Men chase honour and respect for themselves, but when it comes to women they treat them like flowers offered to Gods, discarded after the prayers.
Harishchandra, a Yakshagana performer, who is the pivot of Ananya Kasarvalli’s debut feature, Harikatha Prasanga ( Chronicles of Hari ), is offered this piece of wisdom by one of his women fans. At one level the filmmaker brings the institution of marriage and family up for scrutiny through a village woman’s straightforward articulation of an experience she has lived through.
At another level, Kasarvalli adds yet another dimension to it when she makes Hari apply this to his own “strange life” as an artiste — abandoned, mocked and humiliated off stage; all for specialising in playing women characters. Aligning Hari with the womankind he “becomes” on stage, Kasarvalli offers a gender-bending look at identity crisis, at the masculine and feminine expectations both in art and reality and the larger interplay between reality and charades, how rhetoric gets real and vice versa.
Kasarvalli starts off the film by asserting that it’s a blend of real incidents that appear unreal and unreal ones which seem real. Through the traditional film-within-a-film format, she takes us close to the world of Yakshagana performers. As the artistes put on make-up, perform pooja to start the show and are told that a deep knowledge of the mythological texts is essential for the performance it almost feels like you are in for viewing an insightful documentation of an art form.
Identity crisis
Things take a turn as the two young filmmakers spell out their purpose. Their film is an enquiry into what happened to Hari? Where did he vanish? Is he dead or alive? Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? As they grapple with several versions of truth there is a crucial aspect that comes up for scrutiny: Is playing a woman as simple and matter-of-fact as it appears to be? Not quite when it comes to a sensitive soul like Hari who lives between being a woman at night and man by the day. “I doubt if I am a man playing a woman or a woman playing a man,” he says.
As the feminine ways unwittingly creep into his own life he can’t get married, nor can his discontented brother for the stigma that comes attached with Hari’s calling. Estranged from the family, disillusioned with work, he leaves home and quits his troupe in search of male roles. To make things more complicated an encounter with a sex worker brings his womanly side alive with an added vigour — those soft hands of his and the warmth of his being.
Between cutting away his long locks and wearing a nose ring, between wearing a skirt-sari and shirt-dhoti rests a person who doesn’t quite know who he actually is. All along the camera remains a gentle observer of his dilemmas than an intruder or a voyeur.
Kasarvalli’s narrative is unhurried and serene but there’s a lot of tension boiling under — how a vulnerable soul is torn asunder and tormented by gender expectations of the family and the society and falls prey to his own quandaries.
Sharp critique
Shrunga Vasudevan brings Hari alive searingly, through the gait and demeanour, the expression and the look. Kasarvalli offers a sharp critique of the moral high-handedness of the society, one which treasures its art form but holds its artistes up for derision. Much like the legacy of cinema that has come to her with her illustrious surname, behind the simplicity of Ananya Kasarvalli’s storytelling hides many complex layers of meaning and often also an impenetrable ambiguity. To reach it is rewarding indeed.
