Sunday Editorial
The brute realism of Hindi cinema: tales from Vaishali
By Ratnakar Tripathy
Unreal life: real romance?
That Hindi films belong to the world of unreality is an established cliché, an obvious assumption as well as conclusion that no longer awaits arguments defending it.
But this fantasy world has its own hard-edged side that we often miss. Here is how it works. In a village or a small town, not enjoying the privilege of anonymity, any plans for indulging in romance get hexed on all sides. Most often when you wish to romance someone from your own caste, you are told, you are practicing incest. This is not just the Khap view from Haryana but anywhere and everywhere in Bihar. So you decide to let your heart flow beyond your own caste in attempt to avoid the distasteful sin of incest. And the label incest goes beyond the ordinary right or wrong. It can make you puke it’s so primordial and visceral!
As we say in a Hindi expression, when you move beyond your caste, you drop from the sky, only to get stuck over a tall palm tree! Your romantic songs over the imaginary landscapes have your caste and that of your partner up in arms against each other. If you had hoped for some endlessly joyful moments of intimacy, forget it. The hard and sharp edges of reality surround your tender romance from all sides and love turns into war.
This is a reality that has been happening on the screens in India for almost a century. It’s now happening outside cinema halls all over the place at sites like Haryana and Bihar.
According to a recent news report, at least two to three girls including married ones elope every week in Vaishali district and discover their independence and individuality through a painful process. Their families don’t simply disown them but at times send dangerous stalkers with guns after them. These cases are ‘almost invariably’ registered according to the report as kidnapping cases. Imagine an overworked policeman sitting and listening to tale of alleged kidnapping, when he knows it is just another boring tale of love. Boring because the lies are tiresome but also because someone else’s hostile hearsay second-hand tale of romance will now create more work for him. He’d rather go and watch a Hindi movie than hear a real tale. Especially, as the parental fibs seem too much like the villain’s version of the love story.
I have heard similar stories from Chhapra and my own East Champaran, so Vaishali is no way unique and the new found independence of the youth there has no connections with Vaishali’s deep republican roots in the ancient past.
When I talk to the younger lot in Bihar about the caste system, the post-reservation generations no longer talk about abstractions like ‘transforming mentalities’ or even concrete legal provisions around reservations. Their answers are brutally simple – only inter-caste marriages will get us rid of the caste system.
The trouble with romance is it just happens. Just as it sees no caste boundaries, there is no way to plan or ensure inter-caste romance or marriage. So romance is no place for a well-organized and visionary social reformist, despite the government schemes in some states that offer gifts like household utensils and cooking gas connections to couples who marry outside their castes.
For the above reasons I feel the sociology books in India ought to carry a chapter with the pompous title ‘Romance and social change’, possibly soon after the introduction so the students would begin to understand the massive implications of their flirtatious wink at a classmate, whether from one’s own caste or another.
For the above reasons too I believe Hindi cinema has filled up a serious gap in our gamut of realities as a reality we refuse to label duly. Hindi cinema may of course be accused of a unique sin – of reflecting reality too soon and even before it arrives, very unlike the Hegelian owl of Minerva.
So when a Hindi film happens in a khap in Haryana, the earth shakes up! When a Yadav boy in Chhapra runs away to Hyderabad with a pretty Bhumihar girl, the same earth shakes all over again.
The latest news from Hindi cinema is it is willing to endorse, indeed embrace reality. My reading is Hindi cinema is now overflowing the damming screens into the fields and the dalans [living rooms for men] of rural Bihar.
You still think Hindi cinema is/was escapist or inimical to reality?
Time you looked for a good argument, since the smug assumption don’t work anymore!