Review of Rajkahini via the last song, “Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak”

This is a resounding song. We all know that. The interspersed Yaman strains/extrapolations, emphasize the themes of loss, that the film focuses on.

For an epic narrative like Rajkahini, Rabindranath’s classic composition, later institutionalized as the National Song, is fitting. I am going to see whether the individual lines emphasized in the singing, illuminate/refract the motifs, themes, preoccupations in the film, in significant ways. At the outset, I have to admit that I don’t recognize all the singers. The singing in this finale part of the film, is very good as is the music at other moments, for instance, when Rituparna (Baiji) sings as the Nawab fornicates with the new inmate of the Kothi. If that instance underscores the idea of how Art may have to inhabit and actually, further Death, of how Art may exist in close contiguity with the profane, the bizarre  and the perverse, then the instance referred to above, would be a case in point.

However, ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak Jaya He’, like ‘Vaishnava Jana to tene kahi  eje’( plaintive conclusion to Gandhi), underscores the idea of the scale that is even greater than the  national scale, however epic that might be. Both films, like Shakepeare’s Lear, confront us with the question, ‘What is left after this’? If words fail, then music may step  in.

Even in Gandhi, Narasimha’s song of the 12^th century  may have an artistic point of highlighting Gandhi, once again, at the end of the film. We all know that Gandhiji loved ‘Vaishnava Jano To’. However, the song also provides an alternative frame for acting and suffering. The question is, can the political and the artistic, dialogize in significant ways? I mean, what does ‘Vaishnava Jano’ and ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’ do for these respective films. They suggest, especially the former, ‘the calm of mind all passion spent’—where spirituality remains the only answer to the frenetic questions of doing and having in this world.

Other questions that Srijit’s film raises are many. One of them is the intertextuality produced by Abanindranath’s Rajkahini. That may have been alright in the beginning, but was it necessary to close with that after the definitive gesture/action of the Baiji closing the door. It did have the effect of laboring a point unnecessarily, and feeding the audience too much information. Chittor is another epic narrative, and hence in my opinion, the film story, monumental, gigantic, and all consuming on its own, did not require an additional the artistic footnote.

The acting of the Sahibs was unconvincing and amateurish, and although Rituparna was excellent, most of the other Kothi girls, did not really leave much of an impression. Their  Bangal speech also needed far more practice to sound natural and convincing. Of all the girls in the Kothi, the little one, who disrobed in her father’s presence, was the most memorable. Reminded me of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi, where Draupadi (echoes of the classical Draupadi), disrobes in the presence of Sena Nayak (play on the words), to stage her ultimate act of defiance and resistance to male authority and power, to the male (societal, cultural, institutional, class) appropriation of the female body.

The Kothi itself, powerful leitmotif, motif, image, holding the plot together, seemed to carry for me strong echoes of the mad asylum at Lahore in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh. Do you think that ‘Khol Do’ and ‘Toba’ could both be artistically united in this film? The urgency and drama of the initial ‘khol do’ moment gets diffused in the later Toba Tek Singh narrative structure. The two symbols remain in uneasy dialectic.  There is less fusion, but more interruption in bringing the implied two stories together.

No doubt there is great effort in a film that tries to do so much. As a work of feminist historiography within Partition traditions of India, it is new in film. But I would say that to pull that off, would have required tighter structure, so that the poignancy of borders of several kinds, could hit the audience more forcefully and more plaintively.

Rituparana and Kaushik Sen, moved me the most.

I’m sure you have read Urvashi Butalia, Srijit. I found those women stories, simply haunting. You could have also had a series of Manto stories, which featured women.

This is just my humble opinion.

Sreemati Mukherjee