COMMENTARY
Bollywood, Within and Without Reading Tanu Weds Manu Returns Dhiraj Kumar Nite
With two endearing female protagonists who defy attributes of modern bourgeois femininity and at the same time do not fit in with notions of transformative womanhood, Tanu Weds Manu Returns is a refreshing social drama. It explores social confrontation but in its anxiety to stick to popular Bollywood formula, it loses a chance to become a cult movie.
T
anu Weds Manu Returns (TWMR), released in 2015, might go on to become one of the highest grossing films this year. Popular films like TWMR are an expression of sociocultural and political proclivity of the film-maker. The logic of investment shapes technological inputs; but the narrative strategy, cinematography and the conceptualisation of characters are, equally, a product of the cultural and political locus of filmmakers. These non-economic aspects of film-making can be termed the ethicopolitical and craft logic. The tastes and preferences of the target audience do guide the sexual prejudices inherent in characters. However the sexist discourse that is, ethico–political logic, is also encouraged by film-makers. The movie of our discussion presents a convincing ethico-political logic; the craft logic and the economic logic accompany the former to make it commercially viable. Defying Cultural Restraints
Dhiraj Kumar Nite (
[email protected]) teaches at Ambedkar University, Delhi.
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TWMR brings two endearing female characters, as much similar as contrasting. Both are women-in-rebellion in their own right. They defy the tradition of cultural restraint that patriarchy sets on women. Tanu (Trivedi) embodies as
much a self-seeking modern conceit as, I suggest, a postmodern autonomist self. She seeks to flow freely in pursuit of a boyishly unrestrained newness. But she is bereft of any wishes for financial selfsufficiency. The financial foundation of her adventurous life is the wealth of her parents, romantic partners and husband. She recognises dignity in labour, but keeps away from its rigours. Her character is a novel imagination. However, Tanu is not Anita (Parveen Babi) of Deewaar (1975), an equally infectious, iconoclastic female character. She does not satisfy the criterion of modern bourgeois womanhood, where the woman is supposed to perform the role of an emotional anchor to her male companion and support his productive life. But Tanu also does not fit in with the image of a modern female antithesis, who relishes financial self-sufficiency and transformative womanhood. I attempt to look at her in the context of postmodern womanhood. The refusal to adhere to a productivist paradigm of modernity is her distinguishing attribute. Tanu questions the trappings of modernity. At the same time, she does not regard the female’s virtue in her reproductive function for the manly world because that would be a hindrance to the realisation of her exploratory self. Datto, alias Kusum, is one of the strongest female characters ever imagined in Bollywood. She is equally dismissive of regressive feudal traditions and the self-seeking modern bourgeois conceit. She takes pride in her ability to
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Economic & Political Weekly
COMMENTARY
support her family financially, relishes her agenda (rather than any burden of responsibility) of fostering a web of social relations/network and resists the latter when it attempts to overwhelm her autonomist, exploratory self. She nurtures the ethics of care, cooperation, and progressive transformation. For instance, in the course of the Brahmanical ritual of marriage she enquires on her groom if he is welldisposed to the final step. She decides to walk out for she cannot marry someone, who remains emotionally attached to his first wife. She is careful of and cooperative towards a possibility of consolidation of love between the self-deprecating Tanu and unsure Manu. She represents an image of, I attempt to suggest, a postmodern female antithesis. The latter transcends the self of a feminist or socialist female antithesis, which was born in the modern world and contributed to its progress. She is anyone but Indrani Sinha (Raakhee) of Tapasya (1976). The Logic of Investment TWMR is decidedly neither a naturalist feature film nor a realist drama. It is in the league of some recent movies, which explore shades of grey in their characters—Dabangg’s inspector, Piku’s daughter, Haider’s mother and son, Queen’s Rani. These characters perform their social functions with certain peculiarities. The villains are also grey characters; the hero and heroine also pleasingly indulge in the necessary “social vice.” Different classes intersect—at times collide with— each other here and there. Tanu as a distraught person stumbles across a quiet beggar; the latter kisses her outreached palm and intends to offer a price for the weird thrill that visited him. Disconcerted Tanu moves on. It reminds us of the penultimate episode of Manto’s story A Woman’s life. In the latter Saugandhi was flustered at her rejection by the customer. Tanu is taken aback by her own realisation of the extent of dissolute condition, of acceptance by a destitute man. Needless to say, the realm of imagining of social characters is perilously fraught with the logic of investment. What is saleable sets the circumference, the limit. Therefore, Tanu and Manu Economic & Political Weekly
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return to each other to produce not just a happy ending, so infamously characteristic of Bollywood, but also to satisfy the moral compass of the target audience. No explanation is sought for the change of hearts and minds between Tanu and Manu, who had been so reasonably disposed to undertake separate journeys till the previous moment. Here, TWMR loses an opportunity to become a cult movie. This is a recurrent feature of the story authored by Himanshu Sharma. There was no explanation for the appearance of an uncommon lady, Tanu Trivedi, known as batman, in Kanpur in the movie’s prequel—Tanu Weds Manu. Hobsbawm (1998) writes that there is an increased tendency of exploring the meaning at the cost of explanation, which we find a defining trait of the postmodernist literature. Separating Form and Content The anti-foundationalist and antiessentialist approach presents the aesthetics of meaning; of the politics; of the form; of the hierarchy. Drawing from Fredric Jameson’s (2015) work I argue that in our age we not only use technology, we consume it, and we consume its exchange value; its price along with its purely symbolic overtones. Similarly, the form of the work has become the content; and that what we consume in such works is the form itself. In the modernist texts the effort is to merge form and content so completely that we cannot distinguish the two; whereas in the postmodern ones an absolute separation must be achieved before form is folded back into content. Further, there is centrality of the postmodern economy, characterised as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital. The only thing capital cannot subsume is the human entity itself, for which the attractive theoretical terms excess and remainder are reserved. The post-human is the final effort to absorb even this indivisible remainder. We have yet not entered a whole new era—a new age of third, globalised stage of capitalism as such. Here, postmodern philosophy is associated with anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. This is characterised as the repudiation of any
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ultimate system of meaning in nature or the universe; and as the struggle against any normative idea of human nature. What further distinguishes it from the old critiques of modernity is the disappearance of all anguish and pathos. Nobody seems to miss god any longer, and alienation in a consumer society does not seem to be a particularly painful or stressful prospect. No one is surprised by the operations of a globalised capitalism. This is called cynical reason. Even increasing immiseration and the return of poverty and unemployment on a massive world-wide scale are scarcely matters of amazement for anyone. So clearly are they the result of our own political and economic system and not of the sins of the human race or the fatality of life on earth. We are so completely submerged in the human world, Heideggerian ontic, that we have little time for what he liked to call the question of being. In our time all politics is about real estate. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs. Therefore it was not surprising that one protagonist of TWMR is a builder and another is a squatter. There is also the crucial issue of the couple’s house being located in the distant suburbs of London, a situation not agreeable to Tanu. The craft logic of TWMR is scintillating. Every character is well chiselled. Every cast moulds herself/himself into the concerned social character. The use of closeup camera, not so popular in Bollywood, demandingly tests the calibre of actors. The narrative maintains suspense till the end. Editing carries pace of the narrative at an enjoyable and captivating scale. Cinematography weaves locales, which the audience would identify with and also chew it. The content, dialogue and body language successfully present a refreshing social drama rather than an electrifying comedy, thus making it adhere to the norms of popular cinema even while exploring social confrontation. References Hobsbawm, Eric (1998): On History, New York: The New Press. Jameson, Fredric (2015): “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review, 92, March–April, accessed on 11 June 2015, http://newleftreview. org/II/92/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-ofsingularity.
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