“Rio Bravo [1959] is the most traditional of films. The whole of Hawks is
immediately behind it, and the whole tradition of the Western, and
behind that is Hollywooditself. If I were asked to choose a film that
would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo.”
-Robin Wood, Howard Hawks[1]
The classical Indian cinema today is no more in need of justification than was its
Hollywood counterpart in the late 1960s.
[2],[3] This is not to argue that either cinema has been immune historically to dispersions against its artistic character, nor even that it no longer is; as commercial industries, each has and continues to arouse criticism for its relationship to the marketplace, and for its supposed concessions to capitalist enterprise. Still, to say the neither requires justification is to make the least controversial of claims: that art and entertainment can and do coexist in the finest instances of each tradition. Whether one searches for confirmation in
Citizen Kane (1941),
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and
Vertigo (1958)
or
Awaara (1951),
Mother India (1957) and
Pyaasa (1957), the matter would seem to be settled.
Still, Robin Wood’s formulation, beyond the compellingly revisionist quality of its canonization of Hawks’s film, sustains force to the extent that
Rio Bravo tells us something particular about the Hollywood cinema.
[4] In much the same way, writer-director Kamal Amrohi’s
Pakeezah (‘Pure Heart,’ 1972) succeeds in “validating” the concept of a classical Indian cinema: that is,
Pakeezah’s existence – and indeed its elevated artistic status – is altogether implausible outside the contours of Bollywood filmmaking. This is not to suggest merely that Amrohi’s film
required the commercial and/or technological institutions of the Bollywood industry. Rather,
Pakeezah owes its existence to the singular formal structure of the popular Indian cinema. Specifically, Amrohi’s picture is constructed according to Bollywood filmmaking’s defining epic structure; its characteristic recourse to diegetic musical sequences – with motivations that are not always readily discernable; and its wild disjunctures of space and time. This is to say that
Pakeezah adheres to a set of conventions that mark its distance from the characteristic economy of
Hollywoodstudio filmmaking, even as it instantiates a popular idiom of its own.
At the same time, Pakeezah does not represent simply an adoption of this popular form, but instead an appropriation of its formal singularities for its particular semantic ends. That is, while Pakeezah utilizes a pre-existing mass-art form, its application is calibrated to match the idiosyncrasy of the film’s content. Thus, though Amrohi has not invented a cinematic idiom unique to his film, he has nonetheless succeeded in producing the same level of organic rigor – between form and discourse – than have those artists who have remade the language of their cinema in the image of their subjects: from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Chantal Akerman to Abbas Kiarostami, among scores of others. It is almost as if we might say that the language of the classical Indian cinema is Amrohi’s, to the degree that it was under his direction in Pakeezah that the form appeared to become as malleable as it long has been for the greatest exemplars of counter-cinema, who have all transformed the language of their art to match the content of individual works. Pakeezah thus justifies the classical Indian cinema as it not only marks it as but in fact makes it a singularly expressive form.
‘Rare is the connoisseur who appreciates such a flower’
While it is easy therefore to compare Pakeezahwith Rio Bravo on the level of its adherence to a national tradition of popular art-making, to say that Pakeezah has the ‘whole of’ Amrohi behind it, as Wood said of Hawks’ Western vis-à-vis its filmmaker, is far more problematic. In particular, whereas the American was credited as the director of more than thirty features by the release of Rio Bravo, Pakeezah was only Amrohi’s third directorial effort – with only one more to come – with writing credits on approximately a dozen more (including his three directorial efforts to date).
Amrohi was born Syed Amir Haider Kamal in the town of Amroha, located in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, on the seventeenth of January, 1918. Initially a writer and poet (Hindi-Urdu), many of the Amrohi’s early writings can be situated within “the Shakespearean contours of the Urdu Parsee theatre.”
[5] In 1949, Amrohi made his directorial debut with Bombay Talkies feature
Mahal, a ghost story-psychodrama starring Ashok Kumar. Even in this his premiere feature, a number of
Pakeezah’s key preoccupations are already present – such as the obsessive desire of a male protagonist concentrated on a single female figure of surpassing beauty, or in its emphasis on the tactility of human touch (a subject which will be discussed in some detail with respect to
Pakeezah). In other words, Amrohi began his career as a mature filmmaker, attuned to the medium’s sensorial nature – and particularly to the cardinality of sight and its relationship to touch; indeed, film historians Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen have acknowledged that “
Mahal is now considered a Hindi classic.”
[6] With his second feature
Daera (‘The Division,’ 1953), made for the director’s newly-formed Kamal Pics, Amrohi teamed with his third wife Meena Kumari. Kumari also starred in
Pakeezah, which
commenced shooting in 1964, the year that she and the director divorced, thus halting production indefinitely.
[7] Eventually agreeing to resume the project,
Pakeezah was completed seven years later. In the meantime, Kumari had succumbed to alcoholism, which would lead directly to her death in 1972, only a few days after the film’s commercial release. As Rajadhyaksha and Willemen put it, “her off-screen life extended her image as the lovelorn woman who drowns her passion in drink.”
[8] In fact, Kumari’s notorious end yielded outstanding box office receipts, even after the initial lukewarm response the film received prior to Kumari’s death.
[9] Of course,
Pakeezah’s popularity can also be explained in part by its genre, the ‘courtesan’ film, which Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel describe as “one of the most popular genres, in terms of the box office success rather than the number of films produced.”
[10] (In this respect, Amrohi’s picture again differs from Hawks’s.) In these works, where the heroine is “always a Muslim,” the courtesan’s “attractions give rise to a variety of pleasures in the audience. She is portrayed as a victim of men’s lusts and as an object of the viewer’s pity, but also delights the audience in being the object of the male gaze as she dances for his entertainment.”
[11] Consequently, in
Pakeezah the spectacle on display is not only that of the beautiful Kumari’s body – first in the role of Nargis and then as her daughter, the eponymous Pakeezah – but also her deterioration commensurate again with the actress’s real-life withering. However, Kumari’s decay is procured not simply for the pity it might arouse for the character, but in fact highlights the personal nature of Amrohi’s narrative. Indeed, when the film’s narrator (in the picture’s penultimate line) claims that “rare is the connoisseur who appreciates such a flower,” it is apparent immediately that he is referring not only to
Pakeezah’s fictional lover, but also to the line’s author as well – that is, to Amrohi, the film’s creator and Kumari’s former spouse and lover. In this moment, the film’s autobiographical content comes to the fore.
Following his third film, Amrohi directed one last feature, 1983’s Razia Sultan, a biography of South Asia’s first female Muslim ruler. Less conspicuously personal, Razia Sultan joins the Amrohi-scripted, all-time Hindi classic Mughal-e-Azam(1960, K. Asif) as works of a distant historical setting. The later work is perhaps most noteworthy for the poetic consequence of its gestures – as for example when the film’s young male protagonist Yakoot (Dharmendra) has the female Sultan’s (Hema Malini) communication carved onto his chest, insuring that his blood will forever carry his lover, the Sultan’s, words. Similarly, Amrohi’s final film concludes with one of the most lyrical sequences in the recent history of popular filmmaking. With an echoing voice-over commencing as Yakoot rides off in slow-motion, a spear in his back, we see the heavens, shooting stars and a series of red flares. The aforesaid booming vocal proclaims: “there is a call from the skies! Come!!! This world is unfit for you! We are decorating another new world for you in the skies! It’s God’s order! Shining stars of the skies take our humble bows! The sacrificed love drenched in blood… Are coming into my protection!” In short, Amrohi suggests the union of these two lovelorn souls in the world to come, as a union not of flesh but of pure spirit.
‘Her soul cries out’
With a similar, reverberating narration,
Pakeezah opens in a brothel. As the golden-haired courtesan Kumari dances for a gathering of male admirers, the disembodied voice-over begins
:
[12]“Here is Nargis… [Whose] enchanting voice and the music of her anklet-bells create a stir everywhere.” Indeed, her seductive power flows not only from her staggering physical beauty, but also from the allure of her song. She captivates by sight and by sound, engendering the obsessive, self-destroying desire of her suitors. As we are instructed in the proceeding line of dialogue, “countless hearts spurned by her lie disregarded beneath her feet.” Throughout, Amrohi restricts his camera to the same dimly-lit interior, establishing Nargis’s renown through his film’s overdubbed commentary, refusing at this earlier juncture to illustrate her history.
Suddenly, the narration switches registers as we are told that Nargis’s “soul cries out.” This proclamation is followed in quick succession by the arrival of a dark, bearded man, Shahabuddin (Ashok Kumar – likewise the star of the director’s Mahal), who retrieves her from the hell of the world she inhabits. Amrohi thusly replaces the diegetic relation of information – that is, through the act of telling – with a more analogical system. When we see Shahabuddin save his lover, it is not as if we are viewing a document of the event, but rather the spectator is provided with an impression of Shahabuddin’s and particularly Nargis’s emotional states in light of their union; Amrohi approximates or glosses the event. Or, to put it yet another way, it is a fundamentally poetic or even spiritual depiction of the formation of the couple, presenting their union not in the space and time in which it was forged – through the words, actions, and gestures that would result in their coupling – but instead through an emotional congruence conveyed in acts that do not proceed along the lines of verisimilitude. In this respect, Pakeezah’s opening will be paralleled subsequently by Razia Sultan’s conclusion.
Pakeezah’s analogical prologue continues after the opening brothel sequence. Here, Amrohi’s film sustains its distance from verisimilitudinal reality as Nargis and Shahabuddin travel to the gentleman’s estate, in order to seek his father’s consent for their marriage. In a series of shots depicting the pair in a carriage, the pitch black interior eliminates all background detail, leaving only the couple in each other’s arms. Their touch is infinitely soft, demonstrating a tactility which will implicitly structure a subsequent sequence on a train – the double for that passage, this precursor also focuses upon the sensorial (touch in both instances) in the confined interior of a moving vehicle. The world in this moment is Nargis and Shahabuddin, which will be shattered in the forthcoming scene once his father rejects this woman of low standing. At this point, Nargis rushes out onto the street, where under a pool of lamplight in the deep distance, she hires a rickshaw to take her to a graveyard.
Once there, the introductory prologue concludes with one of the film’s more literary details: her death is figured explicitly in both the crumbling ruins of the ancient graveyard and also in the fact that this is a place which houses decaying flesh, the shells of long-departed souls. Like the sequence in the carriage and also the confrontation with the patriarch, this section in the graveyard is again explicitly picked up later in the narrative, when the eponymous Pakeezah – Nargis’s daughter, who again is also played by Kumari – claims that her “vagabond dead body has returned to be buried” in the “colorful tomb” of the brothels. As she says to another courtesan, “every whore is a dead body;” they are “living corpses, adorned and embalmed.”
Structurally, the film’s prologue provides the groundwork for the subsequent parallels that emerge between mother and daughter, which of course the double casting of Kumari is intended to reinforce. Likewise, the film’s introductory passage also confirms the work of fate in dictating the outcomes of their lives: as the above dialogue emphasizes, all prostitutes are in effect the living dead, whether it is Nargis in the collapsing cemetery or Pakeezah in her later self-awareness. Each will experience the effects of time, losing that which has made them desirable, and indeed a commodity: their beauty. Of course, time’s passage signals not only this loss but a second that is far more severe, though in the world of these women, analogous – that is, death itself – provided that no amendment is made for life after death. In Pakeezah, death is immutable, precisely as the soul does not migrate. Even so, the soul, which is to say the metaphysical self, does exist in Pakeezah: namely, it is that which communes – often magically – with other human beings. It is this surely that Amrohi is signifying in the film’s prefatory opening, or in the forthcoming description of Pakeezah’s great love.
‘Don’t taint them by letting them touch the ground’
To be sure, the themes of beauty and loss in Pakeezah are most clearly present and acutely distilled into a single feature of the courtesan: her feet. They are both the principle tool of her trade and the primary source of her attraction. Again, corresponding in part to the sequence in the carriage, Amrohi portrays Salim (Raaj Kumar) encountering a sleeping Pakeezah on a train. Salim sits beside her and the beautiful courtesan’s toe, imitating the back-and-forth rocking motion of the train cabin, persistently touches the gentleman’s leg. His head bobs up and down with the rhythmic touch of her foot. Amrohi’s framing isolates the object of desire, Pakeezah’s feet, and the male subject, mesmerized Kumari’s appendages.
Responding to this encounter, Salim pens a note telling her that she must not allow her feet to be tainted by “letting them touch the ground.” He slips the message between her toes and leaves without once making her aware of his presence. Waking, Pakeezah finds the note, leading her to instantly fall in love with its author, who has appreciated her beauty without placing any sexual demands on her in return. In this way, his love is inimical to the acquisition of pleasure that distinguishes her profession. He apprehends her beauty without attempting to own it, which given her vocation would be his purview. Consequently, it is to him that she will give her love in the same spirit of freedom.
However, following a set of circumstances that will seemingly render their love as impossible as her parents’ before them, Pakeezah’s response is to destroy the same object of desire which initially attracted the gentleman and ultimately precipitated their union: she knocks over a lamp and proceeds to dance on top of the glass, slicing open her feet. Indeed, this is a gesture of suicide triply: first, she is renouncing her former lover and making any resolution impossible; second, she is committing an act of professional suicide destroying the principle object of her commodification as a dancer; and third, with the ensuing loss of blood, she is literally committing suicide.
The gravity of this action, however, is grounded in the prior rendering of her feet as a siphon for Salim’s desire. And like the earlier sequence in the carriage which renders the tactility of their touch with extreme precision, the train-car sequence is conferred with a similar physicality. Here, it is the bouncing of her toes and Salim’s resulting gaze which confirms the excitement that this illicit touch stimulates in the protagonist. The specific relation between sight and touch is concretized thus, with desire becoming the connective tissue between the male spectator, that is the subject whose gaze directs the mise-en-scène, and the ensuing touch, the possession of beauty which said desire elicits. Accordingly, the space extant between the subject and object produces the corresponding hope and anxiety which a longed-for touch creates. The ultimate end of beauty becomes its possession, even if it is certain to wane, which Amrohi describes in Pakeezah’s (and Kumari’s) aging – the fact that Pakeezah was shot over a period of more than seven years secures a literal instantiation of this same theme. Symbolically, Amrohi figures the female protagonist’s deterioration in the brothels in the object of a kite, which is shown first intact and trapped in the tree, and later decaying in this same place.
Of course, there is another side to the identification writ into Pakeezah’s economy of sight and touch: the perspective of the object. Certainly, as much Salim wishes to touch his beloved, Pakeezah desires the touch of her hallowed lover. While this reading is not immediately obvious at this moment – Pakeezah is after all sleeping, and presumably unaware of his presence – it becomes clear enough when she subsequently finds herself in her lover’s camp. Here, after Pakeezah discovers that this is the man of whom she has long dreamed (the details of which will follow in the next section) Salim arrives home to find her mysteriously lying on his bed. Formally, Amrohi places Pakeezah inside the tent in the right foreground, leaving the center left empty and open, looking out onto the river. When Salim returns, he fills this negative space with Pakeezah remaining turned away from the gentleman. Amrohi cuts to a medium close-up of the male, and then to a point-of-view of her body, which slowly pans down to her feet. Thus, Amrohi reminds his viewer that she is the object of the male protagonist’s gaze. However, his passion is clearly matched by her’s: she remains turned away from Salim, breathless, with her bosom heaving up and down, which Amrohi shows in a tightly-framed medium close-up, cropped from her chest up. Indeed, in this image Amrohi inscribes two distinct witnesses – the one longing for the touch and the other longing to be touched. Desire is shared by subject and object alike. Still, it is essential to remember that Pakeezah’s enchantment followed initially from Salim’s refusal to attain her love coercively. Freely, the object gives itself to the subject.
‘I don’t know when this dream will end, and in what wilderness I will awaken?’
The description thus far emphasizes Pakeezah’s objecthood. However, it is less Salim’s vantage which directs the narrative, in spite of the fact that his subjecthood is established in the point-of-view shots detailed above, but rather it is Pakeezah’s mentation and her anxiety that shapes the narrative’s structure. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the passage following a series of interactions in the
Pink Palace– an opulent brothel in the film’s Punjabi location
[13] – between various courtesans, madames, and their potential suitors. In one such moment, Pakeezah tells another courtesan that “every night at three o’clock, a train seems to come off its tracks and run through my heart.” Consequently, with the train whistle, Amrohi shows his audience the female protagonist rushing out onto her balcony to see the passing train, which she clearly associates with her still faceless lover. Indeed, on multiple occasions, we see Pakeezah reading and rereading her missive; she is completely transfixed by the words of the gentleman.
Yet, it is not a simple pondering of these lines that Amrohi communicates – he is not content in telling his audience that Pakeezah thinks of this noble gentleman, that she is lovesick. Instead, what follows is a mapping of her internal processes, her thoughts and feelings. After a fellow courtesan rejects her assumption that the letter was intended for her, Pakeezah removes herself and lies beside a pool of water. Condensation drips from a chandelier. Then, abruptly, the narrative shifts spaces to a houseboat floating leisurely down a river. (Amrohi composes this image with the boat surrounded by a white field, extracting the action from the space as if presenting a bordered illustration.) The narrative then continues inside the houseboat where Pakeezah finds herself with the same suitor who had purchased her earlier in the passage. He remarks that his heart tells him that she is “stolen property, a crime to buy.”
Following this exchange, he is summoned by his crew as elephants threaten the vessel; she lies back down as the boat is smashed to pieces. Pakeezah however survives and is washed ashore, sleeping on a remaining fragment of the ship. Consequently, she finds herself in the riverside camp mentioned above. Looking through the camper’s things, she discovers a journal that mentions the incident on the train; amongst his things is a feather which Salim had retained from her as a souvenir. Amrohi then depicts the woman singing and dancing in a series of disparate landscapes before returning to the camp. Once back, Salim returns and they converse with Pakeezah’s back to the gentleman (as has been detailed in the prior section); they speak through the canvas of the tent, with Salim telling her that he must leave – though likewise assuring her that he will return before sundown. Though Salim keeps his promise, she is brought back home, after being spotted by a party from the brothel. As such, her journey has proven to be a zero-sum affair; it as though she has not encountered her lover at all, particularly as she has yet to look at Salim. Having thus returned to the place whence her journey began, it is as though Amrohi has depicted Pakeezah’s fantasy of an encounter with her unknown lover rather than a consecutive series of events, however improbable their succession.
In fact, this alternative encoding of fantasy extends to other passages, providing a double to our comprehension of the film as a series of linked, sequential places and times in which the diegesis occurs. In these sections, Amrohi has constructed a narrative that not only operates on the basis of a series of discrete, consecutive events, but additionally upon the internal hopes and conflicts of the female protagonist. Together, these forge the film’s narrative-temporal progression, as a detailing of Pakeezah’s thoughts and anxieties, even as Pakeezah offers a more conventional reading of its narrative world.
The first clue to this alternate interpretation is in the causality attached to the female protagonist’s act of lying down. In example after example, her performance of this gesture precedes a shift in the space and the time of the narrative: for instance, when Amrohi transitions from the brothel to the houseboat, the houseboat to the camp, and subsequently back to her lover’s company after returning to the Pink Palace. In this final instance, she is nearly attacked by a landlord, before collapsing in front of a train, upon which as it happens Salim is riding. Heretofore, it would have seemed that the pair was destined to remain apart; however, with the reclining gesture – which of course, was Pakeezah’s position when they first met as she slept on the train with her feet exposed – Salim and Pakeezah are brought together once again, as if the repetition of this action itself possess a conjuring power. To be somewhat crude, it is on her back that she is transported away from the trappings – and dangers – of the courtesan life (her purchaser, the snake) to the possibility of happiness (in each case with Salim). Hence, Amrohi does not simply present a series of events with different players, but in fact offers opposable contingencies demarcated again by the repetition of a gesture, which it bares stating may suggest that Pakeezah is dreaming. At the very least, Pakeezah’s desire is inscribed in these reversals between a loathsome reality and an ideal alternative.
‘Beloved, let us journey to the moon’
Yet, the indication that Amrohi is charting Pakeezah’s internal life does not stop with the exposition of contingencies, but further is manifest, and indeed dictates the geographical and temporal location of a pair of musical numbers. In “Mausam Hain,” which follows Pakeezah’s realization that she is in her lover’s camp, the introduction of the song number commences with a tight centered close-up of Pakeezah opening her eyes. This gesture corresponds to an earlier image where her wealthy suitor is shot utilizing this same frontal framing as he stares directly ahead, even as Pakeezah keeps her eyes closed. Thus, in the sequentially latter instance, Pakeezah’s desire and commitment to Salim is revealed by her repetition of the gesture that she earlier withheld from the prior admirer. With her feelings for Salim, she is awakening from her slumber.
Indeed, this passion is both displaced onto the following musical sequence and simultaneously, again, guides the spatial and temporal shifts that occur presently. To be specific, Amrohi cuts from this close-up to a slow motion long shot of a riverbank where scores of birds take off during midday. The director then cuts to an image with a similar subject, but one which occurs at sunset. The next image is of Pakeezah in her hammock looking off into the distance – it is again daylight – as the lyrics to “Mausam Hain” begin: “love is in the air.” She slowly turns toward the camera with Amrohi lyrically utilizing slow-motion once again. Following another image of the birds at sunset, Amrohi cuts to a long shot-composition of the camp, alongside the river, in the light of late afternoon. Pakeezah is thereafter shown wading into the river in slow-motion; standing atop a small cascade; and then, following an image of a landscape after dusk, she is depicted in daytime on dry land. Consequently, it becomes clear that while this passage can be read tentatively as a series of places in which Pakeezah improbably (given the floral and topographical variations that the author presents) finds herself over a period of time – inserted with non-diegetic landscapes – it also might be read much more plausiby as an exemplification of her emotional rapture at the revelation of her good luck. Amrohi tells us what is within Pakeezah more than where she stands.
While certainly musical numbers are used routinely in Indian popular cinema to articulate the feelings of a character, thereby occupying distensions in the time of their narratives, it just so happens that in this apparent moment of temporal expansion, Amrohi also uses a series of often unconnected and temporally incongruent landscapes to similarly parse Pakeezah’s feeling of love for her still (at this point) unknown suitor. Consequently, these landscapes can be viewed in a fashion similar to the song lyrics, which themselves serve to reinforce the conflation between interior and exterior that governs this musical sequence. As she says at one point, “the dark monsoon clouds awaken a desire in me.” The landscapes themselves indicate her emotional state.
The second of the two songs that figure Pakeezah’s thought in the spatial-temporal logic of its picturization, “Chalo Dildar,” follows the protagonist’s tortured disclosure to her lover that she is a prostitute. His reaction – that it is immaterial because he loves her – prompts the number beginning with the lyric “beloved, let us journey to the moon.” Again, the protagonists find themselves within a primordial site of beauty – that is, within nature.
‘Each day my soul struggled away from my body’
However, even more important than the recurrence of this logic is the dialogue that precedes it, or to be more specific, a single line of dialogue spoken by Pakeezah during the build-up to her pained confession: “each day my soul struggled away from my body.” In this declaration, not only does Amrohi encapsulate the psychology of his female protagonist, but moreover succeeds in defining the structural logic of his entire film: Pakeezah represents the wanderings of her soul in contradistinction to the degradations (and ultimately degeneration) of her body. On the one hand, she is a courtesan, she is nothing other than her flesh; her entire value as a human being rests in her physical appearance, which is bought and forcibly returned to the Pink Palace. On the other hand, Pakeezah is the sum of her dreams and fears; she is a romantic that longs after a mysterious lover. As such, Amrohi’s narrative form allows for the exploration of her physical self (as instantiated by her role as a prostitute) and her metaphysical self (showcased in her meetings with Salim) simultaneously. That Amrohi succeeds in this is accommodated by the film’s classical Bollywood structure, which allows for the aforesaid spatial and temporal disjunctures. The non-epic Hollywood form again would not permit this film’s structuring contradistinction. It is in the form of classical Indian cinema that Amrohi finds space to explicate his metaphysics.
As to this content, it bears stating that as much the sequence that leads up to and follows their initial meeting in the camp can be read as a depiction of pure interiority, of contingencies for which she alternately fears and longs, it might be viewed likewise in terms of its alternations between the subjection of her body to the waking death of prostitution and the enlivening possibilities of love. To be sure, Amrohi seems to suggest this antagonism in her final return to the brothels where she remarks that prostitutes are ‘living corpses, adorned and embalmed,’ and that she is a “restless corpse, lying in an open grave.” In this way, Amrohi is suggesting the spiritual-emotional emptiness of this life and that these women are in fact shells with no deeper metaphysical presence. This declaration comes after the film has charted her internal wanderings in great detail, thereby reaffirming the disconnect between body and soul – in a sense, the moments of connection with Salim are nothing more than pure spirit, soul without body – and thus sharpening the film’s discourse: there is no escape ultimately for women of this society.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Pakeezah’s achievement once again resides in its simultaneous inhabitation of the contours of a commercial art, even as these forms convey the film’s unique content – namely, in its communication of its female protagonist’s subjectivity. If this subject exceeds the expressive limits of film art, to the extent that cinema is the most material of media (limiting itself to surface realities) classical Bollywood’s pliable narrative structure allows for the exposition of interiority. That is, Pakeezah highlights the capacity of commercial Indian cinema to engage matters of the soul through a conventional adaptation of its forms. By comparison, the presence of religion in Hollywood filmmaking, and in those instances of counter-cinema that have been positioned in relation to, and as a response to conventional studio filmmaking, dictate that immateriality is conveyed in the subject matter, iconography or as explicit absences (as in the blank surfaces of Robert Bresson’s cinema). By comparison, immateriality is repeatedly the subject of Pakeezah, whether it is the invisible relationship between sight and touch or the meeting of pure spirit that the film’s conventional narrative structure weighs against the deadening corporeal existence of the eponymous lead.
Still, Pakeezah remains one of the most profoundly material and indeed tactile films ever made, whether it is the film’s emphasis upon the sensorial or its more ubiquitous treatment of beauty as a subject. Nowhere is the latter focus clearer than in the second song sung by the titular lead, “Thade rahiyo.” Here, we see Kumari centered and positioned in the lower half of the symmetrical frame – all of which is characteristic of Amrohi’s mise-en-scènein Pakeezah – with reflecting pools beside either shoulder. These bodies of water are utilized throughout the sequence to reflect the actress’s image or the red candles that ring the liquid. That is, Amrohi’s staging of this sequence emphasizes the pictorial richness generated by these shifting surfaces, in addition to Kumari’s beautiful, moving body. In each case, it is with beauty that Amrohi populates his frame.
This is not to suggest, however, that Amrohi’s staging lacks an organic relationship to the film’s content – which is to say that it does not seem imposed of the film’s thematic constellation. In the preceding musical number, “Inhi logon ne,” Amrohi constructs a multi-planar space to highlight the scope of the world Pakeezah inhabits: with Kumari, covered by a cascading red veil and dress, again restricted to the center of the lower foreground, we are provided a vantage of Patiala filled with multi-storied structures containing arched apertures. In these framed openings – and in one case, on the roof of a structure in the right background – we see women echoing Kumari’s movements, dancing and spinning. As such, Amrohi visually constructs the scope of the social problem instantiated by Nargis and later Pakeezah, through a series of receding, populated planes.
At the same time, this space construes the director’s obsessive interest in detail that was equally present in the prior example. In a word, we become aware in either case of the director’s aesthete’s sensibility. His concern is for beauty, whether it is Kumari’s, his sets’ and costumes’ – Dwyer and Patel have argued that the courtesan genre is responsible for “some of the most extravagant and beautiful sets and costumes in the history of the Hindi film”
[14] – or the pooling of a golden, artificial light that paints his actress as she returns to the Pink Palace. Hence, if
Pakeezah’snarrative structure (which is also to say its use of time) derives from the codes and conventions of Bollywood filmmaking, as does nominally its emphasis on art design as a source of spectatorial pleasure, Amrohi’s spatial articulations and handling of light underscore his individualized sensibility. In this respect,
Pakeezah does more justify the popular Indian cinema; it manifests the artistic sensibility of a truly ‘rare… connoisseur.’
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