It was a dark and stormy night

A year-end musing on masala-fry taste


It was a dark and stormy night

The obscure 19th century writer, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, has left behind at least two lines that have notched him a couple of cuts on the scratching post of posterity. They are both acute masala-fry lines with instant appeal to people such as ourselves who can’t, or more correctly won’t, make up their minds whether their films are thrillers or dramas or musicals or comedies or tragedies or all of the above and then some.

The first Bulwer-Lytton line is lampooned by fashionable creative writing courses on both sides of the Atlantic. It is the tagline of the annual Bad Writing Awards handed out in the UK and named after the poor man, no less. It is this innocent little phrase: It was a dark and stormy night.

Personally, my Indian heart can’t see what’s wrong with it. It may indeed be a little opaque but conveys the moot point perfectly well. It has also turned into a fashionable cliché or was it already one when Bulwer-Lytton inked it in at the start of his novel Paul Clifford in 1830?

In point of fact, the phrase was actually the start of a reasonably long compound sentence; one that ran to the size of a short paragraph. But, if the objection is to the turgidity of long compound sentences and their stretch-limo style construction, then why not say so instead of picking on the opening line?

But, like Charles M Schulz’s star Beagle Snoopy, who loved and made this melodramatic opening line famous, yes, in all of Schulz’s syndicated glory, I like it too.

The world’s most famous Beagle used it whenever he worked his iconic Olympia Traveller, pounding on it, Schroeder-like, playing the novelist, atop his dog-house, starting, but alas, never finishing, a series of books with it.

For Snoopy’s ever attendant friend, Woodstock the bird, even this act of borrowing Bulwer-Lytton’s resounding line was an act of considerable genius, worthy of fulsome applause.

But the modern day Western literary critic is a bird of a more dyspeptic hue. For him, repository of smart 20th century literary opinion, English-speaking, white, upper class, understated, tweedy, Baron Bulwer-Lytton can’t write.

Ours may truly be a different sensibility,Hindu,having been reared on 40,000 Gods, the Ramayana and Mahabharata rather than The Bible, The Illiad and The Odyssey; at least in terms of one’s diet of myths of childhood; but one feels oppressed, stripped, as if, of aesthetic sense. One feels like calendar art, lurid, or a two dimensional cartoon character, unable to discern a bad line from a good one.

But to be fair, the trans-Atlantic pundits weren’t thinking of us, our temperamental differences, our polytheism and so on, when they set out to mock their own dark and stormy to a man, inclusive of those long, run-on Bulwer-Lytton sentences aforementioned.


Perhaps it has something to do with the Western urge towards order and homogeneity, the unitary, that One God principle, but if these litpundits had their way, they’d have every writer and aspirant turn into the literary equivalent of late method actor Marlon Brando - and the more contending incoherence the better; particularly when filled out by the beauty and length of eyelash on Marlon!

Or, if writers must be compared to writers; like apples to apples: to Ernest Hemingway; never mind that he spent most of his sentient years battling erectile dysfunction and outright impotence. What counts is that he did it with macho hunting escapades and yards of drink! So what if all this heroic effort caused no more than desultory twitches in his urge to penetrate. What matters to the litpundit in his lair is Hemingway’s spare, whittled down, implication-laden short sentences! The suffering, the big man’s-man impotence, is so much grist to the mill, but Papa never let it lead to over-writing like dear old Bulwer-Lytton, did he? So fecundity be damned and do not mention the millions of Victorian London whores. Creativity must, if it is to be applauded, run along neat pathways of well crafted words and well bred emanations of emotion.

Still, persuasive as this sounds, I’m not ready to buy this line.I’ll take my emerging Asian market chances; possessed as I am of the effrontery to find dark and stormy still fresh and evocative! To me, it has a pregnant and suspenseful Mary Shelley style Prometheus or Frankenstein about it. It raises expectations. It makes you look forward to what comes next in a lip-smacking ketchup and Tarantino sort of way. Honestly, it is a classic- a Shammi Kapoor “yahoo” of a ham-fisted offering, an ingredient for a hit, redoubtable and reassuringly familiar, dear old masala –fry bubbling on the kadhai.

The other line, used so often that you’d think it came from folklore or the editor of the newspaper with the weakest circulation in the land, is this: The pen is mightier than the sword. There it is, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote that one too!

This sentence, sometimes turned caption to a cartoon on a self-important scribe, is not otherwise derided at all. It might remind an idle mind of the Fall of the Roman Empire, complete with campy centurions in skirts brandishing short and shiny jabbing-swords; but it too succeeds in running to just as much of a cliché!

Bulwer-Lytton’s body of work, prose, poetry and letters, is obscure but not negligible. He didn’t exactly lack readership or critical acclaim in his time. A time, let it be remembered, when pianos wore drawers and the prostitute population of London outnumbered other women four is to one! A time perhaps, when melodrama was not entirely disliked, particularly behind closed doors when the stays could come off and Victorian rectitude be rested on the brass bedpost for a spell.

To wit, Bulwer-Lytton’s letters to his son and others betray a certain self-satisfaction. But, all in all, it was just as well that he was a bona fide aristocrat, a Baron with an independent income, the sensibilities, friends and connections. This worked in an era when a pint or two of Anglo-Saxon/Norman blue blood, a family seat, and a genuine title affixed to your moniker ensured you were part of the flotilla that ruled those Britannic waves.

But as far as I’m concerned, it is just good to know that Bulwer-Lytton, rather like our less than “A list” Bollywood actors, felt no pain during his lifetime, notwithstanding the ridicule heaped on his literary name today.

And for us, for those of us who might want to take this linemeister to heart, there is an India connection too. It came via his child and grand-children and it is this: Bulwer-Lytton’s son, after turning down the proffered Governorship of Madras, became Viceroy to India.

Robert, Lord Lytton, Viceroy, 1876-1880, presided over a humdinger of a famine, the first Afghan War and the “Empress Durbar” in 1877 which proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India. He also designed various protocols and intricate gun salutes to calibrate the relative importance of each of the princely states, all 558 of them! Lytton enjoyed himself over this - some kings with kingdoms the size of football fields got no guns at all, several middling ones got 9, the biggest and the best got 21, and the Viceroy gave himself a chandelier rocking 31- so that no-one was left in any doubt as to which tribe, in effect, ruled India!

Drama, like mousiness, can, and does run, in one’s blood.

But all this high-dudgeon was not what Robert the Viceroy was all that keen on. What he wanted, was to be a writer, just like papa. His letters refer to it time and again, pining, and sentimental yearning that indicated that he wanted to match up to his father’s perceived literary stature. Robert did write furiously in his youth, stacks of poems of indifferent quality, using the foppish pen-name Owen Meredith, only to wilt gradually, damned by faint praise and stymied by neglect. His novel- in-verse Lucile was probably the high-water mark. It was made into a film too, in 1912, more than a decade after his death in 1891, but nothing much came of that either.

Fortunately, goaded by his father, who probably suffered the pitfalls and pangs of the literary life even if he didn’t plumb its depths; Robert did take up a parallel career in diplomacy. He began as the Ambassador’s dogsbody at the British Mission in Washington, working for his Minister uncle; served happy years in Italy and various spots in Europe; and reached the zenith of his career in India. And later, after some years in the wilderness, he was appointed Ambassador to France. Interestingly, Robert Lytton even died in the act of composing a poem.

His son, dark and stormy’s Simla-born grandson, was briefly Viceroy in the 1920s too. It was a short stint in between holding down the seat as Governor of Bengal between 1922-1927. The grandson, all Victor Alexander George Robert of him, ran into quite a few dark storms of his own trying to contain the burgeoning freedom movement- scrapping with Sir Ashutosh at Calcutta University one day and working out how to keep the non-violent Mohandas Karamchand at bay on another!

There is more. The first Lord Lytton’s daughter Emily married one Edwin Lutyens, the talented arch-imperialist who designed Rashtrapati Bhavan and a good deal of New Delhi besides. Lutyens laboured away, anchoring his thoughts on the belief that it would all endure. It was an Albert Speerish notion, as it turned out, because the Raj lasted just twenty years after Viceroy House was built.

Perhaps Edwin should have taken a cue from his wife Emily who became the most ardent follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti. She also befriended the young and promiscuous Annie Besant and the growing Indian Freedom Movement. Edwin didn’t pay any heed to Emily’s native infatuations, of course, and probably didn’t need to, because imperial and obtuse to the last as he was, cursing Indian architectural traditions even as he stole from them, it is Edwin Lutyens, and not India loving Emily, who is remembered today.

Going full circle to grandfather Bulwer-Lytton, it must be understood that there is something of the genesis about this pen and sword business, not to mention the dark and stormy sally. They both have oodles of a certain je ne sais quoi fanfare about them. Bulwer-Lytton probably wrote like that all the time, with a touch of Victorian drama verging on the mawkish.

It was probably in his blood because his son picked up on it, wielding both pen and sword, and so did the grandchildren, and who knows, perhaps the great-great and the great-great-greats - are still doing it!

But if Bulwer-Lytton were alive today, and if he cared to put his quill to it, he’d go down a Salim-Javed-treat in Bollywood. After all, as his progeny realised soon enough, when they were here, we take our melodrama very seriously and see absolutely no reason to laugh at it in the interests of taste.

(1,855 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Thursday 20th December 2007

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

No good deed goes unpunished

No good deed goes unpunished- it’s a strange and mysterious thing to say, and coming, as it does, from a Protestant priest, one William Sloan Coffin, sometime Chaplain at Yale University and the presiding minister at Riverside Church in New York City; it is doubly intriguing and enigmatic.

I came across it again, this phrase, glibly tossed off by the Irish film star Pierce Brosnan, delivering a line in the film version of The Tailor of Panama based on a book by John Le Carre. It’s a spy story, but it is also a squirmy tussle between moral turpitude and redemption, subtle and masterfully evocative, fuelled by guilt and underscored by a hard-defended integrity. You might call it all so much classic grist to the mill for the inevitable suffering induced by do-goodism of the kind Mr. Coffin had in mind. No wonder then, that Brosnan used Coffin’s fine line in the film. It was, as they say, a damn good fit.

But even in isolation, the phrase intrigues- you can’t readily decide whether it’s just unwarranted cynicism, or quite true; specially, if you think about it a bit. And when you do so, you feel a cold and heartless finger prodding you in the ribs bringing you just a touch of despair. You have to ask yourself - isn’t the well-lived life about performing good deeds? Whatever am I meant to make of the boy scout ethic now?

But immediately after this rather destabilising thought, another one, even worse than the first, quickly follows. It’s a dark notion, this one, but it brings relief, as apparent solutions to puzzles often do, even if the accompanying logic seems a tad woolly. It is simply this-good deeds somehow provoke the environment and invite retaliation.

This is because doing good is rarely selfless. If it were, it probably wouldn’t concern itself with outcomes and certainly wouldn’t care two hoots about credit. But truth be told, do-goodism, more often than not, is shot through with lesser or greater measures of ambition, self-aggrandising ambition to be precise. So, this proverb-like statement of Mr. Coffin’s, refers to just desserts for hubris; for sneakily seeking recompense for your immortal soul; for playing at mahatma as if the business of developing a great soul was some kind of plug-and-play device.

But what has this priestly philosophy got to do with Narendra Modi’s impending re-election in Gujarat? Apart from the Party with the lotus symbol projecting him as The Saviour you mean? Well, in the alleys and the gullies they are saying that if he wins, it is a sure fire beacon of hope for the Hindutva fuelled Right and all its Modi-mask wearing acolytes. Some others are saying that like Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, the home state of Gujarat and the gaddi at Gandhinagar may not be able to contain Mr. Modi’s ambition for very much longer. And that he will shortly be vying for the prime ministership, maybe as early as 2008 or 2009 along with Behenji from Lucknow.

Interesting possibility certainly. Consider that both are as yet state politicians, but politicians of daring and rare conviction, not ashamed to push and promote the cult of their own personalities; and newly arrived at their eminence as possible contenders for national power.

Consider also that they have both demonstrated spectacular dynamism and vision. In Modi’s case, the achievements are economic and in terms of social upliftment, even as his failure to take all people, particularly the minority community along for the ride, is the biggest black mark against him. And in Mayawati’s case, it is the spectacular forging together of a rainbow coalition encompassing disparate castes and creeds that happens to be her crowning glory. For both contenders, it is likely, that the road ahead is going to be even more spectacular than the distance already travelled.

And who knows, they might make for natural allies in future. They both have the requisite audacity and intelligence certainly.

But all this street talk is worrisome, even alarming, to all those other do-gooders who run some risk of becoming redundant as the situation evolves along these lines. What will become of the stars of the present firmament at the centre, communists and anti-communalists like Messrs. Yechury and Karat of the frequent threats for example? And what of old war-horse LK Advani and tyagi Sonia Gandhi and the great dimpled white hope of the future generations who populates only teasers and trailers as yet? What fate will befall his Blackberry flaunting brat pack? And what about all those hoary old loyalists heavy with experience and know-how? And what of those dark glass clad regional satraps in their capes and cowls, their jaunty moustaches and gigantic tilaks? These too, after all, are all considerable do-gooders in their own right.

Apparently, the days of outright wins at the centre are over. But that’s what everyone said about Uttar Pradesh till Mayawati showed them how it’s done. And they say Modi is too dictatorial to form a coalition at the centre if he needs too. But that’s exactly what they used to say about the Defender of the Dalits too till she started defending Brahmins and Muslims and the in-between castes as well. Circumstances change and the real Modi without the mask is likely to change right alongside. I remember Narendra Modi well from his days as a BJP spokesperson making reasonable comments on all the news channel talk shows. And now the same man is a demagogue with a 56” chest. Tomorrow, if it is statesman time, Narendrabhai, like Soniabehn, will not be found wanting.

But what if Modi loses. What will it mean? Will it imply that he’s been too good for his own good? Will all the collective good he has done so far, so thoroughly outweigh the good done by his adversaries, that he is fated to be punished as per Coffin’s aphorism?

Happily for Modi, the converse might well turn out to be true.He might survive because it is revealed that he really hasn’t done as much good as he thinks!

Whatever the electoral outcome, if Coffin’s right, do-gooding is a hazardous business better left to the Opposition.

(1,042 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Monday 10th December 2007

Also published on the EDIT PAGE of The Pioneer on Friday 21st December, 2007

The Greasy Pole of Power Politics & The Slippery Slope of Reform

Book Review


The Politics Of Change, A Ringside View by NK Singh
Published by Penguin Viking/ The Express Group, 2007
254 pages,Rs.395/-

The Greasy Pole Of Power Politics & The Slippery Slope of Reform

NK Singh’s new book The Politics of Change is a selection of 63 of some 125 articles contracted for by the Indian Express Group, appearing from June 2004 onwards. The first one in the series, in a column entitled Ringside View, which also forms the subtitle to this book, was penned shortly after Singh retired from the IAS to become Deputy Chairman of the Bihar State Planning Board.

The articles in this book are grouped into sections such as Globalising India, India and China, Multilateral Relations, Infrastructure, Energy, Reforms, Political Dynamics, Managing the Economy and States Of The Union. But such compilations, particularly on matters of sonorous economic policy, do end up frustrating the interested reader owing to the necessary brevity of the newspaper format, carried over, unnecessarily, into a book.

It would perhaps have been more rewarding, also less dated, and more representative of the writer’s abilities, if the topics and sub-topics had been explored at greater depth in an integrated continuous narrative. This particularly, as in the India of today, as Singh points out himself, yesterday is clearly no indicator for our tomorrows. So much so, that the economic perspectives of 2004 and 2005 seem insufficiently robust and confident, as if haunted by the years of moribund socialism that preceded them.

In all the articles, too short to be called essays, Singh bears witness to a plethora of conferences, some symposia and a sheaf of studies and reports, both national and international. And throughout, he makes consistent, if mild reformist noises, averring repeatedly that government policy must change towards greater openness, transparency and hold a brief for competition. This careful balancing act is designed to nudge our political masters towards a more modern and confident polity, rather than criticise, beyond, that is, a flutter or two of frustration at the slow pace of progress. This positivist stance is understandable in its desire to commend the glass as half full, but makes one wonder whether senior bureaucrats, with a stake in continuance and keen on being palatable, are able to do justice to their independent thoughts, particularly when they are aired in the public domain.

While none should quarrel with Singh’s reasonable and forward looking views, though Mr. Prakash Karat & Company will disagree, with even this measured tread; it is Shekhar Gupta of Indian Express, in his foreword to the book, who credits Singh with the quiet and extremely successful privatisation of ICICI Bank. It is this not widely known revelation which rescues “NK’s” reputation as a doer. It also allows the reader to veer away from the suspicion that here is yet another semi-retired bureaucrat/soldier/diplomat/politician who’s turned armchair theorist - now that he is substantially beyond harm.

Singh on his part, gamely hints both in style and substance throughout the book at salutary contributions that he has made throughout the agonisingly slow reforms process initiated in the nineties, from each of his various positions of bureaucratic power in the Ministries of Commerce and Finance, in the PMO and the Planning Commission at the Centre.

He also candidly acknowledges that there is much yet to be done and warns that the work that lies ahead has the potential to choke off the growth we have been enjoying of late, unless infrastructure and other bottlenecks are speedily removed.

But in the end, it is clear as a subtext in all the articles, that bureaucrats are able to implement only what the politicians let them. The bureaucrat, however exalted, cannot force the pace of change, for better or worse. He also cannot do very much about the adoption of particular policy directions over others.

But then it is the politician that faces the electorate and enjoys power only as long as he wins his election! So, it is he who decides what to do, in his elected-representative- laced superior wisdom, or lack of it!

So, to fulfil his policy making ambitions, now that NK Singh’s file pushing days are
nearly over, it might be noted that his relative youth marks him out as a good prospect for the
political arena. But if NK Singh does join active politics, there may well have to be changes made, in tone and tenor, like Yashwant Sinha and Mani Shankar Aiyar, civil servicemen both, who took the plunge before him.

We will then have to contrast the dulcet silk and Saville Row semantics of NK Singh’s current pronouncements with the media reported thunder and lightning of the impending state election in Gujarat - to illustrate this point. But then, it may be more appropriate to liken NK’s political profile and chances, should he want to take them, to our current reformist Prime Minister, who is not doing half badly as a former academic and Wold Banker turned politician. All NK needs is a political mentor or two like Prime Minister Singh and Bob’s your uncle.

(850 words)
By Gautam Mukherjee
Sunday, 9th December 2007

Also published in the BOOKS section of The Sunday Pioneer on December 23rd,2007

This and all other essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2007 by Gautam Mukherjee. All rights reserved.