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