Another day, another heroine used as a mere prop!

Plot summary

Virendra Pratap Singh can inherit his father’s substantial estate only if he enrolls in the army. So he enlists in Major Jasbir Singh Rana’s training academy, planning to perform so badly that he is expelled quickly. Major Rana prides himself on his training and cadets, and refuses to expel Viren despite his best efforts.

Viren falls in love with Nisha, the local police commissioner Shankar’s sister. Nisha initially dislikes Viren, but after some 90s-style wooing/sexual harassment, she reciprocates.

Shankar, who is a decade older than Nisha, has raised her himself after their parents passed away when they were children. He wants her to marry the son of a wealthy politician, and disapproves of Nisha’s relationship with Viren. He emotionally blackmails Nisha and forces her into an engagement with the politician’s son. Viren disrupts the engagement, and despite the security arrangements at the venue, is able to prevent it from happening.

Sensing trouble, Shankar pretends to agree to the relationship, but then secretly thrashes Viren so badly that he loses function of all his limbs. He then disposes his body off at Major Rana’s academy. Major Rana is furious, and tells Shankar that no cadet from his academy is so weak that he can be laid low by a civilian. He then commands Viren to get up and walk towards him, and Viren actually does so. Major Rana challenges a stunned Shankar that Viren will one day barge into his house and take his sister away with the very limbs Shankar thought he had destroyed beyond repair.

Major Rana puts Viren on an intensive training schedule, and after a while, Viren is back on his feet and stronger than ever. Viren and Nisha begin meeting again, and finally elope. This leads to a skirmish between the army and the police, in which Major Rana gets shot. He has been given up for dead, but Viren refuses to accept this. He urges Major Rana to wake up, as a soldier must, and soon, Major Rana revives. He then recovers rapidly.

In the meantime, Nisha, unwilling to get married without the blessings of the brother who is her sole family,  but unwilling to love without Viren either, consumes poison. Major Rana informs Shankar of this, berating him for not fulfilling the duties of a guardian. Shankar is shattered. Major Rana then tells him Nisha is safe. A relieved Shankar realises the error of his ways, and agrees to get Nisha and Viren married.

On the day of the wedding, the politician intercepts Viren’s wedding procession and kidnaps Nisha. Major Rana and his cadets avert Nisha’s forcibly getting married to the politician’s son, and Viren and Nisha are finally married.

Nisha’s navigation of heartbreak

I have nothing new to say about Nisha’s navigation of heartbreak – it is the same pattern we see in Jaan‘s Kajal. The movies were released close to each other, and were both intended to be commercial potboilers. Both movies were intended to be a vehicle for the hero to showcase his skills, and the female protagonists have little to do, or distinguish themselves from one another.

Nisha does get an entire song to herself to describe her pain, a rare event.

 

She is even able to sing this in a public event. However, the impact is essentially the same – next to nothing. This is merely the family property’s bagaavat, reflecting badly on the family’s honour, but otherwise of no relevance.

Nisha’s heartbreak is on familiar lines:

• She learns belatedly that she was not allowed to have the agency to be in a relationship in the first place. As a much-indulged young woman, it is an understandable error of judgment – her brother has fulfilled her every wish thus far; why would he refuse her in this matter? But it turns out that while Shankar has no hesitation in giving his sister material luxury, he will, on no account, allow her even basic autonomy as an adult.
• Nisha is still in some denial – she asks aloud how her brother can possibly arrange for her to be married to someone without asking for her consent. He has raised her; it is true, but it does not mean he owns her.
  True enough, but in Bollywood and Indian society, the act of parenting is an essentially selfish one, giving the parent (or parental figure) the rights of a Roman patriarch – to do as he pleases with your body and soul, forever. Nisha’s brother tells her as much, reminding her of how she owes him for having raised her.
• Nisha’s persona of being a wilful, headstrong young woman instantly falls off, and she rushes upstairs, sobbing. She can do nothing else.
• Nisha is now officially a damsel in distress, and she does what is a time-honoured act in Indian performance art – she sends Viren a message asking him to rescue her, and if he does not, she will surely perish from the pain of separation.
  The act of sending a messenger and the way the message is worded harks back to Sanksrit drama, in which similarly distressed nayikas sent the exact same messages to the brave hero. Kalidasa’s plays are full of such lovelorn SOS messages, and Krishna is said to have received the same message from Rukmini, as has Arjun.
• Nisha must now wait. If her hero heeds the summons, all will be well. But there is the chance that he will not, or cannot, and in this case, she is completely powerless to change her fate.
• The hero does appear, and Nisha then leaves with him, assured of his protection. Despite being shown as a college graduate, Nisha is as helpless as a 5th century nayika to fend for herself independently. Despite this, this is the only time when she finds herself a voice and speaks out against being forced to separate from her lover (pictured in song above).
• When Viren’s rescue attempt is foiled, she is once again relegated to sulking and crying in her bedroom. The picturisation of this, while brief, shows viewers absolute confinement – Nisha is in her room, and even there, on her bed. She does not go out anywhere else, and is alone. No one listens to her as she cries. No one is available for her to talk to.
• She demonstrates some agency in sneaking out to visit Viren (it is unclear how she has managed this), but is spotted and slapped in public, by the politician’s son of all people. The only claim he has over her is the disrupted engagement. Nisha has to be defended by Viren, as we might expect.
• Nisha’s status as chattel/property continues. She is literally stolen from her brother’s house, and away from Viren and Major Saab (yes, she is now his property too, because he is the stand-in pater familias for Viren and thereby controls the loves of his son and daughter-in-law). She again has to be won back.
• The act of winning/stealing Nisha is valorised, even by the only other female character of importance, the Major’s wife. She talks of being stolen (uthana, lifted) from her parents’ house as a young woman herself, and urges Viren to do the same. The objectification, therefore, is so deeply entrenched that women take active part in their own reification.

The takeaway

I have nothing to learn from how Nisha dealt with heartbreak – it is certainly of no use to me (or anyone, I would presume). But my other objective in starting this blog was to see for myself and document empirically whether Bollywood heroines did, in fact, largely follow the nayika way of privately crying, refusing food and waiting around to be rescued. I begin to see a pattern emerging, though I will have to watch more movies to actually be sure of this. I must also see if there are marked shifts in the approaches to young women over successive decades.

 

I am an Indian woman. I am dealing with a heartbreak.

The person I lost was someone I considered “home”. I knew and imagined nothing beyond “us”. When we broke up, I lost the sense of being grounded; the answer to “What does all this mean?”

I am putting together the pieces, somehow, anyhow.

Heartbreak and getting over one is such an intensely personal experience. Everyone has something to say; some advice to offer, but the truth is, you have to find your own path and method.

Conversely, heartbreak is a universal experience, as is overcoming one. There are so many different bits of advice, and all of them are true.

While I do all the usual things like journalling and meditating and exercising, I also want to take a few tips from my imaginary friends in Bollywood. Love stories are staple fare in Bollywood, and it can’t always be rain dances and kissing flowers. Bollywood has plenty of material for the heartbroken lover as well, from songs to sumptuously choreographed visuals. But somehow, it is all so overwhelmingly male.

The Bollywood hero follows a fairly standard pattern when his heart is broken—he gets blackout drunk, cries/cusses before a few loyal buddies, and sings a song crafted for the occasion. But I’m not a man, and though India is slowly opening up to women being more expressive, public debauchery by a woman is still frowned upon. And in any case, I would like to keep my job, rented apartment, and my few friends, and regular drunken outpourings aren’t exactly conducive to this. I wanted to see how my fellow women in Bollywood deal with having their hearts broken. Women in Bollywood films, after all, seem to face so many more obstacles—rich fathers who lock them up, heroes who jet off to foreign shores in search of fortune and find an angrez girlfriend, brothers who are always in the rival gang and therefore must beat their beloveds up, a jealous pre-existing fiance…

Despite this variety of formidable odds, I can’t recall a go-to coping mechanism heroines resort to to deal (productively) with heartbreak. But I want to be more thorough, and actually research what the heroines in different films over the years do in the face of losing your soulmate. This is where I’ll record my various impressions. And maybe find some useful tips for my own broken heart.