Indian Cinema – Bitch Flicks

‘Meera’: The Satyagrahi as Social Rebel

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s ‘Meera,’ starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s ‘Meera,’ starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

Written by Brigit McCone.

“Mirabai is said to have offended her husband by following her own conscience, was content to live in separation from him and bore with quiet dignity and resignation all the injuries that are said to have been done to her … Mirabai practised Satyagraha.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Meera, or Mirabai, was a 16th century mystic poet from Rajasthan, North India. Over 1000 poems are attributed to her, which speak of her renunciation of worldly wealth, her devotion to Krishna, her surviving attempts to poison her, and her defiance of family and society. In her willingness to suffer for her beliefs, resisting social pressures, and convincing others through the power of words and example, Mirabai was cited by Mahatma Gandhi as an embodiment of satyagraha (truth force), his philosophy of non-violent resistance. While our culture offers us female martial artists and superheroines as icons of unreal empowerment, it is worth remembering that social orders built on violence inherently disadvantage women, while the philosophy of satyagraha offers women a potentially level playing field in its emphasis on moral courage rather than physical strength.

In expressing her devotion to the divine by calling herself slave or bride to Krishna, Meera may be compared to Christian nuns who conceived of their religious vocation through the feminine role of “bride of Christ,”, even while rejecting dependence on men and often becoming the most educated women of their time. Yet, unlike Christian nuns whose social impact was usually limited by their entering a cloistered, regulated community, Meera roamed freely across the countryside and interacted with people of all castes and genders, making herself a powerfully subversive icon of popular resistance to the dominant social order.

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s Meera, starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s Meera, starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

“My eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules” – Mirabai

Made as a Tamil film in 1945, remade in Hindi in 1947, and regarded as a milestone in the development of Indian cinema, Meera is one of only a handful of films to star the Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi, whose iconic status as the “Nightingale of India” led her to perform for the United Nations in 1966, to be awarded the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1990, and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), in 1998. Subbulakshmi plays Meera as a “simple, untutored” girl, but one with fervent belief and musical talent. After protecting Krishna’s temple bodily, against a cannon sent to demolish it on her husband’s orders, Meera is inspired to leave her husband’s protection and go to Brindhavan (where Krishna is said to have lived as a mortal), renouncing her wealth and royal title “in search of Him who grew up in the humble dwellings of the Ayar clan, of him who is the kinsman of the poor.” Her resistance to caste prejudice and solidarity with people in poverty is one of the core characteristics of this interpretation of Meera. Meera wanders alone among rocks, singing hymns, demonstrating her endurance and independence, before being revived with water by a peasant boy embodying Krishna.

The film cuts to a follower of the guru Rupa Goswami explaining, to an all-male ashram, a chain of authority from mother to father, from father to guru, and from guru to Lord, placing women at the lowest rung of this hierarchy, and a woman’s husband as her intermediary to God. When Meera comes to the ashram of Rupa Goswami, singing of Krishna dwelling in her heart, she is told that the “divine guru will not so much as set eyes upon one born a woman.” Meera asks, “Who in this holy place of Brindhavan can be called a woman, and who a man?” reminding the devotees that they all aspire to emulate the gopikas, cow herding girls famous for their unconditional devotion (bhakti) to Krishna, and therefore that Krishna’s male devotees consider themselves symbolically ‘womankind’ while ironically rejecting fellowship with actual women. The guru (Serukalathur Sama) emerges at her words and professes, “Mother, it is you who are my supreme guru. You have driven out my ignorance.” Woman thus becomes the spiritual equal of man in their shared devotion to Krishna, and Meera becomes the equal of Rupa Goswami in her right to interpret religion.

A similar argument to Meera’s could also be made about Gandhi’s satyagraha as a social philosophy, in that it urges men to renounce traditionally masculine traits of aggression and violence, and to find power in traditionally feminine virtues of patience and self-sacrifice. Where feminism is popularly, if inaccurately, represented only as a campaign for women to adopt stereotypically male roles, satyagraha proposes the equality of male and female through the transformation of both, and as a natural consequence of society’s rejection of all forms of violence and domination. The full film is available on YouTube, subtitled.

“What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels” – Mirabai

The 1979 Bollywood film Meera replaces the 1945 film’s visionary mysticism with a portrait more focused on Meera’s satyagraha against the patriarchal social order. The film begins with Meera’s sister (Vidya Sinha) being induced to drink poison because she has been promised to two husbands and must preserve her father’s honor. It climaxes as Meera confronts the head priest, Kool Guru (Om Shivpuri), and is publicly condemned to drink poison because she defied her husband’s authority. Whether sacrificed with her dutiful submission or punished for her resistance, the woman is the victim either way.

Meera’s journey from a theoretical religion of romantic dreaming among books and statues, to the fully embodied beliefs of a satyagrahi, is gradual, and the film slow-paced. She sheds her “inherited jewels” as her dress grows progressively plainer, from bright red to intense saffron to pale yellow to ascetic white. She abandons her “family body” by defying her husband’s family, refusing to cook sacrificial meat and insisting on her vegetarian beliefs, with the same mental independence shown by Subbulakshmi’s Meera. When a temple to Krishna is shut, Meera fasts outside it until it is reopened, a self-suffering protest for religious freedom that recalls the political fasts of Gandhi. Abandoning her husband’s protection and going on pilgrimage to Brindhavan, Meera sheds her “town body” as a wanderer in the wilderness. Finally, she sheds her “social body” as she publicly renounces her family and society before a court of scornful men. As she completes this journey, she is regarded with hostility and fear, not only by the men of her family but by the women, whose rationale for their own lives is threatened by Meera’s freedom.

Through the shedding of “bodies,” or externally imposed identities, Meera achieves a state of selflessness in bleached white costume. Meera’s renunciation of self allows her to publicly voice socially unacceptable beliefs, fearless of death or punishment. The climactic courtroom scene begins with a wide shot of an echoing royal chamber, with a large audience of men rising in unison as the high priest Kool Guru enters, wielding a majestic staff of power. The crowd sits at his command, amplifying his authority, as women watch from the gallery. A gong sounds and the doors pull back to reveal Meera in a martyr’s robe of simple white, isolated and flanked by guards. She steps forward with downcast eyes and modest bearing. The guru proclaims that although a man cannot judge another, “religion and society follow some norms, and anybody violating them is a sinner in the eyes of religion, society and God”.

By choosing to portray Meera’s attempted poisoning as a sentence imposed by a crowded courtroom, rather than a secret conspiracy as in the 1945 film, the 1979 film crushes its heroine beneath the full weight of religion and society’s norms, as represented by ornately enthroned religious patriarchy. The first charge — “scriptures and society decrees that a wife should adopt her husband’s religion” — effectively negates woman’s conscience, once more positioning her husband as her intermediary with the divine. Meera replies, “My religion is only devotion to the Lord,” insisting on her right to a direct relationship. The charge “by interacting with people of low-caste, she persecuted the royal honor” requires her support of the injustices of the caste system, in the name of religion and society’s norms. Meera is asked to acknowledge that her “duties to her husband” are to bear him a child, while male onlookers nod in agreement. She replies, “I’m the soul, not the body. I’m an emotion, not a statue of society norms,” demonstrating that she has fully renounced the “social body” in favor of her spiritual self. This version of Meera’s tale also features a compelling performance by Vinod Khanna as Meera’s husband, a man himself torn by the painful contradiction between his conscience and the social role he feels forced to play, squirming in his seat as Kool Guru condemns Meera.

“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” – Mirabai

Meera is framed in close-up, drenched in a golden glow as she calmly stares into the eyes of Kool Guru and declares, in measured tones, “I’m the epitome of love and am not tied in the shackles of family bonds.” In this moment, Meera represents the ideal of a satyagrahi, resisting all external authority in the assertion of her own loving conscience. Hema Malini’s Meera equally represents an ideal of traditional femininity in her soft-spoken delivery and classical beauty, but the radicalism of her message of female emancipation cannot be denied, with its total rejection of society’s concept of woman as a dependent defined by her family bonds. As Meera’s resistance enrages Kool Guru, she calmly declares to the priest, “Anger leads to destruction, so don’t get angry,” denying the legitimacy of violence as the basis of social power, before defending her decision to associate with the Muslim sultan by rejecting sectarianism and xenophobia: “I don’t accept your parameters as my country.” If this courtroom confrontation were edited to replace Kool Guru with many of today’s politicians, Meera’s stand would sadly be as relevant as ever. The film ends after Meera drinks the poison, miraculously survives and roams the countryside, leading devotees in song and establishing an indelible portrait of her beliefs through her poetry. Through this image of Meera, satyagraha emerges as a quintessentially feminine form of social rebellion, one whose power we ignore at our peril.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPW25vLQY84″]

Brigit McCone is not the epitome of love, and is occasionally tied in the shackles of family bonds. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

‘Mother India’: Woman, Pillar of the Nation

‘Mother India’ treats Radha’s abnegating nature as a positive. Look how nobly she suffers for her husband and sons, the movie seems to say. In real life, such glorification of women’s suffering enables an exploitative system of economic growth on the backs of underpaid, overworked women. They get nothing except lip service, sometimes not even that.

This guest post by AP appears as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

“All Hindi films come from Mother India” – Javed Akhtar (lyricist, poet and scriptwriter)

Many people consider Mother India (1957) the definitive Hindi film. This legendary film won countless accolades, earned higher revenues than any film before it, and ran for more than three decades. Wondering what all the fuss what about, I watched it recently for the first time. It’s highly entertaining and moving, with a great plot, dialogues and music. It’s three hours long, so I spread my viewing over a couple of days. Despite its length, it drags very little.

The iconic Mother India poster, where Radha (Nargis) bears a heavy wooden plough almost like a crucifix — The iconic *Mother India* poster, where Radha (Nargis) bears a heavy wooden plough almost like a crucifix.

The film tells the story of Radha (Nargis), a farmer, from her days as a young bride to her old age. When Radha gets married and moves to her husband’s house, she lives a happy life until she learns that her mother-in-law has taken a loan from the usurious village moneylender to pay for the wedding. Unable to repay the loan, and beset by tragic accidents and a disastrous flood, the family eventually becomes impoverished. Radha loses her husband and mother-in-law, and raises her children on her own. She suffers great hardship but raises them to adulthood, and even faces down the crude advances of the moneylender.

Years pass; the family survives, but continues to be exploited by the moneylender. One of Radha’s sons, Birju, grows to hate the moneylender, and finally snaps. Circumstances lead him to become a bandit. He kills the moneylender, and for further revenge, abducts his daughter.

One son dutifully gets married and settles down. The other, Birju (reclining), is much more rebellious and restless.

Radha is distraught: she cannot stand to see a girl’s honour violated. She threatens to kill Birju, telling him that dishonouring any girl of the village, is tantamount to dishonouring the entire village, which includes his own mother. When Birju tries to ride away with the kidnapped girl, Radha shoots him dead.

“I am a woman. I can give up a son, but I can’t give up honour.”

Several years pass; Radha is an aged woman. There is a hopeful note in the air: modern technologies are being introduced by the government to increase agricultural productivity and lessen the peasant’s burden. The villagers revere Radha for all she’s done, and invite her to inaugurate the new irrigation canal. Water the colour of blood flows through the canal, a reminder of Radha’s sacrifices.

After watching the film, I understand why it was such a big deal. It’s because it captured the mood of the nation, its values, hopes and aspirations. At the time, about 80 percent of Indians were engaged in agriculture. The colonial yoke had been thrown off. The film reflects the period’s broad consensus that for the nation to progress, two things were required: food security through advancement in agriculture, and rapid industrialization through investment in heavy machinery. The film is a celebration of farming, and shows reverence of the land that nurtures us.

The movie also celebrates the idea of woman as the nation’s pillar of strength. I’ll focus on this theme, and on the character of Radha.

The Bad

In some ways, Mother India is quite conventional. Its intended messages about women are regressive from a feminist point of view. The movie conveys that the ideal woman is nurturing, self-sacrificing and hardworking. It ignores the reality that women did all of this for very little reward. For all their sacrifices, did woman have a say even in basic decisions like how many children to have? Not much. In the 1950s, when the movie was released, women’s legal rights were severely restricted; for example, the progressive legislations introduced by stalwarts like B. R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, for Hindu women’s inheritance and marriage rights, had been stonewalled and diluted in Parliament.

Mother India highlights the plight of the farmer, but glosses over or erases the specific difficulties faced by women farmers specifically: lack of access to resources, invisibilization of their labour, and their self-deprivation in times of scarcity. In times of food insecurity, adult women often deprive themselves and girl children of adequate food. It is not necessarily forced upon them; more often it’s a choice (made in the context of patriarchal society).

Mother India treats Radha’s abnegating nature as a positive. Look how nobly she suffers for her husband and sons, the movie seems to say. In real life, such glorification of women’s suffering enables an exploitative system of economic growth on the backs of underpaid, overworked women. They get nothing except lip service, sometimes not even that.

Lastly, a central theme of the movie is honour/modesty. Radha values honour – her own and other women’s – over and above everything else. Maintaining honour is the prime duty of a woman. Her honour is not just her own, but the family’s, the village’s, and by extension the nation’s. But the problem with honour is that to maintain it, women’s mobility, freedom and sexuality must be tightly controlled.

The Good

Having said all that, there are some ways in which the character of Radha is a triumph for women’s representation in Indian cinema. She is a formidable, determined woman. She is uneducated (she can’t read the moneylender’s accounts), but she is tough and practical. She has the skills, knowledge, and the will to protect and raise her children. She never dithers or acts silly. She commands respect from her sons, from the villagers, and from the audience. She has to make tough choices in bleak circumstances. She breaks two negative stereotypes: that women are not intelligent, capable decision-makers, and that women don’t do arduous labour. In Mother India, it is the woman who builds the nation with her sweat and toil.

Through images, music, and lyrics, the movie establishes Radha’s sheer physical strength. The foregrounding of physical power is rare in today’s female characters, but appropriate for a portrayal of a rural woman.

Standing in waist deep water, Radha holds her children up on a wooden platform during the flood.

On one hand, the audience is inspired (maybe even awestruck), by Radha’s resilience, and by her steadfast adherence to her moral code. But at the same time her humanity takes centre stage, and she is allowed to express a range of emotions. She suffers devastating losses, is disrespected, and is sometimes terrified for herself and her family. She also enjoys periods of relative prosperity, good harvests, the joys and frustrations of family life.

After the flood, a helpless Radha begs food from the moneylender, who makes improper advances.

Radha turns furiously and beseechingly to the image of the goddess in the moneylender’s house. “You may lift the burden of the entire world, goddess. But try lifting the burden of motherhood – your feet will falter.” — Radha turns furiously and beseechingly to the image of the goddess in the moneylender’s house: “You may lift the burden of the entire world, goddess. But try lifting the burden of motherhood – your feet will falter.”

Radha celebrates the birth of a grandchild.

Radha hears of her son Birju harassing village girls, especially the moneylender’s daughter. She refuses to speak to him, or eat. A contrite Birju adopts the murga position to convince her to eat.

She warns Birju that she can forgive all his mischief, except for maligning the reputation of a girl of the village. She ties up her sons to teach them a lesson.

In the climactic scene, Radha shoots dead her son Birju. Framed starkly against the sky, Radha is an awe-inspiring figure, a wrathful goddess. She is rendered human the next minute, when she runs to her dying son and holds him, weeping.

The last point about Radha is her love for the land. She does backbreaking work with dignity and forbearance, not just because she has to feed her children, but because she considers the land her mother.

When the villagers want to abandon the village after a devastating flood, Radha persuades them to stay, and together they begin the laborious task of clearing the flooded land.

On one hand, Mother India suffers from fatal flaws – the glorification of traditional gender roles and modesty/honour. On the other hand, the film’s recognition of women’s contribution to building then nation, its characterization of Radha, and its reverence for farmers, are its triumphs. Paradoxically, the character of Radha is mired in stereotypes, but also represents women’s labour, and can serve as a source of strength and inspiration for Indian women.

The agricultural focus is also key. I’ll end with this evocative scene: the villagers have weathered calamities, and there is a song celebrating a good harvest. With the last line of the song, there is an image of haystacks shaped like the map of India, inside which farmers are singing and dancing. Today, with agriculture in dire straits in India and several other parts of the world, Mother India’s image of agricultural prosperity becomes even more important to work toward.

AP is a student. She likes traveling, good food, and movies.

When Biopics Go Awry: ‘Bandit Queen’ as Rape Revenge

When considering female agents of violence in a film, there is a troublesome tendency that plays to the audience’s anxiety about a women disrupting the essentialist notion that women are naturally gentle and nurturing: the tendency to have the woman acting in response to sexual violence, that only after a woman is overpowered and assaulted can she find a place of violence in her. Once the naturalness of a woman is disrupted by an outside force—a (usually male) perpetrator—she is no longer required to be viewed as “womanly.”

This guest post by Colleen Lutz Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

When reading articles about the rape revenge genre, one sees cited I Spit On Your Grave, Teeth and other western films. But I would like to put forth that Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen should be considered a rape revenge film, even if the film that is supposedly putting forth the “truth” exploits the rape of the main character Phoolan Devi, an Indian gang leader who was murdered in 2001, to drive the plot of the “biopic.”

Phoolan Devi herself did not authorize the making of the film depicting her life and filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers. In a 1999 interview with AkasaMedia, she bemoaned the fact that more people talked about the mythology of Phoolan Devi than of Phoolan herself: “It’s unfortunate that they don’t talk much about me, they don’t write much about me, the real Phoolan Devi. Of course the movie is also a part of the story of my life, but it’s not the real thing. I wish they could have done it more realistically. I also wonder why they focus so much on the movie, instead of on the real person.” When explaining why she filed the lawsuit, she explained, “The case is over, I’ve withdrawn it. What I wanted was that, in India, they shouldn’t show four scenes of the movie. One was the rape scene. They should not show that, because people feel very disturbed about it–society can’t take it.” Devi herself did not want the rape scene shown. This scene (and other shorter scenes of brutality against the character of Phoolan) works to transform the film from a biopic to a rape-revenge film; the protagonist’s actions are motivated by a desire to make her rapists suffer, leading to the climax of the film.

Halfway through the film, Phoolan is captured, thrown on a boat, and taken to an enemy’s hideout where her bloodied body is tossed into an outbuilding. The first man enters the building (1:14) and the viewer is on the floor with Phoolan as she watches him approach. A beam splitting the screen makes us feel trapped with her. Her feet are untied so her legs can be splayed. Her cries continue as the other men come to watch her being raped. The camera lingers on rusty debris between the rapists’ entrances and exits. The light softens on her battered face while the rest of the room is dark and dusty.

Man after man enters the building during the three-minute scene pierced by her cries and their grunts. The audience is to assume that the assaults last for another three days until the bloodied, naked Phoolan is forced to walk in front of the village, arriving at the well where she must fill the urn thrown at her feet.

Her main perpetrator, Thakur Shri Ram, grabs her by the hair and drags her through the square while young girls watch and receive the message that no woman should ever dare to desire a position of power in a gang.

From this point in the film, Phoolan becomes larger than life. As her body heals, her desire for revenge grows. She cultivates a new gang. She collects weapons. She earns the moniker of the hero, “The Bandit Queen.” When she arrives at a wedding attended by Shri Ram (1:37), she exacts her revenge. She has her gang line the men up so she can harass and beat them.

The sound of a girl child’s screaming permeates the scene. As Phoolan shoots the men, the camera cuts to the naked child wandering the scene. She and Phoolan are the only females present. The audience sees Phoolan’s intense desire for revenge in her eyes as she punches and kicks the men who raped her or stood by as she was raped. As the child screams, Phoolan’s gang shoots the men dressed in white, pulverizing them into bloody mounds. Gunshots are juxtaposed with the toddler’s cries. The camera follows Phoolan’s eyes as she watches the men being executed. The naked child stands at the well, an empty bucket behind her, forcing the viewer to connect the screams of Phoolan to the screams of the child, linking this scene to Phoolan’s rape earlier in the film. The scene ends as the child walks alone across puddles of blood.

Again, Phoolan Devi herself did not want the rape scene in the film. Yet the final rape scene becomes the defining moment in the film, the turning point when the character Phoolan begins her trajectory to becoming the legendary Bandit Queen. In the film’s depiction of Phoolan, she acts out of revenge and also helps other lower caste people along the way. Her motivating desire is to gun down those who raped her, who demeaned her, who humiliated her. Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist, wrote a scathing piece in which she claims those responsible for the film silenced their subject and disallowed Devi from even having a claim to her own life story. In “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” she says the film should be entitled Phoolan Devi’s Rape and Abject Humiliation: The True half-Truth?, arguing that the “centerpiece” of the film—the rape scene—is exploitative and not “tasteful” as the critics have said. Mala Sen, the film’s screenwriter, told The Independent in a reply that Phoolan did give consent for the film and signed the contract willingly and argues that Roy herself is using Phoolan as a pawn in another ideological debate.

All of the debates leave me with the same questions: Why does Phoolan Devi need to be repeatedly raped in the film? Why does the film shift into the rape revenge genre instead of acting as the biopic that the filmmakers claimed it to be?

Is it so “unnatural” to see a woman leading a violent gang that we require a monstrous reason to allow us to rationalize her existence? Would audiences be unable or unwilling to go along with the narrative if there weren’t some reason, some thing we could all point to and say “Aha! That is why she isn’t acting like a woman anymore. Because the thing that made her a woman was taken away from her,” as if a woman cannot have access to violence as a form of resistance?

I teach The Bandit Queen along with Teeth and ask students to consider both as rape revenge films. While the latter is a little easier for students to connect with contextually, they are able to see the former for what it is: a rape revenge film. While not a successful biopic, as a rape revenge film The Bandit Queen offers the audience a satisfying conclusion following the genre’s plot and character development. Phoolan finds agency in violence and is able to make those who wronged her regret their actions.

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Foreign Film Week: Sexism in Three of Bollywood’s Most Popular Films

Guest post written by Katherine Filaseta.

It is no secret that India has problems when it comes to the status of women. Everyone heard about the gang rape in Delhi in December 2012; it was broadcast in America so much that some people didn’t even know about the events in Steubenville, but knew all about India. There is a common perception in America these days that women in India are seen as “sub-human” by all of Indian culture, and this is entirely false. However, it is true that I do not feel safe being a woman and walking down the streets of India alone, and this is a problem.

I adore Bollywood; it allows me to watch an entire generation evolve on the silver screen, no matter what country I’m currently living in. I even love the fact that some Bollywood love stories are more romantic than the sappiest fairytales. However, some of these love stories come with the price of reinforcing terrible patriarchal standards – and any story that makes sexual harassment appear commonplace and “okay” isn’t romantic, no matter how charismatic the leading man is.

Which Bollywood films become hits and which become flops can be indicative of which values Indian society places the most importance on. Perhaps if the right films are successful, the next time I go to India I’ll feel safe walking down the street alone – maybe even at night. Safety for women doesn’t have to be some elusive fantasy, and Bollywood can help us create this change.

Terrible Films That Everyone Loves

There are a lot of films in India which have been wildly successful, but which have also been detrimental for the feminist agenda in India. All of the films that follow are in this category. These three films together encompass all three major Bollywood stars and are on the must-watch list for anyone interested in Bollywood. I am also convinced that every single one of these films has played a role in shaping the way Indian society thinks, making it more difficult for women to live safely and comfortably in India.

Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 1995

To give you an idea of just how wildly successful DDLJ is: it has been running in some theaters for 900 weeks straight as of January 11, 2013. People love this film. Shah Rukh Khan plays Raj, a charming douchebag; Kajol plays opposite him as Simran and is stunning and loveable as usual. It is one of the first films to address the problems that affect NRI’s (Non-Resident Indian, or Indians living outside of India), as well as the conflict of “tradition vs modern” faced by Indians in the 1990s as everyone tried to reconcile their family’s values and traditions with the growing influence of Western culture – and it does an amazing job portraying each.

What it also does, though, is help to solidify a patriarchal standard. This film tells people, through the love story of Raj and Simran, that with enough persistence, harassment, and stalking, a man can convince any girl to fall in love with him. A girl is a prize to be won, and sexual harassment is the way to win her. Not only that, but the ultimate way to show respect for a woman is by refusing to marry her until her father literally hands her over to you – solidifying the female’s complete lack of choice in the scenario.

(Spoilers follow the images)

How Simran feels about Raj before intermission

How Simran feels about Raj after intermission

Raj spends the entire first half of the film harassing Simran non-stop throughout Europe. They are trapped together in the most unfortunate of circumstances, but Simran remains wonderfully strong. Soon, however, Raj professes his love for Simran – and she, apparently suffering from some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, returns his love. However, Simran and Raj can’t be together; Simran has already promised to follow through with a marriage her parents have arranged for her back in India.

Raj follows Simran to India, but they can’t just run off together. Simran has been won and is willing to leave her family behind forever to spend her life with Raj, but unfortunately for her Raj still has another challenge to complete before he can run off with his prize. Simran is still owned by her father, and Raj is too decent to steal an object from another man. He has to convince Simran’s father to give her to him, and so commences the second half of the film. Of course it turns out well for the couple, as after and hour and a half of convincing and fifteen minutes of dramatic tension, Simran’s father literally allows her leave his hands and run into Raj’s.

Every single line used by Raj in his harassment of Simran over the course of this film has also been used on me in India. By Raj succeeding in marrying Simran, her discomfort at his harassment is transformed into simply a girl playing “hard to get”. DDLJ has helped shape my coarse response to similar harassment into nothing more than encouragement for men to try harder.

Aamir Khan in Lagaan

Lagaan, 2006

Lagaan is only the third film out of India to be nominated for an Oscar. It didn’t win, but it put India on the map for the first time since the 1980’s as a place where legitimate films are made. It is set during the British Raj, where an insufferable British officer is abusing his power over the local villagers by imposing a land tax they can’t afford to pay. They end up placing a bet over a cricket match: If the villagers, with a strong-headed patriot named Bhuvan at the lead, can learn the game and defeat the British officers, they will not have to pay the tax. It is a very well-made film starring Aamir Khan, who is known in India for fighting for social change across the country.

There are a lot of good things about the film, and it deserves most of the positive attention it has garnered. However, there is a major problem with the film as well: there are only two female characters, and both of them serve the sole purpose of fawning over the male lead. Elizabeth Russell is a very kind British woman who sneaks out of her house to teach the villagers the game of cricket, despite the language barrier and opposition from her family. Essentially, the instant she meets Bhuvan, she forgets her greater purpose of helping the fight against injustice and falls head over heels for him. She even professes her love for him, but of course Bhuvan can’t speak English so doesn’t understand what she is saying. Elizabeth’s opposition is Gauri, a village girl who is also in love with Bhuvan, but who has never told him. She has, however, shown her love through making him rotis, as any good Indian wife should. (Spoiler alert ahead!) In the end, Bhuvan marries Gauri and Elizabeth moves back to England to be single for the rest of her life.

Elizabeth Russell singing about how much she loves Bhuvan

Gauri singing about how much she loves Bhuvan

In a typical move of exoticizing the other, there is a common stereotype in India of white or “Westernized” women being sexual to the point that they have already given their consent for anything a man might want to do to them. We did the same to them by popularizing and exaggerating the kama sutra, so you can’t blame them too much – but by creating Elizabeth Russell, this stereotype is only being reinforced. White women clearly all come to India for the sole purpose of falling in lust with men they can’t even communicate with, but Indian women shouldn’t worry – men will always marry the proper Indian girl who makes delicious rotis in the end.

Salman Khan in Dabangg

Dabangg, 2010

I could have easily and accurately instead said “every movie starring Salman Khan in the past few years,” but Dabangg was the beginning of the movement. I was in India when Dabangg came out, and the excitement over Salman Khan’s comeback film was pervasive and insane. This is a ridiculous film starring a man who epitomizes a certain standard of masculinity: Chulbul Pandey has bulging muscles, a propensity for fighting, and an ability to woo girls by harassing them until they fall in love with them (a la DDLJ). Chulbul Pandey’s signature dance move is the hip thrust, and he uses it every chance he can get.

If Dabangg did anything right, it was play to Salman Khan’s strengths. This is a man who has gotten away with killing a man while driving drunk, and who has a restraining order placed against him by his ex-girlfriend whom he used to physically abuse. He was the first Bollywood star to really “bulk up,” which has helped him win over a few of the most lusted-after Bollywood starlets. Chulbul Pandey has testosterone flowing in every inch of his body, and Salman can play this character perfectly.

There are essentially two females in this movie: the one Chulbul woos by harassing her until she feels she has no choice but to marry him, and an item dancer – a girl whose sole purpose is to appear in one song wearing close to nothing while a bunch of drunk men (Chulbul included) fawn over her oozing female sexuality. Other Salman Khan films since, including the Dabangg sequel, haven’t been any better.

Mallika Sherawat dancing her item number, “Munni Badnaam Hui”

(For a well-written, feminist perspective on Dabangg 2, see Priya Joshi’s review for Digital Spy)

Is There a Bright Side?

For the most part, last year was a great year for Hindi films. February gave us Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, winning the feminist audience over with its ending, in which the central relationship is left to proceed on the girl’s terms. March gave us Kahaani, an amazingly well-made movie with a strong, central female character. In October, we were brought something amazing through English Vinglish: a female-directed film with a strong female lead, which beautifully addresses some of the issues middle-aged Indian women are facing both in India and abroad. Previously, the cut-off age for female leads in Bollywood has been around 30, so Sridevi’s starring role in this film in itself is an additional breakthrough on the feminist front.

I haven’t watched anything promising yet in 2013, but given the success of more progressive films in 2012, we can remain optimistic. In Mera Naam Joker, there is a female character named Meena who pretends to be a man and carries a knife, which she pulls out at the tiniest threat to her safety – simply so she is able to live alone in Bombay. Even though this film is over 50 years old, I have spent a lot of time myself wondering if I could pull off what Meena did. The situation now isn’t much better, but it can be. We can control our own future as women in India, and Bollywood can help us – not just hold us back.

Katherine Filaseta is a recent graduate of Washington University in Saint Louis whose life has somehow managed to become constantly split between the United States and India. She really likes Bollywood, education, feminism, zoos, and the performing arts. Follow her on twitter.

Guest Post: Feminism in ‘Aiyyaa,’ and Why It Ain’t Such A Bad Movie

Aiyyaa

Guest post written by Rhea Daniel.

Aiyyaa shows how a perfectly loving Indian family, specifically a Marathi family (but this sort of traditionalism runs right across this arranged-marriage loving country so an Indian woman can relate) can make their female offspring miserable over the subject of her single-hood up to to the point where she’ll resort to taking any low-paying job as an excuse to stay out of home as long as she can. But leave home on her own terms she won’t, she needs a man first. She keeps fantasizing about packing up in the middle of the night, grabbing her mum’s gold jewellery and running away with her dream-man. Yes, she’s a romantic, a Bollywood fan and her ambitions extend thus far to falling in love and living HEA.

So why is this even feminist? I’ll explain:

Understanding the Arranged Marriage:

Speaking from my own observations, the concept of an arranged-marriage works well when the network of well-informed relatives can tell you what kind family you’re marrying your daughter/son into. This well-informed network will let you know if the family is traditional enough and boy isn’t of the wife-beating breed (that is if you care). Ancestral records are generally exchanged.

For the girl, if she’s marrying into an Indian family, she’s marrying the entire extended family of sisters, brothers, sils, bils, cousins, grandmas and grandpas, who feel they have a right freely express their opinion on your shape, colour, behaviour, job, hobbies, sexuality, dress sense, reproductive capabilities, domestic skills and also your parenting skills. This could happen to a triple PhD. or an aeronautical engineer, it don’t matter, because a brilliant career is only good to up one’s resume in finding the perfect mate of equal or more ped-degree. Smart people are generally expected to produce higher quality offspring. Yeah, however organized… this stuff gets intensely patriarchal. That’s why it’s okay if the entire family lands up at the dissecting table, not just the dude. Plus, it’s a good investment to have a Dil who’ll take good care of you when you’re old (another good reason to have at least one son). It’s archaic, but there you have it. Feelings can be manufactured.

Also, get ready to take on the roles Meenakshi’s already faking, you have very few moments to be yourself. Meenakshi dresses up seemingly voluntarily for the sit-downs, seems to be making an effort, but the audience knows that it’s an act. So why can’t she just say no, right? To understand why being in such a situation is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place take a look first at this fascinating TED talk by Sheena Iyengar on how Asians view choice:

I’ve come across people who are super-ready to marry whoever their parents choose for them, make their choice within an hour of meeting, marry within the week and go back to their jobs. I don’t really get it and I guess they have a great relationship with their parents, but the closest thing that explained it for me was this study by Sheena Iyengar. There’s no such thing as individual choice, there is only The Best Choice. While the system works well for the collective it wrecks havoc with individual desire. For some people stuck in this system it’s a leap in light-years to choose one’s own partner without the whole family acting like it’s criminal, or with threats that the family will fall apart of you do such a thing*. So Meenakshi‘s parents put an ad in the newspaper to attract potential grooms. The sexism begins. The boy gets First Choice, the girl can be Convinced. As far as cultural imperatives go with boys, they need be good providers, (and reproduce capably, I suppose).

Sabotage:

Her parents are getting desperate. None of the boys like her, but then finally comes the nice boy who likes her within ten minutes of the meeting. He likes her crazy family too. She knows she’s fucked, because she’s not allowed to say no, so her only recourse is sabotage. She tries to drive him away with her singing. He likes her even more. He remembers to ask her whether she’s okay with it too, she doesn’t get the opportunity to answer, but the parents are ecstatic, even more reason not to open her mouth. Thanks to the director for making this a hard decision for Meenakshi: her fiancé is incredibly nice, he respects her choices, he likes her the way she is. It’s the sort of subtlety the directors of Brave failed to employ when creating their potential grooms. His only failure is his inability to tell that under that mask, she doesn’t really like him at all.

The Patriarchal Mother:

Meenakshi indulges a small rant that her mother laughs off as melodramatic. Don’t expect any sympathy from the Patriarchal Mother (a woman who subscribes willingly to patriarchal views), a daughter married off to a man her parents deem suitable only gives them a sense of continuity, they don’t consider their children’s lives separate from theirs, even if they suffer the same misery. “I did it too, it didn’t kill me” “You’re so selfish, he’s such a good boy!” “You’re mad!” are perfectly justifiable responses to a daughter’s unhappiness. Nobody in her family seems to get it, but then comes the only opposing voice from wheelchair-bound Grandma, who shouts: “Run away, Meenakshi, I couldn’t!”–when she makes a leap to freedom from the balcony of her fiancé’s house, providing a contrast to Meenakshi’s mother’s subservient simpering.

‘Man-hunting’**:

She falls for Surya, a Tamilian artist who visits the library she works in. She does her own version of the arranged-marriage research, asking people he’s acquainted with all sorts of questions about his personality etc. Her colleague informs that he is rumoured to drink and do drugs, that’s why his eyes are so red, but it doesn’t faze her. She tries to find out more about his culture. She’s advised to watch Tamil movies. She learns the language, beginning with sexually suggestive compliments, learning how to say “please leave your shirt button open” in Tamil. She goes dreamy-eyed every time he passes and swoony over his after-shave (or body-odour, whatever it is). It might help to know that the entire movie is the based on one of stories from the Marathi movie Gandha (2009) (translated to ‘smell’ or ‘fragrance’) by the same director. Meenakshi seems sensitive to any noxious type smells. Her olfactory sense seems to be her love-guide. She hates the smell of the college toilets, but there’s a scene where she trance-walks into the men’s loo because she can smell Surya in there. Lucky for Surya he was just washing his face. Imagine someone standing outside your toilet cubicle smelling your farts.

Anti-feminism:

While the research she does is justifiable, the stalking is not. Granted, she’s shy and he treats her like wallpaper, even when she tries speak to him directly in Tamil (we find out later he’s doing this deliberately) so she has to find other means to approach him. As the day of her engagement draws closer she grows more and more desperate to see in him an ideal partner, so her investigation leads her down some unsavoury roads. She then escapes her home on the eve of her engagement and follows him to his incense stick factory (that’s why he smells so good), finds out he’s not such a bad dude, and his eyes are so red because of the incense fumes. He finally confronts her, knows she’s been following him, says he likes her guts and wants to marry her. There’s another cute scene where they happily share their mutual academic failures. I know the stalking’s a play on role-reversal considering Bollywood’s long history of stalking-as-romance, many girls and women are victims of this imitative ‘romance’ in real life, but entering his home under false pretences and stealing his t-shirt crosses a line, even though she is portrayed as harmless. Stalking is a recourse in a society where there is firm divide between the sexes, and it’s one of the primary things that has to go with archaic notions of love and romance, boy or girl. In this movie Surya knowingly strings her along to see how far she’ll go. Very well, but the sooner we get to enthusiastic consent or polite decline (and acceptance), the better for both parties.

Anita Date as Maina in Aiyyaa

I don’t care if Meenakshi’s librarian-colleague Maina is an an exaggerated comic-relief character, I found her funny. I couldn’t find much on Anita Date, the actress who plays her. She serves as advisor to Meenakshi, encouraging her to marry Maadhav, because he’s good ‘husband material’ and later on have an affair with Surya. Meenakshi prefers to go by the direct route. Poor Maadhav, her fiancé, gets the raw end of the deal when she lands up at her own engagement ceremony with her preferred love Surya. He takes the rejection sorrowfully but gracefully, and refuses her patronizing offer to remain ‘just friends’. In the midst of all the madness director Kundalkar gives his minor characters their dignity.

Despite this movie’s sprinkling of annoying Bollywood fantasy numbers (which I skipped) and occasional mind-numbingly loopy, loud scenes, most of it was gratifyingly funny. In Meenakshi’s declaration of love for dark people (technically what she says translates to “I don’t like light-skinned people, I like black people”) she’s referring to her love for South-Indian Surya, but it comes across as a taunt to the Indian majority that views ‘fairness’ as as a prerequisite for attractiveness. The only incongruity of this statement is that Malayali actor Prithviraj doesn’t qualify as ‘dark’ by any Indian standard, so it makes her declaration specific to his race (South-Indians are stereotyped as dark-skinned) and her willingness to integrate with them. Dreamum-wakuppam, a parodied version of South-Indian dance numbers (not to mention the language) can seem insulting at first***, but by the end of the movie she’s transformed into a traditional Tamil bride, and speaks Tamil like she can’t help it. Her exclamations of ‘aiyyaa!’ change into the South-Indian ‘aiyyoo!’ Having visited a traditional Marwari household in Pondicherry and Gujarati household in Chennai who regularly feast on idli–dosa made by their super-traditional sari-clad wives, I’d believe the integration is not just for survival, it’s embraced.

I know that wives have cheated on their husbands in Bollywood before, I know they’ve also shown cheating husbands the door, but these stories have remained distant scandals before. Caught between one’s desire for freedom and one’s cultural call of doody ie., to marry and reproduce, is a common cross to bear in this country, and I’ve never come across a Bollywood movie that didn’t conveniently villainize the parents/society in order to dramatize the girl or boy’s situation. So despite all the mayhem Ayyiaa manages to make itself a predominantly feminist film, and had some subtle observations to make that shone like little jewels through the script.

*Preferring to remain single is an alien concept, let’s not even go there.

**Didn’t really like the way that was advertized, man-hunting seems to refer to a search ranging across several men, when she quite obviously interested only in The One.

***I thought it was hilarious.

———-

Rhea Daniel got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/.

LGBTQI Week: ‘Fire’: Part One of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements Trilogy’

This review by Editor and Co-Founder Amber Leab previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on November 21, 2011.

Fire (1996)

Fire is the first film in Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy (Earth and Water follow). Made in 1996, it focuses on a middle-class family in present-day (funny how I still think of the 1990s as “present day,” despite the global changes of the past fifteen years) India.

The film centers around two married couples–Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and his wife Radha (Shabana Azmi), and Ashok’s brother Jatin (Javed Jaffrey) and his wife Sita (Nandita Das)–who run a carryout restaurant and video store, and who share a home with the brothers’ mother, Biji (Kushal Rekhi), and their employee, Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry). Jatin and Sita are newlyweds, but we quickly learn that Jatin loves another woman (Julie, a Chinese-Indian woman who has perfected an American accent and dreams of returning to Hong Kong), and married a “traditional Indian woman” out of pressure from his brother and mother.

The film offers the womens’ perspectives on the conflicts between desire and duty, and between tradition and the realities of a modern India.

As with almost any film centering on family drama and dynamics, we see the tensions simmering beneath the surface as the film focuses on the two women and their lack of fulfillment from their marriages. Mehta, in the DVD’s Director’s Notes for Fire, states,

I wanted to make a film about contemporary, middle-class India, with all its vulnerabilities, foibles and the incredible extremely dramatic battle that is waged daily between the forces of tradition and the desire for an independent, individual voice.

More than 350 million Indians belong to the burgeoning middle-class and lead lives not unlike the Kapur family in Fire. They might not experience exactly the same angst or choices as these particular characters, but the confusions they share are very similar–the ambiguity surrounding sexuality and its manifestation and the incredible weight of figures (especially female ones) from ancient scriptures which define Indian women as pious, dutiful, self-sacrificing, while Indian popular cinema, a.k.a. “Bollywood”, portrays women as sex objects (Mundu’s fantasy).

To capture all this on celluloid was, to a large part, the reason I wanted to do Fire. Even though Fire is very particular in its time and space and setting, I wanted its emotional content to be universal.

Sita learns very early in her marriage that her husband is in love with Julie–he doesn’t hide the relationship from her–and she seeks solace and comfort from Radha. Radha hasn’t been intimate with her husband in 13 years; when Ashok learned she was unable to conceive, he sublimated his desires (and began channeling a good bit of their income) into religious study with his swami. The friendship between Sita and Radha soon evolves into a sexual relationship, and when the women are found out by their family, they must decide whether to obey tradition or follow their hearts.

Radha and Sita

The film explores what traditional marriage has done to alienate these women–particularly Radha–from their own desires. The desire for intimacy and sex, sure, but also the desire to live their lives for themselves, rather than for their husbands. My reading of the film is certainly from a Western perspective, however, and you could argue that the film is about discovering desire (rather than reconnecting to it after a period of alienation), since the traditional, conservative Hindu/Indian culture didn’t allow much–if any–space for individual desire for women. Sita embodies changes in the society, as she comes from a traditional family, but is more critical of the traditional rituals and more in touch with her body and her desires. (When we first meet her, for example, she playfully tries on her new husband’s pants and dances around their bedroom, unashamed of her body.) Sita is also the one who initiates a physical relationship with Radha.

Depicting a lesbian relationship on film fifteen years ago proved hugely controversial, and Fire was immediately banned in Pakistan, and soon after pulled from Indian cinemas for religious insensitivity. Although the film twice passed the Indian censor board–they requested no editing, and no scenes removed–violent protests caused movie houses to stop showing the film. In “Burning Love,” Gary Morris writes,

The reaction of some male members of the audience was so violent that the police had to be called. “I’m going to shoot you, madam!” was one response. According to Mehta, the men who objected couldn’t articulate the word “lesbian” — “this is not in our Indian culture!” was as much as they could bring themselves to say.

It isn’t only the tangible pleasures of a lesbian relationship that created such heated reactions, though that’s certainly the most obvious reason. This beautifully shot, well-acted film is a powerful, sometimes hypnotic critique of the rigid norms of a patriarchal, post-colonial society that keeps both sexes down.

The controversy surrounding the film may have superseded the film itself–which is beautifully shot, heartbreaking, and even darkly comedic at times. Fire contains so many elements that I love in film: strong female characters, an exploration of complex issues that is never oversimplified and that never leads to individuals being labeled good or evil (although they certainly behave in good and/or evil ways), and immersion into a culture that isn’t entirely familiar to me. Speaking to a Western audience, Mehta has stated that one of her goals in filmmaking is to “demystify India,” its culture and its traditions. Fire complicates our understanding of a traditional patriarchal culture, and throws into sharp relief the ways these traditions impact women in particular.

Again, here’s Mehta on Fire:

We women, especially Indian women, constantly have to go through a metaphorical test of purity in order to be validated as human beings, not unlike Sita’s trial by fire.

I’ve seen most of the women in my family go through this, in one form or another. Do we, as women, have choices? And, if we make choices, what is the price we pay for them?

***

There is a ton of information online about Fire. Here are some selected articles for further reading:

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Amber Leab is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a Master’s degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from Miami University. Outside of Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared in The Georgetown Review, on the blogs Shakesville, Opinioness of the World, and I Will Not Diet, and at True Theatre.

‘Fire’: Part One of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements Trilogy’