Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  All soul, an inveterate coiner of poetic phrases on the sorrows and sublimity of love, the romantic lover must split off his corporeality and find it a home or, rather, an orphanage. The kotha, the traditional style brothel, is Hindi cinema’s favorite abode for the denied and discarded sexual impulses, a home for vile bodies. Sometimes replaced by the shady night club, a more directly licentious import from the West, the kotha provides the alcohol as well as the rhythmic music and dance associated with these degraded impulses. Enjoyed mostly by others, by the villain or the hero’s friends, for the romantic lover the sexual pleasures of the kotha are generally cloaked in a pall of guilt, to be savored morosely in an alcoholic haze and to the nagging beat of self-recrimination.

  The Krishna-lover is the second important hero of Indian films. Distinct from Majnun, the two may, in a particular film, be sequential rather than separate. The Krishna-lover is physically importunate, what Indian-English will perhaps call the ‘eve-teasing’ hero, whose initial contact with women verges on that of sexual harassment. His cultural lineage goes back to the episode of the mischievous Krishna hiding the clothes of the gopis (cow-herdesses) while they bathe in the pond and his refusal to give them back in spite of the girls’ repeated entreaties. From the 1950s Dev Anand movies to those (and especially) of Shammi Kapoor in the 1960s and of Jeetendra today, the Krishna-lover is all over and all around the heroine who is initially annoyed, recalcitrant, and quite unaware of the impact of hero’s phallic intrusiveness has on her. The Krishna-lover has the endearing narcissism of the boy on the eve of the Oedipus stage, when the world is felt to be his ‘oyster.’ He tries to draw the heroine’s attention by all possible means—aggressive innuendoes and double entendres, suggestive song and dance routines, bobbing up in the most unexpected places to startle and tease her as she goes about her daily life (Jeetendra is affectionately known as ‘jack in the box’). The more the heroine dislikes the lover’s incursions, the greater is his excitement. As the hero of the film Aradhana remarks, ‘Love is run only when the woman is angry.’

  For the Krishna-lover, it is vital that the woman be a sexual innocent and that in his forcing her to become aware of his desire she get in touch with her own. He is phallus incarnate, with distinct elements of the ‘flasher’ who needs constant reassurance by the woman of his power, intactness, and especially his magical qualities that can transform a cool Amazon into a hot, lusting female. The fantasy is of the phallus—Shammi Kapoor in his films used his whole body as one—humbling the pride of the unapproachable woman, melting her indifference and unconcern into submission and longing. The fantasy is of the spirited androgynous virgin awakened to her sexuality and thereafter reduced to a grovelling being, full of a moral masochism wherein she revels in her ‘stickiness’ to the hero. Before she does so, however, she may go through a stage of playfulness where she presents the lover a mocking version of himself. Thus in Junglee, it is the girl from the hills—the magical fantasy-land of Indian cinema where the normal order of things is reversed—who throws snowballs at the hero, teases him, and sings to him in a good-natured reversal of the man’s phallicism, while it is now the hero’s turn to be provoked and play the reluctant beloved.

  The last 15 years of Indian cinema have been dominated, indeed overwhelmed, by Amitabh Bachchan who has personified a new kind of hero and lover. His phenomenally successful films have spawned a brand new genre which, though strongly influenced by Hollywood action movies such as those of Clint Eastwood, is neither typically Western not traditionally Indian.

  The Bachchan hero is the good-bad hero who lives on the margins of his society. His attachments are few but they are strong and silent. Prone to quick violence and to brooding periods of withdrawal, the good-bad hero is a natural law-breaker, yet will not deviate from a strict private code of his own. He is often a part of the underworld but shares neither its sadistic nor its sensual excesses. If cast in the role of a policeman, he often bypasses cumbersome bureaucratic procedures to take the law in his own hands, dealing with criminals by adopting their own ruthless methods. His badness is not shown as intrinsic or immutable but as a reaction to a development deprivation of early childhood, often a mother’s loss, absence, or ambivalence toward the hero.

  The cultural parallel of the good-bad hero is the myth of Karna in the Mahabharata. Kunti, the future mother of the five Pandava brothers, had summoned the Sun when she was a young princess. Though her calling the Sun was a playful whim—she was just trying out a mantra—the god insisted on making something more of the invitation. The offspring of the resulting union was Karna. To hide her shame at Karna’s illegitimate birth, Kunti abandoned her infant son and cast him adrift on a raft. Karna was saved by a poor charioteer and grew up into a formidable warrior and the supporter of the evil Duryodhana. On the eve of the great battle, Kunti approached Karna and revealed to him that fighting on Duryodhana’s side would cause him to commit the sin of fratricide. Karna answered:

  It is not that I do not believe the words you have spoken, Kshatriya (warrior caste) lady, or deny that for me the gateway to the Law is to carry out your behest. But the irreparable wrong you have done me by casting me out has destroyed the name and fame I could have had. Born a Kshatriya, I have yet not received the respect due a baron. What enemy could have done me greater harm than you have? When there was time to act you did not show your present compassion. And now you have laid orders on me, the son to whom you denied the sacraments. You have never acted in my interest like a mother, and now, here you are, enlightening me solely in your interest.9

  Karna, though, finally promised his mother that on the battlefield he would spare all her sons except Arjuna—the mother’s favourite.

  The good-bad Bachchan hero is both a product of and a response to the pressures and forces of development and modernization taking place in Indian society today and which have accelerated during the last two decades. He thus reflects the psychological changes in a vast number of people who are located in a halfway house—in the transitional sector—which lies between a minuscule (yet economically and politically powerful) modern and the numerically preponderant traditional sectors of Indian society. Indeed, it is this transitional sector from which the Bachchan movies draw the bulk of their viewers.

  The individual features of the good-bad hero which I have sketched above can be directly correlated with the major psychological difficulties experienced by the transitional sector during the course of modernization. Take, for instance, the effects of overcrowding and the high population density in urban conglomerations, especially in slum and shanty towns. Here, the lack of established cultural norms and the need to deal with relative strangers whose behavioural cues cannot be easily assessed compel the individual to be on constant guard and in a state of permanent psychic mobilization. A heightened nervous arousal, making for a reduced control over one’s aggression, in order to ward off potential encroachments, is one consequence and a characteristic of the good-bad hero.

  Then there is bureaucratic complexity with its dehumanization which seems to be an inevitable corollary of economic development. The cumulative effect of the daily blows to feelings of self-worth, received in a succession of cold and impersonal bureaucratic encounters, so far removed from the familiarity and predictability of relationship in the rural society, gives rise to fantasies of either complete withdrawal or of avenging slights and following the dictates of one’s personal interests, even if this involves the taking of the law into one’s own hands. These, too, form a part of our hero’s persona.

  Furthermore, the erosion of traditional roles and skills in the transitional sector can destroy the self-respect of those who are now suddenly confronted with a loss of earning power and social status. For the families of the affected, especially the children, there may be a collapse of confidence in the stability of the established world. Doubts surface whether hard work and careful planning can guarantee future rewards of security. The future itself begins to be discounted to the present.10 The
Bachchan hero, neither a settled family man nor belonging to any recognized community of craftsmen, farmers, etc., incorporates the transitional man’s collective dream of success without hard work and of life lived primarily, and precariously, in the here-and-now.

  The last feature of the portrait is the core sadness of the good-bad hero. On the macro level, this may be traced back to the effects of the population movements that take place during the process of economic development. The separation of families, the loss of familiar village neighbourhoods and ecological niches, can overwhelm many with feelings of bereavement. Sometimes concretized in the theme of separation from the mother, these feelings of loss and mourning are mirrored in the Bachchan hero and are a cause of his characteristic depressive detachment, in which the viewers, too, can recognize a part of themselves.

  As a lover, the good-bad hero is predictably neither overly emotional like Majnun nor boyishly phallic like the Krishna lover. A man of controlled passion, somewhat withdrawn, he subscribes to the well-known lines of the Urdu poet Faiz that ‘Our world knows other torments than of love and other happinesses than a fond embrace.’ The initial meeting of the hero and heroine in Deewar, Bachchan’s first big hit and widely imitated thereafter, conveys the essential flavour of this hero as a lover. The setting is a restaurant-night club and Bachchan is sitting broodingly at the bar. Anita, played by Parveen Babi, is a dancer—the whore with a golden heart—who comes and sits next to him. She offers him a light for his cigarette and tells him that he is the most handsome man in the bar. Bachchan, who must shortly set out for a fateful meeting with the villian, indifferently accepts her proffered homage as his due while he ignores her sexually provocative approach altogether. Indeed, this narcissistically withdrawn lover’s relationships with his family members and even his best friend are more emotionally charged than with any woman who is his potential erotic partner. Little wonder that Shashi Kapoor, who played the hero’s brother or best friend in many movies, came to be popularly known as Amitabh Bachchan’s favourite heroine!

  Afraid of the responsibility and effort involved in active wooing, of passivity and dependency upon a woman—urges from the earliest period of life which love brings to the fore and intensifies—the withdrawn hero would rather be admired than loved. It is enough for him to know that the woman is solely devoted to him while he can enjoy the position of deciding whether to take her or leave her. The fantasy here seems of revenge on the woman for a mother who either preferred someone else—in Deewar, it is the brother—or only gave the child conditional love and less than constant admiration.

  The new genre of films, coexisting with the older ones, has also given birth to a new kind of heroine, similar in some respects to what Wolfenstein and Leites described as the masculine-feminine girl of the American movies of the 1940s and 1950s.11 Lacking the innocent androgyny of Krishna’s playmate, she does not have the sari-wrapped femininity (much of the time she is clad in jeans anyway!) of Majnun’s beloved either. Like the many interchangeable heroines of Bachchan movies, she is more a junior comrade to the hero than his romantic and erotic counterpart.

  Speaking a man’s language, not easily shocked, she is the kind of woman with whom the new hero can feel at ease. She is not an alien creature of feminine whims, sensitivities and susceptibilities, with which a man feels uncomfortable and which he feels forced to understand. Casual and knowing, the dull wholesomeness of the sister spiced a little with the provocative coquetry of the vamp, she makes few demands on the hero and can blend into the background whenever he has more important matters to attend to. Yet she is not completely unfeminine, not a mere mask for the homosexual temptation to which many men living in the crowded slums of big cities and away from their womenfolk are undoubtedly subject. She exemplifies the low place of heterosexual love in the life of the transitional man, whose fantasies are absorbed more by visions of violence than of love, more with the redressal of narcissistic injury and rage than with the romantic longing for completion—a gift solely in the power of a woman to bestow.

  Having viewed some dreams in Indian popular cinema with the enthusiast’s happy eye but with the analyst’s sober perspective, let me reiterate in conclusion that oneiros—dream, fantasy—between the sexes and within the family, does not coincide with the cultural propositions on these relationships. In essence, oneiros consists of what seeps out of the crevices in the cultural floor. Given secret shape in narrative, oneiros conveys to us a particular culture’s versions of what Joyce McDougall calls the Impossible and the Forbidden,12 the unlit stages of desire where so much of our inner theatre takes place.

  4

  The Sex Wars

  There is a certain kind of popular narrative in India which neither consists of the folk version of stories from the pan-Indian epics nor of legends based on local events and motifs. Widespread over large linguistic regions, this narrative has a specific form, where the mundane is not separated from the supernatural.1 With a frame-tale as its starting point, the narrative comprises loosely connected stories within stories, a format made famous by A Thousand And One Nights.

  In spite of a profusion of magical happenings, these narratives are closer in spirit to the folktale than to the myth. They too fulfil the folktale’s psychological function of neutralizing the archaic, alloying ambivalence with humor, alleviating anxiety through playfulness, and demonstrating clear-cut pedagogical intentions. The last is accomplished by portraying specific patterns of behaviour which are registered unconsciously by the reader or the auditor till a corresponding situation arises in his life. Recalling the story, he can then recognize the pattern as it applies to his own predicament, thus enhancing his feeling of conscious mastery and expanding the borders of his observing ego.2

  Printed in cheap paperbacks in thousands of copies every year, and easily available at the pavement bookstalls of bazaars in both small towns and larger cities, these books are also a part of the literary offerings at well-known temple complexes where they routinely jostle Hindu theogonies, prayer collections, descriptions of rituals, and shiny scrolls with coloured illustrations of the various tortures of hell. Sporting a jacket cover of pure kitsch, generally in faded reds, blues, and yellows which have run into each other on the low-quality paper used for their production, these books are printed in an unusally larger type—known as Bombay type in the Hindi-speaking heartland and periya elutta (literally ‘large script’) in Tamil—for the instruction and entertainment of men and women at the edge of literacy and also uncertain of the availability of sufficient illumination at night.

  Exclusively focusing on the relationship between the sexes, Kissa Tota Myna or The Story Of The Parrot And The Starling is one such popular collection of 14 tales in Hindi. Although of poor literary quality, Tota Myna may nonetheless claim a noble ancestry in Sukasaptati, a 12th-century collection of tales on the unfaithfulness of women, told by a parrot to a merchant’s wife to guard her chastity while her husband was away. Like its counterparts in other languages, for instance Matankamarajan Katai in Tamil, The Parrot And The Starling has an abundance of magical and supernational trappings and eschews decription and reflection in favour of a fast forward (and sideward) movement of the story. Its characters are preeminently princes, princesses, and courtiers from kingdoms of never-never lands. Its language, though undemanding, is nevertheless ornamented with well-known couplets and folk sayings from both Hindi and Urdu, reflecting the interpenetration of Hindu and Muslim streams in the mass culture of northern and central India from which this narrative derives.

  The frame tale of Kissa Tota Myna is of a parrot who alights upon the branch of a tree one evening seeking a place to rest for the night. The tree is home to a starling, militantly feminist in her own way, who demands that the parrot fly off immediately. The starling cannot bear the thought of sharing her night abode with a member of a sex she hates for its cruel and unfaithful nature. The exhausted parrot defends the male sex and levels counter-allegations against the female of the species. As ev
idence for their respective positions, each bird then tells a succession of tales which, taken together, last for 14 nights. The following story, eighth in the series, is quite typical for both the literary poverty and the cultural-psychological richness of the whole collection.

  The parrot said ‘O Myna! A city called Kanchanpura was ruled by a king Angadhwaja and his queen Chandraprabha. The queen was virtuous and devoted to her husband. One day a brahmin came to Angadhwaja and gave him two pieces of paper. On the first piece it was written, ‘A king who stays awake all night achieves great results.’ On the second, ‘Whoever honours an enemy has all his transgressions forgiven.’

  ‘King Angadhwaja put both pieces of paper in his pocket and sent away the brahmin after honouring him with a gift of money. After a few days the king wanted to test the truth of the brahmin’s words. One night, after finishing all his work, he decided to stay up till the morning. While the king was awake in his palace, he heard a woman crying outside. The king felt great pity for the woman and thought to himself that there were unhappy people dweilling in his city. “I must go at once and find the cause of her unhappiness,” he said to himself. For the dharma of the ruler demands that he take part in the sorrows and pleasures of his subjects, punish according to the crime and look after his people as if they were members of his own family.’

  ‘Arming himself fully the king walked towards the sound of weeping and found a 100-year-old woman sobbing loudly. “O Mother! What makes you so unhappy that you are crying at midnight?” the king asked.

  “O traveller! Why do you interfere? Go your way. The cause of my suffering cannot be removed by the Creator himself let alone by a man,” the woman answered.

  “At least tell me what makes you so sad,” said the king.

  “I’ll tell you only if you never repeat it to anyone for otherwise you’ll be turned into stone,” the old woman replied.