From bedchambers to cremation grounds: On women, dilemmas and puzzles

Mani Kaul and Amol Palekar have navigated the same short story through vividly varying lenses– yet, only one could entirely succeed.

A cloud of uneasiness casts itself over Vijaydan Detha’s Hindi short story Duvidha. The fictional work chronicles the life of a newly wed bride who faces the dilemma of choosing between her husband- a workaholic merchant who goes on a five-year-long business trip right after getting married-, and a lovestruck ghost who shapeshifts into her husband and impregnates her. Here’s the catch though: the bride rarely gets to make the choice, but is almost always the victim of some or the other conundrum. Her identity is constantly toyed with throughout the course of the story, which finally ends with a deeply distressing yet ever-relevant question: Are women allowed to have any will of their own?

Detha’s story has gone on to receive acclaim over the years, particularly after being adapted into not one, but two feature-length films. The first being the eponymous Duvidha (1973) by the arthouse auteur Mani Kaul. The second being the commercial darling Amol Palekar’s Paheli (2005), a loose adaptation of its source material. The two films are as poles apart in their approach as their directors, and it is intriguing to compare the two and highlight the things that sat well with me, as well as the ones that didn’t quite hit the mark.

I have been enamoured with Mani Kaul’s work for a minute now. The definitive personage of Indian art cinema, Kaul is known for his realist approach in his films and his ability to create a great impact with minimal elements on a relatively inconsequential budget. But my greatest takeaway from his films has always been the autonomy he let his female leads have.

At first I didn’t get it. I didn’t know what I was expecting. I had watched works of Kaul’s contemporaries like Kumar Shahani, Kamal Swaroop and Saeed Akhtar Mirza, prior to watching Duvidha. Even though all four of them have widely different approaches to film-making, I likened Kaul the most to Shahani– which is somewhat of an inevitable comparison, as I later found out. Both directors have the same precision in their frames, the same ampleness of room for their characters to breathe, the same slow pace. At least that’s what I managed to collect from my comparatively limited film knowledge. But the other thing that I noticed was common in both genre-greats was the stressed emphasis on their female characters. It isn’t the most obvious thing to strike you after watching Duvidha- especially if you have only consumed blaringly in-your-face commercial cinema before, like me- but the film does put its female protagonist on an elevated platform, even without having her to do much.

For one, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to this “problem.” It isn’t that kind of a story. In fact, the film prods its viewers to ponder upon the status of women in society, and the level of agency they are allowed to have. Duvidha takes place in pre-colonial Rajasthan– a feudal hub. The society is visibly patriarchal. The atmosphere of the film is heavily saturated in yellow, and there are minimal dialogues, minimal expressions. These are aesthetic choices, but they also hint at the overall mood of our central character: the bride. It didn’t hit me at first, but a friend later explained to me about how the “morose” tone of the film directly reflects the woman’s position in society. The bride isn’t particularly enthusiastic about getting married. The groom isn’t either– but at least, he gets to enjoy a sense of freedom. He gets to come and go as he pleases. The bride, on the other hand, is confined to her husband’s mansion, which no doubt, is spacious and convenient, but in the end, is still a kind of “prison” for her.

The very fact that the woman gets married into such a palatial house spells out her status in society. She seems to be of a high social standing, but is ultimately, still a victim to patriarchy. At the end of the day, marriage is still a patriarchal institution that only sees women as transactional commodities to be traded and bought. At no stage in the film is the bride even asked her choice. Kaul skillfully makes up for Padamsee’s inexpertise in Hindi by barely making her talk. Her husband leaves her, and she has to stay back, without mouthing a single word of her own. The ghost, madly obsessed with the bride, reveals his true identity to her, which posits a shattering realisation onto her, as well as a ghastly dilemma: does she stay true and loyal to the husband who doesn’t think twice before leaving on a long-winded expedition, or does she give in to this “respectful” ghost who is deeply in love with her?

The truth is, the bride’s agency to make a “choice” is still bleak. She doesn’t get a lot to choose from. She is still torn between two men she barely knows and had no part in choosing her life partner for herself. She didn’t know the man she was married off to. She doesn’t know the ghost who claims to be in love with her. Her taking a stand for herself by choosing to consummate her marriage with the ghost instead may come off as a “strong” and “independent” choice to some– but it is really not, for this story belongs to a place at a time where even male ghosts are able to have the agency of choice easily, but real women of flesh and blood are not.

Years roll on, and the ghost impregnates the woman. The real husband ends up returning earlier than usual, and upon finding out that his supposed doppelganger is now the father to his wife’s unborn child, takes up the decision to find out the truth. In a chaotic turn of events, the ghost’s identity is revealed to the townsfolk, and he is left to die in a river, while the husband dutifully gets to return home and fulfill his duties. The bride becomes extremely submissive upon his return. She follows all the instructions obediently. She doesn’t pose a single question, now that the one thing that she had made her “choice”on was also gone. The film ends with a heavy-hearted voiceover, taken from the original short story, as it goes in English:

How many lives would she have to endure in this one bedchamber? But if this baby girl, now at her breast, should not have to endure such a life when she grew to womanhood, the mother’s sufferings would not have been in vain. Even animals cannot be so easily used against their will. At least they do shake their heads in protest. But are women allowed to have any will of their own. Until they reach the cremation ground, they must be in the bedchamber, and when they escape the bedchamber, they go straight to the cremation ground.

Duvidha is a depressing film from start to end. It reeks of pessimism and monotony in every frame, but that’s the thing Kaul does best. He makes sure the despairing mood of the film oozes out of every element involved. The minimal dialogue delivery is flat, the colours are blindingly humdrum. However, I would like to also digress and state that there is something very intriguing about Kaul’s frames. He has a wearisome wash of yellow slathered onto every shot, but the repetition of the colour also makes occasional contrasting hues stand out. There is a very striking use of red in some frames, which symbolises pleasure. But the overall absence of vibrant shades throughout the film successfully reaffirms the film’s purpose.

I had the privilege of engaging in a conversation with celebrated art film director Kamal Swaroop the other day. We nerded out on parallel cinema for about an hour, and eventually the topic of Mani Kaul and the interestingly “hollow” dialogue delivery of his characters surfaced. Swaroop recalled Kaul’s obsession with non-actors. He mentioned how Kaul aspired to become an actor himself, and had this unexplained “animosity” for professional actors. In Swaroop’s own words- “Usko chid aati thi actors se” (He despised actors). But there was also the priority Kaul gave to the composition of his frames over individual performances of his actors. What I deduced after watching a couple more of his films was that Kaul did not want to superimpose his intentions onto his audience. He didn’t want to flat out spell it out to his viewers on how “feudalism and patriarchy is bad;” he wanted them to figure it out for themselves. I think that is very interactive– in a way, the director is having a conversation with his audience. Those who get it get it. I didn’t have this epiphany until I watched my next Kaul film Ashadh Ka Ek Din, which somehow became an immediate favourite of mine, even though I believe I have years ahead of me to understand that film completely.

Ashadh Ka Ek Din does the exact same thing that I conveniently missed in my first viewing of Duvidha– it centres itself around the female lead. I won’t go much into Ashadh here- that masterpiece deserves a post of its own- but let’s talk more about Duvidha. Duvidha is centered around a woman who would normally occur to a layman as a “side character” in a man’s story. Face it- the bride does not have a life of her own. She isn’t allowed to. All her actions in the film take place on the instruction of someone else. Her entire existence relies on her spouse, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her. But Kaul’s camera rarely ever lingers on the man. His lens is point blank on the bride. He turns the object of someone else’s life into a subject, a doer of actions, in his work. He gives the woman that sense of agency, that autonomy, while still letting the viewers see how brutally the system suffocates her. Her sullen face right from the beginning makes it evident as to how entrapped she is in her marriage, something that is usually said to spark zeal and pomp in the Indian societal context.

And this is exactly what Amol Palekar’s Paheli completely misses. While Kaul tries to inject the bride’s sadness into every still of the movie, Palekar opens the movie with an exuberant Lachchi (Rani Mukerji) overly elated to spend the rest of her life with a man she has never met. It makes little sense. But for the commercial cinema audience, it works. I’m not using the term “commercial cinema audience” in a derogatory sense. I was a serial Bollywood watcher not too long ago. And believe me, I would have eaten this film up in my Bollywood phase from last year. Because of course, if you have never seen the ocean, a pool sure seems deep.

Paheli is littered with vibrant colours, pompous musical numbers and the usual Bollywood zest, in complete contrast with Kaul’s realistically dull sequences. It caricaturises Rajasthani culture by overdoing the local dialect, showcasing camel races and introducing puppets as narrators (voiced by Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah). And to top it all off, it stars Shah Rukh Khan in a double role– as the boring husband, Kishanlal, and the charming romantic ghost. But what Paheli gets completely off is its compartmentalisation of characters. Subsequently, we have the archetypal bad husband with Kishanlal, and the good feminist man who honours the woman’s consent with the ghost. But it’s really not that simple.

Paheli poses as a riddle, while Duvidha is a much deeper, more complex dilemma. Kaul’s effort puts his characters at crossroads at nearly every point in the film. Is it right for the husband to choose his business over his wife? Is it right for the ghost to live with the clueless bride as her husband or should he reveal his identity as it is? It isn’t just the bride that ends up being the object of the hypothetical duvidha.

Moreover, Paheli presents a complete black-and-white portrayal of reality, and ends it all up with a mythical “happy ending” (the big twist in the end is that the ghost takes on the husband’s body). It’s not about good men warding off bad men. It’s about the feudal and patriarchal structure doubly suppressing women. The “happy ending” does not make sense, because what happy ending can a woman have when she is put to test at each of the three suhaag raats she has to face, where she isn’t even allowed to unveil herself on her own? Paheli also brings in half-baked new characters, leaves multiple unanswered questions, and brandishes its edge with a tinge of casteism. “Berries are eaten only by village bumpkins.” This is evident in the original tale too, but with Paheli’s supposed “happy ending,” it seems almost normalised. At one point, the female puppet even addresses the husband using a casteist slur- obviously in a derogatory and non-literal way- which doesn’t sit right with me either.

It is hard to make a Bollywood film actively questioning women’s oppression, without covering it with the classic neo-liberal blanket. It is even harder to make a bankable commercial film wallowing in shades of pessimism. For the theatre-going audience, Paheli is like a watchable fantasy drama, with a sprinkle of comedy and the obligatory social message, which makes the film reviewable and recommendable. But when it comes down to precisely adapting the original text whilst retaining its true meaning, the bar set by Mani Kaul hasn’t even been reached halfway.