Raanjhanaa — “The girl who used the boy”

He sleeps around with girls, he is a “playboy”. She talks of sleeping around with boys, she is a “slut”. Many viewer reviews of Raanjhanaa were not very different.

The tale of a pleasant vagabond from Benaras and his everlasting obsession with the beautiful girl from nearby makes the crux of this rather raw and unstructured drama. A school boy gets a crush on a beautiful girl. They play along until the parents find out and the girl is sent away. The girl outgrows her school crush and falls in mature love with another boy. The first boy still retains his obsession and expects the girl to reciprocate. Turned down by the girl, the boy is hurt and decides to take revenge, unknowingly getting the girl’s to-be husband killed in the process. The girl now hates the boy and the boy goes all out to make amends. This time, the girl takes revenge and gets the boy killed, leaving both regretful and destroyed in love in the end. Throw in religious clashes, politics, street plays, Rahman’s delightful music and some wonderful supporting actors and that is Raanjhanaa.

While most Indian cinema-goers are no connoisseurs of Cinema and have hardly been known to critically or socially analyze the content of a film, many of them spared no mercy in describing this tale as that of “the girl who used the boy”. We see what we believe and this reaction was no exception to the norm. The part being referred to under this popular analysis was about how the girl (Zoya — Sonam Kapoor) deliberately gets the boy (Kundan — Dhanush) killed by putting him at risk after misleading him into believing that she loves him. Yes, she was wrong. Yes, she committed a rather hateful act. But did she “use” him? She took revenge on him just like he did on her. When he was turned down by her, he ensured that she couldn’t marry the boy she loved and got him killed unknowingly, and that was fine! Yet when she decided to put him in the line of fire because he got her fiancee killed and she couldn’t see him usurping her dead lover’s position, she “used” him?

In fact, halfway through the film, Dhanush’s character uses the girl who pines for him — Swara Bhaskar to go and semi-strip and get promiscuous with a boy just so that he can click them together to defame him and thus prevent his marriage with Sonam’s character. But no one really caught that! Maybe because Dhanush was a boy and isn’t judged with the same lens as Sonam and can thus do what he pleases. A further critical analysis of the film would reveal how Dhanush almost stalks her for most of her life, simple refusing to go away and even slitting his wrist to win her over. Both remain extremely dishonourable, overbearing acts. Yet, neither of the two got pointed out the way Sonam “using” Dhanush got interpreted!

The irony is that I didn’t find anything morally or socially wrong with the Director’s portrayal. The story was engaging, the acting and the music brilliant and the Director’s portrayal was not politically correct but it was raw and real. Do we not see boys stalking girls! Do we not see girls who outgrow their crushes! Do we not see marriages being prevented because of differences in religion and class! Revenge, anger, obsession are often how love stories in a nation such as ours go. Most College campuses have witnessed several affairs consisting of most of these and much more. But what irked me was the selective and completely irrational analysis of otherwise ignorant cinema-goers.

But I guess there isn’t much more than can be expected from a crowd that considers dumb machismo and forced objectification as ‘normal’, so much so that aberrations appear ‘boring’ or in this case, cruelly biased to them!