May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (36 page)

The reality was that Indian actresses, even those as independent as Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil, could not ignore the rules that had been set down for women in India. Although their unusual status gave them the freedom to reject those rules, they paid a high price for that in
India. Most actresses, particularly the younger ones, were not as self-aware as Azmi or Patil. Despite their money and love affairs, they were culturally still very Indian, reacting to life as daughters and wives. “Most of them are still very dependent on what their parents say,” said Nari Hira of
Stardust
. “Their parents control their money, and when they get married, the husbands take over. They’re not exposed to the outside world at all.”

The plots of the films themselves showed that the country was even more conservative than it seemed on the surface. Chidananda Das Gupta, the film critic, took this a step further and said that the Indian commercial film was not just a passive reflection of society but also an active “moral guide” for the working classes struggling to hang on to traditional values in a world that was changing too fast. In one of the more persuasive arguments of his book, Das Gupta maintained that the Indian commercial film, in its condemnation of the sinful twentieth-century woman and endorsement of the traditional wife and mother, “paradoxically becomes the most effective obstacle against the development of a positive attitude towards technological progress, towards a synthesis of tradition with modernity for a future pattern of living.” Ironically, it was the actresses, in their screen roles, who were the chief promoters of the regressive values by which their personal lives were so harshly judged.

The melodramas in the actresses’ private lives didn’t stop anyone from buying tickets to see them, of course. In a country as poor as India, the stars were so fantastically out of reach that they really were idols, allowed to behave in ways that would not be accepted among ordinary mortals. The movies may have been moral guides, but the lives of the stars proved that people in India liked to have it both ways. The fans delighted in the scandals of the actresses in the same way that Indians had always loved the legends of their promiscuous deities. In that sense, the stars were simply continuing a tradition as old as the Hindu myths. “Clandestine relationships have existed from time immemorial,” Amitabh Bachchan said. “Most of our gods have had two wives.”

CALCUTTA HAS BEEN FAMOUS FOR AT LEAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS AS ONE
of the most appalling places on earth, and on initial impression it lives up fearsomely to that reputation. The city is one of the largest and most densely populated urban areas in the world, overflowing with more than ten million people, many of whom live in such miserable conditions that I often felt as I walked through the streets that I ought to do something, anything, to help, and not just stand there observing another human being’s degradation, or worse, taking notes. For as long as anyone can remember, hundreds of thousands of people have lived, died and procreated on the city’s pavements. Some had been there since World War I and were still unable to afford better shelter. One family that I came across in 1987 was camped out on a noisy traffic island and was forced to subsist on meals of chicken skins thrown out by a butcher. Six million people were crammed into mud huts and tarpaper shacks, many built along gutters rippling with raw sewage. Traffic choked the streets, crawling at an average rate of five miles an hour
and spewing forth noxious black fumes. During the monsoon motor transport did not move at all. Then only barefoot rickshaw pullers waded knee-deep through fetid, flooded streets, past pigs that rooted through piles of reeking garbage not far from the city’s most expensive hotel.

Widespread summertime power failures, euphemistically referred to as “load shedding,” routinely threw homes and businesses into sweltering darkness for hours each day. Calcutta’s businesses were regularly crippled by strikes, a testimony to the city’s tradition of worker consciousness and leftist politics. To use the telephone in Calcutta was to plunge into the unknown; calls usually ended in busy signals, strange clicks or dead air. During one of my visits, the city announced that 55,000 dead phone lines would be down for two years. Although some services did improve over time—by the late 1980s there were fewer power failures, and a new subway had cut down on the gridlock in Calcutta’s affluent neighborhoods—the city still seemed to me to be in a permanent state of cardiac arrest. Even the state government tourist guidebook observed, with the kind of literary reference much prized by the city’s educated residents, that “Calcutta appears to lie helpless, like a prostrate, disembowelled Gulliver.”

In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi casually referred to Calcutta as a “dying city” when he responded to a question in Parliament about why most major airlines no longer flew there. This provoked an uproar in Calcutta and an angry demand for a retraction from the state government, which was controlled by one of India’s two Communist parties. The
Telegraph
, the city’s most literate newspaper, quickly conducted a poll and reported that two thirds of Calcutta’s citizens felt the city was not dying at all but merely “decaying,” a distinction perhaps best appreciated by the residents themselves. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi was only the most recent notable to continue a long tradition of denigrating the city. Rudyard Kipling once referred to Calcutta as “the city of dreadful night” and Winston Churchill, in a letter to his mother, observed, “I shall always be glad to have seen it—namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again.”

And yet, I eventually came to love Calcutta, in a complicated, guilt-ridden way. For all of its troubles, Calcutta remained India’s thriving center of culture and thought, the nation’s largest and most alive city, more proud to have been the home of India’s three Nobel laureates than of the merchants and industrialists who had made Calcutta a thriving commercial center at the turn of the century. Once
the capital of all of British India and in recent years of the state of West Bengal, the city was a crazy, appealing mishmash of architectural styles. The English imperialists had erected near-replicas of the government buildings they remembered from home. Calcutta’s rich had displayed a weakness for Italianate arches, domes, turrets, pilasters and porticos, and built hundreds of “palaces,” most of them now decrepit but still so romantic that parts of the city looked like a stage set of old Southern mansions from a Tennessee Williams play. Calcutta was also the headquarters for Mother Teresa’s worldwide network serving the poorest of the poor. Every day at her home for the dying, the sisters tended rows of twisted, emaciated forms; in the evening they returned to the simple walled complex known as Mother’s House, and softly chanted prayers as they knelt on a cement floor in a candlelit room.

But what I loved most about the city was its people. Calcutta was defined by the Bengalis—creative, passionate, deeply intellectual, sensitive—a stereotype accepted by the Bengalis themselves, and one I found in many ways to be true. Within the city lived one of the world’s greatest concentrations of poets, artists, filmmakers, novelists, actors and thinkers. Very few actually made a living from their creative activities, but that was beside the point. When I met a Calcutta accountant, he told me he was really a writer; a surgeon invited me to his latest play. A rickshaw puller knew how to find the home of Moni Sankar Mukherjee, one of India’s most successful novelists, because Mukherjee, he informed me, was his favorite author. Calcutta had also produced Satyajit Ray, one of the few Indian filmmakers with an international reputation, who told me that his work “has been possible only because I have lived here, and have loved Calcutta.” Bikash Bhattacharya, an important young artist whose paintings of the city were haunting in their satire and desperation, said simply, “Calcutta is my mother.”

Calcutta had been the home of many unusual women, too. The nineteenth-century reform movement in Bengal that sought to ban purdah, sati and child marriage had elevated the status of wives in the middle class, and a hundred years later, Calcutta’s women were still better off than those in the north. Dowry deaths were rare in Calcutta, and women were not as afraid of harassment and verbal abuse in the public streets. Calcutta’s women had also benefited from the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, the city’s poet laureate and its most famous Nobel Prize winner, who had been one of India’s greatest supporters of women’s rights.

Calcutta was a place of a thousand revelations, but I was especially struck by the way it worked as a leitmotif in the lives and the work of three creative women: a filmmaker, a painter and a poet. All of them worked under adverse conditions unimaginable in the West, and yet all said they could not be as creative living anywhere else. They alternately romanticized their lives and felt guilty about Calcutta’s squalor, and simultaneously loved and hated their city. But they seemed to blossom not in spite of but because of the misery around them, and the city always appeared in some startling form out of this tension in their work.

I also found in the subtleties of their creations some of the most impassioned statements and sentiments I had encountered about women in India, and women anywhere—even though not one of these women considered herself a feminist, associating the word with politics and single-minded groups that they saw as ineffective and uncreative. They wanted their work to speak to a much wider audience, in a voice that was strong, angry and even accusatory, but still tempered by irony and a sense of life’s ambiguities and biological contradictions. In the end, the three women taught me not only about Calcutta, but about the relationship of an artist to her environment, and why women who thought and created in the India of the 1980s found it impossible not to rebel.

APARNA SEN’S FIRST FILM,
36 CHOWRINGHEE LANE
, UNFOLDED IN AN
almost magical world of narrow, intimate side streets, soft afternoon light and lovers’ quiet walks across the lush green expanse of trees and grass of the city’s central park, or maidan. This was a Calcutta of solitude, without crowds, beggars and traffic jams, a city drawn more from the director’s imagination than from the reality in the streets. Written and directed by Sen,
36 Chowringhee Lane
told a semiautobiographical story of a lonely Anglo-Indian teacher of Shakespeare in a school for upper-class girls. The film, though widely admired by Calcutta’s intelligentsia, was also criticized for its nostalgic view of a city that no longer exists. And yet that forgotten Calcutta seemed to me an important supporting character in the film, a poignant setting for a schoolteacher whose hybrid ancestry had made her feel an outsider in both modern India and England. She seemed at home only in the old Calcutta of wrought-iron gates and palm-shaded balconies, or of silent Italianate mansions, stained and crumbling after years of
monsoons. “This is the Calcutta of my childhood,” Sen remembered when she talked about the film. “It was greener, much greener, and it had a sort of lazy quality about it. I have a strong nostalgia for closed shutters and summer afternoons, neem trees, and these deserted streets, and hawkers’ calls. To me, Calcutta is not the dirtied-up place it is now. There is no point in showing that.”

Aparna Sen was one of India’s finest directors, male or female, making the kind of intelligent, serious film that her mentor, Satyajit Ray, had helped inspire with his own classics. After
36 Chowringhee Lane
came
Paroma
, a daring look into the layers of social pressures surrounding an upper-middle-class Bengali housewife who has an affair. Sen’s third film, still in production when I left India, was
Sati
, the one in which Shabana Azmi played the mute Brahmin girl who “marries” a tree. Sen’s work was among the best and most interesting I had ever seen. I interviewed her three times in as many years—twice in her flat in Calcutta, once on the location of
Sati
. At the first interview, in the summer of 1985, I arrived at Sen’s apartment in Alipore, Calcutta’s affluent neighborhood of tea traders and industrial barons, to find the director, very much amused, on a chair in her living room surrounded by a half dozen schoolgirls. For years, Sen had been one of West Bengal’s most popular actresses, and the girls had come on a school field trip to ask awed questions about how to become actresses themselves. Sen was nearly forty, but she still had a smooth, dreamy face, with large, slightly almond-shaped eyes and a full, sensuous body built for saris. When the girls had left, she apologized for keeping me waiting, then agreeably settled in for my questions about an artist’s relationship to Calcutta.