Does India fail to understand the special expressive qualities inherent in our art?

A FEW WEEKS AGO I read a newspaper piece by a well-known columnist in praise of Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus. Nothing wrong with that— Ship of Theseus is a very fine work, especially remarkable for a debut feature. But what put me off were some of the generalisations in the piece, and how the film was used as a pretext to run down more conventional forms of Indian cinema. Among the assertions made: “It was very, very different from—and better than—anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far […] subtle and restrained.” And “Everything about this film smells revolutionary to me.”

In fact, there is a familiar ring to such gushing, and it came up elsewhere when Ship of Theseus was discussed. In case you haven’t seen it, this film is a cool, understated work, full of thoughtful silences and an almost documentary-like minimalism in some scenes (though for my money, some of its best moments were the showier ones that made superb use of lighting, sound design and cinematography). It is explicitly driven by ideas, right from its title, which comes from a philosophical query (“if all the planks of a ship are replaced one by one, does it remain the same ship?”) and connects the film’s three narratives about people who have organ transplants.

It is unquestionably exciting that a young Indian writer-director has made a film like this, and equally encouraging that a well-known personality— Kiran Rao—took the initiative to distribute it, so it could reach large audiences. But to welcome and praise Ship of Theseus is one thing; to use it as a salvo against “regular” Indian movies, and to bemoan the idea that we have not so far had an intelligent cinematic culture, is nonsense founded on both elitism and ignorance. This attitude overlooks how many different types of movies—good, bad and mediocre—there have been in India for decades (often divided into simplistic categories like “commercial”, “parallel”, “new wave” and “middle cinema”). It also fails to recognise that there are many possible modes of cinematic expression. At one extreme is kitchen-sink realism—spare and stark—and at another extreme is great stylisation, or the expression of emotions through hyper-drama. What should concern the critic is not the mode itself, but how well it is executed to realise a film’s internal world.

I was thinking about these things when I happened to read Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, a collection of essays about seemingly disparate subjects, including computer programming and literary theory. There are so many stimulating ideas in this book that even a long review wouldn’t be able to mention them all, but I was struck by something Chandra touches on fleetingly. Writing about the history of Sanskrit, he discusses concepts that have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, such as rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance) and dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader). There has been a long tradition, Chandra points out, of the mixing of rasas in our art. To take just one instance, the great epic Mahabharata has a sequence after the war has ended and the grieving women are running helter-skelter on the battlefield, looking for the dead bodies of their husbands and sons. In one passage, the wife of a slain warrior finds his severed arm, places it on her lap, strokes it gently and begins a remarkable monologue: “This is the hand that took off my girdle/That fondled my full breasts…”

Here is, Chandra says, an example of the combining of emotional registers. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different— some might even say inappropriate— mood. And this is also what mainstream Hindi films often do—merging different emotions and formal devices, so that a tragedy can accommodate inspired comedic scenes (consider the role played by Johnny Walker as the dejected hero’s resourceful friend in such solemn films as Pyaasa or Madhumati).

A few years ago, when his superb novel Sacred Games—a very “filmi” story about the intersecting lives of a policeman and a gangster in Mumbai— was launched, I had a conversation with Chandra. “I feel very strongly about this notion of what is ‘too filmi’ as opposed to what is realistic,” he said. “In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we’ve had an education that has trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the Western tradition of psychological realism. But given the history of colonialism, we should be suspicious about this.”

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling in the Panchatantra or the Upanishads and the cool minimalism of modern American writing. And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he points out that even the drums played by those “primitive” people contained a sophisticated artificial language: the drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages.

Conrad, given his own background and education, was understandably oblivious to much of this. But it would be a pity if we in India were to fail to understand the special expressive qualities inherent in our art and culture—whether it be the heavily stylised beauty of local dance forms or the heightened rasa offered by song sequences and drama in Hindi movies.