Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Posted on 13 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. ‘But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.’

One of William Dalrymple’s lyrical explorations of India, this tells the stories of nine people with roles in Indian religion – mostly Hinduism, though the point is well made both by Dalrymple and by several of his interlocutors that it’s all a bit syncretic, and drawing strict boundaries between different faiths is not a good path to understanding.

People who think that all religion is bollocks won’t find much to like in this book. But if you are interested in the belief and faith systems of the largest country in the world by population, this is a very enlightening guide to what nine of the 1.4 billion think, at least as reported by one observer. (No doubt, like any good writer, he has combined material from a number of sources to create nine good stories.)

There’s the Jain nun. There’s the prison warder who becomes a dancing god for two months a year. There’s the singer of epic poems which take five days to recite. There’s the woman Sufi mystic. There’s the maker of bronze idols. There’s the tantric guardian of the cremation grounds. There’s the blind bard of Bengal. Dalrymple respectfully gives them all their voices

And saddest of all is the Devadasi, the temple prostitute who has been servicing worshippers sexually since she was a young girl. Supposedly this practice was made illegal by both the British and by independent India, but it has simply gone underground, with even less protection for the women and girls who get involved. In general my instincts are for the legalisation of sex work where all involved are consenting adults, but that’s not what is going on here, and the story of Rani Bai is heart-rending.

Anyway, well worth getting, and you can get it here. This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves; next is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘Indian’ uncle

Posted on 10 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Content warnings: racism, spousal abuse, child marriage

Rosemary Sutcliff notes that her aunt Edith married

…Archie, weak-willed and amiable, who did not tell her beforehand that he was a quarter Indian — his mother being the product of an Indian Army colonel and a rajah’s daughter — what would have happened if he had told Aunt Edith before it was too late, there’s no knowing. Maybe she would still have married him, but I very much doubt it. As it was, finding out afterwards, she refused to have children — I very much doubt if she even allowed him into her bed! — and set out to make his life a cold hell to his dying day. I have been there at some family gathering myself, puzzled as a dog may be by stresses in the air, the electric discharge of things I did not understand, when he came into the room…

For many years, the family were quite seriously prepared for Uncle Archie to murder her one day, and prepared, if he did, to go into the witness-box on his behalf and swear that he did it under unendurable provocation.

This is an uncomfortable passage about the racism of her aunt, and the readiness of the rest of the family to turn a blind eye to both the aunt’s racism and the potential for her to be murdered by her husband. Sutcliff attempts to play both for laughs, but I doubt if it went down well in the 1980s when the book was published and it certainly doesn’t work for today’s reader.

‘Race’ is a social construct anyway, but NB that if Uncle Archie’s grandmother was a rajah’s daughter, but had a European mother (as is implied), Archie himself would have been an eighth of Indian heritage rather than a quarter.

I decided to check up on the details of the story, and found some interesting data. “Aunt Edith” is Edith Fanny Sutcliff (1871-1960), who in 1897 married “Uncle Archie”, Archibald Gordon Selwood Langley (1872-1943), son of Charles Archibald Langley (1841-1877) and Sarah Elizabeth Hewett (born 1850, married Charles on her 20th birthday, lived to at least 1901). Sarah is reported as being the daughter of Colonel William Selwood Hewett (1824-1889) and Frances Elizabeth Hall (1835-1865). All were born in India. Sarah’s birthdate is recorded as 5 December 1850, and her parents’ wedding as 30 October 1849. Frances’ birthdate is recorded as 14 September 1835, so she was married six weeks after her 14th birthday and gave birth to Sarah a couple of months after her fifteenth birthday. Errm…

Frances herself was the daughter of James Frederick Hall (1809–1837) and Ann Clifford (1816–1865). She was the third of her parents’ four children, born between 1832 and 1837, and her mother then had another seven children with her second husband. James and Ann married in 1831, when Ann was still 14, so errm once more. Again, this is all happening in (British) India. But this doesn’t fit Sutcliff’s story, which is that Archie’s maternal grandmother (Frances) was a rajah’s daughter; unless the suggestion is that Ann had an extramarital relationship with a rajah in her late teens, a couple of years after her marriage to James.

But maybe the story got confused down the generations. James Fredrick Hall’s parents were born in England, but I note that the records of Ann Clifford’s parents are sparse; her father John Clifford is known to have died in 1830, a year before her early marriage, and the only information we have about Ann’s mother, Archie’s great-grandmother, is her first name, Elizabeth. It could have been Elizabeth who was begotten by an Indian father in the closing years of the eighteenth century. This would have made Uncle Archie technically only a sixteenth Indian rather than a quarter or an eighth, but prejudice is rarely interested in the facts. (Or indeed Elizabeth herself might have been the daughter of two Indian parents, and then become known by an English name.)

And Aunt Edith still sounds horrifying, no matter what her husband’s ancestry was.

The best known books set in each country: India

Posted on 14 April 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

A few years back I ran through each of the countries and territories of Europe and looked at the books set there which had the highest number of owners on LibraryThing and the highest number of raters on Goodreads. This is of course an imperfect metric, as all such metrics must be. But it does indicate the visible cultural impact of each country among GR / LT readers. No judgements can be made on literary merit, just on the effectiveness of marketing.

So I think I will try it again, but this time taking the whole world. If once again I take the countries in order of population, that puts India first, as it has recently overtaken China as the world’s most populous state. I’m going to be completely arbitrary about how many books I list from each country, but will generally aim for five-ish.

Edited July 2024: For the first few posts in this series I found that far too many books not actually set in the country I was looking at had been tagged with that country by LibraryThing and especially Goodreads users. So from Egypt on, I’ll be eliminating such impostors at an early stage. I also found that five was generally too few, and all of the lists so far have eight books.

India is a big place, and the top eight books on Goodreads and LibraryThing which readers describe as being set there are as follows:

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
~~Eat, Pray, Love~~	~~Elizabeth Gilbert~~	~~1,743,759~~	~~22,110~~
*Siddhartha*	Hermann Hesse	771,529	27,768
The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy	298,095	19,592
Interpreter of Maladies	Jhumpa Lahiri	193,413	12,094
The White Tiger	Aravind Adiga	191,661	9,573
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	123,795	13,881
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry	149,498	9,155
A Passage to India	E.M. Forster	80,357	12,409

So, something that is going to happen quite a lot if I continue this project is that I will have to disqualify books of which less than 50% is set in the relevant country. In the case of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, less than 30% of the book is set in India, the first third being set in Italy and the remainder in Indonesia. So it gets disqualified.

As it happens Siddartha, by Hermann Hesse, is quite high on my reading list right now. Investigation reveals some doubt about whether the key moments are actually set in India or Nepal; the site of the Buddha’s home town, Kapilavastu, is contested. A quick scan of the text reveals that there are very few place names mentioned apart from Savathi, also known as Shravasti, which is definitely in India.

But there is room for reasonable doubt about whether Hesse was really writing about India at all. It’s clear that the top book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing which is both set in a recognisable place called India and by an Indian writer is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, which I read and enjoyed many years ago. But I’ll come back to this after I have read Siddartha, to give Hesse a fair chance.

Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan

Posted on 8 April 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What the devil…?’ the Judge demands, springing out of bed like a suddenly switched on fountain. ‘Why is that ruddy Gulgul cavorting about naked in my garden like a sturdy gazelle?’

I hugely enjoyed Anuja Chauhan’s story of an Indian parliamentary by-election, Battle for Bittora, when I read it in 2014. As a respite from Hugos last month, I sought out her top book on Goodreads, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, and devoured it fairly quickly. Romance novels are not my usual fare, but sometimes it’s good to have a change.

To my surprise, though published in 2013, the book is firmly set in a specific few months of 1988, with a major subplot being the male love interest’s attempts to hold a government minister accountable for the deadly pogrom against Delhi’s Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination four years before. This is grim stuff for a romantic comedy, and I felt that the author did it justice.

Otherwise, it’s a nicely observed comedy of manners, as the fourth of Judge Thakur’s five beautiful daughters, newly hired as a TV newsreader on India’s main evening bulletin, navigates her romantic destiny, finding her backbone as well as her love. There is a healthy dose of political scepticism too, but the main thrust of the humour is in the character observation.

No actual sex on page (unlike Battle for Bittora) but lots of more than significant glances and fragile egos needing any support they can get. I didn’t like it as much as Battle for Bittora, but then I liked Battle for Bittora a great deal. You can get Those Pricey Thakur Girls here.

Not surprisingly, an easy Bechdel pass, with the two youngest sisters discussing how to get smart for a TV appearance in the middle of the first chapter.

The novel is in English, but the 2015 TV series based on it is in Hindi and you can find every single one of the 150 episodes on Youtube. (Five 25-minute episodes every week for more than six months! Phew!) Here’s the trailer.

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

Posted on 13 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I finished rereading Midnight’s Children almost two weeks ago, but had not yet got around to blogging it until yesterday’s terrible news pushed me into action. It’s good to hear that Salman Rushdie is likely to survive this dreadful attack, but awful that he has been grievously wounded in the course of what should have been a normal professional engagement.

I fear that there are lessons here for anyone involved with organising cultural events; none of us is safe from a determined malefactor. I know that the internal culture of sf conventions is increasingly conscious of security risks, both internal and external. It sucks but it is necessary.

It should also be noted that the risk comes from all extremes. No ideology or belief system has a monopoly on the use of political violence. Christians, Jews, atheists, leftists and right-wingers all use terrorism. Anyone who says that it is a uniquely Muslim phenomenon can go forth and multiply with themselves.

This particular incident is almost certainly rooted in the fatwa pronounced against Rushdie back in 1989 by Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death. I have always suspected that it was an outworking of Iranian politics at the time; the dying Ayatollah wanting to reinforce the place of his regime as a champion of Islam against the West, as the world in general was undergoing revolutionary changes, and therefore picking on a very prominent Westernised Muslim writer as an easy target of opportunity.

The practical effects for Rushdie were devastating even before yesterday. I recommend reading the account he wrote (in the third person) for the New Yorker ten years ago. He makes a very interesting point about the real problem as he saw it:

When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a more particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted books, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a violent attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.

I don’t feel well informed enough to comment in much more detail. I read The Satanic Verses fifteen years ago and found the critique of Islam pretty mild stuff, at least to what I am used to reading about Catholicism. I hope that Rushdie survives to write more.

My copy of Midnight’s Children was given to me 35 years ago by a dear friend who I have since fallen out of touch with. Opening it again was a return to the better times of that relationship, and I felt a warm glow of nostalgia just from the title page. I enjoyed it over Christmas in 1987, and I enjoyed it again now. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. That is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

This weekend is the 75th anniversary of the Midnight of the title, the moment of India’s independence in 1947. The book is the story of India in the last years of British rule and the first thirty-odd years of independence, and it covers also Pakistan and Bangladesh, because you can’t tell the full story otherwise. We know we are onto a good thing in the second chapter, when hereditary nasal problems prove an unexpected blessing to the narrator’s grandfather during the Amritsar massacre:

As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life.

The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is one of the thousand children born in the first hour of India’s independence, all of whom are endowed with supernatural powers of one kind or another. He is perpetually conflicted about his own identity, unaware that in fact he was swapped at birth with the child of a poorer neighbour. His life loops in and out of Indian (and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) history; his powers prove more a curse than a blessing; the political becomes personal and the personal political. It is tremendously engaging; sometimes funny, sometimes very bleak, sometimes both.

If you don’t know a lot about India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh), as I did not in 1987, you’ll learn a lot from this and enjoy the process. If you do know a bit more, I think you’d still enjoy it. I think the one point that has not aged all that well is that the protagonist is actually not a very pleasant person, especially to the women in his life (who are in general as well drawn as the men), and that gets a bit tiresome. But overall I can see why it was acclaimed at the time and why it remains popular. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves which I had read but not yet written up on line. Next is a much older magical book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Slumdog Millionaire; and Q&A, by Vikas Swarup

Posted on 26 June 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2008 and seven others, Best Director (Danny Boyle), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. The other films up for Best Picture were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader, none of which I have seen. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to WALL-E.

Slumdog Millionaire is 4th on one IMDB ranking but only 26th on the other, with The Dark Knight, WALL-E and Iron Man ahead of it on both lists. Along with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, those were the Hugo nominees and I saw them all. Weirdly enough I watched Mamma Mia! for the first time also last weekend; apart from the, the only other 2008 film I have seen is The Duchess, based on half a chapter of Amanda Foreman’s book.

For the second time in a row (after No Country for Old Men), I found no credited actors in common with other Oscar-winning films, Hugo or Nebula winners, or Doctor Who; perhaps a bit less surprising in this case, as almost all of the cast are from India and have made their careers there, and the kids in the flashback scenes have in general not become actors now that they have grown up.

It’s a film about a boy from the slums who wins the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. As the film starts, he is arrested just before the final question is asked on suspicion of cheating, and explains his knowledge to a sceptical policeman, once they have finished torturing him, providing a series of flashbacks which tell the story of his life.

So, to start with the bits I didn’t like, as usual. I did not like the torture scenes. What can I say. I am squeamish. It’s weirdly out of tone with the rest of the film. They’re in the book as well, but there is a lot more violence in the original novel, so it’s less dissonant, and also you don’t have to watch it on paper.

It’s probably the least white film to have won an Oscar so far in my watching, but it’s very male. There is one female lead character, Latika, played as an adult by Freida Pinto. Again, the book is better on this – it memorably features a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.

It reduces Indian society to 1) the struggle of the poor and 2) the dynamic between the protagonist’s Muslim origins versus the forces of nationalism and/or the state, as specifically experienced in Mumbai. That’s an important story of course, but once again the book has a lot more diversity – it is set in New Delhi and Agra as well as Mumbai, and we encounter Indian Christianity, Sikhs, and quite a lot of stupid white people.

And I must say I twitched when the credits flashed up and there was only one Indian name (Loveleen Tandan) among a host of Brits in the senior production team. Somehow this mattered less for Gandhi, which was as much as anything about the relationship between India and the outside world, especially Britain. Slumdog Millionaire purports to be an Indian story about Indian people, but it isn’t.

Having said all that, I did generally enjoy the film. To be grim about it, the interrogation of poverty and social division is a crucial driver of the narrative, and is firm and not subtle. The story starts with the protagonist’s mother being killed in sectarian riots, and life in the slums is vividly depicted.

To be more positive, Dev Patel is great as Jamal, and all of the cast basically glow. I liked the comfortable bilingualism of the script (thanks to Loveleen Tandan apparently). I love quiz shows. I also love the interweaving of narratives where the past unexpectedly informs the present. It’s nice that a crucial plot point depends on The Three Musketeers, a novel which I like more than it really deserves. It looks fantastic and colourful in all the right ways. There is a happy ending. And the music is good.

I’m putting it just above the halfway point in my ranking of Oscar-winners, below It Happened One Night and above Gigi.

Next on my Oscar list is The Hurt Locker, which I have managed to maintain utter ignorance of since it came out (also in 2007, but it won a 2008 Oscar).

As noted above, I read the original book, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I don’t read the Maharashtra Times. In fact, I don’t read any newspaper. But I occasionally pilfer a copy from Mr Barve’s rubbish bin. It is useful for stoking the fire in the kitchen, and sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I flip through its pages as a time pass before they are reduced to ash.

Some repetition below because I’ll be posting this section of the blog post independently to Goodreads and LibraryThing, in due course.

The central concept is the same as the film: a boy from the slums who wins a quiz show because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. The book is more violent. It has more sex and more female characters – as noted above, it has a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.

It’s also a broader look at India and its interactions with the outside world. The protagonist, Ram Mohammed Thomas, can pass as Muslim or Hindu, or indeed Christian; there’s a memorable chapter where he works for an Australian diplomat (the author is himself an Indian diplomat) and another where he makes a living taking tourists around the Taj Mahal. He also looks at the darker side of Bollywood, and of war heroes.

And at the very end there are a couple of pleasing plot twists, which I might have found rather contrived if the rest of the book had not put me in a generally good mood. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Border poll – the precedents

Posted on 13 March 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

There is much discussion in Northern Ireland – and in the Republic – on the conditions for a referendum on whether or not Northern Ireland should stay in the UK, or become part of a united Ireland. I’ve been fairly clear in my own mind about this for a number of years. I wrote in 2014 that an Assembly election in which Nationalist parties exceed Unionist parties in either votes or seats, or two non-Assembly elections in a row where that happens, would surely be sufficient grounds for the Secretary of State to call a Border Poll.

I’m also fairly clear – and wrote about this in the Irish Times in 2019 – that for the pro-United Ireland side to win such a referendum requires three things to happen: 1) Brexit working out badly; 2) Unionists continuing to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground; 3) Nationalists coming up with a better offer, especially on health services. The first two of these conditions are close to being fulfilled at present; the third, however, is also necessary and we are not there yet.

But there has been much less examination of where such votes have happened previously. Self-determination referendums and plebiscites are not exactly rare in world history. But it’s pretty unusual for the options to be restricted to a choice of which already existing state you want to be part of. Much more often, voters are choosing between independence, on the one hand, and rule by someone else, on the other. I was myself involved in the two most recent independence referendums to have succeeded, in Montenegro in 2006 and in South Sudan in 2011.

Referendums have their advantages and their flaws, and I’m not really going to go into the merits here, just present the historical detail. I’ll note that (of course) they are a pretty blunt instrument, offering little nuance or reassurance for minorities, and that not every one of these historical votes could really be described as having taken place under free and fair circumstances.

Historically I find the following internationally recognised precedents for a popular vote where the electorate were asked about future sovereignty, and independence was not one of the options. There are (arguably) twenty-one of them. In eight cases, voters chose to remain in the country they were currently ruled by. In ten cases, voters chose a change of sovereignty, though in three of those nine cases the will of the voters was not in fact implemented and they stayed where they were. And in the remaining three cases, the territory was split between the two states who wanted to rule it.

1527: Burgundy. The scholar Mats Qvortrup cites this as a very early example of a plebiscite. Under the 1526 Treaty of Madrid, Burgundy was to have been ceded by France to Spain; but King Francis I of France organised a vote of male property owners in Burgundy, who rejected the Treaty, and Burgundy remained French.

1860: Nice and Savoy. Between 1849 and 1870 there were a dozen referendums on self-determination in Italy, as states voted (usually by huge and dubious margins) to join with the new kingdom, effectively merging with Piedmont in the process known as the Risorgimento. Most of those votes do not count for present purposes, as the choice was between continued independence and Italian rule. However, there is one exception: the price for French support of the Risorgimento, under the Treaty of Turin, was the annexation of the town of Nice and province of Savoy, which had until then been under Piedmontese rule. Two referendums in 1860 ratified the transfer.

1868 and 1916, Danish West Indies; 1877, Saint-Barthelemy. A couple of interesting cases in the Caribbean, where on three occasions, islanders voted on which external power they wanted to be ruled by – the Danish West Indies choosing whether to be ruled by Denmark or the United States, and Saint-Barthelemy choosing whether to shift from Swedish to French rule. In all three cases, the referendum was in favour of change, but the US Senate rejected the annexation of the Danish West Indies in 1870, changing its mind almost half a century later; they are now the U.S. Virgin Islands.

1919-22, post-War Europe. The end of the first world war brought a number of new states into being, none of which chose to ratify their independence by referendum. However, there were a number of cases of border adjustments being made by holding a vote in the disputed territories. Only a minority of these votes resulted in a transfer of sovereignty. Two of them were frustrated, both in 1919, when the Vorarlberg province of Austria voted to join Switzerland, and the Åland Islands off the coast of Finland voted to join Sweden, but in both cases, the result was not internationally recognised and they were compelled to remain under Austrian and Finnish rule respectively.

In 1920, there were five such referendums, three of which resulted in votes to stick with the country they had previously been ruled by. So, in February 1920, the northern part of the German province of Schleswig voted to become part of Denmark – the only successful transfer of sovereignty from a single referendum. But a month later, in March 1920, central Schleswig voted to remain in Germany, and the planned vote for southern Schleswig was cancelled. Later that year, the formerly German towns of Eupen and Malmedy voted to join Belgium in a very dodgy process where there was no secret ballot; East Prussia voted to stay in Germany rather than join Poland; the southern zone of Carinthia voted to stay with Austria rather than join the new state of Yugoslavia. In 1921, the district of Sopron voted to stay in Hungary rather than join Austria.

The biggest and messiest of these referendums was the last, held in Upper Silesia in March 1921, in a situation of violence and vote-rigging from both sides. The vote was 60% for Germany and 40% for Poland; the territory in the end was divided, with both sides getting about half of the population, Germany getting more of the land and Poland more of the heavy industry. (It should be added that intimidation and violence were standard features of these referendums.)

1935, Saarland. In a hangover from the First World War, the Saar Basin Territory (now the Saarland), which had been under international rule through the League of Nations, was given a choice between the status quo, joining Germany, or joining France. The German option won more than 90% of the vote, with the status quo a very distant second. So few voters chose France that I hesitate to include it on this list. It’s a rare case of a referendum with more than two options, not that it made much difference in the end.

1947, India/Pakistan. I find only five more internationally recognised referendums in the last hundred years where voters chose between different countries, without independence being on the table. Two of them were parts of the Indian independence process in 1947, with both the North West Frontier Province and the District of Sylhet voting to join Pakistan rather than India. Sylhet was divided, with a small part of it staying in India and the rest now in Bangladesh.

1961, British Cameroons. There have been a number of referenda and plebiscites in Africa, but in almost every case independence has been one of the options on the ballot (including, as mentioned, Southern Sudan, now South Sudan, in 2011). The only exception that I have found was the former territory of the British Cameroons in 1961, in which the population were given the choice between joining the former French colony of Cameroon to the east, or Nigeria to the west. In 1959 they had already voted on whether or not to join Nigeria, and chose not, or at least not yet. In 1961, the Muslim north voted to join Nigeria, and the Christian south to join Cameroon, and that was what in the end happened.

1967 (and 2002), Gibraltar. The 1967 referendum on Gibraltar’s sovereignty clearly satisfies my criteria for inclusion on this list. It was the result of a talks process between Spain and the United Kingdom, and voters were given a choice between integration with Spain or continued British rule. They chose British rule by an overwhelming majority. In 2002 the government of Gibraltar held another referendum, but I don’t think this counts for my purposes: it was a declarative (and again overwhelming) rejection of unpublished proposals for shared sovereignty between the UK and Spain, without any positive option being on the ballot.

1973, Northern Ireland. It is almost fifty years since voters anywhere in the world were given the choice of which country to be part of, without independence being one of the options, and the last such vote was the March 1973 Border Poll in Northern Ireland. On a 59% turnout, 99% of voters supported Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom, and only 1% voted for Irish unification. I find it interesting that 50-60,000 votes for the Union were cast by people who did not then vote for pro-Union parties in the local council and Assembly elections a few months later.

Next time, the result will certainly be closer.

Gandhi: film and Fischer biography

Posted on 15 November 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Gandhi won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1982, and also seven others, Best Director (Richard Attenborough), Best Actor (Ben Kingsley in the title role), Best Original Screenplay (John Briley), Best Art Direction (beating Blade Runner, that year’s Hugo winner), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Editing. So far only Gigi (9), West Side Story (10) and Ben-Hur (11) have won more. Blade Runner was also nominated for Best Visual Effects, but lost to E.T.

The other films up for Best Picture were E.T. and Tootsie, which I have seen, and Missing and The Verdict, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank it 5th of the year on one list but only 22nd on the other. Apart from Blade Runner, the other films from that year that I have seen are Wrath of Khan, The Wall, Fanny and Alexander, Airplane II, The Year of Living Dangerously, Fitzcarraldo, Night Shift, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Who Dares Wins. Apart from the last, these are all films I very much enjoyed, or maybe that’s just my uncritical fifteen-year-old self. Here’s a contemporary trailer for the US market, leading with future President Bartlett.

This is the fifth or sixth biopic to win Best Picture (after The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton and maybe A Man for All Seasons which was adapted from a stage play). It was two in a row for British directors and a largely British cast, though as it turned out this was a blip rather than a trend. I saw it in the cinema when it first came out, and felt that it held up very well. I had been prepared for it by hearing the BBC radio play, No Ordinary Light, also about the life of Gandhi, by Hallam Tennyson and starring Sam Dastor.

I won’t list the actors who appeared in Gandhi as well as in earlier Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films, let alone Doctor Who; there are just so many of them. Basically every moderately well-known British actor aged between 40 and 70 seems to have been transported to India to play one or other clueless imperialist. Three have reappeared from last year’s Chariots of Fire – John Gielgud, Ian Charleson and Richard Griffiths. Three also appeared in the only other Oscar-winning film set (partly) in India, Around the World in Eighty Days – Gielgud again, Trevor Howard and John Mills (though all three are only in the London bits of the earlier film).

No fewer than nineteen of the cast also appeared in Doctor Who, chronologically from Ron Howard, an extra in a crowd scene here and also in The Ark (1966), to Colin Farrell who plays a clerk here and was in this year’s Who story Orphan 55. Shane Rimmer was in Doctor Who and Dr Strangelove. John Savident was in Doctor Who and A Clockwork Orange. Jack McKenzie and John Ratzenberger were in The Empire Strikes Back. John Boxer was in Bridge on the River Kwai.

So for my photo comparisons this time, I’m going to switch fandoms to Secret Army. Bernard Hepton, star of the show as Albert Foiret, turns up here as the GOC, and Terrence Hardiman, who plays doomed Luftwaffe Major Reinhardt in the third series, makes a brief appearance here as Ramsay MacDonald.

Well. This is a film about a famous man, and the women get a look-in only in so far as they are important in his life; plus it has to be said that while the real-life Gandhi was very firm for his time on the emancipation of women, the film is rather less so. It easily clears the first leg of the Bechdel test, but I am not sure that we ever see two named women having a conversation, and if they do I am sure that it’s about the central character. Rohini Hattangadi, aged 27, is tremendously convincing as Kasturba Gandhi from young mother to old age, but doesn’t get a lot to say.

However, it’s undeniable that just four years after the unapologetically racist The Deer Hunter won the Oscar for Best Picture, here we have a film which is unambiguously about racism, oppression, and the ultimate defeat of white supremacy. I guess that many viewers were able to explain it away as a movie about things happening to other people in other countries. For myself, watching it in Belfast in 1982, there were strong local resonances: discriminatory legislation, hunger strikes, British soldiers firing indiscriminately into a crowd. (Also, Lord Mountbatten.) The Amritsar sequence is possibly the most effective seven minutes of the film.

The film generally looks brilliant. With the full support of both Columbia Pictures and the Indian government, one should hope so too. The 300,000 extras in the funeral scene are the largest number ever assembled for a film.

And it’s a convincing portrait of a remarkable man. It errs of course on the side of Gandhi’s saintliness (more on that below), and cannot conceal the fact that having spearheaded the cause of Indian independence, he was left behind by political developments on the ground; his answer to tensions between Hindus and Muslims was to refuse to eat until they stopped fighting, which did not work as a long-term solution. Still, he was much more often right than wrong. Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji) truly inhabits the role; occasionally you can see Ben Kingsley looking at you out of Gandhi’s face, rather than the other way round, if you see what I mean.

Anyway. The film is a bit hagiographic, and a bit long, and a bit male, so even though it looks great and its heart is (mostly) in the right place, I’m not putting it right at the top of my list but about a fifth of the way down, between West Side Story and The Best Years of Our Lives.

Next up: Return of the Jedi and Terms of Endearment, in that order.

The Oscar for Best Original Screenplay was not completely fairly awarded this year, as the screenplay was not particularly original. The film is pretty strongly based on Louis Fischer‘s 1950 biography of Gandhi, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:

In an out-of-doors group picture of the 1890 Vegetarians’ Conference at Portsmouth, Gandhi was wearing a white tie, hard white cuffs and a white dress handkerchief in his front pocket. His hair is neatly dressed. He used to spend ten minutes every morning combing and brushing it.

Written soon after Gandhi’s death, it is largely positive but does not gloss over some of the negative aspects of Gandhi’s beliefs and behaviour. He was a terrible parent to his sons, emotionally distant and borderline abusive. He was also an anti-vaxxer who believed that all illness could be healed by meditation and diet. As noted above, he lost touch with his own political movement towards the end. One also has to wonder what Kasturba really thought; we don’t hear much from her between their marriage as horny young teenagers to her death sixty years later.

However, Fischer as a journalist does very well at explaining the situation of both South Africa and colonial India to the general reader, and making it clear just how important Gandhi was to the political developments of both. In particular, he stresses Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence even more than the film does. And I think it’s fair to say that without a Gandhi-like figure, India would certainly have become independent, probably somewhat sooner, but at a much greater cost of lives lost in conflict.

I was also interested to learn that Gandhi’s family were always political – his grandfather served as prime minister of Porbandar, the small state where he was born, and his father was successively prime minister there and in three other states, Rajkot, Wandaner and Bikaner. The book does get a little unmoored at the end when Fischer appears in his own narrative and gives us verbatim notes of his (many, long) conversations with Gandhi, but in general I found it readable enough.

You can actually download a scanned PDF of Fischer’s book from the Gandhi website, but it has a lot of misreading errors, and if I were you I would get it here.