IF THE MOUNTAIN WILL NOT COME TO YOU
A family goes to set up an engagement for their marriageable-age daughter, while also hoping to catch glimpses of a majestic mountain peak. Over the course of an hour-and-a-half, each member of the extended family catches some glimpses, but not probably of what they were hoping for.
Satyajit Ray’s first colour film is also his first original screenplay, and probably the best one he ever wrote. Characters take long beautiful walks and keep crossing paths, some know where they are going and some don’t, but each one is left to wonder where there exists greater freedom – in the vast mountain range or in their own thoughts.
Human (And) Nature
It is revealed that the family have been in Darjeeling for seventeen days and yet to catch a glimpse of the great Kanchenjungha mountain because it remains shrouded in mist. It is also revealed that the head of the family, Indranath, is trying to set his younger daughter up with a very eligible young man, but is yet to seal the deal because his daughter too is shrouded in some uncertainty.
Of course, if there is one person who never entertains any uncertainty in his life, it is Indranath. He has never had a moment of doubt over his actions – whether it is to have stayed away from the national independence struggle, whether it is how he is as a husband, whether it is how he has chosen grooms for his two daughters – Indranath knows he’s always right. After all, nobody has ever told him otherwise. It’s quite logical that a man who successfully runs companies can easily make some quick calculations on match-making.
The groom he has chosen is a success like himself, educated in the United Kingdom and earning a salary four or five times the average. With that much pedigree and money how can Monisha, his younger daughter, ever be unhappy? It escapes his notice how unhappy his own wife seems to be with him and his similar pedigree, but since she has never said anything it must be smooth sailing.
Then there is the elder daughter, who is carrying on illicit communication with an ex-lover because she was made to marry someone of her father’s choosing. Not only is she unhappy herself, her husband is devastated when he finds out. They have a child together, and if the couple were to split apart then the child would pay for her parents’ mistakes and her grandfather’s arrogance. But everybody’s silence gives Indranath the chance to repeat the same mistake with his other daughter.
His son, meanwhile, appears stuck in the juvenile pursuit of women, but escapes the attention of his family. Like his young niece he goes round and round on the same ride, enjoying every bit of it, while others have to deal with grown-up problems. He has freedom to carry on playing the game of love without any plans being made for him, at least not before he’s ready. The women he pursues also display the freedom that the two sisters lack, playing along the game of flirtation without anyone to interfere. The sisters’ affluent background seems to clip their wings.
In all this Ashok, the outsider in their midst, is taken along for the ride. He, too, is exceedingly polite and says nothing so everybody thinks he is happy to be dumped on with their baggage. But eventually his fortitude breaks and he expresses his discontentment at Indranath’s bulldozing behaviour.
Seeing the shock he has caused, Ashok is delighted and decides to be frank with everyone. He cannot allow others to ride roughshod over his feelings even if he is supposed to be at their mercy. He cannot keep quiet when he is also being accosted. He must speak, because it is clear that until he does nobody will know what’s going on.
It’s strange to see how human nature has become trapped in an unending set of etiquettes and expectations where a family hides their true fears and desires from each other and where quiet suffering keeps the covers on every mistake that has ever been made. And fittingly this story unfolds in a hill station built by the British (another culture that’s known to keep a tight lid on their feelings) and within a very anglicised family.
The locals, who don’t have the best representation in this film, seem to be symbolic of a truer state of being where not so much is bound up by social convention. They have been turned into servants and service-providers on their own land, but they really should be seen as part of the grand landscape that everybody comes there to admire. Once again the human has been separated from nature.
Even apart from the overbearing tendency of Indranath, have the others succumbed to their zombie-like state of existence willingly or against their wishes? He may be easy to dislike, but what Ashok could achieve, why couldn’t his family do sooner? Even Indranath’s brother-in-law, a much kinder man, has no qualms about willy-nilly descending on Ashok and swooping him away like a bird of prey and then carrying on a one-sided conversation with him. This is not a bad man and not one who expects silence, and yet Ashok gives him exactly that.
Very often we save our worst behaviour for the ones close to us, and very often politeness is more harmful than speaking out. It’s not that it is a bad quality, in fact it is one of the most benign, but it is one that can conceal something toxic. When a daughter walks quietly into loveless marriages because that’s easier than having a frank conversation with a parent – that’s politeness that can kill you.
Institutionalised
Marriage is an institution, we are told. And that’s probably why we expect we have to play by institutional rules. There are strict instructions, especially for upper class and caste people, to ascertain whom to marry – reputation, money, prospects, even skin colour. There is no room for foolish tasks like desire, companionship, and mutual fulfilment. These are as useless as a bicycle for a fish. What really matters is how inheritance can be received and passed on.
This is why Indranath feels he can close this deal, meaning the marriage contract between his daughter and the high-salary groom, before finishing the trip. There is nothing unmanageable about this union, unlike the mighty but shy mountain.
When Kanchenjungha seems to refuse to give a glimpse, she could almost be saying that she does not give a hoot about our expectations. There is nothing to say that staying there for a fortnight will ensure a sighting, just like a jungle safari need not offer any assured tiger sighting. Nature carries on despite us, not for us. And the human heart also beats despite us, even though it is in our core. We cannot make it stop, just as we cannot make it start.
Like the way in which the locals of Darjeeling became second-class citizens on their own land after the town was gentrified, so also is love a second-class citizen in the gentrified town of marriage.
The strange thing is that the institutionalisation of marriage is sold to us with the promise that it generates the highest probability of happiness. Like the way the modern world thinks it can use algorithms to improve all processes of living, so too have people believed in match-making since ancient times. After all, the parent has only the child’s best interests at heart.
The problem is not in the intention, but the execution. By relying too much on the algorithm of marriage we have made ourselves incapable of choosing right partners for ourselves. Take the case of Monisha, the dreamy literature student who doesn’t know her own heart. She may not want to get married to the man her father has chosen, but she also doesn’t seem to know what it is that she is looking for in a partner. Her father hasn’t prepared her to take her own feelings into account, and neither has her mother, and that’s why even if the match is a good one she wouldn’t get to know it.
For his part, the intended groom is actually a good man. He is honest, even revealing his flaws, and doesn’t intend to force Monisha into a marriage that she doesn’t seem to be ready for. The fact that she doesn’t refer to him by his first name, but as Mr Banerjee, should have made that clear to him. The problem with this institution is that even an intended beneficiary like him can be victim to it. It wouldn’t benefit him to be in a loveless marriage just as it didn’t benefit the elder sister’s husband. Only some utterly conceited and uninvested person can see this situation and feel it deserves to stand the test of time.
The problem with institutionalising marriage is like institutionalising love itself, or even life. It a many-splendored thing and to try and formulate it denies the very vibrancy of all of life and reduced it into a simpering mass of contradictions. It robs us of our human nature.
When Monisha is uncertain, it is because she is trying to see everything the future holds at once. This is because the institution of marriage tells us that this is possible. If we are taught to see marriage like a lab experiment that gives the same results under the same conditions, we will naturally try to achieve perfect repetition. But that’s not the case at all. No two people are the same, or can be the same. Hence the belief that one can achieve the same results induced under the same conditions is a hoax.
Marriage is always an experiment, and no matter how much we try and control it we will never possess any complete knowledge of it. And it is not at all necessary that people must expose themselves to its vagaries. Those who recognise that it is not for them are best advised to follow their instinct and not be forced into it at all, or until they are ready at a later time. But for those who feel they want that kind of companionship in their life, they must be willing to be led by their hearts, and then to also be led by the soundness of their judgement. Love requires compromise, and it requires faith. While there can never be guarantees, that doesn’t mean there should be formulations.
Kanchenjungha is very much there even if she is covered by mists. And she has been there for millennia before us, and will be there for millennia after. Only the ones who dare to climb it will ever know her and be intimate in her embrace. Similarly love and marriage are fantastic human experiences, but they belong to those who dare. No one standing on the side-lines can describe it, no one without courage can define it. One has to give it time before she reveals her full majesty.