The main plot-mover in Avinash Das’s excellent new film Anaarkali of Aarah is an incident that begins as a show of buffoonery but grows into something dark and nasty, even as we go from chuckling to shifting uneasily in our seats. Anaarkali (Swara Bhaskar), the star of a small-town troupe, is singing and dancing for her admiring audience when Dharmender (Sanjay Mishra), a very drunk and very smitten vice-chancellor, clambers onto the stage. At first he behaves like any number of over-enthusiastic men at this sort of show, briefly making a spectacle of themselves before staggering back into the audience. But he doesn’t back off: he goes from begging for Anaarkali’s personal attentions – in the manner of a pitiful, Devdas-like swain – to pawing and assaulting her.
Much of the scene’s effectiveness comes from how it toys with our perceptions: this flailing middle-aged man, barely in control of his movements, doesn’t fit our general ideas of what a menacing sexual predator might look like (Mishra, wonderful actor though he is, has a screen personality that seems better suited to playing savants or eccentric sidekicks); and Anaarkali, who has just performed a raunchy song in a garish costume, all gyrations and winks at her mostly male fans, doesn’t - initially at least - look like an imperiled woman.
Yet that is the very point, and it’s what makes the scene so discomfiting. In the space of a few seconds, the power equations shift: we see that Anaarkali, so assured when she is performing of her own will, embracing both her art and her sexuality, has suddenly had that control wrested from her (Bhaskar shifts gears from fiery self-possession to vulnerability with consummate ease); and that Dharmender, a man with political connections in Aarah, is a very real threat to her autonomy and livelihood.
It is one of many fine moments in a story about social hegemonies and the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which sexual oppression plays out. After last year’s Pink, which affirmed the “No means No” mantra in the context of a young urban woman being sexually harassed – with the film underlining that it doesn’t matter how she dresses or how hard she parties – Anaarkali of Aarah tackles the theme in a different setting. But in the process, we are reminded that ideas about “loose” or “available” women transcend the rural-urban and class divides. In the south Delhi of Pink, these perceptions might be directed at an office-going girl who lives away from her parents in a PG accommodation and goes out with boys late at night; in the Aarah of Das’s film, it might be a woman in a “not very respectable” profession that invites the male gaze and seems to hold out a promise of more than just looking.
And in both these stories, the woman says: yes, I’ll do this and this and this if I choose to, but that doesn’t mean you can assume I’ll do this as well.
Pink was a good film, but I thought Anarkali of Aarah was sharper and more focused overall, largely because it keeps its lens fixed throughout on a compelling woman protagonist. Bhaskar’s performance and Anaarkali’s centrality to the narrative (the film’s men, though well written and acted, orbit around her) make this a more overtly “lady-oriented” film (as censor-board chief Pahlaj Nihalani would reproachfully say) than Pink, with its grandstanding male lawyers and male judge, was. The first scene – a tragedy from Anaarkali’s childhood – prepares us to meet someone whose life will be tinged with melancholia, but this doesn’t happen. Instead of being crippled or dispirited by the past, she derives strength from memories of her mother – a woman who probably had less agency and fewer choices than Anaarkali does, but who managed to retain her dignity and self-worth even in a tough situation.
After a very taut first half – including a tense, masterfully staged scene where Anaarkali, accompanied by her partner Rangeela (Pankaj Tripathi), goes to meet Dharmender – the film slackens a little. To a degree, this has to do with the protagonist’s shift to a new setting and the need to lie low for a bit. (I was reminded of the post-interval change in tone of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat, which has a comparable narrative arc.) But the pace picks up again as the story moves back to Aarah (you have to go home to stare down old demons) and towards a stirring climactic scene where what might seem on the surface to be “just” a lowbrow dance performance becomes an exhilarating reclamation of sexuality and choice.*** And the buildup to this Big Moment is paved with some lovely scenes in a minor key, such as a brief meeting between Anaarkali and Rangeela at the courthouse when the affection between them is palpable despite everything that has happened.
It could be pointed out that like the young women in Pink, Anaarkali too eventually needs a man to help her pull off a final coup (which has the feel of a deus ex machina). But the assistance in this case feels more incidental; one gets a stronger sense that events have flown from the force of her own personality, her upbringing, her unwillingness to keel over in a situation where many of us would think that was the safest, most practical option.
I don’t know how much this film has been directly influenced by real-life events, but it seems particularly topical in the current climate. An early scene is reminiscent – in its depiction of how “fun and games” can cross a line and become lethal – of the recent shooting of a dancer at a wedding party near Bathinda. (And again, lest you think that this sort of thing happens only in “backward” places, remember Jessica Lal.) But on a broader note, there is also the ongoing farce of the “anti-Romeo” squads in Uttar Pradesh which infantilize young women who have boyfriends, telling them they need to be careful “for their own good”, even if that means staying shut up at home until their parents find a socially approved groom. This suppressing of female sexuality (or requiring that no such thing should exist) goes hand in hand with the assumption that women who don’t fit the good-girl mould are fair game and shouldn’t complain about harassment. Against this background, how satisfying it is to see a scene - even if it feels a bit like wish-fulfillment - where a woman looks a powerful man in the eye and tell him that whether he thinks of her as a randi or something “a little less than” a randi (a reference to an earlier dialogue) or as a housewife, he mustn’t touch her without permission.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*** The
climactic scene can also be viewed as a comment on the subject-gaze
relationship. Earlier in the film, Dharmender crudely broke the Fourth
Wall by encroaching on Anaarkali’s performance; now, as he sits next to
his wife and daughter, she pays him back in the same coin, stepping off
the stage, dancing around him and fracturing his personal, domestic space
[From my Mint Lounge column]
I haven’t watched Pan Nalin's Angry Indian Goddesses yet, but the other day I caught a remarkable, under-discussed film that also has a wrathful “goddess” at its heart. She isn’t just angry though, she is distraught and foul-mouthed and usually in an afeem-fuelled haze of self-loathing. She is the title character of Madhureeta Anand’s Kajarya, a village woman who is saddled with the task of getting rid of the community’s unwanted girl-babies.
Fifty-five years ago, Satyajit Ray’s Devi gave us an indelible visual representation of how patriarchy can simultaneously put women on a pedestal and enslave them: the story centred on young Dayamoyee (played by the 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore) whose life is altered when her father-in-law dreams that she is the Mother Goddess incarnate. In no time, she goes from being a normal girl, playing with her little nephew, to becoming an object of veneration, a living idol effectively imprisoned in the prayer room and brought out for darshan when people come asking for favours and miracles.
Much like Devi, Kajarya begins with goddess images – a clay statue, a painting – that are made to look sinister both by how they are framed and by the given context. We see that the village is dominated by men: most of the children seem to be boys; women are largely invisible; the local police chief has a lady assistant who banters with him, but she seems the exception that proves the rule. And then we meet the flesh-and-blood goddess, Kajarya (a mesmerizing performance by Meenu Hooda), who is a puppet in the hands of her “devotees”. “Jai Ma Kali” these men shout in a frenzy, even as they perpetuate their dominance over women.
Into this rustic setting trips a privileged young journalist from the city named Meera (Ridhima Sud, who played the wealthy ingénue in a very different sort of film, Dil Dhadakne Do, earlier this year). She looks and behaves like a card-carrying citizen of the modern world, she speaks Hindi with an accent and is a misfit in the village, but as the narrative progresses our view of her changes too; we become aware of her vulnerabilities and compulsions, some of which she doesn’t face up to herself. She is no stranger to enslavement and objectification, and she has her own form of nasha to help her cope.
There have been some notable films recently about female-infanticide and the related theme of how a society treats its women in various contexts. Take Anup Singh’s beautifully shot and performed Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost, in which a girl-child is murdered not literally but symbolically (her father, despairing for a male heir, not only raises her as a boy but tells the world she IS a boy and comes to believe this himself). Or Nila Madhab Panda’s layered Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid, in which a city-bred girl travels with her dad to the village of his childhood, a place where both women and water – two sources of nourishment that are linked by this fable-like story – are now scarce. That film had a shadowy “daayan” who strikes fear in people’s hearts but who turns out to be an unfairly maligned outcaste. In Kajarya, things are a little more complicated: the “witch” really is a murderer, even if she has been victimized and manipulated along the way.
The divide between city and village, modernity and tradition, is central to Anand’s film, as the story moves between the spaces occupied by its two protagonists. But are these spaces really so different? In one scene, a high-society Delhi woman says that the villagers should use technology to pre-determine a foetus’s sex, instead of killing it after it has been born (“so barbaric”). In another, Meera tells her boyfriend in a disgusted tone about how a group of village men had playing-cards with photos of scantily clad women on them – “you could barely make out the faces, it was just bodies” – and as she speaks, we see a shot of her body (with her face outside the frame) from the boyfriend’s perspective. He then comments on her short dress, saying “Are you going to office dressed like that, or a disco?”
Some of these scenes may feel a little pedantic – perhaps this is inevitable in a “message movie” that combines fictional narrative with documentary – but Kajarya’s most powerful moments transcend message-mongering. They include a climactic confrontation where two women sit in a room, facing each other as antagonists. One of them is the interrogator, but soon the equations shift; it is the other woman who starts asking the hard questions, while the person who was initially in a position of power is forced to admit “Mere haath mein kuch nahin tha”. Here they sit, two goddesses in shackles, all too aware of how they are perceived and represented in male-dominated arenas.
[Related posts here: Qissa, Jalpari, Devi]
[A shorter version of this review appeared in Open magazine]
The 2012 “Nirbhaya” gang-rape case led to much-needed public discourse about sexual violence and gender discrimination in India, but it also opened cans of nasty-looking worms, bringing into clearer relief a society’s deep-seated chauvinism, lack of introspection, and reverence for status quos. In recent times we have had people in positions of power linking sexual assault with chowmein-eating, a “spiritual guru” with a large following saying rape isn’t possible if the girl is not in some way compliant (it takes two hands to clap), and the extolling of “Bharat” as the unspoiled, sari-clad twin of the hedonistic, westernized “India” who is always “asking for it”.
In such a climate, the problem for a parodist, or for a writer of allegories, is that life always seems a dozen steps ahead – even when it is jogging backwards. How does one effectively do satirical exaggeration, or create a simplified parable, when the real world is overrun with politicians raving incoherently about "dented-painted women" and senior lawyers puffing their chests out and proclaiming that a daughter who had a pre-marital relationship should be burnt alive (but only in a gated farmhouse, you mustn’t disturb the neighbours)? Can fiction be much more dystopian than reality?
And so to Sowmya Rajendran’s slim novel The Lesson, which is a satire built around a series of archetypes. The characters are given no names: they are known as “the rapist” (a government employee socially sanctioned to deal with women who go to pubs, have multiple boyfriends, or sully the holiest of all institutions, Marriage, by seeking divorce), “the moral policeman”, “the media mogul” and so on. And the woman at the story's centre, the one who has transgressed so dramatically that a brand new punishment must be devised, is just “the second daughter” – a fitting tag given this is a society where women are defined mainly in terms of their relationship to men. But her acts of defiance, both at the beginning and at the very end, will drive the plot and, finally, supply a fourth-wall-breaking-moment where a hitherto immersed audience is slapped in the face with its own complicity.
These people inhabit a world where the unspeakable has been normalized. The rapist (who is a regular guy in many ways, stressed out by his work, prone to headaches and performance anxiety, thinking sadly about his wife and little daughter back in his hometown) simply calls up his next victim and tell her, very politely, that she has a lesson scheduled for Sunday, and what time would be convenient? Dupatta-regulators ensure prescribed standards of morality, the media mogul literally has a pair of Golden Geese in a cage (the male violently pecks at the female, as if in imitation of its human counterparts) and the Conduct Book contains a law – no, wait, it’s only a “guideline” for now, but a strong one – that a raped woman must kill herself if her family comes to know. Outrageous things are said with a straight face, injustice and persecution are taken for granted, and whatever hope there is comes in tiny slivers: hardened sorts like the moral policeman do show signs of being real human beings with real emotions when things get too personal, when their own loved ones are in danger.
Rajendran’s writing is effective when it adopts the mode of icy detachment, as in a scene where a woman who is to be raped on a TV reality show is briefed about the actress who will play her in the buildup episodes (so that the audience will “enjoy the show” better). I liked how the seemingly casual, almost gratuitous use of the word “rape” (“For how long will he rape me?”, “He’d never raped a pregnant woman before this and he wasn’t sure if he liked the idea”) echoes and comments on the offhand (and non-ironical) overuse of the word in the real world, e.g. “I raped that guy in the college debate”. Also notable is the book’s recognition that the patriarchy can in some ways be oppressive of men too, through its insistence on defining templates for maleness: there is a conversation about the pressures of being “The Only Son”, there are glimpses of the distant pasts of people like the president and the moral policeman, which humanise them – to a degree – and suggest that they are products of a social framework.
On the whole though, The Lesson is hit and miss, very sharp at times, earnest and over-expository at other times, and I have rarely been this conflicted while writing a review. Part of me felt it was heavy-handed; another part recognised that some of the talk around sexual harassment in this country has been so confounding, so much from a surreal otherworld, that there is no point trying to underplay things. Besides, it goes without saying that such a book will mean very different things to different people. For the privileged male like yours truly, some of it might seem shrill and stretched out. A reader who gets squeamish easily or has limited tolerance for dark humour might think it in poor taste, even repulsive. On the other hand, for someone who has grown up in a very conservative environment and lived with the worst controlling aspects of tradition, it might not even read like exaggeration, more like an unvarnished record of what daily life can be like.
Personally I wished a few more inventive things had been done with the premise, that there had been more passages with the kinetic energy of the one where a dupatta-regulator has a waking nightmare about being surrounded by acres of human nudity (“He looked out of the window and saw a naked man on a motorbike, his fat, hairy legs straddling it […] the dupatta regulator’s eyes were drawn to the pockmarks on his arm, a constellation of acne scars”). Most of all – and it feels odd saying this about a story with a rapist and his target as protagonists – I thought the book could have been funnier, more biting. It is occasionally blunted by verbosity, as in a conversation where the dupatta-regulator explains “if a student wears her dupatta properly, she is automatically protected from molestation. If you were molested in spite of wearing a dupatta, it means only one thing: you were not wearing it properly.”
But even if it doesn’t have the caustic power of the best satire – the quality that has you shaking in laughter even as the punch to your solar plexus knocks you breathless – The Lesson is provocative, driven by understandable anger, and a baby step in what will hopefully be a more extensive tradition of abrasive, absurdist writing that shakes and discomfits a society. One might say we are asking for it.
An excerpt from Mishi Saran’s essay “Split in half, six ways”, one of my favourite pieces in the new anthology Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves:
I had this strange notion that when they ask you to write about writing, it’s all over, because they are not asking for a poem, or a novel.
They are saying, “Tell us what you do all day long.”
There is no good, clean answer for this, since the backstage of writing is a cluttered, blood-spattered arena, overrun with escaped ghosts, dented friendships, the stink of lost battles and a tenuous sense of self.
Besides, it’s not what I do all day, it’s what I am, and what I am is split in half, six ways.
First, there’s me, walking, looking, chatting, eating, sleeping, cooking, living in Shanghai.
Then there’s the dwarf clamped to my shoulder – a mini-me – hissing into my ear: “You could use that.” Very few moments in my day are purely, fully, simply lived, because each one must be dissected for its potential to feed the blank page.
Edited by Manju Kapur and featuring 23 writers from the subcontinent – all published novelists, many of them poets and non-fiction writers too – baring their souls, analysing their relationship with their craft, this is a valuable collection for anyone trying to understand the nuts and bolts of writing (whether from a safe distance, with no intention of treading these waters themselves, or as an aspiring writer). But some of it also works if you’re simply in the mood for a good horror story. “Writing is a narcissistic and powerful and self-absorbed God; it will take all we can offer and leave dead, dry shells behind,” writes Lavanya Sankaran. “Having written is a powerful fulfillment, but the act of writing is not a nice thing to experience,” says Meira Chand, who also offers an account of the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of waking up at 2 in the morning with new words crowding one’s head, and the knowledge that two hundred labored pages must be discarded in order to facilitate a fresh beginning.
“When the novel is done I feel I have come out of a long sleep,” says Shashi Deshpande, “The world looks different: I see things I had missed for months; I see colours which had somehow seeped out of my vision until then.” Bina Shah believes writing is like walking a tightrope – “the minute you stop what you’re doing to look down, you start to wobble and sway.” And here is Saran again: “The successful (read ‘sane’) writer must navigate two worlds. She must hop around the hubbub and arc lights of quotidian life, then pull apart those red velvet curtains – carefully, for it turns out they are edged with hard wire – a and she must dive into the darkness of ropes and pulleys. She must go from one land to another without too much flesh torn in transit.”
Some of this – and the many other passages in this book about the agonies and ecstasies of writing – can sound self-important and precious, but any writer who has experienced these things will understand. (I have, and I quickly lose patience with anyone who says this kind of talk is just a way of needlessly romanticising the creative process.) And though the details of the authors’ life experiences are naturally very different, each essay makes it clear that whatever the difficulties, these writers wouldn’t have it any other way: they need to do what they are doing. (“Nervously I count how many more years I might live,” writes Kapur in her own piece, as she contemplates the possibility of not being able to write again, “How will I fill them?”)
Included here are accounts of early influences and inspirations, and anyone who grew up in the subcontinent, reading in English from a young age, will find much to relate to: for instance, both Janice Pariat and Moni Mohsin mention the effect Enid Blyton’s Famous Five had on their early reading and writing lives, despite the unfamiliarity of such things as potted meat sandwiches and galoshes, or such exclamations as “Golly!” Consequently, these pieces are also about gradual shifts in perspective and self-knowledge, about negotiating cultural identity and discovering new interests. So Namita Devidayal writes of believing in flying chairs that could transport a bored child to a magical new world, or expecting to find “little foreign elves” in the garden – but also how, years later, journalism grounded her, taught her to be respectful towards the seemingly mundane, to discover magical possibilities as a writer in everyday things. And Anita Nair relates her initial struggles to find the right voice (given that she was writing in English but telling stories set in suburban and rural India) and on the puzzlement of her first book Ladies Coupe being labelled a feminist novel when Nair herself had no such conscious ambitions for it – she was simply writing, as honestly as she could, a book of stories about women.
Of course, women writers are confronted by labels – beginning with “woman writer” – to a greater degree than men are. (Some have to deal with labels twice over: what does it mean to be a “north-eastern writer”, Pariat wonders.) And in a relatively conservative society, there are other challenges. No wonder the ghost of Virginia Woolf makes repeated appearances through this collection, with many writers alluding to her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” – about the financial independence and the emotional and physical space a woman needs in order to write – or her sharp dismissal of the idealised “angel in the house”. But George Orwell’s “Why I Write” is referenced a few times too, which is a reminder that many of the discussion points in this book are gender-neutral ones. More than one writer underplays the distinction between “male and female literature”. “I think in some sense writers lose their sexuality when they walk into the world of words,” says Nair. “Once I sit at my table to write, I am just a writer; nothing else remains,” says Deshpande. And Sankaran amusingly incorporates this blurring of sexual identity into the form of her own piece; discussing the importance of taking a break, she says, “I need to spend some time with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out, scratching my balls and picking nits out of my beard”. Yes, you think – writing can do that to you!
Or, you can simply continue toggling between your many selves. During a session at a literature festival a few years ago, a (male) moderator asked the women panelists a flip, patronising question about how it felt to spend one’s time at a writing table instead of at a dressing table. The session was problematic in conception anyway - its raison d’être being the bringing together of “three female writers” even though their work didn’t have much in common - and the moderator’s question implied a clear line between the writing life and the things a woman is “supposed” to do, or expected to be interested in; that one thing excluded the other. Yet here is Amruta Patil, in her illustrated essay, divulging that even if she has a full day of working ahead, involving no human contact, she dresses up immaculately each morning, “earrings coordinated, every detail in place”. The image with this text is of a woman in a summery dress sitting at a table, a kettle of tea in the foreground, a reminder that being a female writer – or any writer – doesn’t necessarily mean letting go of one’s other identities; that you don’t have to be the stereotype of the unshaven (or unwaxed) slob, completely lost to the world.
Many women writers don’t have that option anyway, often having to juggle their work with domestic obligations – but real or figurative rooms can always be sought out. Saran describes leaving her home for her writing sanctuary each morning, against the objections of her little daughter - I pick her up and rub her nose with my nose and say, “Baby girl, I’m a writer. It appears that I’m happier when I’m writing, I’m even a better mum when I write” - and Jaishree Mishra feels guilty about completely forgotting about her child – arriving home by the school bus – thanks to an intense writing session that spanned many hours, but also admits that “All maternal and domestic concerns fell right away, inconsequential, trivial even in the face of this, my new love.” In any case, children don’t have to be made of flesh and blood: Patil describes her text and image as “monozygotic twins, born of one egg, identical of DNA, but quite apart. They run holding hands. One leads, the other gamely tries to catch up. Sometimes one steps back to allow the other centre-stage.”
Other epiphanies include Anjum Hasan finding unexpected resonance in the work and life of Pablo Neruda (“this
is still part of me: an image of Neruda eating sour plums alone in a
tree, thinking of a book, nestling within the experience of me on a bed,
reading about Neruda eating sour plums…”) and Mohsin learning that it is possible to be deeply affected by a book like Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, but to eventually find one’s own voice in a satirical newspaper column titled “Diary of a Social Butterfly” (“The
Butterfly freed me as a writer … I had always thought that if I ever
wrote it would be ‘serious stuff’, and yet my most convincing fictional
creation has been this ditzy airhead. But over time I have come to
realize that funny is not necessarily non-serious.”)
Some of the essays here ruminate on process and rituals, on time, place, mood: Ameena Hussein recalls working not in hallowed silence but while playing music by Guns ’n Roses and Depeche Mode. Kapur’s piece is a firsthand account of the frustrating, dead-end-ridden process by which a novel may slowly find its final (or almost-final) shape – how ideas coalesce, how an incident or perspective works its way from the middle of a story to the beginning. Others look at the big picture, at the arc of English-language publishing in the subcontinent: Anuradha Marwah posits that until the late 90s, women novelists were mainly overshadowed by “Rushdiesque writing – grandiose and phallic”, and that even the space created for women’s voices “is hijacked by the market that prioritises glamour and femininity over the writers’ activist impulse against patriarchy”, while Deshpande expresses the non-activist view that a novel has no space for ideology – “that to bring an ideology into a novel, that to use a novel to send out a message, is to destroy the novel”. And Tishani Doshi points out that even a dark, self-absorbed, seemingly pessimistic poem is a gift, “an act of
reclamation. It is saying, Even though I was born out of a howl in the
dark I am offering you a song.”
All of which means that though such a book can seem circumscribed (a bunch of writers navel-gazing?), there is enough variety here in the insights, in the experiences, and in the writing itself, to make it more than worthwhile. Some pieces – Saran’s, Pariat’s, Hasan’s among them – are carefully constructed, with the rigour of a good literary essay, while others are chattier, more informal, like a free-flowing compilation of thoughts or a linear description of a writing career, but they are all candid and revealing in different ways. The one minor lack I felt (it is covered to an extent by Mohsin’s thoughts on her flighty Lahore socialite) was that of a piece by a popular, commercial writer who operates outside the ambit of “respectability”, working in such genres as the derisively named Chick Lit. In the current publishing scenario, such labels can be equally limiting (and again seem to attach themselves to women writers more than men) and the obstacles just as many, even if we sometimes convince ourselves that popular writing doesn’t require similar levels of effort or introspection.
[Also see: Ann Patchett on killing her butterfly. And an old conversation with Anita Desai, which touches on some of the issues facing a woman writer in India]
Nishtha Jain’s documentary Gulabi Gang, completed in 2012 and released in theatres this week, has many aesthetically pleasing scenes. The first few minutes give us beautiful nature shots, vistas of the fields surrounding Bundelkhand, and the vivid fuchsia of the saris worn by the Gulabi Gang group, founded by Sampat Pal Devi to tackle injustice against women. Sampat banters with other members, the newer recruits joke amongst themselves, a little awkward at first but slowly opening up; the mood is convivial. Yet ugliness is soon revealed beneath the surface of this setting, and the film doesn’t flinch from it.
The camera follows Sampat into a hut containing the charred body of a young girl, limbs spread out in rigor mortis, and then we see the first steps in an amateur investigation as Sampat questions the victim’s in-laws, picks holes in their account, wonders how roof and walls have remained undamaged after such a fierce “accidental” fire. Other viscerally disturbing scenes follow: a conversation with the dead girl’s husband, who might be a murderer; the faces of men standing outside a car, looking in through the window, offering explanations and rationalisations, changing stories as per convenience; children at the scene of the crime, staring at the camera, primed to grow into adults who will keep this cycle of violence and concealment going. The contrast between how the film began and the bleakness of these scenes is telling – here is a “simple”, “God-fearing” community that closes ranks in the face of a terrible crime.
At this point Gulabi Gang also has the texture of a busy investigative thriller, driven by Sampat’s determination to see justice done. But as if to remind us of the true pace of life in this setting, and that this isn’t a story where loose ends will neatly be tied together, things slow down. The case becomes entangled in local politics and taken over by apathetic policemen, the justice-seekers have to make numerous trips on rough roads to courts and police stations, the girl’s own family invokes divine inscrutability (“Kya hua Ishwar hee jaanat”), one gets the sense that nothing can ever really change in a place so mired in patriarchy and feudalism. (Indeed, Jain mentioned after a preview screening yesterday that this particular case was never satisfactorily resolved.)
And yet, this group has been an agent of change in the past decade – its influence has spread, it has won small battles and the woman at its centre is a strong, magnetic presence. Gulabi Gang makes for a good double bill with another documentary, Kim Longinotto’s 2010 Pink Saris – together they present a well-rounded picture of Sampat Pal and her movement. Jain's film examines the larger picture – the promotional campaigns, the participation in grassroots politics, the work being done by the group’s other leaders such as the robustly likable Suman Singh – while Pink Saris employs an intimate, worm’s eye perspective, focuses on relatively common problems (a pregnant girl being deserted by her husband, a married woman wanting to run off with another man) and uses the particular to illuminate the general, by setting the facts of Sampat Pal’s life against the situations of the people she is helping. We are told that Sampat left her husband, whom she was forcibly married to at age 12, and shortly afterwards we see a young girl who looks into the camera and asks, how can I stay at my parents’ house? That isn’t what girls are born for. What choice do I have?
****
Though Sampat is more of a central figure in Pink Saris – present in every scene – in both films the camera seems drawn to her, and who can fault it. Whether she is yelling at people who cross her with religious mumbo-jumbo (“Main devtaa ko nahin maanti hoon, insaan ko maanti hoon […] Aisi ki taisi ho devtaa ki. Naari se badhke koi shakti nahin hoti”) or softly consoling a weeping man who says his brothers were killed for trying to do social service, she has the poise of a minor-key movie star who knows the precise emotional register required in each scene. The qualities that got her where she is – strength mingled with empathy, 
the ability to be caring yet profane yet practical – often shine through. Young girls today won’t unquestioningly do all the house-work “jaise hum karte thay”, she tells another middle-aged woman, showing a rare quality – the ability to rise above the resentment that comes with knowing that the next generation has more freedoms than you did.
Some of the most interesting bits in Pink Saris are about her personal life, including things that aren’t clearly spelled out. She lives and works with her “partner” Babuji, an educated man who was originally employed to do the group’s paperwork – but one of his first appearances here has him massaging her back as she lies on a table. Soon after this she is shown in conversation with her estranged, “angootha-chaap” husband, who is dependent on her (“Main tumhaar thekedaar hoon,” she tells him [“I’m your provider”]), and then arguing with Babuji, who accuses her of being “ghamandi” (I am just a small scorpion, he says sullenly, while you get famous in the three worlds).
In these latter scenes two things are in evidence: the insecure man unable to deal with challenges to an order that he has taken for granted all his life, uncomfortable about being dependent on, or second-in-command to, a woman; but we are also reminded that anyone who acquires power and respect, no matter how well-intentioned to begin with, might walk a tightrope between genuine philanthropy and self-righteousness of the sort that goes “I am doing so much good, living not for myself but for others – therefore I am above the law and answerable to no one.”
Without casting aspersions on Sampat’s motives, it is possible to feel ambivalent about her as an individual. There are traces of hubris in her behaviour. “Main police se zyaada hoon,” she often says, and refers to herself in the third person. (“Log Sampat Pal ko auraton ki messiyah bulaate hain.”) Her Bigg Boss appearance can be seen as an effort to draw wider public attention to a worthy cause, but can also be interpreted in terms of a personal need for publicity. That she is very conscious of the need to control her image can be seen in her reaction when she learnt about the fictional film Gulaab Gang (to be released next month). Her autobiography, as told to a French journalist, was published in 2008 with the delightful title Moi Sampat Pal: Chef de Gang en Sari Rose, and only translated into English a few years later; in the Introduction, Zubaan’s Shweta Vachani writes of travelling with Sampat as an interpreter to Stockholm and there finding that “she would expect us to do everything for her, including make her tea, clear up after her and wash her dishes. It wasn’t hard to infer that she was unused to doing anything in her own house or village.”
None of this lessens the value of the work done by the Gulabi Gang over the years, shaking up the status quo and striking fear, even encouraging introspection, in the hearts of people who were used to having everything their own way. At one point in Pink Saris someone suggests that things have really worsened since the group was formed, but one can conjecture that this is only because many ugly things – hitherto hidden behind closed doors and given social sanction – are now coming into public view. And an achievement of both these films is that despite Sampat’s forcefulness, we never lose sight of just how hard it is for real change to happen. Looked at from a distance, the Gulabi Gang may seem like laathi-wielding avengers, efficiently cleaning up the world, but up close things are more complicated and murky. Compromises are necessary: the shock of a casually spoken sentence like “Sasur isski izzat loot raha hai, aur yeh isse pasand nahin hai” (“This girl’s father-in-law has been raping her, and she doesn’t like it”) is augmented by the realisation that Sampat is arranging for the girl to return to her husband’s home (and for her in-laws’ actions to be closely monitored and reported on), because that is the only realistic solution in the given circumstances.
Jain’s film offers a bitter pill near the end, through a woman named Husna who has been asked to temporarily disassociate herself from the group because she is trying to shield her brother, a murderer. Sampat and Suman tell Husna – in a friendly, sympathetic tone – that she should stay away for her own safety. But after they leave, in a long, unbroken shot, Husna – who prides herself on having worked with the Gulabi Gang for years – speaks to the filmmaker, defiantly justifying the “honour killing” and revealing an attitude that is the very antithesis of “Change begins at home”. On the one hand, she says it is her duty to protect her brothers and sons no matter what, even if they do something wrong; on the other hand, she insists that brothers are entitled to kill their sisters if they feel they have transgressed. It is a chilling scene, made more so by Husna’s self-assuredness, and our realisation that she isn’t the stereotype of the illiterate woman hopelessly insulated from the outside world; that she has been out there, seen terrible things, even battled some of them…and then returned home to preserve “tradition”. It is such betrayals from within that, more than anything else, point to the magnitude of the challenges facing Sampat Pal and her group.
At one point in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely, a soft-core sex scene is being shot for a horror-titillation movie – the sort of C-grade movie that the Duggal brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) specialise in. A bosomy starlet, writhing on a bed in bridal wear, is being given directions – “Tera mard na-mard hai” (“Your husband is impotent”) – and we get a vague sense of what the scene is about: the woman on the bed has her eyes closed or turned away (in the manner expected of a good Indian bride), and so she doesn’t realise that she is being necked not by her husband but by a scaly-headed monster.
The film being shot is a cheesy, low-budget thing that might make the work of the Ramsays seem refined in comparison, and the monster looks more comical than scary. But the contrast between a na-mard (which can be shorthand for a passive, hence “effeminate” man) and a rapacious, hyper-masculine bully is also at the heart of Miss Lovely’s own plot. Of the movie-making Duggals, the younger brother Sonu – our point of entry into the film, because we are privy to his inner thoughts and personal stirrings – is effete and dreamy-eyed, and seems to want to break away from this world. Vicky, on the other hand, is a ruffian who mockingly says “Bada mard bannta hai” when his brother tries to strike out for himself. He is the real fiend here, more of a threat than the badly made up monster in that sex scene could ever be, and he is presented in menacing terms: in one scene in a darkened disco, there is a striking shot of him looking down from a height, a red light next to him blinking away as if to signal Danger.
The brothers will fall out over a seemingly innocent girl named Pinky (Niharika Singh), who wants a break in films and who Sonu becomes besotted with. But that makes Miss Lovely sound more narrative-driven than it is. The idea here isn’t so much to tell “a story” (the plot, such as it is, could be scribbled on the palm of your hand, much like Pinky quickly writing her phone number down on Sonu’s hand during a stolen moment) but to create the mood of a particular world – the world of small-time moviemakers in the late 1980s, conducting shady deals, negotiating the chaos of a profession where things have to be done fast, in hurriedly improvised locations, with the knowledge that a police raid may always be around the corner.
Being abstract and often anti-narrative, this is a slow-moving film (I’ll confess my attention wandered at times) but it tries to do something very interesting: to admit us into this milieu, and the states of mind you might find in it, without over-explaining anything – letting the visuals, the art direction and the sound design do most of the work instead. Much of it is shot in the style of a handheld-camera documentary. There are relatively few outdoor scenes, the main impression is of oppressive interiors, rooms that are small and dimly lit and overcrowded, characters who are almost brushing up against the camera; there is a sense of drifting through shadowy places and hearing faraway voices as if through a tunnel. (I read that director Ahluwalia counts Seijun Suzuki among his influences. I don’t know Suzuki’s films apart from Branded to Kill, but parts of Miss Lovely reminded me of the work of another non-mainstream Japanese director of the 1960s, Nobuo Nagakawa, especially Jigoku, which offered a stylised vision of hell and its lost souls, looking for small salvations.) In fact, a viewer can get so steeped in this setting that it may come as a minor shock to hear – in one scene – the polished, anodyne voice of an English-speaking newsreader talking about exploitation movies and forced prostitution. These incidents seems like they belong to another world, the newsreader says in what sounds like a dispassionately patronising tone, and of course, from her perspective, they do.
But this is also an “other world” film in the sense of the past being a foreign country - it is a reminder that the late 80s and the early 90s were a time of transition, in India’s metropolises at least, and in the entertainment industry: the last years of the video-cassette culture, the shift to an era of multiple TV channels(!) and the greater possibilities they brought for home entertainment. We see Ambassadors and Fiats (and a few Maruti 800s) on the roads, black-and-white TV screens with pictures barely visible through static. Nataraj pencil ads play over transistors and little boys fight each other with makeshift maces, no doubt in imitation of the TV Mahabharata which would have been playing at the time. Even the film’s opening titles play like a homage to 1980s B-movies (or some 80s “A-movies” for that matter) – garish background colours, names like Biddu and Nazia Hassan improbably sharing space with Ilaiyaraaja.
At the same time there is nothing dated about the contrast between the supposedly glamorous world of show-business (even in a C-movie universe) and behind-the-scene realities. A newspaper 
clipping places a photo of a starlet smiling out at the camera next to a picture of her muddy corpse found in a swamp. A mother tells a producer that her daughter will do anything and gets the approving response, “Bahut acchhe sanskaar deeye hain”. Throughout, one is aware of the divide between people who are motivated and single-minded enough to make a life for themselves in this world, and those who are unable to.
Which brings us back to Sonu, for Miss Lovely also begs the question: what might happen when a man with a strong introspective impulse, given to philosophising and dreaming, finds himself born to the manor of a coarse, cut-throat world like this one? His voiceovers (which overlap sometimes with the dialogue in a scene) include lines like “Aadmi ka level hona chahiye – level nahin toh aadmi kya”. He is too idealistic and too meditative to join his brother in playing the “bada game”. And for me one problem was that I didn’t really feel like I had got to know him, or understand how he came to be working in this business for so long without having his heart in it. One shot in that disco scene has Sonu, left in the lurch, holding two glasses and looking confused as the smoke of the dance floor envelops him. This film has many intriguing things in it, but its protagonist – the person we want to relate to or at least empathise with – remains as distant and hazy as that shot suggests.
At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should I stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their back-stories and insights into the creative process – can be invigorating, or at least useful at the level of information-gathering; but as a critic who hasn’t yet had enough time to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, it can be a little problematic hearing the director and crew speak about what they were trying to do. It can create white noise, or even sway one’s feelings. (In my early days in literary journalism, it sometimes happened that I read and disliked a book, then met the author and not only found him extremely likable but also, through conversation, came to understand and even empathise with what he had been trying to do. At the end of such a meeting, even if I retained my basic view of the book, I might easily feel guilty for having been over-harsh in the review.)
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening chat – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was intelligent and engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about (in response to audience questions) touched on and confirmed my own fragmented thoughts.
For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa is deeply invested not just in Partition – the sundering of a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)
[A very minor alert here. Strictly speaking, what follows isn’t a spoiler, since it is revealed within the first 15-20 minutes of the film – and if you’re attentive, you might guess it even during the opening credits, which have photos of the main characters. But part of the effect of the film for me was the subtle way in which things play out and come into clearer relief in these early scenes.]
The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy.
“Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife Meher (Chopra) is unhappy, but the family mostly carries on as if nothing is amiss. Other people – distant relatives, elders in the community, a teacher who instructs the “boy” in manly things like kasrat – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on. (One scene in particular, when the 12-year-old Kanwar tells her father that she is bleeding, and Umber responds by hugging her and exclaiming “My son is growing up so fast!”, is chilling.) Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good son – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl and Umber’s patriarchal fervour takes an even uglier turn, the conflicts escalate.
Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but its canvas widens to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit worlds, between sanity and insanity (I thought of Bishan in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, lying under the barbed wire at the India-Pakistan border, and the question of whether he is madder than the world around him). This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers (an audience member told Anup Singh that he thought it was two different films in one) and the film undeniably has many balls in the air, but I think there are important links between these themes too. Many people who suffered the worst of Partition became living ghosts in the sense that they were petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh – a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle – this situation is made even more complicated because he can view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward; each successive birth of a girl is like a slap on the face for a man who needs some sense of permanent identity and rootedness. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.
This is a stately, well paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped translate the original, English dialogues into Punjabi). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert (sitting with the screen just above me, I often had to turn my head a full 90 degrees to look at one thing, then another, and was reminded that even this awkward experience is preferable to the one of watching a good-looking film for the first time on a small YouTube screen) – but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house, where the very air is thick and oppressive; you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters.
For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject, and for me its allegorical and magic realist elements worked just fine.
The lead performances are excellent too, and I thought there was something to be said about the casting; you might not think of Tisca Chopra and Tilottama Shome as being a convincing mother and daughter, but watching them here I couldn’t help seeing a distinct facial resemblance. In fact, Shome mentioned during the discussion that she thought Singh was making a big mistake by casting her, a short-statured Bengali woman, as a Punjabi girl who has to live her life as a man. “I came to the role with my usual stereotypes of what masculinity should be,” she said, “but Anup told me, don’t worry about being ‘a man’, just focus on being a good son to Umber.” She also said Singh had asked her to watch the old Dilip Kumar films Tarana and Aan for cues on how to play the role. It took her some time to figure out what her director wanted her to discover in those performances (“at first I thought it was because Dilip-saab had these very deliberate gestures, and I wondered if there was something specifically masculine about that”) but later she realised that Singh wanted her to “find” Kumar’s way of smiling – even in difficult situations – in those films. In the larger picture, Kanwar’s story may be a sad, grim one (when she is liberated from the pretence, she finds she doesn’t like wearing women’s clothes because they have become like “scorpions” for her), but that didn’t mean the actor playing her had to look sullen.
****
I found the Dilip Kumar anecdote interesting, because it suggested a director who could make unusual connections and leaps of imagination, draw inspiration from a variety of sources. When I spoke with Singh afterwards, he told me that he watched all kinds of films enthusiastically. “I am a big fan of Guru Dutt and Kenji Mizoguchi,” he said (and here I thought of the lonely ghosts in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).
During the Q&A session, in defence of his film’s structure and its supernatural elements, he had mentioned that Indian storytelling had always adopted very different methods from the cool, psychological realism of contemporary Western narratives: in traditional Indian storytelling, there have been tales within tales, the idea of closure has not been very important, there is room for whimsy, for one mood blending into another. I asked him later if his interest in such narrative methods extended to the forms used in popular Indian cinema. “I love mainstream Hindi cinema, it has been so much a part of my growing up,” he replied. “But I have a caveat. I feel popular cinema has played with Indian storytelling traditions but also misused them at times. We have many hierarchies as a society – in terms of class, gender and so on – and transgressions have always been important in our storytelling, going back centuries. There have always been narratives that critique the prevailing traditions and assumptions. However, when storytelling is used simply to reaffirm the status quo – which is what popular cinema often does – I think that’s a problem.”
Examining the status quo – and how lives are affected when change occurs – is a central concern for him. “I have lived a life of fragments myself,” he said, “I felt much within me was scattered, and Ghatak’s cinema gave me an insight into my own scattering. I have also been interested in the making of new ‘refugees’ in our times, notions about nationhood, about families and genders: what is a man, what is a woman? And how our views of such things are proscribed and limited, leading to immense inner violence and unnecessary separations.
"When our old traditions are being challenged, we tend to hold on to the past and we take out our frustrations on those who are closest to us, as Umber does in the film. In the opening scene, his first words are 'Listen to my story'. And by the end, the man has realised his culpability, realised how his actions have ruined so many lives. It is very much a story about a changing world, where new ways of thinking and living exist, and where people who are set in the old ways have to deal with this."
****
[Qissa, which has been co-produced by NFDC, should get a commercial release next year, and will be out on DVD soon after that]
P.S. And returning to the question with which I began this post: this boy, with whom I saw Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, would have answered with a very firm “No”. As soon as the film ended and the director walked up on stage, our venerable critic gathered his notes, leapt out of his seat and made a mad scramble for the exit. That’s purity of purpose for you.
Watched Hitchcock’s Notorious for the umpteenth time the other day, captivated as always by its almost flawless construction, unmatched elegance and fluidity, and the stunning performances by the three leads. Noting again how the film’s sympathies rest with the Ingrid Bergman character Alicia vis-à-vis the manipulative men in her life (this has always seemed very obvious to me, though I know people who disagree), I was reminded of the many allegations of misogyny in Hitchcock’s work. And this super interview of Camille Paglia, who rambles magnificently about Hitch and his artistic impulses.
I love her passion for the subject, even when I disagree with little specifics. This bit is notable, and I think it cuts to the heart of a major divide in “film reading” and how we tend to make up our minds about whether a movie is misogynistic (or racist, or whatever):
I’ve been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of ‘the male gaze’ that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she herself has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last 25 years. The idea that a man looking at or a director filming a beautiful woman makes her an object, makes her passive beneath the male gaze which seeks control over woman by turning her into mere matter, into “meat” – I think this was utter nonsense from the start. It was formulated by people who knew nothing about the history of painting or sculpture, the history of the fine arts […]
Hitchcock obviously had a complex and ambivalent attitude toward women. […] Any artist is driven by strange forces. The whole impulse in art-making is to untangle your dark emotions. There is some huge conflict and inner war in every major artist. And yes, the sexual battlefield is where those things were going on in Hitchcock. But look at his own life: From what people have been able to conclude, his actual sexual practice was fairly limited. He remained a virgin until he was 27, when he married, and he did produce a daughter. There’s some suggestion that perhaps his marriage was not particularly physical. He was almost a kind of priest or monk. The Jesuit-trained Catholic impulse in him was very strong. And if his film eroticism was voyeuristic, well, that’s what we want, for heaven’s sake, in a painter or a filmmaker! We want someone who lives through the eye.
The full interview is here. I also recommend Marian Keane’s piece “A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock and Vertigo”, a riposte to Laura Mulvey’s thesis that the camera in Vertigo represents an active, controlling male gaze (which in turn implied that the film is “on the side of” the James Stewart character Scottie). A large part of Keane's essay can be found here, on Google Books.
Incidentally Paglia made related observations in an interview for this book on screen violence. An excerpt below:
Interviewer: I agree he was a great director, but he was nakedly misogynistic...
Paglia: I don’t accept this. That is an absurd argument. We’re talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created. I mean, for heaven’s sake, to call that misogynistic, when we think of Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, when we think how fabulous Janet Leigh is in that shower scene, we think of Kim Novak in Vertigo [...] what I’m saying about all of the great artists from Michelangelo to Botticelli to everyone else is that in the fascination with these goddess-like figures of women there is an ambivalence, a push-pull in it, a complexity of response, but to stress the negative in Hitchcock...? I think you need far more complex terminology to deal with people who achieve at the level Hitchcock did. The women he created, for heaven’s sake, have absolutely dominated the imagination of late twentieth-century cinema. Everyone’s imitating it, everywhere, to this day.
[A sequel to the last post, and part of an irregular series about musical sequences in Hindi cinema]
In this post I mentioned one of my favourite recent discoveries, the long song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” from the 1968 film Aashirwad. As far as I know, it is among the only Hindi-movie scenes to make extensive use of the Lavani dance form with its many hallmarks, including sexually aggressive gestures by the performers and banter involving the audience. The full video is below. You might need to watch the song a couple of times to really appreciate it, but it builds in energy, and I especially like how it goes from the 3.45 mark onwards.
Some context: music is central to this film. The lead character Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is the son-in-law of a rich zamindar, but he is also a lover of classical music and never feels happier, more relaxed and more in touch with his finer emotions than when he is practicing with his “guru”, an old villager named Baiju (played by the poet/actor Harindranath Chattopadhyay). In the scene in question, Jogi Thakur, Baiju and their friend Mirza saab go to watch a performance by a visiting dance troupe and end up participating in a musical battle of wits.
Some things I like about the sequence:
– One of the big themes in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema over the decades – in films as varied as Anuradha, Mem Didi, Abhimaan and Rang Birangi – is how men and women move tentatively towards parity in a relationship. This is 
often expressed in humorous terms, with music as a conduit: for instance, Mem Didi has the dance number “Hu Tu Tu” in which a group of women face off against a group of men during a celebration, singing about the politics of marriage, each group jokingly claiming victimhood for itself. In “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, music becomes an equalizer, blurring roles and mannerisms: the women on stage whistle lewdly, make crude “male” gestures such as scratching under their armpits to mimic a monkey (“Kyun Sikandar, banoge bandar?”), mock their audience (“Aisa lagta hai jaise hum gadhon ke gaon mein aa gaye hain”). And the watching men participate in the performance with a childlike delight, shedding the baggage that they might otherwise carry of being privileged observers or patrons. In both directions, gender is being transcended. (Within the narrative of the film, we have already seen a reversal of traditional roles: Jogi Thakur is a caring father and in general more humane and sensitive than his wife Leela; the implication is that this is because he is more in touch with his artistic side, while Leela – a thakur’s daughter – has grown up obsessed with money and power.)
Music is also an equalizer on another level in this film: it removes class and caste lines. The “guru” is the lower-class Baiju, who recoils in embarrassment when Jogi Thakur tries to touch his feet; for me you are the real Brahmin, says the upper-class man, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. In this scene, the two men sit together on the floor and sitting with them is a Muslim friend; the unforced bonhomie is a direct result of their love for music and the performing arts.
– It took me a couple of viewings to "get into" the song, but I like the way the music shifts register, from the languid, sweet melody when the women describe “Radha” and “Jamuna”, to the strident, challenging notes when they demand the answer to their riddle. And the wordless dance movements near the end, where the dancer conveys a possible answer to Jogi Thakur’s riddle purely through gestures rather than words; the viewer is allowed to interpret her movements, it isn’t spelt out.
– Ashok Kumar’s voice may be rough-hewn and nasal, but how appropriate it is for this song, and how much it adds to the authenticity of the scene. In a regular Hindi-film song – the sort that one can think of in dreamlike or symbolic terms, as taking place outside normal time and space – it isn’t so disconcerting to suddenly have an actor’s voice being replaced by that of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi. (Of course, viewers who are new to Hindi movies do take some time to adjust to this.) But “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” is very much a “realistic” part of the film’s narrative – an actual performance with real Lavani dancers performing on a stage with real musical instruments being played. Given this, how pleasing it is to hear the lead actor sing in his own voice (one of the most recognisable voices in the history of Hindi film, going back to the first decade of sound). Chattopadhyaya, all of 70 years old, does his own singing here too, just as he would in the lovely “Bhor Aayee Gaya Andhiyara” in Bawarchi.
– The sequence is beautifully acted, both by the dancers (especially the lead, whose name I don’t know) and by Kumar and Chattopadhyay, who seem so comfortable with the setting, so genuinely pleased by the opportunity to do something like this on screen. I particularly love the two-second scene near the end where Jogi Thakur, about to reveal the answer to his riddle and seal his triumph, looks back at Baiju and Mirza (who are out of the frame) with an impish, childlike smile; Kumar’s expression is pitch perfect, and so “musical” as well – it has its own beat and rhythm.
– How the answer to the final riddle overturns our expectations – expectations that arise from the innuendo-laden nature of the performance, as well as the naughty way in which Jogi Thakur asks his question. But though the mood here is one of fun and games and laughter, the riddle takes on somber echoes later in the film. “No one gets to see his own wife as a widow,” Jogi Thakur points out gleefully, and the words foreshadow what will soon happen to this jovial man: he will go to jail and effectively be “dead” for his wife and little daughter.
If anyone has further thoughts on this sequence, the film, and on Lavani in general, do weigh in.