“I lived in a skyscraper
The lifts broke down
I envied the beggars
In the shanties of the town…”
From Bombay Boli
(Ed. by Bachchoo)

Oliver Stone’s film Alexander was the climactic show at the Goa International Film Festival some years ago. The UK film critic Derek Malcolm and I were standing in front of a wall-sized poster by the beach at the closing party.
Spotting sound bite potential, an enthusiastic young lady presenter/producer led her crew up to us.
“Mr Dhondy, what did you think of the film?” she asked.
“Er... which film?”
“This one”, she said pointing to the poster.
I turned round and back with as much theatrical indignation I could muster.
“You expect me to have seen this film?”
“Why not?” She was genuinely puzzled.
“It’s like asking a Jew if he wants to see a film depicting Hitler as a hero.”
“What? Why?”
“Because this bastard Alexander the Damned tried to wipe out our Zoroastrian civilisation! He set fire to Persepolis, burnt the palace and libraries, raped and enslaved our Parsi women....”
Her jaw dropped to her blouse.
“When did all this happen?” she asked.
“In 326 BC”, I said.
Then, seizing the time I added “This film offends minorities!”
“No, Farrukh”, said Derek attracting the cameras away and stealing the punchline, “It offends majorities — the majority of people who see it!”
My remarks were tongue-slightly-inclined-to-cheek. I do feel that Alexander’s murderous exploits can be looked at from the Persian point of view as not very nice or heroic, but that has never stopped me eating a good moussaka, reading Homer, going for a break on a Greek island or indeed having Greek friends.
I even sympathise with the economic plight of Greece in Europe though I know it’s their own mass fault.
The fact that Europeans and Americans think Alexander should be called The Great is all the more reason for me to apply my casual historical corrective to assert that he and his armies had no business in Zoroastrian Persia.
I rehearse this argument here this week because I have just participated in the Mumbai Literature Live Festival, principally to launch my new book, London Company, to interview Sir V.S. Naipaul and to take in some culture. With which latter aim I attended a session in which Girish Karnad was to expostulate on his career in theatre. Instead, I witnessed the honourable Girish in full flow stabbing Naipaul’s reputation in the back (Naipaul had left town). Girish had come to bury VS, not to praise him.
The noble Girish accused VS of being tone-deaf to music. He wasn’t saying that VS didn’t know Mozart from Mozarella, that VS believed that Bach was something his neighbours’ dogs shouldn’t do or even that Sting was a waspish prerogative. He was saying that VS had made a remark somewhere that the great and ancient tradition of Indian music had been ruined by the Muslim and Mughal conquests. He went on to accuse Vidia of being blind to architecture because he had somewhere said that the Taj Mahal was a building he couldn’t look at without thinking of the suffering that had gone into its construction — not on the part of the love-struck and vain tyrant Shah Jahan, but that of the workers who built it — a Marxist sentiment if ever I heard one, but then the noble Girish was more appreciative of ethereal floatations of marble, which is an aesthetes’ opinion and fair enough. Everyone can’t be a Marxist.
Girish then turned to Vidia’s India: A Wounded Civilisation, giving us his own erudite account of the wars of southern India in the 16th and 17th centuries. The burden of this song, or oratorio since it was keyed in many quoted, syncopated registers and raags (Dekha? I knows my musik!) was that VS was no historian, was against Muslims and even advocated their elimination and the demolition of their disused mosques. It was this that prompted Girish to defend his Muslim friends and their feelings. Truly noble!
Then Girish presented his theory that VS was awarded the Nobel Prize after years of waiting for it only after the Twin Towers in New York had been demolished by Islamist terrorists. We were supposed to deduce that President Bush had subsequently instructed the Swedish Academy to award the prize to someone whom Girish Karnad could prove was anti-Muslim. I was shocked. That’s idle Internet-monkey talk!
Khair!
I was by now mourning the murder of truth and balance so when they called for comments, I got a microphone and began “Friends, Indians, countrymen…” — (I have a PIO card) — but Brut… I mean Girish cut me off with “Not Farrukh, anyone but Farrukh.” Silenced.
But not here:
If VS did hate Muslims because they follow a particular religion and if he did say the things Girish accused him of, then it would be a grievous fault and grievously must VS answer it.
But of course Vidia doesn’t hate Muslims — he is married into a family of them — appreciates very many buildings with Islamic architectural antecedents, has never claimed to be a historian and has never advocated or approved of the killing of anyone.
What VS has attempted to do in books and interviews is to indict the history of an era in which Hindus and Muslims were demanding freedom from British colonial rule and consequently glossed over the atrocities and slaughter of the Muslim raids, conquests and governance of India.
He didn’t add that Humayun and Sher Shah fighting it out for the possession of Hindustan is as absurd as me and Girish battling it out with Parsi and Kannadiga armies in some field outside Amsterdam to set up as Emperor of Holland.
Yes, the Muslim occupation and settlement brought kebabs and evolved qawwali. Agreed, there is no caste system in Islam, so they brought notions of equality. Still, isn’t it time to explore history for more truth than the political necessities of nationalism (or of Hindutva)
prescribe?