Subhash K Jha revisits the adaption of V.S. Naipaul’s novel Mystic Masseur, directed by Ismail Merchan, which was released in 2001. Om Puri’s thoughts on the film right after he returned from the location shoot in Trinidad are included in this special feature.
Ismail Merchant’s adaptation of V.S. Naipaul’s Mystic Masseur is no achievement. The ‘unfilmable’ novel is part of the immense Naipaulean vision of an existential conundrum where characters don’t mean to say what or who they are. But they are, period. No wonder the author denied permission to film any of his novels. Mystic Masseur was the first of his books, which the Nobel prize-winning V.S. Naipaul allowed to be filmed.
I’m sure Naipaul doesn’t regret his decision to let Merchant into the invaluable merchandise of his creativity. The film has turned out exactly how Naipaul would’ve wanted it to. Caryl Phillips’ screenplay captures the sassy languor of Trinidad’s Indian community as it sits primly perched on the dias of its diaspora.
The characters seem to leap straight from the book into the film without losing a single strand of their soul. The intellectual pretensions of a people who have undergone tremendous historical and geographical upheaval and are driven by a passion to move intellectually above themselves are all put forward in that stunningly eloquent synthesis of powerful visuals and content that have given the Merchant-Ivory films their mark of poetic eloquence.
Sans Ivory, Merchant’s self-directed films like In Custody have suffered from a dry demeanour. That sense of fugitive moistness figures in our reading of Merchant’s Mystic Masseur. But here, the dryness is not directorially imposed. It’s part of the ethos of a cultural chaos that Merchant describes in such lingering detail in his supple rendering of Naipaul.
The West Indian milieu of utter mundaneness, where a simple act of opening a tin of dried salmon becomes a ritual of bonding and affection, is teased out of the narrative with such gravity and precision that you feel the narration may crumble under the pressures of enormous exactitude imposed by the brilliant artwork, the cinematography on the torpid landscape of palm trees and bamboo groves, all of which indicate an unformed and uninformed civilization.
The satirical thrusts in Naipaul’s story are deep and yet inoffensive. The affection for people who are rootless is never ruthless. Rather, Merchant takes the characters even further down the craggy road than where Naipaul left them. As the narrative traces the rise of Ganesh Ramsumer (Asif Mandvi) from village masseur to national politician and self-styled scholar, we are given lingering glimpses into the protagonist’s life and heart.
Though the material has been edited with acute economy, the feelings that underline the surface tensions are never sacrificed. One of the film’s great moments occurs when the self-important Ganesh suddenly decides to relinquish his position as the healing masseur. As he moves forward with his bright new protegee (Jimi Mistry of The Guru), his loyal neighbour and friend (Sanjeev Bhaskar) suddenly gets left behind…
And we realize how brittle is the quality of these ill-defined lives, and how difficult it is to keep them from becoming caricatures. The Trinidadian speech patterns are particularly problematic to the outside viewers. After a point, it gets irritating to watch the actors grappling bravely with the strange tenor and accent of a language that has no respect or patience with grammatical niceties.
Only Asif Mandvi, perfectly cast in the title role, gets the Trinidadian English perfectly unobtrusively right. The other actors seem to concentrate as much on their diction as their demeanour. Sometimes, the balance just doesn’t work. Jimi Mistry, as Ganesh Ramsumer’s protégé and the film’s narrator, speaks what can only be called a cockney Trinidadian.
And Om Puri! The character of Ganesh’s father-in-law, Ramlogan, is pivotal to the plot. In his struggles to rise above the petty proprietary and spousal squabbles with his father-in-law lies the secret to Ganesh’s efforts to attain an intellectual nirvana. The traditional Hindu undercurrents of bartering tension between the older man and his son-in-law is well captured in the narrative, except when Puri’s accent gets grossly overdone.
The mystical phoniness of a people who suffer from congenital bankruptcy is never held up for ridicule in Merchant’s film. This is the film’s greatest accomplishment. Though its characters, even the self-appointed hero who thinks the number of books read in life is a measure of an individual‘s intellectual growth, are sitting ducks for parody, the film never plays around with their dignity.
The gentle compassion of the original text is never sacrificed for laughter and other cinematic gratification. In remaining true to the characters and their unproductive milieu, Ismail Merchant has created a milieu so bereft of true creativity that the characters’ pretensions seem strangely touching in their simplicity.
At the end, surrounded by a library of learning in Oxford, Ganesh Ramsumer thinks he has finally found his intellectual metier.
The Mystic Masseur was Om Puri’s second film with Ismail Merchant. They earlier did the screen adaptation of Anita Desai’s Booker winning novel In Custody which was shot in Bhopal. Puri played Ayesha Dharker’s father, who plots and plans to get his daughter married to the well-placed masseur of the title.
I spoke to Om Puri when he was back from Trinidad (West Indies) after shooting for a screen version of V.S. Naipaul’s Mystic Masseur. “I only wish the budget was a little more generous. I had done another film with Ismail Merchant—In Custody. I hadn’t felt any budget constraints then. He should’ve been a little more generous now on the production side. I was fine. I was there in Trinidad for a month. I was paid well and given wonderful accommodation during Mystic Masseur. Since I’m not much of a meat-eater, I did my own cooking, fed seventy of my unit members, and had seven or eight dinner parties. My director, Ismail Merchant, came twice to have my dinner. He seemed very taken up with my dishes. I’ve been interested in cooking from childhood. I learnt the basics as a boy scout. Then I used to watch my mother. I’m not a fancy cook, no grilled and baked stuff for me. But I’m a basic rice-pulao-dal-sabzi cook. Sometimes, I get a little more adventurous. In a supermarket in Trinidad, I picked up everything Indian in ready-to-cook packets. I could even slap together a dosa from a packet.”
