| An Indian in Paris By Lavina Melwani
Jaya
Ganga’s Vijay Singh.
Nabha,
his hometown, is just 15 km away from Patiala in the
Punjab. But for the last 30 years noted writer and filmmaker
Vijay Singh has lived continents away in Paris, the
City of Light. A contributor for major French publications
like Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique and Liberation,
he is perhaps the only journalist there who writes in
English and whose work is regularly translated into
French for the dailies.
Indeed, it is here - far from India - that he has written
critically acclaimed books, produced documentaries and
a feature film, of which the subject has often been
India. His books include Whirlpool of Shadows, La Nuit
Poignardee, Jaya Ganga: In Search of the River Goddess,
and The River Goddess, all from major publishers like
Penguin, Gallimard Jeunesse and Jonathan Cape.
The books have been translated into French and other
European languages. He was awarded the Prix Villa MÈdicis
hors les murs for foreign literature in 1990 and the
Bourse Leonardo de Vinci in 1994. He also won awards
for Man and Elephant, the love story of a mahout and
an elephant, which was been shown on 100 television
channels internationally.
Ever since he was a child, Singh has had a fascination
for the River Ganges and it has found its way into his
writings and is the spirit behind his acclaimed feature
film Jaya Ganga based on his book of the same name.
Observes Singh: "I thought Ganga was the ideal thread
for my story - a great river, a great goddess, a great
woman, she is beautiful, she's charming, she's erotic,
she's erratic, she is sense and nonsense, an ideal companion
for my big journey. Incidentally, the Vedas and other
ancient scriptures were born on the banks of this very
river. That's where Hinduism first took form."
This hauntingly beautiful film, with its rich music
and lush photography, is romance, mystery, surreal fable,
travelogue and an ode to the River Goddess all rolled
into one, and Singh who had journeyed down the Ganges
- 2,500 kilometers in a skim boat for 5 months while
writing the book - repeated the journey for the film,
only this time with half of India's population surrounding
him!
"The audience thinks that the Benares scenes in my film
have been shot so naturally and effortlessly," says
Singh. "Good heavens! If only they knew there was a
crowd of 3,000 around the camera and 70 armed cops controlling
them. The most challenging part of the shoot was the
trip to the source of the river Ganges --38 kilometers
on foot, 4,000 metres up in the Himalayas, 32 porters,
no roads, no tracks, landslides - I almost lost my cameraman
in a landslide."
Jaya Ganga premiered at the World Film Festival in Montreal,
and was also shortlisted for the Prix Franaois Chalais
Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. The film
ran for 49 weeks in four art house theatres in Paris
and was shown to enthusiastic audiences in Canada, the
U.K., Europe and India. The film got stunning press,
especially in the UK, where it played in 75 cities.
It's played in 35 countries, been shown in several film
festivals and also made a star of Singh's discovery,
the striking Smriti Mishra, who has been compared to
the late Smita Patel and who went on to star in Shyam
Benegal's Sardari Begum. "Before intruding into the
world of cinema, I had always thought that writing,
as compared with cinema, was more magical, more meditative,
more fulfilling for the soul. I no longer feel quite
the same," says Singh.
"The difference probably is that writing is more private:
everything takes place in a tiny space, in silence,
in isolation. On the set, a film director is as naked
as a bird: everything takes place out in the open, on
the surging waters of a Ganga, on the maddening ghats
of Benares, in the midst of five thousand people vying
to catch a glimpse of the shoot while you are trying
to film a silent tear-drop. So the meditation is the
same: a writer meditates in isolation, a director does
it in the midst of a clamouring crowd."
Passionate about words, ideas and cinema,
Singh is not so excited about the promotional aspect
of his work, and that's one reason most people in the
United States have not seen Jaya Ganga at all or read
the book. Recently the director was in New York for
a private screening of the film and to distribute the
movie in this country, as well as raise funding for
his next film.
While in New York, he met with Little India and discussed
his life and times in Paris. He was born in the Punjab
(" I explain to my western friends that while all Sikhs
are Singhs, not all Singhs are Sikh) where his father
was a state surgeon. After studying History at St Stephen's
College, Delhi, and Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, he received a scholarship
to Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris,
for his doctoral work.
Like the elite achievers of his generation, his thinking
was intellectually formed by Jean Paul Sartre and other
French thinkers. In 1976, he wrote and directed a play
Waiting for Beckett by Godot, bringing together the
thinkers he admired the most - Beckett, Sartre and Andre
Bretton. Not knowing a word of French, he landed in
Paris to do his thesis work on popular creativity in
the streets and cabarets of 19th century Paris, dealing
with the history of prostitution, the history of alcoholism,
and history of madness.
" There are people who write poetry with words and there
are those who write with silence," he observes. "So
the people who write their poetry in silence were the
subject of my thesis. There is a grain of madness in
all of us, and in some of us it's more pronounced."
Indeed, Nadja or Jaya - a half real, half imaginary
woman - was the muse for his book Jaya Ganga.
In Paris, Singh's writing career took off unexpectedly.
In India he had been an activist for railway and textile
workers and felt somewhat vindicated by Mitterand's
victory in 1981, a victory of the Left. He recalls,
"At a seminar about India I felt a lot of nonsense was
being spoken, so I gave a fiery political speech. I
came home, partly sad, partly revolting and wrote an
article on caste and class in India today and since
I wasn't a journalist I wrote 38 pages!" He sent two
copies out, one to Simone de Beauvoir, the editor of
Les Temps Modernes and the other one to the editor in
chief of Le Monde.
Amazingly, Le Monde published the article in its entirety
and it became a calling card for Singh. The next day
he also received a call from Liberation, Jean-Paul Sartre's
paper, and the second major daily in France, and he
wrote for it for the next eight years. In the years
that have followed he has become a leading authority
on India in Paris. Yet he is not as well known in America,
England or India, perhaps because of the absence of
his presence in the Anglophone world. So people often
ask him 'Why Paris?"
Indeed, why Paris? For someone who is so deeply involved
with India, he now lives in a country with just 3,000
Indian passport holders, including himself. Does he
feel Indian or French in his skin? The answer, perhaps,
is both. Explains Singh, "I do see myself as French.
The first thing that I did when I landed in New York
was to call Paris to get the results of the election!
Yes, I do feel French, I speak the language fluently
and I work with Le Monde. I go on television interviews
- interacting with the movers and shakers - and I feel
a part of the power structure of the country. I feel
I belong there. I don't feel any sense of non-assimilation
or anything. I love French men and women and I've been
there for a long time and for me, it's home."
Then he adds, "Despite all that, your own language is
your own language. I sometimes feel, am I going to die
in a foreign language? When I went to England to present
my film, the amount of love those people gave me, I
feel I need to open my eyes and go back to my roots
in some ways. My life is just a series of accidents
and the good or bad thing is I accept them," says Singh.
"Now that I've turned 50 two months ago, I'm reconsidering
my choices."
In Paris, there are very few Indians though the desi
face is very visible there. According to Singh, there
are about 100,000 Pakistanis and about 50,000-100,000
Tamilian refugees as well as a Bangladeshi presence
too. Still, Singh has never really derooted himself
from India and has not had to choose between two worlds.
He met his wife, an Indian who is a French expert, in
Paris two days after the release of his book Jaya Ganga
and interestingly, her name, Mandakini, is also a synonym
for the Ganges. The couple travel to India several times
a year.
He points out that he came to Paris not out of economic
necessity, but for the richness of her culture and so
there is no fear of assimilation. He says, "If you're
not scared of interacting with different cultures then
where is the problem? I once wrote an article for a
magazine in which said that my Carte de Resident was
not given by the police department, but by the French
girls! It's by meeting them and in the act of making
love that there's the greatest assimilation of a foreign
culture."
Singh is once again putting aside his writing to make
a film. One Dollar Curry is a social satire about immigration
and a group of French financiers and producers are putting
up $4 million. This amount, however, goes down if the
film is not made in French. Since so many people are
encouraging him to make the film in English for it to
get a wider viewing, Singh was in New York to raise
funds to make up the shortfall. He also met with possible
American distributors and plans to shoot the film in
August-September in Paris.
Asked for the secret of straddling different cultures
and still keeping one's sanity, Singh says, "I don't
think about what's going to happen next. I don't treat
life very seriously. What keeps me going is the element
of surprise - I would like to surprise the world and
I would like to be surprised by life - the two of them
together."
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