Ravan - Hero or Villain

Ravan is the villain of Ramayana, because he kidnaps Ram's wife Sita. In Mani Ratnam's film, the character played by Abhishekh Bacchan is shown as Ravan, because he has kidnapped the wife of the good policeman called Ram.

 

However the film has a surprise - its Ravan is the not such a bad guy, nor is Ram such a good one. Both have shades of grey, and in the end it is not easy to decide who is the hero and who is the villain.

 

This post is about the way film-director Mani Ratnam flips our understanding of the hero and the villain in his film Ravan, making us question how our media can create positive and negative images.

 

Introduction 

In his new film Ravan, director Mani Ratnam has experimented with the story telling - he introduces a person as a villain and another as the hero. By the time the film finishes we are not very sure who is the hero and who is the villain.

For the last few years, I find difficult to sit through most bollywood films. So, after reading all the negative reviews about this film, initially I had decided to not watch it. However, then I thought about Mani's other films, especially Yuva. I had loved them and I had loved Abhishekh in Yuva. So I decided that I had to find out for myself, how could both Mani and Abhishekh get it so completely wrong, like the reviews seemed to suggest? 

Ravan - Film's Storyline

The film starts with a mix of shots introducing the three main characters - (1) the good-looking and no-nonsense policeman Dev (Vikram) giving a speech in a military academy; (2) the policeman's beautiful wife (Aishwarya) on a boat; and (3) the outlaw Beera (Abhishekh) who kidnaps the policeman's wife.

 

The policeman wants to get back his wife and make the outlaw pay for it. The outlaw also wants his revenge from the policemen for the rape and death of his sister, a tribal woman (Priyamani). In the background is the story of exploitation of tribal lands and people. 

The Archetypal Cops-Revenge Stories

The revenge stories involving cops have two main archetypal versions:

(1) Poor ordinary man and the corrupt cop story: The poor good guy is the hero and corrupt power-mad cop is the villain. The villain kidnaps and rapes the good guy’s sister/wife or kills his brother/father/friend and the good guy takes up arms for revenge. At the end of the film, the villain cop is thrashed, jailed or killed.

(2) The honest cop and cruel outlaw story: An honest cop is the good guy. Somehow he manages to irritate the mafia don. For revenge the don decides to teach the policeman a lesson and kills his family or kidnaps his wife/sister and rapes her. The honest police officer, goes after the don and in the end, kills him.

Mani takes these two kinds of stories and mixes them up. The film starts as the type 2 story, that is “honest cop versus cruel outlaw” story, with kidnapping of honest cop’s (Vikram) wife (Aishwarya) by the cruel outlaw (Abhishekh). Almost halfway through the film, you realise that actually it is type 1 story, a “poor ordinary man and the corrupt power-hungry cop” story.

 

However, Ratnam does not create a linear narrative and creates confusion by planting red-herrings on the two sides. He plays with our human biases and uses them to cheat & confuse the viewers. It is very thought-provoking film. Yet, I can understand, why people had difficulty with the storyline of this film. 

Right and the Wrong - Who is a Hero? A VIllain?

Ratnam’s question to the viewers seems to be - are you sure that you are supporting the right and the just side or you are letting your inherent human biases guide your feelings for the wrong side? I think that this question is very topical if you think of some issue of contemporary India like big dams, exploitation of tribals, beneficiaries of economic development, etc. It seems that if you have nice names like Vedanta or if you can use nice words like development and "India the new super-power", you can get away with exploitation, destroying the homelands of rural poor and tribals and worse.

 

The other side of the coin is to talk of rights, tribals, nature etc. and keep people prisoners of old ideas about community and simplicity, not allowing people to decide on what kind of development they want. 

 

Mani uses similar techniques – mythology, looks, names to create a hero and a villain, who are not what they seem to be. 

Comments About the Film

Tribals in the film are not the cute bum-shaking, singing and dancing villagers of Bollywood, they have mud, ash or yellow paste of haldi streaked on their faces. Their clothes have black streaks, their eyes are circled with black, to make you think of devil or Shiva’s Yam-doots.

 

Beera is made to look repulsive. He even mentions that he has ten heads like the demon king Ravan. He also has a habit of changing his expressions, and usually ends up with a crazy glint in his eyes. Just in case you didn’t get it, his hands move on his head like wings of a fluttering bird, making you feel that he is mentally unstable.

The other guy (Vikram) is macho, good looking, educated, apparently in love with his beautiful wife, a regular city guy, a hero material. His wife is cute, does lovely dances, and they are surrounded by cute small children. His name is Dev, and there are different indications that he is like Ram from Ramayana. His relationship with his younger brother (Nikhil Diwedi) reminds you of Ram-Lakshman relationship. If you still had any doubts, there is Sanjeevani (Govinda), the forest guard who makes you think of Hanuman from the way he climbs on the top of roof-tops and swings from one tree to another.

Ratnam plays dirty, events unfold in such a way that every time you can feel a twinge of sympathy for the poor Beera, the director makes sure that you feel a little repulsed about him, by playing with the prejudices of urban film goers about rural unkempt, mentally ill, black and ugly uneducated persons.

 
It is only at the end that you understand the way the policeman manipulates everything cold bloodedly, uses even his wife and her emotions, to get his own way. He does not hesitate from trapping and killing Beera, even while he knows that Beera has been good to his wife and has even spared/saved his own life.

 

May be in the background there is some mining company or some other big company, who want the tribals and especially Beera out of the way, but Mani does not tell you about it.

I think that Abhishekh is brilliant and courageous for accepting to come out so strongly in being repulsive and crazy. Actually I liked everyone in the film, except may be for Aishwarya Rai. She does try hard enough, but she does not create electricity with Abhishekh, their vibes are not hot. I would have preferred someone more earthy and intense like Rani Mukherjee, the way she had portrayed Sashi in Yuva. Or Nandita Das or Konkana Sen. Aishwarya looks beautiful, but she vibes better with Vikram, like in the dancing song, “Khili re”. And she doesn’t fit with the wild jungle and thumping waterfall  even if it is photographed beautifully.

The weak points about characterization of Beera (Abhishekh) are his hands, his legs, his teeth. His fingers seem too well kept, clean and manicured, and his teeth too white for being the tribal oulaw. I also felt that Mani went a little overboard in asking for his repulsive makeup. Like, in the dance “Thok de killi” with blacks streaking his clothes and around his eyes, looked too theatrical and obvious.

Some parts of the film, like the whole sequence at the end, with Ragini (Aishwarya) getting down from the train, coming to look for Beera, their meeting at the cliff top and their getting surrounded by police, seem very implausible. However, looking for that kind of logic does not help in appreciating the film. In any case, I think that the film was not about logic or believability of the story, but about archetypes of good and bad in Indian unconsciousness, and using them to raise questions about our inner prejudices.

Think of Yuva, by no stretch of imagination, you can call Lallan played by Abhishekh, a good person, yet in Yuva you can understand his compulsions and even identify with him. In Ravan, Beera is a much better character compared to Lallan, yet Mani does not let you feel any empathy for him. That required courage or may be it was foolishness? 

My Doubts 

The film uses ideas about Ram and Ravan to create confusion in our minds, to make it more difficult for us to decide who is good and who is bad, which is fine.

 

However, when I think of the scene where Nikhil Diwedi pulls at Priyamani’s nose at the wedding mandap and then she is gang raped by the policemen, it created a repulsion and unease in my mind, the connection of this episode to the Lakshman-Surpanakha episode in Ramayana is obious and perhaps Ratnam goes too far. 

Conclusions

Ravan is a provocative film if we look at it as extremification of Ramayana characters to insinuate that perhaps its hero was not so heroic and its villain was vilified unjustly. It is definitely a film which makes us reflect.

 

***** 

 

Changing Worlds, Changing Identities

I was reading about the drama caused by Joel Stein's column in The Times, the complaints of Indian American community and the subsequent apologies tendered by Stein and Times, and also the opinions of some Indian opinionists about the issue.

The editorial of Sagarika Ghose in Hindustan Times was clear in its advice for the Indian emigrants - if you are going to be in the global marketplace, learn to laugh at yourself and also learn to live with the communities that host you. It criticised the ghetto mentalities of Indian communities and advised them to stay at home in India, if they do not want to adapt to the culture of their adopted homelands.

Another editorial in HT by an Indian-American, Anika Gupta, complained that being an emigrant kid growing up in US, she was forced to learn to laugh at herself since the majority is incapable of understanding diversity. Thus they have had enough and can't be expected to take such irresponsible comments from a person like Stein in 2010.

I agree with some parts of both the views and yet have some problems with both of them. Sagarika Ghose's views are expressed in a superficial and insensitive way. Anika Gupta's view is perhaps too close to her own experience and thus lacks the necessary detachment.

I think that people have a right to express their feelings. If this debate was not about cultures and identities, perhaps we could accept others' feeling without much problems. (Expressing emigrant identity through music and culture - image from Bologna Italy below)

If I grew up in a calm area surrounded by green farms and clear skies and today I find that place covered with concrete houses, busy highways, speeding cars and increasing pollution, no one is going to get upset if I decide to write about my feelings, and about how I miss the old days. There will be people who are happy at the change, who look at the change as being "development" and appreciate the comfort of having shopping malls and cinema halls, but even they can appreciate that you are remembering something else, and don't argue about your right to remember the old times with nostalgia.

But the place where you grew up, if it has changed because many immigrants speaking different languages, eating different food, wearing different clothes are living in that place, it is not polite to say that you miss the old times when things were different. If you say that, it is automatically taken to mean that you are a racist or an ignorant conservative.

However, I don't think that is the best way to look at it - I think that we human beings can appreciate the good things about the changes, and yet miss parts of the past, before those changes happened.

On the other hand, being emigrants is a complex business. Understanding your own diversity and negotiating how you can live with the culture that surrounds you, can be painful and difficult, at least for some. So you have the right to express your difficulties and ask for respect.

Thus, in my opinion, both the view points are legitimate and should be expressed, without worrying if someone is going to get offended. I agree that emigrants need to express their own issues and difficulties, but we can't ask others to shut up and not say what they feel.

So for me Joel Stein also has an equal right to remember the old days before their neighbourhood changed. I can understand it and empathise with it. Even I feel a bit like that, every time I go back to Delhi and look at the way city has changed in the past thirty years. It doesn't mean that I am negating that emigrants don't have difficulties in defining their own cultural identities and negotiating with majority cultures.

*****