Relationships Which Have No Name’: Family and Sexuality in 1970S Popular film Ulka Anjaria*
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South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2012, 23–35 ‘Relationships which have no name’: Family and sexuality in 1970s popular film Ulka Anjaria* Brandeis University, Waltham, MA This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships specifically by means of its use of melodramatic formulas. Against a dominant periodization of the decade which emphasizes rupture, I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see a process of repetition and resignification whereby formulas such as the ‘lost-and-found’ plot and the love triangle were re-presented and their constitutive elements rearranged in order to generate alternatives to conventional kinship and romantic paradigms. Discussing several films from this decade, including Sangam, Yaadon ki Baaraat, Deewaar, Sholay, Amar Akbar Anthony and Silsila, I show how Hindi cinema in the 1970s was engaged in considering how to represent human relationships outside of social sanction or conventionally accepted kinship terms, thus offering a new paradigm from which to read popular film at large. In the closing moments of Farhan Akhtar’s 2001 blockbuster Dil Chahta Hai, the dying Tara describes her connection to Siddharth (Sid) by saying, ‘There are some relationships which have no name.’1 This is a redemptive moment in an otherwise tragic scene, as Tara grasps on to the last few minutes of her life and Sid struggles to convey how much she has meant to him. The communication is particularly meaningful for Sid, whose relationship with Tara, throughout the film, exceeded conventional understandings of relationships between men and women, and which, when it was briefly forced into the paradigm of romantic love, all but fell apart. For a popular cinema so seemingly invested in fixed relationships, a sentiment such as Downloaded by [Ulka Anjaria] at 09:26 13 March 2012 Tara’s might seem strikingly novel. Indeed, many critics have heralded Dil Chahta Hai (DCH) as a new kind of film, which transgressed conventional representations of familial and romantic relationships in Hindi cinema. Sid and Tara epitomize this sense, in part because Tara is older and divorced. But Tara’s words suggest that what is significant about their relationship is precisely that it eludes definition, that it cannot be understood by means of any preexisting relational terms. If its undefinability is the source of its transgression, then DCH is not entirely new, but furthers a concern with the nature of relationships that popular film has been experimenting with for decades. It is no accident that it is in Farhan Akhtar’s film that the idea of a relationship without a name finds form in language, as it mobilizes a sentiment found in the scripts penned by his father, Javed Akhtar, and his contemporaries a generation earlier. Indeed, it is in the films of the 1970s *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2012.655103 http://www.tandfonline.com 24 U. Anjaria that we see an intensification of Hindi cinema’s pressing and somewhat paradoxical interest in representing socially unrepresentable relationships. A narrative of rupture tends to dominate critical studies of popular film in the 1970s, based in seminal historical moments which are seen to have radically transformed the paradigms of Hindi cinema. Although the particular historical markers vary – from the India-Pakistan war of 1971 (Ahmed 291–292) to the release of Zanjeer (d. Prakash Mehra) in 1973, to Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 – a consensus remains around the idea that somewhere in this decade, Hindi popular film underwent an inalterable change. Central to this narrative is the figure of the ‘angry young man’ (Mazumdar 1), who represented the deep social angst of the time, and constituted a major shift away from the romantic heroes of the decade before (Ahmed 301). Yet while this narrative has significant explanatory power, it overlooks the less spectacular undercurrents of change that are more generalizable to popular cultural forms. In what many critics consider the conservative domain of popular culture, change most often does not occur through ruptures or revolutions but by means of small adjustments in conventions, formulas and structures, through which new moral content gradually emerges to reflect or reorient the larger popular moral universe. Indeed, popular cinema in the 1970s, like Hindi popular cinema across the decades, relies on what film theorist Ravi Vasudevan calls ‘high contrivance in narrative mechanisms’ (Vasudevan 10) such as formulaic plots, tropes and themes.2 In contrast to contemporary parallel cinema, in which social injustice is described through a harsh realism and original, psychologically probing plots and characters, the social angst of the angry young man is not represented in opposition to formulas but by means of them. The figure is thus often positioned as a son, or a brother, or a lover; familial and romantic structures serve as background against which this more dynamic figure is placed and in relation to which his meaning emerges. In this way, we cannot completely account for the angry young man without looking at the less spectacular changes in conventions for representing family and sexual relationships. This requires considering the significant continuity between conventions for representing family and love from the 1960s through the 1970s, preceding and following the Emergency, and even through to the early 1980s. This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships, but within and based on its use of melodramatic formulas. I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see not radical rupture, but a process of Downloaded by [Ulka Anjaria] at 09:26 13 March 2012 repetition and resignification whereby generic formulas such as the lost-and-found plot and the love triangle were re-presented, and their constitutive elements rearranged, in order to generate alternatives to conventional kinship and romantic paradigms. These alternatives were not paraded, and often not even articulated, but were advanced nonetheless through the insistent suggestion that, anticipating DCH’s Tara, the language used by Hindi cinema to describe relationships at times falls short. It is in this indirect way that these films bring to light lived experiences of fraternity, love and desire at the margins of social legibility. These experiences illuminate the complex ways in which popular cultural forms make meaning, and nuance our understanding of the cinema of the 1970s as one marked primarily by radical change. I. The broken family Hindi Film scholar Tejaswini Ganti points to the common usage of the ‘lost-and-found’ formula in 1970s films, which she relates to healing the traumas of Partition. Here, popular film is figured as a utopian space where the land, family and sense of wholeness lost South Asian Popular Culture 25 at Partition can be put together again. This certainly accounts for the pathos and popularity of the formula, but it is not quite clear, in Ganti’s hypothesis, why the lost-and-found is so prominent more than two decades after Partition. One wonders, by contrast, whether there might be a connection between the lost-and-found formula and the sensibility of angry restlessness that is also seen to define the decade’s films. Although seemingly incompatible, their coincidence in the 1970s seems suggestive. Deewaar (d. Yash Chopra, 1975), although not strictly a ‘lost-and-found,’ might seem a central text to advance this theory, as the young man’s anger against the state is inseparable from his alienation from his family. Deewaar tells the story of two brothers, Ravi and Vijay, who take separate paths as they reach adulthood, which lead them to opposite sides of the law. Ravi becomes a policeman and Vijay a smuggler associated with Bombay’s biggest gangs. As film and literary scholar Priya Joshi shows (forthcoming), Deewaar is in many ways a film about the psychic loss of the mother’s love, which is allegorically cast as alienation from the nation-as-mother. Its anger against the state is thus figured via what Joshi calls a ‘family romance,’ a Freudian parable for filial expulsion and loss. In this sense, Deewaar might be seen to offer a specific, allegorical repetition of the more traditional lost-and-found, such as in the earlier film Yaadon ki Baaraat (d. Nasir Hussein, 1973). Yaadon begins with the orphaning and separation of three brothers, who watch their father and mother die at the hands of Shakal, a masked thug, and are separated as they try to escape his men. The film flashes forward to their adulthood, where the brothers have taken significantly different paths. They are unknowingly brought together by a series of coincidences that land them all at the same hotel, where Monty, the middle brother and now a pop singer, begins a concert with a song that their mother had sung, the eponymous ‘Yaadon ki Baaraat.’ The brothers, all attending the concert for reasons of their own, hear the song and are thus reunited. Unlike Deewaar, the separation of Yaadon’s three brothers does not carry any obvious allegorical weight, either relating to the mother-as-nation or to Partition. If anything, their separation is attributed to nothing beyond Shakal’s villainy. Shakal is a smuggler and runs a gang of thieves and thugs, and there are a couple of indications that he steals high-price jewelry and other valuables so that he can sell them to Robert, a mysterious foreign buyer, and presumably an Englishman. The connection to colonialism is thus invoked, but it is Shakal who continues to be the target of the brothers’ rage and it is his downfall that the ultimately united brothers work to effect, even after Robert has made his escape.