Now that the show is over, would anyone be interested to discuss attitudes towards romance, love, and sex on MHRV in the context of other works of fiction?
I think that MHRV unmistakably endorsed the regressive attitude that a romantic heroine should be sexually untouched and a romantic hero should be hyperbolically experienced. Accordingly, there was a blatant double standard in how Pallavi reacted to her first husband's return and how Raghav reacted to his ex-girlfriend's return.
If I came across one story about widow remarriage in which the widow was never physical with her first husband, I might accept that it's a creative decision by the author. However, if I see this situation in story after story, with widows who fully experienced the first marriage being the exception, I have to call out a pattern of storytellers being afraid to dramatize a societal issue honestly.
Can anyone help me to make a list of daily dramas and other fiction that had a widow remarriage plot, and whether the widow experienced her first marriage?
I have seen a couple of Marathi movies from around 1960 (Kanyādāna and Suvāsinī), in which the heroine lost her first husband, and her husband's family had to consider getting her remarried. In Suvāsinī, the man who wanted to remarry his best friend's widow explained that because the first husband went to war on the wedding night, the so-called widow was virginal. When the first husband came back alive, as his "widow" clairvoyantly insisted he would, it became clear that the virginal-widow-remarriage-proposal subplot was supposed to be progressive without offending anybody. In contrast, Kanyādāna boldly depicted the heroine going into the bedroom to share a conversation over a glass of milk with her first husband (who even managed to visit her at her parents' house before the wedding day!), but she couldn't sleep there because the garbhādhāna ritual was delayed. They shared a song while honeymooning in a garden; it was undeniable that she had deep romantic feelings for him, and she was shown outgrowing those feelings after his death when she fell in love with a fellow student at college. I wonder why, if the heroine's emotional intimacy with both men could be portrayed like this, was it necessary to include the detail that she was physically untouched?
I could have understood if a story authored in the nineteenth century chose to advocate for widow remarriage by asking, why should a childlike widow be denied the true experience of marriage? However, in 1960 it was a case of art falling behind life. Widow remarriage was already trending for several decades, and the actress who played the heroine in Kanyādāna would go on to write in her autobiography that in 1953, having been scandalously in love with a married director, she chose to rebound by getting married. Her husband didn't expect an untouched wife; he only asked if the affair was over before he accepted her proposal, and after marriage he trusted her to work with her ex-lover. Now, here we are, another 61 years later, with Mehandī Hai Racanevālī going out of its way to keep Pallavi physically pure for Raghav until the end.
Did Goriṇṭāku's heroine Srivalli also lose her first husband before intimacy? Did she love him?
I know of a couple of Marathi daily dramas (Asaṃ Sāsara Surekha Bāī and Sukhācyā Sarīṃnī He Mana Bāvare) in which the heroine is a remarried widow who deeply loved her first husband and suffered the loss of her pregnancy after he died. Has there been a show in which the heroine is a widow with a living child, and she gets remarried?
Not only was Pallavi a widow who never started married life, she was written to diminish Mandar's importance in her life progressively. She gave Raghav a chance in Mandar's name; yet she never felt affection for Mandar after courting for four months; she looked uncomfortable with Mandar even when she felt sorry for him; she pretended to choose Mandar over Raghav, but couldn't act like it to save her life.
Contrast that with Raghav's dialogues: "first time I've named a sexual partner," "best at kissing," "years of experience massaging," and his actions: getting handled and unbuttoned in the back seat of his car; carrying Anjali to bed; offering to marry the "decent" Telugu actress instead of Pallavi; crying over his ex-girlfriend (who also kept herself pure for him while married to another man) and getting carried away with her. The writers made it clear that Raghav could have countless dalliances and still be worthy of Pallavi, but women who had belonged to another man (Anjali, Amruta, Sulochana) were unworthy of him.
MHRV tried to tell risqué stories while winking at the audience that the heroine is a perpetual good girl. The show gratuitously objectified the shirtless male lead while appealing to tradition with the saree-clad female lead. The writing made Raghav a poster boy for male privilege, bragging about conquests and demanding forgiveness for his infidelity, and at the same time, Raghav was the arbiter of womens' sexual morals: he degraded his date in the first episode, Anjali, Amruta, and Pallavi; he tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend for leaving him and strike her for revealing their adultery; and he imposed his choices on Kirti constantly.
There's a line in Narendranath Mitra's Bengali story Abataranika that I think really captures the attitude of shows like MHRV. The wife shows her husband a lipstick that her Anglo-Indian co-worker has given her, and the husband who smokes cigarettes every day asks sarcastically, "How long before you start to smoke cigarettes?" The same behaviour that is liberating for the man, he imagines to be corrupting for the woman.
The weak storytelling for Mandar's return annoyed me so much, I decided to write a fan fiction that didn't change the circumstances of Pallavi's widowhood, but tried to be more human about what Mandar's return should mean for her. In my story, Pallavi and Mandar had a meaningful four months of courtship. Pallavi is physically attracted to both Raghav and Mandar, and she is still the same person who chose to marry Mandar and sees the same worthy qualities in him. In my story, Raghav doesn't need Pallavi to be physically pure because he loves the person, not the ideal.
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