Early on in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), two young women use the slang “cad” for a good-looking young man. As Seth’s narrator explains, the term is derived from Cadbury’s chocolate. Just as chocolate goes from milk to dark, the term “cad” accommodates all kinds of skin colour. Given its setting in a Khatri milieu in the post-Independence years, the novel’s characters may betray a preference for fairer skin, but they are alive to the possibility of a dark cad being “bitter but sustaining”.
Only a few months after this assessment, on Holi, the aforementioned Cad gets himself high on bhang and molests his brother’s pregnant wife, who happens to be the elder sister of one of the two young women. After “fondling her a bit”, he “[rubs] the moist powder onto her kameez over her breasts, laughing all the while.” Seth doesn’t spend too much time on these actions and their meaning, for his plans with these characters take him further and elsewhere. But nothing stops us from pausing here.
In itself, the diptych illustrates a degeneration — from cad to caddish — from desirable to detestable — from mint to varmint — that the young women of this country, whether from the previous century or from this one, are all too familiar with. Young men are never too far away from the reprehensible.
Preceding the publication of Seth’s novel by a generation, and following the fictive world created by Seth by a generation, another set of fictive worlds — operative in a different language and different art form, concerned with milieus quite different from Seth’s, and with rather massy aspirations — delivered a category of good-looking man radically different from the Cad: The Angry Young Man. Faced with an indifferent and corrupt system, alert to injustice big and small, and full of hard boiled witticisms and dollops of machismo, the Angry Young Man is easily violent. Additional drama is sourced from his mother worship, his daddy issues, and whether he finds himself on this side or that side of the law.
Salim-Javed, the creators of the trope called the Angry Young Man, have recently been afforded some old-celebrity treatment in a three-episode documentary streaming on Prime Video. By old-celebrity treatment, I mean the cultivation of an air of low-volume, soft-yellow-light applause; the curation of retrospective flourishes that expertly conceal their hagiographic intent (presenting days of “struggle” with more specific detail, say, than days of success-led delirium); and a general, well-paid-for aversion to exploring the subject matter from challenging and contrarian vantage points.The old men’s not-so-young children have produced the documentary, so perhaps it is advisable to curtail one’s expectations. By the end, the whole thing inevitably comes to resemble a tastefully done family video.
Read more – ‘Salim-Javed asked me to dub Amjad Khan’s voice for Gabbar in Sholay,’ recalls director Ramesh Sippy
The only stray squeak of critical inquiry I noted in the documentary was on the question of how Salim-Javed conceived women. One of the talking heads avers that female leads were peripheral to their cinematic vision and even those who started out with strong backgrounds did not get to do anything significant in the storyline. The film gets immediately anxious with this little insight, and feels it necessary to snip any unintended thought-streams in the viewer’s mind by making other talking heads (one of them Javed’s daughter) offer anodyne explanations.
The effect is comic. Elsewhere, the same film draws its dividends from suggesting that Salim-Javed’s personal lacks and longings had seeped into their writing and were crucial to the creation of the Angry Young Man. Here, however, no linkage to their personal worldview can be allowed: They suddenly become men who are products of their times rather than men with claims to shaping a whole era.
Shifting our attention from the creators to the creation, we arrive at another question: Is the Angry Young Man far from the reprehensible? Is the Angry Young Man beyond treating women badly? Not sure the answers are in the affirmative. On Holi, for instance, it may be a stretch to believe that the Angry Young Man would not assume the same licence as the rascal in Seth’s novel.
Besides, if anger is touted as the single biggest quality for a man, then there isn’t much more to look forward to other than violence. The scansion from right violence to righteous violence to Right-O violence is always imperfect, and the trope itself comes with no specified limits. The same cocktail of injustice and daddy issues that creates Deewar’s Vijay or Trishul’s Vijay can also lead to Animal’s Vijay. Lift the trope from the gestalt of poor vs rich and plant it in the arena of the rich fighting an internecine war, and what you get is a rank distortion.
And then the other question — if we note the dialectic in Salim-Javed’s many Vijays and the real mid-70s event of the Emergency, which real event or situation might Animal’s Vijay, and perversions thereof, be in correspondence with?
In culture and in life, insofar as the two remain patriarchal, our hopes must lie with the Cad. Why? Because it’s a term that includes both women’s gaze and women’s judgement. Maan Kapoor, the bhang-addled brute of Seth’s novel, must be read as a vile exception that fails to dent the rule. In movie terms, perhaps we are back to doffing our hats to those dozen-odd years by Shah Rukh Khan — a benign, albeit flawed, path for Indian masculinity.
Solanki is a writer, most recently of, Manjhi’s Mayhem (2022)
