With pre-Diwali blues having replaced customary pre-Diwali cheer, I meant, this week, to cheer myself up by watching Guru Dutt’s romantic musical Mr & Mrs 55. The husband had bought a DVD selection of Guru Dutt classics — to celebrate our acquisition of a home theatre system that a loving uncle has thought fit to gift us. And since I decided, quite erroneously as you shall find out, that this was going to be the least annoying (and self-pitying) of the filmmaker’s works, Mr & Mrs 55 it was.
Despite Madhubala, it was torturous watching. Not even O P Nayyar’s music —hardly his best — could lift this tirade against feminism, or at least the filmmaker’s notion of “feminism”. Durga Khote is a caricature feminist who has learnt alien notions of divorce from her “sisters in the US and Europe”. The filmmaker — and the rest of the society, if we take popular films to be a reflection of prevalent mores — obviously think this is something that will ruin Indian womanhood and hence deserves to be lampooned. Divorce, of course, is seen as a threat to the social fabric — the Hindu Marriage Act is dated 1955 and so this was obviously the great debate of the day.
Watching something such as this makes one realise how far we have come, not just in terms of material things but also vis-à-vis society and individual rights and expression. On the other hand, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Indian women can now perhaps take solace in the fact that they can walk out of failed marriages with greater ease. And they have certainly emerged to be more than baby-producing machines that Mr Guru Dutt clearly advocated. (One of the moral centres in Mr & Mrs 55 is a rural woman with four children from four years of marriage; she speaks of this as the great joy in a married woman’s life when a horrified Madhubala questions her, this, of course, also being pre-family planning days.) Yet, they also cling on to more ancient identities: You only have to look at everyone in north India celebrating Karva Chauth, going from a session at the beauty parlour to a saree-shopping spree (jewellery being more expensive this year) and finally breaking their fasts in a Karan Johar moment, husbands and steadfast moon by their sides! It would be easy to lampoon that too… But let’s not.
Organised religion and patriarchy reinforce each other, we all know that. And while those of us who see ourselves as “liberals” are bound to be impatient with both, this is a battle not merely of ideas. There are far more real dangers of adhering too closely to either — religion, as we have seen, and patriarchy, in not just repression and suffering for one half of mankind, but also for the other.
In a patriarchal society, the man is, in fact, an equal victim, caught up in his image of being the supreme provider. What happens when he is unable to live up to that self-image is a story that many families that are staring at an economic crisis these days may be able to share one day.
To my mind, when an NRI in America, whose great dream has gone sour, kills not just himself but also his family, unable to provide for them, because it is “the honourable thing to do”, he is as much the victim of patriarchy. His ego and sense of worth are clearly defined by his upbringing in an impossible, unequal culture.
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So you see why Mr & Mrs 55 didn’t cheer me at all!
