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!
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A beautiful lady, to boot.
Miles away from the parasitic consumer society that is plaguing not only India
but the whole developed world, Jagan’s character is a reminder of the possibility of detachment and simplicity, which even he has had to learn: the book shows him first fighting against his son’s
encroaching possessiveness. When Mali had first decided that his father (along with his father’s money) would agree, as always, to pay for his selfish plans, he had not counted on a limit: that
of Jagan’s self-respect. Putting his father’s name on that advertising leaflet in order to force him into business and make him pay was one step too many, and Jagan’s reaction, perhaps childish
in a way, is quite normal. He shuts himself up like a hermit crab, and avoids confrontation. Not very mature, definitely, but what Mali is doing is not mature at all. In fact what Jagan
will need, like Rama in the Gita (who, says Narayan, prods the hero on when he is in doubt), in order to understand what to do next,
Its story is the first thing that shows that ambivalent quality: it’s both psychologically interesting
and clumsily patched up, almost too complicated, and yet lifelike. Amit (Almitabh) the poet falls in love with Pooja (Rakhee Gulzar) who loves poetry and the poet. But their parents have other
plans, as usual, and they submit to their fate: we are not yet in the 1990s! Pooja starts her married life with Vijay (Shashi Kapoor) and Amit with Anjali (Waheeda Rehman). But the past is kept
quietly secret by the two lovers. On top of that, Anjali had a daughter before getting married to Amit, who doesn’t know it. We are introduced to her life with her foster-parents. She’s called
Pinky (Neetu Singh) who will soon meet up with Vicky (Rishi Kapoor), Pooja and Vijay’s son. The wedding is announced, and on account of it, Pinky’s foster parents believe they have to tell her
about her past, that she isn’t really their daughter. She cannot, they think, begin her married life on a secret. But this revelation will trigger a reaction which will catapult the past into the
present. Pinky flees her home to go and meet her unknown mother, leaving everyone in a crisis.
The fact that this rather old-looking teenager decides to reject the loving relationship which the
story has painstakingly (but lamely) tried to establish (there is some absurd frolicking between herself and her parents, which is REALLY hard to watch) would be contradiction enough if the film
wasn’t exploring the idea of filial love and what makes people recognize their parents as such. Pinky’s reaction to the revelation that she isn’t who she thought she was, might be “silly” from a
post-modern point of view where genetics don’t matter as much as the people themselves who have adopted you; but she shows that this question of one’s origin is a deeply set one, and that the
debate as what is the most important, nature or culture within us, isn’t as easily decided. When Vicky scolds Pinky for being selfish and risking the balance of Amit’s household with her absurd
quest, he hasn’t understood this legitimate need for biological roots. In France, the law favours biological descent in cases of doubtful parenthood, and I think this is a reflection of this
reality, even if the rights of adoptive parenthood might seem greater in terms of relational investment.
What’s interesting is that the quest for the origins brings about the other problem that the film
deals with: how and to what extent our past is still present in our lives. That is the main subject of the movie: our intimate relationships as mature beings are often shaped by wishes or regrets
which played long before, and which adulthood has not managed to sort out. One major illusion we have is that maturity and adulthood should integrate and neglect what have only been the passing
desires of youth. Indeed an adult is considered to be such inasmuch as he or she has reached a balance which puts into rightful perspective the desires of young age. Psychoanalysis tells us so,
up to a certain extent. But it also tells us that a certain labour might be needed before we reach that stage, and we often meet mature men and women who clearly have not reached it, and behave
as if they were re-living (or transposing) the unsolved conflicts and contradictions for which they have not been able to find a solution later in life.
Of course the film contains the standard criticism of the Indian practise of arranged
marriages, but it contains it only as an aside: it clearly isn’t the main subject. Even if indeed Amit and Pooja should have been given the right to live together as married man and wife, because
love once born between man and woman cannot be suppressed by social decisions, what Yash Chopra is doing in Kabhie Kabhie goes further. After all, he
shows that the human mind is much more flexible and malleable than cheap romancing would have it: Vijay and Pooja make a good couple, who in spite of Pooja’s secret, build a relationship which is
not only cemented by the existence of their son Vicky, but by true love and an acceptance of time’s decrees which isn’t far from wisdom. And the same goes for Amit and Anjali, even though their
union was sitting on the time-bomb of Pinky’s hidden existence and Amit’s romantic wounds.
I think what has interested Yash Chopra is not only to provide his audience with the entertainment of
love, even if clearly the film has that aspect. But it also tackles the serious issue of maturity, ie, the responsible management of one’s emotional life. This refers to who we are now, but also
to who we have been, and the balancing act of both.
But the film also shows that a past whose status has not been settled remains present and
that the more it is denied its presence, the more it will grow out of proportions, compared to what it once was. Anjali was wrong to have hidden the existence of her first daughter to her
husband, or rather the society which imposed on her the need to hide this as a sin is wrong. But perhaps Amit was right to feel he had been cheated of his love with Pooja, and perhaps it wasn’t
really Anjali’s business to inquire into what could have remained a slowly receding pain? A secret must sometimes remain secret if it hurts too much to be known and thrown in the face of the
reconstructed person who has had to rebuild himself as an adult. And it is the responsibility of the secret holder to judge whether the truth is better than the ignorance.
