The Japanese Wife

By Aparna Sen
Saregama Films



Here’s what I can muster for Aparna Sen’s film The Japanese Wife: I still don’t quite get it.

The Japanese Wife is not as simple as Madame Butterfly, but I think a similar analysis applies. This film was odd. The story is about this awkward (poor!) Bengali school teacher who is lifelong pen pals with an equally socially obtuse (relatively poor) Japanese woman. Neither of them speak English as a first language, yet they communicate, fall in love, get married, and live their lives (separately) through letters. There was no miscegenation happening.

Now what is the term for sub-empires orientalizing other sub-empires?

Every time Miyage, the Japanese Wife character, spoke there would be this ever so delicate music wafting in (gongs!) and all of a sudden, as if it were the elusive groundhog itself, would come her voice. Her tiiiiiny, high-pitched, broken-English voice. I have nightmares about this voice. Exotic yes, feminine definitely, little Miyage. Flutter flutter. "Miyage" to my knowledge, is a Japanese surname, not a first name. Miss!

A lot of The Japanese Wife was by the book. Like Snehamoy (the husband) being seen as a “race”-traitor/Japan-lover, so the plot line included the exotic Asian woman captivating Snehamoy enough for him to shun Indian women, specifically Sandhya (Raima Sen’s character), the beautiful young widow who (due to unfortunate circumstances) moves in with Snehamoy and his aunt. It’s best shown in a scene that takes on nationalistic proportions, where Snehamoy represents Japan in a village kite battle against the ultra-Indian kite team manned by the local teenage boys of Snehamoy's village.

So I figure, like the timing of M. Butterfly, Incredible !ndia, too, is going through major cultural-economic shifts. I mean look at the March Nuclear Agreement; thanks to the Obama Administration, India’s ascendancy as a "sub-empire" is firmly in place. Clearly Incredible !ndia’s capitalist growth and emerging status as world economic power (8.2% growth according to Asian Development Bank in 2010) is a discursive force in itself.

New India should exercise its growing machismo and brand its own Orientalism. But that’s not it! Bengali men are not exactly the epitome of machismo. Neither does India share in the post-WWII relations between the U.S. and Japan. India is expanding and the wave it’s expanding on is producing, circulating, and reinventing cultural practices and relations. So, it’s not as simple as saying that this example of fetishizing Japanese women is some sort of inherited or weird mimesis of nation-buildings past.

In a sense (and I feel like I’m sidestepping history, power, labour, etc.), the idea of the gaze is flexible. And employed by Indians. Just watch The The Japanese Wife. Or Chandni Chowk to China. Or the host of new Indian films featuring ethnically Asian characters.

Now the celibacy of Miyage and Snehamoy remains. Maybe Sen really is a genius and made it easy for us to see the symbolism in Snehamoy’s celibacy as a way of describing a postcolonial nation-in-process. Clearly India is not Empire-proper. Indian men are still symbolically emasculated, same as U.S. hegemony still exists. Or I mean, shoot, it really is all about miscegenation. And Indians are not ready for transnational-transracial love like this. You’ve got to preserve some Brahmin in there.

Shrugs.

Review by Nafisa Ferdous

Half Life

By Roopa Farooki
St. Martin's Press

Love stories aren’t really my thing, but Roopa Farooki’s newest novel, Half Life, shows many shades of love in a way that warms the heart, wets the eye, and expands the mind. The book opens with Aruna Ahmed Jones’ seemingly crazy and impulsive decision to leave her year-old marriage. She does this quite literally by stopping mid-breakfast, throwing on a light jacket, and making her way through the Tube to London’s Heathrow International Airport where she hops the next plane to her hometown of Kuala Lumpur, and back into the arms of lifelong friend and ex-lover Jazz Ahsan. We soon learn that two years ago Aruna left Jazz in a similarly rushed and unexplained exit, and the story progresses by attempting to resolve the characters’ (and reader’s) unanswered questions about her ostensibly hasty retreats.

To go into any depth about the somewhat unsettling plot would be to reveal too much; indeed, I recommend the reader skip even the publisher’s description on the front cover flap and dive headfirst into chapter one. The core of this story revolves around the destructive nature of family secrets and the reparative qualities of truth. Half Life is full of subtle yet astute observations about the personal and social functions of one’s identity as a person of a particular class, gender, nationality, and mental health status—and exemplifies how all are historically and geographically situated. Without being too obtuse or heavy-handed, the story is, ultimately, about finding one’s authentic self while avoiding being a detriment to those one cares for deeply.

Language makes the ordinary extraordinary, and Farooki’s gift is in the ease with which she perfectly captures the complexity of a moment with a casual, pithy description. Literary hat tips are littered throughout with tender references to such masterful figures as the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, British poet Wilfred Owen, and Jacobean dramatist John Ford—all of whose influences can be readily felt while turning the book’s pages. Farooki is obviously a thoughtful writer, and the story is executed with well-planned precision. Half Life is penned in a visceral style similar to that of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies or Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Farooki’s witty wordplay constructs a melancholy emotionality that mirrors the interplay between the main characters. The ubiquitous sense of suspense maintains reader’s interest even after the elements of surprise are effortlessly divulged.

Half Life is a substantative beach read that is engaging as it is accessible. But be sure to slather on the sunscreen or find a cozy spot in the shade before cracking the spine. You might just find you’re unable to put this book down once you pick it up.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Cross-posted at VenusZine

Bina Das: A Memoir

Translated by Dhira Dhar
Zubaan

“History is always in the making, and our struggle for a truly free country will not be over easily,” says Bina Das towards the conclusion of her memoir, brilliantly translated by Dhira Dhar, who was close to this firebrand revolutionary of Bengal. In its pages, Bina Das: A Memoir holds history in flashback. The glorious and gradual unfolding of an Indian nationalist who is counted amongst the heroes of the history of the country’s struggle for independence (like Pritilata Waddedar, Surya Sen, Shivaram Hari Rajguru, and innumerable others) in the few pages of her memoir is nothing short of poignant.

The curtain rises on the eve of August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. A nation standing at the crossroads of destiny may have caused countless minds like Das’s to be filled with a sense of despair and doubt, coupled with the misery of Partition, yet she asserts that this freedom was finally the real one and “flashed like lightning through our thrilled souls.” She reminisces her life at the backdrop of this day when she expected her country to march ahead in full glory. And thereafter, the entire story of her life unfurls before the reader in dramatic flashbacks, moments of captured memory framed in the ensuing pages.

Das narrates her family background, her life as a student, and the wondrous transition phase of her life when she graduated from a non-violent freedom fighter into that of an armed revolutionary. She talks of her participation in the last lap of the freedom movement, her subsequent nine-year imprisonment, her release on the eve of independence, and her return to politics from a long prison life. Each of these events has been described in poetic subtlety.

Like children of her generation, her education began at home under the careful guidance of her parents. Often Das’s father, the erudite Brahmo scholar Beni Madhab Das, who played a pivotal role in shaping the thoughts of the young Subhas Chandra Bose, would sit with Bina and her siblings and read plays like Bhishma, Shahjahan and others by D.L. Roy. This, Das claims, was her first introduction to the heroic and tragic in drama, bound to have left indelible imprints in her mind.

Das belonged to a family and a generation that was making the platform for the freedom movement. Her mother, Sarala Devi, was exceptionally enthusiastic about all kinds of social work. Sister Kalyani (Kalyani Bhattacharjee) was also a leading social activist and revolutionary. Das acknowledges that the most precious thing she received from her father was the wealth of freedom he gave her. Understandably this was instrumental in building the consciousness necessary for the struggle for freedom in her later years.

A ceaseless, tireless worker, Das concludes that her only prayer shall be to remain active in the cause of suffering humanity and not lose herself in the “idle morass of inactivity.” This perhaps aptly sums up towering figures like Das and those of her bygone generation.

Memoirs are almost always untranslatable, and Dhar has done a grand job of translating this one with impeccable skill. It is a must read, especially for those who wish to recapitulate the lives and times of revolutionaries like Bina Das.

Review by Jhuma Sen