BackIndia season in Britain
A play based on Katherine Boo's book, a TV series on sex and politics during the days of the Raj, and BBC's India's Daughterexplaining India in the UK
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On a fine February day in 1993, during what passes for winter in Madras, as Chennai was then known, I was in our hotel lobby, talking to my former colleague Shekhar Gupta, when we saw English cricketers, looking morose, checking out of the hotel. Mohammad Azharuddin’s squad had just thrashed them. The English blamed their disastrous performance on food. Shekhar said, in a voice loud enough for the squirming English cricketers to hear: “Funny, no? They ruled us for 200 years and still can’t digest our prawn curry."
Nor can they understand India, it seems, even as they keep hankering for it. Nearly seven decades after leaving India, they keep returning for more, even if the India they discover bears only a partial resemblance to what they thought they knew.
Britain periodically gets these nostalgic fits. In 1982, it hosted the first Festival of India, the year Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi was released. Two years later, there was a glut—David Lean’s Passage To India, based on E.M. Forster’s novel, and two major television adaptations, The Jewel In The Crown, based on Paul Scott’s novels Raj Quartet, and a miniseries based on M.M. Kaye’s romance, The Far Pavilions. When the Festival of India travelled to the US in 1985, Anita Desai keenly observed in “The Rage Of The Raj", a powerful essay in The New Republic, how the West—and Britain, in particular—continued to misunderstand and misrepresent India.
India remains the mystery that defies those who seek to interpret it through generalizations. Squeezing India into a box isn’t easy. But the age of Twitter forces narratives to become simplistic, and audiences want affirmation of long-held views and prejudices. The four new works—a TV series, a TV documentary, a play and a magazine—try in different ways to capture the Indian reality, even if they don’t make any promise.
These are hyped productions that raise expectations. And they fall short: There is the instinct to explain the Indian reality through a singular narrative; the nostalgic impulse to imagine a past; the desire to see modern Indian pursuit of material wealth as somehow problematic; and the difficulty of putting together a mosaic from the sum of India’s many parts.
Channel 4’s lavishly produced 10-part drama series, Indian Summers, reportedly has a budget of some £14 million ( ₹ 130 crore); the current season ends on 19 April. Set in Shimla in 1932, it combines viceregal certitude and grandeur with imperial paternalism and cunning and sets them against a slowly rising Indian political consciousness. Perhaps with a view to avoid protests that accompany foreigners whenever they film in India, as well as the negotiations with India’s suspicious bureaucracy, which would want to censor the script, the producers decided to film the series in Penang.
The Malaysian resort is pretty but it is not Shimla. While some 7% of Malaysia’s population of 29 million is of Indian origin, the vast majority of them are Tamil, and the sight of so many Tamil extras in a film set in what is supposed to be Himachal Pradesh is incongruous; so are the rather unusual names of two female Parsi characters—Roshana and Shamshad. Another character, Leena Prasad, an Anglo-Indian teacher at a mission school, seems like she has time-travelled from the 21st century, so alluring is the way she wears her sari and walks. And a powerful white man who seduces and betrays an Indian woman is called rakshas, or monster—not the first word to roll easily off Indian tongues when describing such a man.
The series reinforces clichés about colonial India, with characters turning predictable and the plot getting more entangled. The series will return next year, taking the story forward to 1935.
While the production Behind The Beautiful Forevers is impressive, the story itself is not new for those familiar with India’s parallel cinema movement. I kept thinking of Rabindra Dharmaraj’s 1981 film Chakra as I saw the slum dwellers and their petty rivalries grow into vengefulness with catastrophic consequences, and the way they were deceived at every turn.
Surprisingly—and disappointingly—there are elementary mistakes in many of the signboards and banners in the play. It is as if the production outsourced the task of writing titles that appear in Devanagari script on banners on the stage to Google’s transliterate function, resulting in gems such as “police" spelt as “pulsi", “station" written as “sateshan", and “Kurla" appearing as “Kurala". Indian signboard artists do routinely produce hilarious howlers. But here, the humour is unintended.
At a broader level, the play underlines a certain type of British view about India: a poor country, badly governed, with corrupt politicians and judiciary, and sadistic police, where even slum dwellers lie and allow grudges that turn petty day-to-day disputes into situations with horrendous consequences. The play is based on Boo’s meticulous journalism, but because it lacks any redemptive qualities, it seems fictional, unlike the book.
The British audience that warms to such a play, and writes out a cheque to charities, is the kind that reads The Guardian and The London Review Of Books, buys at local farmers’ markets and shuns supermarkets, opposes multinationals and genetically modified foods, and believes it is virtuous because it eats organic quinoa and cycles to work. It also reads Granta.
The magazine’s 1997 issue coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence. It included articles from writers already famous—Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, R.K. Narayan, Nirad Chaudhuri and Mark Tully—and introduced the then fresh voices of Arundhati Roy and Suketu Mehta. The 2015 edition reflects a similar taste, with a difference: It features more writers who live in India, and there is more non-fiction written by Indians. Besides the late Arun Kolatkar, there are only a few writers with several books to their credit; some have made a name through long-form writing in magazines such as The Caravan. There are more women in this issue than the one 18 years ago.
The writing in Granta offers a range of perspectives—from Amitava Kumar’s outstanding and moving description of his mother’s funeral to Amit Chaudhuri’s gently funny account of a student in 1980s London; from Deepti Kapoor’s tragicomic story about a Gurgaon memsahib to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s delightful tale of an anxious father preparing a lecture on Othello for his daughter’s school, ignorant of the teenage drama playing out around him. The poetry of Anjum Hasan and Tishani Doshi is firmly rooted in their landscape; Karthika Nair’s explores our myths. Sam Miller’s droll report retracing the footsteps of a well-suited Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as a lonely Londoner in the 1880s is charming and becomes oddly timely, with the unveiling of Gandhi’s statue in that city’s Parliament Square this March. Raghu Karnad takes us into Delhi’s past, of Japanese internees during World War II, which Indian archaeologists are unaware of, embarrassed about, or simply not bothered about, and Samanth Subramanian vividly records an exclusive club in south Mumbai. But there are few translations, which shows that the unfinished cultural war between English and bhasha writing will go on.
And there is the matter of tone. Those who write about the post-1991 India—of a liberalized economy, with multiplexes, malls, and money—do so with a slightly sneering tone, as though the pursuit of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, is somehow unbecoming of Indians, who must somehow show disdain towards the material world. To that extent, it comforts British audiences who draw sweeping conclusions from Hare’s Mumbai with its misspelt billboards, Udwin’s ahistorical Delhi, and Channel 4’s Shimla, stuck in time. Granta makes no grand claims. It lays out stories—each valid in its own way, each revealing a part of Indian reality, but not all of them add up to offer a neat conclusion.
It is a window to India, not the window to India; another equally competent editor could have put together an equally fascinating issue with a completely different set of writers, and it would still have been as interesting. That only shows how hard it is to generalize about India, and why the less you seek its meaning, the more you discover.
Salil Tripathi is the author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War And Its Unquiet Legacy. He writes the column, Here, There, Everywhere, for Mint.
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