Farrukh Dhondy is a novelist and playwright and in his life has been a teacher, anti-racism activist, a senior television executive who commissioned some notable documentaries, and friend to several notable figures. But most of all, he is a storyteller, a kind of literary flaneur, flitting from one anecdote to the other, some amusing, others outrageous but a few others that show him in a pensive, reflective mood. His latest book, a memoir oddly named Fragments Against My Ruin has all of these and more. To some of his friends and acquaintances, these stories may sound well-scrubbed and sanitised for polite audiences.
Here is one from his younger days in Poona. Young Farukh, then in college, along with his friend Dileep Padgaonkar, also a student, set out to create a fake story and sell it to the Poona Herald, where both were freelancing, and making some pocket money.
Farrukh Dhondy
Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life
Context (August 2021)
It turned out that Stephen Ward, then in the midst of a sex scandal in Britain, had worked in Poona. Ward, an osteopath for London society, had been arrested, committed to trial but just before the verdict, died from an overdose of sleeping pills.
The two intrepid journos wrote a bogus story about his Poona days. The Herald published it, and this brought a famous crime reporter Capt Colabawalla from Blitz, who gave the boys a treat in a Chinese restaurant and ‘bought’ the story. It made the front page of the tabloid. A fine start to a career as a writer.
Dhondy went on to get a graduate degree in chemistry and go on to Cambridge with a scholarship from the Tata Trusts to read for one more. He tells us a funny story of going for his scholarship interview in the most inappropriate clothes, with long hair and generally looking most unlike a serious candidate. But he got it.
In Cambridge, the home of the elite, privileged, white Britons, he saw the “enduring reality of Britain – the class system”. The only ethnic faces too came up from powerful colonial families – there was no one from among the poorer migrants, but several bright (and white) students from the grammar schools, who were not accepted among the public schoolboys.
He wrote on the racism among Cambridge landladies for Indian papers and then moved to writing for an international news agency that distributed opinion and feature pieces to publications around the world. Among his early assignments (with his friend, a photographer with the agency) was to write about a new band that was playing in cellars and clubs. The band later grew to be Pink Floyd, and Dhondy claims some of the sentences at the back of their first album were lifts from his piece.
More fun followed: “Andrew rang to say that the Beatles were meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to whose mystical philosophy they subscribed and that we should report on the encounter.”
Dhondy got pulled out from the scrum of journalists by George Harrison and saw, in close up, the Maharishi talk to Lennon and Yoko Ono in “unmemorable platitudes”; his report was suitably skeptical.
But harsh reality was all around them, and Dhondy – and his live-in girlfriend Mala Sen – found it difficult to rent digs in Leicester, where doors of apartments on offer for rent were slammed in their faces. Until he was directed to a neighbourhood where migrants lived.
In a nearby pub – Pack House, known among the whites as ‘Paki House’ – they met migrants from Punjab who worked in nearby factories.
This was the time when anti-migrant racism in Britain was at its peak. Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was to come a bit later, but Britons resented the presence of Indian and Pakistani workers and Blacks from the Caribbean, who had been brought in to add to the labour force. Mala and Dhondy showed the workers how to set up a union which then took up collective action to force the management to take back some suspended colleagues. Dhondy the activist was born.
Dhondy became a teacher and was sent to a ‘difficult’ school, where the students were mainly from the Caribbean, along with poor whites. The students bullied him until one of them – the leader of the pack – discovered that he was an activist against racism, after which he became a hero.
When he was confronted in the school by two machete-wielding Black men – from the anti-racism British Black Panther Movement he was a member of – the students came out and challenged them.
Dhondy had walked out of British Black Panther Movement, aghast at the kangaroo court held to humiliate and throw out a member because he had sneaked a white girlfriend into his room—the radicals could not brook dissent, a common tendency among ideologically inclined bodies, both on the left and the right.
Racism looms large in his narrative at this time, reflecting British society where to be a ‘foreigner’ – i.e. anyone who looked different from the whites – was suspect and a potential subject of violence. For the reader, it is a good window to what Britain was at the time and perhaps still is, in some parts.
Dhondy began his writing career at the time, writing articles, books, and short stories. It led to a job in Channel 4, which was more risk-taking than the BBC. As commissioning editor, he gave a platform to multi-cultural shows and documentaries, among them the famous Bandung File done by Tariq Ali (who, curiously, does not get much air time in the book) and Bandit Queen by Shekhar Kapoor.
That was when Charles Sobhraj approached him to get a book published and then told him that he had information about the sale of contraband material for nuclear weapons and asked Dhondy to introduce him to some “CIA contacts”.
Charles Sobhraj leaves a New Delhi court in 1997 after he was released from prison on bail. Photo: Reuters
Another colourful story is about Bandit Queen, which Arundhati Roy allegedly tried to trip by her getting the former dacoit Phoolan Devi to file a case against the channel. In a stealth operation, Dhondy landed up in Delhi from London, and along with producer Bobby Bedi, met Devi’s husband before dawn and handed him a handsome cheque to drop the case, which was costing Channel 4 a lot of money. Phoolan Devi walked into the court a few hours later and to the shock of her supporters – which included a writer and a journalist – withdrew the case. The film went ahead.
The book does not touch upon the series of hard-hitting articles Roy wrote in a magazine, week after week lashing out against Dhondy and Kapoor, which became a talking point among the chattering classes—the pieces obviously had no impact and the film was lapped up by audiences. One can only speculate why Dhondy avoids that bit; perhaps there were some legal issues in bringing all that up.
In Dhondy’s life, interesting people come and go – Allen Ginsberg, looking around for a gay bar; the Clockwork Orange actor Malcolm McDowell, who gets a haircut in a small roadside saloon in Mumbai; Subhash Ghai, with his erratic working style, who commissions Dhondy to write a film, Kisna. And an encounter with Prince Charles, to whom Dhondy gives a somewhat risqué answer to his question about the dwindling Parsi population.
Towards the end of the book, Dhondy writes movingly about his two friends and icons, C.L.R. James and Vidya Naipaul. James had left his home after some disagreements with his wife Selma and lived with Dhondy in his flat. He was Dhondy’s mentor who gave his phlegmatic advice at crucial moments in his life and every morning demanded the perfectly boiled egg.
To Naipaul, known for his surly, misanthropic worldview, Dhondy showed extreme loyalty, defending him from the charge that he leaned towards Hindutva, which, incidentally, made the Trinidadian writer a favourite with Indian right-wingers. The RSS had invited him for a talk. Whatever Dhondy’s private views – and he is totally secular and a social liberal – he stood by Naipaul. During a literature festival in Mumbai, where Girish Karnad attacked Naipaul, Dhondy got up to ask a question, whereupon the Karnad loudly protested: ‘Not Farrukh, anyone but Farrukh”.
When Dhondy stepped out of the session, he was surrounded by the controversy hungry media and he had his say.
In the last chapter, Dhondy writes feelingly on his many children, from many wives, for whom he wrote books, ending with a rumination about why writers write. It is a satisfying end to a book full of reminisces, but also about lessons learnt, battles fought and friendships retained and lost.
