~*Sushant's Bollywood Journey *~#17 - Page 79

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Gayatri smokes, admits to having a number of affairs and asks the new boy in her life to kiss her the moment she considers a relationship with him. Raghu runs away from his wedding, an arranged marriage with a beautiful bride, because he realises that an arranged marriage is not for him and also because he has just met a girl he is attracted to.Shuddh Desi Romance (SDR) is the love story of this unlikely couple, played by Parineeti Chopra and Sushant Singh Rajput.¹ As the name suggests, it is a story of lovers inhabiting this land, this reality. As such the claim of the film is large but also tongue-in-cheek - that of presenting the reality of love in India.

The word shuddh to mean "pure" used in shuddh ghee (home-made clarified butter), shuddh sona (gold) is associated with certain typically Indian traditional obsessions as well as an obsession with tradition and thus with a certain construction of Indianness. By suggesting that this is a pure Indian romance, the film-makers claim that there is in fact an indigenous romance - a desi romance that is now being brought to the screen. For Hindi cinema that is a mischievous claim, not the least because it manages to upset and reconfigure the discourse of purity, Indianness and the provincial self.

Romantic love has always been a staple of Hindi cinema. Love not only suffuses the screen via performance, lyrics and mise en scne but often has been the only narrative pivot of plots organised around the meeting and separation of lovers. In a societal context where love is not a common experience and marriages are arranged along the lines of caste and family background, cinema's investment in romance is intriguing and has invited critical and scholarly engagement. The absence of cultural sanction to romantic love in the country's tradition-bound patriarchal social and family structures has meant a consequent absence of the conventions of courtship and dating. Thus cinematic romance has entertained and, probably, educated an audience in the ways of love, by producing romance that is often unrealistic, fantastical but also stereotypical. From the 1950s onwards, down the decades, as Bombay cinema was transformed alongside a changing economy, fashion, lifestyle, technology and reach, on-screen romance has taken many forms and newer shapes.

If in the early decades, love offered a fantasy of modernity as I demonstrate elsewhere (2013), in the time of Bollywood it has been tied to the fantasies of abundance, consumption and global travel (Mazumdar 2008; Dwyer 2007; Kapur and Pendakur 2007). At all times the imagination of love has been largely divorced from the lived experience of the majority of Indians, who have lacked individual agency offered by modernity as also affluence afforded by the neo-liberal economic transformation. To be sure, over the years, the experience of romance has become accessible to a minority of individuals - either brave or culturally and economically privileged. Presently, even as incidences of honour killings targeting young lovers and married couples occur with a depressing regularity, opportunities for intermingling in educational institutes and work-places and a certain liberal ethos in these pockets allow young people the experience of romantic love, particularly in metropolitan cities and to an extent in smaller towns.

New Formula of Romance

If the opposition to love that is ingrained in culture is seeing some let-up, the second half of the last decade has seen the emergence of a new formula of romance in Hindi cinema. Now, the obstacles to love are not created by the family - thekhandan or villains - representatives of the bedard zamana (heartless society)and formulaic embodiments of the social opposition to love. In the new romantic scenario the obstacle to love is within and needs to be overcome jointly by the couple. The format thus requires the couple to undertake a trajectory of discovery from initial attraction to separation over misunderstandings or disagreements to a final realisation of their love for one another. Love now is not at first sight but a gradual understanding of the self and the other arrived after a narrative traversing of time, space and other relational possibilities. The last decade has seen films like Hum Tum (2004), Salaam Namaste (2005), Socha Na Tha (2005),Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na (2008), Jab We Met (2007), Love Aaj Kal (2009), Break Ke Baad (2010) and many others playing out variations of this formula that seem to have taken their inspiration from Hollywood romantic comedies. Discussing the popularity of the romantic comedy in the American cultural context and ascribing it to the "end of romance", Dowd and Pallotta (2000) note the changing form of relationships of love and intimacy in the present time and culture. Observing the change as evidence of an increasingly "hedonistic, strategic, monitored, self-reflexive, rational and instrumental" attitude towards relationships, Dowd and Pallotta note the consequent alteration and demystification of "the culture's romantic script" (500-53).

Needless to say, unlike their American counterparts, Hindi cinema's romantic comedies cannot be seen as responding to a widespread and generalised cultural transformation in the way relationships are organised. Although changes are afoot and economic liberalisation has brought unprecedented affluence and opportunities to the culturally significant middle class, inequalities in the access to resources, prospects and modernity as also the reinvention of tradition and growing militant orthodoxies produce a contradictory and conflicted public sphere, which in turn thwarts and frustrates youthful aspirations and desires. Based on her sociological survey of north India, Prem Chowdhry (2009) notes not only the prevalence of marriage arranged along caste lines, but also, bewilderingly, young people's own agency in choosing this mode and custom for the formation of alliances. Chowdhry's findings may require only local variables to be applicable to the rest of the country, alerting us to the near absence of a universal cultural context to the indigenous romantic comedy. Not surprisingly, many romantic comedies are located in western metropolitan cities like New York, Sydney, London or San Francisco. Along with the evident and implied economic class of the protagonists, who are able to zip across continents to resolve misunderstandings and/or admit love to their partners, foreign locations offer a liberal cultural backdrop, wherein premarital sex or even live-in relationships can be imagined and condoned.

Significantly, this decade has been witness to a return to small-town India by films that explore its landscapes of crime and/or romance. If a discussion of the material reasons for the "invention" of the cinematic small town in the present geopolitical moment is beyond the scope of this article, the ability of films to construct an aesthetic of authentic "Indianness" and afford the pleasure of the discovery of the "other" within the self can scarcely be denied. Films likeGangs of Wasseypur (2012) or Raanjhanaa (2013), deploying a realist framework, brought to screen criminals and lovers who were at once exotic and ordinary, drawn from and responding to long existent cinematic constructs and conventions, and yet claiming an authentic location in a real space hitherto ignored by mainstream cinema. Even Band Baaja Baaraat(2010) and Vicky Donor (2012) although located in Delhi, depend upon the Punjabi small town at the heart of the metropolis for its quotidian comic charm.

Anti-Marriage Stance

Insofar as Gayatri and Raghu's romance unfolds in touristy Jaipur, SDR cashes in on the contemporary trend to push through and explore the newly available space of the "other" India. Where it departs from the other films is in its attempt at reconfiguring gender relations, its anti-marriage stance and its advocacy of loving relationships outside the realm of conventions and customs. Thus the film not only espouses values that go against normative constructs of Indianness but also questions cinematic conventions that invested in a transgressive romance, which was always contained by the happy end of marriage.

Since narrative obstacles due to parental pressures and/or differences due to class and religion are not anymore the part of the imagined landscape of cinematic romance in its new avatar, its plots get organised around confusions, misunderstandings or disagreements between the lead pair. SDR similarly unfolds as Raghu and Gayatri play out their insecurities, anxieties and the resulting confusion about commitment and marriage. Even as they quickly get into a relationship and Raghu moves in with Gayatri, the prospect of marriage seems daunting, and in a comic replay, one then the other, and finally both, run away from their weddings. In the interlude Raghu once again forms an alliance with Tara (Vaani Kapur), the bride he had run away from right at the beginning. Marriage is not only important as a narrative pivot in the story of the couple's romance; marriage is the backdrop and frame of SDR. Both Raghu and Gayatri moonlight asbaaratis (wedding guests) with the wedding planner-cum-caterer Goyal, played by Rishi Kapoor. Goyal, in keeping with his profession, has a pragmatic and business-like attitude to weddings. Weddings are his livelihood - he provides food, spectacle and even fake wedding guests and, therefore, the more the weddings the better it is for him. He is also a father figure to Raghu, offering him work, counsel and caution even as he eggs him on to take the final plunge into marriage.

SDR is important because of the way in which it splices the individual confusions of the romantic couple with the confusions that prevail in the country's social fabric punctured by hierarchies and orthodoxies of caste and patriarchy. Given that there is a premium on marriage in our society and given the social, economic and psychological pressures on youngsters to marry, often on the dictates of family, caste and community, films too have always offered happy endings to love stories in the mandatory marriage. Indeed, the transgression implicit in romantic love has been allowed only because of the promise of a marriage at the end that contains it. Thus, even as films started showing some premarital sex or even a live-in relationship, as in Salaam Namaste (2005), there was no escaping the diegetic importance of the marriage that came at the end. Also, not surprisingly, many of these films dared to show couples in live-in or sexual relationships by locating them in metropolitan cities abroad. Hindi cinema's much discussed westward move since the 1990s served the imagination of romance well because now it was possible to show couples in adult sexual relationships, although even now the sex is mostly implied rather than performed on screen. However, the affluence of the characters inhabiting these locales and the liberty offered by western cities could justify the implication of sexually active lovers precisely because it was displaced away from the land, the desh. By mobilising the generic requirement of the romantic comedy, the confused and indecisive hearts of lovers and the resultant twists and turns in love's progress, to comment upon the phoniness of marriage and its ceremonies, SDR does not merely "(re)present" a possible reality of love, but in fact advocates new possibilities of self-fashioning.

It is on his way to his own wedding that Raghu meets Gayatri, who has been hired by Goyal to play the smart "English-talking sister of the groom". Having himself played a "wedding guest" earlier, Raghu is not new to weddings and seems to have formed very strong views about arranged marriages. The encounter with an independent, free-spirited Gayatri brings all his misgivings about arranged matches to the surface. Raghu's doubts about arranged marriages, where couples are strangers to one another, with no felt love or connection are expressed to a sympathetic but amused Gayatri as they travel in the wedding bus along with the rest of the wedding party. An impulsive, awkward kiss between the two is quickly aborted by them and the rest of the journey passes uneventfully, except that during the actual wedding Raghu excuses himself for a pee and escapes from the back door.

Gayatri and Raghu's romance unfolds in Gayatri's flat, where she lives alone on her own terms, and produces a remarkably alluring gender-equal space. Gayatri assumes and Raghu agrees to the sharing of domestic chores, and we see the quotidian space of love coming alive in Gayatri's cramped messy lower-middle-class terrace flat as the two share domestic work interspersed with frank love-making. The song Mili mili hai, Zara khili khili hai, Finally chali hai meri love life performed with gusto, as they cook, clean, cuddle, dance, shave, smoke, drink, play, read and eat together delivers the promise of romantic camaraderie, without a transport to a fantasy land in an exotic foreign location. Significantly, knowledge of Gayatri's earlier boyfriends and an abortion has aroused no jealous or moralistic censure from Raghu, until the moment when goaded on by a local gossip, Gupta, Raghu suspects Gayatri to be a serial ditcher of boyfriends. However, this little misunderstanding is quickly resolved as Gayatri not only dispels any doubts about her seriousness regarding their relationship, but also explains the value of trust to childish, inexperienced Raghu.

A Reconfiguration

SDR's advocacy of a new love is tied to its reconfiguration of Hindi cinema's gender stereotypes. Despite some roboust exceptions, the binary of "good" and "bad" women and the consequent punishing of "loose" women and the rewarding of the "pure" and "chaste" heroine persist. For instance, the love triangle in last year's Cocktail (2012) required Gautam Kapoor (Saif Ali Khan) to choose between the wild, spoilt, hard drinking flirt Veronica (Deepika Padukone) and the hapless, shy, desi Meera (Diana Penty). Testifying to the continued power of this binary imagination, Gautam, who is an Indian boy and can therefore never disappoint his mother in his choice of partner and hence must marry someone like Meera, conveniently falls in love with her, despite his longstanding close friendship with Veronica, with whom he enjoys casual sex. In the moral universe of Cocktail a man's philandering earns him a wife his mother approves, while the "loose" woman must be large-hearted in defeat and singledom.

That Cocktail's location in liberal London was unable to save it from these clichs is the measure of the resilience of Hindi cinema's gendered imagination as also of the barriers SDR has overcome with casual ease. Both Gayatri and Tara, the other girl, are spirited and able to stand their ground. Tara lands up in Jaipur to find closure from Raghu who ran away from his wedding with her. Having taught him a lesson or two, she does fall in love with him, but also leaves him with a shrug of her elegant shoulders when Gayatri returns and she perceives Raghu's involvement and deeper commitment to her. Notably, despite Gayatri being the wild one, the logic of love is allowed to prevail, and despite her prior affairs, frank sexuality, smoking and drinking, her "desi" romance with Raghu rules the day. Overturning the popular stereotype of the chaste, good heroine of Hindi cinema, Gayatri's cool presence gives currency and visibility to an alternate model of feminine subjectivity and agency.

Along with a new heroine, SDR's hero, if not as newly-minted, is definitely unusual in a context where contemporary screen is being ruled by heroes, who have sculpted metrosexual, transnationally mobile bodies (Gehlawat 2012) or by masculinities that perform a lumpen machismo in small towns. Raghu works as a guide to tourists in Jaipur. In his spare time he mobilises his proficiency in English to help roadside cloth merchants dupe gullible foreign tourists into buying ethnic wear, and of course, doubles as a wedding guest with Goyal. With antecedents in the 1950s' hero, who often worked the street - driving a taxi, selling cinema tickets or relieving people of their wallets - Raghu, like them, is romantic in his devotion to his girl. However, he needs to be distinguished from Hindi cinema's single-minded pursuers of romance, whose latest avatar is Kundan Shankar (Dhanush) in Raanjhanaa (2013).

Refreshingly Different

To be sure, Raanjhanaa like SDR, deploying a realist register, is located in a small town in India, Banares. Also the scrawny, scruffy Kundan, like Raghu, is unlike the affluent jet-setting heroes currently popular. But it is important to mark the very real lines of difference between these two small-town Romeos. Despite his small frame and marginal social status, Dhanush's Kundan is a valiant heir to the masculine, aggressive and determined heroes of the 1980s, whose pursual of the heroine was indistinguishable from harassment. Kundan pursues Zoya (Sonam Kapoor) for eight long years, follows her to Punjab and then to Delhi, transforms himself to lead a student's political party in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and finally sacrifices his life, never once pausing to ask if Zoya loves him back. Despite the real menace of eve-teasing and harassment faced by girls in urban India, and despite the violence that makes daily news, women murdered or disfigured by men who were ignored or rejected by them, Raanjhanaa's Kundan emerges heroic in love and sacrifice and earns the audience's sympathy while Zoya, who never returns his affection, is projected as confused, manipulative and cruel.

Charming, accommodating, confused and non-judgmental Raghu is, refreshingly as far apart from Kundan as is possible. Attracted to the independent, sharp-tongued Gayatri, Raghu is the new man required by the times and Hindi cinema. Uninterested in asserting his masculine privilege, Raghu is merely keen on finding a comrade, a lover and a friend to brighten his days and make easy the ordinary struggles of his life.

Towards the end, Gayatri and Raghu, finally together, try to get married again but run away from the wedding only to discover that they are running away not from each other but from marriage itself. Finding themselves at Gayatri's door after having fled the wedding venue, Gayatri and Raghu wisely decide that their fear of marriage has no bearing on their love for each other and their desire to live together, and the film ends not with the promise of their living happily ever after in married coexistence, but in their gutsy decision to live together and see how it goes. If the trajectory of this desi romance highlights the uncertainties and confusions experienced by the young pair, the strength of the film is the clarity of purpose that traces this journey.

SDR's characters, dialogue, performance and situations are all tied together by its liberating politics: the staging of this light-hearted romance is driven by its serious investment in producing entertainment that relies on offering an alternative imagination of romance. The mukhada of the title song of the film speaks of the possibility of romance - not as a matter of course but by seizing whatever chance available in the openings in a fraudulent and normative social structure glued by custom and ritual - khidki dariche se, dabe paoun niche se, jhoote samajon mein, jhute riwazon me, liye he jaye koi chance! The youthful, fun-filled texture of the film deceptively slides over the gravity of the situation it rebels against. Youngsters in India can die for being in love, an actuality even Hindi cinema has not been able to ignore as seen recently in Ishaqzaade (2012). The violence, and more specifically honour killings reflect, as Jyotsna Kapur observes, "the right of the patriarchs to determine proper sexual expression, ultimately tied to preserving private property via an insistence on purity, i e, of caste and class" (2011: 211). Unlike Ishqzaade's violent small town, however, SDR's Jaipur is quaintly liberal. Here, even traders and small-time businessmen like Goyal are not only accepting of Gayatri's transgressive behaviour, Goyal's interest in marriage, it turns out, is merely instrumental - weddings, after all, is how he makes a living. In the end, Goyal's worry about the imminent demise of this hoary institution is actually the utopic hope of a film that advocates a desi romance antithetical to the dominant ethos that values ceremonies and hierarchies above desire and freedom.

Crucially, the shuddh of the title cleverly highlights this anxiety with purity, which the film goes on to blithely ridicule. To be sure, Jaipur is not any small town. Having long been a tourist destination, the impact of economic liberalisation on its tourist economy and culture would distinguish it from other small towns. The unfolding of Raghu-Gayatri's romance in Jaipur, therefore, possibly hints at the unseen but decisive transformation in lifestyle and conventions taking place at those junctions where the global is ostensibly entering the local.

Missing the Obvious

SDR's reception has been oddly inattentive. Although it has been declared a hit, reviews have either praised the film for being an ably performed, well-scripted entertainment in the romantic comedy genre, or have been downright hostile for being excessively sexual. Missing, in both instances, is its explicit politics. At a time when the war on love is daily assuming new forms: when honour killings, Hindu fundamentalists' campaigns against Muslim youth for "waging lovejihad", communal and caste violence triggered by signs of individual agency in love are taking place, SDR is a brave and hopeful film. When the performative bodies of Parineeti Chopra and Sushant Rajput stage an exhilarating spectacle of romance in small-town India, the film retrieves as it invents and promotes the possibility of a frank love outside of marriage and a gender-equal space within the precincts of the nation.