Lust Stories sides with traditional authority

If there is one motif that Bollywood films cannot do without it is the motif of ‘love’. It is so ubiquitous in popular film narrative that to describe a film as a ‘love story’ is not to describe it all. There are many features that go along with love in popular films and one is that lovers are never in doubt that they are meant only for each other and their love is ‘eternal’. Love can be between different classes, castes or religions but when that happens, popular films usually offer a message about equality of human beings or invoke a transcendental object of loyalty going beyond such divisions.

‘Lust’ is not often an issue in Indian cinema but there are occasional (A certificate) films where the notion is dealt with, and the general sense is that while ‘love’ is spiritual, ‘lust’ is physical, and a result of irrepressible bodily urges. A crisis is created when the two need clear demarcation, and a transgression involving lust is condoned after clarification is duly given. Still, the dividing line between ‘love’ and ‘lust’ remains nebulous and it is in this context that the collection of short films titled ‘Lust Stories’ on Netflix makes interesting viewing. The four films are directed by Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar.

Of the four films, the last one by Karan Johar is the most amusing because he treats the notion with farce–it is about a newly married school teacher in an unfulfilling marital relationship who resorts to mechanical means to quench her ‘lust’, and gets into trouble with her in-laws. The first three films are different in that they are solemn about the notion. In the first one by Anurag Kashyap, a woman teacher in a college seduces one of her male students. Kalindi (Radhika Apte) is in an ‘open’ relationship with her husband and she gets into an affair with Tejas but becomes jealous over Tejas’ girlfriend. In the second film by Zoya Akhtar, young bachelor Ajit (Neil Bhoopalam) is into a sexual relationship with his maid Sudha (Bhumi Pednekar), who is required to make tea and serve snacks to his prospective wife and her parents who visit. In the third film by Dibakar Banerjee, Reena (Manisha Koirala) is married to Salman (Sanjay Kapoor) but is in a relationship with his best friend Sudhir (Jaideep Ahlawat). Barring the film by Karan Johar which is different, what is interesting is how the directors interpret ‘lust’ as a notion.

All the three other films are about relationships without social sanction – a teacher and her student, a bachelor and his maid, and a woman and her husband’s best friend. Where ‘lust’ and love were traditionally distinguished through the emotions associated with each of them, it would seem from the three films that only a relationship with social sanction can claim to involve ‘love’.

Although the term ‘love’ is not used explicitly in opposition to ‘lust’, each of the transgressing protagonists is in another relationship with a greater degree of permanence and might hence be ‘love’ – even if it is stale – or (as in Zoya Akhtar’s film) might develop into ‘love’. It is significant that the maid Sudha, after being nonplussed by the casual way Ajit is romancing his would-be wife under her nose, accepts her situation; she does not make a claim on his ‘love’, indicating that she is conceding that their relationship is driven only by ‘lust’.

Differentiating between love and lust may not be more than romanticising ‘true love,’ but distinguishing between the spiritual and the physical does serve a higher purpose of some sort that differentiating on the basis of social sanction does not.

Many of the great tragedies with love at their centre try to show love as flourishing despite the obstacles placed in its path by social diktat and I would cite Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina here. Imagine what would have happened if Anna and Vronsky both admitted that the feeling between them was only ‘lust’. The story would collapse since there would be nothing ennobling about it.

Anna taking her own life on account of ‘failed lust’ would also be ludicrous. For a relationship in literature or film to be considered driven by ‘love’, it must necessarily overcome social obstacles placed in its path, which means that the relationship cannot have ready social sanction. Bollywood ignores the notion in Lust Stories and one cannot be certain why. But I propose that this points to a level of conservativeness that might not have been suspected, considering the ‘liberal’ views of Bollywood personalities on talk shows.

Castigating unsanctioned sexual relationships as ‘lust’, a debased romantic category, and upholding only sanctioned relationships also echoes what is happening in the public space. Couples who defy social diktats in ‘love’ are being hunted down by ‘traditional authority’. Perhaps the logic covertly employed by such authority is that any sexual relationship outside that socially sanctioned can only be based on ‘lust’.

(The author is a well-known film scholar and critic)