Saturday School. Crocodile justice

Perhaps the most powerful image in the Mahabharata is that of Draupadi on the field of battle, bathing her long hair in the blood of her once-tormentor Dushasana. The aesthetics of the epic poem overlap, for just a moment, with those of the B-movie. The strange, perverse pleasure of this scene comes from the vent it gives to an ethical emotion too visceral to be expressible within the canons of good taste.

Popular culture everywhere, and through the ages, has recognised the power that the idea of revenge exercises on human minds. Like the idea of love, it has a power independent of, and sometimes in tension with, the demands of morality.

Draupadi’s was the original khoon bhari maang : the parting of the hair lined not with the vermilion that is supposed to be the mark of the married woman in certain Hindu communities, but with blood. The lurid phrase is the name of a revenge drama from 1988, a hit at the time and still a cult favourite among viewers of a certain generation.

Made up to look conspicuously dowdy when the film begins, Rekha plays a recently widowed young mother of two children tricked into marrying a glamorous man-on-the-make who wants her money (Kabir Bedi in his most loathsome onscreen avatar). The film’s most notorious scene — where Bedi throws an unsuspecting Rekha into the jaws of crocodiles — is, like much else in the film’s plot, a straight lift from the 1983 Australian television melodrama Return to Eden . But the Hindi dialogue has a strange, compelling power all its own. Spared by the crocodile, though badly disfigured, Rekha utters that wonderful, resonant word, inteqaam : like maang , it can be translated into English (revenge), but at what a cost!

She sells the diamond earrings from her bridal trousseau, finds an obliging American cosmetic surgeon to give her a new face, and returns as the far-from-dowdy Rekha we know so well. Naturally, no one, not even the Bedi character, realises that this sultry diva is the retiring hausfrau he tried to murder in the first act. The climactic set-piece gives us the supremely satisfying sight of Rekha as avenging angel on horseback, wielding a rifle and a crocodile-leather riding crop. Bedi tries playing it cool. These, he says, are the vain threats of a feeble woman. Wrong move: no more Ms Feeble Woman, says Rekha, and launches into the speech we’ve been waiting for. Sita, the Virgin Mary, Savitri, the goddess Durga and Razia Sultana all get a hat tip.

Sure, says Rekha, she could have handed him over to the police. That would be justice of a kind. But this kind feels better. Just for a moment, as Bedi hangs desperately at the precipice, begging for mercy, we see her hesitate. But no, this sister has no damns left to give, and the crocodiles have been promised a picnic on the rocks.

We shouldn’t get carried away. Even while Rekha is telling us that hell hath no fury like a women cast by her grasping husband to riverine crocodiles, the filmmakers (needless to say, all male) have her clad in gratuitously tight black leather jodhpurs. The fantasy this is playing to is not, needless to say, a feminist fantasy. Worse, its focus on the individual male baddie risks concealing precisely what feminists are concerned to reveal: that violence against women has a good deal to do with a structure that goes beyond any particular villainous male.

This kind of revenge fantasy stands in an uneasy relationship with demands for structural reform. Revenge successfully carried out can feel like a balancing of some cosmic ledger. But there is no such ledger, and the survivor of abuse, even when avenged, cannot expunge the fact of abuse from the story of her life. What has happened will not un-happen, even if some kinds of justice are better than others at giving the wronged a sense of closure. The point is to remake the world so that there will be no wronged women to be avenged.

Yet, the half-virtues of Khoon Bhari Maang are real. As the film scholar Carol J Clover says, more generally of the genre of so-called ‘slasher films’, in her classic work Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992), it makes its audience identify with its female protagonist and her allies. It sees the wrong done her as a wrong to her body and its integrity, not her husband’s honour. It does not tell her to calm down, or to forgive and forget. It tells her to hold on to her anger and to use what arms she can muster (plastic surgery, riding crops, cunning) to get herself the nearest thing to justice.

(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)

Nakul Krishnais a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge

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