The main beauty of this little film, Katha (Sai Paranjpe 1983), which suffers somewhat from clichés that are perhaps enjoyed by a certain type of audience, is the delightful portrayal of the Suburban chawl where a community of friends and neighbours live together, united by a community spirit which I have rarely seen as warmly described as here. It’s perhaps a little idealistic, but surely the level of good-natured friendliness belongs to the best of what one likes about India, that frank and open humanity, where each person can have a chance to be part of the whole. I had first been attracted to Katha thanks to Carla’s excellent review, where she underlines this quality too.

I am nevertheless more sensitive than she is to the movie’s weaknesses, and especially the characterization and story flaws. For me, Farooq Shaikh’s character, that obnoxious self-imposed buddy who decides to take advantage of his long-standing friendship with heart-of-gold Rajaram (Naseer), is just too grossly delineated. Yes, I see that he’s a caricature, but somehow I felt the story would have been much more interesting to follow if he’d been a genuine parasite, with a more ambiguous attitude. As it is, one cannot stop regretting Rajaram’s absurd subservient attitude: no one in their right mind would accept the bullying he has to undergo. Some reaction at least would have been normal, and just doesn’t come. It’s over the top (that’s why I was wondering if perhaps a certain type of audience, for whom satiric exaggeration carries some value, isn’t the film’s natural audience).

Same thing goes for Sandhya (Dipti Naval)’s infatuation for the crass superiority of “Washu”: Okay, we are in a “Katha” (a tale, a fable), but should she really have stooped so low as to let herself embezzled by this pretentious prig? There isn’t enough psychological truth there. I know women (that kind of women, at least) aren’t that easily taken in. Sandhya belongs to the type of lovely middle-class women who know appearances when they see them, and can be valued for their solid common sense. Or perhaps I’m carried away because in Sandhya I see Dipti Naval’s very satisfying femininity…

I enjoyed the movie’s quiet originality; the way it suddenly introduces a cartoon when one doesn’t expect it (at the moment when Wasu goes to meet his cuckolded boss in his office); the sudden change of Rajaram’s parents’ picture (above) when he yields to Wasu’s “improvement” of his flat, as the latter pins up a model in bikini on the wall; the day-dream that turns Rajaram into a mock-Washu, with Sandhya suddenly at his service the way he thinks she would be for his boisterous friend. Then there are pleasantly unassuming humoristic touches, for example when the wedding actually takes place between Sandhya and Rajaram, after having been cancelled between Sandhya and Washu: the two carriers lift the exultant cripple who had just gone back, forlorn, to his flat, thinking the festivities were off! What’s fun is that we see him pass in front of us, as if the screen was a sort of window, and he couldn’t see us, so engrossed was he is in the pleasure ahead.

That’s what the film is: a tamasha, a spectator’s perspective from the window of cinema on a lovable community where life flows in and out, with its little and big moments. The stairs, doors and windows of the chawl represent the little flaps which the director lifts for us to see what occurs inside, and we open wide eyes on the private happenings; we laugh at the little secrets, we understand the humble lies, we frown on the ridiculous habits; we marvel at the love and generosity that are showered even on Washu the profiteer. Naturally, you need a story for all these modest “events” to take place, you need Washu to cast his magic charm on the inhabitants and make them realize what they’re losing. This pretext becomes the non-essential narrative of the essential background: and so I suppose we need Washu’s disruptive arrival, and his utterly improbable tricking of both Rajaram’s boss and his daughter. But the important is elsewhere, in the celebration of truthful and elemental community life in the chawl.

Naseeruddin Shah wasn’t at his gritty, slyish best yet, but you can already feel the talent he displays in personifying that half-dull, half-impish Rajaram of his. One cannot stop loving him, because like the children who jump around in the playground outside, and break the cantankerous old lady’s pot with their ball, he’s a child too. Unlike Washu’s character, which isn’t as finely-tuned, Rajaram strikes as a real creation. He’s the ideal mother’s boy, one that all the secretaries at work know they would like to marry, because they would have their way with him, and he would be depended upon not to fool around. Perhaps that’s what Sandhya saw too, up to a point. Compared to him (and of course on the surface), Washu certainly has more class, more maturity. But Katha tells us that purity of heart is way more satisfying than adventurous glory, and that family virtues, even if a tad quaint, are preferable to the self-assigned freedom and the flaunting of rules.

                                                                   Happy ma and pa!

                                                                  Future ma and pa!

There are many reasons why the spectators might not have liked Guru Dutt’s opus, Kaagaz ke phool back in 1959. First its badly-humoured despondency (why go to the cinema and see sad things, life is sad enough as it is), then its flaunting of proper morals and conventionality (the film contains a rather crude picturisation of family dirty linen); the absence of a satisfying happy end (the director dying an absurd death because of his abuse of alcohol)…Many people still think today that the movie drags on, that it’s self-indulgent…

I’m not going to say that all this criticism is wrong. Certainly the film has flaws, but I wonder whether these defects aren’t the signs of Guru Dutt’s genius at work. Perhaps he’s indeed a self-absorbed monomaniac, or a gloomy dreamer. Dutt has often prepared us for such roles and moods (Pyaasa being the one that comes most easily to mind) and well, it’s true that our level of preparedness has to be raised! Much has been said (for example here) about how much the director’s life had been poured into the film. This is always a risky recipe, because then you tend to look at the story with a double gaze (how much can/should the director say…) and the added complexity isn’t always added depth, as Carla (in her short and perceptive review) suggests very well. A certain amount of what I had said about Pakeezah could be repeated here: too much personal involvement in the story, and you come up with a bloated imperfect movie which the spectators can’t appreciate if they don’t know what the director has put into it.

But I like this imperfection; I think its weirdness and self-consciousness are signs of a suffering reality. Honestly, I do prefer less depressing movies, comedies that make you roar with laughter or smile with appreciation. Still, Kaagaz ke phool possesses a soulful charm, a sombre artistry that touches me, and evokes romantic poetry at its destructive best. There is a truth in these dark evocations of self-centred dreams and thwarted hopes. Not only that, but the whole film, perhaps because of its autobiographical quality, is filled with questions, and unmatchable sequences, and this provides an interest which a faultless work of art might not have in the same way. At any rate, with such movies, you escape formatted plots and predictable issues.

For example, after that country escapade where the heroine and her director are teased by the bunch of youngsters in the hay-filled truck, the scene cuts to the aftermath of a car accident: he has been wounded, while she’s all right, and he has to wear a bandage over his eyes. There is no real need for this accident in the structure of the story: it will not bring the two lovers any closer, thanks to the age-old trick of pitying feelings, or to some cheap physical contact. On the contrary: Sinha is going to chase Shanti away from his presence. The interest of the scene is (I believe) in the introduction of the theme of blindness. Sinha wears his bandage over his eyes to make us understand that he is resisting the attraction which he is feeling for Shanti, and that his cinematographic art isn’t sold out to appearances and superficiality, as his in-laws declare, and as a gossip-mongering press (which his daughter’s friends read at their school) would like to connect him with. For Sinha (or Guru Dutt?), within cinema, and in spite of its close contact with surface truth, there is a quest for innocence and inner beauty that you can only truly understand if you blind yourself against the charms of surface reality. Sinha has seen all that emerge on Shanti’s face, and that’s why he’s so upset when he spots her all made-up at that party.

The scene at the end of the movie, where Sinha runs away from Shanti, can be interpreted in the same way. Hardened to the point of schizophrenia in the belief that his dream of purity has been desecrated even by the woman he loved (she’s accepted to work for the movie industry -forced by contract, but he doesn’t take this into consideration - whereas he had kept his “pride” to himself), he has come to see her one last time, but is unable to quit a life of self-delusion fed by alcohol, and as he runs away from her, he runs away towards a death which is the only target he’s really pursuing.

The song heard during his flight uses the words of the title of the film: “Fly, thirsty bee, there is no nectar here, where paper flowers blossom; not in this garden where innocence is lost…” These are Guru Dutt’s final key of meaning. Sinha (or Dutt himself), cinema’s thirsty bee, who has tried to find the nectar of truth and beauty within his art, and transform it into the honey of entertainment, is now urged to run away: the flowers of cinema are nothing more than paper flowers, artificial and dead: they only have the appearance of purity and beauty; only this sort of flower can survive in the corrupted and greedy garden which the 7^th art has become. It’s difficult to decide whether Guru Dutt is actually saying that “Tinseltown” is hopelessly sinking away from its original artistic mission, as prophesied by the moral aristocracy – which he obviously loathes – or whether this interpretation is a tragic appropriation of what Sinha had rejected, what he had fought against, and which he is now inflicting to his sick mind. There is a third possibility: the stance according to which Dutt is exploring an alternative form of art: creation as salvation from despair and illusion. Sinha’s escape could then be the choice of artists who prefer to keep their dream pure, even to the cost of their own lives, in a frenzy of self-sacrifice. 

Such an interpretation - cinema is possible as a fallen art, but it still directs you to the Light – needs all of the artist’s powers, to prove the moralists wrong, in spite of their paradoxical reasoning. For Dutt probably agrees that cinema corrupts, and is corrupted by money, appearances, and power, even if the main protagonist of this position, Sinha’s father in law, is the absurdly pro-British buffoon we discover in the film. There are many subtle signs of Dutt’s criticism of cinema, and to underline it I’ve chosen this amazing scene, when the Ajanta Films’ boss, shocked by Sinha’s decision to keep Shanti in spite of what he has just said, exclaims “who’s the boss here, he or me?!”, and all his associates crowd around him like mad dogs around their master:

               (Notice how the creative beam of light is also present at that moment!)

Now, many people like to say that Rocky, Sinha’s brother in law, played by an incredible Johnny Walker, is a very good side-kick in the movie. Very true, but also very false: he’s not a side-kick at all. At least not here. He represents something which directly connects to the movie’s main theme: is pure art possible within a corrupted industry? Normally Rocky (since he benefits from the same luxuries) should side with his father’s denunciation of cinema as a corrupter of souls. But he leads the life of an idle gamester, who doesn’t care about the sacrifice which goes with Sinha’s stance of purity and radical commitment to his art. If he’s Sinha’s friend, it’s perhaps mainly because he despises his father’s ridiculous extremism, and that he prefers his own freedom to the burden of any ties (viz his song “Hum tum jise kahata“). But compared to Sinha, he’s a sort of minor fraud, a compromiser; he represents what Sinha precisely refuses to be: a free agent within the corrupted system. Rocky uses the system (money, freedom) without questioning its flaws. One could say he’s escaping reality, but then, so is Sinha.  

But for Sinha the desperate romantic, such a life of compromise isn’t possible, and he can only open memory’s closet to see what is left him: a doll from his lost daughter’s childhood and Shanti’s knitted scarf, which she gave him as a parting gift. The whole film is in fact a plunge into memory: there was a time when he thought, success permitting, that compromise was possible, that he could both indulge in his beloved daughter (who is under the guardianship of his ex-wife) and recreate love and life with Shanti. But this was proved impossible – such freedom can only exist if one is ready to sacrifice one’s pride, as much as to say, one’s absolute independence of belief, one’s dream of beauty and purity. I believe that the black and white cinematography in the movie serves this purpose: the beam of intense white light, that burns through the darkness of the studio, is the artist’s creative dream; his vision, his will and his desire.

This laser-like ray of light corresponds to the artistic process of transmutation of the object which the artist perceives as creational material. It isn’t a surprise that Sinha only recognizes Shinta’s creative value during the projection of some rushes where she had appeared by mistake: it’s on the screen (where the beam of light stops and opens itself, so to speak) that her beauty and her purity become visible to him  Before, he simply hadn’t noticed them. See for example this moment of her first appearance under the dark tree:

She hadn’t yet been touched by the Light! Yet her burning beauty was there, ready to be enlightened. And here’s another picture just before she enters the beam: we can already see her eyes, but shaded, as if they needed the poet’s inspiration to reveal them fully (pic on the right). Sinha himself needs to enter this surreal beam as well, by the way. Perhaps that’s why he is present early in the morning in the studio, alone with the beam which he enters too, symbolically appropriating the power of divine transmutation. And of course when Shanti, that same morning, steps in the empty studio, unsure about her capability, because the company director has “seen” nothing in her, and then passes through the beam, this transforms her into Sinha’s dream: she becomes Paro in Devdas!

During the timelessly soulful song that we all know, “Waqt ne kiya”, there happens the last step of this metamorphosis: both lovers leave their old beings, their corporal envelope and stride into the Beam of eternal Art: the process is well-known; all artists create in order to survive within in the beauteous forms of their art, and whoever they take with them is also assured of immortality. Time (waqt) enables certain mortals to meet, to exchange (and recognize in the other) their need for an Absolute which they cannot find on this Earth, and then, thanks to the creative process, can hope to live on through these transfixed eternal forms of beauty. Guru Dutt has purposefully chosen the story of Devdas to dramatize the creative process which emerges from love, loss and death. At the end of Devdas, Paro runs to meet the one she should never have abandoned, yet had to - it was her duty - and she can now reveal this forbidden desire because she knows, somehow, that it is death which makes it possible. Had she not known that Devdas was dying, she would never have gone out and run towards him. Of course in Kaagaz ke phool, Sinha isn’t behind the door, begging to see his Paro one last time, but his mind has nevertheless shut the door of hope, and metaphorically, he is indeed dying from his loss of her. Both of them are lost in the beam of creation, which devours its chosen ones, and they meet, but only beyond the pale, in our memories, in our desire of their eternity.

I’ll just finish by a few words on the actors. I have already said how much I liked Johnny Walker in the film: he’s just hit the right mix of artificially calculated clowniness, to make us understand that, even if he is taking advantage of his social situation, he’s aware of it, and can side with the moral condemnation of a society based on the established hierarchy of money and appearances.

Guru Dutt strikes as the sombre and dejected idealist he likes to pose as, yet behind the pose we feel his sadness and his pain: more than in other films, perhaps (Pyaasa, or Sahib bibi aur ghulam are the ones I have in mind), the theme of desolation and recreation through art and love beyond the decadent society of men, is present, and here he’s chosen an art which places him in the centre of what he has to say about himself, as an actor and director.

Waheeda Rehman, finally, fascinates thanks to her multifaceted talent and grace. I’d say she’s less emotionally sophisticated than Nutan, less deeply aware or herself than Meena Kumari, less majestic than Nargis; in short she’s perhaps less gifted as an actress than these luminaries, but she has a persona whom we can cover with affection, and is closer to us, because it is both passionate and naïve, both clever and anxious, both hilarious and ardent. Her femininity is closer to our humanity, perhaps, because she expresses her desires and emotions on a reachable level, where one recognizes a sister and a comrade.

On top of bloggers already mentioned, Harvey and Thebollywoodfan have interesting insights of their own.

(PS: This is my 150th article!)

In Satyajit Ray’s Home and the world (1984), there is a mystery: why does Nikhil (whose name means “free”), the open-minded husband who wants his wife to espouse modern ideas and leave the traditional confinement of the home (the Purdah), let her see his friend and soon rival Sandip: doesn’t he have eyes? Doesn’t he know that his lovely and inexperienced wife is falling in love with this manly orator and activist? Does he harbour some perverse intention to watch his wife fall in another man’s arms? And his first move, to let her leave the seclusion of the home, so as to have her confront a “world” which she wasn’t asking to confront, was this wise, was it healthy? His own sister in law, who hovers in her widow's whites through the home, had warned him :

The film is an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel which apparently contains a number of inconsistent traits, among which an exaggerated opposition between the two main protagonists, Nikhil and Sandip, and even if the film reduces it and makes the contrast less stereotyped, perhaps it also retains some of the original story’s blemishes.

The critic in the link above says that in the book, Nikhil is the main character of the story. In the film, the barycentre has shifted: Satyajit Ray has clearly put Bimala, his wife, in the main position. The pretext of the story remains nevertheless the same: to uphold a non-violent, non nationalistic attitude towards future self-rule in Early XXth century India. In the book as in the film, Sandip stands for the nationalistic, the-end-justifies-the-means attitude, whereas Nikhil on the contrary wants to embrace Swadeshi in a way which won’t victimize the minorities. But I think Ray has taken this purpose as a means, and no longer as an end. In 1984, there was no longer any need to insist on self-rule the way Tagore had done back in 1915. At that time a radical approach was understandable, and the poet opposed it on idealistic grounds. That was the reason for writing Ghare-baire. In the novel, Nikhil bore a strong resemblance to Tagore himself, in his apolitical and non-interventionist attitude. And Sandip stood out as the caricature of the Machiavellian activist, ready to sacrifice everything to his cause.

But the film treads much more delicately; the balance between the three characters is finely tuned, not unlike what Ray did in Charulata, and Mahanagar, where other women’s discovery of the world also put the age-old equilibrium between man and woman to a dangerous test. Here we have Bimala (facetiously, but also symbolically nicknamed “the queen bee”) taking centre-stage and observed by the director-entomologist. She’s his main experiment. In 1984, what Ray is doing is taking a new look at feminine identity and feminine desire. The eternal triangle is once more at work under his lenses.

So what do we have at the beginning? A still rather young couple, but not young to the point that its single-tracked love would exclude other needs for enrichment and modification. A middle-aged intellectual husband has asked his rather reluctant wife to be “educated” by a European lady. She submits, but strangely enough, is ashamed to show him the result of her education (this prepares us for her own anti-colonialism). Then Nikhil decides that she must leave the woman’s seclusion from the home (the purdah) and meet his friend(s) who have been informed of her accomplishments. Of course the couple talks about the proposal, and Nikhil tries to justify it rationally. Then, when Sandip, his friend and Swadeshi activist, comes in the region, he introduces his wife to him, and urges her to take her own stance, assuring her that she needn’t follow his more reserved attitude towards self-rule. In front of Sandip, he declares his wife “free” (like him) of her own thoughts and moves. Thus pricked forward, she declares her opinions, which turn up to be quite in favour of Swadesh.
Quite naturally afterwards the path is paved for her to fall into the arms of the boisterous and passionate politician. We will come back to this later, but for the moment we need to finish with the intentions. Because of course Nikhil needs to give an added value to an already much beloved wife. In order to do that, nothing is better than having somebody else value her from his (different) perspective. And isn’t his friend in the best position to gives her this new value? Of course Bimala’s importance increases, and she can only be tempted to go further. Being looked upon from two masculine angles now, she can compare herself from these two angles (hence the importance of mirrors in the film). Before that, she had only Nikhil’s angle, and the uniqueness of this angle was coherent with the sole perspective she used to have. In fact Nikhil has given her in Sandip the possibility to have this other perspective on herself. The man she loves gives her this other access to herself, which becomes a newly beloved self. How can she resist ? And what can her jealous sister in-law do against it? The political sacrifice (ie, side with Sandip and Swadesh for the benefit of the future generations)  justifies her adultery (which can be rationalized as a rejection of the compromise that her husband embodies). So she embraces Nikhil's experiment, but it soon becomes her own trap, because it enables her to test her seductiveness (and its power) on someone else, with what looks like her husband’s acceptance and even interest.

The game is now set for Sandip to enjoy it too. For him it’s an exciting mixture of power and control: what is now open for him to do, and the unknown waiting in store for him. No wonder at some point he exclaims that he can’t believe his eyes: his friend Nikhil has put in front of him an object which offers him a chance to practise his consummate skill, the game of power (with its risks and its uncertain but fascinating possible victory), and at the same time a sensual pleasure which he must have been deprived of for a long time, having been on the road (for his campaigning) for so long. His encircling manoeuvre succeeds beyond hope: the Queen Bee is hopelessly charmed by Prince Sss (for snake). But contrary to Tagore’s novel, Sandip isn’t a brutal boar; his approach is made possible by a fascinating observation of Bimala’s move towards a sin which she understands means her empowerment and at the same time her downfall.

So it’s wrong to interpret Sandip’s “defeat” in terms of having got what he wanted (money for his movement, satisfaction for his senses): he leaves because Bimala’s blindness has ceased, and she no longer looks at herself in his mirror (her eyes open when she realizes that Sandip will not abandon his cause for her sake). Having realised the spell under which she had fallen, she can break it, and frees herself from its bond. Does this mean that Nikhil’s experiment has succeeded? Has he succeeded in transforming her into a more beautiful, more feminine, more independent object of desire? Yes he has, but only at a price: his own death, symbolically signifying her total emancipation. In a sense, coming back to her husband meant that he too is now free to choose his own route, and that the cost of her freedom was symbolically the loss of her former marital ties as she knew them. So even if Nikhil’s character often reminds that of the indecisive Hamlet, in fact he does act, but on a lower key. His is the ideologist’s relationship to action: he prefers to follow the shape of reality rather than (like Sandip) bend it to his own will.

Satyajit Ray appears a master of colours in Home and the world. Black and white would certainly have enabled him to use contrasts and opposition, but that being impossible at the time, for commercial reasons probably (if he even thought of the idea), he uses reds, purples, blues and whites to the full, manipulating their symbolical value, to express desire, guilt, pain, anger, distance (viz that blue night scene when Nikhil joins Bimala on the terrace outside, and she flashes her lover’s contempt at him!). The variation in colours and lightings makes up for an otherwise rather static setting.

More information here: http://www.satyajitray.org/films/ghare.htm

 araswati Chandra (Govind Saraiya, 1968, last Bollywood movie in B & W) tells the story of a young aristocrat, Saraswati (Manish), who is indifferently raised by his step-mother and yet grows up and becomes a compassionate person who has lofty ideas and decides to do without his personal happiness without informing his father, who fixes his marriage to Kumud (Nutan), an educated girl from a rich family. Saraswati decides to cancel the engagement and writes to Kumud to inform her. But soon she replies and soon the two keep on exchanging letters. Soon Saraswati decides to defy the customs and pays a visit to his fiancée. The two soon serenade and a short-lived romance takes place. Soon Saraswati returns home after promising Kumud and her family that he will return. However, on his return a family feud takes place and Saraswati writes to Kumud that he is not able to marry her (the IMDb synopsis stops here). This triggers a series of misunderstandings, which end up in Kumud’s marriage to a rich but illiterate suitor named Prabhat (Ramesh Deo). She is forced to marry because of family pressure. But as soon as she joins her husband at his palace, he quickly disdains her for nautch girls, and hardly hides his double life, asking her not to comment on his “weakness”.

Meanwhile, Saraswati, having forsaken his home, has been roaming the country, certainly not very far away, because he reaches Prabhat’s mansion and is found sleeping by the pool there one morning. His presence is made known to Kumud’s father in-law, who despises his son’s cheap life, and adopts Saraswati as his secretary. Of course the two former lovers meet, but Kumud is adamant about her duties, and staunchly stands up for religious traditions. Saraswati witnesses her anguished life and tries to reach out to her, but she objects: why does he interfere in their lives? She is “bohot khushi” (very happy)! Nevertheless things change, because Prabhat’s behaviour is more and more openly flirtatious, and Saraswati’s presence lasts longer and longer! One night Kumud cannot resist entering his room, and if nothing happens, Saraswati decides to leave. On his way he is caught by dacoits and left for dead in the sun. A group of holy men spot him and take him away to their hermitage where he starts leading the life of a recluse.

Things darken for Kumud. She’s chased away from Prabhat’s mansion after one of his mistresses lays her hand on a fragment of her former lover’s letters. This gives Prabhat the pretext he’s been looking for: she must go back to her mother. The blackmail works well, because if she says he’s been unfaithful, he shows the letter to everyone. Nevertheless her dignified attitude has earned her the friendship of women in her in-laws’ household, and they reveal to Prabhat’s parents that he has chased his wife out of lust and selfishness. These chase him away and he vows he will die (he does die, strangely enough, because such a weak character would hardly have the resolve). Kumud takes advantage of a halt on her way back, and tries to drown in the river. But she doesn’t die, and is retrieved by some holy women on the bank. They take her to the same temple where Saraswati is trying to atone for his sins. So they meet again!

Last episode: the two lovers are once more face to face. First Kumud cannot believe she’s bumped into him again, but submits to her fate, and accepts the senior sister’s advice that she has to do something for Saraswati. The latter, on the other hand, has a mission to fulfil: told by the guru that Prabhat is dead, he will have to break the news to Kumud. A (very static) meeting is organised: after having realised that their fate has brushed them together, they admit they are made one for the other, and love starts developing. But Kumud doesn’t know she’s a widow, and still hangs on to the hope that she might change her husband, and that her life will continue at her in-laws once she gets back there.

When Saraswati reluctantly tells her, he faces a new Kumud, who must now embrace the widow’s status. How can she hope to marry her old lover? Widows remain widows; they cannot give again what they have given once. She drifts away from him, again, led by her new duty. The only thing left is for her to convince Saraswati to marry her sister Kusum, so that she might be close to him, be “his companion”. But he refuses. He prefers to wander away once again, and walks down the mountain, fleeing her. She follows him, singing that love cannot be life’s only task, that others await one’s devotion, that you must sometimes  sacrifice love in order to fulfil your destiny. The film ends with Saraswati accepting Kumud’s desire, and so sacrificing his will and hopes to devote himself to community tasks.

ne might think that this story is boringly, even sickeningly traditionalist. That duties and religious laws govern people’s lives unflinchingly. That there is no hope for feelings and the simple pleasures of the heart. That this inert and hopeless story-telling cannot succeed at the cinema because it systematically thwarts all natural and real emotions. One would not be totally wrong… Not only is love denied to the two lovers, but they fight against it (at least Kumud does), and accept to sacrifice it on the altar of religion and abnegation.

Nutan and Manish are quite good, if a little stilted sometimes, but the rest of the cast attract no particular praise. Clearly the film wasn’t made to exalt extravagant acting! But it certainly explores the psychological depths of love and sacrifice, as much as it tries to prove the point that femininity should be stronger than the petty movements of the heart. The movie also has another goal: uphold the sanctity and truth of established social rules. It doesn’t reduce feelings and desires to nothing, simply it submits them to realities that transcend them. Individuals cannot hope to transform a structure which applies not only for humanity, but also for divinity. And their best chance to secure some happiness in this world is to obey and integrate this cosmic order.

In Saraswati Chandra, We are not far from the universe of Greek or classic tragedy, where forces beyond man’s scope are at war and the story tells the necessity of obedience to these forces. This might seem dreary and far from us, but it has majesty, and he lesson comes out clear and strong: there is such a reality as fate, and wanting to change it is useless. Better understand where your place is, and submit willingly to whatever is decreed, because wanting to change this order is useless and will only lead to chaos and death. If the hero accepts (Kumud for example when she says she’s bound by the “shackles of marriage”), then he is within the order, and he can live. Otherwise, he must die.

Our civilisation on the other hand has fought against such obedience and acceptance. It has elevated the rights of the individual to a point where there are far less rules and orders to obey, where desire and instinct play a much greater role. Personal choice has replaced dire necessity. Freedom reigns supreme, and as a result, selfishness and degradation too. I do not mean to say that the society described by Govind Saraiya (who has filmed a well-known novel by Gujarati writer Govardhanram Madhavram Tripathi) should be a model for ours, of course. But Kumud’s strict obedience to her ideals isn’t without a certain grandeur. She strongly believes in the religious values which she has been taught; it isn’t just passive: she wants to make them come alive, and at the same time wishes to be whole and happy. This religion hasn’t for her lost its value as soon as it goes against her desires and personal accomplishment. Rather she has accepted that if it does, then her desires will have to come second. She doesn’t just hold on to her faith when it blesses a bountiful life, and enables the soul to express its thankfulness to the Gods; but even when it means abandoning what is dearest, she believes she must do it, that such are the unfathomable ways of the divinity. This moral rectitude might seem a little excessive, but is it so obsolete?

he film’s pathos comes from the struggle she goes through, wanting to uphold her religious traditions, and at the same time feeling so passionately for Saraswati. This is the classic Cornelian situation: two lovers separated by obstacles which only serve to heighten their love, and which they renounce because their virtue is greater than their passion. And at the same time, this passion is so increased that they constantly run the risk of sacrificing their lives, wanting to die because the strain is too great. They flee from their loved one when they would like to embrace him (or her), because suddenly the dictates of virtue speak louder, and slowly drift back towards each other when they love overpowers them. It’s as if there were two heroes and two heroines: each character is alternatively a passionate lover, and a rigid ascetic.

There are some excellent moments which play on this double attraction and repulsion phenomenon, in which their freedom expresses itself now as tenderness, now as rebuff. One is during the dance Main to bhool chali babul ka desh: In spite of her despondency, Kumud is asked to perform as lead dancer and singer for some guests, among which Saraswati (who’s also been asked to attend). Along to some ravishing dance steps and moves, she sings about her marital happiness, how she’s found a second family at her in-laws’ home, how the sun and moon are beautiful, but how much more lovable is her husband, her Godhead… All this in front of Saraswati, to make him understand how determined she is to maintain her role as righteous wife. Naturally he soon cannot stand it any longer, and leaves. We can see her wince, but courageously continue, having but wiped a tear. Some might say she’s nothing but cruel; I think she’s fighting. She feels traditions are essential, and must be respected; she knows that as a woman she must uphold the social fabric of rules which her husband so shamelessly flaunts, and she wants to convince her ex-lover she’s not going to yield. So her song is a battle against the forces of destruction (inside and outside); she’s fighting for the Gods. She doesn’t flinch, or only a little, a slight moment for us to see her efforts.

Another scene takes place inside the Temple, when the pair is given time together to sort out their fate, and before Kumud has been told she’s a widow. Things have changed between the previous scene and now. She’s been chased from her home, has been saved from the waters, and is more isolated. Saraswati is sleeping (how can he sleep when his much-desired lover is next to him – well, this is tragedy, not reality!), but Kumud isn’t. Eyes wide open, she is all senses, and slowly rises, comes near him, and recognizes that even if she cannot become his wife, he is nevertheless her God deep in her heart. She twirls gracefully in and out of sight, behind the pillars, hides behind a wall, and reaches him. She then lets herself embrace his sleeping foot. A dream ensues, in which she sees herself getting wedded to Saraswati. But when her mother gives her the marriage garland, her moral persona wakes up within the dream, and she shouts: “If a woman marries twice in one life, Religion will be in danger!” When love like a magnet brings her too close to breaking her vows, she brutally breaks free and reasserts the moral framework.

The last scene is the one at the end of the movie. Kumud has just told her beloved that she wishes him to marry her sister instead of her: Saraswati, after having refused, escapes her pleading presence and symbolically descends from the heights of sacrifice and resignation to the lowly steps of personal interest. Kumud is obliged to come down to him, and sings to him her message of generosity and forbearance. At the bottom near the lake, she asks him: “don’t you want me to be happy?” and this argument wins him over. He accepts to marry Kusum, which is the best possible compromise they can come up with.

So we can see that in this society, like the one which Vikram Seth describes in A suitable boy, love isn’t understood as the one and only feeling around which all of society should revolve. In the West, love is referred to as the religious absolute (ie, God is love in the Christian faith), and this might well sometimes justify the scale of values according to which an individual’s right to happiness through love comes first, before the weight of traditions, before society’s interests, before the needs of the community. Today’s rate of divorce in civilized societies is a witness to this radical individualism. On the other hand, Indian women have been the prisoners of customs which have shut them up and turned them into their husbands’ slaves, and clearly the film advocates such things as marital respect and concern. But it also stresses the need for couples to base themselves on a greater bond than that of the enjoyment one can draw from love as long as it lasts. Without going perhaps as far as saying that women’s behaviour is the guarantee of religion (which is what the movie indicates), one can accept that private virtues are strongly connected to the public interest and society as a whole. And each time an excessively individualistic stance is taken, thus breaking even more the frame which we have inherited from the previous generations, society runs the risks of finding itself made up of separated and isolated particles, unable to relate to one another other than by the laws of attraction and repulsion, and thus alienated not only from each other but other from themselves as well.