In the Mahābhārata, Gandhari voluntarily blindfolded herself throughout her married life. Her husband Dhritarashtra was born blind, and on meeting him and realizing this, she decided to protest silently by blindfolding herself. (source: Wikipedia – Jatland.com has a slightly different version “she decided to deny herself the pleasure of sight that her husband could never relish.”) Another website says that her protest was in keeping with her devotion to her husband, and as a result “she was hailed as a Sati for her sacrifice”.

In Sai Paranjpe’s movie, Sparsh (Touch, 1980), the character played by Shabana Azmi, Kavita, similarly becomes engaged to a blind headmaster (Naseeruddin Shah), and because she seems too devoted to him, gets called by that name. This puts the movie in the context of the movements for woman’s emancipation, but with a twist, since in the sacrifice of Sati, the widow who joins her husband on the funeral pyre obviously doesn’t remarry. In Sparsh, not only is the context a remarriage, but Anirudh, the blind headmaster of an institution for blind children, warns Kavita against turning into a new Gandhari. He wants no such devotional sacrifice. And yet, this denial doesn’t seem to carry the weight of the film’s message: clearly Kavita’s sacrificial attitude is justified by the director. So could it be that Sparsh is more traditional than what it seems at first sight?

Several first-rate reviews of this little jewel exist on the web: for Carla the film, in spite of its slight defects, is sweet and touching, whereas Banno is more attentive to the educational dimension and A2line declares her enthusiasm at Naseeruddin’s acting skill. You can go and read the story first if you haven’t seen the film. But I’ll still have to say a few things about it, because some of its minor events carry an important significance. And we’ll come back to Gandhari bye and bye. You probably know that the drama at the centre of the story is Anirudh’s decision to break the engagement that he had started with the demure Kavita: having met by accident, the two notice each other at a party, and the teacher asks her if she might come and join the team of child-minders in his Institution. After some hesitation, the young widow decides to join, and quickly becomes very successful, both with the children and the staff. Until then lost in a withdrawn, nostalgic past, she finds a new present, and the promise of an undreamt-of future.
Even if Anirudh is a proud, demanding person, she senses this must hide a soft spot and soon enough she finds it. It means accepting a reorganisation of her values, first: she mustn’t consider the children or anyone at the Institution as “poor souls”, or handicapped victims, but as persons who need some help. No compassion please. Anirudh explains:
She is very much in need of involvement, and soon the pleasure and life-lines coming from the children win her over. Her personality blooms, and quite naturally she becomes closer to the man responsible for this. Anirudh cannot refrain from noticing her engaging character, her natural and warm nature. The way their budding attraction for one other is filmed makes it very interesting to watch, because one constantly wonders about the unusualness of the match. Everything seems to be going perfectly at first, and then little hitches occur, triggered by remarks overheard by the blind man. Kavita’s a real goddess, she’s sacrificing herself for him, how lucky for him, she will be able to do everything he can’t… Unwittingly, she’s rubbing in what he’s been trying to evade all his adult life: dependence and pity.
And that’s where he balks. Pity: for him pity is an attitude he will not harbour; pity makes him feel how much he’s been fighting against himself to be self-reliant and grown. If other people feel pity for him, the conclusion is that he’s not been successful in projecting an autonomous persona for himself. If people pity him, then he’s still the child he suffered to be all those years. Pity means inferiority, inadequacy and failure. How dare these people feel pity for him who has, so much more than able people, fought successfully to the top and reached the position of headmaster of an educational institution?
Anirudh’s refusal of pity and sympathy shows he doesn’t see the reasons why others might pity him, and also indicates how far he still is from real independence. He doesn’t see that love contains pity, essentially. Love needs to give itself, to pour itself on wounds and complete what is incomplete. Love is so soul-searching that it can accept to maim itself in order to be accepted and loved in return. This is what happens to little Paplu: this young boy, who isn’t blind, is a pupil at the Institution and helps his blind friends to read. He therefore has an advantage which he sometimes uses for his personal ends. But when Kavita comes to the school, and makes the blind children less dependent, he’s less used, and less loved, and this is what his father comes to the headmaster to complain about:
 And as a result we have the very funny and touching story of the lovely princess in her devilish Castle who one day sees her Prince rush in with his Chariot and fly to her rescue. Such is the power of love that it provokes sacrifice, because it contains it. Loving means sacrificing one’s ego on the altar of the beloved. But if this ego isn’t yet built, how can one sacrifice it? It becomes suicide. Anirudh has a colleague, Dubey (played by a young Om Puri), whose wife is ill, then dies, and whose grief we witness: 
When Anirudh puts together his growing feeling of unease because of Kavita’s insisting presence, (which he can’t understand as her attraction to himself), and Dubey’s realization that now he’s going to have to become independent again, as he had been before his marriage, something clicks inside his darkness: “she’s trying to “understand” me, she’s doing what I have set to do for myself, because nobody else can do it: make sense out of my suffering, find meaning in the pain and humiliation. She wants to educate me, I am a child once again”: 
  Anirudh’s drama is that he cannot “see” like a child sees, through love. He hasn’t yet reached the point where he can “change and become as little children” (Matthew 18,3). Indeed, such a change requires one to have gone through a process of abandonment; to reach this state where you can see the Others around you as divine images and become their child, so to speak, you must accept who you are, you must even forget who you are, forget your indulging quest for yourself, and extract yourself from yourself. He hasn’t yet suffered enough, perhaps, or conversely, he has suffered too much and isn’t healed yet. He cannot see that Kavita’s love is this healing. He believes he can heal himself on his own, through his own efforts. Conversion is precisely that: accept to be healed by another. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” healing comes when one recognises that efforts alone, no matter how in earnest, cannot save us.
Now Kavita too has suffered: but what makes the difference between the two of them? How come she’s the one who “sees”, whereas he’s “blind”? She’s also been shut up in herself, and has had to reconstruct a broken ego. Why can she love authentically, and not him? The answer is in the film’s title: Sparsh, touch. Kavita’s change (her conversion) has come about through a touch: she’s been touched, that’s how children have converted her and brought her to the school, where she’s sloughed off that old nostalgic self. We often see Kavita’s hands, they’re the physical and at the same time spiritual means which has saved her, and why she will be able to save Anirudh: she’ll touch him, and cure his sickness, she’ll finally be able do that miracle. (Well, in fact the last move will be operated through Manju, Kavita’s friend, but in essence, everything Kavita has done before has enabled Anirudh to finally open his ears to what Manju tells him, and let go of himself).
The theme of touching has been the subject of other “meditations” on this blog (Sujata, for example, or Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable). Blind people operate with hearing, smell and touch. Hearing is of course the primary sense for them, but touching is much developed too. What’s therefore surprising is that Anirudh’s sense of touch isn’t as sensitive as Kavita’s, who normally doesn’t need it so much and, according to the Darwinian law of need creating the function, shouldn’t have developed it all that much. One clue is the conversation which they have around the theme of darkness, at Kavita’s house one day. “Please leave me alone in my city of darkness”, says Anirudh, hurt because he cannot make her understand he isn’t ready for her love. “I too am living in the dark”, she answers. And then she suggests:  
A beautiful passage indeed, which demonstrates Sai Paranjpe’s art as a writer, but which also explains the two different uses of touch exemplified by the two characters. Anirudh’s blindness has made him develop a certain sense of touch, of course, but he’s been blind to realities which have also stunted it. Kavita, on the other hand, has felt her way out of her darkness thanks to the light of love, and now she knows the way out. If only he’d let her, she could teach him how to feel his way out from the sombre pit of anger and self-pity. Anirudh is locked in the cave of his own making, and it’s all the more poignant as he’s so keenly in need of her touch: 
      

For me, the photo on the right shows a very distressing moment, when Anirudh tries to make the miracle happen. In the gospel, the divine healer also had put his hand on the blind man’s eyes, mixing it with dirt, and this had healed him. It seems here that Anirudh is trying to reproduce that moment, and wanting love to perform the same miracle. Out there on the lawn, in the famous scene when the pair evoke Kavita’s beauty, everything was so right: Anirudh had perfectly understood (= his blindness had wonderfully prepared him to understand) that real beauty belongs to the invisible realm of the person’s inner sanctum. Even if the film-maker makes us at that moment contemplate Shabana Azmi’s flamboyant physical beauty, even if the scene, as somebody says somewhere, is full of erotic magic, nevertheless it opens onto the silent world of touch, where we are all equal, all children of one Creator of velvety softness. 
One last discovery in Sparsh: at one point, Kavita declares something which is misunderstood by Anirudh. For her “love isn’t everything in life”, and she explains that she has a “duty” to perform: she has remained too long pent-up in herself. Now is the time for opening up, doing something no longer for herself alone, but for “everybody”, as she puts it, and Anirudh is part of that plan. She will no longer think about herself anymore. But he sees that as nothing more than a sacrifice; in fact he has a simplistic understanding of sacrifice. He cannot perceive its transformative process, how it enables somebody to merge into a vast and infinite dimension. Kavita for him is only involved in a pact with herself. And so logically he refuses that. He refuses her to become Gandhari, who, according to the myth, was said to have had one hundred children! 100! I think the incredible record for a single woman is 68, astounding as it sounds. But one hundred, this figure clearly means that Kavita is going to love and nurture as many children as she can, she is going to multiply her attention to reach out and help as many as it takes. Perhaps Anirudh confusedly feels this “sacrifice” in fact sacrifices him!
To round off this long review, just to say that the two leads are excellent, perhaps Shabana Azmi even greater than Naseer, who pulls off a superb performance. We can actually see in him Anirudh the blind headmaster, and he’s very convincing. But Shabanaji, ah, she’s perfect, there a dedication, an effortlessness in her acting which distinguishes her as one of the magnificent actresses of her age. Her Kavita is a constant delight to watch and one falls in love with her promptly: anyway, she’s said it: she’s going to love everybody!

What is the soul of poetry? Isn’t it a kind of universal music which, universal as it is, springs fresh and clear from a homely and unique source of inspiration? When Tagore writes:

Nahin kisi ko pata kahaan mere raja ka rajmahal

Agar jaante log, mahal ye thik pata kya ek pal

I hear a very Indian voice evoking a king’s palace and telling us that even if it is made of gold and silver, in the reality of whispering truth it stands “at the corner of our terrace where the tulsi-plant grows”. The tulsi is that traditional little tree in the centre of the courtyard, the same aromatic plant we in the West know as Basil (etymologically the king) which means immortality in Hinduism, and is associated to Lakshmi, the home-Goddess, and Sita the perfect wife (see here). So this evocation is localized, but universal too because it comes in the shape of a common mystery: nobody knows where my king’s palace is… and if they knew, it would vanish into the air… this palace is really a corner of our terrace where the sacred tulsi stands… All lovers of poetry can recognize the theme of knowledge, unattainably noble and intimate, yet simple and close at hand, present in the secret of everlasting life.

Why I have started with Tagore and tulsi will hopefully soon come clear in this presentation of Ritwik Ghatak’s classic masterpiece Subarnarekha (1962) which tells of the dramatic life of Bengali refugees near Calcutta in the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal in1947. We start with the life inside a refugee camp where two teachers, Haraprasad and Ishwar, are setting up an Indian school for the camp’s children. The first will teach Sanskrit and Bengali, the second English and History. This is to be part of a newly established Hindu settlement of refuges in India’s West Bengal province. From the start one feels the anguish of exile and homelessness; the theme of the lost home is constant. We focus on Ishwar’s “sister” (is she really, though, because she calls Haraprasad her brother too), young Sita, and Aviram, the boy of a low-caste woman from Dacca who tries to get admission in the camp, but is refused, because of the ever present Hindu caste system (“If we can’t keep the difference, what are we left with?”). But an incident happens: some thugs of a local landowner come to move the refugees off his (uncultivable) lands, and Aviram’s mother gets caught in this batch of people. “New Life colony” starts as all new settlements, amid deprivation, hope and strife.

Around the period of Gandhi’s assassination (which makes Haraprasad say “somewhere we have been duped”), educated Ishwar soon gets a job offer from an old college friend of his who works in the neighbourhood. He is to supervise some business at a foundry in a village (Chhatimpur) in the country. The pay is meagre, and he hesitates, but then accepts for the sake of the children. Haraprasad libels him as a coward and a deserter. For him, he is leaving the cause of the foundation of a new Bengal. But Ishwar isn’t an idealist; he’s an anxious, meditative, withdrawn sort of man. The first part of the film shows him in a very positive light, full of care and warmth, smilingly attentive to the children he has to look after, and very close to them. He sends Aviram to college and makes sure that the boy doesn’t mind; he agrees to have Sati instructed by a music-teacher. He keeps Aviram with him in spite of his low-caste, and only changes when his boss, a very religious man, has noticed the problem and this threatens his job.

But from then on, things alter. Ishwar becomes caste-conscious and this triggers a series of transformations around him: Aviram, who has fallen in love with his childhood friend Sita, is forbiddent to marry her, and has to leave for Germany to study engineering, whereas he wants to be a writer. Ishwar, who has recently been promoted at the foundry, starts asking suitors to come and see the girl. In spite of fierce opposition from Sita, he hastens the wedding day, but before she is tied with her brother’s choice of a husband, the two young lovers run away to Calcutta, where they start a family. The story resumes some years later, Sita now has a 5 year old boy, Binu, and Aviram finally finds a job as bus-driver (writing hasn’t brought him anything – a scene at the beginning, where we saw a rookie journalist being asked to cheat if he wants to stay in the job gives the key to this passage). But then a catastrophe occurs: the company gives him a brakeless bus, and he runs over a little girl. The angry crowd burns him alive in his bus. Sita stays alone.

All this time back in Chhatimpur, near the Subarnarekha river, Ishwar has been on his own, guilt-ridden and sombre. One night, he decides life isn’t worth living any more. But he’s interrupted by a ghost from his past: Haraprasad, who’s lost everything as well and has come to see the old “deserter” because the latter has the advantage of being much wealthier than him. He stops him from committing suicide, and takes on a “devil’s” tour of the night-life in Calcutta. Ishwar, who had been dejected and miserable, but had kept his honour, now loses that in despair. He leaves the river’s edge to follow his old enemy and tempter. In Calcutta, half lucid, half raving, they transgress all the rules, they party, drink, revel end up at a brothel. Ishwar has miraculously driven there because his glasses have fallen and been broken in a bar. At the brothel, he is led to a girl for whom it’s her first client (a well-sought after bonus), and he doesn’t see who she is. The coincidence (but with an obvious heavily symbolical significance) is that it’s Sita, who of course recognises him immediately and slices her throat before he can touch her. He then recognizes her and then breaks down madly, accusing himself of having murdered her.

The epilogue happens two years later, after a legal struggle has proven him innocent of his sister’s death, and he gets to look after Binu. He goes back to Chhatimpur, and even if he learns en route that he has been dismissed, he nevertheless continues onwards towards the new home that he has promised to give little Binu, and where the boy hopes to be reunited with his mother and father. What a grim story, one might say. The director explains (here) he had to face his contemporaries’ opinion that he’d shot a pessimistic, desperate portrayal of India’s origins, and we can understand why. The movie didn’t meet with success, and had to wait for the audiences to mature and see its worth. What then has ensured Subarnarekha’s fame? Why is it recognised as one of Indian cinema’s undying masterpieces?

I believe it’s because it has a universal content, and that what is shown of West Bengal’s origins can refer to all stories of origins. There is an archetypal value in Ishwar’s foundation of a new home away from his own, with his two little ones who (like in Ray’s Pather panchali) discover and recreate the world’s beauty with their childhood’s innocence while the grownups struggle in the fallen world of men. But more than Ray, Ritwik Ghatak insists on the opposition between the potential of recreation and the destructive forces of society. The opposition between youth and middle-age is thus fierce and unforgiving. It is represented by the feud between Ishwar and Sita, which begins when Ishwar believes he has to separate her from her lover, and he reverts to violence whereas until then he had never had with her but tenderness and affection.

The conflict is so unexpected and sudden that the spectator has to bring in other subterranean force to explain his reversal. We have this sublime scene when Sita agrees to represent Ishwar’s mother because he says he has lost her, and she bends over him and, lover-like, brushes the words against his ear, and soon after there is this exchange of iron-cold stares between them. Ishwar’s kind face becomes frigidly fierce, and Sita shows hers in the achingly false bridal attire which she puts on to show her beloved brother how changed he has become. In Subarnarekha, a lot happens on the characters’ faces. The facial symbols are strong, from the nightmarish apparition of the harlequin in Sita’s dream-like childhood, to the evil transformation on Ishwar’s face in the second half, and Sita’s final transfixed Fear. There are also the timeless instants when Sita sings and the universe stops for a time at her voice.

Then film explores the silence of closed eyes, for example when, in a scene of absolute purity and beauty, the two lovers, both grown and yet delicately chaste, go out in the woods and, sitting among the forest of frail white trunks, are felt to rise inwardly towards their common sky, and we know this is their revelation, this is when their soul blooms and its perfume wafts out towards their mate. Certain rare flowers in high lost places also have this fleeting moment of fecundity when their species can propagate before shutting back into undifferentiated greenness. Those who are lucky to witness this moment keep it as a beautiful secret.

The tragedy of the story (which transmutes into its hope) lies in Sita’s curse: it seems that from the start, she is doomed to grow up too fast, and confront the sinful reality of violence, desecration and death. Her figure, saintly and achingly beautiful, falls and suffers so much that one wonders if and wherefrom any redemption might come. The forces of evil erupt and seize Ishwar so fiercely that one is left with only tears and desolation, it seems. Have exile and loss and absurdity been too strong? Have their poison been too virulent? The author, most surprisingly says no, life, struck and cripple as it is, continues to flower and bring forth its immemorial hope that one day, the garden will again be open and men will live there in peace. Little Binu represents this frail new life, with its amazing resilience.

Finally Subarnarekha, which documents the calamity of displacement and exile, touches because this historical account rises to a universal and beautiful portrayal of men exiled on Earth and forced to live the violence of birth, love and death. There is little freedom in such a life; one quickly thirsts for the eternal home which was lost long ago, and there is barely enough time to see all the beauty of life before it shuts your eyes once again. The winner in the cyclical movement of birth and rebirth is Life itself, and humanity in its essence, more than the fragile individual: « Victory to man, to this newborn, ever living ».

The movie can be seen in 13 instalments on youtube.

The cinematographic monument Mera naam Joker, which was directed, produced and starred by Raj Kapoor took 6 years to complete, cost millions and was a catastrophic flop when it came out in 1972 (see the wikipedia page). No wonder: the first version was more than 5 hours long! And even in its present length of 3 hours 44 minutes, it has two intermissions. Each of its three main episodes could almost be a full feature. Yet the movie has everything one could wish: Raj Kapoor at the steering wheel, a crowd of great actors and beautiful girls, romance, humour, great moments of showmanship: so why the disappointment? On Imdb somebody comes up with this explanation: “This supposedly autobiographical epic tale from Raj Kapoor broke all film-making conventions of '70s India. It was too long, there was no constant heroine and the hero never won.” Indeed, the movie is probably too raj-kapooresque for its own good. It seems it must be an essential piece of incriminating evidence in the enduring blogosphere RK bashing… or is it? Well, here goes, let’s see!

It opens on a clever piece of self-promotional derision which probably contains the key to the movie’s enigma: some important people, whom at first we now nothing about, are welcomed to the first seats of a circus and when the show begins, we are told in a grandiloquent manner that this is the final show of the company’s well-known clown, Raju. And sure enough, he soon pops out of a heart which represents his love of the stage, of life… and perhaps of himself. But a real funny scene follows: a bunch of hysterical surgeons, as clownish as Raju himself, rush to explain that his heart is too big, he has to undergo an operation, otherwise he will die! He protests, but they drag him to the operation table and in an accelerated Chaplinesque way, fight and fuss around his reclining body before uniting to pull out (with a huge pair of tweezers) the swollen heart. All this while, the VIP onlookers have been seen to wonder at the allegory, which of course is clear: the film is going to be an exploration of Raju’s overgrown heart; we are going to be shown what it costs to love too much. But before we enter the movie per se, let’s listen to Raju’s answer. It sums up both his mission as a clown, and the ambiguity of freedom vs determinism. Whose fault is it if he has loved to excess?

It’s never a simple task to tell one’s own story. By definition, one is still alive when the task is attempted. So even if one starts with the beginning, childhood, then youth, etc. one is quickly assailed by questions such as: do I say this? Do I leave that unsaid? What will “he” or “she” or “they” think if I dare speak about this event, and what if I don’t? Very cleverly, Raj Kapoor has chosen an avatar of himself, the joker, to deflect what might have been too personal in the story of his life; he has also decided to focus on only three, symbolical, episodes; and unless one knows his real biography, it’s difficult to say whether these episodes even refer to real relationships. Clearly though, there is a progression. We go from aching initiation (Mary), to pure love (Marina), and finally to deceitful seduction (Meena). In itself, this sequence contains a pessimistic teaching: love and happiness do not go hand in hand; one cannot both have a heart and master it. The fact that RK has built his film around these three women also reveals both his strength and his weakness. Any true hero would have been faithful to one only. But the realism of these three figures gives the movie a power that legend doesn’t have. An undercurrent of confession lurks beneath the archetypal characters. Besides, which man, even if happily married all along to one single wife, has loved only one woman in his life? (The same works for women of course). For all its allegorical dimension, Mera naam Joker is thus founded on serious stuff: life itself.

First icon in the gallery: Mary (Simi Garewal, who cannot act, but this won’t be held against her), the perfect teacher of love. When she arrives in Raju’s class one day, they’re all prepared: this replacement teacher is going to be lampooned big time. But she enters the room coolly, and upon looking at her caricature on the board, says: is this me? Every representative of the male sex present in the room only has to look at her, and then back to the board to admit there’s a huge difference… And she laughs them all into exquisite submission. From then on, a slightly podgy Raju (young Rishi Kapoor) will pour all his love on this not so old educator, just because she has a certain sense of justice and believes everyone should be treated equal, whether lean or fat. The fatso will grow to become the best student in the class because nobody else has ever paid attention to him, and this beautiful teacher will become his guru: simple, isn’t it? Well, only on the surface. Because there are enough signs from Raj Kapoor the string-puller at the back that whatever is presented as a coming-of-age story was in fact (perhaps) a more sombre story. At least for young Raju, if not for Mary herself (whoever she is hiding). Look for instance at this picture of her wedding:

Isn’t this almost panicky glance, half-hidden behind the white veil, the sign of a secret which young Raju cannot fathom (or openly admit to)? His question, “What must I do?”: who is actually asking it? Isn’t it Raj Kapoor himself, confronted to existential choices for which his film is a kind of answer? Shouldn’t we understand this interrogation as passing through all the film? What must I do if life and love have made me who I am? Should I hide what I think is most magnificent and transcendent for a man in this world: the love for women and their beauty, just because religion, morals and propriety oblige us to hide it? Of course we have to respect women themselves, their intimacy, their feelings, their own desires. But we owe them the truth which their social role denies them so often. Is it wrong to suggest that a young teacher, the moment she’s getting married, feels an attraction for one of her students? What should I decide (RK might have been saying), knowing that my films are going to reach millions and that what I say, perhaps too daringly, will remain in the public’s memory and shape the educational standards of the next generations? In fact this question of choice or decision is recurrent in the movie: 

Raju himself, and many other characters, are faced with the moral question of which way to choose or which decision to take. In this sense, Mera naam joker is an adult’s movie, and it perhaps isn’t very surprising that it flopped: as a rule, audiences come to watch pictures with a child’s mind: they want clearcut options of what is good and bad, they want goodies and villains, reward and punishment. The kind of complexity which is apparent in the first episode, with Mary the temptress teacher and initiator to desire, is hardly meant for them. 

The second episode with Marina is morally less difficult; it’s more in the aesthetic field. It owes its attraction to Kseniya Ryabinkina, an actual Russian ballet dancer from the Bolshoi, whom RK probably got to know because of his huge success in the USSR, where hits like his Awaara were appreciated. She’s a Madonna type beauty, a Leonardo, with her hair neatly parted on each side, and her wistful airs from a faraway North. Her charm also comes from her ignorance of Hindi, and the slow progress she makes throughout the episode with her funny accent (it was great, I could understand everything she said! I mean, in hindi, not in Russian!).

It’s clear she represents ideal love; she’s an archetype for a love so wonderful and simple that it somehow doesn’t belong to this Earth. Otherworldliness was clear in her job: Marina is a flying trapezist, she swings and jumps far too high for a clumsy clown like Raju to bond with her. Yet the story makes her notice him and, like the legend of the worm in love with a star, she befriends him and caresses him like only angels can. It is within her story that Raj Kapoor focuses on the fourth feminine figure of his film, Raju’s mother. Of course like all mothers, this one desires her son to marry and continue the cycle of life. A lot of good feelings there, perhaps too many for the movie’s good, but well, this is RK’s, sensitive chord. He allows himself to show his self-pity in such a way that it’s almost painful. We have to watch Raju moping, Raju whining, Raju’s dejected looks…I wish RK hadn’t let himself become overwhelmed by this sentimentality, and I wonder whether he indulged in it because he thought it would make people love him more, or whether he wanted to expose his fragility and thus get rid of it?

Anyway, what Marina does in the story, the figure she cuts, all this is almost nearly always merry and fun. In spite of the mother scenes, with all its crying and imploring, and in spite of Raju’s self-pitying scenes, everything that happens when she is there is bathed in an optimistic light which makes the rest of the film look sombre in comparison. No wonder Raju is so desperate when she leaves. No wonder he is so nostalgic (it is during this episode that we are shown extracts of Shree 420 and Awaara): it is 1972 and for the man he is now, the road is more downhill than uphill. His great successes are behind him, and the kind of love, the kind of fulfilment embodied by Marina belongs to the past. At 48, he cannot hope to find love again.

I don’t know whether she represents somebody in particular, Nargis for example, with whom RK had an affair; I think I don’t care. Of course if it was clearer, it would have to be taken into consideration. But I believe Marina’s more a construction, an idealization which Raj Kapoor has used in order to represent one aspect of love, and of his loving soul. She comes from Russia: he could easily have imagined that his well-known screen persona had burnt itself in the heart of an innocent and dreamy dievouchka, and from there imagine Marina’s character. Apart from being an angel (the airborne and sauntering Marina leaves on board a plane in a very insistent scene), and a fairy – that’s what Raju’s mother calls her,- Marina is Raju’s poetess and interpreter. She literally translates his message to the world, and makes him understand that, like Jesus leaving his disciples and telling them that if he doesn’t go, how will they receive the Holy Spirit, she has to leave him in order for him to continue his mission as clown and more than clown:

Marina’s love belongs not to earthly desire, but to the aspiration towards purity and elevation that we all harbour in our lives. She is the visiting angel which each of us, perhaps, has been lucky to meet once, even if only fleetingly, she is the twinkling star which we can always look up and watch and who can inspire us to be better human beings. After she leaves, Raju and Ustad are observing the departing plane, and Raju, visibly aged and reminded at that moment of the famous song “Awaara hoon” (“my heart is filled with pain, but I wear a smile on my face”), looks straight at the camera and at us, perhaps to ask for forgiveness and compassion:

After Marina’s departure, Raju has left the circus, or at least that’s what we guess because he’s wandering alone aimlessly. He’s deserted the company of his fellow men, and he’s an orphan in more than one sense. The moment is ripe for his meeting with his last feminine figure, who nevertheless appears to him as a man, or rather as a boy. (We have to accept Raju’s delusion, because for us spectators, Padmini is so obviously feminine, even with her short hair, that we cannot mistake her for a boy!) This encounter is perhaps the most developed, the most meaningful and probably the deepest in terms of autobiographical content (could she represent Vijayanthimala, with whom he’d shot Sangam, and who, even if she denies it, probably had an affair with RK). Meena’s story is a complete chronicle of illusion and delusion, of trust and betrayal, which could have justified a movie in itself. Raj Kapoor has portrayed it with consummate art, and including it in Mera naam joker has elevated it to a universality which leaves one wondering what were for him the links of life and the screen. Somehow we’re not so far from Guru Dutt and his meditation on their connection (see kaagaz ke phool). A sense of tragic nostalgia pervades both works.

So Raju meets a boy, called Minoo, and they enter a kind of contract: s/he has a dog, they could train it and start up a travelling circus sort of business. He’s a clown, s/he has a shack where they could live. Soon nevertheless this contract breaks down: Raju discovers Minoo is in fact Meena. He decides to leave her, but she tells him she loves him, and so they stay together. This time she plays feminine roles and is so successful that their little drama shows attract more and more people, among whom professionals who ask them to perform in real showrooms here and there around the country. Finally, one day, Meena’s spotted by a cinema producer (Rajendra Kumar) in search for “new faces”: she must choose between her association with Raju and her dream of becoming a movie-star, idolized and famous, at last. The temptation is too strong, and she leaves him.

There is something profoundly pathetic in Meena’s episode; she genuinely loves and needs Raju, who tells her the truth about herself (“enter the world as your real self”, he tells her while gifting her a woman’s sari), yet she is manipulated by her ambition and thirst for self-accomplishment to the point that she will break his heart, a heart swollen from its love-disease. Inside her, a kind of devil was present from the start, and she has listened to it too much. At least this is what I believe Raj Kapoor is telling us. There is in some women (in men too, arguably, but in women it seems more catastrophic perhaps) a desire to use the beauty and power they have been given from above for their own personal use, and because they have so long and so constantly been deprived of the possibility, they somehow get their revenge on men this way. Such an interpretation of Meena’s attitude is too strong, I feel, but RK’s pessimistic attitude makes me say this nevertheless.

Naturally things could also have been disenchanted by Raju’s despair and diseased mind: he has been initiated to the intoxication of love and to women’s power, and this makes him a half-consenting victim. He falls into Meena’s ageless trap very easily. Her charms operate on him only too easily! And Raj Kapoor delights at both showing them to us (it seems he’s saying: “look how adorable she was”), and denouncing them (“she’s like a devil, she’s impossible to resist”). RK possesses perhaps even more a Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde ambiguity as Meena herself! Here’s Meena in all her glory:

And here she is in her treachery:

There’s even a picture where I fancy RK wanted her to appear almost snake-like, where she implores Raju with her tongue between her teeth:

Do you remember this scene? It’s when she wanders after him, alone in her sari through the strangely empty and misty streets and in which, it seems, by her very appearance, she causes that extraordinary storm to happen. She first wanders solitary, and finally she finds Raju brooding inside one of the concrete pipes lying around their unfinished neighbourhood: but what a brilliant piece of cinema! It’s both expressionistic and oneiric, reminiscent of the scene of the Fall (Genesis 3) where Adam and Eve, after their sin, are chased away from the garden of Eden by a wrathful God and must seek protection against new forces with no other help than their own, hampered by their guilt and misery, and watched by the frightening new power of their conscience (here in the shape of an enormous eye):

There’s a drama in this scene which doesn’t seem to correspond to the story. After all, what has happened? Only Raju discovering Meena was in fact a woman… Why does he disappear like that? What is he escaping from? From love? Yes, but isn’t it as much Raj Kapoor himself as his clownish double who is running away? And if this is so, isn’t he making an autobiographical and retrospective statement about the love he has given, perhaps unwisely? Raj Kapoor multiplies, mirror-like, all his warnings and curses against the dangers of excessive love:

And at the same time, he underlines the various avatars in which Meena appears. Her transmutation from “uncut diamond” to priceless (media) jewel is used to warn his audience against the maya of feminine beauty for which he has, it seems, paid such a heavy price.

We are left, at the end of this long review, with the question: What’s a joker? Raj Kapoor fancied himself as a clown, a joker. He has his joker doll which he passes on to each of the feminine figures he meets in his life, but they all reject it. None of them will keep it. It’s difficult to say whether RK wants us to accept this as his destiny, or whether it’s a result of his unlucky starlit life. In one scene with David, Mary’s fiancé, he suggests that “God is the greatest joker of all”. I don’t think we should take this assimilation to mean that RK seems himself as god on Earth (at one stage, he’s even “found guilty of being human”), but rather that what he has tried to do, luck and unluck put together, has been a divine mission, that of entertaining crowds through art and fun. Of course the difficulty of passing on this message about himself doesn’t quite merge with the actual entertainment. One doesn’t go to the cinema to have the director tell us, even through a namesake, what mission he thinks he has! So it’s logical MNJ didn’t have for the public the importance it had for RK himself. But being a joker carries also the sorry acknowledgment that RK might have been only that, nothing more… Women don’t want to become the partners of a clown, and perhaps Raj Kapoor’s disillusioned goodbye in the end is telling us that his star-studded path has in fact been more Hell than Heaven? Watch the film and decide for yourself.

I have read so often about Raj Kapoor’s last movie, Ram teri Ganga maili (1985, Ram, your Ganga is sullied), that I wanted to have a personal opinion about it. The movie has itself been sullied as obsessively concerned with Mandakini’s nakedness and the director himself as a scandalous and ageing admirer of young feminine beauties. If you haven’t seen the movie, and you google the film’s name, you’ll inevitably summon up the “hot” waterfall scene, of course quite innocuous by today’s movie standards, but which sparked the censors’ condemnation. We can start talking about that, and get it out of the way.

Ganga (which refers both to the girl and the river) was born in the Himalayan Mountains, and lives up there a rustic life until she meets Naren (Rajiv Kapoor), a kindly lad from Calcutta, where the river flows into the Ocean. He’s full of naïve ideals (his heinous Industrialist Daddy cannot understand why he reads about Vivekananda and rejects the values of money), and so is she, of course, born as she is near the heavens and bathed by the pure icy streams. Well, precisely, not so icy because, even though she’s got a hard skin that the poor city dweller doesn’t have (reference to a totally corny scene where she crosses a river barefoot, and he whines and pouts, until she kisses him), she can shower near the glacier with only a see-thru thing on her… Right, so yes, this scene is not very useful in terms of the movie’s message! But it does help attract him to her: they marry and consume their union, in spite of an incredible family feud, which ends in a bloodbath while they are busy lovemaking in the temple that night!

But it would be a pity to restrict the film to RK’s lasciviousness (because, they’re right, there is that other breast-baring scene in the train!!). The film’s idea, for example, I found a rather good one: it’s a parallel between the river Ganges flowing from its pure sources to its polluted estuary in Calcutta, and Ganga’s downfall from innocence to ruin, as she follows the river on her way to find the father of her child in the capital.

          
On the way, we see her fall prey to profiteers and thieves, who notice her beauty and charms; she’s saved by the wife of a lecherous priest in Benares, and put back on the train by a considerate policeman; but en route she’s spirited away to a music school (a “blind” tout has noticed her singing on the train), where her talents are noticed by high-flying politicians who are paying a visit.

She’s already been considered a prostitute for going around with a child on her own, and now in the music-school, where tawaifs were so common, her downfall from grace has been acted out. Anyway, this is where her story rejoins the film’s other story: Jeeva, Naren’s dad (Kulbhushan Kharbanda, pretty good) is busy obtaining political support for his capitalistic and polluting factory, and has befriended the candidate for a local election soon to take place around the theme of Ganges depollution. This new politician, Bhagwat Choudary (Raza Murad), manipulated by Jeeva, has a daughter who they agree Naren should marry, and the preparations had started just before he left for the Himalayas on an expedition where he was to meet Ganga…

         
Well! So who are the politicians who have just come to listen to Ganga’s improving talents at the music-school? Bhagwat’s gang of course, and as soon as they eyes on her, they stop dead and wonder how they can appropriate her…I think this is Raj Kapoor’s film’s second strength: the gallery of villains. Of course their appearance underlines this, but not only, there’s a real and scathing criticism of vice in the film. Greed, debauchery, vicious cruelty, selfish thirst for power, wilful humiliation of vulnerable human beings, gratuitous slander, and when these wrongs are performed by the powerful, it’s almost impossible to expose them and reform the ills which their power has established in society. In the movie this is done by a rather unexpected righter of wrongs, played by a spirited Saeed Jaffrey.  He’s Kunj, Naren’s uncle, and his reputation is that of an openly recognised brothel owner, so he’s looked down upon by the rest of the family who keep up appearances, at least Jeevan, the corrupted and scrupleless tycoon.

I think the interest of this character is that even though he’s morally degraded, he doesn’t hide it, and therefore unlike the others, doesn’t add hypocrisy to his vices. He’s the only one in the movie who seems neither sanctimoniously candid nor ferociously beastly. In short, he’s an average human being, with his vice but also his honesty and his courage. In fact it’s probably because of his own sins that he has the guts to stand up and denounce the far greater ones of his sanctimonious brother and his hidden corrupted plans: he has no reputation to lose.

Kunj is Raj Kapoor’s spokesman. Raj Kapoor might be equated to a lecherous old man, as is often said: but this has perhaps enabled him to say things unpleasant to see and admit, because falling from grace is never pleasant. Perhaps living in the real world boils down to that: reality isn’t only music, dancing and simplistic, sugar-coated feelings, like too much of Bollywood would like to have it. Under luxury and glitz, there’s money; under money, there’s greed; under greed, there’s the growl of power, there’s the wolf waiting for the lamb. This might sound cynical especially when one knows that RTGM was RK’s farewell to the silver screen, but well, it’s also the voice of experience.

The “lamb”, in Ram teri Ganga maili, after being compared to her predators, comes out rather human. Her trip to Calcutta provides us with the right portrait of her. If you have in mind the Ganga from the first half of the film, she’s pathetic; but the battling, sneering mother of the second half shows the little that Mandakini was able to do. Unfortunately, even that little doesn’t come from Rajiv Kapoor who, I hear, didn’t pursue a very long film career … BTW, had he lived, I wonder what Raj Kapoor would have felt in front of Aishwarya Rai: his filming of a radiant Mandakini certainly feels like he had a tender spot for the likes of her: