Reflections of the Hindi film Sholay

Reflections of the Hindi film Sholay

Ramish Sippy’s (1975) film Sholay is a story about the tyranny of a rural community by Sikh bandits, the suffering and revenge of a police officer, and the bond and rehabilitation of two petty thieves. The plot unfolds when Thakur Baldev Singh recruits two of his legendary arrestees, the inseparable duo of Veeru and Jai, who only concedes to a coin toss to help him avenge his family’s slaying and his maiming, and to repel the vicious control of the city of Ramgarh by the infamous bandit Gabbar Singh, the bane of Thakur Baldev Singh’s existence.

Gabbar Bandits Terrorizing the City of Ramgarh

Attracted by the compensation package, Veeru and Jai, report for duty, but after discovering Thakur Singh’s real inspiration behind the mission, they eventually agree to offer their services pro bono.

Jai, Veeru, and Thakur Negotiating Deal

The outlaw buddies eventually become immersed in the life of Ramgarh, both developing romantic interests, Veeru in Basanti and Jai in Radha.

Basanti and Veeru Bonding

Their communal engagement also takes them through phases of attrition and reconciliation; however, the painful sacrifices of liberating themselves and the city take their toll on their body and spirit, registering the film’s tragic grand narrative.

Jai and the Village in Mourning over Murdered Boy

Melancholia and suffering dominate the thematic elements of this film. This is most vividly portrayed in Radha’s constant grieving over the massacre of her family and Thakur Baldev Singh’s obsession with revenge. Radha, speaks only one line in the film, and as an allegory, her dumbness possibly represents the protracted suppression by a generation of Indians of the trauma suffered from the violence and carnage surrounding partition.

The Grieving Widow, Radha

Another conspicuous element of Sholay is the extent of the male bonding between Veeru and Jai. Traditionally, Indian cinema tends to highlight gendered relationships, whether through oedipal complexes or heterosexual romance, but in Sholay these formulaic relationships are subordinated to the intimate friendship between Veeru and Jai. So when Jai is killed by Gabbar’s men, Veeru must abandon his promise to marry Basanti and mount a near suicidal counterattack to avenge his friend and ameliorate his own pain.

Jai Dying in Veeru Arms

The film also offers a normative commentary on the role of women in rural Indian society. Basanti’s agency in life relies on her ability to get married to a “worthy” man. Her guardian, Mausi, clearly emphasizes this ambition, when Jai represents Veeru in asking for her hand in marriage.

Jai Seeking Mausi's Approval for Veeru's and Basanti's Marriage

Therefore, when Gabbar Singh tortures her fiancé Veeru,  it comes as no surprise that she must share in the suffering, even to the point of dancing on glass, until overcome by fatigue, in her quest to save his life and ironically hers, for without Veeru, she losses a sense of worth or societal value.

Basanti Dancing, Hoping to Save Veeru's Life

These tropes point to the film’s narrative contestations between the traditional and modern. When Jai explores the possibility of marrying the widow, Radha, he must wrestle with the community’s traditions and its prescription of the widow’s role. Also, Veeru’s citified concept of dating, contrasts with Basanti’s adherence to the traditional processes of romantic bonding. Ultimately, he has to go to extreme means, feigning suicide, to circumvent one of the most deep-seated community values, that of parental consent to marriage.     

Veeru Threatening Mausi with Suicide

Sholay also highlights complex, race, cast, and religious anxieties and prejudices. Although the film is Hindi, Gabber, the unscrupulous bandit, is a Sikh and one of his most trusted followers the film’s lone black man.

Gabbar the Terrorist

This was the first time that I had seen a person of African descent in Hindi cinema, and disappointedly it replicated the Hollywood racial stereotypes of that period by demonizing him. Interestingly, there are no obvious Hindi villains, and those who engage in immoral behavior are eventually humanized.                                                

Thakur Releasing Jai and Veeru from His Custody

Additionally, the film also points to the limited presence and influence of the state in rural communities. The police is absent from the community of Ramgarh, forcing the impotent  and retired police officer Thakur Baldev Singh to rely on vigilantism to protect the community. Sholay also  endorses Virdi’s (2003) theory that many post-independence Hindi films present characters that are physically dismembered or disfigured. Imam Saheb is blind and Thakur Baldev Singh has lost his both arms to Gabbar’s cruelty.

Reference:

Virdi, J. (2003). The cinematic imagination: Indian popular films as social history. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Review of the Hindi Film Shree 420.

Critical Review of the Hindi Film Shree 420.

Raj Kapor's 1955 film Shree 420 opens with the protagonist and orphan Ranbir Raj in a Chaplinesque trot en route from his rural community to Bombay, where he hopes to find work. He soon learns that his naiveté and honesty put him at a disadvantage in surviving city life. Both symbolically and literally, he pawns his gold medal of honesty, trading it for the unscrupulous wiles of a city hustler.

Raj Learns the Ways of the City Streets

When he encounters Vidya Shastri, a pious school teacher, on the beach, Raj uses clownery and cunning to endear himself to her and her father. Homeless and broke, he searches tirelessly for work, finding luck within his network of footpath friends. Eventually, he lands a job ironing at a laundry, but ironically his uncontrollable obsession with Vidya leads him to negligence on the job, resulting in his dismissal.


Raj and Vidya Bonding

Notwithstanding, Raj's tenure at the laundry is not fruitless. It leads him to Maya, a sassy dancer with numerous connections to the bourgeoisie and the bosses of the Bombay underworld. When Maya discovers his exceptional skills at cards, she forces him to a poker match with her rich friends,and through threats and intimidation deprives him of all his Rs.20000 winnings.

The Scheming Maya

The wealthy corporate mogul, Sonanand Dharmachand, Raj’s defeated poker rival, lures Raj into white collar crime and corruption that eventually target the deception and financial exploitation of the homeless, including Raj’s own footpath friends. Haunted by his conscience and taunted by his love for Vidya, Raj is in a constant moral flux. At the final moment, he heeds Vidya's unceasing pleas to him to abandon his corrupt practices, and ironically, through chicanery, exposes Dharmachand's and his cronies’ scheme to defraud millions of homeless Indians.

The Unscrupulous Sonanand Dharmachand

From the onset, when Raj reaches Bombay, one of the first people he meets is a street beggar with an amputated leg, who feeds him with proverbial cues of an inevitable destiny.  This scene is loaded with historical meaning, which speaks to the physical mutilation and dismemberment caused by the realities of partition. As Sarkar (2009) notes, “They became flawed subjects whose wounds could be read metonymically as marks of a collective laceration” (p. 108). The fixation of Vidya’s father in the wheelchair and his lamentation over the demise of his professional and social standing also supports this theory.

The Symbolism of Disability in Shree 420

Kapoor could not have presented the poignancy of the inequities of post-independence India better than allowing the homeless vagabonds to take refuge in the yard of the wealthy Dharmachand.  This narrative does not only serve to reference the separation and displacement of partitioning, but it also foregrounds the deep stratification and classification of the citizenry caused by urbanization and industrialization (Sarkar, 2009, p.110).

The Homelessness of Bombay Streets

The recurrence of the role of the mother figure in Hindi Film continues in Shree 420 with Ganga Ma, the homeless banana vendor, providing comfort and solace to Raj, the orphan, even when nothing else in Bombay gives him hope; thus, revalidating the oedipal complex of psychoanalytical theory.  The redundancy of feminine representation also shows in Vidya’s role. She, like Madhumatti, and Rita in Awara, epitomizes all that is honorable and good of traditional Indian culture: she is the voice of conscience and the symbol of nobility.

Vidya as the Symbol of Traditional India

Again, Kapoor presents corruption and crime as a Western construct. His villains adopt Anglo-Saxon tastes and habits. Whenever his female characters splurge in vice or immorality, they seem to flay or shed some layers of their Indian identity or traditional culture.  

Maya Dancing to mud mud ke na dekh mud mud ke

Therefore, the flirtatious and avaricious Maya smokes flippantly, flaunting a blend of upper-class Indian vogue and Western panache. She speaks the only English words uttered in the film with an order to Raj from her room, “Get out!” When she dances at the elitist club, her dance is not traditional nor her dressing cultural, and even the logo on the instruments of the band in the background reads, “Rumba Boys”.
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Reference

Sarkar, B. (2009). Mourning the Nation. Durham: Duke University Press

Review of the Hindi Film Mother India

Critical Review of the Hindi Film Mother India

Mehboob Kahn’s 1957 film Mother India is a Hindi classic, a tragic drama of a rural family struggling to survive post-independence India. Radha marries Shamu and inherits the inescapable land debt that Shamu’s mother owes the avaricious loaner Sukhi.   The family’s attempt to pay off the debt only leads to spiraling indigence and suffering, from Shamu’s dismemberment and flight to the death of two of Radha’s children, one by her own hands.

Radha Struggling To Feed Her Kids

Mother India is as political as it is historical and cultural. It overtly registers the land disputes that foreshadowed India’s independence. While the conflict between Sukhi and Shamu’s mother outlines the pervasiveness of patriarchal power, all the council elders are men, it perhaps more vividly shows the vulnerability of illiterate rural dwellers to the vagaries of the capitalist ethos propagated by independent India. Sukhi is not simply the village schemer. To the villagers, with his hidden ledger and indecipherable accounting system, he represents external business interests and governmental systems.  As a critique of nationhood, the film clearly shows the peasants’ distrust of governmental structures and the inability or unwillingness of the State to provide them with effective buffers and protection, not that it would have been easy, for as one villager elder noted, “The police should never enter our village.”

Working to Pay the Family's Lifetime Debt

Mehboob goes the distance in recreating rural India, melodramatizing traditional values and practices. He could not have chosen a more powerful ritual than the wedding and the institution of marriage to introduce his audience to the values, norms, and morays that set the foundation for the unfolding tragedy. By situating much of the film’s action against agrarian backgrounds, he establishes the intimate connection between the land and the villagers.

Evoking Happiness in Perpetual Poverty

The plot unfolds as a flashback in the life of an elderly village woman called Radha. The flashback operates as reclamation of the painful history of partition. Even at the end of the movie, while the village celebrates the inauguration of a water dam, the forlorn Radha, who seems emotionally suspended in the past, is reluctant to participate; instead of celebrating the irrigation benefits that the dam promises, perpetually mourning her painful encounters with the transitions of partition, she reflects not on the future of water but the past of bloodshed.

Radha in Deep Contemplation

While the film presents rural India in its most pastoral form, it constructs complex gender relationships that blur the feminine and masculine power divide. The women characters, though contained within patriarchal dominance are inherently empowering. Radha’s fortitude and gumption belie the typical depiction of women as a romantic prize or a sexual gaze in traditional Hindi film. She traverses and redefines gender roles, conflating concepts of masculinity and femininity into a singular reflexive will to survive and care for her children. So physical strength, courage, defiance, and virtue, values traditionally invested in male characters all belong to her.  Alternatively, the film perpetuates traditional Hindi films’ portrayal of fatherhood, typically fraught with absent men, men unable to effectively meet their filial responsibilities, or men whose agency is temporal, inevitably disappearing, in their tracks whiffs of emotional distress or a painful memories.

Shamu Loses his Arms Trying to Move this Rock

The main protagonist, Radha is not simply a victim of partition; she is partition itself, representing the pain and suffering caused by the historic separation of peoples, cultures, and families. She carries the pain of the period as much as she negotiates her survival around it. Director Mehboob most effectively illustrates this when he twice presents prolonged scenes of Radha painfully dragging a cross-shaped plow, exploiting the biblical imagery of Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross of Jesus in the Christian story of crucifixion.

Radha in a Simon of Cyrene Strut 

The film also deviates from common Hindi films in its metaphoric situation of conflict. While the film centers nationalistic struggles within the family domain, it does not use the family to represent the nation. In Mother India, the village becomes the nation. So while Radha negotiates nationhood through her filial duties, loyalties, and obligations, the film subsumes this struggle within larger communal rules, values, and traditions. Thus, her untrammeled need to comfort and protect her son, Birju, a validation of the Freudian theory of oedipal complex, cannot supersede her commitment to the nation, for the audience can reasonable approach the village as a metaphor for the nation.

Radha's oedipal connection to her sons

Therefore, when Birju is about to commit sacrilege against the village, the despoiling of its bridal prize, she shoots him in the back, an aggressive act in honor of the nation that no context can demoralize. Also, Radha’s military pose and the symbolism of the gun as the punitive instrument should not be understated, since the gun serves as an apt symbol of governmental authority and her reaction a patriotic act of national defense.

A Mother's Deepest Anguish