Finding Radha

by Namita Gokhale

  Suddenly, Radha wants to shout louder than all of them—Shame, not on me but on you. Shame, shame, shame! Now Radha is tired of being a woman and wants to be a man. Cackling with laughter, she shrugs off her upper garments under the starlit skies.

  The following morning, they find her sprawled on the banks of the river.

  ‘It’s that madwoman,’ they whisper, embarrassed by her nakedness. One of the women hurriedly covers her up.

  ‘What’s this?’ another woman exclaims, pointing to what looks like a broken flute in Radha’s fist. They try to pry her fingers open, but the chill of death has already set in. Radha clutches the lifeless reed to her breast. Radha no longer has black rings around her eyes. Radha sleeps.

  20

  ‘RADHA’ IN BOLLYWOOD CINEMA

  ALKA KURIAN

  RADHA OCCUPIES A central position in Hindu mythology and popular imagination. She is either seen as a goddess or as Krishna’s lover, or both. Some worship her as a reincarnation of Lakshmi, or as female energy—Shakti. Others revere her for her eternal love for Lord Krishna. While some regard her devotion for the supreme cowherd Krishna as divine, others see it as adulterous, and still others as an act of defiance against her stifling reality.

  Radha is one of the only mythological/religious figures with no divine powers—and, in turn, she doesn’t have to play by the rules that define Sita, Savitri and Parvati. Sita does not have the agency to love outside marriage. Parvati revels in serving her husband. Savitri fights Yama to have her husband restored to life. Radha, on the contrary, revels in her impossible longing for a God she can never have.

  Radha has long been a muse for artists and is affectionately recalled in sculpture, painting, dance, song, theatre and poetry, each rendition attuned to the cultural, political and historical context of the time.

  Although parts of Radha’s orally transmitted mythological tale have been distorted since she first appeared in the 12th-century poet Jayadeva’s lyrical rendition Gita Govinda, the essence of the legend endures. As his childhood friend and soulmate, Radha is enchanted by the beauty of Krishna, who plays the flute to court the village gopis, dallies with them and mischievously waylays them at the well or the river, playfully stealing their clothes as they bathe in the water. Her all-consuming love overpowers societal disapproval.

  On growing up, however, Krishna falls under the competing demands of the state, and the call of duty takes him away from his home town, Vrindavana. He later marries Rukmini. A bereft Radha dedicates the rest of her life longing for her lover. Thus, she is effectively a female Devdas (with a twist), and the Radha–Krishna duo a Hindu version of the Romeo–Juliet or the Heer–Ranjha coupling; their legend dramatizes the inability of family, community and individual desire to align with each other.

  The medium that has mobilized this legend of Radha more than any other is India’s Bollywood cinema. It makes more allusions to Radha than Sita or any other goddess. What is fascinating is that Radha defies the tropes of the sati-savitri naari, the dominant view of women in Hindi cinema for the longest time. She is a married woman in love with another man and is quite unabashed about it. She openly expresses her feelings of sexual attraction for Krishna and is not afraid of the repercussions. There might be a subtle hint here at the rapture of ‘forbidden’ love—more so because popular lore has it that Radha was in fact Krishna’s maami (maternal aunt)—so this narrative is not only about an extramarital affair but also a suggestion of incest. Then, there’s the reciprocal, exciting and erotic nature of the relationship between Radha and Krishna, as contrasted with her dull marriage, which has no romantic connotations. Radha remains an alluring character for developing screenplay because of her unrequited love as well as her transgression of societal norms.

  If the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are seen as the progenitors of the essential narrative form and ideological foundation of Indian cinema delineating its formal circularity and ethical compulsion of dharma and societal order (Mishra 1985), then it is my contention that Radha’s relationship with Krishna offers the central narrative framework for romantic love in Indian cinematic discourse. The tragic love story of a devoted Radha and a playful Krishna caught in a triangle of desire and unfulfilment makes for potent and melodramatic film plots. This ‘unfulfilment’ is characterized by the stance of ‘waiting’, a recurrent theme in Hindi cinema, and especially in the romances of the 1960s, where the heroine was portrayed in the mould of Radha, patient, forlorn and faithful, waiting for her love to come back to her. Many songs referring to Radha’s love equate the heroine’s feelings with hers. Several popular lyrics that deal with a woman wistfully lingering cast the heroine, at least momentarily, in the role of Radha, waiting for or abandoned by Krishna.

  The story of Radha and Krishna satisfies the need for romance in the Bollywood format, which was deemed to be essential to a film’s commercial survival in postcolonial India, where cinema was not patronized by the state (Gopal: 15). Their legend constitutes the perfect text offering the challenges, impediments and the dramatic conflict that was necessary for the ‘heterosexual couple formation’ in film. Unlike in Hollywood films, in classic Hindi cinema, the romantic couple’s declaration of the ‘right to be’ independent, self-determined individuals in itself triggered a narrative drama (Gopal: 2). Given the intersection between family, marriage, reproduction and population composition, one may surmise that individual emotions and couple formation were contingent upon the larger concerns of the family, community and the nation state (Gopal: 15, 17). Furthermore, owing to its socio-religio-cultural sanction, the legend of Radha–Krishna offers a legitimate framework within which to locate Bollywood’s filmic romantic duo.

  Radha’s story is remembered and recalled in film after film. The ubiquity of this key mythological tale has ensured its familiarity among the audience that derives cinematic pleasure not from an accurate re-enactment of the original tale but through its variation, eagerly anticipating how the story will be reimagined and retold.

  Radha’s character in Hindi cinema is mostly implied, and the heroine’s love is compared with Radha’s devotion to her dark Lord. Many films show the couple near the river, the ocean, at a hill or in a forest. According to Heidi Pauwels, such landscapes are the ‘later-day equivalence of the woods of Braj and Yamuna’s banks’, and the Raas Leela using several energetic dancers is a way of suggesting ‘Krishna multiplicating and dancing with gopis’ (Pauwels 2014: 190). The personae are introduced often through a song. While the Hindi film song has frequently been derided as an unrealistic, hyperbolic, extra-diegetic intrusion in film, it permits ‘popular Hindi cinema to capture the particular stakes of couple-formation in India’, says Gopal in her extended analysis of ‘transgressive conjugality’ which demonstrates how ‘the song sequences allow us to sensually experience the stakes of such coupling’ (Gopal: 25–26). Rather than replaying any one version of the Radha–Krishna story, filmic iterations invoke the pain of Radha’s unrequited love to convey the transcendent beauty of an infinite romance which scores over the predictability of a domesticated marriage.

  ‘The greatest showman of Indian cinema’—Raj Kapoor—has made some of the most well-known adaptations of the Radha–Krishna legend. His 1964 magnum opus Sangam has Radha’s character caught between two lovers, a predicament resolved through death. The well-to-do Radha (Vyjayanthimala) and Gopal (Krishna’s namesake, played by Rajendra Kumar) love each other but a working-class Sunder (Raj Kapoor) pines for Radha. The famous song ‘Bol Radha Bol, Sangam Hoga Ki Nahi’, where we see Sunder, imagining himself as the mythic Krishna, stealing Radha’s clothes by the riverside (the key motif of many a Radha–Krishna song), and having her agree to ‘unite’ with him, becomes a premonition of things to come. On Gopal’s advice, Radha marries Sunder, now a soldier in the Indian army, sacrificing her romance at the altar of the nation (Gopal: 17). In the process she exchanges innate love for mundane domesticity. There is further drama in the film. Confronted by a narcissistic, fatalistic a
nd jealous Sunder, Gopal takes his own life to protect Radha’s honour. But more importantly, given the film industry’s intersection with the nation-building project, Gopal’s sacrifice needs to be read as his commitment to ensure the married couple’s continued service to the nation. The demands of the nation supersede. In this sense, she is akin to the mythological Radha whose personal desire for Krishna will forever be sacrificed. The mythical Radha, an ordinary milkmaid, is already married and will never be able to marry Krishna the prince without upsetting the social order.

  And if at all there is the possibility of the two lovers coming together, it will only happen once the patriarchy is able to overcome the odds stacked against it. In Raj Kapoor’s 1978 film Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Rajeev (Shashi Kapoor) falls in love with the village belle Roopa (Zeenat Aman), who, unbeknownst to him, has a facial scar that she keeps concealed behind her veil. Horrified at seeing her scar for the first time on their wedding night, he thinks he has been tricked into marrying the wrong woman. Rajeev goes back to his veiled Roopa, little realizing that she is in fact his wife. Buried in his decision to finally offer social respectability to Roopa as his legally wedded wife is Rajeev’s defeat at being seduced by Roopa. In a song sung earlier in the film ‘Yashomati Maiya Se Bole Nandlal’, he had playfully reproached the erotic beauty’s kohl-lined eyes for ensnaring him down the path of lust. It will take the androgynous and vulnerable hero an incredible moral courage to ‘confront the choices: truth versus falsehood, rural life versus city, love versus lust, innocence versus knowledge . . .’ (Ahmed 1992: 301) before he accepts Roopa back into his life. Radha/Roopa therefore has to be shamed, humiliated and dragged through a natural disaster before Krishna would come to her rescue.

  The same fate awaits Radha in Raj Kapoor’s 1985 end-of-the-career film Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Radha (Divya Rana) is promised to Narendra (Rajeev Kapoor) who falls in love with Ganga (Mandakini), who in turn overcomes familial, communal and social disgrace and physical obstacles to take Narendra away. In the song, ‘Ek Radha, Ek Meera’, Ganga publicly seals Radha’s destiny by identifying herself as Krishna’s other lover Meera, the famous mystic poet who had abandoned her marriage in search of Krishna, whom she believes is her true husband. In a series of interlocking episodes Ganga deflects the mythical Radha by instituting herself as Meera. In a film such as this, the characters are given names that resonate with traditional meaning and hence the drama of conflict becomes even more terse.

  In Mughal-e-Azam (1960, directed by K. Asif) it is class and societal censure, and not a triangulated relationship, that comes in the way of the two lovers. Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) falls in love with the court dancer Nadira/Anarkali (Madhubala). During the palace’s Janmashtami celebrations, under the gaze of the Muslim king Akbar (Prithviraj Kapoor), his Hindu queen Jodha Bai (Durga Khote) and a full royal court, Anarkali openly insinuates her love to the prince, using the Radha–Krishna song ‘Mohe Panghat Pe Nandlal’. Her dance brims over with innuendoes but remains completely unnoticed by the king who is mesmerized by Anarkali’s rendition of the lyric. However, the young couple’s love, articulated under the guise of the socially sanctioned Radha–Krishna song, is thwarted by the demands of the state that supersede individual emotions. Akbar will never allow his son’s desire for conjugality with a slave girl, Anarkali, and sentences her to death.

  In Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s epic 2015 historical romance Bajirao Mastani, romantic and sexual indiscretion comes at the price of social disgrace and death. Feeling humiliated at losing her husband to Mastani (Deepika Padukone), Bajirao’s (Ranbir Singh) wife Kashibai (Priyanka Chopra) compares her fate to that of Krishna’s wife, Rukmini. Bajirao brings Mastani home as his second wife but cannot escape the pressure of his family and kinship groups. As he goes to battle, his own mother, Radhabai, imprisons Mastani. Towards the end of the film, as an injured Bajirao lay on his deathbed, despite Kashibai’s pleas, Radhabai refuses to release Mastani, at the cost of letting her son succumb to his wounds. In many ways, Radhabai’s character is reminiscent of Radha in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 blockbuster drama Mother India. The two men that Radha (Nargis) is linked to are named after Krishna: her husband, Shamu, who abandons her after losing his arms in an accident, and her flirtatious and rebellious son Birju, who teases village girls, stealing their clothes, and whom she kills to maintain social order. She is both Radha and the wilful Kunti. In Bhansali’s film, therefore, the audience recognizes the mother’s violent decision as déjà vu, bearing in mind the changed set of circumstances under which she acts. Both films bring together two of the central mythological narratives structured around the Mahabharata and Radha.

  Radha’s portrayal in some of the post-2000s Hindi films has undergone a significant shift. Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap’s 2009 remake of Devdas, for example, is a powerful illustration of this change. As the most frequently adapted literary piece, Devdas constitutes another of Indian cinema’s enduring myths that resonates with the Radha–Krishna’s love. Devdas’s story reiterates the ‘underlying model of the impossible triangle’ (Creekmur: 181) where the lovers’ union is thwarted by a competing set of forces located outside of the couple’s control. In this popular legend of unrequited love, the upper-class parents of Devdas (played by a number of actors but most famously by Dilip Kumar in 1955 and Shahrukh Khan in 2002) prevent his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Paro (Suchitra Sen, 1955, and Aishwarya Rai, 2002), who, in their eyes, is socially unequal to their family’s prestige. Feeling snubbed by this rejection, Paro’s parents retaliate by immediately marrying their daughter off to a rich widower, leaving a distraught Devdas to seek comfort with the demimonde Chandramukhi (Vyjayanthimala, 1955, and Madhuri Dixit, 2002) and drown his misery in alcohol, eventually seeking death at Paro’s doorstep. Kashyap’s 2009 adaptation has the hero (Abhay Deol) pull himself together and take his chances with the prostitute Chandramukhi (Kalki Koechlin) instead of taking to the bottle and pining for Paro (Mahi Gill). This adaptation that signals a departure from its earlier iterations embodies a powerful intersection between the new and old order in post-1990s neo-liberal India, which has triggered a new cultural movement by boldly challenging traditional mores (Kurian 2017: 21).

  Karan Johar’s 2012 film Student of the Year is the furthest removed from the original Radha–Krishna legend. The love triangle between Shayana (Alia Bhatt), Abhi (Siddhartha Malhotra) and Rohan (Varun Dhawan) is resolved with the two men settling their professional and romantic differences with each other and becoming friends, comfortable as they are with the ambiguity and agency that comes with modernity.>1 Embodying Indian millennials’ socio-economic and cultural mores, the film is part of New Bollywood that began where classic Hindi cinema left off. If the central narrative drama in classic cinema was structured around the challenges of the couple coming together due to competing forces—family, community, state—then New Bollywood cinema sees the appearance of a ‘post-nuptial couple-form . . . as private, nuclear, [that is] typically located in urban space with weak links to family and community’ (Gopal: 2, 24). If in ‘Radha Kaise Na Jale’ (Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar, 2001) an indignant Gauri (Gracey Singh) gets upset at her fiancé, Bhuvan (Amir Khan, sporting Krishna’s signature flute and peacock feather) for dallying with the white Englishwoman Elizabeth (Rachel Shelly), Johar’s Student of the Year’s Shayana has a radically different reaction to her boyfriend, Rohan. In the song ‘Radha on the Dance Floor’ she first discards her billowing veil (worn Ganga-style by Ram Teri Ganga Maili’s Mandakini in the song ‘Ek Radha, Ek Meera’) before launching into an energetic dance. She then proceeds to ridicule Rohan’s flirtatious behaviour and hypocrisy in blaming her for his failures and, in a role reversal, proceeds to make romantic overtures to Abhi instead. This open declaration of her sexual power represents New Bollywood’s discomfort with the traditional ‘Radha–Krishna’ motif in Hindi cinema. It also promotes the shifting terrain in modern India with young Indian women refusing patriarchal demands and living life on their own
terms.

  The Radha–Krishna duo is no longer culturally relevant for couple-formation in New Bollywood. A sexualized Shayana derides patriarchal privilege, asserts the need for unconditional freedom and demands social acceptance. The articulation of this new form of sexual politics represents, as I have theorized elsewhere (2017, 2018), fourth-wave feminism in India.

  In the film Tevar the triangulated relationship between the central character Ghanshyam (Krishna’s namesake, played by Arjun Kapoor) and villain Gajendar Singh (Manoj Bajpai) is resolved by the hero and heroine’s (Sonakshi Sinha) union. It is interesting to note that here it is the mafia and not tradition or culture that prevent the couple from coming together, making Radha’s character all the more superfluous.

  Radha, therefore, has come full circle: from providing the essential melodramatic context for the challenges of the couple formation in classic Hindi cinema to becoming irrelevant in New Bollywood, which does not need the Radha framework any more since the couple’s right to come together is no longer threatened by external competing forces. In addition, Radha becoming an item number as a profit-generating strategy, as in some films, is of no cultural resonance. Given this, has Radha’s time passed? Will she disappear from Bollywood cinema? Or will scriptwriters find new ways of intersecting Indian modernity with the myth of Radha?