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This is the piece on ‘ Lajja’ that I wrote for Hindustan Times:

Loud …because it needs to be heard.

If any communication medium can act as an agent of social change in India, it has to be television or films, simply because in a country of low literacy, only these two have the necessary reach. Television in the era of TRP wars has relinquished its social obligations altogether, what with Doordarashan itself joining the rat race. Commercial films of course had never pretended to provide anything other than escapist entertainment. The financiers are too concerned about getting a return on their investment, which is best ensured by following, or at best anticipating, prevailing social trends rather than by challenging them.

It is in this perspective that a film like Lajja deserves a big round of applause and a critical second look. It is a brave and sincere attempt on the part of Raj Kumar Santoshi, trying to make a mainstream film that showcases many different faces of oppression of women across social strata in our country. Many critics have called it loud and melodramatic. Yes, it is told in the language of mainstream cinema and not the art cinema of the festival circuit. But that does not mean that what it portrays is any less true or worthy of our concern. On the other hand, its format and style makes it accessible to millions of men and women in the hinterlands of India, where anti-women values are most prevalent. A film like Hari Bhari might be elegant cinema, but how many in Bihar and UP have actually seen it?

The story of Lajja starts with Vaidehi ( Manisha Koirala) who is married to Raghu ( Jackie Shroff) an NRI businessman based in the USA. Raghu is in the habit of flirting with his business associate’s wife and is not perturbed if his associate makes a pass at Vaidehi. Vaidehi cannot accept this and leaves Raghu stranded in a party which they had hosted. Vaidehi is sent back to India, to an unwelcome homecoming. In the meanwhile, an accident leaves Raghu incapable of having children. On discovering that Vaidehi is pregnant, Raghu’s father advises him to lure her back and get rid of her later. Vaidehi runs away from her escorts at the airport on learning about the family’s evil intentions. As she is chased by Raghu and his men across the country, she runs into many different women and their problems.

This introductory episode is the weakest in the film. The treatment of women in rich but feudal-minded business families as shown here is accurate enough, but the handling of the incidents is somewhat slipshod, betraying elements of confusion in the director’s mind. But it can be excused as a necessary ploy to weave in the three meatier episodes which form the core of the film.

The first of the three episodes concerns Maithili ( Mahima Cowdhury) who is about to get married to a boy whom she knew in college. But it is a traditional marriage where the bride’s father has agreed to a dowry clearly beyond his means and finds himself Rs.50,000/- short. A thief (Anil Kapoor) Vaidehi had befriended earlier tries to make good the amount. But things go awry. The groom’s father heaps humiliation after humiliation upon the bride’s father. Maithili cannot take it any more and refuses to marry a coward who sits down and stands up at his greedy father’s bidding.

Vaidehi now lands up in a small town where she is given shelter by Purushottam (Tinu Anand) the lecherous owner-director of a drama company. Here she is befriended by the alcoholic lead actress of the group Janaki (Madhuri Dixit) who is carrying the child of a fellow actor Manish whom she plans to marry soon. But Manish dumps her at the instigation of Purushottam. Janaki is heart-broken and vents out her ire on the male species during an enactment of Ramayana. Veering away from the original script, she as Seeta refuses to go through the agnipareeksha. “Don’t you trust me?” she asks Rama. “And if you do, must you make me go through this indignity just to please your insensitive subjects? And if there has to be test of chastity, shouldn’t we both be walking through the fire, after all, we both have been living away from each other?” The crowd gets restive. “Shameless character, loose woman!” they shout and vandalize the hall. The religious zealots join in the protest. As she is being escorted to the lunatic asylum, an unsound mind being the only possible excuse that can ward off violent retribution, she is trampled over by the unruly crowd, losing her unborn baby in the stampede.

Vaidehi runs away and lands up at the hut of Ramdulari (Rekha), the village midwife somewhere in UP. Ramdulari’s attempts at spreading education among the villages and her tirade against practices like female infanticide is tolerated indulgently by the evil landlord brothers Gajendra
(Danny Denzongpa) and Virendra (Gulshan Grover). But when Gajendra’s daughter and Ramdulari’s son, classmates at college, are discovered to be going around together and subsequently elope, the brothers reckon it is time to teach the upstart woman a lesson. Ramdulari is held captive in her own house, raped and burnt alive mercilessly. This episode also springs on us the character of Bulwa (Ajay Devgan), an outlaw and a violent activist, who wreaks revenge on the tyrant brothers.

There is an epilogue to the film where Vaidehi confronts Gajendra with a fiery speech where in she laments the treatment meted out to the Vaidehi’s, Maithili’s and Ramdulari’s in a country where they worship Seeta. Her speech is shown to have stirred up the crowd to rise up against Gajendra. There is a kind of coda too, where Raghu and Vaidehi are back together in New York. There they meet the thief who is now a taxi driver married to Maithili. We also see the posters of a dance show by Janaki, which Raghu’s company is organizing to raise money for fighting women’s cause in India.

It would be downright naïve to think of this conclusion as the preferred solution recommended by the director. It is just a tag-on happy ending for the film to make the audience feel good as they leave the theatre. In the final analysis, what is commendable is that Santoshi has brought to the fore many issues and ideas that are not heard beyond the drawing-rooms of the well educated or meetings of activists’ forums. What is refreshing is that each of the episodes throws up many little insights that go beyond the core issue drawn in bold strokes.

In the Maithili episode involving dowry, for example, the thief remarks, “I am a stranger here. But I can tell you who are the people from the bride’s side and who from the groom’s, why I can even tell you who is the girl’s father. Look at that person with a drooping pagdi, apologizing without any reason to anybody he meets. That’s him.” The swaggering groom’s father and the obsequious bride’s father are meant to be exaggerated caricatures, but they capture so poignantly what goes on in every small town in India. Both the money-grabbing monster that is the groom’s father as well his spineless son are shown up to ridicule for good measure. Surely it is a bold and necessary corrective step in the world of today’s blockbuster family films where parental consent is idolized in movie after movie like HAHK, DDLJ and Mohabbatein.

The Janaki episode is the most daring and also the most intelligent, dealing with many subtle aspects of women’s rights. First and foremost, by challenging the behavioural models prescribed by our epics, Santoshi has shown the courage of a true social reformer. Shying away from the issue because it touches sensitive religious beliefs would have made him miss the opportunity to strike at the root where the rot begins. Because we must realize that epics like Ramayana were written by well-meaning poets and social thinkers, who were propounding codes for living based on the prevailing social conditions. Not all of those edicts can provide the right guidance in a changed social perspective. Admirably, Santoshi has been realistic enough to show the difficulties likely to be encountered by iconoclasts who challenge long-held traditional beliefs.

Apart from the basic message of double standards followed in our society with relation to man-woman relationship, the episode also paints many delightful vignettes of what the joy of a woman unfettered may feel like. The scene where Janaki and Vaidehi are lying in bed talking, laughing in total abandon, or the scene where Janaki teaches Vaidehi how to whistle in a cinema hall, are wonderful scenes of woman-bonding. Scenes from “Thelma and Louise” as the two women hit the road, having burnt the bridges of their feminine role playing, comes to mind. There is also the scene where Vaidehi wants to get back to her room after their visit to the cinema because she wants to take a pee. “Do it behind one of these bushes” Janaki suggests, “If men can do it openly on the road, why can’t we?” she asks. Seemingly frivolous, the scene is really a cipher about how public space has been appropriated by the males, pushing
the women into the andar mahals of protected but caged existence.

There are little asides here and there which reveal nuances above strident sloganeering. Take the scene where Janaki shows off her saree collection to Vaidehi. “It might be just a village drama troupe, but I am its heroine. So I have to maintain my appearance, don’t I ? And to tell you the truth, if I am walking on the road and a couple of men don’t turn around to look at me, I can’t sleep well that night.” She craves for the admiring looks of males but won’t put up with unsolicited passes from a lecherous Purushotttam. How many feminist films in the art house circuit recognize the paradox and concede its legitimacy?

What adds to the effectiveness of this episode is the many-layered, confident and colourful portrayal of Janaki by Madhuri Dixit. This is her most mature performance to date for sure.

The Ramdulari episode, as is widely known by now, is based on a real-life incident that took place in Bhawanipur village of UP. In fact it is this incident reported in the newspapers that inspired Santoshi to make the film in the fist place. Those who suggest that such an incident is a sporadic case should look at the spate of subsequent killings of inter-caste lovers in the Jatlands of UP, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan. They should also read about the incidents of sharing of wives in the family by the Gurjjars of Rajasthan and other communities elsewhere caused by badly skewed sex ratio to realize the havoc that practices like female feticide and infanticide can cause to our social fabric.

The relationship between feudal set ups and gender inequities is brought out by Santoshi quite powerfully in the film. Santoshi’s Gajendra Babu is a perfect metaphor that helps us understand the nature of the upper-caste male mindset in the feudal societies of rural India. This mindset finds echoes in the pronouncements of many public figures in the Bihar/UP region. A politician of some stature remarked in the aftermath of a rape in Bihar, “ What offence has been committed? After all a woman is a thing to be enjoyed! (Aurat to akhir bhogne ki cheez hai!) The MP from Muzaffarnagar, where the ill-fated inter-caste lovers were hanged by their families and relatives was equally unrepentant about the cold-blooded murder, terming it as a necessary step for maintaining social order. Obviously he was talking of a social order where the oppressed remained oppressed and the oppressors called the shots.

Many of the feminist critics have raised their concern about whether any of the protagonists in the film have been empowered through the crises they have gone through. The answer would be, yes, in varying degrees. Maithili has walked away from a marriage with a spineless son of an inhuman money-maniac. Janaki has dared to challenge sacrosanct but fossilized belief systems of a stagnant society, using the platform available to her as an artist to espouse her views. Ramdulari was already empowered, working at spreading enlightenment among the villagers, taking the lead herself by sending her son to college. She gets victimized for her daring. But as Bulwa says somewhere in the movie, “ Sufferings and sacrifices are a part of one’s struggle against oppression. But the important thing is that they raised their voices. “

Yes, there are compromises and there are lapses, but in a country where ninety-nine out of hundred popular films are escapist entertainment, one would have to be grateful that the film has happened at all. Now if the intellectual establishment does not give Santoshi a pat on the back because it is not perfect or elegant enough, that would really be a shame. Because Lajja’s message needs to be heard, loud and clear, across the country. And we need many more Lajja’s to shake us up from our social apathy rather than films that just make us “feel good”.

UTKAL MOHANTY