Bhojpuri Cinema:
Looking closely at a private moment

Ratnakar Tripathy

Having made a number of broader points in the earlier post on Bhojpuri cinema, I will take a break from a likely avalanche of generalizations. However, I will revisit the theoretical issues in another post if only to modify or fine-tune them. Now let us get down to some specifics for the time being!
To begin with – why study cinema? For many of us, the answer is justifiably obvious. It makes for such a huge chunk of our lives in terms of overall influence if not the time spent. Furthermore, studying cinema can yield significant social insights – some of them confirm what empirical sociology says, and some of them modify insights gained therefrom. There is another variety of insights too which either throw light on relatively unseen areas of life or play a counter-intuitive role vis a vis lay experience or professional surveys. This is not to make a ‘superstrong’ claim that insights gained through cinema are unobtainable from workaday experience. I only claim that such insights can seem sharper and are more ‘conveniently’ derived from elements such as cinema, TV, and music!
I must admit that I find cinema studies at its boring worst when it plays a confirmatory role in telling us what we already know. Apart from the boredom, I also object to the theoretical extremes such analyses are prone to. They often take naïve reflectionism [cinema reflects society etc.] for granted. This path also seems nettled with philosophical difficulties of a wide variety. The most bothersome and obvious among them perhaps is the pragmatic question I have had to face – if cinema tells us only what society and history overtly tell us anyway, why waste our time. Intellectual excitement after all often lies in being modified or contradicted rather than in tame confirmations.
Having said that, let me underline and illustrate what I mean by insights, and also why I consider the study of entertainment to be especially rewarding. In order to do that I need to discuss a Bhojpuri film ‘Kanyadan’[2006] in some detail. My purpose here is after all to ‘specifize’ rather than generalize.
The film opens stormily with the offering [dan] of a newborn girl to the river Ganga as you blink and wonder if this is some secret exotic ritual that your own culture managed to keep from you. Soon, as the tiny body plops in the water you can’t miss the devastating irony. You then enter the outwardly sedate lives of a middle-aged couple just as their nth daughter is being born. With a lump in the throat, you soon realize that the husband has been throwing all his daughters away while the poor mother thought she gave birth to a series of stillborns. Perhaps after prolonged denial the dying mother turns wise if only too late, accusing her husband of being a ‘rakshasa’[demon].
Normally the husband would respond with the usual blame – ‘you are as good as sterile if you can’t bear a son’, but we already know that and thus no great need to discuss the film further. However, the conversation takes a very unusual turn. The husband, made apologetic perhaps by a dying wife tries to defend his deeds and you are suddenly privy to an intimate and vital secret. This is what he says:
‘I am not a demon. If I do not want a daughter, it is because of a trauma. Long ago when I was younger, I saw my brother in law come to my father and hurled my sister at his feet like a rag doll. His reason for it – my father did not side with him in local politics. My father even removed his pagree and placed it at my brother in law’s feet, but he won’t relent. It made me believe forever that with a girl in the family anyone can trample on my honour at will.’
The above lines make a potent mix of an emotional confession and a moral argument. The most interesting thing however is they are spoken in utter privacy. It is not often you are allowed to walk into the bedroom [birth-rooms, which are highly exclusive spaces] of a village Thakur and then walk further down the narrow lane of private emotions with him. Once having overheard these lines of course we are free to interpret them. [in the story the saved girl child grows up to justify her existence somewhat in the King Lear mode]. So let us.
First, it would seem that the very idea of a girl child makes the Thakur feel insecure to the core. And that our Thakur will go to any length, even murder to cure himself of such insecurity. This raises a number of questions – why doesn’t the prospect of a son make the Thakur insecure? Have we already reached the rock bottom of patriarchal prejudices? May be. May be not.
We can now claw away the veil from the face of a ‘trauma’ and look at it for it really is. Thakur’s ‘spiel’ would have been convincing if along the way he also admitted that while his father lost his pagree, the real and primary loss was his sister’s who was dragged in public and deposited at her father’s feet. In fact, our Thakur seems to have borrowed his trauma from his sister and declared it his own. It is after all his claim to trauma that makes him human rather than a rakshasa.
Before you shed another drop of tear for the man, be warned that you deal with a brother who has expropriated his sister’s suffering to retain his wife’s [and the audience’s] sympathy. In the process, he has reduced his sister to an instrument of humiliation. He actually seems to be in partnership with a villain who chooses to hit where it hurts most - dragging his wife to her father, using her as a weapon. Among the assembly of men, the woman then becomes both a festering wound [of the supposed victim] and the weapon [of the perpetrator] that caused it. One more way for a living throbbing human life to reach the levels of opaque symbolhood!
The irony is – the living throbbing woman never gets a chance to tell her story. Of course, the film does the next best thing by saving the Thakur’s last daughter and letting us watch her grow into a heroic figure proving her worthiness in the King Lear fashion. The greater irony however is – we actually do not even know how the father of the humiliated woman felt, or the mother, or anyone else for that matter. Wait! Would our Thakur now seem to have a near monopoly over female suffering. How very heroic!
Actually, how very banal! He is probably just another male with grand visions of persecution. The only difference is unlike men who will never get to confide their secret sufferings, this one is able to address a cinema hall filled with audience [lucky for social researchers like us!]. Others will simply carry on with their version of Kanyadan by the river, or opt for amniocentesis before taking due action.
The above interpretation is by no means complete if ever there was such a thing. But it does allow us to get a preview of all the stories that get unearthed in the premises of private clinics all over India – little pieces of baby bones that horrify, puzzle and sadden us leaving us with the question ‘why’, after all the condemning is done.
Is this the end of my interpretive efforts? For the time being, yes. I have this fear of developing the ‘special’ eyes of an expert who sees the macrocosm within the macrocosm, who may begin to see the whole world in ‘Kanyadan’, and even get progressively convinced that those who haven’t seen the film miss Reality altogether. I have just parodied what I like to call hermeneutic delusion, a neurosis of both faith and ratiocination. Another version of the same may be – ‘Kanyadan is whispering to me certain secrets that I am able to share only with great effort.’ Of course, others may believe that the interpreter is just spewing what is fairly well known or obvious even if it’s made to seem rather unknowable.
However, I have an immense hermeneutic appetite. I do need to carry on a life of interpretation. The solution may be - I should continue to watch other films and other media and see if there are linkages that allow me to interpret further. I could also stop and listen to others interpret Kanyadan. Going round and round within ‘Kanyadan’ can get tiresome! I thus decide to renounce my hermeneutic greed and declare myself full for the time being.

PS: since this piece has turned out fairly lengthy I will post my discussion piece on the issues of esthetic ‘taste’ and ‘moral goodness’ some time next week. For those who will not forgive a teller of incomplete tales, the male character [Thakur] in Kanyadan grows old to admit his mistakes and makes piece with his devoted daughter and perhaps the rest of womanhood as the film ends.