A few decades ago every ravishing vamp was made to die, either directly killed by the villain or during her own attempt to rescue someone following her remorse and newfound respect for “our values”. When a supporting character “slipped her leg” in her blind love for the not-so-good guy, towards the end either she died too or that not-so-good guy was good-ified and made to marry her. What would Helen Schlegel of EM Forster’s Howards End (1910) have thought about it?
Yoganand’s mUganOmu (1969) is one movie I recall where the heroine gets premaritally pregnant with the hero’s child. For the heroine herself to tread in that path seemed courageous, though the poor newborn had to be eventually left outside an orphanage and the movie had more to do with class differences and sacrifices of women.
Jandhyala’s nAlugu stambhAlATa (1982) dealt with similar themes and his chanTabbAyi (1986) through a short montage of scenes impressively portrayed the strength and vulnerability of Dr. Nischala who never married after a failed love affair.
Other than such occasional nods and mentions over the decades, women who make “bold” premarital choices have often been kept at a distance, if not outright oppressed, and this treatment is subtler though still perceptible today. Men, on the other hand, appear undeserving of such questions and thus this discussion is not even possible for heroes.
In Anand (2004), Shekar Kammula wrote a cute dialogue in his signature style of fragmented sentences. The scene was to establish Rupa’s openness and expectations from her relationship with Anand. In it she tells him that she had never kissed Rahul the way she kissed him. Sweet. Previously I never considered the dialogue to be anything more than what it seemed to be, but the last time I came across the dialogue I realized that the writer was carefully marking the heroine’s territory.
Rupa continues to be hailed as the true independent Telugu heroine after a long time. The movie starts with her breaking off a marriage with her boyfriend minutes before tying the knot, on seeing one side of her future husband and mother-in-law. Then why was she not allowed to cuddle up with him during their courting before that marriage that never happened? Would that have degraded her character from independent to “loose”? Clearly everybody seemed to accept her making out with the hero before anybody mentioned marriage.
I wonder if this is the implicit non-stand that the Telugu film industry takes. Anywhere else one couldn’t be sure whether a character marries another, but in Telugu movies there is rarely such a risk. So this stand appears bold enough for the younger generations to like the heroine going all the way with the hero, and restrained enough for the older generations to prefer the heroine not going all the way with her boyfriend who wouldn’t become her husband. An old newspaper editor once called something like this “peeing down both the legs”.
Among recent movies Chandrasekhar Yeleti’s anukOkunDA oka rOju (2005) appeared to accept the reality without judging either way. Tsunami Swetha’s was a character comfortable with her life style that occasionally involved sex. Her unplanned pregnancy and planned abortion get reprimanded by her friend Sahasra and respectfully treated by the doctor.
This line of thought accidentally reminded me of Mouli’s manasu mamata (1990), a rare movie which dealt with premarital choices of women and their consequences (as deemed appropriate for those times) with the sensitivity it deserves. I watched it very long ago and cannot recall to my satisfaction. The heroine (Sitara) gets pregnant with her first child (Tarun, in his first Telugu movie) and then marries the hero (Naresh) without telling him the truth. The hero loves the son as his own, and the heroine doesn’t because he is a living reminder of her guilt. They are mostly happy, maybe bittersweet, until a family friend (“Subhalekha” Sudhakar) asks their suggestion in marrying a “cheDipOyina” woman (Sudha Rani) who confessed to him about her past. DV Narasa Raju wrote both mUganOmu and manasu mamata. I tip my hat.
Times have changed and reality with it. The directors and writers, the actresses and their dubbing artistes, all know it well. I hope to watch a movie on what they know more than what they think the audience will prefer. Once in a while.
Amazon Ads:
Well written with a tinge of humor. That is what I like in your posts.
Thank you.