Gulzar's Ijaazat by Mira Hashmi

Author:Mira Hashmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

chapter six

Jhoot Moot Ke Shikve Kuch

Sudha

‘I’ve led many lifetimes in one, and I’ve explored myriad aspects of Indian womanhood.’

– Rekha

In its many visits to the story of a married man torn between two women, Hindi cinema has usually painted the role of the wife in the same broad strokes of silent suffering, unwavering faith and unconditional forgiveness. She will wait patiently, confident in her belief that her ‘goodness’, contrasted against the inherent ‘badness’ of the Other Woman, will make her erring husband realize the folly of his ways and he will return, chastised and grateful, to the folds of home, hearth and her sari. It is a cliché employed so thoughtlessly over the decades that it became a parody of itself – ‘Bhala hai, bura hai, mera pati mera khuda hai’ (Good or bad, my husband is my god), sang one obliging patni as her husband cavorted with another.

But Ijaazat, as is abundantly clear in so many ways, does not play by the conventional Hindi film rule-book. If Maya is a world away from the stereotypical scheming, amoral Other Woman, and Mahendra much more than an ‘unsympathetic ogre,’25 Sudha, too, is not a cookie-cutter sacrificial lamb of a spouse whose floods of tears cynically paint crude columns of black and white in the morality stakes. Instead, in Sudha we find Gulzar’s assertion that womanhood is neither easily defined nor streamlined into convenient categories that act as little more than reductive mirrors for men’s egos to be magnified or, as the case may be, get a dressing down in. Sudha, like all of Gulzar’s women, is an individual, not a cut-out, who possesses both an astounding self-awareness as well as the ability to read others better than they can read themselves. Not that she sees these qualities, or herself overall, as anything extraordinary: ‘Main ek bohot saadharan aurat hun’ (I’m a very ordinary woman), she writes in her farewell letter to Mahendra. ‘Ziddi bhi hun, jal bhi jaati hun, pighal bhi jaati hun’ (I’m stubborn, I burn easily, and I melt easily too). In defining her own weaknesses, though (and it’s arguable whether they can be classified as such), Sudha inadvertently proves herself to be anything but ordinary; a woman whose very transparency makes her a near-enigma. That she is played by Rekha is casting that is not only intelligent but also prescient in its understanding of an actor who, in the decades since, has come to be regarded as an intriguing amalgam of talent, presence, personality, persona and legend, and who, much like Sudha, has consistently defied simplistic categorization.

While the trajectory of Rekha’s career has most often been described in the familiar terms of the ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan, that cliché fails to acknowledge that that transformation, as well as her longevity in an industry well-known for its sexist attitudes, has been about much more than just looks. Her larger-than-life image, one that still inspires awe in fans both old and young, is not one carved out

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