An Interview with Naseeruddin Shah

rehan Ansari....

a question for you?

how much of what you are writing is ...

trying to prove something? just asking!

Zehra:

``rehan`s fat?`` That is Rhetorics 101?

``any other chowkwalas seen the play? temporal? ferozk? PM? anyone?`` We are going tomorrow evening, play followed by a sumptuous 17 course veg/nonveg (almost) all night feast at M`s. Thought you and DadiJaan were coming?

........well........

lve

t

Rehan:

Do they still use the expression `break a leg`?

Best wishes for a good beginnig. Go kill them!

rgds

t

...........THUS SPOKE THE SCRIBE........


.......DIGEST

sitting atop the mound, coated in blessed ash, wearing a saffron bow tie with matching loin cloth, the sage turned to the fakir and said, ``It is Tuesday!``

.......INSTRUCTION

Hatter thought of the washer woman: if (the ever qualifier (?) qualifying (?)if fate had ordained and he had come up with her dues he would nothavebeenbombarded by Bannerjee`s bard`s tales.

Sage touched his possessions, in a gesture to be made famous decades later by M. Jackson Esqr, and addressing the cloud of dust enveloping Hatter said, ``I (will) be, and you (will) be, whatever (will) be. Doris Day was yet to be. Or she`d have piped in Kay sera seraa.......... or as the bard would say....

............PRESUMPTION

Will come, O ReHatterhan, if you change the name of your column. Nawaz wasn`t your first shareef. Or the last.

rgds

t


P.S. My apologies in advance to those who haven`t read Desani. And to Rehan who claims he has.
P.P.S. Come for pow wow, 5-6 Sun, bring S.

The sad this about this response by Naseeruddin Shah is his daft notion of the `contemporary`. He really does imagine that there is a taken-for-granted present that film makers from this part of the world can live in. And the reason he thinks this is the example of Hollywood where everybody knows what Dustin Hoffman is up to in Kramer vs Kramer. That`s the `present` for him, a bunch of contemporary mannerisms from the metropolis that his Hollywood betters can enact and be famous for playing well. A world where being accurately mainstream is well paid. Envying Hoffman`s payday is forgivable; what is pathetic is his desi worship of Hoffman, this truly second-rate actor who believed that mimesis was the end of actorly art, who disappeared up his narcissistic arsehole in the Rain Man. If he needs a mainstream hero, why not Brando or even Harrison Ford. Naseeruddin Shah isn`t Brando or Kinski, but he`s twice the actor Hoffman ever was; the horror is that he doesn`t know it.

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Well, i liked the bugger. Even watched some of his films. His legacy? A B-movie actor. Thats what people will remember him as. I remember his role in Mohra, he was good though, playing the blind bad guy.

Dear people: anita, aaliya, ferozek, aamina, truth, goga

I am gratified by your interest in partition narratives. I have been collecting some in lahore, on audio, as part of a project that includes interviewers working in delhi, ahmedabad, bombay, calcutta and dhaka

Our project is peripherally interested in questions of politics and history. Who did what to whom is not what we have made our business. We are primarily interested in victimhood, and the psychology of victimhood.

Our form of interviewing is non-directed. We wish to trigger the memories of the interviewees, and let them choose their own issues.

As part of the project I have proposed making a video out of some of the narratives I have collected. There are delhi-based filmmakers interested in collaboration, including a member of a feminist film collective.

Rehan

Anita Zaidi (Post #16):

Are you serious when you say that your perspective on partition changed only after you came to the US - until then you believed the migrations had only been one way: Muslims to Pakistan.

Is that an individual experience or do you think that is representative of the perception of the majority of Pakistan`s post-partition generation? Just curious....

To Aliya et Aamina Ahmed

There is an excellent article in the Pakistan Defence Journal, written by Brig. (retd.) Francis H. B. Ingalls, the first commandant of the Pakistani Military Academy. In that article is an interesting account of what happened during the cross-migrations as seen by Ingalls himself, as he travelled from Delhi to Lahore on the eve of Partition itself!

The article makes for an interesting oral history on Paritation! The title of the article is ``The Last of the Bengal Lancers``

The web site is:www.defencejournal.com

Re: Goga`s post # 29

Just some historical facts...

The saying ``never again!`` or in German, ``nicht weider!`` was the creation of the Allied Tribunal at Nurnberg. If memory serves me, the saying came from a German newspaper headline of the time which proclaimed the Allies determination to prevent another Shoah. The allies were so over come by their complicity in condoning the exterminantions of the Jews during the war that they promised that they would never allow something similiar to happen again and if it did, they would resist it.

nicht weider....Sarajevo...nicht weider...Bosnia...nicht weider...Kosovo...nicht weider...

This saying is similar to the one which said, ``the boys will be home before Christmas`` on August 1914 as the armies marched off to World War One. How many times since then have we heard that; Second World War; Korea, Suez 1956, Malaya, Yemen, Vietnam, the Gulf War...

Ironic isn`t it, the names and the places change, but the words remain the same...

Re: Aamina Ahmed post # 26

I agree with Aliya. A viedo oral history of the Partition would be highly efficent and cost-effective. To me, the biggest problem is a logistical one; it lies not in documenting the Partition survivors, but in locating them. Another means, to over come this problem, could be a massive self-awareness campaign to inform people on what is being done.

Here is some food for thought...

There are couple of ways of doing this. One is simply to go back to the records of the last census, and find out which residents of Pakistan were born around 1930 (an example year open to change). Next step would be to find their address listed and go talk to them. Even if they have moved, a little detective work could find them, because people in Pakistan, unlike in the west, still keep ties with the old neighborhood.

Another way would be through the offical district commission gazzettes, created and maintained by the British Indian Civil Service. These documents listed the names of all the poeple living in a tehsil, but what is more important, it also listed their known relations in other tehsils for cross reference purposes. These are amazingly detailed documents and are still used by Pakistani government for admininstrative purposes. That suggests that they have been updated since 1947 and that implies that new arrivals would be registered. If people migrated, it makes sense that they would chose to reside with their relatives till they could get their lives re-organized. Hence, that gives us a starting point.

The above are some of the ways of finding these people, but there has to be some sort of an infrastructure that facilitates all of this search.

My own suggestion would be to follow the example of collecting the D-Day veterans` oral testimony on the Normandy invasion. Like them, it would be easy if a questionaire is mailed to each household in Pakistan asking if there is Partition emigree living there. Based on the return answers, this search could be further fine tuned. Then the problem becomes a financial one; who will pay for all of this?

Hope this helps you.....

The recording of Holocaust events is so important to Jews is because of the special emphasis they place on history which is religious in origin. The other reason that majority of Jews do not believe in the afterlife. They believe that they will live in the memories of their love ones after they die. So there is a comprehensive program to gather the stories of Holocaust. I haven`t seen a New York Times Book Review going by without something on Holocaust. Within last few days about five books on Ann Frank alone came out. Also the collective history of Jews is filled with persecution and memories of the Holocaust are to be used as a conscious effort that such an event never takes place again: You can hear them saying, ``Never again!`` Another difference is that Nazis are no longer in power and the current German government is fully cooperating with such efforts.

In the subcontinent, at a governmental level, such a program would not possible given the animosity that exist between the two countries: They always accuse that the other was more viscous. Comprehensive individual efforts might be as difficult to carryout given strong presence of patriotic extremists in each country. I am skeptical of anything like this happening at a large scale given the current state of affairs.

RE; Aamina Ahmed


As someone quite naive about matters of historical documentation, I am not qualified to take up your challenge, but I`ll suggest something for the interim (until someone who is qualified to do so volunteers).

How about turning on a video camera, and just letting people talk about their experience of the partition, and then archive the interviews for future researchers. There is a massive data compilation of this sort going on with Holoucast survivors (if I remember correctly, in Los Angeles).

While we are thinking of the best (chowk) person for the job, I`ll nominate someone too: Ansari Saheb........Interested?

Thanks for your really interesting interview. I am a fan fo N. Shah and I liek what he says.

Re: Bina

Surely we digress, but I can`t resist it. After the Ice-candy man I could not stomach BS. Almost as bad a mills and boon, elevated to sociological comment. Sorry if anyone is a BS fan, but please there is much better out there.

Indeed, most Indian movies are disgusting. Bollywood should be called Baloneywood -- that will make more sense.