“Dharmecha, arthecha, kamecha nathicharami”, chanted just before the mangalsutra (sacred necklace) ceremony during a Hindu wedding ritual, represents a promise between the couple, bringing them together in a sacred bond. An ideal Hindu marriage is considered beyond life and death, for seven births, especially for the woman, whose duties towards her husband don’t end with his death. As long as she lives, she is supposed to be the grieving, devoted wife, married to the memory of her husband. Despite its interactions with a globalized and modernized world, Indian society’s expectations of its women haven’t changed much and being in a close relationship with society, these are reflected by our cinema. The mainstream, popular Hindi film rarely crosses the numerous Lakshmana rekhas set for women, a characteristic that has become the success formula for a blockbuster. Among the few movies that dare veer away from the same is the critically-acclaimed 2018 Kannada movie Nathicharami (“I Promise”), directed by MansoRe, which follows the journey of a young widow Gowri and her struggles with social and individual morality on her path to getting in touch with her body and emotions. In a cultural context where most people still believe in “na stree swatantram arhati”, a woman isn’t fit to be independent, the film is successful in presenting a widowed female character and her sexuality away from a romanticized or victimized space. The protagonist, played wonderfully by Sruthi Hariharan, is a young widow learning about and coming to terms with her physical and social being outside of the relationship with her husband. Her loss is accompanied by trauma, depression, and gradually an unlearning of the social ideals of being a widow in India. The process however doesn’t happen in a bubble; all the characters represent different elements of the society with whom Gowri negotiates in myriad ways on her journey to self-discovery, which leads to an unraveling of multiple layers of politics that dictate the issues of gender and sexuality.
Gowri is an independent woman, living alone and earning for herself. In doing so she becomes a perceived threat for the societal setup, which needs and demands that a woman be dependent on a man. At different moments in the movie, we see characters, including Gowri’s parents, telling her that her choices are bringing shame to the family and that she needs a man to rescue her from her miserable loneliness. It is not that Gowri doesn’t feel the void created by the demise of her husband, however it arises not from the desire for a protector but that for a partner. This brings us to another vital supposition of the society that we live in – that of a virtual absence of sexual desire in a woman. Our ancient scriptures mention female desire mostly in relation to marriage, procreation, and servicing her husband. They also propound that a widow remain chaste after her husband’s death for the rest of her life. Gowri breaks both these rules with the help of her counselor Carvahlo, in sessions with whom she gets over her own apprehensions about having physical needs despite still loving her husband. Several emotionally-charged yet constructive discussions later, she emerges victorious in her being’s tussle with how the society wants her to behave at a moral level.
Once she gets over her inhibitions, Gowri is faced with the challenge of finding a man who will understand what she requires – a relationship only to satisfy her bodily needs. The two men, Abhimanyu, and later Suresh, who Gowri chooses in order to explore her sexual desires, symbolize the two main positions of men in the context of their relationship with women. Abhimanyu, the first man Gowri meets on an online platform, voices a much-ignored fact when he points out that “I am being used” is not a gender-specific emotion, that men too have physical as well as emotional necessities, and one cannot compensate for the other. Suresh embodies the society’s ideal man, the one more familiar to us – an entitled husband, a man oblivious to the fact that women have physical needs, so much so that when Gowri comes up to him with her proposition of a solely physical relationship, he is shocked. Why? Because women from “good families” aren’t supposed to talk, behave, and express themselves in a certain way. This “good woman” is seen best in his own wife, serving all his needs and enduring physical and emotional abuse without uttering a word. How oppressively she is being treated and how Gowri is judged for having desires, underlines the point that for both the good woman and the bad, the heroine as well as the vamp, society remains a bed of thorns.
This is not to say that all women experience sexual politics and the resulting social realities alike. Women from the upper class/caste are more strongly governed by religious and cultural values in comparison to women coming from poor and socially backward sections. The upper class has the duty of keeping up the façade of cultural purity, whereas for sections struggling to keep their body and soul together, such constructs hold no major value. This can be illustrated using the examples of the domestic worker Jayamma and Suresh’s wife. While Jayamma works as a maid to earn her living, her background and the fact that she earns free her from the unnecessary complexities of cultural values and the trap of “what will people say”. Suresh’s wife on the other hand is a middle-class housewife, who has to bear the burden of being the ideal wife; whether or not she is happy or satisfied is inconsequential as long as she serves her husband and his family. She has to accept whatever semblance of affection she receives because she has no autonomy, sexual or otherwise. Gowri’s is somewhere in between these two situations. In a relatively better condition, because she doesn’t rely on anyone for her survival, Gowri, walking a path full of barriers, finds her way out of her trauma by realizing and accepting that she is an individual with sexual desires and that they are nothing to be ashamed of.
Film critics have raised the issue that even the works that are woman-centric do not show the story from her perspective, something which is taken care of in Nathicharami, since from the beginning to the end, we see life as experienced by Gowri and it remains her point of view throughout. The wife-whore dyad of popular cinema is also challenged as, despite her unfaltering love towards her late husband, she doesn’t hold herself back with respect to her sexual needs. Neither she nor the others in the movie can be placed in the watertight compartments of good/bad – they are just people, encompassing the best and the worst and everything in between. The impressive thing is that none of the messaging is heavy-handed – the movie is driven by subtle and thought-provoking conversations, Sruthi Hariharan’s inimitable acting finesse, and the director MansoRe’s delicate and careful handling of the subject. The film is rated 18+ on Netflix, which tells us that open discussions on bodily autonomy and sexual needs is more controversial than the plethora of socially-accepted content objectifying women and their bodies. This is indicative of the socio-cultural attitudes towards female bodies and sexuality and the almost complete lack of agency attributed to women by the society, which more often than not further begets a kind of self-loathing on an individual level in regard to body and sexuality. Gowri triumphed over all of this, and yet the truth remains that many women don’t. However, in conclusion, Nathicharami is a bold and beautiful film that has the potential to inspire and transform several lives, as we very well know that cinema can, especially in this country.
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