by Sudhir Kakar
During his absence, the family’s considerable estates were looked after by a friend of his father’s, the movie’s first villain, who would like his daughter to be married to Raju. Encouraged by the mother, who is not averse to this proposal, the young man takes the girl out on a buggy ride. On the way he narrowly misses being bitten by a cobra which, coiled around the rear axle of the buggy, follows him home and is witness to the mother’s love and distress at the danger her son has just escaped.
The next day Raju visit the ruins of the house in which he had spent the first six years of his life. Here, among the ruins which have a powerful emotional impact upon him, he hears a female voice singing a song with the refrain: ‘A forgotten story is remembered. An old memory surfaces again.’ Through the mist which swirls among the ruins, Raju gets tantalizing glimpses of the singing woman—the back of her head, a shoulder, a foot tapping in rhythm to a dance—and he follows her. Finally, he comes face to face with a beautiful young woman who tells him that they had spent a lot of time together in the ruined house in the past. Raju, in spite of his best efforts, cannot remember. He continues to meet Rajni (‘Night’), which is her name, and duly falls in love with her.
In the meanwhile, the villain has received Raju’s mother’s consent to the hero’s marriage to his daughter. Raju, though, protests and persuades his mother to change her decision in favor of Rajni. The villain vows revenge for this slight. He sends one of his henchmen to murder Rajni, but two cobras, who are the girl’s protectors, kill the would-be assassin. The villain then arranges for a gang of bandits to attack Raju’s house on the day of his wedding to Rajni, but cobras bar the bandits’ way and the marriage takes place as scheduled.
The villain now refuses to hand back Raju’s property; the documents in which he had acknowledged Raju’s ownership have been misplaced. But Rajni, who the audience by now knows is an ichhadhari cobra—a snake who, in India serpent lore, as a reward for many hundred years of ascetic practices, can assume any form at will—locates the. missing documents through her paranormal vision. The villain and his men waylay Raju with the intention of killing him. Rajni again protects her husband and the villain dies, bitten by the cobra.
Much more dangerous to the couple, however, is the arrival of the family’s guru, an evil tantrik (the practitioner of an esoteric Hindu cult) who possesses formidable occult powers. Immediately on entering the family mansion, he discerns the presence of a cobra and recognizes Rajni to be a snake woman. However, before he can do anything he is ordered out of the house by the unsuspecting Raju who looks down upon tantriks and gurus as purveyors of old-fashioned religious mumbo jumbo.
The guru sends his own pet cobra to bite Raju, who is convalescing in a hospital room from injuries received in the fight with the villain. Rajni, who is watching over her sleeping husband, resumes her snake from and kills the guru’s cobra after a fierce struggle. She then warns the guru from trying to harm Raju, maintaining that her powers gained through her devotion to her husband are as great as the guru’s undoubted ones.
The guru now informs Raju’s mother about the real nature of her daughter-in-law. He tells her to keep a close watch on Rajni who must resume her original snake form once every 24 hours. The old woman does so and sees for herself Rajni changing into a cobra at night. She rushes to the guru for help. The evil guru tells her that she should get her son out of the way on the day of the snake festival, when he would come to their home and carry away the snake bride whom he needs for his own purposes. She is his lead to a nagmani, the mythical snake ruby supposedly found in the head of a rare ichhadhari cobra, whose possession will make him the most powerful man on earth.
Rajni, who knows of her mother-in-law’s visit to the tantrik, seeks to dissuade her from seeking the guru’s help. She tells Raju’s mother that she has come to their home to love and protect the son and means the family no harm. In a series of flashbacks, she reminds Raju’s mother of the day when her son was bitten by a snake on his sixth birthday. The boy was dead but was revived by the tantrik guru, who took out the snake’s life and put in into Raju’s body. The snake who thus died in return for the child’s life was Rajni’s husband and she had vowed revenge. But on seeing the closeness between mother and son, she had relented and decided on Raju as a husband. The frightened mother-in-law, however, chooses to follow the guru’s wishes and on the day of Naga-Panchami sends Raju away from home on some pretext.
Now follows what has been popularly regarded as the movie’s highlight: Rajni’s ‘snake dance.’ Clad in saffron robes, a string of beads around his neck, the guru enters the hallway along with four of his similarly attired disciples. They start playing the been, the thick wooden flute pipes used by snake charmers, whose sound is supposed to be irresistible, drawing out snakes from the most hidden nooks and crannies. In an upstairs room we see Rajni dressed in a sequined, tightfitting white dress which emphasizes her large breasts and swelling hips. As the strains of the been come floating into the room, Rajni feels impelled towards the sound in a snake-like slithering movement. Her hands cupped over her head in a cobra’s hood, she sashays down the spiral staircase. Dancing toward and away from the men, all jiggling breasts and writhing hips, the been of the men looming large over her body in close-ups and then retreating, the guru’s face reflecting a cold, determined lust, Rajni is dancing her way into an apparently reluctant yet clearly willing sexual surrender. The spell is broken by the unexpected return of Raju who slaps his wife for her ‘shameless’ dancing. Rajni runs away to the ruins, followed by the guru who, in turn, is followed by a furious Raju. There is a long drawn-out fight between the two men, in which Raju’s mother is killed while protecting her son. The guru is finally bitten by the cobra but before dying repents of his evil desires and prays to Shiva to release Rajni from her snake incarnation into a human one. The prayer is granted and both Raju and Rajni live happily ever after.
Nagina is, of course, also a traditional folk narrative, though with many additions and modifications to suit contemporary Indian conditions which encompass certain modern, essentially Western, elements. Just as many scholars claim that in India, in contrast to Europe, there are no hard and fast boundaries between folk and classical traditions, both of which share a common base and thus are different aspects of the same tradition rather than separate traditions, similarly I believe Indian popular mass culture also cannot be clearly delimited from its folk and classical counterparts. Popular culture, too, exists in continuity, almost a flux, with other cultural forms, and a part of the same basic tradition to which it provides fresh subject matter and new impetuses.
The story of Nagina can be ‘read’ from many perspectives. A more sociological reading, for instance, will perhaps emphasize the critique of modernity implicit in the persona of the naive hero whose Western style rationality is utterly ignorant of the hidden mysteries of the occult realm accessible only to traditional knowledge. Our more psychological reading, though, focuses exclusively on the symbolic reverberations of the snake woman figure, both in the plot of the movie and in the larger tale of Indian gender relations.
Raju’s first encounter with the snake woman already points in the direction we should look for her meaning. Singing of forgotten, that is, repressed memories in the ruins of the house where Raju had spent the first six years of his childhood and which he feels impelled to visit again and again, emerging from and retreating into mists of the past, the snake woman, I would suggest, incorporates a particular ‘vision’ of the mother from the earliest years of the boy’s life. She is not a passive, long-suffering paragon of maternal love, which is the way the real mother is portrayed in the movie and the way ‘Mother’ is consciously perceived by men in most Indian narratives. A more unconscious construction, this mother is utterly sensual yet fiercely protective. She is both the seductive dancer and the hissing, spitting cobra fighting to protect the boy from all who would harm him. She is the desired mother of the six-year-old’s wilful fantasy to whom a villainous father, in
the shape of the guru, also lays sexual claim, and whose adult virility she can barely (and perhaps does not even want to) resist. Saved from the ‘evil’ designs of the man by the boy, she helps the son vanquish the father so that they can live blissfully united together in an age-old boyhood dream.
5
Husbands and Others
To cynics, love, the core of gender relations, is the opiate of the privileged classes; its relevance for lives of the destitute, locked in a struggle for sheer survival, minimal. Suspicious of romanticism, old or new, they believe that the ‘culture of poverty’ (to use Oscar Lewis’s telling phrase), generates its own compulsions in the very poor, which override the ideals, values, and prescriptions of the traditional culture of the society which in any case is preeminently an elite creation.
The following autobiographical accounts from the slums of Delhi try to give voice to the hopes, wishes, fantasies and conflicts of two women who belong to a group which is otherwise ignored and rarely heard from in the largely middle-and upper-class discourse on the relationship between the sexes. The self-narratives of Janak and Basanti are vibrant tales whose allusions and nuances can only be imperfectly conveyed in any English translation of their tape-recorded interviews. In narrating their first-person stories, my primary intent is to recreate a sense of the ‘who’ in the lives of two individual women enmeshed in a web of relationships. As an analyst who is also professionally aware of the fate that befalls an interrupter of tales, I would ideally have the reader fully enter Janak and Basanti’s stories before I come in with my own interpretations. My endeavor is to guard against the reader’s experience of the two women being prematurely foreclosed by explanation.
Yet going beyond their individual fates, the women’s talcs invariably also tell us something about gender relations in Indian lower-class life and in the culture of the larger society to which they both belong. Before letting them speak in their own voices, I shall abstract some of the features they share with other lower-class Indian women and compare them with other women, both in the higher strata of Indian society and in the urban slums of some other parts of the world.
Together with many others from the ‘resettlement colony,’ home to some of the poorest of the poor of Delhi, Janak and Basanti have a gift for self-description, even self-dramatization, once their initial mistrust of a stranger is replaced by a confidence in the stranger’s empathic intentions. They are neither inarticulate nor does their language operate according to a ‘restricted code’ (as compared to a supposedly more ‘elaborate’ code of middle-and upper-class language) which is said to be the characteristic of lower class speech in the West.2 Often crude and vulgar by middleclass standards, their language reflects accurately the women’s animation and their utter involvement in the drama of their own lives. With a marked lack of preparation in utterance, there is yet a kind of zany fluency in the language which is liberally sprinkled with analogies, allusions, and proverbs from the dominant Hindu culture from which the women have not been separated by poverty. Thus when Janak, talking of what she swears are her husband’s unjustified suspicions about her sexual morals, says ‘I wished the earth would split open to swallow me,’ she is referring to the well-known episode from the Ramayana where the epic’s heroine, Sita, placed in a similar predicament, called upon her mother Earth, to open up and take her innocent daughter back into herself.
The culture penetrates many other areas of their lives. Janak and Basanti are not strangers to the rituals and the vratas (the ritual days of fasting) prescribed for Indian women, and have followed the Hindu blueprint for a woman’s dealings with the supernatural, for instance, when one is possessed by a spirit or a goddess.
The stamp of the traditional culture is clearest in shaping their ideals of the ‘good’ woman, especially in relationship to a man. They share with women of the higher classes the feelings of being loved and approved of by a watchful inner sentinel when conforming to this ideal, and stabbings of guilt when they deviate, as sometimes they must. The ‘good’ woman, of course, is a daughter whose premarital chastity and steadfastness to the monogamous ideal in thought, word, and deed is the repository of her parental family’s honor (izzat). The ‘good’ woman is naturally fertile, particularly in the matter of giving birth to all-important sons. Her failure in this regard can lead to banishment from hearth and home, a punishment which may be resented yet is also accepted as just for her betrayal of the ideal.
Above all, in the ideals of the traditional culture, the ‘good’ woman is a pativrata, subordinating her life to the husband’s welfare and needs in a way demanded of no other woman in any other part of the world with which I am familiar. The pativrata conduct is not a mere matter of sexual fidelity, an issue of great importance in all patriarchal societies. We can understand the underlying male concerns when in the Mahabharata, the goddess Uma, laying down the guidelines of right conduct for women describes a pativrata as one, ‘who does not cast her eyes upon the Moon or the Sun (both male in Hindu cosmology) or a tree that has a masculine name.’ The goddess, however, goes further.
Devotion to her lord is a woman’s merit; it is her penance; it is her eternal heaven. Merit, penances, and Heaven become hers who looks upon her husband as her all in all, and who endowed with chastity, seeks to devote herself to her lord in all things. The husband is the god which women have. The husband is their friend. The husband is their high refuge. Women have no refuge that can compare with their husband, and no god that can compare with him. The husband’s grace and Heaven, are equal in the estimation of a woman; or, if unequal, the inequality is very trivial. O Maheshwara, I do not desire Heaven itself if thou are not satisfied with me. If the husband that is poor or diseased or distressed were to command the wife to accomplish anything that is improper or unrighteous or that may lead to destruction of life itself, the wife should without any hesitation accomplish it.3
This ‘right conduct’ for the wife, repeated over and over again in the major repositories of the cultural tradition, builds a part of the Hindu woman’s ideology of the superego.’ With varying degrees of intensity it cuts through all strata of Indian society. The echoes of the pativrata wife will also be heard in the accounts of women from the slums who often invoke the name of Sita, the personification of the pativrata ideal, and allude to one or another episode of her mythological life.
The problem, of course, is that unlike the spouse of most women in the higher classes, the slum husband is apt to be shiftless. For all practical purposes, the lower-class woman frequently finds herself abandoned and in charge of the family even if her abandonment does not reach the degree and proportions met with in the ghetto families of, say, New York. The imperatives of physical protection, economic support, and the quieter need for male companionship lead her to establish more or less permanent liaisons with other men. Such unions and consensual marriages inevitably force cracks in her inner image of the good woman, faithful to one man not only through this life but in all subsequent ones. Sexual promiscuity is not a consolation or a compensation she readily permits herself for her many deprivations, unlike her sisters from slums of some other parts of the world. Like other Indian women, she too recoils from seeking a sexual remedy for injuries inflicted by life.
The woman from the Delhi slum is like her counterparts in other slums of the world in that there is a high degree of physical violence in her relationships with men, mutual suspicions of sexual infidelity being the apparent cause for frequent explosions. She, too, is more tolerant of hedonistic entrancements (except those of sex) which make spontaneity and enjoyment still possible in the daily grind for survival. She, too, has developed a fortitude and an ability to cope with problems that would leave women from the middle-and-upper-classes helpless.
Where she differs from women of other urban slums is in an enduring intimate connection with the traditional culture in her inner life and in her close, tangible ties with the natal family. Indeed, the support she receives from her parents, brothers and siste
rs, would be the envy of other Indian women who are expected to forego this source of aid and succour and deal with the exigencies of married life on their own. Thus the slum woman rarely feels marginal, isolated, or dependent, and only occasionally helpless.
Her connectedness to the cultural tradition and the family also help in shielding her from the realities of her situation when these become too grim. It provides her raw material for fantasy in her poignant yet determined struggle to maintain self-respect as a ‘good’ woman. One major fantasy, protecting her from feelings of depression and rage, is of the heroine, battered by fate and men, finally triumphing both through her suffering and her commitment to virtue. In the last act which fantasy obligingly conjures up on her inner screen, the man will be abjectly contrite as he realizes her true worth, his brutishness transformed into adoration. The grown-up children, mindful of the mother’s sacrifices on their behalf, will be devoted to her needs and welfare. And in the heavenly aisles the gods, no longer indifferent, will give her a standing ovation as they shower her with flowers and looks of pride.
[The translations of the following narratives are my own.]
Janak
We have lived in Madangir since the last 17-18 years. Earlier we stayed in Gandhinagar. We were three sisters and two brothers. After coming to Delhi from Pakistan as refugees we stayed with relatives. My father was very poor. We ate two rotis (North Indian bread) in the evening and then went to sleep. There was never a third one. When we sisters wore clothes or plaited our hair, people used to say, ‘There father is so poor. Where do they get money for clothes?’ We wore clothes only when someone gave us old ones. My father was mostly unemployed. I was the eldest child in the house. When my father came home in the evening he was always in a bad state. My heart ached for him. The other sisters did not care.
