CM Gets It Right, Reporter Doesn't

The excitement of the night of 7 September 2008 was such that I thought I wouldn't be able to go to sleep! Mamata Banerjee, inspite of the Left Front and the right-wing Bengal media's attempt to present her as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" (to use a phrase from another era used for another person in another country!) managed to pull off a spectacular triumph by forcing the ludicrously arrogant Left Front Govt. to capitulate and bow down to most of her demands. This whole Singur-Nandigram controversy has been fascinating for the clarity with which the CPI(M) kept consolidating its newfound position as the bosom friend of the capitalist and the sworn enemy of the farmer! Not surprisingly, a section of the media is very pleased with the Communist Party's newfound love of capitalism and have happily decided to vilify anyone who gets in the way of no-holds-barred money-making. Mamata Banerjee is such an easy target! Lacking as she is in English, in sophistication, in "class" she ready material for snobbish ridicule! Recently she was compared to the Roman Emperor Nero!! Her painting was declared equivalent to Nero's fiddling! So far so acceptable, because this comparison did not pretend to be a report, but merely a childish comparison! What stunned me was a report in Monday's press, of Sunday night's press conference at Raj Bhavan. In one newspaper, the reporter describes the scene thus: "A little after 10:30, when the talks ended, [Chief Minister] Bhattacharjee was a picture of chivalry as he and Mamata followed governor Gopalkrisha Gandhi to Raj Bhavan's Marble Hall to face the media."
""You get on the dias first," the chief minister said, and she did." Well, as the first image in this blog will tell you, it was the CM who was first up on the dias (he can be seen standing to the left of the Governor). Even after he has taken his position beside the Governor, Mamata Banerjee is still climbing the steps. I saw this bit of the drama over and over again so I know what happened. The CM did indeed ask Mamata B. to get on the dias first, but she firmly asked him to do so, repeating the "request" once! He sheepishly climbed up, followed by Partho Chatterjee in the green kurta and then the lady herself! CM got it right. He knew who was really wearing the dhoti last night. He did as Mamata B asked him to do. Our reporter probably had his eye play a trick on him. He blissfully reversed the order in which the CM and the "Mad Lady" got on the dias! Our reporter also does not realize that "chivalry" is a deeply patriarchal, patronising code of conduct towards the female and not really something to applaud anyone for, even if that anyone is a Capitalist-Communist Chief Minister of a Capitalist-Communist state so beloved of the capitalist media!

How courageous!

I'm back to blogging after a long time, because I have once again found a few things to write about. This extraordinary interview came to my notice recently. Published in The Times of India, Calcutta edition on 3 September 2008, this is an interview with starlet Anuj Swahney. It is fantastic how homophobic we can be even when we try to be gloriously liberated! Of all the things that Swahney talks about in the admittedly otherwise-insipid interview the newspaper thought it best to headline the story with a throw-away comment by our two-bit actor that he is open (mind, meet gutter!) to playing a gay character. Like that is the final frontier! The ultimate taboo! Child-molester? No problem! Drug-dealer? No big deal! Terrorist? Why not? Serial killer? Sure! Gay? Ermmmmm..... Let me get back to you about it!! Anuj may not be aware that at the last count at least ten two-bit actors like him have already played gay characters and the list is set to grow with Bobby Deol playing one in the film Dostana whose music will be released at the end of this month and which itself will (ahem!) open nationwide on 14th November! Soon to be released in the latest Madhur Bhandarkar film Fashion where homosexuality features more prominently than it has hitherto done in his previous homo-friendly movies such as Page 3 and other movies such as Rules - Love ka Superhit Formula, Life in a Metro, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd to name just three. While actors in other countries, even other Asian ones, don't think twice before signing on for a gay part, in India our actors have to take a deep breath, weigh seriously the enormous damage their (often-non-existent) careers will suffer, before signing on the pink dotted line! Anuj, - forget about Western films - I suggest you watch an Indonesian film called Arisan, or a Taiwanese film calld Formula 17 or a Filipino film called Duda (Doubt) and realize that it really shouldn't be a big deal even for an Asian guy to play gay! What is even more surprising about Anuj's line is that it is coming from someone who has been trained at the Barry John Acting Studio. Barry John, in one of his productions of Shakespeare, had turned a pair of heterosexual lovers into homosexual ones (Othello: A Play in Black and White). So, good luck with your career, Anuj and I look forward to seeing you play a gay character! You would be so brave!!

Don Bachardy, 1997

Last Wednesday (9th July) Fresh Air (NPR) broadcast an interview with Don Bachardy. I was unable to hear that programme but was fortunate enough to accidentally catch it in full on Sunday the 13th on the weekend edition of Fresh Air. Listening to the interview not only reminded me that I had to post pictures on my blog of the two portraits of myself done by Don but also of my meeting him in 1997. It was interesting to hear Don describe himself as an "unconscious mimic" when Terry Gross asked him about the uncanny similarity between his voice and that of Isherwood's. I remember the first time I called Don's number and was greeted by what I thought was Isherwood's voice on the answering machine! "Oh my God!" I thought, "he has still got Isherwood's voice on the answering machine!!" I subsequently realised that it wasn't Isherwood's but Don's own voice! In his interview with Gross Don says that he was beginning to sound "a bit like [Isherwood]" within a year of their relationship! Don also has the habit of saying, "Very good, very good" apparently exactly the way Isherwood used to. Edmund White writes in one of his essays that he once caught himself saying "very good, very good" during a conversation with someone on the 'phone and then realized that he was saying that phrase because he was missing Isherwood and wanted to hear his voice.
I was also struck by what Don had to say to Gross about mimicry being an important aspect of his drawing people. So when Don drew me was he mimicking me too? If so, how? We were from two fantastically different worlds: him, from sunny California; I, from hot and dusty Calcutta. By strange coincidence, I believe that Don has only drawn two Indians in his life and both are Bengalis from Calcutta: the other Indian and indeed Calcuttan Bengali was Swami Prabhavananda - Isherwood's Vedantist guru. So, I'm in very good company!
Don's 18-minute interview on Fresh Air made me realize how fresh the memories of that April in Santa Monica are still in my mind.

Portrait of Artists as Companions

On Friday, 20 June 2008 a documentary opened in one New York cinema house. Called "Chris and Don: A Love Story" the documentary charts the relationship between the novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) and Don Bachardy (1934 - ) from the time they met in early 1953 to Isherwood's death on 4 January 1986. (In a sense the relationship continues to this day.) The documentary also sketches in Isherwood's life in England before he came to America to permanently settle there in January 1939. As I am in Calcutta, India, I do not when I will get to see this documentary, but seeing the two trailers now available on youtube it felt weird. As the camera followed Don Bachardy around the Santa Monica house where he and Isherwood lived from 30 September 1959 and where Bachardy continues to live I found myself revisiting my memories of interviewing Bachardy there in April 1997. I remembered being shown around the house by Don, being struck by the amount of light that bathes the house and, next day, sitting for two portraits by him. I shall soon upload images of those two portraits on this blog.

Also in the trailers, it is fascinating to see artistes like Tennessee Williams (third picture from the top in this post) and Igor Stravinsky in living colour. So far I had only seen black and white still images of the playwright. I had only seen Don in person in 1997, but it gives one a strange feeling to see him as a teenager, posing on the Santa Monica beach for Isherwood's movie camera . Seeing the moving images (moving both in the sense that they are mobile and that they are touching) one begins to understand the helpless love Isherwood must have felt for this teenager.

As of the 17th of this month, gays and lesbians in California have been able to marry. Don told me that because there was no such provision in the days when Isherwood was alive, the writer had to adopt Don as his son so that everything could be left to him when Isherwood died. I haven't been in touch with Don for almost nine years now. I hope he is healthy.

I subsequently published my interview with Don in a book and titled it "Portrait of the Artist as Companion". What the makers of this documentary gives us is a movie version of David Hockney's iconic double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy: a portrait of two artists as each other's companion.

The Male Body in Bengal Art

Ever since the new building of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations opened in Calcutta on 1 June I've been waiting for an opportunity to go there and check out the five inaugural exhibitions they have organised in different floors of the same building. Today I finally got the time to check out the exhibitions. Plenty of goodies to feast your eyes on, but my attention was monopolised to a large extent by an oil that I found in one of exhibitions. Since I am always intrigued by the lack of male bodies in Indian art (boobies, boobies wherever you look!) I was struck my Rathin Moitra's undated "Nulia" (the first two pictures in this post). This painting reminded me of the pictures of Bruce Weber, somehow. Weber's subjects are mostly well-built young men, mostly on the beach, mostly in swimwear. By strange coincidence, Weber appeared on BBC World hours after I returned home. He was being interviewed by Stephen Sackur on Hardtalk. During the interview Sackur tried to out Weber but the photographer was defensive. He thought what he did in his bedroom was irrelevant. The fact that his images are often described as homoerotic does not, apparently, put him under any pressure to come out. I know nothing about Rathin Moitra apart from the fact that he was part of the Calcutta Group formed in 1942, a group which emphasized colour over form. But what can see in the painting is an awareness of the young male form like it is seldom seen in Indian art.

Asian Identity Formation in a Western Hothouse

In the Mandarin-English film The Map of Sex and Love (blogged about earlier) the long-haired Hong Kong dancer - who has never set foot outside Hong Kong - asks the bespectacled Chinese American man he is looking to pick up, "Do you go to Christopher Street often?" Behind them, across the waters, glow signs of multinational companies such as Hitachi and Siemens. It is interesting that two Chinese individuals are establishing contact with each other in Chinese-administered Hong Kong and the event is framed by the presence of globalisation, be it in the form of glow signs declaring the omnipresence of Japanese and German companies or be it in the mention of Christopher Street, an address of mythical significance to American gay identity formation. That a Chinese gay man is aware of the presence of Christopher Street is an indication of the fact that Western - especially American - gay culture, as has been shown by Dennis Altman in his work, can and often does serve as a template on which Asian, non-Western gay identities are formed. In the Israeli film The Bubble (blogged about earlier) there is a scene in which a group of gay Israeli men discuss gay male British pop stars. Names such as George Michael, Morrissey and Stephen Gately (of Boyzone fame) are mentioned. The camera also focusses on a wall covered with pictures of gay British singers cut out of magazines.

In the Indonesian film Arisan! (2003), similar influences are seen in the identity formation of gay Indonesians. The two gay men in the film, Sakti (Tora Sudiro) and Nino (Surya Saputra) first meet and greet each other (although they had earlier discreetly eyed each other up at the gym) in a restaurant that can only be described as a square mile of intensified America in Jakarta. As the middle image shows, when Nino (in a white shirt) and Sakti (in black) leave the restaurant, the camera follows them, taking in an arrangement of small American flags and a Coca Cola sign on the wall. When the two men leave the place, the camera stays inside but turns its gaze on a huge poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. This is what Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980) calls an "advance mention". The significance of the Marilyn Monroe poster would become clear at the end of the film when one of the lady friends of Sakti declares that not diamonds, but "a gay man is a girl's best friend" referring to Monroe's song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The fact the film seems bracketed by the Monroe motif is yet another example of the hothouse Western environment in which global gay identities take shape in Asian countries.

When we first see Sakti he is just finishing his daily workout. He stands in front of the mirror and beams, joyfully, at his reflection in the mirror. Here is the joyful acceptance of one's identity as theorised by Lacan when he speaks of the "mirror stage". What has to be remembered is that the beam on Sakti's face is an affirmation of the fact that he has been able to conform to the imaginary of the global, ergo Western, gay man - toned body, flawless skin, perfect teeth, straight-acting.

It is not my job to judge this teleology of Asian gay self-fashioning, but merely to say that such processes of identity-formation are being cinematically represented with greater and greater frequency. And in a way this is rather appropriate, isn't it? What better medium than cinema to exemplify a kind of identity formation which depends on the visual? After all it is called the imaginary!

The Republic of Nepal

I am a monarchist. I believe that constitutional monarchy is the best form of government. On 28th May 2008, Nepal ceased to be a monarchy. I watched Nepali television, thrilled to be watching history being made before my eyes. Yes, thrilled. Thrilled because I believe, like most Nepalis do, that it is better to be a Republic than to be under a king as universally unpopular as Gyanendra. I could not help being struck by the irony of the fact that the brand new National Assembly had gathered yesterday evening at the Birendra International Convention Centre to formally abolish the monarchy. The event took place inside a building named after the king who will, I firmly believe, always reign in the hearts of the Nepali people - King Birendra. I share with many Nepalis grave doubts about the official version of what happened in the Narayanhiti Palace in June 2001. My posting of an official portrait of King Birendra and his family here is meant to convey to my Nepali brothers and sisters that I feel their pain (which I'm sure seven years have done nothing to dull) at the loss of their beloved King Birendra and his family, but I also congratulate them warmly for getting rid of King Gyanendra and constituting themselves as a Republic. I wish the Republic of Nepal a happy and prosperous future.