Retake: Punar Janam, second chances and coping with life’s asymmetry through cinema

Bollywood has been ridiculed for its many eccentricities, clichés and simplistic plot devices that lasted decades. But these curious tropes of mainstream Hindi cinema say a lot more about the socio-political history of our country and the age they emerged from. In Retake, we look back at some of these ideas and apply to them a modern lens to extract what they might or might not say about us as a people.

Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949) is possibly one of the finest gothic horrors to come out of the early years of post-Independent India. Not because it makes you flinch but because its internalisation of dread as a condition one could suffer from responded to the many civilizational horrors a young country was born out of. The film eschews hope for a sense of despondency about the incomplete - stories without closure. It also points to the realism that makes cinema’s pleasures impossible without a tint of the bizarre or the convenient. Reincarnation, first introduced in Mahal as an idea has its origin in faith, but in Hindi cinema it became over time a mechanism to cope with life’s asymmetry.

Mahal is often recalled for the painful ode to hope “Ayega Ayega Aanewala” sung by yet-to-be-discovered Lata Mangeshkar. Decades later in Rakesh Roshan’s Karan Arjun (1995) a wretched mother bemoans “Mere Karan Arjun Ayenge”. Almost a decade after Mahal, Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, used the trope of a previous life as a ruse to extract justice, a template also followed by Subhash Ghai’s Karz (1980). Spread across generations these films can be re-read for the socio-political subtext they were built around. The devices may seem as if they have been passed along and plastered, but beneath the application of these rudimentary ideas there is a lot that can be inferred.

Madhumati is a poignant but expectant view of civilisation because it wants to frame men through the lens of moral obligation. In the film, the protagonist unexpectedly discovers a past life where his beloved had been wronged. Spurred by this injustice, he plots his way to reform and to the convenient revelation that his partner in his present life is actually a version of the one in his previous one. Here reincarnation becomes a second shot of the bullet implying the inter-connectedness of all people as beings who have been christened to complete each other’s journeys. It’s almost as if the past is an all-consuming place that men want to repair at the cost of the present. Nobody just lives on. It’s what the partition must have felt like in those early years. How could it not? To rebuild from the point of ruin, takes mesmeric fantasies like installing morality as the foot that steps on the peddle of life. It’s what a hopeful, dreamy civilisation conceives the future must be made up of because there possibly isn’t any other way.

In Mahal, Hari’s (Ashok Kumar) arrival at an abandoned palace is preceded by the story of its painful past: of two star-crossed lovers separated by an untimely death. There is no homicidal injustice in Mahal, just a ravaged site that once flourished with doting men and women investing in each other their dreams of a future e. Hari is enveloped by grief more than he stung by anger. All that love, all that hope, massacred by fate, he spirals into a state of persistent shock, unable to separate everyday reality from the pain that has begun to slowly cleave him from the inside. Can children born out of trauma – even in rebirth – ever really escape it? Hari overcomes misery by unintentionally surrendering his life. Is this the perfect allegory for the trauma that partition’s many survivors have lived with? Is Mahal a metaphor for a bruised India still nursing the wounds of a violent rift between its own?

By the time Karz released, morality had moved indoors. It had been sown into the fabric of society, coded on the basis of gender, caste and creed. Ghai’s film therefore employs the idea of reincarnation almost too casually to subsist any of its shock value. Of course, punar janam and returning heroes had been standardised by then, but Karz is the domestication of society’s fault lines – intimacy breeding contempt. And though it extracts justice in the most stylistic way possible – the name literally means debt - hidden underneath its textural brilliance is the idea that social contracts don’t come undersigned by eternity. From ‘saat janam ka saath’ then to the flitting nature of relationships, Karz introduces cynicism to an audience that would have found it easier to disbelieve the concept of rebirth.

Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om is of course a kind of homage to this age-old trope that merges both faith and fantasy. It is what cinema does best really, perpetuate myths to embalm the toxicity of lived realities. There is an aspect of mental health to the paranoia of Mahal, a sprinkling of hope to the conveniences of Madhumati and an almost too casual noiresque poke at nihilism in Karz. Karan Arjun, on the other hand feels like a magical allegory that seeks to counter the narratives of post-globalisation classicism. The idea of rebirth has sustained not only in scriptures but in our cinema as well because it is the most fantastical stabs at creating a post-reality story. It’s where cinema really begins because it contradicts life’s asymmetry where each is cut a different size of the same pie. At least films make it seem like a mouthful of the same redemptive story.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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