Movie: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Year 1805. Off the Coast of Brazil. England and France are at war over the lordship of Europe. English navy captain Jack Aubrey receives orders to intercept a formidable French frigate which is twice in size and strength of arms and soldiers. Action begins.

You get to see a glimpse of how life would have been in the middle of the deep blue seas for men away from land and women. The pressures, the fatigue, and the sense of duty that was slowly transforming into full blown national patriotism at that time.

I enjoyed limited action scenes interspersed with depictions of intrigues and personal rivalry of comrades on a ship. The language of the script didn’t quite live up to the vernacular for a story set in early years of the 19th century. Film’s visuals were nonetheless a treat to watch. Rated at 4.5/5. IMDb Link

Movie: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999)

It is rare to find a woman as remarkable as Joan of Arc (1412-1431) in the annals of European Middle Ages who left a lasting influence on history in her short life before she was burnt at stake when she was only 19.

The film portrays the life of the French war heroine and her efforts to reinstall the deposed French ruler whose throne was usurped by the English as the latter inched along conquering the rest of whatever was left outside their control.

Joan of Arc’s presence, deemed heavenly and miraculous at that time, boosted French morale. She literally led the French army from the front to decisive victories against the English Crown which changed the course of the battle. The French ruler managed to become King after English defeat. Joan of Arc was caught by Burgundians who were English allies. She had a sham inquisition, convicted of witchcraft in a politically motivated religious trial and subsequently hanged.

Historical drama has the license to add in fiction to history to make it a presentable whole. However it doesn’t have the license to distort history in a way that depicts major and decisive events completely falsely, unless, of course, it’s “alternate history”.

The film, therefore, is grossly misleading in so far as it depicts major historical events. One example is French betrayal of Joan of Arc after she’s captured by the English. There was no betrayal in reality and it was out of the power of the newly installed French King to help Joan out of English captivity.

The other thing that irked me greatly was the use of modern language especially the dialogues and (disappointingly) American accent of few actors. The guy who played Dauphin/King of France was a complete joke. He with his looks, hair cut, and peculiar constitution is well suited for a character of a baseball junkie in downtown Philadelphia but certainly not the King of France in the 15th century.  My rating 3/5. IMDb Link

Movie: The Madness of King George (1994)

“His Majesty was all powerful and all knowing, but he wasn’t quite there”

King George III (1738-1820) is known in the annals of British monarchy as the Mad King. He suffered from recurrent mental illness that caused him delirium and hallucinations.

A plot was hatched by a court faction supporting the heir apparent to have the King declared insane by the Act of Parliament and therefore install heir apparent as de facto King.

The film fictionalises the King’s struggle to come to terms with his deteriorating mental health amid his increasingly erratic relation with his son, the Crown Prince who leads the parliamentary faction wanting to declare the King unfit for monarchical duties.

It’s a funny and fantastic piece of film making. The difficulties of an all-powerful King with his waning health and tainted public image give it a sad, humbling tinge. Nigel Hawthorne as King George III has done a commendable job in his role.

Helen Mirren, who played Queen Consort, has established herself in playing royal characters (Elizabeth I in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”, Elizabeth II in “The Queen”, Countess Tolstoy in “The Last Station” etc)

Although it’s a low-budget Channel 4 production, and a bit old, yet anyone with a thing for old English and British royal history will enjoy it,  methinks. 4/5 is how I see it. IMDb Link

Saadat Hasan Manto: Selected Stories

(Translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan; first published 2007)

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) is widely acclaimed as one of the best short story writers of Urdu. He broke away from traditional story writing (epitomized by Maulvi Nazir Ahmad) and laid the foundation of progressive fiction in Urdu. His genius lay in writing about topics which were hitherto considered social taboos in Indo-Pakistani society. His stories mostly revolve around characters previously thought as too “unimportant” for pristine literature, such as prostitutes, pimps, thieves, tonga-walas, sewage-cleaners and generally about women under male patriarchy. Socioeconomic inequality and brutal criticisms of the nobility and supposedly respectable people are some of the currents running through his fiction.

Psychoanalysis is the defining theme of his stories. He links it with the study of human behaviour especially of acts of mass insanity in times of unrest. Further, he is credited with the creation of a particular subgenre exclusive to the Subcontinental literature. Partition literature, as it is popularly called, stories and novels revolving around the human tragedy of the partition of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan in the wake of Independence from British rule, is a rich and diverse subgenre, with new writings still being produced. The other major theme is his insistence on writing openly about sex lives of his characters; openly enough that he was dragged to the court under British obscenity laws.

I have read Manto in original Urdu since my teenage and have always enjoyed the simplicity of his language and spontaneity of his characters. This is the first time I have read translations in English. This collection boasts some of his most important stories, including “Toba Tek Singh”, translated variously as “The Lunatic Asylum”, and “Exchange of Lunatics”. Sometimes it goes by its original name, since Toba Tek Singh is the name of the main protagonist as well as a small city in the Punjab, now in Pakistan.

“Toba Tek Singh” is the story set in an insane asylum or madhouse. After the partition of British India and the creation of independent India and Pakistan the governments of both countries decided that, just as they had exchanged populations, civil servants and military assets, they ought to exchange clinically insane interned in their respective jail-like madhouses. So Muslim inmates from India were to be shifted to Pakistan and Hindu/Sikh inmates were supposed to move to Indian madhouses.

The story gives a harrowing account of the unrest that ensued in the madhouse of Lahore whose Hindu and Sikh inmates didn’t want to be separated from their Muslim friends. In the confusion that followed, the people who were supposedly insane behaved most sensibly and those who were sane resorted to utter madness. It’s a scathing critique on the ethic of mass scale population exchanges that followed the partition of the Indian Subcontinent, which, at that time, in 1947, was the biggest ever population exchange ever in the world.  It’s an excellent story. Other stories I particularly like are “The Return”, “A Woman’s Life”, “A Man of God”, “The Last Salute” and “The Blouse”.

“The Return”, sometimes translated to the effect of its literal Urdu title as “Open it” (Khol Do) is a story of a Muslim girl who escapes with her father to Pakistan when the rest of her family is killed in partition riots. They are separated from each other on their way to the safety of Pakistan. Her father, upon reaching his dream country, enlists the help of Pakistani volunteers who are keeping guard at the new borders and are also in the process of retrieving stranded Muslims in Indian Punjab which, by now, has become a cauldron of riots. They finally retrieve and bring the girl back to Pakistan, but only after she has been kept in confinement and raped several times by the same men who were supposed to protect her. The father, upon seeing his daughter alive, jumps in utter joy and thanks the paramilitary volunteers without realising what has happened.

A note on the translation: I am not impressed with the quality of the translation. Khalid Hasan, the translator, is otherwise a fine translator but I feel that he hasn’t truly captured the essence of the linguistic style of Manto in English. In fact, reading some stories, Manto sounds like a language disaster. He comes off as having his hand on the social pulse but fails to articulate it in good language. Is it perhaps because the simplicity and spontaneity of Manto is best suited to Urdu and not fully translatable into English? I can’t say. There is another translation of a selection of Manto’s stories by Aatish Taseer, the son of the assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer. I am going to read it for comparative purposes as soon as I get the book. Despite, I will give 4/5 to this collection. It’s available on AMAZON.

Delhi by Khushwant Singh

(First published 1990)

It’s an usual novel; in part historical fiction and in part an invented story; in part a collection of independent short stories and in part a tale of a degenerate Delhiwala, but, taken in whole, it is an extremely rich depiction of the history and culture of Delhi.

It is, primarily, a story of the city of Delhi from the medieval till modern times. Two sets of narratives run simultaneously. First is the story of a journalist who returns to his native city after “having his fill of whoring in foreign lands”. Out of work, he sets out to explore his native city in the footsteps of an archeology historian. He accidently meets a hermaphrodite prostitute, a hijra, falls in love with her and moves her to his house. Through their dialogue, their outings and picnics, and their uninhibited sexual encounters, the geography and culture of Delhi comes alive.

The second set of stories is stand alone, independent pieces of narrative set in important periods of the history of Delhi. The stories are brilliantly told in the first person of figures such as Nadir Shah, Emir Taimur (Tamerlene), Aurangzeb Alamgir, Mir Taqi Mir and Bahadur Shah Zafar. They were prominent people, the attackers and the defenders, who tell their stories as they must have lived them.

There are more characters set in the times of Ghiyasuddin Balban and Khawaja Nizamuddin Auliya which take the reader back in time and make them a part of the setting. There is a semi autobiographical story of an entrepreneurial family which plays a major role in laying the foundations of a new city off the historical metropolis of Delhi, which was soon to be known as New Delhi, now the capital of India.

In the end, the novel narrates first person accounts of the upheaval of Partition and ends with the murder of thousands of Sikhs on the streets of Delhi in the wake of the assassination of Indra Gandhi. It’s an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of not only Delhi but of the whole Indian Subcontinent. My rating 5/5. Get it on AMAZON.

Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India by Stanley Wolpert

(First published 2006)

This review is going to be shorter than usual. The central argument of the book is, as the name indicates, that British, when they decided to leave India, did not plan the transfer of power properly enough.

The consequences were catastrophic as, inter alia, there were unresolved border disputes between the newly independent states of India and Pakistan (the latter divided into East and West wings), princely states, including Kashmir, were left in constitutional limbo, and millions of people were uprooted from their ancestral homes in a tragedy which cost up to one million lives.

The British were desperately trying to chalk out a workable plan of Independence acceptable to both parties of the conflict (Muslims and Hindus) for at least a decade. Failing that, after World WarII, when British power waned considerably, they just decided to dump India and go home. The last post-WWII viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, brought forward the date of Independence by one year, against the time-frame set by the British Parliament in London. In later years Mountbatten reflected on his policies and conceded that he “fucked it up”.

From Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission after the Fall of Singapore in 1942 till the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 this books gives a detailed account of the events that led up to the Partition and Independence of the Indian Subcontinent. This is a detailed and rewarding work by an author who is arguably one of the most authoritative writers on the subject.

My rating 5/5. Find it on AMAZON

God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad by Charles Allen

(First published 2006)

This is one detailed work not so much as on the origins of Wahhabism in Nejd (present day Saudi Arabia) but on its spread in the Indian Subcontinent. For that matter, the title of the book is quite misleading. Only a chapter or so talk about the “Wahhabi Cult” and its relationship with “modern Jihad”. Rather, it is a book which extensively charts the introduction and spread of Wahhabism in British India.

Shah Waliullah and the founder of Madrasah Naeemiya of Delhi [whose name slips my mind!] were instrumental in propagating early versions of what they claimed was “pure Islam of the salaf”, italics meaning the first Muslims. In India, at that time, this movement had not yet been identified as Wahhabism. It was with the rise of Syed Ahmed and his influential close aides, including famous names in Indian Muslim nobility, who stood up and fought against British rule in the name of Jihad, that Indian Wahhabism was officially thrown into limelight.

Charles Allen charts Syed Ahmed’s all uprisings and battles, especially in NWFP – now in Pakistan – and makes an interpretation that those battles cannot be categorised solely as national struggle of the indigenous people against hegemonic imperial rule. They were, in most part, religiously motivated. The underlying rationale with which those battles were fought was something new to Indian Muslims. No other Muslim sect carried out their struggle against British Raj in the name of Jihad per se, save this group of budding Wahhabis.

The author makes an interesting point that Syed Ahmed and his followers were already fighting the British before the Rebellion of 1857  but,  interestingly, they did not join forces with the “mutineers”, which included people of all religions, Hindus as well as Muslims, when they rebelled against the British and symbolically gathered under the banner of the nominal Emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is because Syed Ahmed’s Wahhabis saw their Jihad as exclusively as a religious duty and it could be only waged if special criteria were met. Only a God-inspired Imam could declare Jihad and Indian Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was not a qualified Imam; for Wahhabis, the Imam was Syed Ahmed.

A book worth reading if you have patience for long and confusing Subcontinental names and don’t mind reading extensively detailed accounts of each and every battle fought between the Wahhabis and Britishers in the mountain passes situated at the extreme edge of the then British India.

The title of the book should be: “The Wahhabi Jihad: It’s Origins and Spread in British India”.

My rating 4/5. Here is the link from AMAZON