paroma (1984)

Starring Raakhee, Mukul Sharma, Anil Chatterjee, Dipankar Dey, Aparna

Sen
Screenplay Aparna Sen
Art Direction Ashok Bose
Cinemtography Ashok Mehta
Music Bhaskar Chandavarkar
Produced by Nirmal Kumar
Directed by Aparna Sen
Synopsis

Paroma explores the metamorphosis of a middle-aged, urban housewife from an upper-

middle-class family from a contented and complacent wife, daughter-in-law and mother
to a woman who learns to come to terms with herself only when she learns to 'read'
herself through the perceptions of another man. The film opens with Durga Pooja being
celebrated in the Choudhury family. Rahul (Mukul Sharma), a noted photo-journalist
who contributes to magazines like Life and distantly related to the family, has come to
photograph the Durga Pooja. In Paroma (Raakhee), he discovers the ideal subject for a
commissioned piece on the Indian Housewife. Paroma's family is elated and her husband
is amused. But as Rahul and Paroma explore the nooks and corners of the city of
Calcutta during the photographic shoot, the two engage in a torrid affair. But the affair is
short-lived as Rahul is called away for an emergency commission to Chad. When copies
of Life magazine arrive in the post with Paroma's pictures in them, all hell breaks loose
and Parama's life, as do the lives of everyone else she is linked to, changes forever...

The film

Paroma is one of the first Indian films after V Shantaram’s Aadmi (Hindi)/Manoos
(Marathi) (1939), to endanger the power base of patriarchy. Sen makes her protagonist
Paroma deviate from accepted norms of social behaviour, from established values of
sexual morality. Instead of using her energies in a struggle where the ground rules are
stacked against her, Paroma unwittingly learns to apply them to
the active creation of alternatives. In this option, where she
chooses to turn her back on society, she experiences that society
– positively or negatively - can no longer ignore her. Those who
take a course of action that deviates from the accepted codes of
and practices are pursued and deviance is seen by those in power
(namely men) as a very threatening thing.

Those whose power base is threatened will behave in one of two

ways. They will colonize the 'deviant' behaviour, take it over,
adopt it, absorb it into acceptable practice in society. Or they will label it as something
undesirable. This theory is ideally proved by the polarities in the audience response to
Paroma from the time when it was released to the present time. When Paroma was first
released, a major slice of the Indian audience reacted to the film by registering extreme
shock and outrage at the film’s gross violation of marital morality by a woman from an
urban middle-class family. Today, the scenario is different. The audience – including
many of those who had seen the film more than ten years ago – views the film positively,
heralding it as a turning-point film in the history of the portrayal of women in Indian
cinema. However, the patriarchal and feudal tendency to label all creative new activities
and discourses entered into by women as deviant, weird, perverse, sick, queer and
marginal sustains in contemporary Indian society. Any attempt by a woman to get away
from the way things have been done or life has been led is attacked with impunity,
irrationality and totally out of context. This is a desperate attempt to undermine its appeal
and to isolate those involved. But deviance, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder.
What is deviant behaviour to a secure group will be perfectly rational behaviour to those
for whom the very security of that group means repression.

Paroma has a conventional narrative structure. It tells a story, sets up a conflict, and
offers a possible solution to the conflict. It is an open-ended film. We are not sure
whether Paroma really takes up the job. Whether she goes back to the Choudhury
household or somewhere else. It is an unpredictable, almost violent climax with a strange
period of retrospection and nostalgia following it. The editing deliberately slows down at
this stage, as does the camera, to rhyme with Paroma's mental pace. It almost reaches a
point of stasis at this point. There is no foreshadowing of the film's resolution. If there is
one, it is in the Shyam Kanchan plant in which Paroma rediscovers her lost childhood
self and reunites this self with her present one. Potentially, Sen's discourse, from her
subordinate place in the discourses in the text is clear in Paroma. In this film, Sen works
against the naturalized, dominating male discourse to produce textual contradictions,
which denaturalize the working of patriarchal ideology.

This film deserves to be commended for its courage and its power, though, not so much,
for its honesty. Because, the quality of honesty in this film is at times, diluted by its
somewhat voyeuristic stance. Its use of the camera-eye, the camera being within the
command of a man, within the film, is clearly voyeuristic, reflecting the voyeurism of the
eye of the movie-camera as well. This however, is relative to interpretation and
description. Paroma reveals the oppressive nature of gender relationships across class-
lines in contemporary Indian society. It goes on to suggest the direction in which women
may be pushed, to discover their own voices and escape from patriarchal domination of
thought. It manages to convey this through a deceptively simple, but subtly political
structure that creates several riveting layers of conflict in the central character of Paroma.
This is reflected in a myriad different ways to the viewers who watch the film, either the
first time, or several times, with irregular gaps between viewings. As a consequence,
Paroma is controversial and polarizing. Many men and some women find its sympathetic
approach towards the adulterous woman morally reprehensible. TG Vaidyanathan's
critique of the film unfolds as a scathing attack on the film and on Sen's fleshing out of
its central character. "Paroma does not have the moral right to offer such excuses, and by
her own exacting Brahmin standards, her action is, quite simply, unpardonable," he
writes.

Though Paroma can be termed a feminist film within the Indian realm thematically
speaking, it panders to the male gaze in terms of style, formal technique and in part,
representation. Ms. Sen made the critical choice between aesthetics and political
consequence that marks the line of difference between an aesthetically beautiful film and
a feminist film. Paroma clearly has a feminist moral structured into a somewhat laboured
climax because the search for that lost plant and for its name suddenly appear like a
forced metaphor that is not taken care of. Interestingly however, the narrative journey the
film embarks on to arrive at this climax is through the very agents of dominant cinema
with its patriarchal clichés which Ms. Sen seeks to dispel through plot and theme. The
perspective of every frame reveals a male ordering of space.

Ms. Sen limits Paroma by casting Raakhee, top star of Hindi mainstream cinema at the
time, in and as Paroma. The 'star' in Raakhee, which invests her persona with superficial
gloss, keeps peeping out from behind the character Paroma on screen. Raakhee, at once a
part and a 'victim' of a popularly constructed star-system cultivated, sustained and
perpetuated by dominant commercial cinema, tends to blur the difference 'between the
constructed persona of the star and her construction of a character on screen.' However
desperately she tries, however much the star in Raakhee tries to internalise the 'character'
of Paroma on screen with reinforcements of culturally appropriate costume and make-up,
the transparency of the cosmetic metamorphosis cannot be denied. The stylisation is too
deeply ingrained to be demolished so easily. As a consequence, 'neither the star persona
nor the fictional character could conceal their interiority from her audience, who had a
privileged insight into secrets, suffering, passion and loss.' Though Ms. Sen might not
have intended to present the star's performance as spectacle for consumption, Raakhee's
performance is like 'the woman who must perform, and for whom performance is
invested in appearance. Performance, appearance, masquerade and their erotic shift from
the surface of the screen into the story itself.' Yet, in the final analysis, for Raakhee - the
star, the artifice of successful femininity constantly cracks and out of the character
Paroma's vulnerability, rises a towering star performance.

Another reason why the star often intrudes into the character is the beauty of Raakhee,
sensuous, feminine, even regal, at moments in time. This beauty marginalizes Paroma's
creative past, a past in which she played the sitar and read Premendra Mitra. This throws
up pertinent questions on whether Rahul, as a professional photographer, and then as a
heterosexual male, would have been attracted to this woman, had she not been so
beautiful. In that case, would the explosive adulterous affair and its repercussions on
Paroma have ever happened? The question that raises its ugly head here is therefore: why
did Ms. Sen make Paroma so beautiful?

Paroma has an ‘odyssey of consciousness’ structure. This structure follows the route
where the initially apolitical and symbolically typical housewife-mother, gradually takes
on - by circumstance or by choice – the politics of her identity and her sexuality through
a confrontation with the repressive patriarchal family and the medical apparatus. At the
end of the film, Paroma takes the first autonomous decision of her life – she will take up
a job. The salary, the designation, the organization that she proposes to work for, does
not matter to her. The decision does. This journey from false to true consciousness is the
motivating narrative drive of this film. The audience is almost invited to make this
journey with the central protagonist, Paroma. Paroma’s journey is from non-feminist
heterosexuality to self-identification. Rather than work on a puritanical refusal of the
pleasures of 'looking', Sen, through Paroma, prefers to explore the contradictions and
instabilities typical of the representation of women in mainstream cinema. In the process,
Paroma, the woman, is transformed from an object of contemplation and ‘looking’, into a
site of conflict and struggle, although there is still, always, the risk of recuperation. Sen
does not shy away from taking this risk.

Paroma, attempting to redefine the iconography of woman in Indian cinema, came up

against resistance from the Left and the Right alike, the former questioning the relevance
of its theme and the latter challenging its assumptions. The facelessness of the woman in
contemporary commercial cinema in India has affected conventional stardom by
reducing the span of any individual star dangerously. The body exposes and exhausts
itself faster and more absolutely than the face. The more controlled and regulated
eroticism of the earlier cinema, confined to the contours of the face, has given way to a
more exhibitionist eroticism that is too facile to stand by itself. It needs to be sustained
by unnatural violence in all its horrible manifestations. The eruption of violence in Indian
commercial cinema and its 'middle cinema' variants is a natural corollary of the
progressive denudation and consequent demystification of the female body on screen.
The inaccessibility of the early stars embodied in the cold dignity of the 'good' fallen
woman, or the rock-like endurance of the matron, or the naïveté of the sweet young
thing, could generate an erotic charge that is diffused in the greater exposure of the
woman in later cinema. This is the context against which Paroma sets out to establish a
woman's right to choose her life.