RSSAnd Never the Twain Shall Meet
18 Dec 2008 Comments Off
in Discussion, Movies
The recent tragic news from Mumbai, formerly Bombay, regarding the terrorists attacks, has again turned my thoughts toward the world’s largest democracy. Apropos of Bombay, long ago, Rudyard Kipling, the British writer, who was born in Bombay wrote:
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
So Bombay was not only Kipling’s birthplace, but was also the port of entry for most of the Europeans who emigrated to India in the times when one traveled to India by ship. Bombay Gate, likely where those steamers Kipling refers to made port, is just steps from the stately and regal Taj Mahal Hotel which was a target of those recent attacks.
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A pair of movies about illicit love had come to my attention recently, before the news emanating from Mumbai, and we will get to them shortly. But first, to set the scene, and to provide a historical background, let’s look at a bigger and an older picture.
For many years, the entire Indian subcontinent which now includes Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, was considered to be simply India. As you can see in the above map, from the pre-independence era, Pakistan, and Bangladesh did not exist as independent nations, nor were they on any map.
India was and is a huge and diverse country containing a multiplicity of languages, religions, and customs. Centuries ago the land was made up mostly of princely states, and small kingdoms, each with its own ruler. And even though the land was big enough, the sub-continent was not unified.
Though the country is millenniums old, it was just in the last three hundred years that the British arrived. First as the British East India Trading Company, and then by the mid 19th Century, ‘India’ was colonized as a holding of the United Kingdom. While the British unified the country, and while they helped to build a land with a codified legal system and an efficient administrative arm of the government, it was good but only on the surface. The people of India ultimately chafed and resented the yoke of British colonialism that had been placed on them.
Gandhi and Jinnah
Nehru and Gandhi
Nehru appeals to his audience
Eventually, the British had to give up the control of India, and the modern state of India officially came into existence. It was created as a consequence of years and months of public statesmanship, political maneuvering behind closed doors, non-violent protests, and the Quit India movement. At the stroke of Midnight on August 15th, 1947, India was at once independent and partitioned. Jawaharlal Nehru gave a famous speech called Tryst With Destiny, which began:
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Simultaneously, the independent nation of Pakistan was created to the northwest. An eastern wing of Pakistan was also created and located to the northeast. This parcel later fought for its own independence and became the nation of Bangladesh in 1971.
But boundaries on a map, and real life are two completely different things. In fact The Partitioning of India did not go down easily at ground level as millions of people were displaced, having to abandon their homes to move to a place where they would be amongst their own coreligionists. Violence and extreme communal strife occurred.
This is of course is just a brief and extremely elementary surface sketch of the history. But once the layers of government, politics, economics, and religion are peeled back, and we look at the men and women of India, at the level of individual persons, we see that they are still susceptible to the attractions of the opposite sex. Often people were still attracted to each other despite the communal, religious, racial or ethnic differences, as well as the lack of societal approval. It seemed that when when passion reared its head, other considerations might be forgotten.
I’m going to look at four examples, all of which were set in India, of the effects and aftermath of events when fictional members of one race or creed sought to mix, or wanted to mix with a member of the opposite sex as well as a member of a different ethnic or religious group. In these examples we will find that art once again is only an imitation of life.
A Passage to India was a novel written by E.M.Forster in 1924 and was brought to the screen, sixty years later, in 1984, by the famed movie producer/director David Lean. This is a story about tensions between Indians and the colonial British which come to a boil when a white female tourist, Adela Quested, accuses a young Indian, Dr. Aziz, of rape during a visit to the Marabar Caves.
Aziz’s trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring out all the racial tensions and prejudices between indigenous Indians and the British colonists who ruled India at the time.
Over the years this novel has brought forth discussions on whether, given the time when the book was published in 1924, an Indian could be friends with an Englishman. Or were the British actually racists? Or how could the western minds, which generally need to categorize everything, get its arms around the stunning diversity of India. While I did not read Forster’s novel, I did see the movie and do recommend it. And yes, though the novel was written more than 80 years ago, you can still buy it today,
The Jewel In the Crown - was a TV Series based on Paul Scott’s novels collectively called “The Raj Quartet”. This series of novels explored the ramifications of the British presence in South Asia. While this is about the social and political atmosphere across India, the stories are told both on a personal as well as a national level. To be sure, desire, duty, and destiny repeatedly intersect. The outcomes are always dire, often disastrous.
In the first novel in the Quartet, which was entitled, as was the TV series, The Jewel In The Crown, Daphne Manners, portrayed by Susan Woolridge, a young lady from England, had come out to India to find herself and to find her fortune which might include a husband. But she found life a struggle in India. As the first book opens, Daphne has been raped in the Bibighar Gardens in the fictional Indian city of Mayapore.
Hari Kumar, whose role was acted by Art Malik, was a British lad of Indian heritage who had spent all but two years of his entire life in Britain. He “fit in” in England. He had enjoyed a public school education (in England this actually means a private school) and enjoyed what was considered a privileged life. But when he came out to India as an adult, he decidedly did not fit in. In his own words, Hari/Harry was both ‘English and black’. He could not communicate in any of the Indian languages which isolated him from the Indians themselves. And for the British in India, he was simply another Indian. Never mind his British education and sensibilities. He will be accused of the rape.
Lt. Colonel Ronald Merrick, (performed by Tim Piggott-Smith) was the police Inspector who held Hari responsible for the rape. He kept Kumar imprisoned, he tortured him, and all the while, he knew Kumar was innocent. Merrick resented Kumar’s excellent British education, which he didn’t have, and all the advantages Kumar had in England. Merrick was also a rejected suitor to Miss Manners.
And there you have the main players, at least as the first novel of the Raj Quartet, as well as the TV Series, begins. This rape was the linchpin that started Scott’s novels, as well as the TV Series, which was produced by Granada TV. But the Raj Quartet and TV series were more than just the stories of Daphne Manners, Ronald Merrick, and Hari Kumar. Daphne later dies in childbirth. Kumar becomes incidental, and Merrick’s homosexual tendencies became known, and he will die in disgrace. But the story began with the forbidden attraction to Hari by Daphne.
The overall agenda of both the novels and the TV series was the final days of the British Raj (ruler-ship) in India. The novels were a vast look at what was happening, globally, nationally, and very locally in India at the time. Remember, when Paul Scott wrote the 1st book of the series, it was 1966. The British were only a single generation removed from India’s Independence and the partition of the subcontinent. There is no doubt that those events pre-occupied many people for many years.
As for Mr. Paul Scott, the author of the books, it was merely twenty years after India’s independence when the first book of the Quartet was published. Was he obsessed or not is a question I cannot answer. I personally read each of the four novels, as well as watched the entire mini-series which was was 14 episodes. It was broadcast from January 9th 1984 to April 3rd, 1984.
Think of all that is apparent as well as what might be below the surface in this quote from the book,
“Ah no, waste no pity on young Kumar. Whatever he got while in the hands of the police he deserved. And waste no pity on her either. She also got what she deserved.”
The above was spoken with something other than affection, wouldn’t you say? And isn’t it a telling remark about the people’s reactions to that tragic event in the Bibighar Gardens, or on a larger scale, weren’t those remarks a key indicator of the differential between colonial masters and an indigenous population?
Before The Rains (2007) is a movie set in southern India in the late 1930s. This provocative tale traces the story of three people caught in an inexorable web of forbidden romance and dangerous secrets. The English spice planter, John Moores (acted by Linus Roche), seemingly represents all that is good about the colonial times.
Despite the growing resistance by the Indians to the British, Moores provides jobs and incomes for the local people by deciding to build a bigger and better road than the existing one, which as you can see in the above image, was barely big enough for a small lorry. This would enable more spices to be sent out from the plantation in larger quantities and much faster, which would increase profits and be good for everyone. At least that is what he thought. He must have this road built before the rains (monsoons) come. But other thoughts also occupied him.
While his wife and son are away in England, he begins an affair with his housemaid, Sajani, as acted by Nandita Das.
Sajani is caught between her traditional Indian marriage, and the certainty that she would be cast out of her own community if her affair with Moores is discovered. But, facing this deadly ostracism, she makes a decision which has tragic consequences.
Between Moores and Sanjani, is the plantation’s foreman, T.K. (Rahul Bose) He desires the increase in status and lifestyle that his job with Moores brings him. Yet he is bound by the customs, rituals, and mores of his own people. He will face a monumental decision when he must choose to either cast his lot with his boss, Moores,
or help his own people determine what was Sajani’s fate. His risk – nothing short of his own life and freedom. As the film’s tagline says, Passion has its price.
The Bengali Night (1988) – a very young Hugh Grant, in his first starring role, is featured as Alain, a French engineer,
who becomes entangled in a forbidden romance with his Indian employer’s eldest daughter, Gayatri, portrayed by Supriya Pathak. As their passion ignites, the East-meets-West clash of cultures leads to surprising and tragic consequences.
While this wasn’t a particularly good movie, the real-life back story was. The original source material was a 1933 novel by Mircea Eliade called Bengal Nights. Eliade the author, who left Europe in 1930 to work in India
was in fact the real life source for the character of Alain. But there was a real person behind the Gayatri character too. Her name was Maitreyi Devi, who met Eliade in the early 1930′s. She was the inspiration for Gayatri. She only became aware of Eliade’s book some 40 years later in the 70′s. Following confrontations with Eliade , though they had time to take a photo together,
she thought she had exacted a promise from him that the novel would never be published in English. In 1974, Devi published her own version of the story in Bengali which went to great lengths to dispute the implications of Eliade’s passionate novel. The English title of her book was It Does Not Die.
Devi claimed that at least some Eliade’s novel was a fantasy – a product of a fevered imagination, roasted by the steamy and exotic Calcutta, and a distortion of the real events between them . Years later, after watching the movie go into production in Calcutta, she brought a lawsuit against the producers of the movie, and actually it got to court. She claimed the movie was insulting to Hindus, and pornographic, and sought to bar it’s release.
I can’t tell you the results of that lawsuit but the film itself, a French production, was shown only once in India, at a film festival, and was never released to theaters in the USA. However, now it is available in DVD. Eliade’s novel was not published in English until 1994. In fact, a lengthy article was written in 1996 by the Indian authoress Ginu Kamani,
and published by The University of Chicago Press. Its title was A Terrible Hurt: The Untold Story behind the Publishing of Maitreyi Devi, and is available online. So the story of a young Frenchman who arrived in Calcutta in 1930, went on to become an erotic novel, then 40 plus years later, a second book was published as a response and contradiction. Fourteen years after that, a movie based on the original book was made, which was followed by a lawsuit, and then, a half dozen years after that, a lengthy article was published about these events. All of this stemmed from what may have occurred on a Bengali night so many years ago.
Since beginning this column, another movie came to my attention. The Namesake (2007) was directed by Mira Nair, and its source was the novel of the same name written by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Mira Nair
Jhumpa Lahiri
This is a tale of a Bengali couple who immigrate from Calcutta to Queens, NY. It is a generational picture, and eventually the couple’s first child, who was named Gogol by his father, after the Russian author Nikolai Gogol, matures and seeks to find his own way between the cross-cultural experiences that he grew up with and faced as a first generation US citizen born of Indian parents, and the lifestyle he chose for himself as an adult.
Gogol is played by Kal Penn who is best known for his work in the Harold and Kumar films. As Gogol, his path leads him to two wrenching love affairs. His first love was an American girl named Maxine, played by Jacinda Barrett,
with whom he lives until he finds out that she has cheated on him. His second love turns out to be the westernized but hot-to-trot Moushimi. Ironically, the role of the Indian girl Moushimi was cast with Zuleikha Robinson, an actress born in London of mixed ancestry.
Though this film is not about forbidden love and the recklessness that towering passions bring forth, it does place the viewer in a position to feel and understand the struggles of Gogol to find his identity as he straddles both cultures and follows his own passions. In fact, there are two taglines for this movie. The first is: Two Worlds. One Journey. The second tagline is: Know Where You Came From to Get Where You’re Going. This film was given awards for excellence by a few film boards.
Mr. Kipling also wrote:
Oh East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet
Those words have passed the test of time in the sense that while we may not always remember that these were the words of Kipling, we do find those words memorable. In his lifetime (1865-1936) Kipling was considered one of the finest and most popular writers in poetry and prose. He even was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. But later on his works came to viewed as controversial. Some claimed he was prejudicial and militaristic. Others said his words promoted British imperialism. In fact Kipling was a lightning rod for discussion for most of the first half of the twentieth century. I wonder if his words had an influence on E.M.Forster, or Paul Scott?
Clearly I haven’t provided any answers to the questions brought forth by these books and films. Nor did I intend to. I have merely presented these to you. To sample them, or to try them on, or to weigh and measure your own sensitivities to this topic is an action that each of you will have to decide to do on your own. But of this we are certain, that when people with cultural differences meet, and heady passion is added to the mix, this recipe may very well become a combustible event.