Farrukh Dhondy reconstructs the history of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in London, through the story of one cinema hall

The first time I went to the Liberty Cinema, at some forgotten date in the early seventies, was not to watch a film but for an afternoon political rally. One of the conspicuous buildings in Southall (Pronounced ‘South-Hall’ by its residents and ‘Sudhhll’ by the snooty English), West London, with its ludicrous Chinese-dragon facade and its rather fetching art deco interior, it sits between the two shopping hubs of the Punjabi suburb.

Almost opposite it is a park and the main road proceeds over a railway bridge under which is Southall station with a connection to West London’s termini. It descends the railway bridge, passes a very famous pub with figures of men with sashed turbans stuck on the exterior called Glassy Junction and pronounced ‘Gill-arsyy Junkshin’ and runs a quarter of a mile to the High Street.

If one ignores the simplicity of the Victorian and Edwardian worker’s-cottage-terrace architecture this High Street with its garish signs selling sweetmeats and DVDs could be a market street in Ludhiana. The large groceries of the High Street flow onto the pavements with, to Britain, exotic fruit and vegetables: karella, kuddhoo, methi, different kinds of mirch, bunches of dhania and cardboard boxes of the various varieties of mangoes when in season.

The other road from the cinema leads to another shopping centre with equally sumptuous supermarkets for groceries, fineries and jewellery, past a tiny park where the old men, whom as a passer-by I always think of as Sikh veterans of the Second World War, gather of an afternoon. Then on to various gurdwaras and out of the suburb to the M4, a motorway that connects London to Bristol.

The Liberty cinema was the venue for the first of several rallies I attended. It was, when not showing films, the hub of political agitation, meetings and rallies invariably called by one of the Indian Workers’ Associations. If you guessed that there were three or more factions of this organisation, owing allegiance and sending money to the Congress, the Communist Party of India, to the Communist party of India (Marxist) and to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) you can give yourself a pat on the back. That these organisations hated each other and have now, with the integration of the new generations of Southall into British life and away from strictly Punjabi factional politics, melted away without significant numbers or significance, is also true.

I went with others to Southall from London proper—or improper considering the nature of the districts in which we lived—as a pamphleteer, agitator and member of other immigrant organisations such as the British Black Panther Movement and Race Today.

The one mass meeting held in the Liberty Cinema in the late seventies was to protest the death of a young man called Gurdip Singh Chaggar, fatally assaulted, it was alleged and never proved, by three skinhead youths. At the time the leading neo-fascist party of Britain was called the National Front. One of its leaders John Kingsley Read, commenting on the killing of Chaggar publicly pronounced “One down— a million to go.”

All of Southall, as other parts of the country, came alive and demanded action and justice from the police and government. The militant factions of Asian youth, that marched, declared Southall a no-go area for racists. It was 1976.

Three years later, in April 1979, the National Front decided to hold a rally during the general election of that year in the town hall in Southall. It was a stunt to get attention as they had no members in the area but wanted to make a gesture of propagandist defiance by holding their meeting in the heart of an immigrant community.

Their main platform was the repatriation of immigrants, and the police who gave them permission to hold a meeting and a march on those streets in an Asian suburb were well aware of the certain provocation and threat to civil order this posed.

The cops were out in force, with vans parked in several side streets, and patrols and contingents numbering hundreds with riot shields and vizored helmets lining the High Street to hold back the counter demonstration of anti-fascists.

A school-teacher called Blair Peach joined this counter-demonstration under the banner of the National Union of Teachers, a professional union to which I earning my living at the time as a schoolteacher belonged. I knew Peach as he was an activist in the Union and we met in left-wing organisations. At the time the male sartorial fashion was flared trousers and shoulder-length hair with perhaps a growth of beard in imitation of the rock stars of the day. It is embarrassing to recall how both of us looked like that!

The police with riot shields fought off the young Asian crowds who attempted to stop the National Front members who sought the protection of vans and buses in their passage to the Town Hall. All hell broke loose and by the late afternoon several street battles had been fought and very many young Asians and others arrested.

At around 6 pm, when things were quieter, Blair was attempting to make his way away from the troubled High Street, taking a short cut through the terraced Edwardian houses of Southall, when he passed a police patrol getting into their van.

One copper left his van, ran up to Peach unprovoked, according to witnesses, and bludgeoned him with his baton. Peach fell to the ground and was assisted by Asian bystanders who witnessed the assault from their garden. They called the ambulance but Blair died from the cracked skull and injuries to his brain an hour or so later.

The newspapers denounced our anti-racist demonstrations instead of taking the police and the National Front to task for this needless provocation and mass civil disturbance in which three people had their skulls cracked open and many others suffered injuries.

The murder of Blair Peach was the singular tragedy and injustice of this street battle. My colleagues and I went to a protest meeting again at the Liberty cinema. By then the hall was in a decrepit condition with the stuffing emerging from the split seats and the paint dull, with perhaps the smoke from cigarettes patrons lit up, ignoring the non-smoking signs. There was no heating as I remember. The rhetoric was brave enough.

The film that was showing at the time was called Baton Baton Mein starring Tina Munim, Pearl Padamsee and Amol Palekar. I recall reading the poster and thinking of the irony. An English person would read ‘baton’ not as ‘baathon’—‘conversation’ in Hindustani—but as the police’s bludgeoning weapon and ‘mein’ as the possessive pun in German. It was an idle thought and certainly one that hadn’t occurred to anyone else.

The demonstrations of the late seventies were symptoms of the incipient upward mobility and growing demands of the second generation of South Asians who form today, with their children, a third and even fourth generation of immigrants, 65 percent of the population of the suburb.

Those demonstrators in the late seventies were not going to accept any form of second-class status in British society and they were making it clear that those forces antagonistic to their presence would be met with the sort of retaliation that film heroes such as Amitabh Bachchan or Mithun Chakraborty would dish out in the potboilers produced in those days.

*

It was not always so. The Asian inhabitation of Southall began, so the legend goes, when a British officer of the former Raj who had returned to West London after Indian independence and set up a small factory—some say a bakery—invited the retired Sikh soldiers he knew to join him as workers in Southall.

The suburb is close to Heathrow airport which today uses Asian labour in various capacities, from lavatory attendants to baggage handlers, security guards and the staff of packaged-meal suppliers to airlines.

In the years between 1950 and the mid sixties Southall grew through the untrammelled, at the time legal, influx of the families, relatives and village neighbours of the dominantly Punjabi workers who arrived in Britain and took up these jobs which didn’t require any great familiarity with England, its culture or language.

The community built on itself, opening the small-trade shops of imported food and ‘native’ goods. It became a settlement, though never a ghetto, with the white population moving out and the Punjabis, from both sides of the Indo-Pak border but predominantly from Amritsar, Jullundur and Hoshiarpur, moving in and acquiring the relatively cheap terraced housing.

Of course there had been Indians in Britain before the 1950s. They were mostly from aristocratic and upwardly mobile families. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Lord Sinha, Shapur Saklatvala and later Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi had all passed through and made their mark.

But here now was the ex-peasantry of India, in Britain not to study and return to its leadership but to settle and work, mostly at the jobs that the British white working class had abandoned—‘shift work and shit work’—after the Second World War.

India was a newly independent country and was consciously searching for its identity. Indian film was now the lingua franca of the country. A pioneer of the industry Raj Kapoor was compellingly aware that what he was doing in telling his stories and portraying his characters on screen, or presenting Nargis and other actors with himself, was defining what an Indian is or should be. From Aag, Barsaat, Awara and right through his films of the sixties, Raj Kapoor is creating the new myths of what an Indian man is. The patriotism emerges in the songs:

“Mera joota hai Japani

Yeh patloon Inglistani,

Surr pey lal topi Russi

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani… ”

It’s an anthem that recognises that India may not yet manufacture all the externals—the shoes, trousers, hats—but the heart that beats within…

And then the defining of the man with a simple heart caught up in the turmoil of modernity and conquering it with the simplicity of the Awara, the Shree 420 or of Raju who lives where the Ganges flows:

“Mera naam Raju,

Gharaana anaam

Behti hai Ganga

Jahan mera dhaam.”

The peasant, the wanderer is the generous heart of the new nation:

“Mehmaan jo hamara hota hein

Wo jaan sey pyara hota hein… ”

And it goes on to pronounce the mantra of survival of a country that knows itself as poor. Indians will survive by steely humility and not through materialism.

“Zyaada ki nahin laalach humko

Thodey mein guzaara hota hein… ”

The characters he creates, the lovable rogue, the bewildered villager wandering into the city with a Chaplin-like innocence and conquering the evils and complexity of city-slickers and their plots are an off-shoot of the Gandhian vision of spinning wheels and simplicity. Of course these mythical virtues exclude chastity or there’d be no scope for the seductiveness of Nargis.

The ideal is constructed on a nationalistic myth.

“Jahan hoton pey sachchayi hoti hein

Jahan dil mein safai rehti hein

Hum us desh key vaasi hein

Jis desh mein Ganga behti hai.”

One can be certain that, with some part of their minds, the children of the new republic were conscious that our lips were not constantly endowed with indelible truth or our hearts clean as the driven snow. Only the geography of the lyric was dead accurate: we did live in the country through which the Ganges flows.

Then there was Nargis who broke away from Raj and acted in Mehboob’s extravagant Mother India. If Raj defined the Indian man in that immediately post-independence decade, the years of the first Indian settlement of Southall, Nargis’s role harked back to the message of Krishna in the Mahabharat. She surrenders her son, who has turned to dacoity, for the sake of the greater truth. Her karma remains in the service of dharma.

Godliness is for Gods and however strong our self-image as created by the films of the fifties was, the nation should have realised that films were merely incarnate ideals and entertainment— and that’s how we liked them. If films allowed in too much reality they became ‘art’ and who needs to go to the cinema for that? We get enough of it at home!

*

The Himalaya Palace, the most recent name of the Liberty Cinema around which I have attempted a peripheral and deficient history of Southall, began life in 1912 showing silent British and American films. With the severe and relatively swift change in the demographic by the early sixties, the owners screened some Hindi films on weekends. It was renamed the Godeon, then altered to the Godina— perhaps to reflect in its first syllables a version of the Punjabi pronunciation of ‘Godeon’.

In 1972 it became the Liberty Cinema and by then it was London’s only Hindi picture palace. It was where I, with friends from bed-sitter central London, went to see Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah and Manmohan Desai’s Bhai Ho To Aisa. Both films were extremely popular though one noticed a distinct difference in the clientele. The Pakeezah audience were older men and very many women. The love story, the pathos and the nostalgia for even an enclosed Muslim haveli culture was evident.

The Manmohan Desai film, devoid of the classical grace of Pakeezah, was stuffed with stunts and imitations of the cheaper tricks of contemporary Hollywood. The outrageous plot, reminiscent of Marie Corelli’s bad nineteenth century novel Vendetta, gets the hero to fake his own death and reappear as an avenging dacoit to kill his brother who tried to kill him. The audience for Bhai Ho… was packed with young males and they followed the action with howls of approval and seemed silently willing to suspend their disbelief when faced with the absurdity of the plot.

*

In 1979 I gave up my steady job of teaching a South London school in order to write my fourth published and, I hoped, succeeding books. Writing didn’t immediately pay the bills so I farmed myself out as a ‘supply’ teacher, one that’s assigned to a school to cover the classes of teachers who are away through illness or other circumstance.

As it happened I was assigned to a girl’s school in Southall. I had to travel the fifteen miles from my home to the west of London each day, but the actual teaching was a surprise.

I had known and met the citizens of Southall in several capacities but they had all been men, young and old or they were the shy and retiring older ladies who were occasionally my hostesses when I visited some grandee of the Indian Workers’ Association or some activist on the Asian Left. They spoke in Punjabi accents and served tea and parathas and sarson ka saag.

Here in the girl’s school was a captive second or even two-and-a-half-th generation— daughters of some first generation immigrants or of their offspring who had been brought to England from the Punjab at a young age and had grown and married and sent their girls to school.

All the girls, 90 percent of them Asian, spoke in London English accents and some of the sixth form to whom I had to teach Keats and E. M. Forster (no, not Passage to India) had somehow, possibly from their British teachers, acquired middle class accents, a sort of preparation for a smooth entry into the professions. The statistics were telling. This predominantly Asian school got far better exam results than a hundred others in the boroughs around.

“So will you go to university?”

Six of the twelve would.

“And then will you return to Southall?”

They looked at each other. Where else would they go?

I knew what they meant. Southall was the world, they knew no other and they hadn’t come to terms with the fact that they were probably fated to be the first to break out of it.

“You never know, as in the Foster novel, you leave home, you fall in love and romance carries you away.”

They giggle.

“It happens all the time in the Hindi films doesn’t it?”

Yes, they admitted, it did and they loved Hindi films and I heard the yearning for the possibility in their answers. But they didn’t go to the Liberty cinema anymore even with their families. It was too rough and the cinema showed the sort of films that only boys like. Two or three of them illustrated the point by saying “dhishoom, dhishoom!”

And those who wouldn’t go to university even if they got good grades at A level? One said her father wanted her to join his estate agency, two of the others said they would be sent to college in the Punjab “where it was safe”.

My few weeks at the school were a snapshot of the advancing and turbulent culture. The girls would go home and speak Punjabi. In the playground I heard some of them swear like cockney troopers. Most of the girls in the school wouldn’t get to the sixth form. Those who didn’t would remain in Southall, probably marry and make families and homes there.

By the beginning of the eighties Southall was not just Little India, it had spread as those who could afford it. Those who had money through prosperous business on the central streets, or through the warehouses on the periphery, had moved outward to Hayes, away from central London, and to Greenford and Ealing, a mile or two towards it.

*

By the early eighties the Liberty had shut down and an enterprising businessman had bought it and set up a market of stalls. The enterprise was doomed. It was too far away from the main trading centres and market streets and the community had no preference, as may have been exercised in a pretentious white area of London, for shopping in an art deco converted interior over finding the cheapest bargain on the stalls of the High Street. The market didn’t last.

The coming of Channel 4 to national TV and the proliferation of Hindi films on video were the last sharp and decisive nails in the coffin of Southall cinema. Both of these happened in 1982. Channel 4 began showing classic Hindi films in ‘seasons’ of twelve each, with one or two new releases thrown in. It was free to air and as the Channel 4 executive responsible for choosing, buying, contracting, subtitling and transferring the films to transmittable media I gathered the statistics. 80 percent of Southall accessed our Indian film seasons. Hindi films were by that year on video anyway and the popularity of electronic media was beginning to kill the potential of cinema.

A couple of years into my job as a commissioning editor of Channel 4, I received a phone call from a fellow who identified himself as a young filmmaker who had to produce a short film to qualify as a director. Could he have one of my short stories set in Pune, India—and then—would I also write the script. He began to explain that he had no money and was asking me to give him my story and adapt it as a script for free. I thought it over and, out of the goodness of my hard heart, I agreed.

He said in the days to come that he was going to capture on camera the Indian milieu in Southall and I tried in vain to explain that Pune in Western India, on the Deccan Plateau, bore little resemblance to the British-Punjabi setting of Southall. He said he had reconnoitred the Liberty cinema and it was ‘perfect’. His team persuaded him that it was not.

I wrote the script and he shot the film in a mall cafe that doubled as Pune. It was his first film and he was, though very British, determined to reach out to the world as he did starting with filming in Southall and moving to more international climes and becoming, as Michael Winterbottom is, a famous director.

Michael may have seen the charm of the cinema hall that had fallen into desuetude, but couldn’t really stage a Pune tea cafe in it. It was derelict and worse.

British sentimentality and aesthetic nostalgia came to the rescue of the ruined setting, the beacon of different dreams in Southall. English Heritage, a national organisation that safeguards architectural treasures looked at the faux-Chinese exterior and the deco interior of the building and decided to spend £135,000 on its restoration.

In 2001 the building reopened as the Himalaya Palace with three screens devoted to Bollywood blockbusters. The theatre was now as swanky as anything in the West End with the added attraction of the restored architecture of George Coles who designed its present appearance in 1929.

Sitting in the Himalaya Palace to watch Singh is Kinng sometime in the first decade of this century was strange. My friends and I had gone for the experience of the deco theatre, to appreciate as well as be sardonically critical (to take the piss, to be truthful) of the film and then eat at our favourite restaurant— the Brilliant. The theatre was virtually empty. The film was of the genre of pure entertainment that more and more cynical Indian audiences, seeking the definition of their souls and roles from realms and dimensions other than filmistan, watch.

Why weren’t they watching this one? Three good reasons. Any number of video channels by then aired any Indian film you wanted, even the latest ones on some demand arrangement. Then, Southall is by most measures the largest DVD bootleg market for Hindi films in the known world. Perhaps the most important factor of all is that the young, from teenagers to people in the third of their Shakespearean seven ages, and perhaps even those in their fourth and fifth, watch American and British films. Less attention on the Hindi. They are in that limited sense bicultural.

The Himalaya Palace terminated business in 2010. Pass the site now and you find the plywood boards on the windows and signatures of graffiti artists on the walls.

The fortunes of the Himalaya Palace building with its ups and downs is not a metaphor for the progress of Southall which is a settlement that has, octopus-like, spread through West London and is a measure of the prosperity and mobility of the Asian community that converted this characteristic outlying limb of London into a muscular demonstration of the city’s global dimension and growth.

Indian cinema, while worshipping and pouring the money of unimaginative producers into blockbusters is fast evolving new genres of film that take observation of reality rather than the construction of myth as their raison d’etre. I am thinking of the films like Dhobi Ghat and Peepli Live or the more commercial but still observed films of Anurag Kashyap such as Gangs of Wasseypur. There are a growing number of others. These films have come to Britain but are, as of now, festival fare.

The coming year or two will determine whether Southall has a segment of its population that will begin to support their commercial exploitation in Britain. Will that lead to the Palace of the Himalayas having a new lease of life?

A small news clip covering the clash between the police and the predominantly asian community in Southall, London (April 1979)

The writer’s latest novel London Company has more on the times he writes about in this report and is now available in stores and online.

TBIP reports on a new experiment in filmmaking that is catching on

On November 4, 2012, a Sunday morning, Dr. Parvez Imam walked into Devi Art Foundation, in Gurgaon, for the first shoot of his collaborative video art project, to find that none of whom he had invited to participate in it had turned up. So he started shooting instead with the guards at the foundation, the manager of its cafeteria, and other staff who happened to be there. As the shoot progressed, Imam noticed that those who had finished playing their part were engaged in a heated discussion on how the film should play out. They were saying: “Nahin, galat kar di story (No, we took the story the wrong way). Idhar nahi, udhar honi chahiye thi. Arrey isne to aise kar diya, aise thodi jayegi story (It shouldn’t have gone here, it should have gone there. Now he’s made the story like this, but it isn’t how it’ll work)”. Imam, 45, a psychiatrist turned filmmaker, is fascinated by how, in the middle of his experiment, “the artists were becoming their own critics”. This is one of the things the People-Powered, Script-less Video Art Project tries to build on.

Imam’s film, supported by Sarai—a program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)—one of Delhi’s most reputed research institutes, is still being shot. It is one of three intriguing film collaborations that have emerged on the Indian cinematic horizon last year. The other two, which were completed and released in 2012, are The Owner, a collaboration between 25 directors (of which four were Indian) from 14 countries, and The Last Act, a whodunit made by 12 filmmakers from India.

“The basis of my project,” says Imam. “Is understanding how we can take filmmaking, which is thought of as such an elite thing, to literally anybody who wants to participate”. He shoots on the streets in Delhi and Gurgaon. He puts up a banner that says “Jan Sanchalith Video Film” in English and in Hindi and waits for people to come. Imam gave the film its first byte, starting it off with why he’s making it. Other initial scenes show the guards and staff at Devi Art Foundation weaving a story about a girl auditioning for a role and attending a film shoot. But the ‘story’ could go anywhere. Anyone can walk up and ask to be a part of the film, and become its narrator. Anyone from a lay child, who had said: “Main bhi karta hoon (I’ll do this as well)”, to a temple priest, a milkman from Faridabad, an auto-rickshaw driver or a security guard who was insistent on reciting a poem he remembered being taught in his village school. When people ask Imam for his opinion to see if their contribution fits in with the rest of the story, Imam consciously refrains from influencing ‘their’ film. “The politics of aesthetics (of movies today) is also that they come from the director and the director comes from a certain background,” he says. “So I’m also trying to let that be, so that it’s their aesthetics, their way of storytelling.”

***

The Owner was released on May 25, 2012. It was steered by Collabfeature, an international co-production film group founded by filmmakers Marty Shea, 35, and Ian Bonner, 34, in 2008, and run out of Shea’s tiny apartment in Detroit. The Owner is their first film. It chronicles the journey of a backpack as it is passed from person to person through 14 countries. People put things into it, and take items out too. Of the people who come across the backpack, some want to own it for various reasons, some try to deduce who its owner might be from the contents so they can send it back.

“I first had the idea back in college, where I was studying ‘auteur’ filmmakers who have a strong personal vision,” says Shea. “But I was also interested in music and I love the idea of each musician responding to the other, each contributing their own personality and vision to the song, so that the result is bigger than the sum of its parts.” How one musician got a melody and then the other improvised a beat and then another added the lyrics and a song was born. That got him thinking about how the concept of a band could apply to filmmaking: “How Ethan Coen would sit at the typewriter while Joel Coen paced around and how you can start to see their two distinct personalities in different scenes. The way Mike Leigh writes his films through improvising with his actors.” Shea says he felt like “anthology films had always existed”, but he “never saw one where I felt like there was real collaboration”.

Well known films such as Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You have brought together several directors to work on one film before. Yet each of these has been, in the end, a collection of distinct short film segments, not a feature length movie with a continuous narrative, a connected story.

Shea and Bonner began collabfeature.com as a one page website with a message board. They mailed other filmmakers and posted the link to their site on filmmaker forums. But after one enthusiastic response from a filmmaker, the emails were not replied to for days on end. “I remember thinking that the interest just wasn’t there,” says Shea. “Then slowly, people started joining the message board and the excitement started to build.” They didn’t know what their first film would be. “We just wanted to start a conversation about collaborative filmmaking,” Shea says. “Then we came up with the ‘backpack project’ in 2010 and invited the filmmakers to participate and to shoot on a no to low budget.” The Owner was a name the filmmakers chose for the film the ‘backpack project’ became— by consensus.

Two years later, collabfeature.com is powered by a web application—that Bonner built and is looking to patent—which allows registered filmmakers to interact with each other, provide feedback, vote and upload scripts and film footage. For The Owner filmmakers submitted a portfolio with their application to be a part of the collaboration, and, says Shea, “every applicant was reviewed by the already accepted filmmakers, making even the acceptance of new members a collaborative process.”

Beginning with the premise of a backpack that travels around the world, the filmmakers brainstormed ideas for their own segment of the film, ranging from four to five minutes, shot in their own countries. Finally they came up with an outline of a story that included all of the film segments. “A lot of it was dictated by geography,” says Shea. “European segments had to connect to each other, US cities and Indian cities had to also connect.” Everyone spoke English and all scripts and pitches were done in English, but ultimately every filmmaker shot their part of the film in their local language.

Every filmmaker fixed the budget for and funded their segments for The Owner themselves, without any official investor or financial partner. Only common and centralized expenses, such as those involving shipping the bag to different countries, hard drives, internet related and legal expenses, were covered by the project directors, Shea and Bonner. A point system was instituted to mark the participation of each collaborator and determine his or her final share in the film’s profits. John Versical, one of the filmmakers involved, says: “the points acted as an incentive to stay as involved as possible, even if it meant just logging into the discussion board a few times a week and providing feedback.”

Shea remarks that, through collabfeature.com’s centralized web application, he has “gotten to know many of my collaborators so well even though we haven’t met in person.”

Neha Raheja Thakker, 32, a Mumbai based architect turned filmmaker, was one of the Indians shooting a segment for The Owner. She says what was most exciting for her was the feedback she got at every stage of the process, on “the writing, the rough cuts, the sound… you always had this group to turn to”. “They wanted to make your product as good as their product,” she says. “It wasn’t about competing, it was about collaborating”.

However, she admits “a lot of disagreements came up at the rough cut stage and also because the duration of the project has been fairly long”. This led to some filmmakers dropping out of the project.

Asmit Pathare, 29, another Indian filmmaker shooting a segment for The Owner was disappointed because “It took almost 12 months for me to make my five minute segment. When I finally saw the output only 20 seconds of my segment was there”.

Pathare met filmmaker Anurag Kashyap while promoting The Owner and spoke to him about the film. “He was really excited,” says Pathare. “I think that thought stuck with Anurag. Even after that when I met him a couple of times at his place, he did mention that film to me.” Later in the year, Show House India, an event management company, put together The Last Act, produced by their subsidiary Show House Films. This was put together under an initiative called Large Short Films, funded by Show House India’s client Royal Stag Mega Movies, a brand that is subsidiary to the alcohol brand Royal Stag. Filmmakers Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra and Chakri Toleti were asked to mentor the project. Kashyap provided a plot outline for a murder mystery: a mangled dead body was to be found with 12 clues on it from 12 different cities. Each segment in each city would be filmed by a different director, making this a collaboration between 12 filmmakers. It was decided that the film would be premiered on December 12, 2012.

Kashyap also asked Pathare to direct one of the segments and to be Project Director for the entire film. Unlike in The Owner, however, here Pathare was the only point of contact for the other 11 directors, who had to sign a contract to not communicate with each other while they made their parts of the movie. Every step in the pre-production, shoots and post-production was co-ordinated by Pathare through individual phone calls to each director. When asked why the directors were prevented from talking to one another, Pathare says: “We needed to put that extra layer of challenge so that it would make it difficult for the filmmakers to make the film. If they still made the film, then that would be a big achievement.” Whether or not that makes much sense, the removal of the need for consensus every step of the way, while not aligning with an ideal vision of a collaboration, does seem to have sped things up. Unlike The Owner, which almost took two years to make, The Last Act was completed in about five months. It was launched, as planned, on ‘12.12.12’.

***

Any film is a collaborative venture. A large team of individuals work together to make a movie. And yet every film usually has one director, the proverbial captain of the ship, who steers the entire project to its final destination. So what happens when there are not one, but several directors? Both of the completed collaborations, The Owner and The Last Act play on this idea of quest. The premise of each movie was thought of so as to complement its form.

Yet a differing degree of control in each of these collaborations has affected the final film. In The Owner the filmmakers started with nothing but the idea of a backpack traversing the length and breadth of the world in search of its owner. This inanimate object is the only constant that is used to channel the viewer’s attention as he or she traverses through 25 segments, spread out over 14 countries. The backpack becomes an object to be coveted, an object of discord, of curiosity, evoking a variety of responses as it changes hands. The charm of The Owner lies in its motley mix of genres, styles and secondary characters. Every bit of the film showcases the style of a particular director and takes you on a whirlwind trip not only across the world, but also across cinematic sensibilities. As we follow the backpack’s journey in search of its owner, we realize that there might, in fact, not be such a person at all. The backpack becomes a metaphor for the movie, a receptacle for the ideas and experiments of different directors. The minor moments of dissonance cease to matter. The fast moving segments become a cinematic style in themselves.

In the case of The Last Act, the genre of the film was predetermined. This narrowed the range of directions it could go in. So, despite not being allowed to discuss their scripts with one another, 10 out of the 12 filmmakers ended up writing their segment around murder investigations conducted by the respective city’s police force, as opposed to those conducted by private detective agencies, or merely bystanders, perhaps, who could have gotten embroiled with the case somehow. Each of these were possibilities, even within the crime genre, which went untapped mostly. Yet, this could also perhaps be the reason why there is a stronger sense of uniformity and cohesion in the story lines and the style of the film’s 12 segments. Despite not having a central character the mystery is seen as unfolding through the eyes of the investigator in each city. To the credit of this collaboration, the detailing of the plot in each city is incredible, though this does also make it difficult to keep up with the film because of the number of things you need to remember as you go along. The final segment goes a long way in bringing the film together.

In sharp contrast, the style, content and form of the more fluid and freewheeling People-Powered, Script-less Video Art Project depends entirely on the frequently changing narrator of the story, the person speaking to the camera. Imam’s project may be smaller in scale, but it strives to go a step further than the other two by allowing for unpredictable and unique results from its collaborations, possibly because these collaborations are with amateurs, rather than professionals who have set ways of thinking about cinema. Each collaborator’s ideas, language and gestures are reflective of the part he or she plays in society. The camera remains a still spectator and this sharpens the focus on the narrator. Imam keeps coming back to talking about the awe and exclusivity commonly associated with the camera, which distances it from the natural. “Filmmaking is considered this huge exercise, some scary kind of thing which doesn’t happen anywhere and everywhere,” he says. “So the idea is to reverse and re-inverse all of that.”

Bombay, Bollywood, Book Launches and Other Bizarre Tales 

Seldom does one come across a subject whose name leaves you at a loss for a headline that will better it. Revenge Of The Naked Princess is one such.

Or not. The name of this book, on the subject tab of an email invite to its launch, has been abridged, by enthusiastic public relations personnel, to Revenge Of Naked Princess, emphasizing the weird, dropping an article, keeping it crisp. The invite reads “The launch will take place in the presence of Renowned Actors like Smita Jaykar, Anup Soni, Anshuman Jha and Spiritual Guru Dr Rajshri and Celebrity Author Ashwin Sanghi… at Crossword Book Store… Juhu… Mumbai… on 19th December, 2012.” The presence of a “Guru” at the launch of what the press release calls “India’s first novel on forced conversions” (by ex-journalist Oswald Pereira) is perhaps mandated. Dr. Rajshri has been summoned to grant the book spiritual, if not religious, legitimacy. But preceding her, in the list of distinguished invitees meant to lure recipients of the mail to the launch, are names of three “renowned actors” whom you will have to google. At the fag-end of the list is an author, who has been anointed a “Celebrity”, lest his name get lost in the crowd of luminaries.

The marked difference between an average Delhi book launch and an average Mumbai book launch is one of the many ways to consider the divide between the two cities.

In Delhi, other writers are invited to talk at an author’s book launch and the conversation, for better or worse, revolves around the subject of the book and writing in general. Of course, there is wine, smugness, snacks, gossip, literary incest and bitching concealed as self-serious debate but nothing in any of the innumerable Delhi book launches can match up to the sheer absurdity of the rare Mumbai book event.

To begin with, no event in Mumbai can possess a sense of self-worth unless attended by someone, anyone, from Bollywood. Here, even Shobha De, a celebrity in her own right, had to invite actor Manoj Bajpai to speak at the Mumbai launch of her book Sethji, on December 20, where he waxed eloquent about the first time he met her and wondered how despite belonging to “a certain section of the society” she could “delve so deeply” into the “caste system and caste conflict“. However not all authors can pull off having someone of Bajpai’s stature at their launch. And where “renowned actors” do not exist, they must be created.

***

Or substituted by characters who can hold their own against Bollywood. My earliest memory of a book launch in Mumbai is one I covered as a reporter for the city paper Mumbai Mirror on February 14, 2006. A book of Hindi love poems had been written by a journalist who had christened himself Mukesh Kumar ‘Masoom’ (Masoom, his pen name, means ‘innocent’). Hindi journalists in Mumbai aren’t as well connected as their counterparts in the English media, so Masoom had been unable to procure a Bollywood celebrity for his launch. Instead, he had invited a tabloid sensation called ‘Doosri Radha‘ (the second Radha) to launch his book of verse on Valentine’s Day. Radha is the consort of Krishna, a Hindu god. Doosri Radha is Devendra Kumar Panda, an ex-Inspector General of Police in UP who announced in 1991, while he was in service, that he had had a vision of Krishna who had said to him that he was his consort. Panda moved away from his family, wore women’s clothes and, much to the relief of the UP Police, claimed voluntary retirement. He next hit headlines when he declared that his organs were becoming “delicate and soft” and that he was metamorphosing into a woman.

Panda, wearing bangles, a large nose ring, a pink dupatta and yellow kurta and churidaar, took over Masoom’s book launch. He held forth on Karma, and on the fact that the UP government—which was delaying his pension, and which had charged him for breaching the police dress code—would soon be punished by his lord (Krishna). He denounced another ex-government employee from Jamshedpur in Bihar who, after watching Panda on TV, had said he was Panda’s ‘Krishna’ and quit his job, in turn, to dress like the god and play a flute. Panda got into arguments over such matters with journalists at the launch, and eventually began to swear at them. One enraged journalist shouted back saying: “Humnein hi to ise banaya hai, varna ye kuch nahin tha (We’re the ones who’ve made this man so big, otherwise he was nothing)”. Masoom, who hadn’t been able to speak about his book of love poetry yet, tried to calm Panda down by tapping him gently on his shoulder, at which Panda screamed abuses at Masoom till he fled the stage. He threatened to beat him to pulp if he ever touched him again, saying: “Only my lord has the right to touch me”. He added that Masoom, while inviting him there, had said that the event would be a “Krishna Mahotsav (festival)”.

***

“This reminds me of Doosri Radha,” says a writer whom I’ve accompanied to the launch of Talespin— a book of short stories by Sanjay Chopra, a pilot with Air India and husband of actor Tisca Chopra. I’d narrated the story to him only an hour ago. It is the evening of December 11 and we are at Olive, a posh Italian restaurant in the suburb of Bandra, Mumbai. The party has a smattering of Hindi film actors such as Perizaad Zorabian, Simone Singh, Boman Irani, Arshad Warsi and Gul Panag. Zorabian is compering the event. Singh and Irani have read from the book. Warsi comes up on stage towards the end, in a checked shirt that is half-unbuttoned to expose his chest, and a hand wrapped in a crepe bandage, to say that he had never thought that his friend, the author Sanjay Chopra, could write, but then Chopra had mailed him two of his stories one day and “Shit, I thought. This guy’s sensitive”.

What prompts the writer to make the comparison to Doosri Radha, possibly, is that after the readings, and the kind words, each actor has been mobbed by reporters asking questions that don’t seem to pertain to the book in any way. Panag speaks about writers in the movies and hundred years of Indian cinema. Irani talks about films and writing as well, and about the importance of the written word, and on whether he’s attending Vidya Balan’s wedding. He ends one interview saying: “Agar aapke paas koi bhi opinion hai, to aap writer ban sakte hain, agar aap bol sakte hain, to aap writer ban sakte hain. Agar aap nahin bhi bol sakte hain, toh bhi aap writer ban sakte hain (If you have any opinion whatsoever, you can be a writer. If you have a voice, you can be a writer. Even if you don’t have a voice, you can be a writer)”. Warsi is asked by a journalist whether all the ills of society can be blamed on cinema (he disagrees) and also what food he likes to eat. Among the more outrageous things he has tasted, he says, are raw frogs.

***

It is December 19, 2012. At Crossword Bookstore, Juhu, in the fiction section, actor Anshuman Jha (who played the protagonist in one of the segments of Dibakar Banerjee’s ensemble Love Sex Aur Dhokha) is reading a passage from Revenge Of The Naked Princess:

“Princess Darshana Kamya Kathodi jumped into the air like a wild cat in the jungle, twirled to a perpendicular position and kicked Brigadier Braganca with her bare, dark brown right foot. She aimed her kick at his groin with all the force her stringy, five-foot-two-inch frame could muster.

The speed and intensity of her attack was impeded a bit by the long and loose ‘ghagra’ that she wore. But the kick from the 18-year-old princess landed on its target with so much force that the six-foot-four-inch bulky Braganca fell on his back with a thud on the red polished stone floor of Princess Darshana’s bedroom.

As waves of pain coursed through his groin, Braganca screamed ‘Mama’ in agony… ”

Jha goes on for a couple of paragraphs more, then says: “This is entertaining writing. It grips you. (To the author of the book, Oswald Pereira) You’ve hooked me on to fiction. Thank you.” Jha also informs us, very helpfully, that the first piece of fiction he had read was Pereira’s previous book The Newsroom Mafia, a story of how the underworld exercised great influence over the media, released last year (before that, he says, he was only an “autobiography reader”).

Revenge Of The Naked Princess is a potboiler set in the middle of the 16th Century, when the King of Portugal, John III, ordered that civil and military bodies should assist the clergy in converting native Indians to Christianity. Upon his orders a conversion brigade wages war on a local tribe in the Yeoor Hills, now in Thane, and its princess.

“It was really from my heart,” says Pereira about the book. “One of the characters could be me.”

“It’s not easy to write about one’s own religion,” he goes on. “You face a lot of criticism. But I think, among my Christian friends, there were a lot of Christian friends who agreed that conversion was forced, that it was not a good thing to do. And others who felt this shouldn’t be written about.”

When one of the audience members asks Pereira whether it is wise to bring up such incidents from the past, after people have found their closure with such “dark tales” from history, he says: “You learn about the present only when you know about the past. We’re born over and over again. What happens in the past stays with you. I wanted to remind Christians about this, the conversions.”

A tricky conundrum— the present and the past, the past present. In the not so recent past, on the night of January 22, 1999, Missionary Graham Staines was set ablaze with his two sons while they were sleeping in their station wagon. In the still less recent past, in August 2008, riots against Christians broke out in Kandhamal, triggered by the killing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Lakshmananda Saraswati. At least 38 people were killed. Soon after, in September 2008, well over 20 churches were vandalized in Karnataka. None of these incidents are recalled at this launch; no questions are raised about the impact Pereira’s novel can possibly have: a book by a Christian revisiting crimes in the name of Christianity, sold to the masses at an easily affordable price of Rs 125, prone to being transformed into juicy propaganda material by Hindu chauvinists.

Instead, these gems.

On being asked about the difference between spirituality and religion, actress Smita Jaykar goes on to say: “I’m a Hindu, my hair-dresser’s a Christian and my make-up man’s a Muslim. We call ourselves Amar Akbar Anthony. Thankfully even they, though not so educated, don’t ever say I will not come to a Hindu temple, they know when Datta Jayanti is and when Shravan Mahina starts, even more than I know.”

Jha: “I was born in Allahabad, and there was a mosque right in front of my house. My uncle didn’t let me go there. He said: They won’t allow you inside. One day later I just walked in.”

Pereira validates these inane utterances by explaining, “If you read the book, the message is the peaceful co-existence of religions.”

“It’s about the guts of a writer,” says Jha, in turn, talking about Pereira and how he wrote this book without fear of opposition from his community. “If he wasn’t scared of the bhais back then (when he wrote The Newsroom Mafia) why should he be scared of anyone now?”

I’m still trying to remember the last time underworld dons attacked a fiction writer for writing about the mafia.

Thus spake two “renowned actors” we were invited to hear. The third, sadly, hasn’t turned up. But spiritual guru Dr. Rajshri does a good job of filling in. She begins by advertising that she has cured many diseases through Karma healing, and has also helped so many cancer patients, of course. She goes on to commend the ‘spirituality’ inherent in a chapter of the book, and to say that the difference between spirituality and religion is that while the latter is “materialistic”, the former is not. Also, before leaving the venue, she says to Pereira: “Now that I’ve met you I will read your book properly”.

That leaves us, finally, with the “Celebrity Author”. “One of the reasons I loved reading your book was because it’s the sort of stuff I love writing,” says Ashwin Sanghi. “When you don’t know what is fiction and what is fact.”

Understandably. Sanghi’s last book The Krishna Key, is a page-turner which after a series of wild historical conspiracy theories (warning: spoiler ahead) concludes in its climax, rather disappointingly, that a magical Hindu alchemist’s stone is lodged inside the dome of the Taj Mahal.

Seeds for this, as well as other ideas in this novel, can be found in the thoughts of Hindu revisionist writer P. N. Oak, founder of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, who in his book Taj Mahal: The True Story laid down why he believed the Taj Mahal was actually a Shiva temple. Oak also went on to say the Vatican was a Hindu temple. And that the papacy was a Vedic priesthood. And that Christianity had actually evolved from ‘Krishna-Neeti’.

***

I had last thought of Oak on a pleasant Delhi winter morning in 2011, in the middle of a casual chat with historian Dr. G. S. Khwaja, at the lobby of Delhi’s India International Centre. Dr. Khwaja, who is Director of Epigraphy at the Archaeological Survey of India, Nagpur, was telling me how people wouldn’t stop writing letters to his office asking whether the Taj Mahal was actually a temple. As if that was the only thing worth resolving in the scheme of history. “Educated people!” he exclaimed, very distraught. “All they want to know is whether the Taj Mahal was a temple.”

***

But to be fair, Sanghi seems to be trying to strike a balance of fundamentalisms, of sorts, in his bestseller by providing for antagonists who are evil Hindu fanatics. Pereira seems to see no need for doing this.

“If you look at organized religions the world over, you will see they have common roots,” Sanghi continues. “Take the ‘A’ out of ‘Abraham’, and you will get ‘Brahma’. And while Abraham’s consort was called Sarah, Brahma’s consort was Sarah-swati.”

“Wow,” says Jaykar.

“You have one holy trinity that is Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, and another which is the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Sanghi says. “And if you put two triangles of the two trinities together you get the Star, of David.”

“Wow,” says Jaykar.

A journalist in the front row, who had asked Pereira a while back whether his novel, set in the 16th century, was autobiographical in any way (Pereira had denied this), stirs.

“So if you look at these things, you really wonder: what were the crusades for?” Sanghi goes on.

The journalist nods and says: “Politics.”