Chamak-dhamak, Hrithik-Kangana and the moral compass of the “bourgeois press”

“हमारी फ़िल्म लाइन अजीब है प्रफ़ेसर साब, एक शरीफ़ आदमी को विलेन का रोल करना पड़ता है, और मुझ जैसे को हीरो ।”

(“Our film line is so strange, Professor-saab, an honest man has to play the role of a villain, and someone like me, a hero.”)

One of the reasons I think Hrishikesh Mukherjee is a genius, is in his understanding of cinematic performance in the context of everyday performance. In Guddi (1975), the titular protagonist is a just-eligible-for-marriage 18-year old who is convinced she is in love with the film star Dharmendra. Having watched his hit film Anupama some 25 times, Guddi is unable to trivialize her feelings for the star. In a bid to rid her of her starry-eyed wonder, as he sees it, her mamaji — played by an enthused Utpal Dutt — engineers several meetings between Guddi and Dharmendra on the film set, and then recruits Dharmendra to perform ordinariness. It is clear that within the narrative, mamaji is quite convinced Dharmendra is not actually all that ordinary (“जितनी फ़िल्में, उतने गुण”), and Guddi will likely be all the more enamored by his perfection if she meets his actual self. So, Dharmendra needs to act ordinary then, in a way that will make her family-ordained engineer-suitor Naveen look heroic in comparison.

I come back to Guddi many, many times, to try and figure out what Dharmendra is supposed to be in this tale. Is he the “real” Dharmendra? Not likely. Because what actor could play his “real” self on screen — would he even know what his “real” self is? So, the Dharmendra-playing-himself in Guddi is himself a character scripted by Mukherjee. Then there is the Dharmendra-of-Guddi’s-imagination, who is a fictional construct of herself a fictional construct. Then there is seemingly-ordinary-Dharmendra as created through mamaji’s request, and another film-star-Dharmendra that we the audience already had a preconceived impression of. And finally, there is a “real” off-screen-Dharmendra who is likely anybody’s guess. At every point, we encounter a Dharmendra who is by default a cinematic construct, and never a flesh-and-blood human being, which is an impossibility in any case.

This is why the Hrithik-Kangana drama that is unfolding now has become fascinating for me. It seems we are supposed to take sides in this mediated conflict — which too, is an impossibility in any case. People are proclaiming who they believe more — female viewers tend to take Kangana’s side as victim, male viewers, Hrithik as victim. On the other hand, film industry folk who know Hrithik are actively voicing faith in him through social media, mediapersons who know Kangana are trying hard to get her story out in social as well as mainstream media … the lines are being drawn, but all through media. And it seems like this factor of mediation is just being lost by everybody.

Because I really don’t think we (media consumers) will ever completely know the “truth” of this story, all we will ever be presented are smoke and mirrors, he-says-she-says, endless retweets and Facebook posts and Instagram photos. The narrative we build out of Hrithik and Kangana’s story is actually the narrative we wish to project on them, and their media handlers are depending on this very function of the media. To be clear, there is an army of public relations professionals, publicity managers, lawyers, media liaisons and middlemen of all kinds who are advising both of these personalities on how to “play” this story — how to script more Dharmendras of their own, so to speak.

And so, men who like to think they are rational, logical people in my circles are being made to point to Hrithik’s providing of “evidence” in the form of his laptop and passport and paper trails that they are being told are “objective” documents. Women are being made to refer to long histories of female actresses poached by powerful men in the film industry, and how their reputations and careers have suffered as result — and then they are being asked to connect Kangana to this genealogy.

At the end of the day, Barkha interviews Kangana, Arnab interviews Hrithik, and depending on whose media persona scripts a better story for you, will likely decide whose mediated narrative you will advocate for — and our advocating as the audience, is intrinsic to the monster of mediated Bollywood, where roles and performances no longer begin and end on screen, but are constantly performed and in circulation across a range of media.

“अरे फ़िल्म के जो असली heroes हैं, वो लोग सब कैमरा के पीछे रहते हैं ।”

(“Arre, the real heroes of the film, they are all behind the camera.”)

So I want to bring this back to mamaji — the charioteer-like figure steering the romance in Guddi’s life, guiding her away from the ephemerality of the performer-pretender and towards the immutable, reliable, caste-endogamous Naveen. As Professor Gupta, the savarna mama is presented as a man of science — an experimental psychologist — who is progressively anti-dowry, a bachelor family man, and who understands that repressive methods only go so far in controlling female behaviour. Played by a savarna Kayastha and real-life communist (Utpal Dutt), mamaji is really the god-like puppeteer, holding the spine of Guddi’s narrative together. The contradictions of this are of course that “corrective behaviour” enacted by the benevolent patriarch to recover Guddi within caste-patriarchy, is presented as progressive through the progressive Brahmin-savarna male actor. Mukherjee’s Guddi/Kusum is never meant to move in a feminist direction, but Guddi’s consent is essential for the project of caste-patriarchy. And so, this consent is won by constructing Kusum’s perceptions of star and suitor.

“बहादुरी दिखाने के लिए दोनों गेम देने कि क्या ज़रूरत थी?”

(“To show off your bravery, what was the need to give both games away (to Dharmendra)?”)

If you listen to Kangana’s narrative on the mainstream stage, these contradictions of patriarchy consistently come up — the construction that Hrithik didn’t behave like a “gentleman,” that he is a “silly ex,” that feminists shouldn’t create a “complex in men,” that she is a proud Rajput and Hindu… In fact, throughout her interview with Barkha Dutt, you see that it is Barkha the savarna feminist journalist, who has to gently nudge Kangana into the position of wronged feminist, to win her consent by constructing her perceptions of Hrithik and herself.

Note how Barkha gently guides her into the right way of sharing stories of suffering (the number of times she nudges Kangana into talking about being homeless); note how she picks out the stories of empowerment (and Kangana’s nonplussed expression when Barkha brings up her learning English, or her discomfort with talking about Hrithik); note how she then nudges her into mimicking someone’s accent of “Queen’s English” because this performance is funny — for the audience. Note how she tells the audience to applaud at the right time, how she hurries to assure Kangana she is on her side (“You won’t get a bigger fan than me”), and then note how she singles out all these savarnas in the audience for their questions (who also rush to assure Kangana they support women) … it’s really a masterclass. And Kangana whose great acting comes out of her solid understanding of how narrative works, has now mastered this way of narrating her life. It is a masterclass of a populist feminism that is not really meant to challenge caste-patriarchy, but to perform a wounded feminism that builds layers upon layers in narrative.

A similar role-playing is constructed in the Hindi Aap Ki Adaalat interview. The scripted nature of Aap Ki Adaalat is fairly well-documented, so I don’t need to stress on it here. But the performative nature of the staged courtroom, the lawler-ly interrogation and the audience as jury, all add an extra layer of authenticity for Kangana’s audience, which has clearly started to believe she is on trial here. Even if Kangana is being accused of using her relationship as a publicity stunt, fans of Kangana’s narrative are embracing her performativity as a strategy.

“किसी का भला करने गया था … थोड़ा ज़्यादा हो गया ।”

(“I went to do some good for someone… it became a little too much.”)

Similarly note Arnab’s “handling” of Hrithik. Note how Arnab says:

“I appreciate the fact that you’re being frank enough with me in saying you’re not feeling comfortable with me right now… because there are many politicians who are actually not comfortable sitting in front of me, but who pretend that they’re comfortable… there are others who pretend. Let’s talk.”

And then,

“I believe TV is a transparent medium.”

To which Hrithik says,

“People are afraid to be vulnerable… I had to come to terms with my own vulnerability.”

Immediately, within the first 5–10 minutes, we are being made to think — Hrithik is not pretending, this is transparent, Hrithik is vulnerable. Pretty much everything said beyond this point is being filtered through this lens, and Arnab asks just the right number of questions for Hrithik to act incredulous, innocent. So when Hrithik says he has never spent any time with Kangana one-on-one, when he says all he did was send her a smiley every now and then, we are the ones who are mystified… and then somehow convinced that she is delusional, after all, there has always been an unhinged air about her, something not quite right.

It is hard not to see this as the gender battle par excellence. He is calm, unshakeable logic, she is pure, unfiltered emotion. He is all evidence, she is all pain. He is all vulnerable, she is all strength — in the rules of populist feminism that the December 16 gangrape has catapulted us into, this subversion is essential. The woman is fearless and निर्भय , it is the man who is all fearful, भय.

“नहीं, नहीं, मुझे किसी ने नहीं बहकाया… मैं ख़ुद ही फ़िल्मों की चमक-धमक देखकर भटक गया ।”

(“No, no, nobody has led me to wander… I myself got lost seeing the glitter and glamour of films.”)

What this exercise has been about — peppered with actual Hindi dialogue from Guddi — is reading performance into every encounter a star has with his/her “public,” something that we seem to have forgotten is happening everytime Hrithik and Kangana hit the news. It should not be possible to ignore the Barkhas, Arnabs, and Rajats who are the Utpal Dutts guiding us through the murky world of Hindi cinema, yet we do.

There is that great moment in Guddi when Dharmendra (perhaps the scripted Dharmendra-playing-himself) is confronted by an indignant khaadi-clad journalist who complains that if he prints sensationalist material, it is because of a “bourgeois press” that is greedy, a form of “prostitution,” as the dialogue goes. And Mukherjee’s own politics is far from innocent, steeped in the Brahmin-savarna gaze as it is. The “bourgeois press” is really a caste-drenched extravagance, too steeped in Brahminical mythology, and too much in love with moral absolutes, like the idea of a Sita performing agni-pareeksha, or a Ram standing by his morals.

And such is the mythology of stars. Writing about pop stars, Richard Dyer in his Star Theory notes three areas that make a star. They are just as acceptable in film stardom:

• The star is a construction.
• The star is a commodity.
• The star is an ideology.

He also notes the paradox of stardom, that the star has to be both ordinary and extraordinary, and that the star must be both present and absent in everyday life.

Perhaps it is time to remind ourselves of Star Theory every time Bollywood makes news… or perhaps, just remember Guddi/Kusum, and that she never got a chance to just meet her Dharmendra, one-on-one. Because the star can never actually be encountered.