Do you remember those animated shorts that used to be aired on Doordarshan? One of the most famous of these was called Ek, Anek Aur Ekta on national integration and had a song that went ‘Ek chidiya, anek chidiyan…’ It was a charming film and had us all humming along. But subtlety wasn’t exactly its forte or even a prerequisite really. Released by the Films Division of India, it was the first film made by a nascent NCERT and its aim was exactly that: to instruct an unruly young nation in the lessons of national unity and integrity.
Those were also the years of the famous educational slogans — ‘We two, ours one’ went one, while another would extol us to ‘Work more, talk less’. It was a paternalistic Government telling its citizens how to behave from every city wall and every lorry. Population control, polio vaccines, breastfeeding, education for all… all these lessons have been regularly rammed down the throat of the Indian demos since Independence, and have had a not inconsiderable degree of impact in some areas at least.
We must look at Pink from the same angle. It is an instructional film. Not an NCERT animated short, of course, but made with the same glorious absence of subtlety or cinematic sleight of hand, and the same happy intention to “do good”.
It would be foolish to critique it from an evolved feminist position. And immortal cinema it certainly isn’t. Incidentally, I dread the day Amitabh Bachchan will finally run out of strange illnesses that he can take on to display his acting chops. I simply can’t understand why a healthy and principled lawyer could not have defended the women in Pink .Unless I’ve missed the point entirely and it’s actually the film’s clever way of saying that only lawyers with mental illnesses are principled.
Then there’s the completely unnecessary terminally-ill-wife-in-hospital trope, a new fad in our filmi vocabulary. Plus the evil Haryanvi female cop whose testimony even an unlettered idiot could have torn apart, but the film only does in the last excruciating bits.
But let’s not go there. Let’s not snigger either at the ghastly title or the Amar-Akbar-Anthonyesque female protagonists. Let’s not sneer at the tick-the-box obviousness with which the Christian from Goa or Bandra has been replaced with someone from Meghalaya. And let’s not raise our feminist eyebrows at the helplessness to which three educated, working women are reduced in order to be rescued by Bachchan. I’d have liked to see three angry young women rather than one overdone angry old man but I am not going there.
Because, like the ‘Ek chidiya’ film, Pink I believe is what we need. What a clueless-about-women Indian society needs. A simplistic film that states everything in bold, underlined sentences repeated twice over. It knocks concepts into the audience’s heads with a sledgehammer — No means no. Working/ drinking/ partying women are not ‘available’ women. Even sex workers can say no. Having a boyfriend/ lover is not equal to being available to all men . Women can go out at night or live alone without being “immoral”.
The Delhi men are menacingly accurate, but they could just as easily be men from Chennai, Bangalore or Amritsar. I use the word menacing because that is exactly how some men think. If you don’t believe me, read a blog called themalefactor.com on the film. This person is unlikely to be even aware of how apt his blog name is. And as long as there are men like him around, you know why we need films like Pink to lay it on thick, subtlety be damned.
In many ways, it is exactly like teaching an illiterate nation why polio vaccines are necessary. And it is certainly no coincidence that the same Bachchan who scolds parents into vaccinating their children is here scolding men about the right ways of thinking about women. Who knows? What reams of print cannot do, one histrionic performance might well achieve. We Indians like being lectured by superstars.
