Vanaja: The Film as Message
Sangeeta Mall
MFA, Creative Writing, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Introduction
Vanaja is the dissertation film by Rajnesh Domalpalli, an MFA student from Columbia University. The film has been shot on location in South India. It is a feature film about Vanaja, a fifteen year old girl, who leaves her school to go into service for the village landlady, who used to be a Kuchipudi dancer, in order to learn dance from her. During the course of her training, Vanaja is raped by Shekhar, the landlady, Rama Devi’s son, who has recently returned from the US and aspires to join politics. The girl becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a boy, much against Rama Devi’s wishes, who would like Vanaja to abort the foetus. Vanaja hopes that the physical evidence of the child will be proof of the rape, and that somehow Shekhar will be brought to justice. This is an impossible dream in rural India, where wealth, power and caste are almost synonymous. Shekhar has no desire to marry Vanaja since she is from a lower caste, and the match will be an unequal one. In the end, as predicted, victory remains with Rama Devi and Shekhar, who also gain possession of the child, who will grow up to be an upper caste boy.
Vanaja is located in a village in Andhra Pradesh, a region where caste loyalties run high, and the politicization of caste is at its zenith. The director belongs to this region, although he has lived in the United States for a number of years.
The Artist in the Film
There are three art forms that the director has depicted in Vanaja, classical music, Kuchipudi dance and the Burra Katha folk narrative form. With the onslaught of popular entertainment, all these forms are being slowly replaced by the vulgar entertainment of Bollywood films and MTV. In one of the sequences, Yadigiri, the urchin, dances and sings an English pop song whose primary words seem to be ‘Kiss me, Baby’. It is obvious that he does not know the rest of the song nor what it means, but judges it to be acceptable since he has seen it performed somewhere. The director has contrasted the vulgarity of the song and the attendant dance movements with the grace of Vanaja’s dance.
The obvious poverty of the Burra Katha dancers is a clear indicator of how the popularity of this art form is declining. In one interview, Domalpalli has stated that he also wants to use Vanaja to promote Burra Katha, now restricted almost entirely to rural South India, and being slowly made extinct by the proliferation of cable television in rural India.
Rama Devi, herself, is emblematic of the fading popularity of classical dance forms like the Kuchipudi. She is willing to teach Vanaja Kuchipudi so that she can reclaim her own lost glory as an exponent of this dance through Vanaja, whose eventual fame she will claim as her own.
As for Vanaja, she too seeks power through her dance. Convinced that she can become as rich as her employer if she learns to dance like her, she is willing to suffer any humiliation provided she can be taught Kuchipudi. She is even willing to take care of her baby as its maid as long as she remains in practice under Rama Devi’s tutelage.
The portrayal of an artist through the two characters of Vanaja and Rama Devi is different from the usual portrayal involving an eccentric, obsessed person, elegant and refined while in the pursuit of art. Though classical dance evolved from the temple dances by devdasis (servant maids of God), who were typically from the lower castes, this and classical music became the sole preserve of the upper castes, mainly because these castes were economically enabled to patronize the arts. Vanaja shows an entirely different portrayal of the artist. While Vanaja is of lower caste and is shown to be in training while at the same time performing the most mundane domestic chores, Rama Devi is shown to have become a greedy landlady, more interested in pushing her son into politics than pursuing her own artistic calling. The training takes place in a room in the house where it is frequently interrupted by Shekhar, another hint that what the two dancers are doing is certainly not sacrosanct. Neither character follows the stereotype of the artist. The viewer might even get the impression that for both these characters, Kuchipudi is merely a means, not an end in itself. It will take Vanaja to wealth, while Rama Devi is only trying to reclaim her lost glory. Art for art’s sake is not the dictum of these characters. They simply can’t afford it.
Vanaja: The Author
Vanaja claims to take control of her own destiny when she decides to fight the landlady’s claim to her son and the landlady’s grandson. Instead of submitting to the humiliation of being raped by Shekhar, she decides to try and file a criminal case against him, something that everyone is convinced is a lost cause. However, the start of Vanaja’s downfall is a visit to a soothsayer who predicts Vanaja’s rise to fame and wealth through dance, a stark contrast to the woman’s own miserable and poverty-stricken existence as a Burra Katha dancer. Only based on the soothsayer’s prediction, Vanaja chooses to leave school and go into service. It is a fortuitous move for her father as well, an impoverished fisherman who is heavily in debt and whose boat is eventually confiscated. Vanaja’s salary can also improve the home finances. It is significant that Lacchi remains unswayed by the magic of the soothsayer, and her life remains unchanged. In one scene, she demonstrates her contempt for superstition by smearing Vanaja’s head with sugar, so that a pregnant elephant will bless her decision to have a baby, knowing that the elephant will be attracted by the smell of the sugar. Vanaja strays, not because of her poverty, but because of a fortune-teller.
In one of his interviews, Domalpalli expressed his vision of Vanaja. “I wanted the protagonist to go alone through this journey. Isn’t it that way? Going through life, we often have only ourselves to depend on. We are in a community, but when it all boils down, things have to be drawn from within yourself. I wanted Vanaja to find that strength. Vanaja is a metaphor, it means a water-lily, something that is growing out of mud and muck at the bottom, but something very beautiful. The final dance, the final sequence is a metaphor for that.”
All through the story, Vanaja remains committed to her own interests. It is she who decides to go into service at the landlady’s home, she who persuades her mistress, a canny woman, to take her under her tutelage, she who tries to seduce the postman, Ram Babu, into foregoing her father’s debt, she who deliberately shows up Shekhar in front of a crowd of farmhands, she who decides to have the baby rather than have it aborted, she who enlists Ram Babu’s support though she fails to make a police complaint, and eventually, left orphaned, she who confronts both the landlady and her son alone, and gets an assurance from them about the child’s future, though the audience knows that that assurance will never be respected.
For a lower caste female in rural India to take all of these initiatives bespeaks a power and self-assurance that verges on the extraordinary. In a sense she is vindicated when Shekhar is vilified by the opposition, and forced into stepping down from the elections. But this is poor consolation, when she herself receives no compensation or security. Vanaja takes on the role of an author in the film, one who is writing her own future after the initial folly of forsaking it. In a way, Vanaja’s story is like that of any struggling writer. There are several reasons for her to abandon her self-ascribed task, and only one for her to continue, that of her own conviction that what she is doing is right. Like a writer, she too is forced to conform to her social milieu while charting her own path. Like a writer, she is never sure of success. In fact, like most writers, in her first attempt at rebellion, she fails. But her cheerful demeanour at the end of the film indicates that, like a true writer, she will keep trying to script her own life story.
The Director as Auteur
Clearly, Domalpalli has chosen to chart a new path for making feature films, that of remaining as close to reality as possible. In order to forsake even a hint of artifice, he has chosen to use people literally picked up from the streets to star in his film. That this technique can be successful is evidenced by the fact that Mira Nair won international acclaim and recognition for her film Salaam Bombay, in which the children were street children. However, Nair chose to use some accomplished actors as well, something Domalpalli has not done for Vanaja. A more recent example of a film using non-actors is Babel. The director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, has given a similar reason as Domalpalli, that the actors were too well-groomed for the roles they were expected to perform.1
In his press kit, Domalpalli gives the reason for using non-actors for the film. He says, “The first hurdle was finding appropriate talent and crew in a state where most filming was big-budget Tollywood, the Telugu language version of Bollywood…Given the rural nature of the story, and the tendency of most acting to lean towards the theatrical, it was clear that non-actors drawn from hutments, labor-camps and the vast Indian middle class were the right choice.”
In Indian cinema, fair-skinned actors, particularly females, have always been in demand. In the genre of Hindi commercial cinema, producers and directors tend to cast reputed actresses for all kinds of roles, from college co-eds to village belles. The audience is transported into a fairyland where there is absolutely no premium on verisimilitude. This was especially true of Bollywood, and to some extend Tollywood, where glamour was almost used as a character in films. Art film directors used trained actors, and even mainstream actors, but ensured that their appearance conformed to what the role demanded.
Hindi parallel cinema, as the Indian independent cinema genre is called, first started digressing from the trend of using mainstream actors and actresses in the mid-seventies.
Though socially relevant cinema always had a presence in both Bollywood and Tollywood, it was only slightly short of marginal, with mainstream actors being recruited for both mainstream and alternative cinema. From the mid-seventies, a separate class of actors emerged, one that chose to rebel against the established norms of what a typical actor in Indian films should look like. The fair, well-fed, urban, well-groomed looks were replaced by a man-on-the-street appearance that was both earthy and more realistic. Earlier, actors could not afford to nurture such looks. Those who did either made do with marginal roles in cinema or stuck to theatre. However, actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil contributed to the development of parallel cinema by their unglamorous looks, looks that were supplemented by outstanding acting. Where almost all mainstream Indian actors need to be trained in, not just acting, but also dance to the extent that some of the top stars, both male and female, were better dancers than actors, these actors could hold up a film based on the strength of their acting alone. However, all directors of parallel cinema have used trained actors for at least the lead roles, something that Domalpalli has chosen not to do. There are roles in the film that would have suited a trained actor quite well, for instance that of the landlady, who has to have an aristocratic bearing, as well as know classical music and dance. Many actresses in South India are suited to such a character. Perhaps budgetary constraints prevented the director from hiring such a person.
The director is also the screenplay writer, and co-editor for the film. It is interesting to note that Domalpalli opted not to use any of the stories about social justice that abound in Telugu literature, and chose to write his own screenplay. For a first film, that Domalpalli is now trying to launch commercially, this was a strategy fraught with risk. In an email to this writer, Domalpalli expressed his conviction that the foundation of a good film is the story. This is perhaps a throwback to his background as a short story writer during his college days in India, one of which was broadcast over BBC.
Auteur as Crusader
New wave Hindi cinema started to make its presence felt, if not on the box office, then on the Indian film and cultural scene, with its closer to the ground stories, realistic acting and a more overt political or social message. Mainstream cinema, since the seventies’, had lampooned the Indian political and law enforcement machinery, but its caricatures and improbable plotlines communicated another message altogether, that it wasn’t to be taken seriously by the audience. Parallel cinema, on the other hand, excited a more visceral reaction. Shorn of all artifice, whether in the story, locales or actors, the characterizations and storylines almost mirrored the social ills that existed. Ardh Satya, directed by Govind Nihalani, one of the few films from this genre to become a commercial success, showed the moral decline of a cop in the face of corruption within the police department. One of the most noted directors of parallel cinema in India, Shyam Benegal, had this to say about Manthan, a film about economic revolution within the milk farming community, “Its real value as it turned out was beyond its worth as cinema entertainment. Spearhead teams from the National Dairy Board used the film for discussion and debate in at least 50,000 villages all over the country. The creation of milk cooperatives in all the milkshed areas of the country has contributed to making India one of the largest milk producers in the world. While the film cannot possibly be credited with this success story, it certainly had a seminal role in stimulating farmer interest in the making of co-operatives. This has convinced me that films can be effective catalysts in social change but not necessarily through their conventional use in cinema theatres.”2
In fact, the most renowned directors of Indian art cinema in the years from the 50s to the early 80s centered their films around the personal rather than the political. Even overtly political filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak chose to communicate their politics through moving images of individuals entrapped by the world around them. The films made by these filmmakers explored relationships through characters, their genius in filmmaking lying in their exploitation of all aspects of filmmaking to best effect. For instance, Ray’s attention to camera movement in all his films drew international appreciation.
However, with the advent of filmmakers like Govind Nihalani in the late 80s onwards, a new trend in Indian cinema has emerged, that of the overtly political film, one in which the politicization of the individual is stronger than his or her individual circumstances. Thus, there is a going-back-to-the-roots trend in most art cinema, a radicalization of film as a message, not just a medium. As the genre of art cinema in India slowly becomes marginalized with lesser funding from the state in favour of more private funding, what exists has moved further towards the political. This might be a function of the bewilderment felt by filmmakers in the face of the rampant liberalization that threatens to submerge any individual voice that favors art as art, (a paradoxical situation, since art is supposed to thrive in a more emergent economy) and the tendency of globalization to put a premium on conformance as opposed to individualism. For instance, a film will be billed as being a ‘commentary on the prevailing caste exploitation in southern India’ rather than a moving story of an aspiring young dancer seen through the eye of a camera lens.
Such politicization has turned filmmaking into a message. Domalpalli, in his email, has stated his intention to continue making films in rural India. He says, “I hope to continue making similar such films in Andhra, rooting myself for the most part in the rural areas. These films will deal, at least initially, in a psychological / social / artistic currency that is at once strongly rooted in our local culture, yet globally relevant. As time goes by, I'd like to branch out to other issues - such as environmental degradation and wildlife conservation (or the lack thereof).”
Many filmmakers, particularly art filmmakers, have taken upon themselves to espouse causes through the medium of film. Derek Jarman, for instance, used his films to look at the issue of gay rights in the 70s and 80s. The overlap between auteur and crusader seems to become increasingly strong, as the role of the state in protecting the interests of the threatened minorities, the depressed, the oppressed and women, reduces. The conflict arises when the filmmaker omits to use auteuristic structures in his films in favour of foregrounding the message.
Conclusion
Rajnesh Domalpalli’s Vanaja is essentially a commentary on caste oppression in rural south India. Though technically flawed, the film carries a message, that of the courage of one of the most oppressed sections of Indian society, a young girl from the lower caste. The most interesting aspect of the film is the artistic journey, short-lived in the case of the girl, and aborted, in the case of her mentor, the landlady Rama Devi. Through its use of non-actors for all roles, the film demonstrates that with training, a committed team can successfully collaborate to create an admirable film.
Notes