15/5/2011

Notes

1) Finally saw Lagaan yesterday afternoon. I can remember when it was released in Britain; a film which seemed to capture its moment and reach an audience that wouldn't normally be attracted to Bollywood cinema. It's a really enjoyable movie, in that cartoonish way that in my admittedly limited experience seems to be characteristic of a lot of Bollywood cinema. And it had an interesting subtext beyond the obvious (the Eevil British Empire!), although I'm not sure you'd be able to see that without an Indian explaining the references as you watched. What I found really interesting was a comparison I saw with a film made about 5 years later, Rang De Basanti, which would have been the very first Bollywood film I saw if only the DVD hadn't screwed up 15 minutes before the end. Both films star Aamir Khan, and in different ways draw upon colonial Indian history to try and say something to India's present. And both films contain the trope of a white English women educating young Indian men, which is...interesting.

2) Whilst hunting for Spearhead from Space photographs I found a really interesting blog post about the serial, which contextualised the story in terms of its production history and contemporary culture. It's interesting to hear that the BBC were considering cancelling the show in 1969 after Patrick Troughton finished his run. Not the first time that would occur. The decision to exile the Doctor to earth was also part of an overall aim to bring a stronger element of realism to the show, an element which was replaced in the following season with a more 'comic book' approach. I was particularly taken with this section which grounds the shows themes in the late 60s/early 70s:

"Gradually, as Season 7 progresses, it offers a reflection and commentary on the legacy of Wilson’s ‘white heat’ and on Tony Benn's then role as Minister of Technology (arguably symbolised throughout Season 7 in all the various factories, installations and special projects used for good or ill).

"With this theme also comes an acknowledgement of the rise of new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, the impact of economic and industrial recession with their resulting strikes and blackouts, the rise of corporate culture and the loss of Empire. This is all seen through the refractive mirror of an alternative, future Britain with its own space programme, research into nuclear power and drilling projects as emblematic of a still thriving world power.

"That view also coincides with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s best-seller of 1970, Future Shock. He suggested society was being so rapidly restructured, emerging as it was from the industrial revolution and hurtling towards, and transforming into, a ‘super-industrial’ society, that it would leave major casualties in its wake. People would be overwhelmed by such progress, and this technological, biological and social acceleration would leave them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – the 'future shock' of the book’s title. Holmes's use of plastic as a symbol of this feeling of being overwhelmed by modernisation, of the synthetic in contrast to the real, the obsession with inanimate objects given life, is expressed in both Auton stories through the mass production and commodification of plastic goods and the use of 'new techniques' in manufacturing.

"The new realism ushered in by Holmes's story and Sherwin's vision for the series also see a number of characters, usually the victims of attack, enter a realm of hysteria where their states of mind become subjected to unmanageable fear or emotional excesses. We can correlate Toffler’s ‘future shock’ and the symptoms of "shattering disorientation" in Spearhead From Space with the much revered high street attack from the Autons, the hunting down of Ransom and the Auton attack on Seeley’s cottage as the best examples of how the theme of ‘domestic terror’ operates in the programme, creating unease, dislocation and stress in an everyday location and thus making it extraordinary. 

"The fear of invasion, possession and death is not only more firmly embedded into an earthbound setting but also mines the inner fears, troubles and preoccupations of the British citizens of the Seventies. At the time there was much concern about the rapid changes to society, science and technologies out of control, mistrust of politicians and bureaucrats, worries about industry, jobs and the environment as well as class and gender divisions. Spearhead offers an overt representation of the ‘other’ in the physical form of monsters from outer space walking down the high street and through their appropriation of familiar materials, objects and their control of people."

(from cathoderaytube)

3) Kundera's nostalgia is interesting because his disdain for much of present day culture has a far more clear eyed and rational feel to his arguments than any simple reactionary. Yet, take the quote I put up the other week. Try a thought experiment. Imagine someone born in Britain in 1800, who may have lived 65 years and died in 1865. In that stretch of time such an individual would have lived through rapidly increasing industrialisation, the crowning of Victoria, the death of the Queen's consort, the year of revolutions in 1848, and goodness knows what else that I can't remember of the history of the first half of the 19th century. In other words, such a person would indeed have lived through more than one historical period. Dickens, who lived a very similar stretch of time, from 1812 to 1870 can certainly be said to have done. His later novels bear considerable witness to that. George Eliot's later novels demonstrate a similar change in their depiction of provincial England coming into contact with the wider national stage. So I wonder, is it only our nostalgia which assumes the past to have been far more static than it was? Our nostalgia which compresses the differences between different periods which would have been so much more apparent to those people who were living then.

4)

"Walk and talk, talk and walk; that was his new job. As he went along the street, he put his hand on anything it could reach. A fore hydrant, a railing, a kid's head became so many markers along his route"

Francois Truffaut, "A Portrait of Humphrey Bogart" (1958)

" One of the fine moments in 1940's film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign"

Manny Farber, "Introduction", Negative Space (1971)

5) I'm fascinated by this review by John Clute of a new collection of uncollected, mostly early stories by Joan Aiken:

"Almost all the stories assembled in The Monkey's Wedding...flow with a porcelain lucidity and gaiety that manifests the high energy of Aiken's early prime, and also because they are not only about Ago, but were written then: deep in the world of England just before the Beeching cuts began to poison the wells of community. The crystal-clear but flowing joie de vivre of the book—eight of the tales included here empolder courtships, most ending in marriages—comprises an epithalamium to wells of doing and saying and living not yet half-dead with drought. Some are fantasy; some are comedic within narrower frames. None seem specifically written for children: but almost nothing she ever wrote barred any reader from entering. A bit like A. E. Coppard or H. E. Bates but immensely faster, Joan Aiken caught and coiled the land of her birth into tales told: tales that fabulated England into a Matter that seemed unkillable.

"To read these stories now is to see that something happened."

He articulates, far more succinctly than I could manage, my own sense of what has been lost. Something is always happening.

Old British Stuff in Bombay

What's in a name?

Bombay, because that's the name my wife insists on. The change of name to Mumbai occurred sometime in the early nineties I think, a rather obvious post-colonial reaction. "Let's change a name left over from the British Empire for something more 'Indian'." Not that everyone seems to be aware of the change. The nurse who gave me my injections before we left wasn't aware that Bombay and Mumbai were the same place. To be fair, she also said she's never visited, so why should she know? It seems a reasonable mistake to make about a country that's so far away. More interesting is the way for people who live there, the two names seem to be interchangeable, as though 20 years haven't quite managed to erase the older name.

According to my wife, they should have stuck with the older name anyway, for all its supposed imperialist associations. Without the British, there would be no Bombay. The city is built around a bay and islands which were originally little more than swamp, although I think there were still a number of fishing villages. It was claimed by the Portuguese who then gave it to the British as a wedding gift. Seeking to obscure the rather unattractive aspects of this gift, they named it (in Portuguese) "Good bay", which was then anglicised as Bombay. It was the British whose engineering and land reclamation projects transformed the place into the beginning of the huge urban environment that it's since become. The name Mumbai comes from a Hindu goddess who was associated with a village further up the coast which has now been swallowed up by the spread of the city, but which had nothing to with the original islands which became Bombay.

This at least is the story as I understand it. There's actually very little of the city that could be termed 'Old British stuff' since so much of it has been built and developed since Independence, but we saw some of it in the oldest part of the city which we were able to visit one day. I must admit that I love that style of architecture, whatever it's associations with colonialism and imperialism. Then again, without the history of the British Empire and the association between our two countries, would I have ever met my wife? It feels silly to put it like that, when we're talking about something which is history. I don't, so far as I know, have any ancestors who were involved in the British Empire beyond presumably enjoying something of the economic prosperity it must have brought to the home country. And I'm a good left wing liberal, so of course I don't approve of imperialism, but I'm becoming increasingly aware that on a personal level, the meetings between the different cultures must have been far more complex than someone like myself might instinctively suppose. That after all, is part of what William Dalrymple was trying to show in his book White Mughals.

But then again, we're part of a different story anyway. We met at a British University and are part of a more modern movement of people around the globe. Well, she is at least. I still live in the same city in which I've lived for the past twenty years. And more importantly, we're our own story. Just us.

Horn OK Please

If I say that I found Bombay to be hot and very crowded, I wouldn't be making a very original observation. So many conversations involved complaints about the traffic (which has of course gotten so much worse) or the weather (and we British think we talk about the weather a lot!). We were there for a wedding, so I didn't really get to see very much of the city, which isn't after all much of a tourist city anyway. My first Indian wedding and it was my own! I won't therefore say very much about it because that's personal. What did strike me were the commonalities I could see. In the humanities we're, rightly I think, taught to be suspicious of universals, but that doesn't mean that they can't be found. Clearly, wedding photographers are going to be really annoying wherever you are. Although to be fair, it's their job to take good pictures, so maybe that's unavoidable. More seriously, the vows (which were in Sanskrit, so I suppose I could have agreed to anything!) as far as they were explained to me, seem very similar to what we would agree to in a ceremony in the Church of England. To love and protect. Care for each other. Share all we have. Honour and obey (okay, that's been dropped from the C of E, and I don't really expect her to anyway). Really, what else are they going to be? What else is a marriage about, wherever you're from? Of course, the outward form of the ceremony is very different...

But that's what Bombay was like. Different of course, but also familiar. As a long time enthusiast for the novels of Charles Dickens, I could see something of the city he wrote about in Bombay far more than I ever have in modern day London. The again, whilst Dickens is firmly associated in our minds now with the mid-Victorian city he himself always remained attached to an earlier city, so much of which had disappeared by the middle of the nineteenth century. His later fiction is mostly either explicitly set in the past or else it overlays the city of his boyhood onto the rapidly changing present. That's what we saw in Bombay: a rapidly changing city, with whole streets transformed or newly driven through what were previously slums. And extremes of wealth and privilege jammed next to poverty (which, to be fair, can still be seen in modern day London). My Dad made another interesting comparison, to Bristol where he grew up in the 1950s. People live outside, in a way that we used to do in Britain, before poverty was drawn inside by the attractions of television. And yes, we did see poverty, mostly through the closed window of an air conditioned car. If it's worse than what you can see on the streets of Britain, that's only because there are more children. And it is saddening, heart breaking at times, but it's also frightening how quickly you can become used to it.

Too obvious

In trying to write about India and some of my impressions, I wonder if I haven't ended up focusing on the obvious stereotypes. The Empire, poverty, etc. We were also there for the Cricket World Cup and witnessed some of the attendant celebrations. I certainly didn't intend to do that when I started writing this piece.

Or else I've ended up talking about home, but perhaps that's something you do when you go travelling, or even just spend time people who are visiting from abroad (I know a lot of foreign students studying in England and it's easy to find yourself talking about cultural differences). The differences and similarities become an obvious point of comparison.

Partly, it's because the things that made the greatest impression on me - our wedding, the new family I'm now a part of - are private and I don't want to write about too much that's personal on this blog. So I fall back on trying to frame things in a more general, if cliched, framework. I was there for less than a month after all, and inevitably you visit a place with unspoken assumptions. Nor did I really visit any of the obvious tourist parts of India, apart from a few days in Jaipur. Mostly I was in an ordinary part of a working city, surrounded by people going about their daily lives and general business. It's beautiful, yes, in a way, because I'm someone who's always found beauty in urban landscapes, but that's always been a problematic beauty.

Rushdie and Kundera

I made the comparison with Dickens above, but I could have just easily made the same point about Salmon Rushdie's fiction, since Bombay is clearly his city, or at least it was in his earlier novels (I've read nothing he's written since The Moor's Last Sigh). Perhaps it's just that there's something rather Dickensian about his fiction. I do also feel as though I understand Rushdie a little better since I've seen a few Bollywood films, and yes, his fiction clearly owes something to this city. Reading Milan Kundera's Encounter over the last few days, I was especially struck by the points he makes about exile. It was similar to a point Rushdie also makes in one of the reviews collected in Imaginary Homelands. Responding to Geoff Dyer's first book about John Berger he points out that whilst Berger has always paid attention to the experience of migrating labourers, he fails to acknowledge the full complexity of the experience of migration. Berger always sees it as an essentially tragic experience, a loss of one's homeland. Rushdie, like Kundera, points out that exile and migration can be a liberating experience. Of course, Kundera, for all that he was fleeing totalitarianism in the mid-1970s, was still, like Rushdie, something of a privilaged migrant. It's still true though, we do all carry our homelands within us.

Books read during the trip:

George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, because what else would you want to take to India with you than a Victorian classic of English provincial life?

Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof. One of my wife's favourites when she was growing up. It was the copy she won at the age of 12 that I read. A incredible novel of adolescence, all the more incredible because it was written by an author who was an adolescent at the time. Also interesting to read in conjunction with Rumor Godden's fiction. For her India is something which is foreign to her characters, something overwhelming. Whereas for Ruskin Bond it's precisely that sense of being overwhelmed by the life of India which his characters want to be a part of. The world is the means of discovering themselves, from which there is ultimately no way back.

J.L. Carr, What Hetty Did. Another tale of an adolescent escaping from an intolerable home life. I don't quite agree with the journalist quoted on the back cover copy; I did occasionally feel the 72 year old author behind her words, but Hetty is still a marvellously engaging creation, a wonderful example of spoken English.

Tim Pears, In the Place of Fallen Leaves. That rarest of things, English magic realism.

Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life. Not so interesting for his critical insights (although they are there), but rather for the passion Truffaut brought to the watching of films. Similar to David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Cinema it becomes a kind of refracted autobiography, inspiring the reader not only to go and watch more films, but also to pay better attention.

Films seen whilst on board the plane:

Mike Leigh, Another Year. Where Ruskin Bond finds a metaphor for life in the river, Mike Leigh finds one in an ordinary suburban allotment. Utterly inspiring.

Red, because I like Warren Ellis' grumpy old men. Adapting a short work, the script does a very effective job of preserving his caustic voice. It's still rather irritating though that out of our 4 or 5 heroes, the only one who dies is the one black man (Morgan Freeman), and the only one who gets injured is the one woman (Helen Mirren, clearly having a ball).