Column | Henry Sugar and Poison, Wes Anderson movie adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, capture his fascination with India

Wes Anderson’s films, in many ways, represent the two ends of the West’s engagement with India.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Sugar and poison are two sides of the same delectable confection that is Wes Anderson. The filmmaker’s stylishly-executed recent renditions of four Roald Dahl stories are a treat to watch. But two of them — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Poison — are of particular interest to South Asians.

They represent in many ways the two ends of the West’s engagement with India. (Spoilers ahead.)

Henry Sugar is partly set in Calcutta during British rule. A man named Imdad Khan (based on a real Pakistani named Kuda Bux) comes to a hospital and announces to bemused doctors that he can see without using his eyes. The white people are awed by his yogic powers and deeply grateful to learn at the feet of masters. This is ‘Namaste Vishwaguru India’, the fount of mysterious wisdom.

In Poison, the same cast of Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel and Benedict Cumberbatch act out the other extreme of the colonial dance between the West and the East. Here, an Englishman thinks there is a deadly poisonous krait on his stomach, and an Indian doctor goes through an elaborate rigmarole to try and rescue him without startling the snake. He gets no gratitude for his pains and instead finds himself the target of a stream of racist slurs.

Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley in a still from ‘Poison’.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Netflix

They are like mirror images of each other. While one is feel-good and the other deeply disconcerting, both in the end have more in common than merely the cast. In neither case does the Indian get to enjoy the fruits of his own wisdom and expertise. Imdad Khan lives and dies as a performing act in a magic show. It’s Henry Sugar who masters his skill to become a wealthy philanthropist. Thus, they are both stories of colonisation — one comes with a gracious smile and the other has its fangs bared. But the teeth bite just the same.

Staying true to the artist’s work

What subliminal message author Dahl intended to convey is hard to tell. “Sensitivity readers” have rewritten Dahl lately, which has drawn the ire of many writers, including Salman Rushdie. Dahl’s anti-Semitism was well-documented. Now words like fat and ugly have been banished from his stories. His Matilda who once went sailing with Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling now has to settle for the less colonially controversial John Steinbeck and Jane Austen.

British novelist Roald Dahl, December 1971.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

By making Dahl himself a character and sticking to his text, Anderson is giving us Dahl unexpurgated and unsanitised, keeping the story defiantly in Dahl’s own words. He told Rolling Stone uncategorically that once a work of art is out in the public domain, not even the artist should tamper with it because the audience has already engaged with it. And rewriting Dahl is worse because he is dead.

While I don’t know what message Anderson himself was trying to send out by selecting these two stories to bookend his series, his own fascination with India is well-known, including his love for seersucker prints. The film The Darjeeling Limited (2007) of course is the most famous example where three estranged brothers travel across exotic India by train to the accompaniment of a Satyajit Ray soundtrack.

Anderson spoofs the stereotype of the white encounter with India by making the brothers “say they are interested in India but not really, they are hardly interested in each other”. But Anderson has been accused of much the same himself. In The Darjeeling Limited, one of the brothers has a a brief encounter with a dusky attendant on the train but then she vanishes as if she was nothing more than a transit stop on the brothers’ spiritual journey. Writing on Slate.com, Jonah Weiner says, “for a director as wilfully idiosyncratic as Anderson, it’s surprising how many white-doofuses-seeking-redemption-in-the-brown-skinned-world-clichés The Darjeeling Limited inhabits”.

Holy cow!

A still from Wes Anderson’s ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ (2007).

But there is one cliché the Netflix shorts are thankfully free of. The famous Indian cow is missing. At one time, it was the unavoidable fixture when it came to the white gaze on India, the directorial stand-in for authentic India. In The Darjeeling Limited, there is a cow and a snake. The latter gets loose and causes havoc. But while the Netflix short has a snake, or the threat of one, the cud-chewing cow is missing.

At the time The Darjeeling Limited was released, I remember seeing a call-centre comedy called Outsourced by Seattle filmmaker John Jeffcoat, starring Ayesha Dharker. In one scene, there is a cow, and the cow is literally inside the call centre. I wondered if it was the same cow-extra as the one in The Darjeeling Limited. Either way, the cow standing phlegmatically in the middle of chaos stood as a symbol of unchanging India just as the call centre represented rapidly-changing India.

Now, Wes has again met the East but at least the sacred cow has left the scene. We should count that as progress.

The writer is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.