[Detailed spoilers follow.]
Padmaavat begins promisingly enough with a scene that immediately evokes a strong cultural memory for those of us who grew up on tales of Hindu mythology — a beautiful woman in a sylvan glade spies a spotted deer in the forest. Unlike the gentle beauties of Hindu lore, however, this is Padmavati, an agile and graceful huntress of the forest, who smiles as she chases after the deer with bow and arrow in hand. Sanjay Leela Bhansali remains one of the few directors to visibly embrace Deepika Padukone’s effortless, graceful athleticism, his lens following her long limbs set leaping after an adorable little deer that looks faintly clumsy by contrast. She misses the first shot, then the second, and so pauses for a beat before shooting her third arrow with cocky certainty — right into Ratan Singh (the prettiest Shahid Kapoor has ever looked), pinning him right above the heart.
It’s a refreshing take on a classical trope: the Hindu princess in the forest is the strong hunter who penetrates the king upon their first meeting, striking him with her worldly weapons as much as her beauty. I felt a tiny flutter in my heart: would this, after all, be an interesting movie?
Alas, no.
Where in the world is Padmavati?
Having established his heroine as a force of nature, a woman accustomed to command and action, Bhansali and Ratan Singh transport her to a desert kingdom where she is immediately cast in the mold of a stern goddess come to bestow her gracious presence on mere mortals. Padmavati’s deification begins, sans context or build up, the moment she is introduced to Mewar. There is zero exploration of what could have been a richly dramatic period in the lives of these characters: one day, she is a Buddhist in a Sri Lankan cave; the next, she is installed in a glittering marble mausoleum as primary deity. Ratan Singh, greeting her in the zenana where she is to live in splendid isolation, says there is only one thing he cannot give her — a woodland sprite, a warrior princess, a human being who once roamed unfettered in the verdant green of her realm — and that is the ocean. The film does not even care to pause to consider the manifest untruth of this statement and Padmavati rushes to make her dutiful responses.
“Duty” is a word that is never far from Padmavati. Upon her entry into Chittorgarh, she is quizzed extensively about her queenly duties. When she decides to show Khilji her face in the teeth of her husband’s opposition, she frames it as her duty to the kingdom. After she rescues her hen-brained husband from the lion’s den, the women of the fort hail her as “Sati Savitri”, that most dutiful of all Hindu wives. And at the end, when she makes the decision on behalf of the women of Chittorgarh to commit jauhar, she explains it to them as their duty toward the men who have gone to fight for their honor.
Seldom have I despised a word more than “duty” and this film is the perfect explanation why: duty is the unexamined weight of societal expectations that is most often shouldered by those who can least protest it. How many men laid down their lives for Ratan Singh’s empty honor? How many women would have taken their chances with the vile invaders or would have chosen a gentler death but were never asked their opinion? We know the little girls were fed to the fire along with their mothers but what happened to all the little boys of the fort? The movie doesn’t care.
Ken and Barbie Can’t Keep Rajasthan
Talking about things we care about, I was surprised to find myself upset about the much-discussed lack of chemistry between Deepika and Shahid — and I blame Bhansali for it. While it is true that some actors are simply magic together and don’t require much in the way of direction, there is ample evidence that chemistry can be achieved (or destroyed), like everything else in cinema, through collaborative construction. That’s why Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri were a rage in Dil Toh Pagal Hai but had absolutely nothing going on in Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam.
Watching this “love story” unfold on the big screen was actually maddening — one, because a soul hungers for anything interesting to happen about halfway through the interminable first half and would kill for some sexy times; and two, because I know what Bhansali is capable of extracting from his leads. This is the man who directed Devdas, an awful film about exasperating people who still managed to leave you feeling tingly. Ram Leela is practically a roaring fire whenever Deepika and Ranveer are in the same frame even without touching. And who can forget Sonam Kapoor pinned to a bed like a butterfly and wooed with lines from Mughal-e-Azam by Salman Khan in Saawariya?
As we discussed in the Padmaavat digression on the Khandaan podcast, Bhansali is a master at sexualizing his leading men. In Padmaavat, however, the camera is so respectful of Padmavati and Ratan Singh that it turns them asexual. Shahid wears yummy clothes over a sizzling bod paired with hair that’s always flirting at the border of not too long and not too short but just right — and instead of worshipping him as the petite Indian Ken doll he is (seriously, Deepika spends most of her screen time dressing him up in pretty clothes like a demented pre-schooler planning a dolly wedding), the camera’s gaze is always held at a respectful distance, moving in only if it can properly obfuscate any desire it might feel. This is insane because the story has been deliberately set up for Ratan Singh to be the yin to Khilji’s yang — if Khiji can’t score a woman except through brute force and deceit, then here was an excellent opportunity for Ratan Singh to overpower the audience with his sex appeal.
Instead the camera gives him a couple of sidelong, bashful glances and then has Deepika, who is only THE main object of desire in the film, regard him with tears and reverence in her eyes absent any longing at all. Compare the look in Padmavati’s eyes to the expression in Leela’s when she whispered, “Dushman!” while staring at Ram through a haze of desire in Ram Leela. Similarly, when the characters play Holi in the excellent Lahu Munh Lag Gaya, Deepika almost set the screen ablaze merely by putting colors on herself; here, Shahid and she smear each other with colors, nuzzle a bit, and nearly put me to sleep. For shame. If the thought of Khiji as bedmate is repulsive enough to drive Padmavati to a gruesome death, at least contrast that with her craving her hottie husband.
A Villain in a Farce
So does this mean the film is weighted in favor of Ranveer Singh’s greasy, rapacious Khilji? In terms of the astonishing amount of footage that is thrown away on scenes that do little to advance his characterization or serve the story — such as a detailed wrestling match that adds absolutely nothing — yes, he does come out ahead. But this is Padmaavat; nobody wins.
You’ll note the descriptions of the character in every review boil down to this: Khilji is pure id. The movie struggles to portray a man whose lust for life and everything in it overwhelms the people in his path; there is no doubting the sincerity of Ranveer’s effort, but the film ends up painting the very picture of a buffoon. I laughed out loud in several places where I think I was supposed to feel repulsed or intimidated, such as the outrageously silly Khalibali, a song that belongs to Kanti Shah at his peak. Bhansali tries very hard to show us Khilji’s animal magnetism — as a man who will say or do anything to achieve his ends, Padmaavat says he is capable of brief periods of seduction. But it is in his powers of destruction that the movie wallows like an unwieldy hippopotamus pregnant with meaning.
I knew rape, or the threat of it, is central to this movie but I didn’t expect the strong sense of déjà vu that came over me as the scenes progressed. The captured princess he keeps chained in a tub (??) as an exotic candelabra; the way he chooses to perfume himself by first sprinkling a handy concubine and then rubbing her against him… it all felt weirdly familiar. And then I realized these scenes were reminiscent of the kind of trash stories my brainwashed classmates with right-wing parents used to tell me at the height of the Babri Masjid era about the sexual terrors visited upon Hindu women by Muslim conquerors. (These might still be in circulation but as I don’t need to associate with people like that anymore, I don’t know.)
The captive candelabra princess, for instance, is presented as an example of the kind of life that awaits Padmavati in Khilji’s harem — but it’s a very specific kind of male fantasy of the fate of women as prizes of war. Women, who spend a significant part of their lives imagining what rape must be like and how one can avoid it, don’t generally worry about being used as household fixtures but these are the details that form the backbone of religiously motivated sexual paranoia. I have a distinct memory of getting into a heated debate about the Mughals in the 7th grade with someone who’d recently transferred in from a school with a stronger Hindu affiliation, let’s say, than ours — I’ll never forget her screaming, “Akbar used captured Hindu women as bannisters!”
I remember laughing because it was so ludicrous but I’ve always thought these stories grotesque. Rape was and remains a significant part of warfare and life in a harem was horrendous even for those who weren’t brought there as bounty, but the specificity of detail contained in these minutely-imagined, self-inflicted, evergreen traumas of history always hold more than a touch of masochistic pleasure. The teller is never simply recounting a horror but imagining a salacious version of it meant to titillate as much as horrify and then provide the basis for violent reprisal upon one’s fellow citizens for actions carried out centuries ago by long-dead conquerors.
Discussions of such matters always devolve into a question of whether one believes the director or the actors involved are actively bigoted or wish to discriminate against a particular group. Such speculations rather miss the point, which is that when one chooses to create a work that contributes toward a prejudiced majoritarian narrative (in the case of Padmaavat: “Muslims are evil”, “rape is worse than death for women”, “gay men are effeminate”, etc.) by depicting those narratives absent any examination, one is no longer a neutral party. You have chosen a side by default. The side of bigotry.
I support your right to do so in a free republic but I am just as free to despise you.
The failure of (male) imagination
In retrospect, none of these choices should surprise me because it is all of a piece: it is a failure of imagination. This is an odd thing to say about Bhansali, who is a director of singular vision with an abiding love for the extreme registers of emotion. But Padmaavat is proof that he is interested in everything about a movie except for the story, choosing to transfer text to screen without a hint of interrogation.
Consider the controversial jauhar: unlike the women of the fort who grew up accustomed to the thought of such practices, Padmavati is an outsider. Bhansali makes the baffling choice to pepper the movie with scenes in which Padmavati is introduced to the convoluted Rajput notions of honor and duty but refuses to grant her so much as a fleeting beat to grapple onscreen with the weight of these ideas. You are allowed a glance at the discomfort on her face when she is greeted as a living goddess upon her return from Delhi with her fool husband, but it is immediately subsumed into her feelings of guilt about the deaths of Gora and Badal. There is a similar scene where she first hears of the practice of jauhar and does a tiny double take but the movie is in a rush to move on to other things.
A movie titled Padmaavat might have at least tried to imagine the emotional journey of a woman introduced to us as a warrior, proven to be a wily negotiator, and lastly presented as a vengeful goddess but I guess that would have taken precious seconds away from Ratan Singh being dressed and undressed or Khilji hanging out with his bros. There is a story here about a woman who was better than her time in history allowed her to be; the tragic tale of a brave and clever woman who was penned into the restrictive mold of a goddess because the people around her, especially her husband, had eyes too small to appreciate her as a fully realized human being; a fighter who was defeated first by those who loved her most by being denied the chance to seek her own honor on the battlefield and was thus driven to commit whatever defiance she could. How deep might that have resonated with women in India even today?
A lot of the counter arguments leveled against this scene fall into the “women who fear sex slavery have a right to kill themselves” category but the movie is expressly interested in establishing the fact that Padmavati is not afraid. Apart from a scene in which she explicitly says that to her husband, we also have scenes such as the one in which she encourages the senior queen to sneer at their enemy. So what we have instead is a woman who lauds the men arrayed on the battlefield as “gods” (actual dialogue) and presents herself as an offering at their altar. Khilji and Padmavati both use the language of objectification — the only difference is the moral judgment made by the movie, which says Khilji is bad because he was objectifying the woman out of lust whereas Padmavati is divine because she is objectifying herself as a sacrificial offering on the altar of Hindu patriarchy.
This film was never meant for someone like me; no matter how beautiful I find the costumes, I will never be the target audience for a movie about a woman who explicitly sets herself on fire to preserve the honor of her husband. But the reaction of the intended audience, the Karni Senas of the world who masturbate to grandiose fantasies of militant Hindu valor that can only be defeated by treachery and deceit despite every evidence to the contrary, perfectly illustrates why cinema in India can no longer even pretend that a movie is “just a movie”. We don’t live in a world any more where we can disengage from the meaning of our own work to hide under the fig leaf of unintended consequences.
It’s 2018. Do better.
