Bandini: Of Human Bondage

(First published at Desicritics)

A new batch of female inmates is ushered into the zanaanah ward of a pre-independence prison. Among them is Kalyani (Nutan), our protagonist, serving time for poisoning a woman to death. One night, an old inmate is struck by tuberculosis, and Kalyani is the only one who volunteers to nurse her-and how!-she insists that the jailor sign her papers right now, in the middle of the night, lest he should forget the next day. That's Kalyani-an unshakable confidence under a demure exterior. Is it any wonder then, that the good prison doctor Devendra (Dharmendra) is smitten by her?
The genius of Jarasandha's script surfaces in the scene where Deven first touches Kalyani: soon as the good doctor places a loving hand on the convicted woman's shoulder, the prison warning bell sounds. A freedom-fighter-inmate, we are told, has just struck a blow to a cop. And we're immediately brought home to the reality of moral authority, which will sound warning bells whenever Kalyani is touched by love.
The juxtaposition of personal and political freedom struggles is a recurring motif in Bimal Roy's Bandini. Throughout the film, authorities continue to silence the voices of freedom, just as the warden whacks an inmate for singing. Beauty has no room in a world governed by strictures, a fact the Superintendent of police makes explicit by voicing his dislike for flowers in prison. Even the slightly self-indulgent night sequence of a freedom-fighter's hanging ends with a pithy, ironical scene - the prison guard crowing at dawn break, "sab theeeek haiii!" This is scriptwriting at its finest.

In the flashback that leads up to Kalyani's imprisonment, Nabendu Ghosh's screenplay cleverly reverses the customary male gaze upon the village girl; here, it is Kalyani whose eyes twinkle when she first sees rebel freedom-fighter Vikas (Ashok Kumar), even before she meets him ("He laughs funny", she says. It's doubly effective because it's Ashok Kumar she's talking about!) It is through her perspective that we see Vikas. In the only romantic scene the duo gets, Vikas praises Kalyani, and the way Nutan stays true to character, shying coquettishly without losing that spark of defiance, speaks volumes about her acting finesse.
In the end, once she is free, Kalyani must choose between Deven and Vikas (Mark how, in all the important scenes between Kalyani and her suitors, there's a barrier between her and them). The characterization of the men is deceptively clever; it plays upon all our preconceived notions. Deven is young, handsome, clean-shaven and a doctor; while Vikas is older, gaunt, unshaven and sickly (he always has a fever). The casting seduces us: surely, on the face of it, Ashok Kumar would attract fewer women than Dharmendra, so that the viewer ends up rooting for Devendra (admittedly, I did). Even their names-Deven(king of gods) and Vikas(progress)-heighten their contrasts.
But a closer look reveals why Kalyani chooses Vikas. The good doctor is conventional; were Kalyani to go with him, she'd be walking back into society-a place scarier than prison (remember her pleas to the jailor not to be released). Vikas, on the other hand, is a rebel. He comes with no baggage; he'd long declared Kalyani to be his wife without officially marrying her, convention be damned.
Freedom isn't always neat, easy and clean shaven; it is often unattractive and full of hardships. Deven would've meant a comfortable life, Vikas means a free life. This, then, is Bandini's sophisticated take on the nature of freedom: it may run against all conventional wisdom, but being free means being able to choose.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: God, Slave, America

(First published at Desicritics)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book about the lives of Tom and many other slaves in pre Civil War America. Through Tom’s fortunes, his various masters, and those of his other black friends, we get a sense of those terrible times in American history.
The best parts are those involving women and their kitchen politics. Clearly, the Southern kitchen is a world Stowe knew intimately and remembered fondly. The corn cakes, the “poetry” (Aunt Chloe’s pronunciation of “poultry”), the pies and the women are vivid and oddly cute. Stowe’s kitchen becomes a microcosm of the slavery-days America. The territorial conflict for kitchen dominion between Dinah, the disorderly black cook, and her master’s propriety-personified Northern cousin, Miss Ophelia, at once captures all the nuances of North-South, black-white, slave-master politics; and it does so with all the humor of a good old who-owns-the-kitchen feud.
But Stowe is too sharp a writer to leave it at that. A few pages down the line, after a stunningly perceptive tirade against slavery, the cynical St. Clare likens slavery to Dinah’s kitchen: you love what comes out of it, but you wouldn’t if you saw the mess inside. What a sophisticated, damning and clever observation!
Uncle Tom is a deeply religious book. Much before Stowe makes it explicit, you know that little Eva, the daughter of Tom’s new master, is divine. What starts out as a Christian undercurrent, gradually becomes a full blown Biblical allegory. The early references to Christian love are ennobling; they remind you of the humanist sense in which (of all people) Bertrand Russell advocated it. But somewhere down the line, Stowe’s missionary zeal gets the better of her. It is one thing to use a Christian allegory as a literary device, but when it usurps the human story, it can be troubling. Surely, Tom’s death and the subsequent gift of freedom to the other slaves is sufficient to tell us that Tom is the adult Christ who bears his country’s cross (the cherubic Eva is baby Jesus).
Left at that, this is a brilliant and daring (remember, Tom is black) characterization. At least, it lifts Tom above the “noble savage” image of slaves in American writing of the time. But Stowe wants more. She wants us to think that Tom’s heart wrenchingly tragic end is something to be celebrated as his union with God. The problem is that this, unwittingly, makes slavery a part of the Divine Plan and somewhat minimizes the serious human damage it did. It also takes some of the bite out of Stowe’s criticism of churches that assured divine sanction to slavery. So strong is Stowe’s agenda that the skeptical St. Clare and the freethinking George Harris must be hastily made to accept Christ, lest they come across as happy/good heathens. Even if we grant Tom’s divinity as an allegorical necessity, it’s a pity that, in her final strokes, Stowe paints the other human characters in one hue. Her bending over backwards to exalt the virtues of the “African race” is also quite unnecessary. The way Christianity morphs in the book-from an ennobling and humane philosophy into the absolute and only truth-eerily foreshadows the trajectory it has taken in American politics.
None of this takes away from the powerful pang of the story. We weep for Tom in his horrifying last days. But we weep because his story is far too achingly real to offer any redemption in an imagined afterlife. For collecting such histories and weaving them into a single, beautiful narrative, Stowe deserves to be read.

Manmohan 'Marquez' Desai

A high-brow critic once remarked how he was surprised by the use of an eagle on Amitabh's arm in Coolie. Apparently, this is an erudite Muslim symbolism, and janaab high-brow was surprised to find it in a 'trite' (that was the word he used) film like Coolie.

This best betrays our somewhat schizophrenic attitude to Manmohan Desai. As receptive children, we loved his movies; as cynical adults, we remember him with a mix of embarrassment and patronizing nostalgia-like we'd remember a Chandamama or a Chacha Chaudhary comic.
But, like those comics, his stories had morals and socio-political commentary. His cinema worked not because it was trite, but because we are a sophisticated audience. We understand, if only implicitly, the metaphor for a divided people in Amar, Akbar Anthony. MD had read a newspaper story about three brothers being separated from each other, which inspired him to make a movie about children of the same mother (India) who grow up with different faiths. If that isn't creative genius, what is? The father in Amar, Akbar Anthony reunites with his son by literally digging up a buried past they share: a gun. There is a message, here, for a country whose violent divisions are buried by official history. And mother India can only be literally blind not to see her own flesh and blood: after all, she survives because sons of all faiths literally give her their blood.

Divisive forces were MD's villains- the smuggler, Robert, in Amar, Akbar Anthony; and the jilted lover, Zafar in Coolie. Both were wealthy and drunk on power; they lusted after their desires and divided us, the people. MD's heroes were classic Davids who fought the Goliaths of their times. In Mard, a prince is reduced to a taangewaala and turned against his own father by the British. Father and son fight each other, as the sadistic outsider looks on. Here, mother India loses her voice after the British invade (What a telling metaphor!). But the father has left a proud, indelible mark upon his son's breast-the literary equivalent of DNA. This will help them discover both, their mutual kinship and their real enemy. If Mard taught us the strengths of biological kinship, Parwarish showed us its weakness. What better comment on caste than to show that your blood isn't always pure blood? In Shahenshah, a cop who is corrupt by day turns into a crime-fighting superhero by night, beating up the very goons who bribe him. MD saw the paradox in a corrupt society-the hand of the law being fed by the very forces it was supposed to crush-and turned it into a literary device. If this was his brilliantly original superhero, his earlier Saccha Jhuuta used the classic look-alikes device to make a 'Jekyll & Hyde'ish comment on human nature.

Manmohan Desai's work, like our best epics, was driven by imagination. With an innate acumen for metaphors, he created a magic real world of his own. Garcia Marquez would've been proud.
(Cool IMDB trivia:The line, "sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance of your own verbosity" that is spoken by Anthony when he emerges from the Easter egg is an almost exact quotation from a speech given by Benjamin Disraeli in 1878. Disraeli (who was referring to W.E. Gladstone) used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated".Wonder of wonders!)