Fandry: The work of Shakespeare in our times

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? 

Shylock (The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1)

  Where generations of urban and upper-class/caste Indians have been able to appreciate the pain articulated by Shakespeare in the Merchant of Venice, Fandry, the Marathi language film written and directed by Nagraj Manjule locates the sentiments of the grievously wronged Shylock within the setting of the Maharashtrian Deccan through the story of Jabya. Born into an untouchable caste, Jambavant (Jabya), demonstrates the universality of the human experience when he experiences a boyhood crush on his classmate Shalu. The problem, however, lies in the fact that not only does Shalu seem completely oblivious to Jabya’s feelings for her, but that this possibility does not even cross her mind since she belongs to the area’s dominant castes. What is heart-wrenching in this story is that Jabya recognises that the gulf between their social circumstances would play a role in Shalu refusing to consider his love for her, and yet, continues to hope against hope, that she will indeed fall in love with him. Given that there is no harm in seeking the aid of higher powers, Jabya is also engaged in a hunt for a black sparrow, since he has been convinced by his older friend, Chankya, played by Manjule, that sprinkling the ashes of this bird on the object of one’s affection will make ensure that they fall in love with their admirer.

There are a plethora of reasons why Fandry stands out as an exceptional film, the foremost of which is that it manages to turn our gaze on the ruthless operation of the caste system and the associated social structures by seducing us into following this universal story of first love, and empathising with Jabya’s situation. There is no preaching, no moralizing; Jabya’s story unfolds matter-of-factly, humorously even, with all the quotidian humiliation, and challenges that would face a young untouchable in any mofussil town or village. The film locates the school as the space for change, the space that will enable India to realise its republican dream and challenge the oppression of the caste system. It is the school that permits Shalu and Jabya to inhabit the same space and allow Jabya to be enamoured of his girl. It is also the fact of his going to school and being forced to interact with others as an equal that spurs Jabya to refuse to fulfil the traditional obligations of pig-catching that his caste, and his father (nicknamed Kachru, or rubbish, by the dominant castes of the village) in particular are forced to fulfil. Indeed, the film makes it quite obvious that if caste persists in India, it is not because it is a remnant of some ancient system, but because it is physically enforced by dominant castes across the country and acquiesced to by impoverished Dalits with no other option. Into this miserable reality, it is schooling that provides a possible way out.

It is not as if the school is without its problems. Jabya’s best fried Piraji is prevented from sitting next to an ‘upper’ caste boy because this boy pinches him. Jabya is similarly threatened, and humiliated, by an ‘upper’-caste classmate who sees Jabya’s interest in Shalu and makes it clear that this interest will not be tolerated. It is in fact this burden of curbing Jabya’s self-assertions that by this Patel boy that lays the ground for the dramatic conclusion of the film, when Jabya demands a revenge no different from that of Shylock.

This conclusion comes at the end of the capture of the village’s pig (Fandry) scavengers that Jabya’s family are required to engage in. After having captured the audience with the universality of the human experience it is this dramatic hunt that brings into sharp highlight the various institutions that operate against the Dalit. There is the humiliation of not merely individuals, but entire families as they are forced to do work that others consider degrading. Having engaged in such work for over a lifetime, individuals such as Kachru begin to lose their self-respect. It highlights the threat of rape by dominant caste men that continuously hangs over Dalit women. Most importantly, the film mocks the rituals of nationalism that rather than aiding the lives of Dalits, in fact add to their burdens.

Fandry is a marvellously thought-provoking film that must be seen, not merely for the manner in which it awakens the audience to the silent ways in which the caste system operates in this country, but for the manner in which it elegantly highlights the pain that results when we deny that the Jew and Dalit are as human as the European Christian and upper-caste Indian. 

(A version of this post was first published in DNAindia.com on 13 Dec 2013)

Booking a trip to Goa 1 - Jacob and Dulce

The December issue of See Goa carried my review of 6 books on Goa. I am including these reviews, one book per blog post (for easy reading). Happy Reading!

Booking a Trip to Goa
– jason keith fernandes

For those of you who are familiar to Goa, you will know that the Goan is always complaining that both Goa and the Goan are so keenly misunderstood. They will protest that in fact Goa is much more than the beach, and that the label of sun, surf and sand is but one small part of a larger, rich cultural mosaic. The next time you get down to Goa for that do-nothing-all-weekend holiday, do yourself and the Goan a favour: pick up one of the following books to get inside the workings of its society!

Jacob and Dulce



Written originally in Portuguese and only recently translated into English, Jacob and Dulce is perhaps the one book that must grace the bookshelf of every literate Goan or Goalover. The book, Originally presented to the world as short sketches that appeared in the newspaper, O Ultramar, in the 1890s, is a sharp and caustic take on the Goan society of the turn of the 19th century. Some Goans will insist that the social critique made in the 1890s hold good even today. Penned by one Francisco João da Costa under the pen name Gip, the book is set in the mythical Goan town of Breda. It documents the lives of Jacob, a young scion of a family of some means, and his wife Dona Dulce, and through the story of their wedding and life captures the workings of the world of the upper-caste Goan Catholic elite.

Given that da Costa was from Margao, and that the book captured a slice of urban life, many at the time of its publication were convinced that the book was a thinly veiled story of Margao. Persisting with this idea has its benefits, as it allows us the pleasure of actually recreating the life of those pretty homes around the Travessa of the Holy Spirit Church in that city.

Gip was not kind to his society though and lashed out against the vapid lives filled with (in his opinion) meaningless rituals that marked the existence of the social world of Jacob and Dulce. It is because he was attempting to critique his society right down to its very detail that Jacob and Dulce provides us a sharp sketch of what it meant to be this kind of Goan Catholic at the turn of the 19th century. Unlike the writings of later and contemporary writers, Gip was not afflicted by nostalgia and the desire to embellish, and this in itself makes for refreshing reading.

The Muslim and the Catholic in Goa and India

This column is being written from Delhi where I have just completed a tour of North India with a bunch of Americans. It was while on this trip that I realised, with a fair amount of horror, the extent to which the Indian national identity is built on the idea of the image of an all-encompassing gentle Hinduism and an evil and barbaric Muslim. Despite the overwhelming Persian influence on this region, brought by the Islamic Turko-Afghans, at almost every site the tour guides stressed a ‘Hindu’ linkage where the Muslim emerged only as a destroyer of the wonder that was India. More often than not these stories twisted facts around to emerge with the Muslim as the villain of the piece.

Visibly agitated, I was asked the question if whether having a Muslim guide would have given us a different perspective. Thinking through this question I realized with sinking heart that this would not be a solution, since the nationalist narrative has effectively worked out the space for the Muslim. There is the good Muslim as represented by Akbar who is supposed to have Hinduised himself, and the bad Muslim represented by Aurangzeb who apparently violently asserted an Islamic identity over a syncretic option open to him. Whether they actually were or were not as this history represents them to be, is not really a choice open to the common man: we have to accept them as such, and then either praise or vilify the appropriate Emperor.

Arriving in Delhi this realization was further affirmed when I flipped through the brochure of a prominent centre for Islam in India. The Centre continues within a tradition that understands ‘Indo’ as code for Hindu, accepts the proposition that Islam is from outside and can never truly be internal(ised) but asserts at the same time that one can be a good Indian Muslim. This assertion, it should be pointed out, works for a particular class of Indian Muslims—the upper class/caste—who stress their foreign origins, and derive social distinction vis-à-vis the lower caste Indian Muslims from it. Further, their emphasis on clarifying the “true” meaning of Islam creates a space where their access to the text is privileged. This emphasis on the text of Islam, rather than the happy soup of lived practice inspired by the message of Islam, in fact creates the necessary background for fundamentalist Islam. In sum this acknowledgement confirms their place as leaders and representatives of Indian Islam and denies any space for lower class/caste Muslims to stress their vision of what it means to be Islam, a vision that could possibly escape the fundamentalist readings of what it means to be a Muslim.

In Goa, the Muslim shares a similar fate. There is a similar celebration of Hindu nationalist myths with the Muslim either erased or cast as the bad guy. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art is a good example. The term Indo-Portuguese in fact operates as code for Hindu-Catholic and celebrates their union. The term leaves no space for the influence of the Islamicate in Goa, which though plentiful is expelled. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art therefore casts the Muslim as the eternal outsider to Goa, while creating Goa as the legitimate space for the Catholic and the Hindu. This equation operates for only a certain kind of Catholic though, the upper-caste Catholic. The upper-caste Catholics are able to link up with the Hindu imagination for the nation through stressing their Brahmin, Kshatriya backgrounds. At the same time a textual interpretation of the religion stresses their distinction from the lower-caste Catholic masses. Both ways it leaves the lower class/caste Catholic without an option. It delegitimizes the easy mix of local and Catholic belief that marks Goan Catholicism and also leaves a lower-caste Catholic with no way to link up with a nation that is imagined primarily in upper-caste terms and pride in racial origin.

For years now the Muslim problem in India has been imagined as precisely that: as a problem of and by Muslims. Increasingly though we are coming to realize that this problem is the result of the history of Hindu nationalism and impacts equally on all communities that are not Hindu and upper-caste, or do not share in this exclusivist vision accepting a subordinate role within the narrative. In Goa our belly-gazing has still not allowed us to realize what exactly is going on, but for those who are willing to see, the writing on the wall is pretty clear!

(This essay is dedicated to Khaled Anis Ansari thanks to discussions with who I have been able to view the Indian Muslim community from a radically new perspective, which has allowed me to relook the Goan Catholic community as well.)

(Published as "A Celebration of Nationalist Myths" in the Gomantak Times, 30 January 2008)