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Magazine
A new divide
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The vapid and monied class of `Monsoon Wedding' has probably never heard of the word uxorious and this is a new divide in its already divided world, says T.G. VAIDYANATHAN.
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`Monsoon Wedding'... secrets that surface eventually.
IN my essay "A Divided World" on Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding (The Hindu, Sunday Magazine dated January 13, 2002), I described "Chadha Uncle's ... attempt to enlighten Aliya on the spelling of Roman names" as pathetic. Not less pathetic were my own attempts in unravelling that scene, for the word uxorious which puzzles young Aliya has nothing Roman about it. But it is enough to puzzle that loud-mouthed ignoramus — Chadha Uncle — who mistakes it for the word luxurious with which it has nothing in common except a faint phonetic similarity. No wonder he thinks the word is actually misspelt and merely needs an l to make sense. It is certainly a revealing, almost a Freudian slip, you might say. Except that, in the social circles of Chadha Uncle, the word in question is unlikely ever to be known, let alone employed in conversation. It belongs to an entirely different order of being and a vastly superior quality of life. The talented and inward-looking Ria — whose love of Tagore can go hand in hand with her light-hearted jibbing of Bengalis as pretentious — could surely have helped Aliya to sort it out. But she was never asked. The vapid and monied class of Monsoon Wedding — plagued by perpetual "cash-flow problems" — has probably never heard of the word uxorious and this is a new divide in the already divided world of Monsoon Wedding.
"The New Shorter Oxford" (1993) defines uxorious as "greatly or excessively fond of one's wife, doting" (Volume 2, p. 3535). From what we see in the film, neither that distinguished-looking paedophile, Tej Puri, nor that much-married man, the bearded Talk Show host, Vikram — who is having a quiet fling on the side with the restless and aimless Aditi — can be accused of being "greatly or excessively fond of [his] wife". The upper-class is too immured in money and cushioned by creature comforts and servants to know anything about uxoriousness. There are, of course, some exceptions to this who manage to rise above their class. Ria, for instance, who plans to do a creative writing course in the U.S., is seen holding a copy of Tagore in her sleeping hands. In marked contrast, Aditi, sleeping beside Ria, is very much of her class. Bored and petulant, hating most things Indian (look at her reaction to that lovely tune which grates on her nerves in Ria's room) although she protests her love of India to her fiance, Aditi is clearly an avid reader of Cosmopolitan — seen by her bedside and so dear to the monied class — and is in many ways like her equally corpulent kid-brother who is seen watching inane cookery shows on TV. One wonders what on earth Aditi will find in Houston to calm her frayed and frazzled nerves. In that short interlude following Neha's electrifying number, the night before the wedding, there is a breezy exchange of views about kissing which leads inexorably to the film's Moment of Truth. Bored and tired opinions are bandied about till Aliya — eternally the observer — drops her little bombshell and suddenly the prevailing atmosphere of listless banality goes up in a cloud of smoke.
But, for the brute majority of the ostentatious upper-class — the word that Bengali woman uses to characterise the Punjabis, uxorious with its implication of passion or obsession — uxoricide is killing one's wife, a crime of passion which is the subject of Shakespeare's Othello that I mentioned in passing towards the end of "A Divided World" — is something that is alien to the world of Monsoon Wedding. This empty and self-devouring elite is only capable of a crime as ignoble and revolting as paedophilia. It is their equivalent for a crime of passion. We may remember that in Nabokov's Lolita, paedophilia leads eventually to murder. In Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding it only leads to expulsion from paradise and the only paradise the Indian will ever know is the womb-like, all-embracing family.
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