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.

("Make way for Queen Victoria!")

  Shatranj ke Khilari (1977, The chess players) shows how close Satyajit Ray has come to Shakespearian inspiration. In this story of two gentlemen of Lucknow we have the dilemma of the good king, made powerless by a power stronger than his own; we have the Realpolitik of History and Conquest magnified to the dimension of lyrical drama, we have - on the backdrop of a nostalgic XIXth century society of servants and breathtaking outdoor scenery - the subplot of loud-spoken and often clownish compeers who bring their conventional comic relief. The two stories intertwine superbly, and create a rich pattern of symbolical and psychological truth which deserves the greatest praise. I think only Satyajit Ray could pull this off, in Indian cinema.

There have been a number of “chess films” and books, too – Ray’s film is in fact based on a story by Munshi Premchand – notably Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle, and the game’s inspirational symmetrical structure contains a sort of magnetism which is easily used visually and dramatically. But Satyajit Ray isn’t a victim of that influence; the game’s charm, or its curse, doesn’t interest him: he plays with its evocative tradition of confrontation and isolated pair of opponents, and is as much interested in the players as in the game. Chess is only an image for the main subject of the film, the conflict of power opposing the various protagonists. It is thus possible to decide that the main characters are the title-bearers, i.e., the two noblemen with their quirkiness and their aloofness from outside events, or the king, his prime minister and General Outram, the British Resident in Lucknow (Richard Attenborough). Depending on whether you think the first are Ray’s target, you have the perspective according to which the film criticises the moral futility of the gentility, its indifference to the real world. Or your point of view would be a more political and historical one, and you would say that the film dissects the weakness of Indian resistance to British imperialism.

("Forget the game, tonight")

  I have decided to choose the second one, for several reasons. I realize that the film isn’t called “The powerless king”, or “How Britain ate the last cherry on the Indian cake”. But I’ll explain this later. First there is Satyajit Ray’s choice of language. Shatranj ki khilari is his only film in urdu. We know that otherwise he writes and directs his film in Bengali. Choosing urdu means that he is placing himself in the centre of the political and historical chessboard, where the roots of modern India are to be found. How did England become a colonial Empire? What were its moves to achieve that aim? Everything started in Bengal, around Calcutta. But things really became serious when the imperialist power began conquering the subcontinent in a pincers-like movement, South towards Madras and North towards Delhi, thus preparing for the moment when the two claws would meet in Bombay, as you can see on this double map of India. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/India1837to1857.jpg

  The encircling is done in 1857, one year after the annexation of the kingdom of Awadh (or Oudh) which occurred in 1856. And 1857 is the year of the famous Indian Rebellion, which marks the end of any Indian claim to supremacy. The Sepoy mutiny takes place in Lucknow, and if Ray chooses to film the event of the dethronement of the king of Awadh in 1856, it is in natural reference to the events of a year later. The strategic moves which would enable Britain (through its commercial cover-up, the East Indian Company) to rule all of India as from 1857, were prepared by the careful planning of the 1856 coup.

So making the characters speak Urdu emphasizes for Ray the centrality of Awadh as an essential square on the political and military chessboard. Just as Lucknow was the centre for refinement and culture at the time (and Urdu its linguistic medium), Awadh was the central and remaining link in Britain’s conquest of the Northern states. It had to be subjugated, and even if the move provoked the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 (which showed the importance of the tactical decision), the British had already gained too much power for a divided and multiple resistance to come back to the old Mughal Empire. The Government of India Act, voted in Parliament in 1858, instituted the new era of the British Raj which would last until 1947.

                                                          (A slice of Oudh, your Excellency?)

So “the chess players” are really Lord Dalhousie and General Outram on the one hand, and king Walid and his ministers on the other. The trouble is that the Indians play in their “Indian” way whereas the English have adopted a “faster” variation of the game. On the English chessboard the Queen has all the power (that’s Queen Victoria of course), whereas the Indian version has only a “minister”. The soldier pawns move at double speed too: two squares instead of one! Finally, the rule of promotion of the pawn into a queen, once it reaches the eighth square is a clear reference to the “conquer and rule” policy. These details of the chess game, explained in the film by the delightful character of Nandlal Sahab, only serve to underline the British expansionist superiority that India could do nothing against at the time. The film also carefully presents General Outram’s conflict of duties, forced as he was to implement the Governor’s decision to annex Oudh, and this gives us a fine psychological insight into the understanding of the broader historical picture.

                                                        ("Do they find our game too slow?")

As a result, the two noblemen Mir (Saeed Jaffrey) and Mirza (Sanjeev Kumar) engrossed in their “stupid” game (as Khurshid, Mirza’s wife – a fiery Shabana Azmi -, says) serve as an comical illustration of the tragic History that engulfs them. They play chess, but mainly they play, while others are involved in the serious job of designing the future of their country above their heads. They are children who do not understand what is happening in the adult’s world. Their “order” is based on the simple rules established by their ancestors long ago, and they have not learned to observe the changing times. And the catastrophe is that the king Wajid Ali Shah (Amjad Khan) is one of these children too! He is shown as a pensive introvert who realises he’s not up to the task of governing, but cannot change that. His character is beautiful and poignant at the same time.
When he is asked to give his order for an army and artillery to be summoned to retaliate the Company’s advances, we see him heave a sigh, as if he was going to cry, look away ahead of him – a view of the palace rooftops appears for a moment in the sunset - and, to the dismay of his ministers, he starts a song about his beloved Lucknow that he doesn’t know how he will be able to leave: “You can take away my crown, but you cannot take away my dignity…” We know that King Walid is known to be a revivalist of the classical arts: “He is hailed as one of the most prodigious promoters of Thumri (A form of classical music) and Kathak (A popular form of classical dance from northern India). In this paradoxical character, Amjad portrays the masculinity of a King and effeminacy of a man dedicated to dance, poetry and music, with equal conviction. Music of the movie is also a plus. In most of the scenes, one can listen to melodious thumris or other compositions of Indian classical music being played in the background.” (Kandarp Mehta from IMdB)

This reviewer has an axe to grind, by the way. He criticises Ray for not being faithful to Premchand’s story. Here is his main criticism: “the biggest alteration has been made in the climax of the story and this destroys the very patriotic essence of the story. In the original story, both the characters, Mirza and Mir, end up killing each other. Munshi Premchand very categorically mentions twice that they did not lack 'personal valor' but didn't want to use qualities of courage and bravery for their nation. Munshi Premchand was a patriotic writer. He wanted to show that prosperity made the Indian elite lazy, myopic and lackadaisical, and fated India with foreign rule. On the other hand, Ray kept them alive, and actually portrays them as impotent people, who accept their cowardice as a fact of life. New York Times Review of the movie (DT: May 17, 1978) wrote Ray Satirizes Indian Nobility: Civilized Impotency. This is definitely not how Munshi meant it to be. In order to have a greater universal appeal, and fetch more awards, Ray killed the very patriotic soul of the story.”

("What would happen if war broke out?")

I’m not sure that there is such a difference, notwithstanding the “personal valor” which Premchand might have wanted to bestow on the two noblemen, reduced to “impotency” by Satyajit Ray. Did making them kill each other show their valour more than having them fight, and after having reconciled, start to play once again? I wouldn’t say they are cowards; they are simply ignorant of reality. They are never faced with a decision which could have, if taken, saved the fate of India. Ray points out on the contrary that it is too late, that India in 1856 was doomed. 1857 was at hand, and even if a battle (and its uncertainties) had to be won by the British, in retrospect, this date marked only one thing: India’s subjection. On the other hand, Ray also shows that the culture which Mir and Mirza stand for, and which the King promoted, was exquisite and elaborate, and this isn’t downplayed by the film. Certainly he is saying that today’s culture might gain from revisiting the sources which King Walid revived. Globalization represents a threat which can be fought against. And if some believe that, like the fate of the Indian empire in the movie, Indian culture is equally doomed to be eaten up by the global trends, they may be right, but that history has still to be written.

One last remark, concerning the cinematographic pleasure experienced in Shatranj ke Khilari: the game metaphor is an apt one for any movie, where actors move on the board as directed by the master; but the depth and intelligence of the game also receives added brilliancy from the contrast of scenes, inside and outside, the close-ups and the wide-angle shots, the rich and colourful evocations of a luxury where time seemed to have stopped. In short, the film is a song, a swan-song maybe, filled with tedium perhaps, but the song whose variegated accents – now grave, now joyful, ominous or ludicrous, mingle to recreate a world of refinement and beauty, eternal in its fleetingness.

For other reviews, do not miss upperstall.com who puts the movie in a perhaps more decadent perspective than the one upheld here. But his commentaries of some of the scenes are a real pleasure.  On satyajitray.org there is the remark that the film was made during the “Emergency” period of Indian Politics, and he suggestion that Indira Gandhi acted in a similar way to that of Mir and Mirza. Minai has a rather pleasant take on the film, and Rameshram's comments make an interesting counterpoint! And at culturecartel.com John Nesbit holds the view that the film suffers from “excessive narration and overly staged acting”, so it’s interesting to read their point of view in the perspective of Ray’s “wonderful canon”.

Sagina (1974), a hindi remake of the bengali Sagina Mahato, shot by the same director (Tapan Sinha) four years before, is a reflexion on work exploitation, oppression and revolution. The story is set in the “tea gardens” of North-East India, in the forties, and centres around the charismatic figure of a local worker, Sagina Mahato (Dilip Kumar), who is the acknowledged leader of the exploited bunch of mountain villagers toiling away for the benefit of the British. As expected, the capitalistic manager is a ruthless heartless racist, whereas Sagina, who has the guts to confront the boss, manages to make him understand that the coolies are human and cannot be simply beaten and used like cattle.

Sagina’s fiery character is doubled by that of Lalita (Saira Banu), a mountain Bengal tigress ready to slit whoever approaches her, and whose faithfulness to Sagina is one of the movie’s great wonders. Because Saira Banu isn’t a the movie’s pretty face: that title is reserved to Vishaka, the socialist secretary we shall speak about in a minute, played by beauty Aparna Sen. But to have cast Saira Banu as Sagina’s companion (we don’t know if they’re married, but it can be supposed) shows a sure flair. The movie’s realism and authenticity certainly gains from it.

To say the truth, it also gains from Dilip Kumar’s personality. The “king of tragedy” cuts a fine role as a cunning country labourer, alternatively as peculiar and unsexy as possible, and then just as hilarious and witty. He manages his pathos with consummate art, knows when to play the fool to avoid hero-worship, and when to stop for the spectator to grasp the tragedy of the cause. His antics with Lalita are really what befriends him to us: together they’re a great couple, full of temper and pride, and these are based not on a selfish desire to ensnare the other into a private relationship, but their love builds the community, and testifies to its lively spirit. For instance in the scene where a young Indian girl has been raped by a white employee from the company, who gets caught and Sagina declares revenge, at the window Lalita watches him go, and, as she holds the frightened girl in her arms, she breathes in the fantastic breath of victory and confidence in the man who is such a naturally fearless leader.

Things start deteriorating nevertheless when revolutionaries from the city (nearby Calcutta) start becoming interested in the particular worker resistance that has coalesced around Sagina. Such a feat cannot remain unexploited: the communist party who probably is also trying to federate some reaction against the colonial power, comes to the company in the form of Amal, who ventures to put some socialist ideas about rules and legality in Sagina’s mind. Act legal, become a recognised party: that is Amal’s creed. But Sagina, even if he tries to do his best, remains a political yokel, and when a crisis comes, will follow nothing but his instinct. The workers he leads remain unruled and wild, as the Bengal tiger who leads them.

This prompts a second step, and Amal’s party superiors arrive, together with the apparatchika, the party secretary, Vishaka, who incidentally is the daughter of the Calcutta-based owner of the whole industry of which our little mountain unit if only a regional branch. Vishaka is the archetype of the idealist, and we see her father ponder the fact that she has preferred the communist party to her own family. But according to her, it’s because her parents have been absent from her life, the father working, the mother partying. So in a way, she’s the embodiment of criticism against a certain form of Indian colonial profiteering, where the rich upper classes took advantage of what the British needed, a superior-minded class of collaborationists who would help them maintain their stronghold on the dominion.

The tragic irony of the following scenes is that the communist party boss, Aniruddha, is going to team up with the capitalistic British manager against the untameable Sagina. They jointly organise his election as “welfare officer”, an honour which in effect sends him away to the city where he will be out of the way for the party to set up its own rule with the supposedly prepared workers. Strike is soon declared against the company owners, and the workers, headless, obey their new masters. What happens next is the normal consequence: when Sagina comes back to the village, having understood he’s been trapped into leaving, his departure is thrown into his face as a betrayal: nobody wants to see him any more. The workers are starving and nobody is helping them; the commies are as ruthless as the company manager! Sagina, their chief, their tiger, is back too late: they have lost trust in him. He can go back where he comes from, his former fellowmen are blinded by grief and oppression. Only Lalita, who at first escapes him too (she has not completely groundless reasons to believe her lion has succumbed to the cool charm of the fair apparatchika!), finally falls in his arms and sides by him, explaining everything to him. He then tries to speak to the assembly of workers, but they boo him and, rushing to wards him, trample him mercilessly.

The last step is Sagina’s arrest at night. The communists have staged an emergency trial in the forest in order to trap him and continue their totalitarian application of their revolutionary theory. All the inhabitants are summoned in the woods, and the revolutionary leader hopes to stage a swift and efficient condemnation. Doesn’t everybody hate Sagina now? Doesn’t every single former friend look upon him as a damned traitor, who has sided with the oppressor? Well, the trial begins and the protagonists start remembering… And this is where the film’s structure comes in, because in fact it opens with the trial, and the flashbacks, which tell all the story, are individual recollections of each of the main actors of the drama: we relive the beginning of Sagina’s epic through their eyes, so to speak, and this all forms the complete story which comes to an end in the woods that night.

And in fact, slowly, one by one, they refuse to play Aniruddha’s hunting game: at first they’re struck by the scene, but recovering their senses, they realize that Sagina has also been trapped, as they have been trapped. He hasn’t betrayed them, nor is he all-powerful, he’s just one of them. Darker forces had tried to hypnotize all of them into believing Sagina was a double-dealer. Now even Amal loyally recognizes that Sagina cannot be the monster Aniruddha portrays and, cornered, tries to judge all on his own, declaring him guilty and that he should be killed straight away. He has a gun, and is going to execute his crazy justice, but Amal intervenes, and takes the shot. Aniruddha tries to escape, is caught by a vengeful Sagina, who throws away the gun: his hands are enough. But then another executioner enters the scene and ends the madman’s life.  

What is very original in this movie is its complex treatment of the forces of good and evil, when an overwhelming number of movies simplify the opposition to a pitifully weak antagonism. Okay, the communist leader is a caricature. But he’s the only one. All the actors in the drama have virtues and merits, alongside with shortcomings and prejudices. Sagina for example isn’t the hero whom everybody loves at first sight. If you identify with him, it is because you understand precisely that he’s limited and ridiculous, and that this is his nature.  And this works also for his attitude concerning political action. This attitude has nothing you can tie it down to. It isn’t revolutionary; it isn’t theoretical, it isn’t even political. He fights with his instinct, his courage and his magnanimity. When he senses his community is wronged, he displays a formidable flair for the right words to say to the right person, the right thing to do and when to do it, and this opportunism is his strength. His keen sense of justice and human dignity works miracles among the people he knows, and of course his enemies understand that, who send him away in order to cut him away from his zone of influence.

Sagina therefore demonstrates the limits of political science, which is commonly based on the opposition of binary systems: rightists vs. leftists, conservatives vs. revolutionaries, capitalism vs. communism, etc. Both the company bosses, who ruthlessly exploit the workers, and the communist revolutionaries, who come to the Tea Gardens to organise their revolt, are formatted by these antagonistic pairs of opposites. Both believe in imposing their rigid frame of understanding to human labour, and both fail because they don’t understand the human factor, which is made of need, hope and self-respect. Workers are human beings who suffer when exploited (that’s the communist perspective), but also recognize the company as their “mother” (that’s the patriarchal industrialist’s model, which communists will deride as oppressive). Sagina Mahato represents a political force that theorists cannot place in their rigid grid; his freedom represents a third type of interpretation, more complex, more human too. At one moment, the communist leader tells him that orders oblige him to do something. But says Sagina, I don’t obey orders. If you request, on the other hand, it’s another matter. His political practice bases itself on confidence and respect.

Of course, you might say that such a political attitude is limited in scope and efficiency. If you want to make things move on a greater scale, that of a country, for example, or that of nations, you have to revert to party discipline and follow orders. Outside the community where he is known and appreciated, what is Sagina’s stance worth? Well, perhaps this isn’t true: Gandhi has shown the world that the dualist politics based on the violence of conflicting interests might not always be the rule; alternating right and left parties are not necessarily the only way to practice politics. A great deal of strength is surely needed to go beyond commonly accepted practices, but they aren’t necessarily doomed. The trouble is that people come to public affairs with these structures in their minds: which party shall I join, which party will give me the best chances to fulfil my interests? Even idealists opt for one side, and believe that if you want to win elections, you have to control a party. Saginas are rare today. But the film’s lesson is that they can and must exist, that politics shouldn’t be left to politicians only. We know it, but how do we act in order to make this change?

One other theme in the movie, which is connected to the preceding one, is the questioning of rules as the media through which human relations must be established. Amal tells Sagina to act legally, and the latter tells him to “forget the rules”!  (top photo)It isn’t enough to say that rules are made for men and not men for the rules; some rules can be changed, some rules are bad, but the concept of rules itself must also sometimes be questioned. The law guarantees that people will live in peace, normally. But sometimes is creates war, because the law has become the expression of the oppressive power of the rich and the great. They uphold the law as a means to continue their rule and protect their interests. So the law must regularly be re-evaluated by another law, that of “humanity” (whatever that is – it depends partly on which human community is concerned), the law which is inside all of us, and serves as the ultimate standard. Sagina represents also that final recourse, a fragile one, as the movie shows, because it can be manipulated (hence the need for education – Sagina is illiterate), but an indispensable stay against the perversion of the law.

In Sujata (The well-born, 1959), Bimal Roy has made the untouchable touching, adorable an object of disgust, and visible a pit of darkness. I’m not saying that he has made THE unique Dalit movie (I don’t know which one this would be… Ankur? ), but for me the character he’s cast as the untouchable in the film, Nutan, is his attempt at visualising on the screen what he thought about any human being: Bimal Roy could have signed this famous Shakespearian verse:

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is!

O brave new world! That has such people in't!

(The Tempest, V,2)

Man, this divine creature, possesses a beauty which testifies to its origin, and all men, no matter how ugly and deformed, are all as beautiful in the eyes of their maker, who sees in us the divine image (Genesis 1,26), and not the surface, our mortal envelope. But of course, the cinema is the cinema, and even if one might perhaps regret Roy’s choice of the heavenly Nutan, because a plainer heroine would have more easily deflected our stare towards the inner sanctum than she does, nevertheless I believe we can say she displays such a charming modesty, such an delicacy and such a simplicity of manners, in short such a grace, that this way one does not forget that innocence and beauty do sometimes (perhaps even often) go hand in hand, and that man’s divine creational status is made visible thanks to her. And because of the sheer artistry she has put in the role, Nutan is way up there, untouched by rivals!
I will not tell you the story, because Madhulika at Dustedoff has done it for me: she summarises mostly the beginning of the story, but it helps to have all the circumstances. So thanks Madhu, but I shall also take the opportunity to thank her because she was the one who enabled me to see the movie, and who gave me the hint as to where to find it.

It’s the story of an untouchable girl, as my DVD cover writes. These persons, according to the Hindu religion and caste system, cannot be touched (cf. Untouchable, by Mulk Raj Anand). If people from the other castes do, they are defiled, and must wash in order to regain their purity. Such a phenomenon is common in ritualistic religions. In ancient Judaism, it was also defiling to touch a leper, or a woman having her periods, for example. One might understand why the contact with the leper was proscribed, but in fact it is the same thing as the other cases: any apparent illness or physical disorder was believed to be a sign of divine rebuttal, and touching meant not only being contaminated, but also become excluded from the community, because the sick, the cripple and the destitute were visible proof of an inner sin against the divinity. Siding with them meant incurring the divine wrath which caused their sign of exclusion.
Touching somebody in primitive societies (of which our more evolved ones still inherit) also has ritual potential. Medical and magical powers often travel through the hands, which are a way to bestow authority and inheritance. Touching means asserting the reality and resistance of whatever is touched. In official ceremonies, there often is a sign by which the hand signifies the contract, or the alliance. And so naturally in rites of passage, the hands are endowed with the power which enables them to perform what is intended by the rite. I am not an expert in these matters, but perhaps hand decoration, in various cultures of the world, has a significance in this respect. At any rate, touching always means an influence, a power, an acceptance which integrates the receiver in the community. Being untouchable does the opposite; it prevents the person from any integration, and forces untouchables to be touched by other untouchables, thus doubling their curse.

When Sujata is first touched by Adhir (a Brahmin, played by Sunil Dutt), she winces; the hand to shoulder contact means of course man to woman contact, with all the sexual load attached to it, but it’s also a transgression of another kind, which cannot be experienced as pleasurable: anguish and fear are increased by this simple gesture. Whereas humanity resides in a meaningful (and not only emotional) practice of touching between human beings (such as it is expressed by the rites we have mentioned), the existence of untouchability has perverted this human bond that builds trust and confidence into a barrier which separates people. Touching normally enables a proximity, a language beyond the words; untouchability (or any kind of apartheid for that matter) recreates the distrust and fear which was the consequence of the Fall in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3,10).

(In the greenhouse, cornered by Adhir, Sujata brushes against a Mimosa pudica (above), that reacts to touch by folding in its fronds - an apt symbol for herself!)

What the director associates in the movie with Sujata being touched for the first time by her suitor is the trembling frond of a tree: as she is touched, we have in a flash the picture of a quivering branch with leaves, which recalls the scene where Sujata, at first realizing that a pleasant-looking youth of a higher caste loved her, runs out in the garden and communes with the life of nature, a nature full of exuberant movement, as if it was dancing and twirling to answer the flutter she experiences at that moment. So just as nature has responded to her arousal, she herself responds (to Adhir) and braces herself, like a rope suddenly taut. In her, life which had naturally flowed from birth and had been stopped, is, by that touch, set free within her once again. Hence perhaps all the water in the film, all the tears, all the rain. When life flows again through her body, the shock she feels overwhelms her. There are also tranquil waters, as in this night scene:
Of course the end is melodramatic and very predictable, and that’s one of the weaknesses of the movie. I would almost have preferred the union of Sujata and Adhir not to have been possible, because this would have seared a much deeper hole into the confidence of the India consciousness. Yet the image of the blood transfusion contains both power and truth. That the life of a dying community, represented by the mother Charu (Sulochana Latkar) needs to be transfused by the love of its enemies the untouchables, what a subversion of everything the Indian society used to believe in! And perhaps (as Madhu suggests in her review) India at the time needed the (“hard-hitting”) happy ending (and the unsubtle allusions to a crying Gandhi) to make it aware of the necessity of including dalits in the social fabric as everybody else, and so to transition towards an abolition of casteism.
I’d like to say a word about Upendranath’s character (the father, Tarun Bose) whose calculated compromise with caste prejudice represents perhaps one of the reformist solutions. Not that he’s very adventurous! But his only half-refusal of the baby at the beginning, and his feeble enthusiasm at chasing Sujata when she’s little, coupled with a ready acceptance of her when sufficient signs of “destiny” have transformed the family into a foster one, all this has enabled her to escape death. He’s the one who gives her her paradoxical name, too. But of course, that name is true: she’s well-born, being born with the right, life-saving blood of generosity and selflessness. Upendra represents non-violent wisdom, even if not quite assertive enough, but such an attitude is for me by far preferable to revolutionary methods with their accompanying bloodbath.