The faults in our stars - II

The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).

What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.

A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context

One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.

Taparia’s inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker, no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that the only success on IM is the engagement of Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious sub-community.

In Mundhra’s 2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

Motichoor has been much berated for its political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin) first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

Dreamy pictures, earthly selves

My Mirror column:

Made in Heaven fails in the Delhi authenticity department, but there's some promise in its protagonists' struggles to embrace themselves. 

(The second of a two-part column. The first part is here.)

Last week, I suggested that Made in Heaven is a posh update on Band Baaja Baaraat, with a nostalgic dollop of Monsoon Wedding (MW) feels. MIH's creators actually rejig certain specifics from Mira Nair's 2001 film: MW's child-molesting uncle is transformed into a teen-molesting father-in-law, and at least two actors re-appear. There is the tragically underused Kamini Khanna, making the most of her minutes as a memorable aunty in 2001 and in 2019, and in a much larger part, Vijay Raaz: then playing a hangdog tentwala besotted with the pretty family maid, now appearing as the wry, edge-of-dangerous Johari, a plumber with a plan.

More than any of these things, though, what's common to MW and MIH is the use of English as the primary language. By which I mean it is the language in which this world is imagined, and the language primarily spoken by most characters, sometimes even when a character's social background can't carry it off: witness Vinay Pathak talking of unscented soap. Conversely characters who speak in Hindi or Punjabi often sound excessive: witness Tara hissing at her sister at the opening of her husband Adil's new factory: “Naali ki kutti ki tarah baat mat karo”.

Band Baaja Baaraat knew the Delhis into which it shepherded us. MIH doesn't. So wedding after wedding feels like a PR video seen from the objectifying distance of Bombay – a tastefully well-off older couple get an old haveli setting, an organic-seeking IAS groom gets a trip to Dastkar Haat, a poor Muslim bride gets a rooftop sangeet. A character like Jassi/Jazz is interesting in theory – the Dwarka girl doing South Delhi – and she gets a couple of great moments, like when she shows up in a blingy dress for Kabir's ultra-dressed-down house party. But most of the time MIH can't pull off Jassi's in-between-ness – her clandestine liaisons with a motor mechanic are even more unconvincing than her desire for Kabir. The dialogue verbalises things in a way no-one living it ever would. For example, no Delhi person, no matter how rich, would use the word “vernac”.

So is MIH still worth watching? I'd say yes, for the riskiness of its central characters. MIH is rare in this regard – and not only because Karan is gay and Tara is married. When we first meet Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), we're primed to empathise with her, perhaps because she's trying to make it as a businesswoman, and her rich industrialist in-laws don't seem to trust her or her acumen. Ditto for Karan (Arjun Mathur), who seems to have a domineering father and not-so-nice friends who bring up his all-too-real money troubles at inopportune moments.

But as the series progresses, we learn new things about both. Karan's backstory focuses on his sexuality. He is a gay man who's out to his friends and colleagues, but still straight at the family dinner table. His dating life, which seems to frequently begin at The Piano Man and end in bed at his rather nice barsati apartment, must be conducted away from the prying eyes of landlords and policemen alike. But if the forced secrecy of Karan's life presents him to us as a victim, MIH also successfully complicates our perspective by showing us someone Karan once victimised. (This happens with other characters, too – turning their victimhood or villainy upside down – and it might be the best thing about the way the show is written.)

Tara's backstory is even more interesting. On the surface, it's about class – she's the good-looking girl who managed to marry the boss. But it is also, quite vividly, about her sexuality. If sex is Karan's Achilles' heel, it is Tara's secret weapon. The flashbacks that trace Tara's relationship with Adil (a very sexy Jim Sarbh) are among MIH's most interestingly crafted sections, with Dhulipala turning in a fascinating performance as a woman aware that her sexiness is her most monetisable asset – but also realising that it isn't a stable one.

Karan and Tara's problems don't seem comparable at all. And yet, as the series progresses, for both the question of selfhood emerges as the crux. Karan has hidden his inner self so long that he doesn't quite know what life outside the closet might entail. Tara has polished her exterior so successfully that she fears she may have rubbed herself out.

Some of the show's most ambitious arcs involve a central character recognising themselves in another. Example: Tara is a lot like the first bride we meet in MIH – a journalist marrying a business scion she'd first met to interview. At another level, Tara is a successful version of Jassi: she's successfully transitioned out of her old class. Sometimes a situation allows for unspoken resonance: when an older character I won't name sees himself in Karan, or when Karan seems to identify, unwillingly, with the young girl who thinks a monetary compromise is a better deal than a public battle. 

Sometimes we only see ourselves in the mirror of other people.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Mar 2019.

Heading to the Wedding

My Mirror column:

The new series Made in Heaven is a meaty addition to a genre that has captured our imagination for the last two decades: the big fat Indian shadi. (First of a two-part column)

As I succumbed to social media peer pressure and binge-watched the new web series Made in Heaven this week, I started to wonder when weddings in our movies went from being the all's-well-that-ends-well freeze-frame at the end of all the drama to becoming the locus of the drama. 

The original moment of change, it seems to me, might have been Monsoon Wedding. Mira Nair's 2001 film used an upper middle class Delhi wedding as the setting for a social and familial unravelling. Nair and her screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan unveiled the deep, dark secrets of the Indian family with a frankness that felt shocking at the time – but managed to use the glitter, the banter, the infectious energy of the North Indian wedding as the perfect foil for all the intense stuff.

In retrospect, Monsoon Wedding was the sophisticated prototype of something that would define our era. Among South Asians, a daughter's wedding had always been something to spend on. But a decade after liberalisation, the country's burgeoning middle classes suddenly had more money to spend – and were increasingly unabashed about being seen to spend it. The big fat Indian shadi and the high-gloss, exportable version of Hindi cinema that we call Bollywood arrived in the world more or less together, film and life cross-fertilising each other. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released the same year – 2001. Through the 2000s, aided by Karan Johar and others, the shadi became an essential part of Bollywood – and Bollywood became essential to the shadi. Across regional/linguistic boundaries, in India and in the desi diaspora, a with-it wedding now had to have a choreographed Bollywood sangeet. Across national boundaries, too, the newly performative Bollywood-style wedding established itself as a hegemonic cultural export – as a graduate student in New York in 2004 or so, I had the enjoyably surreal experience of watching my university's Pakistani Students Association stage a Bollywood-style faux-wedding as their big cultural event of the year.

Nearly a decade after Monsoon Wedding, in 2010, came another era-defining wedding movie: Band Baaja Baraat (BBB). Written by Habib Faisal and directed by Maneesh Sharma, BBB was also set in Delhi, but with a much more expansive socio-economic canvas than Monsoon Wedding's elite, English-speaking South Delhi family. BBB opened with Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar (Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma) meeting at a wedding, as so many Hindi movie couples have from Chandni to Saathiya – but then cleverly subverted expectations until at least halfway through, by making them partners not in love but in business. A wedding planning business, to be precise, which let Bittoo and Shruti – and their audience – work their way through a series of different Delhi milieus.

Made in Heaven (MIH) – conceptualised by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and co-written by Alankrita Shrivastava of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame – often feels a cleverly reworked combination of Monsoon Wedding and Band Baaja Baraat (BBB), expanded to series length and set in the present. As in BBB, the protagonists run a wedding planning business, and each wedding they organise gives us a ringside view of a particular Delhi social setting.

Only Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra (Sobhita Dhulipala and Arjun Mathur) move in more moneyed circles than Bittoo and Shruti. And consequently, so do the couples whose weddings they organise. The poshest echelon of golf-playing industrialists and their rummy-playing bitchy wives are straight out of Akhtar's 2015 film Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD), as are the Punjabi-speaking business families one notch down, whom the top tier fraternises with but also scorns. And as in DDD, these jokes at the expense of non-English speakers – a rich aunty saying “twat” instead of “tweet” – often feel like a stretch. Sometimes it’s the placement that's off. I'm not saying the Delhi rich don't mispronounce English words, they do – but if your daughter's marrying their son, you don't correct their pronunciation.

There are other glitches that show up the lack of Delhi detailing by a team of Bombay people who can't be bothered to go beyond visual and class clichés. Sure, this is fiction – but if you're going to say a character lives in Dwarka, then don't show her getting off in Sheikh Sarai, at the other end of Delhi. And definitely don't show her in a home that isn't a DDA flat. Don't give us a Delhi-based character who describes himself on his website as a “Mughal historian” and then responds with baffled surprise to the existence of a late Mughal haveli. Don't bung in a troupe of hijras from a “Fateh Baba Ki Dargah” when there isn't one in the city. As a Delhi person, I rate MIH sadly low on the authenticity scale – a matter I bring up only because every second episode seems to end on a platitude about Delhi delivered by Shashank Arora's video-camera-wielding Kabir – apparently Akhtar's human replacement for Pluto the dog, who delivered them in DDD.

But then what makes Made in Heaven worth watching isn't Delhi. If BBB acquired some cool in 2010 from not making its central pair start romancing immediately, MIH is immeasurably cooler because the couple at its centre are not a romantic couple at all.

The second and concluding part of this column is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Mar 2019.