Of late Bollywood’s women-centric films have been vaunted for taking on strong themes. But as much as I applaud these efforts I found that it was not that easy to congratulate Srijit Mukherji’s film Begum Jaan.
I started out excited; the posters of a hookah-smoking Vidya Balan spilling out of her bodice and onto her charpoy promised endless layers of deconstruction. The plot had promise: Sir Cyril Radcliffe has drawn a boundary line to partition India, and Begum Jaan’s kothi happens to come right in the way. Boundary commission officials tell her she is being evicted, get a local thug to smoke her out, and she puts up a fight with the women of her brothel. Women’s bodies, men making decisions, the motherland, the birth of a nation… I could barely contain myself.
Begum Jaan is, however, a disappointment. For all the promise of its plot, it fails to mine several rich veins. The film did, nevertheless, touch upon some acts of subversion that are worth noting.
Vidya Balan in 'Begum Jaan'
Consider the opening scene. (Spoilers ahead) It is modern day India and a young couple gets on a bus. A gaggle of laundas starts harassing them. The struggle moves onto a deserted street where the young man is beaten and the woman manages to escape rape. She runs off with two laundas in hot pursuit. They are stopped, however, by the sight of a hag who magically appears. The young woman cowers behind her. “Get out of the way,” the punks shout. The hag is silent. She starts taking her blouse off. The laundas watch on, in horror. “What are you doing!?” they screech. The hag persists. She drops her skirt. The would-be rapists can’t take the sight of her shriveled body and bolt.
This was a spectacular opening that I instantly recognised as a spinoff from Indian writer Mahasweta Devi’s short story Draupadi which has been translated by scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a theorist who turned the field of Postcolonial Studies on its head with her 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’. Devi’s short story gets its title Draupadi from the name of a heroine of the Mahabharata and its central character is a woman with a similar name, Dopdi.
Director Srijit Mukherji
Dopdi is an insurgent with the Naxalite rebellion that the Indian government cracked down on in 1971. She is apprehended after her husband is killed and is brought before army commander Senanayak. His men repeatedly rape her. When the army commander then orders Dopdi to get dressed, she refuses and pushes her mangled breasts in his chest: “What’s the use of clothes?” she says. “You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?” Dopdi put up a resistance by refusing to put her clothes back on; the hag in Begum Jaan’s opening scene resists by taking her clothes off. The hag offers herself in the most powerful resistance to rape I have seen.
Dopdi’s story in turn takes its inspiration from the legend of Draupadi. Draupadi’s husband bets and loses her in a game of dice and she is brought before the enemy chief, who attempts to humiliate her by pulling her sari off. Draupadi prays to Lord Krishna to save her and by a miracle, the more the man pulls at her sari the more of it appears. Devi reincarnates the enemy chief of the Mahabharata in the form of Senanayak, the army commander in Draupadi, who degrades Dopdi.
Begum Jaan and her girls are forced to resist the eviction of their brothel as it falls on the Radcliffe Line
Spivak wrote about Draupadi/Dopdi to examine the forms of subversion or resistance that can emanate from the subaltern or the figure that has the status of an Object. Women are objects. They are the subaltern, a term from postcolonial studies, that started out as a British military term for a junior officer. It literally means ‘subordinate’. In postcolonial theory it refers to figures who lie outside the power structure and cannot speak for themselves.
Dopdi “will finally act for herself in not ‘acting’”. When she refuses to re-cover herself with her cloth after she has been raped, she acts without acting. By definition, the subaltern figure does not have agency or the ability to act independently and make a free choice, but it can, as an Object, by insisting on its abjectness and misery, subvert the power of the Subject (the army officer, the rapist). Devi gives Dopdi power beyond what she has as a woman by refusing to veil her body. She turns her, otherwise an Object, into a SuperObject.
At the end of Begum Jaan the hag’s act of resistance is repeated in a penultimate scene. Begum Jaan realises that the thug’s men hired by the Boundary Commission officials are going to come after her and her kothi. As it becomes clear to her that a gunfight is imminent, she dispatches one of her prostitutes with two children of the house. She doesn’t want the little girls to come in harm’s way. The trio escapes by foot but are suddenly stopped in the headlights of the jeep of a police officer who corners them, flanked by rows of his sipahis. Here the scene from Dopdi is recreated. The police officer advances towards the trio, taking his pants off and throwing them to the ground. It is clear that he is after the older prostitute.
Naseeruddin Shah as Raja Ji in the film
But then, the youngest girl steps forward to shield the other two. She is barely nine years old. She starts taking her blouse off. The police officer stops in his tracks and starts shouting at her. With a dead gaze, the little girl continues to disrobe. “What are you doing? Stop it,” he cries. The child then sheds her pants. The officer falls to his knees, shielding himself from the sight of a naked girl child. “You are my daughter’s age,” he sobs. A silent girl child puts on the most defiant act of nonviolent resistance. She snatches power from the police officer and strips him of his masculinity by altering her status as an Object to become a SuperObject.
This kind of subversive act has been used by women across the world. Nine hundred years ago Lady Godiva rode a horse through Coventry without a stitch of clothing on, covered just by her long hair, to protest her husband’s oppressive tax. And more recently, just on the 19th of May, women in Nigeria’s Abiriba put up a strong resistance to soldiers who were trying to prevent them from holding an indigenous people’s conference. They stripped half naked and walked the street in their bras. And on the same day, 100 female students at the University of Praetoria did the same by protesting rape on campus by going topless. A few days earlier Femen protestors went naked to a police station in France to register their preference for Marine Le Pen.
Indeed, Begum Jaan fails as a feminist figure
These two ‘disrobing’ scenes were the only saving grace of Begum Jaan. For in tackling the other themes and points of conflict — Hindu-Muslim riots, the rending apart of childhood friendships, the nature of a brothel where your religion, caste or creed doesn’t matter, just how rich a customer you are — the film is utter tripe.
It loses an opportunity to tackle satti. Sati or brahmacharya was abolished in 1829 because the British decided that they needed to ‘save’ Hindu widows from the ‘barbaric’ practice. The Hindu widow is the subaltern here and the British were trying to speak for the subaltern by enacting the law. (Hence the title of Spivak’s essay). Fire features prominently in Begum Jaan with it all going up in flames right at the end. After a gun battle with the men who are trying to evict her, Begum Jaan and a handful of her girls who survive the fight, walk back into the kothi, which was set ablaze by Molotov cocktails. They decide to die rather than give it up. It would have been a great Thelma and Louise moment were it not for the complete lack of subtlety. On the surface of it Begum Jaan has triumphed. But has she by choosing ‘satti’? The men set the fire, she walks into it. It is perhaps her only choice left?
We see other subaltern figures in the film and I would wager that it was banned because of the way a Kashmiri girl is treated: not, as some people would imagine, because of the brothel scenes, which are benign. A young girl who was raped in the pre-Partition rioting is brought to the brothel and given to Begum Jaan. The girl is mute for the trauma that she has suffered. We never hear her speak. Begum Jaan figures she is Kashmiri because of her ruddy cheeks. The girl is not initiated at all but when Begum Jaan pleads with her patron, the raja, to help fend off the Boundary Commission officials, he sets a price: bring me the untouched Kashmiri girl. And Begum Jaan has to sacrifice the already traumatised child to more violence to save her kothi.
Indeed, Begum Jaan fails as a feminist figure. She makes some grand speeches that make her appear a feminist who doesn’t care a fig for men’s opinions and that her law prevails in the brothel – but the reality is that she depends on the raja’s benefaction and patronage to survive. Her arguments that she is a ‘caring’ madam who looks after the girls, gave them refuge, nursed them back from the dead are thwarted by her cruelty by holding them indebted to her. As one girl says to her as she escapes with a lover, you can’t call it love when you feed a tethered goat grass.
The writer is news editor at TFT and tweet at @Mahim_Maher
