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.

***** 

Heartless Cities

I was reading about the report of Smita Jacob and Asghar Sharif about the homeless persons dying everyday in the streets of Delhi and their conclusion that up to 10 homeless persons die every day and that most of them could be starvation deaths among men of working age. I am a little sceptical about these conclusions, even though I do believe that our cities can be terribly heartless places for the poor.

I remember reading about Delhi Government's decision to "send back" the beggars in Delhi to their original places to prepare for the Commonwealth Games. And I was trying to think, in what way this was different from the witch hunt against Bihari bhaiyyas living in Mumbai by the goons of Nav Nirman Sena? Beggars are not persons who have come to earn their living? Isn't Delhi their capital too and don't they have the constitutional right of all Indians to live where they wish? People who were indignant about Mumbai antics of the Thakre family and their followers, didn't seem much bothered by Delhi Government's decision about the beggars.

I am definitely not looking at beggars from rose-tinted glasses. However, I do believe that if they are part of an organised racket, those who earn most from it must be respectable citizens who can afford to move around in big cars and who definitely do not need to be afraid of being sent away from Delhi. That racket must be paying hefty fees to the whole series of paymasters, starting from the police to the politicians.

No, my scepticism to the conclusions of Jacob-Asghar report comes from other considerations. I don't think that if people are dying of hunger, the majority of it them will be working age men. It does not seem logical. I think that the city does offer opportunities for working age men to find some work, at least enough for eating, and if homeless persons in Delhi are dying, I would expect them to be mainly elderly persons, women, children or sick persons.

I think that the Supreme Court and we all need more answers and they should not be too difficult to get. Delhi has four medical colleges. Ask them to organise autopsies for all unidentified dead persons in Delhi for ten days, as a pilot study. It is not so much extra work, just 2-3 extra autopsies per day each medical college for just ten days. Perhaps the medical colleges already have this information and somebody just needs to involve them in the discussions?

If there are an average of ten homeless persons dying every day, in ten days of pilot study, the medical colleges can do 90-110 autopsies and it will give us hard data about the ages, gender, other diseases and nutritional status of the people who are dying on the streets of Delhi. Then Supreme Court can take a better decision.

***** 

Children of Mixed Gods

Yesterday, I was at the presentation of Fatima Ahmad's new book "Aukui". Fatima's mother was half Indian and half Vietnamese, her father was Somali. Fatima was born in Cambodia, where she lived for the first 21 years of her life, till the war broke out and they were forced to migrate to Somalia.

In Somalia, Fatima faced the more orthodox side of her religion. She was not supposed to go out, not to talk to men. It was different to grow up as a Muslim in Cambodia, a predominantly Buddhist country than in Somalia. After three years in Somalia, Fatima moved to Italy.

"Aukui" means "black devil" in Cambodian and refers to the difficulties she faced in Cambodia because of her skin colour. She also had to overcome barriers created around her disability. She said that she has written this book to tell her story to her younger brothers and sisters, who were born later and do not know about their roots. About her religious beliefs, Fatima said that she takes what she likes from Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism.

Discussions about mixing of faiths and religions immediately resonate in me. In my close family, we have three religions - Hinduism, Catholicism and Sikhism.

I think that with globalisation, with people moving from one country to another, there will be even more opportunities for people of different religions to meet, fall in love and make families. I also think that today, with greater awareness about ideas of human rights and religious liberalism, there are greater opportunities for people in mixed families like ours to maintain our distinct religious identities and yet be all together in harmony.

A couple of months ago, I was in Vietnam and one evening, I had a discussion with a friend, who is Buddhist and has married a Catholic. They are planning to shift to Italy in a couple of years. "I continue to be Buddhist", she had said. I had thought that in her words, there was an unexpressed anxiety about shifting to a predominantly Catholic country and yet, continuing to be a Buddhist.

"And the children of such mixed families, what about their religion?", sometimes people ask me. I don't know how did others deal with this, I can only share how we dealt with it. For us, all children have a right to their family traditions from both the sides, mothers' and fathers' sides. This means that children should be able to feel at home in all their family religions, should participate in all their religious traditions and rites. We had had a church wedding and a Hindu wedding, our son had his baptism and his Hindu mundan.

It is true that sometimes religions have prayers that talk about supremacy of their god and being the only true religion, but I think that if children can understand that their parents are in peace with each other, they grow up with their own understanding of their religions.

I feel that these children growing with shared understanding and beliefs of different religions, will be the new citizens of the world. I also feel this understanding is precious and should be valued and nurtured by everyone.

In India, because we grow up with different religions around us, over the centuries we have developed so many examples of mixing up of religions and traditions. Between Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, etc.

Once I had read about one of the first Indian censuses done during British times and how people had difficulty in telling their religions, they were not sure if they should call themselves Sikhs or Hindus, because so much is shared heritage in the two religions, and were forced to decide. Over the past decades, growing ideas of religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism among all the different religions, seem to strengthen our differences, our divisions and the boundaries between religions and beliefs.

We, the children of mixed Gods, we need to counter this and ask for respect of all our religions, and our mixed-shared religions.

I have been reading debates about Indian census and if we it should ask questions about the castes or not. I wish that Indian census would also ask about religions of persons and give them the possibility of giving multiple answers - we can also be Hindus and Muslims at the same time, Sikhs and Jains at the same time, Hindus and Sikhs and Parsi at the same time. I wish there is a question that asks, how many believe that there is just one God for all human beings not withstanding their different religions? and how many of us also pray in religious places of other religions?

***** 

Alternate World Histories

Tamim Ansary has written an alternate world history. Born in Afghanistan and settled in America, Ansary was asked to edit a school book on history and his job was to identify the significant world events, divided into ten units, each unit with three chapters. Thus, the world history had to be broken down into thirty chapters.

In the introduction to his new book, Ansary explains his experience of dealing with members of his school editorial committee, negotiating with them about what events can be significant enough to go into those chapters, and how those persons didn't see Islam as important enough to have a chapter.

Ansary says, from the view point of the academics in the West, the world history can be sub-divided more or less into the following significant areas - birth of civilization (Egypt and Mesopotamia); the classical age (Greece and Rome); upper renaissance (spread of Christianity); Renaissance and reforms; Illuminism (science and exploration); the revolutions (democratic, industrial and technological); the coming up of nation states and the fight for the empires; first and the second world wars; the cold war; and the triumph of democratic capitalism.

However, Ansary proposes to look at the world from the point of view of Islam and to identify their significant events for the world history, and he comes up with the following list - The antiquity (Mesopotamia and Persia); birth of Islam; the Caliphate and the search for universal unity; the fragmentation - the era of Sultanates; the catastrophe - the crusades and the mongols; the renaissance and the era of three empires; the permeation of the Orient by the West; the reform movements; the triumph of modernist lays; and the Islamic reaction.

Thus, Ansary has written a book called, "Destiny disrupted. A history of world through Islamic eyes".

I like the idea of the book and I think that it will be interesting to read about the world and the events through an alternate point of view. The Western world-view is so dominating that we end up thinking that this is the only way there is to look at the world.

I think that it will be equally interesting to read about the world histories as seen by other points of views. For example, from India, what events we see as significant, that shaped the world? Probably it will start around Mohanjodaro and Harappa for the Indus Valley civilisation, go on to the spread of agriculture in the Ganges valley? What role will play Ashoka and Buddha in shaping the history of the whole Asian continent?

And the Chinese world history, how it will it differ from others? And the world-view of an African or a South Amerindian?

Perhaps, some book publisher will bring together persons from all over the world to write an alternate world history, that brings together the significant events from all our pasts! I would like to read that.

***** 

The Old Pictures

It was an old black and white photograph. There was nothing particular about it. Yet, it caught my attention. And I must have glanced at it only for a moment. With my sister, we were going through old papers of my mother, trying to think of things to keep and those that could be given away or may be thrown away.

My mother had died and there were too many things to be looked at, so we were just trying to look for really important things, and to keep them separately. At the rest, we could take a look later.

"Margo", I told my sister, showing her the picture. The name of the person in the picture had come to me in a flash. There were two of her pictures there and a postcard. I had put them in the bag of things that I wanted to look first.

My mother's diary was the most important thing among those papers, and it was the first thing I did - transcribed it on computer. Day after tomorrow, it will be three months since she died. Going through her papers, her diaries, her pictures, is perhaps my way of trying to hold on to her memories.

So yesterday, while going through some of my mother's papers, I again saw that black and white picture of Margo. It has her signature on it, with her full name, Margaret Louise Skinner. But she liked being called Margo, I remembered it.

I had met her in Hyderabad in June 1960, when I and my other sister, had gone there to spend the summer holidays with our father, who was working in that city at the office of Socialist party. I have a vague memory of going some where with Margo and my mother on a rickshaw. At that time, I had no idea of who she was and what she was doing in Hyderabad. She was obviously angrez, a foreigner and a friend of my father. I also thought that she was somehow related to Socialist party, perhaps someone admiring Dr Lohia, the socialist leader - I don't think that anyone had said it to me, I must have assumed it.

Some months or may be a year later, when we were back in Delhi, I remember her parcel arriving from the USA, full of gifts. There were two animal figures like soft and furry gloves in the parcel, where you can put your hand inside the glove, put fingers in the eyes or mouth of those animals and move your fingers to make them move like puppets. It also had some make-up things like lipsticks and eyeliners for my mother. I remember looking at those gloves once, but I never found them them again and slowly I forgot about them. May be my mother had put them away as they must have been very precious because you couldn't have found something similar in India in those days. Or perhaps, she gave them to some body?

Those childhood memories, sharp and vivid once, slowly faded as I don't remember hearing her name again. Some of those things came back, as I looked at her pictures.

The postcard is from Florence, it has a postal stamp of 19 January 1961. The card is addressed to my father and she has signed it as "M". In the card, in small and neat handwriting she talks about her stay in Florence and the things she has seen in the city ("staying in a pension, for 5 dollars a day, including three wonderful meals and wine"). She also wrote that was getting ready to leave for Paris and then to take the boat back to New York.

The second picture gives a little more information. It is the "afternoon tea" offered in the faculty to "the Fullbright professors Miss Skinner and Miss Smith" in 1953. From the faces of the persons in this picture, I think that it must have been taken somewhere in Philippines. So this means, Margo was a university professor and had been a Fullbright professor outside USA! May be she had also come to India as a Fullbright professor in 1960?

I did an internet search and discovered some more things.

One Margaret Louise Skinner was born in San Francisco on 10 April 1921, and she had died in 1992. In 1990, together with a person called Fritz Leiber, she had published a book of poems under the name of "Margo Skinner" titled, "As green as Emeraude" (Dawn Heron Press, USA).

There was another Margaret Louise Skinner, born in 1921 in Kentucky, who had also died in 1992. She was married but didn't have children.

I couldn't find any of their images on internet, so I was not sure if poet Margaret was the Margo I had met in Hyderabad or was it the Kentucky one?

I tried to look for more information on the poetry book and found my answer. Among the titles of her poems there are - At an Indian wedding, At Mahabalypuram, Vishnu and ... To Deepak, and her book is dedicated to Deepak, my father.

***** 

Calling names

This reflection about names of places and countries started from the book "Empires of the Indus" written by Alice Albinia.

Indus is the mighty river that starts from high mountains in Kashmir and goes to end in the Indian ocean through a wide delta in Sindh region of Pakistan. All the other important rivers on the western parts of India (Satluj, Ravi & Beas), Pakistan (Jhelum & Chenab) and eastern part of Afghanistan (Kabul), end in Indus. It is this river that gave India its name, though today most of it belongs to Pakistan.

Albinia writes that when India was divided, and Pakistan chose its new name, Jinah was expecting India to take the official name of Bharat and was aghast when it decided to keep India as its name, the name of the undivided country. It meant that India could claim the heritage and history of the past associated with the name "India", while Pakistan had to invent a new history for itself.

However, this reflection about Indus and India took me into another direction of thoughts. The Indian name for Indus river is Sindhu.

Rajesh Kochhar in his book "The Vedic People - their history and geography", makes an interesting point about development of languages in western part of the Indian subcontinent. His story starts with persons from central Asia. They moved into Afghanistan and then some of them migrated towards Sindhu river (Rigvedic people, as they wrote Rigveda) and others went towards Persia/Iran (Avestan people, as they wrote their sacred book Avesta). Later, as iron became available and thick jungles in the gangetic plains could be cut, the Rigvedic people migrated deeper into India.

Kochhar says that Avestans, used "H" more commonly in their language while Rigvedic people used more "S" in their language. Thus, Rigvedic group had names of many places and rivers starting with "S", including Sindhu river, while Avestan group had the same names starting with "H". So that for the Avestan group, Sindhu became Hindu.

Among other things, Kochhar proposes that Rigveda is mainly about three thousand years BC, when these persons were living in what is today called Afghanistan. To support this theory he explains the lack of references to Ganga river (Ganges) in Rigveda. Thus, he says that Sarayu river of Rigveda is not the present Sarayu in Uttar Pradesh, but is actually Haroyu (present name Hari Rud) of Afghanistan; in the same way, he arguments that Rigvedic Sarasawati river was actually the mighty Afghani river, Harahvaiti.

That is how, persons living on banks of Sindhu river were called Hindu and their religion became Hinduism. Come to think of it, Rigveda also does not mention any religion called "Hindu".

And, where did the word Indus came from? I guess, it came from Latin, the language of Roman empire and the lingua franca of the classical Europe, where "H" is silent and rarely used. For example, in Italian, Hinduism is called "Induismo" and Himalaya becomes "Imalaia". Therefore, the name of Indus river and country's name, India, both probably come from Latin.

All these reflections about names of places and country, worry me a little.

Thinking of all the campaigns for reclaiming our roots through name changes (Mumbai, Bengalaru, Chennai, etc.), perhaps one day there will be a campaign to change India's name to Sindhia and Hindus can call themselves Sindhus, and Hindi can become Sindhi?

That obviously raises another question - how are Sindhis going to call themselves?

*****