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Magazine
Review
The novel as secular space
SUMANA ROY
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Filming collapses the boundaries between fiction, research, history and myth.
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Filming: A Love Story, Tabish Khair, Picador, 2007, Rs. 495.
Filming, Tabish Khair’s novel about the increasing dominance of the optic in the life of the post-19th century man, set in a time when many believed that “watching films made one blind”, takes cinema and the novel, two art forms born in the West, both mixed genres, and by placing the forms in the context of the birth of nations and the adolescence of Hindi cinema, it, immediately, makes the reader aware of the manifesto behind its tale.
Fluid identities
Names and identities change with every reel, narrators becoming subjects and characters changing into unreliable voiceovers. The nameless Muslim prostitute, who takes on the name of the Hindu goddess Durga, becomes Bhuvaneshwari, and later, a “Mrs.” in a foreign land, all these identities linked by a delicate narrative thread; Harihar, the “bioscope-wallah”, becomes Haribabu, Chotte Thakur becomes Rajkunwar and Saleem Lahori an unlikely hybrid between a silent film-star and a generous facts-supplying narrator. Amidst this, Khair introduces the figure of the researcher-narrator, someone who questions claims of “authenticity” and “truth”. The collapsing of boundaries between fiction, research, history and myth gives the novel the texture of a manuscript coated with a “film” of dust, a forgotten memoir of man and motherland, proving Khair’s allegiance to the amphibious form that he claims for the novel.
Dreams operate as Daliean windows in the novel, opening out, amorally, to past and future, so that the spoils of history are shared, even if unequally, by dreamers and the subject of the dreams. The dreams are part of a sequence: seven days, January 23-29, 1948, reveal a kind of progression, a progression that is possible only in the anaesthetised fixity of dreams, leading to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the “Sant of Sabarmati”, invoked in the Epigraph with borrowed words, the first from the lyrics of the Hindi film Jagriti, the second from lip-reading the lore of history, the secular saint’s supposed last words, although the dreamer hears the word “terrible” instead of the mythical “He Ram”, both expressions sharing almost the same lip movements. It is this “yoking” of difference that Khair uses to fascinating effect — Harihar’s troupe “specialised in Bangla adaptations of Shakespeare, sometimes merging two plays into one”; the effeminate Chotte Thakur emerges from his mother’s dressing room as “a grinning hybrid of a girl and a clown”; through all this and more, Khair makes claims on the novel as a secular space, something analogous to Batin’s flat in Copenhagen which “was singularly devoid of any symbols from living religions”.
Visual tropes
History, encoded in the uncensored possibility of dreams, moves like the neighbour’s wife, a parable of sight without sound: the different stylisations, the bold letters, the different fonts and italics, are Khair’s visual tropes for a heteroglossic novel; reality subtitled with dreams on the printed page, so that the footnote becomes the central text, and Shakespeare (“Under the greenwood tree”), Gandhi, Manto, a “dented pair of US Army binoculars”, 1947 and “a thoroughbred horse” can inhabit the same space.
The dreams-prefaced chapters, tagged with dates, the burden of lost history, bear names that are an homage to the history of cinema as well as a commentary on the novelist’s technique: “The Magic Lantern”, a tribute to William Henry Jackson’s “Magic Lantern India” series, prefigured motion pictures and had an epical quality, produced largely by magnification of details, a technique that Khair uses liberally; “The Panorama Box”, a kind of “peep show”, incorporated a series of vignettes to illustrate a story such as the scenes from an historical event, as Khair does in Filming; “The Phantom Bird”, a phrase reminiscent of the “Phantom Ride” films, is
an apt metaphor for the invisible narrative force here; “The Kiss in the Tunnel” is the name of G. A. Smith’s film, where two visual perspectives are presented, as in the chapter which carries the name; “The Dream Machine”, a flicker device that produces visual stimuli, created by Gysin and Sommerville, could be an alternative title for Khair’s novel; “The Ride on Grapeshot”, a phrase from Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism”, anticipates the speed of modern day cinema and the narrative violence at the end of the novel.
Khair’s novel is a parody of the “formula Hindi film” (“fragmentary … a mishmash of Western and Indian elements”); a re-formulation of Bharatamuni’s Theory of Rasa (Epigraph) to accommodate the genre of the new novel (a tautology, for the word demands invention, a claim which Filming can make by virtue of its architectonics) by dedicating chapters to all the Rasas except the Comic, another acknowledgement, albeit with a sly wink, to a different tradition, to Aristotle’s Poetics which treats comedy almost like a bastard child; an homage to the power of the oral (“Khul Simsim”) which gives the novel the inward-looking flavour of a fable; an archivist’s scratches on the names of the characters (Harihar and Durga, for example, are names of characters in Ray’s “Pather Panchali”). It is, ultimately, the late-born post-colonial writer’s claim to the cusp of twin streams, two traditions, not just where horizons seemingly meet, but where the angler’s net finds the best catch.
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