Anand Parthasarathy reviews a book by Dileep Padgaonkar titled Under her spell. Here is how he ends the review:
Padgaonkar passes no judgment. In lively, yet unsensational prose, he has filled in some significant pieces in the jigsaw that was the life of one of cinema’s great auteurs. In the process he has done justice to the Indian woman who played her own role in the complex pattern of his life.
But from the review, neither the role played by the Indian woman, nor how justice is done to her, is clear; in fact, some parts of the review certainly does read sensational. Here is one example:
Among those the director [Rossellini] met was Hari Dasgupta, who had served as an assistant to the great French film maker Jean Renoir who had made “The River” in India in 1949. Dasgupta hoped to attain a similar position with Rossellini. When that did not look like happening, he introduced his wife Sonali and got her a position on the director’s team, to help in a vague way with the script.
It is not clear what Sonali’s special talents in writing were …
And, here is another:
Rossellini seemed to have succumbed to Sonali’s charms and she was sucked into an “affair” that provided the stuff of many sensational and jingoistic stories. Even Jawaharlal Nehru was called upon at one point to intervene — though official correspondence that was released into the public domain in recent years, show that Nehru took a firm but humane line and ensured that Rossellini, whatever the official perception of his culpability, was not hounded.
What is the affair within quote and unquote all about? And, didn’t the Prime Minister have other important issues to take care of in 1957 other than to intervene and take humane line in issues of “affair”s?
May be there is a point behind the book, and why it is getting reviewed in the Hindu. But, I am not getting it.
PS: By the way, I have nothing against books that are sensational and are about the affairs between great auteurs and the wives of their assistants; it is to the prose of the review (which sounds really cheesy), and the hypocrisy of praising the book for unsensational and non-judgemental prose, and for doing justice to the Indian woman for her role blah blah blah in a review which is itself so very sensation mongering, that I object to.
Tags: Dileep Padgaonkar, Under her spell
