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| Casting a spell: Sharmistha Mukherjee |
Sharmistha’s Bach to basics
After nearly 90 minutes of energetic Kathak at the Nehru Centre in London, what Sharmistha Mukherjee needed most was a serious drink and a cigarette.
“I’m a bad Bengali girl,” she joked.
She reminded me of the wisdom of Zsa Zsa Gabor (or was it Mae West?): “When I am good, I am good, when I am bad, I am better.”
Far from being bad, Sharmistha was actually very good and won people far more easily than, say, her father, external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, who has not found it easy to convince the Left of the virtues of India’s nuclear deal with the Americans.
Sharmistha’s solo Kathak performance last week was a tour de force, especially the last bit when she adapted the language of her classical dance to the terrifically rousing music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
When she tried this out in Leipzig, Nuremburg, Munich and in Bavaria generally, the Germans went mad, she told me. Now, she is thinking of dancing to Vivaldi, whose The Four Seasons would also adapt well to Kathak, she feels.
Although born in Calcutta, Sharmistha grew up in Delhi, attending school at Lady Irwin, before studying history at St Stephen’s followed by a spell at JNU.
She never thought of following her father into politics. “I am just not interested in politics.”
On the other hand, “I am fond of western classical music, especially Bach and Mozart”.
She is also considering the Kathak possibilities of the Hungarian composer, Bella Bartok, and even Spanish flamenco.
Though her father has come to see her dance, admittedly “very rarely”, it is her mother, Subhra, who has encouraged her interest in the arts.
Back at the Nehru Centre, the audience fell in love with Sharmistha, I can reveal. One Pakistani man wanted her to return to Pakistan, where she has danced to the sufi music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as she also did in London. Another man wanted to buy a video of her dancing, but, being Bengali and “not very commercial minded”, she said she had nothing to sell.
Perhaps she should consult her father and set Comrade Karat’s twists and turns to Kathak. Seriously, though, in a place like London, the arts organisations, which are always keen to explore innovation in Indian dance, would shower Sharmistha with sterling, I suspect.
Sharmistha once accompanied Dr Kalam on a state visit to Iceland as part of the official Indian delegation. Since selling culture is now part of foreign policy, she should be given a few more similar trips as part of India’s “soft diplomacy”.
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| Coming soon: A poster of Gurinder Chadha’s upcoming film |
Making moves
“Have you seen my new movie?” asked Gurinder Chadha when I bumped into her at a London party where she was accompanied by her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges.
I had to admit I had not been to an advance screening of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, said to be a British comedy about a 14-year-old’s coming of age based on Louise Rennison’s American novel, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging.
But no matter. Gurinder is back on the buses, which is advertising the movie, ahead of its general release on July 25. She will hope to repeat even a part of the huge success of Bend It Like Beckham, which was also advertised on the side of buses.
These days she says she is enjoying being a full-time mother. She and Paul, who have jointly co-written the screenplay of the film which Gurinder then directed, have young twins.
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Defending Rushdie
Who should leap to Sir Salman Rushdie’s defence when he was ridiculed in the Evening Standard newspaper but the Pakistani author, Kamila Shamsie?
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was voted the Booker of Bookers recently by readers but the novel did not impress the Standard’s literary critic, David Sexton, who took issue with the “ostentation of his storytelling”.
Dismissing Sexton’s charge that Rushdie’s writing was “showy” in a letter to the paper, Kamila declared Midnight’s Children to be “a dazzling feat of imagination”.
Sexton was reflecting a view held by a section of British commentators, who boast that they have been unable, despite their best efforts, to get through the book.
Kamila sets out to educate Sexton, telling him that “if Midnight’s Children is ostentatious, so is The Arabian Nights and Tristram Shandy”.
“In fact, the prose,” said Kamila, warming to her subject, “with its bilingual word play, its various patterns of subcontinental speech, its boisterous yet controlled energy, is a triumph.”
Kamila, author of such novels as Salt and Saffron, Kartography and In the City by the Sea, added that “for those to whom subcontinental speech patterns were unfamiliar, it remade language. No other Booker winner has done so much to renew the novel.”
Rushdie, I fancy, couldn’t have put it better. By way of thanks, I do hope he is gallant enough to give Kamila’s next novel an especially warm endorsement.
Picking a fight?
More on Salman Rushdie who appears to have picked a fight with writer Amit Chaudhuri, I notice. In a Guardian interview, Rushdie speculated that Midnight’s Children had profoundly influenced younger novelists, among them Kiran Desai and Rana Dasgupta. “And then there’s Amit Chaudhuri. Barely a week goes by without Amit taking a swipe at Midnight’s Children. So it has been influential even among those who hate it.”
Chaudhuri immediately protested to the Guardian from Calcutta that he is “at once dismayed and amused” “because I actually like his novel very much”.
“I may not be an unequivocal worshipper at the shrine; I’ve only reviewed him once, a mildly critical piece on Shalimar the Clown; but I do think Midnight’s Children, with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, is his best book, and one of the most amazing novels to have emerged from India in the last 30 years,” added Chaudhuri, who is, incidentally, a judge for the £60,000 Man Booker International Prize.
This England
In order to do its bit to save the environment, Waitrose is making home deliveries in Cambridge by bicycle.
“If successful, we will look at rolling it out to other branches,” promised Tony Solomons, retail director of the (up)market supermarket chain.
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Tittle tattle
If a senior British politician arrived at Delhi airport with a visa out of date by only a day, would he be put straight back on a return flight to London by Indian immigration authorities?
Perhaps, but the chances are that after some frantic phone calls to the British High Commission which would get in touch with someone high up at the externals affairs ministry, the politician would be let in with an exhortation that he get his visa renewed as soon as possible.
Shatrughan Sinha, alas, had no such luck at Heathrow. According to gossip on the London party circuit, the actor-politician did not take kindly to being denied entry by some flunky at the airport. More informed gossip says he was not allowed to take off in Delhi.
Perhaps he should have bellowed, “Do you know who I am? Why is there no one to receive me?”, as he is alleged to have done when he turned up at the home of a well known Indian hostess in London in the early hours of the morning in a slightly tired and emotional state.
