Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. Not that there isn’t suffering in Lajja; horrible things happen to some very good people, and not all of the protagonists makre it through to the end of the film. But the suffering is thankfully not unrelenting. There are moments of real humor and warmth in the film, as well as some impressive action scenes.
Lajja takes its central metaphor from The Ramayana; Rama, having freed Sita from the wicked Ravana, doubts her chastity. After all, she had been living in another man’s household. To prove her purity, Sita submits to a test by fire, emerging unscathed. The story resonates throughout the film; all four heroines are named after Sita, fire is a recurring element, and one of the heroines is an actress playing Sita in a stage version of the Ramayana.
Our viewpoint character is Vaidehi, played by Manisha Koirala. Vaidehi lives in New York City with her husband, Raghu, played by Jackie Schroff. While Vaideha is a traditional good Indian wife, Raghu considers himself modern, so modern that he’s carrying on a blatant affair with the wife of his business partner, and not bothering to conceal that affair from anyone. When the business partner hints to Vaideha that he wouldn’t mind a bit of wife-swapping either, she’s horrified. She’s even more horrified when Raghu tells her that he wouldn’t really mind either. “It’s the twenty-first century!” After an argument in which Raghu hits her, Vaideha is sent back to her parents in India.
When she reaches home, though, she finds her family doesn’t want her. They believe that once she left for her husband’s household, that became her home. Meanwhile, back in New York, Raghu is in a car wreck. he survives, but when his father consults the family doctor, he learns two thing; Raghu will never again be able to father a child, and Vaideha is already pregnant. Father consults with son, and they quickly hatch a plan: lure Vaideha back to New York, and once the baby is born they can pay her off, or (if she doesn’t co-operate) have her killed. Mwa ha ha.
After a “Come home, all is forgiven” phone call, arrangements are made for Vaideha to travel back to the U.S. accompanied by a hapless employee of her father-in-law (Johnny Lever!) At the airport, Vaideha recieves a call from the family doctor, warning her not to return to New York. She deftly avoids her chaperone, and goes on the run.
From this point on, the film is a picaresque. (That’s my English Lit degree at work, folks!) Vaideha travels through India, and the deeper into the country she goes, the worse the plight of the women she meets. There are three main stories she encounters on her travels: Maithili (Mahima Chaudhry) is a bride whose father is having trouble raising the dowry, Janki (Madhuri Dixit) is a free-spirited actress, and Ramdulaari (the legendary Rekha) is a village midwife. Vaideha also encounters more than one sympathetic man on her travels, and by more than one I mean two: Raju (Anil Kapoor) is a charming thief with the proverbial heart of gold, and Bulwa (Ajay Devgan) is an insanely bad-assed rural bandit and avenger of the downtrodden.
As a non-Indian, I’m not qualified to lecture on the state of women in India. (I’ll let Preity Zinta do it instead.) I can talk about what I’ve noticed about the role of women in Bollywood, however. All too often, Bollywood’s women are passive; bad things happen, and the women suffer in silence until they’re rescued by the hero. This is by no means universal (Preity Zinta’s heroines are often active (and spunky), and Biwi No. 1’s heroine certainly took matters into her own hands) but it’s very common. Additionally, a “good Indian girl” is supposed to be demure, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility (see Jeans, for instance.) Vaideha starts out the same way, but along the way she learns to fight, and inspires others to fight as well. Raju and Bulwa rescue a few women from physical peril along the way (especially Bulwa, who takes on twenty or so men single-handedly and wins at one point - did I mention that he’s insanely bad-assed?) but the battles that matter are fought with words, and they are fought by women. This is an angry film, and it asks a simple question, “How much of this are you willing to take?”
Before watching Lajja, I was worried that it would prove to be three hours of unrelieved suffering. I was wrong,a nd it’s a stronger film for it. Seeing these women through good times and bad makes them seem real, rather than faceless symbols of the downtrodden. This is indeed a “Big, Important Film!”, but it’s one I would happily watch again.
I think I’ll give Bulwa the last word:
“I know only this much. Humans are those who raise
their voice against injustice. They’re among the living. Glory to
the Goddess.”
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