A Requiem to a Journey Worth Every Step

By Utpal Borpujari

Long before the cinemas of Asian nations had started making waves across the world, when Asian cinema meant largely only Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi to most, and when Iranian cinema was just about to make its first international splash; one sprightly lady devised out of New Delhi what was perhaps the first magazine globally to fully concentrate on cinema made within the geographic boundaries of the Asian continent.

That sprightly lady was Aruna Vasudev, and the magazine was Cinemaya, which later became the official journal of the Network for Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC), the highly-respected organization that to a great extent helped establish Asian cinema’s presence across all major film festivals in the world. Cinemaya later led to Cinefan – the Cinemaya Festival of Asian Cinema – which was later taken over by the art auction house Osian’s.

Unfortunately, both the quarterly Cinemaya and the annual Cinefan have ceased to exist, despite having grown to become a niche but highly-respected magazine that complemented the popular film festival in Delhi. The book: Asian Film Journeys, published jointly by NETPAC (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary) and Wisdom Tree, is a fine reminder of that Cinemaya was, and a requiem to what was almost a movement for developing a common identity for cinemas from Asian nations, which with their diverse history, cultures and politics, offer such a huge variety of cinemas that it is actually in a way impractical to tag them under the single label of “Asian cinema”.

Edited by Rashmi Doraiswamy and Latika Padgaonkar, the first two staffers of Cinemaya, the book comprises a selection of articles as they were carried in various editions of the magazine over the years, introducing the reader to cinema from virtually every filmmaking nation in Asia. And what a compelling read it is, despite the articles having been reprints from old issues of the magazine the first issue of which had hit the stands in 1988, and from the catalogues of the first five editions of Cinefan which had begun in 1999.

In a sense, the articles, interviews and analyses comprising the book present the story of cinema in Asia, be it in the prolific filmmaking nations like India and Japan or those with smaller industries, such as Myanmar and Cambodia. What was really unique about Cinemaya was that its writers were people who were highly-knowledgeable about their subject. Some of the legendary names who contributed to it, and whose pieces are part of this book, are Tadao Sato, Donald Richie, Mark Schilling and Chris Berry. And the fact that the magazine went beyond mere criticisms of cinematic work to include in-depth interviews with directors, actors, cinematographers et al, apart from extensively covering issues related to cinema, such as censorship, expression of sexuality and political ideologies and contexts, etc., made it a journal that was academic yet accessible.

The editors of the book have tried to include pieces from the magazine giving representation to all Asian filmmaking nations. And by doing so, they have made it a collectors’ item, especially for those who might have got to read Cinemaya. How cinema has moved in all these countries, and how the society and politics of each country has impacted its cinema, come through in some detail through the articles, analyses and interviews included in the book. For example, the interview of Rithy Panh (“Look Back In Pain”), while primarily focuses on one film, brings up a vivid image of how creativity suffered during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Noted critic Chris Berry’s piece on censorship in China, Tony Rayns’ analysis of Zhang Yimou’s work and a fine essay on the “fifth generation” of Chinese filmmakers are able to present a comprehensive picture of the Chinese film industry. Then there are gems like a piece on documentary filmmaking in Pakistan and another on cinema in Myanmar, two virtually unknown aspects of Asian cinema elsewhere. There are several other such interesting pieces that make this book a collectors’ item for both serious film buffs and common viewers who love their world cinema. The Indian angle comes through an interesting essay by Ashis Nandy on “How ‘Indian’ is Ray?”, an interview of Mani Ratnam and write-ups on the works of legends like Ritwick Ghatak and Guru Dutt.

It’s a book that has come out at the appropriate time, when NETPAC is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and quite surely, it is the perfect requiem for a belief that was called Cinemaya, which survived amidst all odds for a number of years, even as quite a few other serious cinema journals took birth and died in between. Reading this book, one can only wistfully hope that someday Cinemaya will return. Amen.

(Asian Film Journeys; Wisdom Tree & NETPAC; pp 655; Rs 1,495)

(Published on http://www.dearcinema.com, 21-02-2011)

http://dearcinema.com/column/a-requiem-to-a-journey-worth-every-step/5246

Reading the North-East

By Utpal Borpujari

Is there a distinct literary stream that flows from North-East India as compared to literary trends in the rest of India? As literature from North-East India, a region still far removed from the national consciousness unless it has to do with negativities such as insurgencies, corruption and natural calamities, is slowly but surely getting more and more visible, this is the question that is raising its head.

A region with rich literary traditions – whether in written form or in the oral traditions of numerous tribes – the written word from the North-East is suddenly attracting the attention of big publishing houses and even legendary agents like David Godwin like never before. Authors like Mamang Dai from Arunachal Pradesh, who resigned from the Indian Administrative Service to become an author, or Temsula Ao from Nagaland, have been published more than once by publishers like Penguin and Zubaan and got noticed for their strongly rooted writings.

And while writings like them who write in English, a language that traditionally has been a strong point with North-East Indians, are getting their place under the sun, the rich literature in the local languages and dialects, and even those carried from generation to generation as part of the oral storytelling traditions among the numerous tribes, has started attracting the attention of the outside world through increasing translations. While authors like Dai has recreated stories from oral traditions in English, the powerful writings of prominent authors such as Bhabendranath Saikia, a physicist-turned-author-playwright-filmmaker who is considered among the greatest of Assamese creative brains ever, and Jnanpith Awardee Mamoni Raisom (Indira) Goswami are getting appreciated by readers across India in their translated versions.

These and particularly a recent publication by Oxford University Press (OUP), the two-volume “The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India” comprising fiction, essays and poetry by both prominent past and present writers as well as young authors and poets, has been in a way a pointer to a distinct literary strain in the region – distinct from the rest of India. The OUP publication, for the first time, has brought within one single cover writings of some of the most brilliant authors from the region, such as Navakanta Barua, Hiren Bhattacharya, the first Jnanpith Awardee from the region Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya, Saurabh Kumar Chaliha, Dai, Ao, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih et al. While much of the content in the publication have been reproduced here from various publications, what this has done is to enable the reader to have a first-hand journey into the literary minds of the North-East in one single place.

While original English writing has come out into the mainstream only recently, literature in Assamese and Manipuri has histories going back to centuries. But thanks to increasing translations, even North-Easterners, leave alone book lovers from rest of India and the world, are discovering literature from within the region. And with that the distinctiveness of the literary trends of the region. As Tilottoma Misra, the editor of the OUP volumes, puts it, “An intense sense of awareness of the cultural loss and recovery that came with the negotiation with ‘other’ cultures is a recurrent feature of the literatures of the seven north-eastern states. Each small community or linguistic group has responded through its oral or written communication to the encounters with the majoritarian cultures from either mainland India or from outside the borders of the country, in its own distinctive manner.” This is exactly what perhaps makes literature from the region different, as the writings not only tell a story but also reflect the unique histories, cultures and heritages of each of the multiple communities there.

Aruni Kashyap, who is the first author from the North-East to be represented by Godwin, and whose debut novel “The House With a Thousand Novels” will soon be published by Penguin, agrees with Misra’s view. “Due to the troubled relationship with the narrative of the Indian state which north-east shares with India, the writers have something very different to say than the other Indian-English authors. Apart from having a different sensibility, it’s the political nature of these writings which make them different. The fraught relationship most of the North-Eastern states have with the Centre often gets reflected in the literature, be it in  English, Assamese or Bodo. The fact that literary circles have been discussing ‘literature from NE’ as a different body of work, attests that it is developing in opposition to Indian-English writing, which probably mirrors the fraught relationship NE has with Delhi,” says Kashyap, two of whose poems feature in the OUP publication.

Indeed, much of the original English or regional language literature, that has emerged from the region at least in the last two decades or so, either have strong political backdrops or recreates stories from the history of the North-East that ‘mainstream’ historians – be it those writing school or college history books or those who have been known as prominent historians – have always bypassed while telling the ancient, Medieval or modern history of India. If Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya’s 1979 Jnanpith Award winning novel “Mrityunjaya” fictionalised the large-scale participation of North-Easterners in the Freedom Struggle of India, something that has never been given its due space by ‘mainstream’ historians, Easterine Kire’s recent “Mari” (Harper Collins) or Siddhartha Sarma’s award-winning “The Grasshoppers Run” (Scholastic) have brought to the mainstream stories of times when the region had become a major theatre of the Second World War. The OUP publication itself has “Samiran Barua is on his way”, a translation of a story by young author Manoj Goswami that has already achieved a cult status in Assamese literature for its strong political content. But apart from this strong tilt, stories from the region are also getting the attention for being able to reflect the societies of North-East that are unknown to the rest of the world, for example those by Arunachal Pradesh’s Lummer Dai and Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi, Assam’s Rong Bong Terang, Manipur’s Yengkhom Indira or Mizoram’s Margaret Ch Zama.

Urvashi Butalia of publishing house Zubaan, which has published several women authors from the region, explains the scenario thus: “When publishing writers from the North-East it is difficult not to look at the political nature of that writing – virtually everyone writing from there is somehow or the other rooted and involved in the politics of the region. It is difficult to find writers from the North-East who, importantly, are not scared – as often writers of fiction are – of saying they are political. I’d say that is a key difference, and personally I find that much writing from the region has a strong sense of place. I expect that over the years, North-Eastern writers will begin to transcend borders and write about things that may not necessarily be rooted in the North-East, but for the time being it is this that makes the writing so distinct and unique.”

Siddhartha Sarma, whose travelogue on the region, “East of the Sun” (Tranquebar Press) has just hit the stands, believes that while every part of the world has a fascinating collection of story mines – and so does North-East India – but says there are some distinct markers about literature from the region. “The ethnic/tribal/linguistic interplays, tensions and interactions are possibly a little more pronounced, even edgy, in the region, than elsewhere. The more complicated the scene on the ground, the more fertile the ground is for harvesting stories. Viewed in that light, the North-East contains within it the kernels of some of the richest stories that can be told. I also like to believe that in many ways, the region contains some distinct attitudes to life and living. There is a degree of innocence and simplicity which runs through our lives. Part of it has to do with the fact that the region has stayed away from the mercantile approach to living that appears to have permeated the rest of the country so definitively. One still meets artists and craftsmen in far greater number from the region who practise their craft out of love for it, not so much for profit or publicity.”

Norway-based Kire, who taught at Nagaland University for some 18 years and did her PhD in English literature from Pune University, has an interesting viewpoint to offer. “The North-East has always been under-represented because all literary output from it has been hitherto overshadowed by the political conflicts that plague the region. We have had to make our own mark in the Indian literary world by forming The North East Writers Forum and showing the rest of India that there was much more to the North-East than political literature.” She also strongly believes that literature from the region has its own uniqueness, “The entire cultural base of the North-East is different from the rest of India. We may have some shared folk stories with some of the other states of India but otherwise, what the region has to offer is a wholly new literary experience. Its myths and legends are tied to the land, the hills and the rivers. Both the natural world as well as the spiritual world are always alive and real to the North-Easterner. What the North-East has to offer is this spiritual apprehension which is unlike anything that the other states have in their cultures.”

But Atreyee Gohain, who is currently pursuing her PhD in English literature at the Ohio University in the US, and whose translations of various authors have been published in the OUP anthology as well as by Penguin and Sahitya Akademi, has a slightly different viewpoint to offer. “I am not sure. I don’t know if there is a NE literature, same as I am not sure if all the diversity of literature in India can be categorized under Indian literature,” she says. But like all others, she too is happy that literature from the region is starting to get its due at last. “The ignorance of the rest of the country regarding writers and writing in North-East is not just limited to literature. It is heartening now to see our writers getting their dues.We have good translators, and publishers are just about beginning to explore the richness of writing in the North-East,” she says. The rays of the North-Eastern literary sun is for sure lighting up new horizons.

(An edited version of this article was published in The Times of India Crest Edition, 05-02-2011, http://www.timescrest.com, 05-02-2011)

http://www.timescrest.com/culture/recognition-for-north-east-writers-4689