The Meera Trinity

The easiest thing to do is turn on men like maulvis, celibates and idols.

Let us start with the maulvis. What Pakistani actress Meera is doing is titillating them with her “I just brushed his lips” and “I’ve two names, Rubab and Meera”. Suddenly, from pakeezah she transforms into patakha.

Who knows her by any name other than Meera? What is she trying to prove? She flaunts that she has a Pakistani passport and then says, “I was never told about my artistic limitations when working in a foreign country. I am a Pakistani. I hold a Pakistani passport. I’ll go to court to ask about my restrictions as an actress. Today, I’m working in India, tomorrow I may be working in Hollywood. So please, will they (in Pakistan) specify my limits, so I don’t cross them?”

Meera is merely an upstart who has suddenly discovered the larger world. Or so she seems to be telling her country. Javed Akhtar, poet-lyricist, commenting on the issue made an apt observation: “Wasn’t a kiss un-Indian till now in the Indian film industry? So, if Pakistan doesn’t like their girl kissing on-screen, what’s wrong with that? They’re still traditional and very conservative. Why are you surprised that Pakistan should feel hurt about their girl coming here and kissing around? In India, we’ve only changed now, after so many years. Until recently, a kiss in Bollywood evoked similar reactions. Let’s get off the high horse of moral superiority and get real.”

I dread to think that Meera might be made into the liberal voice of the modern Pakistani woman by the Indian media. The film ‘Nazar’ is directed by a woman, Soni Razdan, but it is her husband Mahesh Bhatt who is acting as front-man. That Meera is latching onto and being encouraged by this drum-beater comes as no surprise. He loves to play Svengali, he loves to use his life as a canvas, and he loves to believe he is some sort of secular messiah. If he were so interested in Indo-Pak amity, why was Pakistani actor Muammar Rana, who acted in his earlier film, not given all this publicity?

Is Meera playing her mythical namesake who is ready to give up all for her lord, more likely to be fame than some fantastical peace?

After her recent visit back home, she just could not think of returning to a normal Indian welcome. So, although her port of disembarkation stated ‘Mumbai’, she deplaned at Delhi to participate in an Indo-Pak peace rally. The Indian Home Ministry was asked by Bhatt to intervene and permit her to be in Delhi and they did so as a “gift”. Why is Meera being given gifts by a department of our government whereas even PIA pilots cannot go beyond the duty-free shopping area at the airport lounges on their sectors here (and this too is a recent move)? How many cities have been stamped on her Indian visa?

If this woman wants to throw attitude, she may do so in her country. Let her not try her political games in India. “I have come here as a peace ambassador and there is a particular lobby in Pakistan that cannot digest this fact,” she says. There were rumours that the Pakistani government has fined her! A government whose head of state blatantly asks for an invitation for a cricket match and even more blatantly says that that is not all he will be looking forward to would want to botch up the peace process with such a ridiculous move?

Pakistani musicians have performed here, sportspersons play here, traders are talking business, social activists are taking part in exchange programmes – they are all acting as peace ambassadors without making a song-and-dance of it. In fact, their reach is greater and I have heard some of them talk glowingly about India in the media. Has the government fined them? Cricketer Shoaib Malik, it has been discovered, has married a girl from Hyderabad. Will the government fine him/deport him?

While hitting out at the mullahs, it is she who is fanning the imaginary fires. “They love me out there. And they’re offended because I’ve kissed Ashmit Patel who is Hindu while I am a Muslim girl. They feel, ek Mussalman ladki ek Hindu ladke ko kaise kiss kar sakti hai?”

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How would Krishna’s Meera react to such a controversy? It is said that once Emperor Akbar and Tansen went to hear her sing. Akbar was so moved that he placed a necklace of priceless gems as an offering to the idol. When the news reached her husband that the emperor had set foot in the sacred temple in disguise, touched the feet of Meera and even presented her a necklace, he became furious. He told her, “Drown yourself in the river and never show your face to the world in future. You have brought great disgrace on my family”.

Meera argued, “What is lineage, heritage or inheritance? What is the meaning of the division amongst devotees as Kshatriyas and Brahmanas and shudras and the like? Who is man and who is woman? Krishna is the only Purusha and all of us are women. He is Pati and we are all Pasus. I am no more Queen than you are King. There is only one King and my life belongs to him.”

At one level, she was clearly asserting her choice. But her statements raise several questions:
- By upholding the existence of only one man-god, was she hitting out at the male stranglehold or was she de-sexualising the male and therefore herself?
- Was she just a smart cookie who used her high station in life to court controversies and then give them a slap because she could well afford to do so?
- Was she an adulteress?

She married Rana Bhojraj because he understood her piety. She had developed an instant loving attachment to the idol and began spending most of her time in bathing, dressing and worshipping the image as though it were real. She danced about the image in ecstasy. She sang beautiful songs to it. She talked to the idol. She slept with it.

What she was doing was using one patriarchal structure against another. She lived with her husband, but declared, “I have already given up my life to my beloved Lord Krishna”. Although trained in warfare, as was the royal custom, and adept at archery, fencing, horseback riding and driving chariots, she chose the protection of the male. Even when taunted about her role, she would say, “Family honour, words of scorn? /I care not for these one jot, /For my Krishna’s bewitching form/Is etched forever on my heart.”

Would she have been able to go it alone without the name of Krishna attached to her? Not only that, she co-opted a bunch of sadhus to travel with her and sing hymns. Instead of renouncing, she was in fact openly declaring her sexual longing: “For his touch/My body aches/My thoughts take wings … My grief grows/more and more/like the mounting poison/of a cobra’s bite…”

Is it any wonder that Lord Krishna intervened in her dream to advise her, “If the gopikas could do their duty to their husbands, tend their families and above all be totally devoted to me all the time, you can do the same thing. Do your duty. I shall not leave you any time”?

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Wasn’t this how the Mahatma kept another Mira in his thrall? She had left her charmed existence to join his ashram when she was 33. With her new cropped hair and khadi clothes and the discarding of all traces of vanity, ‘self-denial’ in fact became a vehicle of pride. She became the chosen one who got to sit with the Mahatma every evening while she massaged his feet.

Was Gandhi’s Mira, a name he gave the Englishwoman Madeleine Slade, colonising his mind with desires he had suppressed or was she being used for one more of his experiments with truth? Sublimation became the most potent longing that bound them together. Questions have been raised about their relationship, including a fictionalised account ‘Mira and the Mahatma’ by psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar.

Like Krishna’s Meera, Mira was certain that she would never “be willing to return to my old life and old interests”. The Mahatma kept sending out contradictory signals by writing her 500 letters during the period of their association. Even when he felt that she was getting too involved, instead of letting her get the message, he drew added attention to it by calling himself a lover forced to make the drastic move of cutting off ties. “No lover has ever given pain without being more pained. But such is my brutality toward those I love most. . . .May God remove what I consider is your moha.”

He smartly covered his guilt and effort to escape beneath the blanket of her infatuation (moha). By now she had transformed into a completely dependent devotee/beloved. Realising that he did not want her company every night, she expressed her wish to give herself up, so to speak. She had learned well from the sage how to use emotional blackmail!

But he was the master at the game, so he reprimanded her: “None else would have felt like committing suicide over a simple innocent remark of mine. This disease is idolatry. If it is not, why hanker after my company? Why touch or kiss the feet that must one day be dead cold? There is nothing in the body.” A body he was constantly putting to the test, a body he used as a weapon of poverty and power, both political and penitential.

The problem with the Meeras of the world is that they think, or are made to believe, they are the puppeteers, but what they are pulling are not strings. They are saddled with elastic bands that snap on them with greater ferocity the more they are stretched.