What the burqa and the bindi (and the hijab) stand for in our books, and in our current lives

An essay published on the website Scroll.in:

There’s a scene in Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel Leila that never made it to the Netflix adaptation. In a not-too-distant dystopian future of water shortage, Riz and Shalini throw a grand poolside party for Leila’s third birthday. The children get their fill of inflatable slides, the parents of champagne. It’s a posh, Westernised crowd, where the women are comfortable leaving a shirt slightly unbuttoned, or showing some leg through the slit in a long dress. So Shalini’s sister-in-law Gazala stands out by being “sheathed in a flowing single-pleat abaya... with a dusty-pink silk hijab that brings out her alabaster complexion.”

“Cheeks glowing with rouge,” Akbar’s description continues. “This is probably as much sun as she ever gets.” The bitchiness is explainable as Shalini’s, not the author’s. But given Akbar’s otherwise nuanced characterisations, Gazala seems an easy stand-in for tradition-bound Muslim femininity. She is somehow both decorative and covered up, and never gets to speak. Her burqa does the talking.

Earlier, Shalini’s reluctance to live in the Muslim sector with her husband’s family is also routed through the veil. “Look, no disrespect to Gazala...,” she tells her brother-in-law Naz. “But I don’t want my daughter in a burqa.” In response, Naz shames Shalini – for offering him a beer, for not knowing that her maid has taken her child out. And Gazala, his hijab-wearing wife, gets held up as the contrast to the liberated, cosmopolitan Shalini: “She might not know as much about the world as you. But she knows our culture.”

Typecasting the burqa

 

The fact that Gazala’s burqa stands in for her is disappointing, but not surprising. No matter where one looks, it seems that the burqa comes to us always already loaded with meaning – and rarely a positive one. In Indian popular culture, it has long been trotted out either as a comic disguise worn by the Hindi film hero, from Shammi Kapoor to Rishi Kapoor to Aamir Khan in Delhi Belly, or as a symbol of women’s oppression. Sometimes, as in the dubious Islamicate subplot of the recent Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl, it is both.

Feminists don’t necessarily do better: even a thoughtful film like Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha can only see the burqa as the agent of the teenaged Rehana’s oppression. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy is a welcome exception, giving us in Alia Bhatt’s lovely Safeena a headscarf-wearing Muslim girl who is neither a prude nor a pushover. Bhatt is also burqa-clad in Meghna Gulzar’s superb Raazi, where her fetching coloured hijab does fascinating triple duty as good Muslim, good daughter-in-law – and spy.

In Alice Albinia’s 2011 novel Leela’s Book, too, the burqa has the quality of subterfuge. First, an upper class Hindu woman purchases it secretly, hiding it from her liberal Muslim husband. Then her young Muslim maid Aisha takes it from its hiding place, wearing it to walk through her own neighbourhood unrecognised. It is an “Arab-style burqa”, heavy and black “with some gauzy thin material over the eyes”, writes Albinia, such as “some women in the basti [Nizamuddin] now wore”.
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It allows Aisha to rescue the man she loves from unjust police custody, but Albinia the author cannot resist describing her character’s experience of wearing it as a limiting one. The burqa is too big for Aisha; the tree canopy seems denser and darker through it; her lover does not recognise her in it: “he peered at her, disturbed by the distance this... fabric put between them: it was as if they were seeing each other through a crowd of people”. The liberal non-burqa-wearer, it seems, can only attribute to the burqa-wearer a sense of alienation from herself and the world.

A sign of unfreedom

 

One way to normalise the burqa’s existence is not to dwell on it. In Altaf Tyrewala’s whipsmart novel No God In Sight (2005), we meet multiple Muslim female characters without being told if they veil. And when someone does, that doesn’t become the important thing about them. Jeyna-Bi’s burqa attracts attention because it is fluorescent orange, not simply because she’s got one. In the accepting cultural mix of Tyrewala’s Mumbai, a burqa can be a topic of banter, it can get sadly soiled when poor Jeyna-Bi throws up her portion of a wedding feast. It can be, in effect, just another piece of clothing.

But the space for such a perspective is steadily narrowing. Since mid-December 2019, as unprecedented numbers of Indian Muslim women have emerged into public space to protest against the discriminatory religious basis of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the burqa has become even more heavily charged with meaning. Not all the women protesting in Shaheen Bagh (or the many female-led sit-ins it inspired nationwide) wore a veil or headscarf. But the fact that so many did seems to have caused great bafflement and unease.

Because the burqa has become, for anyone who does not wear one, a sign of unfreedom. And if you aren’t free, how can you possibly be out on the streets, resisting an oppressive state? How can you be the living embodiment of oppressed Muslim womanhood that the Hindu right claims to be saving from Muslim men, and simultaneously be leading a political protest?

And so, according to the Sangh’s Whatsapp factory, the lakhs of women who sat out in the wind and weather for three months, while braving police lathis, abusive goons and horrific communal violence, were not doing it to claim their threatened rights as Indian citizens, but for Rs 500 a day and free biryani. What is chilling is that so many other Indians want to believe that canard.

We saw another glimpse of that suspicion and ill-will on March 23, when the mainstream media reported the police destruction of the gloriously democratic art-filled protest sites at Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere as some sort of desperate public health measure – as though the women had not already vacated the sites.

Wearing an identity

This tarring of burqa-clad women as not being legitimate citizens with legitimate concerns dovetailed perfectly with the Prime Minister’s statement in December that those protesting against the CAA-NRC “can be recognised by their clothes”. That shamelessly partisan taunting of a community fighting its own legal marginalisation has sparked a new kind of battle, with people turning their marked bodies into sites of symbolic display.

Refusing to be shamed for wearing burqas, caps or other identifiable markers of their community, many Muslim protesters have instead responded by embracing them. But histories of religious populism elsewhere suggest that such a move can be a double bind. In Meena Kandasamy’s recent novel Exquisite Cadavers, a Tunisian film-school student in London finds his white British teachers pushing him to tell his country’s history through the hijab.

A French-influenced secular diktat banned headscarves in Tunisia in 1981 – so when the dictatorship was unseated, wearing the hijab became a form of community identity. The Islamic right exploited people’s desire to reclaim their religion, and a country where a hijab-wearing “Arabian Barbie” had once caused a liberal outcry, Kandasamy writes, became one that provided the largest number of foreign fighters to the dreaded Daesh.

Closer home, as the recent violence in North East Delhi makes clear, such defiant wearing of religious identity on the body reaches its tragic, terrifying limits when social fissures widen into the abyss of communal violence. Symbols have power: they can mark us or unmark us, divide or unite. In Leela’s Book, the same Hindu woman once buys a packet of gold-embossed bindis for the maid Aisha, only to have her Muslim husband tell her, “They don’t wear bindis”.

Fear and loathing

Among the fascinating ways in which women have chosen to express cross-community solidarities these last few months is the interlacing of burqas and bindis. The young poet Nabiya Khan’s words rang out across many anti-CAA-NRC posters: “Aayega Inqilab, Pehen Ke Burqa Bindi Aur Hijab”.

Optimists of various stripes are bringing bindis and burqas together. But those whose minds are filled with poison can only see conquest, not mingling. To such commentators, like the virulently anti-Muslim “Katyayani” on hindupost.in, a poster saying “Women Will Destroy Hindu Rashtra” with a fierce female face wearing both a bindi and a headscarf, with sunglasses on her head and her tongue out, looks like a “demonised” Kali “surrendering” to the Islamic veil.

Another anti-CAA-NRC poster, of three women wearing both bindis and burqas, underscored by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s now-viral poetic challenge to all dictatorships “Hum Dekhenge” (“We shall see”), seems to the same writer a call to “to ‘free’ bindi-sporting Hindu women by converting them into burqa-clad ones”.

Communal polarisation now involves a repeated insistence that the way people look is who they are – and yet when what is on display doesn’t fit the entrenched majoritarian narrative, then suddenly it is dismissed. “Bharatiya women of non-sanatani faith are also sometimes seen sporting the bindi, but that is just how a demography raised in mixed-culture behaves,” declares Katyayani when faced with the sociological fact of non-Hindu bindi-wearers.

No God In Sight contains a biting scene in which a young (upper middle class Hindu) wife must report her missing (Muslim) husband to the police. She wears her most saffron-like nylon sari, and borrows a mangalsutra and a bindi from her maid Gangu-bai, hoping that the Mumbai police will treat her complaint more seriously if she looks like a practising Hindu. They tell her to go to Pakistan.

Published in Scroll, 28 Mar 2020

Backing and advancing

My Mirror column:

Has the mature woman with a marriage in her past finally become a legitimate recipient of romance in Hindi cinema?

Irrfan Khan and Parvathy in a still from Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017)

Tara (Shefali Shah) runs her own small Mangalorean restaurant, drives herself around Mumbai, and has been a single mother to her two children since her husband’s death twenty years ago. But when this highly capable, independent woman gets home at the end of the day and her grown-up daughter asks her if the restaurant landline is working, Tara feigns ignorance, brushing the question off quickly. The phone relationship she has struck up with the almost-divorced actor Amar (Neeraj Kabi) is, for some reason, a guilty secret.


The idea that their desires are illegitimate is buried so deep inside most Indian women’s heads that even to acknowledge them can feel like taboo. To want companionship, romance, intimacy — and yes, sex — is perfectly natural, but still fraught with the possibility of social censure, especially for a woman past a certain age. So Kanwal Sethi’s atmospheric film Once Again, released last week on Netflix, gives us in Tara a rare Indian heroine: a woman who has walked the slow path towards recognising her needs.

And yet how little it takes to propel her back into guilt. Caught on camera by a paparazzi photographer while out walking with Amar, Tara finds herself to be the target of childish anger from her adult son as well as humiliating barbs from his prospective mother-in-law. Once Again eschews melodrama for piercing looks and pregnant pauses, but Tara’s samdhan manages to get in her critically frosty line: “In our family, we place our children’s desires far ahead of our own.”



Watching even the self-possessed Tara crumble under the pressure, I thought of another recent film in which a woman finds it hard to tell a judgemental world that she’s dating again. Released in 2017, Tanuja Chandra’s romantic comedy Qarib Qarib Singlle starred the well-known Malayali actress Parvathy as Jaya Shashidharan, a 35-year-old woman who’s been alone for so long that she’s forgotten she has the right to move on.


Unlike Tara and Amar in Once Again, whose relationship is conducted through lovely old-school means such as as landline conversations, handwritten notes and home-made meals, Jaya meets her suitor Yogi (Irrfan Khan) via a dating website. As a match for the tastefully turned out, punctual Jaya, Yogi seems an eccentric and unlikely choice at first: a self-published shayar with a fondness for mangoes, banter and running — invariably running late. But Chandra’s idea of romance is all about entertaining unlikely possibilities: before we know it, Jaya has joined Yogi on a tripartite journey to visit his three ex-girlfriends, and romance is afoot.


Despite many dissimilarities between the two films, it struck me that both the female protagonists are widows, not divorcees. And the films imply —sometimes humorously, sometimes with pain — that neither woman has been in any sort of intimate relationship since their husbands died. These social double standards are acknowledged by the way the characters are written, too: Irrfan has no compunctions chattering on about his exes to Jaya, from the sweet, quasi-familial terrace romance of his childhood to the sultrier adult one (with Neha Dhupia) — but he is rendered speechless when Jaya digs up an adolescent boyfriend of her own.


The figure of the still-youthful, attractive widow has a history in Hindi cinema — though much less of a history than proportionate reality would demand. Off the top of my head, I can think of Nutan as the translucently lovely widow Mahjubi in the 1973 Saudagar, whom a duplicitous Amitabh Bachchan marries for her talent in making the best palm gur, and Padmini Kolhapure as the exploited young creature whom Rishi Kapoor takes it upon himself to save in Raj Kapoor’s 1982 social melodrama Prem Rog (interestingly, Kamna Chandra — who is Tanuja Chandra’s mother — has partial writing credits for both Prem Rog and Qarib Qarib Singlle).


A much more radical portrayal of a widow who has desires was, of course, last year’s Lipstick Under My Burkha. Ratna Pathak Shah brought both comic flair and a tragic edge to the 55-year-old Usha Parmar, whom the world knows only as the stentorian Buaji, but who yearns to be recognised as someone altogether more tender. Usha’s secret life involves not just reading steamy Hindi romance novels and learning to swim, but also falling for her buff and youthful swimming instructor. Her secret phone conversations with him, unlike those between Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi, are unabashedly sexual. And yet when the veneer of anonymity is shattered and Usha suffers public humiliation, it is hard not to think of all those dozens of Hindi films we grew up on, in which the illusions of romance cultivated by the spinsterish figure of Lalita Pawar would turn out to be nothing but illusions.


It will be a while yet before Buaji swims free.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 Sep 2018.

The Year of Sex - II

My Mirror column:

Hindi films in 2017 made more space for sex than ever before, but there’s still a self-fulfilling hierarchy to be overcome. (Second of a two-part column.)

2017, as I wrote last week, was a year in which sex got more screen space than ever before. Films like Lipstick Under My Burkha, Haraamkhor, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Tumhari Sulu, Anaarkali of Aarah and others gave us a whole host of characters, many female, for whom sex was a factor in their lives. Its role in these films was as varied as in real life.

But whether sex appeared as a painful yearning, a trigger for excitement, a source of anxiety or a comfortable anchor, after a near-century of watching butterflies alighting on flowers, it felt remarkable that it was allowed to appear at all. Having finally made its entry into an area reserved for romance, however, sex remains a second-class citizen. This hierarchy was expressed over and over in what the Hindi film industry put on our screens.

One way in which the hierarchy appeared was the traditional one — to pretend that romantic love has no sexual component. Tu Hai Mera Sunday, which I mentioned last week, did this in all the relationships it wanted us to root for. The test of love was doing things for the other person: Rashid’s connection with his neighbour (Rasika Dugal) involved watching out for her disabled children, Barun Sobti’s romancing of Sahana Goswami took the route of babysitting her ageing father, a third relationship blossomed over being on the same side in an office battle. All very heart-warming, but there was something incongruous about the way the film kept the erotic at bay — as if the appearance of sex would make these loves less true.

Another instance of this in 2018 was Bareilly ki Barfi. For all its sharply-observed portraits of masculinity, there was a deeply asexual quality to the film. Its old-fashioned romance, produced by the old-fashioned means of handwritten, hand-delivered letters, unfolded with zero erotic charge.

The hierarchy becomes clearer when you compare Bareilly’s chaste world of Mishras and Dubeys with another 2017 film set in the Uttar Pradesh small town: Babumoshai Bandookbaaz. If Bareilly’s Brahminical universe has not a smidgeon of sexiness, Kushan Nandy’s thriller (which also had a Dubey) seems wholly propelled by it. Right from the first scene where a man gets off on watching his wife receive a massage, to the heroine Bidita Bag’s ‘intro’ scene demanding that Babu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) pay her double for the privilege of having checked her out as she repaired his sandal, all the way through to the lust-fuelled denouement, this is a film intent on delivering a sock in the jaw to old-school romance. It is of a piece with that ambition that Nandy makes ‘Kucch toh log kahenge’ the soundtrack to Nawaz taking a shit in the open, and has ‘Maine tere liye hi saat rang ke sapne chuney’ playing in a butcher’s shop. In Babumoshai’s world, love is fuelled by lust — but so is violence. And the lusty woman’s loyalty is always suspect.

The suspect-ness of sexual passion is clearly a powerful narrative in our heads, appearing even in what was the year’s most programmatic attempt to frame female desire as a legitimate thing. In Lipstick Under My Burkha, Aahana Kumra’s Leela broke from a long lineage of coyly resistant Hindi movie heroines when she showed up at her lover’s room proposing a bout of passionate make-up sex. But Lipstick also shows how easily all the power of that openness can be turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.

Even in a film with as risk-taking a heroine as Simran, the old separation between sex and love has not left us. Despite the non-judgemental calm with which Kangana Ranaut’s Praful deals with her friend’s and her own sexual escapades, the film’s only depiction of a loving, potentially-long term relationship for Praful is one in which there is only conversation, and the conversation isn’t even flirtatious. The having of sex, it seems, is now allowed, but it is a marker of non-seriousness. Of non-love.

So it should be no surprise at all that the year’s self-proclaimed big romantic release, Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal, turned on precisely this hierarchical division between lust and love. The film’s plot, such as it is, turns on a whirlwind journey through Europe, during which Shah Rukh Khan’s tour guide character Harry becomes unwillingly, unwittingly involved with his sort-of client, Anushka Sharma’s Gujarati heiress Sejal. Harry is the textbook hero of modern romantic fiction aimed at women: cocky on the outside, unhappy on the inside, the man for whom flirtation is a game in which he always wins, until he loses his heart — to you. But what’s relevant for our purposes here is that even when the man is a player — or perhaps especially when he is one — and the relationship hinges on a tantalising sexual chemistry more than anything else, sex must be removed from the equation, to prove it is love.

I’d be the last person to suggest that sex must be necessarily tied to love, or even to a relationship. Sometimes sex is about pure erotic thrill, and that can be a wonderful thing. But it is the converse that worries me. As long as Hindi cinema continues to insist that true love must be produced independent of sex, all lust will continue to remain suspect.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Jan 2018.

The Year of Sex - I

My Mirror column:

Looking back at what sex has meant in 2017, both onscreen and off. The first of a two-part column.

Looking back at Hindi cinema in 2017, it seems to me that the theme of this year was sex. I’m not suggesting at all that we’ve suddenly got it all figured out; no, that we certainly haven’t. In the world outside the screen, the anxieties of politicians and principals alike coalesced around matters sexual – condom advertisements on television were banned as “indecent”, two teenagers were suspended from a school because they were seen hugging…. These anxieties reached ridiculous heights when it came to the silver screen. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) tried to block Lipstick Under My Burkha for its “lady-orientedness” and delayed the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, When Harry Met Sejal because its trailer contained the word “intercourse”.

Later in the year, the international award-winner Sexy Durga was rechristened S Durga and then unceremoniously dropped from the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), along with a Marathi film called Nude. A censored version of S Durga was later screened for the jury following a directive from the Kerala High Court.

But such anxiety is a barometer of cultural transformations. It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that what did manage to reach our screens revealed a society in the midst of unbuttoning – and so intent on the task at hand that it no longer cares if some people are gaping.

The year began with Shlok Sharma’s wonderfully rich and strange debut, Haraamkhor, with a radically nonjudgemental portrait of sexual comingof-age that was buoyed by Shweta Tripathi’s simply stellar turn as the teenaged schoolgirl Sandhya. Less stark but equally significant was Vidya Balan’s thoroughly charming portrayal of the non-posh, non-svelte housewife in Tumhari Sulu. Balan’s channelling of her character’s warm, enthusiastic, sari-clad self into a public persona as radio jockey on a late-night-show gave us a rare model of sexiness based on being comfortable in one’s own skin.

Other female characters speaking of sex and actually acting on their desires appeared in Alankrita Shrivastava’s imperfect but pioneering film Lipstick Under My Burkha. The radicalness of these depictions came from their wrenching frankness about the body’s yearnings, forcing viewers to think about how the possibility of pleasure is suppressed by an overarching social discourse of shame.

Sex and shame were also on the menu in one of the year’s chirpiest films, Shubh Mangal Savdhan, with director RS Prasanna serving up the unspeakable subject of erectile dysfunction with remarkable warmth and wit. Ayushmann Khurana and Bhumi Pednekar followed up their previous pairing as a just-married-and-havingproblems couple in Dum Laga Ke Haisha with an often hilarious turn here, aided in no small measure by Seema Pahwa’s magisterial comic timing and Ali Baba, gufa and Chaalis Chor euphemisms.

Irreverent humour was crucial to another of the year’s most ambitious bad girl films, Simran. In one of the film’s emblematic dialogues, Kangana Ranaut’s Gujarati-American heroine Praful tells a joke. A small girl asks her mother, “What is a boyfriend?” “If you become a good girl, you will get one,” the mother says. “And if I become a bad girl?” the little girl asks. “Then you will get many!” concludes Praful, laughing hysterically. Praful’s guilt-free pursuit of the good life includes a happy hook-up with a stranger at the bar, made even more fun by her abandonment of the proceedings when she discovers he has no protection.

Something particularly pleasing about this year’s crop of films was that it wasn’t only bad girls who made out: whether it was Parineeti Chopra’s Bindu Shankar Narayanan in Meri Pyaari Bindu’s 80s Calcutta, or Anushka Sharma’s rural Punjabi poetess from a century ago in Phillauri, the good-girl-fromgood-family is now allowed to sleep with a lover without being disqualified from niceness.

Sex scenes of charm and intensity also appeared in films that weren’t necessarily ‘about’ sex at all – I think, for instance, of the spontaneous erotic encounter that sets Sandeep Mohan’s quirky road movie Shreelancer off in an atmospheric new direction, or the moving seduction of Rajkummar Rao’s bespectacled hero in a ratty bedroom in Trapped.

Sex in a ratty Mumbai bedroom also made an appearance in Tu Hai Mera Sunday, with Avinash Tiwary’s Rashid as the player who brings home a stream of attractive young women. But Tu Hai Mera Sunday, despite having several unexpurgated discussions of all sorts of things, seemed to me to hold back when it came to sex. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the film judges Rashid or his sexual partners as immoral (in fact it makes a point of having Rashid tell us – and his male buddies -- that these young women are all “decent”), I wondered why it needed to shake love apart from sex. Because sex, then, seems naturally to fall to the bottom, emerging somehow as the inferior of the two.

The question of sex versus love is of course, the great chestnut – and I shall return to it next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Dec 2017.

Speaking of Sex

My Mirror column:

For the women in Lipstick Under My Burkha, words are a necessary weapon on the quest for desire – but they can also wound.

Sometimes a film can start a conversation. Lipstick Under My Burkha, about which I wrote in these pages last week, definitely has. I suggested in the previous column that what makes Lipstick stand out in the long history of Hindi cinema is that it allows us to see women as erotic beings, with their eroticism shorn of the necessary veneer of long-term romantic love. Certainly writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava and her co-writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suhani Kanwar have crafted a film in which women have more of a relationship with sex than our female characters have ever been allowed to.

But thankfully, unlike a particular sort of feminist girl-gang movie recently emerging from India with English titles – think of Pan Nalin’s infuriatingly flimsy Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), or Leena Yadav’s overly-choreographed rural drama Parched (2016) – the women in Lipstick experience sex in a variety of registers. Repression and bawdiness, set up as polar opposites, are not the only modes of being sexual.

Yes, the film uses the unabashed excesses of Hindi erotica to unbutton our tightly-laced selves, as well as casually dropping references to husbands getting excited by a ‘Brazilian’. But there is a tendency to imagine that women who speak freely – of sex, or anything else – are necessarily empowered. Lipstick, I was overjoyed to find, recognizes the range of possibilities that exist in the gulf between silence and staging.

The woman whom we see suffering through the worst sort of sex with her husband, Konkona Sensharma’s Shirin, is also the one who most needs to produce the pretense that all is well. The brave front she puts up is a recurring theme in the film. Early on, a woman to whom Shirin is selling a pest-control gun turns it towards her husband’s portrait, asking if it will work on this sort of pest. Shirin smiles a secret smile and says her ‘pest’ stays in control – even without a gun. We have not yet met her husband, so we – like the customer – are taken in.

Later, after the film has let us view the humiliations of her marital bed, we hear her produce another bit of light-hearted repartee, this time to explain to her gynaecologist why she keeps getting pregnant. “We get so caught up in the moment that it’s hard to stop and make him wear a condom...,” she says, looking at us rather than the doctor. This time, neither the doctor nor we are fooled.

That depiction of her husband as being swayed by desire offers, in fact, a sinister contrast to the brutally mechanical way in which we see him use her body. It is cold comfort that Shirin is also the only character who speaks – if only once, and fearfully – of sex as pain. “Jalan ho rahi hai,” she says as her husband enters her without the slightest kiss or caress, or even an affectionate word. And yet to hear her say those words is shocking, because it brings into a Hindi film soundscape a female body’s response to forced sex – not couched in the dramatically over-determined register of rape, violation, or even fear, but as physical pain made ordinary.

The emotional impact of that recurring physical hurt, on the other hand, is not something even Shirin can summon up words for. We see her, in the aftermath of the worst such scene, stuffing her mouth in silent anger – a cake she baked hoping to sweet-talk her husband into giving her ‘permission’ to work is now merely something to help her swallow her own tears.

The film’s feistiest character, Leela, is someone to whom words come easily, whether it is in wooing potential clients for a new business idea, or seducing her photographer lover. She is the opposite of years of Hindi-movie coyness when she appears in her lover’s room and says with beguiling candour: “Sex toh kar le.” And yet all the power of that openness is easily turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.

The Rehana segment, otherwise weakened by its excessive cool-girl stereotypes and its overly obvious dialoguebaazi (“jeans ka haq, jeene ka haq”), has one wonderful scene in which sexual tension is created with words. She is drinking with a flirtatious senior (Shashank Tiwari) when he gestures casually in her direction and asks, “Virgin?” Rehana freezes – and only relaxes when he indicates it is only her alcoholic virginity he was inquiring about.

Perhaps the film’s most challenging narrative is that of Usha, who uses two kinds of verbal covers – the words of a fictional character called Rosie, and the anonymity provided by the telephone – to carry on an increasingly torrid affair with a younger man. Words are what enable the 55-year-old widow to articulate a long-dormant, long-frustrated erotic self – but the man seduced by her “sexnuma awaaz” is quick to turn against her when he realizes who she ‘really’ is.

But all this talk of the body is a way of exposing the innermost corners of our minds – and that can make us incredibly vulnerable.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 July 2017.

Those Who Dream In Daylight

My Mirror column:

Under the easy symbolism of burkhas, lipsticks and cigarettes, Lipstick Under My Burkha is a film that’s urgently needed, astutely told and deeply felt.

If you ask anyone who's grown up watching popular Hindi cinema, they would probably agree that its most important preoccupation is love. No matter what other themes a film might take up -- the decline of Indian family values or the reiteration of their longevity, urban crime, the crisis of corruption, relations between communities, war, sports, patriotism -- there is invariably a romantic relationship at the centre of the plot. Often more than one.

In a country in which arranged marriages remain very much the norm, romantic love is the fantasy for which real people go to the cinema. Love is our grand narrative of choice, even when the romance is not epic but everyday. And yet, these depictions of love -- invariably heterosexual, almost always battling social obstacles to get to the end-point of marriage -- are too coy to speak of physical desire. If the sexual self is allowed to exist, it must be folded into the romantic, and ideally subsumed by it. You can want love, but to want sex is taboo. This is true even for male protagonists, but it is most certainly true for women, who must remain objects of desire rather than desiring subjects.

Of course, things are changing, slowly but surely: in recent years, we have glimpsed desiring women on screen in the most male-centric narratives, like Anurag Kashyap’s DevD; in films seeking to radically alter our perspective on sex, like Margarita With a Straw or Haraamkhor or Anarkali of Aarah; or character-driven dramas with other social concerns, like Masaan. But Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha still feels astonishing.

Perhaps it is the fact that her women characters are, none of them, aiming for marriage as the happy-ever-after. If one is pre-marriage, another is post-marriage; one has a marriage that offers her only humiliation, and the last doesn't want the right marriage. The 55-year-old Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah) has long been husband-less and has no desire to be controlled by a man again. The teenage Rehana (Plabita Borthakur) wants a hundred things that she feels life behind a burkha can't give her -- and marriage isn't yet one of them. Shirin (Konkona Sensharma) already has a marriage, complete with three children and a sexually exploitative husband who refuses even to use contraception -- it is one she would quite happily do without. Even Leela (Aahana Kumra), on the verge of a marriage that would secure her family’s future, cannot make herself see in it the shape of her present.

Perhaps it is that these women do not circumscribe their desires by what is expected of them; they do not want what they are supposed to want. Or perhaps it is just the frankness with which Shrivastava's characters experience sex and sexuality -- even when they are not speaking of it. One of the useful devices Lipstick's script uses in this regard is to bookend the tales of these 'real’ women with the voice of a properly fictional one called Rosie, who lends her purple prose to each narrative in turn. While she remains trapped between the covers of a steamy Hindi paperback, the unexpurgated quality of Rosie's desires forces us to contend with our squeamishness.
We are so unused to women speaking of sex (or even being acknowledged as wanting it) that sexlessness is the norm -- except within the approved bounds of grihasthashram, when it is duty rather than pleasure. And so whether it is Leela’s ravenous lust for her scruffy photographer boyfriend (the gorgeous Vikrant Massey, last seen in A Death in the Gunj), or the long-celibate Usha's fierce attraction to a man much younger than herself, these are not just unsuitable boys but unsuitable desires. I found particularly moving Shrivastava's telling of Usha's tale: how the physical proximity of a physically fit male body mingles with the giddy excitement of being reminded that she needn't be Buaji to everyone -- the evocative power of merely using her name makes one realise how women are boxed into their relationships, literally losing themselves.

But as the film makes clear, in a country where a widowed old man is generous when he 'considers’ a 40-year-old as a second wife -- and where we have been brought up to giggle at the merest thought of a spinsterish Lalita Pawar believing herself wooed, even by a man of her own age -- what hope can we hold out for Buaji?

Rehana and Shirin's desires are less obviously couched as sexual -- freedom to dress as they please, drink, smoke, work, wander the world, and be treated as an equal. But the sex scenes between Shirin and her husband (Sushant Singh) are the film's most horrifying -- because that stifling experience, of being reduced to being a forced provider of sexual services, is likely the norm for more Indian wives than not.

Given the depressing realities with which Lipstick deals, I am glad to be able to report that it is not itself depressing. The right to pleasure is serious business --but what is serious can also be pleasurable. The film ends with one final nod to romantic fantasy, which I loved. We might have picked the wrong man to be our sapnon ka raajkumar, suggests Shrivastava, but isn't the dreaming what keeps us alive?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 July 2017.

Lady-Oriented Lipstick Dreams

My Mirror column on 5 Mar:

Making sense of the CBFC’s recent ruling is tough, but not impossible. Our columnist reaches a speculative conclusion.

In a letter to Prakash Jha Productions, dated January 25, the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) refused to certify for exhibition a Hindi feature film called Lipstick Under My Burkha, directed by Alankrita Srivastava.

The reasons for 'Certificate Refused' to the film, as stated by the CBFC were as follows: “The film is lady oriended, their fantasy above life. There are contanious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one section of society.”

Yes, that's it, folks. So take a minute. Let the words sink in.

And now, shall we attempt to extract the CBFC's intended meaning from its garbled prose? Let's assume “lady oriended” to be an uncle-ish (and misspelt) version of 'women-oriented', or 'female-oriented'. The Oxford Dictionaries site online explains 'femaleoriented' as “Biased toward, dominated by, or designed for women.”

It doesn't take a genius to tell you that we don't have too many cultural products like that, not in India. But funnily, until the CBFC clarified matters, I had been fooled into believing that Uncle-jis across the land were cool with lady-oriented stuff. Because (a) it vaguely gestures to the West that Bollywood (thus India) can be modern, too, and (b) d-uh, men don't actually watch stuff made by or for women (In fact, most women don't either). So 'women-oriented' = simultaneously useful and harmless.

But clearly, having actually watched Srivastava's film, the CBFC's members – both men and women – have come to the conclusion that a certain sort of women-orientedness is dangerous stuff. The clue to why they think so is the CBFC's four-word phrase after “lady-oriended”: “their fantasy above life”. I have only seen the trailer of Lipstick, but it seems to be about four women from different backgrounds giving their long-fettered sexual desires a chance to escape into the real world. (The original title was Lipstick Wale Sapne: literally, Lipstick Dreams.)

Mamta Kale, CBFC member, told the Times of India that Lipstick is absolutely not about women’s empowerment. “Being a woman, you can talk about your sexual rights but you have to keep one thing in mind as to how you are showing that issue. Can families go together to watch such a movie? No, they cannot," pronounced Kale.

Kale's remarks reminded me that the CBFC in 2016 allowed Leena Yadav's Parched through, with the minimal blurring of a breast (in an almost-love-scene between two women) and the removal of some verbal abuses. Parched was also very much about women's sexual desires – except (a) the women in the film lived in rural Rajasthan and were horribly oppressed by men, which means that it was undeniably 'about women’s empowerment', and (b) as I wrote in this column, Parched is a feminist fairy tale. The realization of women's desires in Yadav's film takes the shape of a fantasy: the three friends abandon their context, rather than succeed in reshaping it. Perhaps in so doing, their fantasy doesn't threaten to go “above life”?

Another film – also featuring a sexually desirous young woman – that was held up for a year by the CBFC's rejection is Shlok Sharma's Haraamkhor. There, the CBFC objected that it “shows the teachers in a bad light, which is unacceptable to the society.” Guneet Monga, the film's producer, told Hindustan Times in June 2016 that she “tried to reason that these things do happen.” and that “In fact, the film’s director was inspired by real life stories.” The implicit argument there: life above fantasy.

Monga's line didn't work, however. Maybe because the CBFC doesn't actually like real life: not when it doesn't agree with their fantasy of what the world is? Happily, Haraamkhor finally released earlier in 2017, after the Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) reversed the CBFC's decision. Sharma's film is a dark, radical portrait of a young woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with her tuition teacher. But here I want to draw your attention to what the FCAT actually said in its decision: it suggested the film could be used “for furthering a social message and warning the girls to be aware of their rights”. We might also note here [Spoiler alert] that Haraamkhor is a tragedy. Sharma's intentions become irrelevant here, because the film can then be read as follows: Girl is misguided; terrible things happen; let that be a lesson to you.

Lady-orientedness, then, can be allowed in one of two cases. One, if it seems like it’s telling women that desire (outside of love and marriage) really doesn't pay. Or two, if it makes sure to suggest that real life, as the CBFC knows it, won't really be altered by it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Mar 2017.