Posts filed under 'Indian cinema'

Asymptote at the Movies: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

May 12, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Suhasini Patni, and Xiao Yue Shan

Capturing "the porousness between Hindi and English," Arundhati Roy's film is a triumph of voice.

Of her 1989 film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Arundhati Roy writes: “I loved the quirky, spontaneous performances. I loved the fact that there were no ‘beautiful’ people in it. I loved the egalitarian friendships between the boys and girls. I loved the corny clothes, the absurd glasses, the ridiculous hairdos, the uncertainty, the joy and the sadness of it . . . It was from another time . . . I ache for the innocence of it.” Indeed, the film is potent with the tender touches of youthful idealism, fearlessly authentic to its characterisations of young architecture students in 1970s India, and an early emblem of Roy’s intrepid criticisms against the evils of her time. In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni speaks with Blog Editors Allison Braden and Xiao Yue Shan about the complex role Hinglish plays in the film, the depictions of class and social mobility, and how art can arise from the myriad places in which various languages meet.

Suhasini Patni (SP): Before Arundhati Roy became famous for her Booker Prize-winning novel and Pradip Krishen became an important environmentalist, they worked on the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which was screened late at night on Doordarshan in 1989, then largely forgotten by the Indian audience. However, it later went on to win two National Awards (both of which were returned to protest the government’s growing intolerance) and became a cult classic.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Hinglish film ever made in India. Critics found it difficult to categorize the language of the film; some called it an English language film—which does disservice to the mouthfuls of Hindi and Punjabi that form an integral part of the dialogue—and some called it a trilingual film, which doesn’t showcase the Indianness of the English spoken. English that is remolded to include mispronunciations and Hindi slang (“Kya maal hai. Hello sweetheart lovely,” says a catcaller to Radha).

Screen Shot 2021-05-11 at 12.46.42 AM

Discerning commentators found it difficult to admit an entire film existed in this “nonsense” language. Even the title itself is gibberish: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The students in the film let us know what “those ones” are, but at the time of its release, the title was allegedly seen as inaccessible and alienating, and Roy was asked not to use it. But it’s exactly this mismatched, nonsensical language which makes for an endearing experience—a film ahead of its time, as people say.

The dialogue captures the porousness between Hindi and English. Code-switching in bilingualism is not new, but Hinglish, as Roy has written it, really grasps the way social mobility operates in a cosmopolitan city like Delhi. For the upwardly mobile, Hinglish is a language of survival. For those who cannot speak the hegemonic, pure, Sanskrit-ised Hindi, Hinglish helps to adapt to life in the capital. And in any case, North Indians have always spoken Hindustani, a Hindi that generously accommodates Urdu and other languages and dialects. Hinglish is arguably a “modern” version of Hindustani.

I’m interested in knowing what you think about the film, especially considering you’re not native Hindi speakers.

Allison Braden (AB): What a charming film! I agree that the movie’s collegial atmosphere and the students’ easy rapport depends largely on the code-switching; omitting the Hindi and Punjabi in favor of English only would have done away with one of the story’s most authentic elements. For viewers who don’t speak Hindi, some of the linguistic diversity naturally gets lost behind the subtitles, which appeared for the English, Hindi, and Punjabi dialogue in the version I watched, but the languages’ relationship to class remains evident. Arundhati Roy’s character, Radha, clearly struggles with the social mobility issue you bring up, which she articulates toward the end of the movie. She specifically mentions how her position as a student at the National School of Architecture requires her to speak a language that ninety percent of the country can’t understand. Social mobility is also explicitly referred to in the eponymous Annie’s initial thesis project—a plan to line India’s extensive train tracks with fruit trees and encourage the country’s flood of rural to urban migration to reverse course. Despite his enthusiasm for the idea—he even writes to the prime minister about it—his classmates respond dismissively. I was struck by the moment when his partner rebukes him after interpreting the plan as a suggestion that she return to her village. He explains that he’s speaking about a general issue, not her individual situation, but the exchange was such an effective illustration of how those larger issues affect so many individual lives.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Far from being objectionable, for those of us who find language to be an object of fascination, the varying, generous, and emancipated dialogue of the film is one of its overarching attractions—endearing, as you say, Suhasini. Though, of course, I can imagine how difficult the melange may have been to navigate sans subtitles. READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Seagull Books and the Value of Independence

July 13, 2017  |  in Publisher Profile  |  by Sneha Khaund

The idea of target readers out there is a myth: no one can know for certain what people will read.

In a globalized publishing landscape Seagull Books, based primarily in Kolkata, India, stands out as having uniquely made a mark as a world publisher. In its thirty-five years of existence, Seagull has primarily concentrated on publishing literature in translation with a particular emphasis, from its early years, on Indian theatre and cinema from different regional and linguistic backgrounds. Seagull has introduced Indian readers to the joys of literature from different world languages — writers such as the Nobel Prize winners Mo Yan, Imri Kertez, Ellfride Jellinek and the more recent Man Booker International Prize winner László Krasznahorkai. Operating with a small team to produce and design books distinguished by superior literary content and exquisite aesthetic appeal, each Seagull book is a collectible that is also reasonably priced for the Indian buyer. While Asymptote has previously covered Seagull books, Sneha Khaund caught up with Naveen Kishore, Seagull’s founder, to know more about how the publishing house continues to support translation and shape world literature. 

 Sneha Khaund (SK): Can you tell me a bit about how Seagull was conceived?

Naveen Kishore (NK): Overnight. Very specifically, the event that marks our “birth,” as it were, was a festival of grassroots theatre I produced in 1982. Around that time there were a lot of theatre groups working with original themes and using their bare bodies with no props or costumes. Their plays dealt with the human condition around them and the dailyness of survival. Working in a 40km radius around Calcutta, these groups were more interested in going into villages and the interiors of the state rather than trying to perform for an urban city audience. At this event I noticed someone in the front row of benches madly sketching the body movements of the performers. So I turned to a theatre scholar, Samik Banerjee, who was also at the time an editor at Oxford University Press, and I said what a pity there is no way to capture this moment. We were not familiar with words like documentation and there was no digital photography and so on at the time. It was Samik da who suggested that a specialist niche publisher focusing on the arts could be a good way of documenting these evolving movements not just in theatre but also in cinema and fine art. We already had a name! Seagull! So Seagull Books was waiting to happen. We decided to explore the possibility of a theatre publishing programme that would do theatre scripts from different Indian languages in translation and document the vibrant New Indian Cinema movement: Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Jabbar Patel, Goutam Ghosh, to name a few. We would not focus on anything but the performing and the visual arts. So after thirty-five years, in fact after the first twenty-six years—that’s how long it takes sometimes—all the s, a lot of the Tendulkars, a lot of the Mahaswetas, a lot of these plays have now become textbooks. Classics of Indian drama like Ghasiram Kotwal, Charandas Chor. The irony is that even after thirty five years because it’s not a great commercial thing there’s still no other dedicated theatre publisher. It just doesn’t pay enough. So that was the first lesson for a non-publishing person stepping overnight into publishing — that you have to build a back-list because that’s how publishers survive. You can’t produce one book, sell it, recover, then re-invest because the way a publishing chain works is that you are expected to keep producing the books. Regardless. No single book is a profit centre. Small numbers selling across a list of say 500 books is how the numbers begin to make sense. Sometimes there are spikes and you sell certain titles very well. These then support the ones that don’t sell that well! Who said it is easy?!

READ MORE…