Zubeidaa

Based on the story of writer Khalid Mohamed's own mother, Zubeidaa (2001) tells of her unhappy life and untimely death in the early years of India's independence. Zubeidaa's story is framed by the attempts of her adult son Riyaz (Rajit Kapoor) to investigate decades later the life of the mother he barely knew.

Warning: spoilers follow.

Zubeidaa (Karisma Kapoor in an excellent performance) is buffeted by forces she doesn't understand and can't control. First her traditionalist Muslim father (Amrish Puri), himself a filmmaker, forces her to give up her aspirations to be a movie actress and marries her off unwillingly to the son of a family friend. The marriage scene, where a grimly silent Zubeidaa refuses to give her assent and her father speaks for her, shows that even the possibility of defiance is denied to her.

A year later, Zubeidaa's husband is convinced to divorce her and return to Pakistan with his father (the authority of fathers can't be contested even by their sons, it seems). Zubeidaa is left with a baby boy and the stigma of being a divorced mother. But to her parents' dismay, she isn't content to spend the rest of her life sequestered at home. At a polo match she meets Maharaja Vijayendra "Victor" Singh (Manoj Bajpai), who after the proverbial whirlwind courtship takes her to Fatehpur to be his second wife. Zubeidaa's short-lived joy is dashed, though, when her father insists on keeping her son, despite Victor's assurances that Riyaz can be raised as a Muslim.

Zubeidaa's romantic fantasies soon collide with the realities of Victor's relationship to his first wife, the Maharani Mandira Devi (Rehka), who is Hindu and the mother of his sons. Zubeidaa chafes under the precedence Mandira must be given and the time that Victor must spend with her. And when Victor decides to contest the provincial elections, he tours the villages with his Hindu consort, and not his Muslim wife.

The film touches on many issues: women's lack of freedom, the wounds of Partition, the second-class status of Muslims in a Hindu-dominated society, the attempt by the post-Partition Indian government to disempower the hereditary ruling classes, the conflict between the traditional and the new. The treatment of these issues by Mohamed and director Shyam Benegal is unusually subtle; there are no heroes, villains, or melodrama, only ordinary people acting out of comprehensible, if sometimes hypocritical or cruel, motives.

Much credit is due to Mohamed, Benegal and the actors for the many telling moments in the film. When Zubeidaa and the Maharani first meet, Mandira criticizes Zubeidaa's sleeveless choli; it's clear to us and to Zubeidaa that although Mandira reluctantly accepts Zubeidaa's presence, she's jealous of her place in Victor's affections. Yet, the next time we see Zubeidaa she has silently changed into a more demure style--her begrudging concession to Mandira's authority within the household. Later, when an angry Zubeidaa creates a scene at the airport by insisting on being taken on what turns out to be a fatal plane flight in place of the Maharani, Mandira's shame and humiliation are expressed in a single lowered glance at those gathered to see them off. The nuanced acting and directing are matched by A. R. Rahman's typically superb score.

The problem with Zubeidaa is its heroine. While her unwillingness to be limited to her traditional roles gains our full sympathy, that sympathy is slowly eroded by her displays of willfulness, childishness and petulance throughout the film. Her rebellion remains little more than simmering resentment that occasionally explodes into fits of pique. In fact, it's suggested that she may have deliberately caused the plane crash that took her life and that of her husband, a suspicion only partly dispelled in the film's final moments. We wait in vain for Zubeidaa to recognize that anything other than getting her own way might be at stake--to grow up, to put it bluntly. She is ultimately a victim not only of a patriarchal society, but of her own self-centeredness.

And so despite the many pleasures that this intelligent and well-acted film offers, Zubeidaa's limitations make Zubeidaa ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. Still, it is very much worth seeing, and makes me curious about the two other semi-autobiographical films on which Mohamed and Benegal collaborated, Mammo (1994) and Sardari Begum (1996).