Sex in the Indian Family

The new Indian-American expatriate film ‘Leela’, a first-film written and directed by Somnath Sen which was released in India on November 1, could well be considered the first art film made on the Indian community in north America. It is serious and solemn and has an analytical attitude to some rather critical issues concerning the East-West cultural divide. Most of these have to do, of course, with the sub-continental trauma in accepting sexual relations rationally and openly as the foundation of family life, even in the transitional world of the expatriate.

How do you bring the reality of sex into the open? Isn’t that the big bourgeois question in the sub-continent for the westernized desi elite? All the problems that south Asian parents have in ‘the bringing up’ of children emanate from a taboo that insists that you cannot treat sex relationships rationally, because that is not part of our culture and upbringing.

Somnath Sen’s film takes a half-hour to come to grips with its essential theme, but thereafter it is cathartic and dramatic enough, and deserves to be seen widely on both sides of the Indian Diaspora.

One of the admirable subtleties about Somnath Sen’s film is that, on the surface, it appears to tell us a dreamy tale about Leela, the beautiful, forty-something, professor of comparative culture, who is an extraordinary muse for poets and young men. Since Leela is played by Dimple Kapadia, arguably the Indian actress with the most immaculate classical face of all, these days, the romantic mystique that she personifies serves as a veil that shrouds the tense undercurrents of the film’s main concern.

These disquieting concerns come to be represented by a supporting character in the story - Chaitali, played by Deepti Naval, who really dominates the delineation of the film’s theme. Chaitali is a single mother at a university town in the USA. She’s on the faculty and lives with her 18-year-old son Krishna (played by young Amol Mhatre) who is a student there. The film’s dramatic content revolves around the problems that Chaitali and Kris face in growing up; and in discovering that it is so difficult for them, as Indians, to accept each other as adults with a sex drive.

Moreover, there are questions about Leela’s own life, and her relationship with her poet-husband Nashaad (played in a brief cameo role by Vinod Khanna) that overlap Chaitali’s apprehensions about her identity as a woman and a mother.

In Somnath Sen’s admirable first-film, the conventional romantic quadrangle assumes a Shakespearean ambiguity of ‘The Midsummer Night’s Dream’ variety, and there are moments when, in the context of the sub-continent’s sexual mores and norms, it clearly echoes the archetypal enigmas of the Oedipal Complex.

The young Kris woos and then genuinely falls in love with the older Leela. His mother Chaitali is appalled by the young man’s infatuation with Leela - firstly because of her over-possessiveness as a mother, which the film outlines quite powerfully, and only secondly because Leela is her own age. However, Chaitali loses out on the dictatorial mandate of the South Asian Mother when Kris discovers that she has a relationship with a man other than his father. The whole cultural conundrum turns full circle because of Leela’s unspoken problem with her philandering husband, who loves her because she is his poetic muse but who cannot do without the indulgence of other women in order to survive the exigencies of his fame.

The issue of the Asian mother’s inability to accept her son’s infatuation for an older woman is easily explainable because this is a universal anxiety, common to most cultures. In the context of the WASP world, to which Kris openly subscribes and which is sketched out in the film through the simple device of telling us that Kris’s best buddies are WASPs, the wooing of the forty-something Leela is given a justification in that it begins as a bet set up by Kris’s WASP friends, who are otherwise riling him incessantly about his inability to get laid and lose his “Indian virginity”.

However, as time goes by and Kris spends more and more time in Leela’s company, he becomes genuinely enraptured and she becomes the conventional first-love of his life. But not before he shocks her on a couple of occasions with the sheer physicality of his desire! Indeed, between them, Kris and Leela also seem to define the two differing perspectives on sex appeal – the sensuality of the western world is replaced in the South Asian sensibility by sensuousness. That makes perfect the casting of Dimple Kapadia, because in soft-focus close-ups and wrapped in a saree she is as sensuous as they come. Nobody better at the moment on the Bollywood scene.

Leela’s own problems are, however, not handled with a convincing clarity by director Somnath Sen, because like many an expatriate he tends to idealize things Indian a little unrealistically. Leela says she is faithful to Nashaad despite his adulteries, because he is a famous poet, she is his muse and because he has been the love of his life. This, I would say, is scarcely believable about the modern Indian (if not, South Asian) woman any more, especially not from a Bombayite or a big city girl. Feminist demands of sexual equality have been around for over thirty years in the sub-continent and educated Indian women are hypersensitive about behaving like doormats! So, when she feels that Nashaad has committed the ultimate betrayal, her sexual acceptance of young Kris is contrived, though beautifully photographed.

However, I do feel that film-maker Sen has his best directorial moments in the denouement of the anxieties that develop in the relationships concerning Kris, his mother Chaitali, his father (played by Gulshan Grover) and Samar, the new man in Chaitali’s life. Despite his Americanized affectations, Kris finds it difficult to accept that his otherwise “very Indian” mother has a secret love; and that she feels compelled to hide her new life from her son.

Simultaneously, we have a devastatingly honest transformation in Chaitali’s attitude to Leela. On Leela’s arrival in the US, Chaitali is overly affectionate and protective, until she finds Kris spending too much time with the attractive older woman. All the pettiness that Indians are capable of is described through some telling scenes in Chaitali’s hostilities towards Leela, as well as in the irrationality of the over-possessive South Asian Mother about an eighteen-year-old son. It is Somnath Sen’s deft handling of these complex inter-relationships that give his screenplay an originality and a strength that is admirable in a first-film.

My own impression about Sen’s sensibilities as a film-maker prompt me to place him as a talented young director who is inspired, perhaps, by two diverse influences – the romantic aura of Gulzar’s oeuvre, and the analytical quick-cutting intensity of Ritwick Ghatak, who is perhaps the most somber of our great film directors. ‘Leela’ could well herald a genuine new talent in Somnath Sen, in the footsteps of Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta.