Bananas in Banares: Raanjhanaa

Raanjhanaa hua main tera, kaun tere bin mera...

I did not expect to like this movie. The reviews debating the stalkery romance plot were enough to keep me away from the theater, but eventually the song promos and internet hubbub drew me in, and I found Raanjhanaa to be a nuanced and very human story. And despite what I expected, I think it’s watchable from a feminist perspective.

It’s the story of Kundan (Dhanush), the son of a Tamil priest in Benares who falls in love with a Muslim girl, Zoya (Sonam Kapoor). It’s an obsessive, selfish, and unreciprocated love in all its human messiness. It’s not just that they are from different classes or religions. Kundan is in his own world, one where there is only the Zoya of his dreams, who is rather different than the Zoya of reality. I never thought I’d say this, but Sonam was really well cast here. I just can’t connect with her characters, but Zoya can’t connect with people either. She’s not always a sympathetic character when she uses Kundan’s devotion for her own ends, but she’s three-dimensional and we see glimpses of why she acts the way she does and how she feels so trapped.

Zoya, I think, just likes to push boundaries. Whenever Kundan approaches her for another slap or to generally harass her, anyone around is put off, but Zoya is intrigued. That seems to be the reason for getting involved in her fiance’s political group as well-- she isn’t terribly passionate about the cause, but she enjoys the fight, just like she enjoyed fighting with him when they met.

But this is Kundan’s story, not Zoya’s, and I think that’s what so frustrating to us feminists watching him presented in such a sympathetic way. There’s a point at which Kundan abandons Zoya after taking her to Punjab to meet her fiance, not knowing that he has died from being beaten after Kundan outs his identity as a Hindu. The narrative abandons her there too, and we don’t see her again until Kundan meets her again in Delhi.

Swara Bhaskar, who plays Bindiya, who loves Kundan despite his disinterest in her and obsession with Zoya, wrote a piece defending the misogyny in the film. Usually, “that’s how it really is” doesn’t fly with me. It didn’t make me like Ishaqzaade, and it didn’t make the “rescued naked lady commits suicide” in Endhiran any more palatable. But Jasjeet’s line doesn’t surprise or offend me, because there’s more to the story.

I’m not defending Zoya’s plan. It was pretty dumb. But “the schemes of a woman” aren't what landed him in the hospital bed. That we can squarely blame on the passion of a man.

And Dhanush is fantastic as the passionate titular mad lover. He charms the audience even as we see the destruction his obsession leaves behind. Unlike Zoya, Kundan can connect with people. His friends are with him on even the most ill-advised of ventures and in the second half he effortlessly charms his fellow party members and the constituency. Kundan is only the moth to Zoya’s flame, though, and while his best friend Murari (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) supports him, the mistake he and Bindiya make is to assume that he’s on their level, vulnerable to logic and reason.

The movie takes a lot of Hindi-film romance tropes and uses them to good effect, but it remains self-aware enough to keep from painting them as romantic or desirable.

This scene is especially brilliant when you compare it with the same scene in, say, Mujhse Dosti Karoge. In MDK, they’re just playing chicken with their feelings and you know that after the fluff melodrama everything will be all right in the end. In Raanjhanaa, you don’t know that. It’s scary.

The political subplot in the second half sometimes felt like it belonged in another movie, but the scene where the student group surrounds the exhausted Kundan to discuss (in English!) what social factors influenced him to be a thief is hilarious and excellent.