Some of you may be old enough to remember a letter to an academic journal that Sepoy posted last February. Below, I furnish the piece of writing in question for those who are curious. The article, on the portrayal of terrorists in Indian cinema, was written in 2002. It was, I like to think, fresh and timely. It can no longer be described in that manner now. Many new movies have come out that would be interesting to discuss in this context. Mani Ratnam has since made a film that touches more directly on the conflict in Sri Lanka (Kannathil Muthamittal). I would no longer be caught dead writing this kind of academic article. The world has changed, etc. But in the interest of freecycling, I give it to you, below. Perhaps it can be repurposed and made into a quilt?

But before we move on, one last item of business. I must also share with you the reviewer’s comments alluded to in my original letter. The following was scrawled in heavily applied ballpoint on the review sheet:

NO– I am normally very open-minded, but I cannot be so here. I have no interest in advocating an article which is designed to elicit empathy for terrorists & terrorism. I don’t want to “appreciate” or “comprehend” the world of terrorists. I am not naive. The problem is with the terrorist– NOT my understanding of these PSYCHOPATHIC KILLERS. (and yes, I understand the intent of the essay. I am not misreading it)

Let Me Sleep in the Lap of Death:
Indian Cinema’s humanizing embrace of terrorists and freedom fighters

Introduction
In the final scene of the Indian film Dil Se (‘From the heart’, 1998), the hero, an employee of All India Radio (AIR), embraces the heroine, a separatist suicide bomber. The setting is a ridge in a Delhi park, dotted with ruined buildings from pre-colonial kingdoms. The heroine is on her way to bomb the annual Republic Day parade through the nation’s capital. The two embrace, and the bomb explodes. As the flames and embers radiate outwards, the last verses of a song, begun earlier in the film but never finished, are finally heard:

mujhe maut kii god meN sone de

mujhe maut kii god meN sone de
tere ruuh mere jism meN Dubone de…

Let me sleep in the lap of death

Let me sleep in the lap of death
Let your soul be drowned in my body…

For those not familiar with the aesthetics of the Indian cinema in general, and Bollywood (Bombay’s film industry) in particular, the scenario may seem bizarre and even rife with contradictions. How can one have a musical about a suicide bomber? How can the real-life present-day brutality of separatist movements and terrorist acts against states and their citizens be enveloped into the apparently real-time-external Bollywood formulas of romance, action, singing and dancing? We can learn human lessons about the phenomenon of terrorism from the region of South Asia, which has a greater familiarity with the so-called phenomenon of ‘terror,’ a familiarity which is reflected in a number of recent films on the subject. In the past ten years there have been a number of major films released in India with a terrorist as a central character, including Dil Se (1998), The Terrorist (1999), Maachis (‘Matches,’ 1996), and Mission Kashmir (2000). In all these films, the terrorist or terrorists are depicted in remarkably human terms and their motivations and actions are presented in a light which makes the audience see them as sympathetic characters. In each of the first three movies, all of which are discussed below, there are female terrorists.

The spate of film-making on terrorist themes may have been spurred on by the many separatist and violent struggles taking place within India’s borders. From the Islamist separatists in Kashmir, to the struggles in Assam, to the Khalistan movement in the Punjab, as well as the Sri Lankan civil war to the south, India and other South Asian countries have been contending with a number of different terrorist threats for quite some time now. But the paradigm of the terrorist protagonist is nothing new in Indian narratives, and dates back to the era of the struggle for independence in India.

Terrorism in India: context
In India, the concept of terrorism has been around a good deal longer than it has in the US. In the colonial era, the term ‘terrorist’ was used by the British to designate agitators for Indian independence who favored the use of force. The use of the term by the British (as opposed to ‘revolutionaries’, the term preferred by Indian nationalists) grew into a contrastive position with the Satyagrahis, or practitioners of the non-violent resistance advocated by MK Gandhi, whose movement in fact was started in reaction to the violent method of fighting colonial occupation. A non-violence movement only makes sense if there is a ‘violence’ movement. The use of the term by the British sought to denigrate the aims and goals of those who believed that force would be more effective against the British than the philosophies and demonstrations of the non-violence movement. Both groups were freedom fighters, and revolutionaries, but one ostensibly posed less of a threat to the British than the other. Many historians now believe that contrary to what popular opinion and Attenborough’s myth-making 1982 film Gandhi hold, it was, in actuality, a combination of these two tactics, violent and non-violent (along with the second World War and the election of a Labor Party government in England), which led to the successful removal of the British from India. Because of this history of the term ‘terrorist’ in India, one often finds a much more subtle discussion of the idea of terrorism in public debates, literature and film than one is wont to find in the American media. In particular, the notion that a terrorist is often just a pejorative term for freedom fighter or revolutionary is well understood. Many of India’s heroes of the Independence movement were bomb-makers and advocates of force- such as Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar ‘Azad’ and Subhash Chandra Bose (shown above)¹ – and not only do their names and deeds live on in history, but so too does the memory of their label from the British side as terrorists. Because of this, and perhaps because of a longstanding knowledge that one’s ideological and perhaps physical enemy could be living next door, the portrayal of terrorists in Indian films rarely resembles that found in American movies, in which terrorists tend to be shadowy, ‘international’ figures with indistinct and evil goals. Not only does this formulation, which is more often than not drawn from the portrayal of terrorists in the US news media, not help viewers understand what might motivate a suicide bomber- for example, because their goals are so vague and so patently evil- but their foreignness and superficiality play on deep-seated instincts toward xenophobia and suspicion of outsiders. By contrast, the terrorists of Indian film and fiction² are strikingly human, clearly defined in their political goals and motivations, attractive, intelligent, and often even saddened by the path they feel has been forced on them by history.

Songs in Dil Se
It may come as a surprise that a ‘serious’ film about terrorism could be made within the aesthetic framework of the Bollywood musical, but some Bollywood filmmakers have created a tradition of this kind of treatment. Director Raj Kapoor (1924-1988), for example, pioneered the big-budget entertainer with a progressivist political message in his films Awara (‘The vagabond’, 1951), criticizing the criminal justice system and discrimination, and Shree 420 (‘Mr. 420,’ 1955), a critique of big-city corruption and homelessness. In the final scene of Dil Se, discussed above, part of the effectiveness of the dramatic tension resides in the fact that the audience is already, more likely than not, familiar with the song which is about to erupt on the soundtrack. As Meghna the terrorist’s bomb detonates in a ball of fire, the audience anticipates the final lines of the song which round out the earlier verses from another scene. The audience, already fully aware of the lyrics for the song, “Satrangi Re” (‘The seven colors [of love]’), realizes that the line “Let me sleep in the lap of death” has not yet been sung. Death, and therefore tragedy, is anticipated as the ending.

The songs in Dil Se are the work of one of the most renowned composers in the Indian cinema, and certainly the most innovative in Bombay, AR Rahman, and as such are probably even more important to this film than regular songs are to other films. In the opening scene of the film, the hero, Amar, played by Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), enters a remote train platform on a dark and rainy night. He approaches a shadowy figure wrapped in a black cloth and asks him for matches. A sudden gust of wind blows the cloth away from the person’s face, revealing that it is not a man but a woman. For the audience, this one moment makes it perfectly clear that there is something out of the ordinary about this woman, since it is unusual for a beautiful young woman to be sitting on a train platform late at night all alone. SRK draws near to her and begins a lengthy monologue in which he attempts to get her to speak to him or tell him something about herself. The questions he asks her- What is your name? What is the name of your village? What is your mother’s name? And then, humorously, ‘what is your dog’s name?’- presage her discontinuity with location, family, and home. As we realize much later, the only thing she has is a name, and as a revolutionary terrorist she has renounced all else. Eventually he introduces himself, showing her an identification badge and explaining that he works for All India Radio (AIR; see Figure 3, above, in which Amar shows Meghna his badge for the second time). We come to realize over the course of the film that SRK is Meghna’s opposite: he is a servant of the State, an appendage of the government media and propaganda network, which serves the function of binding together the imagined community of India.

As he continues to ask her if there is anything she needs that he can get for her, she suddenly turns and looks him full in the face and replies, “A cup of hot tea.” What is remarkable about this exchange is her naked stare into his eyes. She is a woman, alone, in an empty station in the middle of the night, and she has the composure to look a strange man in the eyes, a mark of union and the beginning of a relationship in the visual-poetic language of the Indian cinema. He rushes off to get the tea and rushes back to see a train pulling out of the station, and Meghna seated in a lit compartment with two men. Pulling his jacket over his head, still holding the two cups of tea, he stands in the rain and remarks with resignation, “The world’s shortest love story.” A remark which signals to us that a) it will be a long love story, and b) we are ready for a song.

Of the many beautifully written and arranged songs in Dil Se, this opening number “Chhaya Chhaya” has attracted the most attention. The song is ‘picturized’ on the top of a train traveling through a jungle that seems to resemble the forests of the Northeast regions of India, where, not coincidentally, there is much ethnic and communal tension, separatism, and violent clashes of organized militias with the State. SRK dances in a contemporary, hip-hop style accompanied by a large chorus and a super model-statuesque woman dressed in peasant attire. The Janet Jackson-style dance moves are a deceptive cover for the complex Perso-Arabic lyrics (much of the poetry of the song lyrics borrows heavily from Urdu poetic traditions, particularly the sonnet-like verse form the ghazal), which would be nearly impossible for the average viewer to comprehend. The nature of the linguistic/poetic style of the lyrics and their reference to devotion and love presage the tension which will carry us through the movie. This is a terrorist movie, but it is also a love story, and not just any love story, but the kind of love story that legends are made of. The setting might be modern, but, as we will learn, this is Romeo and Juliet, or more accurately, Laila and Majnun, all over again. The tale of Laila and Majnun is a traditional Arabic love story in which the two characters fall in love but cannot marry because they belong to separate tribes. Majnun eventually goes crazy from his love and wanders out in the desert where he is nourished for a time by animals, but dies because of the intensity of his passion for Laila.

Thus begins a tale which creates an ingenious blend of commentary on modern day terrorism and separatism and a compelling reworking of the tale of Laila and Majnun. Following in the footsteps of earlier populist-progressivists in the Indian Cinema such as Raj Kapoor, the filmmaker, Mani Ratnam, knows that making a film in the realist mode of say, Satyajit Ray, on the subject of terrorism, will not appeal to the general public. In a cinema which requires non-linear and symbolic narrative; relatively ahistorical, apolitical romances; and the copious use of songs and dances, it is not easy to deliver messages on current events with a straight-on treatment. Mani Ratnam manages to weave together multiple layers of visual, lyrical, musical, and narrative-based symbolism to create both a blockbuster-style film and make a serious commentary on contemporary events. In the song “Chhaya Chhaya,” for example, the most experimental element, in terms of the visual poetics of the Bombay cinema, is not the fact that SRK and a huge chorus are dancing on top of a moving train (spectacle is an important part of the genre, especially during the song sequences), nor is it the complex and elaborate Perso-Arabic flavored song lyrics. Rather, it is the fact that the song is shot in a setting which at least looks like the Northeast frontier area of India. Connected to the rest of India by a strip of land carved around Bangladesh by the Partition of 1947 (Bangladesh was then West Pakistan), the Northeast frontier provinces are a remote region torn apart by separatist movements and brutal army-led crackdowns. In the landscapes of popular national imagination, this thickly jungled and mountainous region does not play much of a role, certainly not in the landscapes of the Bombay cinema. At the same time, forests and natural surroundings, as well as hilly regions, are in fact important parts of the visual vocabulary of the picturization of Hindi songs. In a tradition which could be seen as rooted in the poetics of traditional love poetry from a number of different language literatures in the Subcontinent, Hindi film songs arrange visual cues that are recognized by the audience as symbolizing a complex array of moods and progressions in the romantic aspect of the narrative.³

In the case of “Chhaya Chhaya,” the jungle landscape can be seen as a ‘beginning of romantic love’ setting in the traditional sense, but it is also meant to evoke something unfamiliar: a particular remote area of the nation, and one to which the audience does not frequently travel. In addition, the use of the train as the stage for the dancers can be seen as one step beyond spectacle: it actually is a train, and it is taking us, the audience, and the film’s hero, a character firmly rooted in the capital, New Delhi, on a journey to the periphery. Throughout the film, Mani Ratnam uses this method of merging messages and symbols to create a complex story, one which is a classic tragic love tale, as well as a story about separatism and suicide bombers, with multiple layers of interpretability and accessibility by the audience.

Specificity and Timelessness
How does one fit a narrative which, though not a ‘true story,’ still must contain elements of historical, political, and geographical specificity, into the Bollywood generic framework? The Bollywood framework could be defined as non-specific, non-particularized, and emphatically non-realist, perhaps because it seeks to capture a pan-Indian audience, and perhaps because it plays the role of escapist fantasy for a large viewing public for whom the harsh realities of everyday life are not something one pays money to go and see. One method Mani Ratnam uses is to make the origins, regional affiliations, and religious/ethnic identity of Meghna, the terrorist herself, deliberately vague, supplying the audience with only the barest clues to figure out what movement she has joined.

Her name, Meghna, sounds vaguely Hindu, but on the other hand it is simply the name of a river in the Northeast. She doesn’t appear to be Muslim, although she is sometimes seen wearing a dark shawl over her head, but that might just be for anonymity or warmth. The only truly factual clues come near the end of the film, when Meghna explains to Amar her reasons for being a suicide bomber. Her explanation is depicted by means of a video montage flashback shown partly from the narrative perspective of Indian Army soldiers killing and raping the people in her village. Through the flashback, we come to understand her motivation as one arising from being orphaned and raped by the Indian Army, and later adopted into a separatist army camp for children. In one scene, Meghna is shown as a young girl standing to attention in her training camp with a flag flying overhead featuring a rhinoceros. The rhinoceros is indigenous to Assam, and is often used as a symbol of the region. Here, it probably suggests Meghna’s affiliation with one of Assam’s many separatist organizations, such as the powerful group ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam).⁴

The ambiguity of Meghna’s heritage serves not only to make Dil Se a timeless romance analogous to Laila and Majnun, but also to suggest that in the matter of separatism and terrorism, specificity can only be given so much importance. As the audience seeks to figure out which struggle Meghna is engaging in, they are forced on some level to confront the fact that it could be one of many. The story of disenfranchised communities, either at the geographical peripheries of nations, or simply at the socio-economic peripheries, and the state-sponsored violence perpetrated against members of these communities, is a fact of life all around India, and indeed all around the world. Meghna is simply a young woman driven to the edge who has nothing left to lose.

Mani Ratnam himself is Tamil, from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the separatist struggles of Kashmir and Assam are very far away, and the battle raging much closer to home (but external to India’s borders) is that between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE—The Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam). It was in fact a female suicide bomber from the Tamil Tigers who assassinated the then Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. Dil Se is part of a trilogy rounded out by Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995). The previous two films dealt with Kashmiri terrorism and how it can be of importance to Indians in the South (Roja), and Hindu-Muslim conflict and rioting around the time of the demolition of the Babri Masjid (Babur’s Mosque) in Ayodhya (Bombay). Mani Ratnam’s trilogy attempts to bring together a variety of conflicts eating away at India’s national borders and identity and show how these are conflicts which affect all Indians, although his apparent confidence in the idea of a nation shown in Roja seems to have been substantially undermined by the time he directed the third part of the trilogy, Dil Se.

Specificity and Realism: The Terrorist
Interestingly, Mani Ratnam’s films do not deal with the Tamil Tigers at all, perhaps out of an urge to bring together lessons learned from both the south and the north of India and create a national dialogue. Fellow Tamil filmmaker Santosh Sivan (also cinematographer for Dil Se, as well as a number of other Mani Ratnam films), however, has brought the theme of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination to film in his 1999 The Terrorist. The Terrorist was shot in South India and is a Tamil language film. With no song and dance numbers and not much romance or dialogue, The Terrorist falls into the genre ‘art film’ in terms of Indian cinematic categories. The ninety-five minute film, extremely short by Indian standards, chronicles the life of a young woman in a terrorist training camp, presumably run by the LTTE, in a country which is presumably Sri Lanka, from the time she is selected to take on the mission to assassinate a ‘VIP’ to the moment when she is supposed to press the button. Sivan’s film also lacks specificity, although this is probably because of the dangers both legal and otherwise involved in openly making a non-allegorical film about the Tamil Tigers.

The Terrorist is very clearly meant to bring the audience inside the head of Malli, the terrorist, to help us understand the mindset of a suicide bomber, as well as to explore how such an individual might experience being human. The device used for this is a possible pregnancy; Malli had during a battle spent the night comforting a fellow wounded soldier, and had for the first time found herself in the close proximity of a man her own age. Through a series of suggestions she comes to believe that she may be pregnant and carrying his child. The film never makes it clear whether or not her encounter with the fellow soldier was sexual, but it is also implied that Malli is probably not certain what exact conditions would produce pregnancy in a woman other than proximity to a man. As the consciousness of possible motherhood begins to overwhelm her she undergoes a humanizing transformation, perhaps bringing about an awareness of the cycle of human life, a cycle she has essentially been trained to interfere with. While in earlier parts of the film, Malli is seen ruthlessly and unemotionally killing the enemy with, variously, a machete, an automatic weapon, and a bayonet, she begins to transform into a more emotional and self-reflective state as she awaits her mission and contemplates the possibility that she is pregnant.

Her transformation is aided by the setting where she has been assigned to wait until the assassination date. She is staying with a talkative elderly man in a large, mostly empty house. The room where she sleeps used to be the bedroom of her host’s son. The son, who we later learn is dead, was a photo-journalist, and the tiny room is completely collaged from floor to ceiling in photographs of international conflicts, as well as many pictures of different women, a world map, and a mirror. By looking at herself in the mirror, locating her place on the map, and examining the pictures around the room, she comes to identify herself as both a woman and a human with common bonds to other humans (see still, Figure 5, a reflection of Malli examining herself in the mirror in the room, photographs in the background). A shocking moment comes one day when she realizes that one of the photographs of women in her room is actually a small window cut out of the wall through which she can see her host’s wife, lying open-eyed in a coma in the room next door. She learns that the photographer’s mother had gone into a coma the day she had learned of her son’s death (presumably due to violence surrounding a photo-journalism assignment). As Malli comes to believe that she is pregnant, her identification with the comatose mother on the other side of the wall grows. Motherhood is an all-encompassing identity for the other woman, to the extent that she more or less ceased to exist when she lost her son. She is placed in opposition to Malli, for whom killing ‘the enemy’ as a good soldier is the only identity she has had up until now.

In the final scene it is not clear whether or not she pushes the button, but it seems as though she does not. Oddly, The Terrorist, shot in a realist style with no singing and dancing, seems more farfetched in the end than Dil Se, in the sense that the realist film resorts to clichéd ideas about lifecycles and the contradictions between motherhood and terrorism, while Dil Se suggests that though Meghna eventually admits her love for Amar, there is no practicable solution or way out of her mental state, or her commitment to follow through with her mission. Meghna is not softened by human experience; it destroys her. By contrast, Malli seems to be redeemed by her essential femininity, an unrealistic solution to conflicts and struggles which clearly transcend the urge to play out traditional gender roles in all different parts of the globe.

The Hunger of Majnun: The State Stalks its Borders
Gender roles come into play on multiple layers in Dil Se through the analogies of Amar with Majnun, the crazed and obsessed lover, and, Meghna with Laila, the object of Majnun’s desires. The hero of the standard Bombay film wins the heart of the heroine through dogged persistence and aggressive pursuit. He has to prove his commitment to her through his tenacity, to an extent that would make him seem like a stalker and not a hero in an American film (see Figure 6, from Dil Se, above). Added to this traditional portrayal of the male lover or suitor in Bombay cinema, the actor in Dil Se, Shah Rukh Khan, actually rose to mega-star status through a series of roles, such as those he played in the hits Darr (‘Fear’, 1994), Baazigar (‘The gambler’, 1993), and Anjaam (‘Consequence’, 1994), in which the role of lover and stalker/serial killer are conflated in a manner quite unusual to Bollywood norms. The persona and the layering of roles of a particular actor or actress is often used as a device in Indian movies to build the character the actor or actress is currently playing (theme songs from previous hit films will sometimes be laced into the soundtrack when a particular actor walks onto the set, to remind the audience of the effect surrounding the nostalgia for the previous movie and its songs, for example). Because of this, SRK brings to his roles as romantic lead a strong subtext of violence and obsession, carrying over from the audience’s memory of Darr and Baazigar in particular (see Figure 7, above, picturing SRK in this mode, as opposed to the one below, Figure 8, where he is pictured in his more playful love interest mode). Everyone knows that SRK’s obsessive brand of love can lead him to the border of dementia, and that it is always possible he will appear in a desperate situation before the film is over, in which he must stagger or crawl insanely through some alleyway or forest , stammering incoherently, rivulets of blood and sweat running down his face and body (which does in fact happen in Dil Se).

As the plot for Dil Se builds, and with it, Amar’s Majnun-like obsession with the elusive Meghna, we know, both from the traditional pursuit by the hero of the heroine in Bollywood movies, as well as from SRK’s presence in the role, that this can only lead to madness and total destruction, due primarily to Amar’s self-destructive and all-consuming male desire for Meghna. This use of the gender roles of the hero and the heroine makes possible another, even more compelling analogy: Amar is identified with the State (as a reporter for All India Radio) and Meghna with the peripheries of the State’s borders (as a separatist from the Northeast Frontier). Thus the dogged, macho, and obsessive pursuit of Meghna by Amar becomes emblematic of the State’s ‘desire’ to hang onto the peripheral regions and crush out opposition at all costs, rejecting the possibility of separation, or even dialogue about separation or demands.

As in the gender stereotypes reinforced by mainstream Bombay films, in which women’s desires and women’s voices are neither heard nor relevant, Amar’s desires and Amar’s thoughts are the only ones we hear until the film is practically at an end. This paradigm is reinforced by Amar’s actual employment as a DJ and radio-journalist, who is not only able to speak to us, the audience, throughout the film, but is also able to speak to the nation through the means of broadcasting his voice all over India. In a haunting and recurring song, Amar actually ‘speaks’ and calls out to Meghna by playing a particular song over the radio in which he asks her to call out to him, an ironic and impossible request when broadcast through the unilateral organ of the radio from which she hears it. Her only defense or possible active role in this supposed interchange is to turn the radio off and on, which she does, causing this refrain to echo in and out of the soundtrack:

Ai ajnabii tuu bhii kabhii aawaaz de kahiiN se
MaiN yahaaN TukRoN meN jii rahaa huuN
Tuu kahiiN TukRoN meN jii rahii hai

….MaiN adhuuraa tuu adhuurii jii rahii hai

Oh stranger, will you please call out as well some time?
I am living here, in pieces
You are living somewhere, in pieces

….I am incomplete, you are living, incomplete

The notion that they are neither of them complete beings without the other is his, and is never expressed by her. This again is a reminder of the State’s belief that the nation is incomplete without these regions, a belief that is unilaterally expressed. As she slowly becomes conscious that she loves him, Meghna loses her sense of composure and is robbed of peace of mind, though she does eventually assert herself by using him to achieve her goal. Manipulating his obsessive love for her, she asks him to give her a job at AIR, and thus infiltrates the center, gaining access to press passes that will allow her a good position on the day of the parade. Despite her loss of composure and her love for him, she does not, however, lose her resolve. She is already wired with explosives and walking toward the Republic Day parade when Amar manages to track her down, secure from her the sought-after nod that yes, she does love him, and envelop her in that embrace of unity and completeness he has desired for so long, an embrace which sets off her explosives and kills them both. This suicidal union, setting up a parallel between the Indian state’s ultimately self-destructive pursuit of unity at the expense of peace- broadcasting at the expense of listening- with the legendary crazed lover Majnun, shows both sides tragically entrenched in their positions. By aligning the state and the separatists with the traditional gender roles of the Hindi hero and heroine and with Laila and Majnun, Mani Ratnam suggests that the terrorist’s ostensible goal, for his or her voice to be heard and be considered consequential enough to move the State, can be understood in terms of the suppression of female voices in patriarchal systems of love, courtship and marriage. Though Dil Se ends as a tragedy, with no apparent solution to the entrenchment of both sides, the romantic parallel does suggest ways of re-viewing India’s relationship with insurgency and separatism in terms of traditional gender roles, gender equality movements, and paradigms for dialogue and understanding.

Another Laila, Another Majnun: Maachis
In the 1996 film about the separatist movement in the Indian state of Punjab (or the Khalistan Movement), Maachis (‘Matches’), by the director Gulzar, the Laila and Majnun parallel is also introduced, this time explicitly. The film centers on the transformation of an ordinary middle-class Punjabi teenager, Kripal Singh (Chandrachur Singh), into a terrorist in the separatist movement in the Punjab (following the 1984 Operation Bluestar attack by Indira Gandhi’s government on Sikh separatists in the Golden Temple in Amritsar). The film seeks to show how an ordinary citizen might be driven to extremism in an environment marked by police brutality and political corruption. Leaving behind his girlfriend, Veera (played by the actress Tabu), Kripal Singh disappears into the movement, reappearing only once. Veera’s world is in turn slowly completely dismantled by the police crackdown in the region, and in the end she too joins the movement, surprising Kripal Singh by showing up one day as the new missile shooter in his unit. A series of gaffes on the part of their unit leads to Kripal Singh’s arrest and the annihilation of the group. In one of the final scenes, Veera goes to visit Kripal Singh in prison and, comparing their relationship to that of Laila and Majnun, passes a cyanide capsule to him in a kiss.

The reference to Laila and Majnun is made here not to engage with the paradigm of the crazed lover, but simply to invoke the tragedy of their love story. Here Laila and Majnun are on the same side and are divided by the brutality of the State. Whereas in Dil Se and The Terrorist, the terrorists are depicted as ruthless and impeccably trained for combat and insurgency, the terrorists in Maachis are consistently portrayed as inexperienced and inept. While Malli is humanized by the possibility of motherhood and Meghna is humanized through a sensitive portrayal of the traumatic stress that has created her psychological state, as well as the pain that love causes her (though she stoically withstands temptation), Veera and Kripal Singh are human from the start and never become ‘inhuman’ warriors. Their ineptitude, lack of savvy, and poor timing ensure that their humanity is never in doubt. Throughout the film, it does not even seem as though they ascribe to a clearly formulated political ideology of separatism, and one of their mentors, Sanatan, is even given dialogue in which he suggests that their group wants nothing more than to remain in the nation, but is being driven apart from the center. In the final scene, the hero and heroine ingest cyanide capsules and slowly die, separated from one another, from their movement, from their families, and from the State. Though this method of humanizing the terrorist is effective in some ways, it downplays the actual ideologies of the proponents of the Khalistan Movement and thus casts the terrorists in a weaker position than is actually accurate historically.

Conclusion
The very notion underlying the idea of ‘terror’ as perpetrated by the ‘terrorist’ speaks of the emotional, affective response of a people toward strategically planned acts of violence or threats of violence. The ‘terror’ at the root of ‘terrorism’ is a collective sensation across a society which must be processed in emotional terms. A terrorist and the people he or she targets are in fact locked into an emotional relationship. By imagining terrorism through the romantic generic lens of Bombay’s popular film-making tradition, we can learn new ways of comprehending the phenomenon. In the films discussed here, Dil Se, The Terrorist, and Maachis, the terrorists are all portrayed in sensitive human terms. Though this is in part the legacy of the history of the notion of terrorism in India, which has had an impact on characterizations of revolutionary activity in literature and film there for the past century, these films bring to the genre a new twist. Since all three films feature an intrepid female terrorist, we are given a new lens through which to consider the role of the terrorist in society. The creation of characters who are female suicide bombers works on a number of levels to complicate conventional notions of what terrorism means and what drives individuals to join terrorist movements. On one level, the femaleness of each character, and her inability to play out traditional gender roles of wife, lover, and mother, suggest that terrorism is the last resort of a people and is chosen when conditions of oppression are so extreme that basic life-cycle roles must be curtailed. On an allegorical level, we can read the phenomenon of terror through gender and consider the conditions of extreme oppression of a people closely parallel to those of patriarchal domination and oppression of women. Terrorism then becomes the last resort to make one’s voice heard in an unequal relationship.

Works Cited
Films:
Anjaam (1994)
Awara (1951)
Baazigar (1993)
Bombay (1995)
Darr (1994)
Dil Se (1998)
Maachis (1996)
Mission Kashmir (2000)
Roja (1992)
Shree 420 (1955)
The Terrorist (1999)

Websites:
Cineraider. Cineraider: A Critical Guide to Asian Cinema. March 15, 2003.
.
India Talkies. Dil Se…A Mani Ratnam Film. 1998. Rage-India. .
Internet Movie Database. 2003. .
Sivan, Santosh. Santosh Sivan Online. 2001. .
Subramanian, Satish. Rahman Online!. 2003. .

Books:
Agyeya. Shekhar: Ek Jiivanii (‘Shekhar: A biography’). Benares: Sarasvatii Press, 1940 (Part I), 1944 (Part II).
Ahmad, Eqbal. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Baruah, Sanjib. India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture and Political Economy.
New York: Routledge, 1998.
Chandra, Bipin. India’s Struggle for Independence. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. British Film
Institute, 1999.
Selby, Martha. Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wirsig, Robert G.. India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: On Regional Conflict and Its
Resolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Yashpal. Daadaa KaamreD (‘Dada comrade’). Lucknow: Viplav Kaaryaalay, 1941.
—. Sinhaavalokan (‘A retrospective’). Allahabad: Lokbhaaratii Prakaashan, 1994.

1. Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republic Army and was executed by the British in 1931. He was linked to a number of attacks on the British, including the 1928 murder of the British official Saunders and the bombing of the Central Assembly Hall in 1929. Following the earlier film on his life, Shaheed (1965), five biographical movies are being released this year alone about Bhagat Singh, including 23rd March 1931, Shaheed (2002) and The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002). The sudden resurgence in interest in Bhagat Singh has been linked to the current climate of nationalism in India following recent cross-border conflicts with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue. Chandrashekhar ‘Azad’ (1902-1931) was Bhagat Singh’s mentor, and was assassinated by the British in 1931. Subhash Chandra Bose (1897-1945), also known as ‘Netaji’, was originally a member of the Congress Party and a colleague of Gandhi’s. Later he decided that the only way to beat the British was through allying with the fascists in Europe. Bose forged ties with Hitler and formed the Indian National Army with the help of the Japanese, who released a large number of Indian Prisoners of War to him. After a military conflict with the British Indian Army that ended in the defeat of the INA, Bose died on his way to Japan in a plane crash.
2. Portrayals of the humanized terrorist have a long history in Indian fiction writing going back as far as the Bengali novel Anandmath (1896) by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee perhaps and appearing in many other language literatures.
3. In the study of classical and pre-modern literary genres, these poetic ‘rules’ are of paramount importance. In Sanskrit poetics, the vocabulary of emotions has been classified into eight or nine ‘rasas’ or flavors, literally ‘juices,’ with corresponding landscapes, colors, weather, animals, and the like. It would be a stretch to say that Bombay cinema follows the dictates of traditional Rasa Theory, but more aptly, one could say that Bollywood has a rasa theory of its own, perhaps not so elaborate as in classical models, but still rather complex. For a readable treatment of rasa theories, see the introduction in Martha Selby, Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.)
4. For an excellent and detailed work on contemporary Assam, see Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

A guest essay by Basanti

Mushtaq Bhai: Any last words?
Babban: How about a joke?
Mushtaq Bhai: Yes, go ahead.
Babban: (nervously) There was once this mullah who had a female parrot. This female parrot had quite a mouth on her, always saying the foulest things. The mullah was at a loss, what to do. He went to his friend, the qazi. The qazi said: look, I have a pair of male parrots, who are both very respectable. They are always singing the praises of Allah. Just have your parrot spend a few days with them, and she’ll be straightened out soon enough. The mullah was very happy by this prospect and handed over his parrot to the qazi. But as soon as the qazi’s parrots took one look at her, they started saying the most vulgar things, suddenly acquiring the most foulest of tongues themselves… the worst insults (galis)! I mean… things I cannot bring myself to repeat…you see, I am much too embarrassed. No, I just can’t say them out loud …I’m really just too shy….Are you sure you want to hear what they said?
Mushtaq Bhai: (chuckles) Of course, yes…
Babban: Ok, but I’m really too embarrassed to say it out loud. Shall I whisper it in your ear?
Mushtaq Bhai: (bending forwards) Yes, do tell…

I finally got around to watching Abhishek Chaubey’s much acclaimed debut, a marvel of a film. Ishqiya follows the interconnected stories of a femme fatale named Krishna (Vidya Balan) having just lost her hardened criminal husband, and two thieves, Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad Warsi), on the run. The film’s subtle, yet powerful critique of the Hindu right, its mockery of the rising nouveau rich middle-class; and [relatively] progressive sexual politics, makes it worth a watch. Its landscape is a north India as home through the eyes of its marginalized poor: these happen to include Muslims, (widowed/unattached) women, and lower-castes.

It is to writers’ credit that Ishqiya’s chief Muslim characters—male protagonists aptly portrayed by Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi—are for once not the Good Muslim-Bad Muslim familiar duo of Bollywood, chasing their tales in a narrative about terrorism (a la Fiza, Mission Kashmir, Dhoka, Fanaa, etc.) I will spare you the history of the much maligned figure of the Muslim in many a film from Roja (1992) onwards, which has pitted the Indian nationalist hero in opposition to the jihadi terrorist. Many recent films, when featuring Muslims, are structured around a popular narrative about a purported crisis unique to Islam—between good Muslims working for the success of the secular Indian state, and bad Muslims, taking on the state out of adherence to an aggressively blind religious ideology. Suffice to say, there is rarely a film out of Bollywood these days where the Muslim character is not the bearer of religious particularity or difference or presented as political conundrum. So when a film comes along that doesn’t fall into the usual scenario, and does well at the box office, it is noticeable.

Khalujaan and Babban of Ishqiya are all too complex and human: vagrants who drink, whore, and thieve their way through rural north India, a pair of comedic, endearing sinners, having universal problems like lack of money, being bullied, homelessness, and dreams of moving on to greener pastures, trying their best to survive in a dog eat dog world.

The figure of the Muslim in Ishqiya is that of bearing witness and as civilizing persona.

Set in rural UP, the uncle-nephew pair is on the run from rifle toting Mushtaq Bhai whom they’ve crossed yet again. Mushtaq Bhai, though bearing no blood relation to Khalujaan, does share a kin relation: his beloved wife is Khalujaan’s rakhi sister. The thieves have recourse to pleading with their sister—have your husband spare us—via a mobile phone whose ringtone is amusingly, Mera Zohrajabeen. Ishqiya is quite self-referential, if not nostalgic, about cinema songs between the 1950s and 1960s, a period when progressive Urdu poets dominated the song-writing scene in Bombay—a self-referentiality nicely brought to life by Naseeruddin Shah, who represents one of the last Urdu-wallahs of the IPTA generation.

After groveling for their lives in a pit dug as their graves, even the cantankerous Mushtaq Bhai has the valor to listen to their last words: a latifa (joke) about corrupting and corruptible parrots, which turns out to be a ruse for the thieves to escape from their graves. Making off with his money, they decide not to kill Mushtaq Bhai—for the two are often at comedic cross-roads, regarding the question of taking a life.

The theme song in the opening credits is Ibn Batuta, lyrics by Gulzar, and interestingly, a subject of plagarism controversy .

Ibn Batuta sets the tone of the vagabonds’ adventures, referencing the eponymous Muslim traveler, the fourteenth century Moroccan who left behind a detailed rihla (travelogue) of his journeys from North Africa, through Central Asia, and India (where he served in the court of the Delhi sultanate) and to South East Asia. The song’s chorus:

Ibn-Batuta, bagal mein juta, pehne to karta hai jhurrr!
Ibn Batuta, carrying his shoes under his arm, when he wears them, they go jhurr!

You can view the full mast song here. You can read the full translation of the song, the issue of plagiarism and the similarity to Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena‘s Hindi poem here.

From the outset, Ishqiya celebrates and humanizes the mobility of its Muslim characters, a refreshing break from depictions of Muslim travel as an inherently threatening, terrifying, and anti-Indian phenomenon. And not just any mobility—but mobility of the vagrant, criminal kind—where Khalujaan and Babban wax nostalgic about farting freely in their village, and make off with stolen cars. Out of favor with most of their family, friend, and criminal networks, Khalujaan and Babban are in search of temporary shelter. The two travelers rapidly find themselves in the ‘uncivil’ hinterlands: in rural UP, that apparently means being caught in the fray of gun-runners posing as respectable businessmen, and out of control caste wars.

But for anyone who is familiar with Ibn Batuta there appears to be an interesting reversal of a much older theme of ‘cosmopolitan travel’ at work. The Berber Ibn Batuta was a qazi, and a learned scholar, epitomizing medieval North Africa’s Muslim elite. As Ross Dunn has put it: “the Muslim cosmopolite of the fourteenth century [like today’s sophisticated jet-setter] was urbane, well-travelled, and free of the grosser varieties of parochial bigotry…and above all possessed a self-consciousness of the entire Dar-ul-Islam as social reality.” Khalujaan and Babban are far from urbane elites but the invocation of Ibn Batuta stands in for their vagabond cosmopolitanism.

Incidentally, Ibn Batuta called to my mind that other song about vagabond travel and shoes from Indian cinema (Mera Juta Hai Japani) from Kapoor’s Shri 420. In Ishqiya, we have the itinerant stranger heading out of the city and into the village—where the village is anything but the space of tranquility and innocence. The lyrical Ibn Batuta of Khalujaan and Babban’s world brings to mind older narratives of Muslim travel, where the sojourner from the cosmopolitan city of origin, is a commentator on the ‘un-civil’ customs of those whom he comes across: nonetheless he remains part of this larger world. But I digress. Khalujaan and Babban’s cosmopolitanism is expressed in their language: small town Hindi (and Hinglish), the urban slang, and Urdu. Theirs is by no means a provincial world, but they are linked up via mobile phone, and are quite well-traveled, finding shelters and serais from tour guides to train-ticket masters.

The two heroes eventually succeed in securing a place to stay with an old friend, Verma-ji, whose home’s sole occupant now is his wife, the sharp-witted and attractive Krishna. They soon discover that Verma-ji is not coming back. But Krishna has often lived alone: the film’s opening scene portrays her in repose, delighted to see her husband after his long stint away. He brings the gift of a gold chain bearing a pendant of the Taj Mahal, but their reunion is short-lived. Krishna confesses to having gone to the police querying what her husband’s sentence might be if he fesses up, upping the ante in effort to persuade him to surrender; Verma makes a promise to abandon his criminal activities forever. Shortly thereafter, there is an explosion which leaves Krishna widowed.

The name Krishna is appropriate—as Vidya Balan’s character conveys the mischievous, clever, seductive, thieving, and much adored Krishna of folklore. Whereas the romantic and chivalrous Khalujaan quickly becomes enamored by her sweet voice and manner, bonding with her over their mutual love of 1950s film songs, the rough and roving Babban is drawn to her unapologetically open sexuality. When Krishna blithely remarks on the stark difference between uncle and nephew: “zamin-asman ka fark hai (as different as earth and sky)”, Khalujaan corrects her, “No, only as different as Hindu and Muslim.” The statement shores up the shared social space of these characters negotiated by rituals such as rakhi and by film songs.

Within the first few days of their stay, Khalujaan and Babban discover to their horror that not only has Mushtaq Bhai hunted them down yet again, but the stolen money has disappeared. Their arch nemesis gives them one month (until Rakhi day) to return the stolen money, otherwise, they will be buried alive along with Krishna.

Babban immediately accuses Krishna of stealing the money, though she is quick to point out that while Babban was busy in the brothel, the sweeper Nandu was busy cleaning house. It is Nandu the low-caste teenager who had familiarized Babban with the area, promising to fix his gun: “In our village, children learn to use the gun before learning to wipe their butts,” Nandu explains that the outskirts of Gorakhpur’s villages are gripped by caste-wars, with a growing Sena army, one that he has just recently joined.

As a friend pointed out to me, the film may be making reference to the Ranvir Sena from Bihar, which had initially developed to harass lower castes, though received comeuppance from the Maoists, and who have been around longer than news reports portray. In the film, however, the Sena is out to seek revenge from a neighboring village of Thakurs.

It is to these caste-wars that the Muslim is witness. When Babban angrily goes in search of Nandu, he accidentally interrupts a meeting, witnessing fiery oration and the distribution of rifles by the Sena army. Cornering Babban, Sena guerrillas threaten him, ordering him never to return to the area, sparing him presumably because he comes with good credentials: a guest of the late Verma-ji. Babban as witness is quite interesting, for if shahid—martyr—means bearing witness, it is worth visiting what the Muslim figure as witness in this narrative implies…

Upon his return, an exasperated Babban explains to Khalujaan that they need to leave immediately:

yeh jaga bahut danger hai…hamare paas to sirf sunni aur shia ka chalta hai, lekin yahan to har jaat ki apni apni sena hai, khalu!

This place is dangerous! We just have Sunni and Shi’a differences, but here, each caste has gotten together his own army, Khalu!

My (not so fully developed) theory: in bearing witness to the caste-war preparations, the Muslim as witness in Ishqiya interrupts widespread narratives of the War on Terror, where the root problem of insurgencies in Muslim countries like Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is seen to be (political) Islam. In presenting the figure of the Muslim interrupting a caste-war under way, and then commenting upon it, is the filmic narrative implicitly suggesting a historical, comparative, and regional connection between the sectarian conflagrations of Pakistan, and the ‘tribal/low-caste’ Maoist insurgencies rocking the red corridor of India? I am not quite sure how else to read the Muslim (as a minority) bearing witness to organized political violence centered upon ‘caste’…. I do wonder that had the portrayal in Ishqiya been of the Shiv Sena, as an open critique of rightest forces in India, if such an interruption may have been possible.

A debate between uncle and nephew then ensues, as to whether to stay put or go on the run again with Khalujaan saying he can’t have it on his conscience that Krishna’s life is at Mushtaq Bhai’s mercy. The debate is put to end by Krishna herself, who tells them at rifle-point that nothing will be decided without her permission, a punishment for fools who have put her life on the line.

It is at this point where Krishna officially hijacks the narrative.

If Ishqiya does not fall into simplistic narrative portrayals about the minoritized Muslim, neither does it fall into some fable about an un-hitched young woman (here, widow) waiting to be rescued. From this point onwards, Krishna does not drive the narrative as a simple object of the two thieves’ affection: rather, she is the brains behind a heist carried out by the threesome. Having captured both their hearts, she persuades them into a plan to kidnap a local millionaire and hold him ransom. ‘If you throw a stone in Gorakphur, it will land on the head of one millionaire or another,” says Krishna, for if rural UP is ridden with caste wars and poverty, then the bustling cotu of Gorakpur is home to a class of the newly moneyed. Krishna has learned her husband’s vocation, having tracked Verma’s exploits, his records, and studied all his cons. She suggests one Kakkar, a local steel tycoon, as their unwitting victim.

For anyone who has watched Sholay Ishqiya’s widow is a nice rejoinder to the armless Thakur’s chaste and sorrowful daughter-in-law. Recall that Thakur had enlisted two thieves to fight off dacoit Gabbar Singh, but in Ishqiya it is Krishna as widow who has brought in her two guests/admirers for her own independent agenda. When the two thieves first appear at Krishna’s doorstep late in the night, an elderly widow of the village bangs on the door, asking, ‘Krishna, people for you. Where are you? Have you gone and burnt yourself up?” In these gestures—here the implication of sati—Ishqiya hints too at a history of politics around the ‘woman –community – nation’ question in India, heating up in the late 1980s, following the sati case of Roop Kanwar of Rajastan and the rise of the Hindu right in Indian politics right into the liberalization era.

The link between property and womanhood—Krishna is seemingly the sole proprietor of the house—is a tense one. We see in Krishna the possibility of sexual and intellectual agency, without narrative recourse of turning her either into a kind-hearted, redeemed prostitute who is sacrificed at the end of the narrative, or as someone’s wife or betrothed. That is, in Ishqiya there is the refusal to give Krishna an ending in either marriage or death. Nor is there any recourse to making Khalujaan, Babban, and Krishna as part of a narrative of thick religious difference—for anyone familiar with the predictability of Hindu-Muslim love stories of Bollywood (a la Bombay, Veer Zara, etc.,). Rather, it depicts the triad of Krishna, Khalujaan and Babban in a space of friendship, love, kinship, and intimacy far beyond the narrow confines of middle-class hetero-normativity and morality and always just beyond the reach of the state: a shared space of marginality in guiding human relationships, and challenging power structures. Indeed Khalujaan, Babban, and Krishna share in the most intimate of political relations: bringing moral retribution to a most sinister Sena leader.

Towards the end, Khalujaan and Babban feel betrayed, reeling from the discovery that Krishna had stolen their money and hidden it all along, deciding to carry out the operation alone, and interrogating Kakkar about Verma’s whereabouts. Krishna claims that Kakkar is one of Verma’s men and that Verma is still alive. But Khalujaan and Babban do not believe her, since, “a woman can’t be trusted…”—a statement quickly laid to rest by none other than the low-caste Nandu—as the newly initiated Sena member—who narrates the truth of her tale.

David Bordwell, John Ford, silent man

One headliner is the early Ford series: all his surviving silents, plus a selection of rarely-seen talkies. The first one screened, The Black Watch (1929), concentrates on the Khyber Pass incident of 1914. Captain King is assigned to India while the rest of his Scots regiment is sent to Europe. In India, King masterminds the defeat of the forces of Yasmani, a woman who has been taken as sort of a goddess by her followers. The central section, involving Yasmani’s passion for King and his betrayal of her, seems to me sketchy and rushed; Ford’s real interest, not surprisingly, is in the rites of comradeship among the Black Watch. Twenty-two of the film’s 91 minutes is taken up with the opening dinner celebrating the regiment, conducted while King gets his secret mission; for reasons he can’t disclose, he abandons his comrades and suffers their opprobrium. A bookended sequence at the close shows him returning to the Watch as, in the trenches of war, they hold another dinner, complete with ruffles and flourishes.

Some of the central portion was directed by Lumsden Hare, but it too has some striking moments, perhaps most memorably the display of Yasmani’s powers when she conjures up an eerie vision of the European battlefield in a glowing crystal ball. The war sequences have the dank Expressionist look that Murnau brought to Fox and that Ford exploited in Four Sons (1928). There are as well touching train-station farewells between brothers and between father and daughter that seem very Fordian. Overall, Ford finds ways to avoid the multiple-camera shooting common to early talkies, often using offscreen dialogue during reaction shots.

Needless to say, I have never seen/heard of this movie but now I cannot wait to find it.

Long before John Ford, Khyber Pass entered into American imagination courtesy not only of the Anglo-Afghan wars, but also Rudyard Kipling and Josiah Harlan – Harlan’s memoir¹ was released in 1842 in Philadelphia and Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King came out in 1888. The Anglo-Afghan Wars were front page news in New York Times since the late 1860s (the Sepoy Rebellion had stuck a nerve).

As I noted in an earlier post, the “Indian Question” lay heavy on the brows in New York and Washington. “The Khyber Pass is no longer a hindrance to movement” was the declaration in Feb, 1894 [pdf]. Here, for example, is the NYT in 1897, giving the geo-political consequences of a war going heavily wrong for the British. Change is nothing to believe in. England Facing, a Grave Situation: [pdf]

All eyes here are on the Khyber Pass and beyond. Whether the torrent of Afridis be stemmed as quickly as the Swat Valley troubles were stilled is a question of minor importance compared to the larger issues, which, one after an other, these at present isolated religious revolts are suggesting. There is as yet no proved coalition or combination among the insurgent tribes, but the lesson in each case is the same. Sooner or later, England, that greatest of Mohammedan powers, must suffer for this her latest crusade, into which she was driven by a wave of sentiment of which no English speaking men are ashamed, though many question the prudence of the aggressively quixotic policy when backed by such feebleness in execution. England could not stand by while the helpless Armenians and the too hopeful Greeks were in more or less real danger of life and liberty. So she sided with these people against the threatening Turk – that one Mohammedan soldier power with whom an English Machiavelli would have found wise to make friends, tempering friendship, as in the old days, with just sufficient bullying to keep up the illusion that the feeble sick man, Turkey, was being bolstered up by the unassailable power of Christian England.

In 1898, Kipling got to San Francisco from India and quickly came to embody the spirit of joint British-US expansionist project (He had sent his poem The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands straight to Teddy Roosevelt in 1898 who promptly forwarded it to Henry Cabot Lodge. Further aside, if you have not read Christopher Hitchens’ “Burdens and Songs: The Anglo-American Rudyard Kipling”, Grand Street {1990}, I urge you to run, not walk to JSTOR. )

Where was I? Oh, back to Khyber Pass/John Ford in 1929. Another tid-bit: I am shamefully ignorant of the history of early cinema and its engagement with India/Orient but I did pick up a reference once to a ethno-documentary In the Heart of India; As Seen by Dr. Dorsey (1916) which I have never seen nor been able to trace elsewhere but was reported to me that contains footage of Khyber Pass/Peshawer. It seems that the genealogy of Ford’s Khyber Pass is just as much Kipling and Dorsey as the German Murnau.

Resume normal transmission.

1. A Memoir of India and Avghanistaun; with observations on the Present Exciting and Critical State and Future Prospects of those Countries. Comprising Remarks on the massacre of the British Army in Cabul, British policy in India, A detailed descriptive character of Dost Mohamed and his court, etc. With an Appendix on the fulfilment of a text of Daniel, in reference to the Present Prophetic condition of Mahomedan nations throughout the World, and the speedy dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

But the problem with my analysis is, you will say, that Cameron is not the Department of State or Labor nor is he the official mouthpiece of some quasi-empire. You would be right. Yet Avatar is consensus. It is the consensus of nearly $300 million dollars – pored over every lovingly rendered pixel flesh and woodenly crafted “I got this!”. It is more importantly, a global consensus of consumption – fast approaching the $1 billion dollar mark. As such, I think it provides a credible archive against which to read the past decade.

Sitting through Avatar reminded me of the edifices of empire – not the halls of power (palace and parliament) but those edifices constructed for both the citizen and the colonial subject – simultaneously convincing one of the righteousness of the imperium and the other of the sheer inevitability of imperial power.

Avatar mirrors the techno-capital apogee of this American empire as well the grave ambivalence at the heart of it. Avatar is our Crystal Palace and our Delhi Durbar of 1911 as well our Hastings/Burke moment.

There are more than enough readings out there on the inherent biases and contradictions in Avatar. Read Aaron’s take, for one. Or Bustillos, as well. There is both merit and substance to these readings but I am much more interested in parsing the broader milieu which has produced Avatar. Where previous Empires (without going into whether America is or isn’t one) created magnificent physical edifices of their power and glory, we build monuments of light and shadows (3D) that provoke much of the same reactions: awe, glory, camaraderie. We are united in our appreciation of the technological wonder that created this spectacle and united in our consumption of it. Note that the end-credits stretch across the North (digital houses from New Zealand to California to London). Note as well that from Cairo to Dubai to Bombay, Avatar is playing to packed houses.

Where the Mughals borrowed curlicues from Damascus to Vijaynagar or the British incorporated “Eastern” motifs into the Lahore train station, Avatar borrows the Iraq War. It serves a decorative purpose. Mind you, that doesn’t make it a “throwaway” or “inessential”. On the contrary, it constitutes the very ethos the project itself – which is, after all, a simulacra itself. “Shock and Awe”. It will forever be the curlicue glued to the outside of any edifice – either with a wink, or a nudge, or with a scowl. When Avatar employs it, the audience (in Berlin) smirks loudly. They got this. The parallels are now as explicit as a minaret. No one notes the irony that the company has too few troops for the job. It is only a matter of time before the “surge” happens. But, let that be. Let’s just go back to the Iraq War. Some have suggested that there is a “critique” of the Iraq War buried inside the movie. The war in Avatar is not between the haves and the have-nots (one with tech, the other without; one with mineral resources, the other without) but between different ideas of having and not-having. At some level, however appropriated, Avatar grants some equivalence to the notion that these two civilizations can indeed differ in their reading of what constitutes as essential for survival. But the debate over the Iraq War is not, and will not be for a while, about granting equivalence – either hypothetical or literal – to our civilizational mission (democracy and freedom) and their claim to self-rule and self-governance. In that frame, there may be a mild nod towards Iraq, but there is no critique of war in Avatar. It is pro-war all the way. Eco-tech vs. mech-tech.

I greatly enjoyed Avatar. I will probably see it again on DVD and I will certainly try and teach it in class. Here are some thoughts – out of order – but in the order that they occurred to me.

related: Aaron expands his comments

(sepoy sez: you can find an introduction to purdah on the about CM page)

Greetings CM readers, Sepoy has generously offered me a spot on his soapbox, a turn at the helm, a cameo in his story? Um a chance to reach out to some gentle minds…I would like to begin by discussing the current South Asia project I am working on, somewhat related to TALIBOTHRA, in that it is about the co-mingling of religion, politics and mass media. More precisely I am trying to follow the shifting figure of the terrorist in the Hindi language film industry and am curious about how Islam comes into the picture, and in fact about the precise definition of a terrorist, an “aatankvaadi”[ātaṅkavādī]. At the moment I am not sure what forms this sniffing around will take, perhaps a paper, perhaps a class, perhaps neither? Let me know what you think…

Usually I stay away from such egregiously wide canvases and I despise the simplistic, sociological, film-is-a-mirror-of-the-Indian-State-and/or-Indian-subconscious type readings of popular Hindi films. In my mind such approaches negate the agency of the filmmakers, ignore the ambivalence of cinematic narratives and engage in propagating ideology-driven, reductive readings of Hindi cinema. I could name names but that would be pedantic and beside the point.

So why am I now doing what I hate done by others? I suspect I was propelled down this path by articles on the failure of Iraq war movies; the Times article is online but the better piece by Scott Hamrah in N+1 #7 titled “Jessica Biel’s Hand: The Cinematic Quagmire,” is unfortunately not. After screening nearly every film about the Iraq war released theatrically between 2002 and 2008, Hamrah draws some smart conclusions about both the political and cinematic situation in the US today that point to the impossibility of a Platoon, Apocalypse Now or Deer Hunter being made today. And then I read Sepoy’s posts on the US media hysteria over Afghanistan and Pakistan…unlike the Nazi, absolute-evil WW II villain in Hollywood movies, terrorists in contemporary US films are never directly Afghanis/ Saudis/ Iraqis or Muslims, the viewer has to do some work to get to those categories. The war on Terror is not the war in Iraq. At least not yet. But in India, the not-war on Terror is the only war we know, and is in fact the same war with Pakistan we have been not-waging since 1947.

Popular Hindi films made in the last ten or fifteen years have terrorists that are clearly marked as Muslim, and further have some narrative link to Pakistan. This was not always so, terrorism on the Indian screen had other names and other historical contexts (Freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Naxalites, Tamil Tigers, Northeastern insurgents). But now they are all Islamic psychopaths, trained and funded by the Pakistani government, intent on destroying India. I give you the four phases in the love affair between terrorism and the Indian film industry:

I: Just friends

In my mind Gabar Singh from the spectacular 1975 Sholay is a terrorist, albeit he has no interest in bringing down a State, or any cause beyond being evil. More traditional terror genealogies (like those found here and here) would probably start with the 1986 Karma by Subhash Ghai, a crude amalgam of Sholay and 70s Hindi cops ‘n’ robbers films. Karma features a terrorist turned mercenary played by Naseeruddin Shah—an actor to remember as I run through the terror films today. However Karma, is about vigilante justice and personal vengeance, the State only begins to get involved in the nineties with films like Mehul Kumar’s Tirangaa (1992) or Droh Kaal (1994) made by Govind Nihilani, starring Om Puri and our man Naseeruddin Shah. However, in both these films the exact political causes remain murky and the players are anonymous, the emphasis is more on espionage and reliable intelligence than violence and chaos.

An interestingly different terror film in this period is Gulzar’s Maachis (1996), set in Punjab in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the Sikh killings. This film humanizes (and thus complicates) the figure of the terrorist by presenting a possible how-he-became-one story. Such forays into alternate narratives of terrors remain rare, but thankfully do exist. Of the handful of other films that explore other histories of terror Maachis is perhaps the most widely distributed, but it would still be considered an art-house Hindi film with limited audiences.

II: First thrill

Everything changed with the Bombay blasts of 1993. Thereafter Terror in Hindi film had a target city and a cause. This is also when the talented Mani Ratnam entered the national stage with his stunning terrorism “trilogy” Roja(1992)-Bombay(1995)-Dil Se(1998). These three films are among my favorite Hindi-language films because of their breathtaking cinematography and amazing music (by AR Rehman). It is Roja which directly features the situation in Kashmir and presents us with Indian Army (good) versus Islamic militants (bad) for the first time. In the late nineties a handful of mediocre mainstream films continued to build on this scenario and link domestic terrorism with Pakistan – Jaan (1996), Border (1997) and Sarfarosh (1999) with, of course, Naseeruddin Shah.

The odd film in these few years was Santosh Sivan’s Tamil Theeviravaathi featuring a female terrorist from a nameless organization determined to blow up a nameless politician (er Rajiv Gandhi anyone) in 1999. Once again we see that rare attempt to move away from a conflation of “terrorist” and “Muslim”. Such a move will not occur again until Mani Shankar’s Tango Charlie in 2005 that deals with the situation in the Northeast of India. However, both are art-house films with limited distribution and impact.

III: Saying it out loud

The military events at Kargil in 1999 launched a slew of Indo-Pakistan war films. A few were romance films on patriotic steroids like Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara, and Kunal Kohli’s bizarre Fanaa. The majority were action-war films on patriotic steroids like VV Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, Raj Kanwar’s Farz, J. P. Dutta’s LOC Kargil and Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya.

Perhaps the most bizarre of these testosterone monsters is Rohit Shetty’s Zameen which starts with a historical event: the attack by Islamic militants on the Indian parliament in 2001 but then spirals into the skies and never lands on anything resembling reality. Of course this aerial nature is no coincidence for Zameen is clearly post-9/11 in its obsession with airplanes as weapons. From this point onwards, there was no turning back for the Bombay film industry: terrorists in India=Islamic militants=Pakistani minions.

IV: After the thrill is over :

The final phase, as I see it, is too recent to definitively categorize as it begins with the attacks on Mumbai last Nov, or “26/11” as many call it. There are a number of terror films already on the market: Santosh Sivan, the director of the Tamil Theeviravaathi is back with Tahaan, a film about a Kashmiri boy and his donkey caught up in the Kashmiri war, it aspires to be Au hazard Balthazar but cannot help being Koi…Mil Gaye; Speaking of formulaic junk there is Kunal Shivdasani’s Hijack that stretches the global terror network scenario to its full, thin limit with B grade special effects and actors; I have not seen Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday starring the veteran terrorist-actor Naseeruddin Shah but I hear it is good, and not just from the savvy New York Times. Another 2008 film I want to watch is Nishikant Kamat’s Mumbai Meri Jaan, starring the magnetic Irrfan Khan.

As I end this speculative list of films I want to mention a few more art-house ones that deal with the theme of terror in vastly different ways: different from both each other and from the slew of films I discussed. I should add that both of them were directed by women—the only female film makers thus far— Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002) and Nandita Das’ Firaaq (2008) starring our old friend Naseeruddin Shah. Unfortunately, I have yet to see the Das film but was very disappointed with the Sen. I found the story of Mr and Mrs Iyer predictable and politically facile and its cinematic structure was generic and clichéd. Firaaq promises to be richer, though perhaps more harrowing as it is set in Gujarat after the 2002 communal riots, and perhaps is not even a terror film strictly speaking … I have a weakness for mosaic narrative structures in films, episodic vignettes that build around a central node (a period, a place or an event). As a film on violence I suspect this one will be no more illuminating than any of the rest and simply a liberal attempt to humanize the enemy and break down the “us” versus “them” discourse.

So what did I learn from this short journey, except that the mainstream Hindi film industry—a huge, uniform juggernaut that deserves the name Bollywood—is getting less inclusive, less varied, less individual and more jingoistic? Was there even any other result possible given the nature of the modern entertainment industry and global capital? I happen to disagree with the Culture Industry as Mass Deception folks and think that there are always spaces for dissent, ways to differ. Call me a fool, go ahead.

The failure I have charted here has more to do with two factors: the limitations of the Hindi film form and the limitations of the discourse on terrorism. The masala-musical Hindi filmi narrative form is not designed to capture political complexity, or explore historical conundrums; it is designed to entertain, to make people lust, laugh, swoon, sing and be terrified or angry. Any admirable treatment of terrorism within the confines of this form would look a lot like Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se. When I think of films that succeed in other parts of the world in representing political quagmires and cataclysmic violence the first films that come to mind are Gillo Pontecorvo’s ultra-realist, documentary-style Battle of Algiers or Alain Resnais’ ultra lyrical, experimental Hiroshima Mon Amour, neither one of which is anything close to the formulaic, hyperbolic Hindi form. The most obvious way a hybrid, sensationalist form would deal with terrorism would be to spin it into an over-the-top action-filled nationalist saga, or an over-the-top Romeo and Juliet type love story—examples of which clutter our screen today.

As for the subject matter: terrorism in the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly in South Asia…I know of few fictional narratives I admire that deal directly with it (Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale is probably my favorite on international terrorism). The core term itself is simple, the OED defines it as: “A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.”

This could in fact describe the “policy” of a number of creatures in horror films or monster films (alas, genres not largely popular in India). This definition also allows for a wider exploration of the structure of terror, the varied nature of an aggressor-victim relationship and so on. I find this interpretation or definition hugely promising. Unfortunately, it is the post Bombay attacks and post 9/11 definition that is unequivocally accepted by all the Hindi film narratives produced today and not the earlier one: “Terrorism is an ideology of violence intended to…cause terror for the purpose of exerting pressure on decision making by state bodies. The term “terror” is largely used to indicate clandestine, low-intensity violence that targets civilians and generates public fear.” [Terrorism in asymmetrical conflict: ideological and structural aspects, By Ekaterina Stepanova, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, quoted in Wikipedia]

If this is indeed the accepted theme, there is little a cinematic narrative can do beyond what we have in cinema (from anywhere in the global) today. It is this discourse that unites the US, Israel, UK, Spain and India into an axis of victims, terrorized by international Islamic groups.

Finally it should be said that I am not surprised to see the Hindi film industry snap into line with the international discourse on terrorism. After all it was the city of Bombay that bore the brunt of the worst of the attacks on civilians in India in the last 50 years. Other cities see sporadic, small bomb blasts, or intermittent riots but it is Bombay who gets the maximum treatment. Even after its avowed cosmopolitan openness. Would not the film industry freak out just a little bit?

Go watch the whole thing, now.

Then go pay your regards to Director Nina Paley.

Seriously, go. [via Kottke]

I usually don’t watch telly, but this caught my attention. I missed the segment but found the transcript on NBC’s news site. Not being up on my gossip, I can only hope this is the good news that it seems to be.

Profile: George Clooney talks about Fatima Bhutto and how he’s become involved in Pakistan
11 January, 2009
NBC News: Today
English
(c) Copyright 2009, NBC Universal Inc. All Rights Reserved.
DAVID GREGORY, co-host:
George Clooney is a mega movie star, of course, but he is using his star power these days to bring attention to a Pakistan. Ann Curry caught up with him recently.
ANN CURRY, anchor:
That’s right, David. In fact, Clooney is trying to do something about what the US calls a shame that is happening in Pakistan. The hotties in Pakistan are completely missing from the news. ON Friday he was on ET to brief the anchor about their recent visits to Bollywood and Hollywood, trying to influence those tabloids to help. I spoke to Clooney about his work, and asked him why he’s so concerned about the social lives of the rich and famous in Pakistan and Fatima Bhutto in particular.
Mr. GEORGE CLOONEY: There is so much distortion out there about Pakistan – that people do not realize that they have supremely attractive and intelligent eligible women.
CURRY: Now you’re not just talking about Fatima Bhutto, you’re trying to diplomatically change the perception of Pakistan everywhere.
Mr. CLOONEY: It’s more advocacy than in any way sort of diplomatically trying to change things. We’re trying desperately to shine a light on the beautiful people of Pakistan, and hopefully that light will make them shine like the stars. The news is filled with Talibanization of Pakistan, the Lawyer crisis, the impossible cost of feeding a family, the danger of nuclear armaments in the hands of religious fundamentalists. Papa Nuke is out and he may as well set up a yard-sale for Iran. Pakistan needs other news in the newscycle. Happy stories about love and romance.
CURRY: So what did you tell the paparazzis you might think might help to that end?
Mr. CLOONEY: You know of my struggles with them. This is also an attempt to lure the hundreds of freelance paparazzis to Karachi – the high kidnapping and murder rate is sure to have an affect on them.
(On Fatima) Beautiful, beautiful.
CURRY: And you could use her to raise the focus.
Mr. CLOONEY: Mm-hmm.
CURRY: Why her?
Mr. CLOONEY: She has excellent bone-structure.
CURRY: And just how long are you going to be involved with her, George? This Fatima.
Mr. CLOONEY: I’ll be involved with her until it’s over.
GREGORY: And George Clooney can do that. Like he said, he can have paparazzi show up. How are the State Department reacting to his involvement?
CURRY: You know, actually, because there are no signs at the moment that State Department has any clue as to what to do about Pakistan. The missile strikes are not ending. Holbrooke is actually welcoming the efforts of people like George Clooney, because they want that kind of attention.
By the way, their work is becoming increasingly perilous in the region. And by the way, yes, I know you also want to ask me if he’s as cute as he seems. Yes, he is. Not as cute as you, though, David, so just letting you know. You can feel comfortable in that.
GREGORY: He’s a very attractive man doing good work. That’s important.
CURRY: He is definitely.
GREGORY: Ann, thank you very much.

Background: George Clooney dating Benazir Bhutto’s niece

Thanks to Moacir, I watched the documentary Kabul Transit. Eschewing the usual talking heads approach – or even much of a linear narrative at all – it allows us to follow some people in Kabul for short periods of time. An entrepreneur, some government officials, some Canadian force members of NATO-ISAF, a yunani physician, some Kabul University students, either tell us directly what they think, what they remember and what they see in Kabul or we learn it from their conversation with others. 

It is a powerful work, though it takes a while before you sink into that world and I am undecided on whether the lack of narration and the lack of some explicit structure hurts or help. As someone who knows a little bit more about the history and languages of Afghanistan, I was soon immersed but the people I was viewing with had a harder time contextualizing what was on the screen. 

In the Director’s Statement, David Edwards concludes: “Kabul is an ancient city in which one is continually made aware of how the past shapes the present and intimates the future. History in the film had to seem to emerge out of psyche and experience, as it does when one lives in a place. We vowed not to impose a history upon the place as is done so often in many documentaries…Our goal was to allow insight to emerge out of experience, to reveal rather than describe, and to listen rather than speak.”

Well, sure. I agree. But, there are happy mediums. Since the documentary is indeed geared towards US audience, I don’t see any good reason not to, at least, locate their audience. Tell them what year it is, or why we only see Canadians giving out shovels and building sewage, or how much history lies buried in the rubbles of Kabul. As it is, the people remain nameless even – we only learn their names in the credits – and their personal histories unknown, except for those that share them. The camera obscures far more than it ever reveals.

In any event, it is something that you should try and catch. You can buy the DVD at their site. There are some clips that didn’t make the cut, and best of all, here is Alexandr Rozenbaum’s amazing Monolog Pilota – set to the best sequence in the whole documentary.

I highly recommend that you go out and watch Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar’s The Fall. Think of it as a companion piece to del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth – obsessed with stories, story-tellers and the corrosive realities that surround them both. I was hesitant to go see it, until I read Ebert’s interview with Tarsem (worth reading every line) and the details of the amazing on-location filming and the commitment to his vision. Also worth reading is another interview with ion-cinema (as well as these tid-bits about the framing device). It is not a film upon which you can hang too heavy an analytic curtain – the story and the sub-text is simple enough but it does contains some traces of a quixotic endeavor that is endearing. So, yeah. Oh, the visuals are amazing (especially of Jodhpur and the Jaipur observatory). Go Tarsem and the power of a broken heart.

“Gowarikar came before the media with half a dozen history books and said that he researched the subject thoroughly before making the film.” You will just have to imagine my cheshire cat grin upon reading that sentence in an otherwise eye-rolling reportage on the “controversy” surrounding Ashutosh Gowariker’s bollywood spectacular Jodhaa Akbar. I want every director of every historical movie to come with such arsenal to press conferences.

The movie, which I had the pleasure of seeing, along with two dear friends, at a run-down, mob-front, theater on the north side of Chicago, is underwhelming. Purportedly, it is the story of the Mughal emperor, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (1556-1605) and his “romance” with the Rajput princess Jodhaa. The controversy seems to be in the realm of that pesky popular memory and history. Apparently, the offending parties claim that Jodha Bai is the Rajput wife of Jahangir – Akbar’s successor – rather than Akbar’s wife. And that brings some dishonor to some one. I really stopped reading after a while.

The movie doesn’t deserve any controversy. Irfan Habib and Muhammad Amin have the right attitude as historians: “… nothing to get worked up about”. Because if historians are indeed to huff and puff, the one-on-one combat sequences for all of Hindoostan are far more an egregious crime against history than whether Jodha Bai was Akbar’s wife or daughter in law. Man Singh, Pleez. Akbar did have (a number of) Rajput wives, and other wives, and not every one’s name is recorded. The one from the movie is named only by her given title, Maryam-e Zaman (Mary of the Times), in the medieval sources. A title that gave 19th century popular colonial narrators all kinds of wrong ideas about Christian influences on Akbar.

What I did find more troublesome than Jodha Bai, was the particular brand of Hindu-secularism at display in the movie. Wherein the open-ness of Akbar is needed only to give triumphal space for the Hindu dieties. And while Outlook India notes that this movie is the most noted example of an intercommunal romance where the man is muslim, I simply noted that every villain in the movie is a devout Muslim. Jodhaa Akbar, is a story about contemporary India and the world we live in, not about Akbar the Mughal King.

As teaching tool, I appreciated the bits of social and court historical display available in some scenes – the Diwan-i Aam, the Parcheesi, the night camps – but the rest would have to be avoided outside of a class on popular history and memory. My favorite scene was the “throw him over head first”. I dug.

For those who care, I have put the account made famous by British Orientalist about Jodhaa and Akbar, below the fold.

Here, then, is the account given by Vincent Smith – “the hegemonic historian of ancient India”, as Inden pegged him – in his biography of Akbar written in 1909. It informs some bits of “history” of the movie:

One night, Akbar, when on a hunting excursion, was Pilgrim-passing through a village near Agra when he happened to hear a party of Indian minstrels singing the praises of first Khwaja Muin uddin, the renowned saint buried at Ajmer, and was thus inspired to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the holy man. Accordingly, in the middle of January 1562, he started for Ajmer with a small retinue, hunting on his way. At Deosa, midway between Agra and Ajmer, he received Raja Bihar Mall, the chief of Amber or Jaipur in Rajputana, who offered his eldest daughter to Akbar in marriage. The court made only a brief stay at Ajmir and returned by forced marches to Agra, leaving the heavy
camp equipage to follow. The marriage was celebrated at Sambhar. Man Singh, nephew and adopted son of Raja Bhagwan Das, the heir of Raja Bihar Mall, was taken into the imperial service, and rose ultimately to high office.

The bride subsequently became the mother of Jahangir. Her posthumous official title, Maryam zamani (or -uz zamani), ‘ the Mary of the age’, has caused her to be confounded sometimes with Akbar’s mother, whose title was Maryam-makani,’ dwelling with Mary’. The dust of Akbar’s first Hindu consort lies in a fine mausoleum situated near Akbar’s tomb at Sikandara. The building has been restored
by judicious measures of conservation.

Although it has been asserted that Humayun had one Hindu consort, that lady, if she really existed, does not appear to have exercised any influence. Akbar’s marriages with Hindu princesses, on the contrary, produced important effects both on his personal rule of life and on his public policy. His leanings towards Hinduism will be more conveniently discussed at a subsequent stage, and the effects
of the Rajput matrimonial alliances on public affairs also will become more apparent as the story proceeds. But at this point of the narrative so much may be said, that the marriage with the Amber princess secured the powerful support of her family throughout the reign, and offered a proof manifest to all the world that Akbar had decided to be the Badshah of his whole people—Hindus as well as Muhammadans. While the court was on its way back to Agra one of the keepers of the hunting leopards was convicted of stealing a pair of shoes. Akbar ordered the thief’s feet to be cut off.

Later in life he would hardly have inflicted such a savage punishment for a petty theft.

- Akbar, the Great Mogul.

I recommend that you stick with the epic Mughal-e Azam (1960), one of the greatest movies ever, for your Mughliana romances for a while.

Ashvin Kumar’s Little Terrorist is a wonderful short that I accidently caught on the Sundance channel. The title is a bit misleading – I would have called it “The Wicket” – but it is heartfelt and a nice introduction to some issues of difference and sameness around the partitioned homistan.

(Suggested listening while reading this review: click here; don’t bother to watch the clip, since it’s just a fan slideshow) The film version of Etgar Keret’s novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (which is also recreated in the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze) has finally been released in the US (see the earlier review of Keret’s work here). Despite some major and possibly regrettable alterations to the setting and plot, it is still an excellent movie. The biggest disappointment is the location. The story takes place in an afterlife universe where people go after they have committed suicide. In the novella and graphic novel, this place is a city and surrounding countryside that bears a remarkable resemblance to Tel Aviv. The movie was shot in the United States in run-down parts of LA and somewhere near the Nevada-California border, which makes sense, since most cinematic universes are relocated to California. The characters are now mostly American, or recent immigrants to America. Choosing to make the whole movie American and losing the Israeli element of course robs the story of some of its original flavor, although in the novella the place is never named, and is only meant to resemble the lousy places where the suicides lived before they killed themselves. Suicide is not a culturally flat construct and in the context of an ironic Israeli tale it takes on an especially dark and provoking resonance. On the other hand, the Croatian director, Goran Dukic, has done a superb job choosing the grimmest and most derelict locations imaginable, and this does make up for the initial disappointment that our hero is now from New Jersey and his life has probably improved quite a bit now that he is dead and living in California.

Many alterations have been made to the story, but most of them work well and some brilliantly in helping the writing transition to a visual medium. Dukic shows enormous attention to detail in his choices of location and set decoration. In an interview he explains that he directed his crew to find the most run-down and undesirable objects imaginable for every scene. This was a clever and thrifty way of dealing with the task of creating an alternate universe on a shoestring budget. Added to the general dilapidation of everything is an element of whimsy which helps to underscore the absurdity of the dismal universe of suicides. For example, in a couple of scenes that call for some kind of transportation, ridiculously small vehicles appear, such as a tiny train car that seats only two people. As Dukic explains in the same interview, the color was desaturated after shooting, giving the whole movie an aged, slightly dirty look, like a yellowing, battered old photograph.

Many reviews of the movie accuse it of being yet another entry in the roadtrip/romance genre, with the added gimmick of the suicide universe. Some reviewers have even accused Dukic of glamorizing suicide or taking hipster irony to an unpalatable limit. The roadtrip/romance aspects of the film are far stronger than in the original story, no doubt mostly to give it more coherence and direction. The unexpectedly happy romantic ending was also added for the film, making the whole thing a lot more Hollywoody, despite its clear indie roots. Nonetheless, to take Wristcutters as a roadtrip romance is to misunderstand the underlying mood and message of the story. Far from glamorizing suicide, Keret’s story imagines the outcome of suicide as the opposite of desensitized escape or martyrdom, a continuation of the depressing state before the act, only just a bit more depressing and lonely. An exception to the more depressing rule might be the case of the side-kick character, Eugene, an aggressive, punky Russian immigrant rocker, whose entire family has committed suicide and is now happily reunited in suicide land. Though this character exists in the novella, he is not depicted (at least not in English translation) as a Russian immigrant. In the film, the family’s happiness at being reunited, their close bond and deep affection for one another, and their relative lack of interest in the fact that everything is slightly worse, seems a commentary on the trials of migration.

Eugene’s career as a musician when he was alive provides an excuse for an excellent soundtrack full of songs by the “Transglobal Gypsy Punk Rock” band, Gogol Bordello. The character of Eugene is in fact modeled on the lead singer and founder of Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hütz, a friend of the director, Goran Dukic. The opening scene includes a song by Tom Waits, who also plays the role of Kneller, an idiosyncratic charismatic group leader of sorts, in the film. The Tom Waits part of the movie, toward the end, is worth the price of admission alone, and his acting and character go a long way toward heightening the bizarreness of the story, which reaches a climax in a spectacular show put on by ‘the Messiah’, played by Will Arnett (AKA G.O.B. Bluth). The fact that Tom Waits and Will Arnett play roles very similar to other personas they have inhabited outside the film adds to the heightened surreality of these later scenes. Importing the baggage of very particular (indie-ish) pop culture icons makes the characters they play jump out like scenes in a pop-up book. The effect is clearly intended, and serves as a short hand for the elaborate characterizations in the novella that might otherwise require loads more explication in the film version.

And finally, it is worth taking a look at this interview with Goran Dukic and the female lead, Shannyn Sossamon, if only to see how mind-numbingly dull some interviewers are, how exhausting Sundance must be, and how startlingly undereducated Sossamon apparently is.

» Following last week’s military crackdown in Pakistan and the detention of hundreds of lawyers, the Harvard Law School Association has decided to award Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry its highest honor: The Harvard Law School Medal of Freedom.

» “Mentally and in my heart, I am not a dictator. In my heart, I have introduced democracy,” appeals The General during a recent sit-down with Sky News. The proof? He was not a dictator when he was commanding the army. The mind boggles at the logical contradiction buried in there. (Try imagining a democratic army). But, I am giving him too much credit if I say he is contradicting himself. He is lying. There is news that he has arrested key members of the leadership of Pakistan People’s Party in Punjab including Abida Hussain, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington. Democratic, no?

» I went to the sneak preview of Persepolis – based on Marjane Satrapi’s comic book (see this for background). It is a poignant film – amazing 2d illustrations, perhaps some of the best music I have heard in a movie recently, and lots of “applicability to our current situations” (as I heard one sage describe it on the way out). The story takes place immediately before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and follows Marjane through the early 90s. Especially notable is the nuanced portrayal of a child growing up and learning what it means to know who she is and how to live with integrity. History and memory weigh heavy on Satrapi, though I am sure she will flick her burning cigarette into my eye for such academic l33t speech. I also know that Satrapi did not write this to “explain” the Islamic Revolution or life under the Mullahs in Iran to the United States at the moment we are actively contemplating “liberating” that nation from its suicidal regime. But that is how the US media will see this movie. I predict lots of reviews about how factual or authentic the description of life under Islamic regime is; how she is an apologist for the mullahs or handmaiden to the Great Satan etc. etc. There is no denying that this movie is grist for the hard news-wallah’s mill.

» Nicholas Schmidle, reporting in TNR compares Musharraf and the Shah in Iran – with the backdrop of US support of a dictator. The comparison is mostly facile and the fear is not a new one. General Zia ul Haq thought as much in the immediate aftermath and went on to inject his Sunnification policies into the Pakistani bloodstream (often mislabeled ‘Islamization’). The Iranian example does provide one crucial point to ponder: the role of the cultural intelligentsia and their ability to know and predict what is going on in their own country. We are focused on the middle class and the youth but we need to guage where the country’s over all mood is tilting towards. Let us not get carried away and forget that two of the biggest states in Pakistan are effectively ungovernable by the Federal regime; that an incredibly ruthless adversary is currently operating in Swat; that the people of Baluchistan have long awaited justice and that the Pakistani people are just as scared and helpless to control the direction of their country as we have been in this country. I am hopeful that Musharraf and his uniform and his throne will part soon enough but we need to know what happens next.

In the meantime, we can take heart from Schmidle. After all, it did take two years of hanging out with nastiest Islamists around before he got spooked from anti-Americanism:

At least, not yet. After living in Pakistan for almost two years and traveling to all parts of the country meeting some of the nastiest Islamists around, I had my first encounter with visceral anti-Americanism on Saturday night, an hour after the State of Emergency was declared. I was walking from one side of a police cordon, back into a crowd of anti-Musharraf protesters, when a tall man with a long beard called out from 15 feet away, berating me and accusing me of being a CIA agent. “America is destroying a nation of one hundred and sixty million people to save one person!” he yelled.

I looked back at the line of riot police and wondered if they were going to come to my rescue. But I didn’t fault the man with the beard; even though the White House has criticized Musharraf in the last few days, they have spent the past six years telling Musharraf that he could do no wrong. I just wondered how many American journalists faced a similar barrage in the months before the Shah fled Iran.

» In some earlier post I mentioned Zakaria and his particular brand of “realism”. He now demands our attention with Pakistan’s Pinstripe Revolution. Pinstripe? The analysis is so off-base that it screams for a proper fisking – for which I have no energy. Can I just say that when so-called “liberal pundits” are proclaiming “Periods of transition are never placid” a la Donald Rumsfeld than we really need to re-assess the meaning of the word “liberal”. The meaning of the word “pundit” thankfully should remain what it is.

» Imran Khan finally came out – went to Punjab University – and was tossed un-ceremoniously into the hands of the police by the members of the IJT (student wing of the Jama’at-i Islami, the hardline mullahs). Imran Khan needs to be released, now. He has justifiable fears for his safety.

Aliens in America premiers tonight on the CW. Can someone tell me what that poor kid is wearing?

P.S. Considering it was filmed in Pasadena and Vancouver, let’s not forget to keep a tally of inaccuracies about Wisconsinites as well as Pakistanis.

P.P.S. Alessandra Stanley places Aliens in the genre of imaginary friend comedies. As she wisely observes: “Wish fulfillment gone awry is the essence of many a comedy, and there is no wish as potent and deep-seated as the yearning for an imaginary friend.” Thankfully she clarifies this assertion later on in the review with this clarification:

“Aliens in America,” which begins tonight on CW, follows in the same tradition except that the wished-for best friend is a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan, not a supernatural creature.

P.P.P.S.
It seems that the Pakistani character is named Raja Musharaff.

Just what we’ve all been waiting for: the animated version of Persepolis is being screened at Cannes this week, and that means it should get a general release later this year. There are some great trailers on Satrapi’s MySpace page that include some pretty sweet air guitar and “Eye of the Tiger” renderings by the protagonist. As we mentioned in our Chicken with Plums review, there was a great article on Satrapi in the Independent last year, and more recently, a really good article about Satrapi in the NYT in January (behind the great wall, unfortunately), that has a lot of details about the production, including this bit:

The voices were recorded before the animators began work, with Ms. Satrapi coaching the actors one on one. (Aghast at the prospect of bossing Ms. Deneuve around, she said, she downed three cognacs before directing the actress, who turned out to be ”funny and intelligent and a big smoker.”) Ms. Satrapi allowed herself to be recorded while acting out the physical gestures for each scene, to give the animation team a physical reference.

”We could do any number of movements to coordinate with the words,” said Christian Desmares, the chief animator, ”but Marjane wanted to really personalize each character, to use precise Iranian gestures. And we don’t know how to do that.”

Ms. Satrapi interjected: ”I play all the roles. Even the dog.”

The stills from the movie posted to the official website suggest an interesting mix of styles, with the characters drawn faithfully in the mold of the original comics, and the settings and backgrounds done in a more ‘realistic’ mode, perhaps to give the action some dimensionality to move around in. The look it produces seems almost like a visual joke about bringing cartoons into live action films (à la Spiderman, etc.).

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (Toby Press, 2004), $12.95.
Jetlag (Toby Press, 2006), $12.95.
The Nimrod Flipout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), $12.00.
Pizzeria Kamikaze (Alternative Comics, 2006), $14.95.

It’s one of those days when you find yourself in a new part of town with an hour to kill, and you decide you to sit in a cafe with a book, but you don’t have a book with you, so you walk around browsing in a few bookstores, looking for something you could actually sit and read in public, and to your surprise, you actually find something stunning that you have never heard of, and, frankly never even fantasized about. You notice the book because its cover is well-designed and when you flip through it, there is a lot of shiny silver. Since it’s a graphic novel, you can tell whether it’s good from its cover, because if you don’t like the layout, design and artwork, what’s the point of reading it, really? And this is an Israeli graphic novel, and that’s the part of the whole thing that you had never even fantasized about, besides, of course, all the shiny silver parts. You purchase the book and walk to a cafe, more quickly than you ought to when you are killing time, and sitting on a stool at a shiny silver bar, you order a solitary piece of raw fish, a glass of something cold and proceed to delve into Pizzeria Kamikaze, hoping you will not be terribly disappointed.

A few pages in, you find your expectations vindicated by an unbeatable premise:

Two days after I killed myself, I found a job at some pizza joint called ‘Kamikaze.’

The following sentences seal the deal:

…whenever they used to talk about life after death and go through the is-there-isn’t-there routine. I’d always imagine these beeping sounds, and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, it reminds me of Tel Aviv. My German roommate says this place could just as well be Frankfurt. I guess Frankfurt’s a dump too.

Thus begins a story about an afterlife reserved for suicides, where everyone is just as banal as before, and the town is a real dump kind of like Tel Aviv or Frankfurt, and everything is just about the same except that everyone has a tell-tale scar that betrays their method of suicide, except, of course for the people who died from poison. These people are called the Juliets and they are usually smokin’ hot.

I won’t give away the rest of the story, which does become rather surreal (as any story about the after-life ought to), without ever losing its purchase on mundanity, as described by the desultory tone of the first person narrator and the abundance of hip slang that is thrown about by the depressive and bored characters. I was sufficiently intrigued by Pizzeria Kamikaze that I looked up the author, Etgar Keret, and discovered that he was not, in fact, a graphic novelist or cartoonist, but a short story writer with quite a few publications. Pizzeria Kamikaze is based on a novella called “Kneller’s Happy Campers” that is published in English in Keret’s collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, and is not the only collaboration he has done in the graphic novel line. The volume Jetlag was published in 2006 and represents a collaboration between Keret and five different Israeli artists in which five of his short stories from various collections have been illustrated to varying degrees of success. The artist for Pizzeria Kamikaze seems to actually be a cartoonist, whereas the others appear to actually be artists or illustrators and many of the drawings resemble woodcuts, although it is not clear what media were used. Some of them are quite interesting but I’m not entirely sure what the point is.

Keret’s short stories are hilariously funny but the graphic novels seem to take some of the fun out of them and distract from the style. I am not convinced that everything needs to be turned into a comic book, and am more inclined to believe that cartoons and graphic novels tend to start with imagery as the basis for their story-telling strategies and use words as supplements. Obviously there is no rule for this, but my point is that the visual images in cartoons tend not to be used as illustrations of ideas constructed through words; instead the words are generally used as supplements to the ideas put forth by the images. Illustrations on the other hand, are servants to the verbal text, and faithfully portray the ideas that originate in the words. This little theory is all in the way of saying that while the drawings are quite well done in the second volume, there is a bit of a parallel text feeling at work, where one feels like the writer and the artists are most definitely not the same people and they are not collaborators in the classic sense of comic book production. The drawings are like illustrations, but much of the text has been cut out, leaving the stories bereft of their style, and slightly inconvenienced by the strong colorful images. Pizzeria Kamikaze, on the other hand, has been worked over in a much smoother, comic book style, perhaps because the artist (Asaf Hanuka) is a cartoonist, and thus the adaptation goes down easier, or maybe it’s all the silver.

[As an aside, Amazon customer review fans should not miss out on this gem-like set of observations by Kevin Killian of San Francisco on the topic of Jetlag (if you are not a fan of customer reviews, feel free to just skip ahead):

Etgar Keret, you're the most promising fortyish writer in Israel and you just love working in comics too. Your skills at farce and a Charles Schultz wistful sadsackness give your stories a lovesick, hovering, numinous quality like dark clouds over a child's tea party. In JETLAG FIVE GRAPHIC NOVELLAS you really take the word "novellas" and give it a new meaning, that is, you make it mean something brief and haiku like, when in ordinary English I expect it to mean something long. Comics have their own Orwellian newspeak but to dignify these sketches with the name of novellas would have Henry James, not to mention Isaac Balshevis Singer, rolling in their graves.

Etgar Keret, youe (sic) collaborators on JETLAG all belong to a collective called ACTUS, but their drawing styles could not be any different. Rutu Modan, who illustrates the final "novella," has a classic European clarity and the last panel, of your hero alone with his pet monkey on a seaside amusement pier, is like a panel from some lost Tintin adventure by Herge. Itzik Rennert, on the other hand, dazzles things up with a George Grosz meets Basquiat (or John Bankston) satiric crudeness of gesture and line: big thick sharpie strokes and a pornographic river of debauchery. As an Anerican boy growing up in France I used to try to imitate the line drawings in the books of erotica I found on the top shelves of my elderly professor's directoire, and if I had had three hands I might have been able to come up with something like this. Mira Friedmann is working the ominous shadows overmuch (granted when the story if called "Passage to Hell" that's a mighty big temptation) and one of your other Actus people can't really draw at all, might it be one of your relations trying to break into the big time on your dime?

I enjoyed the book but found it trifling compared to your other current projects. You don't have a really big imagination, do you, Etgar Keret? Sounds like the same thing over and over again. Folktales with an edge.]

After finishing the graphic novels I ended up reading your two volumes of short that have been translated into English, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and The Nimrod Flipout, and was at times truly entranced and nearly convinced that the short story was a worthwhile genre after all. At your best, Etgar Keret, you remind me of Saki, with maybe a touch of Gogol and Manto (but not in a derivative fashion!). Most of your humor is deadpan, and in stories like “Breaking the Pig”, you manage to make me feel absolutely heartbroken in about 2 pages over the relationship of a little boy with his piggy bank, the touchingly named Margolis. Most of the stories are very very short, which is what kept reminding me of the genre of extremely short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Everyone seems so set on producing writing of a standardized length nowadays that is very refreshing and startling to see a contemporary writer embarking on experimentation with length.

[As another aside (make sure to skip this part if you are bored by literary criticism and Subaltern Studies volumes-- I know I am): On the other hand, maybe Hebrew short stories are typically very short, how should I know? Don't want to make the mistake that Aamir Mufti did in the dreadfully under-edited Subaltern Studies Vol. XI, where he based his entire thesis on the notion that the short and very short stories of Manto and those of Urdu writers in general stood for the curtailed status of the Muslim in South Asia, a thesis which neglects the fact that most literatures in Indian languages privilege the short story over the novel. As Mufti states confidently:

Urdu is in fact unique among the major literatures of South Asia in the emphasis it places on the short-story as the primary genre of narrative fiction, even over the decades after Partition. In Urdu, the more common hierarchical relationship of the novel to the short-story is reversed....The absence of a canonical novel form in Urdu is a historico-philosophical fact of great significance and is an inscription, at the level of literary form and institution, of the dialectic of selfhood in Indian modernity.

Whoops...wrong! But definitely an 'A' for jazzy rhetoric and self-confidence.]

On the whole, the stories in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God are more funny and dry, and the ones in The Nimrod Flipout are a bit more angry, so one should turn one’s attention to the stories that best fit one’s mood. The Nimrod Flipout is also much better translated. Bus Driver, at least in the edition I read, which has been succeeded by a more main-stream American edition, seems at times to make a hash of what, one assumes, is the hippest and nowest of slang used by Keret in many of his stories. This problem seems to have been perpetrated primarily by one translator who thankfully did not translate all the stories. I found myself flipping through the book and reading only the ones she hadn’t translated first, so as to avoid the sometimes exceedingly jarring phrases she came up with, like in this little passage from “Kneller’s Happy Campers”:

I met Uzi Gelfland at Stiff Drinks, almost by accident. He acted real friendly. Bought me a beer and everything, which weirded me out ’cause I figured he might be trying to stick it to me or something. But pretty soon I saw he wasn’t on to me at all, just bored.

Maybe ‘stick it to me’ and ‘on to me’ are slang for ‘hitting on me’ and ‘after me’ in some other English speaking community outside the US of A, but over here the meanings are different, and judging from the rest of the translation, I’m pretty sure they were going for the whole American slang thing.

Finally, a few bits of interesting trivia: “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, AKA Pizzeria Kamikaze, has been made into a film that has won all sorts of awards and is due out on August 31, 2007 in the US, called Wristcutters: A Love Story with a cast that includes Tom Waits (whom we haven’t seen on the big screen outside of Jim Jarmusch movies) and Will Arnett (GOB Bluth from Arrested Development) as the Messiah. How cool is that? Also, a great interview with Keret by The Believer here.

Here‘s the madcap comedy we’ve all been waiting for:

The CW’s only new comedy, “Aliens in America,” is about a high school student trying to adjust to a Pakistani exchange student.

UPDATE:

The plot just gets better. According to this source:

The comedy will focus on a shy nerdy kid living in a small Wisconsin town whose mother invites an exchange student to live with the family. The mother hopes the new friend will help her son become more popular, but the exchange student turns out to be Muslim.

If the punchline is “but he turns out to be Muslim” what’s the logical conclusion to the joke? …so therefore can’t help the shy guy be more popular? …does not help him out of his shell? …makes him even less popular?

Luckily further explanation is provided by Variety:

“Aliens” is set in Altoona, Wis., where Justin Hobgood is an awkward, lanky 16-year-old having trouble fitting in at school. His mom hears about the school’s foreign exchange program and signs up her family, figuring the new arrival will give her son a hipness transplant.

Things don’t go as planned, however, when the exchange student turns out to be a Pakistani Muslim who wears a kufi on his head and a shalwar kameez over his body.

I wonder if that means he just drapes the shalwar kameez over his body like a sari? That would not help with a hipness transplant. Bad move, Mrs. Hobgood!

At a dinner table, recently, I asserted that ‘family’ was largely absent from the routines of desi comedians. Their comedy was largely set in the habermasian realm of the public [yes that is a joke. of course, I would never say anything like 'habermasian realm'. ever]. You get lots of material about interactions with the pre-dominant caucasian society, prejudices, life after 9/11 etc. But no sa’as-bahoo jokes. No Auntie Ji jokes. Nothing even about mothers and grandmothers. And definitely no Sardar Ji jokes. Why is that? I wondered. I don’t really know the answer nor am I sure that my assertion is even correct.

So, I compiled a list of desi comedians that I am somewhat familiar with – along with some links to their youtube etc. routines. Maybe you folks can help sort it all out.

• Tinku Patel & Azhar Usman. I was in a security checkout line at O’Hare with Azhar Usman. Fun.
• Rajiv Satyal. I really don’t know much about him besides that he is from around Cincinnati. Which sucks for him. Trust me, I know.
• Hari K. Kondabolu. The tips for brown people is predictable but funny. Also see his blog entry on being a desi comic.
• Aziz Ansari. Ok. I love Aziz Ansari but, the only thing desi about his comedy is … him. Nothing wrong with that and nothing funnier than Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru.
• Aladdin Ullah. I couldn’t find any links to his stand-up.
• Some more random ones.
• Daniel Nainan. Now he does tackle family. But is that because he is taking his cue from Margaret Cho, Eliot Chang and other Asian-American comedians?

Also, asserted at that dinner table: The only people who can laugh at themselves in homistans are the Sikhs [Punjabis in general - maybe].

Feel free to take up either assertion.

From the writing-directing-acting-webdesignin’ duo, the Suhrwardy Brothers comes a Pakistani actioneer, Kaanch. I am unclear as to what Kaanch [crushed/broken glass] is about from the trailer – something about going back home and then running in a jungle? – but, there you go, the fledgling independent cinema of Pakistan.

While Urdu cinema has been dying [dead?] for a while, it is very heartening to see indies take off in Karachi. Later this month, people can go check out the 6th Karachi Film Festival – I am curious about Majagan – a film about Bulleh Shah – and Honour and Shame, about Mukhtaran Mai.

Recently, we watched Omkara – Vishal Bharadwaj’s adaptation of Othello. A few nights ago, I watched Xiaoxang Feng’s The Banquet – Hamlet set in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms of China. I could seriously geek out over the visual delights offered by both of these productions, but I will restrain myself since I have another reason behind this post.

Course Title: Shakespeare in Asian Cinema

Can we come up with a list of movies that can be labelled as adaptations or re-tellings of Shakespeare set in Asia? Difficulty: The movie must proclaim itself an adaptation. We can begin with K.B. Athavale’s 1928 Khoon-e Nahak [Hamlet] and Sohrab Modi’s 1935 Khoon Ka Khoon [Hamlet]. J. J. Madan’s 1941 Zalim Saudagar [Merchant of Venice]. Also, Gulzar’s 1982 Angoor [Comedy of Errors] or Jaya Raaj’s 1997 Kaliyattam [Othello].

Further fun: Comparing South vs. East Asian adapatations.

The Macbeths of Kurosawa [Throne of Blood] and Bharadwaj [Maqbool] could be compared. Or this Turkish female Hamlet!

Add away.