On her passage through India, during the shoot of the 1983 Merchant Ivory Productions film, Heat and Dust , Oscar-winning actor Julie Christie voyaged to Assam, where she was born in 1940 in a tea plantation run by her parents. One of her pit stops during that trip was picturesque Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, where old acquaintances of her parents still lived.
She had taken the winding ride down to the hill station sitting at the front of a tumbledown State transport bus, chatting amiably with the driver. Her travel partner was The Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell (whom she married in India in 2007), himself the author of an India tome, The Paradise Trail , a whodunnit set in the 70s.
Lunch for the visiting ‘foreigners’ was arranged in my family home — a common film connection had set it up. My mother tried hard to keep it continental by rustling up a meal of cucumber salad, fried fish and homemade ice cream. All we youngsters noticed were Christie’s green-blue eyes and her freckles. India wasn’t yet an international tourist attraction, so an audience with a pucca memsahib was a novel experience.
A passage to Forster
Some years later, almost as a kind of allegiance to that short-lived encounter, my mother trooped us around to watch Christie’s classic Doctor Zhivago (1965) at a musty local cinema. We slept through most of it, but the musical motif, Lara’s Theme, became a signature memory of that outing (or maybe that was because hotel foyers were partial to it in those days, long before Kenny G and Yanni took over the market for elevator music).
The sensory overload of Heat and Dust marked the true coming of its production house, and provided a precursory counterpoint to the much vaunted 1984 film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India , helmed by Zhivago director David Lean. James Ivory had his sights set on the Forster novel for years, but was stymied in his attempts to meet the reclusive writer. Lean picked up the spoils, and promptly — and contentiously — cast a white actor (Alec Guinness) as the mystical Professor Godbole.
Adapted for celluloid by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel, Heat and Dust shared many narrative themes with A Passage to India . Christie played a BBC journalist attempting to piece together the story of her great-aunt, Olivia (Greta Scacchi), who had eloped with an Indian prince (Shashi Kapoor), in the 1920s. Olivia is almost a stand-in for Forster’s Adela Quested (Judy Davis), who has a racially charged encounter with an Indian man.
Immediacy and chaos
Similarly, Cyril Sahib, the de facto narrator of Jhabvala’s tale, is partly inspired from Foster’s experiences as the secretary of the Maharaja of Dewas, in central India, as recounted in The Hill of Devi (1953).
Ivory’s treatment gave Heat and Dust an inalienable Indian texture, full of immediacy and chaos, that was missing in the India-at-a-distance vantage of the Lean epic, although the latter was mounted with considerably greater finesse.
Her Assam tour took Christie to a hamlet near Sibsagar, where a tree on which she had engraved her name as a child still stood and still bore the markings. The scene was reminiscent of the one in Ivory’s Howards End, in which Emma Thomson’s Margaret Schlegel discovers the wych elm with the pigs’ teeth stuck into the trunk, exactly as described by kindred spirit Mrs. Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave).
If Ivory’s vision of Forster’s India had come to fruit, Redgrave would have played the young Quested. However, having lost out on A Passage to India , Ivory went on to make three definitive adaptations of Forster novels — Howards End , A Room With A View and Maurice — all produced by Ismail Merchant. Jhabvala scripted the first two, picking up Academy Awards for both efforts.
The writer sought out cinema that came at least two generations before him, even as a child, and that nostalgia tripping has persisted a lifetime.
