A woman is seated on the floor, with her head on an arm on the bed against which she leans, staring out into space, while a blind singer outside sings of separation and deep anguish ironically evoking raga malhar – the raga of union and joy.

In deep space composition, in the foreground, a woman in black lies on a bed on a terrace under a flowering tree, and in profile looks off and away at the festive terrace opposite where wedding celebrations take place while her life ebbs away.

A young man lies dying, unable to speak, under a tree outside the palatial house of the woman whom he loved, whom he could not accept and for whom he destroyed himself, while she is unable to emerge and take leave of him.

 

SCENARIOS of extremity: these are limit situations that concern ultimate questions of life, love, death and meaning. The sequences from which the scenes cited above are taken – Mahesh Kaul’s Gopinath (1948), Kamal Amrohi’s Daera (1953) and Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955) – represent the characters’ tragic denouement that brings into sharp relief a particular melodramatic embodiment of gender and identity in Bombay cinema of the 1940s and ’50s. What are the issues at stake? What is the historical conjuncture that pressures gender and genre to take the form that these films take? What significances does the aesthetic mode employed here press forth from the situations that the films outline? What are the specific contours that the Indian melodramatic form takes to signify its historical meanings? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to raise and address briefly in this paper.

Shifting the ground from discussions of melodrama as genre, recent work on melodrama has focused on understanding the workings of the melodramatic mode, demonstrating how constitutive it is of cinema itself.¹ As one of the most popular and enduring cultural forms through which contemporary social and political crises are cinematically represented and negotiated, melodrama’s ‘capacity to respond to the questions of modernity’² accounts for its pervasive influence in different cinemas of the world. Theorized as an aesthetic form that emerges in transitional periods, melodrama has been seen to negotiate the dislocating traumas of class and gender struggle, and to answer the doubts and aporias consequent to the breakdown of the ‘traditional sacred’.³

Locating myself within this force field, and using the prism of gender relations, I will attempt to respond to questions of melodrama and modernity in the context of Bombay cinema in the ’40s and ’50s. Crucial to this examination via the films mentioned above are the particular cinematic effects that generate the melodramatic affect of these films. In order to identify and understand the aesthetic, moral and social significances that these melodramas articulate, I will outline certain critical historical and cultural constellations that give them meaning.

 

While made in the first decade after Independence, none of the three films respond to a post-colonial Nehruvian imaginary that imbued other films from the ’50s. On the other hand, it is with a more general experience of modernity that the films engage in different ways, a modernity that challenges and brings into critical focus relations of caste, class and gender and their constitutive and determining impact on individual subjectivity. At the same time, in their dark and tragic evocation of melodramatic pathos, they differ from other films and genres (action, stunt, crime and even the social melodramas) that responded to the dynamism, frenzy and the thrills of the urban experience of the modern. The city, in as much as the films deal with it, has dark connotations in Gopinath, Daera and Devdas, and represents not an enabling matrix of self-development and growth, but rather the inescapable, dangerous and destructive potential of the modern.

 

While in Devdas, the modern is constituted as the horizon that challenges a feudal worldview, in Gopinath, modernity is specifically embodied as the allure of cinema that represents a space of enchantment, of mobility, of self-enablement, but one that is also complicit in the destruction of other, deeper forms of being. In Daera, the modern is once again an enticing frame of reference, of a potential for self-fulfilment that is aborted before it can even be articulated. All three deal with the betrayal and failure of women by men, but also with the inability of men to either effectively face their own desires, confront their own unresolved schisms, or take affirmative action against the force of circumstances. An incipient transformative modernity releases desires that exceed the abilities of individuals for realization. The melodramatic mode underlines the pathos of an unsuccessful human struggle against an existential condition within which are inscribed an authoritative patriarchal law, randomness, chance and discontinuity.

Twinned with the experience of colonialism, modernity in India also generated among the elite a critical look at tradition, and later in the 19th century a nascent nationalist urge for self-reliance, both of which resulted in different reform movements during this period. Obscurantist religious practices, education and especially the position of women in society were central to the controversial debates over social reform that had been inspired by Enlightenment ideals and liberal ideas from Europe. The ‘women’s question’ was a central issue here, but historians wonder at the sudden disappearance of questions related to women’s position in society from the realm of public debate towards the end of the century. The politics of nationalism seemed to have overtaken gender issues.

 

Partha Chatterjee’s seminal formulation of the nationalist resolution of the ‘women’s question’ explicates how and why issues related to women and modern society were relocated within the nationalist ideological realm, specifically, ‘in an inner domain of sovereignty, far removed from the arena of political contest with the colonial state’.⁴ This move placed educated and modern women at the centre of the nationalist project, but also placed upon them the burden of preserving the true spiritual and cultural identity of the nation, crucial to an essential and inner sovereignty despite the subjection to the colonial state. And it is from this inner and sovereign domain of spiritual essence, embodied in the home with the woman as its ‘representation’⁵ that the battle for sovereignty in the external material world of politics and economics would also be launched.

 

If social roles were thus clearly identified by gender in a patriarchal, nationalist ideology, this did not represent as Chatterjee points out the ‘dismissal of modernity’ but was in fact ‘an attempt to make modernity consistent with the nationalist project’.⁶ The desire for the modern was the obverse face of the desire for the nation. Moreover, if education was central to the project of women’s emancipation, it also meant the development by the educated woman of key feminine virtues of ‘chastity, self-sacrifice, submission, devotion, kindness, patience and the labours of love’, as well as the inculcation of the typically bourgeois virtues characteristic of the new social forms of ‘disciplining’.⁷ Historians like Chatterjee, Chakravarty⁸ and Sarkar⁹ have demonstrated how women subscribed to this hegemonic construct of the ‘new woman’, producing themselves in accordance with the nationalist project of creating the modern nation.

Women’s writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries is a testimony to the coalescence of their sense of emancipation via education with the ideological burden of embodying a reformed, classisized and disciplined tradition. At the same time, the narratives of struggle for education and self-emancipation are shot through with other desires that do not quite square with the disciplinary regimes and ideals of modern selfhood that nationalist ideology gifted women. And it is these contradictions and ambivalences constitutive of gender identities and of a modernity that was ‘itself not one’¹⁰ that makes for a ‘drama of inertia and entropy’¹¹ that characterizes a particular form of the melodramatic that the films I am talking about represent.

 

The impact of the contradictions of the project of cultural reform which nationalist ideology had placed on its agenda in the latter half of the 19th century continued to be felt in the next century as well, as decadent feudal aristocracies and entrenched class structures experienced the disintegrating forces of the modern. The popularity of Bimal Roy’s Devdas, a remake of P.C. Barua’s film from 1935, is indicative of something significant about its appeal. Perhaps the filmic narrative, like Saratchandra’s novel, spoke to irresolvable conflicts of class and caste and offered gender roles and images that bespoke the poignancy of a moment when individuals were unable to go against determining and constricting structures of caste, class and family to seize and mould their lives in accordance with individual desire.

In its portrayal of the suffering male protagonist, the tragic tale of the alcoholic Devdas, drinking himself to death at the loss of his beloved Paro, unable to completely accept the courtesan Chandramukhi’s devotion and love, is a destabilization of gender roles with a complete inversion of the image of the active male figure of nationalist ideology. Having failed in his attempt to go against family and patriarchal strictures against dishonour through association with an inferior caste and class, and assert his love for Paro, Devdas’s only form of protest is perhaps an effete one – to reject the norms and standards of a world with which he is at odds. Self-destruction then marks the entropic failure and collapse of the attempt to reconcile patriarchal law and desire. While the narrative of Devdas clearly marks the melodramatic crisis of an individual identity ‘out of sync with the relations of authority which are required to legitimate it’,¹² resulting in angst, internalized self-violence and psychic disorders, cinematically the experience of the film communicates via the privileging of a performance of suffering, and an intensification of emotion via music and mise en scene.

 

This brings me to crucial features of the Indian melodramatic form that I want to outline here – the privileging and amplification of emotion, and the centrality of music and the song as the vehicle for this expression, as well as the development of the song as the language of the ineffable. In many ways, what these features of the Indian melodramatic form do is to manifest in a hyperbolic form what a lot of theorists of melodrama have identified as its key constitutive feature – the foregrounding of subjective emotion and an expressive performance mode.

 

In key and climactic moments in Devdas, it is the song that expresses the central meaning of the sequence. These meanings have to do with the subjectivity of the character, his/her inner state, and the pressing need to make intelligible that which the world outside would rather ignore or repress. Thus whether it is the mitwa song that Devdas sings in desperation to mark his loneliness, and his helplessness to address the inextinguishable fire that consumes him, or the two songs sung by Vaishnav mendicants that exteriorize and even ironically comment on Paro’s emotional condition, or the Jise tu kabool kar le song that Chandramukhi sings, each one exteriorises and amplifies the interiority of the character.

Paradoxically, the ‘text of muteness’¹³ takes a very particular form in Indian cinema. If conventional language is inadequate to express the stress of emotion, the language of poetry, music and gesture enables a spontaneous and immediate contact with ‘the occult realm of true feeling and value’.¹⁴ The song used in this way is not then a disaggregated ‘para-narrative’ element, added for spectacular effect during the performance of which narrative suspension takes place.¹⁵ On the other hand, the song is central to the Indian melodramatic narrational form, an element that, when used creatively and intelligently, is crucial to the focus and development of the narrative, in addition of course, to the characteristic pleasure that this narrational form affords.

 

If the amplification and exteriorizing of emotion has one manifestation via the song in the Indian melodramatic form of Bombay cinema, another form of the foregrounding of emotion is one that this cinema shares with other traditions of melodrama. This is the intensification of emotion, and an expression of interiority via not just performance, but an expressive and dynamic mise en scene, with uses of ‘studied composition’,¹⁶ tableaus and an ‘expressive play of mourning and pathos’.¹⁷ I would like to use an example from Kamal Amrohi’s Daera to make this point. While the film makes an explicit commitment to discourses of reform, especially to the unfairness of the practice of marrying young girls to old men, and to the issue of widow remarriage, the form of the film is an extended tableau with a hyperbolization of desire via mise en scene.

A young man, Sharan, is captivated by the sight of a woman lying on a bed under a flowering tree on the terrace opposite. Complicated and complex crane and tracking movements connect the two terraces and the flow of desire across from one side to the other, while songs put into words the connections that the camera is making. All the while, in mid-space between the terraces, two carpenters on a raised platform saw a huge plank of wood that finally falls apart at the end of the film. While Sharan’s passion is exteriorized via mise en scene, Sheetal, the dying woman on the terrace, married to an old consumptive from whom she too has contracted the disease, responds with a seeming indifference to his passion of which she does soon become aware, but remains committed all the while to her dharma to her husband.

The ideology of feminine devotion is undermined, however, by Meena Kumari’s tragic performance as well as by one song filmed on her that uses the metaphor of a burning heart that burns with the wick in the lamp, thus destabilizing her assumed role: deep ke sang jalun mein aag mein jaise jale baati/jaise jale baati vaise jale jiya mor/hai ram vaise jale jiya mor. Meanwhile, the mise en scene that is soaked with desire does begin to figure forth a ‘hysterical text’ in which unrepresentable and unspeakable material is siphoned-off into an ‘excessive mise en scene’.¹⁸ The stylized, saturated mise en scene is thus intensely expressive of unrealizable desire: a desire that needs to be aborted for the historical moment of its birth is not yet here.

 

The struggle for subjective individuation, for an articulation of acceptable individual desire, and the ultimate failure of its realization that all these examples express including the one that I am now going to use from Mahesh Kaul’s Gopinath, are all deeply connected to the project of the modern, to its desires, its ambivalences and the excesses that spill over and cannot be contained within its disciplinary regimes. Paradoxically, the language of the spill over, the excess in these films is the language of Vaishnav bhakti, a traditional devotional idiom that on the face of it seems to run counter to the melodramatic modern.

This brings me to the third point that I want to raise about the Indian melodramatic form that does not seem to occupy the post-sacred world and a desacralized secular space that melodrama theorists have identified as its ‘public space of social imaginings’.¹⁹ According to Brooks, melodrama uncovers ‘the moral occult’ in lieu of the destroyed ‘traditional sacred’ in an urge towards ‘resacralization’,²⁰ and a means of ‘investing individual everyday lives with significance and justification’.²¹ Given that the ‘traditional sacred’ is very much intact in Indian melodrama, is the expressive work of melodrama in the Indian form an urge towards ‘resacralization’, for it does not seem to function in opposition to or as an alternative to the former? One answer could be that what we see at work here is the sacralization of the everyday, a ritual affirmation of faith in the spiritual that is integrally connected to the significant place of tradition in the nationalist ideology of the modern that was rooted not in an identity but a difference with the perceived forms of cultural modernity in the West.²² A rediscovered and reformed ‘tradition’ with spirituality as its core was crucial to the inner domain of national culture that marked the distinctiveness of the Indian modern.

 

However, the work that this idiom of the sacred does in these films is a little more specific than would seem from the above account. I want to use Mahesh Kaul’s Gopinath to make this point. The film is a narrative about a young man, Mohan’s simultaneous attraction for two women: Neela, a film actress who takes a fancy to his innocence and naivete, qualities that are rare in the world of cinema, and his childhood sweetheart Gopi who continues to passionately adore him. Gopi is also Mohan’s mother’s choice for him, a choice that Mohan resists only because he would like to be more modern in the procedures by which a wife is chosen. Love as it is articulated in cinema is his model, and he wants to experience such a magic for himself.

Gopi’s desire is articulated in a displaced form via the sacred erotic songs of Meera and Soordas, a tradition of Vaishnav bhakti (devotion) in which the sacred and the profane are intertwined realms that imbue each other, and in which human desire has a spiritual aspiration and resonance. Neela’s power play finally destroys Gopi for whom madness is the outcome of the irresolvable contradiction between her love and Mohan’s aspiration for a form of subjectivity represented by the allure of cinema, at the very moment when Mohan awakens to Neela’s perfidy and insincerity. By then Gopi is lost to the world, lost in an interior world where nothing exists but Mohan, and where she sees Mohan everywhere and in everyone.

 

Of course, Gopi’s love for Mohan is resonant with Meera’s for Krishna. What the sacred idiom is doing here as in the other two examples cited earlier, is dual. On the one hand, it intensifies human experience in the light of the sacred, or rather establishes a continuum between the human and the divine, thereby giving hyperbolic expression to human desire. Devotion is not just the trope of the erotic; it sacralizes the human erotic and uncovers the spiritual at the core of erotic experience. On the other hand, the idiom of Vaishnav bhakti also underscores the circumscribed, even tragic nature of human possibilities. At this point, the realm of the sacred provides a horizon of transcendence achieved via renunciation or an immersion in the divine. While the idiom of Vaishnav bhakti is an older cultural idiom, and is not necessarily modern, it inflects the cinematic modern at a crucial point in its history, and gives voice to the ambivalences, the failures of the modern and embodies the excess that the modern cannot contain.

While the allure and the fear of the modern is symbolically figured in Gopinath as the cinema, the tragic consequences of desire in all these films that I have used, underscore the failure of the realization of subjective individuation for both men and women at this moment of incipient modernity. While human desire is articulated, the possibilities of its full bodied realization and consummation are denied. The instabilities of cultural and historical transition that lead to a questioning of class, caste, and gender roles have not led to a breaking away from the constructions of the past, or congealed into newer forms. At this point, not only do we see a full bodied melodramatic embodiment of the issues outlined above, it is evident that it is melodrama that as generic form provides the modalities by which the struggles over subjectivity and gender identities in their location in specific historical and social matrices are articulated.

 

However, one cannot assume an unproblematic identification of gender and melodrama. Individual subjectification rather than gender may actually be the typical space of melodrama. At the same time, I have attempted to demonstrate that the intersections of gender with class, caste and a particular social and cultural history constitute both gender and genre in particular ways even while expressive forms like melodrama may be ur-forms. If conditions of impossibility circumscribe especially female, but also male desire in these films, the pressure of a melodramatic modern articulates this failure cinematically. Perhaps one can say, adapting Hansen, that melodrama is the form of the vernacular modern that encapsulates and expresses the contradictions of modernity.²³

 

* I would like to thank Christine Gledhill for her comments on a draft of this piece, and also for giving me an opportunity to present a version of this paper on her panel ‘Genre and Gender: Rethinking Cultural and Aesthetic Intersections’ at the Annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference, Chicago, March 2007. A more detailed version of this piece will appear in her volume Genre and Gender: Culture and Aesthetics in Contemporary Cinema (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, 2009). I would also like to thank Shashidharan, former Director of the National Film Archives and others at the Archives for all their help with access to the films, material and stills: Dhiwar, Chief Preservation Officer, Urmila Joshi, Librarian, Lakshmi and Arti of the Documentation Section and Salaam and Manohar.

Footnotes:

1. Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. BFI Publishing, London, 1987; Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking Genre’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Studies, Arnold, London, 2000; and Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, in Nick Brown (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1998, pp. 42-82.

2. Gledhill, 2000, op cit., p. 232

3. The phrase is Peter Brooks’ – The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, p. 5. Most of the writers on melodrama have spoken of its emergence in transitional periods – Brooks 1984, ibid.; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), op cit., 1987; Linda Williams, 1998, op cit.; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001; and E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma’, Screen 42(2), Summer 2001, 201-205.

4. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and its Women: the Paradox of the Women’s Question’, in his The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993, p. 117.

5. Ibid., p. 120.

6. Ibid., p. 121.

7. Ibid., p. 129.

8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British India’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds.), Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1994.

9. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001.

10. Dipesh Chakravarty, op cit., p. 87.

11. David N. Rodowick, ‘Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. BFI Publishing, London, 1987, p. 275.

12. Ibid., p. 271.

13. See Brooks’ discussion of melodrama as ‘the text of muteness’, op cit., 1984, pp. 56-80.

14. Brooks defines the ‘moral occult’ as ‘the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality.’ Ibid., p. 5.

15. Ravi Vasudevan sees the song and dance and the comic sequences as ‘not merely part of a narrative continuum’, but then also suggests that these ‘para-narrative’ elements insert ‘the film and the spectator into a larger field of coherence, one that stretches beyond the immediate experience of viewing films.’ See his ‘The Melodramatic Mode and the Commerical Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s’, Screen 30(3), Summer 1989, pp. 45-46. I am arguing for a conception of narrative and narrational form in which the song has a crucial function.

16. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989, p. 32.

17. Ibid., xxiii.

18. Gledhill, 1987, op cit., p. 9.

19. Gledhill, 2000, op cit., p. 232.

20. Ibid., p. 16.

21. Gledhill, 1987, op cit., p. 29.

22. Partha Chatterjee, op cit., p. 117.

23. See Hansen’s ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (ed.), Reinventing Film Studies, op cit. Hansen sees classical Hollywood cinema as ‘vernacular modernism’. While her analysis of classical cinema’s sensationalism and its ability to render a distinctively modern sensorium is quite correct, her conflation of modernity and modernism is problematic, for cultural and aesthetic forms cannot be equated. Using Williams (1998), Gledhill (2000) and Singer (2001), I suggest that we rethink the vernacular form as melodrama.