No, I'm just looking!

Is the iconic secret agent transforming both as a figure of desire as well as the figure who desires?

The sensuous secret agent is past 50, and is not done yet. With its all twenty-four releases under Eon productions, Ian Fleming’s iconic James Bond with a pre-script 007 has continued to seduce women as if there is no tomorrow. Providing a visual guarantee of the maleness of the secret agent, from Dr. No to Spectre, the female characters have been treated with disdain by James Bond. No wonder, Bond has been personified as a guilt-free voyeur with a license to seduce and bed women, and if need be kill them too. Without doubt, the legacy of the most-wanted secret service agent has been built at the expense of women of all hues.

How has a character, who has been accused of sexism, endeared itself on the silver screen for five decades? Having studied the James Bond franchise for over a decade, Lisa Funnell has come up with a nuanced but complex understanding of gender, sexuality and female representation in the immensely successful series. Pulling contributions from over two dozen established and emerging scholars, the compilation provides breadth and depth that goes beyond the assumption that the masculine genre of action is created by and for men. In reality, however, Bond has been scripted both as a figure of desire as well as the figure who desires. More than mere beautiful objects, the Bond girls from Ursula Andress to Monica Balucci, have given momentum to the story with their often underrated skills in armed combat and espionage knowledge. 

Funnell, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has often been asked how being a woman and feminist has she followed aggressive heterosexual masculinity and consequent suppression of women by James Bond. Positioning herself in the complex space defined by the patriarchal nature of film, she discounts the problematic nature of the films in favor of consumption of male culture which defines female fandom. Why should gendering of consumptive practices work to delimit pleasure? In the Bond fantasy world, both good and bad women, have a pivotal role to play in furthering the narrative. These characters can easily be viewed as symbols rather than individuals, their position being a reflection of their disposable physical attributes as mere functions of the narrative. No surprise, therefore, that the Bond girl is usually characterized as being independent and willful. 

Does it mean the Bond stories reflect a progressive view of women’s sexuality? On the contrary, the manner in which James Bond ends-up possessing the girl(s) reflects a traditional, and culturally problematic, male fantasy of women’s sexuality. Sample the iconic scene of rising Ursula Andress out of the surf in a white bikini in Dr. No. ‘What are you doing here? Looking for shells?’ she asks. Without missing the gaze, Bond replies: ‘No, I’m just looking’. Sigmund Freud would view such ‘gaze’ from the notion of scopophila, creating a voyeuristic viewing situation in the darkness of the theatre. In drawing greater sexual freedom for women, Ian Fleming extracted greater sexual opportunities for men. And, it has paid dividends at the box-office.   

The social consequences of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes have far from clearly understood, and neither has it been easy given the complex nature of patriarchy and feminism. The book explores tensions between the progressive and the conservative viewpoints, offering scholarly perspectives on the representation of women in the franchise. 

There is an interesting twist to the tale, though. The first Bond novel was published in the same year as the launch of Playboy, lending credence to the assumption that the story emerged in the context of mass-market pornography. It captured the emerging consumptive characteristic of post-war Western Europe and North America. And, there hasn’t been any looking back since then. If graphic account of sex wasn’t enough, the Bond girls were given sexually suggestive names - the most risqué and famous being Pussy Galore, played by Honor Blackman in Goldfinger (1964). Plenty O’Toole and Octopussy were other sexually suggestive names for Bond girls in the series. 

Ever since the iconic character was created, socio-political developments have shaped the depiction of women in the franchise. The book captures the influence of feministic undercurrents on the franchise through the decades, and makes for serious scholarly reading. The most significant change being the transformation of Playboy in recent months. With the magazine having started covering its girls, so has James Bond responded by bedding few women than his predecessors. Spectre, the latest Bond flick, has Daniel Craig in more serious romantic relationship.   

For His Eyes Only
by Lisa Funnell (Ed)
Wallflower Press, UK
Extent: 309, Price: $30  

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on Aug 28, 2016.

The inability to think of the unthinkable

Public response to climate change is caught between the polarities of widespread denial and overt activism.

Like tigers in the Sundarbans, where the beast remains elusive but not its footmarks, climate change is seemingly everywhere and yet found nowhere. Despite its improbable though astoundingly real occurrences, the climatic events have been restricted to our fleeting consciousness. So far, only 19 countries have inked the non-binding Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C. All this is taking place while social media has made climate change research a part of the public discourse. The aim is to trigger action towards a credible policy response. Far from it. Discomforting as it may be, the eerie silence around the dangers of climate change has come to rest on the skewed awareness that we are all living in a ‘new normal’.

Amitav Ghosh questions this notion and our inability to think about the lurking dangers of climate change, and challenges the uniform expectations rooted in the ‘regularity of bourgeois life’. Need it be said that unstinted faith in such perceived regularity has driven the modern world to the point of derangement. It follows that we cannot recognize the environmental problems created by our way of life. As every individual is incentivized to improve his or her standard of living and the state is driven by the capitalist model of double-digit growth, what will drive us to exit the comfort zone of this ‘new normal’ remains a vexed question.

Being a celebrated story-teller himself, Ghosh wonders why climate change has not been taken seriously by fiction writers and literary journals. Although the subject has figured obliquely in his own writings, he contends that a broad imaginative failure arising out of a personal predilection to climate change has prevented writers from negotiating the currents of global warming. The Great Derangement is thus a call for writers to pull climate change out from the realm of scientific research into the literary domain such that contemporary culture may find it easy to deal with it. After all, the climate crisis is as much a crisis of culture as a crisis of the imagination, an inability to think about the ‘unthinkable’.

There is a difficulty in accepting such consideration. Research shows that people do not learn about climate change through personal experience or act on the issue unless it evokes strong visceral reactions. Why would people think about climate change, which involves thoughts on death and their own mortality? Most individuals rarely take seriously even predictions on water scarcity. No wonder then that a film like The Day After Tomorrow, with its depiction of glacial meltdown leading to a submerged Manhattan, served merely as action-movie entertainment and did not lead to serious climate discourse among movie-goers.   

The literary mainstream too has remained on the margins of the crises and has been restrained on the forest fires, cloudbursts, tornadoes and tsunamis that have been pounding our world with ferocious regularity. As public response to climate change is caught between the polarities of widespread denial and overt activism -- which is also under surveillance by the military-industrial complex -- literary minds do have the power to free society from the shackles of cultural cognition and motivated reasoning. Ghosh argues that there can be no compelling period in human history to recognize the urgency for such an engagement.

The Great Derangement views the history and politics of climate change through personal stories. It is a refreshing take on a subject that has just about moved from the post-scientific consensus stage to a pre-social one. Scientific knowledge in itself is never socially or politically inert, particularly when it prompts changes in people’s beliefs or actions. However, it takes time for social acceptance to emerge. Only by acknowledging and addressing this underlying subtext of climate change can the cultural schism be bridged.

The author’s anxiety on the subject of climate change comes through clearly in this erudite narrative. But science does not have the final word when it comes to bringing about a shift in our culture practices. Even the scientific ‘proof’ of a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer has been hard to establish. Science can only describe the problem; it is for cultural processes to guide social and political change. Rather than forcing people to acquiesce, the better goal would be to prepare society to address the full scope of the climate change issue.

Written with ecological passion and literary flavour, The Great Derangement is an absorbing narrative on the subject, the impact of which is getting closer with each passing day. Shorn of scientific jargon, it is an interesting exposition on the most urgent task of our time.

First published in The Hindustan Times dated Aug 27, 2016.

The voice of the vanquished

It is human nature to find everything about the victors virtuously rosy, and everything about the vanquished a vicious black.

Mythology and history have often been unkind to the losers, as these are either written by the victors or by those who eulogize their heroes. Over time, such exaggerations acquire a reality of their own, told and retold as the ‘truth’ of the times. After all, it is human nature to find everything about the victors virtuously rosy, and everything about the vanquished a vicious black. And, the vanquished are forever the whipping boys of posterity, as the Kauravas have been since the days of the Mahabharata. And, the title of the chief villain of the epic war has been bestowed on Duryodhana, the eldest among the hundred siblings borne to the blind King Dhritarashtra. Rarely has anyone questioned the veracity of the story, which has been passed on from one generation to other. But if the narrative strength of the epic lies in its multiple renderings, should Duryodhana not be given a chance to make a case for himself? 

Known to constitute the ruling and the military elite, it is ridiculous to assume that the kshatriya parents would knowingly consider Duryodhana as a chosen name for their child, as it means the one who makes wrong use of weapons. In reality, the crown prince of Hastinapur could not have any other name but Suyodhana, the one who is adept at wielding weapons. And, there is hardly any account of him proving it otherwise. It seems the chronicler of the epic saga chose to identify the crown prince otherwise, a name that eased in anointing devious sub-plots aimed to demean his character. Subjecting mythological facts to logical reasoning, V Raghunathan brings the much maligned prince to life to narrate his side of the story in Duryodhana. 

Candid in his confession, the protagonist argues that if the Pandavas were as good as they have been painted to be then the Kauravas had their share of good deeds as well.  The epic war is stated to be the handiwork of Duryodhana whereas in reality it was on account of the Pandavas staking unsubstantiated claim to the throne, while none of the brothers were sons of Pandu as the scheming Kunti had made everybody believe. Sage Vyasa had himself put the facts across in the epic: Yama, Vayu and Indra were the respective fathers of Yudhistra, Bhima and Arjun whereas the younger two Pandavas, Nakula and Sahadev – born to Pandu’s second wife Madri – were also not sired by Pandu but by the renowned physician twins, the Ashwini Kumaras. Given the non-Kuru lineage, Duryodhana had a far greater right to reject such devious claim than the Pandavas ever had to make that claim in the first place. 

It is tough not to believe Duryodhana who brings the already known facts to light. In doing so, the protagonist builds a compelling case for the version of the epic being flawed because the facts were misrepresented to disfavor the Kauravas. It is equally true that the story may not have been fascinating had it been painted merely in white and black. The Mahabharata is not one story, but there is story within a story and each character is not what it may seem to be. Fact and fiction blend flawlessly, making it quite a task to separate the grain from the chaff. 

It is often believed that just because Krishna fought on the side of the Pandavas, they must have been in the right. If that be so, why did Krishna’s elder brother Balaram, along with many other noble souls like Karna and Jarasandha chose to side with the Kauravas if they were pure evil? Presiding deity he might be but Krishna had his share of ‘grey’ in the epic when he had partnered with Bhima and Arjun to murder Jarasandha by stealth. Duryodhana equates his attempt to kill Pandavas with Jarasandha’s murder as pre-emptive strikes for the protection of their respective kingdoms, but wonders why his attempt was singled out as a crime?    

Duryodhana’s version of the epic is iconoclastic, engaging the reader's attention to the bygone characters and incidents from a fresh perspective. The idea is not to rewrite the great epic but to pick essential lessons from it. Says Duryodhana: ‘We might ascribe disproportionate credit or disgrace to ourselves for our successes and failures whereas the truth is that, we are bit actors in a grand scheme of random events.’ Afterall, like the Pandavas, Duryodhana and his kin were the product of their times over which they had little control.

Duryodhana leaves the reader with a volley of intriguing questions to ponder over. Was it my fault if Yudhisthira chose not to heed his brothers’ advice against accepting the invitation for a game of chauper? Was it my fault if Yudhisthira considered his wife to be his property (though it belonged to his other four brothers) and wagered her in the game of dice? Was it my fault if Shakuni was a better player of chauper than Yudhisthira? Am I to be faulted for winning back Indraprastha by strategic statecraft rather than open warfare?  Why history doesn’t credit me for upholding the personal liberty of the Pandavas by sending them to exile? Why I’m not being credited for letting Draupati her freedom with her good-for-nothing husbands? 

The Mahabharata has been told and retold for thousands of years. The epic has engaged readers and scholars to understand the story from the perspectives of its secondary characters. V. Raghunathan makes a convincing case from Duryodhana’s perspective, which is highly absorbing and immensely thought-provoking.  It adds yet another dimension to the labyrinth that is the Mahabharata, 

Duryodhana
by V Raghunathan
HarperCollins, New Delhi
Extent: 307, Price: Rs 350  

This write-up was first published in Speaking Tree dated Aug 7, 2016.