The Climax of ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’, or What Happens When Men Must Ditch the Script
People may or may not remember or appreciate the rest of Kundan Shah’s 1983 film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, but everyone is equally enamoured of its climax, its brilliant parody of another famous climactic scene — that of Draupadi’s ‘cheer haran’ in the epic Mahabharata. Released five years before the other immensely popular visualisation of this sequence in B R Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan, the film is today chiefly recognised by its iconic climax, which is complete in itself and remarkable in its sheer subversiveness. One need know or remember nothing of the rest of the film to understand its climax, which presents a very effective and entertaining counter-reading of the otherwise grave and anxiety-inducing episode from the epic. But what is it exactly that the film gets so right here, which converts this solemn spectacle to a riot, and elevates this maddening comedy of errors to a biting satire, every bit as iconic in popular culture memory, as the original in mythological memory? What challenge does a brief comic interlude sequence throw at the heart of a centuries-old narrative that never exhausts adaptation?
First, some contextualisation of the disrobing sequence for contemporary audiences. Both, Purnima Mankekar in her study of female viewers of the DD Mahabharat serial in her book Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1999) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan in her insightful essay ‘The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for our Times’ (again, 1999) demonstrate the particular significance of the disrobing sequence for women in particular and society at large. This includes the enactment of ritual sexual humiliation of one woman, as threat/reminder of punishment to all women for being exceptional in any way (strong-willed, ‘haughty’, ambitious, derisive, inciteful, vengeful) or for ‘belonging’ to more than one man, (even if not of her own choice) or simply because of her beauty and inaccessibility. Draupadi, chiefly because of this pivotal role she plays in the epic narrative, is a source of unease — is she a victim or an agent, comprador or feminist, role model or warning, cause of fratricidal clash or merely its excuse, chaste or defiled? To the female viewer particularly, she is a source of anxiety, shame, fear, rage, whether it’s because of her violent entry into the public realm of the court exposed to the collective male gaze in a vulnerable state, or the private betrayal of her family. This is the reiteration of an ancient consensus of institutionalised violence against women across social hierarchy, fastening her in a state of perpetual vulnerability and insecurity. Notwithstanding the titillation that any such visual depiction of sexual humiliation of women invariably invokes under the male gaze, this episode is also a source of some anxiety for men — is Woman-as-property transferrable, is Man-as-protector a myth? And what can be the answer to the impossible question that Draupadi throws to an assembly full of men reduced to speechlessness? All serious, ponderous questions that hint at the chinks in the armour of Patriarchy, which Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro swiftly and masterfully blows up, and to uproarious laughter.
The basic premise of this film sequence is this — what happens when Patriarchy loses its script? Which is to say, what happens when carefully rehearsed roles and lines are disrupted, leaving men to anxiously improvise and switch registers from the high mythological to the low everyday? What happens when evil refuses to perform its evilhood and the righteous recognise with indignance that their righteousness has been usurped? What if interlopers were to hijack this well-worn narrative, make everyone ‘forget’ their roles and replace the chief actor and moral centre of the climax with a corpse? The biggest coup that this sequence achieves, is precisely this — that Draupadi is literally dead throughout — beyond binaries of active/passive, victim/agent, feminist/non-feminist. Simply, dead. Without any limited agency inscribed on her by patriarchy whatsoever, she is reduced to a silent figurehead, a cipher, a physically cumbersome plot device that obstructs the passage of the play, rather than facilitates its ‘natural’ progression towards curses and boons and apocalyptic, righteous war. Removing her from the sequence, the script is instead handed over to the real actors of the episode — the men — those who hold the real authority to argue legalities and moralities, attack and defend her, and decide her fate. This sequence, in other words, pares down the epicsode to its kernel and presents it as not about her at all, but the men fighting over her.
Along the way, there are certain very revealing exposes of some important characters who are denied either moral superiority or tragic depth. Dhritharashtra’s pretend-blindness to what is unfolding before him transforms into genuine bewilderment and incomprehension as each ‘Yeh kya ho raha hai’ crescendoes into his unceremonious exit from the play. The new faux-Dhrithrashtra turns out to be a more decisive one and announces his verdict that Draupadi belongs to neither the Kauravas nor the Pandavas, but her father Dhrupad instead (still within the logic of patriarchy, but widening the conventional binary of this false dilemma). The ‘original’ Duryodhana’s and Dushasana’s macho bravado are repeatedly cut-down-to-size. In a hilarious scene, ‘original’ Duryodhana threatens Draupadi and she literally falls over him; staggering under her weight, and not knowing how to handle her, he quickly delegates the evil deed to his brother and at his menacing worst, is whisked away from stage and replaced with an interloper. The ‘new’ Duryodhana refuses to perform the old script and insists upon respecting and defending Draupadi’s ‘modesty’ instead of ‘outraging it’. The outrage hereon gets redirected from Draupadi-who-must-be-saved to Draupadi-who-must-be-violated, as the prompter keeps urging the actors on stage. The eagerness and compulsion of this central act, rendered comic here, is also its fitting indictment. THIS, all along is the true script: the violation of the woman’s integrity and honour and sense of self, under the guise of its prevention. In contrast, Bheem, or ‘Gadadhaari Bheem’ as he is sought to be reduced to by the original script, far exceeds his role and challenges the condescension of his brothers to whose authority he is conventionally shown submitting, whether because of their seniority or superiority of intellect. He snaps Arjun’s bow, reducing him to childish outrage: “Main nahi karta natak watak, bhaad mein jao tum sab”. He then proceeds to defy ‘dharamraj’ Yuddhishtira and fells him with a blow of his club and chases Nakul-Sahadev away. And in a fitting reversal of the proceedings, himself stakes his claim upon Draupadi, instead of silently fuming while watching her disrobing.
The effectiveness of the satire lies in its success in making the ‘original’ sound contrived and the improvisation, more genuine and spontaneous and thereby, real. That Bheem and Duryodhana find their roles switched does invert the sequence into absurd humour, but also indicates their essential interchangeability, as far as Draupadi’s plight here is concerned, when she finds herself alone and in confrontation with colluding patriarchy. Draupadi has done literally nothing throughout except remain present on stage, pushed and pulled around — no tears, no outrage, no prayer, no incitement. Only the men around her have driven the plot forward. Further, the universality of her condition — a woman who finds herself at the mercy of powerful men for supposed transgressions — is brought to the fore when the cheer-haran episode at the Hastinapur sabha makes an improbable but brilliantly appropriate leap and finds itself in another century and another royal court scene where another woman’s life is at stake — Draupadi becomes Anarkali. Eventually, the sequence draws to a close with not divine but human and legal intervention, with the entry of the police. Instead of hair as a marker of female sexuality, by which a woman can be dragged into public gaze, here hair is revealed to be false: a wig. The culmination is not the disrobing of the woman, but the unwigging of the man-masquerading-as-woman, and thereby, a revelation of misgendering. The charade ends and the humour dissipates immediately. Without the presence of a woman and her personification of ‘sexual honour’, even if in masquerade, the episode loses its meaning for its voyeur-audience.
But not without having established the doubt that perhaps the original epicsode that put a woman’s alleged honour and dishonour centrestage too was a charade after all, one disguising the complicity and consent of men, all along. Its parody, in contrast, exposes this charade for what it truly is. The film also leaves us with that very revealing scene which plunges into the heart of the matter, where one character says to another, ‘Agar Dushasana ne yeh sari utaar dee toh sari pol khul jaayegi’. The conspiracy of Patriarchy needs women to be placed in peril so that men can fight over her and prove their heroism and establish their rightful authority; as such righteousness does not exist in completely extricating a woman from this eternal condition of hers, but to intervene at the cusp of her complete denuding. Not the relief of prevention for the woman, but the anxiety of postponement, for her. The charge of the endless re-enactment of Draupadi’s ritual humiliation lies in this fundamental script of her perpetual shaming, which Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro disrupts so audaciously and delightfully in all of its twelve-minutes of glorious comedy.
