Undooming Laila Majnu!

Revisiting this film after a very long time I found myself becoming something of a fan where earlier I had less taste for it. This is once more an example of a richer Bombay film tradition where the greater ‘good’ of social inclusiveness was frequently married to a progressive politics. Even if this last gesture was often quasi-utopian the cogency of the same can hardly be underestimated in a nation-state with as many fault-lines of identity as India and where the resulting politics has often led to tragic consequences. The Manmohan Desai worldview to use a certain shorthand is enormously valuable not only because of its idealistic and sometimes near-visionary elements but also for the testament it offers to various vitally syncretistic strains of Indian cultural life. Shakespeare-like to this degree the tradition so often represented by the masala ‘super-genre’ (but also evident in other ways) offered a very intoxicating mix of the high and low and the influence of seemingly disparate strands of cinematic and culture influence. Rather than simply being a pastiche effort that aimed to please all of its audiences (though it was certainly this as well much as Shakespeare too was trying to create blockbuster entertainers all the time!) these choices reflected the very clear goal of re-imagining a better nation-state on the bedrock of various notions of emancipation. Laila Majnu in the very same sense invokes an impressive variety of cultural registers. The film itself seems to follow the Romeo and Juliet narrative more than anything else (another nod to Shakespeare whose influence on Indian commercial cinema by way of various street theater traditions and of course some of the writers of the films remains to be documented) but in doing so there is a somewhat restrained masala framework at hand. The mix of classes, the comic interludes, the constant shifts from high drama to lyrical romance but also in the same sense a variety of aesthetic standards from Hollywood Oriental exotica represented in the sets and perhaps even the garish costumes to more indigenous North Indian perspectives on poetry, feminine beauty and the erotic. Equally a mythic framework that not only references the source material but also ‘contaminates’ it with more ‘Indic’ elements. Laila Majnu represents a great popular model of ‘Indo-Islam’ (as the theorists would have it) and in the world of this film everyone is counted (including among the actors Danny who provides a certain Central Asian ‘ethnic’ twist to this Thousand and One Nights entertainment!). Or almost everyone. Desai’s world was more capacious and even more universal than this but this is no knock on Laila Majnu.

Finally the film also avoids the old ‘Muslim social’ paradigm of the ghettoized Muslim or the fantasy of the cloistered minority community able to engage in all sorts of fetishistic activity always barred to the majority! The Pakeezah view of the world! To be sure there is some Arabian Nights harem fantasy in play in the way the film’s interiors are designed but this is rather harmless within the contexts and again represents little more than Hollywood borrowing (without the politics of the latter).

A bit of a postscript on Rishi Kapoor — a pleasure to watch anywhere in the 70s for his naturalness and fluidity and very much important to this venture far more than the somewhat insipid Ranjeeta Kaur (though having said that this was her most appropriate outing!). The later tragic portions of the film somewhat muzzle these qualities (Rishi’s greatest gifts were always least in evidence at the most dramatic end of the spectrum) but he works like a charm in the first half. An actor who deserved better opportunities than he got but always a very welcome, endearing presence.