Should you crave some emotional cruelty and ravishing colors, Raj Kapoor’s Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) is worth a look. When I finally crossed this off my to-see list, where it had beckoned for years, it sparked a number of thoughts, one or two of which I wanted to sketch out in slightly more detail. I will warn you, there is no central thesis here. I’m only picking at threads.
Rupa (Zeenat Aman) is a priest’s daughter; her mother dies in childbirth and she’s considered unlucky by her her father and their village. As a child she has an accident with boiling oil that leaves a significant scar on one side of her face and neck. She is poor, to boot. She’s taunted and rejected constantly. Rupa’s life is without much love or sympathy. She can, however, sing beautifully. This was the problem that inspired Raj Kapoor on a more thematic level: “In Satyam Shivam Sundaram, I was projecting the philosophy that it is love and faith which sanctify a relationship and that beauty is only skin deep.” The film, in fact, opens with a passage asserting that the adoration of a community is what makes a stone in the ground a god—a sacred object. It is not the thing itself, but its perception. Is downtrodden, disregarded Rupa to be recipient of such adoration? Enter a handsome love interest.
As a young woman Rupa meets a dam engineer who comes to the village, Rajiv Babu (played by Shashi Kapoor, the director’s younger brother), who falls in love with her beautiful voice and her shy, veiled figure. The problem is, he doesn’t know her reputation or her “ugliness.” We learn, in fact, that he is repulsed by any sight of ugliness. He cannot stand to be around it. Oh no!
Midway through the film, before Rupa reveals her full face to Rajiv, they marry. But when the husband learns that his new wife is scarred, and therefore “ugly,” he rejects her outright. His cognitive dissonance is smoothed over by the delusion that the woman he’s married is an ugly impostor, while the woman he loves roams free and still meets him at night for trysts, shielding her full face from his view. Satyam Shivan Sundaram doesn’t ask its viewers to think of Rupa as two people. It does take the dramatic license to ask us to believe that Rajiv is unable to see that these two women are plainly the same person. He tells “his” Rupa that the woman he married is nothing compared to her; she hasn’t “his” Rupa’s beauty, nor her eyes. And yet they are the same eyes, of course.
By certain standards of naturalist or realist performance, this would be hard to countenance in the film, in the same way that it’s “ridiculous” that when Superman puts on glasses and a tie, everyone sees him as Clark Kent. But the dramatic key feels to me more clearly mythic, meaning its explanatory power is not literal. One needs to be able to think conditionally, and to analogize and extrapolate. The story invites us to look at something “as if—”
This conditional mode invites us to apprehend better our own ways of perceiving, and to apprehend better others’ ways.
As one character says, trying to reason with Rajiv Babu after the ruse has gone on long enough, “She is the same woman, but you believe they are two women.” Rajiv, meanwhile, is deeply incredulous. He can’t see what’s directly in front of him. But the problem isn’t his eyes; it’s his perception. The mental projection of a fantasy reshapes the world; it speaks to a rift or chasm in the subject itself. (In his book Atomic Light, Akira Mizuta Lippit devotes some pages to the discussion of the Freudian ego as a surface projection and what this might mean for cinema more broadly.) The pristine fantasy romance with the beautiful, unblemished partner conceals the fact of a more human relationship, one with scars and with bad luck. Satyam Shivam Sundaram, from its opening narration, explores the journey toward the inverse of this problem: to see truth, goodness, and beauty coincide in the love of the other.
There is an extraordinary shot in which Rajiv looks up from his bed at Rupa, but can see only her scar. This shot then superimposes over the superficial ugliness of the scar tissue the gruesome appearance of tendon, teeth, and muscle, the things beneath, which would be common to any bride, indeed any one of us, however attractive and unblemished on the surface. The shallow husband’s reason for being sickened, here—that Rupa’s very body is too present, too visible—is in fact also a foreshadowed metaphor of what Rajiv will learn, which is that beauty is more than skin deep and exists through a kind of loving, sensuous apperception.
I am fascinated when art conveys the very sense of overlapping, distinct perceptions of a phenomenon. (This is like the worldly experience of art itself.) Consider a meal scene in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). The proper Mrs. Mallory, balking at the prospect of sitting next to the disreputable Dallas, is escorted to the far end of the table by Hatfield, a “gentleman.” Dallas understands perfectly what is happening, and why, but she is joined by the Ringo Kid, who misunderstands Mallory’s snobbery as a reaction to his own unsavory background. This moment treats us to two ways of making sense of what we’ve just seen. We can identify characters’ correct and incorrect interpretations of the action, but my point is to underline the formal co-existence of incompatible perceptions. Here, Dallas and the Ringo Kid are seeing differently, yet find common cause in the overlapping of their respective marginalization.
This kind of multivalence and conscious ambiguity undergirds a lot of great portraiture of community, in my view. Satyam Shivam Sundaram is not a sweeping social portrait, per se; it is a little more insular by design. By aiming directly at the difficulties arising from someone unable to see what another plainly sees, and by dramatizing the ripple effects of this socialized perception through family and community, Kapoor’s film achieves a rough power.
The erotic and corporeal energies of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, its images and its positioning of its “gaze,” indicate both great privilege within as well as friction against the dominant order in popular filmmaking in India in the 1970s.
This is another level at which the film is playing with the seen and unseen. Aman, as Rupa, also stands in for the famed singer Lata Mangeshkar, who inspired Raj Kapoor to make this film about a woman with an “ordinary” face and a beautiful, heavenly voice. Mangeshkar provides the vocals for Rupa’s musical numbers. There is, after all, a connotative tension between the visible body of a performer anchoring an erotic (and perhaps disreputable) screen image and the audible voice of a famous performer who projects a more chaste and dignified image.
I would recommend Monika Mehta’s book Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema for a chapter that discusses the film’s production and reception history in a compelling way, tying public debates to textual phenomena. (“Bring in the evidence!” said Jean-Luc Godard—and sometimes the evidence required to answer a question isn’t just what’s on the film reel.) Upon its release, Satyam Shivam Sundaram passed the censors but disappointed at the box office and met with a lot of public resistance. Mehta contrasts its release with that of Gupt gyan (B.K. Adarsh, 1974), a film with a sex education slant that met with government censorship but was successful with the public. Mehta reads Kapoor’s own defense of his work, and his wish not to cut any of its potentially controversial elements, as an identification of the film’s “soul” with the body—and this, she argues, “reverses a traditional hierarchy within popular Hindi cinema, one in which sound/voice (the playback singer), not image/body (actor/actress), is characterized as the film’s soul.”
Of course, of course—the question of a film’s “soul,” like its “breath” or its “vitality,” is the kind of non-viral, metaphorical, metaphysical weirdness I am game to think about …