Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the words for what he had in mind. If put coherently, it would read something like, “Are you generally inclined to mystical and spiritual aspects and is that the reason you are caught up in this film and could figure the pattern behind it?”
* * *
If India chose to wrap herself in a saree, it would be smooth and shiny, but could never be touched.
This is a story about India. Not about its economy, nor its politics. I leave those subjects to the mourners. This is a story about the country’s belief system. No, not faith or religion. I leave those subjects to our politicians. I mean the country’s mentality and how it is inherited and passed on by generations of Indians, shaping how we think and act.
Once upon a time, when people still stepped out of their house without second thoughts and travelled the roads, I guided a backpacking German around Chennai, my city.
Arno is a good friend and a client of my company. A curious person, he flew to Chennai on a tourist spree, trusting that as a storyteller I would turn his trip into a merry-go-round. He had imagined a meaningful visit, a dip into new culture and new ways of thinking, but he went back home confused and with a range of spices still undigested in his tummy.
Any Indian city is a jolly pandemonium to foreign senses and sensibilities. However, the most probable reason for his double indigestion, as I look back today, seems to be our visit to Mylapore. The place is a carnival of diverse trades, people, ideas, and even times. Fully digitalized banks sit next to centuries-old paatashala – the school for Hindu scholarship. Sedans and cycle rickshaws elbow each other in the narrow lanes. If time permits, we Chennaiites visit the Kapaleeswarar temple and Our Lady of Light church in the same evening.
The ornate spire of the Kapaleeswarar temple, home to hundreds of figurines, each with its own story. Photo by Prathik Sudha Murali, Founder, Sahagamana Foundation. Used with permission.
Soon Arno and I made our way to the temple, marked by a spire inhabited by hundreds of gods, demigods, and demons, each with a fascinating history. Throughout this walk, some anecdotes I shared from memory tickled Arno’s imagination, while the others catapulted him into so fantastic a world that he stopped walking with me and stood turning around the very tourist water bottle in his hand.
Inside the temple, we came across a statuette of a lady. Arno squinted to take in more of the dark chamber where it stood. It was Poompavai, the girl who lived around the place we were standing in. Everyone in this part of Chennai would have heard of Poompavai. She was like the flavoured bubble gum we mandatorily chewed as children. Born in a wealthy house and trained in the austere ways of Hindu devotion, Poompavai led a rather monotonous life until a venomous snake bit her. My mother told me she succumbed immediately. The girl’s father, broken, cremated his young daughter and placed her bones and ashes in an urn, which he safeguarded in the girl’s bedroom. I think he also appointed a girl to guard the urn. A few years later, a renowned saint was passing through the town when he heard of the tragic death of the little girl. He asked the father to bring the urn to him. There, in the midst of a crowd of temple visitors, hawkers, and curious onlookers, the simple saint composed hymns to the remains of the girl, asking why she departed Mylapore and its various annual rituals and festivals (observed even today). At the end of the tenth hymn, the urn shattered open and Poompavai emerged as a beautiful woman. She was immediately drawn to the saint. The father, so moved, offered to give his daughter in marriage to the saint, but he refused, since having given life to her, he had become her father figure. Eventually, she lived as a spinster and devoted her life to the workings of the temple, thus earning a small shrine in it.
The moment of Poompavai’s resurrection; from left to right: Saint Sambandar, Poompavai as a grown-up woman, her parents. Photo by Prathik Sudha Murali, Founder, Sahagamana Foundation. Used with permission.
Arno didn’t ask any questions. He remained silent for a long time, twisting his bottle. We headed to my regular restaurant and I ordered a crispy masala dosa for him. He wiped his plate clean and drowned everything with the spicy broth we call sambar. That night, without much being discussed, he thanked me and boarded his flight to Frankfurt.
I have seen this happen multiple times. India, my country, must appear like a Rubik’s cube to many tourists; attractive from a distance but incomprehensible closer. There are more such fantastic tales that visitors cannot wrap their heads around but are commonplace, and in fact, unquestionable truths for us Indians.
* * *
A Passage to India
In the wake of Arno’s “I’m-not-sure” experience, I caught up with something I have long had unchecked in my to-do list.
I had this opportunity when Corona reared its ugly head and alarmed governments into imposing lockdowns. Suddenly, time halted, took a sharp U-turn and expanded. Mornings seemed fantastically far away when recalled in the evenings. I felt allowed to take up things that I had been complaining I did not have time for.
I basked in a full three hours and watched A Passage to India, David Lean’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s last work. The novelist had first visited India not to tour the country, but in pursuit of love of a young Indian lawyer. However, India started to stir his mind, inspiring him to write a new novel. The story is of a young, impressionable Englishwoman’s roller-coaster experience with the country, depicted amidst a touchy relationship between the residents and the colonials. I have not read the book but enough about it to learn that it stretches on a larger canvas than its film adaptation and explores a range of themes and holds between its covers imperial and postcolonial discourses. Lean, who had read the book, was dissatisfied with its theatrical script by Shantha Rama Rau. He wanted to bring to the film his own imagination and impression of India, and so wrote and rewrote the screenplay, starting in Delhi and completing halfway around the world in Zurich.
Despite the many English characters and perspectives colonizing the film, it seemed to me a completely Indian artifact, as something about the country had certainly rubbed off on the story and become the most influential of all its characters. This much I immediately understood, but what that Indian trait is, I could not articulate. In fact, though embarrassing, I must admit that throughout the film I sensed something atmospherically mystical that I could not touch upon despite being spoon-fed Indian culture all my life. It appeared to quiz my understanding of my own country. The confidence I had when showing Arno around vapourised in an instant. What do the repetitive images of the burning sun and cool waters mean? What explains the unbearable shock of Mrs Moore at the (fictional) Marabar caves? Did the blackface of Alec Guinness hold any answers? Greedy to obtain that single idea that would explain all these, I researched the themes of the novel and the film, but nothing helped. This made it plain that it resided in Lean’s impression of India – the input that he wanted to bring to the script. So, what was that one thing that the man took away from India and breathed into his last film?
Watching and rewatching the film finally led me to discover a pattern behind the arrangement of the scenes and the choices of symbols. The euphoria this inspired was not unlike the Judy Davis character’s discovery of her sexuality in a ruined temple.
Though it sounded like the answer to my search for the omnipresent mystical element, I wished to validate it by getting in touch with one of the crew or cast who had closely worked with Lean. That the film was released in 1984 did not leave me with many options. IMDb searches of actors and crew members resulted in many “He was” and “She was” descriptions.
A notable exception was James Fox. But how could I, sitting in India in the midst of a pandemic, reach an old Englishman (born May 19, 1932) with no digital footprint whatsoever? After some headhunting, (virtual) door knockings, ice-cold emails, and follow-ups failed, I got in touch with Jack Fox, the son, who immediately (still unbelievable!) put me in touch with James Fox’s agent. And a month later, James Fox gave me an appointment to chat with him about the film and what I felt I had discovered. As the day approached, I found myself regularly reimagining how I would help him visualize my ephemeral finding. I did not want to make him an Arno. So, I did the best I could – I drew it on a piece of paper.
* * *
Seeing India
It is the appointed day. At the scheduled hour, as I join the Skype bridge, Jack Fox stands upside down, helping his father navigate the sound and video settings. Soon we confirm we could hear each other, me as excitedly as Alexander Graham Bell might have when first testing his invention. James Fox settles into a lounger. His face is kind and warm, or so it appears because of his age. The little of the background I could make out is dominated by shelves of paperbacks.
I don’t intend to waste time and therefore gloss over the small talk and jump into the deep end of the conversation, maybe an indecent gesture by British standards but perfectly normal on my side of the world.
I show him the picture and he nods away as I walk him through it: how the life of Indians and the British in India is established in the introductory scenes, how the next one hour is spent in showing the birth of friendships among the lead characters, which is followed by an hour of deaths, both literal and metaphoric, culminating in an epilogue of mending or rebirth of relationships. Fox momentarily presses his forefingers to his temples as if trying to remember something.
“You’ve come up with something beautiful there, absolutely,” he comments.
I ask him if he had imagined the Indian philosophy of reincarnation – this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, metaphorically applied to relationships in the story – as a possible theme while making the film.
“I am not very alert to these things,” he admits. “[But] I am sure David was aware of it, he was an older man nearer death.”
David Lean was 76 at the time of filming. The film, Lean’s last, is often slotted into the shadows of its larger and less enigmatic (although equally subtle and layered) predecessor Lawrence of Arabia. But to me, biased or not, it is David Lean’s crowning accomplishment. It is not the scale of the film, nor the careful, balanced portrayal of the English and the Indians, but David Lean’s empathetic understanding of a foreign country and its characteristics that is the clincher.
Even if Fox had not considered the deeper, thematic aspects of the film beyond the scope of his performance, I suspect the aftertaste of doing the film itself must have deposited an unidentifiable residue in him. So I ask him, “What is mystical about the film for you?”
He smiles reminiscently. “It’s a very funny thing, it’s a very precious thing – the way I connected with [Victor] Banerjee, it is permanent.” He interlocks his fingers to demonstrate his connection. James Fox, for the uninitiated, plays an English teacher who befriends an Indian doctor – played by Victor Banerjee – and makes a spirited defence against the entire English colony to support his Indian friend during his trial.
He adds on what else was inexplicable to him, “Actors weren’t always David’s favourites; he didn’t have many actor friends. I was fortunate enough to be one. When he went through his illness, I was with him.’
I see he is still floating on the surface. I would like to nudge him to go deeper.
How did immersing himself in India, where the thinking and way of life can seem foreign, for nearly six months work out for him, especially after a decade spent in telephone-sterilising/soul-searching?
“By that time, having spent ten years in a narrow evangelical environment in which I came to a spiritual awakening, I had moved from that narrow subculture to more of a culture of the world. Therefore, the Indian culture and religion had an immediate effect on me. It was a learning curve.”
That’s more like it. I prod on to understand how his fellow citizens experienced the film.
“It was mixed. In England, there was a great embarrassment about talking about god or spiritual things or the relationship we have with the transcendent; all of that was seen through these very Western eyes, as though we should be ashamed of it.” This is very interesting to me. Can the masses really restrain themselves from opium? I cannot make up my mind as to who the exception is – Fox or his citizens. But one thing is clear, in the midst of war, Fox would be a pacifist.
Next, I hint at the important man, the auteur himself.
“I always thought of David as a man of deep spiritual sensitivity,” Fox picks up. “He travelled a lot in India, it was one of his favourite countries.” Fox leans his head back and sees something far away, and continues, “He was something of a viceroy himself; he was very grand, he would have fitted in very well as a Maharaja. But,” he quickly adds, “he wasn’t a proud man.”
The viceroy bit corroborates. I came across an account of one of the film’s army of assistant directors who describes the impossibility of approaching Lean on the set. However, to me, after internalizing the philosophical depth of the film, David Lean appears as a true yogi. That is, if we discount the fact that he married and remarried six times.
Interesting conversation so far. I now wade into a controversial zone.
One of the main reasons, to me, that the film seemed mystical was Alec Guinness’s Godbole. It is not a prominent character in the film, but definitely a strange one, even to the other characters who are left gaping at his wisdom. Adding to the strangeness is the character’s sporadic appearance, which I read was due to merciless butchering at the editing table. Was that a conscious decision or a last-minute attempt to salvage running time?
A shot from the film, with Alec Guinness playing the enigmatic Indian Professor Godbole
Fox looks conscious for a moment, then answers, “Alec was a religious man, he was quite a strong Catholic. He deeply respected the spirituality of India. But David could not accommodate Alec’s desire to fully explore the character, particularly the dance that Alec performs; David thought it would hold up the story. Alec had rehearsed the dance and learnt the movements, he wanted to give great respect to the dance. At this minute, their relationship became strained.”
It is interesting to note that A Passage to India has both spliced people together and sliced some apart, making relationships come full circle.
Before we agree to wrap up our conversation, Fox is excited about showing me something “quite special” from his days in India. He hauls himself up, grunting with the effort, and teeters to a hall full of framed pictures. Central among them is a hand-drawn portrait of Fox as Mr. Fielding, kindness exuding from the face. He tells me Lean dragged him to the make-up department the moment he was in India, to be added a moustache and reimagined as the benevolent principal. That was when Bill Stallion, Lean’s draftsman, made this portrait. I see the picture and his frail reflection on it, and wonder how he is suddenly an older man nearer death.
* * *
A Story of Water and Fire
Reincarnation has been a defining trait in the Indian mind. Literates and illiterates, young and old, men and women in India believe in the circular economy of their souls. A new life in new circumstances and new body – fresh packaging – awaits every soul in India. New, definitely, but not necessarily better. The comforts and serendipities in the new life are determined on the merits of the previous life’s actions, called karma in totality.
For centuries, masses of old people have been traveling to Kashi (in northern India) to spend their last days in the holy city and, if all goes well, die there. It is believed Kashi is the tangent that can channel one’s soul out of the otherwise inescapable cycle of life and death.
In April of this year (2021), despite a devastating second season of COVID in India, more than 30 million people attended Kumbh Mela to take a dip in the Ganges and cleanse the sins of their present and past lives so they won’t affect their future births. It can only mean one thing – that people in India value their rebirth more than their health and life today.
David Lean understood this. He spins his yarn on the drive wheel of life-and-death-and-life. He leverages the suggestive phases of the water cycle to demonstrate Mrs Moore’s passage from one life to another in the film. She dies in the middle of the ocean, her body is offered to the waters, the burning sun slurps the water, and soon it is monsoon in India, clouds form and gather, to finally give back the waters to the land, and therefore bring Mrs Moore’s spirit back into the story, conveniently through her pregnant daughter (Lean’s departure from Forster’s novel).
And Lean treats us to gushing water only after making us squint against the scorching sun. Recurrent visuals of the burning Indian sun throughout the film must stand for enlightenment – the chance of attaining knowledge of the cycle of life and the ensuing possibility of liberation.
Thanks to this celluloid masterclass by Lean, I finally noticed the elephant in the room. The ubiquity of this philosophy in the day-to-day actions of us Indians, not just in the redemptive last days, fascinates me. “We are different because we are the only part of the world that believes in rebirth. The rest of the world believes that there is only one life to lead and is in a hurry to make the most of it,” says Devdutt Pattanaik, Chief Belief Officer at Future Group. Yes, that’s a real title! Pattanaik was appointed by Chairman Biyani to implement alternative management techniques that truly understand Indians and the Indian way of thinking. The duo believes that all management wisdom today is based on a linear mindset influenced by the West, which is not applicable to the Indian milieu. They choose to work based on the Indian mindset that nothing is permanent, not even death. Being grounded on rebirth, it assumes the idea that this life is an outcome of previous lives.
Pattanaik explains that the implication of this subconscious thought makes Indians comfortable with diversity. No wonder most of us cannot sit through world cinema of singular themes. We would prefer the variety in Bollywood films, which offer a thali of tear-jerking, glamour, action, comedy, and self-mockery. This unified liking for diversity draws my mind to the muddled images from A Passage to India. The heaps of coolies huddled together, the visuals of the melting-pot bazaar, Dr. Aziz’s unarranged home and the scrambled protests and celebrations near the end of the film. The more I recall these images, the more I respect Lean for his empathetic understanding of a foreign culture and its evocative expression for curious outsiders and Indians themselves.
* * *
The Clarity of an Outsider
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the words for what he had in mind. If put coherently, it would read something like, “Are you generally inclined to mystical and spiritual aspects and is that the reason you are caught up in this film and could figure the pattern behind it?”
As much as this question sounded eerie, it also opened a door in my mind I didn’t know existed. I had to repeat and rephrase his question to seemingly confirm what he intended, but actually to buy time to process what I had already understood. Going beyond the religious pomposity of “mystical” and “spiritual,” in my opinion, and in the Indian setting, what the words point to is the fabric of story and substance that I have been living in along with all the 1.3 billion people of my country. This semi-solid fabric has shaped the topography of our reality, making it difficult for us to question where the truth lies. And at the same time, this Indian entwinement tickles us Indians and generates an inherent need to centrifugate story from substance in all we see – the temples, ancient bridges, films like A Passage to India, and other manifestations.
Those who think of this hyperreal nature of India only in terms of ancient architectures and popular customs are limiting their imagination. It also actively manifests in how people think and act. Take the dispute over the site in Ayodhya where Babri Masjid stood until its demolition in 1992 by a Hindu nationalist mob. The reason? Many Hindus and the Indian government believe that was where the Hindu deity Ram was born 7,000 years ago.
My quest to fill the gap in my understanding of a film about my country led me to rediscover India and its very unique psychology. And it is ironic and special to note that it was James Fox, an Englishman, who helped me realize the equation between the self and stories, and how each one of us regardless of class, caste, and community is a microcosm of India, a thread in that fabric. As this fabric extends across our land, we can see India wrapped in a smooth and shiny saree that somehow, even with extended hands, could never be touched.
* * *
All images are screenshots or were provided by the author or photographer.
