This picture shows my dad working around the home. His love for us.
Why do I always tell people that love is work? And why does no one ever agree with me or understand what I am saying? The answer is simple. I am Indian. I am Punjabi. I live and work in a white world. Where all the rules of love, the expectations, the meanings, the behaviour, everything is different. Where love is not work. Love, whatever it is, is something else. Not work.
But in India, in the Indian consciousness, in the film ‘Rab ne Bana Di Jodi’ (2008) – ‘God has Made the Pairing’, we have this ideology of love as work.
The heroine is heartbroken. On the eve of her wedding, her fiancèe dies. The father of the bride asks one of his students, the Punjabi hero (who loves the professor’s daughter secretly) to marry her and fulfil his dying wish as he is dying of a heart attack. The heroine and the hero get married. But then the heroine tells the hero she has no love left in her heart.
The saddened heroine, assailed on all sides by death and loss, separation, has two interests. Bollywood heroes and dancing. So the hero dresses up like a Bollywood hero in a secret disguise and starts dancing with her in a competition. He is inexperienced with women but he makes her laugh, he charms her. He spends all his time trying to make her happy again.
Note: He changes his personality and image. He learns how to dance. He works to make her happy. He learns how to talk to women when he has never had any women in his life. He transforms his personality from a shy introvert into an extrovert. Learning upon learning. Work upon work.
The original man that the hero is does not make the woman happy. She is miserable in the marriage. She learns only to become happy with the pretend hero. When the hero fights in a sumo match to win holidays to please her and is injured, all he gets is a scolding and the harsh words that the heroine cannot love him.
The pretend man tries to get the woman to run away with him – to cheat on himself. However, this is when – by divine intervention, through the hand of God – the woman finally learns to love her husband, seeing him as a god. Then they realise the truth – how much the man has always loved the woman. Through her awareness of everything – including the work that he has done for her – the woman finally realises that she loves him. Not for what he pretends to be. But for what he is.
A happy ending, no?
So here, we have the Indian ideology of love as work. As the original husband that fights in the sumo match and gets injured, as the guy that emulates the Bollywood hero and the dancer, the hero is someone that works to get love. He makes the woman love him. Why not? The audience want a happy ending.
But we live in the West. This is not India, where love is work. Where when you show someone how much you love them they will love you back. This is not the world of reciprocity. The rules are different here. And, can I ask, even in India, in real life, is love work? When you think of someone and you do stuff for them, is that recognised as love? When you work in your job so that you get love, so you can provide for them, so you are recognised as a man, is that love?
Why do they have this ideology in the films? If it is not true?
Imagine you have a family. You have a wife and children. You are the provider. You work every day for them. They are your motivation. That is the love I have been expected to emulate. That is what my father did for me, my brothers and my mother. So why have the expectations changed? Why is it, that when you dedicate your life and the most precious object in your life, time, to someone, that is not regarded as love here? Time, attention, effort, feeling. Everything is invested in love as work. And yet, that is not recognised here. What are the rules here? A few slippery and meaningless words? Empty promises? Being treated in a cavalier and aloof way without ever being allowed or able to reveal your real feelings? Drunkenness in a bar? I prefer the Indian philosophy. Love as work. When you are attentive and you put someone before yourself. When you go through the ordeal for them. When you can dedicate your life to them. When you are honest and when you reap what you sow. When you are rewarded and recognised for your work. That is the love of the Indian man. That is the philosophy of love as work.
In life, in love, you can become helpless. You cannot force someone to love you. You cannot force love. You cannot change yourself so that someone can love you. You cannot drop your responsibilities and your commitments – your integrity, your duty – for love. You cannot appeal their decision when they do not choose you. There is no court of appeal for love. And no one knows this more than the loser in love.
At the same time, you cannot force yourself to stop loving someone. If only you could switch off all of your feelings. How simple things would be. How free from pain. You are stuck. Helpless.
So what remains? Within the supreme moment of helplessness. Within the moment of the complete loss of power. Within the moment of surrender to the impersonal and hard forces of fate. Is there something? Anything? Is there the will that remains? Is there resilience? What power can be left to you when you are bereft, devastated, grieving? When life holds no happiness for you? When you are crushed like an insignificant insect beneath the stone of reality? When the disappointment seems too much to bear: she is gone, she is in the arms of someone else, she will never be yours…
Somehow, you still have to live. Without the dream. A life that you do not want. Somehow, you have to find the power within yourself to love someone again. As Indian people say, the whole universe is built upon a foundation of hope.
A Hindi song where these issues are explored are in the film Baazigar (1993) – the title itself has a range of connotations with meanings such as ‘acrobat’, ‘player’, ‘gambler’, ‘one who uses deceit to attain ends’, etc. The film is an unofficial remake of the film ‘A Kiss Before Dying’ (1956).
The song is called Don’t Know How to Hide It – Chhupana Bhi Nahin Aata (my translation).
I want to focus on two lines. The context is that Karan (named after the lower caste hero of the Mahabharata who sacrifices his life for his mother that rejects him, one of my heroes) is watching the anti-hero and the heroine loving each other, dancing with each other, enjoying the happiness of each other. Karan loves the heroine. But now that she is with someone, what can he do? So he thinks back to the times in college when he loved her from afar. The song comes. It reveals his emotional state. And then, these lines come from the song’s lyricist [1]:
hatheli par tumhaaraa naam – upon my palm your name likhte hain mitaate hain – I write and I erase
To understand these lines, you have to understand that the lyrics are referencing the idea of palmistry and fate. So when Karan is writing the loved one’s name upon his palm, he is linking her destiny with his. Or, he is ordaining his own fate. This seems powerful. Again, the idea is that of a tattoo. He is trying to make a permanent change in his life. Yet notice the idea of helplessness in love here. First of all, writing someone’s name on your palm is not going to achieve anything. It is a wish. It is not an act. It is the action of a wisher.
Secondly, while he writes the name of the loved one onto his palm, at the same time, even in the same moment, he is erasing the name. His actions are doomed to failure. To erasure. Whatever he does is not going to work. The action can only be temporary. A god can write his own fate. A human cannot. The loser in love cannot write their own destiny.
Let us attempt to understand the ambiguous game of power and powerlessness here. Who is looking at the name on the palm, whether it is there or not? The obvious and crude answer would be that it is Karan himself. And this goes with the rest of the lyrics, which are about not being able to hide that you are in love with someone and also not being able to tell them that you are in love with them. The song is about a personal state of mind.
What we have with the name on the palm is a slippery game of selfhood. It is my palm. I want to link her identity with my name. I want her to be my destiny, my fate. Yet, she does not want me to link her name with mine. So I cannot do what I want to do. So, following what she wants – what her wish and choice is – I have to erase her name from my destiny. Something that I don’t want to do. Because I love her, her choice has become my choice. She has become my Queen.
What has happened here, then, in this game of power and powerlessness, is that the self has been invaded by the Other. Man has become woman. Even his body is not his own any more. His will is not his own. His body is not his own. His destiny is not his own to control any more.
And because there is a fight between man and woman, the fire and the ice, the one that loves and the one that does not. Because of that, there is the irresolution and the helplessness. The moment when every action in the world is fighting against itself. When nothing can be achieved and yet you still cannot give up. You want your fate to be decided. You are living in both hope and despair. In short, you are experiencing all of the horrors of a split personality.
What is the cure for the loser in love? You cannot force someone to love you when they don’t. You can’t force yourself to stop loving someone.
So all you can do is to write their name upon your palm. And then erase it. Over and over again. In the lyrics, the way that the words are sung, the way the verbs are formed, it conveys the impression of compulsion. You are stuck in a time warp where you do the same thing again and again. There is no way out. Can you become like the one with no love – the one that cannot love you? Can you escape from being the one that loves – the one that cannot stop loving her?
There is no solution. There is no resolution. Your hands are tied. You cannot bother someone. You cannot press them to give you what you want. You cannot forget. All you can do, like Karan, is to watch helplessly. As the woman you love walks out of your life. With someone else. And all you can do, in the supreme moment of powerlessness, is to wish desperately that your fate was different. Because this is the last connotation of the lyric. That you are trying to change the lines of fate on your hand by writing her name upon it. In the books of palmistry, the lines on your hands are fixed. They are unalterable. Yet what you are doing is making all of the efforts that you can to fight fate by writing her name upon your palm. You are trying to make permanent what is temporary in your life – her presence. You want to die – you are trying to live. And to live, you need to feel that you are powerful. Not subject to the impersonal and uncaring forces of the universe and the minds of others. You have to believe that you are god or that you are strong enough to fight god.
This is the paradox of helplessless in love. You are both absolute subject and absolute god. The two poles are sutured onto each other and they collide with each other. There is only conflict. Can you imagine the psychic force of this tussle within you? Can you imagine the energy that it takes? You are grieving. One part of you wants to die – become the Other that does not love you. The other part of you wants to live – to remain yourself. To fight against the world that does not love you. And her that rejected you.
It is like Freud said: the reality principle (accepting that you are worthless and insignificant to her) is fighting against the forces of the wish (believing that you are worth something and significant to her). The death instinct (die for her, because of her, thanatos) is fighting against the life instinct (eros, love). The id is fighting against the ego. Self against selflessness – but even then, the self is that you write her name upon yourself. There is paradox, contradiction, ambiguity everywhere.
You have become the superiority complex absolute and the inferiority complex absolute. You have become god and slave. You have become man and woman. You have become… contradiction.
And this unstable contradiction, this compromise. It is written upon your body as Freud found out. It is a mental illness. The lyric signifies automatism, repetition of symptoms, the body as text to perform the identity of the loved one that you have lost.
You should never care what someone thinks about you. Because when you do – when you fall in love, this is the risk that you take. That you are going to be the loser in love. Because, then their rejection of you – their assessment of you as unworthy – that will threaten to overwhelm you and your sense of self.
Afterthought – Erasing her name is a form of revenge – symbolic violence directed at her. For her destruction of the man’s ego. But again, here, the man is assuming the woman’s personality – so there is her in the act too.
[1] I will discuss under the terms of British ‘fair use’ which allow the public to comment for the purposes of academic thought and scholarship and which I feel are appropriate here on a non-commercial personal blog where I make no money.
In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure, the eponymous character at first makes an elementary mistake in translation. He believes that words have fixed meanings independent of context. It is progress in the language under study that enables Jude to see that context determines meaning. Words have a plasticity, not a fixity. Their situation is what gives them meanings. In this piece of writing, I want to investigate the meanings of the word “ruswa” which is used in a number of South Asian languages. Ruswa is a word which aims to convey a particular emotion. I want to stress the multiple meanings and understandings of the word rather than insisting on one univocal meaning. I will first outline the differing contemporary interpretations of the word by summarising arguments from an online translation site. I will then investigate my own meaning of the word through the use of autobiography. I will then reflect upon the political implications of “ruswa”.
I first began to think about the word “ruswa” while I was translating myself. One of the major loves of my life is Hindi music from Hindi film soundtracks. However, Hindi is not the language that I speak at home. I am therefore a life-long student of the Hindi tongue. There is a particularly lovely song from the movie Aashiqui 2 (Love/Romance 2) entitled Sun Raha Hai Na Tu, Ro Raha Hoon Main (Are you listening? I am crying) which had a few words which I didn’t know the meaning of. It was while I was reading the song translation that I stumbled upon the equivocal significations of “ruswa”. I had first thought that I knew what the meaning of the word was. It seemed that there was much more argument over the word than I could have imagined.
The online translation of the song can be found here: http://www.bollymeaning.com/2013/04/sun-raha-hai-na-tu-ro-raha-hoon-main.html . I will present the part of the song that is illustrated, so that the reader can see the context (legally for ‘fair use’, non-commercial and scholarly purposes of commentary):
Manzilein ruswa hain – (my) destinations are not cared for..
Khoyaa hai raasta – the path is lost..
Aaye le jaaye – (Someone, you actually) comes and takes me away
Itni si iltijaa – only this is my small wish..
Ye meri zamaanat hai – This is my surety,
Tu meri amaanat hai.. – you’re mine..
Haan.. – yes
Ruswa is translated by the website’s translator as “are not cared for”. While I had thought ruswa was an emotion in itself, the translator related it to emotion by relating it to the emotions of other people. This translation was very controversial and drew dissent from a number of interpreters, who posted their thoughts in the comments section underneath the translated song. I will summarise some of the positions. An anonymous commentator wrote:
“dude you don’t know the meaning of “ruswa”?? it’s not angry or annoyed. it means “badnaam” or “negatively famous” or simply “infamous””
This first meaning was one that I had never associated with the word ruswa. There was a reply to this first comment: “Ruswa means sad..so the translator s almst right”. This meaning was more in keeping with my own position. It stressed that ruswa was an emotion, although I did not see the emotion as being one of sadness myself.
Both of these translations of ruswa aroused further discord. The next poster wrote:
“Ruswa neither means sad nor angry… or badnaam or even annoy. It means destroy… manzilein ruswa he… translates to my goals or destinations or simply dreams… are destroyed….”
Here was something that was new to my ears again. There seemed to be an element of violence in the word ruswa according to this latest poster. Other interpretations of the word ruswa then surfaced. Here were the other definitions:
Sad/upset
“khafa hona” (to become separate, alienated)
“Naraz hona” (to be angry)
Ruined
Wtf
Dishonoured
negative
blocked
There were a whole host of seemingly differing interpretations around the word ruswa. Each interpreter thought that they were right in assigning their own meaning and that everyone else was wrong. However, there were some, like myself, who also thought that everyone’s meaning was equally valid. My own thoughts are that ruswa is such a complicated term that it can mean several things at once, whether or not we can see all aspects of the word and the relationships to self and other that it entails. It was very illuminating to see how much discord there was around this word in a contemporary song by contemporary commentators. Clearly, language is not the shared resource that some people claim that it is, but rather an all-out war of interpretation and meaning in which meanings and significations are highly contested over.
I want to outline my own interpretation of ruswa through an autobiographical example, for I have been “ruswa” myself as a child. In Punjabi, which is my mother tongue, I was “ruswa”. However, in Punjabi, the word “ruswa” was never used. The sentence that was used is “oho russ gaya” (He has become ruswa). The English translation that was used is “sulky” – He is sulking. I was frequently ruswa as a child and the terms were used a lot. I can well remember what the emotion of ruswa entailed in my particular situation.
I would become ruswa when my will and my desire was thwarted, when I thought that my family hadn’t taken me into consideration. Ruswa was set in the context of competing wills and desires: those between an organisation or collective (the family) and the individual (me). The original translator of the word ruswa was right: the emotion entailed a sense of being uncared for, or neglected. The emotion of ruswa entailed a particular feeling. The moisture in my throat would disappear, leaving me with a parched feeling in my body. There was a slight feeling of pain in my head. I felt angry (naraaz). I felt alone. I felt alienated, separated from others. I was misunderstood. I was the victim of power: the organisation, which was more powerful than myself, had tried to destroy my will and desire. The organisation had tried to destroy me (destruction and violence). However, this destruction had given rise to a peculiar feeling of individuality: I was now more myself in my hurt than I could have been if I was part of the collective.
The emotion of ruswa led to a particular strategy in which I expressed my emotion to the organisation (the family). However, my power as a child was severely limited by the range of relationship that I could take and forms of action against the organisation, the family. The act of resistance was in silence and active separation, termed misleadingly by western commentators as “passive aggression”. I would sulk. I wouldn’t communicate with anyone, or share their language. I would refute their entreaties. I wouldn’t be consoled or comforted. I would dwell upon my injury. The emotion of ruswa in my mind is connected with a word which none of the commentators on the website touched upon: aggrievement. The dictionary definition of aggrievement is the quality or state of being aggrieved, which Miriam-Webster defines as:
For me, ruswa was aggrievement. I had been slighted. I had been oppressed. As the party of limited power, as a child, I had suffered from an infringement or denial or rights. There was a response to injustice in the emotion of ruswa for me. I was the victim of injustice. I had been oppressed by the many. I was in the minority and made to feel it.
Ruswa then, in my translation, in my own personal response, is aggrievement. It is connected to justice and injustice. It is connected to the rights of the minorities and those with lesser power against the will and desire of the majority and their greater power. In contradiction to the other interpreters of the word, my definition of ruswa is connected to law, justice and power, to the relationship between the minorities with less power and the majorities with more power.
For me, ruswa is a political term. I am still ruswa. I haven’t changed. However, the family has been replaced by this society that I live in. The meanings of ruswa, which is a specific emotion, expresses the position that this society is trying to put me in. I am still caught up in ruswa. Being ruswa is a result of politics and power and the expression of ruswa is a result of politics and power and the expression of language and resistance. Ruswa is a word that every minority group in the world has felt and known. However, they have never been able to fully express what ruswa means in a language that the world will understand. To understand ruswa fully, one has to be ruswa. And being ruswa also means that one does not fully know ruswa: one is caught up in the trap of self-reference, out of which one cannot escape. Being ruswa means being limited and severely constrained, both physically and mentally.
I ask the reader to dwell upon the meanings of ruswa. I can only see aspects of ruswa, just as others can only see aspects of it. When I was a child, the emotion of ruswa would go away for a while and then resurface. I was trapped in a relationship outside of which there was no escape: the family. Even know, while I am trapped in the relationship of this society, there is no escape for the one who is ruswa. To escape the emotion of ruswa would take a world-altering event and only then would one be able to see what ruswa had meant, for it would be no more.
Although it was appreciated in India and won a number of awards, the Hindi film Damini (1993) is largely and unfairly unappreciated in the West. It is one of my favourite films. What you see is an answer to the injustice of the middle classes that masquerades as legal truth. and how to base resistance against it. The resistance to the law is in the form of the image, idolatry and photography. The film is not obviously about vision and photography, although for those that see nothing and will try to stop others seeing, it is emphasised that photography is integral to the medium of film.
Damini is about English law, the remnant of British colonisation in India, and its relationship to vision, particularly the vision of a woman of the lower classes. Damini (‘the lightning’) is a lower-class girl that marries into a rich family and makes friends with the house-maid Urmi. Damini’s brother-in-law Ramesh (‘the ruler of Rama’) rapes Urmi, pinning her down below him with the help of his friends and Damini sees him doing so. Damini finally agrees to say what she saw in the court of law, but every attempt is made to exclude her lower class woman’s truth by the middle class which is fully in control of the western-derived legal apparatus, a truth in which the exploitation of the lower classes forms a continuum with the sexual violation of woman and her forced submission to masculine desire. Damini is indeed confined to the mental asylum because of her truth – the lawyer who goes up against her says that she is mad. Here, Damini is indeed driven insane.
Then, in one of the most powerful scenes in world cinema, Damini sees a procession of Durga Maa (‘the Invincible’, Devi Maa, the Mother Goddess, Mata Rani, The Mother Queen, Maa Shaktishaali, The Powerful Mother) in the streets accompanied by the common people through a window in the asylum and regains her memory. The look of the idolater upon the idol, the Mother and the multiple forms of Hinduism behind her, the last true religion of syncretism and one that is not organised around scripture (whatever its other faults), merges with an intense tandava, perhaps one of the most intense dance sequences on film. Damini (‘the lightning’) flashes and her energy is converted in Shiva’s dance, the dance of creation, preservation and dissolution. Shiva is Durga’s consort – her lover. Damini becomes the lightning because it illuminates the world in a flash – like photography and the writing of light.
The dance begins with the eyes and the eyebrows, as can be seen in the video. For it is the opening of Shiva’s third eye, the eye of power. It is a dance of vision. Damini’s bindi, the red mark on her forehead, represents the third eye. The story of Shiva’s third eye is traditionally associated with anger and the renunciation of desire, the renunciation of the desire for the middle class in the movie, it would appear, and the form of power that they represent. The dance is not a solo performance. It is directed at the enemies of the Indian lower class woman. The dance requires mastery of will and body, improvisation and the knowledge of classical forms. The dance is a fight which pre-empts the moves of its opponents, which enlarges and expands the body, which can suit the circumstances and adjust and adapt, which can bedazzle and confuse its opponents. The dance is a carefully constructed martial arts performance, like kata in karate. It is both exhibition and internal consciousness.
Shiva’s third eye is a vision bestowed from integration with the Mother Goddess. For Shiva, like Damini, is the one that loves the goddess – Shiva is Damini’s consort. The love of the Mother Queen and Damini’s bhakti returns her to herself and her vision and gives her the energy to fight for her truth, the truth and vision of woman and the lower classes. It allows her to fight against the legal system of the middle classes and flee the asylum. It gives her the force to say what she saw and destroy the forces of concealment and reorder the world.
The empowered Damini unites with a good lawyer who submitted himself to the desire of woman, his wife, in order to take up his occupation and she is triumphant. The good lawyer returns Damini to her alienated husband, he returns her to her love: he gives her back her desire. In one scene, the good lawyer calls himself a tiger: the tiger is the vehicle of the Mother Goddess, also known as Maa Sherawali, the Mother with or of the Tiger. The good lawyer’s wife, now dead, is only presented to us as photograph, the image. When one looks at the traditional images of Durga, the connection is clear. In an inversion of the picture of the rape that Damini saw, with woman pinned down by men, the Mother is above the tiger, it is her vehicle which she directs (the tiger itself is the national animal of India and Mother India). Above the law, there is the Mother and the law itself must only be the Mother. Thus, the quote by Mahatma Gandhi at the beginning of the movie which is said to have inspired it: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts”.
Damini’s justice is self-serving. It has an identity which it declares and serves, the identity of an Indian lower class woman. It is meant to protect a lower class woman that is her friend. Damini’s justice is based in emotion and empathy. She feels the hurt of another. Damini’s justice invokes a different form of power to the middle class men in power, a power that is feminised and derives its source from the mother and the sphere of the maternal. Damini’s justice is resistance: to serve not those in power, but those that are disenfranchised from power. In India, rapes are concealed by men so that the honour of their household is maintained. Thus, the powerful can prey on the weak. Damini’s justice exposes the act of making the less powerful submit to the powerful via gender in Indian society and calls for the public to claw back their honour. It is a film where justice operates in the honour economy and not the property economy of the West, where the white middle classes not only control the legal apparatus, but are also favoured by it as clients because they have more money.
I’ve been watching Hindi films since I was a child. It is how I learnt to speak Hindi (my language at home – my mother tongue – is Punjabi, not Hindi). Hindi speakers have many words for love. Not like English speakers. Here are some – Ishq, Aashiqi, Mohabbat, Pyaar, Prem, Lagan, Chaahat… There’s probably more. Hindi is a rich language.
Here are some more metaphorical ones, which touch on some of the ways that love is experienced and conceptualised in Indian culture:
Ibaadat – Worship. When you love someone, you love them like a god or a goddess. They are important, powerful, masterful over you. They rule over your heart. They take the place of a god or a goddess, commanding all your loyalty and faith. You trust them without question. You hope everything from them.
Aetbaar – Belief. When you trust them with your heart. You can rely on them without question. They are the one person in the whole world that you can count on the most to stay with you through thick and thin. You expect everything from them, total commitment.
Wafaa – They hold your loyalty. You will never stray from them. The trust and the bond between you is unshakeable.
Behosh/Mere hosh udhgayee – Unconscious/My senses have flown – How love is experienced. Your mind goes on a holiday when you see them, think about them, are around them. They command all your attention. You can’t focus on anything else.
Amaanat – They say that your lover (usually a woman) is your ‘amaanat’ (‘thing or property committed to the trust and care of a person or group of persons’ – https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-amaanat?lang=hi ) A red flag for Western feminists, but indicates the possessiveness that a lover will have over their sweetheart – and even in English, you still say to someone ‘You are mine’ or ‘You are my girlfriend’.
Here are some terms of endearment which further indicate what love means in Indian culture:
Jaanu/Janaam/Jaaneman – ‘My Life’. Love is for life. Your lover is your life. They are everything for you and they are for you forever, like your own life. They are precious like your life.
Mitwa/Yaar – ‘Friend’. Indian culture does not make a distinction between friendship and love between a man and a woman in this term. Which perhaps indicates the truth – that your lover is your best friend.
Humraaz – Someone who has the same secrets as you – you share your secrets with them. You trust them. They are the only ones you can share your most personal thoughts with.
Humnava/Humsafar – Someone who is a fellow traveller through life’s journey with you (the ‘ride or die’ chick). You are committed to the same journey. You have the same mission in life.
Humdum – Someone who has the same life force/breath (‘dum’) as you, your soulmate, someone who is the other part of yourself. The sense of connection, of seeing yourself in them.
Humdard – Someone who shares the same pain as you, because you are so connected. What you feel, they feel. They are the mirrors of you and you are the mirror of them (love’s mirror).
Huzoor – Master – they rule over you because you love them. And you accept their sovereignty over you.
Deewana – Crazy one – because you go crazy in love for someone.
See more terms of endearment from the Hindi movies here:
Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway (2023) – My Bedtime Review
12.05.2023
‘They think that their culture is the best because their country is rich. And they think that we have no culture because our country is poor.’ – quote from the film.
I haven’t watched a film in about a year. I made a special point of watching this one. It was the true story that the film is based on which appealed to me. Mrs Chatterjee, an otherwise unknown immigrant, had her children taken away from her by the Norwegian state because she raised them with traditional Indian practices. As a result, she was declared unfit by the racist and xenophobic Western authorities that believed only their ways of bringing up children were right. However, this Indian mother fought against an entire country to get her children back, a fight that would escalate into a publicised political clash between Norway and India and her ultimate victory as it was proved that an Indian mother could be a fit mother. This fight was not just for herself. It was for all the immigrant families affected by the welfare law in Norway. It was a fight for diversity and difference.
What was my particular interest in this film? Firstly, in my family, we worship the fighting mother, Mother Durga, the Mother Queen who fights against sin, or Mother Kali. Mrs Chatterjee is a heroine based on this particularly Indian role for the mother. Secondly, I have watched Western people judging me silently or in words whenever I tell them about my family, upbringing or anything personal (because we are different as Indians). This quasi-legal arrogance – based on privilege bought at the expense of imperialism and neo-imperialism and its wealth – is particularly disgusting and it is what this film criticises and destroys. (Incidentally, Indian people are actually the majority in the world spread out over all countries, not Western people. If you believe in democracy (i.e. the rules of the mass), then we are right, not anyone else). Thirdly, my first published academic article on Indian film showed that the Western Oedipal complex (with its construction of the legal subject) is based on separation from the mother. This separation itself is based on xenophobia and misogyny directed at the Asian or Indian mother, something that the film attacks. Article link here:
So, having said all this, now to the review. Hindi films are the only medium which can make me emotional. This one did the job. However, I will not talk about this. What I will talk about is the idea in this film. Mrs Chatterjee – the immigrant, the poor, Indian woman – someone that has a precarious being in a country hostile to her – is denied a voice by Western law. Time after time in the movie she is told to be silent in the courtroom. Her son, who is taken from her, is also forced into silence by the brutality of the Western law which is supposed to put children’s best interests at heart. He stops talking. In contrast, the Indian law lets everyone speak, even when they have no locus or standing. All perspectives are allowed, all can say what they want to express. We cannot criticise the unjust Western law, the prostitute of power. The Western law can criticise us. This is one difference between the law in the film and the law in the West.
In the film, the father of the children abducted by the Western state only wants his citizenship at any cost. He doesn’t care about his children. He cares about money. This is a representation of the type of immigrant kept in precarity that will do anything at any cost to get money from the rich and powerful state. A state that he will not attack no matter how much it will attack him and his family, children and future. This is a real person who I have met many times. The slave that would not accept his emancipation in India’s Independence.
The film is not just about one woman’s fight. You have never watched the children turn into people that cannot speak their own language, know their own culture. That behave like the state loving fascists that spat on us, didn’t give us work, excluded us, turned us down and kept us down. The state has abducted our children in the state schools and we cannot do anything about it. But Mrs Chatterjee did it. She fought this abduction and she won. She was a poor woman without any resources. She was someone who couldn’t even speak the language. She was powerless but she fought the power. Like the Mother Goddess, she became Shakti (power). She defeated the arrogance of the state – like Gandhi. The one with nothing goes against the one with everything and becomes the greater. It is an Indian story. It is our history and who we are.
Against judgement, we protest justice. Against the state, we protest love. Against separation, we protest the union of mother and son. I am named after it. I am named after the actor that played the son of Mother India in the film and married her in real life (Sunil Dutt and Nargis). This is a film that reminds us that we are Indian (and by that, I personally mean the village, not the state. The people, not the politicians). And we will not accept a Western law which is based on separation from the Indian mother, no matter how much it is fed by wealth, power and the delusion of superiority.
Often, we retreat from the very great but empty noise that the Oscars make. However, on this occasion I decided to watch one of the films that was up for the nominations, ‘Writing with Fire’. Famously, if one is from an Indian ethnic background, the documentary is the first Academy Awards nomination which has been directed by an Indian director (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh). It is also one of the only films, Indian or otherwise, which has ‘untouchable’ women as heroines. Luckily for me, the film is on BBC IPlayer and is available to stream online as part of their ‘Storyville’ series.
‘Writing with Fire’ is about the perils and adventures of three lower caste (‘Dalit’ which translates as ‘oppressed’) women journalists, Meera, Suneeta and Shyamkali. They work for the only entirely woman run newspaper in India, Khabar Lahariya or ‘Waves of News’. In the opening credits, the film makers write that when these Dalit women set up a newspaper in 2002, they ‘started a revolution’. The film follows the newspaper story from 2016 when the publication went digital. The attempt is to show a sea-change. Meera says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable. Over the last 14 years we’ve changed this perception.” Meera asks us to consider what it would be like if Dalit women had power and what they would do with it.
What follows in the film is a traditional and thoroughly conventional hero narrative which has been built up over thousands of years. The difference is that the hero is not a hero, but a heroine, and from the lower castes. What is the traditional hero narrative? The hero comes from humble origins, like the Greek demigods raised secretly by peasants as children. However, such humble origins disguise the greatness, nobility and royalty of the hero, which are revealed later. The hero faces adversity and mortal danger, as in a glorious battle. It is stated in the credits that India is one of the most precarious places in the world to be a journalist, with many murdered. The film shows the response to one murder of a female journalist by the workers of Khabar Lahariya. The hateful trolling of the women journalists is illustrated as well as their vulnerability to the Indian mafia. The hero is threatened by a return to quotidian life, like Hercules compelled to clean the stables. Thus, the women’s husbands attempt to stop them writing for the newspaper to work in the home instead as housewives. Finally, the hero must triumph. Khabar Lahariya is presented as an out and out success, measured by the amount of YouTube views it attracts, which number in the tens of millions.
This hero narrative unfolds amidst a glorification and justification of journalism, the pursuit that the women have dedicated their lives to. Towards the end of the documentary, Meera recites that the journalists are fighting to transform society. That they are holding the powerful to account. That they have made their journalism the voice of democracy. That they didn’t let the fourth pillar fall. And that they continue to hold a mirror to society. Thus, the film seems to be about everything that lip service holds dear: truth, balance, democracy.
Not only this, but the journalists are presented as law-givers. The screen first jumps into motion with Meera asking a woman in person about being raped multiple times in her home by four men. The opening credits mention how many Dalit women are subjected to violence across India and the film shows how Meera and others are trying to challenge the justice system which doesn’t respond to these atrocities. The unnamed rape victim says that the police refuse to lodge her complaint and intimidate her when she attempts to do so. The woman is going to newspaper because they are the only ones that listen to her story. As the husband of the victim says, “We don’t trust anyone else. Khabar Lahariya is our last hope”. Meera confronts the police about the multiple rapes and she proclaims that she is “fighting for justice in a democracy”.
My impression of the film as a whole was that it was a story told well. Certainly, Dalit women deserve to be seen as heroes too. The focus on the stories of the three women journalists gave that personal touch which made the abstract ideals the film supports into something concrete and something that the viewer could really relate to. The cinematography by Sushmit Ghosh and Karan Thapliyal was very beautiful. However, I am more pessimistic about the role of journalism in society. The documentary aims to present the journalist as objective, neutral, impartial, a server of truth, justice and democracy. These are claims that are a stretch of the imagination much too far for me. Again, I am troubled by why the Western media has nominated the film for an Academy Award. Khabar Lahariya is the voice of the poor, oppressed women in India. Naturally, they are pessimistic about power and the government in India. That is, they criticise the society they find themselves in because they hope to transform it and make a better position for themselves. This is fine. This is acceptable. Indeed, I support these women in their mission. However, what is unacceptable, is that the Western media and its public discourse always criticise India when they know nothing about it, in a supreme act of Orientalism and racism. The Academy seems to have selected a film which presents India as a colossal sewer because this is what they think about the country. This is not fine. This is what is unacceptable. And in this, they are trying to use that objectivity associated with journalism to try and present their racist notion of a whole country as the unqualified truth. Final verdict? A good, revolutionary film spoiled by an Oscar nomination and Western practices of racism.
diary of a lone man 