Nothing can be more cinematically divergent than Padmavati, S Durga and Nude . If Padmavati is a mash-up of history, mythology, fable and fantasy, S Durga and Nude are slices of contemporary lives. One is larger than life in scale, the others are intimate. One boasts of Bollywood biggies, the others are small, in the realm of language cinema — Malayalam and Marathi — with a largely lesser-hyped cast.
Padmavati seems to have lush colours, costumes and sets, much drama, song ‘n’ dance, flamboyance and flourish. Nude looks lyrical, riding on quietude and fluid imagery, and S Durga is spartan, independent and experimental. All three are, however, also curiously united — as I write this column they are all under siege.
Padmavati has been in the eye of the storm right from the start with Shri Rajput Karni Sena vandalising the sets and assaulting the director Sanjay Leela Bhansali. It is now calling for a ban, threatening to burn down theatres, and invoking a countrywide bandh on December 1, the day of the film’s planned release.
The fringe group claims the film distorts facts and hurts their sentiments, without having seen the film or read its script. It has now got institutional support, with Rajasthan Cabinet Minister Kiran Maheshwari joining the protests and U.P. government officials warning about law-and-order issues.
Too much at stake
Padmavati has been in the eye of the storm right from the start.
Nude and S Durga have been summarily removed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting from the screening list of the 48th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), 2017, scheduled to begin tomorrow. The technical reasons offered for their non-inclusion have been contested vehemently by the filmmakers.
The narratives of their battles are as varied as the films themselves. Padmavati is vulnerable due to its budget — there is big money riding on it, running into hundreds of crores, not to speak of the livelihoods of many. No wonder the makers have been swinging between pacification and confrontation, defensiveness and aggression, when dealing with the mobs. There is too much at stake, the reason why various industry bodies have chosen to make a show of solidarity.
On the other hand, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan (director of S Durga ) has decided to take the bull by the horns, all on his own, and has filed a writ petition against the government in the Kerala High Court.
He has no option but to be defiant and fight for the limited spaces — one of them being film festivals — available for his kind of cinema, made on a minuscule budget.
At the root of it is the issue of freedom of expression. But one senses another overarching concern — gender representation in cinema and, in turn, our hypocritical attitude towards it.
Death of irony
We get easily offended seeing a Rajput queen dancing, without a ghoonghat, in a film. But in attempting to save the honour of the character, we threaten to chop off the nose of the actor (Deepika Padukone) portraying the role. Can we not see irony die a thousand deaths here?
Nude might be about nude modelling but it is not titillatory or exploitative.
I have seen S Durga and will stick my neck out for it, in how it holds a mirror to what we have reduced women to — deified in temples but subjected to trauma (physical and mental) in day-to-day life.
It implicates the viewers in a woman’s suffocation, making them deservedly uncomfortable. A film that supposedly dishonours a goddess and, in turn, women at large with its title is actually all about how women are routinely degraded in real life. It’s a film society should be encouraged to watch, yet the moral police prefers to not go beyond its name.
Nude might be about nude modelling but it is not titillatory or exploitative, filmmaker Ravi Jadhav assures me. It’s about the dilemmas nude models face when caught between economic needs and societal censure. “It is an emotional film in which we have handled the subject artistically, with a lot of dignity,” says Jadhav. The finger is not pointed at women but at society.
However, instead of introspection there seems to be this righteous desire in both society and state to control narratives about women — how they should be portrayed, what is appropriate womanly behaviour on screen, what is fit for an audience to watch and what is not.
All of this is based on some obsolete patriarchal notion about a woman’s honour. In other words, an infantilisation of both creation and consumption of cinema in the hands of rampant conservatism. That’s certainly not what women want.
The author is Associate Editor-Cinema with The Hindu in Mumbai. namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
