2nd December 2011

Em-boss. That was Baidurya’s caption for Madhav Prasad in the slide show of the party. Boss is right – Madhav radiates an intellectual authority which seems to be recognized all over India. I realized that this was not a local phenomenon when we went to a film conference together in Calcutta. One could hear the hush descend whenever he spoke. I did of course know that he was ferociously intelligent for he had been my student in Pittsburgh. But, I had not fully recognized the breadth of his intellectual engagement. Film was simply one element in his attempt to understand the current political and cultural reality of India. His project of the moment is to analyse the way that English functions politically in India.  On the one hand English is THE language of India. It is the language of all higher education and it is the language of the Parliament. Although there are a huge numbers of Hindi speakers in the North, Hindi is not spoken in the South and , wherever Hindi is not spoken, there is a much greater animus against it as a tongue of a possible dominant majority than there is against English.  At the same time an astonishingly small number of Indians are fluent in English and the vast majority do not speak it all. It thus occupies a position rather like Latin in medieval Europe or classical Arabic in the modern Arab world. Madhav has been working on the political consequences of this and is delighted when I give him Moustapha Safouan’s  Why are the Arabs not free? which argues that the problem of political progress in the Arab countries is that there is a split between the language of education and government and the demotic. We discussed this on my first day in Hyderabad and now we are having a farewell dinner, we discuss it again.  This time it is in the context of a series on projects that might bring me back to Hyderabad.

When I first wrote to Madhav, asking if there was anywhere he thought that I might find a host for a sabbatical visit, I had in mind Delhi, Calcutta or Bombay. I was delighted when he wrote by return inviting me to Hyderabad but I had some reservations about  heading for what seemed an improbable destination.  My reservations were overcome by my feeling that such a generous and immediate invitation should not be refused and by my Pitt student Usha Iyer who had done her Masters at Hyderabad and told me that I would not find anywhere better in India. She was right. As I near the end of my visit I am both delighted that I came to the EFLU campus at Hyderabad and dying to come back.

One feature of Hyderanad I haven’t mastered is the language of Andra Pradesh – Telegu. From my time in Brazil I developed a theory that you only need four words to function is a language. Hello, Sorry, Thank you and Everything’s OK. On one of my first walks with Satya I asked him to provide the requisite vocabulary and was more than astonished to discover that there were no words for Hello, Sorry or Thank you in Telegu. I’m still reflecting on this astonishing linguistic fact, made even more complex by the fact that Telegu now uses all three English words. Madhav and I discuss this and other matters. It is strange how our roles as teacher and pupil have reversed here. On everything that we talk about his knowledge is immeasurably superior to mine. In addition the shaven young man who I knew in Pittsburgh twenty years ago is now both bearded and grey so he seems to personify age as well as wisdom.

 

We agree on further work on these questions of language and then I raise my current lunatic idea. Everywhere I have gone in India I have heard the impasses of  film and cultural studies sketeched with elegance, insight and historical knowledge largely missing from Anglo-Saxon discussions. Problems with the notions of author, of text , of audience are clearly analysed but it is striking that this anallysis confines itself entirely to Western discourse. Surely it is worth looking at Buddhist and Hindu intellectual traditions to see if they can bring illumination. Madhav is very cautious here. Since Macauley’s minute on Indian education in 1835 where he said that a bookshelf of English common sense was worth a whole library of Hindu vapourings,  there is a long tradition of yar booing from both sides. I argue that what I am suggesting is neither Macauley nor the reverse but a set of specific intellectual impasses to which we want to bring fresh tools. Madhav is still cautious and we order another drink

Ist December 2011

I met Priya Chandan in Nissi’s Chapati centre where a meal costs 50 rupees which the students consider outrageously expensive. For our last meal I take her to the Taj Krishna where the bill will cost 200 times that. I could say that I take her there to impress her but, to be honest, she is not easily impressed. Or I could say that I’m going to check it out for Flavia because after her flight from London it will be a more comfortable re-entry to Hyderabad than the rigours of my apartment where we will spend the last week. But to be honest all Taj hotels are roughly the same and we’ve stayed in lots of them. In fact I go there because I want to drink a good bottle of wine. If the first two months in Hyderabad had convinced me that I could function happily without alcohol, the last three months has removed any doubts that happiness requires good wine. The only way to drink good wine in India is to go to a very expensive hotel and pay astronomical prices ($100 for a bottle that would cost $20 or 30 in the West). I have never engaged in such extravagance in Hyderabad but tonight I have a justification for this time, in taking Priya to dinner, I am returning hospitality.

When we were discussing The Legends of Kazakh , with joint enthusiasm, and musing on contemporary forms of relgion, more Priya’s enthusiasm than mine, I had an ulterior motive for our conversations. From the minute I knew that she was from Kerala, which was more or less, the minute I met her, and particularly when I knew she was from Aleppy, where we would board our houseboat, I had been hoping for an invitation to her house. But I know nothing of the etiquette of such things and hope was all that I could do.

Indeed, I had decided that such a visit was simply outside local norms of hospitality when the night before we left for Kerala, Priya phoned to say we were invited to lunch with her parents in Aleppy. A fellow student, James, who had finished his coursework at EFLU and was writing up his thesis on Malayalam cinema in Aleppy would be our guide.

Kerala was a very welcome change from all our other Indian destinations. It was relatively clean, there were no beggars and there was an air of petit bourgeois well being about it. As a student I had held the petit-bourgeoisie in the traditional Marxist contempt, but then all students are unbelievably ignorant, and I now know that it is a class with a great number of virtues. James had two theories as to why Kerala was different. The first was that the Hinduism is not the dominant religion. With its first Christian churches built in the third century and its first mosque constructed when the Prophet was still alive, Kerala has avoided the fate of being dominated by a Hindu majority. Second it has had Communist governments since 1957. Unlike West Bengal, however, where I had been appalled and ashamed by the fact that thirty years of Communist rule seemed to have bought no benefits whether material or cultural to its people, the Keralan Communists get voted out of office every 5 years and then have to spend 5 years in opposition to a Congress government before they get voted back in again. If only Lenin had realized that this was the true Bolshevik  path we would now be living in Communist heaven .

Priya’s parents were not only unbelievable welcoming but Priya’s mother was a wonderful cook. Flavia had been complaining about Indian food with increasing vigour but the fish curries, varied chutneys and vegetables with taste shut her up for a bit – or at least as long as she was eating. Priya’s sister, Praseeda had taken the day off medical school and she and James acted as translators. As a forestry commissioner and a nurse. Priya’s parents had considerable passive English but spoke very little. It was slightly disconcerting that we had to eat our lunch at table while our four hosts stood around and watched us but as my only rule for travel is “When in Rome, do as the Romans”, I  coped. After lunch we were shown round a garden in which the vegatbles seemed to grow bigger in front of your eyes, a small paddy field with enough rice in it to feed the five thousand and a tiny factory where Priya’s father whiled away his retirement hours making bricks with a couple of chums. All this in the middle of a town and with similar establishments as far as the eye could see.

We then set out for a Hindu temple. I haven’t taken a photograph since 1984 on the grounds that I want to see where I am not take photographs but James kept snapping away. He was a great guide and I feel bad in saying that he is the only photographer I have encountered who is less talented than me at taking a picture (the other reason I gave up taking photos). Here are our holiday snaps

After we had visited the temple and its impressive elephant we went to see a discarded Buddha. When Hinduism swept back through India in the latter part of the first millennia it drove Buddhism out. In Aleppy some guilt must have attached to this displacement because a desecrated statue of the Buddhs has been placed in its own little stupa outside the town. Here I really was pleased to have my photo taken – unfortunately it came out too dark but I like what Priya did with it:

Priya says that she has never drunk wine so I say that she can have one glass. In fact she has two and finally I summon up the courage to ask her the question that I have been pondering almost since the day I got here. Everyone knows that India has a caste system but it is not so well understood that skin color also serves as a form of discrimination. There are two axes to color  - one is geographical – roughly speaking the further south you go the darker the skin becomes and the other is social – roughly speaking the lower the caste the darker the skin. The most evident form of this discrimination is that female beauty is entirely coded as white – all film stars and all advertisements feature women so white they could pass for European. What is so curious about this taste is that it bears no relation  to what I recognize as beauty. Many of the dark-skinned worm in this country, perhaps particularly the dark skinned women in this country, are strikingly beautiful. However asking a young woman how she feels about being coded as ugly requires several forms of courage, in this particular instance half a bottle of wine. Of course I don’t put the question quite in that form  but I do put the question. Priya is surprisingly unfazed and unbothered. Yes, of course, her mother had told her to drink plenty of milk  so that she would become whiter but the man she was most attracted to was coal black and the god Krishna, easily the most attractive of the Hindu gods, is always portrayed as blue, for which read black. We decide to write a film script with a beautiful dark heroine. The desire to become rich and famous while also doing good is the last infirmity of the aging leftist.

I end the evening with my only complaint about Kerala: “Too many Europeans”

30th November 2011

Today Idania has her Ceserean and Fergus and she have a little girl, Niamh. Niamh was the lover of Oisin, the Gaelic poet/warrior  whose wanderings form the title of Yeats’s first book of poetry. Niamh ( pronounced Neve) means radiant, golden haired although with a beautiful Mexican mother, this Niamh may be radiant but she is unlikely to be golden haired. I am pleased as punch to be a grandfather. And I spend a few sentimental moments remembering Fergus’s birth and the happiness it gave me.

To mu students I send, from Act 4 of The Tempest,  Prospero’s speech that brings the masque to an end:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

29th November 2011

 

I rise well before dawn to get an early plane back to Hyderabad. My class isn’t until 2 o’clock but I’ve promised to give a public lecture on Joyce at 11. I say it’s a public lecture but it many ways it is the continuation of a private conversation. When I first arrived in August I had talked with Varvara Rao. Vavara Rao is a great Telagu poet, but he has also been one of the most important public faces of the Naxalites for the past four decades, a role that has seen him spend many years in prison. I had talked with him about Leninism in a discussion that had plunged me back into arguments I had not revisited for more than thirty years. It had also reminded me of Portugal in 1975 where all the best people espoused all the wrong causes. I had promised Vavara Rao that I would talk to him about Joyce and then time had simply evaporated. I had asked Satya to inform Comrade Rao about the talk but I knew that he had been at the forefront of the protests at the ‘encounter’ killing of the Naxalite leader Kisenji five days before in West Bengal and I did not know whether he would be there. I was delighted to see him arrive in the audience but it was a delight mixed with apprehension. I would have to get the argument right.

My lecture took the well known texts of Joyce and placed them in the political context of turn of the century Dublin where he could observe at first hand the nationalist identifications which would lead Europe ineluctably to commit suicide. Ulysses is Joyce’s response to the First World War, Finnegans Wake his contribution to the efforts to avoid a Second. In place of monoglot racially homogenous masculine identities, polyglot mongrel female pluralities.

I know I am going to end the lecture with a reading from the final passage of Finnegans Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is both river and mother, goes down to meet the sea of death. I know from much experience that there is a 50% change of me bursting into tears before the end of any reading of this most moving passage in the English language. As I start the lecture I hope that I will remain dry-eyed. My argument is finished and I start the reading the words so familiar and so foreign: “Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I goes all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?”  Suddenly I know, as I am assailed by memories both of my mother and my own children, that tears are inevitable. It may be that the birth of my grandchild due tomorrow or the end of my teaching life in India due today add their force to the endless cycle of ends and beginnings. What is certain is that I end the lecture, like an old ham, with tears pouring down my cheeks.

One lecture ends, another begins. My last Eastwood class specially lengthened to 6 hours so we can see both Letters from Iwo Jimo and Gran Torino. I have never taught a class which caused me more anxiety. Normally it only takes two or three weeks to get a class going but it took about six – a record for me. Indeed shortly after Flavia arrived I experienced real depression at the thought that I would be teaching a recalcitrant class for the first time in my life. One problem I had foreseen was anti-Americanism. Anti- Americanism, very prevalent in the third world and Europe, has the same political structure as anti-semitism – it solves all problems. You never have to have another political thought – “It’s all the fault of” and from a logical point of view it doesn’t matter whether you put in Jews or Americans – the world is always explained. Of course anti-Americanism, unlike anti-semitism has a real basis in the political actions of the American state but the confusion of specific political actions with a whole country and its traditions is simple idiocy. I had hoped to counter this through readings of the classics of American Studies from Frederick Turner to Leo Marx but ,when I had prepared the class, these classics seemed so idiosyncratic and so internal to America that I had dropped them in favour of my own explanations, which six weeks in were not working. The bigger problem, however, was that they hated the early Clint Eastwood films – a couple of Rawhide episodes, the Sergio Leone films, Kelly’s Heroes – all my favourities were regarded as old fashioned shit. I had forgotten how old Clint and I were. For my students their idea of a Hollywood star was Tom Hanks ( may God forgive them). And then I showed them Clint’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me – a film ostensibly about a mad female stalker but just as much about a predatory male very like Clint Eastwood himself. Then they were hooked, they began to see the complexity of Clint’s movies (complexities which Clint studiously ignores in his own comments). And my arguments about the stupidity of knee jerk anti-Americanism began to bite The class became pure pleasure. Three weeks before I had set them an exam on A Perfect World ( arguably Clint’s greatest film) and their answers, digging deep both into genre and the development of Clint’s own image, were a joy to read. Now we watch and discuss Clint shooting the most famous battle of the Second World War, from the Japanese side, and then staging the death of his own screen persona in Gran Torino. I have rarely enjoyed a class more.

The university has been pleased with my visit and as a rare privilege they have allowed me to hold my farewell party in the Vice Chancellor’s gardens. One of the elements of elite education that I try to reproduce with any class is that intellectual discussion is inseparable from eating and drinking. The trusty Baidurya has been charged with summoning up the finest food and drink that Hyderabad can provide. I want to give my students a great party and I spare no expense. However, I add the explicit instruction that the alchohol must be mainly wine and beer – I fear that spirits might lead to scenes of shame and degradation. I reach the gardens to find biryanis and curries steaming in abundance  – about two bottles of wine, four cans of beer and more bottles of hard liquor than I have seen in my life. A good time is had by all.

Almost all my Hyderabadi friends are there and I reflect, as I will often in my final days, how lucky I was to come to the English and Foreign Languages University at Hyderabad. Early in my stay Bobby Roth had suggested that he and Filipa Cesar come and film my last class. The thought of a repeat of the shoot at Quincy did not appeal. However, I do ask Baidurya if he can arrange a crew. There is no crew and I think no more of it but the next day Baidurya produces his film of the event:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCTrFdyv-7w&feature=youtu.be

Monday 28th November

Bombay. Of course, you’re told that you should call it Mumbai but it’s always been called Mumbai in Marathi. The change of name is as if the Italians suddenly demanded that Florence be called Firenze in English. Nor does the change correspond to any popular demand – it is simply the work of hopeless and corrupt politicians who try to avoid their own misdeeds by whipping up some cheap nationalism. But Bombay or Mumbai this is a city with the wow factor. Like Hong Kong or New York it is a city of skyscrapers on the sea and we’re booked into the Four Seasons which has a rooftop bar on the 35^th floor from which you can admire the view. Provided of course that one doesn’t look straight down where there is a shanty town about a mile square. From this eyrie of the rich ( the eagles fly right up to the windows) you can contemplate poverty as shocking as any on the globe. When I arrived in India I would have classified it as a poor country but now I know that by many obvious criteria ( particularly the black money salted away in Switzerland ) it is a very rich country. Its poverty is somehow willed or, at least, is the product of a lack of will. The rich have withdrawn into gated communities where one suspects that they wish that someone will come up with a final solution to the poor who they dislike, despise and distrust. In Hyderabad the most expensive apartments,situated about 25 miles outside the city, are let by a company called Aliens; their name beckoning their customers to a science fiction future or another civic status. In either case buying an apartment is a promise of escape from the present state of the country. Arundhati Roy points out that after India’s endless history of failed break away revolts the Indian middle classes have just pulled off the first successful secession in the Republic’s history.

After our day at Bombay University, Steve, Sarah and I reflect on our short road show. We certainly seem to have generated some interest, so now we must hope that the interest turns into real students. We shall see.

Saturday 26th November 2011

 

They say every cloud has a silver lining. I had intended to ask Deepti to show Flavia round Delhi while I toiled in the vineyards with Steve Connor and Sarah Joshi. But, because of the visa problems, Flavia will not be flying to India until next Saturday so tonight I’ve asked Deepti to bring a friend and show me how to paint Delhi red. She turns up with Samira, a jolly and direct young woman, and we set out into the Delhi night.

The anonymous luxury hotel that we are in irritates me but we’ve had a very good and productive three days and I’m looking forward to a night out. Our first stop is a restaurant so dark that you know it serves alcohol. Our agenda is meant to be Hinduism and we do indeed discuss animal slaughter (I say that if an animal lives well and dies painlessly and without warning then I have no objection to eating it), the gnastik or atheist tradition within Hinduism, and the Matrikas, wild warrior women who seem to have been absorbed into Hinduism from more local traditions

We do also touch on caste. Deepti confesses that she is a Brahmin and Samira , who is a coastal Andra says she can’t bring herself to say the name of her caste, one of those dominant in her region. “Reddy” ,I suggest as a temporary resident of Andra Pradesh myself. “No”, says Samira. “Then you’re a Kumar”, I say. She can’t bring herself to reply to this question so painful does she find the subject.

The major topic however, introduced, re-introduced and re-re-introduced by the young women, both aged 24,  is: MARRIAGE. In a word, they’re agin it and particularly agin it if it involves an Indian man. The Sapphic path they have reluctantly decided is not for them so the only solution is to leave the country. I find myself slightly uncomfortable at the suggestion that they should voluntarily abandon Mother India but, on this topic, they aren’t much interested in my opinion – they’ve been thinking of nothing else since puberty.

As we finish our food I notice through the gloom that ,apart from my young friends, I am the only person under 65 in the room. I suggest that this isn’t exactly what I meant by a wild night out and we decant ourselves into Connaught Square. As we wander round Lutyens imperial architecture with the street bubbling with life around us, I am struck once again by the incredible decrepitude of these streets and buildings. Why Indian public space is so neglected puzzles me. Given the price of labour it cannot be shortage of money. Did colonial rule so disaffect people with public space that even three generations later it remains alien? Or is a more traditional Marxist analysis that India has never enjoyed a bourgeois revolution the explanation. Certainly explanations in terms of race or ethnicity are simply stupid as Bup-ji’s stunningly maintained Jodhpur palaces prove.

And now we are in a recognizable night club. Particular recognizable to me as all the posters on the wall are from the sixties – Jimi Hendrix and an impossibly young set of Rolling Stones. Unfortunately the volume of the music makes conversation impossible and I suggest we go back to the hotel. At this point Samira has to ring her landlady to get her curfew moved back from 10.30 to 11 and Deepti has to concoct some elaborate explanation for her mother. If I needed further proof of how young Indian women are policed (and how much of an exception the EFLU campus is) it is provided as we arrive at the hotel. Like many Indian hotels there are two entrances – one for cars, which is the only one I have used so far, and one for those arriving on foot or by Auto. There is a real harridan guarding the entrance who takes one look at the young women and doesn’t want to let them into the hotel. The rancid hatred in her eyes bespeaks that age-old horror of uncontrolled female sexuality and I wish that I had had the presence of mind to say “ I’m taking my young friends up to my room to read some T.S. Eliot poems and then we’re going to try out a few sexual positions not covered in your rather tedious Kama Sutra”. In fact of course I was apologetic and embarrassed : “I’m a guest in the hotel and we’re going to the bar – is that alright?”. Reluctantly the guard lets us through. I’m delighted and surprised that Steve and Sarah are in the bar and we talk about the Consortium until the young women drift off into the Delhi night and Steve heads for bed.

Sarah is staying with her Indian in-laws and every day her father-in-law warns her to beware of Steve and me and the unspeakable acts that we might propose to a young woman. While I yield to no-one in my suspicion of masculine behavior, what I have thought hilarious until now is that Sarah’s father-in-law does not realize that his daughter-in-law would deal with any such propositions with all the force and aplomb of a battle hardened young American woman. After my conversations of this evening I sense something much more sinister, a settled belief that without external control every young woman will behave with the sexual abandon of a drug crazed nymphomaniac. This belief is perhaps one of the most powerful forces of social and political reaction all down the ages, for in fact it is only when women take control of their sexuality and reproduction that there is any real possibility of social and economic progress.

Friday 25th November 2011

On Thursday we enjoyed a spirited discussion at Osians , a fascinating mix of auction house, film festival and art magazine. Friday had seen two talks at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The first a small political discussion group chaired by Ashley Tallis and the second a big set piece lecture. Work done we can contemplate a relaxing dinner. We invite Ashley, who has been so crucial to the success of our visit, and he brings Akshi Singh and Agastaya Thapa, another student who is interested in coming to Consortium. Ashley is wearing a woollen cap and looks like a very mournful pixie. He has just had yet another professional set back  and my heart goes out to him. He is intellectually brilliant and genuinely learned, both real handicaps for any academic career. As if this isn’t enough not only is he a Dalit and a Christian but he is an out gay activist.  I simply cannot imagine the strength of character and bravery that this requires in India.  And as if that wasn’t enough he has the most waspish tongue I have encountered since I was friends with Eric Griffith in the 1970s. We talk of the epigraph to the Wasteland. It’s a fragment from Petronius’s Satyricon in Latin and Greek which Eliot, in rather typical manner doesn’t translate but the lines are chilling : I saw myself, with my own eyes, the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys asked her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she responded: “I want to die.” I’ve always thought that Ovid’s version of the Sibyl’s fate is one of the most misogynist of stories, condensing, like the similar story of Cassandra, masculine hatred of a flaunted feminine sexuality which cannot be enjoyed. In both stories young women promise to put out in exchange for Apollo granting then extraordinary powers and, once granted the powers, renege on the promise. Apollo’s revenge is savage.  Cassandra has been granted the gift of prophesy but when she then refuses the God’s advances, he adds the rider that she will never be believed. The Sibyl’s fate is almost worse. She had picked up a handful of sand and asked to live as many years as there were grains of sand in her hand. Like Cassandra once Apollo had granted him her wish she told him to get lost. Apollo then added the rider that she would not retain her youth but would age with every grain of sand. Thus the despairing cry that Petronius records and Eliot quotes. We pass from The Wasteland to the subject of kissing. I had been very struck on first arriving in India to notice that the social kiss, what the French call la bise, is strikingly absent from Indian social life and that, if you leave the educated elite, even shaking hands is considered far too intimate a contact. In my conversations with Satya I had reflected that one of the few definite gains of the hippie revolution of the late sixties is that kissing became a part of normal social life in England. Satya seemed curiously relieved to discover that it was so recent a development and confessed how strange a custom he found it. I was given proof of this when immediately after Flavia arrived we went out to lunch with Satya and Pavana. At the end of the lunch Flavia kissed them both warmly and, while I would not say that they objected, I would say that they both jumped out of their skins. I tell the table that for us in the late sixties kissing both men and women was a deliberately ideological against “the fools in old-style hats and coats” as Larkin called them. Waspish Ashley:“Did you kiss Stephen Heath?”. “Occasionally” I reply after some thought. I warn the table that I am going to kiss them goodnight as I set out on a one man mission to introduce la bise to India.

As we say our goodbyes I hear Akshi’s tuneful voice behind me “Did he kiss you?”

Ashley: “Yes”.

Wednesday 23rd November 2011

Wednesday 23^rd November

I rise at dawn to fly to Delhi where I link up with Steve Connor, Director of the Consortium and Sarah Joshi, our admissions tutor.  I have worked with Steve for over a decade and I both like and admire him. We are not however cut from the same cloth. Very early in our relationahip we flew to Zurich to explore possible links with a cultural studies programme there. After a morning of inexpressible tedium in which  the most pedantic and uninspiring notions of cultural studies were explored at inordinate length, we were released and could contemplate lunch and a lazy afternoon. Zurich has some reasonable restaurants and also an inexhaustible supply of Fendant, James Joyce’s favourite wine. I began running through some of the options we could consider when Steve said “ Actually I never eat lunch and I’m going to run a half marathon now”.

I had hoped that we would stay at Maidens, the colonial palace that housed Flavia and me at the end of September but Steve and Sarah had opted for a more generic modern hotel that could have been in any world capital. Rather rudely I voiced my discontent with this choice until Sarah whispered to me that Steve had chosen it for its outstanding gym. Steve works harder as a writer, teacher and administrator than any academic I know so if what he requires to keep him going is a gym, who am I to argue.

Our first gig was at Delhi University where we were been hosted by the sexual politics group, two of whose leading lights are Akshi and Amartya, pupils of Ashley Tallis. They had interviewed me for their journal on my previous visit. The interview had mainly been about Screen in the seventies, and their questions had really made me think back on that period. Indeed in political terms my trip to India was time travel. The theoretical and political problems of the seventies continue to provide much of the conscious intellectual context of cultural and political reflection in India. In the developed Anglophone world that context persists but only as the forgotten and the unmentionable. One of the reasons I have felt so intellectually revived in India is that the people I talk to in film and cultural studies have the same understanding as me of the history of the last 40 years – something that I rarely find in England or the US.

Steve and I give an account of how the Consortium had come out of the impasses of film and cultural studies in the eighties and in particular with a huge dissatisfaction with how “Theory” had become institutionalized in the Anglo-Saxon academy. The discussion is lively and informed and is brilliantly chaired by Akshi, who has one of the most mellifluous voices that I have ever had the pleasure to hear. Afterwards, I suggest a bar. As always in India this starts off a complicated discussion. All Indians assure me that the country has thousands of bars but when it come to the moment where one needs a bar very urgently, there never seems to be one that near. Eventually a destination is agreed and we set off.

En route I learn that Akshi is from Rajasthan. Rajasthan had occasioned a certain amount of disagreement between Flavia and me. Rajasthan specializes in castles and at some moments you might be forgiven for thinking that Flavia felt that the only purpose in coming to India is to visit castles. I pointed out to her that I had lived for 62 years in England without going to see one castle and that I didn’t feel that I had lived an unfulfilled life. A compromise was reached when I suggested that we avoid touring every palace in Rajasthan and that we just go to Jodhpur. I was keen to see Jodhpur because I had known the maharajah very slightly when we were both undergraduates. He had been an amiable fellow and I particularly remember him making Bloody Marys by the jug “because it saves so much time”.  Reports over the decades from mutual friends had stressed how seriously he took his regal duties and I was keen to see the results of his labours. Flavia booked us into his summer palace, indeed into what had been the maharajah’s own bedroom. The palace was built beside a huge tank and surrounded by gardens that could have been airlifted straight from a very grand English country house.  If pre-colonial period palaces bear no relation to anything you’d bump into in the English countryside, from the late nineteenth century on, the Indians modeled their stately homes on British example – with the proviso that they amplified the size very considerably.

The summer palace had extraordinarily helpful and friendly staff, hampered slightly by the fact that they spoke no English and seemed to have only the haziest of ideas about how a hotel functioned. When I inquired about this in the town I was told that all the staff were the traditional palace retainers. This spoke well of the Maharajah’s loyalty but didn’t quite explain why he hadn’t given them a crash course in hotel management.

The massive fort, which had been the seat of his family’s power, was a great advertisement for his efforts. Our last visit to a similar building had been Fatehpur Sikri in Uttar Pradesh. This astonishing monument to Moghul dominance sits in a sea of filth and beggars and is approached by roads in the last stage of disrepair. Once there you are so assaulted by totally ignorant guides that it is impossible to contemplate Akbar’s extraordinary architecture. Jodhpur’s Mehrangar fort is a very different experience.  Although its foundations were laid before Moghul times its main construction dates from the same time as Fatephur Sikri. But the approach roads are well tended and there is ample parking. The guides, if full of the usual inaccurate political propaganda, (“ caste is really the wrong word, they are communities of people who choose to live together”) have real knowledge of the local history and are allocated through a well organized system. The fort itself, which towers over the town, is hugely impressive. Like Fatephur Sikri, its pre-colonial construction means it owes nothing to the British country house and everything to fundamental military concerns – even the gates have huge spikes to counter the threat of elephants. The fort is built into a huge hill that towers over the town and as you ascend you come across displays of weapons, furniture and clothes all well displayed and documented. By and large, like the summer palace, the fort speaks well of the Maharajah’s efforts to bring Jodhpur into the modern age.  However, it might be said even someone as politically incorrect as myself was slightly nauseated by the folklorique entertainments which greeted you at each turning of the stair. On the first level a solitary musician played the most beautiful music but at the second level traditional dancing wrenched from its context seemed forced and unhappy. But the piece de resistance came further up where tribals (actually actors pretending to be tribals) got up as though they were auditioning for one of Buffalo Bill Wild West tours put on performances as ‘savages” that one would have thought had disappeared with the nineteenth century.

However, if one forgave these monuments to cultural and ethic insensitivity, there was no doubt that the Maharajah had spent time and effort in making the transition from feudal overlord to tourist proprietor with real skill. A fact that seemed widely appreciated. Both prompted and unprompted the inhabitants of Jodhpur thought a great deal of the latest head of their traditional ruling family. They particularly appreciated that he didn’t speak Hindi and spent most of his time in the palace that his father had built which looks over the city facing the old fort. On our last morning in the Summer Palace, I noted a portrait of the Maharajah with his family. I clearly recognised my old acquaintance although the slim young man I had known 40 years ago had become slightly swollen. But then which of us hasn’t. I told our waiter that I had known the Maharajah at university where we called him Bup-ji.  The waiter indicated that this was what all his subjects in Jodhpur called him. “What does it mean?”, I asked. “God’ came the reply.

This exchange was one of my favourite stories of our Indian travels but it did not survive telling it to Akshi. “Actually”, she said in her precise and melodious voice. “ Bup-ji means father”. Thus a good yarn is assassinated by scholarly accuracy. However, Akshi redeemed herself by saying that she would show Flavia and I round Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan when we next vested India. So desperate am I to return that I will even visit another castle.

Interview with Akshi Singh and Amartya for Gender Studies Journal, Delhi University

What do you think are the possibilities and the limitations of critical theory for gender politics?

First of all, I have very little sense of what critical theory is now – my own kind of searing engagement with that work was forty years ago. At the time, it went together with, and for me, was the same as engaging with left politics, with the women’s movement at the end of the 60s and, very importantly, gay liberation. For a moment, which didn’t last much beyond the mid-seventies, it seemed that a crucial part of that struggle was a bringing together of Marxism and psychoanalysis (both then outside the university) with linguistics (very much within it). There was a belief that we could find the key to all the ideologies. Freud, Marx and Saussure would line up with sex and drugs and rock’n roll in the revolution which would be perpetual carnival. I wouldn’t want to dismiss that Utopian dream entirely but it signally failed to achieve its goals. To give a concrete example: in the early seventies, many people I knew (including myself) thought that one would be able to find a definition of patriarchy which would explain not only economic questions, but also give an account of sexual repression etc. By around 1975, it seemed quite clear to me that patriarchy, could be used as a general term of oppression, but it was useless as a theoretical term, attempting to produce correlations where they didn’t exist. I remember Ian McFeteridge saying to me in the early seventies that homophobia was so persistent in so many varied social formations that it was impossible to analyse it as intrinsically linked to capitalism. And many years later Derek Jarman was to say to me that he very quickly became disillusioned by the attempt to link the demands of gay liberation to other political struggles which while they may have been justified but didn’t have anything to do with the specific struggles of gay liberation.  And then much more slowly came the realization that the belief that the breaking of sexual taboos was in itself politically revolutionary was incredibly naïve. In the eighties  capitalism eagerly  exploited the new forms of sexual behaviour, gay and straight

So that kind of theoretical utopia as it were vanished, or at least vanished for me. Instead what happened was an  academicization of theory, and an academicisation of feminism and gay liberation. And I became very tired of the over academicization of sexual politics in the 80s. There was a great moment in the late eighties when these guys turned up in New York and said  ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ I thought it was a great slogan, and about actually recognizing how things are. But within less than two years that had been airlifted into a kind of politically correct academic discourse.  It still seems obvious to me that you can never know enough about either history or biology, but on the other hand, critical theory does not seem interested in either. And the hope that linguistics would provide the key now seems largely misplaced. But I don’t feel in a very good position to answer your question because I have no active involvement in sexual politics in either England or the States still less any connection to the situation in India.

There was a time when sexual politics seemed very close to my life and to my own experience but it has to be said that while homophobia and misogyny continue to flourish, overt sexual discrimination has all but vanished from my own life and work.  If I compare myself as a schoolboy of 16 in 1965 when homosexual acts were still illegal and punishable by imprisonment and my youngest son at 16 in 2003 some of whose classmates had come out as gay then there really has been progress.  If hatred of sexual difference is still a very important factor in the formation of all the fundamentalisms, I’m not sure that I’d look to critical theory to provide the analysis of that. I must stress that in talking about these things I’m talking from a European and American context. I can see that the situation is very different here in India with many of these primary battles still in process.

You mentioned this time in the seventies where you feel that your academic practice is linked very deeply to your political practice – do you think that academics and the university space have changed?

Of course, they’ve changed – the question is what attitude should you take to those changes .You could become sentimentally nostalgic about the good old days and wish that nothing had changed or you could be a little bit more hard- headed and say that it was a moment and a moment based on a mistake. Read Laura Mulvey’s famous article, which I have just done for the first time in forty years, and the article assumes, as did the whole of the Screen board at that time, that we were going to produce theories that are going to change fundamentally the way entertainment was enjoyed. Well you have to say that such a belief is ludicrous. We did think that for a bit and I don’t think it was entirely a bad thing to think but you can’t work out what should be retained until you recognise how ludicrous the assumption was. And when I look now and then at critical theory it still seems to pose as a force that’s going to change the world but now entirely from within the university where it becomes not simply ludicrous but entirely unhinged from reality. And that’s what fosters an attitude where you have a whole generation of young women students who counter identify as feminist because of what has been preached to them in the classroom.

So the seventies was one moment and now we are in another, characterized for me by the fact that both Third International and social democratic versions of politics have collapsed. I see very little sign of that being engaged with in the university and I have a very strong sense that there is nothing outside the university with which to think against academic orthodoxy. When I was a student there were huge areas outside the university:  Marxism (Lukacs had just been translated when I went up to university, Benjamin was translated when I was a graduate student), psychoanalysis, film. Now everything seems inside. So I think that rather than asking what should the relationship between politics and theory be, you should ask “ Where are we now, and how on earth can academic work contribute to a re-theorisation of the political. And, from the other side, what from my direct daily experience of oppression do I need to know and think about?” This is not a blueprint but it is a suggestion that we are at a moment when we need to go back to a certain kind of zero. The thing that most obsesses me at the moment – seventy percent of Israeli people want the recognition of Palestinian statehood, more than seventy percent of the American people want higher taxes for the rich and yet somehow we’re in a political universe where that majority opinion cannot be translated into political action at all. I guess that it has got something to do with the twenty four hour news cycle in particular, and television in general but then we need to understand this better – not as an academic exercise but in order to take effective action.  Occupy Wall Street looks like a step in the right direction.

When you were in college, how did a community begin to form of people who wanted to work together in academics and share a politics?

For me it was the moment that I came back to England from a year studying as a graduate student in France and Sam Rhodie and Peter Wollen took me out to lunch and asked me to join the Screen editorial board. If I look back to that lunch it was the intersection of two histories. The first was the moment of cinephilia, the moment of the reception of Cahiers du cinema and the other was the moment of the New Left Review.  Again both are outside the academy. But cinephilia overlaps with a world of secondary school teaching , particularly in London, and The New Left Review overlaps with a world of well heeled bohemia. The two key references are in the first case an institution, the British Film Institute and in the second a movement, which you could call the New Left and for which the key individual was Perry Anderson. Anderson was key both in intellectual terms, his essay “Components of a National Culture” sketched out a whole intellectual project but also in personal terms in that he was able to underwrite the New Left Review. These two intersecting worlds also existed at the very end of English bohemia with people who scraped a living from reviewing, translating etc. I’d think in this context of Ben Brewster who was absolutely vital to Screen’s achievement.  And that was the world of Screen in the early seventies and a world that vanished. I think I’m right in saying that when I joined the Screen board no one had a job teaching film in the university  (partly because such jobs didn’t exist) and when I left in 1979 every member of the board was teaching film in higher education. This world was not the only one for me – at one edge it merged into the world of the university, in my case Cambridge, and at the other it merged into the world of London letters – journalism, publishing etc.

Yes – partly why we’re asking is because we’re located in the University…

But you see both Screen and the New Left Review were completely outside the University –  New Left Review partly because Anderson underwrote it but partly because it had a genuine audience outside the university and Screen was funded from outside the University by the British Film Institute, and it too had a genuine audience outside the university. What came from within the university was a new take on the Western intellectual tradition and the explosion of the student movement.  If I look at it personally, my first year at university was 1967/68 and it seemed obvious that the most interesting things were happening inside the university. 10 years later (let’s say 78/79) I woke up and suddenly one is aware that historically universities were not where the most interesting things happened and that the late sixties/early seventies looked more of a blip than a beginning. I don’t mean to denigrate the important disciplinary thought that goes on within a university but the crucial moments of social and cultural re-evaluation don’t seem to me to be likely to happen within universities. So to expect the University to be where the most interesting and exciting intellectual developments are happening is itself historically rather bizarre.

Could you tell us more about your work with the London Consortium and how that came about?

 

It happened because I more or less left the academic world and was producing film at the British Film Institute. A new director came in and he said to me ‘I want you to turn the BFI into a graduate institution’ and I thought that if you saw the institute’s own activities as an academic resource, you really could do something very interesting. We set up a master’s degree and that was very centrally what the institute needed to reproduce itself. It sort of built the students into the functioning of the institution. The other thing that I wanted to do was something much more ambitious which was to recast the humanities with film at the centre. That had been the dream of Screen and had been destroyed by the creation of Film Studies that had set itself up as a specialized discipline. I had two very old friends – Paul Hirst who taught Sociology at Birkbeck and who had produced the most creative work on Marxism in the seventies, and Mark Cousins who directed  general studies at the Architectural Association. We were having dinner one night and Mark said he just examined a PhD and said there must be some way of organizing graduate study so that undertaking a PhD wasn’t a complete misery – both for the person writing and for everybody who has to teach and examine it.  So we said, “Let’s do it” and very shortly afterwards we recruited Richard Humphreys who headed education at Tate. This was an unusual historical conjuncture- we were senior enough in our organizations to be taken seriously and we were bureaucratically skilled enough to be able present to each of our organizations a project which clearly served our own institution’s ends, if only peripherally, and which was going to cost nothing except its start up costs. The real resources that got it going was our own labour, which was effectively done in our own time. Strangely enough I don’t think we talked much about politics when we set it up because we had talked ourselves to death politically in the seventies. But certainly I would say that the Consortium is a child of the sixties. That its aim – to produce knowledge in a worldly way, addressing audiences outside as well as within the academy – is an aim that comes from the sixties.  It was an attempt to do something that would continue what was valuable from that moment. But I think I would also stress how much of the Consortium’s beginnings was chance. Three very old friends in senior positions working within 100 yards of each other in central London. Just before he died  Paul Hirst was asked what the secret of the Consortium’s success was, and his answer was friendship. We could only do it because we were very old friends who trusted each other which means we also got annoyed with each other, and fed up with each other and etc. but we didn’t have the kind of problems that you normally have in such collaborations

So it’s been 17 years since the Consortium started?

I can’t remember exactly when we started discussing the Consortium. I became Head of Research, BFI in 1989; we took the first Masters students in 1992. The Consortium took its first students in October 1995.

Is there any work that is being produced that you would like to mention to us?

If you look on the website, it has all the PhDs that have been produced so far.  Most recently there’s a thesis on auditory culture in pre Second World War Japan which takes as its starting point the first time that the Japanese heard the emperor’s voice on the radio: the ammouncement of the surrender to the Allies. There’s a thesis on the genesis of modern biology at the end of the eighteemnth century, a history of Turkish cinema and an account of the relations between analytic and Cointinental philosophy. I think that gives some idea of the range of work that is being done. In some ways the doctorates are not as exciting or innovative as the work done in the core courses in the first year. In order to showcase some of that work I’ve just finished editing a book on Godard’s Contempt which is made up of essays  done for a course that Laura Mulvey and I taught together. The core courses are aptly named because they are the core of the Consortium. The very first four core courses that we offered give some idea of the project. We took a classic text, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, an interesting concept “whiteness”, a pratical project involving audiences – the planning of the Tate Modern and a controversial modern text: Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. With the Satanic Verses the intellectual question was as follows: how do you unertake study in a field you know nothing about. If you read the Satanic Verses seriously then you have to engage with both the early history of the Prophet and Indian cinema. How do you do this in a responsible but critical way?   If you go on the website and look at the core courses, which change every three or four years , you can see the interest of the Consortium.

 Could you tell us something about Critical Quarterly? You are the editor of Critical Quarterly, so could you give a trajectory of your engagement with it?

CQ was set up in the late fifties by two young English lecturers called Brian Cox and A.E. Dyson. They set it up because they were very committed Leavisites but orthodox Leavisitism by then said all modern literature is awful, all modern criticism is awful. So they were completely Leavisite but they thought there was lots of interesting new writing, lots of interesting new criticism. So they set out, and they caught a wave, and they published Sylvia Plath’s first poetry, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, and lots of then very young critics like David Lodge etc. Then in the seventies it went into the doldrums. I knew about it, I knew it was one of the best magazines in England but my mind was focussed on other things – politics and language in the seventies, film in the eighties. But CQ asked me to do a double issue on ‘English Today’, and that was easy – I just asked all my friends. And then Brian Cox  invited me to lunch, and he said, ‘Look, I’ve sat  on 6 professorial appointment committees this year, the Eagletonians are always better than our lot. They are better than us. Your lot have won. It’s over, it’s finished. I’m not interested in criticism anymore; I want to write poetry, will you edit the magazine?’ .So I hesitated a moment, as I was right in the middle of film production,  it wasn’t the moment at all for me to edit an academic magazine. On the other hand, I was aware that I was  being offered a premier magazine just like that, and it would be a bit foolish to say no. So I said ‘I’ll do it on two conditions. The first is that there is no editorial board’. I said that because in Screen it was like the polit-bureau. Editorial board meetings would go on for hours and hours. They were unbelievably vicious. So I said we’d have contributing editors, but there’s no editorial board. In other the decisions are made by whoever is responsible for a particular issue. And I said ‘The second thing is there will be no business meetings which are not also meals.’ So if we have a meeting of all the editorial contributors, it will be a meal in a restaurant. We may have half an hour of business to get us started. Brian said yes. So I said ‘OK, I’ll do it. And I got all my friends to sign up for it, and we did it on that basis’. It’s basically an English literature magazine, so in every one issue in four, I try to be kind of state- of- the-art “lit-crit”, and in the other three I just do whatever I come across that interests me. Like all other academic magazines, its only readership, its only buyers are libraries. For many years  and I tried desperately harad to build iundividual subscriptions to do this. However, in England, every Sunday you now have 2-3 very thick newspapers with culture, politics etc. Saturday, you have another three newspapers that thick. Nobody wants anything more to read. I suddenly realised this one day and since then , which I think is over ten years ago, I’ve  tried to run it as what it is: a very good magazine based in the discipline of English which goes into almost all the largest libraries in the world. The other thing that was a big shock to me was that when we went digital  I discovered that, for an academic magazine , it has a very big readership ( 50,000 downlaods a year). Before that I’d assumed I was the only one that aread it. And there is a paradox there because if the magazine has a concious strategy  it is to refuse specialisation – to look at English literature from Chaucer to graphic novels, to look across all the media, to consider English as global languages and literatures. By my own analysis which is that the academy is becoming ever more specialised, we should be failing but we’re not. I think I edit the magazine with morte care now, partly because I’m aware of that readership and partly because I’m also aware of new developemnts which I’m just not plugged into. I am not quite at the Brian Cox moment but I am also very conscious of the fact that my own reactions are those of someone who is generationally out of it  and so I recruited some young people recently. I have a couple of students from London Consortium now helping. Another paradix is that I don’t think anybody reads magazine any more, they just search for articles but I put quite a lot of thought into it as a magazine – down to the format which I love.

Tell us something your experience with cinema, as a producer. You had a long relationship with Derek Jarman. Could you tell us something about how that experience was?

What happened was that I had written all this stuff on film and I really reached a dead end with it. And then I was asked to go and do an interview with Godard, who said  ‘Are you doing a proper book on me?’, and I said yes, which was  a complete lie , and twenty four hours later I made sure it true. He said the day before that “If you are doing a complete book, you could go through all my archives, you could come on the next film I am going to shoot which is the first proper film I’ve shot in ten years.” And then I went on the shoot for a couple of days and that was really a life changing moment. First of all, it was pretty humiliating, because I did not understand anything at all. And I thought that I don’t want to write from this position, and I decided that once I’d finished that first book I would not write about the cinema untilI’d worked in it.  The second thing was the atmosphere of the set, and I thought “this is the world I want to live in”. In the end, I was very lucky, and I was appointed the Head of Production of BFI, and the first thing I had on my plate was Derek Jarman. Derek had this film, Caravaggio, which had been tied up in development for five years because he had signed a contract with the guy who had the idea for the film. The idea wasn’t Derek’s. It was a guy called Nicholas Ward Jackson, who was an art dealer, and Derek had signed a contract with him. Normally when you sign a contract, you say you’ll write a script and the person who pays you owns it for 2 or 3 or 4 years. And if they can’t raise the money, the option runs out. Now Derek wasn’t very legally savvy and there was no such clause in the contract. So this guy owned it. And he had been trying to raise the money for 5 years and he was so obnoxious that nobody would give him the money. So the BFI had decided that they wanted to make it, but I had to actually negotiate the thing away from Nicholas Ward Jackson. It was a great learning curve, as there was this madman Nicholas and he employed the  most expensive lawyer in London. I’d go to these meetings with the BFI lawyer and they kicked us around the room. After a week I realised that I understood more about what was happening than the lawyer. So I sacked him and I found another lawyer and in the end the contract was 200 pages thick. But two things came out of that which were good. One, that it was a crash course in the business of film. I really learnt about all the finances of film. And secondly, Derek thought that I was bloody wonderful, because he had wanted to make this film for five years and then I finally did it. And we got on very, very well indeed. And he was very charismatic; people just loved Derek, except for the homophobes. The way he made a film, I remember him saying to me quite early on, he said ‘Look Colin, the finished result doesn’t matter. All that matters is that everybody has a good time while they are making it.’  I don’t think he quite believed that but it really was the case that everybody working on the film felt that they were making the film with Derek. They were involved in this process. Derek was one of the most energising people I’ve ever met. He lived near my office in the BFI, and we used to bump into each other quite often, and however low one was feeling meeting him left one completely re-energised. Caravaggio was the only film of his which I produced but we were always thinking of side projects. There was a book on Edward 2 and then when he got into trouble with Terry Eagleton on Wittgenatein, I got him out by publishing a book which had both Eagleton’s original script and the text from Derek’s film.

The thing about Derek was that he was always having such a good time that he never paid all that much attention to the films until he was dying, and then the last films it all gets taken to  another level. Fantastic. I remember when he first screened Wittgenstein, it was his birthday.  I took him to Cambridge and I had arranged a screening in Cambridge in the Art Cinema which is where Wittgenstein used to go and spend a lot of his time. I’d invited one of my old tutors who had been a pupil of Wittgenstein and the widow  of his doctor in whose house  Wittgenstein had died . So I was sitting with these incredibly old people dressed in three piece suits , and I was thinking ‘God what have I done? They’re going to hate this film’.  But of course they loved it Then we went off and had lunch, and it was a great time. With Derek I remember endless great times. Before that, after he had done Edward II I’d been rung up by The Independent, and asked to write an obituary, because he was dying. And then he recovered. I said ‘Why don’t we do it in images, and do it before you die?’ .I spent a day interviewing him on film, and then that turned into Derek. I didn’t look at it for ten years. Then on his tenth death anniversary I looked at it. I don’t know whether you’ve seen it, but I think it’s very good. And he was a very brave man. Sebastian was a brave film. A terrible film, but unbelievably brave. And then coming out with AIDS when he did was unbelievably important. He was always very involved with sexual politics. If he was here now he’d probably tell me why I should be more involved with sexual politics.

Supplementary written questions from Ashley Tallis with answers

How and why did you make the transition to Pittsburgh? How do you handle the US?

When I returned from a sabbatical in Paris in 1979 I determined that I would leave academic life and Cambridge to try to make a living in the media after I had got tenure.  The Maccabe furor made it difficult to turn down the offer of a Professorship at Strathclyde but when I took the job, Channel 4 had suggested that I could combine work in Glasgow with work for the new Channel. The work in Glasgow was so engrossing that I realised that I would have to move back to London and leave academic life if I was serious about producing films. It was at that moment that Pittsburgh offered me a one –semester appointment and the possibility of doing combining both film and academic life seemed possible. It was and I combined both for 17 years ( until 2002). Since then I have more or less given up active production and I work full time for Pittsburgh as I teach a semester on their Pitt in London programme.
I’m not sure that I do handle the US. The States is very regional and my region is Western Pennsylvania and my city is Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh hasn’t elected any Republican to any office since 1928. It is a city I know and love and in which my youngest son went to school. The university has offered me unstinting support

What are you working on now and what are your current interests?
A history of English literature, a book on Clint Eastwood as an American artist and a short book on modernism and realism. But I will drop all that at the beginning of January to start reading economics

Do you not meet the Screen comrades any more when you are in London?

I see Laura Mulvey and Marx Nash all the time. Ben Brewster who I would love to see more is in Madison. I see Stephen Heath in Cambridge. Peter Wollen very sadly has Alzheimer’s. I see Sam Rhodie from time to time.
Do you not engage with the French any more?

I go to France every two or three months to see old friends particularly Moustapha Safouan and Chris Marker. I go to Cannes every year.  But when I see Bernard Henri Levy or Philippe Sollers I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Mainly I just seethe.

Are you still an angry (now old) man or do you think you’ve settled down? Whatever your answer is, why do you think so?

I wasn’t an angry young man. As a teenager I thought a Labour government would usher in a new Jerusalem and then I had more revolutionary dreams in my twenties. Anger didn’t come until a) the stupidity of the nouvelle philosophie in France and b) the stupidity of Christopher Ricks in Cambridge. That anger has grown as I have seen both British television and British universities destroyed in front of my eyes by my own generation. I try not to succumb to this anger but it is difficult particularly when I am in England. I settled down at the rather early age of 25 with the birth of my first child. Since then I have had the luck to enjoy my family and by luck so far to have avoided many of the normal tragedies. But call no man happy until he is dead.

Monday November 21st

I sit in the Gordon Ramsey restaurant drinking moderately. I am looking forward to returning to Hyderabad.  London has been magnificent in the cold November sun that it is the very best season by the Thames. But I long for a little bit of Hyderabadi heat. Indeed the first few days as I shivered in the unaccustomed cold I wondered how the poor Indians who had first come to these shores must have felt as the cold blast of a London winter hit them. However, my Northern genes finally kicked in and I achieved that state of intense living that the cold brings as a blessing.

The question everybody asked:  How was India?

The answer I gave to everyone: Heaven and Hell

 

Heaven:  Every morning I would rise in the house we had rented  in Domalguda, an area of Hyderabad near the huge artificial lake which provides Hyderabad with a centre, and wander out down the nearby streets past the little shops to my barber. It had taken me some courage to venture into the tiny hole in the wall from which he operated . However there are few pleasures in life like been shaved first thing in the morning with a cut throat razor. The whole day is immeasurably improved. My barber, who is a genius at shaving and haircutting is a miserable sod. He speaks some English , but not as much as his claim to a degree in business would suggest. But he is a great believer in “Life isn’t what you know but who you know” and he doesn’t know the right people. His other continuous moan is that all his competitors are drunks. So frequently does he make this claim that I suspect he must be a tippler himself but at 7.30 in the morning his hand is steady. I pay him 100 rupees which is 3 times the going rate.  He is not very obviously pleased. Then it is onto my buffalo milk curd woman who brings out of her fridge the curd that she has made earlier in the morning. Like many Indian women she is strikingly beautiful  but I feel in too much of an alien land to risk flirtation. A huge helping of curd costs 10 rupees. Then to complete my breakfast I wonder over to the dhosa seller.  For the first two months I was here I avoided the street food on the grounds that I was quite fond of breathing. However, I finally conquered this hysterical fear of ingesting foreign substances. I was so fed up with eating the unbelievably indifferent curries that are served in Indian restaurants that I reached the stage that I would try anything to get something that tasted and tasted hot. The street sellers are incredible. They are acrobats of the highest order. The dhosa is tossed turned and finally prepared with skill and panache. Then the curry is put in a little plastic bag and the whole thing is wrapped in a packet of used newspaper. 12 rupees. Not only more delicious than a full English but undoubtedly more healthy. The final task of the morning is to get The Hindu, our daily newspaper. Nominally a paper of the Communist Party (M) it is only slightly to the left of the Daily Telegraph but it is a good paper which reasonable foreign coverage and op-ed pages that put the Guardian to shame.

Then Ramesh phones to say that he has arrived.  A strong bond formed in my escape from the Nature Cure Hospital has become the basis for a daily relationship. Wherever Flavia or I want to go in Hyderabad Ramesh takes us. Unlike all other Auto drivers he knows the city intimately and I feel as though I have been provided with my own personal juggernaut as he whisks me from fish market to liquor store to EFLU campus. On our way to the university Ramesh asks me if I want chai and if I have time we stop at his favourite chai shop where more acrobatics are performed as liquids are poured from glass to  glass as though in some magical ceremony. When I first got here I thought Indian tea made with warm milk and sugar was absolutely disgusting but I always enjoyed the show and now I am beginning to enjoy the tea.

 

While the magic is performed I buy my second Hindu (two and a half rupees) of the day and I start reading. Now I enter Hell. In the last 16 years 250,000 farmers have killed themselves in India. This is the greatest mass suicide in human history and gives some idea of the hell on which this heaven of cheap prices is based. One might think that nothing had changed since Mother India with its predatory money lender but in fact this is not nature but history. The predatory money lenders have gone but they have been replaced by micro-finance which knows that small farmers tied to their land are very good bets as borrowers. And the farmer has been rendered even more helpless by genetically modified crops for which they cannot even grow their own seeds. Endlessly in debt to the banks and agr0-biz, what remains the same as Mother India is that it is almost always the cost of a wedding that provokes the final catastrophe. These stories of suicide vie for place with the “encounter killings” of Maoists, horrific stories of violence against women and endless, endless accounts of tribals being displaced from their traditional homes in one disgusting scam or another. As if this was not bad enough the Indian rich do not bother to hide their contempt for all these ‘poor people”. The fat and ugly boss of Kingfisher airlines ,whose oily tones and disgusting sentiments assault one everytime one takes one of his planes is a  liquor magnate and general show off. When he was asked what he thought about the poor people he had displaced from their traditional lands to build his Formula 1 circuit. “Why bother about these people” he replied “Just look at our GDP, all our growing wealth indicators and concentrate on that.” The reporter, unsurprisingly, could not point out that all these figures are as fraudulent about social well being as Indian politicians. But in India these two mendacities have become one. Hell.

 

 

As I type those lines Flavia rings. The Indian Embassy has refused her the re-entry visa she requires, it being a requirement of tourist visas that if the holder leaves India they cannot return for three months. I’ve rung Denis who in turn has rung Keith Vaz who has in turn spoken to the official the Indian High Commission charged with relations with English MPs. But no.

 

I have not felt so disappointed for decades. Flavia has been the best companion on the Indian adventure and to finish it without her is horrible.

 

Now I’m running. The period from the 8^th was the start of the sprint but the dash is the week we promote the Consortium in Delhi and Bombay

In Hyderabad I meet with the Cultural Studies department for a formal debrief. Then it’s the penultimate class and: Million Dollar Baby. By now the class have really got Eastwood and here he uses his acting skills for the penultimate time in his allegory about abortion. Then meeting with Satya and Mhadav. Plans. On Flavia Mhadav suggests Sunil Khilnani. Sunil was one of the original founders of the Consortium and I certainly know him well enough to approach him with a desperate request.  Three days later Flavia gets her visa. We well miss the Ajante caves and Goa but we will finish our season in Hyderabad.

Wednesday 9th November

Wednesday lunchtime 9th November

My hostel is at the edge of academic housing with a park in the middle. I am munching an egg puff between seeing students and going through their draft essays. I am sitting with a beautiful young woman. She is crying. She has a broken heart. Or rather her heart has been broken and now she is determined to grow a new one. But she cries for the one that has been broken. Cliches are the shortest cut to the truth: “There are plenty of fish in the sea”