A decade in Toronto - 25

Che and his classmates with
Toronto Mayor John Tory, promoting cricket
Che is to the left of Mayor Tory

2015 was the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India after over two decades’ stay in South Africa (he returned to India on 9th January). He had left for South Africa in 1893, a year that is significant to Indian history (and I’ve written about this earlier, too) as it was in 1893 that Swami Vivekananda addressed the World Congress of Religions in Chicago, transforming the world’s comprehension of a civilisation. It was also the year when Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak launched the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav to bring about caste unity.

Gandhi went to South Africa as a lawyer and returned from South Africa as a leader of the masses, equipped to take on the might of an empire. He would transform Indian society and in following decades and have a tremendous impact and influence on the 20th century movements that led to the end of colonialism, the rise of the underclass (the unwashed masses) across the world, and the assertion of fundamental human rights to protect one’s identity.

To commemorate the Mahatma’s return from South Africa, the Government of India launched the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in 2003 – a three-day congregation of the Indian diaspora that commenced (until Narendra Modi changed the date, for no reason except probably his ideological distaste for all things Gandhian) on January 9 every year.

For 2015, the Government of India produced posters highlighting Gandhi’s rise as a leader in South Africa. I have reproduced one here (these are taken from an earlier blog on the subject: A Pravasi Comes Home). 2019 is the 150th year of the Mahatma.

Today, when nationalism is acquiring dangerous dimensions, and there is a tendency (especially in India) to call anyone who disagrees with the official Hindutva line as an “anti-national”, it’d be relevant to understand Gandhiji’s views on nationalism.

During the Vaikom Satyagraha (anti-untouchability agitation), Gandhiji defined his nationalism thus: “My idea of nationalism is that my country may become free—free that if need be the whole of the country may die—so that the human race may live. There is no room here for race hatred.” (Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings (p. 164). Edited By Irfan Habib. Rupa Publications. Kindle Edition.)

For a unique perspective on the ongoing Sabrimala agitation and its linkage to the Vaikom Satyagraha, read Ramchandra’s Guha’s article: Remembering the Vaikom Satyagraha in the light of Sabrimala

The Pulwama attack by Pakistan-based terrorists that killed 44 Indian soldiers has dominated social media in India and in the Indian diaspora abroad. I have often wondered how effective Gandhiji would have been with his satyagraha and nonviolence if he’d faced religious fundamentalists of today. There’s little doubt that he’d have been assassinated all over again, and in double quick time.

There’s a Nathuram Godse in all religions because fundamentalism is an ideology, not religion, and fundamentalists use only those parts of religion that preach intolerance against other religions.

Masood Azhar’s supporters (the perfidious Pakistani establishment) can justify that he is fighting the good fight for his fellow Muslims in Kashmir. But, there’s little to distinguish his thought process from Godse’s. Azhar regularly masterminds the massacre of innocents in the hope that he can bend the Indian state to do his ideological bidding – leave Kashmir. Godse assassinated a man who influenced an entire civilisation to do his bidding for living peaceably together.

In this context, I want to briefly return to the nationalism debate. My former colleague Sudheendra Kulkarni walked out of a television debate recently when the host (the abominable Arnab Goswami) called Sachin Tendulkar anti-national.

Kulkarni's voluminous Music of the Spinning Wheel has a fascinating anecdote of a meeting between the Mahatma and Romain Rolland (Kulkarni presented the book to me when I met him in 2017). 

“I played him the Andante from the Fifth Symphony, and, on Gandhi’s request, returned to the piano and played Gluck’s Elysian Fields from Orfeo, the first orchestral piece and the flute melody,” writes Rolland.

Kulkarni says, “Since Gandhi never showed much interest in Western classical music, we can ask ourselves the question: Why did he expressly ask Rolland to play him Beethoven?” There are many answers to this question, Kulkarni says, and then adds: “…there is another, more important, reason behind Gandhi’s request to Rolland to play Beethoven for him. That reason was Mirabehn.”

What follows is a fascinating narration of a little-known history:

“Strange though it may seem, Beethoven had played a pivotal role in bringing Madeleine Slade to Gandhi. She fell in love with Beethoven’s music when, at age of fifteen, she first heard a composition by him, Sonata Opus 31 No. 2 She writes in her autobiography, The Spirit’s Pilgrimage, that her whole being was stirred by it; she played it over and over again…She learnt French so that she could read about Beethoven’s life in Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe (the 10 volume novel that got him the Literature Nobel)…”

Upon meeting Rolland, she was advised her that “the only living person worthy of the sort of veneration you have felt for Beethoven is Mahatma Gandhi.” Of course, Madeleine had never heard of the Mahatma. Then, after she had read Rolland’s book on the Mahatma (which he had written without having met him), she decided to visit India.

Kulkarni writes, “(Rolland)…had been himself craving deeply for many years to receive Gandhi in Villeneuve and to let him experience Beethoven’s sublime music. In a letter to Mirabehn on 25 April 1927 (that is, four years before Gandhi came to meet Rolland), he had written” “If Gandhi knew him (Beethoven), he would have recognized in him our European Mahatma, our strongest mediator between the life of the senses and eternal Life. And he would bless this music which perhaps, for us, is the highest form of prayer, a permanent communion with the Divinity.”

“Earlier, too, in his letter to Mahadev Desai on 24 February 1924, Rolland had described Beethoven as ‘our European Mahatma’ who ‘sings in his Ode to Joy; Let us – millions of human beings – embrace each other.’”

(from: Beethoven got Romain Rolland and Merabehn together)

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Akshya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India was published in 2015 – the year when the first high-profile lynching of a Muslim allegedly for beef consumption occurred in India. (Dadri lynching)

It was just a year after Narendra Modi took charge as the Prime Minister of India, and there would be many lynchings in the next three years.

Mukul's book gave a perspective to the rise of Hindutva ideology. It linked the rise to the ferment in the Indian society in the late 19th and early 20th century when for the first time since the medieval era, the Hindu identify began to manifest itself socially, culturally, economically, and politically on the Indian subcontinent.

The business class (and in India’s case, the class and the caste almost always subsume) consolidated the Hindu identity by coalescing the other two upper castes (Brahmins and the Kshatriyas) into a force that began to influence the political and sociocultural landscape.

In retrospect, what is surprising is that the subterranean influences that these forces unleashed have remained relevant and have grown in influence to dominate public life in the 21st century. They were reined in and controlled only because of the enduring combined influence of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mukul’s book also gives deep insights into the relationship that the Indian elite shared – it was a nurturing relationship that overlooked ideological differences in preference of protecting class (and caste) interests. To read more, click here: The ties that bind the elite.

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A cinematic experience that I’ll never forget was to see Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights I, II and III at the Toronto International Film Festival, which celebrated four decades in 2015. The film comprises three parts - The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One. It is about contemporary Portugal – altogether 383 minutes that narrates the transformation of the Portuguese society through fantasy; especially graphic is the depiction of the relationship between a young woman and a banker. The film is an epic.

My motivation in choosing this all-day film was to know about contemporary society in Portugal, a country that has historical links to India.

To read more about the film, click here: Arabian Nights I, II, III

Arabian Nights I, II, III

I – The Restless One, II – The Desolate One, III – The Enchanted One

I saw Arabian Nights by Miguel Gomes at the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff), which celebrated four decades this year.

The film comprises three parts - The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One. It is about contemporary Portugal. My motivation in choosing the 383-minute ode was to know about contemporary society in Portugal, a country that has historical links to India. 

It turned out to be a serendipitous decision.

The trilogy depicts the transformation of the Portuguese society in the face of economic recession, and the adversities faced by the population because of the severe austerity measures enforced by the international lending institutions.

Here are my impressions of the epic:

The first part (The Restless One) comprises three stories. The first is Men with a Hard On. It's all about erections induced by a potion recommended by an African adorning tribal costume to a group of technocrats trying try to resolve the economic woes facing their country but unable to agree where to levy the cut in social welfare.

The second - the Story of the Cockerel and Fire is about a talking cockerel who, much to the annoyance of the townspeople, crows rather loudly all night in an apparent bid to caution the townspeople of the misfortune that would strike them in the form of a young arsonist whose unrequited love causes her to set afire forests.

The cockerel acquires such notoriety that his name appears on the list of candidates contesting the mayoral polls. 

The magistrate, who claims to understand bird/animal talk, conducts a hearing to decide whether the cockerel is guilty as charged for disturbing peace. And after the hearing, agrees that the bird’s intentions were noble.

The third story is The Swim of Magnificents and it is about a man who is tries to make some money organizing an annual dip in the sea on the New Year. He gets nightmares when his plans run into a whale of a problem – a beached whale. The local authorities prevent the annual dip, and the man has a nightmare of being inside the innards of the whale.

Fortunately, the bloated carcass explodes, strewing its innards across the beach. In the meantime, the man and his much younger friend in a punk hairdo, begin to record experiences of middle aged unemployed men trying to find a job.

The first part of the trilogy Arabian Nights (The Restless One) sets the tone for a series of stories that continue in the other two parts (The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One).  

The film begins with the director (Gomes enacts the role) abandoning the project of making a film on Portugal’s economic woes, confessing that only abstraction can do justice to such a grand theme. But he confesses that abstraction causes him severe vertigo. He flees the scene and then, the narration is then taken over by Scheherazade, who adapts the stories of the Portuguese people to the 1001 Nights format.

It is this fantabulist bent that characterizes the entire epic. Miguel Gomes has little patience and evidently lesser respect for structure or form, and is agnostic to the intermingling of fact, fiction and fantasy. He combines documentary style camera work, with touristy panoramic visuals of the fabulous beaches and seafronts of Portugal.

All the stories have a basis in reality. In fact, while filming the epic, which took more than a year, the filmmaker had a team of journalists looking for news reports of specific and peculiar instances of hardships the Portuguese society faced during the restructuring phase. Check out the website: Arabian Nights.

In the second part – The Desolate One begins with the story of a serial killer, who murders his wife and daughter. Chronicle of the Escape of Simao 'Without Bowels' is about Simao who is on the run, and has been successfully evade arrest. He becomes a local hero among the locals apparently for no other reasons expect that they are happy to see someone defy authority. He surrenders when he apparently gets bored of the his existence in the wild, which includes an orgy with nubile young women who sit on him in the nude and slap each others bottoms.

The main story in the second part Tears of the Judge. It is about a magistrate who holds court in an amphitheatre to try cases that are straight out of the mid-twentieth century theatre of the absurd. The magistrate’s character is based on a real life magistrate in Portugal who broke down after handling out a sentence to a petty criminal for robbing people outside an ATM.

The magistrate hears cases pertaining to mail order Chinese brides, a stolen cow, a banker and a mother-son duo accused of petty thievery (and the son’s sex addiction). The banker is blamed for all the troubles, and he is never shown on screen. What is shown is his post-coital, limp penis covered in virginal blood. The camera voyeuristically closes in on his young wife, as she walks from the bedroom to the kitchen, blood flowing down her legs, and calls her mother to inform her about her first night.  

The final episode in this part The Owners of Dixie is a story of a destitute couple who get into a suicide pact, as they are unable to survive. They gift their pet (Dixie, an angelic dog) to a young couple, not too different from them, except in age, and their addiction to drugs. Everyone in the condo block loves Dixie, and despite it changing many masters, continues to remain everyone’s favourite.

Towards the end, we find out that in the condo’s corridors has a ghost of a dog that is similar to Dixie. Among the tenants living in the condo is a Gujarati family who has a pet parakeet who talks incessantly, but suddenly stops, and even when the family pays the vet a thousand euros (by borrowing) it speaks no more. 

The condo also has immigrants from India, who play cricket wearing Sahara India shirts, and a bevy of Brazilian beauties who prefer to sunbathe in the nude on the terrace of the multistoried building.

The second part was Portugal’s official entry at the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language film for 2015. It has eclectic music and stunning visuals that at once convey the claustrophobic insides of the apartments, and the sprawling destitution.

In the final part – The Enchanted One – we meet Scheherazade again. Her father – the vizier to King Shahryar – can’t get over the remorse of having got her daughter married to the crazy king. The father-daughter duo who belong to the medieval times meet on a Ferris wheel at a beach that is in the present times.

The father assures the daughter that everything will turn out just fine, but has difficulty believing that himself. Then, the princess sails off on a motorboat to an archipelago where she meets a virile stud of a man who has sired over 200 children. The princess, a practical woman, refuses to the man’s advances for a more permanent sort of relationship, preferring momentary physical pleasure.

The final story of the series - The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches - is of working class men surviving on the outskirts of the city trapping and training chaffinches. It is a story not just of the fluctuating fortunes of these men, but also of the slowly transforming landscape that was once dominated by forests (prior to the 1974 revolution) being taken over by unplanned development.

The story is interrupted by another one of a Chinese immigrant who falls in love with a cop who leaves her after she becomes pregnant. The visuals for the entire episode comprise of tension between striking and on duty cops clashing over wages. The Chinese girl (whose Chinese name translates into Portuguese as Hot Forrest) is only heard, not seen.

The trilogy eschews any attempt to adhere to or abide by any logic, and deliberately strains the viewers’ tacit acceptance of process of suspension of disbelief. The narration is frequently interrupted by unheralded appearance of genies; but nearly all of them are at the end of their powers or easy to manipulate. Film closes with the classic 1970s number Calling occupants of interplanetary craft popularized by Carpenters.