In a This Masterpiece That Year special feature, Subhash K Jha, revisits the brilliance of Raj Santoshi’s Lajja, which remains a classic on the feminine voice 24 years after release.
I’m unable to put aside images of primeval brutality that Santoshi has created. The ringing, bubbly laughter of Madhuri Dixit as Janki and Rekha as Ram Dulari follows you into their gender-doomed nemesis when both women are publicly disgraced. No man or woman in the audience can escape these spirited women’s screams of humiliation and anguish as men hurt them where it pains the most.
We cannot turn away from Santoshi’s film, saying it’s too crude and message-oriented. Women in many parts of the country lead lives far more wretched and horrifying than what Santoshi has depicted. As a matter of fact, I applaud Santoshi for the way he knits humour into the theme of barbaric oppression.
Many critics have failed to notice the nimble knitting of chuckles and pain in the Mahima Choudhary section of the story. They find the entire anti-dowry pitch to be exaggerated. They seem to have missed the point here. Santoshi has transformed the dowry segment into high satire. Anil Kapoor’s jokes about lowered and twirling moustaches to identify the ladkiwale and ladkawale are not to be taken literally. And yet the girl’s father’s humiliation is a very serious business.
So I ask all those who have accused Santoshi of crude propaganda, how do you combat the crudity of the lives that a lot of women lead in our country without raising the dialogue’s decibel and lowering the subtlety ratio? Was Bandit Queen subtle? Did Phoolan’s gangrape and stripping abide by the high aesthetic standards of the squeamish gentry that thinks rape is chee-chee and should be shown in films through gentle suggestion only.
Santoshi specifically hammers in the brutal treatment of his female protagonists. It isn’t just the midwife Ram Dulari who’s raped by men, some of whom she helped bring into this world. Even the upper-class wife, Vaidehi (Manisha Koirala), married to an insensitive man (Jackie Shroff), is roughed up and forcibly made love to by her husband, who doesn’t think twice about flirting with other people’s wives. So Lajja (shame) to aati hai? But about what? Are the naysayers flinching at the film’s quality or content?
A filmmaker told me the comments on marital rights and women’s issues in Lajja reminded him of television soaps. What he probably meant was our cinema has stopped being a medium for social issues. If Papa wants to preach, he goes to… no, not Madonna, but to television soaps where social issues are still permissible.
When did V. Shantaram’s cinema with a social conscience become redundant? When Mahima Chowdhary is positioned on the mandap to throw off her ghunghat and tell her evil in-laws to take a flying cluck-cluck, she has no clue her role model dates back to 1937 and V. Shantaram’s Duniya Na Mane where Shanta Apte is forced into a loveless marriage with an old man. Bravely, she fights back, refusing to consummate the strained and incongruous union. That film is to this day regarded as radical and progressive.
Ironically, Lajja was called regressive and outdated by some people. A strange reading of a film that pointedly plants stinging slaps on the face of societal hypocrisy!
Why does the film make us wince so? Could it be a reflexive reaction to what we know is a mirror image of the prevalent atrocities and discrimination against women? The harsh epic design of the film extends itself into the remotest tendons of Santoshi’s work. Even the sequences featuring the outlaw Bulwa (Ajay Devgan) in the jungles, echoing Nirmal Pandey’s primitive socialism in Bandit Queen, are done with tremendous brutal beauty.
As for the quartet of savaged women, the sheer joy of watching such great star-actresses performing exploitative characters without the camera peering in from odd places, makes us want to give the film a standing ovation. In a film about rape, cleavage, and thighs would seem perfectly in order.
Not once does Santoshi forget what he has set out to do—make a shrieking case against male oppression. Seen within the framework of his earlier films about injustice like Ghayal, Ghatak and Damini (let’s not go into China Gate right now) Lajja appears to be a raging social comment, the kind we thought had gone with the wimp. You know that wimpy kind of propah cinema where, ahem ahem, rape, is never taken beyond titillation?
Lajja takes on its thought-provoking theme headlong, passionately, and manfully. Sure, some of the men appear to be either wimps (Sameer Soni, Mahima’s screen-groom) or lechers (Tinu Anand, Jackie Shroff). But the niceties of dainty storytelling are far from Santoshi’s mind. He’s troubled and tormented by the theme. And it shows.
