I more than
enjoyed Dangal: it was fantastically well-made, uniformly well-acted, and
pulled off the difficult feat of making wrestling interesting, even deeply
engrossing – that’s creditable, when you consider that most sports movies rely
on the built-in appeal of sports that are already popular, with great cultural
resonance. Heck, to even make a sports
film – i.e. a film in one of the most hackneyed genres – half decent, let alone
excellent, is pretty darn impressive.
And yet, when I (more
than once, and over a period of a few months) sat down to write a review of
Dangal, I found I had nothing to say. Which might make this piece nothing more
than a narcissistic exercise in my writer’s block, but I’d like to believe
there’s more going on here. The “nothing”
is symptomatic of a wider issue, namely that Dangal is a very impressive film –
just not a very interesting one. Is that
a high bar? Certainly – after all,
no-one asks whether Chennai Express, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, and Dilwaale
Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge are interesting films (the likes of Karan Johar insist on
treating movies like Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil as examples
of interesting cinema, but that sort of move testifies not only to Johar’s
mediocrity, but to a rather transparent attempt to account for
under-performance at the box office) – but not unreasonably so: in terms of
commercial cinema, Aamir Khan has set a relatively high standard over the last
fifteen years, and has reaped many rewards for his efforts. Dangal, though, crystallizes a trend in Aamir
Khan’s recent work, one that runs through 3 Idiots and PK (but not through
Ghajini or Talaash): it panders to its audience, i.e. it tells us viewers what
we already believe about the world, and does so in order to make us feel good about ourselves.
It’s that last
bit that should give us pause: Dangal’s pandering isn’t problematic because it
gives us what we want (that is banal, in the sense that it is true of most
mainstream movies), it’s problematic because the film demands that it be taken
seriously, and then rewards that engagement by telling us we – the “we” who
have filed in to watch this film – have nothing to worry about, we have been on
the right side of history all along.
What is, after all, the “message” of Dangal? That girls and women are just as good as
men? But who could disagree with
that? Or, more to the point, while there
are millions who might disagree with that, as even a casual look at India’s
socio-economic data on gender and disadvantage will show, who among Dangal’s
audience would disagree with a proposition framed in that fashion? And that is
very much the fashion in which the film presents the proposition, with Aamir’s
Mahavir Phogat leading his daughters Geeta and Babita (fantastically played by
Zaira Wasim/Fatima Sana Shaikh (Geeta) and Suhani Bhatnagar/Saniya Malhotra
(Babita)) into terrain traditionally off-limits to women: the world of
wrestling, and in the Jat communities of Haryana to boot. The father is repeatedly told (including by
how own wife) that wrestling isn’t for girls, and he refuses to take received
wisdom as a given, ultimately getting his way.
Nothing should be off-limits simply because one is female.
Self-evidently
true, but it’s that “simply because” that trips me up: it’s where so much
discrimination, so much exclusion lurks in disguise, and enables bigots and
discriminators to watch this film with a clean conscience. This matters because, in today’s day and age,
sexism and other forms of discrimination do not announce themselves as such (just about everyone recognizes
that a certain opprobrium, a social cost, attaches to open displays of hatred,
it’s almost a marker that one is un-civilized), but as something else. Today, the misogynist hastens to assure us he
doesn’t have anything against women, “but…”; the racist insists he doesn’t hate
African-Americans, but in fact it’s whites who bear the brunt of racism in
America; Yogi Adityanath heaps vitriol against Muslims, but resists any
implication that he is anti-Muslim, or even that he has any problem with
pluralism (he wishes to offer us “true” pluralism, secularism, etc.). That is, if the hallmark of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century –isms was essentialism (e.g. the openly expressed view that
biological differences between men and women meant that each had certain
spheres of activity proper to them; or that different races were scientifically
demonstrated to be superior/inferior to others), the truth of our own times is
the lie: a hatred that dares not speak its name, and dares a great deal as long
as its name is not uttered.
For Dangal, the
above means that the audience never has to face any uncomfortable questions
about its own sexism, or to reckon with misogyny of a more subtle kind –
everyone can get on board this party program, and the happy ending means we
don’t need to worry about what isn’t on the menu. It’s the classic problem with a pop culture
Raavan: if there’s a villain out there somewhere and he can be killed, you
don’t need to worry about the more complicated demons within (an inversion of
Javed Akhtar’s memorable lines from the Swades Ramleela song come to mind, the
words “…dekh taj ke paap Raavan Ram tere
mann mein hai” pointing to a more complicated, more suggestive link). There’s nothing mean or contemptible about
that truth, but it is important to remember that is the truth of the super-hero
comic, and as such it is no more than a pleasant diversion. In Dangal, the world is divided between the
benighted – those who think women can’t do what women haven’t done for ages –
and the enlightened, and the film leaves no doubt it thinks the audience is
among the enlightened (indeed the structure of the film as a sports-film makes
this explicit: by movie’s end we are all rooting for the female athletes, and
hence for the virtuous cause they and their father stand for). From this perspective Bajrangi Bhaijan was far more interesting: consider the myriad
scenes in which rather everyday examples of communalism are represented, scenes
(set around, for instance, dietary practices) that evoke uncomfortable
recognition (displaced by some clever humor, allowing the viewer to engage with
the communalized texture of his reality, but not denied) – in Dangal, the
analogous scenes create a distance between viewer and character: it’s not “we”
who are sexist, not like those Haryanvi rural Jats, shocking really, what goes
on there.
Dangal’s
filmmakers are doubtless aware that even in the film’s target audience, women’s
wrestling might be a bridge too far for some, so it deploys a second lever:
nationalism. At every point, Mahavir’s
and the film’s feminism is powered by nationalism, a one-two punch that makes
Dangal more about the latter than the former: feminism and women’s empowerment
is not an end in itself, but (this is a sports film, after all) something that
will win the nation medals and glory. As
a reflexive fan of the Indian cricket team, I’ve got no problem with
sports-patriotism – but I do have issues with setting that up as a goal so worthy
even women’s empowerment may be used to further it. Stated differently, Dangal’s double move is
to accept as a given that most of us will be rooting for Geeta and Babita as
they make their way in the world of wrestling (under, I might add, the
leadership of their father; the film unsubtly makes the point: when Geeta
forgets his path, she must contend with athletic failure) – but those who don’t
must reckon with the politically uncomfortable truth that they are impediments
to the nation’s progress.
(As an aside,
this is of course an old trope, a common defensive or nationalist response to
the colonial gaze: when purdah was seen as a symbol of Eastern backwardness,
“native” modernizers hastened to insist that “their” women should discard it;
when the absence of a European-style national identity was presented as
evidence that the colonized weren’t ready for freedom, leaders of national
movements insisted on constructing histories designed to show that just such
nations had been there all along; and today, when the discourse has shifted to
women’s empowerment and gay rights, it isn’t surprising to see the
once-colonized try and show that they are no longer backward on that front as
well – blind to the problem that accepting this discourse of modernization,
that is to say, accepting the logic of catching up, means one is forever
behind. Once upon a time, a culture’s
greater indifference to homosexuality, or “lax” standards on men and women
inter-mingling, made it backward vis-à-vis the Victorians; today the opposite
makes one backward, even as the frame remains in place.)
What could be
less feminist than this double move? For
Dangal, feminism isn’t even worthy of standing alone as something worth
striving for – the something that is
worth striving for, that is valuable in and of itself, is nationalism, and
women’s empowerment can help that goal.
This is an instrumental feminism, not something one can give Dangal a
medal for – indeed, what happens to those who seek or win no medals? What happens to causes that do not have any
payoff in national glory at the end of the quest, merely greater justice (and
no, I am not referring to the pat we can all give ourselves on being part of a
system where that greater justice is ultimately obtainable – that’s the path of
the Hollywood “feel good” movie on race and civil rights, no less clear an
example of pandering than Dangal)? What
happens, in short, when the quest for justice does not bring national glory? On that, it seems, Dangal has nothing to say.
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