Colin MacCabe's Blog

The person who I saw most of in Hyderabad was Ramesh my auto driver. After a succession of grisly encounters with drivers who understood neither my directions or the city, Ramesh was a life saver. He knew the city backwards, he was unendingly cheerful and he had large English vocabulary. How he acquired this vocabulary was a mystery. When I asked him he said from his passengers but I found this difficult to believe. He was always drawing my attention to things that he thought would interest me. The most memorable was when he made me get out of the cab to watch the eclipse of Venus to which he attached great significance. On our last night I gave him an envelope with money in it and a speech about what his friendship had meant to me. He was not greatly interested in money or speech but desperate to get my phone number. Today he rings from Hyderabad to wish me a Happy Christmas. Flavia, Johanna and Finn are staying with us, Fergus , Idania, Idania’s mother and Niamh come over. When I hold Niamh I whisper in her ear that I hope that I will live long enough to take her to India to meet her godsister Thara.

The first text comes at 9 am from Hanif. Anita Bennet rings at 11 then all my children. Christopher is dead.

From: Maccabe, Colin <maccabe@pitt.edu>

To: Chris Hitchens <chitch8003@aol.com>

Sent: Fri, Aug 20, 2010 1:11 am

Subject: Love

Dear Christopher,

I have been following your bravery with awe and admiration. I look

forward to seeing you on the evening of September 30th. Don’t make any

effort for me. If you are too ill or too tired to talk then I will talk with

your wife and daughter,

Despite my Irish blood, I am an Englishman and it is therefore always

difficult to express emotions.But to adapt a phrase of yours I’d rather

regret saying it than not saying it. I should also add that Flavia is of the

opinion that just as your body has defied all medical opinion for the last

thirty years, that you will trundle on regardless for many years to come.

But I do want to say before you go whether that is in three or thirty years

that you have been the best of friends, that my life has been richer and

more amusing at every level because of you and that, as I am sure you know,

I love you

Colin

P.S. If there is anything that you wish me to do, you have of course only to

ask. I trust that it can keep until Sept 30th but if it can’t then write at

once.

From: <chitch8003@aol.com>

Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 23:15:33 -0400

To: University of Pittsburgh <maccabe@pitt.edu>

Subject: Re: Love

Dearest Colin,

As you so rightly say, there are some emotions in English friendship that lie too deep for expression. But this need not mean that they need always go unsaid. Let it suffice to say that if our positions were reversed I would write to you – I hope as eloquently – in precisely the same terms.

A husky clasp, then, until next month. And my love to all your tribe.

Fraternally as always.

Christopher

Finn, our youngest son is sharing the house at Addison Avenue. Tory, his godmother, thinks him a delightful guest. I am not so sure as I search for vital papers, books, clothes. But it is a delight when he comes home from his first day on a commercials shoot. He is fizzing with energy and excitement. In 24 years I have only seen him like this when Arsenal scores a goal. He talks and talks – showing me the call sheets and budgets. I notice that they have spent over £300,000 in one day, more than I spent in a week on the feature films I produced. India is already becoming a dream.

Our whole stay in India has been overshadowed by Christopher Hitchens’s impending death. When I saw him last at the end of February in California I thought that he had weeks to live.  But he has hung on, writing away. Long before he got ill he told me that he didn’t want to live one day after he could no longer write and each week I check Slate to see if his column is there. I also ring his wife Carol every two or three weeks. My last e-mail exchange with Christopher had come in October when I’d read an article of his syndicated in a Hyderabadi paper:

Dear Christopher,

I hope Carol told you of my delight in picking up a local Hydrobadi

paper and finding your ruminations on Al Awlaki. Bloody good.

Very much hoping to see you in Washington in January to get your thoughts on

India. Mine in brief:

For: full of life, charm and beautiful women.

Against: can’t get a decent curry, filthy.

You are much in my thoughts and also Laura Antonia. Should she need help or

support, I will endeavour to provide.

Love

Colin

Christopher replied:

Well, the Awlaki insights came mainly from the son-and-heir. Glad that you liked them.

From far off share your impressions of India, which we must bind to us as a friend against the hellishness

of Pakistan.

Love to Flaves, and to you.

Always

Christopher

The signing off seemed valedictory and I have been waiting for a summons to a funeral ever since. When I ring Carol to check in it is obvious that Christopher is very ill indeed. But for the first time I entertain the faint chance that I will see him again when I get to the States in January.

Saturday 10th  December

I rise at 3.30 am to go to the airport. Flavia is staying on another day with Marius and  Spiv. As I stumble down the stairs , I bump into Partha who says he was up late studying and decided to come and say goodbye.  Partha’s genial presence and husky voice is part of the texture of the Eflu campus.  In my very first week here Partha turned up at my door with a pot of haleem and his is a good last face to see. Then it is off on the trip to the airport. The sweeping women are already out on the streets , bent double over their hopeless brooms sweeping dust from one place to another. I came to India to see if there was an alternative to China. It’s certainly an alternative and more pleasurable in many ways. But if I was looking for a political way forward, India is another impasse.

I also came to India to try to acquire some genuine knowledge about Buddhism. Very early on I booked Flavia and me on an eight day enlightenment train journey round the holy sites of Buddhism on the India – Nepalese border. Things began to look unpromising when it became clear that Flavia would not be able, because of her visa, to come on the day trip to Nepal. When I broached the matter with the guy who had sold me the ticket he said not to worry as “ your madam can stay in the hotel and fit in another couple of sessions of meditation”. Unfortunately he copied this incendiary note to my madam who had several forms of fit. I began to dread the journey and what it said about my karma when miraculously the trip was cancelled and my money refunded. I did in my last week have a very illuminating lunch with Santosh Raut who gave me Ambedkar’s life of the Buddha – it’s in my suitcase.

I met Flavia through my roommate at Cambridge Marius. In our fourth year we shared a house and I persuaded my friend Spiv to come and live with us. Marius and Spiv married and I am godfather to one of their four children. Spiv’s maiden name was d’Abreu and she had always understood that her grandfather d’Abreu was Portuguese. However in her fifties she had become perplexed as to how little was known of him or his family and started to research. What she discovered was that her grandfather was not Portuguese at all but an Indian Christian from Mangalore. What in previous eras might have been an occasion of anguish and distress  was in this era a wonderful excuse to go and discover long lost relatives and Marius and Spiv have been regular visitors to India for a decade. This year they are spending their first week with us in Hyderabad.

Priya has been desperate to meet Flavia ever since she arrived in September but Flavia has hardly been on campus. This week, however, we have given up the house at Domalguda and  are living in my apartment. Priya comes to dinner with Marius and Spiv.  They leave early, fatigued by the journey ,and we keep on talking. Priya seems to have developed a taste for wine and after another couple of glasses and while we are talking of cultural differences, she confesses to Flavia that when I had kissed her good night on Thursday after dinner at the Taj Krishna she had been completely overwhelmed because nobody had kissed her since she was a child. Flavia immediately jumped her up and kissed her warmly on both cheeks.  I was rather relieved at this as I suddenly felt that pursuing the cultural revolution I had started in Delhi might be rather more complicated than I thought. After we had stopped laughing we started discussing why physical contact was regarded so differently in European and Indian cultures. I advanced my theory that the Namaste far from being an elegant and polite greeting was a straightforward way of saying “Noli me tangere” and that sex and caste were intimately linked. Priya was having none of this – for her the Namaste was simply a feudal relic of no importance whatsoever. We could all agree, however, that touch did function differently not only in relation to kissing but also in the ease with which men held hands. I recalled that the first time I had crossed a road with Satya he had taken my hand and it had required all my will not to snatch it away. So we whiled away another bottle and then I accompanied Priya back to her hostel. As I walked back I was suddenly attacked by the nostalgia I would feel on leaving this campus where I had lived for more than five months.

She is standing at the top of the escalators one foot resting on a luggage cart and reading her Kindle. Even in her sixties she is strikingly beautiful. But that is not the adjective I would use to describe her. She is composed. This is remarkable given that she has spent forty one years in my company. Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for her, a well brought up English woman condemned to live in a family of wild Irish. But then I reflect that the alternative would have been to live with the English and I cease to feel sorry for her.

I cannot understand why she is already at the airport because I rose at 4 am to be here before her. However time ,which never changes in India, changes twice a year in England and the plane has arrived an hour earlier than I thought. Flavia usually travels very light but today she has a large suitcase with her. “What one earth is in I ask “. “Food”, she replies “I did a week’s shopping at Waitrose”. And so once again and for the last time we head into Hyderabad

They say all clouds have a silver lining. Some have two. Arantxa is my favourite pupil at EFLU. Of course you shouldn’t have favourite pupils but I can make my excuse that the class is over. Even better I can honestly say that by the end of any good class all of the pupils have become your favourites: all of them have said or written something instructive. But Arantxa is my favourite pupil. What first struck me was not her beauty; this is a very beautiful class, but her appearance. Almost all the young women in my class wear much the same dress: salwar kameez or a Westernised equivalent and they all have a uniform hair style  – long black hair tied in a plait. Arantxa wears another uniform – combat fatigues with her hair cut in a bob. I was further intrigued when she opted, without any suggestion from me, to write her long essay on Eastwood’s use of adaptations. Adaptation is one of my obsessions so any student who gets there unprompted has my attention. But what really caught my soul was when she stood up at the beginning of a class in October and asked in hesitating fashion if I would come to a debate on sexual politics that was being organized on the campus. What was astonishing about the request was that it was clear that she genuinely wanted to know what I thought. For three decades and more university feminists have asked my opinion about one topic or another but I have never felt that there was any interest in my answer other than to add to an already long charge sheet. Now for a moment I was transported back to my youth when young feminists asked me what I thought because they wanted to know. Unfortunately our plane back from Rajasthan got in too late that night in October but now the accidents of visas and airline schedules means that I have a free evening.

Killing two birds with one stone is an obsession of mine and I suggest to Aranatxa that we spend an evening out in Hitech city. Hitech city is what Hyderabad has become famous for. Here is where the information revolution is taking place if you believe the hype. I haven’t visited it in all my time here and I ask Arantxa if you can check out our options. Arantxa proves an ace researcher and soon my inbox is full of suggestions. Arantxa is specially pleased to have found an Irish bar called, with stunning originality, The Shamrock. I explain, as gently as I can, that Irish bars are one of my pet aversions. My childhood was spent above an Irish pub when an Irish pub was a pub that served draught Guinness (otherwise unobtainable in London) and before it had gained all the nauseating connotations of the last thirty years. However, Arantxa was so intrigued at the idea of an Irish bar that I relented. Arantxa has armed herself with maps and with Ramesh at the wheel we set out on the long drive to hi-tech city. As we drive I broach the topic of the evening with my controversial statement in my first class that the boys should shift the tables into a circle. This had apparently suggested a sexist division. I warmly defend my position on the grounds that if you don’t tell the boys to do it they will just leave it to the girls, that in general boys are physically stronger than girls and I have in my latter years become a great believer in politeness. I also say that Flavia would agree with me. My views radically change the next day when Flavia tells me that she doesn’t agree with me at all.

By the time we are getting into the importance of politeness, we are in Hi-tech city. Ramesh clearly is in foreign territory and Arantxa’s directions just seem to lead us further and further into a wilderness of half finished skyscrapers with the names of Wall Street firms tacked onto their crumbling foundations. This is Alphaville 2011, city of lost credit. Finally we get out at the foot of a particularly deserted and unfinished skyscraper. “This is it” says Arantxa and bounds up the half finished staircase like a wild Matrika. I have little choice but to follow. Sure enough and most improbably on the third floor is an Irish pub.

“This is no country for old men, the young in one another’s arms” In fact this is India so not actually in one another’s arms, but you get the idea. However, on the bright side there is a really good bar with proper American seats and we are soon ensconced.  Arantxa, proud of her research, tells me they have Irish specialties on the menu. Listen, I tell my young companion there are no Irish specialities. The people were kept in such poverty that a potato and a sliver of pig was considered a feast.  My ancestors were denied culinary invention. “No, no, look at the menu.”  I do. Herewith some of the Irish specialties available in Hyderabad: Chicken Breasts with Apple Cherry Chutney, Cheese stuffed Herb Chicken and Pollo Panna e Funghi. The Irish pub has become a pure signifier but we have drinks in our hands, food on order and I give Arantxa my personal history of feminism.

In my early twenties almost all the women who I most liked and admired Flavia Lambert, Denise Riley, Laura Mulvey, Jocelyn Cornwell were deeply affected by feminism, Germaine Greer in the first instance and then a whole wave of other writers.  Above all this affected sexual relationships, this was generation of women who were going to sleep with who they wanted, how they wanted and when they wanted independently of male norms or expectations. It was indeed a revolution and both very exciting and very frightening to live through. It was not long however before this late moment in the sixties became an early moment of the seventies both politicized and academised. This was the moment of the debates between radical feminism and socialist feminism. Much in these debates was of great interest but it was entirely confined to the politically committed and academically employed. The final stage was the setting up of women’s studies programs in the late seventies and early eighties. As with the very comparable establishment of film studies at the same time, this securing of a marginal academic base led to the debates becoming less central in the academy. While valuable work is done, the very central questions have hardened into politically correct dogma – in particular there has been no significant intellectual engagement with biology. “Well said Arantxa, that’s very interesting but I don’t know enough to counter your argument”. I hadn’t been aware I was making an argument but Arantxa is very sharp so I added, “ It remains the case that women’s control of their reproduction and sexuality is perhaps the most important political demand, certainly on the economic front, in the world. The young women who so excited and frightened me were the very first generation in the history of the species that had access to secure contraception. If we take Aristotle’s biological claim that man is an animal who lives in cities, a zoon politikon, then we are a species only 8,000 years old and it could be argued that the production of female contraception is the most significant event in those 8,000 years. We are living through the aftermath of that, it will be several generations before its consequences are fully felt politically.

By this time I had had enough of lecturing and we turned to gossip. As a general rule I consider gossiping with students to be beneath contempt as it ignores the relations of power and transference between teacher and student. But I am no longer a teacher at EFLU and anyway I have something to gossip about. This is the first term I have spent on a university campus since I was 21. I have seen more of these students in Nissi’s Chapatti Heaven and Sagar’s shop than I have in the classroom. Most important of all Arantxa’s questions and comments are fuelled by such a burning intensity for knowledge that I feel I cannot refuse to answer them. She makes me think of Bunyan’s Valiant for Truth.

And now it is time for home. Ramesh is waiting for us and and I thought again how lucky I was to have come to EFLU and what an awfully big adventure it had all been. As I look at Ramesh’s Auto in which I have spent so many hours, I wonder whether Joyce would have described it as a “low backed car”.  And so we proceeded back to campus.  And the man in the low backed car drove on as behind him the old professor and the young student talked of sirens, enemies of man’s reason, sexuality, performance, Clint Eastwood, adaptation and all manner of things.

One of the features of being in a strange culture is that one has very little idea of the social or political backgrounds of those with whom you are speaking. In England it takes one sentence, in the U.S. a paragraph and I can make a fair guess but In India I have no obvious linguistic or social cues. My one insight into Madhav came when we went together to a film conference. The conference had the distinctly unpromising title “Teaching Film Studies in India” . My plan was to snooze through the first day and escape to Eden Park for an England India cricket match on the second. To my amazement I found myself electric with attention the whole two days. I reaslised that the conference was not as it seemed when Madhuja Mukherjee, the Chair of the host department arrived looking like a film star, shortly followed by our animator Moinak Biswas, looking  like a very sleek film producer ( which it turned out he was). The first day was riveting in its analysis of how the four decades model of film studies was now superseded both by its own theoretical impasses and by the technological developments of the past decade which turned all our students into filmmakers..

It was half way through this first day that I realized that almost all the speakers were, with different topics and examples, starting from the kind of Marxist analyses that proliferated in the sixties and seventies in Communist parties all over the world. It wasn’t that they still espoused those analyses but they provided one of the crucial contexts for their thinking. I suddenly understood why I felt so at home and so invigorated. “The discussion is so good because they’re all ex-Communists “ I scribbled in a note to Mhadav who smiled in acknowledgment. Of course India is the one country in the world where Communist parties are thriving, indeed they have three of the them, the old pro Soviet Communist party of India , The Communist Party of India (Marxist) which split in 1964  and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) which gathered together in 2004 a whole host of parties and groupings engaged in armed struggle. The Maoists are generally referred to as Naxalities and I wonder how many of the conference have been sympathisers or activists .

After the first day of the conference we went off to dinner in a Chinese enclave of  Tangda which is a law unto itself. The chosen restaurant was the Golden Joy and the streets approaching it are so narrow that  I expected our car to get stuck. Nor was there much in the way of street lighting. Finally we arrived at a building that not only showed no sign of being a restaurant but proved to be darker inside than out.

As a general rule of thumb in India the less light showing in a restaurant the more likely it is to serve drink so there were likely to be compensations for the Stygian gloom. I did consider asking if the restaurant’s real name was the Black Hole of Calcutta but decided that I didn’t know the company well enough to risk what might be some terrible colonial faux pas. Finally right at the end of the restaurant I spied Madhav and other speakers from the conference, all of them with fifths of spirits in front of them which they were emptying rapidly

When I sat down at the table I intended to carry out a comprehensive survey of the social and political backgrounds of these pioneers of film studies in India. As it was I just got drunk. I did observe enough to see that this was a fellowship and that much of Madhav’s professional energies over the past two decades must have gone into establishing film studies. As we finished our dinner in Hyderabad I reflected that it made it all the more striking that his own work was now focussed on questions of language. However, we agree to think about the possibilities of mounting a multi-partner research project on Telegu cinema. My keenness to reflect on research possibilities is not simply intellectual. As my departure looms I am desperate to ensure my return to India.

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