Reflections on K. A. Abbas’s Rice and other stories, 1947

I recently chanced upon an old, yellowed copy of writer-journalist-film director Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s Rice and other stories, published in 1947 by Kutub, Bombay, with a preface by writer Mulk Raj Anand. Having seen most of the films that Abbas (1914-1987) wrote—all classics in their own right—such as Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (1946), his own Dharti ke Lal (1946), V. Shantaram’s Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (1946), and Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho (1956), I was curious about Abbas the short-story writer.

The book is a thin volume of ten short stories that can be read in one go. The stories are about ordinary people in ordinary situations— with candid glimpses into life’s extraordinary moments. Every now and then the veil lifts to reveal life’s surprises, its splendors, its ironies. Reality is what we see on the outside, but it is also what we fleetingly see on the inside, made visible through cracks and gaps. And it is those cracks and gaps that Abbas draws our attention to—although I distinctly felt a certain predictability about Abbas’s style, which kind of dampens the reader’s attention. The same does not hold true of his films, which are vastly more imaginative. Halfway through many of the stories, I correctly guessed what the ending would be! For me, maudlin is the word that describes the treatment of many of the stories.

The title story, “Rice,” is about Durga, a poor mill worker’s wife who delivers her baby when she is out standing in the long queue to buy rations. It is stark and grim, and yet represents the joys of new beginnings. The queue is relentless, but hungry mouths have to be fed, and hundreds of women patiently wait their turn outside the government grain store, miraculously open after many days, during a period of grain shortage (which is reminiscent of the darkness of the Bengal famine of 1943 captured on celluloid in Dharti ke lal, 1946). As the crowds teem around and bags are filled with rice, birth—at once mundane and magical—unfolds.

In “Sylvia,” a nurse is elated at the thought that it is her last night of work at the hospital, but then as dawn approaches, she confronts a mind that goes in loops. The more she looks forward to her new life, the greater her wavering. Expectedly, the stories have a certain cinematic feel about them, and it is not difficult to imagine the characters playing themselves out before the camera. In “Sparrows,” Rahim Khan, who is callously indifferent to his family and fellow beings—he is constitutionally incapable of amicability towards his kind—is like moldable clay in the company of the chirpy sparrows that make his hut their home. There is a certain self-destructiveness about Rahim that he is unable to help, which makes the reader at once loathe and pity him. He has a touch of Thomas Hardy’s Henchard about him.

In “Twelve hours,” Vijay, a revolutionary leader released after sixteen years in prison is briefly freed for a few hours—and in that time, he goes to see a film, a talkie, in the company of Bina, a female comrade. It is 1943 and, as Abbas says, Vijay, having missed out on the arrival of the talkie in 1931, has neither heard Saigal’s songs, nor seen stars such as Joan Fontaine, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Ashok Kumar or Kanan Bala. Vijay and Bina go to the screening of a rather outdated action movie called Toofan Mail (1934), famous in its days, produced by Ranjit Studios, starring Billimoria and Madhuri. (For the vintage-film buff in me, these references to big names from the past were most entertaining.) Vijay is absorbed in the picture for a while, but then it triggers certain emotions that he has not known in a long while. Restless, he leaves midway. Having been a prisoner for so long, Vijay has forgotten the pleasures of life, and the reawakening is painful.

The most filmi (if I may use that word) of the stories is “Flowers for her feet,” where a prostitute called Chandra purposely spurns, in the end, the kind young man who loves her because she has lost her legs, a fact that she hides from him because she does not want to ruin his life (somewhat like Deborah Kerr trying to throw off Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, 1957); and while he still brings flowers for her feet as always, Chandra pretends that she favors somebody else.  “Saffron Blossoms” is a figurative tale, though no less melodramatic, of the blood from a dying Kashmiri bride, shot by soldiers putting down anti-establishment protests, giving the saffron flower its red color. “Three Women” takes a look at three women, all disillusioned for various reasons, dying on the train tracks, and the reactions that the deaths evoke. It is the least sentimental of the lot.

In “The Umbrella,” a man, on his payday, gets ripped off a by a woman, a petty thief, during a bus ride on a rainy day: this was a giveaway from the start. “Reflection in a mirror” is about Radha, a beautiful nautch girl who briefly becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, only to realize that a mistress can never take the place of a wife, and decides to return to her courtesan life. That familiar, age-old wife-mistress divide of Hindi films, beaten to death. Finally, “The mark of an Indian” is about an Indian bravely taking on a drunken British cop, and earning the latter’s respect in the process.

In his preface, Mulk Raj Anand praises Abbas’s lyricism, but I would qualify that. There is a certain lyricism but, unfortunately, the soppy treatment of many of the stories detracts from that lyricism. Anand also mentions that Abbas has captured both the strengths and weaknesses of his characters: while this may be true to some extent, one puts down the book with a feeling that the characters are not as well rounded and fleshed out as they ought to have been. And, finally, as I said before, the predictability of the stories kills it for the reader. One had rather read Abbas’s script of Shree 420 (1955) or his other films—that is inspired writing—than wade through this insipid stuff.

Black Narcissus (1947) and the colors of chaos, with a touch of E. M. Forster

This post first appeared in the PassionForCinema blog on August 13, 2009.


No one really knows what exactly happened to Adela Quested inside the Marabar Caves, in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924)—except that she came out of the caves disheveled and nutty, in an accusatory mood, and enveloped in a horrible confusion that was at the heart of this Forsterian narrative. The enigma of the Marabar Caves—and what it can do to hapless westerners, especially women, who end up making spectacles of themselves—is legendary in the annals of colonial literature.

Something similar is the theme of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s British film Black Narcissus, which released in the U.K. on 26 May 1947, just before the British Raj bid adieu to India. (Interestingly, in the U.S., the film released on 13 August 1947, just two days before India’s independence.) Based on a 1939 novel by Rumer Godden, the accused here is a place called Mopu (not far from Darjeeling), 8000 feet up in the Himalayas, where a palace-turned-convent rests rather precariously—both literally and figuratively.

The palace, once a harem of the local Hindu king, is now home to St. Faith, a group of five nuns from Calcutta. At the request of General Toda Rai of Mopu, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr in a subdued role) leads four nuns from the Convent of the Order of the Servants of Mary in their mission, which is to open a dispensary and school for the locals.

Once in Mopu, the nuns discover that the place is not just dangerously windy—it also has a dangerously volatile effect on their emotions. There is something about the air of Mopu that tests the equanimity (both physical and mental) of the nuns, and casts doubts on their lives of abnegation: it stirs in them long-forgotten thoughts and feelings; it rekindles certain emotions and memories that they have learned to do away with; in short, it disturbs the status quo.

The colors of life that they have trained themselves, as nuns, to keep at bay, burst upon their lives—and, indeed, upon the screen in spellbinding bluish-rosy-golden hues of Technicolor—as enticing to the nuns as it is to the viewers.

(A digression here. On the subject of Technicolor, my first impressions are certainly my last impressions: When I first watched Aan (1952), India’s first Technicolor film, I almost wondered if, perhaps, Mehboob Khan had ordered the film reel to be dipped in a bucket of dye. As the screen dripped with color, I felt that Dilip Kumar, Nadira, and Nimmi had come straight out of a book of fairy tales. Later, when I saw Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), it only reinforced that association of Technicolor with fairy tales. And now, after many years, when I watch the Black Narcissus, the surfeit of colors evokes that same deliciously unreal world. Perhaps it is a case of childhood associations dying hard.)

Back to the story: For the nuns, who find themselves flitting in and out of their many reveries, the varied colors of Mopu bring to the fore the now-obscured aspects of life—whether it is the raw enjoyment of nature, the physicality of desire, or the wild human imagination. And all hell breaks loose. In keeping with the empire mindset, the Orient, it seems, has the power to disturb.

While Sister Clodagh is reminded of her first love in Ireland, Sister Philippa (who is in charge of growing vegetables) stares vacantly at the vast expanses before her and takes to growing flowers instead of the more useful vegetables. The worst case, though, is Sister Ruth who lapses into plain hysteria. Sister Clodagh often catches Sister Ruth casting surreptitious glances at the ruggedly handsome Mr. Dean (David Farrar), an Englishman who is the agent of General Toda Rai.

In fact, Sister Ruth, with a rush in her blood, is, in some ways, like Forster’s Adela. The Mopu landscape opens up a deep recess within her, and she goes hurtling down; if Adela was madly attracted to Aziz in the Marabar Caves, and invited doomsday for herself, Sister Ruth wallows in her imagined love for the rather attractively irreverent Dean (who queries Sister Clodagh, “Isn’t it your business to save souls?”), although here the repercussion is her violent death.

Like the Marabar Caves, the palace at Mopu is a maze with its many rooms. It is easy to lose one’s way and lose one’s mind as well. Cinematically speaking, the serenity of the surrounding snowcapped Himalayan peaks provides a perfect foil for the tumult of the mind and the nuns’ inner struggles. This juxtaposition of the inner and the outer worlds in the Black Narcissus is all the more significant because the outer world—the palace of Mopu and the Himalayan peaks—was not really the outer world; it was a creation of the set designer. If cinema is the art of make-believe, it is verily so here.

Powell and Pressburger use chiaroscuro—or the interplay of light and shade—to bring out, very effectively, the nuns’ conflicted states of mind. Sister Clodagh’s bright and cheerful past in sunny Ireland, for instance, transposes onto the dark silhouette of her present nun’s attire. In another unforgettable shot, the crucifix casts its shadow on her, pulled as she is in opposite directions. The camera angles and the lighting are very reminiscent of film noir—the addition here being color, which is co-opted to convey the underlying chaos of the narrative.

The chaos of Mopu is aptly represented by the wind, which “blows seven days a week;” indeed, the wind is such an integral part of the film that it comes across as a character in itself—it becomes a personification of the Orient that defies control. And it, eerily, blends in with the film’s background musical score. It howls and causes terrible echoes—just like the (in)famous echoes in the Marabar Caves that led to Adela’s discomposure.


The Black Narcissus has all the staples of the colonial story: there is Kanchi, the exotic-looking local girl; there is high-strung Angu Ayah, the antiquarian caretaker of the palace; then there is the bejeweled and perfumed young prince (the nephew of General Toda Rai), who persuades the nuns to accept him into the children’s classroom because he “want[s] to study a lot of learning”—incidentally the film is named after a perfume (from the army/navy stores in London) that the prince wears. He asks, “Oh, Sister, don’t you think it’s rather common to smell of ourselves?”

Finally, there is the holy man—the former General Sir Krishna Rai—now a silent, detached observer of life, always unfazed. The General-turned-sannyasi has a profoundly unsettling effect on Sister Clodagh, who, distracted as she is by the Orient, cannot help but feel spiritually inferior, which only exasperates her more. I am reminded of Professor Godbole in Forster’s book.

Filled with subterranean passions that bubble over, the Black Narcissus ends with the fiendish Sister Ruth falling to her death and the mission of St. Faith silently retreating out of Mopu. The viewer is left with images of the falling rain and the snow-clad peaks. According to film critic Dave Kehr, given the release date of the film, the Black Narcissus could, perhaps, be seen as the British empire’s swan song (although the book was published in 1939).

Disclaimer: Images from the Internet have been used for academic/discussion purposes only.