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!