Strength becomes the woman: Vanaja

A review of Vanaja

The strongest element in Vanaja is indubitably its repertoire of actors. The director, Rajnesh Domalpalli, made the film as part of his MFA at Columbia University. Initially his approach was met with uncertainty by one of his mentors at the university, but he decided to proceed with it nevertheless. An experiment which could have easily bombed, he selected his cast from the lower and middle sections of Indian society. They had no prior acting experience whatsoever. Domalpalli put them through acting workshops for close to a year before shooting commenced, even making some of the cast learn Indian classical dance and song from scratch. To put this into perspective, it takes several years to achieve mastery over these arts in real life. There are scenes in the film where this is difficult to believe, such as one of the final scenes of the film – an exhibition of the Indian dance form of Kuchipudi by Vanaja (who plays the lead role), where the emotions and experience of her character shine through beautifully. A more experienced actor may have struggled with keeping the balance between exhibiting a mastery over dance and raw emotion, all the while showing a vulnerability that comes only with youth. Domalpalli’s approach however, is a resounding success, and has been acknowledged as such at more than 80 film festivals around the globe.

Vanaja is a critical commentary on the Indian caste system, an evil which unfortunately still exists in some parts of the country. Narrated as the coming-of-age story of a young teenager, played by Mamatha Bukhya, Vanaja simultaneously shows the audience glimpses of the stark differences in the lives of those who belong to opposite ends of the social ladder. Traditionally, in India, status and riches accrue to the family of the village head, who has supreme authority in the area. Think the controller of large areas of land, henchmen at his or her command and a loyal and subservient band of followers. In the film, similarly, the village landlady is shown holding fort over her property from her own ‘fort’ – a huge mansion with many more rooms than is necessary for the occupancy of just two people (her son takes up residency with her later in the film), and servants at her beck and call any time of the day. On the other hand, Vanaja’s widower father, a fisherman who has an extreme affinity for his drink, (played hauntingly by Ramachandriah Muthiah, whose real-life professions in the past have included being a cattle-rearer and a sweeper for the local Indian government body), wastes away in poverty.

Certainly one of the most noteworthy performances in the film, Mamatha Bukhya excels in her role as Vanaja. She almost didn’t get selected for the role, but when he heard her sing, Domalpalli was impressed enough to cast her. Picked for the role at age 13, with barely a working knowledge of English (she was educated in the regional language - a common phenomenon in most rural schools in India), Bukhya has shown remarkable maturity and restraint along with the innocence that is needed for the character of Vanaja to succeed. In the film, Vanaja is the sort of 15-year-old girl who doesn’t hesitate to give quick acidic retorts to the boys in her community who tease her mercilessly. A fortune-teller predicts a great future for her as a dancer, and convinced, she persuades her father to get her a job as a household help with the village landlady. Not completely without a plan, though, because the artful teenager knows that the landlady was a reputed dancer and singer during her time. Impressed by her audacity, the landlady agrees to take her on as a student when Vanaja is done with her daily chores.

Vanaja, satisfied and happy, goes about her work religiously, as she does her dance and music lessons. At 15, however, typical of most children her age, her curiosity about sex cannot be squashed (she spies on the landlady’s son as he bathes, and trades peeks with the Ram Babu, the young boy who delivers the mail). This burgeoning sexuality does not escape the attention of Shekhar, the landlady’s US-returned son for whom the landlady has great political aspirations. In a move that is reminiscent of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, in an act that is designed to reflect the imbalance of power, Shekhar rapes the underage Vanaja and she becomes pregnant.

Counseled by an older servant in the house to keep the assault quiet as her social status would be unlikely to get her justice, Vanaja runs away at first, but later, realizing the advantages that money and status would bring to her new son, she returns to the landlady. Weeping copiously, Vanaja promises to relinquish her right to motherhood if she can stay on as a nurse, which she does. However, she is intelligent enough to understand by now how society works, and she decides to take an alternative course of action.

What makes Vanaja eminently watchable is the authentic performance of its cast. Urmila Dhammanagari, as the landlady, is at once authoritative and understanding. Karan Singh as Shekhar is necessarily slimy – but not completely, because Domalpalli paints his character with shades of grey, and Singh actually makes the viewer believe he is not totally evil. One almost feels bad for him, the way he is pushed around by his mother, for example. Krishna and Prabhu Garlapati as Ram Babu (the boy who delivers the mail) and Yadagiri (the cheeky brat who constantly gets on Vanaja’s nerves), are entertainers all the way through. The scene where the young Yadagiri gives a surprisingly sexual jig to a ridiculous tune that has lyrics like ‘Kiss me baby love me baby’ elicits more than a few laughs.

But what holds the film high is Bukhya. This is almost an adult story and Bukhya is but a child, yet she portrays both adult and child qualities equally impressively. In the first half, Vanaja is an innocent young teenager, and this comes through almost effortlessly. For example, the scene where Vanaja looks at the landlady when she plays a board game with her, her eyes sparking with untold mischief. Then when the film gets serious in the latter half, Bukhya displays a strength of character that makes it difficult to believe she was just 14 when the movie was shot. Vanaja’s conversations with her drunken father, the scene where she goes to beg the landlady to take her back, and most notably, the scene where her anger, pain and sorrow are all reflected in her final on-screen dance performance, are evidence of this.

In the latter half, the film has the tendency to meander into being episodic. It seems as though the camera trails Vanaja without a specific purpose, just to see what she is doing. In between the caste issue, the dance angle and the mother-child angle (Domalpalli got the idea for the film after watching ‘Sophie’s Choice’), somewhere something gets lost. It is difficult to place a finger on what exactly that is. Is it that the viewer is not entirely sure whether the film has succeeded in dealing with the issue of caste adequately because it starts to focus more on Vanaja’s personal experiences, which though borne out of the caste factor, also have to do with her becoming a mother and being a dancer? Is it that the film starts out with dance as an anchor, but later gets eclipsed by the caste issue, and then the mother-child issue? These are questions that only the director can answer.

The film has been released in Andhra Pradesh, the director’s home state, but has not yet had a nation-wide release in India, the country of its origin. That is often a struggle that independent films have to deal with, despite the fact that they are an important reflection of the society they are staged in. Meanwhile, Vanaja released in New York on August 31^st at Cinema Village and on September 14^th at ImaginAsian, and will subsequently release across the United States.