Post Facto - Emma, Aisha and the sting in the tale: What Austen says about us

This fortnight's Sunday Guardian column:

The last month has been one of remembering Pride and Prejudice, whose 200th anniversary it was on January 28th this year. Jane Austen's celebrated novel about the Bennett family was her second published work, after Sense and Sensibility (1811). Both were successes, Pride selling well enough for a second impression the same year. Given the small readership of literary novels in England then, Pride's first impression of 750 was large. By 1815, when Austen published Emma (Mansfield Park having come out in the interim), her print run had risen to 2000, and she had switched publishers: from Thomas Egerton to the reputed John Murray.

Emma marked another change, too — one less about the external circumstances of the book than the circumstances of its heroine. Unlike the young women in all her previous books — Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennett, and Fanny Price in Mansfield Park — the eponymous heroine of Austen's fourth novel had no financial troubles. Emma Woodhouse, 21 when the novel begins, is the younger daughter of the well-off Mr. Woodhouse. Her older sister Isabella is well-settled, with several small children. But unlike all Austen's previous heroines, for whom marriage is the only route to financial stability, and for whom the finding of a suitable husband is therefore the unspoken object of much of their social interaction, Emma is in the happy position of having (as she puts it to her ever-admiring companion Harriet Smith) no inducement to marry. If the novel's principal preoccupation remains courtship and marriage, it is the outcome not of Emma's interest in her own union, but in bringing about those of others.

To me, though, what makes Emma a fascinating heroine is not her unusually privileged status—she is, in Austen's words, "handsome, clever and rich"—but the fact that she is depicted also as spoilt, stubborn, meddlesome and rather too smug about her own position and abilities. Before writing Emma, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like". But even Austen's 'liking' of Emma does not translate into a flattering picture. Far from glossing over her heroine's foibles, Austen draws our attention to Emma's superficiality and lack of hard work, her preoccupation with good looks and "elegance", her deep class snobbery and the misguided sense of superiority that leads her to match-make for the easily influenced Harriet.

In 2010, a filmmaker called Rajshree Ojha released a Hindi adaptation of Emma, called Aisha. Set in contemporary Delhi high society and starring Sonam Kapur as the Emma-inspired heroine, Aisha was greeted by many Indian critics—and by most of my friends and facebook acquaintances—with unmitigated disdain. Aisha's world of high-end shopping, clubbing, parties and river-rafting trips, punctuated by do-gooding attempts at finding a suitable boy for the Bahadurgarh-arriviste Shefali, was described frequently as "shallow'. The heroine was dismissed as being a slave to fashion (Sonam Kapur's reputation as a real-life fashion diva went against her) and the film as an orgy of brands.

I recently saw Aisha again, and it struck me with great force that whatever the film was, it was not shallow.  It captures a super-rich South Delhi milieu — the polo matches, the Gymkhana Club, the posh yoga instructor — with an astute specificity different from the unexplained luxuriousness of most Hindi film worlds. Most Bollywood films are full of expensive, fashionable clothes; it is only in Aisha that their existence is not glossed over: we're told what the credit card bill was. Aisha's succession of pet projects: painting, wedding planning, animal rights—are shown up for the half-baked efforts they are within the film itself, by a scathing hero. This is a film that is able, while being in this world, to not necessarily be of it. Ojha is playing a marvelous double-edged trick (perhaps both on her producers and her audience). Sure, this luxe bubble bath of a movie might seem the perfect way to soak in the life of the rich. But if you're paying attention, it really isn't that comfortable at all.

If Emma's portrait of Highbury society lays bare its ridiculousness — equal parts hypochondria, gossip, boredom and obsession with rank — Aisha's depiction of Delhi high society is equally stinging. It captures with comic brilliance the paranoid bubble the upper class Delhi male would like his women to inhabit—from "Stay in the car, it's dangerous" and "I'll drop you, it's Delhi" to handing out pepper spray and being shocked that a woman might ask directions "from strangers". It takes a childish, petulant girl for a heroine and then mercilessly mocks her sense of entitlement, using every weapon at hand, from the class-laden appellation 'Aisha Baby' to a superb visual analogy with a real bawling baby. When Aisha condemns one nice boy as "so middle class" and scorns another for running a mithai business, it couldn't be clearer what the film wants us to think of her. This is a film in which even the heroine's father isn't blind to her advantages as a paisewali. Like Emma, Aisha is far from being in thrall to the world it recreates. Perhaps it is we who are.

Twist in the Wedding

Why the shaadi is still a staple of Bollywood romance

Bittoo Sharma first meets Shruti Kakkar at a wedding. She’s rude to him, but he’s quite taken with her. He borrows his friend’s video camera to shoot her dancing, turns up in her U-special the next day to present her with a DVD exclusively devoted to her performance. The opening of Band Baaja Baraat makes one think you know exactly where it’s going. The girl seen by the boy at a shaadi, the wooing that ensues, leading up to the couple’s own wedding — it’s among the oldest tropes in the Hindi movie universe. And Band Baaja Baaraat’s opening scene is a clear tribute to Yash Chopra’s own contribution to the genre: Chandni (1989), where Rishi Kapoor first sees Sridevi at a wedding, starts photographing her in secret, and later, in one of the dramatic high points of the 1980s filmi romance, reveals a roomful of pictures he has taken of her.

The Indian wedding has always been a traditional mating ground. It was a rare, socially sanctioned space where young women of marriageable age were on display, for matchmaking aunts — and potential husbands. (Ask around in any north Indian family and you’ll find at least one uncle and aunt who got married because he saw her at his brother/ cousin/ friend’s wedding and set his heart on her.) The shaadi ka ghar, with its dressing-up and dancing and suggestive songs, was the natural setting for romance, a place where banter between young men and women was laughingly condoned and flirtation was almost traditional.

These days, one might think, urban young people don’t need the socially sanctioned space of the shaadi to meet a potential partner, either on screen or off it. The CCD-mall-multiplex generation should have no time for wedding movies. The days of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...! (1994) are over.

Yet it seems that the 2000s — after Karan Johar’s K3G (2001) — were when the choreographed Bollywood sangeet really became de rigueur, first in movies and then in weddings across the country and the diaspora, and I can think, off the cuff, of three Hindi films in the past few years where the hero first properly sees the heroine at a wedding: Saathiya (2002), Love Aaj Kal (2009) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008). And at least three 2010 films derive much of their energy from weddings — Aisha, Do Dooni Chaar and Band Baaja Baraat.

Do Dooni Chaar is least obviously preoccupied with the wedding — it serves mainly to kick-start the plot, which is really about the middle-class family’s desire for a car. And yet there is a way in which, despite all their travails and tribulations in getting to it — the borrowing of the car, the cost of the wedding present, the potential theft, the potential exposure — the wedding itself has the power to create a generally celebratory mood, successfully drawing in the glum father and the teenage cynic alike.

Aisha — which sets Jane Austen’s Emma in contemporary Delhi — is possibly the most traditional of the three, in that it opens with a shaadi where we first see the heroine, Aisha, and ends with Aisha’s own wedding. But the hero already knows the heroine, so the wedding is not the setting for their romance. On the other hand, it sets in motion a definite trail of matchmaking — only the matchmaker in question is the heroine herself. Almost the whole of the film is taken up with pairing off young people who appear in the original wedding scene, culminating in the final wedding, where we have the pleasure of seeing them all matched up (in more ways than one, since this is the most alarmingly colour-coordinated wedding you’ll ever see).

The film that really takes the wedding movie theme and runs with it, though, is Band Baaja Baaraat. It seems to play by the old rules — introducing the heroine and the hero at a wedding, following their relationship and culminating in their own wedding — but, in fact, it brilliantly subverts both the genre and our expectations by making them wedding planners. Shruti refuses Bittoo’s romantic overtures. She accepts his DVD and, later, his partnership, only on condition that he isn’t going to line maaro her. She arranges weddings, and she’s going to have an arranged match herself. She has Plans — and love isn’t part of them.

Yet, as we watch the two of them lean laughingly into each other at wedding after wedding, complementing each other perfectly in the exaggeratedly comic flirtation-rejection of the wedding song, we know that the shaadi movie will have its way. It’s as if the well-done north Indian wedding — with its glitter, its banter, and, crucially, the zippy song that gets the whole family on its feet — casts a kind of spell, temporarily erasing the rules of the ordinary world and making romance seem somehow inevitable. Much like the well-done Hindi film.

The writer is a Delhi-based writer and anthropologist.

Published in the Indian Express, Friday Jan 14, 2011.