How Khalnayak anticipates Raavan!

A remarkable moment takes place at the climax in what is otherwise a rather tame resolution to the film. Khalnayak of course is a very overt reading of the Ramayana themes but what is intriguing here is that it is Raavan who becomes the ultimate guarantor of Ganga’s (Sita) identity and also the one who restores Ram’s prestige and his, as it were, ‘godhead’. The film then ends with a joyful Ram suggesting more or less that Raavan can in fact become Ram. It is an extremely interesting series of twists that Ghai provides to the entire topos of the Ramayana. I have not mentioned all of these but let’s first move the history forward a bit. Isn’t Rathnam’s wager in his film exactly the opposite? That Ram too can become Raavan! We see during the course of the film how this happens but we also on the other hand witness a Ram (Vikram) who is somewhat chilling and even a little nasty. Ghai’s Khalnayak and Rathnam’s Raavan are then intertwined in very interesting ways. Ghai’s work, which I have revisited for the first time after watching it on its initial release, is easily his most provocative work even if it does not quite have the script to fully develop its subversive designs. This ambitious film is similarly the director’s most carefully shot work, often quite brilliant with its compositions, in terms of the framing and equally so for the contrast and hues but also for its sheer physical spaces from claustrophobic jail cells to magnificent horizon line shots and actually in keeping with some of its themes even an action sequence where the leads engage in combat suspended monkey-like from ancient trees.*

But let’s get back to the Ramayana and its reading in the two films I have decided to juxtapose. I have already written very much on Rathnam’s film and won’t repeat everything here but to summarize things briefly the original title of that film ‘Asokavanam’ should give us pause. Because we are ‘in’ Raavan’s world in that film. We look at world through his eyes. Ram is then the intruder in this world, not its normative center. Raavan himself is always a bit opaque in this film and here his characterization is perfectly attuned to the film’s elliptical story-telling (here the Hindi is more radical than the Tamil). Because ultimately the audience always assumes Ram to be the guiding star and if the story is to be refracted through Raavan’s ‘eyes’ we must be strangers to that world or certainly a bit unstable occupying it which is what Rathnam forces us to do. In other words we too intrude on that world much like Ram and then crucially we go over to the other side. By the end we are with Raavan, hoping for his ‘happy ending’ far more than Ram’s! This is why Rathnam’s originally intended title (at least for the Tamil version) was more to the point. It is not so much that Raavan is the (anti)hero here but that we are in the ‘sign system’ of ‘Asokananam’.

Ghai of course also has Raavan as his anti-hero but he operates in a more ‘traditional’ world which is to say Ram’s system. The film obsessively plays with the title and also keeps offering Ram and Raavan as mirror reflections of each other. There is definitely more than a suggestion here that Ram inflected a certain way can become Raavan while Raavan re-inflected can also ‘return’ to the abode of Ram. In this sense the hint early on should not be missed when a half-crazed Ram brutally beats up Ballu (Dutt) in the jail compound. Inasmuch as this sequence involves a great deal of violence on the part of Ram we are not very far from Vikram’s own characterization in Rathnam’s film. The distinction is that Ram in Ghai’s film eventually learns about Raavan’s story and becomes more sympathetic to him. We even learn that they have been childhood friends thereby completely the twinning that Ghai offers at every turn (eventually the ‘mother’ is also neatly divided between the two, Ram literally saves her life by the end with Raavan as spectator). No such possibility exists in Rathnam’s film. Ram here can never be a reader of Raavan’s story but the reverse is not foreclosed and Raavan dies greatly humainized not least for this reason.

In Ballu’s flashback we get a bold scene when the ‘khalnayak’ throws mud on his revered grandfather’s signpost. The family’s freedom-fighter. The ‘claim’ here is that more than one post-Independence generation has failed the potential Ram figures of India or enabled the Jekyll of Ram to lose out to the Hyde of Raavan. To this degree it is an inspired move on Ghai’s part to have a Joker-like (post-Nicholson) ‘villain’ for his film. Dutt in a sense becomes deranged once he goes over to the dark side and it is hard to distinguish within his performance the unhinged character from the one who simply plays this part. While Dutt is superbly charismatic throughout the film he is not enough of an actor to really bring out the nuances of this dynamic and partly as a result of this the film does not really achieve the emotional resonance it might have. Some of this is probably Ghai’s fault as well inasmuch as the ‘lighter’ ways in which the character is handled as a general matter allows the director to present a masala rogue type and therefore more easily digestible by audiences. In any case we have through the flashback the sense of an India having failed its Ram-virtues. Again we are not too far from Rathnam’s work where the emergence of ‘Asokavanam’ at the fringes of Ram’s order are precisely (and in theoretical terms) Ram’s own unaccounted-for excess. In Ghai’s imagining too it is a damning indictment of Ram that the nation became so hospitable for Raavan.

Ghai’s subversions are not limited to the Ram-Raavan interplay. I have already pointed out how Sita’s claim of chastity here really depends on Raavan’s counter-signing it (and of course here Ram unlike the original one never has doubts and/or is never ‘political’ enough to insist on a ‘trial’). But Ganga (Sita) herself sets out on a dangerous mission to trap Raavan to save Ram’s honor. This too is very provocative. For Ram to be ‘saved’ the woman has to go over to the dark side and come back unstained (and this perhaps complicated the reading I’ve just suggested). Note here how even in Rathnam’s film Ram never really has any doubts about his wife but uses the mythological ‘archive’ rather cynically to trap Raavan. Here woman becomes an easy tool in Ram’s hands whereas in Ghai’s film his righteous hero is never happy with Ganga’s unilateral decision. Either way the conflict between Ram and Raavan cannot be settled without the woman. And Ganga herself seems to be quite drawn to Raavan. The film insists on the purity of her spirit with respect to her original love interest but one could easily read the key song here (aaja sajan aaja.. with Ram in mind) as the sublimation of her desire for the ‘khalnayak’! The trigger for this segment is a Ram statuette provided by Raavan! In both Ghai’s film and Rathnam’s there is despite herself something of an erotic investment by Sita in the Raavan figure but more importantly a deeper ’emotion’ that comes about, that cannot of course be expressed other than in Platonic terms. Each film involves a key sequence where Sita saves Raavan and of course the later work does this in especially profound terms by having Sita actually shield Raavan from Ram (with the former’s blood eventually splattering across her forehead).

A final word on ‘Asokavanam’. Unlike the physical lair that Rathnam’s anti-hero operates in Ghai’s film (in keeping with his own history in this regard.. Hero being an obvious example) the ‘khalnayak’ is really not tethered to a specific place. In fact he wanders with Sita throughout the film across the Indian landscape. Ghai’s in masala mode of course but even in Rathnam’s film the ‘villain’ gets humanized only with Sita’s intervention. Or better still it is the love object that tames Raavan.

I should lastly stress the point once more that for all these remarkably interesting themes and for all rich visual compositions (not to mention the extraordinary set-piece dance sequences) the film still lacks deep emotional resonance. I have mentioned Dutt in this regard (and it is part of the problem that there is never real chemistry between the leads barring in a few rare moments) but it seems to me that there was something ‘unworked’ in Ghai as well. It is a more reflective film for that mode and certainly contrasted with the director’s history (for example a great deal of the dialog happens without a background score) but there is an element of ‘unease’ between the masala fabric of this universe and the quieter notes struck by the director. Nonetheless this a valiant attempt by a director whose career got truncated rather suddenly after this film in the face of the Yashraj onslaught. Ghai oddly enough got spooked out a bit too easily. Pardes, a film which otherwise did well, really marked the beginning of an end for him. Khalnayak perhaps marks the last hurrah of an older Bombay masala tradition. There was really nowhere for this genre to go in the newly emergent order of that period. And yet it is disappointing that Ghai could not frame a better exit for himself given the richness of Khalnayak. It is sadder still to reflect on the fact that even a film that could hardly be compared with the glories of the Bombay masala tradition is still quite enough to put all of the 90s and beyond Yashraj (and Yashraj-inspired) cinema in the shade.

Postscript: this is arguably Madhuri’s greatest screen moment. Greater even than HAHK. Because here the full range of Madhuri’s gifts, her incredible iconic appeal, her sheer luminosity as a star-actress, her mesmeric perfection as a dancer, is given greater expression than any other film that I can think of. In many ways Ghai was always the director most attuned to Mahuri’s ‘essence’ as a performer.

*Sadly both existing DVDs on it are somewhat inadequate. The initial Eros/DEI release is out of print. This was somewhat cropped. The newer Shemaroo release is even more cropped. Leaving this aside neither DVD quite has the clarity of image needed to truly bring out this film’s visual strengths. The Eros is probably preferable.