My Mumbai Mirror column:
Rustom's lurid, overblown courtroom drama turns the 1959 Nanavati trial into a showcase for pop-patriotism.
The trial of Commander Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati for the murder of Prem Ahuja began on the afternoon of September 23, 1959 in the city then called Bombay. The accused was a Parsi naval officer who lived in a Cuffe Parade flat with his British wife Sylvia and their three children. The victim was a wealthy Sindhi bachelor who lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in the posh Jeevan Jyot Apartments on Nepean Sea Road, Malabar Hill.
Despite their shared upper-class lives, the dead Ahuja became a sordid symbol of the immorality of the rich, while Nanavati emerged as a patriotic hero. As historian Gyan Prakash has shown fascinatingly in his 2010 book Mumbai Fables, the groundswell of popular support for Nanavati was largely engineered by the tabloid Blitz. Editor Russi K Karanjia managed to spin an elite sex-and-murder trial into "a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern cosmopolitan city". Prakash writes: "In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services."
It is remarkable to what extent the Akshay Kumar-starrer Rustom, which released last week, 57 years after Nanavati's trial began, takes up and amplifies elements of this same narrative to suit our contemporary pop-patriotic zeitgeist. The faux-grand sets and technicolour shipboard sunsets are a vehicle for Akshay Kumar-style nationalism. As decorated naval officer Rustom Pawri, Kumar gets a stylised hero's entry alongside the Indian flag, and dialogues like "Meri uniform meri aadat hai, jaise saans lena, niswarth bhaav se apna farz nibhana... [My uniform is a habit. Like breathing, like selflessly doing my duty...]".
The film entirely fictionalises his battle with man-about-town Vikram Makhija (Arjun Bajwa), taking their rivalry much beyond Makhija having seduced his gullible wife Cynthia (a tearily soft-focus Ileana D'Cruz). It turns out that the upright Pawri sabotaged Makhija's corrupt shenanigans, hatched in conjunction with his own navy superiors. Poor Cynthia, in this version, is a mere pawn in Makhija's payback.
Gyan Prakash claims that in the years the case unfolded, Sylvia's being British "never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women". This may have been true of Blitz and its English-language public - a function, perhaps, of the surviving colonial cosmopolitanism that still had hegemonic hold over the city's culture. But the form in which the case was first consumed in popular fictional form -- the 1963 Hindi courtroom drama Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke -- departed from that neutrality.
In it, the guilt-stricken Mrs Nina Sahni is cross-examined by prosecution lawyer Ali Khan (the superb Motilal) precisely about having grown up in Paris, where "women are free to drink and smoke in the company of men other than their husbands", and "even divorce them if they are unhappy". The actress Leela Naidu, half-French in real life and raised in Europe, tries hard to claim 'Indian' values as the sad-faced Nina, her plain white sari draped modestly over her head: "Auraton ke liye main sharaab ko bahut bura samajhti hoon [For women I consider alcohol to be very bad]," she says, insisting she was forced to drink by the late Ashok (Rehman). Her husband Anil (Sunil Dutt) defends her, testifying that he and his wife occupy a happy mid-point between traditional mores and new-fangled freedoms. The lawyer, however, declares Anil mistaken, because his wife "is a highly liberated woman, a hundred yards ahead of our time, as Western women usually are".
While painting her as this fiend of freedom, the film simultaneously makes Nina a non-agent in her sexual life: the villainous Ashok flatters Nina, gets her drunk, and rapes her when she passes out. But the traumatised Nina must still ask her husband's forgiveness -- ostensibly for having put herself in a position to be raped.
Meanwhile the wronged hero (and his father) gain in moral stature from forgiving: "You can find a thousand girls, Anil, but not the mother of [your children] Rita and Pawan," advises Anil's father. But in that old Hindi-movie moral universe, forgiving men are never faced with the prospect of actually taking the 'fallen' woman back: Nina dies inexplicably as soon as Anil is free.
The real-life Kawas and Sylvia had three children, and the filmic Anil and Nina two. Rustom 'modernises' by making the couple child-free. Cynthia is also allowed to feel flattered enough by Vikram's attentions -- and angry enough at her husband's absences -- to embark on an affair. But Vikram's unspeakable villainy -- now not just seducer of innocents, but traitor to the nation, insulter of the uniform -- overshadows her misguidedness. She can live to be forgiven.
Cynthia's Englishness is never remarked upon in Rustom. What it does foreground is the Parsi-ness of Pawri and Bilimoria, the tabloid editor who makes him a cause celebre: Kumud Mishra in a roly-poly, comic, money-grubbing version of the tall, patrician Karanjia. Their Parsi-ness is pitted against the Sindhi-ness of Vikram and his sister. But it steers clear of mentioning the real-life Sindhi lobby that had to be placated before Nanavati's connections could earn him a Governor's pardon from Vijaylakshmi Pandit.
Rustom is tacky and often unintentionally hilarious. The 1963 film's sharp-tongued lawyerly repartee (between Motilal and Ashok Kumar) here becomes an over-the-top exchange between Sachin Khedekar and our hero, who argues his own case. The real-life Mamie Ahuja becomes Priti Makhija — Esha Gupta as a bizarrely excessive version of that era's Nadira-style vamp, complete with cigarette-holder. The machinations of these cardboard characters are of interest only because the Nanavati case still holds our attention.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 August 2016.
Rustom's lurid, overblown courtroom drama turns the 1959 Nanavati trial into a showcase for pop-patriotism.
The trial of Commander Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati for the murder of Prem Ahuja began on the afternoon of September 23, 1959 in the city then called Bombay. The accused was a Parsi naval officer who lived in a Cuffe Parade flat with his British wife Sylvia and their three children. The victim was a wealthy Sindhi bachelor who lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in the posh Jeevan Jyot Apartments on Nepean Sea Road, Malabar Hill.
Despite their shared upper-class lives, the dead Ahuja became a sordid symbol of the immorality of the rich, while Nanavati emerged as a patriotic hero. As historian Gyan Prakash has shown fascinatingly in his 2010 book Mumbai Fables, the groundswell of popular support for Nanavati was largely engineered by the tabloid Blitz. Editor Russi K Karanjia managed to spin an elite sex-and-murder trial into "a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern cosmopolitan city". Prakash writes: "In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services."
It is remarkable to what extent the Akshay Kumar-starrer Rustom, which released last week, 57 years after Nanavati's trial began, takes up and amplifies elements of this same narrative to suit our contemporary pop-patriotic zeitgeist. The faux-grand sets and technicolour shipboard sunsets are a vehicle for Akshay Kumar-style nationalism. As decorated naval officer Rustom Pawri, Kumar gets a stylised hero's entry alongside the Indian flag, and dialogues like "Meri uniform meri aadat hai, jaise saans lena, niswarth bhaav se apna farz nibhana... [My uniform is a habit. Like breathing, like selflessly doing my duty...]".
The film entirely fictionalises his battle with man-about-town Vikram Makhija (Arjun Bajwa), taking their rivalry much beyond Makhija having seduced his gullible wife Cynthia (a tearily soft-focus Ileana D'Cruz). It turns out that the upright Pawri sabotaged Makhija's corrupt shenanigans, hatched in conjunction with his own navy superiors. Poor Cynthia, in this version, is a mere pawn in Makhija's payback.
Gyan Prakash claims that in the years the case unfolded, Sylvia's being British "never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women". This may have been true of Blitz and its English-language public - a function, perhaps, of the surviving colonial cosmopolitanism that still had hegemonic hold over the city's culture. But the form in which the case was first consumed in popular fictional form -- the 1963 Hindi courtroom drama Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke -- departed from that neutrality.
In it, the guilt-stricken Mrs Nina Sahni is cross-examined by prosecution lawyer Ali Khan (the superb Motilal) precisely about having grown up in Paris, where "women are free to drink and smoke in the company of men other than their husbands", and "even divorce them if they are unhappy". The actress Leela Naidu, half-French in real life and raised in Europe, tries hard to claim 'Indian' values as the sad-faced Nina, her plain white sari draped modestly over her head: "Auraton ke liye main sharaab ko bahut bura samajhti hoon [For women I consider alcohol to be very bad]," she says, insisting she was forced to drink by the late Ashok (Rehman). Her husband Anil (Sunil Dutt) defends her, testifying that he and his wife occupy a happy mid-point between traditional mores and new-fangled freedoms. The lawyer, however, declares Anil mistaken, because his wife "is a highly liberated woman, a hundred yards ahead of our time, as Western women usually are".
While painting her as this fiend of freedom, the film simultaneously makes Nina a non-agent in her sexual life: the villainous Ashok flatters Nina, gets her drunk, and rapes her when she passes out. But the traumatised Nina must still ask her husband's forgiveness -- ostensibly for having put herself in a position to be raped.
Meanwhile the wronged hero (and his father) gain in moral stature from forgiving: "You can find a thousand girls, Anil, but not the mother of [your children] Rita and Pawan," advises Anil's father. But in that old Hindi-movie moral universe, forgiving men are never faced with the prospect of actually taking the 'fallen' woman back: Nina dies inexplicably as soon as Anil is free.
The real-life Kawas and Sylvia had three children, and the filmic Anil and Nina two. Rustom 'modernises' by making the couple child-free. Cynthia is also allowed to feel flattered enough by Vikram's attentions -- and angry enough at her husband's absences -- to embark on an affair. But Vikram's unspeakable villainy -- now not just seducer of innocents, but traitor to the nation, insulter of the uniform -- overshadows her misguidedness. She can live to be forgiven.
Cynthia's Englishness is never remarked upon in Rustom. What it does foreground is the Parsi-ness of Pawri and Bilimoria, the tabloid editor who makes him a cause celebre: Kumud Mishra in a roly-poly, comic, money-grubbing version of the tall, patrician Karanjia. Their Parsi-ness is pitted against the Sindhi-ness of Vikram and his sister. But it steers clear of mentioning the real-life Sindhi lobby that had to be placated before Nanavati's connections could earn him a Governor's pardon from Vijaylakshmi Pandit.
Rustom is tacky and often unintentionally hilarious. The 1963 film's sharp-tongued lawyerly repartee (between Motilal and Ashok Kumar) here becomes an over-the-top exchange between Sachin Khedekar and our hero, who argues his own case. The real-life Mamie Ahuja becomes Priti Makhija — Esha Gupta as a bizarrely excessive version of that era's Nadira-style vamp, complete with cigarette-holder. The machinations of these cardboard characters are of interest only because the Nanavati case still holds our attention.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 August 2016.
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