Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021
Shyam Benegal’s ‘Zubeidaa’: Women in Search of Freedom and Identity
Sudha Tiwari Post Graduate Teacher, TMRS, Kazipet, Boys-1, Warangal, Telangana, India.
It is an industry of sharp contrast, with work ranging from the noblest to the most preposterous, from the most hedonistic to the most devotional, from the most jovial to the most despairing (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy) This is an accurate statement with regards to the Indian Cinema. Cinema in India began with Dadasaheb Phalke‘s Raja Harischandra, the very first full-length feature film released in the year 1913. Commercial Indian cinema is the most powerful mode of communication and dissemination of message(s) in Indian society. With their exotic locales song and dance sequences, romance, etc. they are a spectacle to behold. Apart from these generalized surface descriptions, if we look deeper critically far from being vague meaningless carnivalesque spectacle, ―Indian film‖ is a repository of ideals and values that it constantly tries to project on to the audience. The social issues it takes-up and how they are interpreted and treated reinforce the certain desired value systems. The figure/character of woman has been an evergreen issue of cinema and Indian cinema more so because of its rich lore of national myths and icons. Women as ‗social issue‘ have been present right from its very inception. Barnuow and Krishnaswamy in their book Indian Film (1980) tell us that films dealing with ―Women‘s issues‖ were made as early as 1920‘s - Gun Sundari (1924) which dealt with a married couple facing discord in their relationship due to the wife‘s feeling of being unappreciated and the husband‘s disinterest towards his wife‘s day to day
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021
activities. The film carried the message that a wife‘s role is not just being a dutiful wife but also a companion. Indian cinema has evolved in recent times. Though we still have movies with the same underlying subject of a hero and heroine, but these characters have become multifaceted. It is not the same old formula of hero fighting with villain or the heroine with beautiful costume waiting for the hero to be rescued. Indian cinema has evolved. The protagonist whether male or female have matured enough from dancing and singing around a tree. They have more layers to their characters and nature. Zubeidaa is one such movie and the protagonist, the titular role is much more meaningful then just a classic beautiful damsel in distress. Zubeidaa starts with Riyaz (Rajit Kapoor), a journalist looking into the life of a woman, the mother he was separated from as an infant when she went for a second marriage. He was raised by his maternal grandmother and was very curious to know about his heritage and specially about his mother. Coming to the centre of it all and going with the title character, the movie is all about Zubeidaa played by Karishma Kapoor. Zubeidaa is beautiful, charming yet strong willed and ferocious. She grows up like any other girl with lot of love and pamper. Being the only child, she is the centre of her parent‘s love and attention. Her father Suleiman Seth played by Amrish Puri runs a film production house and young Zubeidaa is attracted to this world of films. She loves to dance and often spends her time with the artists of the production house. It is here that she dreams of becoming an actress and also dances and acts in a movie ‗Banjaran Ladki‘, a film which never gets released. But as her interest in becoming an actress is revealed, she is tied down by her very dominating orthodox father; who though claims to love her but is not ready to let her live up to her dreams and wishes. He fixes her marriage to his friend‘s son and like any other arranged marriage the decision is solely her father‘s even her mother is not taken into
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021
consideration. What intrigues the most is that Zubeidaa is not like any other girl who would agree to the decision in just one go. She is rebellious, a dreamer and overall, a lady with her own thoughts and desires; she goes on to showing tantrums and denial in the beginning. Later she had to agree to the arrangement and gets married to the man of her father‘s choice. If we look into the era we live in, it looks bit amusing that what is so special in denying to a marriage proposal. But the era to which the movie belongs is the 1950s, when standing in front of your father and rejecting a marriage proposal which you think you are not prepared for was highly objectionable and unimaginable. Zubeidaa is one such character who has the courage to take the first step, without thinking of the end result. She goes on to reject the proposal in the beginning, though later she got married to the man selected by her parents. She goes on to live a normal life of a married woman which she despises in the beginning. Every twist and turn of the plot in the movie, shows her disapproval and disappointment with the relationships in her life; When her husband divorces her on the insistence of his father, when she is failed by her own father as her marriage does not work out. And when she goes for the second marriage with Maharaja Vijendra Singh played by Manoj Bajpaiyee. As we look into Zubeidaa‘s relationship with the male characters and the turn of events; it reminds of the character Nora from Ibsen‘s A Doll‟s House where Nora is expected to behave like a doll, a puppet in the hands of both her father and husband who does not want her to know the ways of the world and when she takes a decision to step into the world beyond her comfortable space is condemned down by her own relations. In Zubeidaa‘s case, Zubeidaa is very well known of the ways of the world, she knows what lies beyond her comfortable life and is bold enough to venture into it without thinking twice.
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021
She is heart broken when her first husband divorces her as he wants to move back to Pakistan living behind his son with her. She is heart broken when her father underestimates to her dreams of becoming an actress. She is heart broken when her infant son is taken away from her as she decides to renew her life again and above all she is heart broken when her second husband denies her the rights of a wife. As at one point he says about his first wife, ―she is a perfect Rajput bahu‖, and he says to Zubeidaa, ―humesha dil behlaate rehna‖; clearly treating his first wife to be his confidante as she fits into the image of a royal princess accepting to the norms and rules set up by the family and the patriarchal society. Zubeidaa on the other hand considers the royal customs and rules to be limiting. The best thing about Zubeidaa‘s individuality is that she never hesitates to speak her mind. Her character demands acceptance and to the entirety of her nature. She is not willing to lay down herself to the image set up by the society. Vijendra loves her but fails to understand and appreciate her spirit for life. Coming to the other female characters; the characters are unique in their own ways, understand each other well, respond to each other and forms a bond with each other which lacks in the male character. Zubeidaa‘s relationship with her mother Fayyazi is special though she disapproves to her mother‘s submissive nature. Fayyazi adheres to the decisions of her husband and accepts his domain as she seems helpless when Zubeidaa was forced into her first marriage and remarks, ―tum jaanti ho hume vahi karna hota hai jo saheb chahte hain‖. Later in movie it was Fayyazi who supports her decision of getting married to Vijendra Singh though on the condition of not letting her son go with her. We come across Miss Rose Davenport played by Lillete Dubey, a dancer in movies who is a contemporary to Fayyazi, Zubeidaa‘s mother and who influences and plays an important role in Zubeidaa‘s life. Though she is disliked by Fayyazi, Rose has a soft heart for Zubeidaa and was
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instrumental in introducing Zubeidaa to Vijendra Singh. Zubeidaa loves and respects the irrepressible spirit of Miss Rose Davenport and looks to her as a confidant and support. The other most important female character is Mandira Devi played by Rekha, the first wife of Vijendra Singh. Both Mandira Devi and Zubeidaa love Vijendra Singh and both understand their contrasting and specific roles in his life. Mandira interacts with Zubeidaa with honesty and frankness. It is her sincerity towards her husband that though people think of Zubeidaa a bad omen in Vijendra‘s life, though they blame her to be the cause of his death; Mandira at the end shows solidarity to Zubeidaa. It was Mandira who possessed Zubeidaa‘s photographs and the copy of the movie ‗Banjaran Ladki‘ which Riyaz was in search of. When we look into Zubeidaa‘s relationship with the other female characters of the movie, we get a deeper understanding of her dreams and her decisions which made her life a life of her own, not dictated by the patriarchal society that tried to control every aspect of her life.
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021
Datta, Sangeeta. ―Globalisation and Representations of Women in Indian Cinema.‖ Social Scientist, vol. 28, no. 3/4, 2000, pp. 71–82. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3518191. Deshpande, Anirudh. ―Indian Cinema and the Bourgeois Nation State.‖ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 50, 2007, pp. 95–103. JSTOR. Gupta, Chidananda Das. ―New Directions in Indian Cinema.‖ Film Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, 1980, pp. 32–42. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/1211852. Hogan, Patrick Col. ―The Narrativization of National Metaphors in Indian Cinema.‖ Analyzing World Fiction, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas Press, 2011, pp. 135– 50, JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/726321.12. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll‟s House. Courier Corporation, 1992. Kumar, Priya. Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film. NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttvbg3. Mohamed, Khalid, and Priya Kumar. ―An Interview with Khalid Mohamed.‖ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006, pp. 100–19. JSTOR. Sharma, Manoj. ―Portrayal of Partition in Hindi Cinema.‖ Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 70, 2009, pp. 1155–60. JSTOR.
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