Of Dowries and Denouements

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Dowry had almost vanished from our cinema, even as it continues to rock real lives. Daawat-e-Ishq takes on a messily difficult subject, and despite many misses, hits upon some inconvenient truths.

Parineeti Chopra and Anupam Kher pretending to be Dubai-returned millionaires in Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq 

The trailers of Daawat-e-Ishq were intent on making us believe it was a film about food and love. The film, on the other hand, is intent on making us believe that it is a film about dowry. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the imagined pressures on a fine filmmaker like Habib Faisal (and how susceptible you are to the imagined pleasures of a fine biryani), you might accept Daawat-e-Ishq as both these things -- or neither. 

If you intend to watch the film, this paragraph contains spoilers. Parineeti Chopra stars as Gulrez "Gullu" Kadir, a Hyderabadi "school topper" who works as a shoe salegirl and dreams of training in the US as a shoe designer. Gullu and her court clerk father (a marvellously subtle Anupam Kher) spend the film's first hour or so dealing with the humiliating dowry demands of largely unsuitable boys. Then Gullu devises a two-birds-with-one-stone scheme, with which she will both fulfil her American dream and take revenge on the male species. Father and daughter assume fake identities as Dubai-based millionaires, and head to Lucknow to find a rich bakra whom Gullu will first marry and then file a dowry harassment case against, under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. But the lamb to the slaughter is restaurant-owner Tariq "Taru" Haider, a rather winsome fellow who turns out not to be the money-minded brat they'd set out to phansao... you get the drift. 

In the much-maligned 1980s, when filmmakers did decide to make a film about dowry, at least they didn't beat around the bush. Anwar Pasha's Dulha Bikta Hai (1982), for instance, cast a woebegone Raj Babbar as a cash-strapped elder brother who marries off two sisters without dowries by pretending that he will marry the sisters of both grooms. When the hapless girls are turned out of their marital homes, Babbar must raise money by selling himself as a groom. It is a heavy-handed drama with a bizarre denouement, but as with many other 1980s films, DBH does not shy away from depicting the nastiness and violence of the Indian family. One sasur maligns his daughter-in-law's morals and beats her up with a cane; another mother-in-law is actually shown trying to set the daughter-in-law on fire. Of course, we were as invested in happy endings then as now, but filmmakers seemed to trust us with digesting some brutal stuff along the way.

This seems no longer to be the case, at least not in mainstream Bollywood. Think back to the Hindi movie weddings you've watched in the last few years. Even if one sets aside love marriages, where let's assume dowry plays no role, we've had quite a variety of views of arranged marriages, from wedding planners (Band Baaja Baaraat) to the paid fake baraati (Shuddh Desi Romance). Intentionally or not, these films provide a pretty good sense of the economics of weddings. But dowry almost never comes up. (I'm not counting the ridiculous -- eg. Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya, with an entire plot driven by Alia Bhatt's quest for a Rs 5 lakh wedding lehnga.) 

Before Daawat-e-Ishq, I can think of one film this year that dealt with dowry: coincidentally another Alia Bhatt starrer, Two States. There Bhatt got to do a bit of grandstanding as the feisty TamBrahm who shows the money-minded Punjabis how not to behave. I'm all for showing down dowry-seekers, but making it seem that dowry figures only among rapacious Punjabis belies the fact that dowry harassment cases are high (and rising) all across India, including Tamil Nadu. (In 2013 alone, Tamil Nadu recorded 118 dowry deaths, and 6,008 women in the state filed harassment petitions against their spouses with district collectors, police and dowry prohibition officers, under the Dowry Prohibition Act.) 

Daawat-e-Ishq doesn't have that problem. As a new-age Muslim social (the second this year, after the charming Bobby Jasoos), it seems keen to both create a recognizably Muslim universe and simultaneously have it pass as pan-religious. So, for instance, we have a whole film about dowry among Muslims -- like BJ, D-e-I chooses not to have non-Muslim characters -- without any mention of meher: the mandatory gift of money or property given to the bride by the groom in a Muslim wedding. The meher can be a token amount, or it can be a significant sum, but either way, director Habib Faisal appears to want not to distract audiences with such complicated facts. 

One wishes Faisal, whose previous work includes the middle class comic gem Do Dooni Chaar and the flawed but memorable Ishaqzaade, wasn't trying so hard to be uncomplicated. Because the dowry issue isn't. For one, dowry takers and dowry-givers aren't as clearly separable from each other as we'd like -- as Dulha Bikta Hai's 'exchange' solution showed, the same family might be a chest-thumping recipient for their son, and revert to supplication when it comes to their daughter. All of society is in on the game. 

Daawat-e-Ishq tries to take a more consciously woman-centric position, grounded in a view of our society as skewed against women. The film's understanding of 498A is muddled, and tragically misinforms its audience. But by showing the frustrated ladkiwale consciously choosing to abuse a legal provision created to safeguard women against domestic violence (including but not limited to dowry-related harassment), it unwittingly reveals how the law is often treated as another weapon in the sad battlefield of Indian marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Sep 2014

States of the Heart

My Mirror column:

The Punjabi-TamBrahm cross-connection has a long comic lineage in Hindi cinema

The protagonists of 2 States – Chetan Bhagat's apparently autobiographical novel in English, and the Hindi film adaptation of it that released last Friday – are an IIT-trained engineer from Delhi and an Economics topper from Chennai. They meet and fall in love in the hallowed precincts of India's Most Wanted educational institution, IIM Ahmedabad. They're wonderfully forthright about their attraction for each other, and it's fun to see them act on their attraction without coyness or melodrama.

But Krish Malhotra and Ananya Swaminathan's tale of modern love is properly traditional at heart. Cementing their relationship means marriage, and marriage, it seems, means making their families fall in love. This is easier said than done, because the Malhotras and the Swaminathans belong not to two states, but seemingly to two different planets. The Punjabi mother insists – contrary to all evidence – that the 'Madrasan' is a dark chudail out to phansao her gora-chitta son, while the Carnatic-loving TamBrahm parents think the Punjabis are terribly uncultured. The Punjabis count cars and toss around dowry amounts, while the TamBrahms tot up the number of US-based engineers in the family. The arrows of parochial prejudice are aimed, but not sharply enough. And there's no real takedown of the prejudices either. There are occasional moments when you see what things look might like from the other side – such as when our misnamed hero (have you ever heard of a Delhi Punjabi called Krish?) remarks that 'South Indian' homes look like they've been burgled, with the thieves having left only the sofa behind because they didn't like it. Even here, though, the opportunity is missed to even things out: we never see how stiflingly crowded a middle class Punjabi home might look to the visiting Ananya.

Though not quite as common as the rich-poor love story, and never quite as epic as love across religious lines, the cross-regional romance has enjoyed some space on the Hindi screen. And the Tamil-Punjabi cross-connection seems to be a particular favourite of the genre. Just last year, we had Shahrukh Khan and Deepika Padukone strike up a relationship aboard Chennai Express, and in 2011, there was the inglorious Ra-One, where Kareena's Sonia is married to Shahrukh's Shekhar Subramaniam, who displays his deep Tam-ness by eating his spaghetti with curd. But the most well-known example is probably K. Balachander's 1981 classic Ek Duje Ke Liye, in which Kamal Haasan's TamBrahm boy and Rati Agnihotri's Punjabi girl fall in love as neighbours in Goa.

The Tamilians in Hindi movies must, it seems, be Brahmin. The only innocuous reason for this that I can think of is that filmmakers are keen on staging a veg versus non-veg culinary clash. Ek Duje Ke Liye, for example, opened with Haasan's father praying in his garden when the neighbours' eggshells land in his cupped palms. (Interestingly, Balachander first directed the same script in Telugu, about a Tamil boy and a Telugu girl. But I haven't seen Maro Charitra (1978), so I don't know if Haasan's Vasu is TamBrahm in the original.)

The TamBrahm father and the Punjabi mother in Ek Duje Ke Liye spend a lot of time standing around trading culinary -- and linguistic -- insults. All that seems to remain of those middle class quarrels about garbage, rasois and food smells by the time we get to 2 States is a single awkward scene where Mrs. Malhotra (Amrita Singh) makes the mistake of offering five-star-hotel chicken to be frostily refused by Mrs. Swaminathan (Revathi). Class, apparently, is not the issue. But in fact when Krish admonishes his mother for suggesting that Ananya's Sunsilk job might mean free shampoo supplies, it is by telling her not to display her middle-class-ness. And much of the plot revolves around the idea that only Punjabis are brash enough to demand and receive dowry.

The most enjoyable TamBrahm-Punjabi romance I know of is also the oldest: Mohan Segal's New Delhi (1954), starring Kishore Kumar and Vyjanthimala. Kishore Kumar plays a young man from Ludhiana who pretends to be Tamilian because everyone in the multicultural national capital wants to rent only to a tenant from their own community. The film quietly extends the community question beyond the problems of one single couple – the divide of biraadari plagues the rental market as much as the office. Also, while TamBrahms may be invested in singing and dancing, and its Bengali may be a painter, the film refuses to give those stereotypes any sting in the tail.

But New Delhi makes few claims to realism either – neither the bharat-natyam-dancing Janaki nor her Tamil-speaking father can apparently see through Anand Khanna's rather thin disguise as Anand Kumaraswamy. Later Janaki herself successfully masquerades as Punjabi, trading in her flower veni for a parandi and her bharatnatyam for bhangra. It's as if these external markers are all that matter.

The film is an unapologetic comedy, it offers no grand critical commentary on the vexed subject of identity. But there's a minor character in the film whose business involves passing off vanaspati as pure ghee. He is shown carefully filling it in tins from Porbander or Mathura, and he offers us this wonderful aside: “It's the labels that matter, who cares about the stuff inside?” I have yet to hear a more gently ironic comment on community identity.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Apr 2014.