A Portrait of the Doctor as an Angry Young Man

My Mirror column: the seventh in my series on Indian films about doctors.

What drives doctors to frustration in our cinema, and has that changed from Dr. Kotnis to Kabir Singh?

Amitabh Bachchan (right) as the dhoti-clad Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee
with Rajesh Khanna (left) as his patient and friend Anand Sehgal in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971)

Over the last six weeks, this column has looked at Indian films with doctor protagonists, beginning with Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), which V Shantaram based on Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, India's real-life medical missionary to China. In the last 75 years, we've travelled some distance from that uncomplicated patriotic doctor who chose duty to profession and country, over even duty to parents.

There have been, speaking rather broadly, two directions in which Indian cinema has taken doctors. In films like Ganashatru and Ek Doctor Ki Maut, made outside the industry framework, the good doctor remains a professional and patriot of the highest order. In these films, it is Indian society that no longer honours that selfless commitment to medical science. This chronological change is true as well of middle-of-the-road cinema. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha (1960), Balraj Sahni's rural doctor slaving away over his research could be imagined stumbling upon some good fortune by film's end. A decade later, none of the rural doctors in Vijay Anand's Tere Mere Sapne (1971) receive recognition or support. Even Dev Anand's 'original research' on a herbal cure for tuberculosis gets him fame only when an American university (Johns Hopkins, correctly) gives him a degree (a much darker version of this international vs national arc appears in Ek Doctor Ki Maut). Even as recently as an Udta Panjab, the good doctor's goodness is wasted on the world around her – ending in tragedy.

There is another cinematic trajectory (sometimes overlapping with the first), where the focus is on the frailties of doctors. Tere Mere Sapne, for instance, offered up one doctor in denial of his own illness, one alcoholic depressive doctor, and one doctor making money off rich patients to take vengeance on an unjust world. Bemisaal a decade later is much darker: the doctor now feels entitled to the good life – and the stakes of 'making money' are his patients' lives.

But some of the most interesting depictions are those that recognise that doctors, just like the rest of us, can have frailties -- even when they are more or less good. In 1971, the same year as Tere Mere Sapne, came Hrishikesh Mukherjee's most famous doctor movie: Anand. If his Anuradha had been routed through the doctor's perfect wife, Anand was routed through the perfect patient. Rajesh Khanna played Anand Sehgal, the sunny patient no-one wants to see die.

The film's narrative as usually understood as Anand's chatty warmth breaking through the hard, serious exterior of Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (a rather wonderful Amitabh Bachchan). That isn't untrue. But watching the film again, I realised that Anand expands on something I suggested in last week's column: the burden of stoicness placed upon doctors. When we meet Bachchan's Bhaskar, he is a man dispirited by his work: exhausted by having to practice in a country where many doctors are willing to treat the imaginary ailments of the rich for a fee, while mere medicine cannot cure what really ails so many patients – poverty. Bhaskar's exhaustion is often expressed as anger – a sneering contempt for the hypochondriac rich, and a helpless snappish rage in the face of the dying poor. What Anand does first is to recognise that rage as the doctor's anger at himself. But what he does next is to jolt Bhaskar out of that overwhelmed state, to frame the doctor's depressiveness and cynicism as self-indulgent – and insist that he live on the side of life, even while constantly having to look death in the eye.

In mid-2019, Indian cinema gave us another film about an angry doctor. Several films, actually – Sandeep Vanga's Telugu superhit Arjun Reddy was remade in several languages, all retaining the same essential plot, about a doctor who becomes a raging alcoholic – literally -- after his college girlfriend is forced by her family to marry another man. I saw the Hindi version, Kabir Singh, and like several reviewers, was struck by the hero's disturbing sense of ownership over his largely passive girlfriend, who seems only too happy to be owned.

Shahid Kapur as the titular protagonist Kabir Singh in the 2016 film about an alcoholic surgeon with anger issues

 

But what is relevant here is that Arjun/Kabir is portrayed as a brilliant doctor -- a surgeon, no less. The film might be seen to suggest, as incoherently as its hero's rages, that the external world – its rules of caste, gender and class, as well as institutional seniority – is a stifling hierarchy against which our hero 'rebels'. Kabir's uncontrolled anger, even when it hurts or endangers his friends, lovers, strangers or even patients, is greeted with awe much more often than censure. His rule-breaking is applauded, his depressive alcoholism is 'understood', even by women and men he treats badly. Anger is feted as self-expression, flaws are forgiven. Where, oh where, is an Anand to cut this Doctor Saab down to size?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Nov 2020

With clipped wings

My Mirror column:

A damaged young woman discovers her strengths in the recent Malayalam film Uyare (Rise).

The new Malayalam film Uyare begins at a college fest somewhere in Kerala. Four or five young women in matching long skirts and kurtis are dancing on stage with unbridled enthusiasm. One in particular catches the eye, her enjoyment is infectious. A young man looks pointedly in her direction, but refuses to catch her eye. Instead he turns from her to the largely male college-going audience, some of whom are taking phone videos of the performance. Lip curled in disdain, he walks out. When she comes out to meet him afterwards, he has nothing to say about her performance, or the prize her group has just won. All he can get out is: “Weren’t you supposed to be wearing something else? Why didn’t you tell me when it changed?”

The boyfriend who can take no pleasure in his girlfriend’s dancing because he is too busy imagining the pleasure other men might derive from it is, unsurprisingly, also the boyfriend who when told she has qualified for pilot training in Mumbai, can only speculate about the girls’ and boys’ hostels being on the same floor at the academy – and the prevalence of late-night parties.

Too many women in India, sadly, will recognise men they know in the suspicious, sour-faced Govind – brothers, fathers, uncles, but also boyfriends and husbands. What makes the film’s internal landscape so effective is its baseline assumption: that the controlling, insecure lover is so common a figure as to be normalised. It doesn’t take long for Pallavi’s friends at the academy to cotton on to the power dynamic of the relationship: a female friend scrolling through Pallavi’s photographs asks if she’s sent Govind the one with a male instructor’s arm around her. “All that power you feel in the sky nosedives when it comes to Govind,” she says to Pallavi – but the acuteness of the observation is somehow blunted into a joke.

Pallavi’s father, too, wonders what she sees in him. But she convinces him otherwise with the story of the adolescent origins of their relationship, when Govind rescued her 14-year-old self from public humiliation. The fact that he was then her school senior seems crucial to his ‘niceness’: he could automatically assume a superior, guiding role. That dynamic is one we have all encountered before, most recently in the much-discussed Kabir Singh, where Kabir’s relationship with his medical college junior Preeti is grounded in a very similar experience of his ‘choosing’ her as the recipient of his attentions.

Unlike Kabir in Kabir Singh, though, Govind is not heroic, or even good at what he does. By making him a loser who can’t find a decent job, Uyare turns audiences against him, while Pallavi, following her dreams, has the author-backed role. Her ambitiousness and positivity are a glaring contrast to his unrelenting pessimism: “No miracles happened,” he says dourly when she asks him how a job interview went. Pallavi’s successes and joys are things that threaten Govind. It seems understandable when she begins to keep her real life from him – and one wants to applaud when she finally speaks up – and wants out. (Spoilers ahead.) Of course, Govind will not give her her freedom. When his suicide threats fail to elicit a reaction, he decides to wound her rather than himself.

Both before and after the acid attack, Manu Ashokan keeps the directorial focus on his aspiring pilot heroine (Parvathy Thiruvothu). But the film is also conscious of the skewed gender dynamics of its Indian middle class universe, from boardroom to courtroom: the ‘humour’ lined with casual sexism, the deeply non-egalitarian assumptions about men and women. The women’s toilet in the pilot-training academy is labelled “Bla bla bla ba bla bla” – in contrast to the men’s toilet’s strong and silent “Bla”. A visitor to the academy, confronted by a pretty woman on the reception committee, assumes she is not a pilot-in-training but a PR woman – and further, that he is free to criticise her outfit for being “cheap”. The judge in the acid attack case is less moved by Pallavi’s present than Govind’s potential future – especially once he offers to marry her. “Why would he offer to marry her if he had committed this crime?” asks Govind's lawyer. In a discursive variation of something notoriously frequent in rape trials, the accused – merely because he is a man – is still imagined as being able to take the survivor “back under his wing” – merely because she is a woman.

The film’s resolution of Pallavi’s pilot dreams – scotched because her vision no longer holds up to the medical standards required – is to make her an air hostess. There’s something fascinating and full-frontal about the acid attack victim claiming a job traditionally defined by physical attractiveness. It doesn’t come easy. When spoilt brat airline  owner Vishal suggests a new role, an angry Pallavi responds with her air hostess ambition, yelling: “You should think twice about making promises to people who lack beauty!” Her anger spurs him to actually examine his thoughtless offer. In some ways, Vishal’s capacity for change is also a reflection of Pallavi’s power.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Oct 2019.

The angry new man

My Mirror column:

Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s film Kabir Singh feels like an unfortunately era-defining film: a familiar alpha male hero with an unfamiliar anger

The Holi scene in Kabir Singh features the devoted friend and sidekick, Shiva (Soham Majumdar), assuring the hero, Kabir (Shahid Kapoor), that his not-yet-quite-girlfriend Preeti (Kiara Advani) is safe: she has been seen in the girls' hostel with not a smidgeon of gulaal. “Don't worry, you'll be the first to put colour on her,” says Shiva. Almost immediately after, though, Kabir gets a panicked call. When he reaches Preeti, she is shaken and weeping, and her white clothes have splotches of colour. Kabir holds her for a few seconds, then tells her to go get changed. Meanwhile, two cowering juniors report, quaking, on where the colour was put on Preeti: her chest. Preeti’s assaulters, it is divulged, are Kabir's football rivals from another medical college, whom he has publicly beaten up during a recent game. The comeuppance of the villainous main rival follows, with Kabir again beating him up in front of his college-mates, hurling abuses all the while.

This single scene encapsulates a great deal of the cultural matrix we live in, whose many assumptions about men, women, sex and gender are the seedbed that throws up a film like Kabir Singh [originally made in Telugu as Arjun Reddy (2017)]. Holi, the film implicitly decides, is only a carnival for men. Or at least Preeti cannot express any desire to participate (although other girls in the hostel seem to be enjoying themselves). The colour/sex metaphor couldn't be more direct: Kabir assumes other men want to colour Preeti, and he has reserved the right to be the first. Meanwhile, Preeti, her virginal fearfulness signalled by the pristine white kurta, is simply assumed to be waiting for him.

Holi becomes the locale for a security discourse created entirely by men. Some men endanger the woman's sexual safety, another designates himself protector. But that protection is premised on his ownership of her. More ironically, her very need for protection is premised on that ownership: Preeti becomes a target only because she is ‘Kabir's girl’.

The other profoundly ironic part of the scene for me is Kabir's rhetorical question, as he bashes Amit's head in: “Teri ma ko chhuega to accha lagega, madarc**d? (Will you feel good if your mother is touched, motherf**er?)”

Women in patriarchy are not people; they are only the most important symbolic signifiers of relationships between men. They are the means by which men compete with each other, hurt and humiliate each other, measure the degree of harm done to each other. And sometimes the ironies are too great for the language to accommodate. (In a later scene, the film does seem to gesture to the ridiculousness of mother-related swearwords – but it’s because the joke is more literal: Kabir, wrestling his brother Karan with a “Teri ma ki”, receives a half-chuckling “Meri ma teri kya lagti hai?” in response.)

Another thing to note in the Holi scene is how Kabir warns Amit never to touch Preeti again – not because molesting a woman is a terrible thing to have done, but 'because I really love her'. All other women, Kabir's behaviour through the film makes clear, can be treated purely as human receptacles for his raging phallus, even potentially against their will – friends’ cousins inquired about with only sexual intent, professional colleagues lunged at in hospital rooms, and in one egregious instance, a woman who changes her mind about having sex told to “open up” at knifepoint. Our hero even persuades a famous actress to “help [him] physically”. The fact that he then gets into a consensual, intimate, talk-y relationship with her is conveniently ignored: he dumps her angrily the moment she utters the L word.

So Preeti is special – but only because she is, as he puts it on more than one occasion, “Kabir Rajdheer Singh ki bandi.” (The word “bandi” is perfect, because it can mean a woman, or a female slave or bondswoman, potentially a servant of God). The “aur kucch nahi” that follows is said in anger, and the film later gives Preeti a chance to turn the phrase back on an errant Kabir. But she has displayed no signs of extraordinariness when she first catches Kabir's eye: when asked what he likes in her, all Kabir can say is “I like the way you breathe.”

Of course, we are meant to know the real reason Preeti is special: because she is capable of loving Kabir back. And the film leaves us in no doubt that its eponymous hero is exceptional: alpha male, ace sportsman, exam-topping medical student, alcoholic but high-functioning surgeon with a brilliant record, and to top it all, rule-breaker extraordinaire.

Kabir's refusal to be controlled by rules can involve moving his girlfriend into a boys' hostel room, or defying the principal's injunction to apologise for his violence. In a world as regimented as this one, where the external world's rules of caste, gender and class combine with centralised exams and institutional seniority to form a stifling hierarchy, Kabir's uncontrolled anger is greeted less with censure than with awe. There is so much suppression around us, the film wants to suggest, that a man who feels anything strongly is a hero.

In this vision of the world, the crazy boy is also the only one who knows how to get his father to cry, or play his grandmother's favourite song at her funeral, its disallowed liveliness triggering real emotion. Kabir Singh is a rebel without a cause – but not if we believe the film's millennial message, in which self-expression is the only cause you need.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Jun 2019