This movie has some legs.. it is still going strong.
62 crores to date...and now people are dissecting it from different angles..
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The Second Sex Of Chak De India
Sonali Pattnaik finds out how the media bought and re-sold feminist sentiment
I continue to be devastatingly shocked at the aftermath. I am speaking about the latest commodity of mass culture that seems to be enjoying a longer shelf life than the date on the can promised- the film Chak de India. I am surprised firstly that the film is doing exceedingly well and secondly that it is doing this well. I was under the impression that I was alone in the immense pleasure I derived while I watched girls who shaved their legs and those who did not wield the stick with equal aggression, those in ghagra cholis and in those in branded training pants get ‘eve teased’, pick up chairs and tables to brutally bash up the culprits giving all and sundry a mere glimpse of what “eves” think about “teasing”.
I hooted and smirked alternatively, while the film brilliantly wove sexual harassment with regionalism and gender bias-Shah Rukh Khan has come a long way from smiling with mischief as a transformed Kajol loses to him in basketball to the irritating background chorus of “ladkiyan basketball nahin khel sakti” to being the coach of the national girl’s hockey team- to deal a singular blow at the audience’s collective male ego. To be totally frank, I wasn’t expecting the film to be feminist in the least. Since the days of the promos my presumptions overshadowed my enthusiasm and I quipped, “ it takes an SRK to get women’s hockey recognised in this lopsided culture of ours”.
The film shattered my presumptions. Women are as much a part of patriarchal discourse, the scene with the hockey board announces, as men. The same woman who the film subtly suggests uses her sexuality to pander to male colleagues and maintain her position of power as a board member is the first to rise from her chair and clap at the triumphant display of hockey made by the girls against the national boys team. Not once does the film fall into well-laid patriarchal and communal trap of the Chopra-Johar brand of bourgeois cinema.
Left to some of these directors we would have had the coach falling in love with the captain and a female rivalry emerging from a love triangle spurred by the supposed jealousy. The other plot in waiting to make a masala curry out of the flick was the character of Preeti Sabharwal being wooed by her pompous but conventionally stunning looking cricketer boyfriend. How many times have we witnessed this- let the girls take revenge or win at a few things. And even if they do, they must return to their essential roles of motherhood, family and marital subservience so that the radicalism can be digested better?
Feminism in Hindi cinema does not exist- except through the religious narrative best captured in the “nari jab chandi ban jaati hai” statement visible in films of the eighties calling to mind the Rekha of Khoon bhari Maang clad in leather astride a horse lashing her whip at the guilty party.
Here is a film that easily breaks the mould. It is not a film about hockey- but one about women and power. Replace hockey with any other sport (even cricket and the film would have remained the same). Replace the women- any one of them with any other character, gender or ethnicity and the film would look very different.
Chew on these: how many times have you seen women resist sexual violence in Hindi cinema? And that too collectively and on top of it celebrated by the junta? Or how about this, women from India’s northeast and Jharkhand featured as protagonists? How about women who have bought houses for their families and are not condemned by the film as bad mothers and wives (recall the ambitious Priety Zinta of Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna who is cast as a bad mother) and don’t stand alienated from society for pursuing their dreams and not relenting to threats from father-in-laws and impatient husbands? Or, most significantly, a film about women featuring twenty of them and not one sold to us as an object of pleasure as all our leading actresses are?
It’s a film about women and power. How they are kept away from it, desire it and wrest it out of the hands of a pugilistic patriarchy. They are helped by a man, but by someone who doesn’t use his gender to perpetuate the oppressive norms of patriarchy, even in a benevolent sort of way. He is not interested in the myths about women’s inability in sport, only in infusing enough confidence into the team about their own ability, to share his hunger and passion for the game with a team that, like him, has long been unjustifiably denied its desire to compete.
The film actually occupies a rather complex and emancipatory position. It understands that it is only the formation of an alliance of minorities, over and against the comfortable alliances that sustain the status quo, which holds the possibility of a revolution. It takes a Muslim male in this country to recognize the denial of rights to another minority community (not in terms of quantity but political and cultural recognition) and to form that unseemly alliance which breaks the boundaries of normative alliances and make room for a more complex understanding of nationality rather than the present-day exuberance over flags, men’s cricket and nuclear families as all things national. The film has been hijacked by just such a sense of nationality.
However, it seems that our uncomfortable audience has found yet another way of co-opting feminist glory and resistance by obsessively terming the film differently. All that the mass media has to offer are lame questions to SRK such as “how does it feel to be called Kabir Khan” or “how different is this from your earlier roles?” For Shobha De this is an occasion for discussing SRK’s clever strategizing for a political career- did someone say she was a feminist?
This myth needs to be busted. Even the female stars aren’t doing too much better. I watched three of them in a recent episode of a comic chat show on television where they giggled throughout to sexist comments from the hosts like “so who took the most time with make up?” or “who was the b***h among you?” or “ With so many girls in skirts who wouldn’t watch the movie?”
The attempt is being made everywhere to reduce the women to their ‘real’ roles as sexual objects, the very thing the film seeks to subvert. It’s not a film about SRK but about girls that are burning with the desire to excel in a sport. And if I have traced SRK’s own gender politics off-screen correctly he’ll be the first to agree. So, its time to re-orient the enthusiasm around the film a little bit and see it for what it is.
I wonder where all those girls are- the girls that the film showcases because I know they exist everywhere, not just on the screen. Its time the real heroes, rather heroines, of this film are given their due. Its time they stood up. The film’s got it right- we’re sick and tired of being labeled, harassed and denied and we’re not about to take it any longer, not even the quick reclaim of the film into a pre-existing male domain. So if the real heroes are listening- could you please stand up?
Pattnaik is lecturer in the department of English, Kirori Mal College, Delhi University
Oct 13, 2007
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THE INDIAN EXPRESS
Sound-tracking India
Amrita Shah
Posted online: Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST
It has become the new slogan of India. Cutting across boundaries of language, location and context, it has the force of a new national imperative. Actor Shah Rukh Khan in an interview to this paper in July had expressed the hope that it would become “like a sporting line”, an exuberant call to be used, in his words: “Whenever Sachin is playing. Or perhaps when Dhanraj Pillai is going with the ball... or get Sania Mirza to win the Wimbledon.” Khan appears to have got his wish. A high point of the Indian Idol’s season finale on Sunday night was the singer Sukhwinder belting it out on stage. The song played intermittently throughout the India-Pakistan Twenty20 final on Monday night and seemed to blare from every car stereo in the euphoric hours that followed that decisive last catch by Sreesanth.
Chak De India! Part exhortation, part exultation — it has just the right amount of zing and energy to work in a stadium, on the street or in a national singing contest. But it is more than a popular song, a motto or a rallying cry. In its form, its content, its multiple uses and its spreading appeal it captures the zeitgeist and holds up a mirror to change, allowing one to compare the past, in terms of concepts, attitudes and states of mind with the present.
We Indians are an emotional people. We are also a musical people, and it is easy to see why film songs, particularly the Hindi film song, the country’s unique contribution to the world, has such a special place in our social life. We use films songs for lullabies and picnic games, to mark festivals and weddings (in the year 2020 there will still probably be a nankhatai band playing ‘Meri pyaari beheniya banegi dulhania’). But above all we use them to express our patriotism, our love and our feelings for the country. From the anti-colonial fervour of the pre-Independence era, to the panegyric lyrics of the war years, to the celebratory songs about India’s natural riches and its spiritual superiority, Bollywood songs have conveyed an idea of the relationship Indians have with India.
‘Chak De India’ pleads for a complete recasting of this relationship. Gone are the melodrama of the past and the brooding Manoj Kumar style of patriotism. There is no anger in this new call, no fear. There is no glorification, nor is there any assertion of greatness. The country is not a goddess or a parent (‘dharti maa’); she is not an ancient land of epic proportions (‘Bharat’/ ‘Hindustan’), a soldier dying in the snow-capped Himalayas, a great heritage to be defended or, if one wants to bring in political slogans, a space for impossible expectations (‘Garibi Hatao’), or for gloating (‘India Shining’). No, the country is more like a buddy, a friend. Someone to urge and encourage, to smile with, to cheer. And it is this stripped-down quality of quiet assurance that seems to pervade the national consciousness — it was certainly in evidence on the field in Johannesburg on Monday night — at the moment.
But ‘Chak De India’ is not just about the things it is not (dread, awe, melodrama, hostility); it is also about the thing it is. ‘Chak de’, a phrase used to denote encouragement in Punjabi, is close in sound to words from other languages. To the English ‘chuck’ for instance (in the hockey fields of suburban Mumbai you can hear the cry, “Chuck it, chuck it, chuck it, men!”); it is also close to the Hindi verb (chakhna) for taste, both resemblances helping to give it a certain onomatopoeic resonance.
In form, its succinctness like the lean frames of today’s athletes evokes the world of sports and concepts such as teamwork, integrity and unity so well brought out in the eponymous film and common both to the sports field and to the building of nationhood. But it also evokes the world of advertising with its own associations of consumerism, cosmopolitanism (enhanced by the mixing of languages), global-ism and contemporariness. Whether it is the subliminal effect of the film’s message or the lyrics of the song (“kuch kariye/ kuch kariye/ nuss nuss meri khaule...”) there is nothing so much the slogan ‘Chak De’ brings to mind as Nike’s ‘just do it’.
A call to action. A farewell to the burdens of the past. Haven’t we been here before? The World Cup victory of 1983 was a prelude to Rajiv *hi’s election as prime minister and to the promised dawn of a modern, 21st century India. Rahul *hi’s formal elevation within the ranks of the Congress on the day of India’s exciting T20 win against the backdrop of India’s technological and economic advancement seems to be another such moment.
As we have seen before the country’s problems are too intractable for easy optimism. And the glamorous ferment of dance contests, cricketing events and soaring Sensex figures cannot obscure the deprivations of a large number of our people. Yet the fact that a youthful exuberance is muscling through the cobwebs of our tangled past and that the middle-class Indian youth is, according to a much reported study by the Swedish research and consulting firm Kairos Future, the happiest in the world is surely a cause for celebration. The challenge is to both boost and harness this new energy and focus it in a purposeful direction. For opportunities are known to dissipate as quickly as champagne bubbles.
Mumbai-based Shah is the author of ‘Hype, Hypocrisy and Television in Urban India’
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/221420.html
AuthorTopic: Chak De! India.. (Read 2770 times)
August 13, 2007, 07:55:35 PM