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Old gold, new setting
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Palekar's `Paheli' has predecessors in Mani Kaul's `Duvidha' and to a certain extent Girish Karnad's `Nagamandala'
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FOLK LORE Rani Mukherjee and Shah Rukh in `Paheli'
"There is nothing new under the sun" may seem like an overworked cliche. But cliches often have a wonderful way of expressing things. True, Amol Palekar's Paheli adds new sheen and patina to an old folklore, but it has already seen less flashy predecessors in Mani Kaul's Duvidha of the 70s and Girish Karnad's play and stage performances of Nagamandala, barely a dozen years ago.
While Palekar's Paheli and Kaul's Duvidha are directly based on Vijaydan Detha's folk tale, Karnad's Kannada play Nagamandala is more amorphous and hence more plastic in a painterly sense, since it could have been from anywhere and capable of being placed anywhere. The origins of folklore (they are not merely folk tales as we understand them) are not easily and geographically traceable. You may find them in the Andamans as easily as in the Aztecs.
This is in no sense a criticism proper of Palekar's Paheli or the folk format from which it emerged, or indeed that of Mani Kaul's or Girish Karnad's work. Paheli and Duvidha are based on a Rajasthani folk tale, which forms part of the fabulous collection of folklore compiled by the Rupayan Sansthan of village Borunda of Rajasthan. These are tales told at the fireside with songs and gestures by old men and women, mendicants and travellers and reduced into writing, for the first time in many cases, by the Rupayan archivists. Folklore traditionally was aural, handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, gaining in embellishments along the way, like with much of our revealed scriptures. Time only diminishes or adds to its surface qualities or patina.
The story is simple enough: When the newly-wedded husband is away, the local ghost who falls in love with the girl, assumes the form of the witless husband with inevitable consequences. After twists and turns, the ghost-husband is banished into the bowels of the earth again.
While Palekar gives the old tale a proper dust-up and decorates it with Tanishq-inspired jewellery in Paheli, Kaul's Duvidha stuck to disciplined movements and formalised expressions (a starvation diet style, according to Satyajit Ray, who never had any patience with new talent), the director being a self-confessed admirer of the austere French master Robert Bresson, for whom it is said, the cinema was like an act of prayer. But Kaul's ghost-husband's shining eyes in the dark of the desert still haunt one. Duvidha did not have a Shah or a Rani. It had non-professionals like an unknown FTII student named Ravi Menon and artist Akbar Padamsee's daughter Raisa, and was made on a shoestring budget. The cameraman was a then still photographer named Navroz Contractor!
But as pure folk form, it is Karnad's Nagamandala that interests because of its verisimilitude to form. Instead of the ghost, we have the legendary king of snakes, lord Naga (King Cobra, anyone?) who falls in love with the girl who gets pregnant. To prove her chastity and innocence, she offers to put her hand into the deadly nest of the snake god. The reference is to Sita's Agnipariksha in the Ramayana. When she emerges unscathed (the Naga could hardly bite her), she has vindicated her honour and also, the fact that happy endings are not to be scorned at. Whether Paheli is old wine in new bottle, is for the audience to judge. In this consumerist age, even old ghosts need designer jewellery to lure their victims - in more sense than one. After all, even the first film on that hoary bloodsucker Dracula was advertised as "The strangest love story that you have ever seen!"
J.S. RAO
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