Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Ray was equally sparing with words when running the set. “He was so brief,” Sharmila Tagore recalls. “He never overinstructed. He just read it out, and we understood what he wanted. His praise was equally brief. ‘Excellent. Next shot.’ It was enough.”

  * * *

  Making an inconstant wife such as the eponymous Charulata a heroine was also typical Ray. Though he’s probably most associated with male characters, such as Apu, his filmography includes an array of contemporary female possibilities: free-spirited thief, journalist, vacuum cleaner saleswoman, student, restless wife. Ray’s sense that women could have multiple identities perhaps goes back to his own widowed mother, who had a career. His women are never seen exclusively through the eyes of men; nor are they exemplars of Womanhood. Like his male characters, they are too complex and particular to serve as social message boards.

  None of these innovations—the subtlety and silence, the everyday scores, the refusal to make his female characters pure and his male ones anything but ordinary—helped convince theaters in Bengal to show his films. So, in 1957, when Aparajito (1956), the second film of the Apu Trilogy, unexpectedly won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it served as a bailout for what was beginning to look like a minor career. That the trilogy went on to critical acclaim in America, connecting Ray to famous directors and cool young fans, made him still more frustrated with Indian cinemagoers. “One realizes what the Indian filmmaker is up against—a colossal ignorance and only a moderate inquisitiveness,” he groused to a Sri Lankan director friend after being lionized in New York. “The East is still as far away from the West as it has ever been.”

  By the 1960s, however, young people in the East and the West had something to share: a sense of political alienation. In India, faith in Nehru’s project had begun to fade, and issues of economic and political discontent started making their way into Ray’s films. He wasn’t signing up to the politics of the street, like his contemporary the radicalisant director Mrinal Sen, and others. Instead, Sharmila Tagore recalls him sitting by his television, in a room surrounded by paintbrushes and books, studying “not politics per se but the effects of politics on ethical and moral values.”

  In Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), Ray wittily explored those effects through four willing victims of cultural imperialism: young men raised in Calcutta to be more English than the English (the type of Bengalis Rabindranath Tagore would have called ingabangas). During a weekend in the jungle, the young men find out that they can appreciate an Indian sunset only through the lens of a Burt Lancaster Western. When they meet the Santal tribals who live in the forest, they regard them as a different species. Almost half a century old, in its mordant humor the film feels entirely contemporary with those made by the Jim Jarmusch generation.

  Perhaps Ray was thinking about his own distance from fellow Bengalis, which he had begun to bridge, just before Days and Nights, by using yet another of his great small gifts. Like his father and grandfather, he had always written and illustrated fantastical children’s books on the side; in fact, he postponed his films from time to time to see them through. Now, thinking of his own children, he made a delightfully loopy adventure film, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha) (1968). It’s the story of a poor grocer’s son who dreams of being a singer, despite a froggy voice, and through magic and cleverness achieves the near impossible: a Ray film without a moody ending! Goopy and its sequel, still unknown in the West—your loss, little people—rightfully became classics and are beloved by children across Bengal today.

  Another Ray work, sci-fi this time, is uncomfortably related to a film beloved by American children. In the late 1960s, Ray authored “The Alien,” a script based on his own short story, but he lacked the technical resources to turn it into a film. Hollywood types jumped in with flattery and promise. Columbia Pictures would produce; Peter Pink Panther Sellers and Marlon Brando wanted in. But then, in what Ray sardonically referred to as his Kafka period, an unstable partner copyrighted his script and pocketed his advance, after which Sellers dumped him by sending a rhyme. Ray tried to view the experience philosophically—until he saw Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in 1982. To the biographer Andrew Robinson, Ray made the careful allegation that the film, one of the highest grossing of all time, “would not have been possible without my script of ‘The Alien’ being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.” The sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke perceived a similar influence. Yet Spielberg denied it, and Ray was outmatched.

  It’s a mark of a great director not always to be acknowledged, and Ray knew enough film history to accept that. But a lingering sense that he’d been exploited by Hollywood caused him to steer clear of that world until shortly before his death, when, with the support of Scorsese and other prominent directors, he became the first Indian, then or since, to receive an Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

  Looking back on Ray’s career, I find him an unusual modernist: Bauhaus in the light-handedness and clarity of his technique; Bengali and Shantiniketan in that what he did and loved best always had the quality, even flourish, of the handmade. As young Indian directors become more literary in approach and more economical in style, and as they study Western directors who themselves have absorbed traces of Ray’s influence, I keep waiting for those of his films more adult than Goopy to move from the Indian art house to the multiplex mainstream. You never know: one day, India’s most internationally respected filmmaker might become one whom ordinary Indians actually like to watch.

  48

  CHARAN SINGH

  A Common Cause

  1902–1987

  How wealthy does a developing country have to become before it has a distinct class known as the poor? When, in popular imagination, are “the impoverished” no longer synonymous with “the people”? For India, that moment came first in the cities, where a professional elite emerged under the British and manufacturing produced, in addition to textiles and trinkets, a politically significant lower middle class. Yet semifeudal rural India appeared to these Indian elites, even at Independence, as a vast, undifferentiated mass of abjectness. In the West, the image was of ribs sticking out, begging bowls, and desperation—a mental picture upon which chubby Western children were commanded to eat every last bite of their dinners.

  But rural India had hierarchies as intricate as they were rigid; you just had to get closer to see them. Charan Singh, the bright, methodical child of better-off-than-average Meerut peasants, saw. He came from an oppressed cultivating caste, the Jats, and grew up to be a lawyer, then a politician, in the United Provinces (later Uttar Pradesh). He melded a generations-old knowledge of rural life with an analytical study of land reforms and agricultural subsidies around the world to do something in North India that doesn’t happen much in the country: he redistributed power and altered the social structure—without violence.

  “India’s villages are the colonies of the city,” Singh often complained about Nehruvian India. Today, he’s remembered as a nemesis of the Nehrus: the politician who took on Indira Gandhi in the Congress party’s heartland, ending its stranglehold on the national government and becoming prime minister. That his term swiftly unraveled through infighting and political treachery, and that his personality was short of panache, tends to obscure what he achieved before failing when he reached the top. Step by step, reform by reform, he became the first national public figure in India’s long history to plausibly claim to represent the rural landed peasant. That’s especially striking given the vast numbers of Indians involved in agriculture—probably more than in any other country. Charan Singh’s life is a window onto that world.

  Against the driving Nehru-era concerns of urbanization, industrialism, and making India a world power, Singh prosecuted a slimmer agenda: making the rural farmer as productive and prosperous as possible. From that, he argued, all else would follow. “Agriculture is the first condition,” he once said. “Our people live in the villages; 72 percent of our workers are now en
gaged in agriculture. So unless agricultural production goes up—unless there is purchasing power with the people—nonagricultural employments will not come up. Industry will not develop. Commerce will not develop. Transport will not develop. Unless these develop, there will be no improvement in the living standard of our people.”

  The British had allowed Indian agriculture to stagnate before Independence; from 1911 to 1941, per capita access to grains decreased by a third. After Independence, there was truth in the novelist Vikram Seth’s crack in A Suitable Boy that North India’s entrenched, upper-caste landlords weren’t pulling their weight in the fledgling nation: “For most of the landlords the primary question of management was not indeed how to increase their income but how to spend it.” Roughly twenty thousand such landlords owned 60 percent of the land in the United Provinces. Singh’s legislative drives played a major role in changing that. Over the course of the 1950s, after centuries of dominance, those landlords were forced to share turf and political influence with some of the people who plowed and sowed. This and other successful political campaigns on behalf of farmers would in time help give North India a rural middle class.

  Although his vision of rural development was not nearly as inclusive as he claimed, and was only partially realized, Singh would, over a political career that spanned six decades, change the fortunes of millions and millions of villagers. And yet the full bill for that achievement—from caste tension to increased rural inequality to near-catastrophic water depletion—is still being paid to this day.

  * * *

  “And in the winter nights we would wrap rice stalks in old discarded clothes, and then hide under that. What did we know what a quilt was? We didn’t even know what shoes were!”

  —United Provinces sharecropper Ram Dass

  To study old photographs from UP villages such as the one where Ram Dass lived is to be reminded of how rural history writes upon the body. Mughal governments from the time of Akbar (16) had empowered large landholders, known as zamindars, to collect rents and taxes from the peasants and to serve as moneylenders. The British, who considered the zamindars natural leaders, yeomen of the subcontinent, entrenched that tradition. So, by the twentieth century, many of this elect were pale and smooth from generations of living in palatial homes that protected them from sun and rain; they were tall and broad from generations of being amply fed; they were loose-limbed from generations of being spared the daily, aching stoop to sow. At first glance, they might appear to be a different race from the manual workers whose labor funded their lifestyles, a race whose muslin and silken robes could house two or three farmers within them.

  The power of the zamindars, who were mainly Brahmin or Rajput, was challenged in a series of peasant movements between 1919 and 1921, when Charan Singh was in his late teens. A young Nehru had experienced rural India for the first time when he came out to support the peasants, who wanted to organize and become part of the Congress. But the agitation was put down by local power and tepid support from a Congress reluctant to alienate the rich landowners whose backing they needed. The British weakened the zamindars’ power a little, beginning in the 1930s, but you can get a glimpse of how potent the system remained from an essay about the peasantry written by a landlord and politician in 1935:

  [The villager] is a willing tool in the hands of any self-seeking, intelligent man … His political life is blank. He is completely ignorant of his rights and privileges. Any man with a little knowledge or power can lord it over him.

  While the zamindars were essentially middlemen for the government, Singh’s people, the Jats (a caste whose men and women actually worked the fields) didn’t see them that way. The people to whom the Jats directly paid what they considered exploitative rents on their land seemed larger in their minds than the regional politicians and Brahmin bureaucrats with whom they rarely dealt. The zamindars were unwavering objects of Jat resentment, and became the target of Singh’s first successful legislative campaign.

  From early on, Singh had conceived of himself as not just a representative, but a rescuer, of his people. This was in part because he had advantages many of them lacked. He was uncommonly tall and handsome, and though he’d grown up “under a thatched roof supported by kachcha mud walls,” as he often put it, his father had worked his way from tenant farming to ownership of more acres than the average peasant farmed. This allowed Singh a crucial bounce off the socioeconomic springboard: he was able to study science and history at Agra College, after which he was called to the Bar. His practice lasted barely a few years: his long-term objective had been politics all along.

  After joining Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, in 1930, and doing jail time for it, Singh rapidly ascended the Congress hierarchy. In 1937, at the age of thirty-four, he was one of the congressmen elected to the new Legislative Assembly of the United Provinces. A protégé of the powerful conservative provincial operative Gobind Ballabh Pant, he was by the 1950s respected in his own right, at high political levels, for the size of his following of farmers. The peasant’s son had risen from district-level politics to state politics by pulling off something that many earlier Indian social reformers had longed to do: convince peasants to make common cause with each other as a class, across their caste affiliation. This was a significant practical as well as a conceptual advance, for Jats on their own made up a paltry 1.2 percent of the UP population—hardly a numerical force sufficient to confront centuries-old power structures.

  In pre-Independence campaigns for debt relief for rural workers, and against rapacious traders, one of Singh’s recurring themes was that farmers were habitually betrayed both by rural elites and by the urban dwellers who dominated nationalist politics and were often as unconcerned about farming as the British. To Singh, farmers were not just a majority; they were an intellectual resource, possessing underutilized knowledge of how to expand the food economy and address poverty, including their own. Yet instead of being heard, they had become the nation’s beasts of burden—a problem for state policy rather than makers of it.

  * * *

  When you read speeches Charan Singh made to his followers, his populist riffs and habit of referring to himself in the third person seem almost demagogic. But to hear Charan Singh address a crowd was to be in the presence, not of some Indian Fidel Castro, but of anticharisma. The social scientist and politician Yogendra Yadav recalls going as a teenager to hear Singh speak in his small Haryana town: “There was no attempt to please the masses. He asked people to either sit down or leave, then went on to give a one-hour-long, schoolteacher-like lecture on the political economy of Indian agriculture. This is the last thing you expect from a major politician who’s out there to woo the public, but it quite characterized who he was—plain, straight, no-nonsense, and to the point.”

  Singh was probably more naturally suited to writing, and his many books and pamphlets on rural policy are exhaustively argued. While Russia produced more than a dozen agrarian intellectuals, and China produced a few, Singh may have been independent India’s one and only. Yet that’s part of what’s affecting about the size of his following: it wasn’t necessary for him to deliver stem-winders at the stump, because millions of peasants understood that he, one of their own, was in a better position to fight for their interests than anyone had ever been before.

  Unlike Nehru, Singh was deeply skeptical of policies to create agricultural cooperatives, pointing to the unimpressive productivity rates that followed Russian collectivization. (Nehru would, after several such policy failures of his own, come to agree.) Instead, Singh thought that undermining the zamindari system and strengthening access to land at the “base of the pyramid” would help India avoid not only class conflict, but also food shortages and famine.

  Immediately upon Independence, after at least six years of study, Singh issued a manifesto to that end. Five years later, in 1952, legislation he had designed—the historic Uttar Pradesh Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act—became law. The act gave some tenant farmers
secure claim to their land, allowed their children to inherit it, and eliminated the role of zamindars in collecting revenue from them. The act didn’t wholly dispossess the zamindars, however: they kept land historically under their personal cultivation (an unfortunately expandable category) and received government payment for land they had to divest—compromises the Congress was obliged to make to keep the support of the rural rich. While the effects of the legislation were further softened by corruption in its implementation, something significant had doubtless been achieved. Zamindari ceased across 60.2 million of the states’ 72.6 million acres. The peasant’s son had created a new class of landowners in the United Provinces.

  * * *

  The thought that land had become the peasant’s and his children’s property “in perpetuity,” Singh wrote in 1959, “lightens and cheers his labour and expands his horizon.” He went on: “The feeling that he is his own master, subject to no outside control, and has free, exclusive and untrammelled use of his land drives him to greater and greater effort.”

  Who were these happy, productive beneficiaries of UP’s land reform? A reliable way to wind up Singh, later in life, was to accuse him of having created an Indian version of the Russian kulaks, that rich, entitled peasant class that Lenin described as “profiteers, who fatten on famine.”