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| Home > Archive > Article: The Adulterous Woman in New Hindi Cinema |
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The Adulterous Woman in New Hindi Cinema
M K Raghavendra
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Hindi noir
A kind of thriller popular in the Hindi cinema of the past few years tells the story of the adulterous/murderous wife. Making it interesting to the film researcher is the absence of a similar motif in the older melodramas – where the woman protagonist was, by and large, an emblem of virtue/ fidelity. The latter kind of film seems to derive from a sub-category in American noir cinema and one of the better known of the Hindi films – Amit Saxena’s Jism (2002) – is an evident adaptation of Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981). The following is an attempt to examine the relationship between the films and American noir, some discourses common to them and the social/ cultural issues they apparently address.
Film Noir has many characteristics but only one requires attention here and that is the absence of romantic love and the family (1). It should be remarked that in mainstream Hollywood cinema love of family, love of father/ruler and love of country are intertwined concepts and the family provides a legitimizing metaphor for hierarchical society – father as the head, mother as subservient and children as dependent. Romantic love and the institution of the family are also logically linked and lovers are transformed into fathers and mothers and romance necessarily terminates in the founding of the family (2). The family, paradoxically, both legitimizes and conceals sexuality and is presented in cinema in a de-eroticized way. All this is broken by noir, which, in presenting family relationships as perverted, broken or impossible, actually founds itself on the absence of the family. The film noir heroine is sexually alluring but treacherous and the husband – if he is present – is not sexually active. In fact, the wheelchair – or crutches – associated with him (The Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity) underscores his impotence. The psychological uncertainty of the male protagonist finds its counterpart in the enigmatic characterization of the female. The narration compels the hero to decide about her nature and instead of winning her, he finds her barring access to his goals or holding him in her power. At the limit he may have to kill her – and/or die himself to break free (3).
Since adultery in noir is associated with murder, it is not untoward that noir films displaying the motif should be thrillers but Indian popular cinema has not favored the ‘thriller’ as a mode of storytelling. Film scholars acknowledge that it has been indifferent to the attractions of suspense and surprise (4). There are certain techniques that go with suspense and surprise. One of them is to build up the spectator’s sense of anticipation through tight causal linking but that is rarely seen in Hindi popular cinema. Most Hindi films also depend on orchestrated music, which becomes grandiose at emotional moments. When reflecting upon film convention in general we recognize that the unforeseen and silence go together. The heavier background scores are heard when surprises are unlikely to be sprung, when the expected will transpire (5). The relative paucity of silence in Hindi cinema also implies that much of what happens is expected and its overtones are familiar. The films do not attempt to shock or surprise us into responses as much as demand our complicity. The use of heavy music at emotional climaxes stresses the familiarity of the respective moments and can be traced to a feature of Hindi cinema’s aesthetics:
“Hindi film aesthetics … is based not on cognition but on recognition…. The fan knows what to expect…. Thus the Hindi film is a particular product of ‘the aesthetics of identity’, which JM Lotman (Die Structur Literarischer Texte, Munchen, 1972) opposes to the ‘aesthetics of opposition’. A typical also trivial product of the latter is the detective story, which functions, as a rule, on the basis of the reader’s ignorance of ‘whodunit’.” (6)
The attempts at composing detective stories in Hindi popular cinema have been hesitant and rely only on withholding items of information from the spectator. The camera eye remains omniscient – never an advantage for a well-constructed thriller that depends on point-of-view. Still, the emphasis upon presenting the familiar does not mean that every episode in the narrative only fulfils predictions. It is more accurate to say that the emphasis is on ‘how things will happen’ rather than on ‘what will happen next’ (7). Hindi popular films are melodramas although they often have the same violent story content (involving jealousy, passion, revenge etc.) as the detective story. Melodramas, regardless of how much crime/violence they contain, are different from detective stories/ thrillers but the difference needs to be explained.
The Russian formalists gave the name ‘fabula’ (the story) to the imaginary construct we create progressively and retroactively as we interact with the text. They gave the name ‘syuzhet’ (the plot) to the actual arrangement of the fabula in the narrative. The syuzhet is a blow by blow recounting of the story as the film or the piece of fiction would render it. To illustrate the difference, a detective novel would yield a fabula beginning with the planning of the murder and concluding with the criminal being brought to book. The syuzhet (corresponding to the novel as actually written) proceeds by concealing parts of the fabula to create ‘suspense’ and sharpen the impact of the text upon the reader. In contrast to the detective story, as David Bordwell explains (8), melodramatic narratives are highly communicative about fabula information. Where the detective story emphasizes the act of unearthing what has already occurred the melodrama plays down curiosity about the past by withholding little from the spectator and employing the omniscient camera-eye. Given Hindi popular cinema’s historical predilections, the emergence of the Hindi noir thriller in the new millennium is doubly interesting and deserves scrutiny.
The family
Since American noir bases itself on the absence of the family, it may be useful to first examine the Indian examples in the light of the family’s portrayal in Hindi popular cinema. The employment of the family as a motif by Hollywood is often perceived as ideologically motivated and the transformation of the family in films like Ordinary People (1980) or Kramer Vs Kramer (1979) is said to reflect the changing perceptions of the public (9). Unlike in the American film, the representation of the family in Indian popular cinema does not problematize the changing circumstances of the family. The working woman has come into her own today but cinema leaves the patriarchal family more secure than ever. The Hindu joint family has been breaking up but the joint family of popular cinema thrives. Indian popular films also do not attempt to persuade the spectator about family values by centralizing the discourse on household discord like Redford’s Ordinary People (1980), and the values are apparently an incontestable ‘given’. Filmic texts from India disallow the social analysis usually applied to Hollywood, implying that the imaging of the family in popular cinema is not ‘representational’ of the historical family. To substantiate the argument, if the ‘modern woman’ of the forties and fifties (Andaz, 1949, Dhool Ka Phool, 1959) had made way for portrayals of greater emancipation, i.e.: if the emancipation of women was cumulative (as in history), such conservative later discourses on family values as in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1995) might not have been possible. Popular cinema does not problematize the actual family’s transformation because it is the traditional (or, rather, the ‘traditional-ideal’) Indian family (10) which is the constant unit in narrative construction. If the ‘traditional-ideal’ family is a constant element, then deviations from ‘idealness’ are anomalies that offer themselves for interpretation. The modern woman of the forties and fifties was such a deviation and the adulterous relationship in the Hindi noir thriller is another one. What I will therefore attempt is to interpret the emergence/ meaning of the latter motif.
The films: Jism
 Before going on to examine the motifs exhibited by the selected films as a category, it will be necessary to relate their stories for the benefit of those unfamiliar with them. The films are: Amit Saxena’s Jism (2002) Anurag Basu’s Murder (2004), Abbas-Mustaan’s Aitraaz (2004), Vikram Bhatt’s Jurm (2005) and Mohit Suri’s Zeher (2005). Jism is set in Pondicherry and tells of the passionate involvement of a lawyer named Kabir Lal with Sonia, the wife of a business tycoon named Rohit Khanna. Sonia induces Kabir to kill her husband and the murder is dressed up to look like an accident. But Sonia is also embroiled in a conflict with Rohit’s sister for his property and things go wrong because of the tussle. Kabir also learns that Sonia was nurse to Rohit’s ailing first wife and married him after her death. The film follows Body Heat but concludes with Kabir and Sonia killing each other even while discovering that they love each other. Apart from Sonia’s sister-in-law, the film also introduces two other characters – Kabir Lal’s friends, one of whom is the police inspector entrusted with the task of investigating Rohit Khanna’s death. This policeman is in plainclothes and this may be regarded as significant because the representation also recurs in Zeher.
Before I interpret other aspects of the film, I should perhaps look at Indian film representations to see if the policeman in plainclothes, a key participant in the story, has a particular significance. One useful way to begin interpreting a text is to commence with the familiar signifiers. The policeman (in uniform) as well as the judiciary – often ridiculed earlier (Taqdeer, 1943) – acquire gravity after Independence and come to represent the moral authority of the State in the 1950s. In Baazi (1951) a policeman declines to address his private interest in a romantic entanglement although this will mean gaining the woman he loves. The respect accorded to the law continues well into the seventies and the moral stature of the policeman younger brother in Deewar (1975) is an instance. But something happens in the early 1980s, the police (and the judiciary) in cinema abruptly becoming corrupt/ weak and often at the mercy of gangland bosses (Agneepath, 1989). Alongside the notion of the weak policeman/judiciary also flourishes the notion of vigilante justice (Insaaf Ka Tarazu, 1980). The corrupt policeman actually doubles as the fearsome vigilante in Shahenshah (1988). The eighties were seen as a period in which ‘divisive forces’ had gained impetus within the Indian polity because of the regional/group demands directed against the Central State(11) and regional politics coming violently alive. The portrayal of the police can be usefully read in this context as the weakening of state authority – if seen alongside the emphasis on strengthening gang identities (Ankush, 1985), caste identities (Ghulami, 1985) and regional identities (Ek Duuje Ke Liye, 1981). In JP Dutta’s Ghulami, for instance, a policeman declares he is a Thakur first and a policeman only afterwards.
If the policeman in uniform has consistently represented the authority of the State, in CID (1956), where a police inspector is charged with murder, the policeman is in plainclothes, as if to establish that the individual and not the State is indicted. The plainclothes police inspector in Jism may therefore be regarded as a moral counterpoint to the hero without the State being brought into the narrative. The film needs a police detective (as in Body Heat) but finds it inconvenient to implicate the State in the story.
 The second aspect of the film has to do with its choice of location. Pondicherry in the film (as Goa in Zeher) is apparently chosen because it is closest in the popular mind to a foreign locale and it is also filmed in this way (12). If the film attempts to take away both the State and the Nation from the story, I detect another erasure – evidenced by the conspicuous absence of the parental figure. The parental figure is often the conduit through which the values inculcated by tradition pass into the story. The parental appearance may be fleeting – as in Rang De Basanti (2006) – but it is still a useful tool by which the protagonist(s) can be made custodian(s) of these values. Without this presence, the protagonists of both Lagaan (2001) and Rang De Basanti would exist in an ethical limbo, which is what the milieu of Jism is made to seem. Interpreted together with the other aspects already remarked upon, we may say that the milieu in Jism is a space from which the Indian State, the Indian Nation and Tradition (the three key moral signifiers in popular cinema) have been evacuated. I suggest that the film hits upon this strategy to promote the discourse that adulterous conduct is the outcome when the moral presences of Nation, the State and Tradition are no longer assured. To make the warning more ominous, the film associates adultery with greed. Her love of money induces Sonia to be adulterous and plan the murder of her husband.
Money as the root cause in an adulterous relationship culminating in murder is a typical plot device in noir and James M Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) is the classic example. But it is significant that noir is not a new genre and even Body Heat is twenty-five years old. Why is the adultery/murder thriller from noir being adapted by Indian cinema now? It may, of course, be asserted that the theme provides ample scope for sex and violence but that does not explain why this theme rather than any other – offering the same scope – has abruptly come into prominence in the past three or four years.
The other films
Before going on to examine the significance of the adultery/murder theme today, I need to provide a brief account of the other Hindi films selected. Anuraag Basu’s Murder (2004) is set in Bangkok and is about the illicit relationship between Simran and Sunny, her college boyfriend. Simran is Sudhir’s wife and she married him after the death of his first wife Sonia. Sonia was Simran’s sister and mother to Sudhir’s child, now Simran’s care. The film begins with the Thai police arresting Simran, who confesses to Sunny’s murder: After a clandestine affair, Simran found that Sunny had another girlfriend. She was disgusted by this but he tried to force himself upon her and she killed him in self defense. The film does not end with this confession because the police have also arrested Sudhir and he has owned up to the murder as well – although the corpse is still to be found. However, this confession has several loose threads including an account of a mysterious blackmailer and the missing corpse. The police are, eventually, not satisfied with either confession. To cut a long story short, they locate Sunny’s girlfriend (the blackmailer) and it turns out that Sunny is not dead – he was merely injured and then rescued by her. In the last segment of the film, Sunny savagely attacks Simran and the child but he is shot dead by the police.
Murder, it can be seen, is constructed differently from Jism but it also deals with adultery and murder. It is, in fact, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidele (1969) or, rather, of its Hollywood retelling, Unfaithful (2002). But what it has in common with Jism is in its visual emphasis upon global lifestyles and in greed being the cause of the criminal’s downfall. It is also constructed as a thriller with parts of the story being gradually revealed.
 The next film Aitraaz (2004) is not a thriller in the strict sense but, being based on Disclosure (1994), revolves around a courtroom drama in which the male protagonist fights a case of sexual harassment. Raj Malhotra is happily married to a lawyer Priya but his boss’s wife Sonia makes advances to him that he rejects righteously. Raj and Sonia once had an affair in South Africa and she proposes to continue the relationship although there are spouses now involved. The film conceals parts of the story like Jism and Murder (though significantly not Disclosure). Raj is morally blameless but Sonia has all the makings of the noir heroine. An interesting aspect of Aitraaz is that it registers a parental presence but this parent is Priya’s – and Priya is the one person insulated from any kind of moral contamination. Priya is emphatically Indian, she has no global associations and she is instrumental in the court exonerating Raj.
In Jurm (2005), wealthy businessman Avinash is arrested for murdering his wife and he tells his story, much as  in Murder. Sanjana is a beautiful woman but Avinash soon begins to suspect her of infidelity. Their relationship goes from bad to worse until in an inebriated moment, he apparently shoots her dead – although he has no memory of it. Sanjana’s ‘uncle’ becomes a witness against him and the evidence against Avinash now becomes compelling. His friend/lawyer Rohit is unable to save him and he is sentenced to imprisonment. But still believing himself to be innocent and wanting vengeance against his wife’s killer, he induces Rohit to help him escape. Rohit assists but tries to kill Avinash and also believes his ends achieved. Avinash is saved by an adoring girlfriend and the two finally trace Rohit to Kuala Lumpur, where he runs an enormous hotel acquired out of Avinash’s money. Avinash also finds Sanjana alive and he learns that the entire affair was carefully plotted by Rohit and Sanjana, now happily married. The rest of the film is about Avinash’s vengeance, Rohit’s death and Sanjana’s final punishment.
I made a few remarks about the plainclothes policeman in Jism to play down the ‘Indianness’ of the space but the other films have no need for the ploy though they all use the figure of the law enforcer. The policeman in Murder is a functionary of the Thai government and global nature of the space is not affected by his presence. The courtroom in Aitraaz is Indian and must be taken to represent Indian State authority but the original relationship between Raj and Sonia is, significantly, contracted away from India’s shores – in a global space emptied of the Indian State, the Nation and Tradition. Sonia’s adulterous character owes to its having been molded in this space. The same observation can be made about Jurm where Sanjana’s character is associated with the global milieu and Kuala Lumpur is where she is domiciled. The plainclothes policeman is not seen in any of these films but he reappears in Zeher (2005) where he is the male protagonist implicated in adultery and also suspected of murder.
The story of Zeher is set in Goa, a Goa from which most traces of India have been erased. This becomes more apparent if this space (representing the ‘global Goa’) is placed alongside the one in The Bourne Supremacy (2005) in which few European traces remain. The attraction of an Indian location in an American film is its exotic, oriental appeal and it is the ‘oriental’ side of Goa that gets emphasis. Siddharth, in Zeher is in the police and married to Sonia, also a police officer. Their marriage is not doing well and Sonia being his senior may have something to do with it. Siddharth runs into Anna one day and it is apparent that her husband Sean ill-treats her. Anna seduces Siddharth and the two have a torrid affair until she tells his she is both pregnant and terminally ill. Since the two are ‘emotionally involved’, she takes out a policy with Siddharth as beneficiary and he misappropriates some drug money so she can get treatment. But news comes of a fire in Anna’s residence and she is apparently dead. When enquiries are made they find that Anna was neither pregnant nor ill. Siddharth is in trouble, especially because Sonia is entrusted with the case. Siddharth eventually locates the stolen drug money and also discovers that the conspiracy was hatched by Anna (who still lives) and Sean to steal it. The film concludes with Siddharth recovering the money and Anna, who has been holding a gun to Siddharth, being killed by Sonia.
The ‘global’
Zeher is similar to Aitraaz in as much as the male protagonist in both films is saved by his wife from the clutches of the treacherous noir woman. The wives are, in both films, associated with the Indian State because while Priya in Aitraaz is a lawyer arguing Raj’s case in an Indian court, Sonia in Zeher is a senior police officer (13). The wickedness of the noir woman, also in both films, is traced to her global associations. Sonia in Aitraaz owes it to her role as a fashion model for global brands and Anna in Zeher to her association with the global drug trade.
The ‘global’ has similarities with the ‘modern’ of the forties and fifties and the ‘West’ of later periods in Hindi cinema but its implications are different. The ‘modern’ pertained to a way of life and could be seen either as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ridiculous. The good modern was, for instance, often represented by the figure of the doctor (Dil Ek Mandir) and the ‘bad’ by the club dancer and/or the urban gangster (Baazi). The ridiculous aspect was most famously represented by Johnny Walker in his many roles (Kagaz Ke Phool). The ‘West’ was different in as much as it is symbolized by white people or tourist locations as in Sangam. The ‘bad West’ was represented earliest in the seventies by the hippies of Hare Rama Hare Krishna and the smuggler flying idols out of the country. The negative portrayals of the ‘West’ perhaps ended with the conclusion of Nehruvian socialism in 1991-92. In the nineties the ‘West’ is once again an invitation to the tourist/ consumer (DDLJ, Hero No. 1).
The foreign milieus in the Hindi noir films are not tourist destinations as in the nineties. They are global spaces in which Indians live, work and succeed. The song sequences on European roads with amused white onlookers embarrassed Indian sophisticates but they had the apparent consequence of distinguishing the Indians. To my knowledge the new films shot in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok do not include such sequences: The films cannot now say, “We are not like you,” to the locals. The songs, if any, are on the soundtrack but the protagonists conduct themselves discreetly like them.
The ‘global’ in new Hindi cinema is more akin to the ‘modern’ of the fifties than to the ‘Western’ of the intervening period because it combines a hint of glamour with more than a touch of the alarming. Like the ‘modern’ it is an attractive but also uncertain quantity that might influence Indians harmfully – which is perhaps the message of the Hindi noir heroine. Interestingly, film researchers detect the influence of noir in the Hindi films of the fifties (14). While this influence has been identified as pertaining largely to the visual codes, there is an aspect that connects directly with the Hindi noir films of the new millennium. Many of the films of the forties and fifties are also nominally structured as thrillers. More importantly, they introduce the unexpected into their narratives in ways involving character ambiguity. Let me cite two examples to illustrate this point: In Guru Dutt’s Baazi (1951), for instance, the unexpected is introduced through the heroine’s respectable father secretly being an urban gangster and the owner of a nightclub, an emblem of bad modernity in the fifties. The agency responsible for the darker side of his dual nature is therefore ‘modernity’. Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949) is not a thriller but the heroine Neeta’s free manner makes the male protagonist Dilip (Dilip Kumar) believe she loves him. Later on, the film introduces the heroine’s fiancé Rajan (Raj Kapoor) and Dilip is unable to come to terms with his presence in her life. My argument is that the heroine’s conduct is ambiguous and the agency blamed for this ambiguity is ‘modernity’. It is because Neeta is brought up as a ‘modern’ woman that Dilip misreads her behavior and tragedy results.
Film researchers are convinced too easily that Indian cinema of the fifties was imitating Hollywood in order to be modern (15) but the thriller format had perhaps another significance. The thriller of the forties and fifties was perhaps a way of problematizing the uncertainties in the modernization project: If the outcome of modernization was uncertain, the ‘modern’ could be employed as the entity within the narrative that accounted for a mystery.
What we are apparently witnessing in the Hindi noir thriller today is a replication of tendencies in the fifties with the ‘modern’ replaced by the ‘global’. The outcome of globalization is as uncertain today as the outcome of modernization was in the Nehru era and this is being problematized by the Hindi noir thriller. The characterization of the adulterous woman may owe to American noir but it addresses apprehensions in the minds of public about the possible erosion of traditional values when India embraces the ‘global’ wholeheartedly. The motif of the adulterous/murderous woman can even be read as the resistance of tradition to globalization.
KANK and the end of Hindi noir
 Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) takes the theme of adultery a step further along the same path by actually appearing to endorse it. If this is a striking departure from convention, more so than in Jism and the others, there are other anomalies that mitigate the endorsement and these are, specifically, the narrative being deliberately confined to the United States – with no acknowledgement of India – and the playing down of the symbols representing tradition – the mangalsutra, the patriotism and the religious fervor to name three. Taken together, the anomalies make it appear that the space of the narrative has been deliberately emptied of the Indian Nation and Tradition to render it suitable for adultery and this runs parallel to the methods adopted by the Hindi noir films.
The motif that still remains recognizable – despite the disguise – is the venerated parent. The father played by Amitabh relishes the company of young women but he treats sex simply as a commodity, having a place in his heart only for his late wife. The mother in Hindi cinema, as often acknowledged, is the site of virtue in the narrative (16). Hence, the adulterous male protagonist’s mother remaining with her daughter-in-law Rhea (and grandson) rather than going with him carries the same connotations as Ravi saying, “Mere pass maa hain!” in Deewar (1975). Only Rhea (Preity Zinta) has no eyes for anyone but her spouse and she, significantly, is also a mother. This is different from the five thrillers beginning with Jism where tradition in the shape of the venerated parent is virtually absent. The difference is perhaps located in the thrillers being a dire warning against the ravages of globalization upon traditional lifestyles within India and KANK accepting, quite cheerfully, the possibility that lifestyles might be influenced and even transformed with Indians going global.
Still, when KANK permits the adulterous Dev (Shah Rukh Khan) and Maya (Rani Mukhherjee) to embark on their own, it does not suggest that the social fabric is under threat in any way. KANK is, rather, asserting that the fabric is secure despite the Devs and the Mayas. Apart from Shahrukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee suggesting vulnerability, Dev’s being disabled – he hobbles through the film – reassures us that he is not the triumphant hero. Where Rhea and the others live in opulence, Dev moves into a bare apartment, the likes of which may not have housed a film hero after 1992. Dev and Maya have little except each other, and that is another anomaly in a cinema where one must be rich to be in a story. If the film is sympathetic to those who break traditional taboos it is also suggesting that they will not be left with very much. KANK is perhaps the first Hindi film to accept cultural globalization even while reassuring its constituency that, regardless of the transformations experienced, what is essential to tradition will be carried forward. Given that KANK endorses the same social/ cultural phenomena that Hindi noir dramatically opposes, might not KANK’s success also mark the conclusion of Hindi noir as a genre? |
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Notes:
| 1 |
Sylvia Harvey, Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, from Anne Kaplan (Ed), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, 1980, pp22-34. (Back to Main Story) |
| 2 |
Ibid, pp 22-34. (Back to Main Story) |
| 3 |
David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Style, from David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p76. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 4 |
See Ashis Nandy, The Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles, India International Center Quarterly 8(1), 1981, p 89-96 and Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen, 26(3-4),1985, p 116-132. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 5 |
“The characters in a film drama never know what is going to happen to them but the music always knows.” Lawrence Morton, Interview with George Antheil, Film Music Notes, 2, No.2, Nov. 1942, cited by David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Style, from The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, p34. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 6 |
Lothar Lutze. From Bharata to Bombay: Change and Continuity in Hindi Film Aesthetics, from (Eds.) Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze, The Hindi Film: Agent and Re-agent of Cultural Change, p5. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 7 |
Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen, 26 (3-4), 1985, p130. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 8 |
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Methuen, 1985, p 70. “The narration will also be quite unrestricted in range, closer to an omniscient survey, so that the film can engender pity, irony, and other ‘dissociated’ emotions.” ( Back to Main Story) |
| 9 |
The following passage gives a useful picture of the transformation: “Hollywood…had always attempted to reinforce those American values that enjoyed widespread support. Among these were the norms and sentiments that cherished the family, the home, and the healing and nurturing power of love. However, by the 1960s a sizable segment of the population no longer shared these or other communal feelings. Central to the malaise that enveloped both real-and reel-life characters is disillusionment with the family. In the older formulaic endings of most films, a loving kiss sealed the matrimonial bargain between a man and a woman and seemed to promise to continue to do so till death did them part. Their actual married life was left to the audience’s imaginations. However, once Hollywood introduced admirable heroines who would not accept monogamy as a substitute for career and a carefree existence, who refused to bask demurely in the reflected status of their husband’s occupation, and who demanded every jot and title that the law and their own individual or collective efforts might obtain, it sounded a little tocsin: the trouble between the sexes was just beginning when the organ played the wedding march…. Kramer Vs Kramer and Ordinary People seemed to seal the fate of the nuclear family and suggest that the future portends a new ordering of the domestic and occupational verities. The all-male homestead would in future link father and son in the only emotionally sensitized and lovingly nurturant haven in what had otherwise emerged as a heartless world, while the workplace would likely become the scene of a harsh and less than feeling competitive struggle between career driven women and ambitious men, the battleground for a cold war of the sexes.” Stanford M Lyman, The Road to Anhedonia: Patterns of Emotional Conflict in American Films 1930-1988, from Social Perspectives on Emotion: A Research Annual Vol. I, 1992. Series Editors: David D Franks, Viktor Gelas, Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press Inc., pp 179-180. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 10 |
M Madhava Prasad ( Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998) pp30-31, prefers to use the term ‘feudal family romance’ to designate the Indian domestic melodrama. This seems to imply that the family as portrayed in Hindi cinema has some sort of historical correspondence with the family in feudal times. ( Back to Main Story) |
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| 12 |
Anyone who has seen Pondicherry knows there are only two streets that continue to remain ‘French’ while the rest of the town is much like any in Tamil Nadu. But the film deliberately sticks to the spaces where the Indian ambience is lowest. Also aiding the film here are the few uniformed policemen seen walking about – their red hats will appear distinctly non-Indian to an Indian spectator. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 13 |
Significantly, while Siddharth is always in plainclothes, Sonia is in khaki when investigating Anna’s ‘death’. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 14 |
For instance see Ravi S Vasudevan, Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities, from Ravi S Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 109-110. ( Back to Main Story) |
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| M K Raghavendra is the founder-editor of Phalanx |
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