Subhash K Jha looks back at 2002’s Shakti: The Power, which starred Karisma Kapoor, Nana Patekar, Sanjay Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan as well as Aishwarya Rai in a special song appearance.
Did the audience come to see Karisma Kapoor and Nana Patekar battling it out as Bahu and Sasurji. Or had they come for Paro and Devdas doing an ‘Ishq kamina’? Itne sarey kamine hain iss film mein, kiss kiss ko dekhoon?
Savagery tumbles out of this handsomely mounted stallion of a movie like horses bolting into the race track on a scorching Sunday afternoon. There’s no respite from the brutality till the very end. And we wonder, what kind of a tortured mind would devise so many ways of tormenting a hapless NRI woman who’s suddenly and shockingly plunged into the vortex of feudal warfare in a North Indian state.
Vamsi ‘s basic plotline about a young woman’s fight to extricate her child from her radical in-laws’ clutches is derived from Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter where Sally Field played a US housewife who discovers a veritable nightmare in her husband’s Iranian lifestyle.
Vamsi transposes the violence of Islamic fundamentalism to a strange no-man’s land in India. We are led to believe that the savage heartland (or should that be heartless-land?) where Nandini (Karisma Kapoor) plays out her brutal nemesis is situated in North Bihar. The characters speak a hybridized mix of Aawadhi, Bhojpuri and Hindi. But the sandy ladscape is obviously Rajasthan.
Obviously, the debutant director wants to prettify Nandini’s petrifying predicament to manageable milieu exuding passionate fury. The swirling ghagras, the bright shining cholis, the ritualistic pooja thaalis, havans animal sacrifices and the blazing bucolic banditry makes an extremely heady vista of overpowering visuals.
In his eagerness to capture our attention Vamsi overdoes it. There’s an excess of everything in the plot, including, regrettably, brutality, which after a while begins to crowd suffocate and deeply disturb the viewer. For a film that was projected as a ladies’ picture the terrritory of violence covered by the film is not only tortuously offputting for the target audience it’s also deeply offensive and disturbing.
It’s difficult for any sensitive humanbeing to watch Nana Patekar playing a primitive barbarian feudal lordhead spewing the most obnoxious taunts abuses and sexist insults at his screen daughter-in-law Karisma Kapoor and other women in the rugged household , so much so that we begin to wonder whose side the script is really on.
In some perverse way this disturbing masala film ends up endorsing the evils of a rigidly patriarchal system by letting the Patekar character indulge in rabblerousing uncouthness. Karisma as the counterfoil to the foulmouthed patriarch tries hard to shriek against injustice with dignity.
She’s like a minstrel boy trying to hold her voice steady at a stag party. For Vamsi, it’s never enough to make his point and then withdraw. He drives in the point of Nandini’s utter degradation and despair in the style of the Hollywood horror movies where the audience vicariously participates in the victim’s debasement.
Till the end we aren’t sure if Vamsi has made a film on a woman’s fight against injustice or a spaghetti Western transposed from Texas to Rajasthan. The director doesn’t know when to pull back. It isn’t enough to show Nandini’s Husband Shekhar (the only sane and sensible male character in the subverted tribal territory) being blown up by a car bomb by his wacko-psycho father’s enemies. Like everything else the car bomb point has to be driven home. Sanjay Kapoor is shot through his legs, hands, heart….Bullets have never been more in vogue.
We are immediately reminded of Prakash Jha’s brilliant study of patriarchal feudalism Mrityudand where Madhuri Dixit’s husband was similarly blown into smithereens. The emotional impact of her widowhood was tremendous. In Shakti, Karisma ‘s character moves on invisible wheels. Nandini doesn’t even look at her suddenly expired husband’s lifeless figure but quickly bundles up her son to make her hasty escape from hell. The character knows she isn’t doing a family drama but a surreptiously camouflaged thriller.
Stranger still is Shah Rukh Khan’s abrupt entry sequence. While Nana Patekar beats his screen-daughter-in-law black, blue, and red (in fact Karisma carries a blood-smeared mouth and face for almost half the film like a religious emblem) outside the police station Shah Rukh fools around in lock-up.
Heroism is turned upside down in this lengthy and harrowing tale of subverted machismo. The visuals and dialogues are deeply offensive to women. Instead of protesting against a harmless film like Ek Chotisi Love Story why don’t the human rights activists and women’s organizations object to the boorish and sexually aggressive language and behaviour of this film’s men towards women?
In one particularly vicious moment Nana Patekar hits Deepti Naval in her belly. To this underrated actress’ credit she performs her subjugated wife’s part with great grace. The sequence where she blows up her husband (not literally, for once) for his primitive concepts of manhood and family honour Deepti proves the fire still burns within her.
Shah Rukh Khan’s much tom-tommed guest appearance as the protagonist’s unlikely one-man rescue squad is very interestingly played. Though at times the director allows Khan to improvise longer than the scene requires, Khan’s interpretation of the goodhearted con-man is astonishingly bravura. Bringing up Maneka Gandhi when the camels are being shot at is a typical Shah Rukh touch. His death sequence mocks at mortality even as it makes us wonder about the actor’s improvisational ingenuity. But his much-hyped ‘Ishq kamina’ song and dance with Aishwarya Rai is so out of place, we wonder why they agreed to do it.
The film belongs to Karisma Kapoor. Rising with fiery dignity above the crassness that swamps her from all sides the actress gives another valid testimony to her growing maturity as a dramatic actress. In some sequences such as the one in which she rages against Patekar after he seaparates her from her child and locks her in a godown Karisma is like a howling wind blowing against an obdurate mountain. Her desperate run for freedom in the deserts echoes Seema Biswas in Bandit Queen.
What we remember at the end is Karisma’s bewilderment as she stands on the crowded railway station with her child when her husband drags her to his village. In these scenes the director’s depiction of native savagery is almost touristic—somthing that David Lean would have done in A Passage To India.
Wisely, Vamsi has used in-sync dialogue for some of Karisma’s dramatic scenes to get the raw effect. The director applies a great deal of intelligence in preparing his brutal agenda. The contrast between Nadini’s cocooned Canadian upbringing and the parched sun-stroked violence of her in-laws’ village is keenly accentuated in Adnan Sami’s haunting ‘Hum tum miley’ song where the contrast between sand and snow is created.
But the film is finally felled by its director’s extravagant zeal. Vamsi shows the feudal household as a terrorist den where men busy themselves making bombs and chopping their enemies’ heads in sugarcane crushers while the women sob and pray when they aren’t wringing their hands and pursing their lips.
In this deeply disturbing scenario, almost like Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen gone awry, S Sriram’s camerawork creates beauty out of brutality. For once, we aren’t sure if the artiste should be congratulated for his vision. At the end you want to simply hurl one of those countrymade bombs back at Nana Patekar’s face for playing such an obnoxious over-the-top selfgratifying character with such pompous lack of subtlety.
