Twins and our other selves

We’ve always been fascinated by the selves that we don’t ‘wear to work’. Ergo, many of the interesting films over the past few years have had split-personality protagonists. Take Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey (2009), for instance. Guddu and Charlie can be seen as two sides of a young urban Indian – one, a social do-gooder and the other a crook who will stop at nothing to make a fast buck.

Twins have always been stand-ins for our other selves, one of the pair usually playing Hyde to the other’s Jeckyll, indulging in guilty pleasures on the other’s behalf. In the late-sixties / early-seventies, Dilip Kumar (Ram Aur Shyam, 1967) and Hema Malini (Seeta Aur Geeta, 1972) split into two so that one of them could bash up villainous family members. Back then, overbearing family members who were always around must’ve seemed like they could use a whipping. Since we couldn’t dream of doing it, why not let our less scrupulous twins out? Perhaps these movies were the early signs of an Indian middle class hankering for a nuclear family. But the villain now isn’t society – it’s one of our selves. Charlie, in Kaminey, is not on much higher moral ground than Bhope Bhau, the closest thing to a villain in the movie. This is why Kaminey speaks to our times.We are all part Guddu and part Charlie and the two fight within us, as they do in the movie.

In the year after Kaminey, came Vijay Lalwani’s Karthik Calling Karthik (2010). This one did not hide behind twins. Karthik has dissociative identity disorder, a split personality. Lalwani’s movie was an intelligent comment on, among other things, Indian men’s schizophrenic attitudes towards women. So, one Karthik loves to party with co-worker and love-interest Shonali, but the other one calls her names. The movie inverts the traditional Madonna-whore (or Paro-Chandramukhi) perspective and shows that the split really lies in the (usually male) eye of the beholder. Karthik also embodies our ambivalence towards what’s often called ‘corporate culture’.

Which brings me to Bharadwaj’s more recent Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013), an absurd (in the genre sense of the term) Shakespearean comedy about a landlord with split identities. Mandola is a ruthless land-grabbing lord by day, when he’s sober. At night, pour a few pegs down his hatch, and he fights his greedy self (Guddu v/s Charlie again) on behalf of the very hapless farmers he’s out to dupe. And, Matru, his man Friday by day, goes by ‘Mao’ at night, stoking revolutionary fires. Matru and Mandola are four people, not two. While Kaminey was more circumspect about the capitalist-socialist doublethink that is the urban Indian mind, Matru spells it out. After all, who needs twin siblings and bad family when there are demons within?