Tiger Truths

A new film on conservation hopes to transform the viewer into participant

As filmmaker Shekar Dattatri travelled across the country, he sensed a lack of direction among those who wanted to contribute to tiger conservation. “People were aware of the gravity of the crisis facing our tigers, but did not know what they could do to help,” says Dattatri. This convinced him to make The Truth About Tigers, a film which, in his own words, marks the transition “from awareness to advocacy”.

Dattatri, a Chennai-based filmmaker, spent years making documentaries for National Geographic and Discovery. But gradually, the disillusionment came. “These are lavishly funded films, possibly seen by millions of people, but they don’t do much for conservation,” he says. “Education is incidental to television, as the main focus is on entertainment.”

Over the last decade, Dattatri has trained his lens into the most ecologically pressing issues of our time – the disaster facing the Olive Ridley turtles in Orissa, the Silent Valley rainforest in Kerala and environmentally damaging mining in Karnataka’s Kudremukh region. In each of his films, Dattatri’s strength lies in articulating a complex issue in a distilled manner that allows greater access and understanding for those not well-acquainted with the terrain.

Two years in the making, The Truth About Tigers is a film in the same vein, making its point in a direct and concise manner. Through a stirring narration by actor Roshan Seth and a carefully edited melange of glorious archival footage, the 40-minute film advocates a more pro-active role for citizens and civil society in saving the tiger. “I believe there is still hope,” says Dattatri.

In line with his faith in narrowcasting, Dattatri hopes to influence those who may go on to determine policy. “Instead of having a million casual viewers, I find it far more useful to target a viewership which may go on to make a change,” he says. However, some of Dattatri’s recommendations are facile – asking citizens to form watchdog groups and write letters to the editor cannot be counted as truly original insight.

Dattatri’s enduring optimism is admirable, as he comes to the end of a disappointing tenure with the National Board for Wildlife (NBW), headed by the Prime Minister. “It has been a disappointing experience, to say the least,” he says. “We are supposed to meet the Prime Minister once a year, even that has not happened regularly.” Dattatri felt even well-intentioned policy measures never left the drawing board.

So once again, Dattatri has returned to the medium he knows best. Armed with copies of his film to be given away free for distribution and screenings, Dattatri plans to hit the road, hoping to spread awareness and will people to action. The message is to be relayed not only in English, but seven other Indian languages. “I decided to become a naturalist after reading Jim Corbett and Gerard Durrell,” he says. “I hope a few more people will attach themselves to wildlife after watching this.”

This piece appeared in Tehelka magazine, April 24 issue.

Defending the culture industry

On Shoma Munshi’s Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television

In 2000, the liberalisation process had firmly set in and the phase of opening the economy to transnational capital was nearing a decade of completion. The frugality and moderation that had forever dominated middle-class lives was gradually making way for a conspicuous culture of consumption. In this dynamic period of transition, industrial modernity was beginning to make inroads, creating in turn the demarcated concept of ‘free time’ and, subsequently, conditions for ‘culture’ to be industrially produced and supplied. In other words, the time was ripe for the constitution of a culture industry.

It was against this backdrop that a little-known company, Balaji Telefilms, began a soap opera in July of that year. This soap opera, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, along with another one by the same company, Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (introduced in October 2000) would become the longest running shows in the history of Indian television, continuing for eight years and dramatically altering the landscape of their medium by the time they ended. Shoma Munshi, an academic presently with the American University of Kuwait, closely examines the abovementioned soaps along with three others (Kasautii Zindagi Kay, Saat Phere and Bidaai) as a prism to view contemporary social issues and practices in her book, Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television.

Munshi contends that “most studies on television tend to privilege the act of consumption”, and through this book, she takes up the anthropological ‘other’ to explore how meanings take shape in the act of production. To her credit, Munshi’s fieldwork is extensive and rigorous, as she meets diverse people working in the industry, including production heads, actors and fashion designers.

Yet, even as you admire the hours of visible labour that make up the early sections, the shortcomings of the text also become glaringly apparent. The arguments lean too heavily on those she interviews, such as Ekta Kapoor and her mother Shobha, without being accompanied by cultural critique to complement them. In the introduction to the book, Munshi confesses she is a fan, and often in the book, she continues to write as one. A banal paragraph describing the expenses involved in producing the soap operas is one of the many examples which illustrate this fact:

The cost of each indoor set ranges from 2-4 crore. Costumes are also expensive affairs. Shobha Kapoor told me that “there are times when we spend anything upto Rs 1 crore on saris and lehengas for one show alone”. The jewelry and clothes worn by characters in all soaps are the most expensive designer ones in the market today… Each camera costs upto Rs 20 lakh and usually three or four cameras are used for shooting. The Jimmy Jib camera crane costs Rs 15 lakh. Recording equipment can cost anything between Rs 7-9 lakh. Shobha Kapoor also told me…

Munshi heaps detail upon detail, without any assessment of the sociological consequences of this phenomenon. Along with further fuelling consumerist tendencies, this exhibition of wealth also ends up creating a mimicking slave class – the tailors across the country who are ordered to imitate the designer wear on these soap operas cannot but create poor second-hand versions. These efforts, to appropriate and partially acquire, symbols of opulence in a desperately poor country are a poignant reminder of the distance of soap operas from social reality. Yet, Munshi elsewhere notes that the expensive sets and decor “are not only pleasurable to see but contributes to a sense of ‘Indian-ness’ (sic).”

For someone who has clearly spent long hours in the studios watching the processes of production unfold, it is a matter of great surprise that the text is densely populated with facile observations. This malaise reaches its apogee in a sub-section titled Differences with the West, which details the features that separate Indian soap productions from production houses abroad.

Second is the belief that Indians have in astrology, numerology and vaastu when it comes to their professional and personal lives…Third is a belief in the strength of prayers and visibility of statues and deities in all the offices of production houses. All the offices have statues of Hindu deities with offerings of fresh flowers and burning incense sticks…Fourth is the incredibly long working hours that production houses keep. I cannot speak with a 100 per cent certainty for production houses in the West, but…Fifth is the manner television soaps are watched in India…

At the crux of Munshi’s book is the refutation of the “general tendency” to dismiss constructions of femininity in soap operas as regressive. An entire chapter, Women and their Representations, is dedicated to this.  But the relationship between representation of these women and its relationship with patriarchal structures is never fully explored. Munshi rightly points out that “the scheming and manipulation (of negative female characters) constantly threatens the patriarchal status quo”, but fails to see that the predatory relationship between women is itself a product of oppression by patriarchal structures. In his essay Woman Versus Womanliness in India, Ashis Nandy has written, “The classic instance of the psychological of turning against the self by identifying with the aggressive male draws attention to the way some social institutions have made her a participant in her self-repudiation and intra-aggression.”

Nandy’s view reaches out at the source of perennial conflict that acts as engines of longevity and sustenance in soap operas. In this context, the male characters may seem peripheral or weak, but even in their absence; male authority defines the limit of play. This is amply clear as Munshi quotes the instance where two ‘strong’ lead characters, Tulsi and Parvati, are thrown out of the house by their husbands for perceived transgressions. In The Schema of Mass Culture, Theodor Adorno wrote about the effect of the ‘disruptions’ that Munshi suggests are sites of contestation. Adorno had written, “There are no longer any real conflicts to be seen. They are replaced by a surrogate of shocks and sensations which seem to erupt from without and generally have no real consequences, smoothly insinuating themselves into the episodic action.”  Munshi constantly speaks of the lead characters as “strong women” but does not engage with the fundamental reality that no conflict within these soaps is truly subversive, as it never succeeds in changing the male-dominated power structure.

Another argument running through the book is the social significance of the soaps representing dark-skinned women. Munshi’s argument is an essentialist one (and there are many others throughout the text) when she says that soaps such as Bidaai “convey the important message that dark skin is of little importance faced with the greater truth of true beauty and love in simple, elegant ways threaded through the soap’s narrative”.

It is no secret that soap productions often exacerbate the dark-skinned theme to create a binary opposition, one that is not supported by empirical evidence. A small fact, within the book, backs the analysis that the focus on the dark-skinned girl is an attempt to ‘otherize’ her existence. Parul Chauhan, who plays the dark-skinned girl in Bidaai admits that her “skin-colour is darkened to make her look three times as darker as she is in real life”. Munshi fails to see how, in many ways, soap operas end up perpetuating trends in society that they claim to reform.

Formalistic construction may be considered peripheral to academic discourses such as this book, but it is important in adding cohesion and potency to any argument. Munshi’s book, on the other hand, is marred by over-repetition of established facts and clogged with unnecessary detail. Information about how a director changed the role of a particular character in Bidaai is mentioned on page 88, and repeated on page 90; a lead character’s refashioning by Manish Malhotra in another soap is mentioned first on page 127, and again on page 128. Many more examples can be employed to illustrate this; the effect is of an inconsistent, muddled and erratic thesis.

But the larger failure of this book is that the arguments expounded in its pages are rarely taken beyond their narrow sphere and situated in the wider socio-political currents of the time. Munshi notes the absence of Muslims from these soaps; it is an observation that is frittered away, without linking it to the social trends towards majoritarianism under a right-wing, Hindu nationalist regime. Similarly, the point that tales in these soaps are predominantly about business empires is not taken further as a subtle legitimatisation of liberalisation, by giving industrial empires a benign, gentle face and shutting out space for thinking about alternative economic and political structures.

It is ludicrous that, in a book focused on production, Munshi never tracks the shift from relatively autonomous conditions under which serials spanning diverse themes such as Hum Log, Buniyaad and Nukkad were produced to the frenetic, detailed organisation under which production houses such as Balaji Telefilms function, creating what Adorno called ‘the magical repetition of industrial procedure in which the selfsame is reproduced through time’. This effect is felt not only in production, but also in consumption; in the standardization of culture and propagation of conformist tendencies, an aspect which Munshi ignores.

It may come as a disappointment that Prime Time Soap Operas is judged more on its omissions, but that is because Munshi fails to engage with the questions that are fundamental in charting a bold, new treatise. This insular approach has rather more in common with the soap operas she seeks to defend; as a cultural critique, Prime Time Soap Operas is deeply unconvincing and poorly argued.

This review appeared in the latest edition of Biblio: A Review of Books.

On a limb

Just hours from the national capital, the scourge of polio is marking a new resurgence

Every year, the changing landscape of Ghaziabad is testament to the Indian economic boom. More apartment blocks come up; new, shimmering malls emerge out of wasteland and markets with big-retail brands sprout and expand. But the incessant construction also causes a strange distortion – series of high rises dwarf a large network of slums, where the construction labourers arriving from all parts of the Hindi heartland make their temporary abode.

The slums suffer from the wretchedness of slums everywhere – families of five or six live in a space not bigger than a small room, sanitation facilities are absent and nutrition for most kids is inadequate. Yet, only now, the disastrous outcome of this state of affairs is becoming apparent, as Ghaziabad becomes the polio epicentre of the world.

In 2008, Ghaziabad reported just five cases of polio – by the end of 2009 that number had shot up to 72, as Uttar Pradesh alone reported 544 cases of polio. UP’s woes have been the reason why India reported 672 polio cases in 2009, more than any other country. This has come as a shock to the government, health officials and development agencies that have set a 2012 target for the eradication of polio.

Health officials at the MNG Hospital in Ghanta Ghar, Ghaziabad’s old commercial district, believe Ghaziabad’s woes are caused by the rising tide of labourers migrating to the township in search of work. “We have got the highest migratory population, as we are in the National Capital Region,” says Dr A K Dhawan, chief medical officer at MNG Hospital. “The rising construction activities also mean the presence of a large number of slums. The migrant labourers coming from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh keep moving and are hard to track down.”

34-year-old Omkar had moved to a slum in Indirapuram’s Gyan Khand area only seven months ago. Originally a resident of Badayaun in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Omkar, a father of five, is a rickshaw puller in the morning, ferrying kids to school; a lunch delivery man in the afternoon and runs a small kiosk outside his house in the evening. His 3-year-old son Jatin suffered from polio. “It makes one sad to see him not able to walk,” says a dejected Omkar.

No one had come to his house to give his son polio drops; yet, the difficulty in tracking down high-risk groups was only part of the problem. In this slum of more than a thousand inhabitants, there was not a single toilet. Nearly all of them relieved themselves at a nearby drain which separates Indirapuram and Vaishali, making transference easier for this deadly disease which spreads from orofaecal contamination.

What is further weakening the fight against polio are UP’s notoriously poor healthcare facilities – the number of cases in the state have risen from 305 last year to 544 this year. On December 26, a UNICEF study released in Lucknow noted that low levels of routine immunization were not only resulting in the resurgence of diseases like polio, but also easily preventable ones such as diphtheria and whooping cough.

The study noted that immunisation levels in 36 districts of the state were less than 20 percent, while in 39 districts, they were between 20-40 percent; only in five districts, the immunisation levels were higher than 40 percent.  This is in sharp contrast to southern states like Tamil Nadu (92 percent) and Karnataka (84 percent).

Nowhere is the manifestation of this apathy more evident than in Dhaulana, the worst-hit rural district in Ghaziabad, that registered 18 cases last year. “We have camps from time to time, but there is no scheme yet for door-to-door routine immunisation,” said Parveen Begum, an 18-year-old volunteer who works as a WHO agent.

Dhaulana is also home to one of two cases afflicted with the P1 virus, a more severe form of polio as opposed to the P3 virus found in majority of the cases, in Ghaziabad district. Four-year-old Reshma, a P1 victim suffered from a deformed left limb, although contingency measures from agencies had been able to contain the damage. “She was born in our village of Siwal, near Meerut,” Mohd Aquil, her father, said. Aquil informed us that for two years after her birth, before they moved to Dhaulana, Reshma had not received any form of immunization.

Yet, there was hope among agencies in Dhaulana as this Muslim-majority village had not seen the kind of clerical diktats issued against polio vaccination elsewhere, that had added a bizarre twist to the fight against the disease. Parveen Begum, who also taught in a primary school in the village, said, “Each of the three mosques regularly makes announcements, exhorting the villagers to vaccinate their children and cooperate with the agencies in every way.”

This had been a problem in Moradabad, almost 100 kms away from Dhaulana, which has been a traditional epicentre of polio, until Ghaziabad displaced it for this unworthy distinction. But Moradabad still recorded 71 cases, and the intransigence of several families in not receiving vaccinations was the result of rumours that polio drops were part of a larger conspiracy to sterilise their children.

In 2008, there was trouble after Sahafat, Moradabad’s leading Urdu daily, published an article voicing concerns expressed by some religious clerics who alleged conspiracy behind the concerted polio campaign. “The people destroyed our camps in anger,” says Ranpal Singh, a surveillance medical officer with Project Concern International, a non-profit agency that has been working in Moradabad since 1996.

But, health officials and development agencies have increasingly joined hands with clerics to create consensus for the fight against polio. And most clerics, like the city imam Masoom Ali, have played an important and progressive role. Masoom Ali explained how the refusal to receive polio drops was a perverse articulation of anti-Americanism. “The initial boycott was in anger against Bush, who was at the height of his misdemeanours,” he said. “But we made regular announcements in mosques to allay fears and anger and explained the importance of polio drops to people.”

A sustained campaign in the press helped a great deal, as Masoom Ali made regular appeals in local papers asking residents to cooperate with development agencies. Moradabad’s press has been robustly behind efforts to eradicate polio. “We have been supporting the campaign since the very beginning, and are ready to help in any way we can,” said Zakir Ali Baig, a journalist for the Hindi daily Awam-e-Hind.

Yet, Masoom Ali had hinted at something else that was part of the reason why about 300 families in the city were still refusing vaccination. “Some people come to us and say – you’re only focusing on this,” he said. “There are so many other problems, but this intensity is not matched in other areas.”

In Pukhtasarai, a walled neighbourhood with three grand, fort-like entrances, close to 40 per cent of the families had not allowed their kids to be vaccinated. 38-year-old Safdar Azam, who was unusual in owning a computer in this poor neighbourhood, had embraced one aspect of modernity while rejecting another. “I am not opposed to vaccination, but what is the reason behind giving the same drops every time?” he asked.

35-year-old Suleiman Farooqi, a small-time mechanic, had other objections. “If there is no disease, there is no need for medicine,” he opined. “I believe this is a conspiracy for making our kids impotent.” This neighbourhood had been a pocket of resistance against polio vaccination, because of a series of diktats issued by Maulana Naseem Farooqi, the cleric at the local Marhaz mosque. He had finally been persuaded to stop speaking against vaccination in 2005, but the fears raised by him had left an imprint that continued to pose an obstacle.

Meanwhile, health officials and development agencies are putting out all the stops to eradicate polio. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has 7 surveillance medical officers in Moradabad itself as compared to one in most other districts, while UNICEF had 5 district coordinators in the area.

The introduction of a new bivalent oral polio vaccine (bOPV) has provided cause for optimism. The monovalent vaccine that is currently being used attacks the deadlier P1 virus – the result has been the sharp rise in P3 cases. The bOPV will attack both the P1 and P3 viruses. “The bivalent is ideal, as it targets P3 as well,” said Dr Amar Singh, deputy information officer at Moradabad’s district hospital. “It is possible to eradicate polio with monovalent vaccine, but bivalent will make that process much faster.”

As reported in The Indian Express on January 1, the Indian expert advisory group on polio has given its sanction for the use of bOPV in 2010 in UP and Bihar, the two chronic states that once again propelled India to the top of the polio chart with the maximum number of reported cases worldwide.

The eradication of polio in UP and Bihar, with its high population density and poor sanitation, will be not be an easy task. “There are multifactorial elements at play in these areas that are making eradication difficult,” said Dr Neeraj Singh, WHO’s surveillance medical officer. It is clear that polio’s defeat will be as dependent on the socio-economic climate as on a rigorous, ruthless vaccination drive that seeks to banish this monster into the annals of history.

A version of this story appeared in The Indian Express.

Tamed rebellion

In its exploration of educational tyranny, Hindi cinema’s articulation of dissent is essentially conformist

In the autumn of 2000, a film ‘inspired’ by Peter Weir’s acclaimed Dead Poets’ Society hit the screens. Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein was set in an institution under the iron grip of an authoritarian principal, who prohibited romance. In a fantasy of absolute control, the character, played by Amitabh Bachchan, even locked the gates of the institution at night.

A striking feature of Hindi cinema in recent years dealing with oppressive nature of rigid, tyrannical institutions has been a personalising approach, where a central antagonist represents and embodies the morbid flaws of the institution. The narrative tool applied to demonstrate this is a tragic loss, which is used to explain their exceptional severity. This is as true of 3 Idiots, as it was of Mohabbatein — in both cases, the characters played by Boman Irani and Amitabh Bachchan deal with the suicide of their offsprings. The institutions are shaped in their external image, with its absence of empathy and feeling, and defined by a megalomaniac pursuit of discipline.

In 3 Idiots, apart from the main protagonists, the emphasis is either on the unimaginative nerd who aces examinations or the flawed genius who is driven to suicide. The quiet majority lack any substantial voice — those who pass through the grind unnoticed, without achievement or catastrophe, but are permanently damaged.

In Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, there is a perennial gap between the dreamy inner life of the young Antoine Doinel and the deep-rooted pragmatism of the institutions he inherits. In the film, which was largely autobiographical, Truffaut recognised the limitations of institutions and their inability to encompass the whole of human experience and subjectivity. While in 3 Idiots, educational abodes are either claustrophobic dungeons (the Imperial College of Engineering) or beacons of freedom (the school which Rancho, the character played by Aamir Khan, runs towards the end of the film).

This facile binary is mirrored in the resolution to conflicts of values. In Mohabbatein, the university’s ills are banished by a mere change of guard, as Bachchan accepts defeat to a maverick teacher played by Shah Rukh Khan. In the end, the conflict is not about the institution itself, but its control. Similarly, in 3 Idiots, the antagonist’s internal transformation ends, in one stroke, all previous arguments that act as a premise for the film’s plot to unfold.

The passionate espousal of rebellion finds itself nullified as success is defined by the same yardstick that these films seemingly seek to defy. The dissent so overtly articulated in 3 Idiots, as in Taare Zameen Par, becomes akin to a defanged beast. Taare Zameen Par rails against the horror of the rat race and predatory competition, yet the young protagonist’s failures are redeemed by victory in an art competition. The individualistic passion for art is not enough — it must receive the sanctity of institutional approval to become an admired trait.

In an incident towards the end of 3 Idiots, the erstwhile nerd, now a corporate millionaire, berates the lead character for ending up as a schoolteacher. But Rajkumar Hirani’s inability to transform this confrontation into a moment of radical assertion represents the real failure of the film. Instead, the lead character is revealed as a prolific scientist, and the opportunity for challenging accepted definitions of success, by illustrating the many ways in which one can succeed, is lost.

Nothing sums up the conformist tenor of Hindi cinema’s attempt to occupy an adversarial space than the postscript to the motto – try to become not successful, but capable — that runs through 3 Idiots. A disclaimer promptly follows: if you are capable, success will automatically trail your tracks. In other words, you may rebel, but the definitions of success are, in the end, uniform and non-negotiable.

This piece was published in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on January 9.

Punjabi: story of a script’s decline

Delhi’s moment of cultural transition came in 1947, as hordes of Punjabi refugees streamed into the city in the aftermath of Partition. From the languid, laid-back city where the charms of Urdu held sway, the city was gradually transformed into its aggressive and boisterous Punjabi character of present-day. Today, Punjabi is Delhi’s second language (it edged out Urdu marginally in terms of number of speakers in the city in the 2001 Census), yet its imminent decay is something it shares with Urdu.

Though it is still widely spoken and can be heard in conversations, public and private, it’s decline in the written form is alarming. Today, Punjabi has all but vanished from public view – from billboards, signboards, posters and, even, graffiti on dust-weathered walls. Which is why, The Centre for Punjabi Literature and Art on Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg holds a surprise.

Instead of a crumbling, sarkari building, the Centre for Punjabi Literature and Art is an impressive whitewashed structure, with well-manicured lawns and a welcoming character. Inside, the library is a cosy, elegant one with wooden bookshelves filled with titles from every genre. But, there is another surprise – hardly any readers. In the two hours Newsline spent at the library, not a single browser arrived to peruse through its shelves.

As librarian Trilok Chand Kaur informs us, the library has all of 75 members. “Every week, 6-7 people arrive. Most of them are students from Delhi University, who are pursuing a degree in Punjabi,” says Kaur. The rest of the numbers are made up by the odd academic and even rarer is the languorous reader with a voracious appetite for Punjabi literature. The visitors register for this month shows just two names, as we approach the middle of November.

This state of Punjabi saddens Pyara Singh, the 85-year-old secretary of the Centre. Singh recalls the heady days of the 1940’s, when he first arrived in the city. “We formed the Punjabi Sahitya Sabha in Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, which founded the idea for this institution. In classrooms, Punjabi used to be taught all day, without any charge,” he says. With quiet passion, Singh writes the Punjabi alphabet and talks about its “facility of script”. “It’s a fairly easy language to learn, yet no one is interested. I can teach it to anyone within a week,” he says.

What accounts for the steady decline of Punjabi as a written language? Its lack of economic status is also accompanied by the paucity of institutions supporting it. Apart from a few schools run by minority trusts, such as the Harkrishan Public School, the options for learning Punjabi at the school level do not exist. In this sense, it is probably worse off than Urdu, which still has a greater transference due to its wide network of madrassas.

The Punjabi Centre for Literature and Art, along with some branches of the Sahitya Akademi, are the last bastions holding up the vast literature of a rich and varied language. Every second Saturday, Singh, along with a few other enthusiasts, organise a workshop at the Centre’s auditorium where poetry and prose pieces in Punjabi are read.

The greater challenge for them would be to breathe life again into the written word of this language that, at least verbally, is still rambunctious and alive. What remains to be seen is whether the works of Singh’s favourite writers, like Bhai Veer Singh and Amrita Pritam, can be woken from their long hibernation within the Centre’s shelves.

A version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express.

A scattered tribe of anonymous artists

71-year-old Charan Singh’s freckles mirror the fine lines he draws to capture the elusive faces as he sits in the Tilak Marg police station. For more than 25 years, he has been drawing the sketches for the police, helping to retrieve them from the sea of anonymity through his deft craft.

Singh spent his early years painting hoardings that were transported to B-grade theatres in Allahabad, Gorakhpur and other areas of UP. With pride, he recalls making the posters of iconic films such as Bobby, Ram aur Shyam and many others. “I got many awards for my work from distributors and producers,” he says.

His services were first called upon after a robbery in Sadar Bazar, not far from his house in Jama Masjid, could not be solved. “The police came with the servant who had witnessed the robbery. I promptly drew a sketch based on what he told me,” he says.

This began what was to be a long association, as his services were frequently called upon to solve similar cases. Through word-of-mouth recommendations, more police stations began to seek his services. Soon, he was drawing sketches for police stations in Jama Masjid, Daryaganj and Civil Lines as well.

But slowly, work began to dwindle as the age of computerisation firmly set in. Today, most police stations employ the services of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the Crime Records Office at Delhi Police headquarters for drawing computer-enabled portraits of wanted persons.

Men like Singh, earlier an invaluable asset, have now become a scattered tribe of artists who are called upon rarely. It is not surprising, then, to hear Singh being dismissive about technology. “Computerised sketches are not the real thing,” he says.

This argument is not entirely without merit. In June, a toddler named Gungun was kidnapped outside India Gate, with computerised sketches proving inadequate. After Singh’s sketch of the kidnapper was published in newspapers, the girl was dropped outside Jhandewalan.

Singh still makes about 3-4 sketches a day. “Sometimes I copy something off the newspaper. If a friend or relative drops in, I make a sketch of him. It is important to stay in touch with one’s art,” he says. In fact, the striking thing is that they see themselves primarily as artists. “Writers, musicians, sportsmen – all need to practice their craft to remain sharp. It’s the same for me,” says Singh.

Yet, the public acclaim of artists forever eludes police sketchers like Singh. In fact, it is a necessary condition for their existence. Even today, he has lost none of the shrewd instincts of earlier years. He never lets an autorickshaw drop him outside his house, or divulge any personal details to strangers.

What gives him the most satisfaction is helping people. “Sketching is a passion, but I need to remain invisible. It is my sketches that must continue to speak.”

Today, he is one among a dying breed of anonymous artists, whose deft craft may not exist for much longer, replaced wholly by technology.

A version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express.

Closing of abattoir butchers many livelihoods

As Idgah closes, butchers and meat sellers fear an uncertain future

As the MCD sealed the buffalo section of Idgah, it meant curtains for the abattoir that has been the source of many livelihoods. By afternoon, Idgah resembled a small township, deserted and abandoned. In small corners, men sat idly, drinking tea and anxiously wondering what lay ahead. Mohd Jameel Qureshi, who has been working at Idgah for the last two decades, said, “I used to buy 2-3 goats every day and sell them in the market. With the new slaughterhouse in Ghazipur more than 15 kms away, whatever I earn will be lost in transportation.”

Small-time traders and butchers in the meat trade, like Qureshi, will bear the brunt of the move to Ghazipur. About 3000 people are expected to lose jobs as the result of this move. The question most of them ask – why has Idgah not been modernised? “For years, we’ve been asking for facilities. At the time of elections, they promise improvements but nothing has materialised for the last 10 years,” said Nadeem Qureshi, a butcher who slaughtered buffaloes at Idgah.

Most of these butchers live in Quresh Nagar, a cramped neighbourhood located a stone’s throw away from Idgah. Most of them are employed in the meat trade, and have been for generations. There is not a family here that doesn’t live under a cloud of anxiety, most of them stunned by this disruption to even begin thinking ahead.

65-year-old Sarvar Qureshi is almost on the verge of tears – she lives with her grandson Hashim, who was employed at Idgah. “We had a little bit – now even that is being snatched away from us,” she said. “We have nowhere to go, as my grandson is not skilled in any other profession. Our whole community’s bread and butter is tied to this profession.”

On a weekday such as this, Quresh Nagar would usually be absorbed in the business of buying and selling meat, and other activities that revolve around the trade. But this is not an ordinary day, and at every small corner, newly unemployed men sit. Most of them agree that crime is likely to increase in the area. 72-year-old Ziauddin Qureshi, one of the ‘elders’ in the area, said, “Our children have been rendered useless. How should we go on – should we burgle and steal?”

A version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express.

In Old Delhi, 1984 was a narrow escape

Every day at 5 am, 56-year-old Karnal Singh begins his day’s work at Sisganj gurdwara. For 15 years now, he has been selling devotional CD’s of all hues and colours, including one that narrates the 1984 massacre. But he doesn’t need it to remember the evening of November 1, 1984, when hordes of hooligans attacked this very gurdwara. “Acid bottles were thrown, stones were thrown. I don’t know how we survived,” he says.

Lakhbir Singh was at the frontline as Sisganj was in a state of siege. He lifts his shirt to show me a stab wound mark that he bore during that time, as a 30-year-old man. “We stopped them from entering the gurdwara. I sustained this wound as I was trying to push them back towards that fountain,” he says, pointing towards the white marble structure facing Sisganj.

The pain may have receded with the passing of time, but the resentment still lingers. Even today, he goes every time when Tytler is produced in court. “Why don’t they arrest and punish him?” he says, trying to contain the anger in his voice.

What do they think of Manmohan Singh as PM today? Words of praise flow out at the honesty and the integrity of the man. In some ways, does it assuage some of the anger and the pain of 1984? “Ek mahaul tha, khatam ho gaya (It was an atmosphere which has got over now),” says Lakhbir Singh. Karnal Singh can’t forget the feast prepared in anticipation of 1 lakh devotees (as Guru Tegh Bahadur shahid divas was approaching) that was later dumped into the Yamuna. But both thank providence and believe good fortune saved them during that tumultuous time.

But the question remains – why did a communally sensitive flashpoint such as Chandni Chowk managed to stay more or less clear of the violence? There are many theories. Karnal Singh says he firmly remembers Kiran Bedi arriving and securing the area. Others say there were few policemen and the resistance from the gurdwara repelled the aggressors.

What is likely to have happened is that, following the first tidal wave of resistance, the aggressors simply realised it wasn’t necessary to win this battle when there were far easier targets elsewhere. Instead of trying to locate the odd Sikh family huddled somewhere within the labyrinthine maze of Old Delhi, mostly in Dariba Kalan and Sitaram Bazar, most of them left for east Delhi where a free-for-all massacre was taking place.

An atrociously edited version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express on November 2.

Resting easy with the Booker

The lack of ‘Indians’ in this year’s prize race should provide cause for introspection

In late July, one news item largely escaped attention, making a fleeting appearance in the inside pages of our newspapers. The Booker longlist was out, and not a single Indian author had featured in it. The national media just as easily ignored it, moving on to other things. For someone not particularly clued in to the literary scene, it would seem that the Booker Prize is not taking place this year at all.

For long, our engagement with the Booker Prize has been defined by this sort of inconsistency. Our frenzied reactions to a Booker win, making no qualms about appropriating the success of an immigrant elite as unmistakably Indian, only make the task of a critical engagement more difficult. In the event of an Indian winning the prize, as Adiga last year did, the otherwise indifferent attitude to the prize transforms into another opportunity to beat up our chests with proud nationalist fervour.

This is particularly silly, because every artistic achievement is, first and foremost, an individual one. Writing is even more so – it is an act of solitary cultural production, the fruit of the labour of hours spent alone. At times, this alliance with nationalism can also backfire spectacularly, when writers are unwillingly bound to the metanarrative of a rising nation. The most obvious example is Arundhati Roy, whose oppositional politics surprised those who were quick to anoint her the darling of a resurgent India.

Far more alarming, though, is the reluctance of the literary intelligentsia to contest the politics of the Booker Prize. The prize now has been awarded to diverse writers from many parts of the world (within that relic called the Commonwealth), imbuing the Booker with the appearance of radical qualities. Yet despite 40 years of the prize, the category of the so-called ‘universal’ writer is still occupied by the white Christian male. The rest can all be slotted in a ghetto of their own – women writers, Asian writers and so on.

Especially in the case of Asia and Africa, the writers function as imperial ethnologists, representing their ‘native’ lands in forms that must both entertain and elucidate. It is not surprising, then, that while the prize-winning citation of predominantly white writers is framed in generally vague liberal humanist terms, the Indian and African writer usually finds his work slotted in particular terms, representing a country or continent.

Another aspect that makes the evaluation of the Booker problematic is the debate within Britain as to what purpose the prize must serve. A substantial section of the literary establishment believes that the Booker is essentially a ‘British’ prize, reflecting the country’s values and ideas of literature. Not surprisingly then, in the year after the prize has gone to an ‘outsider’, the Booker finds itself responding to a backlash that exhorts it to return to its origins as an upholder of British literature.

This is as true of 2009, as it has been of previous years. Let us consider the books that won the prize in 1982, 1998 and 2007 – years after Rushdie, Roy and Desai won respectively. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982), Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) are books that share a convention of form, theme and narrative. All are defined by a sedate, conservative way of storytelling, centred on events distinctly European. This is offset against the tumultuous narrative energy and radical formalism of at least two books that preceded them – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

A look at the 2009 shortlist is revealing, yet entirely predictable, with its abundance of quintessentially British novels. The Booker favourite, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, is a tale about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s trusted adviser, as he tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Booker website calls it ‘that rare thing: a truly great English novel’. Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze is a historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, while Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is a ghost story set in post-war Warwickshire. Add to this, AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a ‘vivid, rich and moving saga taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme’.

It is during years such as this that the Booker’s relevance as a global literary prize comes severely under question. Therefore, this is a time good as any to examine the Booker Prize in its historical context and redefine the terms of our engagement. One of the most heartening aspects of The White Tiger win last year was the vibrant cultural dialogue and spirited debate that followed. It is a dialogue that, in a mature literary milieu, we must now seek to begin on our own. The Booker may then become an event to which we pay attention, but it does not define our sense of literary worth.

The old in the new

By subverting popular idioms, a new wave of filmmakers are redefining Hindi cinema

Once again, we have arrived at a moment in our cinema when the seemingly distinct categories of ‘arthouse’ and ‘commercial cinema’ are collapsing. In the ’80s, when the chasm between these two categories was at its zenith, socially meaningful cinema flourished. Yet apart from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, a scathing satire on the embedded web of corruption, it is hard to recall a film from that period that has survived into mainstream consciousness today. This was after an extraordinary spell in the ’70s, when fuelled by the masterly screenplays of Salim-Javed, films like Deewaar made such categories redundant.

Over the last year, a number of films have challenged those notions, rejecting the ghettoisation of ‘arthouse’ cinema in order to effect change from within the mainstream. Films such as Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and, now, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey have unlocked the potential within popular idioms of Hindi cinema. Contemporary interpretation of the proverbial tale of twin brothers or the story of Devdas for these filmmakers allows easy translatability, giving them a mainstream platform while leaving room for avant-garde expression. Thus, subversion of popular idioms becomes the conduit to weave tales of modern India.

One of the ways in which this subversion is achieved is by privileging disjunctions over continuity. In the original Devdas, for example, his death serves the purpose of preservation of the patriarchal order. However, the subaltern narrative of society’s suppression of women in Devdas is given agency in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. Kashyap’s target is the hypocrisy of patriarchal structures that finds itself in crisis when faced with a more assertive female sexuality. Thus, the lead protagonist played by Abhay Deol encourages sexual liberalism in Paro, but is unable to respond adequately when it threatens to outgrow patriarchal consent. Chanda’s father, on the other hand, commits suicide when shown a mirror to his participation in society’s collective lust which invokes morality while it receives gratification.

In an iconic film such as Ram aur Shyam, the twin brothers are united in pursuit of a common goal— the return to rightful inheritance and restoration of a slightly readjusted feudal order. In Kaminey, for the most part, they engage in a clash of competing self-interests — it seems inevitable that one’s happiness must come at the cost of the other. In earlier versions, the filial bond was sacrosanct, yet Kaminey repeatedly violates this maxim to portray a society getting rapidly atomised. Fittingly, Bhardwaj sets his tale in the brutally competitive world of Dharavi.

Another common thread in these films is the dark, dystopian urban vision, revolving around themes of alienation. The city does not exist as a singular entity — it inhabits diverse worlds, the distance between those is immeasurably vast. This is only too evident in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, a film almost entirely set in the capital that steers clear of Delhi’s dominant representation in cinema. Instead, Banerjee focuses his lens on the claustrophobia of growing up in a west Delhi ghetto, the narrative of people excluded from centres of power. Similarly, the ubiquitous pictures of Marine Drive and Bandra that populate films set in Mumbai are largely absent from Kaminey.

The decade-long reign of the banners of Yash Chopra and Karan Johar, beginning with DDLJ in 1995, came at a moment when the middle classes were grappling with identity — the new wealth could not make them overcome a lingering unease with modernity. Their films celebrated this fraught coexistence, by effortlessly merging regressive values with consumer culture. In Oye Lucky, the protagonist is a victim of both — he seeks to firmly abandon the former, while wanting to conquer the latter. Oye Lucky replicates some aspects of the loud, baroque film with Punjabi characters, only for it to serve as a form of critique. Lucky is the antithesis of the archetype Punjabi lead in, for example, Karan Johar’s films. He never completely belongs in a consumerist milieu while the ‘native culture’ so beloved of their films is, for him, a prison that he must escape.

Another remarkable aspect is the astute skill with which these filmmakers have incorporated contemporary events, without appearing contrived or cynical. From the right-wing politics of Raj Thackeray’s MNS to the DPS MMS scandal, their interpretation has taken the form of progressive interventions.

Vishal Bhardwaj, Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap are at the forefront of a new wave of filmmakers reshaping popular Hindi cinema, merging tribute with critique. Their films have served as expressions of dissent in a cinematic culture veering towards lazy self-congratulation. Contributing to constructive change from within mainstream cinema, they have taken up old chestnuts and infused them with radical energy, opening up new horizons in which we can re-imagine the popular Hindi film.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on August 20.