The Life of Hinduism

(Barré) #1

152. performance


brief appearances). Yet the depiction was hardly “realistic” in other respects. The
costumes and wigs of Ram and Lakshman during their long forest exile, for exam-
ple, remained immaculate and perfectly arranged (down to a dandified curl at each
temple) and their faces clean-shaven, a stylization that bothered critics reared on
more naturalistic theater (R. K. Narayan quipped that the brothers “look like
Wiltech [razorblade] ads”).^30 Hanuman and his legions were depicted according to
long-established convention, with muscular but hairless human bodies and only
long, padded tails and stylized masking about the mouth and nose to suggest a
simian status; their wives were shown as fully human women.^31 Sets and costumes
adhered to the garish standard of film mythologicals, which itself reflects poster art
and the conventions of the nautankitradition and of nineteenth-century Parsi the-
ater. This too provoked criticism—Simran Bhargava in India Today quipped that
“Raja Janak’s palace looks like it ’s been painted with cheap lurex paint and the
clothes look like they’ve been dug out of some musty trunk in Chandni Chowk’s
costume rental shops”^32 —yet Sagar made considerable use of outdoor footage, in-
cluding many impressive sequences of Ram’s wanderings through the countryside.
The poor quality of special effects was another fixation of critics, and those ac-
customed (as some urban Indians now are) to the standards of post-Steven Spielberg
Hollywood would indeed find only laughable the pulsating, garishly tinted “divine
weapons” and the hovering demons of the television serial, which adhered to a tech-
nical standard closer to that of earlyStar TrekorDr. Who.Cost containment was
undoubtedly a factor (though some scenes—such as the burning of Lanka—were
admirably executed), and Sagar may have shrewdly perceived that the bulk of his
audience, accustomed to the modest stagecraft ofnautankiandramlila,would be
sufficiently dazzled by cheaper effects. He must also have realized that special effects
per se were not crucial to maintaining viewers’ interest in the saga, and this leads me
to an observation concerning the overall focus of the production. The emphasis in
Ramayanwas squarely on “seeing” its characters. Not “seeing” in the quick-cut,
distracted fashion in which modern Western audiences take in their heroes and hero-
ines, but drinking in and entering into visual communion with epic characters.^33
To most viewers, Ramayan was a feast ofdarfan, and its visual aesthetic clearly
derived from an indigenous standard. Scenes and dialogues were long (inter-
minable, critics said) and aimed at a definitive portrayal of the emotional state of
each character. This was conveyed especially through close-ups (and in moments of
intense emotion, repeated zoom shots—a convention favored in Hindi films), so
that much of the time the screen was dominated by large heads, either verbalizing
or silently miming their responses to events. Every nuance of emotion of every

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