COLLISION: Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang and Nishtha Jain’s documentary Gulabi Gang have different takes on Sampat Pal and her pink gang working for social uplift in Bundelkhand.
By Gautaman Bhaskaran
Many years ago, I watched Rituparno Ghosh’s Choker Bali. This was a story about a young widow in the Bengal of early 1900s. I was appalled to see the woman looking so ravishingly glamorous. Would a widow in those times — especially a widow without a son — have appeared so made up and lovely. She would have normally led a life of suffering and depravation. Widows then had to dress in white, eat most frugally (with no meat or fish) and to live in punishing isolation and degrading conditions.
But Ghosh’s heroine and the film’s young widow could not care less. And they did not want her to be seen like, well, an early 20th century widow. Maybe her innumerable fans would have been devastated seeing her like, and even if they had overlooked her appearance because the story had demanded it, the lady playing the part would not have agreed to it.
For, she was Aishwarya Rai. Her image mattered more than her character and plot. Who cared about authenticity? This has nearly always been the case when beautiful actresses had been cast in plain Jane roles: they abhorred the idea of stepping on a movie set sans painted lips, rouged cheeks, eyes embellished with “kajal” and hair done up most fancily.
And most directors — driven by market forces — would rather have a star who would not agree to appearing simple than one who may not be a star. Ghosh succumbed to this temptation, with the result that Choker Bali (based on an immensely moving novel by Rabindranath Tagore) was disappointing, to say the least.
Cut to present day, and we have another helmer from Bengal, Soumik Sen, who has also walked into the trap that Ghosh had. Sen’s Gulaab Gang (Pink Gang) has Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit essaying a village do-gooder. Unlettered that she may be, but her almost obsessive aim is to educate the girl child in her village, and education is empowerment. This is what she believes in, and if anybody dares to cross her path, he or she gets a taste of Dixit/Rajjo’s violent ways. With her band of pink sari-clad brigade of women, wielding sticks and spears, Rajjo vanquishes the oppressors.
The pink women also take care of dowry demands and water/power problems of the village. When a man and his mother humiliate the wife and throw her out of the house, because she has not brought enough dowry, Rajjo and her gang teach the guy a hard lesson. When a greedy bureaucrat cuts electricity supply to the farming village and thereby water supply, the brigade incarcerates him in his office. Wooden planks are nailed across the doors and even windows cutting off ventilation and light. Power and water supply are cut. In the end, he agrees to restore electricity to the village.
All this is fine. But Rajjo — who is reportedly modelled on Sampat Pal and her pink sari gang working for social uplift in Bundelkhand — seems too polished and manicured for the role of an uneducated villager. Her hair is always coiffured, her face made up — and her blouses are stylishly designed with deep-cut backs. Is this Sampat Pal?
Of course, Sen and the film’s producer have said that Gulaab Gang has nothing to do with Pal, her women and her work. Although Pal moved the court in vain for a stay on the movie’s release, the similarity is too obvious to overlook. The worst part is that Sen does not even say that his work has been inspired by Pal’s campaign.
What is more, only two weeks ago, Nishta Jain’s excellent documentary, Gulabi Gang, opened in select theatres, and the film authentically documents the work of Pal and her group. Here is one review of Jain’s work I would like to quote extensively in order to show how similar Pal and her crusade are to Rajjo’s. “In Kim Longinotto’s documentary Pink Saris, about Sampat Pal and her all-woman vigilante posse called Gulabi Gang, Pal says to a young woman, ‘If you’re shy, you die.’
The Sampat Pal in Nishtha Jain’s Gulabi Gang is older, more measured and diplomatic. She knows she has to negotiate her way through an intensely conservative Bundelkhand, tempering her anger with smiles and understanding nods. In Longinotto’s documentary, Pal is a legend in the making, a woman working her way towards becoming an icon. In Jain’s documentary, which was shot a few years later, Pal becomes a hero, one whom villagers call in times of crises. She is a potent mix of sleuth and saviour.
“Back in 2006, Pal began a women’s collective that took the law into its own hands. It came to be known as Gulabi Gang, because all the members wore pink saris and carried pink lathis. If a woman or her parents complained to Gulabi Gang that a woman was being mistreated, the ladies in their uniform of pink saris and wielding pink lathis attacked the accused. They became well known in the Bundelkhand area. By the time Jain and her camera started following Pal around, she was famous and revered.”
Rajjo’s gang does just about that — leaping in the air and attacking men with weapons till every one of them is crushed. At the school — which also serves as a shelter for battered women — Rajjo teaches little girls not only alphabets but also the importance of the rod. She says, “rod is god” — perhaps paving the way, in my view, for a society where violence will be greeted with violence.
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. In Jain’s documentary, Pal realises the futility of this, and urges the women of her gang to contest local elections and become part of the system. It is better to fight the system from within than from outside, she avers and rightly so.
But Sen is not quite on to this. What he seeks to create is sheer drama with women as pretty as Dixit turning into male versions of Salman Khan, replete with kick-boxing and sickle-wielding strength. As movie critic Rajiv Masand writes: “Dixit appears trapped under the weight of this predictable script, which in the guise of a feminist film offers no more than your standard good vs evil story. It’s particularly hard to take Rajjo seriously when she breaks into choreographed dance sequences each time the women are taking a break from beating up some offender”.
While Sen’s Gulaab Gang hardly gripped me, it was worth watching for Juhi Chawla’s performance. As the conniving local politician, Sumitra, portrays a difficult role with admirable panache. As men, including police officers, touch her feet (one of them is ordered to crawl under a woman she stands with her legs apart), their psyche bruised, their egos humiliated and their very being shamed, Sumitra has that terribly wicked smile playing on her face. She never lets this go, never.
So, if one has to watch Sen’s Gulaab Gang, one must for Sumitra’s personification of evil that Chawla sinks her teeth into, well and good. But with Jain’s Gulabi Gang quite likely screening alongside Sen’s fiction feature, the outcome may be entirely predictable.
* Gautaman Bhaskaran watched both versions of the pink brigade, and may be e-mailed at [email protected]
