Naomi Richman interviews Christopher Walker, Foreign Correspondent for The Times from 1974-2002. He covered events such as the Romanian Revolution, Chernobyl and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
Blog Page 1911
Massacre at St John’s
The three dozen skeletons found under the Kendrew Quad in St John’s were Danes slaughtered in an act of ethnic cleansing, Oxford researchers have discovered.
Builders found between 34 and 38 young male bodies while digging the foundations of the new quad back in March 2008.
Carbon dating suggested the men died between 960 and 1020 AD, and initially it was thought that they were Saxons executed as criminals.
“They were lying over a prehistoric ditch,” said project leader Sean Wallis, “and buried under a late medieval building, so we thought they had to be somewhere in between.”
But now Wallis, who works for the Thames Valley Archaeological Service, believes he can pinpoint the killings to 1008 years ago to the day.
On November 13 1002, King Aethelred the Unready ordered the holocaust of every Dane in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how the Danes in Oxford were rounded up into a church which was then razed to the ground as part of the St Brice’s Day Massacre.
“It was an awful decision,” commented Robin McGhee, reading History at St Anne’s. “Basically Aethelred was one of the worst kings in British history and didn’t know what he was doing. The Danes invaded Saxon England a few years later.”
The bodies in the Kendrew Quad are an exact match for the Danes, Wallis explained: “There were puncture wounds, sword cuts, and various other wounds.
“Some of them were decapitated, and others were almost decapitated. They were all charred.”
“The Vikings are well known for raping and pillaging, but they were primarily traders. These men could well have been merchants in Oxford, although there is a chance that they were the bodyguards of the daughter of the King of Denmark.”
Forensic science students from Oxford and Cherwell Valley College will continue to study the remains, and Wallis hopes to publish his findings in the near future.
Meanwhile, the reaction from St John’s students has been mixed.
“It’s really very creepy,” said second-year physicist Jane Saldanha. “I don’t think I’m going to get a good night’s sleep in college for a while. I’ll certainly think twice about heading across the Kendrew Quad in future.”
However, Classics graduate student Matt Hosty put a brave face on things.
“It doesn’t trouble me at all,” he said. “Our college has a fine tradition of sanctifying its foundations with blood sacrifice, and I’m reassured that the Kendrew Quad is built on such a fine tradition.”
Little Pembroke gets big
Pembroke College is to expand significantly in a building project which will add two new quads to its existing city centre site.
Pembroke, currently one of Oxford’s physically smaller colleges, will have its main site increased by around 30 per cent. The large development will create a café, seminar rooms, art gallery, assembly room and an all-purpose auditorium, together with accommodation space for a whole year of Pembroke undergraduates.
The work will include the demolition of a collection of buildings acquired by the college in recent years, including old industrial and retail sites to the south of Brewer street. These will be replaced by two new quads in the collegiate style, to be connected to the existing site by a footbridge over the street.
The expansion has been made possible by a fundraising campaign called ‘Bridging Centuries’, through which the college has already raised £9 million out of a targeted £17 million of donations. It is part of Oxford University’s ‘Oxford Thinking’ campaign, which recently passed the £1 billion mark.
The overall cost of the project is £29 million, the remainder of which will be provided by a bank loan.
The development is the culmination of years of planning by the college. Giles Henderson, the Master of Pembroke, said, “It is no mere annexe we are building. This is a major extension of our main site which will benefit members of Pembroke and visitors for years to come.”
Andrew Seton, Strategic Development Director at Pembroke, called the project “nothing short of transformational”.
Mr Seton added, “Pembroke is a great community. It has not had the same facilities as other colleges. Our students deserve more than there are at the moment, and this lovely expansion will provide for that.”
Students have expressed their enthusiasm for the plans, which will also provide a number of en-suite study bedrooms.
Alex Joynes, a second-year student at Pembroke, said, “It’s all very exciting for us. For me, the most impressive plans are those for the art gallery and auditorium, which will really help to show Pembroke’s strong arts side.”
A fundraising campaign is appealing to alumni and friends of Pembroke from across the Atlantic, with separate UK and US campaign boards which launched respectively in London and Washington DC last month.
The college still needs a further £8 million of donations to ‘Bridging Centuries’ to enable on-time completion, intended for 2012.
5 Minute Tute: Japanese Politics
What happened in the 2009 election?
The 2009 election resulted in a landslide victory for the Democratic Party of Japan- 308 seats (DPJ) over the incumbent Liberal Democratic party (LDP) – 119 seats. For the first time an opposition party took over power as the result of an election. Great things were expected, not least the delivery of the manifesto promises: to introduce a generous child allowance (and thereby increase the birth rate), abolish motorway charges, provide new subsidies for farmers and radically reform the policy making process. After just over a year in power criticism is mounting about the new government’ s performance.
What are the main problems?
The 2009 election resulted in a landslide victory for the Democratic Party of Japan- 308 seats (DPJ) over the incumbent Liberal Democratic party (LDP) – 119 seats. For the first time an opposition party took over power as the result of an election. Great things were expected, not least the delivery of the manifesto promises: to introduce a generous child allowance (and thereby increase the birth rate), abolish motorway charges, provide new subsidies for farmers and radically reform the policy making process. After just over a year in power criticism is mounting about the new government’ s performance.
What about overseas?
Abroad the US government resisted all attempts by the DPJ to renegotiate previous agreements made about maintaining bases in Okinawa. The DPJ had promised to remove them entirely. Meanwhile China has become more assertive about its claim for sovereignty over the Senkaku islands in the south and President Medvedev last week visited the northern islands reinforcing Russia’ s possession of them in the face of Japan’ s claims. North Korea continues its unpredictable path towards leadership change. Although they may want to loosen the ties with the USA, the unreliable and indeed threatening neighbours gives the DPJ leadership little choice but to remain close.
What will happen now?
It is hard to argue that nothing has changed. A budget review process has provided the spectacle of open policy making as politicians eager to cut budgets pit their wits
against bureaucrats keen to protect their projects and jobs in televised sessions. However the government has seemed weak and unprincipled in its relations with its neighbours and has failed to innovate enough domestically to satisfy those who voted for it. Prime Minister Kan’ s only consolation is that although his popularity is in rapid decline, the LDP is benefiting little if at all. There does not need to be another election until summer 2013. If the PM and DPJ can weather the current criticisms and court case they should be able to claim some credit for the slow recovery of the economy that will begin next year. That may give it more scope for reform and chance to win back popular support.
Channel tunnel vision
I originally joined the UK civil service through the European Fast Stream a year after leaving Oxford University. I’d been interested in European issues for some time and wanted to work in Public Affairs so it seemed the logical next step. I wanted something that would allow me to do a wide a variety of jobs and not box me into one area of specialism.
I initially joined the Department for Transport in 2002 and since then have moved around loads. I studied and worked in France for a year at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration which is the training school for French senior civil servants. I then came back to London at an exciting time to work in the Cabinet Office’s European team running the UK’s 2005 Presidency of the EU. I then worked briefly for Peter Mandelson in his “Cabinet” (private office) when he was still a Commissioner, before joining the UK Representation to the EU where I was First Secretary for Employment and Social Affairs. I was lucky to be involved in some politically sensitive and difficult negotiations – for example on rights for agency workers and how many hours you can work a week. I moved just over two years ago to the Commission’s press service, first to be a spokesperson for the Commissioner for employment and social affairs, then in the President’s team and I’m now the spokesperson for the French Commissioner, Michel Barnier, who is responsible for the internal market and the reform of financial services and dubbed by the Telegraph when appointed as “the most dangerous man in Europe ” …!
The biggest opportunity my career has given me is the ability to do a wide variety of jobs: I’ve been able to work on many different issues from employment to the Irish referendum campaign on the Lisbon Treaty or right now on new regulations to cap bankers’ bonuses. I’ve also developed different skills such as strong negotiation skills in the UK Representation (UKREP) and media and communication skills in the Commission’s press service. I’ve moved around departments, I’ve moved countries and changed subject areas. It’s that variety which has made my last 8 years fun and a great learning experience.
I’m really enjoying my current job which is not one I could really do in the British Civil Service. My job is to speak on behalf of the Commission to the media. In the UK, there are press secretaries but they are more constrained and can’t, for example, do live TV and radio – that’s left to politicians, whereas I have that opportunity. My day consists of talking to journalists from UK press such as The Guardian or The Telegraph, but also press services from across Europe. Every day, we have a press conference where I can present the issues of the day or answer questions from journalists live if they’re in my portfolio. I also manage all the press activities of my boss – from chairing his press conferences, to writing articles, preparing him for interviews or writing press releases. It’s all a great opportunity.
If you’re interested in public affairs and enjoy a multicultural environment, then I would say consider applying for the EU recruitment competition known as the concours. Don’t worry about language skills too much, because you can always pick that up on the way and perfect it. I think what’s more important is the willingness to move around, embrace variety, adapt to change and want to work with different cultures and nationalities.
Could we have a word, Lord Hurd?
Moody swore. “Michael Crick’s bailed on us.” He hadn’t bailed on us actually – he’s much too nice for that. It turned out he’d been delayed. All the same it felt like bailing as we returned to the tent. Ponces that we aspire to be, the two of us had sojourned to Gloucestershire for a spot of hob-nobbing at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. But it looked as if our plans, like the armies of Darius, would be trampled to dust in the Companion charge of Crick deciding to go back to London.
Told we could hang around for Jonathan Powell, we departed to a tea-tent. Immediately upon arrival we were told he’d gone home. So, we decided, would we. But at a table near us sat an elderly man who looked oddly familiar. “It’s Douglas Hurd” McGhee said warily. “I remember him from Spitting Image”. After briefly reminding Moody who he was (Cicero being the most recent politico the Lit. Humanist knew anything about), it was decided we’d angle Hurd for an interview. Bribed with the Baconian triptych of smiles, coffee and us being from Oxford, the Great Man stepped into the breach like a natural.
McGhee, aka the new Bob Woodward, was less than quick off the mark. “OK, so you were Foreign Secretary- I’m trying to remember off the top of my head…” Unstunned by ignorance in one so young, Hurd was utterly charming. “1989 to 1995”. Er, right. Was that his greatest achievement? “I really don’t know. I suppose I don’t think in terms of climbing up some mountain and planting your own silly flag at the top. I’d really just rather have steered the ship of state well, between the rocks- and there are many rocks to get caught on.” When Thatcher resigned in 1990 Hurd stood against John Major and Michael Heseltine for the Conservative leadership, coming a distant third. It doesn’t seem to rattle him- although, as he admits, “I would have liked to have been PM”.
Hurd does not consider himself a Thatcherite in terms of economic policy. “Nor would she regard me as such. But I was acceptable.” Hurd in the early seventies was political secretary to Edward Heath, who though a Conservative ran a noticeably left-of-centre government. How did Hurd reconcile this with the privatisations of Thatcher? “Margaret Thatcher knew that I’d worked for Ted and been loyal to Ted. She valued loyalty and thought there was a reasonable chance that I’d be loyal to her, which I was. It was not an issue which presented itself. The various things which she might have done which I’d have had to resign over were to do with Europe and other things like that. But she never crossed those boundaries.”
When asked of her greatest achievement, Thatcher famously responded “New Labour”. Hurd is not so clear about this, and the seventies man within him is most concerned with one defining problem of that era. “I think the sense in which she was right was that they left alone what I think probably was her main achievement, which was dealing with the trade unions. Blair always went sideways on that. So in that sense we persuaded them- she persuaded them- to leave that alone. That was absolutely crucial. And that’s now an established fact I don’t think any Labour government would try and sink things with the trade unions.”
But this is all politics for old men and young nerds. Hurd was at Eton and Trinity Cambridge; after a spell in the diplomatic corps he became a politician. “By knocking the direct-grant schools on the head, the Labour government of that time more or less destroyed one of the main avenues for people moving from the state education sector into politics. Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan… the avenue by which they rose is now shut off to people. We’re moving back to a world of Old Etonians.” Hurd is clearly concerned by what it says about social mobility. He is also worried about the impact on British democracy. “My father, who was an MP, said that if I wanted to do that I’ve got to go off and do something else first. So I went and became a diplomat. It’s a bad thing that we have a Political Class. Constituencies ought to give a fair run to people who may be in their fifties, who’ve got many years ahead of them as opposed to youthful professional politicians. So you need all people, you need a House of Commons with a good mix in. We’re in danger of forgetting that.”
His own education he didn’t find hugely important. Is Oxbridge useful? “Well it wasn’t a preparation for the real world. But it’s worth struggling for. What I most enjoy now is history- reading history, writing history. it’s been refuelling my interest in history. Since that’s now my main mission, an academic education was important to me. Though I don’t think it was important to me in becoming Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary. It gave me a certain balance though.”
His experience in foreign policy puts him in an eagle’s nest, able to look with detachment on the increasingly complex world. This applies to the big issues. He was opposed at the time to Iraq and remains, of course, opposed to it. “I was opposed on the basis of ideas and on the basis of pragmatism. The main problem was the junior partner of the United States has certain rights, one of the rights is not to dictate policy, but to insist on answers to some of the big questions. We failed to answer big questions. Blair should have done so: about what would happen when the statue of Saddam Hussein lay in the gutter, how we should run Iraq and on what basis. These were questions which were not put. I think that Margaret Thatcher for example, she would have been desperately anxious to help the Americans. That was her whole instinct. But she would also have demanded answers to these questions: she would have fished a list of things out of her handbag. In the Falklands she tried hard to get American support. That in her mind was a matter of principle, in the way the Iraq war was not. The Iraq war was not a necessary war, it was an option.”
Being a Tory makes Hurd rather optimistic about Britain’s role on the world stage. “Britain’s world position will always stay fairly high. I don’t say that we’ll be in the same league as India and China or the United States. But I think there will never be a time when people forget to worry about Britain’s stance or where Britain is. That’s partly a matter of history and partly a matter of present-day assets. It will be founded on achievement. We have been a successful society which has solved some of the main problems in our society, particularly the relationship between the people and the state, I think we’ve got that about right now. We also have assets: higher education is a big asset, as is the intelligence service, the armed services, the diplomatic services. We do these better than most people. We offer the example of how to run a state successfully, but we’re not going to ram that example down people’s throats. We do have a broadly successful experience.”
It is announced he is leaving; so he does. Randomly bumping into people seems us a good way of running a paper. And when the people are as intelligent, laid-back and just plain nice as Douglas Hurd, perhaps we should try it more often. He seems to be supportive of it. “Good hunting, gentlemen.”
We’d do anything for a Preity face
Meeting a Bollywood star is a little like being elevated to Mount Olympus. To compare Sharukh Kahn with Brad Pitt or Preity Zinta with Audrey Hepburn would be to do them an injustice. Hercules and Helen of Troy may be closer the mark. While Preity Zinta may be one of the more human and accessible actresses, I have to fight an urge, inculcated by years of of living in India, to fall to my knees in awe of her.
You might be forgiven for thinking her a typical Bollywood star. Her cherubic good looks, glamourous dress, disarming laugh and dazzling smile would seem to indicate a model or an ‘item number’, but as I talk with her she reveals increasing levels of depth. She relates her experience with the Bollywood Underworld in the famous Bharath Shah case. He was a diamond smuggler that frequently financed Hindi films. When his activities were finally brought before a court of law nearly every witness retracted their statements, save the irrepressible Zinta who, despite warnings to keep silent, testified. She tells me that she was foolish to expect the court case to remain ‘in camera’ and regretted the way in which it spilled out all over the press. Cheeringly she adds that it isn’t always necessary to engage with gangsters when making films.
Preity Zinta’s smile is as effective as the Indian flag in building a unifying social fabric for India. A man from Kerala in the far south and the Kashmir in the far north may have little in common apart from a few shared ancient texts, an Indian passport and the fact that they were dazzled by actresses like her in films that all Indians love and enjoy. The way Bollywood comes to its viewers is not just in comfortable sitting rooms, bedrooms or posh air-conditioned cinemas. It also comes to the hot, dusty and mosquito-filled village square, to the seething masses in hot small-town theatres, to the tiny television in the richer part of the slum. It soaks into every part of the Indian subconscious, effortlessly cutting across class, caste and faith to give us a universal story. To a foreigner it looks predictable, stylised and inaccessible, but to an Indian it is another religion. It lifts the poor from their desperate lives for a few precious moments, it brings a vast and disparate society together and brings even more wonder to a country where the extraordinary is already commonplace. It makes a nation proud of itself and encourages its audiences that a happy ending can always happen.
Bollywood is a barometer of how India sees itself. As India becomes more modern, Bollywood has become sexier, more international and more consumerist. It shows a billion Indians their own aspirations, blown up on the big screen. It shows to a nation of abject poverty lifestyles of incredible wealth and happiness, played out all over the world. A good Bollywood film today requires at least five dance sequences shot all over the planet: The hero and heroine can spend half an hour dancing together in the Dutch tulip fields, the foothills of Kilamanjaro and the Miami beaches without any of the viewers even raising an eyebrow. It makes Indians feel happy about themselves when they see their countrymen and heroes enjoying life in the richest cities in the world. Zinta’s career has reflected this phenomenon; she has moved from playing the traditional roles – either sexy or submissive – to modern, independent and powerful women, characters in their own right, rather than mere decoration for the male hero.
When I ask Zinta about the seemingly elitist, aloof Bollywood and the massive gulf that exists between the world that it portrays and the horrific reality of the majority of Indians, she gives a startling defence. An Indian doesn’t want challenging films, she says, ‘they want to escape.’ The typical viewer in India is not a middle-class family settling down for some quality cinema at the end of the day. The vast majority are the poor, crowding around a communal television set in the village or the slum. And after the dreariness of everyday existence in the field or the workshop, they want the fantastical. They want their films to be long (‘at least three hours,’ says Zinta, ‘otherwise they feel cheated!’) They want exquisitely choreographed dances and spectacular settings. They want it to all be all right in the end. As it is said in Om Shanti Om, if it isn’t a happy ending, the film isn’t over. Bollywood should be forgiven for often being little more than pure escapism, because its average viewers have so much to escape.
In a nation struggling under semi-literacy, the power of film is almost limitless, with Bollywood churning out more films per year than Hollywood. Film stars become demi-gods, hero-worshipped wherever they go. Many can stroll into politics, acquiring power of a more worrying sort. At times the hero-worship becomes more sinister. I live in the city of Bangalore in the state of Karnataka but our old car had the number plates of the nearby state, Tamil Nadu. When a Tamilian sandalwood-smuggler and gangster kidnapped a great Kannada film star, Rajkumar, then suddenly driving around in a Tamilian car was unsafe. Tamilian shops were attacked and the whole of Bangalore came crashing to a halt. When another legendary character known somewhat elusively as MGR died, the whole state of Tamil Nadu declared a holiday and banned the serving of alcohol. Film stars rank only alongside cricketers in the power they have over the national imagination. And then there is the gangland infiltration of Bollywood. Many films cannot be made without private sanction by one of the Mumbai underworld bosses like Bharat Shah or Chhota Shakeel – the men that Zinta bravely confronted.
And the power is not limited to the subcontinent – all over the world Bollywood has danced its way into the public imagination. It sometimes follows the Indian diaspora, but in some places it comes of its own accord. It brings joy and community and delivers its same magical panacea all over the globe. Unashamed joy and drama and vitality fill the cinemas of London, Nairobi and Sydney as easily they do Mumbai and Delhi. The mere fact that a British film maker made Slumdog Millionaire within the Bollywood paradigm shows its new global reach.
Bollywood is of course not the full story. Many of India’s states all have their own local version of the dream, outside of what was once Bombay. It is also a reflection of India’s morals and standards. From its conservative past, it has become an alcohol-drinking, hip-swinging, cleavage-bearing and dirty dancing feast of ‘item numbers’ – girls featured for a few moments in a song and dance sequence just to excite the male members of the audience. When I compliment Zinta on playing non-typical roles , she exclaims ‘I also did ‘Item numbers!” – clearly it is still a source of real pride to the more serious actress to be an Indian sex-symbol. This is part of a growing sense of liberalism in the industry. In Dostana two men pretend to be gay in order to live with Priyanka Chopra’s character in order to eventually seduce her, revealing a new openness about homosexuality and, indeed, heterosexuality. A nation of conservative repression may be (very) slowly being replaced by a liberal one – and the starlets of Bollywood are in the vanguard of this change.
Of course there is more to Bollywood. It can be a challenging, excoriating and questioning medium. Rang De Basanti is both a celebration of India but also asks why modern politicians have not lived up to the dreams and abilities of India’s founding fathers. Deepa Mehtha’s haunting film (made in Canada), Water, explored the horrific lives of widows in India, and may be one of the most significant films of the century. Zinta herself has acted in films that address serious issues, such as the lives of widows or domestic violence. In Mission Kashmir, she deals with issues of crime, terrorism and identity, set in the war-torn Kashmir valley.
Bollywood may be predictable, it may follow a set pattern for a majority of films but at least it is a self-expression. India has no need to slavishly follow American film culture like certain English-speaking nations. Indeed Bollywood is an expression of ‘soft power’ that makes Indian culture as big a player on the world stage as the Indian economy and military is already. It is a wonderful example of an ex-colonial nation finding its own voice – and what a voice it is! At once loud and subtle, conservative and sexy, challenging and predictable, international and, at the same time, truly Indian.
Alternative India
Indian Cinema is redolent of colour, life, energy, predictable plots, simple characters and cliched endings. The mainstream commercial movies nearly always sit comfortably within a long-established paradigm. Dance sequences, romances and happy endings are rarely replaced by something more challenging. However, behind the first glimpse of midriff-flaunting heroines and hunky heroes lies the dark and enchanting world of Indian alternative cinema.
For many, India is a world of harm and pain. In a country of such glaring poverty and suffering, it is remarkable how easily mainstream cinema ignores social problems, indulging in pure escapism. The alternative cinema, however, points the camera away from the ideal lives and perfect bodies of the Bollywood scene and chases something more profound. Unsurprisingly it started in Bengal. This state, on the eastern shoulder of India, is known for its intellect. Many of the philosophical pathbreakers of independence came from here and Bengalis take up more than their fair share of seats in India’s prestigious universities. Here, India’s version of the New Wave was born.
The paterfamilias of this genre is Satyajit Ray. A child of Bengali intellectualism, his grandfather was a known philosopher and founding member of the influential cultural movement known as the Brahmo Samaj. Satyajit Ray’s career was all set to be typical Bollywood until Jean Renoir, The Bicycle Thieves and Italian Neorealism hit him while on a trip to London.
In a brilliant inter-cultural sleight-of-Hind Ray took the New Wave of European Cinema and gave it a local twist. In a kind of reverse-colonisation he took a western form and made it Indian, giving birth to a whole genre in the process. His sparse and moving Panther Panchali is a tour-de-force of independent film making. It was filmed over three years in fits and starts, as and when funding became available. He maintained his integrity at all costs – refusing funding from anyone that required an alteration of the script or demanded the imposition of a producer. The resulting film is a stark and moving portrayal of the desperation of poverty. Its searing portrayal of human weakness fills it with an almost Tolstoyan spirit.
Ray was a filmmaker able to use the magic of cinema, formerly mostly used for entertainment, to help a nation realise itself and come to terms with its own (often forgotten) realities. Many followed him and the Indian Art Cinema represented a kind of renaissance as the artists of this most modern form re-discovered the power of traditional Indian literature and folklore and created something sublime. From Ritwik Ghatak’s portrayal of homeless and rootless refugees in Calcutta to the startling representation of modern Gandhianism in Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mar to the frank defence of Nehruvian socialism in Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, there have been many superb films produced in this genre that address a vast number of issues and ideas, populated with diverse and unique characters and all driving home a powerful and dissenting message.
There is a permanent struggle between the commercial and the artistic throughout the world of cinema. In India it looks like the commercial side is winning. The financial untenability of many art films, the rapacity of film financiers (including the Mumbai underworld) and the limitless demand for run-of-the-mill movies in India has threatened independent film. One can only hope that some of the millions of rupees that float around Bollywood find their way to a modern-day Satyajit Ray. India is a land with a billion stories to tell and it a shame that Bollywood keeps retelling the same one.
Bully for Bollywood
Sholay (1975) is the magnum opus of Bollywood cinema. Epic in length and themes, it tells the story of two petty criminals that are roped by a local politician into helping capture a local dacoit (bandit). Directed by Ramesh Sippy, the film helped propel actor Amitabh Bacchan’s career to stratospheric heights. It is the highest grossing film in all Indian cinema ($160 million) and it ran in some cinemas for up to fifty weeks. In one particular Mumbai cinema it played for nearly five years on an uninterrupted run. The awards it won were impressive, but, most notably, it was described by Filmfare Magazine as the best film for fifty years.
In the film, Thakur, a local politician is desperate to capture Gabbar, a local bandit known for his vicious cruelty against his victims, and for demanding protection money from the helpless villagers of Ramgarh. He decides that the particular talents of two petty criminals – Jai and Veeru – would be useful in apprehending the terror of Ramgarh. What follows is a series of tragicomic misadventures, shoot-outs, dance scenes, sacrifices and romances that culminate in a final epic battle between good and bad.
The theme is one common to certain parts of India – bandits and gangsters often manage to exploit the corrupt police and political class to obtain sinister levels of power. The character of Gabbar was based on a real-life bandit who was famous for cutting the noses and ears of local policemen if they fell into his hands.
So what are the ingredients of the greatest Bollywood blockbuster? Heroism, comradeship, dance scenes, romance, cruelty, tragedy and, ultimately, justice. It’s actually a bit like an Indian spaghetti western (now known as a Curry Western) with rough-and-ready heroes taking on evil villains in a harsh, unforgiving landscape. The psychotic cruelty of Gabbar is contrasted with the light, bantering and almost reluctant heroism of Jai and Veeru. The chemistry between the main actors is almost irresistible and the cartoon-like violence doesn’t darken the movie to a point where it becomes unbearable.
Romance actually started to develop during the filming. During the (frequent) romantic scenes between actors Dharmendra and Hema Malini, Dharmendra would pay the lighting boys to spoil the shot – necessitating a retake and more intimacy between them. The tactic clearly worked and the two were married five years later. Amitabh Bacchan also married lead actresss Jaya Bhaduri four months after filming started – which caused complications for the movie when Bhaduri became pregnant with Bacchan’s daughter.
The film faced other complications – it was massively over-budget, being torn apart by the censor board and the editors were faced with reducing 300,000 feet of film to something usable. It opened to an initial lukewarm response and won few awards in its first year but slowly the film began to snowball into the largest commercial success Bollywood has ever seen. Its scenes, plot and characters have been referenced, lampooned and just plain stolen by Bollywood films ever since. When the film was first shown on the government television channel, the streets of Mumbai and Delhi were apparently deserted as the entire populace went indoors to watch. Sholay has become a benchmark for film-making and it may be a long time until Bollywood manages to crawl out from its shadow.
National Treasure
You won’t find it on any of the maps, but there’s a room full of treasure in the Ashmolean. Ask to see the Print Room at the information desk and they whisk you off to a staff-only wing of the museum, lined with paintings and curios off-limits to other visitors.
After ringing a bell to be let in and descending a flight of stairs, you enter a huge room lined with hundreds of drawers, each filled with watercolours, etchings and drawings by artists from the 15th century to today. There’s a leaflet listing just some of the many names collected here: Degas, Dürer, Piper, Poussin… even – and I still wonder if it can be this good – ‘Leonardo’.
I had asked to see something by Turner, and watched in awe as the curator set out box after box of his Italian travel sketches on a baize-topped table. She opened up the first one, revealing a neat pile of mounted watercolours, and with a grumpily obliging expression handed me a catalogue with descriptions of each. The best bit, though, was when she asked if I wanted to ‘handle the drawings’. I put on a pair of white gloves, slid out a flat surface from the desk for a prop, and suddenly I was leafing through beautiful paintings and ink-sketches of Venice.
I was the only visitor there, and it felt like if I’d wanted to I could have stayed all morning, gazing at these unframed jewels a few inches from my eyes. It’s not often you can count the brushstrokes that make up a boat against the horizon, or trace the finest of ink lines around the contours of a figure. Do go and see for yourself – anyone can and it’s completely free. Lastly, if you’re stuck for what to ask for, Turner’s ‘Grand Canal 1940’ is an amazing start.