Darius Cooper
“Woh Subah Kabhi to Aayegi…” Sahir Ludhianvi
O
n January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead as he hurried to his prayer meeting. Three shots signaled the complete collapse of the Gandhian dream of a “free” India that many Indians were anticipating. India lost one father, but interestingly in Jawaharlal Nehru, it gained another. Gandhi’s death enabled Nehru to walk, finally, out of his gigantic shadow into a different kind of India he had wanted so long to create: an India where industry would replace temples; where the urbanized city would become the center of progress instead of the village farmer and the ancestral zamindar anchored to their ploughs and their two acres of land. On 26th January 1950, India became a Republic. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was the author of India’s Constitution. He designed a parliamentary government with two houses to represent the people and the states. A strong Judiciary with a Supreme Court was added by this brilliant man and what stood out so prominently was the determined resolve that India would be governed by a system of checks and balances that were needed to take her into a future, so very different from her past.
The Hindi films that reflect this early phase begin with producer director Vasan who created Chandralekha, a song-dance extravaganza, in 1948. If, in Homer’s Iliad, soldiers descended from the Trojan horse to destroy Troy, in Vasan’s film, soldiers burst out of their mammoth drums, to wreak havoc on their enemies. Vasan has gone on record saying that India needed a Hollywood-look-alike extravagant epic at this time to distract and relieve its citizens from the painful war propaganda films they had been forced to watch during those difficult times of partition, communal bloodshed, and Gandhi’s assassination. Rivaling Chandralekha was Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, released in the same year. Its theme was about the establishing of a progressive art center where the artist’s kalpana or imagination would be given free reign to create. Such an imaginative act was deemed necessary, not only artistically but also culturally, especially for an Indian nation just taking its first infant steps. While Vasan’s film replaced an old and exhausted war-weariness with splendid war-dances harkening to India’s rich mythological past, Shankar’s vibrant film moved India into the future with a choreography that was distinctly modern and replete with all kinds of western “isms” deliberately incorporated into its natya-shastra structure. As film historians have pointed out, even James Joyce, who had created the revolutionary novel, Ulysses, in 1922, sensed the same kind of excitement when he actually watched Shankar literally take an ancient India “as a semi divine being” into that modern India that Nehru’s five year old plans were about to give shape to.
In Nehru’s First Five Year Plan (1951-56), the emphasis was on agriculture, irrigation, and power-projects. In its agenda, iron and steel competed with fertilizer and water harnessing. The manufacture of locomotives and the growth of cotton; the production of cement and that of paper were all encouraged on the same scale. Nehru’s dream incorporated the grand occidental visions of massive industrial plants, and the steady hum of machinery. He was determined to alter the traditional Indian landscape, with the Damodar Valley Scheme, the Hirakud Dam, both in eastern India, and the Bhakra-Nangal Project in the north. His India resounded with the railroad workshop at Chittaranjan, West Bengal; the fertilizer factory in Sindri/Bihar and the Nagarjuna Sagar river valley project…to name just a few of his exciting schemes.
The West, for most progressive Indians, had always functioned as a constantly referenced signifier. Dr. Ambedkar’s constitutional drafts, over which he had struggled for three years, borrowed a lot from both the American and the British constitutions. Its powerful slogan of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were familiar to those who had first heard them in the bloody years of the French Revolution. A similar trend, therefore, was very noticeable in the popular Hindi films, made with the same Nehruvian spirit of an adaptable Occidentalism. In the 1951 runaway hit film Albela, Master Bhagwan, a popular Bombay-based comedian, showed this interesting split between an old India that the hero, a poor dispatch clerk, wanted to leave behind. It weighed very heavily on him, first in the form of filial responsibility and dharma or duty to his aged mother. He was also getting tired of his constant arguments and painful estrangements with his strict and authoritarian father, and was finally exhausted by the proverbial sanskritized villainy of an ambitious caste driven brother-in-law. Our clerk dreamed of the new Indian cities he was hearing so much about. He wanted to utilize his unique talents as a singer and dancer in their urban brightly lit city-lights ambience.
Nehru’s occidental impulse was also heard in the excessive use of westernized instruments that rang out loud and clear over the traditional Indian ones in this remarkable new film musical. The bongo replaced the tabla, the oboe and clarinet overwhelmed the Indian basuri or flute, and the trumpet and saxophone silenced the shenai. C. Ramachandra, the film’s maverick western-crazy-music director, under Bhagwan’s black bow-tied and white shark-skinned baton, literally shook, rattled and roll’d Nehru’s new India with his Hawaiian “Shola Jo Bhadke” or “when embers explode” song and dance that the entire nation was soon dancing and singing to.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas illustrated the political aspect of Nehruvian socialism in his scripts for Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), Shri 420 (1955) and Jagte Raho (1956). Authority in Awara rested with the patriarchal figure of Judge Raghunath, who stood for ancient Indian feudal values, totally out of step with the new Indian visions of his rebellious son Raju who soon got estranged and found a new father, Jagga, who operated outside the confines of law and order that his biological, but ancient father, emblemized. Both fathers, however, were found wanting.
Nehru’s India needed, neither the calcified super-ego values of a Raghunath nor the id-animated outlawed ones of a Jagga. Raju, the confused Indian awara or vagabond, killed the latter and was arrested for trying to kill the former. It was his female defense lawyer, Rita, who ultimately showed him the light at the end of the dark tunnel by playing the mediating socialistic-ego figure. What people remember from this popular film is a spectacular dream sequence that took nearly three months to film where both visions of India were enacted from the hallucinatory perspective of the tormented hero. In a strange way, this dream also resembled the confusing signifiers of western plenitude, according to which Judge Rugunath had designed the opulent traditional Indian mansion in which he resided Lear-like, unable to make up his mind about the two Indias.
Guru Dutt’s Baazi also came out in 1951 and introduced to the post-independence Indian audience, the urban westernized persona of its star, Dev Anand, with his puffed up hair, his anti-gravitational gait, and his fast-talking glibness. This slick and suave city gent often used his videshi or western impersonations to settle a dispute, win convincingly at poker, get the girl, and unmask the criminals. This was the new Nehruvian Indian who was not going to bemoan his wretched fate in the old-fashioned puranic style of his whining ancestors. He was going to shake off all those “nets” that life would throw on him and he even had a song that praised him for doing just that. In the song “Tabdeer se bigdi hui taqdeer baana le,” he was advised to resolve all his problems and make his own destiny because he had complete bharosa or confidence in achieving all his goals!
In 1952, the Central Government threw a spanner in Nehru’s nation-building plans. It created a conservative censorship policy, separating A or Adult Viewing from U or Unrestricted Viewing. (This policy still exists in contemporary India where one sees the censored film in the miniplex and then rents and watches the uncut DVD version in one’s living room with the entire family.) Next, came the banning of all popular Hindi film-music from all All India radio stations. Fortunately Radio Ceylon came and resurrected the liberated Nehruvian vision that was constantly emphasized in the songs by popularizing Hindi film-music through successfully sponsored radio programs like “Binaca Geet Mala” that were fashioned on the familiar western models of the Pop Songs Hit Parade. Also in 1952, the westernized English newspaper daily, The Times of India, which had the highest circulation in the country, inaugurated the Filmfare National Awards and presented them with all the proverbial glitter and spectacle borrowed from Hollywood’s Oscar ceremonies, which it then proceeded to emulate on the same lavish scale.
In 1953, Hindi cinema gave us Bimal Roy’s Do Bhiga Zamin or Two Acres of Land, which exposed Indians to the darker side of Nehru’s Utopian efforts. On one hand, it depicted the relentless cruelty of the traditional Indian Zamindari system, still practicing its cruel and remorseless hegemony over the ignorant and downtrodden peasants in the Indian village. But on the other hand, it also depicted the forced migration of the victimized peasant and his family to the nearest big Indian city and the undergoing of new urbanized hardships. In Roy’s film, the farmer abandoned the plough and learnt to pull the rickshaw for his daily minimum wage. His land passed from the arrogant rural landlord to the wily city real-estate agents who conspired to erect a factory on it. The city’s dangerous and protective underbelly, in which this unfortunate peasant family had to reside, was created under the borrowed neo-realist influence of the period’s popular Italian cinema. Roy’s melodrama borrowed heavily from Cesar Zavattini on the script level and his camera was highly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist visions. The kind landlady of the slum, the cheerful shoeshine boy, and Balraj Sahni’s moving performance as an actual rickshaw puller (he used no double or stuntman) became popular archetypes in the Hindi films which were to follow.
In 1954, two films, literally presented “Chacha” or “Uncle” Nehru (since he was very fond of children) and showed how children responded to the Nehruvian Utopia of the first Five Year Plan. In Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish, the orphaned brother and sister go from the shameful act of begging to the more honest activity of boot polishing. While the wicked aunt who feeds them insists on their begging by trapping the two infants into all kinds of cunningly delivered filial blackmail, it is the one-legged bootlegger, John Chacha (maybe a cunning surrogate of Nehru himself), who shows them the boot polish way to respectability. His song “Nanhe munne bacche teri mooti mein kya hai” or “Sweet children, what do you hold in your fists” confirms that children can create and control their own destiny and don’t need to rely on a decaying Indian tradition or their cruel elders.
In the same year, K.A. Abbas came out with Munna. This orphan child was portrayed as a consummate reformer. His goodness transformed even the cynical pickpocket and the diehard crooked Sethji. He made a living pasting posters and dreamt of becoming a Nehru himself, yes, a Prime Minister of India! Finally, his determined optimism paid off. A wealthy city couple adopted him and he was all set to become, if not the Prime Minister, at least the Nehruvian Indian, by the end of the film.
From 1954, I want to pull out Chetan Anand’s Taxi Driver for its representation of the marginalized community of India’s Anglo-Indians as actual characters in the film’s narrative. Usually, the Anglo-Indians (products of British and Indian miscegenation), featured merely as musical extras in Hindi films because of their uninhibited abilities to perform western dances exceedingly well. In this film, most of the action took place in a nightclub, whose Anglo-Indian cabaret dancer Sylvie, is actually shown as being madly in love with the film’s Hindu hero. (She was the first cabaret icon who was later made memorable by another Anglo-Indian dancer, Helen, in her umpteen roles as the Anglo-Indian vamp who always sacrificed herself for the leading man.) But the film went much further. The drummer in her band was a real Anglo-Indian musician, one Vernon Corke. But he didn’t merely mess around with drums. His striking brown haired presence was also used to wash cabs, save the hero’s life, and, as many critics took the trouble to point out, one paid more attention to his spread-eagled self on the roof of the hero’s taxi in the background when the hero and his comic sidekick were getting drunk in the foreground. The Anand brothers of Nav Ketan have to be commended for highlighting the Anglo-Indian community without stereotyping them or marginalizing them. In Nehru’s new India, the film seemed to be prophesizing; there was a place for everyone. (Satyajit Ray would invoke this same theme again with his brilliant characterization of the Anglo-Indian sales girl, Edith Simmons, in his 1963 film, Mahanagar.)
In 1955, Bimal Roy’s pessimism of Nehru’s five year plans was offered this time in his flawed adaptation of Devdas. On an existential level, Devdas has always been a problematic Indian character. To put it authentically, he is portrayed (at least in the novel), as a character that harms others and himself in characteristic “bad faith.” He literally “scars” the noble Paroo and drives her into an unhappy marriage with an older man. He cannot see the whore Chandramukhi’s pure gestures of love and spurns them as polluted gestures. His only salvation is a cowardly retreat into solipsism that is brought about by an expressive need of alcohol. In the end, it is his deceased liver that kills him, and not his heart or his mind. (He was neither sacrificial, bold, nor noble as Guru Dutt’s Chhoti Bahu in his memorable film Sahib, Bibi, Aur Gulam.)
Roy tried to save the film by opening it up to the historical forces that compelled the central character to stage, if not to question, his excessive neuroses. This, I suspect, became admirable for Hindi film’s primary method-actor, Dilip Kumar, to unfurl on his audience his infinite bag of acting tricks. One is not yet certain if the Indian audience reacted more to Dilip Kumar’s tragic mannerisms rather than to the character’s empty and irritatingly narcissistic philosophy. One is, therefore, not quite sure, why this character became so famous in the Indian psyche at that particular time. There was really nothing of the Nehruvian spirit of confidence or optimism in him. He wanted to suffer and he wanted others to suffer with him. He refused to travel in any historical debba or railway compartment that was offered to him particularly towards the end of the film. So when he crisscrossed the country in trains and finally died at Paroo’s doorstep, history was really unmoved even to shed a single tear in his memory.
Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420 that came out at the same time, was a weak stereotypical critique of Nehru’s urbanized progressive schemes. The city’s corruption, to which the rural hero initially succumbs, hardly carried any critical weight. Binaries were simplistically offered with the warm-hearted poor always winning. The Virgin Mary archetype was Vidya, the poor but enlightened school teacher, abandoned temporarily for Maya, the rich femme fatale illusion who literally Mary Magdelained the country bumpkin. Even the songs (like the women’s names) were hopelessly clichéd. The extravagantly westernized trumpet playing dancing girls number “Mudmud Ke Na Dekh mudmud ke” or “Are you looking at me, all bent over?” is defeated by the vernacular folk song choruses of the honest footpath city dwellers’ “Dil ka haal sune dilwala” or “let us sit down and talk freely of our troubles.”
In Guru Dutt’s Aar Paar (1954) and Mr and Mrs 55 (1955), the Utopian possibilities, in the Nehruvian sense, of a newly minted Indian nation, released from over two hundred years of British colonial rule, and the overwhelming difficulties of trying to create a new social and cultural order on its own terms (and certainly also those, imaginatively borrowed, from the West), were captured very sensitively in the determined efforts of the romantic couples of both films to live “happily ever after” in Nehru’s new India.
In these two very sophistically made comedies, Dutt evoked a newly liberated India asserting its autonomy by deliberately parodying older Indian rules and rituals in an attempt to carve out that distinctively modern Nehruvian voice. What was most conspicuous was the enactment, in both films, of a deliberately iconoclastic carnivalesque spirit. Illiterate taxi drivers spent late nights learning English to find better jobs in these newly resurrected metropolitan centers. Unemployed cartoonists did not mind communist labels being hurled at them. Respectable daughters, who massaged their stern father’s legs and their egos behind strictly closed doors, were ready to elope into the dazzling outdoors world, with lovers who offered them its passions, its excitements, and its risks, instead of their mournful enactment of tedious morals and suffocating codes of duty. Wealthy nieces were willing to break all the locked doors of their conventional guardians to elope with jobless talented men, who often went hungry and slept on park benches when their landlords threw them out for not paying their rents. These two comedies captured accurately the rebelliousness of the early period of Nehruvian ideology. They showed how the newly awakened Indians included this subversive ideology of the carnivalesque into the realm of their everyday lives with a daring optimism and an open heartedness and mindedness that was something new to behold.
Another film that needs to be mentioned here is Mohan Segal’s New Delhi (1956). The threat that Nehru repeatedly warned against, of different parts of India not willing to achieve a national unity, and wanting, instead, to maintain their essential differences was effectively satirized here. The haughty North Indian patriarch opposes very strongly his liberal minded son’s marriage to the equally pompous South Indian patriarch’s daughter. Only the frenzied and maniacal antics of our hero (played by the anarchic Bengali comedian Kishore Kumar) can humble both the North and the South of India to finally allow the impervious shehnai to be played on their marriage day in both houses. What is even more remarkable is the dance enunciation of the popular song “Nakhrewali” or “spoilsport” rendered by Kishore Kumar, not only in his own yodelful voice but also danced in the strict Fred Astaire codes of cane, top-hat, and tap dance shuffles.
Nehru’s Second Five Year Plan (1957-61) pushed industrialization considerably, but soon cracks started to appear. In 1957, while All India Radio relented and started serving “light entertainments” in its “Vividh Bharati” service, knowing it had to compete with Radio Ceylon’s overwhelming popularity, in 1958, the first phase of the Bhakra Nangal Dam was completed. Government sponsored steel plants continued to be inaugurated at Rourkela and Bhilai and a new kind of ambitious business man emerged on the Indian horizon in the likes of the highly westernized Parsee, J.R.D. Tata who worked hard to establish an Air India Airline out of his own Tata Airlines, which he had started with a capital investment of 200,000 rupees. A local banya or money-lender (Gandhi’s own caste), G.D. Birla, defiantly moved away from his traditional family in Pilani, Rajasthan, and started the very first prosperous Birla Jute Mills. One envisaged that these were just the kind of kindred spirits Nehru needed to establish the economic infrastructure in his new India, but surprisingly, the exact opposite happened. While attracted to their visionary enterprises, Nehru was not willing to offer the Tatas and the Birlas any kind of Government support because he despised their entrepreneurial profit motives. The business of making money, simply, had no room in Nehru’s India. In fact, Nehru went out of his way to alienate and frustrate these Big Two who had inspired other notable entrepreneurial Indian families like the Godrejs, the Walchand Harichands, the Wadias of Bombay Dyeing, and the Shri Rams to join them. He even went to the extreme of nationalizing Air India, a shocking gesture from which this Airline has still not recovered. Other draconian legislations, approved by Nehru, branded certain targeted business families and severely curtailed their growth. The environment between government and business now turned hostile. India’s population was growing alarmingly. The rural downtrodden in search of employment were migrating to cities in large numbers, and they clashed with the educated unemployed who roamed the streets. Corruption and graft, conmanship and sycophancy soon began raising their ugly heads. Nehru’s dream was beginning to crumble.
1957, in Hindi film, first offered us Mehboob Khan’s very popular Mother India. The newly awakened nation was mawkishly personified in the central character of the noble Radha, who singlehandedly (after her armless husband had abandoned her) struggled against the cruel feudal system to bring up a good dutiful son, who would serve in Nehru’s new India, and killed the bad rebellious son when he chose the code of violence (anathema to Gandhi’s famous legacy of ahimsa or non-violence) to set things right. While the peasants in one song, literally choreographed in outline, an actual map of India, Radha, now an old woman recounting her epic, blessed her dutiful son as he got ready to embark on his new life in Nehru’s India.
It was Guru Dutt’s memorable Pyaasa, released in the same year that accurately questioned the failure of many of Nehru’s five year plans. The nation was being betrayed and national interest was being replaced by personal interest. Sahir Ludhianvi’s great song “Jiney naaz hain Hind par vo kahan hain” or You Who are Proud of India, where are you now” became the film’s compelling thesis. When the celebrated poet, who dared to attack his newly awakened country, was finally thrown out of the auditorium, he was still singing. “Jalo do ise phook dalo ye duniya” or “burn this India that everywhere surrounds me.” The poet and the whore, the film’s two conspicuous outsiders, were ultimately defeated by the combined forces of their hostile families and their greedy friends, both in their domesticated and in their metropolitan spaces. They left, at the end, to seek a utopia outside the city where they hoped to find some kind of purity and salvation.
The resistance to Nehruvian technology and the threat to abolish old agrarian ways was also expressed very openly in B.R. Chopra’s Naya Daur in 1957. While electric machinery and automobiles threatened to retire the plough and the bullock cart permanently from the Indian landscape, a race between a petrol-driven bus and a horse-drawn carriage was waged to prove the merits and demerits of both, traditional and the newly manufactured machine, technology. In the final analysis, humanism prevailed, with the farmers learning how to manage the new forces and instruments of industrialization that would multiply their harvests and add a different kind of verdure and plenty to their primitive serene fields. The popular song “Saathi haath badhana” or “Brothers, lend me your hands” concluded the Nehruvian thesis very effectively for the naya or new daur or era.
In the same year, V. Shantaram, chose to present a Nehruvian experiment in his film, Do Aankhen Bara Haath/Two Eyes and Twelve Hands with the unusual binary opposition confronted by six convicted murderers and a Nehruvian minded jailer, who set up a thriving and decent farming commune, only to be thwarted by the bigoted and devious Brahminic zeal of the virtuous denizens of the nearby village who have now to re-evaluate their economic interests and learn how to share them with their new unwelcomed neighbors.
While the theme was progressive, the film was marred by the ham-handed execution of Shantaram’s over-the-top presentation. The overt and irritating victimization symbolism of palm prints and prison bars was nauseatingly repeated too many times. One particularly hysterical scene in which the convicts refuse to retaliate the violence unleashed on them by the villagers, when they bring their cultivated crops to the market square to sell them, because of the ahimsa or non-violent oath they have given to their jailer, is, in fact, spoilt and made utterly ridiculous when we see these men enduring their blows by clinging desperately and digging feverishly into their watermelons and their brinjals that burst into enormous rivulets of scattered seeds and juices mingling with the blood oozing from their wounds.
1958 in Hindi films began with a revival of the carnivalesque spirit that Guru Dutt had inaugurated in 1954/1955. This time the film-maker was Satyen Bose, and the film was Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. It introduced, perhaps for the only time, Hindi film’s one very valiant attempt at rivaling the anarchic antics of Hollywood’s very famous trio: the Marx Brothers. Bose presented us with India’s own version of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in the familiar trinity of the Bengali Ganguly brothers. The eldest, portrayed by Ashok Kumar, was good at two things, besides repairing a car. He ran a garage with his two brothers, and when not tinkering with cars, loved to box and was a confirmed misogynist. He came through as a curious combination of Groucho, especially in all his nasty asides about the world, and possessed the haughty demeanor of the stoical Margaret Dumont. The middle brother, portrayed by Anoop Kumar, was the dumb one and the constant bumbler. He took on the Harpo mantle and had to have his acts of anarchy actually explained to him by his brothers since he was constantly complaining “Manoo, aab mere Kya hoga” or “Manoo, what will happen to me?” It was the youngest brother, played by Kishore Kumar, who with his combination of Chico’s chicanery and Groucho’s irreverence really unleashed the Marxian iconoclasm directed against the respectable likes of Raja Hardayal and his son Kumar Pradeep. The unmasking of their nefarious deeds and the removing of all the respectable haloes placed by society around their heads became their Marxian resolve.
Aiding them in their deliciously riotous enterprise was a voluptuous heroine played by Madhubala, and a 1928 Chevrolet jalopy. While the former had to bear the slings and arrows of the two elder brothers plus the cupid darts of the youngest one who had fallen madly in love with her, the later functioned with all the oiled panache borrowed gleefully from Hollywood’s Mack Sennet silent-film tradition of comedy, speeding up and slowing down the zany action from Bombay’s Nariman Point to its Bandra suburban garage. Even the superbly composed and rendered musical numbers by S.D. Burman showed a skillful and clever adaptation of popular western songs. Burman’s sexy “Ek laadhki bheegi bhaagi see” or “a lady, wet and running in the rain” was based on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s hit-topper “Sixteen Tons,” but in the context of the film was orchestrated brilliantly by musical sounds all created from common garage implements and tools, some weighing less and some weighing more than sixteen tons! Other songs displayed the virtuous complexities of the proverbial Marx Brothers verbal dexterity that deliberately confused and baffled their opponents, especially the wonderful “Hum thé, woh thi, who thi, hum thé” or “we were, she was, was she, were we” and that’s when “love happened” or “pyar ho gayan” song.
The laughter generated by this Bombay-made film did have an epiphanic trickle down effect for Nehru’s plans in 1958. It gave him the much needed optimism to greet the British Prime Minister of England, Harold MacMillan on his first official visit to India, not as a colonizer, but as an equal. But it was with the same optimism that the Aga Khan, Prince Karin, was installed in India as the head of the Ismaili Community in Bombay. His handsome face now looked down, smilingly and openly, from every shoe shop in Bombay. All the black motor-oil pumped up so feverishly by the Ganguly brothers made India’s first milk serialization plant flow with its glowing white liquid at the newly inaugurated Aarey Milk Colony in Bombay. The nation’s first Indian Institute of Technology was also opened by Nehru in Bombay and Wilson Jones, a Poona based Anglo-Indian, ended that wonderful year, by winning the World Amateur Billiards title for India at Calcutta. Like the title of the film, Nehru’s India was certainly “Chalte” or “on the move,” in 1958.
(To be continued)
“WOH SUBAH KABHI TO AYEGI” from “PHIR SUBAH HOGI” : FULL TITLE SONG !
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Darius Cooper teaches Critical Thinking in the Humanities at San Diego Mesa College, California, USA. His essays, poems and stories have been widely published in several film and literary journals in USA and India A sample: Between Tradition and Modernity: the Cinema of Satyajit Ray (Cambridge University Press).In Black and White: Hollywood Melodrama and Guru Dutt(Seagull Publications).Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill (first book of poems) (Poetrywalla Pub).A Fuss About Queens and Other Stories (Om Books).
More by Darius Cooper in The Beacon: “The Adventures of Goopy & Bagha”: Critical Rendering of a Fairy Tale. BETWEEN THUMBPRINTS AND SIGNATURES Louis Malle’s Phantom India at 50: “Tabula Rasa” As Phantom APOSTLESHIP in SANT TUKARAM and ST FRANCIS: STATE of GRACE in CINEMA COMING HOME TO PLATO’S CAVE OR, DEATH OF CRITICAL THINKING RITWIK GHATAK’S ‘MYTHIC WASTELAND’
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