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ZOOMING IN: A story told and retold
The stories that happen around us are often the stories that best inspire a film. They stir your spirit and touch you in a way that only film reels that roll out reality can. Indian director Prabhakar Shukla’s first feature,
Kahani Gudiya Ki (The Story of Gudiya), ventures into the anguished life of a Muslim girl from Meerut (in North India) who is tossed around like a puppet.
She was happiest when she married Lance Naik Mohammed Arif, a soldier in the Indian Army. But just days later Arif was called to fight the Kargil war. Nobody knew what happened to him there, and his disappearance was seen as desertion. Five years later, Gudiya, reconciled to never seeing Arif again, married Taufeeq. A year later, a pregnant Gudiya learnt that Arif had been taken prisoner in Pakistan and freed as a goodwill gesture. She recoiled in horror when Arif wanted her back, and magnanimously offered to take care of Taufeeq’s child. An unfeeling clergy asked Gudiya to go back to Arif. After all, her first marriage had not been nullified. She returned, gave birth to the child and died of multiple organ failure in January 2006.
It is Gudiya’s tale that Shukla captures on film. The director never met his protagonist but his writer, Ashok Hamrahi, had. When Gudiya’s terrible experience made media headlines, Hamrahi, who was then a Lucknow-based journalist, met her and her family and was moved by her turmoil and horrified by a cruel, contradicting society. He says he decided then that
Gudiya would be the subject of a film.
Often appearing stagy with words muffling visuals, Kahani Gudiya Ki lacks, above all, a certain conviction. Maybe not enough time has passed for a more effective perspective to emerge. The intense trauma that Gudiya faced, having to switch emotional loyalty, has not been portrayed with an intensity that could have taken this film into another realm. Here was a young woman already shaken by widowhood, asked to forsake her feelings for a man whose child she was carrying.
Bollywood actress Divya Dutt essays Gudiya, Arif Zakaria her first husband, Arif and Rajpal Yadav her second husband, Taufeeq. Though Gudiya retains her name in the screen version, Arif becomes Aslam and Taufeeq, Feroz.
Kahani Gudiya Ki is a longish work that has all the weakness of a debutant. Often appearing stagy with words muffling visuals, the film lacks, above all, a certain conviction. Maybe, not enough time has passed for a more effective perspective to emerge. The intense trauma that Gudiya faced, having to switch emotional loyalty — which took her from the familiar to the unfamiliar — has not been portrayed with an intensity that could have taken this film into another realm. Here was a young woman already shaken by widowhood, asked to forsake her feelings for a man whose child
she was carrying. And, mind you, Gudiya was no city-bred, convent-educated girl.Divya does little justice to that part and remains, in true Bollywood style, a glamour doll. Strangely, Shukla’s choice of actors ignores the fact that the Meerut girl was very ordinary looking. However, Zakaria as Aslam and Seema Biswas as his mother offer above average performances, with Yadav as Feroz not far behind.
Had the work been scripted more imaginatively and edited a trifle ruthlessly, it could have made a far greater impact on a grave social issue. But the film works when it documents man’s inherent obsession for control over woman. It is clear in Shukla’s narrative that Aslam wants Gudiya back merely to exercise his male authority or superiority while an all-men clergy backs him. One sees little love or affection in him for a woman he had not seen in years. For him, it becomes a matter of pride to get his wife back from the ‘other’ man.
And, not surprisingly, both men, who had fought for the hapless girl’s affection and attention, remarried soon after she died. The child is now nurtured by Gudiya’s parents. Could there be a better finale for a story of such supreme selfishness?
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