The Dance of Shiva’s Third Eye: A Lower Class Indian Woman Against the English Law of the Middle Classes in Damini(1993)

07.11.2016 (edited 14.05.2024)

Jai Maata Di! (Hail the Mother Goddess!)

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.

Surgery Required

11.04.2024

So, it turns out I’m going to have to have surgery on my leg. The doctor was a Subcontinental woman. Did she break the news to me in a nice way? No. I had about two minutes with her. And during that time, all she did was tell me off and make it out to be my fault. When it wasn’t my fault in any way at all. That’s what they are like. I can say it because I am Subcontinental too. You don’t get any sympathy. You get blame. I’m used to it. Even in the Indian movies, all the girlfriends of the heroes do is to criticise them and tell them off.

But at least two things didn’t happen: I didn’t die and they didn’t have to cut the leg off. I knew everything was okay. It is just the pain. And I will just have to put up with that. Why? Because life is pain. The only thing that can happen now is complications with the surgery and side effects, but there is a good chance that nothing bad will happen and it should all be okay.

Do you know how I developed this problem in my leg? I loved a non-Indian woman. And she didn’t love me back. Then my grandparents died and I got sick. And then I put on a lot of weight. Which ruined my leg. So that’s where the problem in the leg developed. I am still suffering from the past. And those people that tell you to forget about the past? What other problem have me and the Indian men in this country, and the Dalits or the Untouchables in India had except for the fact that no one will love us? The people that don’t love us are telling us how to solve our problems. And to forget the past and the present where they don’t love us. When our problem is that they are not giving us love. What a fucking joke.

Do you know what guilt is? When my grandmother was dying from cancer, I was living with her. She couldn’t sleep in the nights without a man in the house. One time, I came back home and I was talking to her before I went up to study in my bedroom. I talked to her for about half an hour. Because I felt sorry for her and thought she was lonely. She told my mother afterwards that when I was talking to her, she was going through the most torturous pain. But she wouldn’t tell me. She just kept on nodding at what I was saying. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I think about that over and over again. That is what guilt is. I couldn’t even see that she was in pain.

My Instagram feed is full of dating advice. It is always the same: don’t be a nice guy. Be a complete douche bag to the woman that you care about, be aloof from her, treat her like she doesn’t even matter. What a lovely world of love this Western society has created for its women. And some of these people have the gall to call me a misogynist when that is their culture and their ‘love’. Even the women themselves are saying they want the man to be like that. What a culture. If you love women, you are a sexist pig. And if you treat them like you hate them or don’t care about them at all, then you are accepted and you aren’t sexist.

I finally told someone in that context that there is someone there that I don’t like. I don’t like to talk about people behind their backs. I wouldn’t want someone doing it to me. It was a special situation of honesty. I don’t just not like them. That is me being euphemistic. And it is very unusual for me not to like someone in this industry, so that is saying a lot.

I asked my friend from another country if she would cook something for me for that context for lunch. So she said yes and she invited me to do dinner together and she would make me something then too.

I was thinking about Shiva and his stillness – the short note I wrote yesterday. He lies down below Kali when she is in her rage and in her destructive dance. He lies below the Ganga (Ganges) when she flows down from heaven. Do you know that Shiva is represented by the phallus? The lingam. That is his body. That is what is withstanding the flood of woman. How he is able to withstand the flood of woman’s power and to become united with it, to channel it and control it, to merge with it into creation, is by being the phallus below woman, completely still. It is a sexual thing. The woman is dancing on Shiva who is the phallus, or flooding down on him: that is the essence of the act of union.

I have never told anyone something peculiar about the name my mother gave me. Some of you who have been reading know how I got my name. Sunil Dutt saved the life of Mother India in the film of the same name. He rescued her from fire. While he was recovering in the hospital, she came to take care of him and then they fell in love. He played her son in the movie. The son married the mother. That’s why I call myself Oedipus and my life has been that of Oedipus. However, there is a little peculiarity in this love story. Because in the film, the mother kills the son because he rebels against tradition and culture and morality by trying to abduct the woman he loves from her wedding ceremony. My mother didn’t just name me for the one that marries Mother India. She named me for the one that rebels against Mother India too. There is a paradox in the name that she gave me. The paradox is that she named me after the rebel, he who rebels against everything and everyone. I am the middle child. I have been named after rebellion. I live for rebellion. The rebellion of love. You can’t escape from your name and the fate that has been planned and dreamt of for you. Try to escape your fate. See what happens to you. We rebel in the name of love for love. We are the warriors of love. Inquilaab zindabaad! Inquilaab sada zindabaad! Long live the Revolution! May the Revolution live forever!

How much longer can you love someone who is not in your life for more than five minutes in a week? That doesn’t talk to you? Who has rejected you twice? Who you have only talked to for about one hour in total in about six months? But are these the wrong questions? Isn’t the question, can you stop loving someone who you love? Despite everything?

Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway (2023) – My Bedtime Review

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:

https://cafedissensus.com/2022/05/30/there-is-no-bad-mother-beta-and-the-indian-mother-law-against-the-wests-asian-mother-phobia/

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.

The International Booker Prize Shortlist 2023 – Reading Books by their Covers

19.04.2023

These are my initial comments (in my typical jaded style) about the books from the blurbs (my qualifications are a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in English Literature). The shortlist is from https://lithub.com/here-is-the-2023-international-booker-prize-shortlist/

Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey

ABOUT: The recommendation says it is for readers of Rachel Cusk, one of the most boring contemporary authors imaginable. The story is about two ‘independent’ 30 year old career women that don’t have babies (one of them doesn’t want any). Then one of them has a difficult pregnancy. Revives the contemporary debates about whether it is worthwhile for women to have a career or a baby. Explores female friendship following a life changing event.

VERDICT: I don’t want to read this, an exploration of a relationship and ‘independence’ (THE fake myth of the West – nobody is really ‘independent’). The book promotes itself as about ‘the lived experiences of women’ if this is what you want to read about (apparently some people don’t talk to real women who are pregnant as if this was a highly unusual event in life). It is not about the lived experiences of ‘women’ – it is about middle class women from Latin America who have decided to put career before the family but whose plans are suddenly upset by SEX (shudder, the encroachment of a body in their bodiless, body-phobic work environments and culture).

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): Important as an exploration of what motherhood means for this generation, when lesser educated women are choosing to have babies and traditional type families. Lip service to women’s rights and feminism, although the book seems to be contradictory because we have a woman that seems to be giving up her career for a baby (I could be wrong, she could be balancing both things). Is the book critiquing the world of work (but then why should it be women that have to give up the world of work for the family, as per an ideology of what Western feminism tells us is ‘wrong’?)

GauZ’, Standing Heavy, translated by Frank Wynne

ABOUT: Undocumented migrants taking jobs as security guards over the years. French Immigration Law. A security guard’s contemporary criticism of capitalism.

VERDICT: Sounds boring. Notably, there is no suggestion that there is any interesting plot.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): The book’s importance clearly stems from the fact that right wing anti-immigration rhetoric across Europe has created a climate of intolerance despite the fact that immigrants do all the necessary but low-status, low-paid, boring or labour-intensive jobs that people born in Western countries don’t want to do. The nomination can be contextualised as a reaction against this. ‘Diversity’ is being championed. Sheds light on a contemporary reaction against capitalism.

Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel

ABOUT: Time machine museum for Alzheimer’s sufferers is invented as a cure. People use the time machine to try and escape the horrors of the present instead. The past begins to invade the present.

VERDICT: This sounds quite interesting. One of the intellectual, thought experiment type novels that I enjoy reading and the plot sounds interesting because something actually happens. I agree with the idea that the present is horrible, as would any sane person.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN: In a post-Trump era, obsession with a country’s past ‘great’ history is on the literary radar (Trump’s racism is based on the fact that there were less non-white people doing ‘white’ jobs back then, less multiculturalism, and America could go around attacking non-Western countries like Vietnam whenever they wanted as well as denying black people political and civic rights – in this ‘golden era of nostalgia’). I just finished reading ‘The Memory Monster’ with a similar criticism of being stuck in the past with history and not addressing the contemporary ills of society, although there the message was to forget about the past humiliation and violence of the Holocaust. We need to look forwards and at the now, not at the past (only the past for lessons how to deal with the present and future).

Maryse Condé, The Gospel According to the New World, translated by Richard Philcox

ABOUT: ‘A miracle baby is rumoured to be the child of (the Western) God’. Someone investigates.

VERDICT: BORING. I am not interested in religion or its support or debunking in novel form.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): If you have a PhD like me, no one is interested in your academic research. Yet writing like this novel is quite well loved by the kind of people that won’t read actual research, especially when you have pseudo research like this in novel form about something that is completely implausible or patently fictional and irrational. Literature of the undisciplined and uneducated that want to have the glamour of education. Importance? Studies the nature of belief and rumours of exceptionality – could be a debunking of the ego and purported uniqueness (in favour of what? Saying that everyone is base and ignoble? That everyone is a peasant and therefore ‘equal’ in this unequal society – opium of the masses).

Cheon Myeong-kwan, Whale, translated by Chi-Young Kim

ABOUT: No plot given. Described as a fantasy multi-generational novel with magic.

VERDICT: If you cannot at least say what is happening, sounds bloated and incoherent. I don’t like that. Fantasy needs a plot. It says it is ‘beautifully crafted’, but we will be reading it in translation.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): The one novel that isn’t ‘serious’ or worthy on the list. This is usually the one that is supposed to be the best read and there for the reading pleasure.

Eva Baltasar, Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches

ABOUT: Queer women that want a baby when one is forty, although one in the couple doesn’t want it. Almost identical to the other nominated novel about motherhood, but with an LGBT association.

VERDICT: Once again, we have a Western novel exploring whether contemporary women should be ‘free’ of babies and a traditional family or whether they should reproduce. I already know the answer from most of the women of my generation. What is this book actually telling us that we don’t already know? They are mostly ‘independent’ career women that don’t want babies (or if they do, with someone Western or completely Westernised). The usual boring ‘relationship’ novel that I am not interested in reading (fake relationships between people posing as ‘reality’? All from a Western perspective? Not appealing.)

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): Same points as before, but this time ‘diversity’ is exaggerated, with the LGBT connection. Apparently, bringing life into this world is now a BIG PROBLEM for the Western feminist mantra of ‘INDEPENDENCE’ and we have to deal with it in literature so that producing the future in the form of babies can somehow be achieved despite hostility, reluctance and the awareness that you actually have to work to look after someone and invest time and care into them to create human beings for society in a convenience society (which means, shudder: sacrifice).