I want to help the Black man to
free himself of the arsenal of
complexes that has been developed
by the colonial environment.
Frantz Fanon
[Colonialism] creates a culture in
which the ruled are constantly
tempted to fight their rulers within
the psychological limits set by the
latter.
Ashis Nandy
Sexuality must not be thought of as
a kind of natural given which power
tries to hold in check...It is the
name given to a historical
construct...a great surface network
in which the stimulation of bodies,
the intensification of pleasures,
the incitement of discourse, the
formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and
resistances are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few
major strategies of knowledge and
power.
Michel Foucault
Introduction
- One of the most enduring icons of the Indian film oeuvre is
the aristocratic, lovelorn, sexually impotent, politically
disengaged, and ultimately tragic hero named Devdas. Derived from
a popular Bengali novel, written in 1917, by a teenage
writer--Sarat Chandra Chatterjee--the Devdas narrative was
first adapted into a silent film in 1928. While not much is known
about this first Devdas film, its subsequent appeal across
gender, class and regional lines is attested to by many remakes: a
Bengali version in 1935; two Hindi versions in 1936 and 1955; two
Telegu versions in 1953 and 1974 and a Malayalam version in 1989.
Not only has the narrative become a "mythological reference point
for Hindi melodrama" (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 244), but the Devdas
persona has become incorporated into the various Indian languages
and therefore has become an integral part of South Asian culture. The pathos
of this doomed hero of Indian cinema was effectively captured by
Eric Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, when, in their first edition of
Indian Film (1963) they wrote: "And virtually a generation wept
over Devdas " (80).
- In this essay I will read the cathexis of pre- and post-Independence Indian
audiences with the Devdas narrative, as a symptom of what Fanon calls that
"arsenal of
complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment"
(30). I will establish that the contours of the Devdas narrative
discursively construct a prototypical colonial male subjectivity
which is doomed to function within the psychological limits set by the
latter [the colonizers]" (Nandy, my emphasis, 3). These
psychological limits compel the Devdas character to both desire
independence from, and seek the recognition of, an absent master. By
deconstructing the psychic violence implicit within the narrative
and the mise-en-scene of sexuality in the various Devdas films, I
will establish how their eponymous hero became emblematic of the
ideal of masculinity in the South Asian imaginary during the first
half of this century, and why his lack of political and sexual
agency continues to affect a "collective catharsis" (Fanon, 145)
among these audiences to this day. It is my contention that by
displacing the social and political conflicts between colonizer and
colonized onto the psycho-sexual dynamics of a sadomasochistic
relationship between a man and a woman, the melodramatic narrative
may have elided the real ideological tensions and contradictions of
colonial and neocolonial India, but it has also obliquely and
repeatedly opened up a space of resistance for the text's
audiences, throughout this century.
- Drawing from Hegel's dialectic of control in the master/
slave relationship, and extending Jessica Benjamin's now famous
psychoanalytic argument on sadomasochistic violence, I am going to
establish that the "arsenal of complexes" that is condensed in the
Devdas narrative is an index of the Indian masculine subject's
primary narcissism; his failure to differentiate himself from the
feminine (a discursive space to which he has been relegated by the dominant colonial
ideology); and following this failure, his resorting, eventually, to "erotic domination"
over the Other as a desperate means of organizing his masculinity.
- Two important disclaimers are in order here: First, in
counter-distinction to the infantilizing discourse of the
orientalists on the Bengali babu [1], my
intent is not to perpetuate
this demeaning discourse, but rather, to understand why the
otherwise terminal psychic processes of early
childhood--separation and individuation--recur in a magnified form in the
subject's adult life and, more importantly, how, when a society
is caught in new, extreme and symbolic forms of domination and
submission, these processes take on a specific social pathology.
The Devdas films provide this cultural critic with the opportunity
to read the prevailing conditions of psychological, political,
cultural and economic domination/submission in the colonial
context as these are condensed in the familial and conjugal life
of the protagonists of a popular text, and as these conditions
ultimately erupt as the dis-ease of their bodily and sexual
functions.
- The second, and more problematic, disclaimer has to do with
my use of the psychoanalytic paradigm to analyze the processes of
social change as these are indexed in germinal cultural texts. On
the one hand, I am in complete agreement with proponents of
trans-cultural psychiatry who believe that "psychoanalysis as
constituted today is largely an elaborate ethnopsychoanalysis of
Western man," (Roland, xxv) and that the trajectory of
individuation that it charts is parallel to the teleology of
Western bourgeois society in this century. This makes
psychoanalysis as constituted today somewhat unsuitable for
understanding the psychic processes of non-Western societies as
they struggle to formulate their own paradigms of modernity. On
the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that profound though
these civilizational differences between societies may be, that
each can be so tidily essentialized as to call for an altogether
different psychoanalytic methodology. It would have been
convenient to draw from an a priori comparative and transcultural
psychoanalysis to explicate the psychic negotiations of subjects
caught in the interstices of high modernity, but unfortunately
such a mature comparative methodology does not exist. In some
modest manner my study of Indian cinema's founding myths aims to
formulate just such a comparative psychoanalytic paradigm. What I
am calling the "social pathology" of colonialism within the larger
comparative methodology should not be read as a prognosis of
"abnormality"; rather, I intend it to function as a descriptive
term for the complex and unstable "libidinal politics"[2]
between
colonizer and colonized, master and slave, sadist and masochist,
man and woman. Finally, the (vicious) circularity of my argument
should be read as the failure of any pre-existing language and theoretical
paradigms to adequately carry the burden of our collective
historical and psychic experiences, rather than as a symptom of
my confusion.
The Story of Devdas
- The story of Devdas goes as follows: a young, sensitive boy
from a feudal Bengali family is sent to Calcutta to acquire an
education befitting his class. Devdas is distraught at the separation
from his mother and his female playmate--Parvati. When the grown-up
and considerably Anglicized Devdas returns to his rural context he is
unable to relate to his childhood sweetheart. Parvati, meantime, has
steadfastly loved Devdas through all the years of his absence and
wishes to continue the childhood friendship as a romantic relationship
leading to marriage. When Parvati's family proposes her marriage to
Devdas, the latter's family rejects the alliance outright, supposedly
on the grounds that marriages within the kinship group (in this case
the village) were discouraged, but more importantly because her
family's lower social status makes her ineligible for the match with
Devdas. I should clarify that even diegetically these arguments appear
flimsy; for though Parvati's family is not as rich as Devdas's, she is
from the same caste as Devdas, and in the feudal Bengal of the early
twentieth century, it was not uncommon for a rich man to marry a
beautiful, though relatively poor, woman.
- Taking umbrage at the rejection, Parvati's family proceeds
to arrange for her marriage elsewhere and Parvati, risking the
appearance of impropriety, visits Devdas at his home in the dead
of night. A shocked Devdas reprimands Parvati for the scandal
she might cause. Parvati declares that since she is about to
lose all that she deems valuable in her life, desperation has
driven her to surrender herself to him. Devdas protests feebly
about his family's honor and his duty to his parents, but finally
it is he himself who is unable to "take" Parvati that night and is
eventually unsuccessful either in persuading his family or
disregarding its wishes.
- Unable to face Parvati thereafter, Devdas escapes to
Calcutta from where he writes as follows: "It has never crossed
my mind that I desire you." (I will return to the "narcissistic
object-choice" implicit in this statement.) Parvati, of course,
reads this as a callous rejection and has no choice but to agree
to the match her parents have arranged. When Devdas tries to
apologize for his betrayal, the slighted Parvati
accuses him of being arrogant and narcissistic. She declares that
her parents have made a wise decision in arranging her marriage
with an older man, one who is not impetuous and fickle like
Devdas. Incensed at Parvati's accusations, Devdas hits her on her
face, leaving a mark on her forehead, which he claims would
always remind her of him. After a tender reconciliation the
lovers part.
- Parvati leaves for her husband's home and in an inter-cut
sequence Devdas enters the salon of a prostitute--Chandramukhi.
The former takes up her responsibilities as the benevolent
mistress of a vast feudal estate (thereby crossing class lines)
and Devdas falls into a degenerate and purposeless life in the
city. Parvati wins the love of her step-children, who are as old
as herself, and the respect of her husband, with whom her
relationship remains celibate and amicable. The husband
apologizes for his initial lustful designs on Parvati, who is
young enough to be his daughter, and withdraws to a retired life
by abdicating the running of his estate to her.
- Though grateful for the company of a patient and devoted
woman, Devdas initially despises Chandramukhi for her sexual
promiscuity and refuses to sleep with her. Chandramukhi falls in
love with Devdas precisely because she idealizes his chastity.
Hoping, at first, that by reforming her lifestyle she may become
acceptable to Devdas, Chandramukhi gives up her profession as a
prostitute. Later when she lacks the resources to take care of his
failing health, she renews her activities in a spirit of altruism.
Grateful to Chandramukhi for saving his life, but still in love
with Parvati, Devdas comes to loathe himself for
his inability to defy social conventions.
- Despite their markedly different social standings
Chandramukhi and Parvati function as mirror images of each other.
In every version of the film the physical resemblances between the
actresses playing the roles of the two women in Devdas's life are
unmistakable. Nor are these resemblances lost on Devdas!
- Meanwhile Devdas's father dies, his mother retires to a life
of sanyas [3] and his brother tries to
swindle him of his share of
the family inheritance. A dejected and lost Devdas becomes a
vagabond and an alcoholic. Hearing of his sorry situation,
Parvati visits Devdas a second time and offers herself to him once more.
Quite predictably, Devdas refuses her again but dares
Parvati to run away with him. Knowing that Parvati would be unable
to relinquish her social responsibilities as a married woman,
Devdas's dare equates his psychological limitations with Parvati's
social limitations. Each agrees to respect the other's limitations,
at least for the time being. When Devdas promises to visit Parvati
at least once before his death, there is a tacit understanding
between the lovers that they have merely deferred but not
ultimately abandoned the possibility of their union. This deferral
functions as the motor of the narrative.
- When the enervated and consumptive Devdas finally arrives at
Parvati's doorstep, ready to claim her, there is a classic role
reversal: it is Parvati's turn to accept Devdas's submission.
Disregarding her social position as the mistress of an influential
feudal estate and her familial responsibilities as a wife and
mother, Parvati rushes to accept Devdas. Her family, which has
hitherto been unaware of her secret love for Devdas, cannot permit
such an infraction and literally locks her within the gates of the
family estate, thereby preventing the lovers' reunion and forever
cloistering Parvati in a life of chaste respectability. Meanwhile,
in an equally melodramatic scene the chaste Devdas dies at
Parvati's doorstep.
Barua as Devdas: The Prince as Anti-Hero
- The first significant film adaptation of the literary text
was the Bengali version of Devdas made in 1935. It was immensely
successful at the box office. The film was directed by P.C. Barua, an already established
star of Bengali cinema and a standing member of the Assam Legislative Assembly, who
also played the lead role of Devdas. Not unlike the persona of Devdas, Pramathesh
Chandra Barua was himself a handsome young prince and heir to the kingdom of Gauripur
(Assam) in the Bengali Presidency. Barua left his native Assam and came to study at
Presidency College, Calcutta, a premier institution of higher education established by the
British in order to train a burgeoning Indian middle class to serve as intermediaries between
the British administration and the Indian populace. However, unlike other graduates of
Presidency College, Barua did not pursue a career in the colonial Civil Service, and instead
went on a European tour, where he became interested in film-making. He got informal
training at the Elstree Studio in London and after purchasing film-making equipment in
Europe, he returned to Calcutta where, in 1931, he set up his own production studio--
Barua Pictures Limited (Barnouw & Krishnaswamy 77-82). Barua had wanted a large-
scale studio to compete with British Dominion Films and New Theatres, but his father,
angered over his involvement with cinema and the decadent lifestyle that it implied, refused
to finance the venture. Barua's small studio of course did not survive the competition from
the large studios in Calcutta, and three years later Barua became associated with New
Theatres, a studio committed to such progressive social reform issues as the emancipation
of women, widow remarriage, and the abolition of child marriage.
- I mention these details of Barua's life to reinforce the
parallels between his life and that of Devdas, the fictional
character. Both belonged to aristocratic families; were educated in
Calcutta; adopted Western life-styles; had a falling out with their
respective families; and suffered from a tragic despondency.[4] These
parallels are important for my ensuing argument, namely, that in
making Devdas Barua wanted to refute the colonialists' construction
of Bengali youth as effeminate and degenerate. A sympathetic
portrayal of the babu was directed at another set of critics:
Indian nationalists who saw the babu as straying from the social
and religious values of Hindu orthodoxy. Throughout the last half
of the nineteenth century and well into the first quarter of the
twentieth, the anglicized Bengali man had been the object of
scathing social satire in the vernacular press, and in Indian folk
paintings, theater, songs and films.
- Even though it is important to remember that this discourse
on "Bengali 'effeminacy' [intersected] with contemporary
discourses about the regulation of sexual practices and sexual
identities in Britain" at the turn of the century (Sinha: 1995,
18), its real ideological power in India lay in the colonial
administration's ability to offer the Bengali's lack of "'manly
self control"' (ibid 19) as material proof of the babu 's
incapacity for psychological self-determination and, in the long
run, for political self-rule.
- I have argued elsewhere that the British policy on film
censorship, which was purported to be part of its larger
"civilizing" mission throughout the colonies, sought to keep
Indian audiences from watching Western (mainly Hollywood) films
on the grounds that sexual themes were unsuitable fare for the
already sexually overactive, and alternately degenerate Indian
male (Arora, 38). In this essay I will consider what effect the
colonialist charge of effeminacy, degeneracy and emasculation
levied against the Bengali babu had on the latter. It was not
that the babu believed the charge, but rather that he failed to
understand its ideological thrust. In assiduously and earnestly
refuting the charge, the babu inadvertently internalized it--a
classic example of Fanon's proposition that colonialism creates a
culture wherein the ruled are tempted to fight the ruler within the
terms set by the latter. If Devdas gets caught in the conundrum of
having to withhold his sexuality in order to prove his
psychological and political coming of age, audiences sympathized
with Devdas rather than condemned him for his lack of agency.
- Elaborating on Jessica Benjamin's essay, "Bonds of
Love," in which she explains the role of erotic domination
and sadomasochism in the development of gender identity and
gender domination in Western culture, I will extend Benjamin's thesis
on the child's "yearning for mutual recognition" from the domain of
individual psychology to that of group psychology under colonial
rule. The Devdas narrative resolves the contradictions inherent in the
condition of the colonized subject; namely, that he must attain independence from, and yet
seek the recognition of, the colonizing master through the pacifying economy of
melodrama.
By (con)textualizing that which has been repressed/marginalized
by the narrative, I am trying to demonstrate how the Devdas films
work out the processes of attaining political selfhood and agency
within the colonial regime, in distinctly psycho-sexual terms.
- In this context it is interesting to note how the
discourses of fictional melodrama and Gandhian civil disobedience
fed into each other at this historical juncture. Erik Erikson, in
his psychoanalytic biography of the mahatma --Gandhi's Truth: On
the Origins of Militant Nonviolence --discusses how the political
leader transformed his "sexual self-disarmament" into a tool of
active political resistance and "prided himself in being
half man and half woman."(403). I do not mean to imply that
Devdas and Gandhi are comparable in any overt fashion, or that
Erikson's interpretation of the mahatma is definitive. Rather, I
want to suggest that the discursive confluence of sexual
abstinence and political resistance was very much a part of the
Indian nationalist ideology of the time.
Redefining the Babu
- If Barua's direction of the 1935 Bengali version of Devdas
in which he also acted the role of the protagonist was so
successful at the box office, why did he not act the role of
Devdas in the 1936 Hindi version as well? Why did Barua instead
choose the minor role of Parvati's step-son in the 1936 Hindi
version, which was expected to appeal to a pan-Indian audience? I
will offer two reasons for this textual variation: the first, more
obvious and meant to serve a didactic function diegetically; the
second, more conjectural, perhaps, but one that gets to the very
heart of the arsenal of complexes that, I believe, the film
addresses.
- When audiences saw Barua first as Parvati's lover and
subsequently as her step-son in two successive versions of the
story, released less than a year apart from each other, there was
a very definite suggestion that something was not quite right.
This inter-textual referencing had the impact of de-naturalizing
the otherwise socially acceptable practice of men marrying women
young enough to be their daughters. The sequence wherein the newly
married Parvati welcomes her daughter-in-law to the household as
her step-son (played by Barua) admires Parvati's
selflessness, while she endures her own sex-less marriage with her
aging husband, must have made audiences re-think the social
practice of child marriages if not condemn its injustice to young
women outright. This theme was dealt with in other films of the
period, such as Duniya na Mane (The Unexpected , 1937),
was the centerpiece of the social reform movement of the time and was
championed by the progressive urban elite of Bengal.
- The second reason why Barua did not play Devdas in the Hindi
version of 1936 and instead chose a very different actor to play
the role has to do with dissociating the Bengali feudal male
subject from the dominant colonialist discourse of effeminacy,
while foregrounding the babu's traits of nobility, urbanity, and
most importantly, chastity.[5] Thomas Babington
Macaulay's
oft-quoted and defamatory description of the Bengali is
pertinent here, if only to give the reader a sense of
what Barua was reacting against when he chose another
actor to play Devdas:
The physical organization of the
Bengalee [sic] is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in
a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements
languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of
bolder and more hardy breeds (quoted in Strachey, 449-50).
These "men of bolder and more hardy breeds" of India were the Manichean
opposite of the Bengali babu . Kundan Lal Saigal, the actor-singer,
who was chosen by Barua to play the part of Devdas in the Hindi
remake, was just such a figure. On the one hand, his regional
identity as a Punjabi (a people known for their peasant
hardiness), his caste affiliation as a Kshatriya (warrior/kingly
caste), his strong physique, and his "fair" complexion (believed
to be closer to the Aryan race as opposed to the "dark" complexion
of the aboriginal, Dravidian race) countered the charge of
feebleness, effeminacy and ineffectuality typically levied against
the Bengali babu . On the other hand, Saigal's understated and
eventually trendsetting acting style, the sonorous voice in which
he delivered the film's rather sparse and deliberate dialogue, and the low
crooning voice in which he sang the songs, all contributed to the
hero's quiet dignity and strength, without compromising the pathos
and romantic nihilism of the role. It is this tenuous balance of
dignity and pathos that made Devdas so appealing to the women in
his life and to Indian audiences at large.
Redefining Devdas
- So powerful was the appeal of the Devdas persona for
successive generations of actors and audiences that while the
former became inextricably linked with the role, the latter
passionately debated the relative strengths of each actor's
interpretation of Devdas. Writing four decades after Barua's
rendition of Devdas, film journalist Rinki Bhattacharya has claimed:
"Devdas (has been to the Indian actor) what Hamlet is to his
western counterpart" (15). Bhattacharya has also located the
supreme irony of the cult of Devdas in Indian film culture when she
writes: "The hero of Indian cinema was ushered in by, perhaps, the
best known anti-hero of all times--Devdas" (15).
- The fact that from the late 1920s to well into the 1970s
audiences have persisted in empathizing with Devdas, the
antihero, and actors have become inextricably linked with the
persona, belies a social and psychological reality that merits
understanding. For Bengali audiences in the 1930s Barua the
prince and Devdas the character were virtually interchangeable. As
the dying Barua, in 1951, himself commented:
Devdas was in me even before I was born, I created it every
moment of my life much before I put it on the screen and yet, once
it was on the screen, it was more than a mirage, a play of light
and shade and sadder still, it ceased to exist after two hours
(quoted in Ramachandran, 50).
When in 1946, K. L. Saigal, not unlike the fictional Devdas, serendipitously died of
alcoholism at the young age of forty-two, his fans throughout the subcontinent
regarded the actor and the persona as merging together perfectly.
Upon his death, radio stations throughout India obsessively played
the tragic and soulful songs that Saigal had sung in Devdas and
many other comparable melodramatic films, for many days on end, in
what came to be recognized as an unofficial mourning for a
"national" hero. For two decades Saigal's interpretation of Devdas
reigned supreme--setting the standard both for an understated acting style
and a particular tonal quality of playback singing that was
emulated by many other singers of the Indian film industry.
- The Bengali and the Hindi versions of 1935 and 1936 were
virtually identical, with the exception of Saigal playing Devdas.
However, a comparison of the 1936 and 1955 Hindi versions reveals
some interesting differences. The highly regulated film industry of
colonial India was transformed after Independence in 1947. Many new
studios were established; the infusion of private investment
resulted in considerable technological progress; the highly
restrictive (British) Cinematograph Act of 1918 was amended; the
entertainment tax on films was raised considerably by state governments, thereby changing
the demographics of film audiences. Resulting from these transformed modes of
production, the old anti-imperialist values of the film industry needed to be
revised. Bimal Roy--the cameraman for Barua--attempted another
remake of Devdas , this time played by an already established star
of the Indian film industry--Dilip Kumar.
- Dilip Kumar (born Yusuf Khan) was a Pathan--a sturdy mountain
people from the Northwest Frontier Province of India--and in
this respect he was, not unlike Saigal, associated with the
"martial races." Kumar's "filmic identity offered a complex
cultural/psychological terrain displaying the anxieties of
Independence and the nostalgias of a pre-Partition childhood"
since he had previously been cast in the role of "an innocent loner caught
in and destroyed by conflicting social pressures"(Rajadhyaksha & Willemen,
123). So perfectly did Dilip Kumar embody the contradicted persona of
Devdas that the post-Independence generation of filmgoers "swore
Dilip was born to play Devdas"
(Bhattacharya, 15). What is more, so entrenched was Dilip Kumar in
the mythology of Devdas and so detrimental was this to his self-
image, that shortly after he played the role, Dilip Kumar "decided
to change to a more swashbuckling image . . . apparently on [the]
advice of his psychoanalyst" (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 123).
- Even though Devdas (1955) established its own visual style
and bore the imprint of the production values of the studio
system, the persistence of the Devdas myth dictated that
audiences establish the continuities and disjunctures of this
text vis-à-vis earlier versions of Devdas. A debate ensued in the
popular press wherein film critics and buffs alike passionately
argued the relative merits of Barua's, Saigal's and Dilip Kumar's
rendition of Devdas. Bhattacharya writes that the "release of the remake made nearly
everyone wickedly nostalgic, comparing sly notes on all three Devdases" (15). No
consensus was possible; the generation
that came of age in the pre-Independence days preferred either
Barua or Saigal whereas the post-Independence generation
overwhelmingly preferred Dilip Kumar.
- While Chakravarty has claimed that in 1955 "the Devdas
character no longer captivated the popular imagination," (141)
Rajadhyaksha and Willemen have stipulated that "the new approach
provide[d] a more resonant historical background to a story
usually focused almost exclusively on Devdas's psychological
obsessions" (318). This shift from the psychoanalytic
underpinnings of the narrative to the pressing socio-political
implications of the Roy production are reinforced by the lyrics
of Sahir Ludhianvi--the legendary love poet of the film industry
and a Devdas type in his own right.[6]
- The existential angst of the protagonist is interpreted by
the post-Independence generation of Devdas fans as an expression
of the latter's sense of betrayal at the hands of an indifferent
state bureaucracy and political leadership which failed to
address widespread unemployment among urban educated men,
political corruption and a distinct lack of idealism among the
young.
- Nor is Dilip Kumar alone in reinterpreting the Devdas myth in
a post-Independence culture. Other stars of the Indian film
industry such as Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bharat Bhushan
displaced Devdas's psychological neuroses onto a profound
disillusionment with the Indian nation-state. In 1959 Guru Dutt
directed India's first cinemascope film--Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper
Flowers )--in which an idealistic film director fails to realize
his ambition to make yet another version of the Devdas story. In
drawing attention to the marginality of the Indian artist in the
project of nation-building, Kaagaz ke Phool reinterpreted Devdas,
once the prototype of the noble but ineffectual colonial subject,
as an atavistic icon of a failed idealism in a neocolonial
culture, and Parvati not as the legendary beloved, but rather as
an opportunist star of the Indian film industry.
Sex, Age and Ideology In British India
- I am arguing that Indian cinema has immortalized Devdas and
Parvati not so much for their devotion to each other as for
their mutual chastity, and to a lesser degree for their defiance of
societal codes. In order to understand the psycho-social
implications of the lovers' sexual chastity and Devdas's chastity
vis-à-vis Chandramukhi, one must locate this chastity within the
larger gender ideology of colonialism.
- Even though throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century the British had claimed that they were committed to a
policy of non-interference in the social and religious life of
Indians, by the 1930s the purview of this "uncolonized space" had
been steadily shrinking. In 1891 the Age of Consent Act (according
to which sexual intercourse with unmarried or married girls below
twelve years of age, with or without their consent, was to be
treated as rape) had been passed, despite overwhelming protest by
Indian nationalists. However, fearing social unrest the Viceroy had
issued a subsequent executive order "that made it virtually
impossible to bring cases of premature consummation of child
marriage for trial under the Consent Act" (Sinha 1994, 138). In
spite of this corrective measure, the psychological impact of the
Consent Act on the Bengali babu was far reaching indeed! For
between the legal binding of the Consent Act and the impossibility
of its implementation, there opened up a chasm of vulnerability. As
Sinha argues:
The Consent Act humiliated the Bengali husband
without being of much use to the Bengali child bride. . . . [D]espite
its liberal and humanitarian rhetoric, it became the focus of the
colonial disdain of Bengali masculinity and of the Bengali male's
attempt to reclaim his masculinity (1987, 223).
While maintaining the facade of "non-interference," this legislation
permitted the British to champion the cause of Indian women's
welfare while at the same time insulting Indian men by insinuating
that the latter were promiscuous, dishonorable, and most damaging of all, unmanly. Even
though the Consent Bill controversy had far-reaching and complex ramifications for the
British, Indian nationalists, Victorian feminists and the
orthodox Hindu and Muslim leadership in India, my concern with
the controversy in this essay is limited to its impact on the
bhadralok (feudal and urban upper classes) of Bengal. The
babu ,
though not held strictly culpable for his sexuality,
nevertheless felt himself to be under the intense scrutiny of
the bhadramahila (upper-class Bengali women) who had supported
the Bill and the colonialists who had challenged the babu 's
masculinity one more time. It is this anxiety that is at the
core of the melodrama of Devdas ; and the narrative's ability to
relieve this anxiety, I believe, explains its persistent appeal
for Indian audiences.
- Because audiences' critical attention to the Devdas films
has focused almost exclusively on the male protagonist, the
shifts in the representation of the female protagonist have gone
largely unnoticed both by film theorists and by audiences.
Jamuna, who played Parvati in both the 1935 (Bengali) and
in the 1936 (Hindi) versions, was a girl of delicate frame and
constitution. In her quick and effortless transition from the
bold, impetuous and adolescent Parvati who dares Devdas to take
her sexually, to the asexual and mature house-holder, Jamuna's
rendition of Parvati came dangerously close to the British
understanding of Bengal's child brides that presumably had
prompted the Age of Consent Act of 1891. However, we must
remember that it was not the injustices of child marriage per se
that were the target of British reformist zeal, but rather the
"barbaric" practices of the "unmanly and effeminate Hindu male"
who consummated marriages with girls as young as ten or twelve
years old.
- While the reformist agendas of these pre-Independence films
condemned the practice of old widowers (such as Parvati's husband) marrying young
girls and valorized "manly self-control" (as exemplified by Devdas), scant attention was
paid to the fate of the child-bride herself. Thus, even though the choice of Saigal
as Devdas is revisionist in intent, no comparable revision in the
image of Parvati was deemed necessary in the 1936 Hindi version of
the film. It was not until the post-Independence version of the
narrative that a distinction was made between Devdas and Parvati
as children (played by child actors) and later in the film as played by
Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen. The buxom figure of Suchitra Sen, then in her
mid-twenties, was
clearly a departure from the earlier pubescent Jamuna as Parvati.
Even so, frequent flashbacks from Devdas and Parvati's childhood
and the parallel editing of a song sequence connecting their
childhood and their blighted affair in their adult lives do not
let the viewer forget entirely that the relationship had its
origins in Devdas and Parvati's shared childhood where they were
playmates and siblings rather than lovers. If the charge of
promiscuity and effeteness which compelled Devdas to abstain from
having sex with the woman he desired originated from the British,
this charge lingered on even after the British had departed. The
neo-colonial state, after all, is known to perpetuate preexisting
relations of power with a different cast of characters.
- There are other historical reasons for why the colonialists'
indictment of the babu 's masculinity escalated to new heights in the
1930s. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Bengali men who because of their college education had come to
challenge the monopoly of the British over high-ranking Civil
Service jobs were characterized by the British as, one, lacking in
manly self control, and two, acutely intelligent but physically
effete. According to this argument the babu was unfit to be the
equal of the educated Englishman and was therefore deemed incapable of
self-rule. What is more, as Sinha convincingly argues:
[T]he contours of colonial masculinity
were shaped in the context of an imperial social formation that included both Britain
and India. The figures of the 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' were thus
constituted in relation to colonial Indian society as well as to . . . the emergence
of the 'New Woman'; the 'remaking of the working class'; the legacy
of 'internal colonialism' and the antifeminist backlash of the
1880s and 1890s (2).
These complex social forces, however, could
not be accommodated onto the canvas of Indian literary and filmic
melodrama which was painted in rather broad brush-strokes. Despite
the fact that the Bengali press and social reformers had
challenged the dominant discourse of colonial masculinity, there is considerable evidence
to prove that by the first quarter of the twentieth century, the
Bengali educated middle class had not only internalized the
stereotype of unmanliness but was engaged in consciously
overcoming it through training in elaborate regimens of physical
exercise, reforming the traditional Bengali diet, and emulating British
social etiquette. All these efforts were directed at rehabilitating the
image of the Bengali as manly, but even more urgently as civilized.
- Under these circumstances it is easy to see why, despite
other minor variations, every version of the Devdas narrative
begins with the protagonist being sent away from his rural
context to Calcutta: the cultural capital of the British empire in India.
The more the adolescent Devdas resists the separation from his
mother and his childhood playmate, the more adamant are his
father and older brother that he be sent away. The family is
afraid that the rural context may make Devdas an "undisciplined"
and "soft" man. While the narrative makes no direct connection
between his childhood pranks (in which Parvati is his ally) and
the family's anxiety over his potential softness, there is an
indirect suggestion that Devdas needs to be in the company of
other young men. Indeed an important part of the educational
project in Calcutta is the father's plan that Devdas join the
company of other aristocratic young men.
- It is interesting that even though the family members are
unanimous in their desire that Devdas acquire a taleem , an Arabic
word meaning education in its broadest sense, none of the films
shows Devdas attending any educational institution. Instead the
emphasis is on Devdas acquiring the fripperies, social etiquette,
and to some extent the values of the urban elite of Calcutta.
- In the 1936, Hindi version of the film, Devdas is at first
the object of derision in the city when he arrives there clad in
dhoti-kurta --traditional male attire. The film represents Devdas's
transformation through a change in his style of dress. When he
returns to his village, Devdas is dressed in a well tailored
western-style suit and bowler hat (the essential signifier of
colonial authority) and sports a somewhat redundant walking stick in
hand. Parvati remains singularly unimpressed by Devdas's urbanity and
rebukes him for this transformation by commenting, "You have become
like the rest of them!" More importantly, this first meeting
between the anglicized Devdas and Parvati takes place in front of a
small temple where Parvati is engaged in a religious ritual and
Devdas stands awkwardly outside this space, fidgeting nervously
with his walking stick.
- Thus even though in the film's narrative the opposition to
Devdas marrying Parvati had ostensibly come from the orthodoxy of
his own family, there is reason to believe that his guilt at his
inability to act as a free agent stemmed from his own recently
acquired Western-style education. As O. Mannoni argues in his
classic study of colonial relations, Prospero and Caliban , Western
education for the colonial subject is the "road from
psychological dependence to inferiority."
- Parvati, who did not receive a western education, was under no
pressure to refute any orientalist construction of her gender
position. It is no surprise that it was she who took the bold
step of suggesting that the couple force the situation by making
public their love for each other. Devdas, who was unwilling to
take the cue, claimed that he could not defile the honor of his
family. The fact of the matter is that as a colonized subject
Devdas is compelled to choose between the social ideal of manly
self-control and his desire for Parvati.
- According to the cultural logic of colonized India, Devdas is a
hero rather than a coward; he is successful in refuting the
negative construction of him as a morally and physically effete
man by maintaining his chastity. This makes Devdas a text of
colonial resistance; it is a narrative which creates a discursive
space wherein a colonial subject attempts his self-determination
albeit in the terms dictated by a colonizing, imperial discourse.
- Two aspects of gender ideology run concurrently in the Devdas
narrative. The first one--a condemnation of the social practice of
marrying young, beautiful girls from poor families to rich, old
men--was championed by Indian reformist social groups and
subsequently taken up by progressive film studios such as New
Theatres, under which Devdas (1935 & 1936) were made. Parvati's
marriage to an old man with children as old as herself to whom she
must play the selfless mother, addresses an issue that was at the
very heart of progressive reform among educated Indians throughout
the latter half of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The films
condemn the practice and depict Parvati's husband as apologizing to her for his initial
lustful designs on her. However, the appeal of the Devdas
narrative cannot be ascribed exclusively to the narrative's
moralism. Couched in the melodramatic narrative is the more
sensitive aspect of gender ideology which was prevalent in
colonial Bengal, namely the domestic sexual arrangements of
couples who are compatable in age. Parvati's endurance of a
sexless marriage which gains her the admiration of her husband,
step-daughter and step-son also permits her to remain faithful to
her true love--Devdas. There is no mistaking the fact that it is
the chastity of Devdas and Parvati rather than the celibate nature
of Parvati's marriage which is central to the narrative and which
elevates the film to its epic status.
- The opening sequences of each of the Devdas films focuses on
the friendship between Devdas and Parvati as children. These
sequences are marked by the innocence of the children's pranks
and their petty fights; all of them employ idyllic, rural settings. There is
considerable ambiguity as to when exactly Devdas and Parvati ceased
being playmates and fell in love with each other. In the
1956 version, when Devdas leaves for the city, Parvati is consoled
by itinerant entertainers who sing of the divine lovers--Radha and
Krishna--thereby suggesting that Parvati and Devdas were more than
friends. On the other hand, in each film there is a conversation
between Parvati and her girlfriend in which the latter specifically
asks Parvati the age of her betrothed. The issue is further complicated by the fact
that Parvati thinks she is being asked Devdas's age whereas the
girlfriend is referring to the man to whom she eventually gets
married. Whatever the diegetic confusion, the ideological stance
of the 1936 version was to drive home the point to the colonial
Censor Boards that Devdas is 20/22 years of age. This is important
because according to the British it was precisely the early sexual
maturation of the Bengali male which led to his effeteness,
promiscuity, and degeneracy.
- Devdas, the colonial subject, must reject the woman he loves
and who offers herself to him more than once; he must vehemently
condemn the sexuality of those who frequent prostitutes, and
despite his deep friendship with a prostitute, deny himself any
sexual gratification with her. In doing so, Devdas establishes his
manhood and his honor. In the films, chastity between two consenting
adults becomes an overdetermined site for the constitution as well as the
undermining of colonial ideology.
The Fantasy of Erotic Domination
- Regardless of the minor differences between the various
Devdas films, one climactic scene is central to all of them. Devdas
meets Parvati a day before her wedding and attempts to make
amends. Parvati, hurt from the rejection, tells Devdas she is glad
her parents have arranged her marriage with a mature and
responsible man. What is more, she knows her own worth now--she
knows she is beautiful as well as wise. Devdas, by contrast, is
narcissistic and lacking in moral stature. He is incensed by Parvati's
comments, since the charge echoes the preexisting orientalist discourse on
Bengali masculinity and
Devdas's own inferiority complex. Accusing Parvati of supreme
pride which must be tamed, and comparing her beauty to that of
the perfection of a full moon which is marred by a scar on its face,
Devdas hits Parvati on the forehead with a stick (a distinctly
phallic object in the film's mise-en-cadre ). Parvati is instantly
subdued. Devdas proceeds to break and throw away
the stick and immediately to bandage Parvati's bleeding forehead. He tells
Parvati that in the years to come this mark that he has
left on her face will remind her of him. (In later scenes
Parvati does indeed caress the scar when thinking of Devdas.) It
is interesting that in a subsequent shot wherein Parvati receives
a letter from a friend telling her that Devdas has returned to
the village where he whiles away his time shooting birds, the
sequence is inter-cut with a shot of Devdas re-visiting the bank
of the river where he had inflicted the sexual wound on Parvati
and idly sporting another stick.
- The original scene, wherein the erotic and the violent get
conflated, is obliquely repeated throughout the narrative. Even
though Devdas does not literally possess Parvati, he nevertheless
"leaves a mark on her." If, in Devdas's mind, Parvati's beautiful
face is comparable to an unsustainable state of perfection, he
claims his right to be the first to sully it, and she, in turn, is
almost complicitous in permitting this violation. It is no accident that
this scene of "ritual violence" is enacted on the bank of a river, a space where women
come to draw water, and where Devdas in a trespasser. The
presence of the water pitcher on Parvati's waist, whose open mouth
initially faces Devdas (in a point-of-view shot, faces the
camera) and from which the water subsequently gushes out as Parvati
falls to the ground, further reinforces the sexual undercurrents of the scene.
- When Parvati's mother notices that her daughter's face has
been scarred on the day before her wedding, she exclaims in
horror and panic. There is a suggestion, in the mother's
response, that the scar is a signifier of her defilement or
perhaps a violation of her chastity. It is worth remembering
that in India there are strong injunctions against a virgin
moving about freely just before her wedding, as she is believed to be
especially vulnerable at that time.
- Later in the story Devdas decides to return to Parvati only
when he throws up blood--a sure sign of his impending death. This
scene is inter-cut with another in which Parvati falls to the
ground (just as she had done when Devdas had hit her) and bleeds from
the scar on her
forehead. The emission of Devdas's vital bodily fluids is equated
with the bloody effusion from Parvati's sexualized scar. This
co-mingling of the lovers' blood sublimates the sexual union of the
lovers at a meta-textual level.[7]
Story of O/Devdas
- When South Asian film enthusiasts talk of Devdas, it is with
a marked sense of reverence for the suffering of the protagonist
and a nostalgia for a collectively lost innocence. When cultural
theorists, feminists, psychoanalysts or readers of sado-masochist
literature talk of Story of O--the classic text of
sadomasochism--it is with either a sense of subversive irreverence
for bourgeois sexuality or a sense of outrage at the flagrant victimization
of women in Western societies. What, besides
shaking Devdas fans out of a maudlin complacency, do I hope to
gain by comparing these two narratives? I believe that while the
Devdas narrative is by no means comparable to the overt and
explicit elements of sadomasochistic violence for which Story of
O is in/famous, it nevertheless manifests distinct though
repressed aspects of sadomasochism. Despite their differences
each text is centrally concerned with the pathology of failed
differentiation, and it is this pathology that the texts'
readers/viewers are interpellated through. I do not
mean to imply that the pathology of failed differentiation in
Story of O and Devdas may be rooted in comparable
socio-political contexts; the former remains outside the purview of my argument,
except in as far as the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Story of
O enable me to establish a causal relation between the political
economy and the psychology of colonialism.
- In her analysis of control and submission
in Story of O , Jessica Benjamin argues as follows:
The fantasy of submission and rational control is perpetuated by the splitting of the two
basic postures, male and female, in differentiation. One posture, traditionally male,
overemphasizes self boundaries, and the other posture, traditionally female, the
relinquishing of self. The splitting of these postures is the most important boundary
of all (1985, 45).
Returning to the tenets of Freudian psychology, Benjamin argues that
a child discovers his/her own identity by gradually differentiating
from the not-self: the (m)other. The process of establishing one's
autonomy, however, is reliant on the Other affirming and validating
this autonomy. The transition from dependence to independence
entails a "tension of simultaneous sameness and difference." The
masculine posture is stabilized through an over-emphasis on
boundaries and the feminine through the relinquishing of boundaries
and extending of the other to the self.
- As Benjamin herself
implies, the masculine and feminine postures among adults are not
coterminous with male and female, they are not limited to
heterosexual relationships, nor are they fixed or stable. In fact
these postures have to be continually reinforced. "Autonomous
selfhood develops, and is later confirmed chiefly by the sense of
being able to affect others by one's acts," although if these acts
completely negate the Other, the Self loses the recognition that is
essential for differentiation. The failure of the tension between
differentiation and all-encompassing wholeness can result in the
Self resorting to "ritual violence".
- Even though the above précis obviously does not do full
justice to Benjamin's argument, I hope that it will enable me to
locate the babu as floundering between his desperate attempts to
differentiate himself from the all-encompassing feminine posture
and his being continually relegated to the feminine by a persistent
and dominant discourse on Bengali masculinity (or lack thereof).
- According to the logic of sado-masochism "one person maintains
his boundary, and one allows the boundary to be broken" (Benjamin,
285). The pathology of failed differentiation implies that
"together the partners form a whole--the tension in which the
assertion and loss of self are united" (ibid). While in Story of O
the masculine and feminine postures are definite though in constant
need of re-inscription, in Devdas the masculine and the feminine
postures alternate. When the one advances, the other recedes. It is
in keeping with this logic that Devdas may submit to Parvati at the end (giving into the
feminine), but Parvati may not accept his submission (thereby
ascending to the masculine). This paradoxical relationship of
control and submission must either exhaust the dynamic through death
or suicide or it must transcend the inertia/momentum of the
context.
- While it may be fair to say that Devdas and Parvati's
repressed sexuality reached a climax in the scene where he scars
her, extremes of domination and submission between the lovers
persist from their childhood and recur throughout the narrative.
Even in the final sequence of the 1955 film when Parvati attempts
valiantly to get past the gates that separate her from Devdas, she
cannot help her finger getting caught in the door and bleeding profusely. I have tried to
argue that the origins of this repressed though unmistakably sadomasochistic sexuality may
be traced not to an inter-personal sexuality alone, but to the more
pervasive gender ideology of colonialism, within which these
dynamics of domination and submission operated.
- Devdas is perceived as heroic rather than pathetic because he
has continually striven to demarcate the boundary between himself
and the feminine. Not only does he reject first Parvati, then
Chandramukhi, but towards the end he has to fight the temptation of
returning to his mother. Likewise when he writes the fateful letter
to Parvati he states: "It has never occurred to me that I desire
you." Parvati interprets this as his rejection of her, but there is
some suggestion that Parvati is not sufficiently different from him
to be an object of his desire.
- Devdas's masculinity inheres in his ability to resist the
merger with the feminine. Parvati and Chandramukhi weaken this
resistance. In repeatedly surrendering themselves to Devdas they
work at cross-purposes from Devdas's instinct to differentiate.
Early in the narrative, for instance, when Parvati confides in a
friend that she is going to ask Devdas to marry her, the friend
asks Parvati if as a woman she wouldn't be embarrassed at
proposing marriage to a man. To this Parvati confidently replies:
What embarrassment? If I have not felt embarrassed telling
you--my best friend--about it, why would I feel any differently with
Devdas. After all, he and I are not separate (my translation).
Conclusion
- The babu of colonial India sought to self-organize his
masculinity by acquiring a western education; by distancing himself
from the values and practices of rural, "indigenous" India; and by
adopting the Western values of "manly self control". Even though
the colonial regime professedly encouraged the babu 's efforts at
adopting Western values, it could not afford to accede to the
babu 's masculinity unqualifiedly. After all, the British official
was engaged in a comparable attempt at organizing his own
masculinity. Instead of differentiating himself from British
woman, the former sought to coerce the babu into taking the feminine
posture. Unable to intervene in the sexual politics of the British, and unsuccessful
in refuting the latter's pervasive and dominant charge of
effeteness, the babu was compelled to violently differentiate
himself from the feminine within his own cultural context. As
Benjamin reminds us, "male domination is rooted in a struggle for
recognition between men in which women are mere objects or tokens:
the prize"(55). The problem with Devdas is that even though he deserves
and covets the prize, he believes that the greater glory is in
resisting the prize than in accepting it!
- In delineating the psycho-sexual dynamics of the Devdas
narrative, this essay has tried to articulate the subjectivity of the
colonial male subject. The enduring appeal of the Devdas narrative
inheres not so much in its ability to represent the "weak" hero of
Indian cinema but in its subversive potential for indirectly opening
up the space for a (tragic) resistance to imperialist gender
ideology. It is through the latter that Devdas has become an ur-text of
twentieth-century Indian culture.
Notes
- The babu was a term the British used to refer to
the
educated Bengali male who often functioned as an intermediary between the colonial
administration and the Indian populace. Back
- I am borrowing this term from Kaja Silverman's study, Male
Subjectivity at the Margins .Back
- A state of retirement from active social and familial life
spent in religious service and meditation by devout Hindus.Back
- Barua fell in love with and married the actress Januma,
who played the part of Parvati in Devdas . Despite the fact that
he was married to two women who, as rumor has it, lived in adjacent households in
Calcutta, "happiness eluded Barua." Back
- It is interesting that Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, even half
a century later, are not exempt from the discourse of effeminacy
that informed the Bengali babu . For instance, in describing the
lifestyle of Barua they write: "In his native Assam he (Barua)
had already bagged several dozen tigers, a rhinoceros and
innumerable boars--although it is said he blanched at the sight
of a cockroach" (77). Back
- D. Raheja and J. Kothari describe Sahir Ludhianvi's
legendary status as a love poet whom women were crazy about, the
fact that he was a life-long bachelor and one who eventually
became "immensely dissatisfied with [post-Independence]
Nehruvian politics."Back
- According to the Hindu world-view a person is composed of
seven bodily fluids or vital essences, the balance of which is
essential to his/her physical and spiritual well-being. The
essences are arranged in a hierarchical order, with semen being
the most refined and concentrated form of blood. Thus, for
Hindus blood and semen are integrally related. For more on the
subject, see Joel Paris, "Dhat: The Semen Loss Anxiety Syndrome".Back
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