“Rio Bravo [1959] is the most traditional of films.
The whole of Hawks is
immediately
behind it, and the whole tradition of the Western, and
behind
that is Hollywood
would
justify the existence of Hollywood , I think it
would be Rio Bravo .”
-Robin
Wood, Howard Hawks[1]
The
classical Indian cinema today is no more in need of justification than was its Hollywood counterpart in the late 1960s.[2],[3] This is not to argue that either cinema has
been immune historically to dispersions against its artistic character, nor
even that it no longer is; as commercial industries, each has and continues to
arouse criticism for its relationship to the marketplace, and for its supposed
concessions to capitalist enterprise.
Still, to say the neither requires justification is to make the least
controversial of claims: that art and entertainment can and do coexist in the
finest instances of each tradition.
Whether one searches for confirmation in Citizen Kane (1941), Singin’
in the Rain (1952) and Vertigo (1958) or Awaara
(1951), Mother India (1957) and Pyaasa (1957), the matter would seem to
be settled.
Still,
Robin Wood’s formulation, beyond the compellingly revisionist quality of its
canonization of Hawks’s film, sustains force to the extent that Rio Bravo tells us something particular
about the Hollywood cinema.[4] In much the same way, writer-director Kamal
Amrohi’s Pakeezah (‘Pure Heart,’ 1972)
succeeds in “validating” the concept of a classical Indian cinema: that is, Pakeezah’s existence – and indeed its
elevated artistic status – is altogether implausible outside the contours of
Bollywood filmmaking. This is not to
suggest merely that Amrohi’s film required
the commercial and/or technological institutions of the Bollywood industry. Rather, Pakeezah
owes its existence to the singular formal structure of the popular Indian
cinema. Specifically, Amrohi’s picture
is constructed according to Bollywood filmmaking’s defining epic structure; its
characteristic recourse to diegetic musical sequences – with motivations that are
not always readily discernable; and its wild disjunctures of space and time. This is to say that Pakeezah adheres to a set of conventions that mark its distance
from the characteristic economy of Hollywood
studio filmmaking, even as it instantiates a popular idiom of its own.
At
the same time, Pakeezah does not
represent simply an adoption of this popular form, but instead an appropriation
of its formal singularities for its particular semantic ends. That is, while Pakeezah utilizes a pre-existing mass-art form, its application is
calibrated to match the idiosyncrasy of the film’s content. Thus, though Amrohi has not invented a
cinematic idiom unique to his film, he has nonetheless succeeded in producing
the same level of organic rigor – between form and discourse – than have those
artists who have remade the language of their cinema in the image of their
subjects: from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Chantal Akerman to Abbas Kiarostami,
among scores of others. It is almost as
if we might say that the language of the classical Indian cinema is Amrohi’s,
to the degree that it was under his direction in Pakeezah that the form appeared to become as malleable as it long has
been for the greatest exemplars of counter-cinema, who have all transformed the
language of their art to match the content of individual works. Pakeezah
thus justifies the classical
Indian cinema as it not only marks it as but in fact makes it a singularly
expressive form.
‘Rare is the
connoisseur who appreciates such a flower’
While it is easy therefore to compare Pakeezah
with Rio Bravo on the level of its
adherence to a national tradition of popular art-making, to say that Pakeezah has the ‘whole of’ Amrohi
behind it, as Wood said of Hawks’ Western vis-à-vis its filmmaker, is far more
problematic. In particular, whereas the
American was credited as the director of more than thirty features by the
release of Rio Bravo ,
Pakeezah was only Amrohi’s third
directorial effort – with only one more to come – with writing credits on
approximately a dozen more (including his three directorial efforts to
date).
Amrohi
was born Syed Amir Haider Kamal in the town of Amroha, located in the northern
Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, on the seventeenth of January, 1918. Initially a writer and poet (Hindi-Urdu),
many of the Amrohi’s early writings can be situated within “the Shakespearean
contours of the Urdu Parsee theatre.”[5] In 1949, Amrohi made his directorial debut
with Bombay Talkies feature Mahal, a
ghost story-psychodrama starring Ashok Kumar.
Even in this his premiere feature, a number of Pakeezah’s key preoccupations are already present – such as the
obsessive desire of a male protagonist concentrated on a single female figure
of surpassing beauty, or in its emphasis on the tactility of human touch (a
subject which will be discussed in some detail with respect to Pakeezah). In other words, Amrohi began his career as a
mature filmmaker, attuned to the medium’s sensorial nature – and particularly
to the cardinality of sight and its relationship to touch; indeed, film
historians Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen have acknowledged that “Mahal is now considered a Hindi
classic.”[6]
With his second feature Daera (‘The
Division,’ 1953), made for the director’s newly-formed Kamal Pics, Amrohi
teamed with his third wife Meena Kumari.
Kumari also starred in Pakeezah,
which commenced shooting in 1964, the
year that she and the director divorced, thus halting production indefinitely.[7] Eventually agreeing to resume the project, Pakeezah was completed seven years
later. In the meantime, Kumari had
succumbed to alcoholism, which would lead directly to her death in 1972, only a
few days after the film’s commercial release.
As Rajadhyaksha and Willemen put it, “her off-screen life extended her
image as the lovelorn woman who drowns her passion in drink.”[8] In fact, Kumari’s notorious end yielded
outstanding box office receipts, even after the initial lukewarm response the
film received prior to Kumari’s death.[9]
Of course, Pakeezah’s popularity
can also be explained in part by its genre, the ‘courtesan’ film, which Rachel
Dwyer and Divia Patel describe as “one of the most popular genres, in terms of
the box office success rather than the number of films produced.”[10] (In this respect, Amrohi’s picture again
differs from Hawks’s.) In these works,
where the heroine is “always a Muslim,” the courtesan’s “attractions give rise
to a variety of pleasures in the audience.
She is portrayed as a victim of men’s lusts and as an object of the
viewer’s pity, but also delights the audience in being the object of the male
gaze as she dances for his entertainment.” [11] Consequently, in Pakeezah the spectacle on display is not only that of the beautiful
Kumari’s body – first in the role of Nargis and then as her daughter, the
eponymous Pakeezah – but also her deterioration commensurate again with the
actress’s real-life withering. However,
Kumari’s decay is procured not simply for the pity it might arouse for the
character, but in fact highlights the personal nature of Amrohi’s
narrative. Indeed, when the film’s
narrator (in the picture’s penultimate line) claims that “rare is the
connoisseur who appreciates such a flower,” it is apparent immediately that he
is referring not only to Pakeezah’s fictional
lover, but also to the line’s author as well – that is, to Amrohi, the film’s
creator and Kumari’s former spouse and lover.
In this moment, the film’s autobiographical content comes to the fore.
Following his
third film, Amrohi directed one last feature, 1983’s Razia Sultan, a biography of South Asia ’s
first female Muslim ruler. Less
conspicuously personal, Razia Sultan joins
the Amrohi-scripted, all-time Hindi classic Mughal-e-Azam
(1960, K. Asif) as works of a distant historical setting. The later work is perhaps most noteworthy for
the poetic consequence of its gestures – as for example when the film’s young male
protagonist Yakoot (Dharmendra) has the female Sultan’s (Hema Malini) communication
carved onto his chest, insuring that his blood will forever carry his lover,
the Sultan’s, words. Similarly, Amrohi’s
final film concludes with one of the most lyrical sequences in the recent
history of popular filmmaking. With an
echoing voice-over commencing as Yakoot rides off in slow-motion, a spear in
his back, we see the heavens, shooting stars and a series of red flares. The aforesaid booming vocal proclaims: “there
is a call from the skies! Come!!! This
world is unfit for you! We are
decorating another new world for you in the skies! It’s God’s order! Shining stars of the skies take our humble
bows! The sacrificed love drenched in
blood… Are coming into my protection!” In
short, Amrohi suggests the union of these two lovelorn souls in the world to
come, as a union not of flesh but of pure spirit.
‘Her soul cries out’
With
a similar, reverberating narration, Pakeezah
opens in a brothel. As the
golden-haired courtesan Kumari dances for a gathering of male admirers, the
disembodied voice-over begins :[12]
“Here is Nargis… [Whose] enchanting voice and the music of her anklet-bells
create a stir everywhere.” Indeed, her
seductive power flows not only from her staggering physical beauty, but also
from the allure of her song. She
captivates by sight and by sound, engendering the obsessive, self-destroying
desire of her suitors. As we are
instructed in the proceeding line of dialogue, “countless hearts spurned by her
lie disregarded beneath her feet.”
Throughout, Amrohi restricts his camera to the same dimly-lit interior,
establishing Nargis’s renown through his film’s overdubbed commentary, refusing
at this earlier juncture to illustrate her history.
Suddenly, the narration switches registers as we are told that Nargis’s
“soul cries out.” This proclamation is
followed in quick succession by the arrival of a dark, bearded man, Shahabuddin
(Ashok Kumar – likewise the star of the director’s Mahal), who retrieves her from the hell of the world she
inhabits. Amrohi thusly replaces the
diegetic relation of information – that is, through the act of telling – with a
more analogical system. When we see
Shahabuddin save his lover, it is not as if we are viewing a document of the
event, but rather the spectator is provided with an impression of Shahabuddin’s
and particularly Nargis’s emotional states in light of their union; Amrohi
approximates or glosses the event. Or,
to put it yet another way, it is a fundamentally poetic or even spiritual
depiction of the formation of the couple, presenting their union not in the
space and time in which it was forged – through the words, actions, and
gestures that would result in their coupling – but instead through an emotional
congruence conveyed in acts that do not proceed along the lines of
verisimilitude. In this respect, Pakeezah’s opening will be paralleled
subsequently by Razia Sultan’s conclusion.
Pakeezah’s
analogical prologue continues after the opening brothel sequence. Here, Amrohi’s film sustains its distance
from verisimilitudinal reality as Nargis and Shahabuddin travel to the
gentleman’s estate, in order to seek his father’s consent for their marriage. In a series of shots depicting the pair in a
carriage, the pitch black interior eliminates all background detail, leaving
only the couple in each other’s arms.
Their touch is infinitely soft, demonstrating a tactility which will
implicitly structure a subsequent sequence on a train – the double for that passage,
this precursor also focuses upon the sensorial (touch in both instances) in the
confined interior of a moving vehicle.
The world in this moment is Nargis and Shahabuddin, which will be
shattered in the forthcoming scene once his father rejects this woman of low
standing. At this point, Nargis rushes
out onto the street, where under a pool of lamplight in the deep distance, she
hires a rickshaw to take her to a graveyard.
Once there, the introductory
prologue concludes with one of the film’s more literary details: her death is
figured explicitly in both the crumbling ruins of the ancient graveyard and
also in the fact that this is a place which houses decaying flesh, the shells
of long-departed souls. Like the
sequence in the carriage and also the confrontation with the patriarch, this
section in the graveyard is again explicitly picked up later in the narrative,
when the eponymous Pakeezah – Nargis’s daughter, who again is also played by
Kumari – claims that her “vagabond dead body has returned to be buried” in the
“colorful tomb” of the brothels. As she
says to another courtesan, “every whore is a dead body;” they are “living
corpses, adorned and embalmed.”
Structurally, the film’s prologue provides the groundwork for the
subsequent parallels that emerge between mother and daughter, which of course
the double casting of Kumari is intended to reinforce. Likewise, the film’s introductory passage
also confirms the work of fate in dictating the outcomes of their lives: as the
above dialogue emphasizes, all prostitutes are in effect the living dead,
whether it is Nargis in the collapsing cemetery or Pakeezah in her later
self-awareness. Each will experience the
effects of time, losing that which has made them desirable, and indeed a
commodity: their beauty. Of course,
time’s passage signals not only this loss but a second that is far more severe,
though in the world of these women, analogous – that is, death itself –
provided that no amendment is made for life after death. In Pakeezah, death is immutable, precisely as the
soul does not migrate. Even so, the
soul, which is to say the metaphysical self, does exist in Pakeezah: namely, it is that which communes – often magically –
with other human beings. It is this
surely that Amrohi is signifying in the film’s prefatory opening, or in the
forthcoming description of Pakeezah’s great love.
‘Don’t taint them
by letting them touch the ground’
To be sure, the themes of beauty and loss in Pakeezah are most clearly present and acutely distilled into a
single feature of the courtesan: her feet.
They are both the principle tool of her trade and the primary source of
her attraction. Again, corresponding in
part to the sequence in the carriage, Amrohi portrays Salim (Raaj Kumar)
encountering a sleeping Pakeezah on a train.
Salim sits beside her and the beautiful courtesan’s toe, imitating the
back-and-forth rocking motion of the train cabin, persistently touches the
gentleman’s leg. His head bobs up and
down with the rhythmic touch of her foot.
Amrohi’s framing isolates the object of desire, Pakeezah’s feet, and the
male subject, mesmerized Kumari’s appendages.
Responding to this encounter, Salim pens a note telling her that she must
not allow her feet to be tainted by
“letting them touch the ground.”
He slips the message between her toes and leaves without once making her
aware of his presence. Waking, Pakeezah
finds the note, leading her to instantly fall in love with its author, who has
appreciated her beauty without placing any sexual demands on her in
return. In this way, his love is
inimical to the acquisition of pleasure that distinguishes her profession. He apprehends her beauty without attempting
to own it, which given her vocation would be his purview. Consequently, it is to him that she will give
her love in the same spirit of freedom.
However, following a set of circumstances that will seemingly render
their love as impossible as her parents’ before them, Pakeezah’s response is to
destroy the same object of desire which initially attracted the gentleman and
ultimately precipitated their union: she knocks over a lamp and proceeds to
dance on top of the glass, slicing open her feet. Indeed, this is a gesture of suicide triply:
first, she is renouncing her former lover and making any resolution impossible;
second, she is committing an act of professional suicide destroying the
principle object of her commodification as a dancer; and third, with the
ensuing loss of blood, she is literally committing suicide.
The gravity of this action, however,
is grounded in the prior rendering of her feet as a siphon for Salim’s
desire. And like the earlier sequence in
the carriage which renders the tactility of their touch with extreme precision,
the train-car sequence is conferred with a similar physicality. Here, it is the bouncing of her toes and
Salim’s resulting gaze which confirms the excitement that this illicit touch
stimulates in the protagonist. The
specific relation between sight and touch is concretized thus, with desire
becoming the connective tissue between the male spectator, that is the subject
whose gaze directs the mise-en-scène,
and the ensuing touch, the possession of beauty which said desire elicits. Accordingly, the space extant between the
subject and object produces the corresponding hope and anxiety which a
longed-for touch creates. The ultimate
end of beauty becomes its possession, even if it is certain to wane, which
Amrohi describes in Pakeezah’s (and Kumari’s) aging – the fact that Pakeezah was shot over a period of more
than seven years secures a literal instantiation of this same theme. Symbolically, Amrohi figures the female
protagonist’s deterioration in the brothels in the object of a kite, which is
shown first intact and trapped in the tree, and later decaying in this same
place.
Of course, there is another side to
the identification writ into Pakeezah’s economy
of sight and touch: the perspective of the object. Certainly, as much Salim wishes to touch his
beloved, Pakeezah desires the touch of her hallowed lover. While this reading is not immediately obvious
at this moment – Pakeezah is after all sleeping, and presumably unaware of his
presence – it becomes clear enough when she subsequently finds herself in her
lover’s camp. Here, after Pakeezah
discovers that this is the man of whom she has long dreamed (the details of
which will follow in the next section) Salim arrives home to find her
mysteriously lying on his bed. Formally,
Amrohi places Pakeezah inside the tent in the right foreground, leaving the
center left empty and open, looking out onto the river. When Salim returns, he fills this negative
space with Pakeezah remaining turned away from the gentleman. Amrohi cuts to a medium close-up of the male,
and then to a point-of-view of her body, which slowly pans down to her
feet. Thus, Amrohi reminds his viewer
that she is the object of the male protagonist’s gaze. However, his passion is clearly matched by
her’s: she remains turned away from Salim, breathless, with her bosom heaving
up and down, which Amrohi shows in a tightly-framed medium close-up, cropped
from her chest up. Indeed, in this image
Amrohi inscribes two distinct witnesses – the one longing for the touch and the
other longing to be touched. Desire is
shared by subject and object alike. Still,
it is essential to remember that Pakeezah’s enchantment followed initially from
Salim’s refusal to attain her love coercively.
Freely, the object gives itself to the subject.
‘I don’t know when
this dream will end, and in what wilderness I will awaken?’
The description thus far emphasizes
Pakeezah’s objecthood. However, it is
less Salim’s vantage which directs the narrative, in spite of the fact that his
subjecthood is established in the point-of-view shots detailed above, but
rather it is Pakeezah’s mentation and her anxiety that shapes the narrative’s
structure. Nowhere is this better
illustrated than in the passage following a series of interactions in the Pink Palace
Yet, it is not a simple pondering of
these lines that Amrohi communicates – he is not content in telling his
audience that Pakeezah thinks of this noble gentleman, that she is lovesick. Instead,
what follows is a mapping of her internal processes, her thoughts and
feelings. After a fellow courtesan
rejects her assumption that the letter was intended for her, Pakeezah removes
herself and lies beside a pool of water.
Condensation drips from a chandelier.
Then, abruptly, the narrative shifts spaces to a houseboat floating
leisurely down a river. (Amrohi composes
this image with the boat surrounded by a white field, extracting the action
from the space as if presenting a bordered illustration.) The narrative then continues inside the
houseboat where Pakeezah finds herself with the same suitor who had purchased
her earlier in the passage. He remarks
that his heart tells him that she is “stolen property, a crime to buy.”
Following this exchange, he is summoned by his crew as elephants threaten
the vessel; she lies back down as the boat is smashed to pieces. Pakeezah however survives and is washed
ashore, sleeping on a remaining fragment of the ship. Consequently, she finds herself in the
riverside camp mentioned above. Looking
through the camper’s things, she discovers a journal that mentions the incident
on the train; amongst his things is a feather which Salim had retained from her
as a souvenir. Amrohi then depicts the
woman singing and dancing in a series of disparate landscapes before returning
to the camp. Once back, Salim returns and
they converse with Pakeezah’s back to the gentleman (as has been detailed in
the prior section); they speak through the canvas of the tent, with Salim
telling her that he must leave – though likewise assuring her that he will
return before sundown. Though Salim
keeps his promise, she is brought back home, after being spotted by a party
from the brothel. As such, her journey has
proven to be a zero-sum affair; it as though she has not encountered her lover
at all, particularly as she has yet to look at Salim. Having thus returned to the place whence her
journey began, it is as though Amrohi has depicted Pakeezah’s fantasy of an
encounter with her unknown lover rather than a consecutive series of events,
however improbable their succession.
In fact, this alternative encoding
of fantasy extends to other passages, providing a double to our comprehension
of the film as a series of linked, sequential places and times in which the
diegesis occurs. In these sections,
Amrohi has constructed a narrative that not only operates on the basis of a
series of discrete, consecutive events, but additionally upon the internal
hopes and conflicts of the female protagonist.
Together, these forge the film’s narrative-temporal progression, as a detailing
of Pakeezah’s thoughts and anxieties, even as Pakeezah offers a more conventional reading of its narrative world.
The first clue to this alternate interpretation is in the causality
attached to the female protagonist’s act of lying down. In example after example, her performance of
this gesture precedes a shift in the space and the time of the narrative: for instance,
when Amrohi transitions from the brothel to the houseboat, the houseboat to the
camp, and subsequently back to her lover’s company after returning to the Pink Palace
‘Beloved, let us
journey to the moon’
Yet, the indication that Amrohi is
charting Pakeezah’s internal life does not stop with the exposition of
contingencies, but further is manifest, and indeed dictates the geographical
and temporal location of a pair of musical numbers. In “Mausam Hain,” which follows Pakeezah’s
realization that she is in her lover’s camp, the introduction of the song
number commences with a tight centered close-up of Pakeezah opening her
eyes. This gesture corresponds to an
earlier image where her wealthy suitor is shot utilizing this same frontal
framing as he stares directly ahead, even as Pakeezah keeps her eyes closed. Thus, in the sequentially latter instance, Pakeezah’s
desire and commitment to Salim is revealed by her repetition of the gesture
that she earlier withheld from the prior admirer. With her feelings for Salim, she is awakening
from her slumber.
Indeed, this passion is both displaced onto the following musical
sequence and simultaneously, again, guides the spatial and temporal shifts that
occur presently. To be specific, Amrohi
cuts from this close-up to a slow motion long shot of a riverbank where scores
of birds take off during midday. The
director then cuts to an image with a similar subject, but one which occurs at
sunset. The next image is of Pakeezah in
her hammock looking off into the distance – it is again daylight – as the
lyrics to “Mausam Hain” begin: “love is in the air.” She slowly turns toward the camera with
Amrohi lyrically utilizing slow-motion once again. Following another image of the birds at
sunset, Amrohi cuts to a long shot-composition of the camp, alongside the river,
in the light of late afternoon. Pakeezah
is thereafter shown wading into the river in slow-motion; standing atop a small
cascade; and then, following an image of a landscape after dusk, she is
depicted in daytime on dry land. Consequently,
it becomes clear that while this passage can be read tentatively as a series of
places in which Pakeezah improbably (given the floral and topographical
variations that the author presents) finds herself over a period of time – inserted
with non-diegetic landscapes – it also might be read much more plausiby as an
exemplification of her emotional rapture at the revelation of her good
luck. Amrohi tells us what is within
Pakeezah more than where she stands.
While certainly musical numbers are
used routinely in Indian popular cinema to articulate the feelings of a
character, thereby occupying distensions in the time of their narratives, it
just so happens that in this apparent moment of temporal expansion, Amrohi also
uses a series of often unconnected and temporally incongruent landscapes to
similarly parse Pakeezah’s feeling of love for her still (at this point)
unknown suitor. Consequently, these
landscapes can be viewed in a fashion similar to the song lyrics, which
themselves serve to reinforce the conflation between interior and exterior that
governs this musical sequence. As she
says at one point, “the dark monsoon clouds awaken a desire in me.” The landscapes themselves indicate her emotional
state.
The second of the two songs that
figure Pakeezah’s thought in the spatial-temporal logic of its picturization,
“Chalo Dildar,” follows the protagonist’s tortured disclosure to her lover that
she is a prostitute. His reaction – that
it is immaterial because he loves her – prompts the number beginning with the
lyric “beloved, let us journey to the moon.”
Again, the protagonists find themselves within a primordial site of
beauty – that is, within nature.
‘Each day my soul
struggled away from my body’
However, even more important than the recurrence of this logic is the
dialogue that precedes it, or to be more specific, a single line of dialogue
spoken by Pakeezah during the build-up to her pained confession: “each day my
soul struggled away from my body.” In
this declaration, not only does Amrohi encapsulate the psychology of his female
protagonist, but moreover succeeds in defining the structural logic of his
entire film: Pakeezah represents the
wanderings of her soul in contradistinction to the degradations (and ultimately
degeneration) of her body. On the one
hand, she is a courtesan, she is nothing other than her flesh; her entire value
as a human being rests in her physical appearance, which is bought and forcibly
returned to the Pink Palace. On the
other hand, Pakeezah is the sum of her dreams and fears; she is a romantic that
longs after a mysterious lover. As such,
Amrohi’s narrative form allows for the exploration of her physical self (as
instantiated by her role as a prostitute) and her metaphysical self (showcased
in her meetings with Salim) simultaneously.
That Amrohi succeeds in this is accommodated by the film’s classical
Bollywood structure, which allows for the aforesaid spatial and temporal
disjunctures. The non-epic Hollywood form again would not permit this film’s
structuring contradistinction. It is in
the form of classical Indian cinema that Amrohi finds space to explicate his
metaphysics.
As to this content, it bears stating
that as much the sequence that leads up to and follows their initial meeting in
the camp can be read as a depiction of pure interiority, of contingencies for
which she alternately fears and longs, it might be viewed likewise in terms of
its alternations between the subjection of her body to the waking death of
prostitution and the enlivening possibilities of love. To be sure, Amrohi seems to suggest this
antagonism in her final return to the brothels where she remarks that
prostitutes are ‘living corpses, adorned and embalmed,’ and that she is a
“restless corpse, lying in an open grave.”
In this way, Amrohi is suggesting the spiritual-emotional emptiness of
this life and that these women are in fact shells with no deeper metaphysical
presence. This declaration comes after
the film has charted her internal wanderings in great detail, thereby
reaffirming the disconnect between body and soul – in a sense, the moments of
connection with Salim are nothing more than pure spirit, soul without body – and
thus sharpening the film’s discourse: there is no escape ultimately for women
of this society.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Pakeezah’s achievement once again resides in its simultaneous inhabitation
of the contours of a commercial art, even as these forms convey the film’s
unique content – namely, in its communication of its female protagonist’s subjectivity. If this subject exceeds the expressive limits
of film art, to the extent that cinema is the most material of media (limiting
itself to surface realities) classical Bollywood’s pliable narrative structure allows
for the exposition of interiority. That
is, Pakeezah highlights the capacity
of commercial Indian cinema to engage matters of the soul through a
conventional adaptation of its forms. By
comparison, the presence of religion in Hollywood filmmaking, and in those
instances of counter-cinema that have been positioned in relation to, and as a
response to conventional studio filmmaking, dictate that immateriality is
conveyed in the subject matter, iconography or as explicit absences (as in the
blank surfaces of Robert Bresson’s cinema).
By comparison, immateriality is repeatedly the subject of Pakeezah, whether it is the invisible
relationship between sight and touch or the meeting of pure spirit that the
film’s conventional narrative structure weighs against the deadening corporeal
existence of the eponymous lead.
Still, Pakeezah remains one of
the most profoundly material and indeed tactile films ever made, whether it is
the film’s emphasis upon the sensorial or its more ubiquitous treatment of
beauty as a subject. Nowhere is the
latter focus clearer than in the second song sung by the titular lead, “Thade
rahiyo.” Here, we see Kumari centered
and positioned in the lower half of the symmetrical frame – all of which is
characteristic of Amrohi’s mise-en-scène
in Pakeezah – with reflecting pools
beside either shoulder. These bodies of
water are utilized throughout the sequence to reflect the actress’s image or
the red candles that ring the liquid. That is, Amrohi’s staging of this sequence
emphasizes the pictorial richness generated by these shifting surfaces, in
addition to Kumari’s beautiful, moving body.
In each case, it is with beauty that Amrohi populates his frame.
This is not to suggest, however, that Amrohi’s staging lacks an organic
relationship to the film’s content – which is to say that it does not seem
imposed of the film’s thematic constellation.
In the preceding musical number, “Inhi logon ne,” Amrohi constructs a
multi-planar space to highlight the scope of the world Pakeezah inhabits: with
Kumari, covered by a cascading red veil and dress, again restricted to the
center of the lower foreground, we are provided a vantage of Patiala filled with multi-storied structures
containing arched apertures. In these
framed openings – and in one case, on the roof of a structure in the right
background – we see women echoing Kumari’s movements, dancing and spinning. As
such, Amrohi visually constructs the scope of the social problem instantiated
by Nargis and later Pakeezah, through a series of receding, populated
planes.
At the same time, this space construes the director’s obsessive interest
in detail that was equally present in the prior example. In a word, we become aware in either case of
the director’s aesthete’s sensibility.
His concern is for beauty, whether it is Kumari’s, his sets’ and
costumes’ – Dwyer and Patel have argued that the courtesan genre is responsible
for “some of the most extravagant and beautiful sets and costumes in the
history of the Hindi film”[14] –
or the pooling of a golden, artificial light that paints his actress as she
returns to the Pink Palace. Hence, if Pakeezah’s
narrative structure (which is also to say its use of time) derives from the
codes and conventions of Bollywood filmmaking, as does nominally its emphasis
on art design as a source of spectatorial pleasure, Amrohi’s spatial articulations
and handling of light underscore his individualized sensibility. In this respect, Pakeezah does more justify the popular Indian cinema; it manifests
the artistic sensibility of a truly ‘rare… connoisseur.’
This essay was originally published in Indian Auteur, No. 3 (May 2009).
[1] Robin
Wood, Howard Hawks (Detroit ,
Michigan : Wayne State
University
[2]
Throughout the essay, the terms ‘Bollywood’ and ‘popular Indian
cinema/filmmaking,’ will be used synonymously.
This is not to suggest that either is unproblematic or unworthy of
interrogation. Rather, it is my
contention that such a task is beyond the purview of my paper, and for the sake
of variety I have decided to use each when the meaning of a national commercial
industry is clear. As for the ‘classical
Indian cinema,’ my use of this term is intended to suggest Indian cinema’s
bifurcation into blockbuster and art cinema traditions. Whether or not this had occurred by Pakeezah’s release in early 1972, it
seems clear that the film’s initial conception in 1958 squarely precedes this
distinction.
[3] Wood’s
claim that he would choose Rio Bravo to
‘justify the existence of Hollywood ’
first appeared in Howard Hawks (London:
Secker and Warburg; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1968).
[4] As Wood
puts it, Rio Bravo is “a triumph of
what I have described as a ‘communal’ art, growing out of a rich tradition, in
which established genres, certain basic methods of collaboration at all levels
all contribute: an ideal democratic art
in which the artist is a pervasive presence without feeling the need to insist
upon it.” My argument for Pakeezah, is, quite to the contrary,
located in Amrohi’s individual sensibility.
Pakeezah is a work, or even the work of singular artistic
vision. Rio Bravo (London :
British Film Institute, 2003): 85.
[5] Ashish
Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen cite as an example his script for Akhtar
Hussain’s Romeo and Juliet (1947). Encyclopaedia
of Indian Cinema, revised ed. (London:
British Film Institute, 1999): 42.
[6] Ibid.
314.
[7] Ashish
Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopaedia
of Indian Cinema, New Revised ed. (London :
British Film Institute, 2002): 42, 410.
[8] Ibid. 135.
[9] Pakeezah managed a net gross of 2,75,00,000 and a distributor share
of 1,65,00,000, according to website BoxOfficeIndia.com (http://www.boxofficeindia.com/1972.htm). The former was
sufficient to make Pakeezah the
second highest grossing film of 1972.
[10] Rachel
Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India : The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick , New Jersey :
Rutgers University
[11] Ibid.
69-70.
[12] For
clarification, Dwyer and Patel note that “in the booklet for Pakeezah we are given explanation of
what these women stand for. Known as tawaifs, they are regarded as being of a
much higher status than the Western term ‘prostitute’ allows for. The booklet projects them as representing a
tradition and a form of cultural institution, and their existence is traced
back to ancient India where they are mentioned in the texts and were used as
informers by the administrators, thus placing them ‘at the centre of politics
and culture for centuries and centuries’… The booklet emphasizes that she is
not in the sexual market and that she is almost a one-man woman.’” Cinema India
[13] Pakeezah’s is set in Punjabi’s “princely
state of Patiala
in the early years of the twentieth century.”
Ibid., 69.
[14] Ibid.
70.
1 comment:
A good article about indian cinema.
Mughal Tent
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