Let's talk about Bollywood!

I recently heard a journalist ask the question « Is Bollywood nothing more than a cinema made for India, or is there something universal about it?” – and I thought this question deserved a little post. Every one knows for a fact that the Indian cinema is the most productive one in the world, because of the amount of movies a year (is it still 800?) and of course the sheer size of the audiences. I say audiences because the crowds in the South, East and Centre are almost as huge as in the North, and from what I’m told, the penetration of US movies as yet cannot rival. So this raises the question of its local dimension, its adaptation to a public who needs a certain type of entertainment, and the question of the exportability of Bollywood.

In fact I’m not interested here in the figures of the industry’s success in other parts of the world than India. But is Indian cinema universal? Or rather, does it contain enough universal characteristics? Er… and what is “universality”?!  Is it the same thing as worldwide fame? Or does it refer to general recognition? Gone with the wind? Or Titanic? But these are surely typically American, no? What makes them also universal? Probably, something we could recognize in them which appeals to all of us, no? Well at least, most of us. In the two above examples, the beauty of the love-story, because love is a universal emotion. So, if a film deals with that sort of basic human feelings, it would have a chance of being universal: anger, fear, ambition, lust, hate… Yes, but it would need something else too, something like representativity, which would enable people in Japan, Belgium and Chile to feel it refers to them in spite of their irreconcilable cultural differences. What is this artistic quality which enables a culturally defined movie (work of art) to belong to humanity as a whole? Is it not “style”? So (next question…) what’s style?

We’re a little far away from Indian cinema, perhaps? Well, perhaps not: who knows if we couldn’t find that ingredient, style, in some Indian films. Style means personality, doesn’t it? And so we’d have to go in the direction of great directors with that element too. If by watching a film, you were able to say: that’s Satyajit Ray’s style, or that Guru Dutt’s way of filming, and of course if the movie contained a story which everybody would relate to, wouldn’t we have something universal there?

Well, I know of many such universal works – in fact, that’s what I’ve been pursuing in this blog! (Not a surprise, is it?) For example Shree 420, whose universality comes from its profoundly human portrait of man and society, of hope and despair. Or Teesri Kasam, that simple story of love and loss. Bimal Roy’s Bandini, watched recently, would certainly fit in the category, too, for its daring excursion in the mind of an unconventional young woman, whose beauty and purity, rooted in her Indianness, transcends it.  For that is the key element: a universal work of art is not universal because it is so general that all nations could appropriate it (if such a work of art exists), but it’s universal in so far as all other nations see (for example) an Indian film that deals with a collective issue which has found a new and well defined expression thanks to Indian culture. One country’s art forms enable a facet of our human nature to be revealed or dramatized in such a way as we can all recognize it as familiar.

It’s logical that the examples of movies I have provided are from the fifties and the sixties. Up to a certain extent, you need the test of time to say whether great contemporary movies can be called universal: here it’s a little bit like “classic” films. Time does two things to works of art: it elevates them (above the rest of the other works of art of the same period, which become secondary or are forgotten), and it classifies them (the way people refer to them put them in categories where it wasn’t necessarily so clear they belonged when they came out – it’s perhaps easier for movies). Because with time passing, history has been described, and taught. We would now refer to Mother India as a tragic epic with the mother-figure of Indian society held up high for everyone to recognize; but who knows if back in 1957, it wasn’t as much the leftist political message that was clear, because of the specific situation of post-independence.

Success does have a certain relationship with universality, nevertheless. Even if critics could decide, in their beautiful isolation that such and such a movie was a universal one, it would be difficult to accept without a certain element of success. People might throng to see a well-advertised film, and enjoy it because it corresponds to the spirit of the moment, but if the success is lasting (time is a much better judge than space because today even pigmies in the centre of Africa can watch Rambo dubbed in their own language), then the movie belongs perhaps to the list.

The problem today is that we rarely have the opportunity to need to see an “old” film again: there are so many enticing new ones all the time! So I wonder about the spectator’s notion of universality, and I half suspect it to be tainted by Hollywoodian marketing tricks. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if someone told me that a universal movie must be packed with action and emotion, possess a clear and suspenseful story, and, all in all, be a good commercial success. If an American audience can be talked into watching a film from anywhere else in the world, it must surely be a universal film! Well, enough said for now. But feel free to leave your impressions and reactions on that subject.

I remember feeling annoyed when, a few years ago, somebody to whom I was voicing my pleasure at recently discovered Bollywood movies, bluntly told me: “oh yes, but Indian movies now… you want to see those from the 60s and the 70s!” Whether he was right or not is probably more a question of taste, but certainly, if he’d had such films as Bimal Roy’s Bandini (1963) in mind, I understand now why he would have said that. Having fallen for Nutan’s charm when watching Dilli ka thug, I wanted to see others of her films, and landed on this.

“This” is a rare little jewel. Like Teesri Kasam, like, like… hum, I’m finding it rather hard to liken it to many other films I’ve seen. Unless… there is a theme which brings it close to Deewar, in fact: that of voluntary punishment, or expiation. Kalyani (Nutan, who plays the role of the “bandini”, or imprisoned heroine) needs her punishment to compensate for what she knows is her guilt, just as Vijay (Amitabh, in Deewar) broods in the mine over a crime he can’t shake off. And both value their life at such a low price now that they are ready to endanger it if it can save that of others. This in turn draws the attention on the reason why such “generosity” is performed. There is a romantic (perhaps even soppy) side to such an attitude, with the theme of fighting against love because of a moral duty (“for his own sake, I cannot accept his love”, says Kalyani to her Jailor), but also the theme has a real power. It touches the question of sacrifice and redemption, which, when it is well dealt with, naturally is one of the most profound human motives.

Bandini pleases for many other reasons. The simplicity and originality of the story, first; the fact that 1. a woman is the heroine, and 2. she isn’t mistakenly, but really guilty (when so many other pastime movies would uncover a saving clause which clears the hero or the heroine); the realistically delicate balance of feelings which make her sway between the two men, neither of whom are caricatures; the wonderful encapsulation of the movie’s songs, that accompany the action in a masterful way (cf. the percussions springing from the repetitive movements of the women prisoners’ gestures); its rich and satisfying symbolism; its careful construction (cf. the famous flashback within the flashback), and of course the actors’ and actresses’ talent: Nutan of course, with her restraint and her vast emotional scale, but also a young and charming Dharmendra, and a sober Ashok Kumar (only once does he let himself go, and we hear his tinkling laugh), not forgetting the Prison Jailor and the woman inmates, filmed with a care and almost a tenderness which I loved.

Here’s the story, as told by upperstall.com :

“Kalyani (Nutan), an inmate of a women's ward of a prison in pre-independent India, appears determined to serve out her full term, resisting the kind overtures of the prison doctor, Deven (Dharmendra), who wishes to marry her, fearing her past will catch up with her. Her past is told in flashback. In Bengal in the 1930s, the daughter of the postmaster (Raja Paranjpe) of the village, she had become involved with the anarchist Bikash Ghosh (Ashok Kumar). Bikash and Kalyani become close to one another and fall in love and in a difficult situation she is passed off as Bikash's wife in order to save his life. Bikash proposes to her and her father agrees to the marriage. Bikash leaves the village promising to come back. He never does and Kalyani learns he has married someone else. The family becomes the butt of ridicule in the village causing Kalyani to leave the village to avoid her father's dishonour. She starts working in a hospital taking care of a particular shrewish and obnoxious woman patient. Her father comes to the city in search of her but is killed in an accident. The same day she discovers the woman she is taking care of is Bikash's wife. Believing the woman to be the cause of all her troubles, Kalyani poisons her. Deven is still willing to marry her and after reading her story, his mother too accepts her. As she leaves for Deven's house where happiness awaits her, she runs into Bikash again. He is now terminally ill. She learns the real circumstances of Bikash's unhappy marriage, done for the freedom cause, and decides to go with him.”

Let me begin with one the movie’s most powerful symbol, which is of course in the title: that of the bars which separate people and shut them in their own world. Kalyani represents this prisoner even when she hasn’t yet committed the crime that will shut her behind real bars. When she first meets Bikash, it is through some bars:

In the hospital where she has found work away from the slanderous tongues of her village, she is already a sort of prisoner, as the bars through which she can see the welders at work:

This vision, by the way, is reminiscent of a blacksmith’s workshop, and we know that such an activity was the one performed by Hephaestus, the Greek god of metalwork who presided over the Inferno. The clever play with light and darkness during that powerful scene mirrors the hammering that goes on in Kalyani’s mind at that sombre moment. Then of course you have our heroine behind the woman’s prison bars, notably when she watches the freedom fighter go by her cell:

Imprisonment, for Bimal Roy, seems to be an existential reality, for even the spring is seen behind bars.

Now these bars first represent Kalyani’s pent-up seclusion in her guilt and self-humiliation. As Deven tells her rightly, she is fixed on her past, and cannot open her heart to live in the present. She does begin to love him (believing that Bikash, her husband, is dead or has disappeared), but refuses to let go of her cherished guilt. What’s moving in this fixation is that Kalyani knows what innocence means: she is the figure of purity, and it’s because she has, imprinted on her soul, the value of purity, that she weighs her guilt so heavily. She wishes for no extenuating circumstances. On the contrary, for her, punishment is the only way out of her sad distraught state. Without punishment, without this loss of freedom, she is lost. And she can only find herself if she loses who she would have been. Such is the frame of mind of the guilty pure: nothing can come in between their purity and their punishment: they are both their judges and their convicts. One can say that, as she is her own Judge, she is also her own redeemer.

Another conflicting element compounds this one: if Kalyani suffers from her purity, she also is the victim of her beauty (which is another form of purity, by the way). From the start, her good looks are constantly part of what happens to her. During her wood-bound love-songs, for example, she laments the fact that she’s fair and that she would rather exchange this fairness of skin with Bikash’s darker one.

In the prison, her beauty is the target of the sub-jailor’s interest and scheming, as well as the cause of her fellow’s inmates’ jeers. And naturally the two “official” suitors notice it straightaway. Her destiny is thus tied up with men’s desire of her outward appearance.

There is a moral aspect to this conundrum: Kalyani, the bright angel, the lovely bird-like creature whose wings have been wasted, and who’s attracted to dark creatures to the point that she will voluntarily deny, darken and debase herself, is a feminine Christ-like figure: her vocation is to suffer, and to redeem, to befriend fellow-prisoners, and become a prisoner herself, out of devotion for them. It doesn’t matter here that she’s guilty, whereas Christ wasn’t. Her saintliness is both admired and derided, like all imitators of Christ. And this Christ-motif is given additional strength in the movie, by the way, thanks to that strangely stressed (and hauntingly evocative) Via Dolorosa walk performed by the condemned freedom fighter.

One might wonder why has Bimal Roy chosen to include this long scene, which doesn’t connect to the rest of the story. Let us not forget the film contains other examples of selflessness, such as that of Kalyani’s brother, who dies trying to save a girl in a flood. And of course Bikash sacrifices his love for Kalyani on the altar of the higher imperative of his country’s freedom.  Right at the end, too, whereas one might expect him to try and get her back, he accepts once more to sacrifice himself and leave her to her destiny without his unworthy self, and probably it is precisely this noble and disinterested attitude which convinces Kalyani to choose him, ill and aged, over the younger but blander doctor.

Sacrifice belongs to love stories, of course; it is also part of the purification process which all moral stories exemplify. The theme runs deep in the Hindu religion, with famous woman-figures seen positively when and if sacrificing themselves; yet Kalyani is also modern, in so far as she leaves her house, her father, works for a salary and decides alone which partner she will live with. So the sacrifices she performs are her own, they’re not imposed by society or traditions: they’re authentic acts of selflessness and purification; in fact she is as much a freedom fighter as the ones she watches pass her cell towards the gallows. One realises that, doing so, she understands something in her own destiny.

Bandini indeed tells us that destiny and time shape our lives – a banal statement of course, but whose moving and truthful strength is very convincing. The lyrical tone given to Kalyani’s life before her prison time, the poetic evocations of her intimacy at home (her sad and strict father, the little nephew who’s frightened of Bikash’s “bombs”), and perhaps most of all the beautifully empty (almost purified) views of the riversides where she used to live: all this points to a life, with its promises and potential which has not been hers, and yet she owns all of its beauty. Her person carries all this rich simplicity, this truthfulness, with her. Kalyani’s yearning for justice is the soul of this landscape and of this life. Broken as it might seem, her destiny shares with all that beauty and truth a harmony which she cannot lose, and which flows from her.

Chance in life.

Kalyani’s life had potential for another life, for many other lives, perhaps. But our life is shaped by events and chance happenings which come from far back before our birth, and direct it where we know not. We think sometimes we can change that: “I’m not interested in your past, but in your present” says the doctor, in an apparently more human, more respectful way of not wanting to shut someone in his or her failures, and opening the person to the newness of the future. But Kalyani knows that the past must be reckoned with, that it is sometimes wiser to settle for the reality of has happened to us in the past, even if it’s alienating, than want to erase it and pretend to start with a fresh slate. Humanity is never a fresh slate. There will always be past sins to be reckoned with, and atonement to be carried out. Joy and happiness depend on that realism, harsh as it may seem. Children are born into a world where crime and suffering have raged since the beginning, and it will take all their innocence, all their purity, and all their love to come to grips with it. And if they don’t, if they leave it to others to do it, then they will deepen the indifference which allows evil to continue to wreak its ageless havoc. The problem is that life doesn’t deal its missions fairly; some young have more to do than others; the weight on their shoulders is heavier. Some have a dirge to sing, some a hymn of joy. But even if the dirge is heavy, the joy must be sung in this earthly prison: some of us have this mission, while the others have a heavier task. The suffering has to be borne, and fighting against suffering or working towards its eradication will never exonerate those whose mission it is to shoulder the weight of sin and crime from performing their sacred mission.

Let’s finish with the evocation of Nutan. One marvels at her humanity and grace, her charm and strength, her seriousness, her sobriety, her truthfulness. She’s got that rare gift of never pandering to the camera, almost. The fact of being in front of it means that you’re accepting some of the conventions of the cinema, among which the identification process and, with it, the hero-worship and the offering of an image of yourself in lieu of a real person made of flesh and blood. But, even if no actress is immune to such impalpable calculations, where some degree of vanity can always find its satisfaction, Nutan’s performance here is really stunning. Even in passages where her beauty is clearly the main reason for the shot, something of Heaven is present, and one almost forgets the lust, the possessiveness, and one is plunged into her truth. The clarity of her typical (not universal) beauty echoes that of the tranquil river banks of her youth, where fishing boats wait for the tide to take them back to their work.

(Apart from upperstall.com’s review, I would also like to mention the one on rediff.com well worth reading. Bollywood blogs don’t seem to be very interested by such ageless treasures!)

PS/ I've corrected this last line in the answer to Shweta's comment. (check it in the "commentaires"!) And there's a very interesting debate about the ending of the film here (Bollywhat)

You can also go check Shweta's blog: link

Aakrosh (1980) by Govind Nihalani (whose first film it was, and who had won acclaim as Shyam Benegal’s photographer) is a sparsely told parable about the foundation of justice: should men follow the law at the expense of truth, or should they seek truth at the expense of the law? Here’s the story, told by rAjOo (gunwanti@hotmail.com) at IMDB (many thanks to him!):

“After working with his mentor and Public Prosecutor Dushane (Amrish Puri) for many years, Advocate Bhaskar Kulkarni (Nasseruddin Shah) is assigned a legal aid case of Bhiku Lahanya (Om Puri), who is accused of brutally killing his wife, Nagi (Smita Patil) (1). Bhiku remains silent when asked to plead guilty or otherwise. Bhaskar's efforts to get him to subsequently confide in him prove in vain. Even when Bhaskar goes to talk to Lahanya's dad and sister, he is shunned. When he persists his window panes are broken, then one night he is attacked and knifed. He gets Police protection through the courts and persists with his questions - only to run into nothing but a wall of silence. Then he is contacted by a Social Worker who tells him what really happened. Before Bhaskar could do anything, the Social Worker goes missing, & Bhiku's dad passes away. When Bhiku is permitted to attend his funeral - this is where Bhiku will break his silence - a silence that will see him face another charge of cold-blooded murder!!”
 

We have to add to this summary the essential fact that Bhaskar is a brahmin, whereas Dushane is a “tribal” (or adivasi, believed to be the aboriginal ethnic minority of India), like Lahanya, whom he is commissioned to prosecute. Adivasis are not normally considered as a caste, but their inferiority is clear. Attorney Bhaskar too is assigned, but contrary to his mentor, he is at the beginning of his career, and has still ideals and his generosity equals his sense of justice. Another thing: the “social worker” mentioned above (played by Mahesh Elkunchwar) must be identified as belonging to the maoist Naxalites, activists who, during the 1960s and 1970s, were intent on educating and leading to revolt the illiterate adivasi.

Then we shouldn’t omit from this background information the social circle to whom Prosecutor Dushane belongs, and with whom he plays cards of afternoons. This is the elite of the little neighbourhood: Ganpat Rao, local member of the legislative assembly; Bhonsle, President of the District Committee; the well-established Dr Patil, and the Deputy Superintendant of Police. This enumeration is nice to do because Nihalani’s movie is a bandook targeted mainly at such social façades of respectability: these bridge-playing and cigar-smoking sarkari karmchari are in fact nothing more than corrupt and hypocritical criminals, who take advantage of their position to exploit their fellow human beings and earn witness-buying money to protect their comfort and divert the course of justice.

The prosecutor, brilliantly played by Amrish Puri, is a rather different case. He hobnobs with the cultivated circle, true, but as a tribal who has managed to rise to the level of the local landed gentry, he is blinded by his status, and refuses to admit that down deep, he is still an underdog. This is the meaning of his silence when he gets repetitive and anonymous insult phone calls. Whoever it is at the other end sees him, not as a respectable officer of justice, but as a member of this detestable tribe of adivasis, who cannot be trusted to “work properly, and are born useless”, as one dignified official declares. During one bridge game, the way Dusshane is mocked by his peers for failing to use the right strategy is a good sign of his efforts to reach (and remain at) their level, but is in fact subtly kept where he belongs. The subtext of the conversation which takes place after the game is revealing, too, because the losing Dusshane, rationalist as always, is arguing over his partner’s management of the tricks, but this one (the Doctor) points out to him “Don’t you need a support to continue your call?”, and Dusshane says: “At least I wouldn’t have lost in a vulnerable position then.” A clear comment of the balance of power played out in real life.

During the trial, Bhaskar comes to him several times, trying to sort out the muddle he’s in. There is a genuine affection between the two men, and a clear distinction between professional and personal levels. Dusshane encourages his pupil to fight him fairly in the courtroom, for example. He won’t begrudge him if he wins the case, but for him, there’s no doubt about Lahanya’s guilt. On the other hand, he too will fight for what he believes is the law: Bhaskar knows he will receive no encouragement based on humane considerations. Dusshane will be his opponent in court. Outside India, such staunch service of the truth and of the law, independent of personal ties, would be rare and commendable. But, as Bhaskar will realize, Dusshane is a victim of the very system he tries to uphold thanks to his strict loyalty to justice. And the worst is that he doesn’t see he is manipulated by those who know he is prejudiced. Until the end, he remains a tragically faithful soldier of a civil army that is corrupt and criminal.

For Dusshane, there can be nothing outside the rules of the law, and too bad for those who, innocent, cannot be proven so. Proving the case works for him as it should do for a scientist performing an experiment: a hypothesis cannot be accepted unless it has indisputable proof that must convince all observers. A sort of totalitarian rationalism is at work here. Because even if indeed for a scientist, proving is part of the truth-forming process, all real scientists know that the first rule of the validity of a theory is the acceptance by the community of specialists, who regard the proof as valid within the theoretical frame. The same scientists know (and the history of sciences shows only too well, alas) that certain so-called proofs are nothing but subjective or party-built constructions put forward to maintain a class interest or partisan stronghold.

Bhaskar learns that he must submit to this oppressive rule of proving his defence arguments, something that nobody but he (and Dusshane) care about. He knows that in human affairs, there are other realities than tangible proof which can influence a jury, and say the law. The law is in human hands, vulnerable to interpretation and power. But he is confronted to the likes of Ganpat Rao, who is above the laws, and Dusshane, who is under them. He also knows that even if he produced proper proof (which everybody makes sure he will not lay his hands on: even Lahanya is silenced), he would not necessarily win the day: the case could be won, but then he knows his life would be in danger. So we have the classic situation where the proof is not any longer a convincing chain of demonstrative arguments, but rests on the sacrifice of someone’s life, as far more precious than words. And yet, the honour of civilised humanity lies on the accepted use of reason and language, as opposed to that of force and intimidation

It is interesting to notice that the voice of the oppressed, the Naxalite “social worker”, who comes by night to tell him the truth about Lahanya, refuses to testify at the trial, but also tells Bhaskar it’s his job to find proof to defend Lahanya. He knows very well that Bhaskar, inexperienced as he is, has no access to any proof whatsoever: that’s why he comes to tell him what he knows. Yet he leaves Bhaskar alone with his proof-searching. Being alone is already daunting, but Bhaskar will also have to pay for being obstinate, and then proving Lahanya’s defence will be complicated by proving that he is harassed and attacked himself! (I don’t know if Nihalani was consciously referring to the Gospel: “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”!)

What Bhaskar would have needed is less language as opposed to the sickening silence that he confronts everywhere (and which forms one of Aakrosh’s main narrative assets), but a language in which people would trust and believe in (for Christians, Jesus-Christ, precisely, is such a “Word” to believe in – cf. John 1). In fact, what people believe in, in the movie, is action and silence. Or rather, not silence, but hushing. Indeed, silence is a language, the language beyond words (cf. SL Bhansali’s Khamoshi).


What we have in Aakrosh – translated as “the cry of the wounded” – is a muteness, a disbelief in the powers of language to perform its tasks of truth setter and community builder. Crying (in the sense of screaming) is not properly human, but half beastly still. Hushing goes beyond lying: those in power do more than lie. They have understood that language is their enemy, that potentially it transmits the truth that could lead to their fall from power and self-satisfaction. And they have successfully instilled in other users of language the distrust that will help them reach their aim. Whereas in normal humanity, language means life, community and transmission, they have established a jungle of silence and death.

   

(There is one soothing fact about Lahanya’s silence: it is the one he displays with his wife, during their love-making. It’s swift, it’s only a memory, but it’s there, and it softens this otherwise dour movie. Note how, nevertheless, there is a sort of painful quality to that moment, perhaps, because of Lahanya’s present pain. We can add here, too, the tremendous use of Om Puri’s facial skin texture: to me it seemed like a silent scream of horror).

The end of the movie brings a twofold conclusion to this appalling situation: Lahanya’s reaction to his doomed fate is first dictated by what his tormentors have dictated: he kills for real this time. But by killing he somehow frees himself from the trap he was in: depriving the lustful landowners of their probable future prey, he hopes to punish them and protect her. In doing what he does, of course, he in fact punishes no one but himself his unfortunate tribe, because even Dusshane has his version ready: it is only an accident; but nevertheless, it is acting rather than submitting. Even if the curse repeats dramatically itself.

With Aakrosh Govind Nihalani has created a powerful weapon of denunciation, directed not only at the petty and despicable profiteers, but at a system which, under the name of democracy and freedom, satisfies itself with organising injustice. What is better? Following the Naxalites’ call for total revolution? Or like Bhaskar, try and do at least justice to one man? The first option needs historical circumstances that are rarely united: all revolutionary efforts have not succeeded, by a long shot. And their justification comes only after their success, anyhow. But sticking to the law, in the hope of righting individual situations, even if it seems futile at the scale of such a huge country, is that better? Focussing on individuals or small groups claims the advantage of realism, as opposed to the flimsy idealism of changing all of society. Yet, one can hear the criticism immediately: such action won’t reform a sick democracy, where the strength of parties can conspire with money interests to help maintain a system of injustice. It is clear that both actions are indispensable. The question as to whether violence is needed to achieve that goal is also part of the history of India.

Khaled Hosseini is not an Indian writer, but an Afghan-American writer. But having read The kite runner (2003), I wanted to include my review of it here, because it’s a book about the region, and I know that a lot of people have read it in and around India. The literary phenomenon which the book represents, along with Hosseini’s second opus, A thousand splendid suns, also explains my breach of practice.

The kite runner has the charm, the naturalness and the emotionality of great works of world fiction, but its first quality is its obviousness: you start reading it, and you’re immediately at home. There’s no artistic pretexts, no frills, no style, almost. Hosseini, unlike so many writers, has a story to tell; it’s a great story, and he’s a great story-teller. Without realizing it, you’re there, in the Kabul of the 1970s, and the story has started. It revolves around the two boys, Hassan and Amir, and you’re witnessing their childhood games, and you’re drawn by the vision of that faraway time and place. In the streets of the city, on the hills not far out, Amir flies his kites with Hassan, who lives with him among other servants and friends, and the pair enjoy their boyish pursuits together. Then you’re pulled into the murkier waters of the relationships between Amir and his father, a widower (but great socialite) called Baba – who seems to have something to hide from a past which social prejudices prevent him from acknowledging. And then, all around, Kabul, Afghanistan, its culture, its customs, its hardships and its spirit.

But soon, somewhere, an uneasiness, a guilt perhaps, is lurking: Amir can’t help disliking something in that father of his, and it makes the story less transparent. His friend Hassan, the son of his father’s servant Ali, belongs to an ethnic tribe, the Hazara, which is seen as inferior to Amir’s. This unbalance, blended with Amir’s discontent, makes him play sadistic games with Hassan, who, almost unawares, still admires him and forgives him with a wonderful (and half-disturbing) generosity. From that early relationship, with its potential violence, a strain of events is going to flow, fuelled by a history of war and exile, darkened by jealousy and disrespect, torn by the craziness of ethnic rivalry.

“When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba or the myriad of Baba’s friends – second and third cousins milling in and out of the house – wanted to know was this: did the girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyah and fulfil his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?

  Was there happiness in the end, they wanted to know.

If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.

   Does anybody’s?

   After all, life is not a Hindi movie.” (p.327)

Happiness: that’s the key to the book. In spite of its bleak outlook on human nature and human history, Hosseini is telling us we are created for happiness and freedom. Men are boys who find their joy in flying coloured kites high up in the blue sky of friendship and honesty, even if some of them have forgotten it, and play “other” games. The book voices the interrogation about religious terrorism, and denounces any violence in the name of Islam: but it also describes how deep hatred and intolerance are rooted in the heart of men. Generations will continue to suffer before generations can apply balm on the bruises and wounds caused by the religious and ethnic crimes. The pain and sinfulness described by The kite runner is as old as mankind itself, the folly and the animality too. Yet a message of hope and benevolence emerges of the rubble which so pitilessly crushes bodies, hearts and souls. As fragile as a kite in the winter sky, as faded as an old photo, as distant as a lost memory, but it’s there, waiting for children to be born again, and innocence to smile once more.

If The kite runner grips you so well from the beginning onwards, it’s because of the necessity of its plot. Crime, punishment, redemption: a classic pattern, but associated with a clever flashback structure, and the charm and appeal of a visit through a history one wonders at re-discovering, it works perfectly. What has Amir has done, why he has done it, the consequences of this deed and the way he will be brought to amend things: this slowly evolves against the backdrop of the father’s story, which we weren’t aware of at the beginning: and thus we follow the events on two planes, and a logic articulation slowly emerges from them. Some events which first appear like coincidences are in fact soberingly meaningful consequences of the double structure. We might even see the plot as a three-tier system, because we have Amir’s childhood events, his adult’s perspective, and, looming behind, Baba’s life events that have influenced everything.

So that even if Amir is the literary hero of the book (the narrator), his “heroism” owes much to the two other heroes, Baba and Hassan, who are the real moral heroes. Who they are and what they have done before him helps Amir to become a hero, but after them. The moral stature of the father grows throughout the book, as more and more witnesses testify to it. Courage vs. cowardice becomes one of the novel’s great themes. One illustration: whereas one would say, because this belongs to the XXth century’s historical legacy, that cowardice is in the end wiser than courage (wars recognizing no moral values anymore), Baba represents the enduring virtue of courage even in the face of contemporary nihilistic wartime amoralism. The scene where he stands up to defend the unknown feminine co-traveller during the flight out of Afghanistan, and so nearly misses being shot down by an unknown Russian soldier who had been eyeing the young woman: such courage might seem futile and reckless. Post-nazi, post XXth-century-horrors conventional wartime wisdom have long prepared the spectator for another code of morals. Why risk your life for a show of courage which your enemy will never recognize as such? Why remain human in front of beasts? Well, Baba standing up that night, superbly defiant of such calculations is a witness to a courage we all need, in fact. Courage contains perhaps a certain naivety, or thoughtlessness. Too much thinking, and you are in Hamlet’s boots. But that’s being unmindful of a reality which the book stresses so well: the penitent’s courage.

Throughout religious history, pilgrimages have asked, and needed a special form of courage: one that is made of patience, endurance, and acceptance. But those who left their comfort and their peace to endure the troubles of travel and unknown territories were goaded along by another force: a need for atonement and purification. When one’s consciousness of sin, or perception of unworthiness reaches a certain degree (neither too shallow nor too deep; between acceptability and collapse), one normally reacts in ways to re-establish the level of purity or self-esteem one has lost. Hence the energy. Amir’s return to Afghanistan, away from the comfortable life he’s created for himself in San Francisco, is one such pilgrimage. His character is a combination of acceptance and disgust of cowardice, which he knows belongs to his personality. On the other hand, even if he feels responsible for what he as a child did to Hassan, he knows that children cannot be held responsible to the same extent that adults can. So what really makes him go back? And, when he’s back in front of Rahim Khan (the old friend of his dad’s who phoned him at the beginning of the novel), in Peshawar, why does he accept the terrible mission that Rahim asks him? Why doesn’t he tell himself  (and thus justify his adult’s mental construction) that life needs oblivion, that memory itself helps people forget, as a good protection for the balance of the self?

Here is Amir at that crucial moment. Let’s see his strain of thoughts:

“Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I’d change my mind. I was afraid I’d deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great big river and let myself forget, let the things I had learned these last few days sink to the bottom. I was afraid I’d let the waters carry me away from what I had to do.”

The impulse that makes him go towards his destiny (which takes the form of his duty) is, we can notice, less decision than fear. He repeats it: I’m afraid. What is he really afraid of, in fact? All cowards have felt this sort of fear. In fact, he’s afraid of the other Amir, the subconscious Amir who has been pulling the strings of his memory and of his sense of guilt ever since he started growing up with it. He’s afraid that that Amir might win, the selfish, forgetful, fatalistic Amir. What’s poignant is that another Amir still exists, the other Amir who will be revealed during the journey back to Kabul, and one can wonder where this Amir comes from. This one tries to resist to the tide of forgetfulness, struggling against the enemy within, a padding memory that protects him (and all of us) from the pain which guilt inflicts upon us, and makes us forget. This reluctant Amir finally accepts to go back to Afghanistan and deal with a responsibility which he recognises as his.

I’d say this Amir is a child of Baba’s courage. For when Rahim Khan phones, long after Baba has died, it’s Baba’s friend on the phone, it’s Baba’s memory that speaks to Amir’s conscience, and wins over Amir’s memory. In a sense, and contrarily to the common pattern (“the child is father to the man”, Wordsworth), we have Amir the adult winning over Amir the child. But that child had been lied to, and so the violence and the shame felt by the child had to be fought against as a result of the lying. It’s interesting to see that Amir, upon coming back to the US, will nip the burgeoning lie concerning Sohrab (book p.331). He will not repeat the process which led to his catastrophic behaviour with Hassan. America’s freedom enabled at least that. And his redemption.

It’s going to be difficult to mention this redemption without giving away the plot, and I won’t do that (much of the book’s appeal depends on the power of its plot), but on the other hand, I cannot rightly not speak about it! Amir’s crime, his sin, originated in a violence that he was made to inflict upon others, having taken his part of the responsibility in the process. And he is redeemed thanks to a symmetrical violence inflicted upon him. That is at least how he describes the liberating process. One must add that he was saved war and perhaps death by his father’s escape out of Afghanistan, and so similarly, for his redemption to be complete, he also has to save someone. Now this symmetry, with all its satisfying balancing of guilt and reparation, belongs to the essence of justice, of course. The kite runner, in effect, describes an appropriate judgement (or retribution). On the other hand, one might question such an obligation on the very grounds discussed above, ie, that of a child’s responsibility to whom one has lied: a double clause for legal irregularity. From that point of view, Amir might even be said to be innocent, and the guilt that was thrust upon him, declared an additional act of inhumanity.

So the question is, what nevertheless justifies his battle against himself, and the eventual victory of the adult Amir over the child he has been? The answer to this question opens the door to the novel as controlled fiction, because if Khaled Hosseini has decided to write such a story, it’s because he has seen that justification. Could it be that something in an author’s creation corresponds to a recovered childhood? Art as becoming a child once again? Or perhaps, through this process, becoming an adult?  Choosing one’s life? Towards the end of the book, Sohrab says: “I want my old life back”. That sort of declaration is that of a suffering body, a suffering soul. The secret of happiness is looking not back, but forward, and wanting to live what’s ahead. Yet childhood in its essence also lies ahead, because a life worth living is one of innocence and freedom, and that giving children the chance to live these to the full depends on parents who have made peace with the child within.

(Funny how I know I am stopping here, but  am only in the middle of what I could say about it! But all good things have to end, haven’t they?)

The kite runner came out in 2007 (director Marc Forster, who also directed Quantum of Solace), and on the whole, the spectators who left their reviews on IMDb were very enthusiastic. Even the delicate book-film transition was generally deemed good. I haven’t seen it, and I feel I don’t need to see it, that it might actually spoil the story’s representation which is now planted in my brain. Anyhow, that a good film was made so soon after the book was written certainly testifies to its quality as the classic it is already.