Strange that it was Jagmohan Mundhra (of the fame of Sexual Malice and other cheap erotic thrillers) who was fortunate enough to have been able to shoot this story, the true story of a battered Punjabi woman who after 10 years of domestic violence decided to set fire on her torturing husband, and ended up with a sentence of life imprisonment. Here’s the imdb plot summary.

Because Provoked (2006) is a rather good little movie, the filmed autobiography of the heroine, played here by Aishwarya Rai, who reinforces her acting capability, demonstrating that even if she is a pretty face, she can also do the job. Some people say other actresses would have done better: well that’s a present for her, thank you! I suggest looking at those scenes when she’s in the prison, with the other inmates, and perhaps most of all in front of the devastatingly optimistic Radha Dalal (Nandita Das), who with her smooth brown tan and sexy haircut makes a good contrasts with Ash. And there’s this final scene where she manages to half smile, half cry, obliged as she is to celebrate a “victory” which isn’t completely hers (see photo below): quite nicely done.

The movie belongs in fact to India’s social movie strain, where the masala ingredient is reduced, because it has a message to pass on: that of male abuse against silent wives. So there are no songs, only Rahman’s efficient background music (ah, those haunting chorus voices when the suffering gets unbearable, and through them we hear something of humanity’s chant for mercy – it is to be heard in Roja, in Rang di basanti, the same distant wailing, desperate and poignant).  Here, it springs up as Kiran is thrown down on the floor by her Iron Man:

But the film is pleasant and generous also because it’s packed with a healthy humour, as when the Southall Black Sisters, the Women’s Rights defence organization who are campaigning to get Kiran out of jail, are sticking posters on a “no bills” wall: a dutiful cop stops and tells them that “no bills means no bills”, and they comply, but not after having stuck one of their posters on the rear window of his departing car. There are also spirited scenes in the prison, especially that moment (opening photo above) when Kiran unbuttons her friend’s blouse for her to create a better effect at an interview, and whispers “Bosoms!”, in a reference to a reading class where Kiran had stumbled over that word. But of course, the allusion underlines her contribution to the effort towards feminine empowerment. That cellmate of hers, by the way, has been justly praised. Veronica Scott is played by Miranda Richardson, seen in Blackadder, Harry Potter and Absolutely Fabulous, but I enjoyed her talent in The hours, where she graces the exceptional trio of Kidman, Moore and Streep. As a matter of fact, whether this bit (in Provoked, I mean) is historical or not, it perhaps makes the film a little too good to be true. There are certainly other Kirans in other prisons of the world, who have not have the luck to be jailed with the sister of a Lord.

But let’s now come to the film’s axe. Provoked is a denunciation of male domestic violence. You might think that such violence only exists in social backgrounds in which the male is recognised as owner of his female, and where women have but a fraction of the masculine rights. In certain traditional Islamic communities, for example. But even if that is true, the situation is not intrinsically a question of ethnic or religious milieus. It is fundamentally a question of law. In countries where women have been strong enough (which means educated enough) to have laws voted which protect them against male abuse, the reality isn’t as pervasive. This means concretely that in those countries, certain men have accepted not to side with other men, when the offenders exert what they see as their natural virile superiority. Some men instead side with these men’s women! One realises how very strange such a situation might seem, observed from a traditional male-oriented society. In numerous tribe-societies, women are nearly always considered as lower-class. (There are exceptions, where it is women who exert the authority over the community). Why? I’m neither a sociologist nor an ethnologist, but my best bet is because they have already too much power, and that men wouldn’t have any left to justify their physical superiority.

In many regions of the world, it is women who work, prepare food, and raise the children, on top of being more resistant and living longer. Men do not always recognise this superiority, but often don’t, and reduce the weaker sex to a status which enables them to feel superior. So when they reach this stage in the development when they establish laws and customs, they tend to systematically reduce those concern women, and increase the authority of the male over the female. This injustice goes way back to the origins of humanity, the young male needing to affirm himself against his mother, and prove to her he doesn’t need her any more as he grows up. Male frustrations often have something to do with how well boys, and then men, have solved their relationship problems with their mothers. I know Freud tells us with their fathers, but I believe it’s as much with their mothers, because the mother is a subject of love and then interdiction, and this tension creates a need to affirm the young man’s self-reliance and autonomy. So perhaps one might say those male-dominated societies, where women are reduced to servants or even slaves, are “civilised” in the sense that they have legalised this fundamental male frustration.

Now situations of violence like those we see in the movie, where the domineering male (Deepak, played a fine Naveen Andrews) is both attracted physically to his wife, and beats her when she doesn’t get his need, are typical of this frustration fed by a feeling of cultural impunity, where women will always be considered underdogs, and whatever is done to them will go unpunished. Deepak behaves towards Kiran as he would do towards a mother-figure phantasm: attraction and disgust combined, and violent domination as response to her demands for mature behaviour. The violence of these situations is dangerous, because the violent person doesn’t understand where it comes from, and cannot measure it; it increases with his powerlessness. Deepak doesn’t burn Kiran with the iron because he can anticipate (visually) the harm he would do, but he doesn’t hesitate to push her down the stairs (she’s pregnant), because the effect of that violence is more easily disconnected from the gesture. When he joins her at the bottom of the staircase, he is both querulous (“it’s not my fault, you should’ve let me go by”) and upset for what he’s done, now that he sees her writhing in agony and fear. Such disconnectedness between cause and effect are typical of the ungrown emotional stages of infancy. Violence in couples are perhaps fuelled by a variety of forces, but this male helplessness at understanding that a loved woman cannot (and must not) be a substitute mother who will satisfy all of her baby’s whims, this creates perhaps some of the worst types of violence; it is an immature and uncontrollable violence in the hands of a grown-up child who doesn’t understand what’s coming over him, and needs all the attention and care from his family. But sometimes there’s nothing to do anymore, because the guy is just too manipulated by the forces within him. And has gone too far for his own good.

One last word concerning the prison metaphor, Kiran in jail surprises her lawyer when she tells her she’s at least free there; and of course she doesn’t fight at first, convinced she’s guilty and sinful. Macho culture indoctrination takes time to rub off. Her freedom comes first from the fire she lights on him, a purification process which is her response to the defilement she’s endured (Deepak used to rape her), and then of course from the physical distance from the fear and danger she faced in his presence. Any enclosed area world have done the job, and of course it’s shocking for our freedom-built individualism that somebody might say that she’s freer in prison than outside. Well, so much for our limited understanding of alienation. And perhaps this is also a plea towards making our society understand the need for investing in more welcoming prisons.

The white tiger is a rare genetic variation of the normally ochre-skinned feline that is both feared and respected as the king of animals in Asia. But it’s also a 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga which the press has acclaimed and which I’ve just finished reading. Somebody (The publishers weekly) said about it that it was “the perfect antidote to lyrical India”. Other books and films could claim that title, but it’s true that there is, especially in the West, a tendency to lyricize India, matlab, to romanticize it by raving about the colourful and exotic surface, and ignoring the harsher reality below. I’m sure I myself have been a blind victim to this illusion.

Well thanks to guys like Adiga (I would also like to mention writers like Rohinton Misty or Khaled Hosseini, who even if he’s an Afghani, depicts a society shown from the ground roots, which has much in common with Adiga’s. And let’s not forget earlier film-makers like Shyam Benegal), my eyes have opened, and it isn’t that I’ve forgotten about the more colourful iced top, but the cake has definitely acquired a richer and sourer taste. Quite normal, obviously. What Arvind Adiga has done is create a style, a voice and an urgency which all together compel to read and please the reader. And he has something to say. But first the style, the voice.

Balram Halwai, the main protagonist, is writing to Mr. Jiabao, China’s Prime Minister, but in reality, I am Mr. Jiabao, you are, we all are. Balram is telling us how India is now ready for companies from China to come and invest there, because newly set up entrepreneurs have cleared the way for them. People like himself, in fact! And we’re going to to see what it takes for India to become a land of opportunity and success stories to unfold. For those who know what violence is simmering under the silk chunnis and colourful saris, his portrayal of contemporary India will not come as a surprise, but others will shudder.

For Balram the underdog barks very well, and that’s his first asset. It’s very hard not to listen to him. Only masters can do that, by the way. Only masters can make sure that people listen to what they say without being interrupted. Balram is a sly guy too: he is really a master, and at the same time he makes you pity him, he takes the pitiful mien of the pauper, the village peasant boy. Well, in fact it’s sometimes that voice we hear, sometimes the other one, the entrepreneur’s voice. But he does that because he has a secret to share.

He’s clever, because he tells us that secret from the start: he’s killed his master, and he’s become a master himself, says he. But we don’t believe him, because he’s shut up in a room somewhere, and he’s busy dissecting a “wanted” poster where his name and particulars appear. It sounds like bravado, and somehow we fear that all this is going to end up badly, that he’s in a mess and they’ll catch him. Well, they don’t. Not only that, but he’s caught them for once. Incredible, but he’s made it. He’s actually gotten away with it, and the whole book tells Mr. Jiabao how he did it, starting from his childhood in the village and ending in that office full of chandeliers in Bengalore. Whew.

The first trick was that his father, a consumptive rickshaw-puller, wanted him to go to school and learn how to read and write. Detail? No, it’s the heart of the matter. He didn’t lack pluck and good fortune after that, but that was the essential move. The book makes it clear that education sets you apart in a way we have no idea in the West, where every youngster is crammed full of knowledge he doesn’t even know he’s knowledgeable about. Over there, if you can read, you can become a driver, you can be sent to the big city, and be noticed by the right people, be hired, and then move on little by little by edging those who can’t read or write.

And so Balram ends up replacing the older driver he’s ousted and driving the master and mistress in Delhi. He doesn’t quite understand what shady business they’re up to at first, but it certainly isn’t fair dealing, given the amounts of money in transaction that he sees while driving their carriers between banks and posh hotels. He gets to know the drivers’ gang, who slowly initiate him to ways by which he might be able to trick his master, and we of course start seeing the connection. What’s he going to do? Where does the murder fit in?

The hitch is that his master, M. Ashok, is a kind guy. Yes, incredible, he’s even his defender. For all the other rich, mobile touting passengers, that driver is barely a human being, he’s a slave at best, and sometimes hardly more than an animal. But M. Ashok is always there to vindicate him, and underline his basic loyalty, his honesty, his serviceability. When Balram is tempted to tell him his grievances, he suspects he wants a raise, and hands him money without hesitation. How on earth do you get rid of such a considerate master? And most of all, why would you want to get rid of him? Having been brought out of your village, into the capital, being paid handsomely (true, he normally has to send the money to his family, but well…), and being looked after by a humane master, what more on earth would you need? Wouldn’t any underdog believe he’s won his life’s worth of satisfaction?

Now you would only believe that (suggests Adiga) if you don’t know you’re a slave, if your father hasn’t sent you to school, where poetry has opened your mind to beauty, because, as the great Iqbal said “the moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave” (p. 236). You might have been brought out of the “Darkness” of your innocent village, out of the darkness of poverty (1) that of ageless ignorance and repetitiveness, into the “Light” of the city, where modernity rages with all its splendour and violence, you are still a slave, a nobody. As long as your master has a right of life and death on you, what are you?  Because that is the case for Balram, no matter how kind Mr. Ashok is. He belongs to a caste of thugs and profiteers who will forever be crushing people like drivers and servants. These are sub-humans who down deep, are expendable. Just like that cyclist whom Balram’s mistress hits and kills while driving the car, completely drunk, one night. Because of his considerate ways, Mr. Ashok is a sort of exception, but only a sort. He would never think of Balram as a potential equal in terms of humanity. Balram for him is not much more than a good dog.

At this point we have to introduce a particular theme which is half-bakedness. That’s what Balram calls himself, half-baked. The schooling he’s got is unfinished. He’s only half-baked, but also already half-baked, mind you. Some are completely raw. He has something missing, but something the others lack. He’s an intermediate product, and that accounts for his need to constantly feed on sources of information in order to become more complete and understand life better. This half-bakedness has probably protected him as much it has “buggered” him. It is as much a matter of luck as of progress; and if he’s regretting it in part, he’s made the most of it. He’s not formatted as some Indians have been, through history, to the point that they have adapted too much to the role-models they were aspiring to, and as a result, have changed nothing in the society. They fitted, so why should they? Balram, still half-raw from his village and the pain of his ancestors, and having been given some means of escaping, escapes. But he’s not been shaped into climbing the ladder the civilised way!

Another fantastic image Balram comes up with is that of the Rooster coop:

“The great Indian Rooster coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr Jiabao. Or you wouldn’t need the communist party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I’ve heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.

That’s because we have the coop.

Never before in history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.” (p. 149)

He then gives the answers to the two questions: “Why does the rooster coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively?” and “can a man break out from the coop?” Here are the answers:

“the Indian family is the reason why we are trapped and tied to the coop, and if a man wants to break free, it means he is prepared to have every single member of his (always very large) family “destroyed, hunted down, and burned alive by the masters. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.

It would, in fact, take a white tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir.” (p.150)

Ooo… This is big stuff. If any political party, any intellectual, any social reformer starts touching to the sanctity of the Indian family, he’s in for big and lasting trouble. Balram doesn’t want any harm to his family, of course. He’s as trapped as all the others. He’s just a chicken in the coop, and he knows very well that his neck can be wrung any day, for any reason. But, he also knows that everybody has a neck, masters included. He’s away from the immediate contact and pressure of his family, and afraid to fall into its trap (they want him to marry, to become even more tied up in the coop). Balram cannot forget the freedom he’s already tasted, that’s the rub. He’s been allowed to savour that taste, and it cannot be shaken off. He watches everyone playing a role in and around the coop, but he knows that there must be a way out of it for him.

Balram’s story is that of a man who has become immune to the strange mimetic dream that locks up his fellow sufferers inside the coop. He’s in it too, but to him, it feels like a prison, whereas for them it is the normal state of affairs, and if they become chief rooster in the coop, they have succeeded in life. They are under a spell. That spell makes them believe it is their master alone who could free them from slavery: if they recognize their slavish condition, they have no other hope than look to him for their well-being. So they treat their masters well, and this way they will be well treated. The same sense of total loyalty inhabited those who believed in the meaning of the king before the French Revolution. The idea that the king was bad was normal: that was part of the frame. The king was the top peg that held society together. But some blasphemers spoke about getting rid of him, worse, beheading him! For those conservatives, the very fabric of reality was based on a hierarchy, not on equality. Thus the revolutionaries were seen as nihilists, because their opponents couldn’t imagine what reality would be like in a situation for which there was no reference any more, and which would force people to live on their own private resources (the sacred font of power having disappeared), and their conscience full of a heinous crime.

That is exactly what Balram will face up to. OK, you know he does kill his master, and I won’t tell you how it happens to preserve some suspense, but the sense of freedom that he feels after that is also a sense of transgression, that almost nobody before him has expressed so clearly, because of the age long submission of the slave to the master, of the poor to the rich. On his own, he has guillotined the king! He knows he has unleashed the Terror of reprisals too, and he doesn’t want to realize that too much (he avoids any source of information), but he probably tells himself that all revolutions have a bloody path, it can’t be helped. And he does run the risk of saving little Dharam, the boy his family had sent to him in Delhi to learn the ways of getting money, like Uncle Balram.

We are now in Bangalore. Having escaped the police, Balram uses the money he’s stolen to start a rental company. What sort of man has he become? How does he live with his crime? What sort of retribution will be his? One day, something happens. An accident. One of his drivers runs over a boy on a bicycle. What will he do? He’s now in the master position. This time he clears his driver, and shoulders the responsibility. We are still in India, mind you, and corruption being what it is, he doesn’t risk much. He has bought the town police, and is acting in certain respects exactly like his former masters. But a half-baked moral perspective is now present. He goes to see the dead boy’s family, and pays them a hefty sum as compensation. He therefore recognizes the humanity of the dead cyclist, and the ties which linked him to his family. Even if Balram is still the former villager he used to be, and his consideration might be put down to underdog solidarity, or even payback, this is something that the preying headless masters would never have done, on principle, for fear of beginning to lose their status of “protectors” of the poor and the weak.

The exciting perspective that we have at the end of The white tiger is therefore one where good comes out of a necessary evil, and where this evil can and perhaps must be seen as necessary. Freedom from an existing evil sometimes (often?) needs to take the path of evil, so that freedom can win. Sacrifice isn’t always the best way, says Adiga. Sometimes (often?) sacrifice is just slavery. The coherent response to violence is sometimes another violence, because the greater institutionalised violence cannot be changed by non-violent means any more. Now of course this will shock and pain many ahimsa proponents.  Yet, now that the codes of non-violence have entered the brains of violent dealers, now that Gandhi belongs to the institution, it is possible in India to pretend to be a Gandhian and benefit from the institutionalised violence (see Parshuramer Kuthar).

The trouble with Adiga’s initiative is that it advocates an individual, anarchic response in a society where the normal way towards reform is democracy. But he makes the clear point that India isn’t a working democracy. Nevertheless, it is hard to legitimate violent crime, and against a defenceless person, who is certainly guilty of certain crimes, but who hasn’t been tried legally. The book does it, and we must forget some of our western principles if we want to do justice to its purpose. Or rather, Balram’s story forces us to alter our standard understanding of justice? On the other hand, it would be tempting, perhaps, to condemn him for abusive individualism: he decides to take the money and run, knowing full well what will happen to all his family. He chooses a freedom which means also comfort and affluence; and he sacrifices his family, whereas he already knew a better fate than them. One could only endorse this if one has cut away from a certain humanity, no? Well, perhaps like all revolutionaries, that is Adiga’s message, you sometimes have to cut yourself off from a certain type of humanity in order to reach out to a better one.

Only problem, the rarity of white tigers.

“You young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots (said the inspector coming to Balram’s school for a surprise inspection. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals, one that comes along only once in a generation?

I thought about it a little and said:

“The white tiger”

“That’s what you are, in this jungle.” (p. 30)

I was first informed of Saudagar (« the trader » 1973), by Sudhendu Roy, through Carla and given my unruly interest for Nutan, and my unabated appreciation of Big B, I decided that I couldn’t wait any more, and I got that disc. It’s a very simple story, that of Moti (Amitabh), a village palm sap collector, who falls under the charm of a sexy but expensive country belle (“vamp” Padma Khanna). And in order to buy her, he offers to marry his business partner, a widow called Mahjubi (Nutan), with whom he successfully produces gur, a sort a sugary cake made from the boiling of palm sap. Marrying her (for one season) means he no longer needs to give her half the price for her work, and so he quickly gains the 500 rupees needed. He shamelessly disowns Mahju and secures Banu. Of course this sham will not bring him luck, for his association with Phoolbanu, his supple young wife, no longer relies on the savoir-faire of the elder but keener Majhubi. Moti will meet first with financial failure, then loss of reputation, self-doubt, and finally the humiliation of having to go back to his former associate and beg for her renewed help.

And there you have it. It’s that short and straightforward. But the film is nevertheless (or perhaps because of that) a beautiful one. Viewers underline the acting by Nutan and Amitabh, who perform no-frills compositions. It’s perfectly true; both distil a subtle and effective mixture of restraint and emotion. The interest also comes from seeing Big B play the part of a villain and a hypocrite: he pulls it off quite well. But the film’s real worth lies in the almost documentary picturisation of rural southern India, where customs and practices weigh more than moral values. Moti decides to “talaq” Mahju, divorce her, as simply as he had decided to marry her, and thus fulfils his plan to the letter. Such cynicism might seem exaggerated; it’s probably only banal, and Islam give a man such superiority over women that he’s like an elephant in front of a goat: he can afford to ignore her.

Mahju’s sorry plight creates a pitiful pathos that gives the movie a lonesomeness and an emptiness which contrasts with what might have been, if Moti had seen further than his lust. His young love-interest, as he tells Mahju, is too raw and selfish (this was in fact a comment intended to woo her, implying that the younger girls didn’t match her seasoned worth). And he himself doesn’t see the riches at hand in the widow’s heart. So we are left with the pain of ignorance and the silent beauty of nature, both powerless witnesses to this drama of greed and deception. For nobody, save perhaps the trees, the birds and the wind understand what has been lost. Only the beauty of the river, of the sunset, is there to indicate that man has a destiny which should elevate him above his instincts and his immediate selfish desires. Tragically, it is a fraud (and a misplaced sacrifice) which reveals what happiness could have created, what a deepening of shared longing it could have caused. Moti is like a bull, which has seen a heifer, and the refined charms of domesticity elude him.

Well, in fact, only partly, and this is where the movie surprises and charms once again. First Banu isn’t the idling nymphet we thought she might have been; she does work hard to replace Mahju, and fails in her jaggery only through lack of practice. Then the end shows Banu and Mahju turning out to be lost sisters, and we understand that because of that, Moti will be able to be pardoned or reintegrated in some way. Human warmth and compassion is possible after all, and this is done through the benevolence of Mahju’s new husband, who hasn’t rejected Moti like all the others had. We see him at the market refusing Moti to give him the jaggery which he cannot sell – he wants Moti to accept the normal price for it. But once at home, the delicacy is still as sour, and he gets scolded by Mahju for having bought some of Moti’s new jaggery!

Meanwhile, things degenerate in Moti’s life and marriage. He starts despairing: Retribution has laid its heavy hand on him. His pretty wife leaves him for a few days. And so, in despair for a solution, he gets up and shuffles all the way to Mahju’s new home. Naturally Mahju doesn’t want to see her former cheater husband, but she relents upon recognising her sister (who had trailed behind Moti, wanting to know where he was heading). So one might say that Mahju’s confident love, and her hopes for something beautiful in life have indeed created the elevation towards beauty and virtue which humanity needs so much even when it doesn’t know it. Indeed it is probably because she accepted to relinquish her hopes that Moti would come back to her, and because decided to marry the gentle widower who was in need of a mother for his children (thus bringing him a balanced household where love could flow once again), that this man is still humane towards Moti, and enables him to be reintegrated in the community and forgiven a little. And a little shove from providence: by marrying Mahju’s sister, Moti has in fact enabled her to reunite with her family…

This story happens of course because of the “meher”, the dowry to be paid for a marriageable girl; if Banu’s father hadn’t sold his daughter, this inhuman business wouldn’t have happened. Obvious enough, but we become so accustomed to the sordid system that we tend to forget its role. On top of Carla’s review, I also recommend this one, by Uma Iyer. It is full of sensitive comments about the psychological beauty of the film.

Sagar Sarhadi has only directed one movie, and otherwise is known for having worked as Yash Chopra’s screenplay writer. This movie, Bazaar, (1982) supposedly belongs to “New Indian Cinema”, and it feels like it wanted to belong. It isn’t a bad film, but its defects show rather too much. Still, let’s say it has enough interest to be watched. Its quality comes from its story, and the interaction of complex character roles. Najma (Smita Patil) belongs to an impoverished Nawab family from Hyderabad who expects a lot from her in terms of social advancement, and so she cannot answer Salim’s (Naseeruddin Shah) advances on the grounds that the man, a poet, is too poor. One day her mother asks her to accept the offers from men who will sustain the family in exchange. We see her refuse first, but then accept, and live with a guy called Akhtar (Bharat Kapoor), who in fact does care for her, and proposes to her. She decides to flee her country life and go to Bombay with him.

There she meets with Akhtar’s wealthy mentor, Shakir Ali Khan, who seeing his young friend with a stable woman, gets it in his mind to find a wife too, and asks Akhtar to help him. Akhtar asks Najma, who knows back home a matchmaker able to find a girl for him. She is all the more “interested” in procuring the old scoundrel a wife as he has put his condition: Akhtar will only continue to benefit from his largesse is he complies. And Najma’s wedding to Akhtar depends on Akhtar’s revenues… So there we go, on the train back to Hyderabad, and with Salim, because (and this is one of the film’s strengths, this relationship with Salim) even if Najma officially is Akhtar’s girl, she still feels attracted to Salim. There a very unambiguous scene where she dances while he, perhaps half-drunk, is watching her. She looks at him in a serious, erotically loaded way which almost is almost shocking. So she asks him to come along, and the other men joke it off: she has her poet lover at her side.

Meanwhile, another story unfolds in Hyderabad: two young lovers meet and court, Sajid (Farook Sheik) and Shabnam (Suprya Pathak). Sajju is Najma’s brother, and has repeatedly written to her while she was away in Bombay, to ask her to come back. All this is very sweet and romantic. But when the wife-searching party arrives in Hyderabad, drama unfolds. At a singing party, the lion-like Shakil is charmed by Shabnam’s youthful presence, and wants her. Najma arranges the wedding, ignoring the ties that exist between her and her brother. A hefty financial settlement is made. Najma learns too late she has been instrumental in her brother’s downfall. She tries to plead, but it’s too late, the pledges have been made. Salim tries to help too, in a pathetic way of his own, incurring Shakil’s wrath. But this one will finally crush Sajju, and cause Shabnam’s suicide on her wedding day.

The movie’s strength lies in its unusual combination of relationships, with Najma and Salim on the one hand, and Akhtar, Najma and Shakil on the other. This double trio provides and interesting insight into the roles of men and women in middle-class family relationships. Najma’s character is struggling to find meaning within the two jaws of a vice that crushes her: her own family’s dependence on the ageless practice of using female flesh at the best possible price, and the necessity of securing a husband who will give her a form a social recognition without which she is doomed. The compromises she accepts to make to reach her goal, and the agonized moments which she goes through in order to fulfil her needs, all this creates the film’s tension and composes a realistic picture of women’s plight. Her ordeal is made all the more poignant because it is followed by Salim, the poet, whose powerlessness mirrors her. She's manipulated, but so is he, and he drifts alongside her, vaguely hoping for some change in her prospects, offering his pathetic help, and even growing in stature as the others descend to their abominable level. He at least remains pure, as it were. His revolt against the system, the “bazaar” where women are bought and sold, has at least the quality of truth and faithfulness, even if it lacks all decisiveness. He isn’t even the one that gets beaten (that’s reserved for Sajid, the dispossessed Romeo), and so he becomes the sad clown, the wistful jester who, because he’s harmless, is able to address the great and the powerful and tell them their truths. He wins in the end, sort of, but only because death deprives the real winner from his prey.

 
One little remark about the theme of the price of human beings. We share today a general understanding that human life cannot be tied to a price, and the very idea of buying or selling a person of whatever sex, age or condition is morally condemnable. It’s slavery, in fact. Slaves used to have a market value, depending on their physical condition, their sex, their age, etc. And just like animals, they belonged to a master. Now the historical revolution that led to the abolition of slavery is very recent, and one shouldn’t be overly surprised if places on Earth still haven’t ratified what they voted for. But in itself, the idea of slavery has sounded normal to men for thousands of years. There seemed to be nothing wrong in estimating the work value or wife-value of men and women. And such views as St Paul’s in Galatians 3,28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) must have sounded very strange at the time it was worded. The Western world needed 18 centuries of wars and strife before they decided to abolish slavery; it is perhaps normal that places like India will need a little more time yet.

But back to the film. Najma has the delicate role of the young matchmaker, and her balancing act,(picture on the right), by which I mean her compromising with violence and theft has a tragic value. Having been wronged by her relatives, she rebels, and leaves home, but she finds herself the victim of greater interests than those she fled. She left a prison only to fall into another, where her movements are observed and calculated. She is obliged to procure to the lust of men that she had tried to escape from. And what is both sad and beautiful at the same time is that the man she loves (Akhtar) is also trapped. He’s her caretaker, her saviour, but also her master and manipulator. Akhtar cannot escape, any more than she can, from the maze of this bazaar. In order to retain some self-esteem, he has to side with Shakil, and he has to betray his girl. His guilt looks like that of Najma, which looks like her mother’s. Almost everybody is guilty, except Salim, who, elf-like, hovers over them all without being able to stop the disaster. Well, of course, the two young victims aren’t guilty of anything, poor ones, but they’re only there to contrast their innocence with the dark forces that will use them so they can be unmasked.

Najma’s fix is beautifully portrayed thanks to Smita Patil’s acting and striking presence. She lends her sensuousness, her Mona Lisa beauty (that photo above, a strikingly gratuitous shot at the beginning of the film) to the role, and one is carried away by her simple and assured personification. Everything is played inside, in her half-childlike (but also very feminine?) desire to defend her future hopes as a married woman, her self-respect, her dignity, and at the same time one feels she has tasted the forbidden fruit, and can no longer completely decide what is right or wrong. Her destiny has been played, the choices she has made, along with the social determinism that has shaped her: all this creates a vulnerable, touching woman that needs more than she will ever get, and is doomed to be seared by a fire she has both willingly and unwillingly lit. The last picture of the movie, that shows both her face and Salim’s full front, and in which she admits her responsibility, sums it up: the drama which the movie denounces is not outside its victims; they have a played a role in it as well, and nothing can now change that. Has the film’s generous denunciation of Indian abuse of women been of any historical efficiency? Somebody else than me would have to answer, but certainly such situations have existed before and will continue after it, and many more generations of love-breakers and woman-buyers will wreak their havoc before women can be free in provincial India.

Sen has a good review of the movie here. Also you can check Chadrank at Bollywhat, who explains the importance of the ghazals in the movie. And Harmanjit has written a strangely moralizing review here, which is nevertheless worth reading!