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

Wes Anderson's recent renditions of Roald Dahl stories are a treat to watch, especially two of them - "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" and "Poison" - which represent two sides of the West's engagement with India. Henry Sugar is a feel-good story of British awe at Indian wisdom, while Poison is a disconcerting tale of racism. Both stories are of colonisation, with the Indian not enjoying the fruits of his own wisdom. Anderson is giving us Dahl's work unexpurgated, and his own fascination with India is well-known. He spoofs the stereotype of the white encounter with India, and thankfully, the famous Indian cow is missing.

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.

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.

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.

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.