Show Business

by Shashi Tharoor

  “So what do you think we should do?”

  “Keep at it,” Ashwin replies shortly. “That’s all we can do. There are no public opinion polls, no way we can really be certain if Sugriva Sharma has the votes he thinks he does. It’s always possible that the endorsements of the leaders of each of these communities and factions may not, in this case, translate into votes at the booths. That’s one hope: your appeal as a film star may reach deeper into people’s personal voting intentions than their leaders’ instructions. And then there’s the idea of Ganeshji’s here. I think we should pursue that.”

  “What idea was that?” As usual, I seem to have missed something. I look at Ganeshji, the idea man Ashwin indicates, a dark and pudgy campaign worker with more oil in his hair than you need to run a Jeep. He has been chain-smoking beedis throughout the conference; any suggestions he may have made were occluded by struggling to emerge from behind a smelly miasma of fumes, which were occasionally cleared by a gust of air from his rasping cough. Really, it’s not always my fault I don’t catch what’s going on.

  Ashwin is patient with me. “As Ganeshji points out,” he says, with a perfunctory nod to the innovative smoker, who beams in creative pride, “the Pandit is taking his own community for granted — the Brahmins and the rather sizable ‘Hindu vote’ that, in this constituency, comes with them. That may yet prove a tactical mistake, because there are quite a few Brahmins who probably consider Sugriva Sharma something of a traitor to their caste. We must step up our appeals to that community and to the Hindu-inclined element generally. There’s one particular suggestion Ganeshji has that we can act on tomorrow.”

  The thought of tomorrow is already exhausting me. “What’s that?”

  “There’s a local sage here, a sort of guru who runs an ashram on the banks of the river. He has only been in the district for eight or nine years, but he’s already something of a legend. People are beginning to come from all over the country and even from abroad to listen to him. The villagers hold him in awe, the Brahmins particularly, since he is said to know more about the scriptures than the priests at the temple. You should pay him a visit.”

  I groan. “Now I’ve got to get the blessings of a godman?”

  “We don’t know whether he’ll bless you,” Ashwin says, “but even if he just sees you, it could have a positive effect. Every little bit counts, Ashok.”

  Of course I agree; not that I have a choice. Plans are duly made for a pilgrimage to the ashram in the morning. Apparently the Guru’s fame has spread so far and wide that he is attracting a growing number of foreigners, some of whom are acquiring prominence in his entourage. This has inevitably fueled the usual resentments, and the Guru has had to keep his local and expatriate followers apart as much as possible. For both linguistic and factional reasons, therefore, he has taken to holding two public sessions a day, one in English and one in Hindi.

  “I suppose you’d like me to go to the Hindi one,” I say brightly. “To be seen to be there by the local yokels.”

  “Wrong,” says Ashwin. “I think you ought to go to the English one. If things go wrong there, the damage can more easily be contained than if you suffer some sort of public indignity in front of your own electorate.”

  There is some discussion, but the party hacks all come down on Ashwin’s side. It has been a long time since I’ve found myself in a collective enterprise where I can’t always get my own way.

  The visit to the Guru settled, my sturdy supporters file out, leaving behind their beedi stubs and tea glasses and scraps of paper, the residue of political cogitation in India. Ashwin’s eyes are closing behind his glasses. I feel the time has come to tell him how much I appreciate what he is doing.

  “Ash,” I say, recalling a nickname I haven’t used since our school days, “I want to tell you how much I appreciate what you are doing.” And since that doesn’t sound fraternal enough, I gratuitously add, “So all those days I spent playing cricket with you in the backyard are finally paying off for me, hanh?”

  He stares at me for a long time, as if debating in his mind whether to say something or not. His better instincts lose the debate. “Ashok,” he says at last, looking me directly in the eye, “you know what my most abiding recollection is of playing cricket with you, my elder brother, role model, and hero? It was you, five years older than me, deciding to bat first, making me bowl for what seemed like hours in the hot sun, and then, just before it became my turn to bat, hitting the ball into the neighbor’s estate so you wouldn’t have to bowl to me. It happened,” he adds levelly as he sees me about to react, “more than once.”

  What can you say to a thing like that? I had no idea that my brother had stored up these petty resentments. But my tongue has done enough damage already. I choose to be sensible; for once I say nothing.

  The Guru sits cross-legged on a raised dais, his posterior resting on a mattress covered with a dingy white sheet, his back leaning against a pair of lumpy bolsters. He is dressed in a white robe of uncertain provenance, part Arab djellaba and part costumier’s fantasy fromHadrian VII. His balding head is decorated by a cap of even obscurer antecedents, a velvet circle that might have been an Orthodox Jew’s shower cap. The lack of hair on his scalp is more than amply compensated for by the rest of his face, which drips with a lush gray beard that flows in immaculately groomed profusion down his chest. Rings gleam on his fingers, enlightenment in his dark eyes. These are at last open: they have been closed for the last half hour as the Guru meditated, arms stretched out and thumbs tucked into fingers, while Ashwin and I and a host of saffron-clad devotees (themselves, like their master’s attire, of varying and unplaceable origins) sat on the floor and waited reverentially.

  The Guru surveys the assemblage, gently lifts a berobed haunch, and breaks wind. An echo seems to follow, but it is only the devotees letting out a collective sigh.

  “So, who have we here today?” he asks, casting his gleam in our direction.

  “Sir, zese peepul ’ave come to pay zeir rhespects,” says a Frenchwoman in saffron who seems to be the Guru’s principal assistant. “Chri Ashok Banzhara, ’oo his a film hactor from Bombay, and ’is brozer. Chri Banzhara,” she adds disapprovingly, “his also a political candidate in ze helections ’ere.” Some curious heads turn in my direction.

  The sage’s beady eyes light up, their black pupils luminescent with interest. “Ah, friends from the cinema world,” he announces. “A most interesting domain, and how like our religion, is it not?” He seems to expect no answer, and I wonder if it is now my turn to make social chitchat. As I prepare to rise to my feet to greet him, I feel Ashwin’s restraining hand. “Wait till after the discourse,” he whispers. That’s right, of course: the Guru has to address the assembled faithful, as he does at this hour every morning, and then we might find it possible to present ourselves. It is said that the Guru chooses the subjects for his sermons upon opening his eyes after meditation. That certainly seems to be the case today.

  “Indian cinema has many remarkable affinities to Indian religion,” he intones to my astonishment, gazing into the distance as if at some great TelePrompTer in the sky. “Hinduism, as I have explained before, is agglomerative and eclectic: it embraces and absorbs the beliefs and practices of other faiths and rival movements. It coopts native dissenters — Buddha, Mahavira — and plagiarizes foreign heresies, finding the Protestant work ethic, for instance, in the karma-yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. The Hindi film is much the same: it borrows its formulas from Hollywood, its music from Liverpool, and its plot lines from every bad film that Hong Kong has ever produced. The moment an Indian director, a Mrinal Sen or a Benegal, makes a well-regarded serious film, he is promptly seduced into the industry before he can constitute a threat to it from outside — rather as Buddhism and Jainism were reabsorbed into Hinduism in our country. But the underlying philosophical premise is even more absolute. For just as the Hindu notion of time runs cyclically, repeating itself endlessly, so also Hindi cinema consists of endlessly repeated
variations on a few basic themes. The Indian film is the idealized representation of the Indian attitude to the world.”

  “Outrageous nonsense,” I whisper to Ashwin. He shushes me with a warning finger to his pursed lips. The Frenchwoman looks disapprovingly back toward us. I notice that she is uncommonly pretty and that under her thin cotton robe she is braless.

  “I have described to you in an earlier discourse the challenge that Hindu philosophy offers to the notion of a duality between God and man, between the Creator and His creations. In the Upanishads, the ultimate goal of the believer is the realization of his Oneness with the Absolute. All of us, all of you, are one with God; God is within you, and you are within Him, or It.

  “Aha, you might say, then how is God portrayed in so many different forms, as blue-skinned Krishna, as bow-carrying Rama, as elephant-tusked Ganapati, even as female, in the forms of so many divine goddesses? There is a simple answer. The Supreme Being, the essential First Cause of our creation, is visualized in a variety of forms because of our weakness — our inability to worship the divine without personifying it. It is our avidya, our ignorance, that prevents us from grasping the essence of divinity, hence the need to depict the First Principle in forms more comprehensible to humans. This became particularly important in spreading religious belief to the masses, the ordinary people who wanted to worship specific divine qualities such as the ability to make rain, the power to destroy evil, the conferring of good fortune. Instead of bestowing all these functions on one Supreme Being, Hinduism ascribes different names to different manifestations of God, each with his or her own characteristics, duties, and, shall we say, heavenly talents, all just to make divinity more accessible. Thus we have Sarasvati the goddess of learning, Kali the goddess of destruction, Rama the warrior-king of righteousness and justice, and so on.

  “Now is this not also what the Hindi film does? In all Hindi films there is only one theme: the triumph of good over evil. The actual nature of the evil, the precise characteristics of the agent of good, may vary from film to film. The circumstances may also change, as do the stories in our Puranas. The songs vary, as do our religious bhajans. But there is no duality between the actor and the heroes he portrays. He is all of them, and all of them are manifestations of the Essential Hero. Therein lies the subconscious appeal of the Hindi film to the Indian imagination and the appeal, along with it, of the Hindi film hero.”

  I can scarcely believe how raptly the devotees are taking in this twaddle. Some of them have their eyes closed, in order, I assume, to better experience the ecstasy of the Guru’s words. Other eyes are wide open, as if to admit as much as possible of the sage’s radiance. “This can help us,” Ashwin whispers into my ear, and when the Frenchwoman looks back, I sense a softer expression on her face, and I hope it is because she is beginning to identify me with her Guru’s Essential Hero.

  “And what about the heroine, do I hear you ask?” There is unctuous laughter, I am not sure why. “I shall tell you. Do you know why Brahma, the divine Creator in the Hindu trinity, is always depicted with four heads? There is a story that goes back to the time when he created woman — yes, the female human. He carved her out of his own body, not from a spare rib; you see, we are a vegetarian people.” (More appreciative laughter. The devotees obviously found this rib-tickling.) “Now in those days Brahma had only one head, that’s all he had need of at the time. But he admired his own creation, this First Woman, so much, and looked at her so ardently, that she felt obliged to hide in embarrassment from his desire. This she tried to do by running away from his line of vision, but if Brahma could create a woman, he could certainly create an extra pair of eyes. So in order to be able to see her wherever she hid, he grew a head on each side, another one behind, and even one on top, to complement his original single head. Is this not like the ubiquitous camera of the Hindi film?

  “But to return to Brahma. Inevitably the woman could not escape him, and she succumbed to his desire. Out of this consummation came the birth of our original ancestors, the founders of the human race. Wait a minute, I hear the accountants among you saying, That story gives Brahma five heads — why is he portrayed only with four? Well, there is a postscript to the story. The other members of the divine trinity did not entirely approve of Brahma being able to look up into the heavens as well as keeping an eye on earth. So Siva, a god of action if ever there was one, took his sword and cut off the top head, leaving Brahma with four. Like the Hindi filmmaker, Brahma can look around and beneath him, but not rest his gaze on higher things.”

  The devotees nod, while I wonder what on earth any of this has to do with his main point. Or indeed whether he has a main point at all.

  “But I digress. We have talked about the creation of woman, but not about her role as heroine. Here I must turn a little to Vedanta; I hope my foreign brothers and sisters will be patient with me. The universe is made from, and made up of, two simultaneous Causes, or principles — a spiritual Cause called purusha, the male principle, and a nonspiritual Cause called prakriti, nature, seen as female. I am sorry, dear ladies, that you are not seen as spiritual: perhaps too many of our ancient philosophers were men. But the mutual interdependence of these two principles is fundamental — the male principle cannot create anything without the female nor can prakriti produce the natural universe without purusha. Now what is this prakriti, this female principle? It is made up of three gunas, three basic qualities: the shining; the dark, or passive; and the dynamic. This is the tradition from which the Hindi film heroine is unconsciously drawn. She shines, she is resplendent, she is fair (and this is important, because it is said that the goddess Parvati, criticized by her husband, Siva, for her dark complexion, had to perform austerities and penances in the forest before Brahma granted her the fair skin for which she is now famed. No Indian actress can succeed without reminding audiences of the postpenance Parvati.) She is also passive, the object of the hero’s adoration and the villain’s lust. But these two gunas remain in uneasy equilibrium; it is the third, her dynamism, that unsettles this equilibrium and makes the Indian film heroine a heroine.”

  This is going right over my head, a direction in which no real Hindi film heroine has yet traveled. I shift my weight uncomfortably from one thigh to the other and try to admire the curve of the Frenchwoman’s unhaltered breast, which pushes against her saffron shift like prakriti looking for a purusha.

  “You would be right, my dears, in tracing the modern Hindi film to the epics and myths of our ancient times,” the Guru goes on. “Each character fulfills the role assigned to him or her in the film as each of us fulfills the role assigned to us by our destiny on this earth, our dharma. The Hindi film hero’s dharma is to be a hero, the villain’s is to be a villain. It is the same, after all, in the Mahabharata, whose personages act out their roles without being able to deviate in the slightest from the script of destiny. Their dharma determines their character, and their character determines their destiny; yet even this dharma is the result of their actions in their past lives. There is nothing they can do about it: they do what they do because they are who they are, and they are who they are because they have done what they did. This is a concept you can apply in toto to the Hindi film hero.

  “A prime example of this species is now sitting among us. He has come to seek the benefits of my wisdom, and this pleases me. So for his sake, I shall conclude this discourse with a story from the Mahabharata — not, alas, a story like the delectable episode of Brahma and his lady — but the story of an argument, a debate, shall we say, among the five Pandava brothers, the ’heroes,’ if you must, of the great epic. The topic they were debating was a typically Hindu question of hierarchies. Which, they argued, was the highest of human pursuits — kama, pleasure; artha, wealth; or dharma, righteousness? Their uncle and counselor, Vidura, thought the matter was self-evident: the answer was obviously dharma. Arjuna, the most intelligent of the Pandavas, was not so sure: he put artha first, regarding pleasure and righteousness as merely two adjun
cts of wealth. (He would obviously have made a very successful merchant-banker today.) Bhima, the glutton and strong man, disagreed. In his view, the satisfaction of desire, in other words kama, was obviously man’s first duty, since without the desire to achieve, any achievement would be impossible. The twin brothers, Nakula and Sahadeva, wanted it both ways: man, they declared, should go for all three — first pursue righteousness, then wealth, and lastly, pleasure. (I am beginning to think they had a point there, but not necessarily in that order.) Finally, the oldest brother, Yudhisthira, paragon of virtue, surveyed the options and sadly rejected all of them. The only thing for a man to do, he concluded, was to sidestep the debate altogether and submit himself to Fate.

  “I will not draw the lessons from this argument for you. It is yours to interpret as you see fit. But today we have with us a man who has sampled kama, accumulated artha, and seeks to fulfill a dharma of service to the people. He has my benediction.”

  And with that the Guru closes his eyes and resumes his posture of meditation. The devotees rise silently and begin to shuffle out soundlessly on bare feet.

  I stand up, delighted by the unexpectedly positive conclusion to the Guru’s rambling discourse, but uncertain what happens next. Ashwin, satisfied, is already heading for the door. I stop the Frenchwoman as she walks toward it.