The Turkey’s egg goes to...

Shobhaa De’s point is that The Rising was made for western audiences. I wish it had been so, says Farrukh Dhondy

The row over Mangal Pandey: The Rising is virtually over and the producers and distributors are making their way gleefully to the bank. Writers should never reply to reviews. That's a good and civilised rule. However, I've been sent a very curious piece which can't properly be called a 'review'. It's written by someone called Shobhaa De (I hope that's the correct spelling!).

This is how it begins: "Generally speaking, turkeys don't have names. This one does. It's called Mangal Pandey. Ketan Mehta has finally done what I long suspected he would (what took you so long, honey?) - he's laid an egg. A rather expensive egg (Rs. 30 crore, did I hear?). But that's his problem."

De is obviously familiar with Ketan. She calls him 'honey' and seems to know the length of his ovulatory periods. I was faintly puzzled by the clumsy prose and tone, till a friend told me that De does very good work in India writing stories and romances for the slow reader. Her stories have mildly sexual themes and are even published under ordinary-seeming covers so as not to stigmatise these handicapped sections of the population. This friend was full of praise and I agreed. It is noble work, generously conceived. Suddenly her piece on our film made sense: This stuff about men laying eggs - a rather revolting and ill-conceived image, but one which her target audience would, possibly find amusing.

De's most important point in the piece is that The Rising was made for western audiences. I wish it had been. Making films for the West from India is notoriously difficult and hasn't been done completely successfully yet. But the single cut of The Rising that was shown all over the world was specifically biased towards Hindi film audiences.

A lot of Hindi dialogue, six songs by Javed and A R Rahman, performed and danced to in the naach-gaana idiom of Bollywood, is most certainly not going to set the Thames or the Mississippi on fire. The small river that flows through Southall was reported to be ablaze when The Rising was showing there.

Just as it is perfectly possible that one or two people outside De's target readership, of emotionally retarded and masturbatorily inclined people, may read her stories, it is perfectly possible that a few thousand 'goras' (her name for western audiences) may feel inclined to see it.

The piece then proceeds to do a strange calculation. De catalogues all the scenes with any bodily content in them: a British officer's wife sweltering in the heat, an Indian wet nurse breast-feeding a white child, two men stripped to the waist wrestling. She sees 'eroticism' in all of these and calls them 'tired cliches'. I can't recall any film which has caused these images to lose their lustre - but then I don't watch that sort of website. She also writes "This is not epic filmmaking. It is faking the Big "O"… all noise and grunts, heaving and panting, and little else." Again, something I am unfamiliar with.

In one scene an Indian woman acts as a wet nurse to a white officer's child. De calls this scene 'twee' and means it as an insult. And this in a piece full of words like 'Hey!', 'Honey' and 'Hello?' Curiouser and curiouser: she says the costumes for the film seem to have "emerged from Manoj Kapur's attic." I don't happen to know who Manoj Kapur is, but wonder if he really does have 'an attic'? Does he live in Amsterdam? And why does he keep clothes from 1857 in this raftered treasure-chest?

Does she use the same notional locations, attics etc in her stories? And are these stories as full of ignorant American teenage-speak as her piece on The Rising? If they are it may be with the intention of making her unfortunate readers feel part of the 'global village' where there are attics and people habitually say 'Hey', 'Hello', 'Honey', 'tootsie' and - 'like-cool'? (Incidentally, how old is De?)

I agreed to calling the film The Rising partly as a hostage to fortune. I wanted to know who would first fall, in print, into this trap and blithely entertain the world with the predictable joke about male erections.

The prize goes to Shobhaa De (Tantaran!) for this scintillatingly amusing conclusion: "So…. what is it that might salvage Ketan's folly? Perhaps Kirron Kher's mighty cleavage, which, for many viewers, turned out to be the film's biggest revelation. I can visualise several male members (ummm, in the audience, silly), rising to that awesome sight."
I could send her a Turkey egg. But are they safe with all this bird-flu about?

The writer is a scriptwriter based in London.