Sonali Pattnaik
If films were only to be judged by the storyline that they trail then, Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022), director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s latest ‘spectacle drama’ would appear nothing short of heroic and avant-garde, even feminist. However, films, as students of literature are often told to their surprise, are not located in their storylines alone, nor in what they proclaim to be doing but in how they tell/show what they wish to tell/show. Bollywood films exist in a complex relationship with visuality, star power, music, dialogue, camera movements, the dialectics of audience response, inter-textual references and local mythologies.
That the film Gangubai Kathiawadi adapts the story of a phenomenal woman, Ganga Harjeevandas Kathiawadi, who seized the power denied her and deployed it to her own benefit, and to that of the sisterhood of the abject sex workers of Kamathipura is no secret.
The storyline is based upon a chapter titled “Matriarch of Kamathipura”, from the novel Mafia Queens of Mumbai (2011) by Hussain Zaidi with research based upon the work of journalist Jane Borges. However, the mistaken notion that a biopic is necessarily about history or facts can blind us to the contemporary concerns that biopics are generally engaged in, often deploying ‘history’ as Shakespeare does in his several fabulously crafted historical plays, to make veiled comments about the present.
This article is not an analysis of the nature and proximity of written text to visual text as adaptation. What it unpacks, instead, is the subtle mechanisms and the not-so-subtle deployment of aesthetic choices that configure the deeply problematic representation of feminine heroism that the film embarks upon and the ways in which both contemporary concerns and ‘history’ are appropriated via a disturbing male gaze towards forms of erasure and rewriting of threatening bodies for the comfort of a bourgeois-capitalist visual hedonism.
While director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has always (re)created grand hetero-normative spectacles that revolve around women being torn between men, love and filial duty, which glorify failure in men and ‘sacrifice’ in women, such as Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam (1999), Devdas (2002) and Ram Leela (2013) this film is especially problematic in the way it appropriates feminist politics and reduces the realities of a community of women who are rendered abject and are among the most resilient in our self-serving and class-caste-engineered moral and economic environment, the sex-workers of India’s red-light districts and those such as Gangubai, who have successfully battled for their legitimacy into the product of multiplexed star-happy fiefdom. Incidentally, the present is not an area of concern for the filmmaker, but he certainly wishes to cash in on the environment of the feminist uprising and a growing sub-culture of women seeking agency over their own lives in the subcontinent, even as he appropriates this sentiment to churn out a spectacle that ultimately does more damage than good to feminist heroism and solidarity.
In a bid to intellectually resist the co-option of feminism and women’s history, the article delineates the manner in which the film appropriates the story of a radical figure, who must have suffered utter abjection and grown in strength because of that particular form of resistance that only the women of Kamathipura could have provided her with, besides her sharp business acumen and sense of justice, to reach a non-radical, bourgeois, liberal capitalist audience, and more significantly a mummification and romanticisation of the very bodies and lives of the sex workers of Kamathipura.
Thus the filmmaker can emerge as the true hero for dipping his hands into a repudiated ‘history’ to carve out a seductive, cinematic urban mythology, ridding the shores of that history of any sign of politics and materiality for a multiplex audience who is there to watch the spectacle of a blue-blooded star seize and embody her ‘other’ so that they may experience moral adventurism without ever having to confront the unrecognisable faces of their moral ‘others’.
Bhansali’s film walks this tightrope through an aesthetic of corporeal cinematography, a certain chromatism of mise-en-scéne which are coupled with critical erasures of the business of sex trade/work which would offend sensibilities and through the inclusion of support of, and the heroine’s inexplicable docility towards, benevolent men in her life. A woman no matter how powerful, ruthless or subversive, must always “appear” worthy of heroism to the viewership that matters.
It is not new of course for Bollywood to cast the prostitute figure through the lens of devotion and religiosity when seeking acceptance, as films in the past such as Pyaasa (1957) have demonstrated, beautifully encapsulated in the song “aaj sajan mohe ang lagaa lo/lover embrace me today” where the devotional is deployed to legitimise illicit desire of a prostitute.
It is evident that Bhansali chooses to foreground that reference to the film’s narrative by providing the last stanza of the lyrics from the scathing critique of nationalism that Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Wo Kahaan Hai (Pyaasa) that describes the diseased and destitute condition of sex workers in India, as dialogue to an emotional Gangubai, when she meets with then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in the film. Alia Bhatt utters these lines with stoicism, “madad chaahti hai/ye hawwa ki beti/yashoda ki hamjins/radha ki beti/madad chaahti hai/ye hawwa ki beti […] Jinhe naaz hai hind par” and the actor playing Nehru is shown to be stunned and moved into action and yet none of the critique of the hypocrisy of a nation that prides itself, despite the rampant oppression of sex workers that the original carries, comes through in this slick biopic.
This moment is a gestural celebration of cinematic nostalgia, star performance and the affective power of cinema, not social critique. The softness of make-up and clothing, the texture of the grandiose vintage backgrounds and the very poses of seductive ethereality lent to the character of Gangubai trying desperately to channel yesteryear film nostalgia and the power of melodrama to recreate the fantasy of eroticism for a market-driven male gaze that subjugates a battle-hardened woman to a product of class and caste desire, of hegemonic, hetero-normative, nationalistic heroism.
The film offers Gangubai as a palimpsest of boyhood cinematic fantasies, being reminiscent of the drunken wifely seduction of Meena Kumari from Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam (1962) and the austere reproduction of prime minister Indira Gandhi by Suchitra Sen, from the film Aandhi (1972) and of Waheeda Rehman of Pyaasa and Madhuri Dixit as Chandramukhi in Devdas (2002). The temporary loss in transmutation aside, the point is never about the sex workers and the work they do or the respect they deserve, for if that were the case then one would not need stars to do the work of ordinary women. The point is the male gaze as a mouthpiece for the sex worker (even though Dutt’s film is not a tokenistic fetishisation of the abject), the gaze of a filmmaker who can invoke the power of cinema to gesture through dialogue and camera angles towards the subtext of social life in a way that iconises him rather than the subjects of the film. Bhansali’s film produces several such moments of populist nostalgia through well-calibrated jolts to conscience, a form of pleasure that is insular and inward-looking, delimiting any real engagement with history.
Dusty brown and sepia-tinted backgrounds signal to the audience that this is a period film, so they may no longer have to think about the discomforting realities of the continued abjection of the lives of sex workers. This is made amply clear as the voiceover at the end of the film, chooses to erase any reference to the ongoing struggles of sex workers, politically amputating the film from any possible continuity and highlighting its existence as a dichromatic memento, a framed museum piece, a neo-orientalist visual spectacle. The actor/character is configured through an aesthetics of moral chromatism as a fair-skinned, whitened, ethereal presence, often invoking popular representations of Mirabai, against the dishevelled, dark-skinned, ‘other’ women of the red-light district. The effect is that of a flame against the brown of the earthen lamp, or rather of puritanical caste, class privileged, blow-dried and air-brushed Gangubai as ‘naturally’ superior and unique to her environment where dark equals disempowered and dying, and fair and lovely is synonymous with power and egalitarianism.
The film is an exercise in how liberal capitalist anxiety reconstructs a complex material history through the lens of a veritable “camera Indica”, where the individuals who may have been singularly important in the historical Gangubai’s rise and consolidation of power appear as the anonymous, dark mass who will provide the backdrop against which she may shine. If it is a postcard from India’s imagined past, then it is addressed to a constituency of atavistic majoritarian political rhetoric as the destination, within and beyond the borders of the nation that wishes to freeze imaginary time in a freeze-frame. This also explains how the film manages to erase ‘sex’ and the nuances, pleasures and complexities of the sex trade from a film about sex work. Except for a few moments of laughter and wisecracks, ‘sex’ itself stands darkened and negated like the sex workers that surround Gangubai, a contradiction that is only resolvable within the workings of an ideology that both desires to confront the other and not be made uncomfortable by its presence. The pleasure that Gangubai may have taken in actual sex work is also inadmissible in such a narrative as the narrative centralises her wielding of administrative and political power as though the two were disjointed. Even if she is cast as unapologetic, ‘what’ it is that she is unapologetic for must still remain sepia-tint blurry.
Through the same heteronormative pseudo-feminist logic and corporeal aesthetics, Razia Ben, a transgender sex worker and political rival must be configured as villainous and undesirable, rendering a community of individuals who are equally powerful contenders of the sex trade in the country and living in precarity, as unnatural and abject. After a night of drunken revelry, Gangubai throws up and explains, “Razia ke naam se hi ulti aa gayi/ the very name of Razia brings up my vomit”, literally and metaphorically expelling the ‘other’. The same ‘compassion’ that apparently motivates the main plot is not extended to a co-abject, a transgender sex worker who may be doubly abject because of h/er sexuality, and s/he is used instead as a point of disgust to aggrandize the purified corporeality and choices of the heroine reinforcing the myth of transgender identity as a limit to sexual desire and political power. The repulsion felt is the filmmaker’s to own but is instead cunningly redirected through the gaze of a feminist historical figure, resurrecting such a figure at the cost of repudiating the Other.
The anxiety is such that in a bid to cleanse and purify, in a scene that is meant to showcase the sexual agency of Gangubai in the bathing scene, we are yet again deferred and referred to cinematic nostalgia. Her bathing scene is deeply reminiscent of a Mandakini bathing in Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) or Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978). Not unlike those Raj Kapoor films here too, objectification of women is sold as female sexual agency and the anxiety of pleasure allayed through the ‘white’ treatment administered. Most disturbingly, Gangubai’s body carries no trace of the horrific scar cutting across her torso, shown in the scene with gangster Karim Lala, on the virtue of which she demands revenge from him for sexual violence. It is an important exercise in imagination to think of how the politics of sexuality would have been marked differently had eroticism been inscribed upon the scars of violence suffered by this formidable woman, the very hieroglyphics of her commitment to protecting her co-workers, demanding rethinking love and power through bodily wounds.
Why a director, afraid of, and seduced by, the power of feminine sexuality, repeatedly chooses figures of sexual prowess and then disciplines them by casting them in moulds of renunciation is a somewhat rhetorical question and a door to further analysis. For now, suffice it to say that this narrative embourgeoisement of the historical figure of a hardened and powerful sex worker stands as a testament to the bourgeois heteronormative gaze’s need for recuperating, appropriating and homogenising the rising and complex discourses around women seizing power over their bodies, selves and histories, one that needs careful dismantling if that taking over must be resisted.
Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Christopher Pinney, Chicago UP, 1998.
