My Mirror column:
Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan mainstreams same-sex love and battles the insistence on marriage with wit and warmth.
Hailing an auto rickshaw the other day, I found myself thrust into an ongoing conversation. “He has no problems,” said the 50-something driver, waving goodbye to another autowallah. "His children are married. I have to make plans.” Did his son and daughter want to get married yet, I asked, and might they have partners in mind? The driver was surprised, then miffed: “If they decide, we’ll have nothing further to do with them. And if the marriage runs into problems, it’ll be their lookout!”
Arranging the marriages of their progeny, whether male or female, is the great universal burden of the South Asian parent. Romantic love is something we only celebrate in song and cinema; marriage is meant to ensure social and individual reproduction, and it is non-negotiable. “Shaadi toh karni hi hogi,” as the auto driver said, peering curiously into the mirror at me, “aur samaaj ke andar ho toh behtar.”
It is into this universe that a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan drops like a little grenade, exploding the smooth heteronormative shell of arranged marriage.
Many Hindi film heroes have refused particular girls, but Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) wants a boy. The boy is, by his very gender, unsuitable. And as unsuitable boys do in Hindi films from DDLJ onwards, Kartik (Ayushmann Khurrana) must win the family over.
The plot is slender: Aman goes home for a family wedding, taking Kartik along as a friend – but after his relationship with Kartik becomes known, finds himself being forced into marriage instead. The subplots also involve arranged marriages – people desperately pushing for them, people trying to dodge them, people realising they aren’t happy in them. In almost the very first scene, the boys help one young woman (Bhumi Pednekar) elope. Meanwhile, Aman’s cousin Goggle is desperate to be married, even though the marriage market places her at the very bottom of the ladder, giving her ‘options’ that make her feel terrible about herself. Then there’s the hilarious (but perfectly believable) Kusum, Aman’s suitable bride, who turns out to have some unsuitable marital desires of her own. And finally there’s Aman’s parents’ marriage, with Shankar (Gajraj Rao) and Sunaina’s (Neena Gupta) accusations ending in the rare admission that it hasn’t been all that great.
All of this may seem like serious stuff, but Hitesh Kewalya (who adapted the 2013 erectile dysfunction comedy Kalyana Samayal Saadham from Tamil into the 2017 Hindi hit Shubh Mangal Savdhan) writes and directs SMZS with an in-your-face honesty and a zany energy that makes it hard to be bored.
Last year, Shelly Chopra Dhar and writer Ghazal Dhaliwal did something similar for lesbian love, putting a timorous Sonam Kapur to the test of resisting an arranged marriage. But Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga had only half the madness of SMZS – and double the tears.
Kewalya’s film doesn’t shy away from things; it externalises them into a deadpan excess. “First floor ki ladkiyan sabse pehle patti hain, saare Dilli ke ladke jaante hain,” goes one great line. “Kangan aur beta ek hain (These bangles are my son),” says Sunaina, handing Kusum (Pankhuri Awasthy) the traditional gold bangles that promise a girl entry into North Indian family heaven. And while its dialogues perfectly capture the escalating madness of the Indian joint family quarrel, some of the film’s best moments come when it chooses actions over words.
So when Professor Shankar Tripathi (Gajraj Rao) stumbles onto the facts of his son’s sexuality, he responds by actually throwing up. He doesn’t make a long speech about gay sex grossing him out: he simply pukes. There’s something about this as a cinematic device that both allows us to see how starkly he experiences this – and also lets us laugh at him. Rao’s bodily responses make for some more hysterically funny sequences: the hosepipe scene, for instance, or his dancing face-off with Kartik. Another character with a hilarious bodily tic is Kusum, whose performance as the blushing bride involves a fake tinkling laugh on cue.
SMZS is unabashed about its case for the freedom of sexuality, and it uses anything at hand to prop up its argument – new rights in Indian law, humanity, common sense, filmi melodrama, and in one very entertaining thread, science. After the hypothalamus and oxytocin have been pressed into argument, the kaali gobhis (black cauliflowers) that form a crazy projectile backdrop to the film become a metaphor for the foolhardiness of trying to interfere with nature. The social arrangements Indians insist on making for their children, Kewalya seems to say, are unnatural too.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Mar 2020.
Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan mainstreams same-sex love and battles the insistence on marriage with wit and warmth.
Hailing an auto rickshaw the other day, I found myself thrust into an ongoing conversation. “He has no problems,” said the 50-something driver, waving goodbye to another autowallah. "His children are married. I have to make plans.” Did his son and daughter want to get married yet, I asked, and might they have partners in mind? The driver was surprised, then miffed: “If they decide, we’ll have nothing further to do with them. And if the marriage runs into problems, it’ll be their lookout!”
Arranging the marriages of their progeny, whether male or female, is the great universal burden of the South Asian parent. Romantic love is something we only celebrate in song and cinema; marriage is meant to ensure social and individual reproduction, and it is non-negotiable. “Shaadi toh karni hi hogi,” as the auto driver said, peering curiously into the mirror at me, “aur samaaj ke andar ho toh behtar.”
It is into this universe that a film like Shubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan drops like a little grenade, exploding the smooth heteronormative shell of arranged marriage.
Many Hindi film heroes have refused particular girls, but Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) wants a boy. The boy is, by his very gender, unsuitable. And as unsuitable boys do in Hindi films from DDLJ onwards, Kartik (Ayushmann Khurrana) must win the family over.
The plot is slender: Aman goes home for a family wedding, taking Kartik along as a friend – but after his relationship with Kartik becomes known, finds himself being forced into marriage instead. The subplots also involve arranged marriages – people desperately pushing for them, people trying to dodge them, people realising they aren’t happy in them. In almost the very first scene, the boys help one young woman (Bhumi Pednekar) elope. Meanwhile, Aman’s cousin Goggle is desperate to be married, even though the marriage market places her at the very bottom of the ladder, giving her ‘options’ that make her feel terrible about herself. Then there’s the hilarious (but perfectly believable) Kusum, Aman’s suitable bride, who turns out to have some unsuitable marital desires of her own. And finally there’s Aman’s parents’ marriage, with Shankar (Gajraj Rao) and Sunaina’s (Neena Gupta) accusations ending in the rare admission that it hasn’t been all that great.
All of this may seem like serious stuff, but Hitesh Kewalya (who adapted the 2013 erectile dysfunction comedy Kalyana Samayal Saadham from Tamil into the 2017 Hindi hit Shubh Mangal Savdhan) writes and directs SMZS with an in-your-face honesty and a zany energy that makes it hard to be bored.
Last year, Shelly Chopra Dhar and writer Ghazal Dhaliwal did something similar for lesbian love, putting a timorous Sonam Kapur to the test of resisting an arranged marriage. But Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga had only half the madness of SMZS – and double the tears.
Kewalya’s film doesn’t shy away from things; it externalises them into a deadpan excess. “First floor ki ladkiyan sabse pehle patti hain, saare Dilli ke ladke jaante hain,” goes one great line. “Kangan aur beta ek hain (These bangles are my son),” says Sunaina, handing Kusum (Pankhuri Awasthy) the traditional gold bangles that promise a girl entry into North Indian family heaven. And while its dialogues perfectly capture the escalating madness of the Indian joint family quarrel, some of the film’s best moments come when it chooses actions over words.
So when Professor Shankar Tripathi (Gajraj Rao) stumbles onto the facts of his son’s sexuality, he responds by actually throwing up. He doesn’t make a long speech about gay sex grossing him out: he simply pukes. There’s something about this as a cinematic device that both allows us to see how starkly he experiences this – and also lets us laugh at him. Rao’s bodily responses make for some more hysterically funny sequences: the hosepipe scene, for instance, or his dancing face-off with Kartik. Another character with a hilarious bodily tic is Kusum, whose performance as the blushing bride involves a fake tinkling laugh on cue.
SMZS is unabashed about its case for the freedom of sexuality, and it uses anything at hand to prop up its argument – new rights in Indian law, humanity, common sense, filmi melodrama, and in one very entertaining thread, science. After the hypothalamus and oxytocin have been pressed into argument, the kaali gobhis (black cauliflowers) that form a crazy projectile backdrop to the film become a metaphor for the foolhardiness of trying to interfere with nature. The social arrangements Indians insist on making for their children, Kewalya seems to say, are unnatural too.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Mar 2020.
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