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 Until then lost in a withdrawn, nostalgic past, she finds a new present, and the promise of an undreamt-of future.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!

I thought at first I wouldn’t have much to say about Peepli live (Anusha Rizvi, 2010), but as I started writing, the following article poured out very easily! I had told myself that the film wasn’t much more than a properly engineered denunciation of the antidemocratic shifts in today’s India, plus the scathing condemnation of an economic system that lets its farmers die for lack of any viable support, and somehow I wasn’t very enthusiastic. Perhaps the film was too much of a documentary nature? It’s true that this is one of my limits: I do enjoy a certain amount of glamorization, and lo! There isn’t any in Peepli. The film is also rather dry on beautification, and perhaps for the good reasons: it wants to underline how much the mediatisation of drama turns into a dramatisation of the media, and there isn’t any need to show beauty within that blueprint. Anusha Rizvi goes about her business of constructing her cinematographic argument, and it works all the better as it stands out, like a sharp blade, unhampered by any other intentions.

But the film’s point doesn’t lie with the idealistic and honourable Rakesh. It focuses on what Nandita answers him, when he asks her what importance Natha has for the media:
- A farmer is committing suicide because he’s in debt. You don’t think that’s important?
- Yes, it’s important. But there are other farmers too in this village. Aren’t they equally important?
- You don’t just abandon a story midway Rakesh, and move on to something else. No. You’ve got to follow it right to its conclusion.
Rakesh then tells Nandita about Hori Mahato, how he died from absolute abandonment and misery. Nandita answers:
- Let me try and explain this to you. Research shows our audience is interested only in Natha. Do you know why? Because he is the original live suicider. Do you have any idea how big this is?
So now we have it. Here we can understand what the film is doing. Natha is the “original live suicider”. I don’t need to underline the fantastic paradox for a man to be considered a “live suicider”; what is clearly important to the media is the “live” dimension. Hori wasn’t seen dying live. But Natha holds the promise of doing so. Not only that, but he represents a “story”, that is to say he can ensure the media importance and purposefulness. Thanks to him, a channel gets to be watched as much as its “hero”. In fact, it gets to be watched more so, because it can multiply news items around the hero (interviews with the hero’s family, specialists speaking about hero-related problems, updates on the hero’s likes and dislikes…). Nandita’s channel is thus guaranteed a life thanks to the promise of death. Vulture-like, the journalist watches (and directs its spectators towards the show – its cameras are like loaded guns) what it has reason to believe is a dying prey, and what everybody needs to see as a result is no longer the sociological or political unravelling of the causes explaining why such a man is going to die, but an “original” event which  normally belongs to the intimacy of the self and perhaps close family and friends – a man’s decision to end his life on this Earth.
So the film’s strength lies in this powerful exposure of the media carrion-feeder’s status. Its “live” film-mode doesn’t mean it’s showing any authentic or real objects: it’s a killing process. It isn’t interested in poverty, exploitation or oppression. It isn’t a democratic tool aimed at bettering the lives of people thanks to its confrontational methods or its uncovering of untruths. It is pandering to a lecherously prying audience, which as a result isn’t educated to a better understanding of society and social ills – one of the upheld “noble” aims of the media, this indispensable fourth power of any serious democracy. Instead it creates exactly the opposite. It hides the social injustice and oppression by focusing on the sensational and voyeuristic desire of common people to see in other people’s minds and hearts. It panders to that transgressive urge to know what should remain private and intimate. It is procuring this drug to an already addicted audience, and this makes it as tragically blind as the audience who believe what they are shown because it’s apparently professionally done.
What do people want to see most? Sex and death. This association of primal violence corresponds to a deep and elemental anguish: where do I come from? Where am I heading to? Sex correspond to the mystery of birth, and Death to the enigma of life. Nandita speaks about Natha as being “the original live suicider”. “Original” refers to both life and death, because our origin as human beings belongs as much to birth as to death. Both have an essential connection to our essence as men. You cannot speak about a man until it is born, of course, but what would a man be if he didn’t die? He would be a god, not a man. If one can watch death happening, as under a telescope, perhaps it will help relieve our quest and our fear a little. And if it’s done on this truth-revealing machine that we call the TV, then it possesses an attraction which cannot be resisted.
Natha is transformed into a man who will commit suicide in the face of the media. Note that he is made to be that; he himself isn’t willing at all. So what we see then is the hysteria of a whole nation involved in the observation of the impending suppression of a man’s self. If a whole nation is made thus to observe one such man magnified to national proportions, doesn’t it come close to observing itself dying? This is perhaps the ultimate phantasm: kill yourself and watch yourself doing so, whereas normally death is precisely what stops you from watching any more. One cannot watch one’s own death. And if one does, one dies. Now I realize that these statements are symbolical, but symbols have a lot of power.
One scene that had me in fits was the one following Natha’s disappearance. Taking advantage of the dawn when everyone including the soldiers, the journalists and the family, is busy more about themselves than others, Natha goes to relieve himself. He’s nevertheless spotted by one journalist who sends his cameraman up the makeshift tower to film him. We see him at first, but then: he’s gone! The scene that follows is pure delight. The whole nation seems to wake up to the shock. We see newspapers boys crying the event, anchormen analysing it, politicians taking their varied stances about it, and on the spot where Natha was last seen pushing hard, one senior reporter (Nandita’s rival channel’s head reporter) gets the essential piece of news:
It’s a great joke, but with a sting in it, don’t you think? Oh, and another great one: one day, crimson-scarf Pappulal, the leader of the dalit party comes to Peepli to honour Natha as the fighter of the cause of the poor – guess what he presents him with?
And last but not least, these are the most important words of the speech he delivers:

(1).  The film brings in Naseeruddin Shah as Salim, the soft-spoken, wily minister of Agriculture. See top pic!

(2). A piece of information coming from Deepti Sharma, one of Carla’s commentators on her blog : this name is a reference to “Munshi Premchand's celebrated novel Godaan. Many decades ago, this beautifully written Hindi novel explored the sad plight of debt-ridden farmers as well as the great divide between urban and rural India. The old farmer in this film is even named after the protagonist of that novel, Hori Mahto. Much like his namesake, Hori in the novel fights a losing battle against debts throughout his life, and towards the end, deprived of his land, is reduced to undignified labor at a road construction.”

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.

In Chhalia (Manmohan Desai, 1960), we have another of Raj Kapoor’s avatars: his character personifies a “chhaliya”, translated by

Chhalia intervenes when Shanti – Sita like - has been rebuked by both her family and her husband, who both had come to meet her at her arrival in the refugee location in Delhi. Her father considers she is now a stain on the family (probably because she’s stayed so long in Pakistan, land of the Ravana-like Muslim arch enemy) and refuses to acknowledge her as his daughter; and her husband, who had wanted to welcome her back (and had parted with his family for her) now shuns her because the 5 year old son she bore him is called by an Islamic name (Anwar) and says his father is “Abdul Rehman”. But nothing Shanti can say softens the outraged Kewal-Rama! Chhalia saves the desperate young woman from committing suicide, brings her to his shack where she recovers somewhat, especially when she realises that her son has been admitted in the school where her husband, whom she hopes to reunite with some day, is a teacher.

What happens next is Chhalia struggling to express his love for Shanti and at the same time being forced to hide it, perhaps at first because he feels it isn’t requited, and later when she tells him she’s faithful to her husband’s love, he recognises he had been foolish. And because she’s called Shanti (peace), the political allegory is clear: continuing rivalry and enmity are wrong between the two countries who should be united like husband and wife. So it’s a surprise when Abdul Rehman, the grave Pathan, arrives on the scene, and tries to settle an unexplained feud with Chhalia. But the latter represents India, which is perhaps the real cheat, politically speaking. So their fight must represent the war between the two cross-border foes. And of course it is Shanti who stops the fight. Rehman recognises her voice from when she used to stay with him, and abandons his futile warring. He goes back, and meets with his lost sister on the train. So his sheltering of Shanti during the five years when she was in Pakistan finds its reward.

Chhalia now understands his mission. Forgetting his selfish love, he now does everything he can to reunite the wronged Sita to her Rama, who is still brooding about his cheated situation. The first thing he does is make Kewal-Rama accept his son, who figuratively means the fruit of peace. He goes to Kewal’s dwelling, and confronts him with his boy. And when Kewal rebuffs him saying he doesn’t have any proof of his fatherhood, Chhalia cleverly challenges this misplaced appeal for proof:

Man cannot prove much, says Chhalia (who could be Manmohan Desai’s mouthpiece here), and the more he tries to reduce human relationships, which must at all cost be based on trust, to a proof-based contract, he destroys the necessary bond of confidence between men. The lesson of Rama accepting Sita back after her trial of fire (note the choice of this version of the Ramayana, as opposed to the one in which Sita isn’t trusted and not reunited with her husband) corresponds to India accepting Pakistan after the ordeal of war, and basing the new political reality on the fruits of peace.

The film’s climax is the moment when Chhalia manages to reunite the estranged couple, and this is done thanks to the symbolical burning of the formidable figure of Ravana, and the fright it creates for Sita’s life, as Shanti is narrowly saved from the falling burning effigy. The crowds at the Vijayadashami festival could represent the Indian population agreeing to reinstate peace within its midst. The power of cinema is that of a political utopia: that of proposing a future for the two new neighbours based on peace and enduring trust.

A few words about the two main actors; Raj Kapoor does his best to second Nutan, and occasionally reaches moments of convincing characterization, for example during the classic song Dum dum diga diga, where he saunters under the monsoon rain, and playfully dances with the passers-by:

But the palm undoubtedly goes to Nutan, who once again carries the movie, not only symbolically as the flag of peace, but professionally. Her acting is flawless, and thanks to her we suffer when she suffers (for example when she’s rejected by her relatives upon arrival in India):

we rejoice when she rejoices (the moments when she unwittingly waxes tender with Chhalia):

and we hope and dream when she too hopes and dreams (the moment when she’s looking at Kewal taking little Anwar in his arms and in effect adopting him):

She’s our interpret, she carries our emotions and expresses them to their realistic maximum. And there are some moments when she has been almost amorously caressed by the camera:

When one is familiar with the political and historical level of meaning of her adventure, one cannot refrain from loading everything that happens to her with that meaning, and her story becomes beautiful indeed. In the history of the subcontinent, Peace was indeed first espoused, and then wilfully rejected, before it became once again the object of hope and negotiations. The purpose of peace is also greater than what was historically achieved: peace is always ahead of its limited realizations; it is always greater than the flawed attempts which bipartisan negotiations implement. It acts as a ferment, as an incentive, as a desire which is always working from inside in our efforts towards accomplishment. Nutan was wonderfully chosen for such a mission.

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 owe Sharmi an IOU because she’s the lover of “threadbare movies” who watched and beautifully reviewed Satyajit Ray’s Kanchanjangha (1962) on her blog and made me want to watch it! Well, everybody whose review I read (check here and here) calls it a great cinematographic experience, some because of the fact that the film’s story wonderfully fits in the time it takes to be seen, some others because the characters (especially Chhabi Biswas) are so good, others again for…other reasons, but all seem in fact rather puzzling. They do appreciate the movie, that’s for sure, but then why can’t they pinpoint a striking, convincing reason? It’s almost as if they the film’s good on the sole basis that it’s by Satyajit Ray!

First a quick summary of the story if you haven’t seen it. It deals with a well to-do family of five on their last day in Darjeeling: Industrialist Indranath Chowdury, his wife Labanya, their two daughters, younger Monisha (courted by a smart and promising M. Bannerjee) and older Amina, who’s married to dissatisfied Shankar, and with him has a child, little Tuklu; and then there’s Anil who takes advantage of the stay to try his luck at chatting up lady-tourists. On the scene, there’s also Jaganath, Indranath’s brother in law, a widower, and finally young Ashok, who’s introduced to the family by his mentor, who once was Anil’s tutor. and who, upon spotting Indranath, he believes he can secure a job for his charge. The five members of the Chowdury clan are all pursuing something, it seems, or hiding something. Anil is pretending to be jolly in front of his prospective lady-friends, but as soon as they’re out of sight, he’s glum and full of spite. His sister Amina (above), a fine looking woman, hides an affair with a lover she believes her husband knows nothing about, and has to go out in order to read his letters. Her young sister Moni is labouring to elude the insisting courtship of her parents’ approved suitor, and is apparently waiting for something to free her from the trap prepared for her. Their mother, a rather forlorn and brooding lady is clearly hiding her own secret opinions, less because we don’t know them but because they run against those of her husband, formidable Indranath Chowdury. And so, what about him? Is he hiding something too?

The whole film takes place in the late afternoon of the last day of their stay, and we are, like them, plunged in a state of expectancy, even suspense. What for? For the lifting of the mists which are hiding mount Kangchenjunga, India’s highest range and peak, which, as all visitors to Darjeeling know, forms the crowning glory of the resort. But today there are mists, and nothing can be seen, as Indranath tells a fellow visitor at the beginning. So all the events in the family will occur against the background of this potential revelation, when Kanchanjungha will at last reveal its splendour in the skies. Because of this long waiting, everything takes on a note of unfinished business which only the uncovering of the beautiful sight will be able to appease. So revelation is the key word here: revelation is what happens when the veils (the mists) are lifted, when reality or truth appears from behind appearances, when nothing is hidden any more. Revelation is what will happen at the end of the day, when all the protagonists’ stories are unravelled.

Which revelation happens in the story, apart from that of the mountain? First, Kanchanjungha’s apparition at the very end symbolizes the family itself (its name means “the five treasures of snows”: ie, each member will discover their own treasure, up there in the snows), a family who has gotten rid of their pretences and self-screening illusions. Anil must face the fact he isn’t going to succeed with women (and in life) by pretending to be somebody he isn’t. Monisha, thanks to Ashok (it’d be wonderful if his name could somehow be associated with the winds chasing the clouds!), will get rid of her half-truths concerning who she has to marry and obey; Amina of course manages to find the strength to give up her old love “which doesn’t represent anything any more”, and face the truth of her life with Shankar, in spite of his shortcomings. Both their lives had been based on hypocrisy and pretence, so now things can perhaps move forward really. Labanya (the mother), after a moment of solitary meditation but also with the help of her brother in law, finally finds her own solid core when she realises she must support her daughter’s choice of a partner, and so she now has the strength of spirit to confront her husband.

And Indranath also finds his truth, which takes the shape of a young man’s refusal of his advice and help, contrary to everything he had so far assumed belonged to himself in terms of values and merit. Because Ashok refuses to accept Indranath’s offer of a job, and seems to relish in the freedom such a refusal has given him, old Indranath learns the sobering lesson of his own limits. He is suddenly turned into nothing more than the old man he has become, with his outdated aristocratic pride and obsolete colonialist opinions, not unlike the ageing zamindar played by the same Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar. This is what his respectable-looking pater familias figure was hiding: a shameful allegiance to a collaborationist past glory which modern India has to learn to shake off, in order to reach maturity “through [its] own efforts”, as Ashok says to Indranath before laughing at him. Real independence is at that price. The price that Ghandhi’s satyagraha paid, and which many still find too costly and too demanding even today.

In Kanchanjungha, Ray is suggesting that there are moments in life, when circumstances combine to transform our lives, and denounce our old comfortable lies and pretences, our half-accepted enslavements to customs and traditions: sometimes, all of a sudden, a light shines and we see how imprisoned we had accepted to become. A family can be the worst of prisons. But it is first and foremost composed of individuals, who have a right to decide for themselves which path leads to happiness, who have a conscience and a heart to guide them towards their accomplishment. Nothing poisons relationships more than half accepted, half baked submissiveness. A voluntary acceptance of dependence (in spouses) and a recognition of authority (in children) can and must go hand in hand with the overall respect for individual choice, once the subject is responsible enough to decide for himself. Perhaps there was a time when the standard Indian family needed to be reminded of this lesson?

A number of elements in the film are the catalysers of this necessary revelation and ensuing transformation. I’ll choose just two of them, but there are probably more. Birds, first, and children. Jagadish the bird-watcher draws our attention towards the fact that birds, especially migratory birds, can be heard, but are difficult to watch or catch. They stand for the free individuals who can fly for thousands of miles to nest, but are vulnerable in today’s nuclear age and could easily die if too much caging up is forced upon them. Birds are often invisible, but what beauty when you can observe them in their freely chosen environment! Children likewise are one of the film’s powerful symbols: first little Tuklu, who circles round and around her parents, protecting them by her invisible thread of need and love, and then the little native boy who hovers around the group like a tame birdy, and gets the chocolate M. Bannerjee had intended for Moni as he abandons his courtship. One is reminded of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence:

Sound the flute

Now it’s mute

Birds delight

Day and night

Nightingale

In the dale

Lark in sky

Merrily

Merrily merrily to welcome in the year.

Little Boy

Full of joy

Little girl

Sweet and small

Cock does crow

So do you

Merry voice

Infant noise

Merrily merrily to welcome in the year.

What struck me in Kanchanjungha is Ray’s entomological approach to the various people under his observation: each one of them seems isolated and detached on his or her background. Very rarely do we see them touch and reunite. There’s this picture of the father and his girl, but unless I’m wrong, otherwise they’re all separate and solitary, like the five peaks of the Kanchanjungha range, with the formidable father rising higher than all of them. But well, they all find their meaningful position and purpose in the end as the slanting rays of sunset reveal India’s highest peak.

PS: Just wanted to redirect those of you who know Matthieu and his Indian voyage: he'd been to watch the "moment of revelation" in Sikkim in March 2010: link

Dhobi ghat (Kiran Rao, 2010) is a pleasant enough film to watch; it has a seductiveness, an allusiveness whose charm lasts a while in the mind, and one wonders, after the last unfulfilled pictures have gone, what was this? What sort of movie did I watch? Surely, not a classic Bollywood flick, not a social manifesto, so perhaps an arty evocation of a changing society? A meditation on the new reality India is going through? One could also say, an emerging director’s state of the art research. Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan’s second wife, is here busy demonstrating she’s got the guts to go it alone, after her spectacular successes as assistant director in such blockbusters as Laagan and Swades. Do I sense in her attempt that same superiority complex that always slightly bothers me in Aamir Khan’s dos? The feeling that here is a guy who is about to show what India filmmakers have forgotten all along: Indian cinema isn’t only for Indians, but for the world, it is worthy of an attention justified by its artistic complexity and human depth. The only trouble in this demonstration of artistic value is precisely the demonstration: artistic worth doesn’t need demonstration: if it’s worthwhile, you see it directly. And Indian cinema as a tradition contains enough resources for any filmmaker to create superior art if he or she wishes. This idea to look away from your tradition, and do things according to the assumption that a worldwide attention will be given to projects inspired by other aesthetic principles than our own: I wonder if any lasting good can come out of it.
What I’m saying might sound paradoxical: because the movie’s subject is 100% Mumbaite; the city, its streets, shops, beaches, its lights, smells, noises, its highs and lows; the characters, except for Shai (Monica Dogra) who’s a bank clerk NRI on leave from her work and who’s busy photographing the city for some project of hers. She’s the pretext outsider, and her little accent betrays the director’s need for her exterior point of view. She’s the benevolent eye of the world, a motley, already half indianised world, so to speak. And there she goes, clicking away at people, capturing them in her frames, artistically transforming them just like the film does. One guy, a dhobiwalla called Munna – Prateik Babbar - falls in her trap (or she entraps him, if you want) and believes she can get him into the movies. This happens after she had first fallen for Arun (our one and unique Aamir Khan), a moody painter who’s still affected by his recent divorce and finds a new inspiration from some video tapes of his new flat previous owner, left in a box with the furniture in the flat.

But Shai’s interest in Arun cannot break his shell, and she drifts away from him. Not too far though, because the tide of emotionality soon brings her back to him, even though in the meantime she’s started to appreciate Munna… One has to admit that this intertwining of interests, love or business, is cleverly woven, and very suggestive of the complexity of human feelings when desires, hopes, frustration and pain all interact. A person’s life is never one story only: it has several levels, it takes place on several planes, and this is especially true perhaps of urban lives, where the interactions are more numerous. So I’d say this is where the film pleased me most: one follows these lives very simply, the narration is fluid and convincing. The camera work too, even if sometimes it’s overly conscious of itself.

We discover Munna’s underworld, ie, his involvement with the drug-dealing, violent sub-urban reality which so many films have made us familiar with. We feel the slight hovering hush of danger surrounding the young woman as she naively steps into areas forbidden to the likes of her. And it’s rather good too that the film doesn’t conclude, emotionally speaking. There is no happy end, no relief. But then, is there a message? Is there a story worthy to be learnt? What is the film’s relationship with reality, and which reality? Dhobi ghat left me wondering about the situation in which Indian cinema has placed itself in. Where can it go, what should it do? How can it reflect the tremendous changes the country is going through, and suggest some elements of meaning to this change? Perhaps we need such films, as landmarks which later will reveal themselves as necessary intermediary links between one form and another, or they will just be considered as worthless cranking by camera-happy people without a plan?
 

I was uncertain of the answer, so I went on IMDb, and well, what I found is my impression multiplied by the dozens of people who also thought, sometimes kindly, sometimes less, that the film was on the whole a waste of time. Hmm, but sometimes you do have to waste time to find inspiration, you do have to mill around before the spark ignites. You put yourself in the centre of things (Mumbai) and you open your eyes, perhaps some flash of meaning will come from this, perhaps some structure will emerge. An artist has moments of emptiness similar to this soul-searching attitude. But there is also a non-negligible chance that it is sterile, and that one has simply gotten side-tracked. The old woman who lives in the basement in Arun’s building, and whom we see sitting on the side of her bed so powerless, stands out for me as a sort of symbol of the film: for me she represents an ageing Mother India that Arun’s desperate efforts have not yet been able to revive. She can also be looked upon as the unused and inefficient Indian artistic tradition which sits, speechless and incomprehensible, waiting for her new interpreter.

Here’s my belated commentary of Ravi’s song Yeh Raate yeh mausam in Dilli ka thug sung by Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhonsle, lyrics by Majrooh Sultanpuri (I had promised it to Suja! Cf. here). Below you'll find the video, the lyrics and their translation.

The song happens in the film as Asha, the film’s heroine, has started to notice enough of Kumar’s qualities to soften her appreciation of him. This has especially taken place during the gorgeous song C.A.T. Cat maane billi in which the two spoof a learner’s alphabet book, and spring, dance and bounce accordingly. The fun contained in this song is still felt as we see the two on the terrace at the beginning of Ye raate. Asha asks Kumar to go home, and he taunts her as to what might happen if he doesn’t leave. She pushes him away and turns her back to him, pretending to be angry at his wilful disobedience. Then, behind her, he begins the song:

Yeh raatein, yeh mausam, nadi ka kinara, yeh chanchal hawa

and she turns her still irate demeanour towards him. But this soon melts, and we see Kumar, gloriously enjoying his effect, opening his arms to the wonder of love, so evidently pleased of everything about her and their new relationship. But soon he’s the one surprised: for she takes up the song’s melody, and he springs up to meet her, walking to her as he repeats the invocation to the night breeze, to the moon shining down on them, whose pale rays are reflected on the sands of the riverside. The magic can begin. How many times have lovers in the history of the world, sung the time, the place, the hour of their love? How many have done so, knowing they were creating an everlasting memento to a past they would relish to revisit, which they knew was fleeting, should be tasted at its full, and yet represented an immortal present from which suffering and death was excluded?

Kaha do dilon ne, yeh milkar kabhi ham, na honge judaa

The creation of love asks nothing from anything else in the world but its own passionate tenderness, its own words, its own renewal in the eyes of the beloved. Its eternity belongs to the abolition of time while it is being created, celebrated and devoured. It is like the sun: the sun will continue to shine almost forever, as long as there’s thermonuclear energy to fuel it; love too will illuminate the lovers as long as its energy, pouring forth from both hearts and souls, fuels in them enough response to burn and live. Meanwhile, time stops, and there is light. Light in the darkness of infinite space and warmth in the coldness of deepest emptiness. Kishore’s happy smiling face is like a sun, full of life and meaning. His mirth glows and warms anybody who has kept a child’s heart, a heart young enough to understand that what a clown does is precisely create life against the ugliness and sadness of the void. And in front of him beams a feminine cosmic reflection; between them is now visible the exchange of life and light and meaning that makes up our human world possible.

Nutan – I cannot be an admirer of her beauty and everlasting charm without once more insisting on the ravishing feminine creature she was. Look at that fleeting moment when her half-cross disposition has just melted away and she starts to sing the tune, closing her eyes to the melody and slowly opening them on the man she has finally recognized as a passionate and lovable human being (and no longer the exasperating prankster who used to make her angry at each of his appearances). The “mmm” she hums at that short moment, which opens up on the quiet and confident smile that follows, contains the absolute certainty which will be hers throughout the song. This smile is as caressing and sweet as any lover would want his angel beauty to smile: looking at him as she does, one knows for certain that what is now happening is life and love mingled into that overpowering feeling of rapturous generosity that (I hope) all lovers have at least once felt, when their love tells them through each square inch of her (or his) face: I know I love you, and I am going to make you happy forever. What happens when happiness desires only one thing: to make its source of happiness as happy as it is, and goes about the business of showing it? A thrill of joy, a rapture, a flush of desire and gratefulness that blots out everything else.  

This must be what Asha feels when, having briefly met hands with her companion, she moves away a little and dances on the melody before him. Nutan’s figure wasn’t anything extraordinary, I don’t mind to say, but she was tall and nimble, with a healthy fullness which all lovers of maternal femininity will appreciate I’m sure. Even in fact by the standards of the time, she was considered almost skinny! Anyway for me her utter grace is all what matters. I find it just entrancing when she does that perfectly timed double turn on herself before she sings:

Yeh kya baat hai aaj ki chandni me?

Then she repeats the line, and I see both the young girl and the lady in her half-teasing, half-serious looks, which shine like a marvel of creation encircled by her subtly wavy hair and lovely white flower. Perhaps I have said this elsewhere (yes, here), but I would like to say that one thing which attracts me to Nutan is her happiness. This fundamental quality, which I ascribe to her blessed nature, and her moral virtue, creates a perfection in her features, a simplicity, a balance, and one follows her, mesmerized as she moves space and time along with her. Happiness makes the soul visible on one’s face. You can easily spot a happy person because she radiates a gratefulness for the life she enjoys, and the love she feels, even if she isn’t actually “in love” at that moment. But in a sense, a happy person is in love, in love with Life past, present and future. On that person’s face, you can “see” the transcendence of life within her, her happiness makes her person glow with life and love, like God himself. Happiness is the wordless language of love, the radiation of creation of life itself.

Ke ham kho gaye pyar ki raagni me

When she rejoins Kishore, he can only admit of the miracle happening before his very eyes, and both of them sing together the rest of the couplet, fascinated by their mutual and complementary harmony:

Yeh baahon me bahen, yeh behki nigaahein

Lo aane laga zindagi ka maza…

Yeh raatein, yeh mausam, nadi ka kinara, yeh chanchal hawa

Then begins the romance. The violins sing, the breeze blows, the voices hush, the palms gently sway. Everything melts away but the exchange of looks, the eyes that speak better than any worldly tongue could speak. The lovers have no lyrics to mouth one for the other, so their only possible reason for standing one in front of the other is the pure pleasure of contemplation. I have always preferred Kishore in at this moment, even though I’m head over heels in awe for the actress. But Kishore’s face! How I love it here! If you have the whole film in mind, and the almost infinite succession of “faces” he pulls all along, I think you can better appreciate the contrast of this moment of eternity. He’s benevolence and gentleness made man; there’s a goodness, a tranquillity and a faithfulness which I think I have never seen so beautifully and simply expressed. His eyes shine softly, his mouth is closed because there is nothing necessary to be said: everything is being said in front of him; and his half-smile conveys his complete trustworthiness. Asha’s sheer beauty in front of him could make him gasp and cry, but he just takes it in, because he has recognized it: her love comes from the deep well of loving femininity, of life-giving and life-asking beauty which a man can always refuse: but here Kishore is telling her his plain and profound yes. Yes, he will begin the old story of love anew, yes he will be there for her all along the years, yes he will take care of her in good times and bad times, yes she can depend on him completely.

Then comes the eternal picture of Nutan’s dreamy beauty: filled with happiness, she lets herself gaze upon his face, but quickly we see her abandon her smile and become serious too. Her eyes are still full of light, but she’s seen something different in her friend: is it something masculine which her feminine nature recognizes as vaguely invasive? Is it because she understands the depth of his commitment, and is suddenly filled with the feeling of her indignity? Or because she’s wondering whether what she is actually going through is too full, too beautiful and must be a dream? Perhaps also it is her own happiness which, reverberating on itself, makes her realize how fortunate she is, and how very few people on Earth share such bliss? Whatever it is, it doesn’t last too long and a new smile lights up her face before she turns round.

Sitaron ki mehfil ne karke ishara

Kaha ab to saara jahaan hai tumhara

Mohobbat jawaan ho, khula aasman ho

Kare koi dil aarzoo aur kya

Yeh raatein, yeh mausam, nadi ka kinara, yeh chanchal hawa

I’m repeating myself, but in Nutan this very rare mixture of beauty and happiness shines so amazingly (and yet so calmly)! It forms the essence of this song. She possesses a Leonardo face, okay, but then many other beautiful women also do. Even if this can make a poet speechless, because beauty at its best beckons to a world of perfection which our language cannot hope to evoke fully, it’s only nature’s work, and man hasn’t got much part in it. But happiness belongs to us; it is the result of our best efforts at bringing together what we have been given and what we give. We know that happiness makes people become beautiful, even if they’re naturally rather plain. This condition brings about a metamorphosis of our nature, or one might say, it brings it to its accomplished state; there is nothing greater in the whole world than the beauty of a blissful person. This person has reached the goal of creation: God has created us for us to beam a happiness with which He will fall in love. Well now join the two gifts together, a natural perfection of features, and the divine luminescence coming from the inner agreement of who one is and what one does: this is what I see in Nutan. On her face is apparent a glimpse of Paradise, Beatrice’s features guiding Dante through the circles towards the stars, or even the immortal glory of the Virgin Mary resplendent with the love of her Maker.

Kare koi dil aarzoo aur kya

Yeh raatein, yeh mausam, nadi ka kinara, yeh chanchal hawa

Continuing our remarks about the song, there is a moment when both lovers take advantage of a short interval to waltz on the terrace, and after a lovely twirl around him, the young lady sits on the couch. The amorous camera comes close to her while she sings this request

Kasam hai tumhe tum, agar mujhse roothe

Rahe saath jab tak yeh bandan na toote

And we are bathed once again in the sfumato of her incredible charm, a charm that is stronger than any other human power on Earth. Neither Monarchs nor Emperors, nor all the pomp and magnificence of princely palaces and capital cities can fathom this deepest (yet simple) domination: a woman’s beauty in love with her chosen one. Here Nutan’s eyes have the fragrance of roses and jasmine, her lips the taste of mango and guava, her cheeks the freshness of more sweet flowers and tender fruit, like the adorable Queen in the Song of Songs. Her Prince moves behind her, she reclines towards him, abandoning herself to his kneeling presence, and they both make this pledge:

Rahe saath jab tak yeh bandan na toote

Tumhe dil diya hai, yeh waada kiya hai

Sanam mai tumhari rahoongi sada

And while they sing, a sort of darkness envelops them, her eyes become warm flames in the night. Her contentment, their softly joined hands, Kishore’s serious manly face compose a tableau worthy of any romantic rendition of Romeo and Juliet, but with a serenity that the two doomed lovers could not share in this world.

This song has enjoyed tremendous success. It was one among the few which I recognized in shops and garages during our trip to India last year, and if you research it on the net, here is what you’ll find!! These 15 different versions are surely only the tip of the iceberg.

Manohar Bijor & Sangeeta Shenoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZOYESXo65A&feature=related

Two versions by same singer but with a different female voice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOsdai-2dZk&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg6TFNeEzkU&feature=related

A beautiful version (Jayanti Nadig & Sridhar Subbarao)with an echo and pictures of the everlasting scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKvS4Rgu2Ng&feature=related

A version accompanied by traditional instruments (Manas Vandana Chakravarty) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QJpj9hXEH4&feature=related

A version with outdoor modern orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUYDNReMcaI&feature=related

Another with slight instrumental variations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugabdUE8gA&feature=related

Another (low quality recording but very pleasant)  by Gaurav Bangya : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtYMdrOlAsc&feature=related

Murali Narayanan : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eqefyIp-fk&feature=related

Choreographed version at Geet-Rung School of Dance and Music, Atlanta : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIvcWA_SKI&feature=related

A family rendition, without any instruments : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtqy7UwX2ME&feature=related

A nice version, with feel good “new age” pictures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb4GK7KF2-8&feature=related

The original song with devanagari lyrics unfolding with the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NalnqvDNysM&feature=related

A grandfather and his little grand-daughter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CGEoJz1oDg&feature=related

A whistled version by Rajesh Koppikar! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k92R8yT7iSk&feature=related

Some more here: http://songforever.com/search/video/1/ye+raatien+ye+mousam.html

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:

Abhijan (the Expedition, Satyajit Ray, 1962) is the story of Narsingh (dependable Soumitra Chatterjee), a Kshatriya taxi-driver, who after having had his professional license taken away from him for imprudent overtaking, becomes jobless, and heads towards the Shyamnagar province in Bengal. There he gets involved in opium trading. A man he had given a lift to, Sukhanram (Charuprakash Ghosh, very good), is the one who lures him into the business, and that same man also deals in buying women for a time because he has the money. This time he has Gulabi (Waheeda Rehman) with him, and she, aware of her plight, tries to catch the attention of Narsingh who seems to her an honest guy, so as to escape her present master and her future downfall. But Narsingh isn’t interested in her; he looks upon her as a cheap prostitute. He has dreams of respectability, and together with his projects of association with Sukharam, he plans on gaining the attention of the local schoolteacher, Milli (Ruma Guha Thakurta). She happens to be the sister of a distant relative he has encountered upon arriving in this Bengali village of the hills.

This man’s name is Joseph (Gyanesh Mukherjee), a name he has been given after he became a Christian. Alas, unfortunately for the valiant taxi-driver (who by the way has the privilege of owning his 1931 model Chrysler), Milli is secretly engaged towards another man, a one-legged fellow who, believing he was punished as a result of being “naughty” when a boy (he fell down a cliff), is now busy with good deeds and pious reading. Narsingh doesn’t know this, and asks Milli to teach him English, so he can rise socially. She accepts, and we have pleasant hopes for both until they are dashed one day with Milli asking Narsingh to enable her and her cripple to elope together. He agrees to it, but he’s hard hit, resumes drinking, and, perhaps as compensation, asks Gulabi to his bed.

Meanwhile, his affairs with Sukharam are moving ahead, and after some moral wrangling, he decides to take the risk of becoming his partner. He will continue to deliver the illegal cargo of opium, and gets tied to Gulabi (who’s lent him by Sukharam!). He has in effect fallen into the spider’s web, and willingly, but he can only blame himself. On top of that, he’s a rather solitary, haughty guy who thinks himself better than, for example, other taxi cabbies. He’s wounded by his wife’s having left him for another man (we learn this at the beginning of the movie). He’s imbued with the notion that his caste (the Kshatriyas, or warriors) obliges him to a certain social and personal standard. He refers to his “blood”, that doesn’t allow him to stoop to ask the policeman’s favours, or his ancestors' code of values according to which he cannot let himself cheat others. In fact he’s fundamentally an ambitious, proud man, who has dreams of grandeur, and who feels limited in his purposes by obstacles he wishes he could overthrow. His caste has put him at an intermediary social level, and he resents this position as insufficiently rewarding.

The film tells the story of his being tempted, and his resisting, his hoping and his yielding. One symbolic moment is when he is seen sitting against a tree practising his English reading. The word he is spelling is “SLY”: this seems to me as a good definition of who he is. A smart, cunning intellectual (he’s often criticised for “acting smart”), but full of devious compromises with the values he isn’t simple enough to accept at face value. He’s in stark opposition with Rama (Robi Ghosh, excellent), his diminutive hand, who represents unsophisticated loyalty and practicality. Rama proudly looks after his boss’s grand vehicle, cleans it incessantly, wards off the swarms of fascinated children that continuously run after it, and relishes the moments when Narsingh, tired or busy, lets him drive. He’s developed an adoration for the Chrysler, and fancies himself responsible for it as you would a religious object. When at one stage, his master speaks about selling the car, we see his face aghast as if the order of the Universe had broken apart! Rama is like a faithful dog, happy and quick. But Narsingh is the sly wolf.

On the other side of the moral divide, there are the Christians: Joseph, Milli, her lover, their mother. They are egalitarian, caste-critical people full of generosity and disinterestedness, and they delineate Narsingh’s shadiness all the more. Milli loves with a cripple, thus living out Christ’s call to be on the side of the poor and the destitute. Her love, socially, means social salvation for him. Thanks to her and her profession, he won’t be obliged to depend on alms or worse. Joseph too saves his new friend out of a nasty brawl with jealous taxi cabbies in which he has got involved, and warns him about Sukharam’s opium trade. At his arrival in Shyamnager, he takes him to see his family, and they walk past the “Uncle-nephew”, or rock of sins, because a travelling preacher had commented that this unusually balanced rock looked like the weight of sins ready to crush the sinner underneath. At one stage, Narsingh asks Milli about that Christian God of hers, and gets told that the outcome of sins is death. So we are in a moral or religious perspective all along. The film could almost be a sort of Indian Pilgrim’s Progress. This would tie in well with the title of the movie, “the Expedition”: we could then see Narsingh as a kind of Everyman driving himself on the road towards self-accomplishment and truth, now falling into the traps on his way, now being saved by his God-sent friends. But the pious simile stops there, because Ray has made him into a more complex character than the XVIIth century roadside hero.

There is for example the powerful theme of competition in Abhijan. Because of Narsingh’s fiery spirit, he constantly fights (he’s a “warrior”) against other drivers – on the road: the taxi-drivers, the bus-drivers, but also on the rail, and we witness a superbly filmed race between the Chrysler and a train in which he recognises the driver. This vanity makes him of course take risks, and endanger his passengers’ lives. Ray films their faces during one such race, and subtly makes us understand that they are torn between the fear of an accident and pride of having chosen a faster and technologically superior form of transport than the bus and all riff-raff. But when he drives, Narsingh is transformed, he becomes a fearless warrior like his ancestors used to be (Ray at one stage visualizes for us his horseman’s dream), and then knows no rule but speed and bravery. But this attitude attracts the attention of others: the police inspector who takes away his licence (causing him to wander off, deprived of the professional safeguards which a regular job gives) and Sukhanram the opium dealer who sees in his zeal something he might manipulate to his won ends. The risk-taking also has a moral twist to it, because that’s exactly what Sukhanram hints at, saying in a clever sophism that no business is ever straight through and through. If one deals with money, one somehow deals with soil, one has soiled hands. The good businessman is the one who can adapt to the necessary compromises which business demands… In other words, cheating is part of dealing, and one would say, isn’t he right? Who said capitalism was, not the best, but the least bad economic system we had?

Cheating was precisely what Narsingh thought he could not do. The virtues inherent to his caste forbade him any such practice. But Na rsingh doesn’t believe in these virtues deeply. He wishes he could become a warrior once again, because when a warrior wages war, the moral constraints can be shifted due to the existence of higher, war-connected imperatives. What’s the good of a warrior in peace-time? Right at the beginning of the film, in this revealing talk with a barman who tries to talk him into a business partnership, we can see Narsingh in the broken mirror (his flawed personality?) saying:

And this line shows his essential distrust of others, and his solitude as a result. Perhaps this is why, in spite of his unpleasant character, we still feel interested in him: he’s a wounded loner, and one wonders how he’s going to find peace. All he has is his horse, that is, (as he himself jokes to Joseph) the 26 horse-power of his car. That car for him comes to represent his independence, his superiority, and the frequent night-rides that we see him use it for are like his secret in-roads into forbidden lanes. Interesting that Ray films the headlights from in front, so that when Narsingh drives at night, all we see are the two glaring (almost drunken) lights, but the car and himself disappear. Just as the lights shine too brightly in the dark, obscuring everything else around, so does his alcoholic habit blot out his conscience and prepare him for his shady deeds. He hesitates before deciding to accept Sukhanram drug-offer, but the drug of his sick will was already inside him.

So one might say that the film is a drive, a drive around cheating, then deep into cheating and then finally out of cheating. Along this night-drive, he meets the Devil (Sukhanram), whose laughter should have chilled his spine, and whose gun-shaped lighter should have warned him that sin meant spiritual death. He also meets his guardian angel, Joseph, who does all he can to protect him and keep him on the right path. He meets Milli, the bright star, but her light shines in heavens too far above his cloudy gloom. Then he meets Gulabi. She doesn’t seem a positive influence at first sight; compared to Milli the Christian schoolteacher, she’s a tainted woman who is trying to ingratiate herself with Narsingh. The latter’s dreams of elevation can hardly hope to succeed with her. But she is the one he holds on to in the end, isn’t she? And I think the clue to her moral importance in that story she tells about her orphan youth, when she was molested and shut up in a room and almost committed suicide, but found the strength to remain in life in spite of what the future held. She’s really an innocent girl, and if at one stage she’s seen trying to seduce Narsingh, it isn’t, as I’ve read that she’s ready for physical intercourse, but she’s doing this out of a survival instinct. She’s hoping Narsingh will keep her, and anything is better than being some rich man’s pleasure object. Anyway, he’s saved thanks to love, thanks to Gulabi’s love.

Narsingh changes his trajectory when Joseph discovers he’s lied to him. It’s a powerful scene, the warrior’s fall is painful to see, and Ray makes him pathetically run after his guardian angel in order to explain, to say he’s sorry… His head is delineated against the blackening sky, and compared to the Rock of sins close by. But the Rock is also the symbol of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 10,4) who has accepted to carry all men’s sins (2Cor 5,21), so that, when he confronts Joseph’s denouncing eyes, Narsingh is like Peter in the gospel, he cannot but understand that everything he’s done was betrayal. He understands his guilt, and knows he was sinfully proud and vain. He goes back to Sukhanram’s place, gives back the opium he was supposed to deliver, and wrenches Gulabi from her master.

Needless to say that Abhijan is another one of Ray’s masterpieces; this guy has apparently done nothing but that. The special quality of the film is the superb symbolism it displayed and integrates into the story. The car allegory for example contains a wealth of meanings and emotion; it’s almost a living being. And the atmosphere and geography of the Bengal countryside lends the film an eerie quality which sticks to it and isn’t easily forgotten.