For a while, Padmini had a dancing school in New Jersey, too. (Actually, she started it in Flushing, Queens – in a temple that I have visited – but her school became more successful after she moved it to New Jersey.)  Kamala Lakshman/Narayan also came to the New York City area to teach dance, concentrating her efforts in Long Island as well as some suburbs slightly to the north of us. Padma moved to the U.S. significantly later than Padmini and at least a decade later than Kamala, but her New York/New Jersey-area story is pretty close to that of the other two – especially Kamala’s, if you think about it. Essentially, she left India at a time when her dancing skills and the type of role she’d done most often (the vamp and item girl) were beginning to go out of fashion, and Padma was also aware that she was getting a little older. So, with her husband – a director named Jagdish Sidana – she packed up and went to America to start a new dancing school. Actually, they tried Chicago at first but that didn’t work out so well, so they went back to Mumbai for a little while. And then they heard that a lot of Indians were moving to New Jersey so they decided to try that, and their dancing school, Indianica, turned out to do pretty well.

Indianica specializes in Kathak, and it became clear as I read this article that Padma also felt fine about getting away from film roles and focusing on classical dance. (She had actually started out as a classical dancer, performing Kathak professionally at the age of 12.) That part of her story reminds me of Kamala Lakshman’s. Kamala also began to feel unappreciated in India and saw her film career prospects declining, and she seemed happy to focus strictly on dance. But I’ve read some old interviews with Kamala, and it seems that she felt some bitterness about how things turned out. In this interview with Padma, by contrast, she doesn’t seem to feel any bitterness or regrets. And that is a point made very clear at the end of the article, when Mayukh Sen writes:

Khanna, though, is all smiles. Perhaps distance and time have abstracted any frustration, and all that is left is gratitude. “I was always very passionate about dancing, and I still am,” she tells me, noting that she relished being able to dance on film. “Being typecast didn’t bother me at all.”

Padma has had some sad moments – e.g., the death of her husband – but from what I gathered in this article and interview, in 2106, when she was already well into her 60s, she was doing just fine. (And by the way, you can find good current videos from Indianica if you go to YouTube – maybe I’ll post some sometime.)

So, if you happen, by any chance, to be depressed after reading or thinking about the demise of the Tragedy Queen, this very uplifting article about the life of her old body double could prove to be a good remedy.