The Reluctant Fundamentalist

(First published at Desicritics)

When Changez, the narrator-protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, returns to New York just after September 11, 2001 from a business assignment, he is stripped to his boxers by airport immigration authorities. There is a disarmingly clever little detail that Hamid works into this incident:

'...I had, rather embarrassingly, chosen to wear a pink pair patterned with teddy bears, but their revelation had no impact on the severe expressions of my inspectors'

Changez has bared himself to be the childlike, adorably dorky personality he is, but no one seems to recognize that. In post 9/11 America, he feels as though his external appearance defines him. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is largely a book about such prejudices. In a café in Lahore, Changez narrates his past to an American. There is constant tension between the two, obviously mirroring the uneasy love-hate relationship between the two nations. The book is a quasi-monologue; the American remains anonymous and peeks out of the pages only when Changez either repeats his casual questions (“Oh, you ask Why”? and suchlike), or reads his mind (“I see that you are alarmed”). This allows the story to come from Changez’s-and therefore Pakistan’s-perspective, it makes us-the readers-the intended anonymous audience, and heightens the sense of mystery surrounding the American.

The most powerful thing about the book is, not surprisingly, the love story. With some extraordinarily sensitive prose, Erica, Changez’s love, emerges as a brilliant personification of her country (whose name contains hers). Having lost Chris, her first and longtime love, Erica is only beginning to find life in Changez, when 9/11 happens. This pushes her into a depression-a heartbreaking vortex of longing for the dead Chris.
Hamid seems to warn us that this quest for a better future in an imagined past is not only Erica and Changez’s tragedy, but that of all fundamentalism. True to the novelist’s craft, he doesn’t directly condemn this backward looking ideology, but instead brings out the self-destructive tragedy of this outlook.
During their courtship, Erica responds to Changez sexually only when he pretends to be Chris. This is a poignant comment on the obliteration of identity that ‘fitting-in’ demands.

Religion, apart from a few oblique references, is conspicuously absent from the narrative. Hamid is more interested in the psychology of a fundamentalist. Changez’s inspirations are not in Islam; his angst is fuelled by his sense of wounded pride (he cannot bear the fact that even Manila has a swankier skyline than Lahore), his awareness of acute economic disparity, and his alienation-induced identity crisis-issues that all of us grapple with in this “World Is Flat” age.
The novel is the perfect medium to give these issues an identifiably human voice, and Hamid’s rich prose adds to the beauty of this endeavor. (A quibble: too many words are italicized for emphasis, often unnecessarily, sometimes jarringly.) The ending, too, is a slick comment on the perpetual mutual suspicion between the two cultures.

Stanley Kramer, Rama Sethu and The Inheritors of Wind

(First published at Desicritics)

A few weeks ago, I happened to watch two powerful Stanley Kramer courtroom dramas: Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (they now join my all time favorite in this genre - Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men). What drove me to write about these films are the Ram-Sethu issue and the subsequent spate of arguments on Desicritics.

Inherit the Wind is based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where the legality of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution of humans was questioned by Biblical fundamentalists. Both the film and the real trial were star-studded affairs (the irascible H L Mencken reported on the real trial).
To be fair, much of the credit for the film’s grand fireworks goes to writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, on whose play the film is based. But lets give Stanley Kramer credit for those haunting close ups of the fundamentalist prosecutor-statesman Matthew Brady (Fredric March) on stage, shot from below, towering him in our eyes for the messianic sway he holds on the masses. It’s as though the camera were searching his face and inquiring, in an attempt to understand the ‘other’.
Equally memorable are the tense respect-disagree dynamic between Brady and the agnostic defense lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) captured on a quiet Tennessee night, the sweat oozing out of the film as a literal and metaphorical reminder of the heat in that state, and the theme song, “Gimme that ol’ time religion”, used to contrast the two forms of religion-the cacophonous public version sung by the village crowd versus the dulcet private version accompanying the last shot of Drummond.

Judgment At Nuremberg is a much more complex film. It is set in post-World War II Nuremberg, where judges were tried for the “justice” they meted out in the Third Reich. As Hans Rolfe, the German defense lawyer, Maximillian Schell deservedly won the Oscar for his powerhouse portrayal of German indignation. Here, too, it is he and the Hitler-hating German judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) whose close-ups and monologues seek to understand the ‘other’.
During the trial, Rolfe points out how Churchill and American businesses flirted with Hitler before the war, and asks, “Are they not to be blamed?” And as Stanley Kramer’s alter ego, Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy, who else?) concedes when sentencing the judges, “There is some truth in this”. Haywood doesn’t condone Ernst Janning; in fact, he denies Janning redemption by pointing out that the latter had lost moral ground the very first time he sentenced an innocent man to a concentration camp. But what is remarkable about Haywood is that this doesn’t blind him to the finer side of Ernst Janning.

Stanley Kramer’s strength lies in this very quality: He takes an almost egalitarian view of human flaws, and yet maintains an empathetic, noble worldview. His moral compass is a sensitive one; its needle surveys the entire moral dial, but always settles at the right position. He is tolerant of contradiction, but not of dishonesty. (Mani Ratnam’s “Is he a thug or a genius?”, “I think both” in Guru is the Indian example I can recall). His morality is not the hasty judgment of the preacher; it is the calm, dispassionate analysis of the philosopher. His camera is always zooming in on the ‘other’, always inquiring. And his only fierce commitment is to the relentless pursuit of truth-that often unpalatable, usually messy and almost always imperfect ideal.
This commitment is what makes the best in science and art score over judgmental doctrine. With its blind, algorithmic opportunism, science mainly ends up being a dispassionate description of how the universe is, not a passionate prescription of how it ought to be. And the best writing is always peopled with gray characters, it always appeals to empathy rather than moralistic judgment, it is always more feely than preachy. The Ramayana is such writing; reading it literally diminishes it. Those who do so have inherited nothing but wind.

To Be And Just To Be

First published at Desicritics

It’s impossible not to feel anything when independent India turns sixty. Given our conjoined-twins-like history, India’s freedom reminds me of two Pakistanis; specifically, it reminds me of two Urdu short stories by writers who, post-Partition, became Pakistanis.

No-land’s man Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is arguably the more famous one. The story is about the dangers of asserting demarcations - what Richard Dawkins calls the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. Freedom lies in freeing our minds from such arbitrary categorical boundaries.
But it is the other story-Ghulam Abbas’s Anandi that really gets to the heart of the freedom issue. The struggle between arbiters and freethinkers is a perpetual one, still being played out in India and everywhere else. As Faiz observed (with typical melancholy),

na apnii rasm nayii hai, na unkii riit nayii
na apnii haar nayii hai, na unkii jiit nayii

My prosaic translation:
Ours are the same old ways, as are theirs too
Our defeats and their wins, none of these are new

But Anandi ends on a note of irony, not melancholy. Years after a new, vibrant city has sprung up around the banished red-light district, its own council is ready to banish them again. No society can flourish without mirth, and there is mirth in the freedom to think. That is the freedom that Taslima Nasreen, Fehmida Riyaaz, and countless others have sought from the Indian state:

You’re sixty, O Great Referee
Retire, and let us be.