City On Screen: Banaras to Varanasi
Photo: Karan Madhok
From Water and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag to Masaan and Mukti Bhawan, Ankur Choudhary examines films about the holy city of Varanasi to uncover an intersection of culture, gender politics, modernity, and more.
The ancient city of Varanasi—also known as Banaras—has provided a cultural cradle for several Indian movies. The city brings in a context of contrasting values: religious piety and a promise of deliverance from sins in opposition to superstitious beliefs, irrationality, and blatantly-defined gender roles.
The scriptures claim that the Man is the protector and the provider whereas the Woman is a mere ardhangani—the better-half—implying that she exists only in relation to a man. As soon as the husband dies, the woman, as a widow, is ostracised as cursed. After coming to the city, Deepa Mehta recalled her experience of shooting Water, “All it took were 12 protesters and a professional ‘suicider’ to drive us out of Varanasi”. Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005) revolves around Chuyia’s life who becomes a widow at the age of eight. She asks innocently: “Kab tak baba? [For how long?]”. This is India of 1938. The Britishers have already passed Widow Remarriage Act in 1856, but the ones who should know about it are unaware.
Water is a part of Mehta’s ‘Elements’ trilogy, which also includes Fire (1996) and Earth (1998). When the sets of the movie were destroyed and death threats given to Mehta and her crew, she moved the production to Sri Lanka to continue shooting. Famous movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review: “That a film like "Water" still has the power to offend … inspires the question: Who is still offended, and why, and what have they to gain, and what do they fear?”
The movie is an intersection of several lives that start and end with Chuyia. It has an undertone of nationalism and breaking free from the definite fetters of tradition and embracing modernity; all in the colour palette of the night: a pervasive blue, indigo and a moonlit white.
The ancient city of Varanasi has provided a cultural cradle for several Indian movies. The city brings in a context of contrasting values: religious piety and a promise of deliverance from sins in opposition to superstitious beliefs, irrationality, and blatantly-defined gender roles.
Water never explicitly questions caste and class dominance, yet it brings out subtle heroism of its characters in a dreamlike melody, characters who make their own decisions, their own choices. They choose not the life ‘given’ to them, but the one they dream to live. It does not evoke a militant discarding of traditions, but shows that its characters have been cruelly damaged by the helplessness of their circumstances and the religion they follow. It shows that the only ones who are able to step out the circumstances are upper-class and upper-caste men, educated in modern values, and the women/children taken under their aegis. The Varanasi seen through Mehta’s lens offers shades of grey with a blue backdrop.
This thought is taken further by Laaga Chunari Main Daag, released two years later. Directed by Pradeep Sarkar, the movie follows two small town girls near the Ganga ghat—Badki (Rani Mukherjee) and Chutki (Konkana Sen Sharma)—in a blatant patriarchal society. Struggling with financial instability, Badki quits school to allow Chutki to pursue her education. When the situation gets desperate, Badki—being academically under-qualified—gets into sex work.
This is where the title of the movie comes, translated in English as: My Veil is Stained. This is also where the movie becomes problematic. The veil, a symbol of virginity and purity, is stained with rape and pre-marital sex. Important to note here is the movie’s weak script that lazily leads to the rape scene, and then uses it to justify Badki leaning on sex work. The movie establishes Badki as pious as the holy river of the city, when Rohan—her love interest—says: “Mere liye toh tum khud Ganga ho [For me, you are the Ganga herself].”
The convenience with which the movie shifts from addressing its titular concern and becomes a vehicle to bring Badki back into the foray of the society so that both the daughters can get married (and hence, become acceptable by society) borrows from the idea Water ends on. The daughters, mothers and women, via marriage (or by hopping on a train) are rescued by men. Lagaa Chunari Mein Daag does nothing to refer to the sex workers whom the two sisters see on their way.
The Varanasi of Sarkar leaves us with an important question: is the movie about sexual piety, or about the discrimination and ostracisation women face when they claim their sexuality in the society?
Raanjhana (2013) takes it a notch higher. The film portrays men saving women more than once in its two-hour duration, despite getting more than one opportunity in its script to allow the women characters to shine. Raanjhana is a love story forcibly star-crossed with politics and communal violence. It takes pride in eve-teasing, harassment, emotional blackmailing and disses parental communication over complicated manoeuvres to marry the person of one’s choice—especially if they are from a different religion.
Kundan (Dhanush) is in love with Zoya (Sonam Kapoor), whose names represent the line of religion they cannot cross. One is a Hindu, the other a Muslim. They are both in school and young and reckless, but is their love innocent? Kundan slits his wrist to prove his mad-love for Zoya, and she falls for it. Using suicide to thrust the movie forward feels like a cheap trope and normalises self-harm. This also makes one question: how inhibiting could the culture and traditions of a city be that one would rather die than face the consequences of their love or accept rejection?
Towards the end, Zoya loses her Sikh lover, Jasjeet (Abhay Deol), and Kundan is on his death-bed. Here, the script has the potential to let Zoya’s character and that of Bindiya (Swara Bhaskar)—who is madly in love with Kundan—shine. What we rather have is Kundan taking the limelight again and substituting Jasjeet to fulfil the latter’s dreams. Again, a male character is given precedence over female characters to not only act as a saviour, but also atone for his sins: here, the sin is the murder of Jasjeet which happens because of Kundan’s recklessness.
The movie ends on the note of mythical immortality of Kundan, borrowed from the supreme local Hindu deity—Shiva—an analogy that the movie employs from the beginning. Raanjhana goes on to suggest that his love and his lover are immortal, like the (male and Hindu) gods of Kashi. I am reminded of Kundan’s words here in the beginning of the movie, “Ye Banaras hai. Agar launda saala yahan bhi haar gaya, toh jeetega kahan? [This is Banaras; if a man loses here, too, where can he ever win?]”
Is it a matter of love or war? The movie does not seem to be able to make up its mind either. If Varanasi is a reflection of the reality portrayed by in this film by Anand L. Rai, then the city has seemingly refused to come out from the its age-old shackles of gender and patriarchy.
[Water] does not evoke a militant discarding of traditions, but shows that its characters have been cruelly damaged by the helplessness of their circumstances and the religion they follow. It shows that the only ones who are able to step out the circumstances are upper-class and upper-caste men, educated in modern values, and the women/children taken under their aegis.
Masaan (2015), on the other hand, brings in a unique perspective of how caste, gender and sexuality commingle with the suburban landscape which literally cradles between life and death. Masaan—refers to crematorium—revolves around two parallel stories of Devi (Richa Chadda) and Deepak (Vicky Kaushal). Their names symbolise their character arc: Devi—meaning ‘a goddess’—is put through purity test by the society, after her sexual experience with a man is twisted by the local police into a sex scandal. Deepak—meaning ‘lamp’—divides his time between studying, romancing and burning cadavers.
With great ease, Masaan handles the complex web of characters navigating their desires, caste-shame, and caste-privilege, in a corrupt system whose foundation is based on people toeing to the line. The sly conversations on the phone between lovers run the risk of being overheard by the caste-conscious parents of Deepak and Shaalu (Shweta Tripathi). The police intrude on a different young couple in their intimate moment. All of this to ensure that the young are beaten down into relinquishing any ‘perverse’ thoughts of subverting the societal ‘norms’ of maintaining the ‘purity’ of caste and class boundaries.
Set in the backdrop of the beautiful Banaras, the film captures this in a gratifying way and shows the side-B of the city, too, which makes you wonder whether director Neeraj Ghaywan’s words “Jitna chhota sheher utni choti soch [The smaller a city, the smaller it’s thinking]” actually stand true in the times we live in.
The societal shifts occurring in the city are captured with nuance in Mukti Bhawan, the 2016 film by Shubhashish Bhutiani. Mukti Bhawan is a story of a man wanting to breathe his last in the holy city by the Ganges. Writer-Director Bhutiani offers a vivid portrait of the city whilst giving us a glimpse how digitalisation, generational gap and female emancipation complicates matters with the changing tides of time. In one of the scenes, the protagonists’ phone interrupts meditation with a priest. In another, his sister rejects a marriage proposal over a glitchy video lag on Skype.
In films, the holy city has operated in its own time lag. In Water, Narayan says it succinctly to Shakuntala, when she wonders about her sufferings and hopes for a divine answer: “Dharam ki aad main ye bhi ek vayapar hi hai. [This profession, too, is concealed in dharma]”.
This is the ultimate way in which the movies, all of them scouting a shade of Varanasi, come together in exploring how the small-town India—an India romanticised by Gandhi—provides a vessel for innocence like Badki and Chutki or Chuyia and Kalyani. But in the same world also lurk sexual abusers, corrupt police, and criminals. The city offers a web of complex societal regenerations, which could either be a trap, or carry its characters into higher constellations.
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Ankur Choudhary is a writer and Delhi-based Structural Engineer. He writes about movies in his blog, fridayreviewer.com. You can reach out to him on Instagram: @_ankurchoudhary or mail at user.ankur@gmail.com
