Festival d'Automne : India Retrospectives

Jahnu Baruah

Festival d’Automne  or the Paris Autumn Festival is a four month long celebration of contemporary arts. Every year, from September to December the festival hosts over 40 events that can attract up to 100,000 visitors.  Founded in 1972, this festival has grown over the year into a popular event on the Parisian Calendar

In collaboration with Jeu de Paume, the festival this year showcased works of two of India’s iconic auteurs Jahnu Baruah and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. As a tribute to the diversity of Indian cinema, the works of these two filmmakers have been chosen.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan directing Mamooty

Both Baruah and Gopalakrishnan were once trained at Pune Film Institute. From Assam, Jahnu Barua directed twelve feature films, which explore social aspects of rural India in a humanist and realist vein, while Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s documentaries and feature films form an ode to the arts and history of his native Kerala.

Both these directors had remained mostly outside India’s thriving film Industry often called Bollywood and made films which were seldom commercially successful. But there continuing success in making politically relevant sincere films is a testimony of India’s great cinematic tradition once initiated by the like of Satyajit Ray. 

Mallika Sarbhai's Open Letter

Dancer, choreographer, publisher, activist, writer, actor, politician - who is Mallika Sarabhai? She's all that but she prefers to call herself a communicator. She cares about non-violence, about nature, about cruelty, about poverty, about justice, about greed, about deprivation and, above all, about people.

Sarabhai had started as a film artiste, but later branched out into many streams. She is one of the few Gujaratis who is not happy with Narendra Modi's Gujarat. Sarabhai is a socialist and has even contested in an election against LK Advani. ther are many who do not like her, but nobody can deny her steadfast commitment to what she does. And we like the way she makes no bones about she means.

Here is what she write to Anna hazare, for whose anti-corruption-movement she has no sympathy. Here however she is speaking about Anna's shocking endorsement of Narendra Modi's development plans.

Dear Annaji,

We are deeply shocked by your endorsement of Narendra Modi's rural development. There has been little or no rural development in this state. In fact, gauchar lands and irrigated farmlands have been stealthily taken by the government and sold off at ridiculous prices to a small club of industrialists. There has been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for nearly seven years so hundreds of complaints against corruption are lying unheard. From the Sujalam Sufalam scam of 1700 crores to the NREGS boribund scam of 109 crores, the fisheries scam of 600 crores, every department is involved in thousands of crores of scams.

The poor and rural people are being sold to Modi's friends the industrialists. The state is in terrible debt because of his largess to industry while 21 lakh farmers wait for compensation. Your endorsement is appalling and we will be forced to distance ourselves from the Lokpal movement unless it is irrevocably retracted.

Sincerely
Mallika Sarabhai


Is Annaji listening? 

22nd Raindrop Dance Festival

An Indian Classical Dance Festival is a rarity. Not many people know that such a festival does indeed happen every year in Mumbai. And this is the 21st year of the the festival. Started by Kathak dancer Uma Dogra’s Sam Ved Society, the Raindrop Indian Dance festival has been showcasing fine Indian classical dance talents from India and abroad for the two decades.

Srilakshmi Govardhan

The 21st Raindrops was  dedicated to the memory of Guru Smt. Reba Vidyarthy and it featured  four classical styles and performances by six talented dancers. Following the success the format for the 22nd festival which just concluded at Mini Theatre, PL Deshpande Maharashatra Kala Academy was expanded running into three days instead of the usual two. The festival was to  a feast to the senses.

The first performer of the festival was Arundhati Patwardhan who is the daughter and disciple of renowned Bharatanatyam exponent Sucheta Chapekar. Arundhati executed the pure dance and abhinaya aspect with ease and mastery in numbers like the Kanakadasa composition "Krishna Nee Begane Baro" and in the Balamuralikrishna Thillana in Vrindavanasaranga ragam. Arundhati concluded the performance with a Meera Bhajan that exposed varied facets and episodes in the life of Lord Krishna.
 

Shaswati Ghosh

Srilakshmi Govardhanan’s Kuchipudi was noteworthy for its elegance, precision and the natural flair for expressions. Having learnt Kuchipudi from teachers like Pasumarthy Rattiah Sharma, Vyjayanti Kashi and Manju Bhargavi, she has developed her own style that is attractive and impressive. While Lakshmi succeeded in portraying the aspect of both Shiva and Shakti in the Ardharishwara number, she was amazing in the Tarangam that incorporated the Poothana Moksham in a commendable manner. The portrayal of Poothana left a lasting impression on the spectators and Lakshmi deserves to be seen more often on the performing platform. 

Tall and slim, Shaswati Garai Ghosh is a powerful Odissi dancer who is blessed with all the qualities necessary for a fine Odissi dancer. In fact, her performance reminded me of the late Odissi dancer Protima Bedi. Shaswati’s performance was noteworthy for the typical Odissi elegance, accuracy and large expressive eyes which was evident in the numbers Shiva Parvati Sabda and Krishna Janma Katha that portrayed the dramatic and unique birth of Lord Krishna at midnight. Shaswati is the ardent disciple of renowned exponent Sharmila Biswas and has performed with her at various festivals in India and abroad.

Not A Sly Company, Really



Rahul Bhattacharya

 In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, where he meets his life's love a wild and feisty lady by the name of Jan.

Rahul Bhattacharya's first book Sly Company of People Who Care is based on his own personal journey that he had undertaken, perhaps to write. The novel thus has the depth of a truely felt story, and gives amazing glimpses into the writers own insecurities and tribulations.

Rahul Bhattacharya was a surprise discovery at the Hindu literary festival of 2011. But since then the book went up the charts and finally this year he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. May be we are about to witness one more Arvind Adiga.

But that is waht it all looks on the surface. Unlike most other wirters of his age, Rahul is not at all crazy about this sudden attention. Surprisingly he does not have any blog, any facebook page and most of the time, he is not available over phone either. Rahul shuns flashlights, is curiously shy as a person and is very reluctant to even speak about his work. His undesrstated approach to life is amply visible in the way he has written his book. The title of his book appears at the end not as a sentence but as a final sign-off, to reprise the theme of the book. Its appearance in the text comes earlier. In a scene in a library, the narrator encounters in a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the Dutch West India Company, someone's scrawled marginalia. The colonial companies were very sly, and so is the company people keep in the book.

The novel, thankfully, resists offering easy characterization of a culture that has to be seen and heard before it can be understood, of a place “ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.”


An Excerpt

“A prize like this means a lot”

I was in the room when the prize was announced but I could have easily been outside. I was drinking a cup of tea and feeling rather relieved that my last event of the festival was finished, when I was called in. My anxiety in Chennai had to do with the events. I had practically forgotten about the prize. I was more concerned about whether I was going to address Shashi Tharoor as Dr. Tharoor or Mr. Tharoor or Shashi during our session.

I was blissfully calm about my prospects because I was certain I would not win. There were proper giants on that list. People have mentioned my Amarnath remark. It occurred to me afterwards that Amarnath had dismissed the West Indian tail. Madan Lal it was who’d removed Richards, Haynes and Gomes! I don’t think my family rated my chances either. My mother and sister were watching “Ra.One” in Mumbai and learnt of it much later. My wife, who was also the editor of this book, was eating dinner in Delhi’s Goa Niwas and said she’d forgotten about the announcement.

To win a prize like this means a lot to a writer. There is new interest in the book, which is wonderful. The purse is generous and buys you time and space to think about your next work. It’s easy for books to disappear. Sly Company for instance is set in an obscure land, written in a somewhat obscure tongue and has not had a big publicity campaign. So I feel very grateful to critics, the reviewers and in this instance, the judges, who have spread some love for it. And I appreciate sincerely The Hindu’s efforts to support writers and writing

Ice candy to water: the strange case of Bapsi Sidwa

Many a films have been made based on successful novels written in the past. But Bapsi Sidhwa is perhaps the only writer who has done quite the opposite. She has written a novel based on a already made film. We are talking about the film "Fire" made by Deepa Mehta in the year 2005. Following the huge success of the film, Bapsi Sidhwa, the Pakistani writer wrote a literary version of the same theme named Water: the novel.

   

Deepa Mehta and a clip from her famous film 'Water"'

   

Incidentally relationship between Bapsi Sidwa and Deepa Mehta goes back to her first major film "Earth", which was based on Bapsi's 1991 novel : The Ice Candy Man. The novel though, extremely well written, was however not much of a success in the market. It was when the novel was used to make the film that it earned its well deserved recognition.

Taking the cue Bapsi Sidhwa then changed the very title of the book from "Ice Candy man" to "Cracking India", in a hope to apeal to those readers who had seen the movie but not had heard about the book.

                                                                      

                                               Ice Candy man (left) renamed as Cracking India (right)

The whole episode thus once again reiterates how well written novels often fail to make it till a film is made on them. This has happened many times in the past. But for the first time a writer taking cue from this trend decided to first change the name of the novel and write a new novel on a plot which has already been depicted in a film.

Bapsi Sidhwa, born in 1938 in Pakistan is presently teaches at Houston.