RR
28th October 2005, 11:11 AM
The Screen-Turners: 47 Naatkal - Part 2
(contd from Part - 1 (http://tfmmagazine.mayyam.com/sep05/?t=4578))
47 Days & 23 Nightmares
By Naaz
Vishali is all of sixteen when she is married to Kumar who is all of twenty-nine. He seems like a good enough chap – charming, affable, easy on the wallet – and his modesty and self-effacing demeanor is soon the talk of the towns that side of Vizhupuram. Kumar’s parents have put the word out for jathakams, and the agraharams all the way to Aadhichapuram are abuzz with feelers. Kumar, the American success-story, is looking for a very, very Indian bride.
Sivasankari’s novel, 47 Naatkal, begins with a wedding in rural Tamil Naadu and ends with a FBI rescue operation in suburban Chicago. What lies between (pun intended) is a pool of innocence lost and violence found; an allegorical Alice in Wonderland gone way, way bad.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]<img src=http://static.flickr.com/7/10371614_de06655082.jpg?v=0 align=right>[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
The Kumar Vishali wedding is indeed the talk of Aadhichapuram. For a high-school drop out like Vishali, with nothing but looks to bring in her wedding trousseau, to marry Kumar, a prince of riches, good manners and handsome looks, is everything plus a miracle. Vishali’s sister Gnaanam, and her older brother, Chandru, can’t believe the youngest one’s good luck. The marriage consummated, Kumar makes plans to fly back to Chicago with Vishali, who, just a few days into the marriage, has discovered that her husband smokes, drinks, and will very soon eat meat on their flight to Frankfurt, and from thereon to New York and Chicago.
We, the readers, soon realize that what you see is not what you get with a guy like Kumar. Kumar is your classic gold-digger - with brahminical good features. Already married to Lucia, a millionaire doctor back in the USA, Kumar’s hasty wedding to Vishali is one of convenience. Lucia is pregnant and has threatened to quit practice once the baby is born, and Kumar can’t bear to think of the loss of all those easy medical dollars. By now, married for a few years, he has become accustomed to the soft life of being just and only good enough to chill. Lucia’s home-stay with the baby will also signal an end to all those easy daytime sexual encounters with other women; an abrupt goodbye to those afternoons of wild hedonism that are an indispensable part of his “maerkaththiya” lifestyle. Kumar decides on a trip to India, back home, with the hope of finding a quiet, pliant and illiterate girl to marry. To Lucia, back in Chicago, he will present her as his heartbroken “sister” who would love to nanny their child when Lucia returns to work; and to the girl he marries he will have to explain nothing, only say that the “white woman” is his close friend and benefactor, and that kissing your benefactor on her lips whenever you greet her is customary for the average American. The language barrier, one would speak no English and the other no Tamil, will be the great divider, and his translator manipulations would ensure that the game never gets out of hand. There is nothing he couldn’t make up, he reckons, to keep Lucia happy and the Indian girl guessing.
On the third day of her arrival in Chicago, Vishali discovers Kumar’s nightclothes in Lucia’s bedroom and confronts him. In an attempt to convert her with the truth by making her party to it, he confesses that Lucia is indeed his wife, and that he plans on staying with her for a few more years – that is, until he has made sure he has put away enough money to return to India and spend his life farming with Vishali in a Vizhupuram village! Divorce is common in America, he offers, and Vishali would reap the sweet rewards of the settlement if she only played along for a year or two. Vishali turns him down flat. And thus begins a game of bondage and control, mastery and subjugation.
Writing is not merely a political act for an author like Sivasankari. It is also an act of disseminating awareness, of floodlighting the spots of ignorance in the dark corners of the reader’s mind. What sets Sivasankari apart from her contemporaries is essentially this one quality – the author as fully conscious of her writing as a catalyst for change (www.sivasankari.com). Hence, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in her novels the Issue is the Hero. If her meticulous descriptions of bank procedures in Amma, Please, Enakkaaga, her nuanced exploration of the ravages of cancer in Nandu, her compassionate understanding of alcohol addiction in Oru Manithanin Kathai, and her historically and culturally detailed edifice, Paalagal -- if any and all the novels not mentioned above share one thing in common, that one unmistakable stamp of identification, it has got to be the author’s daring, her success at making the unfamiliar both familiar and comprehensive. 47 Naatkal is no exception.
Through Vishali’s eyes we see both the bewilderment and the dangers of alie(nation). Her character provides a dual critique: she lives and symbolizes the cold isolation of NRI brides while allowing the author to implicitly debunk the institution of arranged marriages, particularly those involving girls who have no power in the decision-making. Vishali’s underexposure is a conduit, a tabula rasa, and Sivasankari fills in the thoughts and insights with a simple naturalness.
Kumar, on the other hand, is painted in some clichéd broad strokes. His villainy is presaged by the introduction of cigarettes and alcohol, and subsequently to his being a carnivore and a womanizer. The reader does not share the astonishment of Vishali at these revelations precisely because the reader can read and Vishali can’t, or not really. The stock stereotype is immediately apparent, and hence rendered ineffective. Kumar is a “bad boy”, we get it, and we think it’s a tad facile even for the late seventies. Such obviousness, when put beside the bare-bone contextual information in the development of Kumar, makes him into a caricature of a smooth-operator on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Similarly, his quick descent into sadomasochism (stubbing cigarette butts on Vishali, holding her hand under the hot water tap, forcing her to have sex with him at different locations in the house when Lucia is away, and taking her to a pornography cinema) is more sensational than studied. When the novel was serialized, it afforded the reader a distance to imagine and vicariously live the lives of Kumar and Vishali and Lucia - a break of seven days - before the next installment came along. The readers’ own imaginings, turned up to distressing levels of anxiety once Vishali’s humiliations began, a week between one day (as published) and another, also provided the thrill of having one’s own predictions and scenarios validated or alluded to in the latest chapter. Those accumulative rewards all but vanish when one reads the novel as a published book, making it seem curiously rushed, disaffecting and incomplete.
The film takes the seeming away.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]http://www.mayyam.com/tfmmagazine/nov05/47-naatkal.jpg[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
If it’s indeed true that Sivasankari wears her social liberal heart on her writing sleeve, it is also equally true that K.Balachander lets his bleed all over the camera lens. An auteur meets an author. And when they decided to collaborate creatively on the film version of the book, it was a marriage made in leftie heaven. The timing was also rather serendipitous - the book came along right around the same time that Indian cinema was beginning to carve out “anti-heroes,” - and K. Balachander himself had made such characters acceptable and popular in Avargal and Moondru Mudichhu. What went wrong with 47 Naatkal? Was it just bad luck and an impatient audience? Perhaps. Or it could be Rajnikanth, but we’d never know. However, luck’s not the only reason why the film sank into lukewarm oblivion. Its problems are unique, and they all come from outside of the book.
The film is structured as a mise en abime – a story within a story. Saritha (playing herself) meets Vishali for a tete-a-tete. As such, we, the viewers of the film, we all become surrogate Sarithas, listening to Vishali’s story as it unfolds in a flashback with appropriately inserted present day interjections (not to spur the story, only to prolong it.) A well-worn narrative device of literary merit (Wuthering Heights, anybody?), the only problem it presents here, in this particular case, is that it works directly against the momentum of the novel: While the reader turns the page with a pounding heart to find out about Vishali’s eventual fate, the viewer of the film begins with the full knowledge that Vishali is free and safe. The “Does She Get Away?” question is conjugated in this “transformation” as, “How Did She Get Away?” The formulation renders the film as completely antithetical to the foreshadowing impulses and pay-offs of the novel.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]<img src=http://megafans.com/plugins/coppermine_menu/albums/userpics/10416/chiranj1.jpg align=right width=200>[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
Anonymity is absolutely criticall for Kumar and Vishali to be identifiable as “every day” people, for it is only then can the novel resonate with the “every day” reader. The characters have to be unknown even when they are known - the reader has to constantly build their imaginary faces in an effort to keep the story personal and close to home (arguably not the faces sketched by C. Jeyaraj for sure -see book cover above!), for only then does the possibility that what happens to Vishali could just as easily happen to the girl who lives down the street become frighteningly real. And it did, too, when the novel was serialized. But we know Jaya Prada doesn’t live down the street, nor for that matter does Chiranjeevi. How, one wonders, did the makers of the film conclude that brand name stars would provide that bridge, a conveyor to the urgency of newspaper reports on NRI-bride scandals? The universality that would have emerged with unknown names instantly evaporates in the heat of star-power glitz. It becomes impossible to see Kumar and Vishali as people down the street, or even as characters in the book. The marquee dazzle that gets you in also becomes the one big barrier between you and the topical impetus of the novel filmed. It is a tellingly well-lit irony.
Ramaprabha and Sarat Babu have no corresponding characters in the book, and that’s just as well. Their “grifter / drifter” routine wears thin, and their machinations to whisk Vishali away makes one want to be more considerate in one’s estimation of the novel’s ending which is bizarrely high-handed. (Okay, RP and SB are just bizarre.)
Back to that “disaffecting” feeling - in its own words:
[tscii:85d9c4a8c9]"«ùÅÇ× ¾¡ý.. ¸¨¾ ÓÊóÐÅ¢ð¼Ð, þÉ¢Ôõ §ÅÚ ±ýÉ ¦º¡øÄ¢ ÅÇ÷ò¾ §ÅñÎõ..? FBI ÌÁ¡¨Ã ¨¸Ð ¦ºö¾¨¾Ôõ, æ…¢ Ţš¸ÃòÐ §¸¡Ã¢Â¨¾Ôõ «øÄ¡Áø «Åý §Áø ¸¢Ã¢Á¢Éø §¸Š §À¡ð¼¨¾Ôõ ±Ø¾¢ Å£½¡¸ ¸¨¾¨Â ÅÇ÷ò¾ ¿¡ý Å¢ÕõÀÅ¢ø¨Ä.
¬É¡ø, ´ý§È ´ýÚ ÁðÎõ ¦º¡øÄ¢ ÓÊ츢§Èý..
¬Â¢Ãõ ¸¡ÄòÐ À¢÷ ±ýÚ ¿õÀ¢Â Å¢„¡Ä¢Â¢ý ¾¢ÕÁ½ Å¡ú쨸¢ý ¯Â¢÷ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Ø ¿¡ð¸û ¾¡ý. «¾ý º¢ýÉÁ¡¸ «Åû Å¢üÈ¢ø ÅÇ÷ò¾¨¾ «Åû 慢¢ý ¯¾Å¢Ô¼ý «¨Æò¾Ðõ «ó¾ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Æ¡ÅÐ ¿¡Ç¢ø ¾¡ý. À¢ÈÌ, þÉ¢ µ÷ ¸½õ ܼ þíÌ þÕì¸ Á¡ð§¼ý ±ýÈ ÓÃðÎ À¢ÊÅ¡¾òмý «ñ½§É¡Î ¾¡Â¸òÐìÌ ÒÈôÀð¼Ðõ «ó¾ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Æ¡ÅÐ ¿¡Ç¢ø ¾¡ý..."[/tscii:85d9c4a8c9]
Here’s the implosion: The novel’s sudden turn into first person didacticism finds a perfect corollary in the Ramaprabha / Sarat Babu sideshow. Both are clumsy and irksome cop-outs that blow in from the outside and make you feel cheated, of what you’re not sure yet, but you have an inkling that it might be something resembling human intelligence.
Links
Thread on 47 Naatkal (old) - Page 1 (http://tfmpage.com/forum/10731.3112.01.19.00.html), Page 2 (http://tfmpage.com/forum/3112.01.19.00.html)
[html:85d9c4a8c9]©[/html:85d9c4a8c9] Author 2005
(contd from Part - 1 (http://tfmmagazine.mayyam.com/sep05/?t=4578))
47 Days & 23 Nightmares
By Naaz
Vishali is all of sixteen when she is married to Kumar who is all of twenty-nine. He seems like a good enough chap – charming, affable, easy on the wallet – and his modesty and self-effacing demeanor is soon the talk of the towns that side of Vizhupuram. Kumar’s parents have put the word out for jathakams, and the agraharams all the way to Aadhichapuram are abuzz with feelers. Kumar, the American success-story, is looking for a very, very Indian bride.
Sivasankari’s novel, 47 Naatkal, begins with a wedding in rural Tamil Naadu and ends with a FBI rescue operation in suburban Chicago. What lies between (pun intended) is a pool of innocence lost and violence found; an allegorical Alice in Wonderland gone way, way bad.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]<img src=http://static.flickr.com/7/10371614_de06655082.jpg?v=0 align=right>[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
The Kumar Vishali wedding is indeed the talk of Aadhichapuram. For a high-school drop out like Vishali, with nothing but looks to bring in her wedding trousseau, to marry Kumar, a prince of riches, good manners and handsome looks, is everything plus a miracle. Vishali’s sister Gnaanam, and her older brother, Chandru, can’t believe the youngest one’s good luck. The marriage consummated, Kumar makes plans to fly back to Chicago with Vishali, who, just a few days into the marriage, has discovered that her husband smokes, drinks, and will very soon eat meat on their flight to Frankfurt, and from thereon to New York and Chicago.
We, the readers, soon realize that what you see is not what you get with a guy like Kumar. Kumar is your classic gold-digger - with brahminical good features. Already married to Lucia, a millionaire doctor back in the USA, Kumar’s hasty wedding to Vishali is one of convenience. Lucia is pregnant and has threatened to quit practice once the baby is born, and Kumar can’t bear to think of the loss of all those easy medical dollars. By now, married for a few years, he has become accustomed to the soft life of being just and only good enough to chill. Lucia’s home-stay with the baby will also signal an end to all those easy daytime sexual encounters with other women; an abrupt goodbye to those afternoons of wild hedonism that are an indispensable part of his “maerkaththiya” lifestyle. Kumar decides on a trip to India, back home, with the hope of finding a quiet, pliant and illiterate girl to marry. To Lucia, back in Chicago, he will present her as his heartbroken “sister” who would love to nanny their child when Lucia returns to work; and to the girl he marries he will have to explain nothing, only say that the “white woman” is his close friend and benefactor, and that kissing your benefactor on her lips whenever you greet her is customary for the average American. The language barrier, one would speak no English and the other no Tamil, will be the great divider, and his translator manipulations would ensure that the game never gets out of hand. There is nothing he couldn’t make up, he reckons, to keep Lucia happy and the Indian girl guessing.
On the third day of her arrival in Chicago, Vishali discovers Kumar’s nightclothes in Lucia’s bedroom and confronts him. In an attempt to convert her with the truth by making her party to it, he confesses that Lucia is indeed his wife, and that he plans on staying with her for a few more years – that is, until he has made sure he has put away enough money to return to India and spend his life farming with Vishali in a Vizhupuram village! Divorce is common in America, he offers, and Vishali would reap the sweet rewards of the settlement if she only played along for a year or two. Vishali turns him down flat. And thus begins a game of bondage and control, mastery and subjugation.
Writing is not merely a political act for an author like Sivasankari. It is also an act of disseminating awareness, of floodlighting the spots of ignorance in the dark corners of the reader’s mind. What sets Sivasankari apart from her contemporaries is essentially this one quality – the author as fully conscious of her writing as a catalyst for change (www.sivasankari.com). Hence, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in her novels the Issue is the Hero. If her meticulous descriptions of bank procedures in Amma, Please, Enakkaaga, her nuanced exploration of the ravages of cancer in Nandu, her compassionate understanding of alcohol addiction in Oru Manithanin Kathai, and her historically and culturally detailed edifice, Paalagal -- if any and all the novels not mentioned above share one thing in common, that one unmistakable stamp of identification, it has got to be the author’s daring, her success at making the unfamiliar both familiar and comprehensive. 47 Naatkal is no exception.
Through Vishali’s eyes we see both the bewilderment and the dangers of alie(nation). Her character provides a dual critique: she lives and symbolizes the cold isolation of NRI brides while allowing the author to implicitly debunk the institution of arranged marriages, particularly those involving girls who have no power in the decision-making. Vishali’s underexposure is a conduit, a tabula rasa, and Sivasankari fills in the thoughts and insights with a simple naturalness.
Kumar, on the other hand, is painted in some clichéd broad strokes. His villainy is presaged by the introduction of cigarettes and alcohol, and subsequently to his being a carnivore and a womanizer. The reader does not share the astonishment of Vishali at these revelations precisely because the reader can read and Vishali can’t, or not really. The stock stereotype is immediately apparent, and hence rendered ineffective. Kumar is a “bad boy”, we get it, and we think it’s a tad facile even for the late seventies. Such obviousness, when put beside the bare-bone contextual information in the development of Kumar, makes him into a caricature of a smooth-operator on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Similarly, his quick descent into sadomasochism (stubbing cigarette butts on Vishali, holding her hand under the hot water tap, forcing her to have sex with him at different locations in the house when Lucia is away, and taking her to a pornography cinema) is more sensational than studied. When the novel was serialized, it afforded the reader a distance to imagine and vicariously live the lives of Kumar and Vishali and Lucia - a break of seven days - before the next installment came along. The readers’ own imaginings, turned up to distressing levels of anxiety once Vishali’s humiliations began, a week between one day (as published) and another, also provided the thrill of having one’s own predictions and scenarios validated or alluded to in the latest chapter. Those accumulative rewards all but vanish when one reads the novel as a published book, making it seem curiously rushed, disaffecting and incomplete.
The film takes the seeming away.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]http://www.mayyam.com/tfmmagazine/nov05/47-naatkal.jpg[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
If it’s indeed true that Sivasankari wears her social liberal heart on her writing sleeve, it is also equally true that K.Balachander lets his bleed all over the camera lens. An auteur meets an author. And when they decided to collaborate creatively on the film version of the book, it was a marriage made in leftie heaven. The timing was also rather serendipitous - the book came along right around the same time that Indian cinema was beginning to carve out “anti-heroes,” - and K. Balachander himself had made such characters acceptable and popular in Avargal and Moondru Mudichhu. What went wrong with 47 Naatkal? Was it just bad luck and an impatient audience? Perhaps. Or it could be Rajnikanth, but we’d never know. However, luck’s not the only reason why the film sank into lukewarm oblivion. Its problems are unique, and they all come from outside of the book.
The film is structured as a mise en abime – a story within a story. Saritha (playing herself) meets Vishali for a tete-a-tete. As such, we, the viewers of the film, we all become surrogate Sarithas, listening to Vishali’s story as it unfolds in a flashback with appropriately inserted present day interjections (not to spur the story, only to prolong it.) A well-worn narrative device of literary merit (Wuthering Heights, anybody?), the only problem it presents here, in this particular case, is that it works directly against the momentum of the novel: While the reader turns the page with a pounding heart to find out about Vishali’s eventual fate, the viewer of the film begins with the full knowledge that Vishali is free and safe. The “Does She Get Away?” question is conjugated in this “transformation” as, “How Did She Get Away?” The formulation renders the film as completely antithetical to the foreshadowing impulses and pay-offs of the novel.
[html:85d9c4a8c9]<img src=http://megafans.com/plugins/coppermine_menu/albums/userpics/10416/chiranj1.jpg align=right width=200>[/html:85d9c4a8c9]
Anonymity is absolutely criticall for Kumar and Vishali to be identifiable as “every day” people, for it is only then can the novel resonate with the “every day” reader. The characters have to be unknown even when they are known - the reader has to constantly build their imaginary faces in an effort to keep the story personal and close to home (arguably not the faces sketched by C. Jeyaraj for sure -see book cover above!), for only then does the possibility that what happens to Vishali could just as easily happen to the girl who lives down the street become frighteningly real. And it did, too, when the novel was serialized. But we know Jaya Prada doesn’t live down the street, nor for that matter does Chiranjeevi. How, one wonders, did the makers of the film conclude that brand name stars would provide that bridge, a conveyor to the urgency of newspaper reports on NRI-bride scandals? The universality that would have emerged with unknown names instantly evaporates in the heat of star-power glitz. It becomes impossible to see Kumar and Vishali as people down the street, or even as characters in the book. The marquee dazzle that gets you in also becomes the one big barrier between you and the topical impetus of the novel filmed. It is a tellingly well-lit irony.
Ramaprabha and Sarat Babu have no corresponding characters in the book, and that’s just as well. Their “grifter / drifter” routine wears thin, and their machinations to whisk Vishali away makes one want to be more considerate in one’s estimation of the novel’s ending which is bizarrely high-handed. (Okay, RP and SB are just bizarre.)
Back to that “disaffecting” feeling - in its own words:
[tscii:85d9c4a8c9]"«ùÅÇ× ¾¡ý.. ¸¨¾ ÓÊóÐÅ¢ð¼Ð, þÉ¢Ôõ §ÅÚ ±ýÉ ¦º¡øÄ¢ ÅÇ÷ò¾ §ÅñÎõ..? FBI ÌÁ¡¨Ã ¨¸Ð ¦ºö¾¨¾Ôõ, æ…¢ Ţš¸ÃòÐ §¸¡Ã¢Â¨¾Ôõ «øÄ¡Áø «Åý §Áø ¸¢Ã¢Á¢Éø §¸Š §À¡ð¼¨¾Ôõ ±Ø¾¢ Å£½¡¸ ¸¨¾¨Â ÅÇ÷ò¾ ¿¡ý Å¢ÕõÀÅ¢ø¨Ä.
¬É¡ø, ´ý§È ´ýÚ ÁðÎõ ¦º¡øÄ¢ ÓÊ츢§Èý..
¬Â¢Ãõ ¸¡ÄòÐ À¢÷ ±ýÚ ¿õÀ¢Â Å¢„¡Ä¢Â¢ý ¾¢ÕÁ½ Å¡ú쨸¢ý ¯Â¢÷ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Ø ¿¡ð¸û ¾¡ý. «¾ý º¢ýÉÁ¡¸ «Åû Å¢üÈ¢ø ÅÇ÷ò¾¨¾ «Åû 慢¢ý ¯¾Å¢Ô¼ý «¨Æò¾Ðõ «ó¾ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Æ¡ÅÐ ¿¡Ç¢ø ¾¡ý. À¢ÈÌ, þÉ¢ µ÷ ¸½õ ܼ þíÌ þÕì¸ Á¡ð§¼ý ±ýÈ ÓÃðÎ À¢ÊÅ¡¾òмý «ñ½§É¡Î ¾¡Â¸òÐìÌ ÒÈôÀð¼Ðõ «ó¾ ¿¡üÀòÐ ²Æ¡ÅÐ ¿¡Ç¢ø ¾¡ý..."[/tscii:85d9c4a8c9]
Here’s the implosion: The novel’s sudden turn into first person didacticism finds a perfect corollary in the Ramaprabha / Sarat Babu sideshow. Both are clumsy and irksome cop-outs that blow in from the outside and make you feel cheated, of what you’re not sure yet, but you have an inkling that it might be something resembling human intelligence.
Links
Thread on 47 Naatkal (old) - Page 1 (http://tfmpage.com/forum/10731.3112.01.19.00.html), Page 2 (http://tfmpage.com/forum/3112.01.19.00.html)
[html:85d9c4a8c9]©[/html:85d9c4a8c9] Author 2005