A Radically Skeptical Ramayana

(First published at Desicritics)

An epic has something to offer to everyone. Its spectacular range of characters, situations and emotions allows for a multitude of interpretations. Its tragedy, of course, is that blind men will insist on what the elephant looks like. A radically skeptical Ramayana, which is what Aubrey Menen imagines Valmiki to have written, is not for those who insist upon the One Authentic Version of the epic. The Valmiki Menen imagines is the voice of an Indian Enlightenment whose skeptical realism is nothing short of shocking (even to yours truly godless). Here's how Menen thinks Valmiki's ilk would address us:

“We have nothing against this elaborate toy you call civilization. It is very pretty, especially when all parts are in working order. We do not suggest for a moment that you pull it to pieces and start anew. We do not suggest you do anything at all. So far as we are concerned, our only wish is, with the greatest good will, never to see your face again. If you are curious to know what we propose to do, we shall endeavor to explain, but not very often. We intend to set about the proper business of a human being, which is the improvement of his own soul. In this you cannot join us because you cannot call your souls your own. Since you depend every minute of your existence on everybody, you yourself are nobody. However, we will agree, in parting, that you are a jolly good fellow."

(At one point, Valmiki likens our habit of building societies to a gnat-like insect's act of creating beautiful and elaborate stones in the sea - a likeness that evolutionary psychology would bear out, I think.)

In Menen's view, the Valmiki Ramayana was written in this irreverent vein but Brahmins later sanitized it, depriving it of its piquancy in the hope of making it palatable. (In the following, read "Valmiki as imagined by Menen" for "Valmiki". Of course, I could just write "Menen" but I'm much more intrigued by the Valmiki that Menen wants to resurrect.). The Brahmins' version of Valmiki is that he was a brigand who stole and killed, and was outlawed for these crimes. But, Menen warns us, this could also be because Valmiki's "verses scanned better than anything the Brahmins could ever write."

The entire Ramayana that ensues is garnished with such delightful jabs at propriety, both in its prose and in its narrative elements. Thus Dashratha is described as a rotund, unattractive, hedonistic king who "was loved by all his subjects, and he loved certain of them in return, especially if they were women". Being such a king, he naturally spends most of his time in his harem, leaving the administration of the kingdom to the Brahmins. Ayodhya, as described here, comes pretty close to a liberal-democratic monarchy, warts and all. Thus, the king is a functional head and the Brahmins hold the strings tied to this head. (I don't think Valmiki would be surprised to learn that in our time, the people get to choose their functional head as well.) Valmiki's satire attacks the hypocrisy that is the hallmark of political rhetoric. For instance, Ayodhya’s impartial judges are described as men who have proven their expertise in manipulation of the law; or just before Rama’s army attacks Lanka, both Rama and Ravana propose “peace treaties” that are tantamount to the subjugation of the other side. And there are sexual politics too. Manthara, the woman who poisons Kaikeyi's ears, is Dashratha's spurned concubine; and Kaikeyi extracts Dashratha's promise to send Rama away on an exile through blackmail: she threatens to go public about the king's non-performance on their wedding night.

This emasculation of power is very much in keeping with Valmiki's brand of iconoclasm and it returns even more provocatively when Ravana enters the scene. In this account, when Rama, Laxman and Sita are camped at Valmiki's hermitage, Sita takes long walks and meets up with Ravana a couple of times before she's taken to Lanka. Her reason? She's bored by the intellectual Rama and all the philosophizing at the hermitage. "He loves me", she tells Laxmana matter-of-factly about Ravana, and wistfully wonders if anyone would notice if she never returned from her walks. We understand, as Laxman does, her alienation and the hint of attraction she feels towards Ravana, if only because he is everything Rama isn't.

Laxman is a born fighter - the brawn to Rama's brain, he's always baying for a battle, and is himself not too happy with the daily doze of discourse at Valmiki's hermitage. So, seeking a skirmish in the woods, he chances upon Ravana and picks a fight with him. Ravana retaliates by attacking the hermitage. The odds are naturally in Ravana's favor; he has soldiers and all Rama and Laxman have are hermits. Seeing this, Sita, ever the smartest of the trio, walks up to Ravana and agrees to accompany him to Lanka if Rama and Laxman are spared. As she later explains her decision to Laxman,

"I made up my mind when your bowstring snapped...You looked around and I saw your face and I said to myself, 'Laxman's getting ready to die'...It wasn't very difficult to make up my mind, but I had no time to explain - especially to Rama. He was never an easy man to explain things to."

Valmiki's Sita isn't a sacrificial sati; she's much more - a woman who knows exactly what the need of the hour is. She does save Rama from imminent death and defeat at Ravana's hand, but she is human and all the more admirable, accessible and venerable for it. It is fitting then, that in this account, she is seduced by Ravana. There's remarkable candor and clarity of mind in her confessional dialogue with Laxman:

Sita: "I'd have been a heroine. I meant to be. I meant to kill myself rather than keep my promise [to Ravana]. I think I would've killed myself if he'd come at me as I expected, all drunk and brutal. But I hadn't allowed for one thing."
Laxman: "He played a trick on you, eh?"
Sita: "Yes, Laxman, the oldest trick of them all. He just said that he loved me above everything else in the world and that he would never force me to do anything I did not want. I was pleased at first. Then I was sorry for him. Then he kissed me. Then I wasn't a heroine any more."

The friendship between Laxman and Sita is a tender and true one. As seen above, some of the most personal and disarmingly human lines in the book are the ones uttered by Sita when she confides in Laxman. It's Laxman who makes Rama realize that Rama has wronged Sita and not the other way round.

If Sita is Valmiki's heroine, Rama is very much his hero. On the eve of his exile, Rama is a naïve, cerebral prince. The general opinion of him is that he is "generous, warmhearted, loyal, well-meaning, intellectually brilliant, idealistic, and a damn fool". Valmiki's skeptical realism turns out to be the perfect philosophical antidote to Rama's jejune idealism. In true storytelling spirit, the narrative is interspersed with pithy parables that Valmiki narrates to Rama. My favorite is the one with a locust who insists on reading all the important scriptures; his guru agrees to educate him provided he gives up eating leaves. After a while, the locust is naturally unable to keep his end of the bargain. (The locust is a clever choice because reading voraciously is to gorge on the leaves of a book.) The parable directly attacks Rama's quest for the meaning of life in books, reminding him (and us in these Twittering times) that information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. Here's Rama acknowledging his debt to Valmiki upon returning to Ayodhya from his exile:

"Looking at the city of my birth again brings back to me something of my youth - the time that is, before I had the melancholy advantage of your wisdom."

And here's this "melancholy advantage" at work:

"[Rama] next thought that he might make a great study of the laws of his country and produce a code which would endure for a thousand years, the Code of Rama the Wise: but he remembered the locust and tempered his ambitions."

This is a matured man indeed. The trial-by-fire he holds for Sita is just a theatrical act of political appeasement, a charade where the fire is a fake "Egyptian fire" that looks like fire but doesn't burn at all; all it manages to do is to put out the wildfires of gossip. And this is the only possible trial that would be fair to Sita, vindicating her innocence; anything else would be a de facto guilty plea.

The most important lesson Rama learns from his hardships in exile and under Valmiki's tutelage is the sobering lesson - it could be said - of all good literature: we are fallible and imperfect. Seen as such, the Ramayana (literally, "the travels of Rama") is a wonderful coming-of-age journey, a Making of the Mahatma of sorts. (At some level, it is also a deeply satisfying classical comedy). This ripening of Rama also redeems the Ramayana from Valmiki’s bleak cynicism; the book rises above wisecracking political satire to become an epic story of human triumph. Valmiki’s literary genius is that he is able to give his narrative an ending that is not only happy but also profound because it turns his skepticism inward. After all, Rama’s return to Ayodhya as its king is a man’s return to the messy business of civilization (at its helm, at that) – a graduation, a leap of faith - and by granting Rama the possibility of redemption within the framework of civilization, Valmiki is, like all seasoned skeptics, acknowledging the limitations of his own outlook.

One wonders if such a Ramayana could be published in today's zeitgeist. Exploiting our desperate yearning for a Ram-rajya, militia crop up in Rama's name and large cut-outs in political processions portray him as a fiery, blue superhero with a bow and arrow. But that wasn't Valmiki's hero. Valmiki's hero was a man who was great because he learnt that he was imperfect and chose to step back into life with this wisdom - a humble skepticism diametrically opposed to the proud certitude of his self-proclaimed champions. Sita's tryst with Ravana may offend the machismo of those who created the warrior-god in their image, but Rama was far more sentient than they are. He knew better than to mistake Sita's independence for her dissolution, and would never place the burden of her character on her chastity. How could he be threatened by Sita's individuality when that was what saved him? A man who first nearly lost his life, then nearly lost the love of his life, and in the end emerged humbled by the experience, is certainly worthy of worship - as is the woman who saved him. The real richness of Indian culture lies in the multi-layered texture of stories like theirs. Let's preserve it, shall we?

Shock and Aww

(First published at Desicritics)

zaraa mulk ke raahbaroN ko bulaao

yeh kuucheh, yeh galiyaaN, yeh manzar dikhaao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par un ko laao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par woh kahaaN haiN?

Summon the nation's leaders,

Show 'em these lanes and quarters,

Summon the nation's proud flag-bearers,

Where are the nation's proud flag-bearers?

- Sahir Ludhianvi.

Years ago, on an Indian talk show, a lady in the audience fumed about Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, "Do you have to parade a woman naked in front of the camera just to be realistic?" On the discussion panel was Gulzar, whose apt - if equivocal - reply was, "It depends on your aesthetic sensibilities." And suddenly, I became aware of a fundamental disconnect: being male, I hadn't seen how gratuitous and humiliating the scene might have seemed to a woman.

In Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the thematic equivalent of parading a woman naked before the camera is the sequence where little Jamal, plastered from head to toe in shit, jostles through a crowd, all for an autograph of Amitabh Bachchan. Perhaps there is an aesthetic sensibility here; it just doesn't overlap with mine. To me, some subjects - sexual and economic exploitation certainly rank high among them - just don't lend themselves to flippancy. (That's one reason why I hated Anthony Burgess's gratuitous Clockwork Orange and, despite being a Kubrick fan, haven't cared to watch the film.) It would be one thing if an astute director (of any nationality, for the record) were to make a film that questioned the dominant India shining/poised narrative or exposed the systemic morass of corruption and exploitation in Indian society; Slumdog Millionaire is not that film, and Danny Boyle is not that director. (In recent times, Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky, and Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli are much more up to that task). To me, the shit and autograph scene is an in-your-face, shock-the-hell-out-of-them intro to Jamal's tenacity and the rich - poor divide. And speaking of Gulzar, let me point to how it's done: the scene in Hu Tu Tu where Suneil Shetty and Tabu land their private jet on a road, upending a hapless bicycle-rider.

To be sure, Boyle is clever enough not to attempt anything approaching social commentary - at least not on the face of it. Thus, ostensibly, the film is a filmier-than-thou imitation of those Hindi films of yore (as evinced by shots of Coolie and Zanjeer). But, mirroring the malaise that affects Hindi film makers who ape Hollywood, the imitation is all in form and schema, not in spirit. Jamal Malik is not the angry anti-establishment hero that Bacchan (or Kamal Hassan in Mani Ratnam's Nayakan) was; he is far too bourgeois for that - what subversive hero would exact his revenge on the system by getting rich on Kaun Banegaa Crorepati? Even Salim, his brother on the dark side, ends up mouthing such platitudes as, "India is at the center of the world", reinforcing the cherished delusions of grandeur instead of challenging them. Surely the romanticized urban common man fared far better in the folklores of Manmohan Desai (Mard, Coolie, Amar Akbar Anthony, Shahenshah), Prakash Mehra (Zanjeer) and Yash Chopra (Trishul, Deewaar); or in the socio-political commentaries of Guru Dutt (from whose Pyaasa comes the above verse of a de-Persianized version of Sahir's scathing poem), early Raj Kapoor (Sri 420), Bimal Roy (Do Beegha Zameen) and Aziz Mirza (Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Yes Boss).

As a fairy tale, too, the film isn't engaging enough. In narrating a story that is, to quote the inspector (Irrfan Khan), "bizzarely plausible", Boyle resorts to such gimmicks as jump-cutting to flashbacks in case you didn't connect the all too obvious dots. Even the badness of the baddies is exaggerated; Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar) growls, scowls and throws things around, looking more like a brat than a brute. And Jamal must face obstacles at every step; getting sheathed in shit isn't enough – his mother must be hacked to death in a communal carnage, his girl must be pimped out, and the quiz show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) must thwart his attempts at making the millions. My wife put it best when she quipped, "It's like (Sanjay Leela Bhansali's) Black", where every conceivable ailment and impediment, and a stylized storytelling stifle any possibility of a human connection between the viewer and the characters.

You don't really know what to make of Jamal, for instance. Setting aside the leap of imagination it requires to see any Ayush Khedekar growing up to be a Dev Patel, it isn't clear who Jamal is. Even if you accept the story as allegorical, Boyle is too self-conscious (or perhaps too conscious of the poverty that just won't recede to become a mere backdrop) to paint a large, magic-real canvas in the unapologetic way that, say, Forrest Gump or the more recent Benjamin Button do. Unlike his counterparts from the American South, Jamal never quite becomes the everyman's voice of his period in Indian history; we never hear him telling us other people's interesting stories from his vantage point as an 'outsider' (h/t Amrita's post on Button).

All this makes Slumdog a half-hearted, comme ci, comme ca endeavor that wants to both be a fairy-tale and capture urban poverty but falters on both counts. I, for one, can’t see how you can hide abject poverty behind a “feel good” façade any more than you can hide rape. Can you imagine a sexually abused Cinderella finding her Prince Charming? Wouldn't it end up being a glossier version of a B-grade flick? (Indeed, Seema Biswas once joked about how many such roles she was approached for, post Bandit Queen). As the talk show lady’s gripe with Bandit Queen shows, a sentient film maker would create a film Phoolan Devi could watch and experience something of a catharsis, without feeling like a prop. Sometimes, the artist had better not be a predator. Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay was a stark but empathetic and grounded ode to Bombay’s slum dwellers (and the characters were complex, recognizable human beings. How childlike Chillum was; how Oedipal Chai-pau's rescue of Rekha!).

Reading reviews of Slumdog, you’d think the movie had some unique, far-reaching significance. Here’s a mis-reading by Anand Giridharadas from the NY Times: “It channels to them [Americans] their own Gatsbyesque fantasy of self-invention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy”. Gatsby, the writer forgets, ended up being shot dead in a pool, not kissing his childhood sweetheart in a triumphant “aww” moment. To that extent, Bacchan in Deewar and the protagonists in Satya and Johnny Gaddar were much more Gatsbyesque.

Slumdog, then, is at best an attempt to cook a saccharine dish in a bitter sauce. Unfortunately, when it comes to the hardships of the disadvantaged, I have no palate for bittersweet. If you have a sweet tooth, Karan Johar's your chef (in whose films, hardship is conspicuous by absence). Me? I'm sticking to Sahir's talKhiyaaN - that's Urdu for bitterness.

On Sameh Zoabi's Be Quiet

The best movies are the simplest. And what could be simpler than a nineteen minute film about a little boy and his father in a car, on their way from his uncle's funeral to their field. Except that the father and the child are Palestinians with Israeli license plates, the funeral was in the West Bank, and they have to cross the infamous checkpoints, the field in question being in Nazareth.

Sameh Zoabi's pithily titled Be Quiet is about submittal to authority as a way of survival. For that is the way in these parts; the journey of the father-and-son duo may be simple, but it is far from ordinary. Indeed, life and its little chores can seldom be ordinary under a watchful eye. How can a child endure the humiliation of seeing his father held down by guards at the checkpoints? It can only wound his pride, rubbing in the salt of his father's impotence. Nothing untoward happens in the film, but one can constantly sense how lives teeter on the brink of death (a point cleverly made by a truck almost running over the little boy) in these parts.

Be Quiet is a truly subversive film, challenging the paternalistic authority that power seeks to acquire, whilst recognizing the varieties of paternalism worth having. It reminds us why art is so much about refusing to grow up and resisting cynicism of the sort that perpetuates the violence in these and other parts of the world.

The Benefits of Doubt

One of the many remarkable things about John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is its ability to capture on film that unmistakable pall of melancholy that hangs over Catholic churches and schools. Adding to this somberness are the denizens of the Bronx circa 1964, sporting dull shades of black, gray, brown and white. In fact the first streak of colored garment you notice is the gold rim on Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)'s cassock. This befitting introduction instantly marks him out as being of a somewhat different feather than his flock, igniting in us the mistrust that he will go on to ignite in his antagonist, Sister Beauvier (Meryl Streep). She too is similarly introduced: Towering over her lot, atop a flight of stairs, Sister Beauvier reprimands William London, the most evidently pubescent of the boys, for addressing a timid Sister James (Amy Adams) by gently patting her on the arm. "She's thirsty for blood", Father Flynn quips to Sister James. This little exchange at once maps out the strict boundaries defining Catholic institutions of the day, points to the politics among the characters, and hints at Sister B's hyper-sensitivity to sex - all important motifs in the film.

Between the two nuns and the priest, the skillfully etched out characters span the continuum from free-spiritedness to orthodoxy. Father Flynn is all jokes and bonhomie, a perfect counterfoil not just to Sister Beauvier but also to the weighty seriousness of his institution. A couple of odd incidents cause Sister James to suspect that Father Flynn's fondness for Donald Miller, the only black boy in the school, may be more than avuncular. Her expression of this doubt to Sister Beauvier is enough to convince the latter of the priest's sin. As if to tease us into judgment, there are suggestions that somewhat strengthen Beauvier's point of view, but upon closer examination they merely expose us to our own biases – especially in light of the brilliantly written exchange between Sister Beauvier and Donald’s mother (Viola Davis in a heart-wrenching cameo).
While Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep could never be anything but super, to my mind the performance to watch out for is that of Amy Adams. It’s as though her tentative, virginal and torn Sister James were living the did-he-or-didn't-he dilemma, precariously straddling the opposing certitudes of Flynn and Beauvier.

Writers, like their readers, are often tempted to tie up all their loose ends but John Patrick Shanley does well to respect and engage his viewer's intelligence by not spelling out a verdict.
His use of everyday incidents - someone barging into a room in the midst of a delicate conversation, or a jarring telephone ring - is very effective in heightening the tension. Equally effective are those picturesquely shot, notorious New York seasons. There is one thunderstorm too many, though, unnecessarily emphasizing the tempest within the church. The thunder soundtrack in the background during the showdown between Flynn and Beauvier seems particularly out of place in a film that only alludes and never tells, its very title alluding to the blurry lines between doubt and faith. Mercifully, Shanley doesn’t give us any confrontational high-drama during Flynn’s goodbyes, leaving it to our imaginations.

Sister B's final confessional breakdown, too, merely hints at the real doubts she harbors (via a subtle close-up of her fingers clutching her cross), turning her steely certitude inside out to reveal a vulnerable, tormented soul. And that’s the irony of it all: Father Flynn, the open-minded priest who nearly embraces doubt in a sermon, surely harbors no doubts about his actions; while the seemingly conservative Beauvier, it turns out, has been plagued by that greatest of all doubts. In strange soils, indeed, these seeds of doubt do grow.

(First published at Desicritics)