To leave or not to leave...

I saw Ijazzat (1987) once again! I resisted it for years, despite strong recommendations from many people, and finally saw it for the first time around three decades after it was made. Then I saw it two times in three years. It wasn’t fascination that led me to a second viewing. It was befuddlement.

I must have resisted the movie because of its name. A movie called ‘Permission’ wouldn’t really be my choice for leisure activity. Otherwise, a movie with Naseeruddin Shah and Rekha directed by Gulzar would have been an easy pick, especially after discovering that some of my favourite songs are part of that movie.

After watching the movie twice, I can confidently declare that I intensely dislike this movie.

I do acknowledge that there are many reasons to like it. And here a few: excellent songs, outstanding acting by almost all the actors, aesthetically appealing sets, some lovely handloom saris worn with élan by the beautiful Rekha, a camera that captured the jitteriness of the characters, such care for detail in the screenplay and direction that there was a moment when I could smell the musty odour of a moist towel of an eternal wanderer. Very visceral cinema. Wholesome too, in its way.

Why, then, do I dislike it?

I believe it’s because I feel betrayed. In its presentation of three complicated people, it seems to promise that it will dwell into the existential issues of each of them. The commitment to good cinema, seen in almost every shot, raises the expectations of the viewer. However, as the movie progresses the viewer understands that the narrative has only one protagonist – the man, for it’s his existential anxiety that seems to resonate with the auteur. 

This is good cinema perpetuating the age-old neglect of women’s desires that Hindi cinema has been propounding from the beginnings of time.

The first time I saw it, I thought that Sudha touching Mahender’s feet as a leave-taking gesture made me see red. But then, if I had totally switched off at that disconcerting gesture by Sudha I wouldn’t have registered anything after that shot. However, I had noticed that it was ten minutes to seven on the station clock when the relieved husband gently escorts his wife out. I also remember thinking that this hero will have to stand there frozen for the next forty minutes for the train scheduled for seven thirty to jolt him out of that state.

Of course, I felt bad for the poor chap—losing chance after chance to find emotional stability. Moreover, I had also noted that Gulzar had invoked Devdas, Hindi cinema’s favourite lover, when the hero calls himself Devdas and wants ‘Paro’ to let him into the bolted waiting room after stepping out to find some food. This wasn’t a nonchalant reference to the most popular Hindi cinema trope of unfulfilled desire. It was Gulzar’s experiment with the Devdas trope, albeit a bungled one. For the one who left a “stamp” on the lover – an echo of the original Devdas’s mark of ownership of Paro – was a woman in this movie. It was an awkward transferring of the affect memories of one woman invokes in Mahender when he meets the other woman of the two significant women in his life.

 Probably among the most interesting characters in Hindi cinema, Maya was a rare depiction of a free-spirited woman who lives by her own rules without intentionally meaning to hurt or harm anyone around her. Why ruin such a courageous portrayal by calling her Maya – an illusion – is quite incomprehensible! Does the name indicate that the truly free woman is an illusion? And why was the composed and mature woman called Sudha—invoking the calming effect of moonlight on fraught nerves? Doesn’t the naming of the two women reveal the ways in which they are to facilitate the man?

Mahender man can simply take his tangled web of desire to his wife for her to sort through while he continues to remain a connoisseur of artistic illusions. And when the wife strongly indicates that she will not participate in the mess that he’s made of his love life, he gets a heart attack! Such self-indulgence and sense of entitlement! Leaving an open and messy suitcase in a railway waiting room is an apt metaphor for the night long conversation the two of them have. At the end of it all, he doesn’t get closure. However, he is seemingly not even seeking closure. He’s a will ‘o’ the wisp, a wanderer—he doesn’t live in contained ways for him to feel the need for closure to get on with his life. On the other hand, both the women who were his emotional mainstays are shown to be explicitly asking his permission to leave his life. The artist does it through the most popular song of the movie and the wife does it with an age-old convention— touching the feet of an elder, seeking blessing, before parting. So yes, that ghastly gesture is a very significant reason for my dislike of the movie. However, that is not the only reason.

On watching it the second time, I gained more clarity on why I disliked it so intensely. The narrative’s perspective is such that while there is an empathetic gaze towards the injustices life metes out to all the three main characters, we are expected to shed a tear or two for the lone guy stranded on the platform of an isolated railway platform. We are to stand next to Mahender while he watches a proud gentleman gently take away his best chance at feeling anchored in life. We are to feel his pain at this fresh blow in life. Where there was such empathy for the man’s loss of love and emotional stability in this movie, there was very little empathy for the losses of the two women.

That accusation might seem a tad unfair to some connoisseurs of Hindi cinema because it is actually one of those rare movies in Hindi cinema that fleetingly presents, through two songs, the two women as desiring subjects instead of merely remaining objects of desire. However, I felt that this attempt was half-hearted at best, for these women’s desires were overlooked or thwarted throughout the narrative. Maya dies a violent death within the narrative and throughout the narrative Sudha continues to be the wife who often morphs into the motherly facilitator, suppressing her needs. Additionally, she shows every sign of not getting closure in her relationship with Mahender until he explicitly gives her permission to leave him and be happy in the life she had built for herself.

Sudha had so easily slid back into caring for Mahender within minutes of his walking into that railway waiting room that it was difficult to process that there was a fissure in that relationship. Mahender having to borrow her suitcase keys to open his suitcase marks the beginning of their reliving of coupledom. Sudha is at her best as the efficient homemaker who knows enough to make room for the man in her life to play the adult every now and then. The man, too, does full justice to these opportunities— cycling down in the rain to fetch food, gamely accepting the appreciative laughter at the wasted effort and cleaning up a minor wound after displaying some charmingly possessive anger at the woman’s clumsiness.

If both of them are capable of displaying such adult maturity in their relationship why does each of them seemingly need the man’s permission for the woman to move out of his life? Absurdly enough, she seeks permission to leave his life during a chance meeting a few years after marrying someone else. Does that mean she wasn’t truly emotionally connected with her current husband until she receives due permission from the previous one to desire another man? I would say then that the poor chap deserves to be pitied and not envied by our hero.

This rendering of the man as the one who wields power to permit women to love him or leave him, displayed through the title, the beloved song and the climax, reiterates Hindi cinema’s propensity to depict women as caged beings. And as a double whammy in this movie, both the women are made to go through the full cycle of emotions for desiring subjects – expression of their desire through beautiful songs, feeling desired, and finally feeling that they are no longer desired by the man in their life. To add insult to injury, they also have to seek his permission to stop loving him. But the audience’s gaze is firmly focused, through that of the auteur, to empathise with the man’s losses!

I truly don’t see how women viewers of the movie could have found this acceptable.

Some thoughts on Devdas

While doing the dishes one afternoon during the severe lockdown this summer, a song in a language I barely know floated into my thoughts. It starts with a sweet young male voice telling a woman that he sees her: "Ami chini go chini..." This song, actually this movie is the only Bengali one I can claim to have seen rather thoroughly. It was on the course list of a translation studies course I had done. That was more than two decades ago. But the song stayed in my head, not just as a lovely tune but as a beautiful song. Here's a young man telling his benefactor's wife something like, "Here's looking at you kid." Yes, from Casablanca -- that poignant tale of star-crossed lovers. In a Keatsian way the love is within reach but forbidden. No wonder generations of young Indians have loved Keats's poems. We, whose lives are controlled by cultural rules, feel the pain of consciously giving up love. Although it feels like it is just within reach, we also always already know it never was. We do, in some way, understand why such painful decisions are taken. In Charulata it is societal restrictions, in Casablanca it is ideological choices. What was it in Devdas or Pyaasa? In Kagaz ke Phool, limiting oneself to a very straightforward interpretation, it was society that was keeping the auteur and his muse from becoming lovers. And we can't overlook the fact that the fictional film they were making was an adaptation of Devdas. But no, really, coming back to the one that inspired all these other tales of unfulfilled love: I have often wondered why couldn't Devdas rise to the occasion. Yes, I will let that phrase stay there. The italicised one, I mean. Unintended though the obvious pun was, what's the point of reading so much Freud if I edit that phrase?
As a nation, we have loved and celebrated Devdas for over a century now. During the course of some research on it, one of my students found out and informed me that the book did reasonably well as soon as it came out. We know that there are any number of movies made based on that book. There are three directly adapted, with the same title, in Hindi. The latest witha slightly altered and new age title, Dev D, seriously challenges the idea of the love being star crossed and suggests it is something else that prevents the union. Riveting though that one was, my personal favourite remains the one with Dilip Kumar. I saw bits and pieces of a very bad print of the first one with K L Saigal and that must have ruined the experience for me. And I also suffered through the gala that Sanjay Leela Bhansali called Devdas. My suffering was not out of empathy or identification. It was due to the loudness of it all. The movie is just titled Red in my head. He does seem to do colours, not stories! One colour per movie. This one was red. There was a lot of beige and off-white too but the dashes of red remain in the mind's eye. Probably there is something to be said for that sort of film-making too. Not my preference for cinema, though.
Also, Shahrukh Khan as Devdas! The one who has mastered the act of a quintessential go-getter cast as a helplessly pining lover! What were they thinking! Shahrukh Khan was the best at being Amar in Dil Se. And Amar is as far removed from Devdas as is possible. Amar's a guy who plunges into the unknown, chasing an engima, tries to reason himself into living by rules but is inevitably drawn into the vortex of his desire to finally get consumed by it. Let's not overlook the name-- Amar: Immortal. Immortalised by his love. That was a reworking of the Romeo-Juliet story. Not at all a story of a man who will pine but will not face up to his desires.
I have also, to clarify my thoughts around this national obsession, had any number of discussions about Devdas with many people -- friends, family, colleagues and researchers. I supervised a graduate level dissertation taken up by a young person who seemed committed to crack that enigma-- the pining lover who had willingly given up the chance for union. That young researcher conducted a committed exploration and turned in a rather well-written dissertation. My role in that was to push the envelope-- in terms of thoughts, chasing existing research and in meeting fixed timelines for writing. I am hoping that the said researcher will turn it into a good academic paper and send it to a decent journal at some point. So, I will not go into the thesis arrived upon through that exploration and offer a few of my thoughts over this love our culture exudes for an unfulfilled love. Specifically that. Not unrequited love. That is a totally different bitter-sweet emotion endlessly explored through literature and art. But Devdas is not that.

It is a deeply internalised external, probably cultural, element that disallows the person from accepting their desire. And truly worthy of serious academic engagement, which I do hope I will take up some time in the near future. For now, a small exploration of that beautiful song and here it is: 

Now, while doing that course on translation studies, with a professor who had a deep engagement with Bengali literature and culture, I learned that this movie is based on a Tagore novella titled "Noshtoneer" and very recently I also found out that the lyrics of the song are actually a poem Tagore wrote for Victoria Ocampo.

Despite my limitedness in comprehension of Bengali, I can hear that Tagore is pointing out that the consciousness of his attraction should not just be sublimated but also censored. He gives very rational reasons for this act of censorship -- that he belongs to a different land (thereby a different culture) and that he's a guest (who he seems to feel should not 'betray' the trust his host has placed on him by desiring a woman from the host's land) and that, added to all this, would be the undeniable fact that he's only temporarily there in that place and in her life. To me all these reasons and the very act of rationalising is very annoying. Simply because it's really not talking about the emotion as something that needs to be felt, reflected upon and made actionable by two adult individuals. It's talking about a man trying to tell himself, in a language that was probably almost completely incomprehensible to his muse, that he forbids himself this woman. How about letting her into the equation? That would really mean that he's treating her like an adult who can take a decision for them to act upon. But I'd say it was also a bit of a personal clash between the Indian man and the Universal man out there. And anyway, it really was written at least a hundred years ago. So, one can say it emerged from a context and a cultural milieu. 

The cinematic adaptation, though, of this Tagore poem, was done in the second half of the 20th century. A decade and a half after India became an independent democratic nation with universal franchise, which means that every adult man or woman, at that time agreed upon to be 21 years or older, could exercise their right to vote to choose who represents them in the decision-making body of the nation -- the legislature. And here's a beautiful movie, set half a century in the past, in which a beautiful young woman who is indicating, in unambiguous ways, that she appreciates the fact that he "sees" her is being serenaded with a song of rejection! He sings a song where he tells her that although he sees her, he's must also reiterate that he's a guest, she's exotically beyond his reach and seems to imply that he cannot betray the trust another man placed on him by giving him free access to his zenana. Somehow that reminded me of the anger that surged through me when my literature teacher in one of the earliest classes of my first year as an undergraduate student passionately quoted from Dr Faustus to talk about Helen of Troy's beauty. The quote goes: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ and burnt the topless towers of Ilium/ Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss". Oh well, yes, the end of that quote is the absolute opposite of the intent of the song and also the climax of the movie. But to cut to the chase, the two instances do reiterate the notion that the beauty of a woman can start a war between men. And that is supposed to be a compliment to women! It can only be a compliment if all concerned accept the underlying objectification as a 'given' in a culture. Well, ancient Greece did, if we were to base our understanding of its ways on its representations in literature. Renaissance Europe sure seems to have. Looks like even 20th century India did -- given how well-received the song and Ray's movie was. 

I was spellbound by the beauty of the movie when I saw it for the first and only time, yet, in the late 1990s. I don't think I blinked even once through the entire movie. It was not just the worry that I might miss something and, therefore, fail to do justice to the assignment set on the movie in pre-YouTube days when students solely relied on the one screening done in the class. It was simply that the movie was breathtakingly beautiful. It led you through corridors and stairways into the cloistered lives of the upper class women in late 19th century women. It showed that clad in those beautiful Bengal cottons and lacy Westernised blouses, surrounded by late Victorian furniture and modern toys, like Charulata's binoculars, these women were suffocating. They were possessions of the zamindar and were traditionally expected to act out their deemed roles in his household. They were either the fairly young wife or older dependent relatives, at least I remember only these two categories in this movie. While the zamindar was navigating his way through a changing world, the women spent their entire lives in households shackled by traditions. Left to their own devices in the zenana, with not much productive work to occupy their time, they seemed like extremely well-facilitated people. The "bahu-thakurani" definitely did seem to be so. We do tend to forget that the song ended with her objecting to that moniker from Amal with a "huth". No, I really don't remember that from my only viewing of that film. I saw the song again, on YouTube, this summer when it floated into my head at my kitchen sink. Her seemingly playful objection holds her concealed disappointment at Amal's placement of her as the lady of the household while he's a lowly passerby. I don't need to reiterate what Charulata expected from a young man who's singing "I see you" about her. But we must give it to Tagore that he named the guy Amal, which means "Expectation" -- I learned that through a quick Google search. And he deliberately falls short of her expectation. There goes another Devdas, for all of us to shed quiet tears about and love. What is it about this sort of self-effacement that tugs at out heartstrings? Is it that we recognise the choosing of duty over desire as an appreciable act? A willful sacrifice of pleasure at the altar of civilisation. Isn't that how civilisations are built? By sacrificing pleasure and channeling all the pent up energies into constructive work. Sounds wonderful. If only we can forget Charulata's heart-rending cry, her palpable fear when she hears the gari's sounds and her correcting her nervous welcome into a slightly flirtatious one to invite her husband back into her quarters!

Delhi 2020: A Reflection on Violence and Vulnerability

Delhi is burning or at least large parts of the metropolis were throughout this week. The entire country knows that. It was in the newspapers, on online news portals, on social media and most definitely on an infinite loop on TV news. I try to stay away from sources that give news updates by the minute. What I see and get to know is more than enough to bear. That photograph of a young man in a red sweater striding down a barricaded road, pointing a pistol at someone, completely oblivious of the presence of a policeman close to him, is going to haunt me for a while. It reminded me of a picture of a young man in a blue windcheater with a gun at VT station more than a decade ago. The horrifying aspect of both those pictures was the ease with which arms invaded the frame of a routine day. They suggested that there is no way one can absolutely avoid straying into a dangerously violent incident. I admit that I try to emulate the proverbial ostrich, yet, I live in Delhi, in 2020 and I am intensely affected by the sudden volcanic eruption of violence in many pockets of the metropolis.

Through two decades of active engagement with Delhi, I have arrived upon the belief that regular letting out of violent emotions in small bursts– through callous stereotyping, cuss words, everyday misogynistic acts, and regular road rage – ensures that the quotient of latent violence remains low in this city. Violence is framed by the quotidian out here, making it one of the various aspects of its unique culture. There are some wonderful aspects too that make Delhi’s culture unique. Some of those are vivaciousness, generosity in actions, emotional reactions to practical acts, confident pragmatism and a true appreciation of leisure. It is almost as if Delhiwallahs are singing along with that young person who’s energetically advising, “Duniya mein aayein hai to love kar le, thoda sa jee le, thoda mar le”, probably conflating “love” in that line with “live”. A full blooded plunging into living life, the way Delhiwallahs know best would necessarily involve navigating through violence and making peace every day. When violent thoughts and emotions get dissipated every single day, there is no scope for bottling it up for it to explode.

Living in Delhi never seemed like living on a volcanic mountain.

I know that I live on shifting tectonic plates. Every time I ‘imagine’ I felt an earthquake, I quickly get to know within hours that the plates did shift and that there was an earthquake in Afghanistan or Nepal or at some other place thousands of miles away. Mostly this information reaches me through calls from family and friends outside Delhi, enquiring about my safety. These calls also tell me that when these people hear some unusually threatening news about Delhi, they think of me. And to think that I didn’t get a single call regarding my safety in the past week! A series of volcanic eruptions of violence and, aside from my parents, not one person I know and care for wants to know whether I stayed out of the scalding lava! Either I have been completely forgotten by all who care for me or they don’t think that this large scale violence was ever a threat to me. Being confident that it is not the former, based on other kinds of evidence, I am inferring that it is the latter – they don’t think I am in danger. That is a rather disturbing thought! How can anyone think that a person who lives and works in Delhi is not at risk when there is a riot situation? Did we not make frantic calls to friends and family during the Mumbai terror attacks in 2009? Did we not queue up outside STD phone booths to get across to friends and family in Bombay in 1993? Did we not worry, across the country, about the lives of even absolute strangers in 1984? Didn’t we shudder in horror at the thought of all those people stranded outside the safety of their homes during all these violent disturbances? How, then, is this different? Why are people not panicking about their family and friends in Delhi?

People who care for me would think that I am sure to be safe when they absolutely know that I am not part of the demographic which will be affected by the violence. Although they live outside Delhi and their palmtops are buzzing with news and images of a burning Delhi, they are quite sure that I am not a target of this violence. Clearly, people outside Delhi understand that there are specific targets for this violence; a random denizen of Delhi is not a target. None of my Delhi friends have shared with me that they are getting frantic phone calls asking them to stay safe. Middle class India seems to be quite clear about the target of this violence. It is not a middle class person – man or woman – who also has a Hindu name. It is not people who are protesting against a bill – those protests have been going on for weeks now and it’s been business as usual in Delhi. A look at the names of the people who died in the violence reveals that one out of three dead has a Muslim name. Middle class Hindus located outside Delhi revealed through their nonchalance that they knew the targeted demographic of this violence on the very first day it erupted. It took three days of observation, reflection and theorization for intellectuals and activists in Delhi to reach a realization that the rest of the country already, almost instinctively, understood.

We, Delhiwallahs, didn’t realize something the rest of the country seemed to have known all along. We are confused. We don’t understand large scale violence because we navigate through small provocations of violence each day, cobble together some sort of peace and go through the day. We do, sometimes, hold protests at India Gate or Jantar Mantar. Some of these protests lead to volatile situations that are swiftly handled by the machinery of the state. We see that Shaheen Bagh was different from most other Delhi protests. The protesters are right there in the middle of the city, for us to notice. We just skirted around, if we were not drawn to join them. We have witnessed many instances of communal clashes and have handled the trauma and destruction they cause. But we have never before seen a chain reaction of localized volcanic violence co-existing with large chunks of the metropolis living through a regular Delhi day, with its minor outbursts of completely manageable miniscule violence. We don’t know how to make sense of this cognitive dissonance. It leaves us helpless at an emotional and intellectual level. We summon our pragmatism, confidence and generosity to see ourselves through this incomprehensible situation because we cannot let Delhi burn. We are doing our best to douse the fires but to piece back some sense of normalcy we also need to ask ourselves why Delhi is burning and courageously face the answers to that question.