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Cover Story

- ‘Labour indicators are better than pre-pandemic times and we have added jobs’

Cover Story | Interview: Bhupender Yadav, Union Labour Minister

‘Labour indicators are better than pre-pandemic times and we have added jobs’

The government is making extensive efforts to map employment and this includes the informal economy with a new emphasis on gig workers, the Union minister of labour and employment tells Open

Bhupender Yadav, Union Labour Minister (Photo: AP)

We now have data provided by the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) every quarter. Can it be said that we now have sufficient data on employment in the formal sector?

The major data source of employment and unemployment indicators in India at present is PLFS, conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) since 2017-18. The annual PLFS reports for the years 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 are available in the public domain. Prior to PLFS, before 2017-18, the National Statistical Office (NSO), MoSPI, used to conduct quinquennial employment and unemployment surveys. The last such survey was done in 2011-12.

The quarterly PLFS reports are released for the urban sector only. Moreover, the quarterly PLFS report does not provide separate estimates for formal-informal employment. The annual estimates of different labour force indicators are released for both rural as well as urban areas at the state, Union territory and all-India levels. The annual report of PLFS specifically provides information about “percentage of workers engaged in proprietary and partnership (P&P) enterprises among workers (ps+ss) engaged in non-agriculture sector” in the informal sector. The latest data of PLFS 2020-21 indicates that this stands at 71.4 per cent for combined rural and urban areas. It has risen since 2017-18.

The Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), conducted by the Labour Bureau, aims to assess the employment situation in respect of selected nine sectors of the non-farm economy of India over successive quarters. These are manufacturing, construction, trade, transport, education, health, accommodation and restaurants, information technology (IT)/ business process outsourcing (BPO) and financial services. QES is limited only to establishments having 10 or more persons (organised segment) as identified by the Sixth Economic Census (2013-14). As per the last Economic Census (2013-14), 1.37 per cent enterprises employed 10 or more workers.

The estimated total employment in the nine selected sectors from the first round of QES (April to June 2021) was 3.08 crore approximately against a total of 2.37 crore in these sectors taken collectively, as reported in the Sixth Economic Census, reflecting a growth rate of 29 per cent. Further, the estimated total employment in the nine selected sectors from the fourth round of QES (January-March 2022) came out as 3.18 crore as compared to 3.14 crore from the third round of QES (October-December 2021).

The data shows Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in the Current Weekly Status (CWS) at 47.5 per cent. This is seen as low in comparison to many countries. Is this because we are not adequately capturing informal sector employment?

PLFS is being conducted by MoSPI through scientifically designed survey methods with the objective to cover both informal and formal sectors. The objective of PLFS is primarily twofold.

It is to estimate key employment and unemployment indicators (worker population ratio, labour force participation rate, unemployment rate) in the short interval of three months for urban areas only in the CWS.

It also estimates employment and unemployment indicators in both usual status (ps+ss) and CWS in both rural and urban areas annually.

LFPR for persons aged 15 years and above in CWS is 47.5 per cent for the urban sector only (PLFS April-June 2022). As per the survey methodology, it is expected to cover both informal and formal sectors.

It is pertinent to mention that comparison of labour force indicators of different countries may not be in the fitness of things as it depends on the economic structure of each country, survey methodology, and procedure of collection of data which may be different.

The PLFS data also shows low participation of women in the work force. Again, is it lack of data or depressed female participation in the employment market?

The periodic labour force surveys capture information on the reasons for not being in the labour force. According to the PLFS results, the percentage distribution of men and women not being in the labour force as per the main reasons shows that out of the total women outside the labour force, around 43 per cent were so because of “Child care/personal commitments in home making” and 33.2 per cent wanted to continue their studies instead of joining the labour force. Around 4.3 per cent of women were outside the labour force due to “social reasons”.

Further, some studies indicate that most women work and contribute to the economy in one form or another, but much of their work is not documented or accounted for in official statistics, and thus women’s work tends to be underreported. However, as of 10.10.2022, out of the total registration of unorganised workers on the e-SHRAM portal on a self-declaration basis, 52.82 per cent are women.

The employment debate is as much political as it is about data. What is your response to allegations that growth has been jobless or that the government has not managed the economy well?

As per the annual PLFS report, LFPR, Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Unemployment Rate (UR), in usual status for persons of 15 years and above, were 52.6 per cent (WPR), 54.9 per cent (LFPR) and 4.2 per cent (UR) for 2020-21. WPR and LFPR have steadily increased, UR has dipped.

The data indicates the government has been successful not only in adding more people to the labour force but also in providing more employment compared to the increase in the labour force due to which the unemployment rate has steadily declined.

The quarterly data of PLFS indicates that before the outbreak of Covid-19, the urban labour market had shown signs of improvement in terms of LFPR, WPR and UR. However, the pandemic has adversely impacted the urban labour market. In the first quarter of 2020-21, the unemployment rate for the urban sector rose to 20.8 per cent. LFPR and WPR in the urban sector also declined significantly during this quarter.

With the revival of the economy in the subsequent quarters of 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23, all three labour market indicators show a swift recovery. The latest quarterly PLFS data for the quarter of April-June 2022 indicates that labour force indicators are at a better level than the pre-pandemic level. Further, the independent QES by the Labour Bureau also indicates a steady increase in employment. The estimated total employment, as discussed earlier, in nine selected sectors from the fourth round of QES (January-March 2022) came out as 3.18 crore as compared to 3.14 crore from the third round of QES (October-December 2021), indicating an increase of four lakh in employment.

How can employment in the gig economy and startups be measured?

The eShram portal of the Ministry of Labour and Employment captures the data of unorganised workers. So far, 28.32 crore workers have registered. Recently, a gig and platform module has been added. Further, all platform aggregators have been asked to get all their workers registered on eShram under the newly added module.

About The Author

Rajeev Deshpande

Columns

- Maya Memsaab

Columns | Streaming Smart

Maya Memsaab

Good Bad Girl | Mismatched, Season 2

Samridhi Dewan in Good Bad Girl

Good Bad Girl | Showrunners: Vikas Bahl and Chaitally Parmar | Cast: Samridhi Dewan, Vaibhav Raj Gupta, Gul Panag | Language: Hindi | SonyLIV

Maya Ahuja is not a bad girl, she’s just in a hurry to get ahead. She sees more good in lying through her teeth, whether it is faking an illness to gain sympathy, or pretending that she was assaulted by a woman she detests. A Becky Sharp character who reinvented herself to fit into her new life, she will do anything — sell phone sex and slide out of commitments — if it makes sense to her. She learnt early in life that lying is a profitable side venture. Told in three stages — Maya as a resentful eight-year-old, Maya as an 18-year-old learning that it is best to fake it till you make it, and Maya in the present day as a lawyer who wants the corner office — Good Bad Girl is both social satire and family drama. Fortunately they don’t give Maya too much of a conscience, so there is no redemption. She’s a psychopath and revels in being one.

Why watch it: For a career-making performance from Samridhi Dewan

Mismatched, Season 2 | Director: Akarsh Khurana | Cast: Prajakta Koli, Rohit Saraf | Language: Hindi | Netflix

Rohit Saraf and Prajakta Koli in Mismatched

When Mismatched came out in 2020, based on Sandhya Menon’s 2017 novel When Dimple Met Rishi, it made waves for its carefree depiction of young people in small

town India as opposed to the imagined youth of Bollywood films who have idyllic summer camps and casually sport luxury brands. Mismatched made it cool to be a video gamer and to be a creator of apps. For the majority of students of the Aravali Institute of Technology, getting rich by coding is still the dream. We return to Dimple, who’s even more determined to be the next Nandini Nahata (startup queen played by Dipannita Sharma), and Rishi, the Rajput boy with a problem father, who is a gifted animator. Both are with different partners this time, and season two sees misunderstandings. It’s fortunate actors Vihaan Samat and Muskkaan Jaferi have tremendous screen presence and that Rannvijay Singha makes a cute professor type. Campus life, with its hookups and hangups, friendships and rivalries, drinkathons and hackathons, is portrayed well, with just enough of Rajasthan to keep us engaged.

Why watch it: For the ensemble cast of actors led by breakout stars

In Case You Missed It

Luckiest Girl Alive | Director: Mike Barker | Cast: Mila Kunis, Finn Wittrock | Language: English | Netflix

She left Trashy TifAni behind in the school where she lost her self respect. She changed her accent, her diet, her clothes. She’s what Gone Girl would’ve been if she’d stayed in New York. She’s on the cusp of getting everything she worked for — the marriage to the trust fund baby and a move to The New York Times. New York has never looked lovelier, Kunis is on form, and the American super rich have never been more self indulgent. This is the life she wanted, until she didn’t.

Why watch it: Jessica Knoll’s Gone Girl-ish novel comes alive here

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

Essays

- A Prayer for Britain

Essays | Open Essay

A Prayer for Britain

Liz Truss has made a perfect mess of everything in the shortest time possible

British Prime Minister Liz Truss at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, October 5, 2022 (Photo: Getty Images)

WHAT ON EARTH is going on in British politics? Pundits, pollsters and politicians have all been left reeling by a series of extraordinarily un-British events.

Our new Conservative Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has been in the job a little over a month, but has so far managed to crash the pound, destroy her party’s reputation for economic competence, deliver a painful rise in mortgage interest rates, perform several embarrassing U-turns, lose any sense of cabinet discipline, alarm the Bank of England, and give the opposition Labour Party an opinion poll lead that has touched 33 per cent. The press is full of open speculation that Truss will not last until Christmas.

How could it have come to this? The Tories have always valued pragmatism and commonsense. In economic affairs this has meant sound money and budget prudence, and in social issues ‘one nation’ Toryism always recognised that the wealthy carry an obligation to provide for the welfare of the poor. Liz Truss—a liberty-loving advocate of free markets—has binned all these traditions in the shortest time possible.

She was a high-profile, self-proclaimed loyalist to her predecessor, Boris Johnson, throughout his three turbulent years in office. Many Tories considered that Johnson was primarily brought down by the disloyalty of his chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, or by a malign media conspiracy led by the BBC, but Liz Truss, who was Johnson’s foreign secretary, remained free of the taint of treachery. In the leadership contest that followed Johnson’s forced resignation, many regarded her as the continuity-Johnson candidate.

She built on this platform over weeks of party hustings by adding a new strand—that she would revive Margaret Thatcher’s small-state, low-tax policies. This galvanised the party membership, and enabled her, after she only scraped into the final ballot as the second choice of Conservative MPs, to outbid Sunak, who was promoting fiscal prudence and the necessity of a cautious approach to the public finances in a time of high inflation. He described Truss’ plans to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes as “a holiday from reality”.

But the grassroots Tory members were in no mood for Sunak’s pessimism. They gave Truss the keys to No 10, and on September 5, 2022, she began her premiership on a tide of optimism. The death of the Queen then interposed, so it was on September 23 that Truss’ new chancellor of the exchequer and long-time ally, Kwasi Kwarteng, stood up in the House of Commons to unveil the new administration’s approach, rapidly dubbed ‘Trussonomics’. And here is where the trouble started.

The first shock was the extent of Kwarteng’s departure from the Johnson years. There were reductions in corporation tax, stamp duty and national insurance, a 1 per cent cut in income tax for low earners, and the abolition of the top 45 per cent tax for high flyers. This was accompanied by the removal of a longstanding cap on bankers’ bonuses. In fiscal terms, it seemed that Kwarteng was giving handouts to the wealthy while, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the poor would get nothing.

Boris Johnson’s colleagues, who eventually felt forced to throw him out, are now suffering an attack of regicide’s remorse as Truss appears to be trashing the possibility of continued conservative rule. Her personal unpopularity is the highest ever recorded for a prime minister, at minus 47 per cent, and national opinion polls show the Labour Party with leads of over 20 per cent

The justification for this glaring inequity was the old ‘trickle-down’ theory; give entrepreneurs extra money, they will create new businesses and the economy will expand. But this is a huge gamble: growth is not a given. The rich could just as well squirrel the extra cash away in offshore accounts or spend it on expensive foreign holidays, or fancy goods produced elsewhere, such as luxury cars or super yachts. This looked like crass economics and tin-eared politics.

Worse, the whole ‘mini-budget’ was not costed in detail by the chancellor himself or by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBC), the body tasked with producing an economic impact assessment of all government measures. Kwarteng had failed to show his workings—how he intended to fill the £45 billion hole in the public finances—and had evaded OBC scrutiny in a way that undermined his credibility. Since then, the markets have judged that the greatest threat to the stability of the British economy is the British government itself, because it seemed to be intending to fund all of the revenue shortfall from increased borrowing, which would, as Rishi Sunak had warned, raise interest rates for everyone.

Here was a government abandoning what Truss had dismissively called “Treasury orthodoxy”, meaning balanced budgets, while announcing unfunded tax cuts, and going for growth in a time of high inflation.

Panic ensued, and within hours the pound had collapsed and was approaching parity with the dollar, while the price of government bonds—gilts—went up along with mortgage interest rates. Truss and Kwarteng held firm; she had declared herself prepared to take unpopular decisions for the good of the country and seemed determined to emulate Thatcher’s fabled ability to stay the course in tough financial times.

By coincidence, the annual Conservative Party Conference fell at exactly this point in the calendar, and unfortunately for Truss she had to quell a back-bench rebellion on the gathering’s first morning by abandoning the abolition of the 45 per cent tax rate. This U-turn opened the floodgates of disloyalty, and the next few days were full of plotting against her and calls for Kwarteng’s head. As yet, he survives, and his long friendship with Truss may still save him. Currently, the Bank of England has swung behind him with heavy intervention in the bond market, but that cannot last indefinitely.

Destructive speculation within the party continues. Can she be guided back into more sensible policy channels? Or, to retain any chance of winning the next general election, due by January 2025 at the latest, is it necessary to oust her immediately? As yet there is no decision.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng outside 10 Downing Street, September 6, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)

When Boris Johnson romped home to an 80-seat majority in the 2019 election, people confidently predicted three terms for him. But his colleagues, who eventually felt forced to throw him out, are now suffering an acute attack of regicide’s remorse as Truss appears to be trashing the possibility of continued Conservative rule. Her personal unpopularity is the highest ever recorded for a prime minister, at minus 47 per cent, and national opinion polls consistently show the Labour Party with leads of over 20 per cent.

THE PROSPECTS FOR the Truss revolution do not look good. She always had a reputation for strong-headedness and reluctance to take advice, and she lacks the kind of communication skills that modern politicians require. In this she suffers badly by contrast with her predecessor, who had charisma and humour, and exuded reassurance. Truss, by contrast, has oratorical skills so wooden that her audience risks getting splinters in their ears. She has also shunned the basic political prudence of appointing at least some Sunak supporters to her cabinet; instead, she has pointedly excluded them.

Truss’ new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, on September 23 unveiled the new administration’s approach, rapidly dubbed ‘Trussonomics’. And here is where the trouble started. In fiscal terms, it seemed that Kwarteng was giving handouts to the wealthy while, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the poor would get nothing. The justification for this glaring inequity was the old ‘trickle-down’ theory

Things are bad now, her party realises, but even worse may be coming. Truss is promising massive ‘supply side’ interventions, including reforms of childcare provision, residential planning, environmental protection, and employment rights—in sum, anything that she considers to be standing in the way of economic growth.

On the conference platform she announced that her three priorities were “growth, growth and growth”, and that she was determined to defeat what she called “the anti-growth coalition”. This, it turned out, included those who dislike unfunded tax cuts, or are sceptical about supply-side economics, or have ever advocated regulation of anything. So, pretty much everyone, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The impression was created of a leader making far too many enemies far too quickly.

To create further alarm, the government’s in-tray is stacked with thorny issues, including rising inflation, rocketing energy prices, the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol, the war in Ukraine, and the parlous state of the National Health Service (NHS). Can Truss be left in charge of all this? On the evidence of the last few weeks, a very large slice of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, which did not support her wholeheartedly when given the chance, is saying “no”. But to dump her so soon risks making the party a political joke. On the other hand, not to dump her risks turning the party into an electoral cadaver.

And there is a tricky constitutional issue, too.

At the last general election, millions of people voted not for Liz Truss but for Boris Johnson, who stood on a published manifesto. She was then installed by a micro electorate; the Conservative Party membership represents a fraction of 1 per cent of the population, and she only got 57 per cent of them. Truss has come in halfway through the cycle, which is not unprecedented, but whenever this has happened before, the personal style of the government may have changed a little but its fundamental tenor did not. Truss, however, has scrapped Johnson’s manifesto, with its key policy of “levelling up”. Of course, Johnson himself never quite defined that policy, but its general objective—using the levers of government to address regional disparities—is the precise opposite of Truss’ adoption of low regulation, reduced government spending, and a thorough embrace of economic inequality. Where is democratic accountability in this change?

The chickens of Brexit are finally coming home to roost.

The genius of Boris Johnson was to turn the cause of Brexit into anything you wanted it to be. To vote “leave” was to vote for “not this”. Johnson had the political nous to campaign in such an ambiguous style that he made leaving the European Union (EU) seem like the optimistic option. This lay at the heart of his victories in the referendum of 2016 and the election of 2019. He had created a new style of ‘big-tent’ politics.

Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson at Fourpure Brewery in London, October 27, 2021 (Photo: AP)

But the electoral success of the anti-EU coalition relied on an agenda that was not likely to survive contact with government for long, and Truss is paying the price. The only political entity which tried to sell Brexit as party policy—UKIP (The United Kingdom Independence Party)—was never a strong electoral force. There was always “red UKIP”—disgruntled socialists—and “blue UKIP”—nationalist Conservative rebels—and the two never had to be reconciled within a fringe party that was primarily a sump for grievances. In a party of government, however, that tension has produced real problems. Johnson squared this circle by promoting both high public spending and anti-immigration policies, effectively promising to give everybody what they wanted.

Johnson’s tragedy was that it was not his obfuscating doublespeak that did for him; it was a combination of ineptitude and dishonesty which eventually turned his parliamentary colleagues against him. Liz Truss’ tragedy is that she never even considered trying to manage this unstable post-Brexit alliance. She simply ignored the problem, running headlong to the farthest reaches of the Tory right.

Many Tories considered that Johnson was primarily brought down by the disloyalty of his chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, or by a malign media conspiracy, but Liz Truss, who was Johnson’s foreign secretary, remained free of the taint of treachery. In the leadership contest that followed, many regarded her as the continuity-Johnson candidate

Truss’ government is determined to see a bonfire of regulations, extra rewards for the super-rich, and the creation of the fabled “Singapore-on-Thames” that was always the dream of the cabal of financiers who called themselves “the bad boys of Brexit”. These self-styled malefactors, who emerged from the British financial services industry, had no interest in any electoral constituency; they simply wanted to be allowed to make more money by any means they saw fit. Liz Truss has been in and around their favourite thinktanks for the last decade. She is, unequivocally, their girl.

Truss never had a sympathetic parliamentary party behind her, and she may well find it hard to carry some of her proposals through the Commons. If she can’t, she will fall. Her support is very narrow within the political world and remains sparse in the country. We are watching an angel dancing upon the head of a very small pin.

The market turbulence is not banished yet, and Truss seems reluctant to address the problems that very obviously surround her. She lacks allies and seems bereft of reliable instincts. Currently, she has neither the trust of her party nor the confidence of the nation.

If you’re looking for an upside, lay some money on Liz Truss being the shortest-serving British prime minister ever.

About The Author

Roderick Matthews

Roderick Matthews specialises in Indian history. He is the author of Jinnah vs Gandhi and Mountbatten and the Partition of British India

Features

- China mouthpiece praises Indian “autonomy” over Ukraine war

News Briefs | Diplomacy

China mouthpiece praises Indian “autonomy” over Ukraine war

An article in Global Times refers to foreign minister S Jaishankar's comment on national interest guiding India's ties with Russia

S Jaishankar (Illustration: Saurabh Singh)

In an interesting comment, China’s official mouthpiece Global Times praised India for prioritising “national interest” in resisting western pressure to support sanctions against Russia and said it has pursued the path of strategic autonomy.

The report argued that India’s refusal to tow the US line is indicative of America’s inability to influence or bend opinion of other nations. This is in line with China’s claims that the West has grown “arrogant” and over-estimates its ability to coerce other nations.

Though China has had a word of praise for Indian’s policy on Ukraine before too, the article echoes the views of former Pakistan PM Imran Khan who said that India has shown that it can hold its own and carve a policy path in keeping with its strategic autonomy.

Both Beijing and Khan have their reasons to commend India but there is an acknowledgement that New Delhi will stand up for its interests, which can be read as oblique praise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership.

“During the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India did not participate in the West-initiated sanctions campaign against Russia, nor did it stop its trade with Moscow. Not only that, India increased its energy imports from Russia with a lower price. As a member of the Quad, India refuses to dance to the US beat.

“This must have embarrassed the US. But with whom India trades with does not depend on the US, but India’s interests. If New Delhi had not held this position, it would be now suffering from an energy crisis like in Europe, and have to pay for energy and gas at four times above US market prices.”

The objective of the article is to underline that nations who succumbed to the US pressure would find their economies in dire straits. India had more wisely negotiated a space to keep its energy options open. In fact, the recovery in the Indian economy is seen as one of several reasons why China agreed to pull back from the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh in areas where it massed troops in May, 2020.

“US and its Western allies will keep trying to draw India over to their side. Nevertheless, on many issues including the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India is sending a signal – if the US and the West continue to cast a cold eye to other countries’ national interests while asking them to take sides, they will end up in disappointment,” the article says in its conclusion.

About The Author

Rajeev Deshpande

Books

- Nirmal Verma: A Moral Life

Books

Nirmal Verma: A Moral Life

The making of the writer Nirmal Verma

Nirmal Verma

THE INTRODUCTION TO Vineet Gill’s Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature ends with the declaration: “this is not a biography”. Earlier, Gill distances his book from the techniques and methodologies of the contemporary ‘literary biography’ (“the nitty-gritty of how many words a writer does in a day, how many drafts”) which he also dismisses as “meaningless, like most genre terms”. He also insists that the facts of Nirmal Verma’s personal life aren’t particularly interesting to him. By the time you’re at page 15 or so, you realise this is a necessity because of the atypical nature of Gill’s enterprise — tracing the development of the “writerly sensibility” that Verma (and, as Gill points out, serious writers around the world) displayed in his Hindi novels, short stories and critical essays.

If the bildungsroman’s focus is the protagonist’s moral and spiritual coming-of-age, what Gill has attempted in Here and Hereafter is closer to the Künstlerroman, a narrative that dissects the making of an artist, the array of influences, thought-systems and experiences that contributed towards the elusive “writerly sensibility” in question (think Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels). This would be an ambitious venture in the context of most literary titans but even so, Verma represents a special case—here was a 20th-century Hindi novelist more ‘international’ than his English counterparts (look at Kavve Aur Kaala Paani or Antim Aranya) but seldom counted among the exemplars of ‘world literature’. Here was an intensely cosmopolitan thinker who was also, for complex reasons, hopelessly beholden to certain Hindu religious and aesthetic traditions.

And Gill does an excellent job of breaking down his disparate influences in a calm, unhurried fashion; the picture of Virginia Woolf in the young Verma’s room, the issues of Kesari (a magazine published by the Gita Press) read by his grandfather, his ‘frenemy’ relationships with fellow Hindi writers like Krishna Baldev Vaid—and, of course, Verma’s conception of ‘European’ as a shared idea, a feat of the imagination rather than a meaningful political, racial or religious category. Gill is not only a supremely attentive reader of Verma’s novels (and Hindi literature as a whole; his meditations on Agyeya and Rahul Sankrityayan are equally impressive), he’s also deeply invested in the idea of Hindi literature being a precursor to the kind of novels contemporary commentators love to club under the ‘world literature’ umbrella.

“Bharatendu Harishchandra, one of the pioneers of Hindi writing, translated, among other texts, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice into Hindi. Premchand brought all sorts of influences—from Tagore to Ruskin—into his writing. The Chhayavad poets were indebted, in both direct and subliminal ways, to the British Romantics. This is to say that the ethos of give-and-take—crucial to all paradigms of modern thought—is the sine qua non of the Hindi tradition. Yet, most would hesitate to call it world literature.”

And on the odd occasion where Gill does slip into a more conventional biographer’s mode, there’s usually a compelling reason. Like this priceless passage about a childhood game played by Verma, something that in retrospect feels both macabre and very much in character.

“As a child, Verma would play a game, a sort of death simulation. He would hold his breath for as long as he could and try to fit within those moments as many recollections of his life as possible. An attempt at a pre-mortem flashback, as it were; a child’s pretend version of a near-death experience. But also, an uncanny rehearsal of an idea that would become important to Verma as a writer and thinker: that remembrance is the only viable response to death; that memory can work as an antidote to mortality.”

Over the last decade or so, there have been a handful of books that have portrayed writerly development in wholly original ways: Colm Toibin’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (2012) and George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021), for example. To my mind, Here and Hereafter belongs to that rarefied group, because of its ambition and its close-reading excellence.

About The Author

Aditya Mani Jha

Art & Culture

- Anupam Sud: A Printmaker’s Passion

Art & Culture

Anupam Sud: A Printmaker’s Passion

Anupam Sud plays with the human form to tell a sinister story

Anupam Sud

NESTLED IN THE bylanes of a sleepy village outside of Delhi, is the studio of artist Anupam Sud. Here, she lives and works alone, with only clanky metal sheets and silent human figures—the subjects of her art works—for company. I meet her here on a hot afternoon, for the first part of our interview. Soon after my arrival, she shepherds me from her art-filled living room to her workshop below to familiarise me with the medium she has worked with for over five decades. Her vivid and incessant chatter about her work makes the quiet space come alive, transforming her from a diminutive septuagenarian to the internationally acclaimed printmaker, painter and sculptor known for an expansive body of work.

Sud’s workspace aptly reflects her personality. The neat and orderly arrangements speak of self-discipline and the industrial sized machines and smattering of works in progress, display her creative talent. Adorning a wall here is a half-done plate where a man wears a silky-smooth lungi; decorating a table there is an intricate sketch of a woman clad in a sheer nightdress reclining in a forest; and a third shelf houses terracotta sculptures of goddess-like figurines. Observing these, one begins to understand the fulcrum of her genius: the will to pursue perfection. Later, when we are en route to seeing her life’s work displayed at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) for the exhibition titled Between Vows & Words: Anupam Sud (Five Decades of Art Practice), the first line she says to me strengthens my initial assessment, “I work very hard and very slow because that is my destiny. Art is like an ogre. Either you master it, or it will eat you up.”

Born in 1944 at Hoshiarpur, Punjab, this Himachali from Kangra was raised largely in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Her family migrated to Delhi in 1960, where she pursued a Diploma in Painting from the Delhi Polytechnic, which is now the Delhi College of Art. Here, under the tutelage of artist Jagmohan Chopra, who was her mentor and close family friend; she began to hone her skills in the art of printmaking. In the process, she became the youngest member of Group 8, a printmakers’ collective started by Chopra, which lasted from 1935-2013.

“Printmaking was only a subsidiary subject when I was in college, so I was actually trained as a painter. I just found this medium so magical that I was most attracted to it. Printmaking can never be totally predictable. It is like a sunrise over a landscape. You know what is about to unfold but never cease to be surprised by the revelation,” she asserts.

“Printmaking can never be totally predictable. It is like a sunrise over a landscape. You know what is about to unfold but never cease to be surprised by the revelation,” says Anupam Sud, artist

When Sud started to pursue printmaking in the 1970s, India was in the midst of war with Pakistan, and had banned certain acids needed for the printmaking technique. Chopra, and in turn his students, found a solution and began to use an alternative method known as collagraphy, where the materials are applied to a rigid substrate, which in this case was cardboard. Sud took well to this medium and created numerous works, some of which are currently on display at KNMA. Her proficiency with printmaking became the basis of her application for the British Council scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where she learnt and practiced this artistic technique from 1971-73.

Portuguese artist Bartolomeu dos Santos, who was attached to this prestigious art school, became her guide. Remembering those days fondly, Sud recalls, “My mission to go abroad was to learn as much as I could, so I could put everything into practice in India.” And that is exactly what she did. For nearly three decades after returning from London, she taught at the printmaking department at the College of Art, Delhi.

Roobina Karode, the curator of Sud’s retrospective at KNMA, briefly overlapped with her as a fellow faculty member. Hence, she was uniquely placed to appreciate and present Sud’s works to the world. “Anupam’s practice of more than five decades defies easy classification and periodisation. The sheer volume and scope of this elusive and discreet artist’s oeuvre, escapes any such attempt. She is perhaps one of the most significant Indian artists especially in the context of her extensive engagement with printmaking,” she says.

Persona

As a printmaker, Sud’s work largely focuses on various intaglio processes showing the human figure. Over time, she also expanded her practice to include other mediums such as painting, charcoal, pastels and ink.

At KNMA, Sud walks me through her favourites of the 215 works of mixed media art currently on display. She unapologetically clarifies, “I’m talkative and my work has to be talkative too. It should not put you to sleep! Take the example of these masked works—they have layered meanings. I made them to represent the different attitudes that we wear to cover our true selves. If we want to make ourselves fierce, we wear a mask. If we want to be coy, we wear a mask. Only after you become close to people, you can unmask them layer by layer.”

This intent shines through in an interesting work titled, Preparation for the Next Act…, which shows a woman donning a theatrical mask heavily decorated with Asian-style makeup, with characters from the Japanese language forming the backdrop. Sud says this work represents the repressed women she met while visiting Japan decades ago. In giving them a mask of cheerfulness, she depicts a hopeful future for them. Another striking piece called Olympia, features a gorgeous prostitute as the object of her male client’s gaze. However, her self-assured stance and embellished clothing seek to turn the established narrative on its head.

A Self Portrait

Sud’s mastery over the human form is the common thread in her work, which is spread across a variety of mediums and styles. I ask why she stayed true to the naked form? She responds, “I love the sensuality of the body, whether animal or human. I like to show the beauty of god’s creations as they were made, so I avoid putting clothes on them. Another reason is that clothes can be modes of identification that mark a person as belonging to a certain community or country. I prefer to show humans in their natural form because my artistic concerns are universal. When people ask me why I make nudes, I respond saying because you are nude from within. I make god’s forms. If you only see the nakedness in my work, you are missing its real message.”

“When people ask me why I make nudes, I respond saying because you are nude from within. I make god’s forms. If you only see the nakedness in my work, you are missing its real message,” says Anupam Sud

Endorsing this sentiment, Karode adds, “Anupam’s evolution as an artist, from the ‘plate’ to the ‘palette’ has been an exemplary and singular story. She demonstrated the will and fortitude of a young woman silently and slowly subverting the archaic notions of male supremacy and puritan idioms of modernism. She chose the medium of printmaking as a more democratic and readily transmissible form than painting, though in later years, became proficient in the latter as well.”

She began painting after a debilitating accident in 2008. Paralysed for over a month, she miraculously recovered yet remained weak and unable to perform the manual labour that is essential to a printmaking practice. And so, she began to paint. Fortunately, with the help of erstwhile student and fellow printmaker Rajesh Rana, she has returned to her favoured medium since then, but painting and sculpture have also become integral to her practice.

Thanks to Power

Detailed portraits of family members and herself dot the exhibition, with the latter meticulously capturing nature’s untampered progress over the years. Her parents, in particular, are consistent models in her work, as she lived with them till their death. Sud is grateful that her ailing mother saw her first solo show at Art Heritage, Delhi in 1989, before her untimely demise, but her father’s loss many years later, seems to have affected her keenly. She dedicates a massive watercolour entitled Dressing for a Journey, to his final days. “Daddy was quite ill in the end, and he only wanted me by his side. When he was in the hospital, Roobina was the only colleague from college who came to see me, and she wondered how this life situation would play out in my work. So while painting it, I thought of her often. The work shows my father in his final days with the drip and wheelchair, while on the other side, I’m getting ready for another journey by dressing myself up. A family portrait with all my siblings, and a scene with my best friend and her dog completes the composition, which is very close to my heart,” she says.

Sud’s universe consists of many subtleties that may be lost on first-time viewers. This is where Karode’s role as a curator and long-time colleague and friend, comes into play. Her interpretation of the artist’s work helps to unravel its numerous layers. This depth of meaning comes out in a striking piece titled The Rear Window. In the wake of the Mandal Commission protests, Sud was inspired by the visuals of the carnage of public property. She uses Bus number 345, which plied the Supreme Court / Delhi College of Art route, that she took on a daily basis, as a symbol representing how regular people can be the subject of violence. Additionally, the packed people in the bus hint at the sexual harassment women often face while travelling by public transport.

The Rear Window (Courtesy: KNMA and Anupam Sud)

After hours of traversing the curlicued corridors of KNMA over a long and fruitful discussion of her works, the artist halts in front of the piece which gives this exhibition its name. Between Vows & Words shows a couple holding each other in a tight grip that could represent either a promise of love or the threat of dominance. Examining it with head tilted to one side, she declares that she finds peoples’ varied interpretations of this work oddly reflective of their own life experiences. “Where some see naturally abounding love, others feel the repression of emotional imprisonment. A few toe the line between these two extreme emotions,” she says, inadvertently also summarising the appeal of her own works.

(Between Vows & Words by Anupam Sud runs at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, till December 15)

About The Author

Noor Anand Chawla

Cinema

- Pushing the Envelope

Cinema | Stargazer

Pushing the Envelope

Indian films have tried to crack the Oscar enigma, without any luck

(L to R) Pan Nalin, Madhuri Dixit and Dheer Momaya

Indian filmmakers usually approach the Oscars from an emotional standpoint. It’s either something they covet or pretend they don’t. When Aamir Khan launched a campaign for Lagaan (2001) to win Best Foreign Film, he made it almost a national movement, becoming only the third film from India to be nominated. Subsequent Indian films have tried to crack the Oscar enigma, without any luck. So it comes as a welcome change to see Pan Nalin and Dheer Momaya approach Last Film Show’s potential nomination as a science, and not an accidental art. The film is being distributed in the US by Samuel Goldwyn Films and internationally by Orange Studio which got Floran Zeller’s The Father (2021) and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011) nominated for Best Picture. Orange has been backing Last Film Show for a year; so they were waiting for India to nominate the film, says Momaya. Over the last four years, Samuel Goldwyn has won four nominations and one award for Another Round (2020). “The process is very open, it is our job to show the film to as many voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as possible. The second and third highest number of members is in the UK and France, so Orange Studio helps there. It is also being shown to small but influential groups of voters of AMPAS,” says Momaya. One recent event was at the Mill Valley Film Festival where the who’s who of the Academy take time out to watch movies in their flip flops with a glass of wine and where it won Audience Favourite Award. But that’s not enough. The film must be advertised in the American trade magazine, on hoardings and through word of mouth. That needs money. Nalin and Momaya feel that Last Film Show has enough qualities to enrapture a majority of AMPAS members, if not all 10,000 of them, with the new emphasis on diversity and inclusivity. Add to that Nalin’s reputation in the West as a filmmaker from India whose films have made money at the box office abroad by being sufficiently local and universal at the same time. Both Nalin, a member of AMPAS, and Momaya know this is a money battle as well, likely to get bigger as more streamers enter. This year, for instance, Apple TV+ bet big on CODA. Says Nalin: “You can’t fight the machinery, but in the end it is about how many AMPAS members talk about it.” Their partners, Film Heritage Foundation of India and Kodak, will help film lovers watch it, says Nalin. “A story well told which pushes the cinematic envelope should win hearts,” he adds. His films have attracted non-diaspora audiences—Samsara (2001), a Ladakhi film, made $35 million globally and was released by Miramax in 60 countries but on a mere 30 screens in India—and don’t deserve to be called mere ‘festival films’. “These are horrible tags we give our films,” says Momaya.

The Queen’s Challenge

The last time we spoke to Madhuri Dixit, while she was promoting The Fame Game on Netflix, she said she was learning tennis. She’s picked up quite a bit of the sport. She has played a Gujarati homemaker in Amazon Prime Video’s Maja Ma who discovers that she loves women, and has always done so. It took her just two or three days to say yes to Anand Tiwari, who dreamt big by writing it for her. Dixit’s image as a dancing star is so strong that it is easy to forget her taking risks, whether it was playing a grey character in Pukar (2000) or a single mother in her much-touted comeback film Aaja Nachle (2007), or even the naughty courtesan in Dedh Ishqiya (2014). “I believe in making people realise their own power. This was a story that needed to be told. When you take a risk, you challenge yourself, you go a step forward, you grow as an artist and as a person. Life is one challenge after another. Maja Ma’s Pallavi is a wife, a mother, daughter, yet has her own identity. It gave me a lot of fodder for thought,” says Dixit. For Tiwari, Dixit is a cultural phenomenon with great power who also understands her responsibility. “So that same conversation can travel 240 countries. When you have her can you say something important in an entertaining way that people don’t feel schooled?” he adds. This conversation is also across generations, adds Dixit, who got tweeted by a girl who saw it with her mother and grandmother.

Scene and Heard

The amateurish VFX in Om Raut’s trailer of the forthcoming Adipurush suddenly brought back a lot of love for Anubhav Sinha’s Ra.One (2011) which was excoriated at the time it was released for being derivative and ham-handed. Who’s laughing now? Someone sitting in Mannat for sure.

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

Table of Contents

Open Magazine

Cover Story

‘Labour indicators are better than pre-pandemic times and we have added jobs’

Columns

Maya Memsaab

Essays

A Prayer for Britain

Features

China mouthpiece praises Indian “autonomy” over Ukraine war

Books

Nirmal Verma: A Moral Life

Art & Culture

Anupam Sud: A Printmaker’s Passion

Cinema

Pushing the Envelope