Eleven Heroines Does Not A Feminist Film Make: A Review of Srijit Mukherji’s "Rajkahini"

In "Rajkahini," Begum Jaan, played by Bengali cinema’s old hand Rituparna Sengupta (right), rules over a boisterous group of eight young prostitutes with a hoarse throat and a heavy hand. COURTESY SHREE VENKATESH FILMS
01 November, 2015

In the scene that sets up the Bengali film Rajkahini’s central conflict, four men stand on a hilltop between Haldibari and Debiganj in Bengal, a few weeks after the partition of India and Pakistan. These are two government officials and two policemen, one each from India and Pakistan. “What’s that,” one asks, pointing to a lone house in the countryside before them “That”, comes the reply, “is Begum Jaan's brothel.” Written and directed by national award winner Srijit Mukherji, Rajkahini is about a crisis facing the brothel: the post-partition border passes through that brothel and its residents, mostly prostitutes, resist the two government officials' attempts to evict them from their home so they can erect a barbed wire fence in its stead.

The film pits a community of eleven women living in Begum Jaan's brothel against the male domination of two emerging states. With a hoarse throat and a heavy hand Begum Jaan, played by Bengali cinema’s old hand Rituparna Sengupta, rules over a  group of eight young women—one of whom has a daughter—and an elderly lady, Kamal Thamma (Lily Chakravarty). None of these women is willing to part with their home, despite being threatened with humiliation and violence—though what exactly motivates them remains unclear till the end. Also living with them are two men: the pimp Sujan (Rudranil Ghosh) and the guard Salim (Nigel Akkara). Another, a man called “Master,” regularly comes to visit with educational materials for the little girl.

Their opponents are two childhood friends, Ilias (Kaushik Sen) and Prophullo (Saswata Chatterjee). Now the local representatives of the new countries of Pakistan and India, Ilias and Prophullo must pretend to be adversaries enforcing the dividing line between their countries. Both seem to abhor violence, but goad each other into an escalation that ends in hired goons attacking the brothel to drive out its inhabitants. “You mean those people standing there are in one country,” Begum Jaan asks Ilias and Prophullo when they first bring the eviction order, pointing at the women on the far side of the courtyard, “And we are another?” A pause. The whole group then bursts into laughter at the absurdity of the proposition, leaving the two men taken aback.

Releasing across India on 6 November 2015, Mukherji’s film was flanked by a remarkably visible marketing campaign in West Bengal. When Rajkahini's slick trailer went online in August, anticipation flooded through my social media feeds, as friends from both West Bengal and Bangladesh gushed over it. The film—the trailer suggested—would be a glossy period piece. The scenes depicted the residents of the brothel wearing closely wound saris and wielding guns to defend their home, evocative of edgy, alternative history films such as Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! or Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds. In the promotion leading up to the release, Mukherji called it his “lifetime script” and that he hoped that it would help the younger generation learn about partition. In a tweet, producer and director Mahesh Bhatt called it “the most relevant film of the times we live in,” and announcing that he will be remaking Rajkahini in Bollywood.

National award winner Srijit Mukherji, writer and director of "Rajkahini," on the set of the film. COURTESY SHREE VENKATESH FILMS

On the face of it, the film, with its many female main characters, representing a variety of women's experiences, and references to the divisiveness of caste and religion, seemed to be set up as an interesting mix of period piece, counterfactual and subaltern history. But the superlatives surrounding the film hide that it only uses the Partition as a backdrop to play out the fantasy of these women wielding guns; the sexuality and violence of its premise is more often gratuitous than provocative.

Rajkahini symbolically plays out a historical fantasy: what if, instead of just accepting partition, there had been resistance? What if, like Begum Jaan and the other women, people had taken up arms to defend their home against a distant bureaucracy imposing an absurdity? The Radcliffe Line, named after the maker of the partition border Cyril Radcliffe, haphazardly split up the contiguous economic and cultural area that was once Bengal. It marooned thousands of people of both nationalities in enclaves on both sides, displacing hundreds of thousands who fled fearing communal violence. In many places, it divides villages and homesteads. However, the tragedy of the separation and the horror of the riots that followed are not palpable in the film; it almost short sells the gravity of the situation. The mass migration of millions looks like a short-term trickle across the landscape; the meetings at which leaders tell their people to leave for the safety of the other state, like afternoon hangouts; and the tents of a refugee camps like those of a summer outing. The short scenes of rioting are stylised, becoming more beautiful than horrific.

The scathing view of male power and patriarchy along with eleven female main characters leaves no doubts about its feminist stance. Rajkahini easily passes the Bechdel test—devised to check whether a movie provides agency to its female characters, which requires that at least two named female characters talk to each other about something besides a man—a feat not easily achieved by most films in India or elsewhere in the world. It further challenges itself by making the prostitutes and not the work they perform the focus: can the women be more than just embodiments of male sexual fantasies? It is bold, stopping short of explicit nudity while showing the women engaged in unpleasant sex with their customers. In two short shots, it shows that they have a sexual life beyond their work.

However, the film does not explore the lives and characteristics of these women beyond their identities as prostitutes. Their back stories—being widowed, single mothers, or rape victims—all serve to explain their presence in the brothel, yet seem to add little to their development as individuals. Begum Jaan is the archetypal ruthless mistress with a troubled past: rumour has it that she was widowed as a child and then sold to a brothel from which she escaped.

Actor Jisshu Sengupta, who plays the head of the goons trying to drive out the inhabitants of the brothel in "Rajkahini." COURTESY SHREE VENKATESH FILMS

The women are depicted mostly as a boisterous, fun group, each differing very little from the other. The possibility for further such development is hinted at, for example, in Juthikaa (Sudiptaa Chakraborty) who is held back from an impatient customer by her crying daughter, shining a light on the life of families and children in a brothel—but this is never probed further.

The most exploitative story is that of Fatima, introduced in the first few minutes of the film as the victim of a gang rape, who is then abandoned at the brothel by her father. On her arrival, Begum Jaan slaps her repeatedly until she begins to scream horrifically, releasing her pent-up pain. However, after this scene, she all but disappears, featuring only in one later scene when she is raped by the local Nawab, whom Begum Jaan has called on for protection, enforcing his “right to the first night” with all new women at the brothel. Even then, Fatima submits apathetically. The scene in itself is not so relevant; but it forms a part of a larger narrative in which every scene featuring Fatima prominently shows her as a victim without agency. It is almost as if the characters exist only to serve the depiction of violence.

Stereotypes such as these are not restricted only to the women in the brothel. The film is filled with them, all playing out equally clichéd storylines. The two government officers recall a time in which they enjoyed both, playing Holi, and eating beef on Eid, with equal relish. “Hindu, Muslim, low or high caste—all are the same in the brothel”, Begum Jaan claims. To illustrate this point, she serendipitously turns to point out a Brahmin man who has just had sex with a Dalit woman. Later, a man connected to the brothel is rejected by the woman he secretly loves and wants to rescue. Scorned, he turns to planning to exact vengeance within a matter of seconds.

Thrown into this mix are oddities, such as an Indian man playing the Englishman Cyril Radcliffe, and the talented impersonator Sujan, whose ability to imitate people and animals is supposed to be so perfect that the film dubs a real tiger’s roar and the real voice of a small girl onto his moving lips—a surreal effect that is not even remotely believable. It also includes, crucially, a group of women who, just having learned how to shoot guns from Salim (how Salim had guns for them to use is not explained), still manage to put up a fight against experienced goons.

The film, however, is not without merit. The power of Mukherji’s allegory is that he is able to include a fantasy of communal harmony within the reality of the violence that actually filled Bengal at the time. The world surrounding the brothel is one of riots, rapes and hate; inside the brothel is a community of women and men looking out for one another. Elegantly, Mukherji also superimposes two hierarchies of power: patriarchy and colonialism. The sympathetic protagonists are all women; the enforcers of the Partition and the perpetrators of violence are all men. What difference does it make if British, Muslim or Hindu men rule, asks Begum Jaan. If the women of the brothel symbolise an imagined Bengali resistance to Partition, then it is men who are the colonisers.

However, there is little to learn from Rajkahini about either the Partition or the lives of the women that serve as its protagonists, living in historically significant (or simpler) times. While the film's attempt at a feminist allegory is commendable; unfortunately, much is undone by sacrificing character development for a flurry of glimpses of violence against women.


Lalon Sander is a senior editor at the German daily "taz.die tageszeitung" (www.taz.de). He is currently in India as a fellow of the Media Ambassadors India-Germany program.