{"id":971,"date":"2012-11-10T12:42:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T12:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=971"},"modified":"2015-05-02T20:05:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-02T20:05:18","slug":"playing-passion-over-penance-re-viewing-chokher-bali-1902-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/playing-passion-over-penance-re-viewing-chokher-bali-1902-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Passion Over Penance – Re-viewing Chokher Bali (1902-2002)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u2018Chokher Bali<\/em> came as a sudden intervention\u2026. not only in the way of my own literary journey, but in the entire stretch of Bengali literature as well\u2019, maintained Rabindranath Tagore in introducing his first ever \u2018long story\u2019 (novel), published serially in Nabaparjay<\/em> Bangadarshan <\/em>during 1901-1902.[1]<\/a><\/sup> The novel, subject to a strident controversy, was censured by contemporary critics on grounds of \u2018vulgarity\u2019, for foregrounding the sexual transgressions of an upper caste, Hindu widow. Strong moral indictments came from contemporary critics like Suresh Chandra Samajpati who reprimanded \u2018the utter disregard for literary ethics\u2019 that \u2018eclipsed the novel\u2019 (Sahitya<\/em>, February-March,1902) while Buddhadeb Bose was disappointed with \u2018the floppy and patchy finishing\u2019 of an otherwise bold and insightful exploration (Kabita, <\/em>June-July, 1940).<\/p>\n

A century after the writing of the novel, the film, directed by Rituparno Ghosh, sought to recapture the imagination of the Bengali audience creating a \u2018gorgeous chamber piece suffused with sensuality and its denial\u2019. Binodini, the sexual widow, returned\u2014this time, on the silver screen.<\/p>\n

With Binodini, it has been often argued, Tagore inaugurated a new era of female characterization in Bengali literature though it was not for the first time that the desirous widow who lay latent in Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar\u2019s writings was fleshed out in contemporary Bengali fiction. In the universe of literary imagination, the widow made a long journey, from pulps to scandal literatures, from farces to classics\u2014from Bankim\u2019s Rohini to Sarat Chandra\u2019s Kiranmoyee.<\/p>\n

In Bishabriksha <\/em>(1873) Bankim Chandra allowed Kundanandini to be remarried and introduced the licentious Heera, the widowed maid, who wrecked the family and the moral order by her intrigues. Kunda killed herself. Rohini, another transgressive widow, was killed by the man she loved in Krishnakanter Will<\/em> (1878). In Sarat Chandra\u2019s Charitraheen<\/em> (1917), Kiranmoyee fought a battle with herself in pursuit of her desires and her anarchy was resolved only through her self-defeat and a retreat into madness. All these widows, representing unsettling threats to conjugality, family and the social order, had to be removed from the social canvas, by death or banishment.<\/p>\n

Writing under the shadow of Rohini\u2019s \u2018unjustified\u2019 murder, Tagore deliberately averted the occasion of planting \u2018another poison tree\u2019 in Bangadarshan<\/em>. Tagore\u2019s Binodini, an educated and attractive widow, was placed within the context of the newly emerging urban family of early twentieth century Bengal. Capable of both passion and intrigue, she disrupted the settled, seemingly harmonious, conjugal and filial relationships. She shrewdly played with Mahendra, displacing the na\u00efve Asha, but herself longed for Behari, Mahedra\u2019s friend. But, unlike the lecherous Shyamasundari, the widowed sister-in-law of Kumudini, in Jogajog<\/em> (1929) and the fastidious and jealous widowed Mejorani<\/em>, the sister-in-law of Bimala, in Ghare Baire <\/em>(1916), Binodini was self-aware even as she was disruptive and dignified both in surrender and rejection. Deriving its strength from an elaboration of inter-personal relationships\u2014sexual, marital, familial, and friendships, Chokher Bali<\/em> investigated intricacies of marriage, holding in tension the choice between the irrevocable marital bond and the legitimacy of desire.<\/p>\n

However, Rituparno was not entirely happy with Tagore\u2019s characterisation of Binodini, as he wrote while making the film, \u2018Tagore seemed to have imposed widowhood on Binodini as a literary devise either to increase the commercial value of the novel or to heighten her sexual attraction for readers\u2019. Rituparno surmised,<\/p>\n

[Tagore] himself did not directly encounter the harsh realities of widowhood. The widow\u2019s struggle was not only against her sexual desires. The daily routine of rituals and deprivations could reduce an ordinary woman into becoming helpless, mean and selfish\u2026. Realistically perhaps, it might have been natural for a destitute widow, coming from abject poverty to seek, first of all, sexual pleasures in Mahendra\u2019s arms. But then, Chokher Bali<\/em>\u2019s author would have been someone else, not Rabindranath.[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In \u2018deconstructing\u2019 the classic, Rituparno, however, neither deprives his film of its \u2018commercial value\u2019 nor does he fail to enhance its \u2018sexual attraction\u2019. He is rather keen to produce a \u2018passion play\u2019, based on the sexual forays of a young Hindu widow.[3]<\/a><\/sup> It portrays Binodini as a \u2018desiring subject\u2019, the pivot of a \u2018forbidden\u2019 attraction, sweeping others with her licentious desires. Unsurprisingly, Rituparno\u2019s attempt to recreate the \u2018psychological\u2019 novel invited flak from critics for compromising on both artistic and ethical scores. In the film, observed some critics, \u2018one misses the dignity and self respect\u2019 which went into the making of Binodini in the novel. Instead Rituparno made Binodini virtually a \u2018nymphomaniac\u2019.[4]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In the film, Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) is engaged in wild trysts with Mahendra (Prosenjit Chatterjee), sometimes within the closed enclosure of a phaeton, and desperately yearns for sexual gratification of her love for Behari (Tota Raychoudhuri). The young widow displays herself shamelessly in a red<\/em> jacket and frolics in gold jewellery. She sings English songs while making tea for herself and Rajlakshmi (Lily Chakrabarti), the elderly widowed matriarch of the house. And the one scene that excites much controversy and some disgust is the depiction of an unexpected onset of menstruation of Binodini when she is engaged in the kitchen during Ambubachi. <\/em>Is this a pollution of the ritual purity of abstentious widowhood? Is it a depiction of the other elderly widows\u2019 discomfort with sexuality? Or does it symbolize the sexual fecundity of the widow whose menstruating period coincides with that of the mother earth? The young widow is not, as she is supposed to be, \u2018sexually dead\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"chokher<\/p>\n

Woven around this tussle between sexual desire and sexual death, the film is located firmly within a symbolized domain of ceremonies and rituals that marks and also resolves the tension between two different experiences of upper caste women\u2019s lives\u2014wifehood and widowhood.[5]<\/a><\/sup> Rituparno elaborately draws a visual binary between Asha\u2019s (Raima Sen) celebratory wifehood and the barren widowhood of Binodini, situating them in two distinctive colour zones, signifying their respective sexual-cultural locations. In this symbolic structure of \u2018colours\u2019, laid down by the brahminic<\/em> patriarchal culture, the wife is assigned the vibrant \u2018red\u2019, embodying life, fertility and sexuality, in opposition to the \u2018white\u2019, underlining the non-bride status of the widow and her continued association with renunciation, desexualisation and death. Thus Asha, the only wife in a gallery of widows, celebrates the Bijaya<\/em> Dashami<\/em>, the immersion festival of goddess Durga, by washing the smeared vermillion from her face under Binodini\u2019s jealous and silent gaze, only to be broken by the announcement of the onset of the following lunar cycle, Ekadasi<\/em>\u2014the only ritual reserved for the widow, enjoining her to fasting, may be without a drop of water. While exercises in celibacy involve the process of reigning in every possible desire, Binodini rebels against such proscriptions and remains unapologetic about her \u2018lapses\u2019. Exuding sensuality in her gestures and glances, her every action reflects non-conformity and seduction, subverting her prescribed socio-sexual status. Her fascination for the colour red<\/em>, be it a red jacket or a red shawl, is used as a motif of her sinful passion. More symbolic is Binodini\u2019s abundant hair, which invokes erotic desire and even wantonness, in contrast to the tied or shorn heads of other widows. But here, Rituparno can not be charged of deviating from Tagore as the latter himself provided both these clues in his novel. Tagore allowed Binodini to keep her hair open and to wrap a red<\/em> shawl when she feigned to be in deep sleep as Mahendra stealthily entered the room to capture her photograph.<\/p>\n

\"chokherTo reinforce the demarcation between pleasure and penance, the film expectedly encroaches upon the most intimate private, where the licit love of the wife collides and clashes with the illicit sexuality of the widow. As Asha rejoices in her anniversary night with Mahendra the camera rolls on to focus sharply on Binodini\u2019s bare and unadorned hands, caressing her own body, pining for \u2018pleasures of the flesh\u2019. The entire scene foregrounds her unsatisfied sexuality as the background score wails, \u2018Madhava Milana Tare Amar Radha<\/em>\u2019, drawing her closer to the archetypal symbol of deviant love, \u2018Radha\u2019. In the film, as in the novel, Binodini\u2019s deviance reverberates in the transgressive love of Radha, the icon of medieval romance, who immortalized her parakiya<\/em> prem <\/em>(love outside marriage) with Krishna. Binodini was represented as \u2018the ageless, timeless, the eternal cowherd maiden\u2019, \u2018trudging through the ages in quest of her lover…, bursting with the throb of desire\u2019.[6]<\/a><\/sup> In the film, too, Binodini longs for the \u2018lecherous Krishna\u2019 (Lampat Kalia)<\/em> to rescue her from the thrall of enforced asceticism.<\/p>\n

Indeed, what emerges as the dominant strain in the narrative is the sanction and rejection of \u2018pleasures of the flesh\u2019. Hence, the conjugal rapture of Asha with her husband, Mahendra, once so obsessed with the experimentation of the nitty-gritty of companionate conjugality, by refashioning his wife into a new mould, with new attire and with a new rhetoric of modernity is offset by the blatant violation of marital commitment as he is drawn towards Binodini. Even though Rituparno moves far beyond the narrative text in perfecting his \u2018passion play\u2019, he can not be charged of tampering historical facts when he shows the English doctor suspecting Binodini, who arrived at his doorstep with Mahendra at an odd hour of night, to be illegitimately pregnant! In colonial Bengal, doctors could not blamed for mistaking a minor injury of a wounded finger for a case of clandestine abortion as the latter had been fairly common among upper caste widows.<\/p>\n

Chokher Bali<\/em> marks a sharp break in the portrayal of a Bengali Hindu widow and this perhaps contributed to the controversy over the film. At the same time, the controversy was quite muted. Much greater violence attended the public debate erupted over Deepa Mehta\u2019s attempt to film Water<\/em> in 2000 (finally released in 2005). Water <\/em>was a depiction of the lives of Hindu widows of early twentieth century Benares and their \u2018transgressive\u2019 sexual practices that fell foul of neo-Hindutva ideologues. Agitators went on a rampage and forced Mehta to stop the shooting. Mehta was accused of defaming the city of virtue, of misrepresenting virtuous Hindu widows by portraying them as prostitutes.[7]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

But no such controversy overshadowed Prem Rog <\/em>(1982), one of Raj Kapoor\u2019s less publicized films, which delved into the issues of enforced widowhood, tonsure and sexual abuse of widows. Manorama, in Prem Rog<\/em>, was a young, high caste woman who became a widow after a few months of her marriage. Raped by her brother in-law, she came back to her parental home, where she was forced to observe rigorous asceticism, adhering to rigid sartorial and dietary restrictions. Raj Kapoor finally allowed his widowed heroine to remarry, running counter to mainstream cine sentiment. Running in empty houses, the film was rejected by the Indian audience.<\/p>\n

No big round of applause followed the release of Rajinder Singh Bedi\u2019s Ek Chadar Maili Si <\/em>(1986), a retelling of the traditional customary rite of widow remarriage or Chadar<\/em> (levirate), prevalent in the agrarian economy of Punjab-Haryana. The film narrated the tale of Rano, a widow with two grown-up children, who was forced to marry Mangal, her young brother-in-law, acquiescing to the dictates of the family and the Panchayat<\/em>. While both Rano and Mangal yielded to the \u2018social consent\u2019 of the joint patriarchal family, the film ended with a note of reconciliation, resolving the tension inherent in the politics of the peasant society, where in \u2018allowing\u2019 sexual cohabitation and remarriage of a widow, the family rejected the question of her \u2018choice\u2019 to acquire the command over her property and her labour.<\/p>\n

Widows on the canvas of Bengali cinema are mostly the pristine and the pitiable, past the age of \u2018sexual promiscuities\u2019. In Pather Panchali <\/em>(1955) Satyajit Ray immortalized the pathetic Indir Thakrun and presented the vulnerable but self-assertive Sarbajaya in Aparajito <\/em>(1956). Tapan Sinha\u2019s Nirjan Saikate<\/em> (1963) offered four widows from an orthodox joint family of Calcutta at a moment of brief respite from their gruelling regimen of austerities as they set out for a pilgrimage in Puri to discover a new shore, a new life.<\/p>\n

With a few exceptions, the tinsel industry has upheld the image of the pure and ascetic widow. Does Chokher Bali <\/em>break this rule, deviate from this tested ideal? Binodini offers a powerful voice for female agency. She is able to \u2018speak\u2019 in a radical language, challenging the established norms of female behaviour, and goes far in questioning Rajlakshmi\u2019s ascetic double-standards. The ordinariness of the situation and the every-day settings in which she is placed heightens the potency of her \u2018voice\u2019 and highlights the hypocrisy of the social judgment to which she is subject. She is allowed to rebel against and flout social sanctions in an unprecedented manner, but the threat she poses to the brahminic<\/em> moral order is also resolvable. In Tagore, her \u2018transgression\u2019 itself perhaps affords a useful means of playing out the pre-determined irresolution. Writing in the heyday of cultural nationalism, amidst implacable resistance against gender reforms within the Hindu society, Tagore might have hurried towards a \u2018disappointing\u2019 end of his novel. Has Rituparno, making the film under the shadow of \u2018Water\u2019 controversy, equally compelled to seek a solution other than her sexual gratification? Or would such a resolution of Binodini\u2019s sexuality be too drastic a reinterpretation of Tagore\u2019s novel?<\/p>\n

In Chokher Bali<\/em>, the widow provides a discursive site of cinematic exhibition, which remains an exercise to accommodate deviance within a new code of sexual morality. In one of its opening scenes, reacting to the sudden death of Swami Vivekananda, whose call to sexual abstinence gave brahmacharya<\/em> a new dimension in Swadeshi Bengal, Mahendra questions sarcastically, \u2018How\u2019s that Behari? End of celibacy?\u2019 As the film progresses, the contrast between celibacy and sexual passion encompasses not only the opposition between Binodini and Asha, but also Behari and Mahendra. Binodini challenges Behari\u2019s celibacy thus, \u2018There is no kudos in taking on the guise of Vivekananda.\u2019 She snaps back, \u2018A man who can refuse a young unprotected woman is rather considered a eunuch.\u2019 Celibacy troubles Behari\u2019s ideology. Can it solve the widow\u2019s dilemma?<\/p>\n

\"\"This social question of the widow\u2019s disruptive sexuality is left unanswered in the novel, which ended with an abrupt exit by Binodini from the familial domain. What happened to Binodini, where did she go \u2014are questions not answered by Tagore. Binodini\u2019s unfinished journey, however, was completed in diverse ways by scores of other women in Tagore\u2019s novels and short stories, by Mrinal in Streer Patra<\/em>, Kalyani in Aparichita<\/em>, Damini in Chaturanga<\/em> and Kumudini in Jogajog<\/em>. In all of these, Tagore explored different resolutions to the women\u2019s question. Drawing on Tagore\u2019s later writings to give Binodini a future, Rituparno crafts a collage of Tagore heroines to provide his film a \u2018credible resolution\u2019. Thus, Rituparno\u2019s Binodini chooses self-banishment like Mrinal, withdraws from sexual engagement like Kumudini (and Kumu\u2019s end also reminds us of the fate of Asha in the film) and opts for national service like Kalyani.<\/p>\n

Since the late nineteenth century elite discourses were shot with an obsessive preoccupation with nationalism, it is a somewhat facile resolution to social dilemma, finding its aesthetic fulfilment in the iconic representation of the nation as mother. In the film, in a magic moment of self-realisation, Binodini decides to join the nationalist movement. Hence, \u2018Jara sukher lagi chahe prem<\/em>\u2019, a love song from Tagore\u2019s musical drama, Mayar Khela,<\/em> mingles and merges with the inspiring patriotic score, \u2018Aji bangladesher<\/em> hriday hote<\/em>\u2019, imbued with the ethos of proto-nationalism. The shift is evident from the \u2018private-domestic\u2019 to the \u2018public-political\u2019, from self-desire to self-abnegation, from love for one\u2019s self to sacrifice of oneself for the nation. The emotional tension between the widow\u2019s reciprocated love for Behari and the social sanction against widow-remarriage is resolved by placing on the widow herself the onus of deciding against the consummation of their passions. A fulfilment of Binodini\u2019s love is not the choice of the moment as the hegemonic narrative of nationalism firmly locates the \u2018possible Hindu nation\u2019 in the politics of women\u2019s monogamy.[8]<\/a><\/sup> Thus Asha, demonstrating the life-long constancy of a Hindu wife, returns pregnant to her husband, even though Mahendra remains unredeemed by any virtue whatsoever. Binodini\u2019s devotion to Behari, however, remains unflinching and her transcendental feminine strength transforms her from an assertive temptress to a sacrificing celibate. The end comes with an idyllic relief, with a re-stabilisation of the conjugal order, banishing forever the disruptive widow. As the theatre is filled with pounding beats of nationalist hymns does the \u2018passion play\u2019 lose colour, giving way to a \u2018respectable\u2019 solution?<\/p>\n

References<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. <\/a>Tagore, Rabindranath, \u2018Chokher Bali<\/em>\u2019, Rabindra Rachanabali<\/em>, 8, Centenary Collection, Calcutta, West Bengal Government, 1961.<\/li>\n
  2. <\/a>Ghosh, Rituparno, \u2018Amar Binodini<\/em>\u2019, Anandabazar Patrika<\/em>, 11 May 2003.<\/li>\n
  3. <\/a>Roy, Bishwajit, \u2018Younatar Rajneeti<\/em>\u2019, Anandabazar Patrika,<\/em> 9 November 2003.<\/li>\n
  4. <\/a>Sen, Ashoke and Subhendu Das Munshi, \u2018Tagore Made Easy\u2019, The Statesman<\/em>, 16 November 2003.<\/li>\n
  5. <\/a>See Chakravarti, Uma, \u2018Gender, Caste and Labour: The Ideological and Material Structure of Widowhood\u2019, Martha Alter Chen, ed., Widows in India, Social Neglect and Public Action<\/em>, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1998, pp 75 – 76.<\/li>\n
  6. <\/a>Translation by Sogani, Rajul, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature<\/em>, New Delhi, Oxford, 2002, P 68.<\/li>\n
  7. <\/a>Chakraborty, Aishika, \u2018Virtue in Varanasi\u2019, The Statesman<\/em>, 23 June 2000.<\/li>\n
  8. <\/a>See Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism<\/em>, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2000.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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