There is no denying Italians have a sense of humour. No, we are not talking about Berlusconi. Jokers get elected in many mature democracies, but arguably the most successful political farce of all time, Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist), was penned by an Italian – the Nobel Prize winner, Dario Fo. The play is based on a real-life incident of alleged anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who was accused of planting a bomb. He fell out of the window of the fourth floor of the police building where he was being interrogated. The Italian public, till date, remain sceptical of the official police version that he committed suicide or accidentally fell, owing to no fault of the policemen interrogating him. The incident, which transpired in December 1969, inspired Dario Fo, who was a successful left wing dramatist at that time, to write and produce the masterpiece in 1970.
Dario Fo. Original image published here. Image published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic License.
The play is set in the police building where the death of the anarchist occurred, around a week after the incident. The scene opens with a serial impersonator, a self-confessed histrionic maniac, being interrogated by the police. He soon confuses the dim-witted policemen with his insane logic to the point where they realise it’s not worth the trouble to keep him detained. The “Maniac” however, intercepts a phone call and comes to know of the arrival of a judge to enquire into the ‘accidental’ death of the anarchist. The play progresses with the maniac impersonating the judge, and in the process, managing to expose the contradictions in the police story.
This play about police brutality and fallacy within the construct of the powerful continues to be relevant more than forty years after its creation, and the Maniac remains a dream role for every actor.
The play has slapstick, visual gags, double speak and allegorical sequences which successfully demystify the events relating to the death of the anarchist. With the maniac taking up different roles throughout the play, Fo employs a derivation of the mask technique often seen in Commedia dell’arte, a medieval theatre form having its origins in Italy. The play stands out as one of the few devoid of zoomorphic symbolism, an animal imagery often used to de-humanise existence and bring down authority figures from a pedestal: a staple in Fo works like Archangels don’t play Pinball, Mistero Buffo, La Storia della Tigre and Giullarate.
The play uses Verfremdungseffekt, a technique borrowed from Brecht, which is used in almost all the Fo works. An effect of alienation is brought about by the breaking of the fourth wall – by actors interacting with the audience often by dialogue or actions. It is an exercise aimed at the audience being constantly reminded of the performance as a play and reflecting upon it while the performance is on. The result is that as critic Antonio Scuderi puts it, “Often Fo’s farce leaves the audience not in laughter, but with unreleased anger”.
The historical and political background of the play has to be understood in the context of post-world war Italy. The axis of neo-fascist elements in the state machinery and outside, the Catholic Church and capitalistic agents, were active in their opposition to the rising influence of communism in Italy. A “strategy of tension” was covertly implemented to legitimise a state crackdown on the left wing elements by orchestrating a series of bombings, assassinations, and disruptive activities, which could then be attributed to the radical left. The Piazza Fontana bombing which Pinelli was accused of, was widely seen as a part of this strategy. The policemen involved, including Luigi Calabresi, who was later assassinated by the members of a left wing group, were cleared of all charges following an internal enquiry. The official narrative about the death or the suicide overwhelmed the mainstream media establishments. In this context, Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a true counter to hegemony in the Gramscian sense as moral neutrality was a luxury that Fo did not have.
Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been translated into more than 40 languages, and it has been performed in many more countries. A peculiar feature of the play is its inherent scope to go beyond the literal translations and adapt to fit various political and cultural contexts. The play was adapted in India by various groups, of which Three-Star Operation, produced by Asmita Theatre, was highly successful. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, like all Fo plays, according to Fo himself, is meant to be performed and evolve with each performance. It is ironic, therefore, that Fo has been critical of many of the translations and adaptations of the play, including a version in English, directed and acted by Gavin Richards, who placed the play in a British setting in 1981.
This interview with Aditya Sudarshan, a multiple gold medallist from N.L.S.I.U., was first published in March 2009, a month after his first novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday, hit the stores.
In 2007, Aditya Sudarshan did something pretty unusual for a graduating multiple gold medallist from N.L.S.I.U. He decided to give up the fancy salaries that come with joining some of the top law firms in India and the U.K. and even the option of getting a Masters degree from some the finest Universities in the United Kingdom or the United States. Instead, Aditya took up criminal trial litigation in New Delhi – shuttling between the Tees Hazari and Patiala House courts. Nine months later, he was to make an even more unusual decision – to quit the practice of law to become an author. His first novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday, published by Westland Books, was released last month and is now available at leading bookstores.
A traditional murder mystery, the story follows Justice Harish Shinde who is on holiday in Bhairavgarh – a tranquil little Himalayan town, with his law clerk Anant, and living at the house of Shikhar Pant. Within a few days of their arrival, the tranquillity of the setting is disturbed by violent opposition to the alleged obscenity in a report on AIDS – authored by the Mittals, who are also guests at the same house. Things take a turn for the worse when Pant’s cousin – a noted writer and defender of the report, is found stabbed to death. Anant soon finds himself in the unusual position of being counsel to the Mittals in an obscenity trial, and assistant sleuth to Justice Shinde, as the novel moves towards its startling conclusion.
Aditya Sudarshan has participated in book-readings in New Delhi and Bengaluru. Between figuring out the publication of his second novel and working on his third work – a collection of short stories, he spoke with Rainmaker. On the shift from legal practice to writing, he says the only thing he did consciously was to keep his options open. “As a litigating lawyer, you’re always coming across two fundamental elements of fiction – characters, in the form of your clients, and plots, in the form of their troubles. So your raw material is the same – human drama.”
Rainmaker:Most of our readers belong to the Indian legal community. I am sure they would be interested in knowing how a multiple gold-medallist from India’s top institution for legal education decided to take up writing fiction. Aditya: Yes I guess it is quite a shift. But then there’s no set path to getting into fiction writing anyway. When I was in college, like many people I used to write fiction pieces on the side. At that stage I didn’t think about whether I’d ever be doing it full-time. It was somewhere at the back of my mind, but what I was really considering was a career in litigation. Later I finished this novel, got a contract for it and an idea for another novel, and by then I’d also had nine months experience of litigation. So I was in a position to know which profession suited me better, and that’s when I made the shift. But the whole process was gradual; no single moment of epiphany. The only thing I did do consciously was to keep my options open, and to give myself time to make a decision.
Rainmaker:Was that rare in law school – to keep one’s options open?
Aditya: I actually think it was rare. What usually happens is, for the first three, three-and-a-half years; everyone says they’re keeping their options open. And they are, but it’s easy then, because decision-time is still a while away. As you start to get to the business end of law school and there are recruitment opportunities and jobs and offers flying around, that’s when the pressure to make a quick decision mounts. I think at this stage many people who need more time don’t take it. Not to say that if they’re undecided about their career they should turn down all opportunities, but I think whatever they do take up, it should be very clearly in the spirit of ‘testing the waters’. That takes away some of the pressure of the decision and gives them more space to make a real commitment.
Aditya Sudarshan, author of A Nice Quite Holiday
Rainmaker: The narrator of your novel, Anant, is law clerk to another major character, Justice Harish Shinde – a New Delhi trial court judge. To me, the relationship between judge and clerk was a very interesting aspect of your novel. Can you tell us about your own experiences as a judicial clerk, and its influence on the relationship between Anant and Justice Shinde. Aditya: Well the clerkship I did was just a month-and-a-half with a Supreme Court judge, so it was obviously very different from the one described in the book. But the general relationship between the clerk and the judge did strike me as interesting. As a clerk you’re spending most of your day, often including Sundays, at the judge’s office – which is also in the judge’s house – you’re working on his speeches and opinions, brain-storming with him, sometimes you might have a meal with him. And yet in formal terms, the gulf between the two of you is massive – you’re a total novice and he’s a judge. With a hierarchy like that, you can hardly be ‘friends’ or even ‘colleagues’. And yet, given how much one-on-one time you’re spending together, he is likely to become something more personal than just a ‘boss.’ Maybe he starts to feel like a mentor – but maybe the clerk doesn’t want a mentor. So it’s an interesting relationship, because it isn’t clear-cut. It has potential for both conflicts and sympathies. (Which is good material for fiction.)
Rainmaker:The book is structured like the traditional detective novel, when in fact it deals with much more – small-town morality and politics, to begin with. Is there a reason why you chose this structure?
Aditya: Yes, because a detective story naturally involves thinking through a problem, analysing characters and their motivations, and the secrets they might be concealing. It allows a writer to do these things in an open and overt way, which is what I wanted to do. So the way I look at it, it isn’t as though I’m using the structure of a murder mystery as a facade, while really making points about serious issues. The murder mystery itself entails those issues, and hence in the natural course of tackling the mystery I have to tackle them.
Rainmaker:So does this mean that we will see more of the Anant-Justice Shinde team? Aditya: I hope so. Perhaps not in a novel, but I’d definitely like to write a collection of short mystery stories involving these two.
Rainmaker:Someone once told me that there is a frustrated writer inside every lawyer. Aditya: I definitely think there’s a connection somewhere. I don’t know if this is true, but my guess is that there’s a disproportionate number of lawyers who have taken up writing, whether full time or part time, as compared to other professionals. There’s Grisham, and there’s Scott Turow who studied at Harvard, and there was John Mortimer of England, who wrote the Rumpole stories. And let’s remember that the young Charles Dickens worked in a lawyer’s office too, wanted at one time to be a barrister, and also put a lot of law into many of his books.
So there’s got to be a connection. It’s not that hard to see it either. At least as a litigating lawyer, you’re always coming across two fundamental elements of fiction- characters, in the form of your clients, and plots, in the form of their troubles. So your raw material is the same – human drama. (Then, of course, the way you treat that material is very different.)
Rainmaker:Did legal education and your brief stint in litigation prepare you for your first novel? Aditya: In one very minor sense yes, because my novel involves some legal details that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. But more fundamentally, I think legal education probably did help prepare me. Legal education does train you to think in structured terms about human emotions, and you need to be able to do that to plan out a novel. And it’s not as though every course lets you do this. Science and mathematics might encourage incisive thought and the ability to theorise, but they don’t have a human element. The humanities subjects are full of the human element, but I think usually at a more abstract level. Only the law seems to really get down to the level of individual people and their relationships and emotions. Obviously it isn’t direct training for fiction writing- but then what is?
I don’t think my stint in litigation helped so much. I know I just said that litigation exposes you to characters and plots and that’s true, but as you get into the grind of it, it doesn’t give you the luxury to think of them that way. You can’t afford to think through the deeper motivations of your client, because that’s not why he hired you. You have to try and get him his relief.
The other thing about litigation is that its conventions demand that you write in a certain ‘formal’ way and I think that’s often just bad, painful writing. As a fiction writer, you have to take care of your talent. (Maybe that’s why the writer inside the lawyer slowly gets frustrated!)
Rainmaker:So do you see a lot of Indian writing in English to come out of Indian law schools? Aditya: I do. There is plenty of fiction writing that happens in the law schools. The stumbling block is that law is a professional course and if you follow the natural course of it strictly all the way through, it takes you away from fiction. But if you’re keen enough on writing, then the likelihood is that sooner or later you’re going to do it. I personally know of law school graduates who are writing fiction, or at least actively considering it. And the law schools themselves are still quite young. If I were a betting man I’d bet on this happening.
In his autobiography, Before Memory Fades, Fali S. Nariman wrote:
“We demean ourselves and our profession when we resolve to strike work, and (so) paralyse the working of courts, where public cases and causes demand our expertise, intercession and assistance.”
Pro-Telengana advocates recently boycotted courts in Andhra Pradesh. The protesting advocates had demanded a 42 per cent quota for advocates from the Telengana region in the appointments to various law officers, such as government pleaders and public prosecutors in courts, as a compensatory measure. After many days of stalemate, the Government finally acceded to the demands. The episode generated sharp and divergent public opinion about the mode of protest.
Andhra Pradesh High Court. Image here and on the article banner by Cephas 405; original image published here. Image published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 License.
When the Supreme Court in Harish Uppal v. Union of India, (2003) 2 SCC 45 was faced with a similar question, it had observed:
“It is settled law that it is unprofessional as well as unbecoming for a lawyer who has accepted a brief to refuse to attend Court even in pursuance of a call for strike or boycott by the Bar Association or the Bar Council. It is settled law that Courts are under an obligation to hear and decide cases brought before it and cannot adjourn matters merely because lawyers are on strike.”
The Hon’ble Court had also asserted:
“Unfortunately strikes and boycott calls are becoming a frequent spectacle. Strikes, boycott calls and even unruly and unbecoming conduct are becoming a frequent spectacle. On the slightest pretence strikes and / or boycott calls are resorted to. The judicial system is being held to ransom. Administration of law and justice is threatened. The rule of law is undermined.”
However, a view has been expressed that the observations of the Hon’ble Supreme Court are apt only in situations where a lawful redress is available to remedy injustices. Instances of protest for self-determination almost certainly require special treatment. Without delving into the details and the correctness or otherwise of the pro-Telangana agitation, it has to be said that there is some substance to that view.
It would not be out of place to mention here that the movement for Indian freedom is replete with incidents of boycott of courts by lawyers and freedom fighters. In fact, resolutions adopted by the Indian National Congress during the Non-Cooperation Movement, included the ‘boycott of courts by lawyers and litigants’ on the agenda.
Lawyers are officers of the court and have an overriding professional duty to facilitate the administration of justice. Clearly, the ‘strike weapon’ ought to be employed sparingly and wisely and only as a last option, but each lawyer should decide whether and when to use it according to his or her own ‘political sensibility’.
(Pavan Kumar is an advocate at the High Court of Andhra Pradesh.)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah evokes strong responses in South Asia, and has been cast in a multitude of roles depending on which side of the political line he is viewed from – a master negotiator, a charismatic leader, a cunning politician, a secular liberal, and a conservative reactionary. Few, however, see him as a lawyer, his primary professional training that helped launch his career in public life and shaped both, his political career, and his ideological vision.
Lawyers of course, overwhelmingly dominate the galaxy of political leaders in colonial India. This was partly structural. Professional and middle classes have always played a significant role in republican movements. In British India, law, unlike medicine or engineering, was the only profession that could be practiced without being employed by the colonial government. Jinnah is unique in being amongst the handful of lawyers who became equally successful in both their fields.
A young Jinnah in traditional attire.
Jinnah was born into a Gujarati Khoja Muslim family engaged in trade in Karachi. As a successful trader in British India, Jinnah’s father realised that they had to forge closer links with British traders. It was to learn trade that Jinnah was sent to London. At the age of 15, he began a three-year apprenticeship with the London office of the Graham’s Shipping and Trading Company, a firm that specialised in trading in textiles and port wine. The minutiae of trade did not interest Jinnah, so within a few months of reaching England, he enrolled instead at the Inns of Court to train as a barrister. An apocryphal story suggests that his choice of Lincoln’s Inn was guided by the fact that it listed the Prophet Muhammad’s name over its doors among a list of the world’s greatest lawgivers. Jinnah’s training was purely vocational: he did not have a college education, but he passed his Bar with flying colours, graduating at the age of 19 as the youngest Indian barrister of that time.
From liit’s photostream, Flickr. Original at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/liits/4757763095/
Jinnah returned to Bombay to begin practice at the Bombay Bar on August 24, 1896. The choice of Bombay, instead of his hometown Karachi, was not surprising. Bombay was the leading city of colonial India: it was liberal and cosmopolitan, but perhaps most importantly, was the business capital of India and therefore, the centre of commercial litigation.
Unusually for a lawyer of that period, Jinnah did not begin as a pupil to someone else but started an independent practice. Indian barristers had a hard time building a practice in India, the Indian trained vakils were often hostile and litigants were indifferent to the ‘foreign qualification’. Contrary to popular perception, most Indian law students passed their exams with the help of coaches, and had a limited command over English. While they were versed in English law and procedure, they knew little about the workings of the Indian Penal Code. Moreover, much of the commercial practice was controlled by a monopoly of British solicitor firms, who had their own network of barristers.
Like today, most young lawyers in the 19th century relied on networks of family and kin to get cases. Belonging to a commercial family, it was not surprising that Jinnah’s first case came from home. At the age of 22, he represented his uncle, Ganji Walji, a Khoja merchant who another Khoja merchant had sued for the recovery of Rs.6,790/- due as interest. This litigation, when Jinnah stepped in, was ruining his father’s business.
He did find mentors in Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, a Parsi leading lawyer, and Mr. McPherson, the Advocate General of the state, both of whom allowed Jinnah to access their respective library. McPherson sought to help out a struggling barrister by nominating him to the lower judiciary. In 1900, Jinnah was appointed Third Presidency Magistrate for Bombay, a position that paid Rs.1,500/- a month, and which placed him among a handful of Indians who wielded tremendous executive power and influence. Six months after being appointed, however, Jinnah declined to continue in the position.
While he had built his practice as a civil and commercial lawyer, it was in the period following the Magistracy that he began appearing in criminal cases, often engaged by the government. Perhaps the most famous of his early cases was the murder of a Hindu seer, Sayaji Baba, by an ‘alleged lunatic’. Jinnah assisted the prosecution in proving that the accused held a grudge against the victim before the murder and thus, despite the appearance of lunacy, committed premeditated murder.
Jinnah’s career as a public advocate bloomed after he appeared as a lawyer in the ‘Caucus’ case. The case dealt with the interference of the government in the election of local judges to the Bombay Municipal Council. The Indian Councils Act had introduced limited self-government in municipalities and half the seats of the Corporation could be contested from a limited electorate of 12,000 taxpayers. The other half consisted of nominated officials. The ‘elected’ wing of the Corporation was dominated by moderate Congress politicians, including Jinnah’s mentor Pherozeshah Mehta. In 1907 the ‘caucus’ of nominated officials connived with the government and arranged the defeat of Congressmen like Mehta. Surprisingly, Mehta, a distinguished barrister himself, hired Jinnah to plead his election petition. While Jinnah won only a partial victory (Mehta was declared elected, but many of the charges against the government were not accepted), the case made Jinnah nationally famous. This was the first time the colonial government was accused of rigging elections before its own courts, and the proceedings were extensively covered in both, the English and vernacular press. This case perhaps exemplified Jinnah’s early politics, exposing the British regime’s faults and contradictions through the constitutional framework of British rule.
Compared with his contemporaries, like Gandhi, Jinnah spent a relatively short period as a ‘briefless barrister’. His eloquent speaking style and incisive arguments helped his practice grow. As Frank Moraes was to describe his courtroom manner in later years, “Few lawyers command a more attentive audience. No man is more adroit in presenting his case. If to achieve the maximum result with the minimum effort is the hallmark of artistry, Jinnah is an artist of the craft. He likes to get down to the bare bones of the brief; in stating the essentials of his case, his manner is masterly. The drab courtroom acquires an atmosphere as he speaks. Juniors crane their necks to follow every movement of this tall, well groomed figure, senior counsels listen closely; the Judge is all attention.”
Jinnah’s public prominence grew in 1916, when he appeared as the defence lawyer for Bal Gangadhar Tilak in a sedition case. Tilak had previously been convicted for sedition and had spent time in prison. Jinnah was unsuccessful in securing Tilak’s release in the District Court of Poona, but was able to have the conviction overturned at the Bombay High Court. His argument was twofold: firstly, he argued that Indians as British citizens were entitled to criticise the bureaucracy and they owed loyalty to the British crown and not the government of India; secondly, the C.I.D. had translated Tilak’s Marathi speeches incorrectly, and the English translation wrongly gave the impression of sedition. The case turned on the nuances of Marathi, a language Jinnah was unfamiliar with, but after careful study and briefing, he ably led the cross-examination of expert witnesses. Incidentally, Jinah had prepared the line of defence in this case, and the adoption of this line was a condition for this accepting the case. While presenting his bail application in 1908, Jinnah had reluctantly refused to defend Tilak in his first sedition case because of Tilak’s insistence of dictating his own line of defence.
Jinnah engaged a number of what could be termed ‘free speech’ cases, challenging the draconian press laws that were enacted during the First World War. The most prominent of these was his defence of the Bombay Chronicle, a nationalist English language daily. Jinnah, as a classical liberal lawyer, often spoke up for civil liberties, most famously attacking the colonial government in the Central Assembly over the illegality of Bhagat Singh’s trial. Since Bhagat Singh and his co-accused had refused to cooperate with the prosecution, a special ordinance was promulgated, which permitted the trial in absentia. Jinnah’s scathing attack on the government turned on the harm caused to the rule of law by this ordinance. He argued, “I say that no judge who has an iota of judicial mind or a sense of justice can ever be a party to a trial of that character and pass the sentence of death without a shudder and a pang of conscience. This is a farce which you propose to enact”. The law he pointed out failed to meet the standards that British common law demanded. Even at his most emphatic, Jinnah’s arguments were framed in legal terms.
I didn’t quite know what to make of Draw Muhammed Day on May 20.
True to South Park canon, the source of the problem is a Canadian. Fox News had published her name as the originator of the idea that went viral, even though she has long backed off. The issue dates back to Viacom’s censorship of the 201st episode of South Park. The bi-centennial anniversary was a celebration of South Park’s major characters and plotlines. Yes, even the Super Best Friends who were resurrected to show Buddha snorting cocaine and Jesus using porn. Ironically, Viacom bleeped the show extensively and in particular, Kyle’s teaching point at the end. Allegedly, what Kyle had learnt that day concerned not cowing down to absurd terror. The Canadian was objecting to such censorship.
In the beginning, the banning of Facebook was just one more thing to roll your eyes at Pakistan for. Yet, trawling the pictures people had posted, I saw mainly pure Islamophobia on display. Many drawings depicted the Prophet as a pig. Others invest him with devilish aspects. A common theme was him abusing little girls as a paedophile. Soiling himself was almost a leitmotif. Then there were some that were so ridiculous in their attempt to be offensive that they had genuine artistic merit. Case in point- the I am Muhammed and I have a bread roll in my bum cartoon.
This is not to say that all of the cartoons were designed to be offensive. My favourite had to be the simple stick figure sniffing a flower. Someone had also drawn a rather good portrait of the boxer Cassius Clay. There was even a montage of the long tradition of aesthetic paintings of the Prophet in Shia culture.
When it comes to depicting the Prophet, the issue is more complex than a freedom of expressionversus religious sensitivity debate. This point is best expressed by Karseten Kjar’s documentary Bloody Cartoons. Made as part of a series for BBC entitled Why Democracy?, it peels back layers of the carefully planned protests against Denmark to find it is not much different from the Rushdie fatwa issue. The Satanic Verses controversy is seen by many as a classic wag-the-dog exercise by the Ayatollah. He needed to shore up political support for the war against Iraq, which wasn’t going well. The scene that seals the deal in the documentary is when the filmmaker buys the last poster of Muhammed (depicted in a Disneyish hero iconography) in an Iranian Islamic super-store. The Iranians were going to stop publishing the hero poster to show solidarity with their Sunni Arab brothers (whose guts they ordinarily hate and fought above-mentioned war with).
In many ways this represents how much freedom of expression has shrunk due to that old villain: globalisation. When Super Best Friends was aired in 2001, no one took any notice of it. The Danish cartoons controversy has changed all that. Viacom no longer airs the episode that ran unimpeded for nearly ten years.
The Facebook, er, face-off between offended Muslims and those who are blatantly enjoying the anonymity of the Internet to rile them is very different from traditional conflict. It is not one artist against some fundamentalists. It is thousands of common people versus each other.
I quickly lost any enthusiasm for what had initially seemed a genuine grass-roots reprisal against fear, through social networking. There is a line between challenging the oppression of blasphemy and expressing hate against a people.
