Many shades of prejudice

It holds a mirror on the prevailing culture of alienation that cause us to see others as threats.

The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel, opens with a distinctly Kafkaesque imagination: ‘One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown’. No reason is assigned to this dramatic transformation, but the short novel of long-sentences explores its impact on Anders, his girlfriend, and the people who live in the unnamed town. Trapped indoors because he dreads stepping outside, Anders soon learns that skin color is not frivolous, it gives us our identity that has influence on our bodies and actions. Color is both medium, and the message. As more people change color, the transformation begins to spread across the town such that there is just one white man left, and then there are none. 

Poetic and strangely musical, The Last White Man is a perspective-altering allegory of being the other person within the same body. Anders surreal transformation upends his world, robbed of the white privileges he is forced to create space for himself in the world. It compels him to examine the otherness of others by being the other, drawing distinction on being invisible now as was hypervisible before. It was shocking for him to realize what color does to one’s existence: people who knew him no longer knew him. Neither on the street and nor at the grocery store, nobody noticed his transformation – reflecting a flicker of disliking from the White people. No one hit him or knifed him, but Anders was not sure where the sense of threat was coming from, but it was there, and it was strong. He remains apprehensive about using the rifle his ailing (white) father gave him ‘to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated’. 

It is a discomforting book that explores racism through speculative change, but remains optimistic towards anticipated societal transformation. Can such a future be deferred for long? It is a question The Last White Man seeks to address by drawing attention to racism paranoia. It is through a feeling of ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’, and the imminent danger from those who belong to the category one doesn’t belong can an imaginative narrative be created to envision a world bereft of such threat impulse. Concerned about the unusual transformation are four characters, Anders and his ailing father, his girlfriend Oona and her mother, who lend human face to probe a deep-seated and deeply problematic obsession with whiteness. While Anders father is worried about his son’s safety, Oona’s mother resents her daughter’s relationship. Social perception to the transformed appearance lets loose a can of dreadful worms, as violence spills on the streets. 

Did post-9/11 experience by the author reflect upon the story? Hamid has been reported saying that as a Pakistani Muslim living in the US, the post-9/11 experience of being stopped at the airport and seeing people nervous in his presence had real effects on the story. ‘I hadn’t changed, but, almost overnight, the new racial and ethnic category had been imagined on to me.’ The Last White Man holds a mirror on the prevailing culture of alienation that cause us to see others as threats. Anders sums this up: ‘he wasn’t sure he was the same person, he had begun by feeling that under the surface it was still him, who else could it be, but it was not that simple, and the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are.’ Talking sense into someone in these troubled times isn’t easy, but fiction holds the power to disarm dominant narratives.  

The Last White Man is a short novel of very long sentences, over 30 coma at times in a sentence. Although not counted, the book may have no more than 180 sentences. And, there seems a lyrical purpose to it as the inimitable style allows the idea to grow with all its related and unrelated inferences and references. It gives the story a nuanced impact. The story is poignant and pointed, speaking for a more equitable future in which widespread change can serve to erase the entrenched divisions of the old fade away. Hamid offers swelling remorse and expansive empathy, a story of love, loss and rediscovery.

Hamid ends this strange, beautiful allegorical tale on a hopeful note, with Anders and Oona blessed with a daughter who is brown in color. And while memories of whiteness receded, memories of whiteness lingered too. The whiteness could no longer be seen but was still a part of them. The times had long changed, and the extraordinary power of transformation had stripped the world of its racial prejudice.

The Last White Man 
by Mohsin Hamid
Penguin, New Delhi 
Extent: 180, Price: Rs. 599.

First published in Deccan Herald dated Sept 18, 2022.

A thinking man's actor

He was limitless because he had no set ways in his acting, which helped him humanize his characters.

The characters Sanjeev Kumar enacted on screen have lived on long after his death. These include the hapless husband in Dastak (1970), the deaf and mute father in Koshish (1972), the purposeful thakur in Sholay (1975), the obsessed nawab in Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), and the ambitious realtor in Trishul (1978). Playing every role to perfection, he created a distinct niche for himself among the more conventionally handsome reigning screen stars of his time. Indeed, he was as much a thinking man’s actor as a director’s actor.  

Sanjeev Kumar initially struggled to make it in the film industry that has traditionally been unkind to newcomers. But focusing more on impact than on looks, he became successful especially after his sensitive performance in Anubhav (1971). The role led him to be equated with the legendary Gregory Peck, who exuded a similar warmth and intelligence. The 1970s were a great decade for Kumar with his endearing screen presence showcased in films that displayed both his intensity and sensitivity. By age 35, he had arrived as a movie star.  

In Sanjeev Kumar – The Actor We All Loved, his nephew Uday Jariwala and biographer Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta reconstruct the making of one of the Hindi film industry’s finest performers. Sanjeev Kumar was unusual in that he consciously chose not to be a conventional romantic hero. While remaining commercially relevant, this placed him in the league of actors who were not just mere stars. An extraordinary performer as much at ease in mature roles like the one in Mausam (1975) as in the comic double role in Angoor (1982), he could infuse an ordinary dialogue with deep meaning. He was limitless because he had no set ways in his acting, which helped him humanize his characters. His nine roles in Naya Din Naye Raat (1974) remain the perfect example of his versatility as an actor.  

Winning the coveted national award twice in his short career, Kumar made bold choices in reel life. “This is how I am; take it or leave it,” he seemed to say to filmmakers who pressed for more stereotypical portrayals. 

An eligible bachelor, his love life provided much material for gossip columns in the film magazines of the time. His failed relationships with Nutan and Hema Malini were as much talked about as his onscreen performances. There is no way of knowing if his romantic failures impacted his intense romantic onscreen characterizations or if they even contributed to him being natural in diverse roles. Whatever the case, in his short but momentous life, he earned rich accolades from legends like Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor.  

This book does not dwell on his self-destructive streak, but it was widely believed that Sanjeev Kumar’s gastronomic and liquid obsessions aggravated his hereditary heart disease. Multiple heart attacks followed by a cardiac surgery killed the great actor in 1985. He was just 47.  

This warm and intimate biography has everything that a reader would want to know about the early life of the man known to family and friends as Haribhai, and the subsequent making of the actor called Sanjeev Kumar.     

In trying to pack in everything about the life of a young man born into plenty who embarked on a film career, the biography offers a strange mix of the personal and the professional. It leaves the reader wanting to know more about Kumar’s acting acumen, and how it shaped him as a person. The roles he enacted were not easy to do and the reader/viewer is left wondering how he made it all look so real on screen. Will a new generation of actors look to Sanjeev Kumar for inspiration after reading this biography? The answer to that question isn’t an immediate ‘yes’. However, Sanjeev Kumar: The actor we all loved does fill an important gap in the history of popular Hindi cinema.     

Importantly, while highlighting its subject’s legacy as a devoted family man, a cherished friend, and an accomplished actor, it encourages the reader to rediscover Sanjeev Kumar’s exemplary films.  

Sanjeev Kumar: The actor we all loved 
by Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta and Uday Jariwala
Harper Collins, New Delhi 
Extent: 356, Price: Rs. 599.

First published in the Hindustan Times on Sept 9, 2022.