Jab Raat Hai Aisi Matwaali

MJ Akbar's 2004 'Byline' column on re-watching the colored version of Mughal-e-Azam. It originally appeared in the Asian Age newspaper.

----------

Now that George Bush can confess to getting "teared up" and win an election, I can make

my own confession. I am a total sap for movies like Mughal-e-Azam, the wondrous

classic about Emperor Akbar, his son Salim, and the dancing girl, Anarkali. The casting

is perfection. Prithviraj as emperor: no one has quivered quite like him. Dilip Kumar as

Salim: no one has crossed a heart with his sword with such poetry. Madhubala as

Anarkali: no beauty better deserved a prince. Give me a map of my country rising above

a plasticine medieval-Delhi-skyline on a large screen, a sonorous voice saying ‘Main

Hindustan hoon,’ dollops of the sweetest language in the world, Urdu, and my eyes fill

up like a river in the monsoon. Thank God movie halls are dark. What I was not prepared

for was the intensity of the rest of the audience. It was a late night show in the heart of

Delhi and the hall was full for the colour version of a black-and-white film first screened

in 1960. I thought that only Sixties’ groupies would turn up to relive their comparatively

innocent youth. It was an age when virginal love was considered scandalous, so fantasy

had a wonderful time. The Sixtians were there, and looked frostbitten by reality. They

had found husbands instead of Dilip Kumar, and wives instead of Madhubala.

The young people in the audience were clearly anthropologists who had come to check

out what made the Neanderthals tick. They must have been shocked to discover that it

was songs like Pyar kiya to darna kya, jab pyar kiya to darna kya; Pyar kiya koi chori

nahin ki, chup chup aahen bharna kya! (When I have loved, why should I fear? It is love,

not theft, so why should I sigh from behind a curtain?) It would need a social historian

better than I to convey how powerful, even revolutionary, the idea was that love

transcended fear, for every father was an emperor then, demanding the destruction of

love in the name of some higher social principle. Emperor Akbar would not allow his son

Salim — the future Emperor Jahangir — to marry Anarkali, a kaneez, a palace girl much

above a courtesan but much below a princess because the honour of Timurid blood and

the demands of empire would not permit a leap over social walls that held the

establishment in place. In thousands of mohallas across India, millions of fathers would

not permit a leap over the walls of caste and religion and language. And just as Anarkali,

played by Madhubala, accepted in the end, so did millions of women who dreamt of a

brief moment of defiance and glory that they could call their own and take to their

graves, secret even from their children. All around me every Madhubala had become just

another mother. Sitting to my left was a lady who, midway through the movie, spoke

very softly into her mobile, a transgression I forgave for she was talking to a hospital

about a patient. As in the last moments of the film a frozen Madhubala walked away to

freedom and misery, bereft of a love she had been forced to betray, and the song in the

background became a chorus of catharsis for us all, I could not help singing along with

Lata Mangeshkar: Khuda nigehbaan ho tumhara, dharakte dil ka payaam le lo, Tumhari

duniya se jaa rahe hain, utho hamara salaam le lo (God protect you, my love, take a

message from a trembling heart; I leave your world, broken, but rise and take my last

salute). The lady next to me began to sing as well. I am sure that both of us wished,

strangers as we were, that we had the courage to sing louder.

These are some of the things that could shock the young. In a film of 20 reels,

unravelling over three and a half hours, there is not a single item number. There is no hint

of cleavage. Even the men are overdressed. The highest-paid playback singer in the

movie is the classicist Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, who was given Rs 25,000 for

Shubh din aayo and Prem jogan ban… at a time when Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad

Rafi received about a thousand rupees per song. (Classical Indian music in a popular

movie? Isn’t that truly shocking?) Bahar, Anarkali’s competitor for Salim’s affections,

played by Nigar Sultana, arguably as beautiful as Madhubala, wears a light veil when she

goes to meet a stranger. Madhubala says namaaz for the life of Durjan Singh, son of Man

Singh, who has just rescued her at the cost of his life to keep the word of a Rajput. The

emperor prays to Allah, through the sufi divine Salim Chishti of Agra, for a son, and

accepts prasad from his Hindu wife, Jodha Bai, after she has worshipped Lord Krishna

on Janmaashtami. I could hear the credulity of one youngish voice break down in the

hall. The scene was set just before the epic battle between father and son (the battle itself

is a masterpiece of fusion between K. Asif’s direction and R.D. Mathur’s camera). A

maulvi ties a tabeez on the right arm of the emperor with the famous victory verse of the

Holy Quran Nasrumminallah-e-fateh-un-qareeb. Then a Hindu priest blesses the emperor

as well with a saffron mark on the forehead. "Arrey," asked a querulous voice, "yeh

Hindu hai ke Mussalman hai? (I say, is this chap a Hindu or a Muslim?)" The times are

more liberal now, but the understanding is much less.

Why hasn’t a chain of Mughal-e-Azam boutiques opened up? K. Asif brought master

tailors from Delhi, and specialists in zari from Surat to create an exquisite array of

clothes. But the piece de resistance is the jewellery, made by goldsmiths from Hyderabad

and craftsmen from Kolhapur. It was the most expensive, as well as the slowest, film

made till then, and the passion shows in every intricate detail. The clothes may not find

takers in a culture of pace, but the jewellery that Bahar wears would lead to competitive

bidding in any elite environment. It could even be called the Bahar line. I visualise a

jewellery fashion show ablaze with Mughal gold, ruby, sapphire, emerald, diamond and

baskets of pearl. The models would wear jewellery and nothing else, of course. That

would put their pictures in every newspaper and magazine around the world.

Bahar’s high moments come during two qawwalis in which she is matched against

Anarkali. The first, Teri mahfil mein kismat aazman ke ham bhi dekhenge, Ghari bhar to

tere nazdeek aakar ham bhi dekhenge (Let me test my fortune in your presence, Let me

spend a moment near you), establishes the interplay of character, ambition, opportunity,

love and tragedy. Prince Salim judges the two women. The rose goes to the upbeat

Bahar, the thorn to Anarkali, who knows that tears are so often the price of love. She

accepts the thorn, and tells the prince, "Kanton ko murjhanein ka gham nahi hota…

Thorns never have to face the sorrow of decay."

It is a line that gets derailed in English.

With the ebb of Urdu a civilisation has diminished. Urdu is utterly civil, rooted in values

and anchored in two words that supersede translation: tehzeeb and akhlaq. A "practical"

Urdu-English dictionary defines tehzeeb as civilisation, etiquette, manners, politeness,

courtesy, polish, refinement, instruction, education, discipline, culture. It is all this and

much more, including that very delicate wit that nuances an idea or a sentiment with a

sensitivity that becomes a bridge between lovers and a gulf between antagonists. Akhlaq

is the practice of tehzeeb.

I wondered about the Urdu-deficit in the Delhi theatre hall. Forty five years ago, a film

could be made in superb Urdu for an India-wide audience. Mughal-e-Azam also made

marketing history in 1960 when it was released in 150 theatres simultaneously. Today

film language is a pidgin patois bred outside known cultures. This does not make it good

or bad. To state a fact is not to pass judgment. The relevant point is that the Mughal-e-

Azam audience of 2004 seemed entranced by the music of words, and in the music lay

the meaning. Urdu lives.

The denouement is marked by a qawwali that Bahar sings alone, for the conflict with

Anarkali is over. Love has been defeated by power. There is pyrrhic victory for both

women. Anarkali is permitted to become queen for one night, not — as the emperor

taunts, because a laundi (slave girl) cannot give up the dream of a crown — but because,

as Anarkali retorts, she does not want a future emperor of Hindustan to be remembered

as a man who could not keep his word to a slave. In return, she must drug the prince to

sleep while she is led away by guards to death (in the legend) and desolate freedom (in

the film). Bahar has won the night, but lost the future, for she does not replace Anarkali

in the prince’s affections. But she is permitted her final taunt, and she sings:

Yeh dil ki lagi kam kya hogi, yeh ishq bhala kam kya hoga

Jab raat hai aisi matwali phir subah ka aalam kya hoga!

How will this passion ever diminish, this love ever wither?

When the night is so delirious, imagine what morning will bring!

I have rarely come across a more startling and poignant metaphor for power. This is

the story of every government, yesterday, today and tomorrow. Everyone in power is

permitted the luxury of just one night, and no one ever believes that the night will come

to an end. Deceivers promise a dawn filled with wine, when the truth is that dawn will

bring a drug that will put the miracle to sleep. And you will wake up with nothing around

you except loss; the mind swooning with the memory of what was, and the mouth bitter

with the ash of what might have been.

The Hunt

A version of this appears in the January issue of GQ India.

A master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University was meant to boost my fledgling career. However, six months after coming back home to Delhi, I’m still struggling to find work. I didn’t want to be an unpaid intern or worse, risk being unemployed, which is why I left America. I had already worked too hard at Time Out magazine, running around town looking for story ideas while simultaneously collecting phone numbers of senior journalists who’d help me get my dream job: features editor of a leading Indian magazine like Caravan or GQ. All that was missing was this fancy degree.

Yet, friends and editors have stopped responding to texts and phone calls. I'm now the household errand boy and have to buy medicines, pay electricity bills and get computers fixed. My father has berated me to get a real job; one that involves going to an office, attending meetings and earning a salary, not interviewing a pigeon-caller and visiting a toilet museum, both of which I had to do for Time Out. I really should’ve applied for that unpaid internship as an editorial assistant in Iowa. Better than being a penniless chauffeur to my grandmother.

Admittedly, starting a job hunt was not the first thing on my mind when I returned home. Instead, I wanted to freelance for a while, get some more bylines under my belt and then start looking for something permanent. I don't have rents to worry about, and I don’t pay my own bills, so I thought I should take the risk of working on a piece of long-form journalism. After that three-month-long assignment and a short author interview, I sat back and waited. Now that these stories were out there, the job-hunt would get easier, right?

Wrong. My phone hasn’t been ringing. I’ve often wondered whether it’s on silent mode or the battery is dead. Honestly, this whole Ivy League education feels like a con job. I mean, you work 13-hour days to complete writing assignments – some of those days were incomplete without a dose of anti-anxiety pills – spend thousands of dollars on tuition and living expenses and in the end, you have to return home and become a freelancer.

Now, as a "self-employed journalist", my job involves sending emails, pitching stories, following up with editors, retweeting people on Twitter and posting tweets of my own. My ambition of writing and editing 7,000-word pieces has been reduced to a mere 140 characters.

I’m now writing for anyone who will pay me. I’m only 26, but my family is so worried about my future that they want me find a rich but desperate (read, ugly) girl so I can live off her. My friends have found employment and expense accounts in the corporate world whereas my parents have tightened their wallets so I’m forced to wear faded clothes from five years ago. As if to make me feel worse, property dealers send me spam texts about cheap apartments in Faridabad.

But there’s a silver lining to this dark story: along with all the friends and editors who’ve stopped calling me, PR people have stopped too. It’s not a big perk but as a “self-employed journalist”, you settle for what you get. 

Anatomy of a hit

Just 11 days to go for the release of Salman Rushdie's memoirs. Here's an essay I wrote about his most popular work of fiction during my stint at Columbia Journalism School. 

In the summer of 1981, Salman Rushdie delivered a lecture at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The crowd grew so “unexpectedly large that it had spilled out under the trees and loudspeakers had to be set up to broadcast his voice, a voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of a new age: strong, original and demanding of attention,” recalls Anita Desai in her introduction to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

            Rushdie’s second novel is an arresting allegory for independent India that’s narrated through the life of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – just like his country. He’s endowed with a strong sense of smell, a dripping nose and the ability to teleport himself to wars.

Midnight’s Children is considered the first “Indian” novel because it examined India as a whole rather than being rooted in a particular region.  It gave confidence to future Indian writers that they could write about their country in an English that’s distinctly Indian. It showed publishers in the West that books by Indian writers can be commercial successes. Thirty-one years later, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta is adapting the flamboyant novel into a movie that’s scheduled to release in December this year.

The novel attracted laudatory reviews and commercial success in India when it was published. “It is, in fictional terms, one of the most ferocious indictments of India’s evolution since Independence,” wrote Sunil Sethi in the India Today magazine in 1981. “Salman Rushdie, as a novelist, has chosen his weapons of crucifixion, as few journalists, analysts, soothsayers or historians have or possibly can.” By 1984, the book had sold 4,000 hardback copies and 45,000 paperback editions - substantial figures for an infant publishing industry.

Midnight’s Children closed the Anglicized chapter of Indian writing in English. Rushdie’s predecessors like GV Desani and Mulk Raj Anand depended on Western sensibilities for their success. Desani’s 1948 book All About Mad Hatter was the story of an Anglo-Malay man in search of enlightenment. It created a stir in the literary salons of London rather than the sedate bookstores of India while Anand’s work explored the themes of untouchability. The English poet Anthony Burgess wrote the preface to All About Mad Hatter while EM Forster wrote one for Anand’s book, Untouchables.

The pages of Midnight’s Children opened readers to themes that were never before written about, only experienced. Partition, marginality, abuse of political power and being a Muslim in India bind the pages and the boisterous generations of Saleem Sinai’s family. In doing so, Midnight’s Children followed the path of European and Latin American post-modern literature that mirrored a nation’s progress, in works by such authors as  Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Its success gave a future generation of Indian writers like Mukul Kesavan and Aravind Adiga the confidence to write ambitious novels about India. Kesavan’s 1995 book, Looking Through Glass, is an odyssey through an India gets divided along sectarian lines en route to Independence. Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, touched on themes endemic in contemporary urban Indian discourse: corruption, Hindu-Muslim tensions and an economic rivalry with China.

A contentious element of Midnight’s Children is its prose. Rushdie uses translations of Indian idioms and Bollywood lyrics to make the novel accessible to a wider readership. “His real focus was on Indians speaking in English,” said Amardeep Singh, a professor of Indian literature at LeHigh University. “He showed the world that the language belongs as much to India as it does to the United States and the United Kingdom.” Some critics believe that this was Rushdie’s attempt to make the book appealing to a Western audience. Rushdie himself claimed that he never had an audience in mind for the book. “I didn’t conceive of an ideal reader except perhaps myself,” he said in an interview with the India Today magazine in 1981. “I was trying primarily to write the kind of book about India I would like to read.”

The India of Midnight’s Children was churned in a cauldron fired by the forces of economic liberalization. It gave birth to a new India whose global ambitions and darker realities are now explained by writers like Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga and Sonia Faleiro. Their work seems closer to the phrase ‘Indian writing in English’ than Midnight’s Children. “When I teach Indian literature, Midnight’s Children is a tough sell to my students,” said Singh. “They find it hard to accept the novel as Indian. On the other hand, when I mention Suketu Mehta’s book, their jaws drop.” It is important to distinguish that Midnight’s Children is a novel whereas Mehta’s book, Maximum City, is a riveting memoir about contemporary Bombay. Rushdie uses fantasy and magic realism to tell an allegorical story. Mehta, on the other hand, explains how the city of his birth has changed over time.

 One reason why “Indian writing in English” has come to seem antonymous to Midnight’s Children is the novel’s central theme: partition. In the 31 years since its publication, India has seen the birth of a new generation to which Singh’s students belong. They never experienced the trauma of 1947 nor the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s political power. The only bridge that lessens the gulf between these Midnight’s Grandchildren and those years are history books. Another reason why these students disconnect India from Midnight’s Children is India itself. In his novel, India experiences authoritarian rule and fights full-scale wars with Pakistan. The book portrays Indira Gandhi as the root cause of all that plagues democracy in India and suggests that her departure will ensure the country’s progress. Instead, we’ve made more peace with our neighbor than wars and never experienced authoritarian rule. Indira is no longer alive but her departure hasn’t reduced India’s deep social, political, sectarian and regional fissures.

Midnight’s Children, however, set a frame for a future generation of Indian writers who chronicled the chasms of India in their fiction and non-fiction works. Be it Kesavan or Adiga, Faleiro or Mehta, they all write for India and of India. Their works condition the English language to Indian sensibilities and reflect their own experience with the country. Back in 1981, the novelist Clark Blaise wrote “Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.” The last 31 years have proved him right.

BOOKS Meet Jamal Joseph author of Panther Baby 04/05 by ColumbiaJournalism | Blog Talk Radio

BOOKS Meet Jamal Joseph author of Panther Baby 04/05 by ColumbiaJournalism | Blog Talk Radio

The Free Speech Campaign

Nilanjana Roy, the redoubtable writer and journalist, has started a campaign to protect and reinforce a fundamental right. The idea is to do a bunch of readings on February 14 (the day when Satanic Verses was banned in 1989) to protest book bans and censorship in the arts. The campaign page suggests that you should organize a public reading (or take part in one) at 3 PM in whichever city you are. If you have a blog, post this poem by Rabindranath Tagore: just like I did.

"We cannot let our republic, our beloved republic, our constitutional republic, our free and free-speaking republic, be hijacked by fear. It happened once in the Emergency. It must never happen again.
We cannot let them close our mouths and eyes and ears.
We cannot let them break the pen or ration the ink. ~ Vikram Seth, speech at the Kolkata Book Fair.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth…
Where the mind is led forward by thee 
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

~ Rabindranath Tagore.


(The poster below was designed by Sanjay Sipahimalani. Check out more on his site.)

The Big Move

For the past five and a half months, this blog has been comatose. That's because I've moved to New York City to pursue a master's program in arts and culture journalism at Columbia University (yay!). My life these days is being ruled by dense academic readings on art, theory, post-modernism, anthropology and a lot of other geeky stuff that's associated with a rigorous grad school program in the arts. Which means no time to for any blogging.

The upside is that I've also taken up a digital skills class where I will learn the intricacies of Wordpress and how to blog on that platform. Once I get the basics in order, I'll be moving this blog to that platform and, hopefully, start blogging on Wordpress with a some alacrity. Till then, the blogspot site will remain dormant (save for the occasional rant/post)

For the time being, though, pop over to my twitter feed and browse the archives for light reading

Green peace

A few reasons to love the Lodhi Gardens. Not that you need any reasons but its a good way to celebrate this beautiful garden's 75th birthday. Did a version of this for (what else) the Time Out Delhi magazine.

It has been 75 years since the land east of Safdarjang’s Tomb was transformed, from a place where kings lay dead to a place where common people feel most alive. In 1936, the residents of Khairpur village were turfed out of the vicinity of the Lodhi tombs, so that the 90-acre Lady Willingdon Park could be planted here. This fortnight we celebrate the Gardens’ 75th birthday.


Democratic mingling It’s the only place in Delhi where Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma or Leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley stroll by as families picnic on the lawns and octogenarians squabble about politics. Anil Ambani’s lobbyist in Delhi, Tony Jesudesan, works his charm on politicians over evening walks. Hopefully the tombs of the dead sultans send a message to today’s proud rulers.
  
The butterfly conservatory Visitors to the gardens will spot a multitude of butterflies, courtesy a three-acre area created solely for butterflies. Thanks to the NDMC Centre for Environmental Management for Degraded Ecosystems and the organisation Green Circle, the butterfly conservatory is insecticide-free and has 22 plants specially chosen to accommodate butterfly larvae.

The greenhouse Within the garden complex, this shaded area shelters plants unable to withstand the Delhi heat. Although the flora isn’t for sale, it attracts students of botany as well as visitors interested in plants like the golden fern.


 Time travel By now, its heritage is unconfined to any particular era. Muhammed Shah Sayyid’s tomb of Delhi quartz is believed to have been built around 1444. The athpula, or eight-tiered bridge, was built by Nawab Bahadur, a nobleman in the court of Akbar; it spanned a canal which was part of the river system that once drained Delhi. The gardens were designed in 1936 by Lady Willingdon, the wife of the Viceroy. In 1968, it was re-landscaped by architect Joseph Allen Stein, who also designed the India International Centre next door.

The trees Not just for sheltering canoodling couples, the garden’s foliage keeps all kinds of secrets: The pale grey bark of the Kaim, for instance, is used to treat colic and fever, while its pinkish-brown timber is used to make cricket bats. The leaves of the Jhinjheri are good for rolling beedis and the oil from Kosam seeds are used to treat skin diseases. The city’s only freshwater mangrove can be found near the entrance to the greenhouse.

Recycled water Don’t think about it too long, but the water used to water the lawns is recycled from the Okhla Sewage Treatment Plant. The NDMC plans to set up a treatment plant at the gardens to ensure it has no effluent smells.

Fourty-four species of birds can be spotted at the gardens. These include the Blackrumped Flameback woodpecker, which parks its cackling self on tree trunks. That noise is offset by the fluting call of the Eurasian Golden Oriole which can be spotted in April.


 Its literary prominence The Gardens crop up in every other novel set in New Delhi, recently including Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-goers. Khushwant Singh chose it for his latest work The Sunset Club, in which three octogenarian friends share secrets and discuss sexual fantasies. Singh’s son-in-law, the late publisher Ravi Dayal, chose to stroll in Sujan Singh Park rather than Lodhi Gardens because he said “Lodhi Gardens is a place full of rejected manuscripts”. Vinay Dharwadker called his collection of poetry Sunday at the Lodi Gardens. But it was Octavio Paz, the late diplomat and poet, who captured it best in this poem “In the Lodi Gardens”:

The black, pensive, dense

domes of the mausoleums

suddenly shot birds

into the unanimous blue

Erudite escorts

Sorry for the silence, guys. Work, work and more work has ensured that I only write for the magazine and not for the blog. This, I assure you, will change in the coming months. For now, enjoy this short Q&A I did with Chandrahas Choudhury on his new book, India: A Traveller's Literary Companion.

In a new anthology, Chandrahas Choudhury has compiled 13 works of fiction set in different parts of the country to portray a theatrical version of India. He has included pieces by writers as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kunal Basu and Qurratulain Hyder. In an email interview, Choudhury explains why he chose the smooth world of fiction to describe the turbulence of reality. Are these stories meant to highlight the underbelly of India to audiences that have been enamoured by the “‘great India story?” I did want the book to provide the greatest possible diversity of viewpoints. That’s why literature in English is balanced with literature in translation from several languages, and older Indian writers with newer ones. I’d say that the stories cumulatively reveal both the strengths of India – the complexity of its history, the many layers that make for personal identity in India, the liberatory potential of Indian democracy – and its flaws and stresses, such as the ubiquity of hierarchical thinking and the pervasive suspicion and misrepresentation of the “other”. I didn’t want a formulaic or shallow picture of India to emerge from my selections, especially when the idea of the book was to highlight the particularity and density of “the local”.  How did you select these pieces?  Well, I had all of modern Indian literature to choose from, because the concept of the book was “stories that engage powerfully with place”. Now place is integral to the human sense of self, to our awareness of history, to our dreams – and therefore to storytelling. This meant that the scope of the book was vast. So in a way I was being paid to teach myself a lot more about Indian literature than I did when I was offered the editorship of the book. Many older Indian writers, from the first half of the twentieth century, haven’t really got their due in English – Fakir Mohan Senapati and Phanishwarnath Renu, for example – so I was keen to include them. Why didn’t you include any non-fiction in this anthology? The idea of the anthology, and indeed of the entire series of traveller’s literary companions to different countries, was that it was all going to be fiction. There are lots of non-fictional guides and introductions to India anyway. And in moving between character, society, and landscape, all the while telling a story, fiction offers an intensity and depth of representation that most reportage cannot achieve. Why aren't any of your pieces in the book? Well, usually as an editor of a book it's not considered good form to select your own work. And there was so much good writing to choose from – about a hundred years worth of modern Indian fiction – that it wouldn't have been right to put my own writing into the book. At the same time, I did feel ambitious for the little bit of the book that did feature my own writing – the introduction, and the notes to each story – so I threw myself into making these bits as vivid as possible. The stories in this anthology reflect the political turmoil of the region they're set in… Literature can't but help address questions of politics, social injustice, gender and history. These issues always come up in the telling of stories. Obviously I did want the stories I chose to be a complex as possible, so that they both fulfilled the demands of the theme of the book but also transcended it. I just chose the stories I loved best.

Delhi in the 50s

My latest piece for the TimeOut Delhi magazine as part of our cover story about the ten decades of Delhi. If this essay feels a bit abrupt, it's because it was part of a larger canvas that looked at Delhi life over the last 100 years. Read on:

As New Delhi struggled to its feet after Partition, it had at least two things on its mind. The first was rebuilding the lives of its refugees, in new colonies at the city’s periphery, areas like Rajinder Nagar to the west and Kalkaji to the south. The second was escapism. The elite cinemas of Connaught Place were too few to help refugees flee the difficulty of their new lives in raw, far-flung suburbs. Between 1952 and 1961, cinema halls sprung up right in the neighbourhoods they now inhabited.

Jangpura, the colony originally provided to the villagers displaced from Raisina Hill, received a new deluge of the displaced, and with them Eros, south Delhi’s first movie hall. Karol Bagh had Liberty and Patel Nagar had Vivek. In 1954, the Delite and Golcha cinemas both opened at Daryaganj, the former with plush interiors and the first air-conditioned hall in the city. (Such was the impact of this new cinema-going experience that the Hindustan Times film critic gushed about Delite’s “carpeted floor, comfortable seats with sidelights [and] the lowest rates, lower than any of the New Delhi cinemas,” instead of reviewing their debut flick Angaray.) Come 1961, Shiela would expand the movie-watching experience with its 70mm screen.

The birth of these movie halls didn’t just provide Dilliwalas with entertainment, but also heralded the first days of an egalitarian cinema culture in the city. They collapsed the elite cinemas, like Regal, with the working-class scene of travelling fairground shows. With class-stratified seating and cheap front-row stalls, for the first time, people of many classes shared the same hall, receiving the same entertainment. Inclusiveness didn’t just mean cheap tickets, though. When Shiela opened, screening only English language movies, patrons were offered synopses of the story written in Hindi and Urdu. To add to the sensation, audiences were sometimes treated to live stage-shows, as at Delite in 1955, when the Pakistan-born father-son duo Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor enacted the play Yahudi ki Kahani.

Meanwhile, for the more established set of Dilliwalas, live entertainment meant Rudy Cotton enthralling listeners with his saxophone renditions of “Blue Moon” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” at the Lagoona in Scindia House. Indians had finally inherited the thumping music-stages and dance floors from British officers and US soldiers. At the restaurants of CP – Lagoona, Alps, York’s and Volga – live jazz had centre-stage of Delhi’s social life. While Cotton’s melodies rang through Lagoona’s walls, Hecke Kingdom and the Jazz Quartet band propped up the fortunes of Volga in CP. Until the band arrived, Volga’s tables stayed vacant. After the Quartet tuned up, you were lucky to get in. “Hundreds have had the uncomfortable and embarrassing experience of either queuing up for a table, or going elsewhere for their fun,” recorded the listings magazine Delhi Diary. Those who went elsewhere often landed up at Alps, on Janpath, to hear pianist Mosin Menezes and his Quartet belt out his famous number “Night Flight”.

The crescendo of New Delhi’s jazz era was a visit by no less than Dave Brubeck, on a 1958 world tour sponsored by the US State Department at the dawn of the Cold War. Over 3,000 people crowded into a free open-air concert in the University Gardens to see Brubeck slam out “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and “St Louis Blues” (he would only compose “Take Five” in 1959, on his album Time Out). A sombre State Department communique reported the success of the Delhi show, in demonstrating to Indians that jazz “can display discipline and intellectuality of a high order”, and shouldn’t be classed with “wild and undiscplined” rock ‘n’ roll. Either way, the message from Brubeck that Delhi heard loud and clear was the title of his second song, “I’m In A Dancing Mood”.

A prince among men

Really enjoyed writing this piece since I got opportunity to meet Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma and the author of Dara Shukoh: A Play in Verse to talk about his book. It's a beautifully written volume which looks at the clash between pluralism and orthodoxy through the life of Dara Shukoh, the doomed, younger brother of Aurangzeb. Although my chat with Mr Gandhi lasted about 15 mins, it was one of the most enjoyable meetings in a long time. Read on:

At a point in Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s play Dara Shukoh, Mir Jumla, a staunch ally of the Mughal prince Aurangzeb, camps on the outskirts of Delhi. It is night time, and Jumla is dictating a letter to the prince when he is interrupted. A soldier enters his tent, informing Jumla that he has arrested a family that forced its 12-year-old daughter-in-law to commit sati. Jumla admonishes the soldier, saying “Law is law, custom custom/Therefore, their decrees cannot overlap/We uphold the former, Leave convention for some bold reformer.” His casual dismissal resonates with the Khap panchayat horror that still consumes Delhi’s hinterland, precisely where Jumla might have been camped three centuries ago.

“Very often the combination of orthodoxy and male chauvinism has wreaked havoc in India,” said Gandhi, considering the allegory. A long-time critic of India’s social violence, Gandhi powerfully channels the struggle against religious and social orthodoxy in the play, which was reissued in paperback last month. Gandhi, the former governor of West Bengal, is a prolific writer of history and translated Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindustani. In Dara Shukoh, he uses rhyming medleys – inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s 1892 play Akbar’s Dream and John Dryden’s 1675 Restoration Drama Aurengzebe –to tell the story of the famously enlightened Mughal prince, who despite being his father Shah Jehan’s choice as emperor, was overthrown by his conservative brother Aurangzeb in a bitter war of succession.

While the history is riveting, Gandhi uses the saga to illustrate a contemporary struggly between religious tolerance and conservatism that still blights sections of society today. “I didn’t take him [Dara] out of the context of history,” he said. “He was, to me, a figure in history who lent himself to dramatic presentation without any embellishments.” Of course, as with most tragic heroes, Dara’s character contained a fatal flaw – in this case an overly trusting nature. He was not built to slay his own flesh and blood, and bemused by how easily his brother turned him and their father in the pursuit of power. “From all I’ve been able to understand, Shukoh was a very trusting man to the point of being gullible”, said Gandhi. “His reactions to the intrigues of court were reactions of a trusting man who was bewildered by the betrayal of trust.” His gullibility was matched by severe anger-management problems, which Gandhi does not fail to present, as in the third act when Dara reacts to news of his brother Shuja’s rebellion: “Shuja you malignant tumour/ Cyst of a rumour/ Suppurating excess/ In pig’s recess.”

Yet for all its rage and betrayal, Dara Shukoh is a play counterbalanced with optimism. For the writer, Dara’s story is less a tragedy than a “triumph of tragedy”. The prince has proved an enduring and popular figure in Indian history, a sort of icon for tolerance, Gandhi said. “In India, it is the illiberal who are on the margins but are more vocal. The centre-stage is still extremely tolerant which is why people respond to Dara Shukoh in the way they do.” This response has had traction elsewhere in South Asian literature. In his 2000 novel Moth Smoke, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid uses the prince’s trial as an allegory for the state of Pakistan during the 1998 nuclear tests.

Perhaps appropriately, Dara has received few of the grand memorials that go to men of power. It’s doubtful the visitors who course through Humayan’s tomb every weekend realise that the prince lies buried in an unmarked grave there. Unlike his father and brother, no roads in New Delhi were named after the Sufi prince. But it may be that Dara secured a greater seat than the one that was captured by his brother, Gandhi said. “Aurangzeb ascended the throne but Dara Shukoh was already enthroned in the hearts of the people.”


This piece first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Royal Rajah

Did this for TimeOut Delhi. A short profile of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal whose works are on display at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts until February:

As a 20-year-old student at Thomson’s Civil Engineering College in Roorkee, Deen Dayal was content sketching plans for roads, buildings and canals. It only happened that, in the final year of his course, the college faculty introduced photography as a subject. That was how Dayal came to be quite prepared when, in 1866, as he sat in his draughtsmans’ office at the Indore Public Works Department, he received the news that all draughtsmen were to be replaced by photographers. It was time for Dayal to shed his drawing instruments, pick up the camera and begin a legendary career of photography.

This fortnight, 200 of Deen Dayal’s photographs will be dusted off and exhibited at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the bulk of them on display for the very first time. The images in Raja Deen Dayal: Studio Archives from the IGNCA Collection range from portraits of Indian royalty to grand shots of monuments. Just like the other non-royal Raja, his exact contemporary Ravi Varma, Deen Dayal skilfully adopted a European technology that Indians had had little access to, became a greatly sought-after artist, and broke a new frontier in the visual capture of nineteenth-century Indian life.

“What made Dayal special was the way in which he photographed monuments and portraiture,” said Jyotindra Jain, the director of the IGNCA, who curated the exhibition along with Pramod Kumar KG. “In his portraiture, he recorded almost the entire lifestyle of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mehboob Ali Khan. The British hired him to photograph 78 monuments in central India, and he became famous because of the manner in which he took them. He’d use a slightly low angle to shoot a monument, so its upper part would appear against the sky. The contours of the monument would be extremely clear. But it wasn’t just Dayal’s talent that won him fame. He combined his skills with a tenacity that ensured his friendship with the high and mighty of that era.”

Deen Dayal used his friendship with Maharaja Tukoji Rao II of Indore to have himself introduced to Sir Henry Daly, the British Agent at Indore. Daly had Dayal appointed the official photographer of the Prince of Wales’ tour of India in 1875. Later, he was appointed official photographer to Viceroy Lord Dufferin. “After that, there was no limit [to the extent of his work],” said Jain. “He scored over British photographers because even they didn’t have that kind of access to maharajas, the upper classes and nobility. Being an Indian, he established a certain rapport with these people, and it reflects in his work that his sitters were much more comfortable with him.” In his fourties, he was appointed court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who gave him the title Raja.

Dayal worked in a time when the tools of photography were still rudimentary, yet he created some stunning clear visuals. Photographers used glass-plate negatives, which required long exposures and extreme care. Another striking quality is “the quality of performance in his photography”, Jain said. “The people who he photographed were always performing. For example, the Nizam of Hyderabad held a durbar thrice week. He and the visitors would dress up, and there was a certain hierarchy [of who followed whom]. The whole scenario was almost a theatre backdrop, in front of which these people performed. Deen Dayal understood this element of performance he was photographing and that drama comes out very well in his photographs.” No wonder then that his patron the Nizam composed a couplet in praise of Dayal: “Ajab yeh karte hain tasvir mein kamaal kamaal/ Ustaadon ke hain ustad yeh Raja Deen Dayal [In the art of photography, surpassing all/a master of masters is Raja Deen Dayal].”

Live and Unplugged

(Wrote this for the latest TimeOut India cover story on how social networking affects real life and vice-versa along with my colleagues Vandana Verma, Jaideep Sen and Aditya Kundalkar.)

Moksh Juneja was an early victim of a geo-social privacy breach. No, that’s not what happens when a renegade spy breaks into the CIA mainframe. It’s what happens when you tell your father you’re going to Malad, a northern suburb of Mumbai, but you check into Andheri station on the geo-social application Foursquare.

“That was updated on his Google Buzz,” said Juneja, the CEO of Avignyata, a social media marketing company. “When I got home, he needed to know what I was doing there. I said I was getting a bottle of water at Andheri station, that’s all. I disabled the updates on my dad’s Google Buzz that day.” For years, Facebook has asked us everything about ourselves, except the question “Where are you?” The answer was usually obvious: “Stuck in front of my computer”. But 2010 was the year that new applications, like Foursquare, UberTwitter, Google Latitude and Gowalla, operating on our smartphones, began to ask where we were. Not in which city, but which nightclub, which ice cream parlour, which mechanic’s workshop. 

And people answered.

This wave of mobile apps use the global positioning system found on most smartphones to broadcast your location to your online social network. By taking the powers of existing online tools – your friend list on Facebook, your feed on Twitter, your iPhone’s mobility and GPS – and plugging them into each other, “geo-social networks” could change basic assumptions about how we live with the internet.

We’ve always experienced our virtual and real social lives as a zero-sum game. These new apps represent the threshhold of a lifestyle in which there’s no difference between going online and going out on the town. But as it is, most of us have only the foggiest idea of how to protect the privacy of our online presence (things like photos on Facebook). Now we’re already thinking – or not thinking – about the privacy of our offline presence, also known as our real lives. Take Foursquare. The most well-known of the lot, it lets users “check in” every time they arrive at a destination, earning a point for every visit. They can share insider tips (“try the fig mojito at Shiro”) or post quick reviews. More importantly, 4SQ frequent-fliers rack up “badges” for the nature of their social lives: for adventurousness (a first-time visit), loyalty (repeat visits) or bad behaviour (the “bender”, for many successive nights out).

Obviously, it’s a fantastic way to see if friends (or strangers with shared interests) are around. In March this year, Sarthak Raheja and his wife were holidaying in sunny Pattaya in Thailand. They ventured into Swensen’s, a local ice-cream parlour, to try its“outrageous sundae”. Before they dived into it, Raheja pulled out his Blackberry, fired up “4SQ” and checked in. Moments later, Sumit Berry, an old college chum, saw him check in at Swensen’s – which Berry had done only a little while earlier. He and his wife walked over and introduced themselves to the Rahejas. The two couples ended up exploring Thailand together.

But geo-social life is also almost instantly competitive. Really, for as long as there’s been Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace or Facebook, friends have been involved in a sort of virtual one-upmanship. We vie to post funnier status updates, better-shot profile pictures or the next awesome viral video. Traditional apps like Farmville gave users virtual rewards (like an elephant topiary) for performing incredibly repetitive game tasks, like harvesting virtual strawberries. But 62 million people were drawn into organising their lives so they could be at hand at harvest time. With 4SQ, life is the game. Every place that you go, when you go, how often you go and even who you go with, all potentially earn you points and medals, virtual scores that pit you against other users on your network.

Juneja is a 4SQ “Super User”. He’s made nearly 2,000 check-ins. By having the most check-ins at any one location, he’s been crowned “mayor” of that place, and Juneja is the mayor of 82 places, from Diamond Tyre-Shop to the Gateway of India. (Actually, no longer: “I was the mayor of Gateway of India,” he said, “but one day someone said ‘Moksh Juneja, tu Gateway ko toh chhod de.’ So I left it.”) Every subsequent visitor is informed of his supremacy, at least until one of them tops him, and steals the title. It’s a virtual twist on the hallowed tradition of the regular, who prides himself on haunting the place, and gets his last beer gratis from the bartender. On 4SQ, the pride is replaced by a mayor’s yellow crown, which proclaims your reign to the world... Or at least to the network. “The game is the mayorship. It’s the number of badges you can get,” Juneja explained. “For me there are no physical returns, only psychological benefits.

I’m getting famous, somebody is recognising my efforts… and my effort is only that I’m going to my favourite place.” The competition for a yellow crown means that off-beat locations quickly find themselves on the radar. “It brings a smile to my face to see chai-wallas and bhurji-wallas listed,” said Twain Taylor, a marketing professional in Bengaluru. “One of them is the Cantonment bread omelette wagon, which I’m trying hard to become mayor of.”

More and more, though, being mayor means real rewards as well as virtual ones. The regular’s on-the-house pint is being replaced by the mayor’s special deal. At Mumbai’s Blue Frog, mayors would get a free drink. At Faaso’s, a kabab chain in Pune, the mayor of any outlet receives a free kabab wrap with their meal.  On behalf of his client Inorbit Mall, Juneja contacted all its mayors, and handed each one a Rs 1,000 voucher for Crossword Bookstore. At Delhi’s The Yum Yum Tree, tech-savvy proprietor Varun Tuli is among the first in the capital to offer real rewards for virtually logging real activity. (Still with us?) Book a table at YYT via 4SQ, and you get a free round of draught beer. “The idea here is to be a market leader, and to be prepared for when the masses start calling on us via 4SQ or Twitter,” Tuli said. “I’d say that the reason we have so many reviews online is that we have such an online presence. But customer feedback is the primary motive. People can tell me there was too much wasabi in the wasabi prawns and we can jump on it right away!”

But the larger potential value of geo-social networks lies in harnessing them for marketing. Preetham Venkatesh of Bengaluru-based Catalyst Labs is a “techvangelist” for 4SQ, and his job is to convince businesses like bars and hotels to help 4SQ help them. That means they need to create more rewards for mayors and badges, incentives that will get more people onto the network and spur customer loyalty battles. “While other sites connect people with their actual GPS locations, 4SQ is completely based on game mechanics,” Venkatesh explained. “The game-like competitive environment of badges, mayorships, and points lets businesses reward specific actions.” It’s actually integral to the design of 4SQ that business-side incentives, rather than user buzz, drives its expansion in new cities.

Apart from getting customers to competitively visit, businesses gain access to “data that is specific to their retail outlet… which times of the day and times of the week their top visitors drop by,” Venkatesh said. The involvement of businesses will also help clean up the sometimes chaotic 4SQ map. They create their own virtual establishments, and make sure that sly users don’t duplicate venues to win bogus mayorships. In fact, Venkatesh said, the ability of 4SQ Super Users to merge or delete fraudulent venues is the earliest form of moderation to be introduced on the network. (More authority for moderation is likely to become necessary, especially to certify users’ feedback and tips. Self-marketers and spammers are already afield.)

Proprietors’ involvement may be essential to blowing this spark into a social fire. The number of Indians checking into geo-social networks is currently miniscule, as is the number of reward-schemes. The cycle by which virtual networks spread beyond just the early adopters, and become popularly indispensable, hasn’t begun to turn. Blue Frog actually dropped its mayor’s reward because “the mayor turned out to be the same one guy,” said Lilian Ricaud, head of programming at the bar.“There needs to be more population there, so people compete for mayorship.”

Yet the fire is probably inevitable. Three months ago, Facebook introduced its app Places, a 4SQ-alike that piggybacks onto the network’s existing database of 500 million users. If location-sharing is going to go mainstream, Facebook Places may be how it will happen. And predictably, once Facebook enters the picture, things start to feel a little creepy. If you pop into a bar with another Facebook Places user, it allows them to “tag” you as they check in – meaning your location is broadcast, even if you don’t know about it. That information could be useful to burglars, letting them know you’re not home, or stalkers, letting them know where you are. A trawl through web-safety forums turns up 4SQ safety guidelines – such as checking in when you leave a place, rather than when you arrive – all just waiting to be neglected.

Savvier users are thinking hard about how they manage their geo-social privacy. “The advantage with 4SQ [over Facebook Places] is that you can choose who knows where you actually are,” said Ishita Kapoor, a student at Delhi University. “On Facebook I’ve got around 500 friends and they really don’t all need to know whether I am where I’ve said I am.” Places does, in fact, allow users to define a subgroup of friends who have access to location updates. But set-up is fiddly, a fact that may be nudging most geo-socialisers toward 4SQ. “They’ve got sexy privacy settings. They’ve learned from Facebook’s mistakes,” said Juneja, though he conceded that settings are only as good as their users. “There’s a girl [who] I always tell, you make so many check-ins, and you’ve given the addresses for your home, your office. People can stalk you whenever they want. That’s a serious danger.”

These apps don’t just encourage direct contact between friends, or users and businesses, but they also imply a level of trust between both. “It [geo-social networking] can be a real problem because of the absence of privacy-protection laws in India,” said Peter Griffin, the Forbes India editor for social media. “Apps like 4SQ can be used by companies as marketing tools. The more they know you, the better their service to you. So essentially it’s a trade-off for you: how much privacy are you willing to give up? Now, a lot of these apps are used by younger people who don’t seem to care about how their personal information might be used by companies.”

On the other hand, said Hardik Sanghani, a PR executive with Text 100 and an advocate for “increasing awareness and brand loyalty” through geo-social networks, users have the option of logging into a place but not broadcasting their location. “It’s called ‘going off the grid’.It’s like going into invisible mode,” he said. But will venues you’re checking into still give you points, if you’re invisible? “No. They can’t see it either. If you’re off the grid, you’re off.” It’s not hard to imagine that, in a few years, going off the geo-social grid will feel as impractical as getting off Facebook does today. Anything you hate dealing with online – the laissez faire information economy, the “friendship” of total strangers, the endless distraction of  renewing the News Feed – is likely to crop up again, in all-too-real dimensions. But geo-social networks also point to solutions to many online-lifestyle issues. 

Having more than just information at stake may make us finally take e-security seriously. If 4SQ and its descendants actually make us go out more, rather than less, they could solve the paradox that social networks seem to make us antisocial. Having fresh information and live social options layered over real geography could make living in a new city, or the same old city, a lot more pleasant. In the future, when we connect to the internet, we might really find ourselves reconnecting with the world we live in.