Christopher Nolan’s Inception is an exceptionally ambitious film about the journey of thought-thieves who enter into the dreams of others. The film intertwines multiple story arcs into one viewing experience. The film opened worldwide in July, 2010 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Given that the film deals with topics at the cutting-edge of neuroscience, it is worthwhile comparing the arguments about the mind presented in the film to prevailing theories in neuroscience.

The main character in the film, Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a thief adept in the art of extracting thoughts from the dream-state of individuals as required by his business clients. Inception is a film about his last assignment which requires him to do the exact opposite––insert an idea in the mind of a young business tycoon.

At the heart of the film is a reinterpretation of the old-fashioned heist movie filled with car chases, gun-fights, and resplendent pyrotechnics. These sequences are wondrous spectacles. The second half of the film sees a particularly dazzling progression of scenes, all the more compelling since they are layered in the alternative, tiered, reality of dreams and dreams-within-dreams.

Nolan splices layer upon layer of these different visual sequences to Hans Zimmer’s mesmerizing soundtrack. A film of this nature requires a complex soundtrack to enhance experience. It is worth noting that recent research indicates that both listening to music and receiving formal training helps develop auditory ability in much the same way that physical activity enhances endurance.
The film is also about the complex relationship between emotions, perception, and reality. Cobb brings a fair share of emotional baggage to the table, and the film is as much about his perception of reality and the emotional bonds he shares with others as it is about the mind of the people he enters.

Finally, in order to build the framework for examining dreams, Nolan spends a substantial amount of time in Inception building a set of rules for dream examination and extraction. Plot structure, attention to detail, and character are central to the experience, these components of the film have been dealt with in detail by other critics. Because Inception is purported to be a thinking person’s film and because the director’s invests significant time in explaining the theoretical underpinnings of thought-capture in the film, it is worth examining them in detail.

How do you insert an idea into someone’s head? Let us consider the idea presented in the film first. According to the film, in order to have a successful inception of an idea, it must be planted as a “seed” or a vague notion in the subconscious and allowed to grow into a full-fledged idea. To gain access to the mind, it must be inserted when the subject has his or her guard relaxed: the best way to enter the mind of a subject is when he or she is dreaming because it is at this time that it is exceptionally vulnerable to the power of suggestion.

Why can an idea not be planted through the power of suggestion in a wake subject or through hypnosis? Well, for one there would be no science-fiction blockbuster woven around this simple, yet true explanation. Nolan tries to hammer across the notion that “ideas” are “parasites” that elicit a reaction similar to an immune response in the brain. This is untrue, and there is an inherent paradox in the explanation. We know that very few behaviors, mostly associated with survival, are instinctive. However, if an idea is not innate, then by definition it has external roots and it is susceptible to the power of suggestion—dream state or otherwise. In other words, most ideas do come from outside the mind and are subject to constant modification. This paradox does not detract from the narrative, but it is worth bearing in mind.

Law enforcement officials and magicians have known for years the relative ease by which false memories can be implanted. Psychologists have studied many of the ways by which memories can be changed in alert individuals without their conscious knowledge. Recent studies have affirmed that when there is mismatch between a decision and its outcome, subjects retrospectively rationalize choices they never made in the first place. Clearly, the mind is a place ripe for tricking!

Also, as we all painfully know, the act of forgetting is also a common occurrence. For many years the general assumption was that once a memory had been consolidated and turned into part of a long-term memory system, it was maintained indefinitely. Recent research has demonstrated that even consolidated memories are susceptible to decay. Whenever a memory is retrieved, it is prone to change. In other words, every time you recall events from your childhood, you change these through reconsolidation. Over time, these events add up so you either remember incorrectly or even forget.

There are additional preconditions to the foundations of the plot. First, is the assertion that dreams influence conscious decision-making in individuals. Second, is the corollary that that the rules of conscious decision-making apply to dreams too. Both are required to believe the premise of the film. Currently, these theories are the subject of intense debate. Although there is no reason to believe that dreams can influence decision-making in adults, new research suggests that newborn infants do indeed, learn while they’re asleep. Whether or not this trait is maintained throughout life is not currently known.

What Nolan probably did not know at the time of filming is that the brain can indeed “shut down” sequentially in parts to create altered states between sleep and wakefulness. A study published earlier this year demonstrated that the thalamus deactivates a few minutes prior to the cerebral cortex at the onset of sleep. The deactivation of the thalamus is a prerequisite to losing consciousness, but during this wake-sleep transition phase, there is a high chance that the sleeper will experience hallucinations of a vivid nature.

There is also another concept presented in the film, that of a limbo-state. Nolan concocts an elaborate guise in that the dreamer cannot die in his or her own dream, but the dream invaders enter a comatose, vegetative state once they die inside someone’s dream.

Nonetheless, setting these preconditions aside, the dreams in Inception are vivid, though for the most part, linear. Even the most creative filmmakers are constrained by the limitations of their imagination and their art. I suspect that Nolan knew that it would be foolhardy to even try to replicate an actual dream, so he broke dreams down into two fictitious components. The first is the architectural structure that is created by the thieves and somehow uploaded into the mind of the dreamer. The second is the people that populate these hollow architectural structures which he calls projections in the film. Both are ingenious devices that allow Nolan to rein in dreams so that they resemble recognizable locations such as street corners in Paris.

Nolan also uses a very early Freudian notion of deep layers of thought, which has since fallen out of favor. At one stage, Cobb perpetuates the “we only use a part of our brain” fictitious meme. His use of  “subconscious” (which has no concrete scientific meaning) throughout the movie to the more commonly used “unconscious” is also likely deliberate in order to put forward the idea that there are layers below the conscious. This comes into great effect in the final act when there are layers of “subconsiousness” which can be controlled and navigated like different levels of a video game. The denouement may also leave some viewers exasperated. However, given the complexities of the plot it was one of only few resolutions logically possible.

So is Inception worth watching? Definitely. Is it rooted in the current understanding of how the mind works? No, but that should not detract from the viewing experience. Inception is a thoughtful and beautifully-shot film. In addition, how many other commercial films can claim to ask us to delve deeper into the recesses of our own minds?

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Chandrahas, many thanks for doing this interview. Could you tell us something about the backstory and genesis of Arzee?

My pleasure entirely. About Arzee: in 2004 I was on my way to work one morning (after I finished my studies in 003, I returned to Bombay, where I’d spent nine years when I was growing up, and worked for two years a cricket writer for Cricinfo) when I saw a very short and good-looking man, about my age, crossing the street in front of me in Behram Baug in Jogeshwari. Sometimes faces immediately suggest stories, the shape of a life–surely more imagined than real, but anyhow they set something ticking in the brain.

In those days I wasn’t capable of anything longer than short stories. I thought of a story about a very small young man who’s both teased and loved by his friends, who himself loves the city and yet fears it, who wants all the normal things in life but feels he may not get them, who’s oversensitive to insult, yet has some secret source of power that allows him to hold himself up against the world. Even the fact that he is good-looking is double-edged. He feels it some kind of cruel joke that he such a small size and handsome, so people look at him all the more and make him uncomfortable.

A year later, when I gave up my job to start a different kind of life, I hadn’t yet written this story, but I was still excited by it. So I picked it off the hanger of my story cupboard, and wore it for about a year as I wandered around Bombay, and tried to set up a life in book-reviewing and literary criticism. Often I would go in the middle of the day to the old cinemas, as people go to the Noor in the novel. Finally felt I had all the elements in place: the protagonist, the cinema, his circle of friends and acquaintances, his mother, a sense of the shape of the story and the part of Bombay where it’d be set. Of course it would be a long time before all of these were to be properly realised on the page. I made many mistakes as I proceeded and had to return to correct them.

I don’t remember when I thought of the name “Arzee”, but it was fairly early on. It was one of those things that just arrive by themselves and seem instantly right.

What might you describe as some of the challenges a writer faces in finding his or her voice?

I think that the problem of writing fiction is that everything—character, plot, the narrative on the level of individual sentence and paragraphs, what to say and what to leave out—is completely up to the writer, but this is a freedom rife with difficulties (like most freedoms). In order for everything to make sense the book has to have a certain key, a certain unity of perspective. It takes a long time to find and control a voice: a voice that suits the book and brings out all its colours and mysteries.

Voice works as a kind of filter, a compositional key: some kinds of things have to be wrong for the book if other kinds of things are to be right. If you look at a page of your proofs and cry out, “That’s absolutely stupid!”, it actually shows that you have a sense, set up only by the success of other passages or scenes, that something here is contrived or flat by the standards or expectations that the novel itself has set up. What we think of as a voice actually arrives only in spurts and dribbles: an inexact phrase being replaced by a more exact one, an effect of smoothness and speed being produced by the deletion of two paragraphs one spent a week over. It’s the scrubbing and polishing, as much as the heat of first composition, that creates the voice. You just keep working till you get there.

Also, just as one grows up in the sense of becoming a more worldly and independent person, one also grows up in work. As you keep working and thinking and living, you learn to see why something might have a certain superficial charm but is overall just not a good idea, or that a text’s themes and preoccupations and tone can be realised on a number of mutually supporting levels—that the brew can always be made thicker and stronger.

In similar vein, what were some of the challenges you faced in bringing Arzee to life, both the book and the characters?

Hmm. Let me try and make some notes and observations about the various aspects of the story.

Structure: perhaps the main structural problem was that of balancing the external world of the story with the internal world of the protagonist’s mind. The book is told in the third-person. We see Arzee from the outside, even though the narration tracks his thoughts quite closely and is always tied to him. I thought it necessary to balance out the more considered language of the narrator with bursts of interior monologue on a higher pitch at key points in the story. This was the sound of Arzee thinking, circling, doubting, suspecting, dreaming.

Tone. It was absolutely necessary that the story had a double tone of pathos and humour, laughter and sadness (one journalist disastrously quoted this phrase as “slaughter and sadness”). Although the book was told mostly through the eyes of Arzee, the narration also had to rise above him to allow for a point of view upon Arzee. Sometimes the narrator himself has a joke at Arzee’s expense, as when he gets bored of hearing Arzee ramble on and on and leaves a blank passage in the dialogue, explaining that “there wasn’t anything he said that he had not said already”. While Arzee’s mother always feels for all his troubles, the gangster Deepak is always having a laugh at his expense. The reader was meant to laugh at Arzee as much as he or she sympathised with him.

Time. The book’s action takes place over two weeks, so how time was managed in the book was very important. Early on, Arzee is excited and everything happens very fast. Midway through, everything slows down and Arzee experiences time as an enormous burden. The story had to be given legs—an ability to leap just as Arzee does when he jumps over a wheelbarrow on the street and “almost does not come down” – then a kind of stasis.

Cast. It was always going to be a short book, so it was essential that the characters around Arzee be dealt with quite economically, and contribute something very specific to the story. Sometimes they make just the single appearance. Some of the key characters are persistently present even when absent, such as Arzee’s mother and the hairdresser Monique. I felt this was true to life—one is always having imaginary conversations with the people with whom one is closest, one doesn’t always need them to be physically present. All, or most, characters in the book are brought together in the final chapter, when Arzee recovers his sense of the fullness of life and the power to dream.

Dialogue. I feel this is one of the biggest tests of a fiction writer’s skill. Of course, there are many good writers who have no great love for dialogue at all, and we read them quite happily: we go to them for other things. But I really like books where you feel you can hear someone talking, as if right there in front of you. In real life, talk is always a mix of relevant and irrelevant things. Sometimes a single phrase, or even a pause, opens out a person’s nature completely. In fiction, you’re a little hamstrung because you can’t convey such things as a person’s accent, the pitch of his or her voice, the way someone runs words together or stops upon a syllable, the gesture that accompany their conversation – these are the things that make the talk of a real person so interesting. You have to think carefully about dialogue to make up the deficit. Indeed, dialogue becomes fuller and more satisfying when certain kinds of gaps are left in the conversation—less is more. I don’t think I’ve ever got so much pleasure in my work as from writing dialogue, especially the exchanges between Arzee and Deepak and the long conversation in Phiroz’s house between Arzee and Phiroz’s daughter Shireen.

Who are some of your literary influences, and how do you negotiate those influences as a writer?

One can’t be a writer without first being in love with certain books and certain writers. But one’s influences are so many. I’ve never felt powerfully dragged along in the wake of just one writer or model. It’s like having a hundred teachers, none of whom casts a very big shadow on your work. Sometimes reading another writer shows you not what to do, but what not to do—you see how something complicated can actually be quite simple. On a list of writers I love and admire for different reasons, I suppose I’d put Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Willa Cather, Chekhov, IB Singer, Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoevsky, Sandor Marai, Bohumil Hrabal, and the pair of Egyptians Mahfouz and Alaa Al Aswany.

For a fiction writer, reading a good work of fiction by somebody else inspires feelings of both admiration and a kind of jealousy. You think, “My work had better be just as good, else I won’t forgive myself!” In her essay “Reading Barthes and Nabokov” Zadie Smith writes, “The novels we love best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hideen passageways, et cetera.” The beauty and complexity of novels makes one hungry for them, and one wants to build one’s own house too to be similarly beautiful and durable. Influences of other writers are like the influences of one’s parents or one’s family: one carries them along and in some way can’t escape them, yet one becomes one’s own person and influences others in one’s turn. I certainly think of writers I love ardently—Bandhopadhyay and Cather, for example—as family. I feel I know how they’d react to certain situations.

In your literary journal, the Middle Stage (I won’t describe you as a blogger because that really does not say much about what you do), you talk about literary criticism as a species of literature. How has your work as literary critic and reviewer influenced your writing? In particular,how has writing weekly essays on the Middle Stage and connecting with readers through the site/blog contributed to your formation as a writer?

I was lucky to receive an education (in Delhi and Cambridge) that showed me that the best literary criticism has the same love of language and metaphor, hunger for ideas, and distinction of prose style that we take away from literature itself. Or to put it another way, it may possess not just the reflected glow of literature, but its own bright personality. Working on creative work of my own and reflecting upon the creative work of others and seem to be to be allied activities. Writing about other books—especially books that I feel strongly about, whether positively or negatively—has helped me figure out my own theory of fiction, what I think works and what doesn’t. It has also given me a much fuller and richer life in literature than I would have if I were just a writer of books.

The Middle Stage occupies a big place in my writing life, because I started putting up posts on it in 2005, around the same time as I left my job to begin life as a full-time writer. I’d spent a number of years studying literature at university, and had lots of ideas that couldn’t be expressed through conventional reviews. Three or four paragraphs on the internet was the perfect form for them, and I loved linking to other pieces, thereby compressing two or three hours of reading into a small entry. The sense of having one’s own home on the Web—a space to which you gave everything you could, for no material reward, purely for the love of work—was a big part of my early days as a writer, although these days I’m regrettably not always able to find as much time for my blog as I should.

I feel a good literary blog—several are listed on my blogroll—can provide a really powerful lens on literature, as much as a good literary magazine or weekend review supplement. It’s a place where the contemporary and the classic, the familiar and the obscure, the hyperlink and the long quote, can be brought together, routed through a reader’s strong sensibility. At some point, when I have a little more time, I would really like to immerse myself in work for the blog once again.

As I write in the review of Arzee the Dwarf, I suspect you are a bit of a flaneur, recording on your travels within Bombay its sights and sounds. Could you share some thoughts about your relationship with the city and its role in the book?

I love the city: its different neighbourhoods, the energy and industry of its people, its sense of life as a pitched battle, its acute awareness of space, the immense and often debilitating pressure it exerts upon human consciousness, the beauty of its hundreds of old buildings and its views of the sea, its dozens of relatively inexpensive pleasures, its many-voiced and multilayered history. Just the feeling of standing at the door of a local train at night, looking at things run past and feeling the wind on my face, sets my thoughts going. I’ve lived about half my life here, in two separate chunks, so I feel I can read Bombay in a way I can’t, for instance, read Delhi, where I went to university.

For all that is a concrete jungle, Bombay actually has great natural beauty: the sea and lakes and creeks and backwaters, hills and mountains. It’s India’s most democratic city: people of different classes and cultures mix more easily here than anywhere else in India. For all these reasons Bombay is a treasure trove of narrative material.

Arzee loves it too, as he has never known any other place, and it has given him whatever he cherishes most in his life, in particular the Noor cinema, which is his home in the world. He has a romantic relationship to the city, and loves the routine of the same walks on the same streets at the same hours. In the novel, circumstances make him explore the city more widely than he previously had—Arzee’s map of Bombay expands within the timespan of the book. Bombay is also linked to pride in his own self, to his ego: if life doesn’t work out as he wanted it to, he would rather leave Bombay than feel as if he is being mocked by the city.

In a related vein, the novel, in a sense, may be described as an act of translation and transcription, of bringing the rhythms of life in Bombay to the page. How did you seek to achieve that transcription?

I just tried to depict as strongly and vividly as I could the places that are most important to the book: the cinema and the kind of people who are seen there; the darkness of its auditorium and the heat and light of the projection room; the run-down apartment where Arzee lives and the chawl where he goes to meet Deepak and Phiroz; the low stone wall by the gutter where Arzee likes to stand and think; the salon where Monique works and the small anonymous offices where operations like the betting syndicate and Mehndibhai’s mysterious activities are run from. Arzee’s life is ordered by the life of the cinema, so there is a definite rhythm to his day, a rhythm different from that of most other people in the city. To bring alive the shape of his day was also to bring him to life.

Any advice for an aspiring writer?

A few things maybe. Read as widely and as unsystematically as you can. Mark up all the books you read unless they’re borrowed. Learn to hate certain kinds of books just as you love other kinds, to develop an ear for insincere or fraudulent work. Spend time in secondhand bookshops. Try to listen as carefully as you can to people. Love language and be interested in the history of language, the origins of words and their changing sense across time. Learn to recognise cliches and other kinds of deadwood in language, and to edit these out ruthlessly in our your own work. Always read a piece one last time before submitting it—it shows that you care, and allows you to eliminate minor infelicities. Take some kind of course in either reading or writing if you haven’t already. Try and spend some time at your desk every day so that it becomes second nature to be there.

Finally, borrowing from your interview technique, any non-writing related advice for our readers?

I don’t know…there are so many things. I’m sure I’m more in need of advice from people than able to dispense useful thoughts for them! But a few things maybe. Keep a diary—it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself. It allows you to return to older versions of yourself that you might otherwise lose. Love someone deeply, and put your arms around them often, but don’t get so close (metaphorically speaking now) that the mystery of the life and mind of another disappears. Think about the self—this is just a extension of my own advice to myself at the beginning of my fourth decade in this world—about both the pleasures and perils of ego, about the power you have to be a positive force in the world. Run as often as you can—it’s one of the things that people seem to leave behind when they get to adult life. It’s great for both body and mind—great when you want to work some puzzle, out or escape from some negative cycle of discontent or resentment. Many of the plot problems of Arzee were solved while running! Use a fountain pen to write—words are such fine things that they deserve this little touch of style. Eat lots of fruit. Follow the English Premier League, and support Tottenham Hotspur. This is a very strange bouquet of advice, but there you have it!

Photo credit: Aparna Jayakumar 

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RUPERT MURDOCH’S DECISION to charge users to access online news across his publications is his answer to the steep decline in advertising revenue this year. While it is appealing to try to turn millions of news surfers into paying customers, how realistic is that move?
 
“It is a huge gamble,” said Stephen Jukes, former global head of news at Reuters. “If he fails, surely there will be more blood on the wall.”
 
Jukes, who is the Dean of Media School at Bournemouth University, draws a distinction between what he calls ‘news’ and ‘news’. The first is an everyday commodity, the second a value-added, exclusive product.
 
Jukes believes it is possible to charge for the value-added variety, where the reader gets more. But if it goes wrong, users would avoid clicking through to ordinary news items, and Murdoch would end up with less revenue to pay for the ‘quality journalism’ his plan aims to ensure.

Journalist-turned-academic Liisa Rohumaa is of a similar opinion. A former deputy editor at FT.com, Rohumaa has seen a monetised system work. FT.com runs a three-tier access system, the top of which is a premium-level service for £199 a year, but she doesn’t believe this business model would work for websites that do not cater to niche markets. “It’s a question of who would be prepared to pay,” she said.
 
While a financial analyst may pay for the information that FT.com provides, Rohumaa cannot see consumers approaching The Sun‘s celebrity gossip or The Times‘s general news with the same attitude. Daily news can be accessed from a plethora of sources, including citizen reports and blogs. Convincing consumers they should pay to read what they may read for free elsewhere is unrealistic.

“I think our audience are starting to realise that information isn’t just in the hands of the elite,” Rohumaa said.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and journalism professor at the City University of New York, thinks the decision is more than impractical. “Pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it,” he wrote in The Guardian, “is not only futile but possibly suicidal.”
 
By cutting content off from what he calls ‘google juice’ – the searches and links which draw users and advertisers in – publishers will not only alienate themselves from the real value of the web, they may even make less money. The escaping genie, he believes, should have been bottled up long ago.
 
Rohumaa’s thoughts exactly. The first internet browser was launched 15 years ago and newspapers have had that long to monetise their online content. “There was a chance to cash in,” Rohumaa said, “but the industry failed to see that and I can’t see it working now.”
 
Murdoch is pushing forward, though. He has announced he is looking at ways to block search engines from his content. He thinks Google and others have been acting as “parasites” and it’s time they stopped. 

Google’s response to Murdoch is this: if you don’t want to be on our search index, tell us, and we will remove you. A Google spokesman pointed out that Google News and web searches promote news organisations and bring users to their site – but only if they wanted it.
 
Professor Stuart Allan, author of Online News: Journalism and the Internet, believes the precarious relationship between news organisations and the search engine has been underestimated. He thinks charging users for news content may cause a two-tier effect across the Internet, dividing those who can pay and those who can’t.

“Such a divide would be a great shame,” he said, especially as the net is based on an ideal of access for all. While he is unsure how Murdoch’s plans will play out, he does believe any plans to charge for online news items will have a “chilling effect on the industry”.

A survey conducted by Lightspeed Research shows 91 per cent of people were unwilling to pay for news. In the same survey, five per cent said they might pay for a single news items. Only four per cent would consider a longer term subscription.
 
Vivian Schiller can relate to these figures. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it charged for content and then stopped two years later. She thinks asking users to pay for online news is ‘mass delusion’. And yet the current executive editor of nytimes.com, Bill Keller, has announced he expects a decision to be reached soon about whether or not the website will charge for content… again.
 
The issue, it seems, stretches further than one of should or can. For news organisations losing money daily it may be a case of must. Somehow.
 
Tom Hill, journalism trainer and founder of Up to Speed Journalism, believes it is vital for the news industry to make profit and that the online product can in fact contribute to the bottom line. One of the factors to consider, he says, is the behaviour of consumers. For every rational consumer there are millions of irrational ones; imagining that they are all discerning just will not do.
 
The presentation of the online content and the way in which payment is taken are crucial. If a pay-per-view approach could be integrated with an iTunes account or something similar, users may be more willing to cross the pay wall for unique content. It needs to be what Hill describes as an ‘invisible expense’.
 
One effect of this pay-per-view model, commodifying single pieces of news, is that it will clearly show what stories users value. “Journalists are going to have to earn their spurs if they are to produce content that people are going to pay for,” Hill said.
 
While newspapers need more money, and fast, Rohumaa believes Murdoch is looking for it in the wrong place. “We shouldn’t look to online as the saviour of everything else,” she said. She believes there are other ways to recover revenue and that the search for a business model that builds truly convergent multimedia empires is the way forward.
 
Murdoch is yet to announce how exactly he plans to change the ‘malfunctioning business model’ of the web, though he has said his publications – among others, The Sun, The Times and News of the World in UK – will begin charging for content by next summer. While what that move means for the industry remains to be seen, many media observers are of the view that something must change.
 
“We will only survive if we reinvent ourselves,” Rohumaa said.

Angelica Jopson is a UK-based journalist. She can be reached at angelica.mediamind@googlemail.com

AT THE FOOT of the busy Byculla flyover in Bombay stands the neglected statue of the “Ubhbha Parsi” [1]. Many Bombayites and perhaps a few Mumbaikars are familiar with that odd name. Fewer still would know the identity of this personage—Seth Cursetjee Maneckjee Shroff, a nineteenth- century philanthropist and father of the founder of the Alexandra Girls’ English Institution, arguably the first of its kind in India. It does not come as a surprise that none at all apart from her immediate descendents would have heard the name of Maneckjee’s granddaughter, Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla. Yet, this woman has also made history; she has left for posterity a rich legacy of her life and her world spanning over half a century and three continents, in the form of an autobiography entitled The Story of My Life [2].

What follows in these pages, is not a book review in the strict sense of the term. One cannot review a book published in 1911, a near century ago. Nor is it a text that can be categorized easily; indeed, it is one that could well prove to be a librarian’s nightmare. It is an autobiography; it is a history of the Parsi-British encounter during the Raj; it is a fascinating travelogue; it is a meticulously kept diary; and it is a recreation of nineteenth-century Bombay. Unfortunately, like the statue of yore, this remarkable personal history remains unknown, except to her family.

Questions have often been raised as to the veracity of the personal voice or the authenticity of a diarist as sources of history. A subjective position could misconstrue facts; the memory of a septuagenarian, as in this particular instance, is prone to error; biases, prejudices, factual errors, inevitably seep in. However, contemporary questioning of grand narratives of objectivity and history has created and legitimized archival spaces for personal histories and familial narratives. Sources of knowledge, it has been increasingly argued, need not be only institututionalized records; personal testimonies, diaries, and letters constitute history as well. What is essential are not just facts, but how people remember and construe those facts. Besides, public chronicles and empirical histories have been shown to be as fallible and prone to biases as is any subjective reflection on human experience. Inherently fallible though it might be, the phenomenological experience of a living, breathing individual constitutes a challenge to centrist notions of truth and authenticity.What we see Dosebai doing is particularizing the generalities of the colonial moment. She does not necessarily set out always to contest official history or public discourse. However, she is looking at the same moment from her own, individual perspective. Personal histories, such as hers, offer us, as Urvashi Butalia remarks—in the context of the oral narratives of Partition–a way “of turning the historical lens at a somewhat different angle, thereby enriching history” (15) [3].

Recent postcolonial and feminist scholarship have also disrupted the overdetermined nature of academic and professional histories, offering new possibilities for a poetics of the archive and valid spaces for a text such as Dosebai’s. Paradoxically, such a text will not readily allow for an unnuanced  postcolonial/feminist paradigm. If we, as readers, locate ourselves in a particular moment in history, we need to allow, equally, historical space to the textual narrator, persona, and author. Dosebai’s historical position inevitably defines her ideology. She out-colonizes the colonizer in her imperiousness and her loyalty to the British Crown emerges unabashedly on every page of her 500-page tome. Similarly, her claim, on her mother’s behalf as well as her own, to be pioneers in the field of nineteenth-century women’s education is open to question.

In that sense, one even hesitates to use the term ‘alternate’ history when defining this text. No doubt, it is a personal, subjective record and often it directly and very sharply questions public records of the time, whether newspaper chronicles or historical texts, thereby providing an alternate reading of the period. At the same time, Dosebai’s is not, strictly speaking, a ‘people’s’ history. This particular personal history is created by a prominent personality of the time. The Story of my Life is no act of subterfuge, in contrast to, say Amar Jiban, the autobiography of her Bengali contemporary, Rassundari Devi [4]. In fact, in the manner of a metanarrative, Dosebai’s text constantly alludes to her act of writing and to important personages inquiring of its progress. Both the style and content follow the dictates of a grand narrative. Paradoxically, these very ambiguities in her work and in her personality, and which were the ambiguities at the heart of Empire, enrich our understanding of her account.

Dosebai’s autobiography, as suggested earlier, is hybrid and multifaceted, and I would like to address some of the issues it takes up. A single thread which runs its course, from the first to the last page, is the matter of nineteenth-century education for women and her mother’s role in ‘pioneering’ this ‘movement.’ Inevitably, one’s comments on the text gravitate toward this issue as a starting point.

The Woman Question

Social histories have recorded the reform movement that so radically altered the lives of nineteenth-century Indian women. However, as Lalita and Tharu have posited, despite its attention to ‘the Woman Question,’ and its recording of events in which women were involved, these histories seem incapable of capturing the structural importance of gender in colonial politics [5]. Contemporary feminist scholarship, with the significant inclusion of Women Writing in India, marks a strategic shift in perspective by calling attention to the complex dimensions in which women’s subjectivities were being sculpted and the way in which women negotiated, resisted, or subverted the master narratives through their lived experiences and, in the case of some, through their writing. It might seem pertinent to read Dosebai’s views in a similar vein, even while bearing in mind that she was no subaltern.

In her very individualistic and even personalized manner, Dosebai places her “reverend mother” at the epicenter of change in the cause of education, pushing to the periphery male reformers and educationists, the ’Eminent Victorians’ of India, such as Cursetjee Maneckjee (founder of Alexandra School), Jamshetjee Jejeebhoy, and Sorabjee Bengali. Without quite realizing it, this strong-willed lady is, thereby, radically altering the politics of gender representation.

The raison d’etre of Dosebai’s authorship is to pay tribute to her mother for her contribution to social reform among nineteenth-century Indian women. Interestingly, as she sets about this task, from its very dedication, preface, and invocation, to the last page when she is confronted with the remains of her days, Dosebai shows none of the diffidence or humility traditionally associated with early autobiographies by women. She opens her saga, or rather declares it open, with great fanfare, which, as we read on, we discover is her characteristic style. “Every human life,” she states majestically, “plays its God-assigned part in the unwritten history of the world. But there are some who are destined and privileged to record the annals of history, in which they have participated” (emphases mine.) She is one so destined, for her mother’s “foresight” had made her “the instrument of pioneering the noble cause of higher education among millions and millions of the gentler sex in India” (Preface). Dosebai has donned the Miltonic mantle but with this difference— she invokes the memory of her mother first, even the Almighty is relegated to a secondary position.

Dosebai ‘makes’ history in many ways, often dramatic. “The year 1842 may be cited as the dawn of English education,” she states. Why it is so, is left in abeyance. The remainder of this first of many chapters, then undertakes to trace the ancestral history of her family patriarchs (one of whom was Maneckji of the Ubhbha Parsi fame) since “it has been thought advisable,” possibly by male advisors. Even so, what seeps in, as a subtext, is the story of her infertile step-grandmother’s active role in stepping aside, not just willingly, but purposefully, in order that her husband remarries and begets his progeny. Her parents virtually imprison Barozbai for her initiative. Besides, the Parsi community is in a state of uproar and the Parsi Panchayat, then as now, decides to interfere in the matter. Its disapproval comes in the guise of refusing the loan of the huge pots and pans required for the wedding feast. The question, however, does remain—are these facts? Was it a family myth, perpetuated to honor the philanthropist’s second marriage? Dosebai is often an unreliable narrator but then so are official historians. Facts, half-truths, fiction, these are the family myths that bring the historical past to life, and convey a great deal about the author of this piece of history. In that sense, Dosebai is not only recording history, she is creating history as well, even while we might doubt her claims to the many firsts, which according to her have created a female family history.

In the next three chapters, devoted to her mother, Dosebai gives us the reason for the significance of 1842. It was the year when her mother sent her to an English school and thereby “pioneered” the cause of English education among Indian women. Undoubtedly, hers was a bold and daring act, especially since she had been a young widow and this decision was hers alone. Moreover, she had to face the wrath of her father-in-law, Maneckji. The fact that she was staying independently of the family clan was itself an act of defiance. Dosebai, as family and social historian, as well as the defender of all that her mother stood for, is very vocal in this all-important matter She gives the reader a meticulous record of the consequences of this step and the furor it raised, in the family, community and the press. She reproduces the correspondence between her mother and her father-in-law, which Dosebai claims she had in her possession and which would have been invaluable archival material had it been extant today. However, the translation (from the original Gujarati, one presumes) is couched in the spirited tone of Dosebai and one would want to believe that the fieriness was her matriarchal legacy.

The thrust of Meherbai’s arguments seem to be sharp and pointed. Since her own brother-in-law, Curstjee Maneckjee Cursetjee, had appointed governesses to teach English to his daughters, why then, should the father-in-law raise objections against her effort for her daughter? The reply comes in the form of another argument. Those girls were being educated in the privacy of their homes. Meherbai counters the old man’s argument by pointing out that had Meherbai’s own public initiative not got so much publicity, her brother-in-law would never have thought of educating his children.

The press of that period had thought this act significant enough for it to report it in sensational details—some filled with venom, others (the English press according to Dosebai), full of plaudits.

Dosebai attacks the press for attacking her mother. “These Parsee lordlings,” i.e., the editors of two contemporary Gujarati journals Jame-e-Jamshed and the Chabook had resolved to excommunicate Meherbai and her household. The mother is heard to have lashed back in an unequivocal fashion. Dosebai is equally vocal in setting the record right where another contemporary paper was concerned. This was the English Bombay Courier, which, not surprisingly, praises the “enlightened” family for sending a girl to an English school; ironically, it is the wrong member of the family—Maneckjee Cursetjee, Meherbai’s brother-in-law and target of her attack, who receives praise! Maneckjee receives these and other eulogies, including one from Elphinstone, former governor of Bombay, “quietly.”

Dosebai also chastises the author of the popular A History of the Parsees, Dosabhoy Karaka, because he had failed to mention Meherbai among the galaxy of eminent Parsis. This book, incidentally, is still valorized today, wherein Karaka invests the Parsis of the nineteenth-century with an inherent worth, carried down the ages from their Persian ancestors [6]. Now, Dosebai does not refute the ‘fact’ that hers was the Golden Age of the Parsis; what angers her, is the mother’s exclusion as contributor to that golden age. “The male sex is,” she notes, “always tardy in acknowledging the merits of a female rival.”

Mother and daughter are confronted with the ‘charge’ of defying convention by occupying public spaces, both literally and figuratively. The press has moved the familial into the public sphere. Dosebai’s need to recreate this piece of familial history by way of a spirited retaliation, with the full understanding that it was going to be published, also points in the same direction.

It was certainly no mean achievement for a young widow in 1842 to have made and carried out her own independent decision, in the very controversial matter of a daughter’s education. Equally, the daughter’s attempt to set the record right, and using her educational tools to do so and to write this very piece challenging the patriarchal nature of her world was no small matter.

Having said that, Dosebai’s unqualified claims on her mother’s behalf, as on her own, raise several interesting issues. Some of her statements need reconsidering. “Meherbai’s independent spirit waged war upon the custom of centuries” (32). “This was a time when fathers entertained not the remotest idea of educating their daughters”(29); it was “under the benign rule of her late Majesty, Queen Victoria” that this act of emancipation was made possible,” and by slow degrees others have followed her example” (30?) “The school [Mrs. Ward's] was situated in that part of the Fort exclusively inhabited by Europeans and known by the name of the English Ward, a quarter, scrupulously avoided by the native ladies” (29-32).

Meherbai’s decision, emancipatory as it might have been, cannot merit the beginnings of English education among the Parsis and other Indian communities. If it was a pioneering act, in the sense that a Parsi girl had received a public school education, it was also an individualistic, isolated act. Dosebai’s mention of male educators who were supposed to have ‘followed’ her mother’s precept emphasizes the chronology but does not see either those contributions or her mother’s as a consequence of, rather than as the cause of, change. The larger movements for reform, the conflicts and controversies regarding the Woman Question, all these are erased from her text. At times, it is not so much what the author says as what she does not that we need to look at. The absences are as relevant to our understanding of Doseabi and her narrative, as are the presences. The “benign” rule of Victoria seems to this anglophile the inspiration behind the ‘sweeping’ changes that her mother brought about. As for the entry into the European quarter of the Fort—the family’s privileged class position, it cannot be forgotten—was also instrumental in making entry into its ‘bastions’ permissible. If the quarter had been “scrupulously avoided by native ladies,” more likely than not, it was because of the presence of unwritten but well-defined laws of segregation rather than the absence of courage among the ladies in question. 

Colonial Encounters of the Closest Kind

The textual emphasis, without doubt, is on the Englishness of Dosebai’s English education. Macaulay’s (in)famous Minute finds a living, breathing, articulating representative in Dosebai Jessawalla. Indian in blood, if not so much in colour, Dosebai appears totally English in taste in opinions, in morals and in intellect. Unsurprisingly, the dedication to her mother is immediately followed at the opening of Chapter 1, by an excessively eulogistic tribute to Macaulay, the prototype of “our kind and paternal government” and the true representative of “Victoria the Good.” She quotes at length from Macaulay’s “memorable speech” delivered in the House of Commons in 1833, with its rhetorical evocation of India’s barbarism before the advent of the British.

The impact of Macaulay’s Minute, then and now, is the subject of a history too vast to discuss here. If it is true, as some scholars have argued, that Indian nationalism emerged, partially at least, from just such a class of people as Macaulay had envisioned, it was equally true that the man’s contempt for oriental scholarship, “a single shelf of a good European library [being] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” dealt a fell blow to Indian languages and culture. His devout disciple, William Bentinck, it is believed, had hatched a plan to demolish the Taj Mahal (an emblem of oriental sensuousness?) and to ship its marble to England for sale and reuse (Baron, 216).  On friendly terms with Bentinck, Dosebai had not, however, heard of this near-disastrous venture. Just for once, in fact, her astonished gaze at the “eighth Wonder of the World compels, even this honorary memsahib to compare the Taj favorably to “the large and showy architecture of British rule” (206).

Returning to the point, Dosebai unequivocally endorses the civilizing mission, sees herself civilized by it, and seeks to civilize others by the same principles. One cannot, however, view Dosebai’s predilections in an isolated manner; rather, we need to locate her within the larger framework of the Parsi bourgeoisie under Empire. Formerly from Surat and Navsari, a predominant section of the Parsi community had moved to Bombay by the nineteenth century as commercial partners and collaborators with the British. As trade and commerce grew, so did the social connections between the British and the Parsis in matters of education, culture, taste, and habits. While for some, the learning of the English language was a part of the broader desire for knowledge and learning, for others, especially for the emerging class of seths or merchants, Western education became a matter of expediency. It was a means, not only for easy communication with their colonial masters, but also for stepping up social ladders.

There were, of course, those Parsis like Dadabhai Naoroji, Madame Cama, and Pherozesha Mehta whose absorption of Western mores and non-native intellect had not blinded them to the exploitation by the ruling class; rather, it had sharpened their critical awareness—Dadabahi’s Drain Theory, which Dosebai mentions in passing, points to the economic exploitation of India under empire. One sees in Dadabhai as in some others, Parsi or otherwise, the cutting edge of a liberal education. The scope and vision of such men and women is beyond the ken of Dosebai, although she styles herself a social reformer. The duality of her position was the position of the majority of this Westernized class of people. Parsi women enjoyed greater social and cultural freedom compared to other more secluded women in India. However, liberalism, as advocated by the British ruling class, was wholly myopic about larger sections of Indian society. The beneficiaries of such liberalism, Dosebai being one such example, were equally myopic about their Indian “sisters,” as she was wont to address them. Dosebai was no recluse but this much-travelled woman led, paradoxically, a very sheltered, insulated existence.

Many instances of her insularity come to the fore but her visit to England can be cited as one. It is in 1907-08 that she is in London, and although she is “in the eve of her life” (458), she visits parks, friends, attends public meetings, and functions. One such public meeting is at the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor House where she meets “foremost ladies of rank taking keen interest in the cause of women.” No details follow. Another is the Tableau Vivant, held in aid of the Indian Famine Fund. A vivid recreation of the colorful pageant follows but nothing about the raging famine and the course of action. A “gratifying sight” and one, which inspires a spirited comment on the refreshing changes in society, is the fact that a Mrs. Hormusji Vakil had traveled from Bombay to London all alone to visit her son. The author observes with pleasure how these “social movements” are acceptable now unlike at the time when her daughter traveled alone in the 1880s and 90s. “Now none of the Chabooks …would dare to comment on my bold and enterprising sisters.” The credit for all these vast changes goes to “none but my old and revered mother, who had suffered so much at the hands of the bigoted orthodoxy” (457-58).

The key phrase here is “social movement.” An indication of the sweeping changes that had altered the lives of Indian women is centered, in Dosebai’s scheme of things, on the figure of the traveling Indian woman. Travel, especially to the European world, entailed encounters—as near-equals—with the Western world, outside the confines of one’s domestic and native worlds. Dosebai’s interpretation of ‘social’ ‘movement’ is thereby limited to mean geographical movements and interaction with people (preferably) with the ruling classes. The European gaze is upon the Indians and they were becoming increasingly worthy of the gaze. The leitmotif is heard once more and in no subtle undertones—her mother had been responsible for bringing about these social movements.

A lot can be said about the new freedoms that at least a certain section of Indian women had begun to enjoy—the freedom to travel being one of them. Life behind the Purdah was certainly never enjoined upon Dosebai and her ilk. Of course, it is typical of Dosebai that she takes pains to mention this in no uncertain terms and more than may seem necessary, to prove her point. One can perceive, for instance, her patronizing tones when she mentions how life for Parsi women, at one time, had been the way it was for contemporary Muslim women in the zenana.

Dosebai is very vocal, very articulate, and, at times, very verbose. Yet, if there is a lot she says, there is a lot that she does not. These gaps and fissures in her story are crucial in our understanding of the writer’s mindset and ideology. The year of this traveler’s visit is 1907-08. Britain’s insularity is being increasingly threatened. If things are in the process of falling apart, and the center does not hold, it is in great measure owing to the increasing challenges from the colonies. However, while private and public narratives interpenetrate the text, there is a notable absence of anything even remotely pertaining to anti-colonial movements and of the nationalist histories surging around her.

This is the period when personages like Dadabhai Naoroji and Madame Cama, are, in varied and contradictory ways questioning Empire and making their impact on the metropolitan center of London as well as on the home front. Dosebai knows them in her personal capacity and meets them on her visits to London. She does not meet Madame Cama although she repeatedly mentions being with the Cama family. However, she is conspicuously silent about the import of their actions. This is the time when Madame Cama embarks upon a crusading campaign in London, giving speeches at London’s Hyde Park (Dosebai mentions her delight at visiting the same Park.) It is in 1907 when at Stuttgart she unfurls India’s first national flag; Dosebai is in Germany at the time. Dosebai attends the Jamshedi Naroz celebrations in March 1908,taking care to mention that she was seated next to the “distinguished” visitor, the late Governor of Madras and for a time Viceroy of India (454-55). Precisely a year ago, at the same celebrations, Lord Reay had declared amid cheers (from the Parsis) that the “fortunes of Great Britain and India were irrevocably linked together.” Referring to that event, the revolutionary, Shyamji Krishna Varma, had sounded a warning note to Parsis not to be time-servers, that the Parsis were native Indian subjects, that they could not be “enamored of an oppressive foreign yoke” (Mody, 80-81) [8].

Dosebai’s reaction to the revolutionary’s words could be left to conjecture but one’s guess would not seem too far-fetched. She did not look upon colonization as a “foreign yoke” and she was “enamored” enough to desire an audience with royalty. An entire chapter, entitled My Presentation to The King and Queen, speaks for itself. For this loyal colonial subject, an audience with British royalty becomes emblematic of the rarest of honors that Western civilization could possibly confer upon an Indian subject.

Two decades later, when, on a visit to Britain, Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he had famously replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Like “Victoria the Good,” Dosebai would not have been amused.

A World of Her Own

If Dosebai does create history, it is not in the guise of social reformer much though she loves and embraces that image. It is as a globetrotter that she maps geographical spaces and marks historical time. There is no purpose behind her travels—travel serves its own purpose. At an earlier juncture in her autobiography, Dosebai tells us that though she had “enjoyed more freedom than [her] Parsee sisters,” she had never been more than a couple of hours drive from Bombay. By the time we reach the end of her narrative, Dosebai has reached the furthest ends of the world. She attends the Delhi Durbar when India comes under the crown. She goes up in a balloon in Paris, accompanied only by a flask of wine. She gets a private audience with the Pope. She is presented to England’s king and queen. She visits Niagara “the Indescribable.” She marvels at San Francisco’s recovery a year after the 1906 earthquake “like a phoenix from its ashes.” Her last voyage to England is undertaken “when the rugged path seems nearly ended.” Finally, it is at this “advanced stage of…life” that she completes her task of writing the text that we are reading. The style of her travelogue is remarkable in its evocative quality.

Much of the narrative, therefore, appears to be written in the tradition of the picaresque. In many ways, in fact, she becomes the picara. Episodic in its mode, the traveler narrates the varied events centering around her travels so that as we learn about her travels, we learn about the traveler as well. We have already observed that her anglophilia limits her exposure to the very vibrant anti-colonial movements of the time. At the same time, her sojourns within India and to the Western world can be seen to unsettle time-honored boundaries. The globe-trotter is aware of the pioneering nature of her journeys and what is remarkable is how much at home she is, whether in her native land or in Western metropolitan centers.

The exigencies of the time would not have allowed the lady solitary sojourning; interestingly, however, Dosebai’s traveling companions are given short shrift. Occasionally she mentions them—an old aunt during the Delhi Durbar trip who is, for this social snob, the source of great hilarity when she mistakes the butlers for “honoured” European guests. As casual are the references to her sons accompanying her on her European travels (although she does acknowledge at the end the help she took of their jottings). Again, though she does not walk the streets unlike the prototypical flaneur, the focus is on herself, whether she rides an elephant in Lucknow, or becomes “a motorist “in London or goes up in the balloon in Paris, or drives in an open carriage back home. The emphasis is always on her and on the daring modes of transport. They often invite jeering comments, from her contemporaries, as often, they inspire awe. Considering the number of times she mentions the mode of her travels, she appears to relish the attention, positive or otherwise, because it is further evidence of her pioneering ventures.

True, there was increasing traffic from the colonies to the imperial center through the mid-nineteenth century onwards, reversing, somewhat, the trend of European flow to Asian regions. Even so, Britain’s insularity till then often made the oriental figure “an object of metropolitan spectacle” (Burton, At the Heart of Empire). It would have been discomfiting to most. For instance, Behram Malabari, the noted social reformer, was not at liberty to wander the streets of London without facing barriers thrown up by the exigencies of Britain’s role as an imperial power and more specifically, by the dictates of the civilizing mission that a variety of Britons believed to be their special gift to colonial peoples (Burton, 2) [9]. Pandita Ramabai, renowned scholar, Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first woman to hold a law degree, and Malabari (all of whom are in England around the time of Dosebai’s first and second visits) come to understand through different experiences how elusive the goal of feeling comfortably “at home” was for colonial subjects in imperial Britain.

Although Dosebai’s travels  were a part of this culture of movement to England, her trajectory through late Victorian-early Edwardian Britain differs from the other colonial subjects mentioned above. For one thing, the otherness experienced not only by Ramabai but even by the anglophiles, Cornelia and Malabari, find expression in the writings they have left behind. Not so, Dosebai. Which of them can be considered representative of the Indian abroad is a moot point. As Burton points out, even if we consider a handful among the thousands who were passing through England to study, trade, or to seek political and social reform they are a motley, heterogeneous crowd. “A Hindu woman converted to Christianity, a Parsi Christian woman training in the law, a Parsi male social reformer—none of them was even predictably “Indian” in Victorian cultural terms…(9). To this hybrid mix, could be added the presence of Dosebai—a staunch Zoroastrian, a faithful anglophile, and an enthusiastic tourist, who, from all accounts or at least from her travelogue, enjoyed being a “metropolitan spectacle” and did not seem to be troubled by imperial patronage as the others had been in various ways. 

Apparently, at least, Dosebai’s travelogue, if it is to be taken at face value, seems untroubled by any mention of racist slurs or arrogance. Of course, unlike the other three, she was not in England to study as Cornelia was, or to interact with Christian missions as Ramabai was, or to seek out a reformist agenda for raising the Age of Consent as Malabari was. Hence, since she was in England as a tourist, she might not have been exposed, as the others were, to the conflicting relationship with empire within the ‘home’ country. Moreover, her rather privileged class positions ensured that she move within the inner circles and not be confronted by ‘street’ encounters. Besides, Dosebai seems to enjoy being the focus of attention, because she often mentions being surrounded by crowds of people, who, according to her, wondered whether she was some Indian princess.

We cannot, of course, take Dosebai’s accounts at face value. Her rather strong ego would not have permitted her to admit, in what was going to be a public discourse, that she might have experienced racism, even by default. One such episode that she does mention happens on her travels in her own homeland; however, since British arrogance, seemed to increase in proportion to the distance it traveled from Britain to colony, the example would be even more to the point. On the train to Delhi, two British co-passengers make fun of Dosebai’s appearance, till they realize to their astonishment that she understands English. But once the ‘misunderstanding’ is cleared up, it becomes a great source of “merriment” to Dosebai and she eagerly accepts their help and hospitality. Does Dosebai hide even from herself the offensiveness of what has been termed civilizing philanthropy? Alternatively, does she covet the acknowledgement of the master race to such a degree that she obliterates the rudeness of the remarks from both her mind as well as her narrative? Would she have tolerated the same behavior from a fellow-Indian, especially of a humbler background? Moreover, was she so delighted at the Englishmen’s amazement that she knew English?

It might be a digression but a relevant one, to refer to Dosebai’s maternal grandfather at this point. The pet name of Set Jamsetjee Nanabhoy Guzdar was Sipla or Sapla, which, as she explains herself, meant possessing a “sweet” and “ingratiating” temperament in the Gujarati language. Dosebai appears to possess both the positive and the not-so-positive aspects of that temperament. A digression within a digression—inscribed under the title of this rare copy of the book by her great-grand-daughter, is the inscription,”Sipla Ne Dosi—her pet-name” (Sipla’s Dosi).

Familial Spaces— The House as Archive 

Although Dosebai does not describe her domestic life in as sustained a manner as her travels, the many casual references add up to a vivid picture of her experiences, shared, to a smaller or larger degree, by her class and community and period.

In her appropriately entitled book, Dwelling in the Archive, Antoinette Burton explores a group of late colonial women’s writing, viewing them not only as elite, private narratives of house, home and family, but as the foundations of counter-histories [10].  The house provides the ‘foundational’ archive for the histories that the women have left behind. In turn, these personal, familial histories, themselves constitute invaluable historical archives. One can extend this argument to include Dosebai’s own story. The religious rituals, the domestic routine, articles of furniture, food, and clothing, all assume significance beyond being mere interesting memorabilia. Dosebai’s accounts of domesticity and familial space archive history as a lived experience written at the intersection of the personal and the political, the familial and the social, the private and the public. Historical time is gauged, as it were, by domestic space. The transformation of house and home into durable archives was not just a way of rescuing domesticity from the oblivion of history, but, as Burton argues, was also a means of rescuing history from the triumphalist representations of dominant discourses (Burton, 16).

It has been suggested, that under colonial rule, the nineteenth-century Bengal household generally, and conjugality specifically, came to mean the last independent space left to the colonized Hindu male. The joint family submerged individual rights whereby patriarchal strictures became near absolute [11]. There is no evidence to prove it was otherwise among the traditional poor and middle-class Parsi households, whether rural or urban. However, among the growing bourgeoisie and wealthy Parsi families where exposure to education and the outside world would have been less limited, womenfolk, like Dosebai or even her mother, seemed to enjoy a greater amount of freedom of thought, word, and deed than their other Indian counterparts, both within and without the household.

Dosebai’s dwelling is her domain, even her dominion. She has access to much more than a room of her own; empress-like, she rules over a minuscule empire. The customary practice whereby women ate off a common plate after the men folk’s repast was over, and which practice had earned the contempt of J.S.Mill, appears equally distasteful to this proudly Westernized householder. Even as a newly married daughter-in-law, her “Aunt” as she called her mother-in-law, would affectionately indulge her. She would allot her special crockery, table and chairs, and a special room, even providing her secretly with an extra dish or two, so as not to kindle envy in that large household, which could, at a random guess, have amounted to thirty-odd people. When he was at home, we are told, her husband would join her in her repast, which, she points out, was “unprecedented” in the nineteenth century among the majority of even Parsi households.

These details may appear trivial, but Dosebai is making a point, and the point is well taken. The households, of a particular class of Parsis, were gradually possessed of an infrastructure whereby the need for greater privacy for young couples was being recognized and appreciated. Community living was being replaced by private space; whether this Western influence was for better or for worse would be a moot point. Dosebai rejects what she refers to critically, as the zenana of the Bohras and Mahomedans and enjoys the “luxury of living in a bungalow.” Parsis, as researchers posit appeared to place a premium on privacy, and lived with fewer people per room than others of similar socio-economic standing ( Luhrmann, 111) [12].  

Life in the joint family could have offered a sense of community and security, which the private residence of a nuclear family may not have given. At the same time, one cannot deny that a separate household offered conjugal intimacy and a sense of freedom. Since Dosebai’s action had preceded most others, the young couple was the butt of “ill-natured” remarks but conversely, it added to their enjoyments, “the chief of them being the walks with each other in the garden.” Even to the modern Dosebai, however, venturing as husband and wife together in an open carriage was an impossibility although they were already parents of married children. It would have created a furor in the patriarchal household, and Dosebai emphasizes that her husband was always “obedient to the will of his father and mother” (81).

“Colonial domestication of space,” as a researcher on the Parsis remarks, “indicates a colonial orientation of mind (Luhrmann, 111) We notice this inclination in the various shifting domiciles of Dosebai’s mother. Meherbai’s move to the Malabar Hill-Walkeshwar neighborhood signifies not only her bid for independence but also her desire to approximate the colonial lifestyle, both of which had prompted her desire to give a public English education to her daughter. Once more, it raises a storm of familial and public protest, but, once more, she weathers it. They move in 1848, among the earliest Parsis to do so; the rest were Europeans who were as astonished at their advent “as if we had come from another land” (55). (There is no implied irony in this remark.) Incidental to the narrative, but significant for the post-independence Bombayite, are the ‘street’ histories of the location. “Messrs Kemp & Company,” located at a corner, had rented the house, to which Meherbai moves. The busy traffic junction of “Kemp’s Corner” bears the name, although the company has long since gone, the house demolished, the quiet corner morphing into a nightmarish crossroads. 

The antecedents of Walkeshwar recede even further into the realm of myth, although the tank and temple, associated with the myth, remain as the oldest surviving structures of Bombay. Ram was believed to have been on that spot in his search for Sita, and had created a lingam  out of the sands of the seashore. Hence, the name Valuka Ishwara or Lord of the Sand. However, as the locality first made way for the Europeans, and then for the burgeoning merchants, the class to which the Shroffs and Jessawallas belonged, “the focus of activity,” as city historians point out, “shifted from the ancient temples of Walkeshwar to the Governor’s residence at Malabar Hill” (81) [13].  Mountstuart Elphinstone was the first to build the governor’s residence, which remains the official residence of the governor in postcolonial India. The ancient gods had departed long ago, others had taken abode, and when they were vanquished, others, have forever been ready to replace them.

The other neighborhood to which Meherbai moves is the Fort, another European garrison. Once more, the freedom-loving woman makes history, because she successfully petitions the local governing body to demolish the gloomy ramparts that projected over her house. Like the walls of Jericho, the walls came tumbling down, a whole decade before they were removed from the entire Fort area since by then fortification was redundant to the totally secure city of Bombay.

The House becomes a “telling place” in other ways. It is interesting to note the numerous references Dosebai makes to material objects around the household. Dosebai’s style of writing further recreates these inanimate articles to life on the page. Among the many gifts that the doting mother lavishes on her only daughter, are the gifts of a working table and a writing desk. Like the piano, these very European pieces of furniture were familiar features of Parsi women’s households, and remain so as lasting legacies today in some of these homes. Undoubtedly, such items would have served a useful, practical purpose, but they might also have showcased a fashionable lifestyle and evidenced the close proximity of the Parsis to the Raj, and the participatory nature in the ‘civilizing’ process.

At the same time, one would like to imagine that the gift of Meherbai’s writing desk to her daughter as part of her trousseau could have been an acknowledgement of her daughter’s literacy and education. Dosebai admits she had to give up school at thirteen but that her reading continued. Apparently her writing did so as well, at least intermittently, for surely, the minutely recorded facts, figures, events and dates, could not have been all dredged from a septuagenarian’s memory? So one can imagine this woman, seated at her writing desk, in the privacy of her room, recreating house and home, fashioning the story of her life.

If the inanimate writing desk has its own story to tell, so do the varied references to clothes, food, manners, and household work. Dosebai can cook Western food for an entire contingent of friends when on a holiday the Portuguese cook is unavailable. She steps out of the confines of her home to feed the horses, much to the annoyance of the grooms. She shops herself for fabric, silks, and jewellery, which is uncommon and which again means free access to the world outside of domestic confines that this lady enjoys. She enjoys, one feels, the freedom to do so, as much as the actual doing of things. However, what fascinates most is her repeated references to the very traditional, ‘homely’ art of embroidery, which in its very nature is born at the heart of the home and at which Dosebai is skilled.

True, embroidery could have been an individual skill that Dosebai possessed and she was not one to be modest about it. However, one would like to link it with a practiced skill, common amongst nineteenth-century Parsi women. Those of more ordinary means would weave the kusti (the sacred thread which Parsis are supposed to wear) all their lives, for the family and as a means of livelihood. Others, who had more money and time, indulged in exquisite embroidery as a leisurely pastime. Family heirlooms are a visual testimony of an art that unfortunately has died with time. Of course, not all were embroidered at home. Many saris like the gara and tanchois were crafted professionally, after three embroiderers were sent to China by Jamshedji Jeejibhoy to acquire the requisite skills. Of course, although it was traditionally a feminine skill, the craftsmen were all male. It would have been unheard of for women to step beyond geographical boundaries for commercial purposes.

Dosebai, however, emphasizes how she stitched and embroidered her own clothes, showing the greatest of contempt for professional tailors. As for her embroidery, several public occasions are mentioned when she called it upon herself to use her talent. She describes the objects in the most minute of details so that the work of art emerges before our eyes—one masterpiece is a cap, which her son wears for a wedding—it has miniature photographs of the family stitched over it, framed by intricate patterns in silk thread and precious stones. Another piece of embroidery wins a medal at the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition held in London. For Dosebai, of course, the highlight of her embroidery career is when the reigning king and queen of England, Edward VII and Alexandra, accept as gifts, a cap and dress-front, exquisitely embroidered and studded with diamonds and rubies. Where must these treasures have gone? Only the photograph remains, to tell the tale. Characteristically, the occasion for which the embroidery is done is given as much importance as the embroidery itself. In fact, it is difficult to imagine Dosebai seated demurely at her worktable, sewing a fine seam. It is easier to visualize her basking in the attention she inevitably receives.

 A visual record of 19th century Parsi women’s fashionable attire can be gauged from portraits  found in Bombay’s Prince of Wales Museum  as well as  from private collections. Many of these have been reproduced in the exquisitely  created coffee table books like Zoroastrian Tapestry [14] and Portrait of a Community [15].  Dosebai’s bok includes family portraits of women as well, which also indicate changing fashions, with increasingly  modern  influences. Dosebai is pictured wearing the traditional mathubanu (a white scarf) under the sari sorr (head covering formed by the sari). Her mother’s head is tightly covered, so that not a wisp of hair is revealed. Dosebai’s, recedes somewhat; her daughter’s reveals her central parting quite clearly and her daughter is seen to wear no mathubanu, and though her sari does cover her head, it is fashionably only on one side. The four generations of mothers and daughters reveal the crossing of thresholds, real and symbolic, just through their sartorial being.

Curiously enough, apart from some references to her family, we do not get to know much about Dosebai’s numerous children. While entire chapters are devoted to personages outside the domestic household—for instance, the visit of the then Prince of Wales to Bombay, her visit to the Delhi Durbar, the ball hosted by the Viceroy Lord Lytton and Lady Lytton in Calcutta, we do not get to know much about her children. She mentions one son in connection with the famous embroidered cap. But what was her son like as an individual? Which of her sons was he? How did she relate to him? What did he do when he grew up? What were his interests, his tastes?

Dosebai’s husband, Cowasjee Jehqangir Jessawalla, remains in the shadows as well, although she devotes an entire chapter to him. (She does the same to Kesarbai, her only Hindu friend). However, we do get a picture of their married lives together. He does not appear to be the stern nineteenth-century patriarchal figure; he is mild-mannered, benevolent and generous, giving free rein to his wife’s independent spirit, considering that she ventures out of house, home, city, and country, without feeling the need to escort her. The much-talked about ‘companionate wife’ of the late-nineteenth century, undergoes a sea-change in the case of this couple, for he appears to be more the companionate husband, ready to satisfy his wife’s whims and desire to be in the eye of the public and in European company. Or an analogy Dosebai might have preferred—he was her Prince Albert to herself, Queen Victoria.

Understandably, given the exigencies of the time, even the articulate Dosebai would not speak intimately about conjugality. Considering those taboos, the woman allows herself to express the shared intimacy of a young bride. In the chapter entitled, “Insight into Married Life,” (Chapter vi, 67) she thanks the Almighty, for the marital bliss that she enjoys, adding, “It would be out of my power to describe the thrill of ecstasy which the love of my husband excited in my hitherto virgin breast.” (70)

The Almighty finds a place in Dosebai’s home. He is a ‘household’ god, in the sense that religion centers on customs, rituals, and taboos, related to birth, marriage, or death. It is not the spiritual aspect as much as the social aspect of the Zoroastrian faith that concerns this very worldly woman. Religion is the social debt paid for all the material comforts bestowed on the family. If it could be put this way, she is as loyal to the Zoroastrian faith as she is to the British Crown. Neither the philosophical aspect of one, nor the political aspect of the other touches her experiences. Both politics and religion are eschewed and domesticated. Both sustain her, give her a sense of well-being, both arouse within her unquestioning loyalty and remain an intrinsic part of her daily life.

The socio-religious governance of Dosebai’s home was not peculiar to her individual household. On the one hand, the Parsis were anxious to see themselves and be seen by the ruling elite as progressive and their religion as being scientific; therefore, they downplayed some of the existing rituals and customs, which nonetheless existed as an essential aspect of their daily domestic routine, customs that were neither logical nor scientific. Thus, the lived reality was often ritual-ridden. We see these dichotomies at work in households such as Dosebai’s, as well as of others from personal histories, handed down from one generation to another.

Parsi women, we are told, were gradually being allowed to defer marriage till they were in their late teens although child marriages were not totally unheard of. Dosebai marries at sixteen and only after she has approved of the match and after she has rejected an earlier one. The noted Parsi reformer, Behram Malabari had Hindu women in mind when he struggled to raise the Age of Consent from ten to twelve and had met with such fierce opposition from traditionalists like Tilak. Further, Parsi widows, although debarred from participation in festivities, did not suffer the ignominy and persecution as their compatriots did. Even so, Dosebai’s criticism of their seclusion suggests her progressive stance. As evidence, she refers us to her mother’s photograph, included in the text, wherein she is dressed totally in black and sans jewellery. However, the existence of such a photograph (and according to Dosebai, her mother was the first Parsi lady to have her photograph taken), does speak of a more liberal attitude to widowhood, where the mother and daughter were concerned.

Conversely, Dosebai was no exception when it came to the observance of certain rituals, especially those associated with purification. Her English friends find her forty-day ‘confinement’ after childbirth to the customary prison-like room “incredible,” especially since it is observed by one who so loved “English” freedom.  Her reply comes in the guise of a harangue that an All-wise Providence had willed us to respect one’s ancestral religion (125). Likewise, the much-coveted audience with the Pope is in near-jeopardy when she refuses to kiss his toe, not on hygienic grounds but religious ones, since “it would be considered sinful by the Parsees (335). Preoccupations with pollution and purification may well have been ingrained Indian customs, but which, over time had taken on a specific Zoroastrian coloring.

The lived reality was often in conflict with these assumptions about the scientific nature of the religion. Ambiguities prevailed, and we see these reflected in Dosebai’s own rather conflicting views. On the one hand, she is at pains to prove her near-equal status with her English friends and on the other, she adheres to socio-religious rituals, which were neither scientific nor logical. She is caught in those dichotomies as she is at pains to uphold the progressive nature of her household, which is seen as Westernized, and equally anxious to endorse rather rigid customs, which she upholds as sanctioned by Zoroastrianism.

The open reception that Parsis gave to Western thought, definitely and unambiguously stopped short at religion. They refused to imitate their British masters in this regard, insulating themselves against the proselytizing of Christian missionaries. The apparent peace-loving community was known to have resorted to violence if they perceived—what they considered—a threat to their religion. We see an example of this occurrence when hired Parsi mobs stoned Sorabji Kharsedji (Cornelia Sorabji’s father), and more than once his life was in danger after his decision to convert to Christianity. (Gooptu, 14) [16].  

Parsis had begun to be frequent travelers to the Western world, Dosebai, as we see, being one of them. However, they were careful to carry their versions of the ganga jal which Hindu Maharajas were wont to carry on board the ship to England. A nineteenth-century portrait painting of the younger scions of the shipbuilding Wadia families includes an unknown figure. We are told that such a person would be a chaperone lest the Parsi youth be tempted to eat beef and pork and worse still, be converted to the Christian faith while on their stay abroad (Portrait of a Community).

On their part, Christian missionaries could and did subvert the Crown’s Policy of Non-intervention, in subtle and not so subtle ways. A nineteenth-century treatise by John Wilson, entitled The Parsi Religion, speaks of “the glory” of the Christian god, as it does about “the darkness and ignorance” of all other religions, including the Zoroastrian religion [17].

Warning the author to desist, the Parsi editor of Samachar  (Bombay’s oldest Gujarati paper) remarks pithily,  “From striking two stones together, you will elicit nothing but fire.” Not to be outdone, Wilson retorts, “The spark elicited by striking two stones together, may… kindle a flame which may devour the rubbish which has long been accumulated” (30) (Samachar, 8th August, 1831).

Dosebai who has a lot to say on a lot of matters is not far behind in the championing of her faith. Typically, what sparks off these harangues are what she perceives as shortfalls in the modern Parsi lady’s housewifery skills, which make her neglect the rituals for the dead. To Dosebai, this neglect is tantamount to a vice and contempt for the Zoroastrian religion. She warns her fellow-believers never to “lend an ear to the sly whisperings of deceitful tongues which traduce Zoroastrianism as imposture and uphold Christianity as the embodiment of truth” (147).

This is the same Dosebai, who, flattered at being invited to dance at a ball, regrets not having acquired that Western skill. However, religion, at least its ritualistic aspects, went very readily hand in hand with the most fashionable of outdoor pastimes and Dosebai was not one to complain at these incongruities. Actually, it is these very incongruities in her personality, her life, and her times, which make this raconteur’s narrative so fascinating.

Dosebai’s narrative overflows with a fecundity of stories—stories breed more stories and still more stories. Interestingly, when I chanced to talk with friends and acquaintances about the Dosebai ‘discovery’, I discovered even more stories directly or tangentially related to The Story of my Life.

The arguments about the pioneering claim in women’s education seem to be carried on a hundred odd years later. I found that while the descendents of the Jessawalla clan staked a claim for Dossebai’s mother, the Cursetjee family and Alexandra School alumni claimed the founder of the school as the pioneer. The old school anthem kept ringing in one’s ears—”Cursetjee, our Founder, great in memory is enshrined.”

An octogenarian friend claiming to be a descendent of the same Cursetjee knew much about Dosebai without ever laying her hands on the book. “My mother’s stories-oral histories you know…” was her response to my astonished queries. Yet another, talking generally about women’s education, told me how her mother’s school education had been brought to an abrupt halt by her father; he was worried lest she follow the footsteps of Ruttie Petit (a distant relative) who had eloped at that time with Jinnah. Another friend was pleased at my interest in the Parsi community—”that way lies survival,” she seemed to suggest. Conversely, another friend was puzzled at my interest in the dead past. Without sounding too Eliotian, I tried to explain to her and to myself as well, of the livingness of the past and its relevance to us today.

Dosebai’s travels evoked memories of other intrepid travelers, real or fictional, of a bygone age. One particular account, dredged out of almost a collective consciousness, was contained in the travelogue, Mamai Ni Musafari  (Voyages of a Grandmother). Mamai, however, lacks the sophistication of Dosebai. In fact, she resembles Dosebai’s blundering aunt, her numerous faux pas shaping the amusing narrative. Try as I might I could not lay hands on the book although all the Parsis I asked, middle-aged, elderly or old, had heard of the book. Many had read it, others, had it read to them by their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. One eighty year old even recalled her mother playing mamai’s role in a dramatized version. I remember the book being in tatters—as tattered as our memories of the tales. All we could recall was mamai’s insistence on traveling with her talking parrot aboard the ship, with hilarious consequences.

The search continues—not only for that long-ago book, but for an irretrievable past, for all those mothers, and aunts and grandmothers, and for all the tales they had to tell us, but which, unlike Dosebai’s, never found their way in print.

Dosebai embroiders a sari of white English satin, which has a pattern of flowers and birds of various hues. She uses forty-two shades of silk to highlight the variegated colors. She has embroidered it especially for a family wedding, and is delighted at her sisters-in-law’s envy and the wedding guests’ wonder. Dosebai’s narrative marks her creativity in another, yet similar direction. Her material is, of course, the English language. Many strands go into the weaving of the text, as vibrant and colorful, as the exquisitely embroidered sari.  Sad to say, Dosebai did not live to rejoice in this creation and bask in the public gaze, as she so loved to do. She died on 11^th January 1911, barely two weeks after she had signed her preface, dated New Year’s Day of the same year. The book appeared in public shortly after, also in the same year.

NOTES

[1] Ubhbha  in Gujarati and Khada in Hindi, mean ‘standing upright.’ The term may have originated from the fact, that unlike the seated or equestrian statues that dot Bombay, this one was in a standing position. Even as I write this piece, the Mumbai Mirror (Sept.2, 2009) reports the decision by the Municipal Corporation to refurbish the statue “back to its original glory.”

[2]  Dosebai  Cowasjee Jessawala, The Story of my Life. Bombay: Times of India Press, 1911. I am grateful to Adil Jussawalla for lending me a copy from the family archive.

[3]  Urvashi Butalia. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Delhi: OUP, 1998.

[4]  Rassundari Devi. Amar Jiban (My Life) 1876,1906. Translated by Enakshi Chatterjee. Calcutta, Writers’ Workshop,1989.

[5]  K. Lalita and Susie Tharu (eds). Women Writing in India.New Delhi:OUP,1991.

[6]  Dosabhoy Karaka. A History of the Parsees. London: Macmillan,1884.

[7]  Archie Baron. An Indian Affair. London: Channel 4 Books / Pan Macmillan, 2001.

[8]  Nawaz Mody (ed). The Parsis in Western India: 1818 to 1920. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1998.

[9]  Antoinette Burton. At the Heart of the Empire. California: University of California Press, 1998.

[10]  Idem, Dwelling in the Archive. New Delhi: OUP, 2006.

[11] Tanika Sarkar. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation. Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001

[12]   TM Luhrmann. The Good Parsi .Delhi: OUP, 1996.

[13]  Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra. Bombay, the Cities Within. Bombay: Eminence Designs, 1995.

[14]   Pheroza Godrej and Firoza Panthaky-Mistree. A Zoroastrian Tapestry. Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2002.

[15]  Portrait of a Community:An Exhibition of Paintings & Photographs of the Parsees. Exhibition Committee, Khorshed Gandhy and Others. Mumbai: National Gallery of Modern Art, Chemould Publications and Arts, October 2002. The book includes photographs of Dosebai’s extended family and friends.

[16]  Suparna Gooptu. Cornelia Sorabji,India’s Pioneer Woman Lawyer, A Biography. Delhi: OUP,2006.

[17]  John Wilson. The Parsi Religion. Original publication details not known. Reprint, New Delhi: Indigo Books, 2003.

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Adam, many thanks for doing this interview with us! Could you tell us something about the origins and history of Lost Weekend?

Lost Weekend started when Dave Hawkins, Christy Colcord and myself found ourselves unemployed in the summer of 1996. We had all been working in the music industry and agreed that to get a “real job” at this point in our lives was to be avoided at all cost. We came up with a simple idea for a small business that we thought would be good for the neighborhood: a big, well-stocked independent video rental store that would satisfy ravenous film fanatics and casual new release renters alike. Dave came up with the name Lost Weekend, which was inspired. After a year of searching for a space, buying stock (VHS was still the format then), finding fixtures and calling all of our friends to get it up and running, Lost Weekend opened its doors on August 1, 1997 with a mountain of credit card debt and virtually no idea what we’d gotten ourselves into.

Could you share your thoughts on some of the challenges in running an independent video rental store, in light of the existence of  video rental megachains as well as internet-based video rental companies?

The challenge has been going up against the major chains you refer to. Aside from maintaing the usual websites to keep people updated on our stock and goings-on, our store is not participating in the internet revolution. We cannot compete with Netflix, which revenue-shares with the studios and thereby gets movies for free. We can’t compete with Blockbuster and Hollywood for the same reason. And we can’t compete with iTunes because we don’t have the power and servers and time to deliver films over the web. So we simply don’t try. We are a neighborhood, walk-up mom-and-pop that is run by people who know and love film. We’ve somehow managed to outlast Hollywood Video down on Cesar Chavez and we proudly display dozens of scissored Blockbuster cards on our wall like so many big-game heads. Go figure.  

Articles and readers’ reviews about Lost Weekend note the fact that, in contrast to a purely for-profit ethos, Lost Weekend embodies and encourages a collaborative ethos built around a shared appreciation for art, music, and culture, forging links between various cultural communities in San Francisco.

We try to be the best film library out there, though we are a bit limited by our space and relitively shallow pockets. In terms of the way we do business, we are fair and accommodating to our people. I know for sure we don’t make nearly as much on late fees and replacement costs as the majors.

We support a lot of the various film festivals that happen in the city. And our contribution to SF’s music, art, film and student scene is evident in our staff. Most everyone who works for us is involved in some other creative outlet. We are happy to be someone’s “McJob” while they pursue their other interests. And we always take them back after time off for tours, installations, school, whatever. We pay a decent wage, feed our staff and provide health insurance to full time employees. I am proud of that. 

Lost Weekend is, among other things, a repository and treasure trove of rare film, out-of-print titles, and boasts a capacious, catholic, and eclectic collection. Is there a philosophical vision that motivates your acquisitions and expansion of collections?

Only our own taste, which fortunately varies wildly between all of us. Sure, we have the entire Criterion Collection, but we also just picked up Leprechaun 2 because we love movies you hate to love and movies you love to hate. I have to say, Lost Weekend has been accused of snobbery and I must call bullshit on that. Also, credit belongs to our regulars for some of the great stuff we carry. We write down their suggestions for titles every day and actively seek them out. This kind of collaboration in “curating” the stacks has been really successful, and cool.  
 
One of the pleasures of browsing the collections at Lost Weekend is encountering the logic and taxonomy of classification. You have film organized by genre as well as by director and nation, staff picks, special two-for-ones, and so on. Did this evolve naturally or is there an idea behind it?

We get bored alphabetizing. It’s easier and more enjoyable to break things up. We have a new section called 80s Teen, with all those Reagan Era, big hair high school angst movies. I’d like to do a Biopics section in Drama and a Post-Apocalypse section in the Sci-Fi area. Maybe a shelf for Parodies and Rom-Com movies in Comedy. I’m just thinking out loud here. This is how it all starts. 

Lost Weekend is a San Francisco and Valencia institution. How, in your view, does Lost Weekend reflect the shifting contours of life in the area and city?

Well, the internet came. And then it left. Then it came back again. We noticed trends on paper, but like a lot of Mission District residents, even relatively recent arrivals, we really felt it just walking around. At a certain point, a bunch of our more eccentric customers just disappeared, which was a drag. Even after just twelve years in the same location, you see patterns of post grads coming in and new families moving away. Businesses come and go. But through all of this, we have changed very little. And I think that’s why we’re still around. I mean, we have a jukebox that plays vinyl 45s and a Defender video game from 1983. I assume people like this about us. 

You have a devoted following of members, whose relationship to Lost Weekend seems to be more than just that of customers. Could you share some thoughts about that.

We know of many couples who met at the store. A few even got married and had kids. And let’s be honest, a lot of couples broke up at the store over late fees or what movie to get. But our regulars are our friends, and friends know that if you bake cookies for us or bring coffee, late fees seem to magically disappear, or at least get radically reduced. Unless it’s The Secret. We always charge full-on for The Secret.

What would you identify as some especially significant moments in the history of Lost Weekend?

Opening the store was huge. After the sun went down, we turned on the neon sign and walked across the street and just marveled at the thing. Also, once the alarm went off and the cops came and nearly shot our lifesize Han Solo cutout. After a tense several seconds, one of the officers said, “Do you guys have ‘A Bridge Too Far’?”

WHEN THE PHONE wakes me up from a delightful nap on a Sunday afternoon, the last thing I want to hear is a journalist requesting a list of books to ‘put’ in her article. What is the article about? Oh, it is an ‘insightful’ story on how reading certain kind of fiction or non-fiction can guide women in handling the men in their relations better – you know, husband, brother, father, son. Could you suggest a list of books women should read, ma’am?

Let me leave that journalist at the end of that phone line – till eternity, if possible — and consider these questions:

Should a woman’s reading choice be circumspect to the boundaries set by social systems and limited to the multiple ‘roles’ she has to play? What about looking at a woman as an individual, as a human being? Can she not just read for her own pleasure? Can she not pick what she wants to read? Is it not more important that women read books that will open out new worlds (real or imaginary) – books that will make them evolve into fine, articulate human beings?

Why is everyone trying to dump down on women?

In retrospect, I realise the journalist was only trying to do her job. She was, in all probability, working on what she thought was a ‘progressive’ story, being self-righteously ‘modern’ in trying to portray women reading. After all, reading is learning and if you read stuff on how to deal with men smartly, you are a smart woman! This was her brand of feminism – a brand that defines a woman’s identity by weighing how successfully she plays the roles the society has ascribed she must enact.

My own view, which I must confess I conveyed to the journalist rather brutally, is that it is not a war where we wrestle power from each other. It is about living a life with a freedom to make choices not governed by dictates like ‘because you are a woman, you must read Grahshobha and because you are a man, you must watch business and political news on TV all the time’.Feminism has waged various battles over years. People imagine a stereotypical image of an angry, man-hating, unattractive woman with hairy armpits, screaming irrationally about imagined insults and leading other ‘closet feminists’ to voice their opinions without identifying with the cause.

It is time to look at it as a liberal humanistic approach. It is not just about women being liberated, but also about liberating men from sexual stereotypes. It is about equal opportunities and positive action. It is about breaking free from prescriptions of sex-appropriate behaviour and self-perceptions. There are set social patterns and norms, which have been fed as a regular diet to women. This has led to ample misrepresentation of the ‘real’ person, not only repressing what women are made up of, but also making them believe they are, for the most part, responsible for only ‘playing’ gender typical roles in life. Any deviation from this norm connotes ‘inadequacy’. If we were to investigate the effects of patriarchy on women, it does show that we are ‘expected’ to be respectfully subservient to ‘rules’ at play. Expressing an opinion that contradicts any such construct immediately labels the woman in question as ‘improper’.

Should not the media and all those who proclaim themselves to be socially egalitarian and sensitive make an effort to consciously grow away from portraying women in the same standardised way? There has to be an effort to construct a consciousness of selfhood and individual identity instead of a focus on how ‘womanly’ women should be, how it is all aimed at suiting the men in their lives.

Be womanly, by all means. Dress yourself up, flaunt what you have, but do it for yourself, not to pamper the male definition of the fluffy feminine. That is exactly what my brand of feminism says – be yourself, the realisation of your own identity based on your self-hood, your being a human being is the essential core of your existence.

I cannot blame that journalist entirely, because the dominant forms of feminised fiction in the 19^th   and 20^th century were moral, didactic, domestic and habitually focused on private, domestic experiences. All discourse on fiction was organised around the concept of the proper and improper feminine – the dangerous other. The journalist possibly grew up on that. She probably felt she was being smart about learning how to ‘handle’, ‘manipulate’ men which was her feminist agenda coming from a very simplistic definition of feminism. She was ultimately talking about the power of manipulating men, but then we do not want the male definition of power handed down to us as a legacy.

A new discourse is possible. It is still a minefield since we have not transcended gender yet. It is still another ‘F’ word. “The misrepresentation of how different the sexes are, which is not supported by the scientific evidence, harms men and women of all ages in many different areas of life,” writes psychologist Janet S Hyde. “The claims can hurt women’s opportunities in the workplace, dissuade couples from trying to resolve conflict and communication problems and cause unnecessary obstacles that hurt children and adolescents’ self-esteem.”

We have had supposedly mature politicians play the sexist game. It reveals how deeply entrenched the social stereotypes are. What if the media did not respond to such comments? It is utopian, but what if some of us actually took a stand and ignored all such references, instead of printing a whole column? And can we think of starting to change mindsets at home?

We have to work towards not retaining the binary divide between men and women. We need not reverse the hierarchy. We are not looking to demean or demolish men. We are looking for a better way of life that liberates us all – men and women.Men cannot be our destination; we are not theirs. They can be companions, lovers, friends, but not the main plot of our lives. We are not looking for subtle manipulative power. We do not want power that is gained to win over men, but the power that comes from logic and choices made by the individual.

If power has to come to us, we need to earn it. Men are not the generous donors of power. We are not eager supplicants. We are moving in an age that demands this way of thinking. Have you ever come across a man doing an article on what books men should read to make their relationships work with their mom, sister, girlfriend and wife? There has always been a sexist approach, and it is pathetic to see women succumbing to it mindlessly.

The Pink Chaddi Campaign in India worked, which is proof there are lots of women out there who want to break out of sexual stereotyping. So why the delay?

Mita Kapur is the CEO of Siyahi, a Jaipur-based literary agency. She can be reached at mita.kapur@gmail.com

TO ASSERT THAT Britain’s regional and local press is in crisis because of the recession is to state the obvious.

But in fact, the reasons behind the crisis sweeping through newspaper titles and broadcasting alike are far more complex. We are witnessing the convergence of a series of deep rooted changes which are fundamentally reshaping today’s creative media industry. It is a mix of technological revolution, new economics and recession or, to use what has become a journalistic cliché, a perfect storm.

That storm has its origin in global trends that have been gathering pace over the past decade.

Instant communications technology has brought far reaching change which makes the Internet revolution of the 1990s look tame by comparison. Today’s generation of media consumer is, to use a phrase I will examine in detail later, a “digital native”. This means that social networking and user generated content is now the norm. News is no longer the prerogative of the chosen few journalists, it is now in the public domain. Put simply, the media are no longer in control of their destiny.

New technology has also ushered in new business models. In short, New Media equals New Economics. And while media organisations grapple with this and the still unresolved conundrum of how to make money in New Media, recession has brought the regional and local industry to its knees.Together, these trends have combined to create an unprecedented crisis that is creating lasting structural change in the industry. The greatest threat is that we are seeing less and less original reporting, a homogenised news agenda which focuses on image and sensation and a consolidation in ownership which drastically reduces the plurality of the news offering.

Of course, it is true that the digital revolution has brought new tools which are being used for the generation of news, not least mobile phone images, blogs and – the latest innovation – Twitter. But this material often does not stand up to scrutiny as news and it is no means certain that it will compensate for the growing deficit in traditional reporting.

The technological revolution

It seems incredible to think that when I started in journalism thirty years ago that I was using a typewriter, ‘sandwiches’ of paper and carbon paper which subeditors would ‘cut and paste’ into shape. By the mid-1980s, as a Reuters foreign correspondent in the Middle East covering amongst other things the Iran-Iraq war, I was struggling to master what Fleet Street was calling ‘new technology’. In my case, this was a Radio Shack Tandy 100, complete with acoustic coupler. Given a good phone line, and a bit of luck, stories could be transmitted back to London, followed of course by a phone call to see if the text had actually landed somewhere. But if the phone receiver happened to be the wrong shape and didn’t fit into the coupler, it simply wouldn’t work!

By 1989, communications were slightly more advanced but when the Berlin Wall came down we had no mobile phones to compare with today. It was a matter of holding normal telephone lines open and hoping that you could find one! But soon after that the pace started to pick up – the 1991 war against Iraq put CNN on the map, by 1996 America Online was starting to make a name for itself, and in 1988 the Drudge Report broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (although it has to be said only because Newsweek decided not to run with the story).

But the pace would quicken still further in the last eight years. The 2003 Gulf War saw television correspondents reporting live from the battle front by video phone;  and then something else changed — the ability for everyone to take and transmit images ushered in the age of user generated content or the ‘citizen journalist’. When bombers struck the London transport system on July 7, 2005, film crews couldn’t gain access to the Underground tunnels. But passengers caught up in the bombing took pictures with their mobile phones and sent them in their hundreds to the BBC and other news organisations. The same was true when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; or when the Asian tsunami wreaked its havoc on Boxing Day 2004.

The mobile phone, in the hands of a digitally literate population, suddenly changed the relationship between the media and consumers of news. Under the old model, foreign correspondents would tell the public what they needed to know, when they ‘needed’ to know it (i.e. when it suited them). Today, consumers of news pull down what they need, when they need it and how they need it. Sometimes, as in the examples above, they have actually contributed to the news gathering.

These are today’s digital natives, a term popularised by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 2005. There he set out the dilemma facing his generation of “digital immigrants”, none other than the owners, movers and shakers of the established media organisations.

“The peculiar challenge then is for us ‘digital immigrants’ to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience of dealing with,” said Murdoch.While immigrants often succeed in learning the language of their adopted country, they often retain an accent. In the digital world, the immigrant’s accent manifests itself differently but no less clearly. How often have I caught myself printing out an email to read, or ploughing through the instruction booklet of a digital camera that a digital native would simply switch on and use!

While Murdoch was pondering the generation gap and its consequences, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was spelling out how technology had fundamentally shifted the balance of power away from the media organisations. In his parting shot at the media in June 2007, Blair spoke of “a radical change in the nature of communication.” The Media, he said, were no longer the masters of this change but its victims. He went on to bemoan the impact of web-based news, blogs and 24-hour news channels to draw the conclusion that standards were unravelling. He spoke of a “Media that increasingly, and to a dangerous degree, is driven by impact.”

“Impact,” he said, “is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed.”

More news? Or less?

So did Blair call it right? Certainly he didn’t pull his punches but nor did he really address the idea that there may be some sort of trade-off between new and old media. Clearly, instant communication is driven by image, is emotionally charged and does tend to be superficial. It caters for a short attention span and often shuns the less sensational, analytical story. On the other hand, it is certainly true that new media has brought a wealth of content we would never have otherwise seen.

There are two key questions here.

Firstly, to what extent is this user generated content news? Does it stack up when judged by traditional news values of being fair, objective and free from bias?

Secondly, does this user generated content stand alone or is it, at best, complementary to a traditional feed of news about a specific subject?

Assuming video captured on mobile phones or otherwise is genuine, and has not been doctored, it is reasonable to suggest that footage of the Asian tsunami uploaded to YouTube does pass the test of being free from bias. It simply shows what happened and offers no comment. Another strong example is the video footage of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson who died during clashes with the police at G20 demonstrations in London earlier this year. Had it not been for a U.S. investment banker, who filmed Tomlinson, the public would never have known that he was struck on the leg and pushed to the ground by a police officer. The case was taken up by The Guardian and quickly became mainstream news. Arguably this had a profound impact on the British public’s perception of policing, shattering the cosy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ image of the friendly neighbourhood bobby.

On top of this feed of complementary news material, comes the latest technological innovation that is Twitter. By the end of June this year there were already 45 million users worldwide. News of the U.S. Airways jet’s miraculous crash landing on the River Hudson was captured by Twitter, as Janis Krum, on a ferry close to the scene ‘twittered’: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up people. Crazy.” It has become so pervasive as a medium that it seems to be almost backward not to twitter from a meeting. So much so that the Editor of Reuters, David Schlesinger, felt it necessary to remind his reporters about basic ground rules for using the new medium.

But here it is clear that we are talking about a communication medium that may not be just about news in its traditional sense. It seems that Iranian opposition figures, frustrated by the outcome of June’s re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used Twitter to coordinate demonstrations and rallies. That in itself is a story but it serves to remind us that not all communication is news in its own right.

New economics and old-style recession

The other main factor in play is economics, both new-style and old-style. These economic forces seem to be working against the plurality and diversity of news and are combining to create the crisis in the regional and local press. The whole thrust of New Media economics is to gather the news once and produce it — and sell it — multiple times across multiple platforms. In practical terms, this means that journalists, especially on regional and local newspapers, are multi-tasking, writing a story, taking still pictures and shooting video. And then editing the package, uploading it to the website… and so it goes on. It is a classic triumph of form over content. Journalists are almost chained to the production desk, becoming factory-style processors of content rather than generators of news. So there is less and less time to gather original news.

In addition to that, the actual number of journalists is shrinking as the industry consolidates worldwide. This trend had been gathering pace over the past decade and is particularly marked in America where Disney, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner and News Corp dominate the landscape, supplemented of course by Microsoft and Google.In the UK, the same consolidation has swept through the newspaper industry. In 1992, some 200 companies owned newspapers. By 2005, 10 companies owned 74 per cent of the British regional press.

The recession has given this trend added impetus as advertising revenues plunge and organisations seek to reduce costs. In Britain, the picture in broadcasting is one of crisis. ITV has cut its news regions to eight from 17 and laid off 1,000 jobs last year. Channel Four has mounted a vigorous campaign for public finance while also shedding staff. In the middle of all this, the BBC is clearly on the back foot, defending its state funding from a series of attacks, not least in the government’s Digital Britain report. The fortunes of regional and local newspapers are even more dire. Sixty titles closed last year and well over 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Overall sales declined by seven per cent and advertising revenue fell by 15.8 per cent.

With hindsight, it is clear that newspapers made two fundamental strategic errors.

Firstly, newspapers believed that they could protect advertising revenue — their lifeblood — by setting up web sites. But advertisers, instead of simply transferring their business loyally across to the newspaper site found they had far more effective ways of doing business. In short, those small ads migrated to specialist web sites, for car sales and the like, which are able to draw on a far wider market and offer customers greater choice. UK newspaper advertising revenue is expected to fall further still this year, by some estimates by up to 21 per cent.

Secondly, newspapers believed that news would have a monetary value on the web. This too was wrong. So far only a handful of newspapers, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, have managed to charge customers for news. This is, to use the jargon, ‘value added’ specialist financial news, out of the mainstream commoditised pool of what is general news and widely available for free. Murdoch is now attempting to turn back the clock after 15 years of free news, stating what is frankly the obvious, namely that the current economic model is not sustainable.”Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch stated recently.

But many media commentators believe that even Murdoch will not get his way this time. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest newspaper publisher, posed the obvious question: “Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?”

Shrinking news

The impact then of new and old economics is hugely damaging. Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, last year broke the taboo that dog doesn’t eat dog by writing a scathing book about the state of the media. Entitled Flat Earth News, the book sets out Davies’s central argument that less and less original news is being generated. Partly because of cost cutting, and partly because of the need for speed, fewer stories are being written, fewer stories are being checked and increasingly newspapers are falling back on agency copy (within the UK principally from the Press Association) and public relations material.

“The profession (of journalism) has become damaged to the point where most of its members are no longer able to do their job,” he writes. “They work in structures which positively prevent them discovering the truth.”

This damning verdict on the media is supported by academic research that Davies commissioned at Cardiff University. Their researchers examined the news sections of five mainstream newspapers, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Mail. They found that 60 per cent of stories were wholly or partly made up copy either taken from the Press Association of from public relations agencies. A further 20 per cent of stories contained clear elements from these sources. In fact, the researchers were only able to state with any certainty that 12 per cent of the copy was original and generated by a newspaper’s own staff.

That shocking finding illustrates the extent to which the content of today’s newspapers has been reduced to a commodity and become infiltrated by PR. There is also another threat to newspapers in the form of a wave of alternative players now emerging — online only newspapers such as The Huffington Post, local council newspapers (proliferating at a rapid rate), community websites and blogs of all flavours and persuasions.

But does this proliferation of new media, much as Twitter or mobile phone pictures, compensate for the shrinkage in traditionally generated news?

In my view it does not. Not least this is because so often, these new media outlets do not offer news that passes the most basic tests of objectivity and freedom from bias. The journalist Henry Porter, who writes in the Observer, put it very succinctly in a recent article for the paper:

“All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an inquest or badgering local bobbies, democracy and accountability in Britain would not be possible…”

…the web might give you the cinema times but it won’t tell you which planning official is in bed with a supermarket chain.”

The impact of the digital revolution is now being subjected to increasing scrutiny and was the subject of a recent analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A paper written by Andrew Currah, an Oxford lecturer specialising in the digital economy, reached an alarming conclusion:”

Increasing commercial pressure, driven by the inherent characteristics of the digital revolution, is undermining the business models that pay for news,” Currah wrote in his study, ‘What’s Happening to our News’ earlier this year.

“…this threatens to hollow out the craft of journalism and adversely impact the quality and availability of independent factual journalism in Britain.”

Change is here to stay

So where does this leave us all? Certainly the industry is still very much in state of flux or, to return to the original analogy, the storm is still raging. But I think it is safe to say that the changes we have already witnessed are here to stay.

There is a clear danger that our news today is a mile wide and an inch deep, on the face of it a huge offering but actually very shallow. Technology and economics have combined to reduce the amount of traditional news gathering. Regional news appears to be most at threat but the same processes are narrowing the scope of reporting at a national and international level.

Without doubt, technology has brought us news we would never have seen before. YouTube, Flickr and Twitter are new tools which clearly can play a role in newsgathering and do have the potential for significant social and democratic impact alongside more traditional notions of journalism. But these new tools are not at the moment fully compensating for the shrinkage in traditional news.The one clear lesson is that news in no longer the prerogative of a chosen few journalists but of the many. And the new media landscape will undoubtedly see the profession of journalism and the community of others who are generating content — of all types — working far more closely together.

Stephen Jukes, formerly the global Head of News at Reuters, is Dean, Media School, Bournemouth University. He can be reached at sjukes@bournemouth.ac.uk

“The curious fact is that as we move into the 21st century, historians have become central to politics. We historians are the monopoly suppliers of the past. The only way to modify the past that does not sooner or later go through historians is by destroying the past. Mythology is taking over from knowledge.”

—Eric Hobsbawm in ‘Politics, Memory and the Revisions of History in the Twenty-first Century’, lecture delivered at Columbia University, 2003

IF HISTORY REPRESENTS collective memory, and if it is to be objective and not written by victors, it becomes important to guard its sanctity. After artists like Maqbul Fida Husain, the Hindu nationalists’ prime target is Indian history. In late February 2008, a group of Hindus stormed into the history department of the University of Delhi, breaking windows and causing general mayhem. They belonged to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All India Students’ Council), the student wing of the BJP. They were angry because the professors had directed students to read an essay on the Ramayana that they considered ‘blasphemous.’

The essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by the distinguished poet A. K. Ramanujan, a Macarthur Genius Fellow who died in 1993 in the US where he taught at the University of Chicago, marvels at the sheer diversity and range of the epic Ramayana, and recounts many of the unusual and alternate renderings of the myth, pointing out the vibrant plurality in religion and literature. The head of the history department, a quiet academic called Saiyid Zaheer Hussain Jafri, is, as his name suggests, a Muslim. The professor who reportedly assigned the essay is Upinder Singh, who happens to be Sikh and the daughter of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This particular combination gave the nationalists further ammunition.

The conventional Ramayana narrative is complicated enough. Most interpretations tell a story with which many Indians, Hindu or not, are familiar. But as you travel through the length and breadth of the vast Indian nation, the stories change, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite drastically, and no one singular view prevails. Ramanujan’s essay irritated Hindu activists precisely because it showed that there is no one, unique rendering or interpretation of the Ramayana. Not surprisingly, the student activists called it “malicious, capricious, fallacious, and offensive to the beliefs of millions of Hindus.”

But to silence a voice that says that there are many versions of Ramayana is not only an act of crude censorship and an attack on Hindu intellect, it also goes against the central tenet of Hinduism. The doyen of Indian history, Romila Thapar, herself a target of vicious attacks by Hindu nationalists, has shown how the Ramayana’s many versions embed stories reflecting social aspirations and ideological concerns of each group that propounded a different version. The Hindu nationalists’ challenge to the diversity of voices is more a political proposition than a religious assertion.

And how diverse those narratives are—not only across India, but as far away as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos where they vary even more widely than in India. These multiple narratives interfere with the master version of a strong, virile, masculine and martial lord/warrior-king—like the image now reinforced by Virgin Comics in India which casts him as a muscular, Superman-like hero in Ramayana 3392 AD—that the BJP wants to project in India.

There is political purpose behind depicting Rama as a soldier, and not as maryada purushottam (the ideal man who knows his own and society’s limits, and who will sacrifice his interests for others). And that is to inject militancy into the Hindus, who, the BJP believes, have been made to feel like second-class citizens in their own country.

Feminist scholars are indeed appalled by the Ramayana’s overt masculinity. But they have also found in Sita a cliché-ridden representation of femininity, a docile woman willing to be led wherever her husband takes her and unquestioningly accepting her fate, including cruel punishments and chastity tests. Gauri Parimoo Krishnan notes: “Valmiki’s Ramayana has been wrongly ascribed canonical status, giving rise to a sort of patriarchal, literate, pan-Indian elitism which in recent times has been scorned.” In the Indian feminist magazine, Manushi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Madhu Kishwar have written powerful critiques of the masculine interpretation of the Ramayana.

A survey of Hindu epics may suggest that Hindu gods don’t claim to be morally perfect; they do practise subterfuge and trickery. In an uncertain universe, we often have to act in ways that seem morally impure in order to achieve a higher end. That, indeed, is the message of the Mahabharata. On the other hand, the Ramayana aims to show how it is possible to lead a morally pure life. Rama’s heroism is not simply based on his battlefield skills but also on his ability to place the interests of others—and his own sense of obligation—above his own.

Such sacrificial acts are passé; the BJP wants to project Rama as a superman. However, elevating him over other gods makes Hinduism seem monotheistic, a bit less like itself and a bit more like Islam or Christianity. The late Morarji Desai, a former prime minister, astutely noted this point in a conversation with me in the late-1980s, when the BJP was still only beginning to embark on what then seemed like a quixotic campaign—to reclaim the site of the Babri Masjid. “They are playing a dangerous game,” he told me. “They want to create a cult of Rama. They are converting Hinduism into Islam—they are making Hinduism a religion with one book (Ramayana), one place of worship (Ayodhya) and one God (Rama). That is not Hinduism. Hinduism is about plurality.”

Edited extract reproduced with permission from Seagull Books. Offence: The Hindu Case will be available in bookstores from August, 2009. It is published by Seagull Books (Calcutta/London/New York) and distributed worldwide by the University of Chicago Press. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon in the UK and US.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. He has written frequently for a range of publications, including Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Guardian, Index on Censorship, Washington Post and Salon. He is also a columnist for Mint and a writer-at-large for Tehelka. Salil serves on the board of English PEN, and has been a senior visiting fellow at the Kennedy School, Harvard University.

Email Salil at salil61@hotmail.com and visit his blog at http://saliltripathi.wordpress.com/

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A poignant, compellingly rendered tale about a little man ajar with the world, Arzee the Dwarf is also a love letter to Bombay. Rohit Chopra reviews Chandrahas Choudhury’s brilliant debut novel.

A SPECTACULAR NOVEL about a small man locked in a permanent lover’s quarrel with the world, Chandrahas Choudhury’s Arzee the Dwarf reminds us why we read. It reminds us of the reasons that we as humans need to dwell in language. And it reminds us why writing that can claim the name of literature is both of its milieu and beyond it, illuminating the peculiar richness of a time and place and, in doing so, gently asking us to reconsider the self-image of that historical moment.

The novel ushers us, in media res, into the life of Arzee, who works as a projectionist at the Noor, a cinema that has seen better days. Convinced that the cosmos has dealt him an unfair hand—largely but not only because of his diminutive size—Arzee chafes at both his professional and personal situation. He lives with his brother, Mobin, and his mother, who he loves even as he feels hemmed in by her. Plagued by the memory of a lost love, he yearns for that intimacy and fulfillment that neither friends nor family can provide.

Arzee, however, is not quite ready to give up on life. He is willing to grant the universe the opportunity to redeem itself, which it tantalizingly offers to do. When we meet Arzee, he is on the verge of realizing a longstanding ambition. Phiroz K. Pir, the head projectionist of the Noor, is about to retire, and hand over control of the Babur, the great German projector of the cinema, to Arzee. In addition to earning Arzee respect from his friends and his mother, the promotion will also allow Arzee to pay off a gambling debt to Deepak, the ne’er-do-well who hounds him across the streets of Bombay to collect the money.

But the universe complicates things, as the universe is wont to do, and Arzee must contend with a few surprises, disappointments as well as delights, in the days that follow. Unfurling the course of events, Choudhury takes us on a captivating ride with Arzee that is funny and sad, ecstatic and glum, tender yet unsentimental. Travelling with Arzee across the streets and suburbs of Bombay—and within his head as he mulls on the meaning or meaninglessness of things—we arrive at the bittersweet end of the novel, which verges on hopeful possibility but withholds from us the easy satisfaction of certitude.

The novel throngs with a memorable cast of characters, drawn with great economy in prose that is controlled and evocative. We meet, with Arzee, several of his colleagues, from the spectral Abjani to the canny Phiroz; Deepak, whose heart is really not quite in the villainy his profession demands; and Dashrath Tiwari, the taxi driver given to poetic eloquence and philosophical rumination. To this human cast, we may also add other life forms. The Noor, its corridors adorned with framed photographs of Bollywood heroines of years past, is both character and setting, demanding its own adjective: Noorian. The Babur—a linguistic mutation wrought by the Indian tongue on the German name Bauer—the magnificent life-force of the Noor, uncomplainingly throwing its beam on screen day after day. Tyson, the house dog of the Noor, who we meet briefly. And, finally, the great city of Bombay, in all its shabby, resplendent charm.

Indeed, the novel is also a love letter to the city of Bombay, to its alleys that, despite their filth, hold in them a quiet silence and beauty, to its decrepit buildings like the Noor, and to its dusty suburbs. Choudhury writes as someone intimately familiar with Bombay, incorporating the rhythms of the city and the cadences of its speech into the flow of events in the novel. This is the city of the flaneur, quite distinct from the fevered nostalgia of the expatriate seen in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or the vacuous, sterile aestheticization of filth witnessed in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire.

Choudhury’s skill as a writer shines through in his description of the relationships between the characters, which are conjured up with empathy and sly humor. We sense the grudging admiration that lies underneath the sarcastic banter of Arzee and his friends, and the gruff tenderness that develops between seeming adversaries as they realize that it is circumstance that has pitted them against each other. Unusual and apposite metaphors, unexpected turns of phrase, and delicate poetic touches vest the text with a pleasing richness. Waking up one morning, hot, bothered, and in a foul mood, Arzee’s annoyance is compounded by the fact that he is covered by a sheet, which Mother has placed over him, a perfect symbol of the nature of their bond, as Arzee sees it. A light mist rises, “like that seen when sugar is poured into jars” (59). The day looms before Arzee like a “long, flat, soul-sapping expanse” (67). And Arzee’s unruly mind, even in his despondency, cannot help wonder what shampoo the Godman Sri Sri Ravi Shankar uses.

The one criticism one might have with the book is that Choudhury is almost overcautious in not wanting to overwrite. Readers of The Middle Stage, Choudhury’s literary journal, will know that he considers engaging in pointless verbal pyrotechnics an act of literary self-indulgence. While Choudhury is careful not to lapse into such excess, one feels that some of the relationships, like that between Arzee and Phiroz or Arzee and Phiroz’s daughter, are pregnant with possibilities that could have been mined further. But this expectation may itself be seen as proof of Choudhury’s abilities as a writer, and his commitment to restrained and measured description does not diminish the tremendous achievement of a remarkable first work.

As a result of India’s integration into the global economy, the abiding effect of the Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga Booker victories, and the interest of Western publishers in Indian writers, Indian fiction is at an interesting crossroads. It appears to be driven by competitiveness for bigger advances, global markets for neo-Orientalism, and a fetishization of the expatriate Indian experience. The imaginative worlds of recent fiction about India, by Indians and non-Indians alike, teem with themes by now tedious because worked threadbare. Many novels or collections of short stories are simply unoriginal elaborations of such ‘Indian’ themes, a representative list of which might be as follows. Masala or spice, chutney, chai, the idiosyncracies of Indian English, immigrants finding their roots by returning to the towns and villages of their ancestors, laments about the diasporic and postcolonial predicament, the encounter of East and West, arranged marriage, love marriage, women throwing off the yoke of tradition and entering the state of emancipated selfhood, joint families, poverty, garbage, caste, religion, riots, especially of the Hindu-Muslim variety, terrorism, the Indian underworld, and Bollywood. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson’s controversial remark that all Third World literature is national allegory might, paradoxically, hold true for much Indian (and South Asian) fiction being produced today, even as the content of the national is reframed for global markets. Alternately, one finds Indian novels that are simply compendia of the excruciating minutiae of personal biographies, masked in unconvincing pseudonyms, to which grand political and sociological significance is immodestly imputed.

Like the finest novelists writing today who take as their canvas that space and place called India—among whom one might count Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Jhumpa Lahiri, and I. Allan Sealy—Choudhury’s work refuses to be straitjacketed into a formulaic prepackaging of things ‘Indian.’ Arzee the Dwarf, the poignant, moving story of a man slightly ajar with the world, finds kinship with characters from a range of literary traditions, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Beautifully produced, with a mesmerizing cover design, Chandrahas Choudhury’s gem of a book inaugurates what promises to be a formidable literary career.

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Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University, California.

IN THE FIRST part of this series, I looked at the particular joys and pains of reading/interacting with a form of storytelling that has still to find its feet, and find an audience beyond academia. My research with 36 readers highlighted several key aspects of interactive fiction, which I believe can be addressed by writers in order to offer readers a truly interactive experience.In the sections below I outline what writers should be thinking about when they compose their narratives, and what they should build into the design of the all-important interface. After all, the interface is the ‘site’ where the story is accessed, and too much current material neglects interface design to the detriment of the reading experience.

Use web design conventions for interactivity

Aarseth’s (1997) concept of non-trivial effort seems highly significant here, especially when that effort interrupts absorption (Nell 1988) in the narrative. In hypertext, reading and narrative expectations clash with interface expectations, setting up awkwardness, uncertainty, unwelcome effort, and ultimately some reported high levels of frustration and negativity.Thus, in the case of afternoon, a story, LOveOne, and These Waves of Girls the readers in my study were all trying to reconcile their expectations of narrative and reading behaviours, with their expectations of usability for a screen-based medium; essentially they were looking for a reading activity and simultaneously a web-style interactivity. The two behaviours rarely lived comfortably together. Where the interface design was more overtly visual and web-like, there were fewer reported difficulties with interactivity itself.All of this is not to suggest that writers cannot experiment with design and/or narrative form, but they must be aware that hypertext, in its newness and unfamiliarity to the great majority of readers, places heavy demands on a reader’s attention already, without unnecessary work being added by sloppy design.

Ensure interactivity does not impede reading absorption

Campbell (2003) has argued that a risk for writers of interactive fiction is that the pleasures or other distractions of an interface may detract from the act of reading. Some readers in the study did indeed say that there can be too much happening on a screen, so that reading becomes pushed back to a secondary activity, simply because there are so many interactive features to ‘check out’.The data showed how some readers slipped into a kind of play mode either because the story was hard to find because of poor interface design (eg afternoon, These Waves of Girls, LOveOne) or because the interface was very busy (eg The Virtual Disappearence of Miriam, Amelie), or difficult to use (Of Day, Of Night). Some readers reported that they were distracted from reading by playing with the interface to see what it would do, because they actually enjoyed that activity, as in the case of Amelie. If we wish readers of hypertext fictions to be audiences rather than game-players, the data in this study suggest that authors must strive to achieve a balance between an interface that is visually and operationally appealing, and a reading experience that is absorbing.
 

Offer adequate control of interactive elements

Although advocates of hypertext narrative (Bolter 2001, Jackson 1997, Landow 1997, for example) have enthusiastically argued that interactivity offers the reader more creative input, the difficult balance between the positive rewards of creative control and the negative effects of unwanted effort, is an aspect barely discussed in the literature, though Murray (1997) and Ryan (2006) acknowledge the issue.The data strongly supports Murray’s (1997) contention that authorial control and reader agency must be carefully balanced. What appeared to be happening for the readers in my study is that the presence of interactivity promised something that hypertext in its current form could not deliver — ie, a game-like level of user control combined with a novel-like level of audience subordination to authorial leadership. The two experiences seemed to clash destructively in many readers’ minds.The readers who commented on this issue all talked about the need for control to be given such that it progressed the narrative at all times. Whether that control is the offer of hyper-linked words, or animated images, whatever the reader does to the screen should develop the story.

For example, the video clips in Of Day, Of Night would be considered inappropriate, despite the fact that they clearly were part of the narrative, because they could not be controlled easily and quickly.The point here is that an element of control has been offered in order for the reader to access the video and watch it, but inadequate control has been offered in order for the reader to stop or maybe rewind the video.The data also suggests that there is an optimum amount of choice to be given if the narrative experience is to be maintained. In These Waves of Girls, for example, too many links on text simply led to choice overload and the perception in my reader-participants that there was no story at all. The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam and Of Day, Of Night seemed to be reaching a satisfactory balance: both of those pieces only offered choices that took the reader to consequential and sequentially logical parts of the narrative.Narrative development is the key concern for readers, and should drive all design decisions, whether of visual or multimedia effects, screen layout, availability of menus, placement of links on text, or use of images as hotspots.

Ensure reader can discern between ‘navigational links’ and ‘storytelling links’

Links are, as some writers (eg Calvi 1999, Landow 2004, Kendall and Réty 2000) have argued, highly significant in the telling of the story, and so to discuss the design and functionality of links is also to discuss their role and effectiveness in allowing the reader to ‘navigate’ the plot. The data show that links need to take readers to places in the narrative that makes sense to them, in terms of an unfolding story. Readers are mostly searching for the story when they choose which links to follow, and writers should design linking structures with that specific desire in mind.In an information-seeking activity, a reader will look for alternative links until the desired information has been found — the desire to find out is the driver; but in the reading of hypertextual fiction, the motivation to keep reading has to be generated by what each link delivers when it is followed. The desired ‘information’ is the unfolding narrative and if that does not emerge as each link is chosen, then the desire to ‘find out’ is killed off.

Ensure effective free movement, including backtracking

Clear and easily accessed backtracking is required: the reader needs to be able to go back in step-by-step order (a trail), and out of order (using a map for example) to anywhere in the narrative that they have so far experienced. The analogues to this are obvious: with a print book, the reader can easily go to any page forward or backward; and of course in the case of a book, spatial orientation and narrative orientation are the same thing, assuming the reader reads the book in page-numerical order. In the hypertext environment, where habits from reading now must co-exist with habits from browsing, a backtrack facility should offer a reading trail and a map, both easily accessed.Nielsen (1990) talks about free movement being appropriate to need. In a narrative context the need is to achieve a familiarity with the fictional world, to gain sympathy or antipathy with characters, to build a consistency of apprehension of the concepts and events of the fictional world. Effective free movement (including backtracking) in hypertext therefore would ideally enable the reader to go anywhere they wanted in the site, but more importantly, to go wherever they want to in the narrative.

Site location is not necessarily the same as narrative location

The extra facility (demand) of interactivity and the intangibility of the virtual book-space change this equation, so well-established in print, between ‘site’ location and narrative location. In hypertext, site orientation and narrative orientation must be considered as a unity in the design of the navigation system.A navigation system in an information-giving website need not concern itself with this correlation because the user creates his or her own ‘narrative’ as they search for information. In the case of fiction however, there is, certainly for the readers in my study, still the assumption and desire for an author-created narrative, delivering the underlying story, which the reader will eventually be able to discern. The readers in this study all wanted the author’s design to eventually be accessible, since that is what they see as a core pleasure.So, navigation tools must allow the reader to know were he is in the site (the book) and in the narrative, and these two orientations in turn allow the reader to apprehend the story. If one or both of these orientations is hard to gain, or conversely, easy to lose, the reader’s sense of story is also disrupted.Navigation tools need to provide both linear movement and non-linear movement, and provide a total command of the space, combined with a continual ‘update’ of the narrative context.

The most positive, though not perfect, exemplar for this requirement would be The Virtual Disappearance Of Miriam, which combines a relatively straightforward and linear plot, with web-familiar navigation, including clear book-like chapter menus, and a simple ‘back to home’ link. These features enabled readers to trace their path through the story and around the whole site without becoming lost in the negative sense: this in turn enhanced the experience of becoming lost in the positive sense.Good navigation design can provide security of place; good narrative design, facilitated by good navigation design, can create imaginative security. Several critics talk about this possibility as something for a somewhat distant future (Murray 1997, Douglas and Hargadon 2001, Miall 2003), but the data here suggest it is possible now, given an understanding of the reading experience.

An overview menu should be available at any point in the reader’s ‘journey’

Several comments were made by readers to the effect that they would like to know not only where they are in the context of the site and the story, but that they would like to know the size of the reading commitment. Overview options of various kinds could offer this.For example, in the case of 253 there was an overview site-map, and accordingly this piece was seen as relatively easy to move around. Of Day, Of Night actually relied on the reader returning regularly to the homepage map (because otherwise the narrative did not progress), and readers here were aware of how much there was to see.A further aspect of overview raised by the data is that some visual representation of how much has been read of the whole is needed by readers. The only example this researcher has so far found of hypertext with an always-available home page, and a progressive bookmark is The Mobius Case, an unpublished Master’s project by Rutger Van Dijk (2005) at Bournemouth University. It shows, as a permanent feature of the screen layout, which sections of the piece have been read, and which have yet to be read.

Conclusion

Whilst the intensity of debate around the joys and pains of hypertext fiction appears to have subsided somewhat, the continued availability of interactive fiction online suggest that it is a form not likely to disappear anytime soon. It is hoped that the ideas outlined above will give writers useful ‘tools’ for the creation of interactive fictions that will appeal to readers; it is believed furthermore that theorists and critics may understand the nature of hypertext fiction better by allowing their analyses to include knowledge and understandings from the previously not-connected disciplines used in the study reported here. Literary theory, reader-response research, multi-media design practice, and human-computer interface usability studies are all highly relevant in the understanding and creation of hypertext fiction, and as Murray (1997 p274) has already said, the writer of fiction in the era of interactive media is now ‘half hacker, half bard’.

Concluded. Read Part 1, Twists in the digital tale 

Dr James Pope teaches at the Media School, Bournemouth University, England. He can be reached at jpope@bournemouth.ac.uk

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