Satvan Ghoda, Suraj ka: A narrative delight

Reviewed: Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda: (The Seventh Horse Of The Sun)
Director: Shyam Benegal
Story: Dharamveer Bharti
Cast: Rajat Kapoor, Raghuveer Yadav, Amrish Puri, Neena Gupta, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Illa Arun, Pallavi Joshi, Lalit Tiwari, K.K.Raina, Ravi Jhankal and others

Some movies dazzle the viewers with a tight gripping story, some with spellbinding performances of the actors and still a few others with brilliant background music, a bit of slick action, great editing and what not, but Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda dazzles with its narration, mind-boggling as it is. I will no doubt effuse with happiness when I start describing the movie and fill buckets with my profuse applaud for a movie directed by Shyam Benegal, accepted as the master craftsman by people from all over and over all strata, so let me at the outset divide the review in two, One for those not initiated to the magic of Benegal and his crew but do want to dip in the pool of brilliance, and the other for those who are a convert. With the previous long statement, longer than most I have ever written without the Microsoft word warning me with green curly wavy lines, Let me rephrase and mention now that Benegal may be brilliant but Dharamveer Bharati is no doubt a genius. The movie is no doubt the filmmaker’s vision but the novelty is only because of brilliance named Dharamveer Bharati.

For the Un-initiated:
(For the people unaware of a gem called Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda)

Fiction: Good movies are supposed to relax the senses.
Fact: Movies should no doubt be enjoyable in addition to challenge the thinking and bringing a social message to the hearts of the viewer.

Says who? Manik Mullah (The sentence being tastefully modified to suit my future ranting)

Without my fancies running abound screaming, Let me start by asserting that Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda is a movie for audiences with matured tastes and let me clarify before any brickbats come my way, I am not being judgmental or being opinionated here, and I think there should be different movies for varied tastes. Coming back to my narrative, the movie is a near accurate adaptation of the novella of the same name by Dr Bharati who tells a simple tale of the clichéd emotions like love and betrayal ranged across a period of seven afternoons. The tales are simple narratives of low middle class families adjoined in miseries in a hot and humid, nameless (Don’t remember the name, If mentioned) town in the Hindi heartland of northern India. All these tales (connected by a common thread with common characters appearing nondescript in a non-chronological random manner) are narrated by an unreliable narrator named Manik Mullah.

When I talk about narration, I should step back a bit. The movie starts in an art gallery with a short man, ordinary looking, nattily dressed in a Safari suit, peering at paintings. He stops in front of a painting with women taking bath and guys rambling around, basically a busy locality of some sort, and suddenly starts with his narrative about a nameless town of some yester years when he was a reticent guy and a friend of a ingenious storyteller named Manik mullah who used to entertain them with impromptu stories with morals (hardly so) drawn out of it.

The stories he churns out are commonplace and have similarity with Sharat Chandra’s Devdas in content, with love and separation as a permanent motif and lust, betrayal, meekness, illicit relationships, amorality and other human emotions thrown in. But describing the movie in terms of only the content of narratives is describing the sea as only a storehouse of water. This is one movie, which I can say has the maximum usage of literary techniques, The unreliable narrator is the mainstay, then the use of Chekov’s gun, author surrogate, foreshadowing, in media res, are just to name a few. In the movie, Manik mullah comments that only a person, who doesn’t have a story to tell needs techniques, maybe this was the author’s point of reminding the viewer to take notice of the paraphernalia attached to the narratives without concentrating on the commonplace unoriginal narrative inspired from the novels of Sharat Chandra and thousand others on the politics and life of a small town.

Without riveting on the story fearing that I may involuntarily divulge information, Let me shift to the acting department. The movie when released in 1994 had some seasoned actors like Amrish Puri, Raghuveer Yadav, Neena Gupta, Pallavi Joshi, K.K.Raina, Lalit Tiwari etc. and newcomers of the Benegal stable, who in no time became the who’s who of art cinema like Rajeshwari Sachdev, Ravi Jhankal and above all Rajit Kapoor to whom the movie no doubt (co-) belongs to. Having read the English translation of the novel, I had a vague picture of Manik mullah sketched and Rajit Kapoor fits in snuggly in that picture of mine and I am confident, in any picture of Manik Mullah. The nuances of the character are so very well portrayed by Rajit that he just transforms into the character displaying hurt with a twitch of his lips, and curling up his eyebrows, anger with a hasty shift of eyes and pain with a prolonged unfocussed look. Rajit Kapoor, primarily a theatre artist has never done it better and sadly will always be remembered as Byomkesh Bakshi and not as Manik Mullah (Not that I hate BB, Just that love MM better). All others have brought life to their characters and have done a commendable job. I want also to commend Amrish Puri, Neena Gupta and Lalit Tiwari for having done a wonderful job with their characters. Amrish Puri, with a crooked grin with hopes of lust marked on his face, when dressing up for the evening, is one of the best moments of Amrish for me, ever.

Coming to Shyam Benegal, applauds don’t seem enough. With a repertoire of films like Ankur, Nishanth, Manthan, Mandi etc., Benegal has proved his caliber and understanding of human pain, time and again. During the course of the movie, the screenplay changes direction, the pace sometimes race ahead and sometimes stall to a deafening silence. The sun outside sometimes is valiant like the afternoon sun while some other time pleasant like the evening. Like the sun, the characters also change colors, with Manik sometimes appearing as a naïve observer, sometimes the oppressed individual and sometimes the oppressor himself. Like the triumvirate of Hindu Mythology, Brahma Vishnu and Mahesh, he has a different role in each of the story. This I may have to take up in a separate thread for the fear of proving spoilers here. The camera movements are pleasant without induced jerks and the visuals are pleasantly placed as well without urgency.

The usage of music is one, which I would so love to describe. There is just one song, “Yeh Shaame, Yeh Sab Ki Sab Shaame ”, which is a romantic song shot with Lily (Manik’s second lover) and Manik and shot in the outdoors describing the afternoons spent together. The only other song is a folk song (Hindora, if am not wrong) sung by Neena Gupta that pierces the heart with a non-indulgent music hanging around while the loud high-pitched voice takes over. The background music is used intelligently enhancing the sketch on the celluloid and creating a human picture.

The movie should be seen without expectations and with a pinch of salt and best viewed at a time when the mind is relaxed and receptive to ideas that keep churning out like the nectar and the poison inter-twined like the first ever churning of the sea by the good and the evil combined.

For the Believers:
(People who have seen and love Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda)

Caution: Spoilers Ahead

At the outset let me set the agenda correct, the following is an interpretation of the movie according to my understanding and I take full blame or credit for the same. I would love to discuss if there is any point, someone take offense to.

For me the key to the movie lies in the title, “The seventh horse of the sun” and like the movie there can be multiple meanings to the same and all of these may be the correct explanation to it. Similar in trying to understand the meaning of life, each Individual on seeing the movie may have a different interpretation and if it suits the character of the view that’s the truth. Let me voice my varied interpretations, May be the sun is life and the seven horses together pull the existence, sometimes these horses race ahead and sometimes slow down to a standstill describing the ups and downs in life. The seventh horse, which is the slowest horse, makes everyone else slows down as it is the weakest as well but that, like Manik said, is the horse of future that later will decide the course that life would take. If we look at the movie, may be the master narrator played by Raghuveer Yadav, is a taking a biographic dig contemplating that the weakling like him, mostly snubbed and hardly given importance became a writer while fibbers and storytellers like Manik Mullah just faded away. Maybe the movie is about potential and the lack of rising to it. Manik Mullah with his impromptu story telling could have reached the level of his ideals like Flaubert, Maupassant and Chekov but in the end he failed to rise to the potential.

The second interpretation is based on the key word “Weak Horse”. Maybe the movie is about the lack of strength in character of Manik Mullah. In the first story, he is a naïve teen who enjoys the company of the childish Jamuna but fails to stand up for her. He also portrays himself as the blameless child with Jamuna taking over the primary role in their relationship. In the second romance between him and Lily, he floats over the border between friendship and romance and again fails to take a stand when Lily is forced to get married to a guy she hardly knew. In the third romance of his, Manik as a narrator, comes out as a lover forsaking his love and sacrificing it, at the alter of social correctness. From a character with a halo, he transforms to having shades of gray and finally being a villain in the piece. Like discussed earlier, Manik plays each of the triumvirate of Hindu mythology in the stories. In the first, he is the progenitor of Jamuna’s desire to continue living, in the second, he the preserver of Lily’s chastity and in the third he is the destroyer of Satti’s hopes and ambitions.

The third interpretation stems from Manik’s statement that the seventh horse is the horse of future, which holds all dreams and desires and visions that stories are made of. For me the movie was for literature what “The Dreamers” is for movies. So maybe the author (Raghuveer Yadav) intended to provide a clue to Manik Mullah being a figment of his imagination after all. All the characters cease to suffer anymore and become fictional ones and the visions that Shyam saw reminiscent of Dante’s Divine comedy all becomes lifeless visions.

This leads me to the most interesting part of the movie, the convergence of reality and fiction. The movie begins with the surmise that Manik was a storyteller par excellence, his existence never in doubt. The story begins with Jamuna as a sweet love story without much value then takes up the social context on Shyam’s mentioning dowry system as an social evil. The third story takes up Maheshwar Dalal (Amrish Puri’s Character) and talks of filial oppression and amorality in lower middle class families. While the first two stories had ended in a happy ending the third does a U-Turn to end with a violent death. The fourth story again meanders on the border of love and separation with the mood generally light and the last story begins with a violent surmise of a quick shot of Satti interspersed with lazy medium shots and end with a death and introspection. The viewer now is led to believe that Manik is a fibber who can create impromptu stories and dazzle listeners but all these fizzle out when Manik is made to face Satti with the listeners in tandem. At this point, the question is put forward as what was real? Was Manik real and everything else just fibbing, if so, then what of Sati? Or was it that all the stories were true and Manik was telling stories of his life, strange, as it may seem? The other possibility could have been that Manik himself was fictitious and thus the smile in Raghuveer Yadav’s face when he says, He became a writer. The smile may be symbolism of the viewers intelligently fooled and thus dazzled.

Whatever the case maybe, I believe the movie is a cornerstone of art-house movies, that similar to Rashomon and Ek din achanak brought narrative techniques to world cinema. I adore the movie with the reference to Devdas, with narratives taking shape with change in landscape. The cow in the beginning of the first scene, the knife in the fifth. The reference to Devsena in the 4th story when challenged by a friend and so on.

The movie should be watched and relished for one self. I saw the movie first as a kid, twelve years may be and I didn’t understand a bit. Each time I saw it, I added a little bit to it and today after 4-5 viewings my movie is far from complete. And all the afternoons I spent watching this movie, sing to me:
“ Yeh Shaame, Sab Ki Sab Shaame, Kya inka koi Arth nahin,
Ghabra ke jab inhe yaad kiya, kya un shaamon ka arth nahin “