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Synopsis
Paroma explores the metamorphosis
of a middle-aged, urban housewife from an
upper-middle-class family from a contented
and complacent wife, daughter-in-law and
mother to a woman who learns to come to
terms with herself only when she learns
to 'read' herself through the perceptions
of another man. The film opens with Durga
Pooja being celebrated in the Choudhury
family. Rahul (Mukul Sharma), a noted photo-journalist
who contributes to magazines like Life and
distantly related to the family, has come
to photograph the Durga Pooja. In Paroma
(Raakhee), he discovers the ideal subject
for a commissioned piece on the Indian Housewife.
Paroma's family is elated and her husband
is amused. But as Rahul and Paroma explore
the nooks and corners of the city of Calcutta
during the photographic shoot, the two engage
in a torrid affair. But the affair is short-lived
as Rahul is called away for an emergency
commission to Chad. When copies of Life
magazine arrive in the post with Paroma's
pictures in them, all hell breaks loose
and Parama's life, as do the lives of everyone
else she is linked to, changes forever...
The film
Paroma is one of the first Indian
films after V
Shantaram’s Aadmi (Hindi)/Manoos
(Marathi) (1939), to endanger the power
base of patriarchy. Sen makes her protagonist
Paroma deviate from accepted norms of social
behaviour, from established values of sexual
morality. Instead of using her energies
in a struggle where the ground rules are
stacked against her, Paroma unwittingly
learns to apply them to the active creation
of alternatives. In this option, where she
chooses to turn her back on society, she
experiences that society – positively
or negatively - can no longer ignore her.
Those who take a course of action that deviates
from the accepted codes of and practices
are pursued and deviance is seen by those
in power (namely men) as a very threatening
thing.
 Those
whose power base is threatened will behave
in one of two ways. They will colonize the
'deviant' behaviour, take it over, adopt
it, absorb it into acceptable practice in
society. Or they will label it as something
undesirable. This theory is ideally proved
by the polarities in the audience response
to Paroma from the time when it
was released to the present time. When Paroma
was first released, a major slice of the
Indian audience reacted to the film by registering
extreme shock and outrage at the film’s
gross violation of marital morality by a
woman from an urban middle-class family.
Today, the scenario is different. The audience
– including many of those who had
seen the film more than ten years ago –
views the film positively, heralding it
as a turning-point film in the history of
the portrayal of women in Indian cinema.
However, the patriarchal and feudal tendency
to label all creative new activities and
discourses entered into by women as deviant,
weird, perverse, sick, queer and marginal
sustains in contemporary Indian society.
Any attempt by a woman to get away from
the way things have been done or life has
been led is attacked with impunity, irrationality
and totally out of context. This is a desperate
attempt to undermine its appeal and to isolate
those involved. But deviance, like beauty,
lies in the eye of the beholder. What is
deviant behaviour to a secure group will
be perfectly rational behaviour to those
for whom the very security of that group
means repression.
Paroma has a conventional narrative
structure. It tells a story, sets up a conflict,
and offers a possible solution to the conflict.
It is an open-ended film. We are not sure
whether Paroma really takes up the job.
Whether she goes back to the Choudhury household
or somewhere else. It is an unpredictable,
almost violent climax with a strange period
of retrospection and nostalgia following
it. The editing deliberately slows down
at this stage, as does the camera, to rhyme
with Paroma's mental pace. It almost reaches
a point of stasis at this point. There is
no foreshadowing of the film's resolution.
If there is one, it is in the Shyam Kanchan
plant in which Paroma rediscovers her lost
childhood self and reunites this self with
her present one. Potentially, Sen's discourse,
from her subordinate place in the discourses
in the text is clear in Paroma.
In this film, Sen works against the naturalized,
dominating male discourse to produce textual
contradictions, which denaturalize the working
of patriarchal ideology.
This film deserves to be commended for
its courage and its power, though, not so
much, for its honesty. Because, the quality
of honesty in this film is at times, diluted
by its somewhat voyeuristic stance. Its
use of the camera-eye, the camera being
within the command of a man, within the
film, is clearly voyeuristic, reflecting
the voyeurism of the eye of the movie-camera
as well. This however, is relative to interpretation
and description. Paroma reveals
the oppressive nature of gender relationships
across class-lines in contemporary Indian
society. It goes on to suggest the direction
in which women may be pushed, to discover
their own voices and escape from patriarchal
domination of thought. It manages to convey
this through a deceptively simple, but subtly
political structure that creates several
riveting layers of conflict in the central
character of Paroma. This is reflected in
a myriad different ways to the viewers who
watch the film, either the first time, or
several times, with irregular gaps between
viewings. As a consequence, Paroma
is controversial and polarizing. Many men
and some women find its sympathetic approach
towards the adulterous woman morally reprehensible.
TG Vaidyanathan's critique of the film unfolds
as a scathing attack on the film and on
Sen's fleshing out of its central character.
"Paroma does not have the moral
right to offer such excuses, and by her
own exacting Brahmin standards, her action
is, quite simply, unpardonable," he
writes.
Though Paroma can be termed a
feminist film within the Indian realm thematically
speaking, it panders to the male gaze in
terms of style, formal technique and in
part, representation. Ms. Sen made the critical
choice between aesthetics and political
consequence that marks the line of difference
between an aesthetically beautiful film
and a feminist film. Paroma clearly
has a feminist moral structured into a somewhat
laboured climax because the search for that
lost plant and for its name suddenly appear
like a forced metaphor that is not taken
care of. Interestingly however, the narrative
journey the film embarks on to arrive at
this climax is through the very agents of
dominant cinema with its patriarchal clichés
which Ms. Sen seeks to dispel through plot
and theme. The perspective of every frame
reveals a male ordering of space.
Ms. Sen limits Paroma by casting
Raakhee, top star of Hindi mainstream cinema
at the time, in and as Paroma. The 'star'
in Raakhee, which invests her persona with
superficial gloss, keeps peeping out from
behind the character Paroma on screen. Raakhee,
at once a part and a 'victim' of a popularly
constructed star-system cultivated, sustained
and perpetuated by dominant commercial cinema,
tends to blur the difference 'between the
constructed persona of the star and her
construction of a character on screen.'
However desperately she tries, however much
the star in Raakhee tries to internalise
the 'character' of Paroma on screen with
reinforcements of culturally appropriate
costume and make-up, the transparency of
the cosmetic metamorphosis cannot be denied.
The stylisation is too deeply ingrained
to be demolished so easily. As a consequence,
'neither the star persona nor the fictional
character could conceal their interiority
from her audience, who had a privileged
insight into secrets, suffering, passion
and loss.' Though Ms. Sen might not have
intended to present the star's performance
as spectacle for consumption, Raakhee's
performance is like 'the woman who must
perform, and for whom performance is invested
in appearance. Performance, appearance,
masquerade and their erotic shift from the
surface of the screen into the story itself.'
Yet, in the final analysis, for Raakhee
- the star, the artifice of successful femininity
constantly cracks and out of the character
Paroma's vulnerability, rises a towering
star performance.
Another reason why the star often intrudes
into the character is the beauty of Raakhee,
sensuous, feminine, even regal, at moments
in time. This beauty marginalizes Paroma's
creative past, a past in which she played
the sitar and read Premendra Mitra. This
throws up pertinent questions on whether
Rahul, as a professional photographer, and
then as a heterosexual male, would have
been attracted to this woman, had she not
been so beautiful. In that case, would the
explosive adulterous affair and its repercussions
on Paroma have ever happened? The question
that raises its ugly head here is therefore:
why did Ms. Sen make Paroma so beautiful?
Paroma has an ‘odyssey of
consciousness’ structure. This structure
follows the route where the initially apolitical
and symbolically typical housewife-mother,
gradually takes on - by circumstance or
by choice – the politics of her identity
and her sexuality through a confrontation
with the repressive patriarchal family and
the medical apparatus. At the end of the
film, Paroma takes the first autonomous
decision of her life – she will take
up a job. The salary, the designation, the
organization that she proposes to work for,
does not matter to her. The decision does.
This journey from false to true consciousness
is the motivating narrative drive of this
film. The audience is almost invited to
make this journey with the central protagonist,
Paroma. Paroma’s journey is from non-feminist
heterosexuality to self-identification.
Rather than work on a puritanical refusal
of the pleasures of 'looking', Sen, through
Paroma, prefers to explore the contradictions
and instabilities typical of the representation
of women in mainstream cinema. In the process,
Paroma, the woman, is transformed from an
object of contemplation and ‘looking’,
into a site of conflict and struggle, although
there is still, always, the risk of recuperation.
Sen does not shy away from taking this risk.
Paroma, attempting to redefine
the iconography of woman in Indian cinema,
came up against resistance from the Left
and the Right alike, the former questioning
the relevance of its theme and the latter
challenging its assumptions. The facelessness
of the woman in contemporary commercial
cinema in India has affected conventional
stardom by reducing the span of any individual
star dangerously. The body exposes and exhausts
itself faster and more absolutely than the
face. The more controlled and regulated
eroticism of the earlier cinema, confined
to the contours of the face, has given way
to a more exhibitionist eroticism that is
too facile to stand by itself. It needs
to be sustained by unnatural violence in
all its horrible manifestations. The eruption
of violence in Indian commercial cinema
and its 'middle cinema' variants is a natural
corollary of the progressive denudation
and consequent demystification of the female
body on screen. The inaccessibility of the
early stars embodied in the cold dignity
of the 'good' fallen woman, or the rock-like
endurance of the matron, or the naïveté
of the sweet young thing, could generate
an erotic charge that is diffused in the
greater exposure of the woman in later cinema.
This is the context against which Paroma
sets out to establish a woman's right to
choose her life.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance
journalist who specialises in cinema and
gender. She has won the National Award for
Best Writing on Cinema twice.
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