The arc of appearance

My Mirror column:

Amar Kaushik’s Bala takes a witty Kanpuriya route to show Indian viewers that our preoccupation with surface-level qualities runs depressingly deep

 
Bala in Bala is a pun on the Hindi word for hair, as well as the nickname of its hero Balmukund Shukla. What’s remarkable about Bala is that its hero is not a nice guy. And no one in Amar Kaushik’s film is trying to tell us that he is. Once the teenaged Shah Rukh Khan of his Kanpur school/gali/mohalla, Bala in his twenties is experiencing a massive crisis of confidence. As he loses his once-luxuriant mane of hair, he also loses the head-tossing arrogance that came with it.

Once the sort of cocky upper caste boy who could effortlessly cast himself as hero of his North Indian small-town universe, the balding Bala is now assailed by self-doubt in greater measure than those who haven’t had his level of entitlement. Far from being an action-packed vehicle for his starry antics, Bala’s life is now a tragicomedy: a series of misadventures with ever more outrageous hair-replacement tactics.

Coming after 2018’s Stree, in which Kaushik sneaked a snide gender angle into a ghost-centric comedy, it isn’t surprising that in Bala he uses the male balding plot as a way to hold up a mirror to our lookist universe. But not just any universe. Bala’s second plotline, featuring Bala’s childhood friend Latika, is about India’s constricted ideas of beauty, particularly for women. It holds up to the light our bizarre obsession with “fair” skin, which does especially widespread damage to self-esteem in a country where almost everyone would be considered “dark”. And it illuminates how these ridiculous casteist, subliminally racist ideas, far from being smashed by a more inclusive ‘global’ modernity, are being reinforced and amplified by a social media explosion that feeds on ever-greater exhibitionism and display.

In fact, we might think of the film as deriving its premise from a semi-conscious recognition: that women have been judged primarily by their looks pretty much through history, but the image-focused quality of the selfie era has finally started to get to men, too. Bala’s particular form of vanity gives him long-term aspirations – he does stand-up comedy on the side. But his need for outlets for more immediate gratification leads him down the TikTok path. Which leads into the arms of his dream girl Pari Mishra: a TikTok celebrity and the ‘face’ of Pretty You, the mass market fairness cream for which Bala is a marketing agent.

Having first cast Ayushmann Khurrana, Bollywood’s current patron saint of North Indian masculine vulnerability, as Bala, Kaushik goes on to give his hero a great deal of screen-time so we might learn to sympathise with him. Having seen the preening boy Bala at his worst – mocking his teacher for being takla, or jeering at Latika for her dark skin, we see those frailties turned inside out in the adult Ayushmann, when the character’s own fixation on good looks comes back to haunt him. You may still not like the fellow, but there’s definitely something about his honest appeal for help that works to make him human.

The female leads are both actors who have been paired with Khurrana before: Yami Gautam in Vicky Donor, and Bhumi Pednekar in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Gautam aces the part of Pari, the perfectly turned out social media queen, whose primary desire on her wedding night is to make a suhaag raat TikTok video. Her purpose is primarily to entertain, but she gets one powerful dialogue moment in which to introduce us to the interiority of the surface-level character. Latika is played controversially by Pednekar in unfortunately varying degrees of black-face make-up. Pednekar gets a well-intentioned but not very fleshed-out role as the strong girl who refuses to be defeated by her complexes. She is meant primarily as a mirror for Bala to begin to see himself. But it seems to me significant that the film is self-aware enough to flag that fact – and that Latika has several moments to point out Bala’s self-absorption to him.

What makes the film transcend its inherently lecture-like core is the consistently well-crafted surround sound, achieved by a great ensemble cast who take the superbly written dialogues and produce a pitch-perfect rendition of a contemporary Kanpur milieu. Particular mention must be made of Abhishek Banerjee as Bala’s friend Ajju, Javed Jaffrey back in fine fettle as the Amitabh-impersonating Bachchan Bhaiya, and Seema Pahwa as Latika’s marvellous upbeat mausi, who has had her own look battle to fight in the form of being identified as “moochhon wali” (Ritesh Batra’s recent Photograph also contained a reference to a moustachioed aunt). The film has a brilliant soundscape, in which the base physicality of “kantaap” bounces effortlessly off the Shuddh Hindi register of “guru upahaas”. It also gives us an infectious Tequila song – and the potentially viral coinage “babyu”. We may not believe in Bala’s redemption speech entirely, but the film keeps us listening.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Nov 2019.

A love for all seasons

Continuing my tribute to RK Films, a look back at the banner’s first success, Barsaat (1949). What was its place in Raj Kapoor’s life and career, and in Hindi cinema?

A moment between Raj Kapoor and Nargis from Barsaat (1949) -- Raj Kapoor's first hit as a filmmaker -- became first the poster (left) and then the RK Films logo (right)

Raj Kapoor’s second film as a producer-director was Barsaat (1949). His father Prithiviraj had been the hero of all the Prithvi Theatre plays he directed over 16 years. Raj Kapoor, too, cast himself as his own protagonist from his directorial debut Aag (1948) until Mera Naam Joker (1970). That penchant for playing the hero may have been connected to the semi-autobiographical quality he brought to his cinema.

The central tension of Barsaat is between the philosophical worldviews of two friends, Pran (Kapoor) and Gopal (Prem Nath). They are educated young men of the same class background, both babus from the city who end up romancing naive girls from the mountains. Kashmir is never named, but the clothes, the women’s jewellery and the shikara rowed by Reshma (Nargis) establish Barsaat as part of a long history of Hindi films in which the unhappy state has figured as a beautiful playground for mainland heroes, “pardesis” who love and leave. The metaphorical weight of that cinematic history is undeniable, especially as we watch it in August 2019, when what seemed an innocuous theme 70 years ago has come home to roost as an Indian ‘national’ claim on Kashmiri territory and women.

But to return to the film’s more frontal concerns: the two men stand for very different things. Pran is a sensitive violin-playing poet, waiting for his one true love, while the pragmatic Gopal has a girl in every port – taking his pleasure where he can and never looking back. As one of the film’s multiple brilliant songs went, “Main chanchal madmast pavan hoon, ghoom-ghoom har kali ko choomoon”. If wind was one metaphor for moving unapologetically on, a flowing river was the other: in the words of scriptwriter Ramanand Sagar, later of Doordarshan Ramayan fame, Gopal describes himself thus: “Bas dariya ke lehron ki tarah guzar gaya, laut ke phir us ghaat ka khayaal tak nahi aaya.”

Prem Nath had already played foil to Raj Kapoor in Aag, where Kapoor’s character Kewal describes Prem Nath’s artist Rajan as a worshipper of the body rather than a seeker of the soul. In Barsaat, too, Nath’s Gopal is a man of lusty appetites while Kapoor plays a true romantic, who believes love must contain pain as much as pleasure: “Jismein ansoo nahi hote, woh saccha pyaar nahi hota”. Barsaat cemented the persona Raj Kapoor had already begun to create with Aag: that of a man in love with love.

But while he constantly berates Gopal for saying that love is only lust by another name, Kapoor's romantic hero is not quite the pure disembodied lover he wishes to be. Raj Kapoor had placed that quandary about loving ‘inner beauty’ versus physical attractiveness upfront in Aag, with the hero saying his life might have been different if he hadn’t been so attracted to beautiful girls. There, Kewal went to the extreme of disfiguring his face as a test of real love. Here, in Barsaat a year later, Kapoor seems more at ease with his own vanity, letting his on-screen lover Reshma (played by his off-screen lover Nargis) refer to the depths of his blue eyes (she talks of them in Aag, too, but there her attraction is punished).

These were themes that lasted through Raj Kapoor’s life: vanity, physical beauty, lust versus love, body versus soul. A man of average height in a family of tall Pathans, he was always insecure about height: he once said he knew when Nargis was going to leave him because she came to see him wearing heels. His pride in his blue eyes was also legend: Madhu Jain’s book on the Kapoors tells of how he finally scheduled a long-needed eye surgery because the surgeon also had light eyes. Only a man who knew the value of those eyes personally would safeguard them from harm. Jain also mentions that Kapoor wanted to make a film called Soorat Aur Seeratstarring Lata Mangeshkar as a disfigured heroine with a magic voice. Many years later, he came back to it in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

Perhaps these are irresolvable questions. Barsaat came down emphatically on the side of one true love, the film’s Nargis-Raj Kapoor track suggesting the almost miraculous power of loyalty and longevity. It also made the Nargis-Raj Kapoor jodi the stuff of legend, their undeniable passion enshrined forever in the film’s posters, and later even more permanently and publicly, in the RK Films logo. The man who holds his woman and his violin in the same passionate embrace, suggesting that his art and his love were inextricably linked, may have been an accurate depiction of Raj Kapoor’s relationship with Nargis. And yet Barsaat was also the work of a man who had married his wife Krishna in 1946, a woman who sold her jewellery to help him make Barsaat. He met Nargis four months after, and had entanglements with other creative muses after her – Padmini, Vyjayanthimala and Lata Mangeshkar among them – but he never left his wife.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Aug 2019.

At what price beauty?

My Mirror column:

Women struggle to feel beautiful in an intriguing television series called Dietland, and a new comedy called I Feel Pretty.

“Apart from Steven and a few other people, I’d learnt to live deep inside myself... My body was just a thing I used to move my head around,” says Alicia ‘Plum’ Kettle early in the first season of Dietland, the ongoing television series of which she is the heroine and sometimes narrator. The thought isn’t a complicated one. But Plum’s description of her inner life as a fat person also encapsulates what seems to me to be a most universally resonant thought: a split between the body and the mind, the feeling that one’s visible outer self does not really represent one’s inner being. Based on Sarai Walker’s novel of the same name, Dietland’s aim is simple: it places a woman’s struggles with obesity at the centre of our consciousness, forcing us to engage with our prejudices and pity-parties, even — perhaps, especially — when they come couched as concerns about the fat person’s health and happiness.



As she moves hopelessly between her friend Steven’s cafe and her lonely Brooklyn apartment, her thankless weightwatchers meetings (where she is lectured by annoying thin women) and her freelance gig as ghostwriter for teen zine editor Kitty Montgomery (where, too, she is lectured by annoying thin women), Plum gets sadder and angrier. Still, she continues to suspend all her present-day desires in aid of a future Day of Fulfilment, pegging her meagre savings and oversized hopes to a gastric band surgery that promises to unveil her “thin person within”.

So in Plum’s case, the split sense of identity is based on being fat. But Dietland makes it clear that what it’s really targeting is much larger: a world of impossibly precarious standards for what counts as female beauty, held in place by what it refers to as the “dissatisfaction industrial complex”. “They get us to tell them how broken we are and then get us to buy things to fix it,” says the wonderfully savvy Julia, manager of the so-called ‘Beauty Closet’ that’s part of Kitty Montgomery’s media empire — who also enrols Plum into a secret project to subvert it. Meanwhile, an anonymous female vigilante group by the fantastically normal name of Jennifer starts to claim responsibility for the grisly murders of rapists who have escaped the law. Their violence is effective and media-grabbing — it shuts down Fashion Week and kills off a female porn star associated with rape porn — and even as Plum is adopted by a peaceful ‘anti-diet’ philanthropist, the connections she’s making seem to lead her closer and closer to Jennifer.


A few weeks after I watched Dietland, I came upon a 2018 film that seems to engage with very similar concerns. Called I Feel Pretty, it stars the influential stand-up comic Amy Schumer. Schumer’s Renee Bennett is by no means obese, but like Plum Kettle, she struggles with insecurities about her looks. 

If Plum slaves away secretly over her laptop in her apartment, Renee leads her work life in a dank Chinatown basement. Both are wage slaves employed by insanely posh women in the youth and beauty business, who gradually start to see the value of our anonymous, non-posh heroines. Where Plum had Kitty, Renee has Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams in a memorably excessive performance), heir and CEO of a cosmetics corporation called Lily LeClaire that’s looking to branch out from high-end to mass products. Most strikingly, Renee yearns to know what it’s like to be “undeniably pretty” — which, in both Plum’s and her minds, is what will make them worthy of being desired, and thus — at least potentially — loved.


I began by being struck by how similarly Dietland and I Feel Pretty set up their scenarios. But I ended up amazed by the different routes they take to resolve them. I Feel Pretty uses the old knock-on-the-head device to create a version of amnesia: Renee wakes up from a gym accident convinced that she has been transformed into a woman of stunning attractiveness; a babe by mainstream standards. That illusion kickstarts her lifeless dating life and career, as romantic partners and snobbish bosses alike are first bemused and then charmed by her self-confidence. As feel-good comedy, this premise walks a bit of a political tightrope — because, of course, the reason everyone (including us, the audience) is so amused is because Renee’s new confidence is misplaced, incongruous, delusional. And there are moments of annoying obviousness when Renee befriends the beautiful people — her gym friend or her boss — only so that we can be told that hot people have problems, too.


What I Feel Pretty’s makers want us to concentrate on, however, is that feeling “undeniably pretty” is enough to make the life we want. If we feel it on the inside, it’ll start to show up on the outside.



Meanwhile, in Dietland, we watch Plum being treated badly, by strangers and by potential dates, because fatness has been declared not just unattractive but inferior, worthy of fetishising but not respect and love. But then we also see women with the most flawless of bodies being objectified. “They’re perfect,” says an acid attack victim with a disfigured face. “How’s that working out for them?” In fact, Dietland wants us to arrive at the same place as I Feel Pretty —just via a darker route. The most beautiful body is no guarantee of anything, if we aren’t feeling pretty on the inside.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Aug 2018.

TV review: Thin within

A review of the new TV series Dietland, for India Today magazine. (You can stream it in India on Amazon Prime).

Alicia 'Plum' Kettle is an overweight young white woman in Brooklyn, plodding heavily through her unhappy present while keeping her inner life afloat with dreams of a thinner future. While the imaginary Alicia struts sveltely in a perfect red dress, the real-life Plum (Joy Nash), clad invariably in shapeless black, moves in a ceaseless loop between her friend Steven's coffee shop, her "sad apartment" and waist-watchers meetings led by an annoying skinny woman who calls eating a "bad habit".

Dietland is at its painful best when depicting what life as a fat person can feel like: the casual rudeness, the non-stop judgement, the angst about body image engulfing all aspects of selfhood. Obesity isn't just Plum's greatest stumbling block, it's the sole subject of her aspirations. All other goals -- career, love-life, just life-life -- are placed on hold while she saves for a gastric band surgery to free her "thin person within".

Like the 2015 Sarai Walker novel its based on, the series refuses to offer psychological reasons for fatness. "One of the things I push back against in Dietland," Walker said in 2016, "is that fat is an outer representation of some kind of inner trauma." Instead, it looks outwards, placing its heroine in the midst of a multi-pronged female fightback against constricting beauty standards.

Plum's job is answering sad letters that teenage girls address to Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies), manager-editor of teen zine Daisy Chain. Plum's replies to catch the attention of Julia (Tamara Tunie), who wants to subvert "the dissatisfaction industrial complex" from inside the belly of the beast: the Beauty Closet she runs in Daisy Chain's basement. Initiated into an anti-diet self-realisation programme by the philanthropist daughter of a dead diet guru, Plum goes off anti-depressants to find herself hallucinating about sex with a man-tiger. Meanwhile, a vigilante group called Jennifer is murdering rapists, while targeting Fashion Week because it "fosters rape culture".

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Dietland has many things going for it, a heroine on the cusp of transformation, engaging feminist politics, striking women characters, but it also has too much going on. The constant segues from its bitchy Devil Wears Prada tenor -- into loopy animation, lush NatGeo-inspired fantasy, violent masked murders -- can feel choppy. Plum's unusual path, though, might successfully cut a wide swathe through the stock gender tropes of pop culture.

Published in India Today, 20 July 2018.

Picture This: Different Tyrannies

Nisha Pahuja's new documentary tracks young women through two Indias: a beauty pageant and a Hindutva camp. (This month's BLInk column.)

Durga Vahini camp leader Prachi Trivedi addresses a group of girls

Nisha Pahuja’s documentary The World Before Her, slotted for a 25 April release by PVR, will now hit cinemas only in June. The delay is a pity, because the film helps lay out the choices before Indian women, in ways that no party has articulated, but that form our everyday political matrix. Some would say, correctly, that Pahuja maps two extremes, and that most women stand somewhere in the middle. But TWBH presents the poles through real, believable, often conflicted characters, making their worlds come alive.

On one side is Prachi Trivedi, 24, a sturdy Durga Vahini activist whom we first see twirling a baton. Prachi’s opening voiceover is both a warning and a plea: “Egyptians, Romans, they are history now. It’s going to happen with us. So we are trying to save ourselves... Our country is becoming modern. But our past is our roots. We cannot forget our roots.” The other side is represented by Ruhi Singh, 19, a Jaipur girl with her heart set on the Miss India crown. “A lot of people think that if you let women get modern and educated, you’ll lose your culture...” says Ruhi. “But I don’t agree. As much as I love and respect my culture ... I want freedom.”

The Durga Vahini (DV) is the women’s youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Pahuja says she is the first filmmaker to be allowed into a DV camp. We watch as Malaben Rawal, DV’s national president, ties Aishwarya Rai, Miss World, skimpy clothes and Lux sabun into a scathing narrative about Westernisation and videshi corporations. We see young girls pushed to their physical limits by the camp’s shaaririk module; we see them go from giggly to exhilarated by learning to fire a gun; we watch them shout slogans in defense of the Hindu rashtra, against imaginary Muslim and Christian enemies. Earlier, Prachi’s father Hemant Trivedi literally demonises these communities, inserting them into a tweaked Hindu iconography: “Muslims with their beard and caps even look like rakshasas, don’t they? And Christians, they come with their hands folded, like Pootana (a demoness). But like Pootana, the milk they offer is poisoned.”

Meanwhile, at the Miss India pageant preparations, another kind of remaking is in full swing. A female trainer teaches young women to catwalk: “Chin parallel, elbows front, back straight. It hurts? It looks fab.” A cosmetic physician blandly urges a chin extension surgery because the “three parts of the face” need to be “equal”. The men are even more brazen about the fact that they’re making and packaging a product. One Bombay Times photo-op has the aspirants line up in uniform: tight blue jeans and a thin white t-shirt, which a man rips and re-ties to reveal maximum bosom. Another time, they parade with faces veiled so that the pageant director can rate their legs without distraction.

Miss India contestants wait around before a practice swimsuit round 

At first, Prachi seems to speak for the old world, where women have no agency, and Ruhi for the new, where we are ostensibly free. But it quickly becomes clear that both these worlds are responses to modernity. The battle, as always, is being fought on the bodies of women — and our freedom is as elusive on either side.

Each side feels like a factory, where women are sought to be shaped into pre-given forms — forms of use to militant religious nationalism, or forms that might enter themselves smoothly into the capitalist commodity machine. But Pahuja’s painstaking interviews reveal that the factories do not only spit out the well-oiled clones they might want. Ankita Shorey wins third place in the Miss India pageant, but she knows that “achieving her dreams” comes at the cost of objectification. Prachi remains terrifyingly loyal to the Hindutva vision — even as she recognises that the ideology she wishes to make a career of declares that women should not have careers.

The rhetoric throws up constant contradictions. Amid all the enforced thrusting-out of butts and boobs, it isn’t too persuasive to hear ex-Miss India Pooja Malhotra insist that the pageant isn’t only about “external beauty”. The DV atmosphere is one of near-machismo: when a girl fumbles over a gun, the teacher jeers: “Are you planning to chop onions all your life?” Yet marriage is a woman’s only future: one DV leader mocks male-female equality even as she proclaims that girls must be married by 18, because by 25 they would be “too mature to control”.

Pahuja’s talent for juxtaposition gives the film great texture. The DV girls giggling over their saffron sashes as being Miss-India-like; the uniformity of the beauty pageant eerily echoing DV’s drills; both Ruhi and Prachi calling themselves ‘products’ that must fulfil their parents’ expectations.

The film’s juxtapositions reach their acme with female foeticide — and it is also here that any equivalence between the film’s two worlds must be abandoned. We learn that Pooja Malhotra’s mother walked out of her marriage to keep her baby daughter alive. Soon after, Prachi tells us that she cannot really be angry with her father for curtailing her ambitions, because after all, he let her live. Malhotra’s love of her mother is stronger for knowing the battles she fought, but she does not carry around the burden of perpetual gratitude. But if Prachi’s world were to be our future, all women would be forever beholden to men — for their very lives. Crushed under such a weight, what other battles could we possibly hope to fight?

Published in BLInk, Hindu Business Line's Saturday paper.

Post Facto - Beauty is the beast

My Sunday Guardian column for March 1st:

Suchitra Sen

In a sketch that's part of the Tadpole Repertory's superb play Taramandal, a nervous young woman arrives at the office of a Bollywood agent. She nods when asked if she wants to be a star. But she doesn't speak Hindi — and for the most part of her time on stage, doesn't speak at all. The more he talks, the more terror-stricken she looks. Eventually he suggests, not unkindly, that she sign up as a Junior Artist, commonly known as an extra. "It'll be work. And with your looks, you'll get slotted as A-Class."

The aspiring star is played by a strikingly attractive actor, and to hear that fact referenced in the dialogue — "aapki looks" — seems appropriate, even necessary. It both acknowledges her beauty and dismisses it as not being enough. But is it really not enough, one wonders? And suddenly that idea — that beauty isn't all it takes to become a star — begins to seem a little bit like the wishful thinking oftheatre-wallahs. Because in fact, the film industry seems to declaim from rooftops that beauty is all. Talent, if at all it counts, is secondary.

The young Suchitra Sen — then plain Krishna Dasgupta — apparently once sat on a school bench and announced that she would be remembered long after her death. An ordinary middle class girl who was one of nine siblings, and an average student bereft of any artistic talent, all Sen had was her looks. But apparently, that was enough. "She was conscious of her great beauty... and behaved as if she... deserved every bit of the natural selection," wrote Susmita Dasgupta in a thoughtful Facebook note. At the time, a wealthy groom was the biggest prize a middle class girl could expect for her beauty. Krishna got that, too. But her stardom, says Dasgupta, came about because she believed she was meant for bigger things. Beauty was her claim upon the universe. Hindi film star Juhi Chawla recently described entering the Femina Miss India contest when in college. "I knew I was good," she said, but "there were prettier girls in my class and that always kept me grounded."

Women are constantly being rated on grounds of beauty — and rating ourselves, too. The sad thing is that it isn't just those who aspire to be models or actors, professions that overtly reward bodily perfection, who buy into this hierarchy. Seemingly, it's everyone. And that ingrained sense of superiority or inferiority, based on how you think other people think you look, can coexist with an otherwise well-formed intelligence. I was distressed to hear recently of a bright, high-achieving woman being thrilled that a college reunion still rated her among the hottest girls in her batch.

Men are rated on other things: intelligence, talent, wealth, power. Looks, not so much. That criterion, seemingly, they reserve for us. Off the top of my head, I can think of a boy in high school whose unsolicited rating of three female friends as "cute", "pretty" and "beautiful" I have never forgotten. Another male friend introduced someone a decade after college as "one of the hot girls in college". What's worse is the enshrining of this stuff as popular culture — in university fests, college mags and so on. In St. Stephen's College, premier educational institution of the land, it was long considered a "fun" thing for male students to regularly produce "chick charts" — a list of the top 10 "chicks" in college, based on their physical attributes. In 1984, soon after the pogrom against the Sikh community, they produced a "Sardine" chart — the top 10 female Sikh students rated on their looks. Filmmaker Saba Dewan, then a student there, wrote in 2012 of the uproar that followed, the all-out gender wars in which the authorities sided with the male "pranksters" against women students protesting objectification, who were termed troublemakers. St. Stephen's College in the late 1990s, when I went there, no longer had "chick charts", or at least not public ones. But very similar issues existed, and came to a head around "Miss and Mr Harmony". Ostensibly gender-neutral, it was, in practice, a contest of wit for boys, but looks for girls. The gender wars of my time ended with the entry of women into residence at St. Stephen's, for the first time in its history.

Re-watching Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar the other day, I had a moment of shock. Ali — who went to Hindu College himself — had decided that the best way to introduce his Stephanian heroine to us was to show her topping the chick chart. And the only woman we see respond to it says merely, "Dekhna kya hai? Jab tak yeh St. Stephen's mein hai, yeh hi hogi na No. 1". There it was — a thing so many women had fought so hard to get rid of, shorn of all its history, reinstated as instigator of the beauty myth.

A day after that, a friend said to me she identified with much of the rule-breaking fun that Ali's heroines had, but his actresses were too pretty. "They do what girls want, but they look like what boys want." Ah, no surprise there.

Back to the future: Mohan Maharishi's Vidyottama

Time has always played the lead in Mohan Maharishi’s work, says Trisha Gupta, and it’s true of his latest as well.

Playwright-director Mohan Maharishi’s new play, Vidyottama, came out of a chance conversation. Maharishi was sitting around chatting with a few friends, when the conversation turned to the legendary Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidas. “How do we know whether someone called Kalidas produced these works? Suppose his wife wrote and he took the credit?” someone asked. A remark made half in jest, perhaps, but Maharishi was intrigued enough to return to some of Kalidas’s most famous works – Abhigyan Shakuntalam, Meghadootam and Kumarasambhava. “I went through these texts again, and felt that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to have imagined female beauty in the way it is described in them,” says Maharishi, who spent two decades in Chandigarh as head of Punjab University’s Department of Theatre. However, he found himself increasingly arrested by the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fictive figure of Kalidas’s wife, Vidyottama. “It is believed that Kalidas married the daughter of King Vikramaditya, whose name was either Vidyavati or Vidyottama. But there is very little historical detail available. We are not even clear whether this was Vikramaditya I or II. The tikakas, the commentators who came after him, talked only about his work, not his life. Perhaps it was not fashionable then to talk about a writer’s life,” suggests Maharishi. The lack of biographical certainty, though, gave Maharishi the liberty to more or less create his own characters – something that might otherwise have been much harder. “I have imagined Vidyottama as a very intelligent woman and a brilliant classical dancer. She is also a Cassandra-like figure – she has a boon from Shiva that allows her to see into the future. In fact, to travel to a different time. She disappears for days at a time. And she raises questions that no one else does,” says Maharishi. At one point in Maharishi’s play, Vidyottama asks Kalidas why there are no evil Brahmans in his writings. How is that possible, says Kalidas, my audience will reject me. “Oh,” retorts Vidyottama, “So you admit that to survive, you have to believe whatever your audience believes?” For Maharishi, the play has been a chance to think aloud about the difference between classical art and modern forms of creative expression. “In the classical view of things, raising social issues was not considered the function of art.”  And yet, Maharishi believes that Kalidas’s works exhibit a sense of “connection… with the cosmos” that could not have been created by a writer “completely isolated from the outside world”. It is the figure of Vidyottama who becomes, in Maharishi’s eyes, both Kalidas’s source of inspiration and energy, and the force that threatens to rupture his blissful world. In the play, Kalidas, attempting to write the scene where Shakuntala makes her way to King Dushyant’s court, asks his wife how she would react if her husband returned to his old life and refused to recognise her. “Gali deti,” says the straight-talking Vidyottama. Maharishi thus creates a very contemporary back-story for a famous classical scene. “This scene has perhaps the strongest language ever used by Kalidas, where Shakuntala calls Dushyant ‘anarya’ – one who is not an Arya,” he points out. Kalidas is unhappy with Vidyottama’s criticisms, or her freedom-loving nature, but he can’t do without her. The climactic event in the play is a journey that Vidyottama makes into the future. “She goes somewhere, imaginatively, intellectually or physically – and returns violated. She finds the future so ferocious and violent that she comes back sick. The clash between the past and the present is borne by Vidyottama, on her body,” explains Maharishi. The current play brings together many of Maharishi’s previous interests. He has been exploring the idea of time since he wrote his most famous play, Einstein, in 1994. “Time is as still as this door, this wall behind us,” he says quietly. “This idea that time moves is a very limited concept. Einstein understood that. But we persist in thinking that we have a past and a future… In fact, all time is always present.” Is that why his approach to the “present” is always routed through the past? “I do not wish to be topical, to write about something that will come and go. So I look for symbols. I have always been concerned with the present. But the past is my interest because it refuses to go away. It persists.”

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 1. April 6-19 2007