English Vinglish(2012) is celebration of women, cosmopolitanism, and compassion, and is a great film to watch during Women's History Month!Few films have made me as happy as English Vinglish. There is so much joy and wonder in the story. The music is disposable, but the acting by Sridevi is flawless.
Sashi is a mother and wife who runs a business out of her home making ladoos. Her husband and daughter tease and exclude her for not speaking English, still the language of status and upward mobility in India. Her husband tells company, “My wife was born to make ladoos!” and cannot understand why she does not see this reductive assessment of her worth as a compliment.
New Coat!
When Sashi's niece in New York decides to get married, Sashi is sent ahead of her family to help make preparations. She is reluctant to travel alone, and struggles in New York without English. Then she decides to take her money (her own money, earned from her business) and enroll in a four-week language class in Manhattan. Her classmates come from around the world and are ultimately united in their affection for their teacher and one another. Unlike in Kal Ho Naa Ho(2003), also set in NYC,gay New Yorkers are not the butt of discriminatory jokes. English Vinglish celebrates the diversity of NYC, and the city is busy and bustling but ultimately also a place of reinvention and rediscovery. New York looks beautiful, and it was good for me to be reminded that although things feel bleak, there are still places in the United States where diversity is celebrated.
The joy of the film for me came from watching Sashi grow in confidence as she learned to navigate New York, made friends, and her English improved. The subtle changes in her posture and interactions with the people around her were beautifully acted. I cheered when she bought a trench coat like the one she considered buying in India- until her daughter teased her about it. Her purchase was in part inspired by the film within the film The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor. Sashi slays in her trench coat.
By the end of the film Sashi declares, “I don’t need love. I need respect.” Bold words at a wedding, and bold words from a woman in any film, in any genre. To point out, as some reviewers did, that not everything will be perfect when Sashi returns home is missing the point- Sashi has reminded herself that she is worth more than she believed, and reminded her family of her worth as well. What happens next is up to her.
Which brings us back to misogyny and Women's History Month. We received several emails this women's history month at work, and they all felt incredibly hollow. Our President is a sexual predator! But women are super cool! Look how far we've come! But Women's History Month is also fraught as a result of the ongoing schisms within the feminist movement, as exemplified by conflict within the Women's March. I am not sure anyone believed that a single large protest was going to make mainstream feminism intersectional once and for all- or maybe we did- but I at least hoped that we could all get on the same on at least some of the things. We couldn't.
Suffragettes released from a Washington workhouse Their original arrest was also for protesting
This is not a new problem. For an introduction to the politics of (white) First Wave Feminism in the early years of the 20th century, The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore is a place to start. It is illuminating as much because of what is left out as by what is included: women of color are almost entirely absent, a reminder that feminism has a long and ongoing problem with exclusion. I do not believe for a moment that POC didnt read comic books and missed the First Wave, but the subjects of the book- WW creator William Moulton Marston and his family- either didnt notice or didnt care. However, the book does provide an overview of the tensions between different political agendas and personal beliefs within first-wave and pre-second wave white feminism. The women in long skirts seem so static in old photographs that I sometimes forget that the first wave also had militant and free-love fringes, and that the question, "What does equality look like?" has always elicited passionate and opposing answers. That the answers have so often excluded huge numbers of women helps answer the question, "How did we get here?"
Film: English Vinglish (2012)
Director/Writer: Gauri Shinde
Runtime: 122 minutes
Language: Hindi, English
Country: India
Reviewing Umrao Jaan (1981), like Sholay(1975) or Mughal-e-Azim (1960) feels a bit like reviewing Citizen Cane (1941), but it is too good to not write about. What follows is a review of the 1981 film, not the critically blasted 2006 re-make.
The Story
Umrao Jaan Ada, considered by some the first Urdu-language novel, was written by Mirza Hadi Ruswa and published in 1899. The eponymous Umrao Jaan Ada is a tawaiff (courtesan) in Lucknow in the years leading up to 1857, variously called the Sepoy Rebellion and the First War of Independence (please see Mangal Pandey: The Rising). In addition to providing commentary on the hypocrisy of a society which professes devotion to a tawaiff which means nothing but heartache and social rejection for the object of devotion, Umrao stands in for India herself, as men step up with promises of love which are nothing more than exploitation. Umrao Jaan, like other tawaiff, occupies a liminal, ambiguous space between the sought-after and the disposable, neither and both.
In 1981 Rekha's portrayal of Umrao Jaan won her a well-deserved National Film Award for Best Actress. As in 2006, when Aishwarya Rai Bachchan portrayed Umrao Jaan, one of the most beautiful women of her day was chosen for the titular role; as the doomed courtesan, object of so many men's desire, Rekha is radiant, resilient, and vulnerable.
She is also self-sacrificing, as is required of sex-worker heroines. Umrao gives up the nawab, the love of her life, so that he may be married according to his mother's wishes. She reminds him that his mother has a far greater right to him. She is kind to her friend Gohar Mirza, portrayed by a young and rakish Naseeruddin Shah, even though he is not necessarily a good friend to her. She is loyal to her Ustaad (teacher) Khan, and to the madam in charge of the kotha, Khanum Jaan.
Her Ustaad tells her, "you are not a thing of this kothay, the whole world belongs to you." As a tawaiff, this is cruelly untrue.
Ruins of the Residency in Lucknow
The Setting
Our story takes place in Lucknow, the city where I studied with the American Institute of Indian Studies. Umrao Jaan is melancholy on several levels- most obviously, Umrao Jaan is doomed by her profession to a lonely life as a public woman. Adored by all men, she is known only to a few, and can lay claim to none. The other, opposing melancholy of the film lies in the ending of her world with the uprising of 1857. While in Lucknow I was often struck by the sense of living in a post-1857 world, a sense I had nowhere else in India. Whereas (New) Delhi looks back to 1947 and Partition or forward to a flashier, more powerful future, Lucknow seemed to me to look back to earlier, more elegant and prosperous times; Urdu as a language and linguistic identity, with its emphasis on purity of vocabulary and pronunciation, courtly manners, and literary traditions, seemed a language and culture more concerned with the past than with the future, the continued use of Urdu in cinema, and especially film music, notwithstanding. In Lucknow the relics of a pre-1857 world were everywhere, from the crumbling city walls to the ruins of the Residency, a focal point of violence and site of much bloodshed. If Delhi is a city of "what if..." then Lucknow felt like a city of "if only...".
A complete aside for people who may have missed the Lucknow reference on Downton Abbey- when the Dowager Countess is encouraging Lady Sybil (forever in our hearts) to pursue nursing, she references an aunt who also defied expectations by "manning the guns" in Lucknow. She meant this Lucknow and the events of 1857. Another queasy colonial moment from Downton.
The Costuming
The costuming of the film consistently makes best-of lists, for good reason- it is exquisite. Umrao wears a variety of different styles which draw primarily on Persian and other Central Asian traditions. The wide sashes holding jeweled sabers worn by men epitomize a dichotomous world of elegance and brutality. Silk, crepe, organza, airy cottons and exquisite brocades evoke the sumptuous moment that was late-Mughal Lucknow about to go up in a rain of cannon blasts and a puff of gunpowder smoke.
It is also worth noting that the idea that India has no history- in the sense that things are the way they have been for hundreds of years- is an orientalist/colonialist construct which has stuck, particularly when it comes to women's fashion. This is spite of the fact that a wide range of clothing has been worn for generations. Vogue India's photo slideshows are always fun and gorgeous, and showcase this blending of styles and cutting-edge designs.
Aside- while in Tbilisi with my baby sister we noticed a woman of East Asian decent wearing a gorgeous turquoise shalwar khamez. Baby sister noted that the Soviets moved their Korean population away from the border to North Korea to Uzbekistan, where women evidently adopted the eminently practical outfits.
For an interesting reflection on music in the final years of the Awadhi court, I recommend this fascinating interviewwith one of the last performers in Lucknow's court. A new website created by Indian industrialist Sanjiv Saraf, Rekhta.org is a tremendous resource for video and sound recordings of Urdu poetry.
To the dancing!
Rekha as Umrao Jaan performs a style of dance known as kathak. Rekha was not a professionally-trained kathak dancer, and can be forgiven for not being very good. She is not very good. Whatever you do, please do not take Umrao Jaan as a prime example of Indian classical dance.
The Jewelry
Kundan jewelry
My host mother in Lucknow was from a land-owning family in Uttar Pradesh. She told stories, handed down to her from grandmothers, of great-grandmothers whose every need was attended to by servants, and who could be carried in palanquins for an entire day, always on land owned by their family. Some of the jewelry used in the film was owned by her family. The jewelry, specifically the jewelry with inlaid jewels and seed pearls, is called kundan. Jaipur is particularly known for its production of kundan jewelry, just as Hyderabad is known for pearl jewelry. The pendants worn by women down the parts in their hair and onto their foreheads are called tikka, the pendants worn along the side of a woman's hair is called a jhapta; Umrao Jaan wears both.
A note on the red coloring on Rekha's hands- most of us are familiar with mhendi (usually marketed in the US under the Arabic word 'henna'). We have seen intricate designs of flowers, vines, birds, etc. Rekha wears what I was told is a more traditional pattern for Muslim North India, in which only her fingertips, fingernails, and circles in her palms are dyed. For notes about the mhendi Rekha wears please see my previous post "Bringing Bollywood Home".
The Poetry
One of the most iconic scenes of the film features the Nawab sitting in his carriage under the kothay's latticed window listening, enraptured, to Umrao Jaan's performance of her poetry. This is the closest we will ever get in film to a man falling in love with a woman for her soul sight-unseen.
To the cultural notes!
When I first arrived in Delhi and saw red paan stains on sidewalks, roads, and outdoor walls, I was concerned that I had moved to the knifing capital of the world. I was hugely relieved to learn it was just spit. Paan is a mild stimulant comprised of a green paan leaf filled with sweet or savory morsels, breath freshening seeds, and a bit of this and that. Paan is addictive, kills hunger, and is widely consumed. It can also cause mouth cancer.
