TheDaak review

Commentary

To do or not to do, that is the question– in a nutshell, this is how one can describe The Dilemma penned by Vijay Dan Detha. It is a masterful retelling of a Rajasthani folk tale essentially passed down from one generation to the other. The story centers around a ghost, Seth’s son and his wife whose lives are entwined in the strangest ways possible. Two cardinal dilemmas shape its contours: the ghost’s dilemma of whether to possess the wife’s body or not fades away into oblivion as the wife’s dilemma of committing ‘adultery’  for her own pleasure in the absence of her husband takes the center stage. With the aid of vivid description of the surroundings and an acute understanding of human nature, Dan Detha portrays the range of choices, or the lack thereof, a woman has in a conservative patriarchal setting .

A quintessential feature of folk tales is their ever-changing nuances as per the various methods of retelling. Celebrated auteur Mani Kaul brings The Dilemma to the screen as Duvidha  in 1973, which  received critical acclaim. The transition of a verbal anecdote into a recognized short story and then into a much talked about art film certainly lends the hitherto ‘unheard voices’ a greater agency thereby doing justice to the crux of the tale. It also propels the original tale through multiple levels of metamorphosis via an act which is neither ‘translation’ nor ‘distortion’. This act, which while staying true to the spirit of the story, adds new layers and flavours to it and can be termed as ‘transcreation’.

Hand-written slides in Devnagari are used in the opening credits to perhaps allude to the rural indigenous origins of the film. In the final slide, instead of the usual ‘directed by’ prompt we witness the bold proclamation of the director – ‘Mani Kaul dwara kalpit chhavi’ which translates into ‘a film imagined by Mani Kaul’, a claim which sets it different from Detha’s version of the  story at once. This act of ‘re-imagining’ the subversion of conventions, which is at the core of the folk tale, makes it a document in need of critical inquiry. Kaul transitions into a ‘Gentle Colonizer’ who constructs a new edifice out of Dan Detha’s clay while preserving its spirit to a large extent.

Quite contrary to Dan Detha’s lucid narration which provided a greater freedom of visualization to the reader, Kaul’s almost static and restrictive frames portray the events from an apparent ‘dispassionate distance’. His intermittent use of folk music as the background score and the almost inanimate dialogue throwing or movement of the characters allude to the rural Rajasthani art of puppetry. It is perhaps a thinly-veiled reference to the conventional restrictions and taboos of a rural society which impedes a  woman’s expression of free will.

The two central characters of the story, Seth’s son and daughter-in-law, have no names. The bride’s expectations of marital bliss are quashed when the groom takes the arbitrary decision of traveling far away for business soon after marriage. Then comes a ghost, already smitten by the bride’s ethereal beauty and assumes the form of the absentee husband. When the phantom divulges the truth to the bride, she is put in a spot to decide for herself and gives in to her yearning for love and intimacy.

While the act of consciously choosing to lead a conjugal life with an imposter certainly gives the woman a sort of agency, which she was previously devoid of, it also depicts the crude futility of having to ‘make do’ with her limited options. In the film, the bride’s face remains fully or partially veiled till her husband leaves the village and as the night creeps in, the ‘forbidden desires’ wake up from the hidden crevices of the body and mind.

Kaul’s frames are vibrant with colours, and nod to his deep admiration for the works of Amrita Shergill and Akbar Padamsee, who is also the father of Raisa, the lead actress. He weaves a tale of acquiring emotional and sexual freedom but brings back the element of fate which is the defining factor of a folklore. The doppelganger, who might also be the product of some wishful fantasy or an alter-ego of the insensitive husband, is finally caught in its act of deception as the ‘real husband’ returns to the village. Thus, the respite from the inevitability of fate is temporary and the bride’s bliss is crushed under its wheels. The bride is somehow coerced to drop the ‘berries’ (food of village bumpkins) which alluded to the biblical forbidden fruit and thereby cede her short-lived agency to the rigid normative structure.

Dan Detha refrains from revealing whether this ‘tale centered around a woman’ is also a ‘tale told by a woman’. Kaul interestingly uses a male voice as the narrator but many of his shots, including the one where the bride is writhing in labour induced agony, captures the narrative from the ‘female eye’ thus staying true to the eternal characteristic of folklores.

Beyond the obvious depictions and contestations on gender, consent and coercion, the story brings in fundamental elements from the prevalent caste-based discriminations into its fold. From the distribution of sweetmeats to the mass by ‘a pair of hands’ signifying the Seth’s ‘cautious distance’ from the lowly village-folks to the villagers regaling at the news of a scandalous affair in the Seth’s family, the entire narrative historicizes the reality in the traditional Rajasthani society.

With a paradoxical touch, we witness the fruition of these enmeshed socio-cultural tropes and references on a huge barren field quite akin to the field of Asphodel (Greek underworld’s field of judgement). The figure of the shepherd is introduced as the dispenser of justice with a tacit reference to how these ‘pariahs’, often feared as charlatans and left outside the conventional social fold, are looked at as impartial mitigators of grave matters. He too is stricken by a ‘dilemma’ as he takes measure of both the men (literally) before deciding the verdict. 

The ghost of desire is captured in a waterskin and all that is nonconformist is thus stifled. As the jury fades away into the dreary landscape, the unseen narrator bluntly says – ‘The Ghost was taught a lesson’. And what of the lady? She lies in her bed, static and cold. Her face is veiled again and as she goes through the many sanctifying rituals for her ‘transgressions’, the camera zooms out. The brightness of her yellow saree and demure visage swiftly turns into the veiled shadow of a distant figurine quite akin to a nameless, formless apparition stripped off freedom and life.

Saukarya Samad is a student at Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi