A 1981 film Itni Si Baat (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Maushami Chatterjee) tried to flip the idea of a conventional marriage like a drippy omelette that crash lands on the chef’s face. So we had the husband burning the food and fumbling through daily domestic chores with a song, “Raja o Raja, tera baj gaya baaja, ” playing in the background. And the wife who takes up the job of a salesgirl (because ofcourse, what other job can she aspire to after having dedicated her best years to her kids) gets routinely humiliated by her boss and is reminded time and again to keep her “maan, maryada, izzat” in “ghar ki chaar deewari.”
A random stranger begins to stalk her, a prostitution racket almost swallows her and finally things come to a boil to make the point that only a woman can raise a family and only a man can be a provider. “Jiska kaam usiko saaje…..” being the moral of the story. That this film was made in the 80s made the premise even more shocking though the makers tried to sneak in the consoling message that it is not easy to be a wife and mother either. This was also a time when heroines in films like Tapasya and Jeevan Dhara were deified as sacrificing goddesses because they worked only to fulfil the ambitions of their siblings. Not because they enjoyed working because God forbid, a woman, the creature of duty, should find joy in anything.
Even progressive films like Dooriyan (Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar) pitted a woman’s ambition against the well-being of her child. A working woman is after all an exotic animal in Hindi cinema and most of the time, the makers don’t know what to do with her. Even in a film as recent as Inkaar (2013), Chitrangada Singh’s character is defined more by the unquenched need for a man who has belittled her than a desire for excellence. In Balki’s Ki & Ka, atleast one thing is reassuring. The woman is unapologetically ambitious and is raised by a joyful, emotionally present mother who was able to manage her own life just fine, all by herself.
So far so good but the ease with which Kareena Kapoor’s Kia climbs right up to the top rung of the corporate power structure, does not take into account, the challenges that women routinely face in corporate environments. Maybe her story is an exception and we should all be happy to see a driven, highly-motivated woman in our cinema. But then her characterisation begins to incorporate all the cliches associated with ambition. She is insensitive to her spouse and expects that he only fulfil the role he has chosen for himself, that of a faultless, self-effacing caregiver who must feed her, clean the floor during a party at home when something breaks (as if the homemaker does not even deserve the dignity of being helped if a glass tumbler crashes to the floor), take the blame for an unwanted pregnancy and get slapped in emotionally charged moments while she herself makes no time for family because there are more important conversations to be had and milestones to be reached outside the “ghar ki chardiwari.’
And as an ego-centric overachiever, she also cannot stand it when the spouse begins to whip up a little success story of his own and holds it against him when he is not at home during a fateful night while she herself is in the US, furthering her own career.
Arjun Kapoor’s Kabir ofcourse extols homemaking as the work of a true artist but the ease with which he picks up a broom and begins to clean the unkempt house of his wife and whips up gourmet meals, redesigns interiors, chips in with extra money, takes Kia’s moodswings and her erratic working hours in his stride, it seems again as if homemaking is a breeze. As if there are no days when the caregiver wishes to be taken care of or to think of her/his own needs first. As if the idea of a successful family must have one of the partners playing the “khamba” (as the film’s occasionally abysmal writing equates a caregiver with) while the other builds a grand edifice of personal ambition.
In one of the supposedly enlightening scenes, Kia’s mother says that the ego-centric tensions between partners have little to do with gender but with who the provider is and that it is natural for a provider to resent if the self-effacing other half begins to get attention. But all can be well if the dominating partner, usually the one who earns, makes space for the other. Well, there you have it. An eternity of disproportionate gender-based power play in the institution of marriage, explained away in simple words.
In a country where women are routinely suppressed and a marriage becomes more about symbols than personal growth or fulfilment, it is refreshing to see a heroine tying the mangal sutra around the neck of her groom but in a modern marriage, why do we need symbolic demarcations of roles anyway? Where the film fails, despite good intentions, is in the presumption that only one person in a marriage can afford to be ambitious and that homemaking requires the negation of not just ego but also self-respect even as the provider oscillates between temper tantrums and guilt trips. In a recent interview, entrepreneur Richard Branson shared how he built his empire without isolating his family and was a stay-at-home, working dad when his kids were small. There are many women too who have raised their kids, looked after their families and built successful businesses and neither a man nor a woman today can be restricted to just one kind of a role.
Ki & Ka is however salvaged partially by Kareena. Like a well-tuned instrument, she finds just the right sur as a performer amid the chaos. Arjun Kapoor is endearing, and in a tacky set that we are supposed to believe is the Bachchan residence, we meet yes, the Bachchans who represent the ultimate example of one partner sacrificing personal glory for the other. There is also a rather confused message this meeting throws up about how it takes a real man to stand by his woman but it takes a special woman to accept a man who only stands by her and does nothing else. In the end though, the film misses the biggest point. That a modern marriage does not need a role reversal where a man does what a woman was once expected to do. That in the end, it is not about who wears the mangal sutra or the sweat pants in a relationship. It is really about balance and equality where each partner has both responsibilities and privileges and is entitled to respect… regardless of how much he or she earns. Or not.
Reema Moudgil is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.