Naturally trained to be a sniffer dog, of the kind that likes to spot codes, the semiotician in me was slightly thrilled to discover that something was happening beneath the obvious plot in Laapataa Ladies. Right after the two newly-wed brides are lost on the train, the mistake discovered only when a bride lifts her veil to reveal her face, and her husband, in a state of shock, says that this is not his Phool, I begin to notice the pattern. Deepak’s bride’s name is “Phool”, flower. The bride who’s mistakenly been brought to this village says that her name is “Pushpa” — that means flower as well. Her husband’s name, she says, is “Pankaj”, meaning lotus.
Phool, young, innocent of the ways of the world, is unable to remember the name of her husband’s village. It’s named after a flower, she says. Her new companions at the railway station supply her with names of flowers from time to time. “Gulab, Champa, Chameli, Matiya, Kaner, Dhatura?” asks Chhotu helpfully. No, Phool shakes her head; neither “Parijat” nor “Nalini”; not “Mogra” either. “You’ve turned us all into bees,” Manju Mai, the woman who sells tea and bread pakoras, tells Phool playfully. We eventually discover that the name of the village is Suryamukhi. It seems appropriate, even if it comes only as an afterthought, that Deepak’s village should be named sunflower — Deepak, meaning lamp, a source of light. To remain alive, Phool — flower — would need this source of light, even if it’s not the sun. The bus that gets Deepak and Jaya to Suryamukhi village is called ‘Pushpa Travels’; Jaya praises the lotus stem dish made by Deepak’s mother. These cues and clues about plant life are smuggled into the film even though they might not be directly related to the film’s “meaning” or experience.
I found myself thinking frequently of a Mahasweta Devi story as I watched the film. It’s called “Seed”. Unlike Laapataa Ladies, which is set in the fictional state of Nirmal Pradesh — “nirmal” means pure and clean — Mahasweta Devi’s story is set in a violent time and space, in Kuruda village, around the time of the Emergency, where landlords could kill farm workers without worrying about punishment. Mahasweta Devi’s village is harsh and brutal, casteist and hostile. The little “politics” we are given in Laapataa Ladies is how names of villages change with changes in governments: Indirapur to Atalnagar to Mayaganj; how similar the village is to a woman, whose name is changed after her marriage.
It is possible that it was Jaya’s passion for “organic farming” that set off the comparison with Mahasweta Devi’s story in my mind. “Organic farming” is an imagined vocation for Jaya — it’s also a feel-good phrase and upper-class aspiration for the urban audience of Kiran Rao’s film, one that allows us to feel correct, equitable, and nurturing of the planet and ourselves. In Mahasweta Devi’s story, Dulan Ganju’s land, not allowed to be farmed for years because the landlord Lachman Singh has buried corpses of the men that he’s killed there, begins to show signs of fertility: The dead “Karan and Bulaki are now those putush bushes and aloe plants”. Even Dulan’s son Dhatua, who protests against the landlord, is buried there.
After managing to kill the landlord, Dulan plants paddy on the land: “I won’t let you be just aloe and putush. I’ll turn you into paddy, Dhatua … When the seedlings appear… Lachman, Makhan or Ramlagan’s fertiliser-fed seedlings are nothing in comparison… Tall, strong, healthy plants.” It was of this manner of “organic farming” I found myself thinking of as I watched Laapataa Ladies, where the only killings that are mentioned are a wife who has died by suicide and insects that are killing the crops.
The flower-like sweetness of the film (Phool adds rose petals to her kalakand in a barely functional kitchen; the police inspector’s name is Manohar, meaning “lovable”), with its handbook feminism that has made it endearing to all of us, is made possible not because it’s a “comedy”, but because it’s a fantasy, an Aamir Khan Productions version of the utopian Indian village imagined by those who have never lived in a village. (“When I would see these villages from a train, I’d wonder about what happens there,” Rao said in an interview for Netflix), where patriarchy can be defeated with as much cinematic ease as winning a game of cricket helps a village get rid of land tax in Lagaan.
I do not remember a single mention of any flower in Mahasweta Devi’s story. Dulan’s son will never be found — he is under the soil, his rotting flesh and bones now manure for the paddy plants. “Dhatua, I’ve turned you all into seed,” says Dulan, the farmer-father. Organic farming indeed.
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of creative writing, Ashoka University. Views are personal
