To Sir, with Love?
Ratna, a young widow, migrates to the city in order to provide for her family and support herself. A person with no degrees and certificates, she understands the importance of educating her younger sister — for the continuation of whose education she is the primary provider. Ratna, like the many young women migrants in the city of Mumbai, ends up finding a job as a domestic worker. Here she meets the spirited Laxmi tai who has roughed it out in the city and in the high society neighbourhoods for much longer. In India, 78.4% of urban women workers are in the informal economy and about 9.4% are domestic workers, most of whom fail to avail any social security benefits — their collectivity makes their conditions liveable.
Ratna is ambitious, she dreams of becoming a fashion designer and as a first step towards realising the dream she decides to take up part time tailoring lessons; with the permission of sir (her employer, Ashwin) who to her surprise, more than gladly agreed. The tailoring classes require a minimum fee, despite Ratna’s principled refusal to take credit, Laxmi tai comforts her and lends her money to ensure she is able to enroll for tailoring classes.
The camaraderie between Ratna and Laxmi tai, though not the main theme of the film, constitutes a heartwarming subterranean layer.
Does love conceal class barriers or are class barriers the condition for love?
At first it may appear that the US-returned soft hearted, ‘decent guy,’ Ashwin (employer, sir) is but blind to social realities that differentiate the lifeworlds of Ratna (domestic worker at Ashwin’s house) and himself. This trait can readily be attributed to the caste-class cluelessness reserved for genteel foreigners who are woke enough to acknowledge their privileges but not woke enough to dismantle it for their lifestyle is contingent on the preservation of the social order. The limits of Ashwin’s niceness is also symptomatic of the limits of class society. Thus implying that mere acknowledgment of one’s privilege is not enough to undo social relations. If anything, the announcement of privilege lessens the burden of guilt while inadvertently continuing to pursue one’s class interests and performing its role.
Very often, we the audience sit back and assign ourselves to the task of adjudication — judging the “appropriateness” and “appropriation” of aesthetic choices and narrative styles — extricating ourselves from the visual experience as well as exonerating ourselves from our complicity in maintaining the social landscape of which we too are a part. When critiquing such a movie, we either tend to speak from the location of a structural guilt which compensates for “privileges’’ by overidentifying with the narrative of the working class woman or we suspend all agency by being one with our structural complicity. Therefore surrendering ourselves to a faith in the inescapability from class society, and content with the insurmountability of historical tendencies by presuming an eternal and undifferentiated character of class formations rather than actively probing them.
The point of this story was not to prove the inevitable separation of lifeworlds of the working class and the ruling elite nor did it seem to point at the impossibility of love in a class fragmented society. Both class conflict and internal fragmentation of people are effects and symptoms of capitalism and are here to persist till capitalism does. By not offering any easy reconciliation or closure, the film demonstrates the continual presence of class struggle as the structuring condition and background on which social relations unfold. It offers us the limits of will, deliberation, contestation to point at deeper conflicts, underlying struggles that inform our actions. When all shall be done, Ratna’s family, community and fellow villagers would still remain in the same relation with the system – in antagonism with it, while being its driving force. They will still be there even she is able to transcend her reality. Therefore, the social process is irreducible to individual actions and choices. Individual choices and actions, rather are inscribed in the process which produces the conditions for such strained choices.
The real achievement of the film lies in its ability to capture the deep and ordinary paradoxes that one lives through in their everyday life. It was the very internal splitting that both Ashwin and Ratna experienced in their interactions that shed light on the structural and subjective contradictions caused by capitalism. The movie invites the reader to read subtle gestures and silences. It wants us to study the gaps that substitute for moral dilemmas, the struggles that go into the concealment of mutuality of love with pragmatism.
I am sceptical of a premature writing off of the film for the very attempt to imagine a story such as this one. Nor am I tempted to demonstrate all the ways in which it fails to represent and overcome reality. To me, it seemed that the story represents a structural anomaly that reaffirms, “Love is not enough.” The anomaly lies in the very presence of love between the two protagonists, who belong to and represent two mutually dependent but contradictory social realities. However, intuitively we may know this truth, we cannot presume a damning conclusion to their love.The gap between the domestic worker and the employer, though remains unbridgeable under the present conditions — because of the concrete difference in their socio-economic location and political status — the possibility of them falling in love represents a window to radical transformation. I would therefore hold back the urge to prelude all analysis and short circuit the singularity of their narrative by letting it diffuse under the background of a generalised social crisis.
I am more interested in what the film offers us than imagine an ending in which love triumphs over class antagonism which is more likely to placate its viewers with a ‘radical’ daring. Moreover, it is not uncommon for men from rich urban families to wed obedient village girls from within the same caste and therefore, it’s barely radical to overstate inter-class wedlock as a revolutionary ideal. Additionally, the temptation to disqualify Ashwin’s feelings as a simple exercise in power is an ideologically blinkered approach for its fetish to narrowly constrict the presence of structural antagonism in directly conflictual terms. Rather, it is more characteristic of capitalist ideology to function through people who console themselves with illusions rather than confront the reality of capitalism’s entrenching of antagonisms in society — it is through exploitation that surplus is produced, whether than be directly oppressive or not.
Therefore the point of this essay is not to point at the obvious underlying layer of exploitation which scripts love and informs desire, to do so would be an act of self-congratulatory indulgence. Many observers will note how class comes in the way of love but I wish to offer the quite opposite of that interpretation — all love/desire/intimacy is inflected with and animated by capital, and therefore class struggle. Is it possible for us to study class antagonism as the very condition for love — a condition for its sabotage as well as its stimulus? Throughout the film the nature of class difference has not been kept hidden at all — both Ashwin and Ratna are more than conscious and aware of the nature of permissible contours of engagement. Therefore far from being reckless and clueless of the risks that could cost Ratna her livelihood, Ashwin is alert to the overlapping realities of simultaneous production of oppression (characteristic of Ratna’s world) and opulence (characteristic of Ashwin’s) are understood well by them both.
They know they could not have been together — “she is his maid!” And yet…the movie showcases them to organically develop feelings for each other.
The real stickiness of subject positions lies in their experience of the complementarity of coinciding paradoxes of love and loss, enjoyment and exploitation that leaves them both distraught and torn between following their heart and following their mind. Both of them are aware of the brutal realities of exploitation that dramatically fragment socialisation, even if one wants to, there is little opportunity to get to know someone who l toils as another reaps their labour. The protagonists understand the precariousness of “bravery,” of the struggles that it takes to strive in a system that is geared towards dispossessing the people it deploys for its own reproduction.
When Ashwin confronts Ratna with his feelings for her, her pragmatism is her defence against the reality of social antagonism which separates the lifeworlds of two potential lovers were it not for the society we live in. The social antagonism is a hindrance to and condition for their love. The antagonism is the substance of reality which may or may not seal their fate to the present condition by tying them to it, but can sufficiently make life difficult. A critical audience that complains about an underwhelming projection and portrayal of class contradictions and antagonisms, fails to grasp the elusive structure of class struggle which persists in its ordinariness as the elephant in the room. It is present in the palpable tension that animates their transgressions and structures their mutual refrain. Despite all the kindness, the two of them are constantly walking on eggshells, bring blessed with moments of grace where they can slide in gestures that communicate affection.
Love me or leave me — a rule or anomaly?
Ashwin’s towering skyscraper bachelor pad in Mumbai hosts a section of society whose aspiration is to ‘Westernise’ and refine its taste in order to accomodate the cosmopolitanism of its social networks while still striving to separate themselves from the crudeness of their parent’s generation. It cannot so much as bear a woman like Ratna to “interrupt” their conversations with her philistine suggestion of preparing for them, food to eat. Since his breakup with his fiancé, Ashwin no longer observes the company of women, which makes Ratna’s presence in the house more pronounced. It is no wonder then that Ashwin’s friend Vicky diagnoses Ashwin’s love for Ratna as infatuation. He conjectures that Ashwin was drawn to a “sweet chick” like Ratna because she has devoted herself to take care of him. This was in stark contrast from his ex-fiance, who had cheated on him. Ratna’s presence in the apartment caused much discomfort to the fellow workers in the neighbourhood who felt protective of her and never left a chance to offer her another job in anticipation of gossip and rumors around their boss and her.
Ashwin believes his love to be deeper than infatuation and takes keen interest in Ratna’s experiences, anecdotes, lifestyle, moral principles, struggles, aesthetic choices and ambitions. He is mindful of the social attitudes and behaviours that could perturb her and is seen giving it back to high society women for their casual dismissals of and callous ruthlessness towards working class women. Ratna, who cannot confront his fondness for her, ends up wanting to convince herself to believe that his kindness towards her is motivated by the desire to get her in bed. This lie is more comforting to her than the truth.
Ashwin is not merely enticing or flattering his domestic worker with gifts but the gift (a sewing machine) is representative of the attentiveness to her aspirations. By extending her basic courtesy, engaging in dignified social interactions, he seems to have been genuinely relating to her — gradually forging a “level of trust” that he could not “find in Sabina,” his former fiance. At no point does it appear that the kindness he extends to Ratna is unreserved for his other workers — rather, he treats them all with respect — as employees. We must confront this reality, he is not a prototype of an evil oppressor on whom the viewer can pass the buck of exploitative social relations to exonerate themselves. Rather, he is both nice and a part of the exploitative ruling class. We must remember that the road to hell was built on good intentions and this structural paradox over-determines Ashwin and Ratna’s condition.
The post-financialisation city of Mumbai is different now, “shahar ke ladke itne bure bhi nahi hai” (men from the city are not all that bad) and they are sufficiently clued and are curious about the underclass that forms the edifice of society. That is the real paradox of structural contradictions, that a person can be nice and still be complicit in the perpetuation of structural oppression. The use of the term, “sir” by Ratna to address Ashwin is peculiar and indicative of the neoliberal shift in the configuration of employment hierarchies — there is an inscription of workplace ethics and professionalism which gives both a texture of formality to informalised labour while insisting on subversive capacity to address each other on first name basis.
Throughout the film, Ashwin and the others in the building — watchman, Raju (driver) — maintain that Ratna works for Ashwin’s mother, who is her employer. As it so happens, it’s the domain of the women of the house to broker a deal and find the ‘right maid’ for the son, who lives a bachelor life, independent of the family. Ashwin maintains a cynical distance from asserting any direct authority over Ratna, as he is one step removed from being her employer. That could also explain his warmness, which is uncharacteristic of urban households.
Many times Ashwin is shown to be embarrassed on behalf of his social tribe when they hurl casual insults towards Ratna at their rooftop parties but he is simultaneously shocked at her ability to veil and withstand those indignities under a poker face. In a sequence where Ashwin finds her eating her meal on the floor, seated with the rest of the staff after serving at Ashwin’s mother’s party, he feels a sense of responsibility towards her. He tries to warmly elevate her from her immediate reality and offers her a ride home which she politely declines. He then assumes his usual gentle demeanour and proceeds to ensure that the driver makes the arrangements to drop her back to his home.
This courtesy is unusual and therefore, suspect to a room full of working class people. The moment he leaves the room, it resounds with laughter. With fellow workers taking a dig at his friendliness which is seemingly oblivious to class difference even when he is standing and they are seated on the floor. Much to Ratna’s embarrassment, Ashwin’s niceness towards her de-stabilises the experiences of her contemporaries. Later, when she returns home he asks her how she feels about being spatially constricted to a separate eating space, “How do you feel about it,” he beseeches her somewhat aggressively. Taken aback by his entitlement to access her ‘inner’ feelings as if the answer was not obvious, she is not allowed any better! She firmly replies, “What is the answer that you’re looking for from me?” To which Ratna simply responds by saying, “Yeh toh hamesha se hota hai!” (This has always been the case!) In the light of his fondness for her, her class oppression is made visible to him — even as the rest of the staff members continue to sit on the floor to eat. The re-orienting of Ashwin’s gaze towards a loved one comes as an awakening but also simultaneously affirms his blindness; a testament to the hitherto concealed realities from his vision. However, what to Ashwin appears as a “social evil” or a “misfortune,” is actually an inevitable consequence of the production relations under capitalism. It is not accidental that the capitalist system of social economy expropriates and exploits labour of the toiling people, which becomes capital in the hands of the ruling class.
In the very next sequence, she responds to his expression of love, by saying, “Main gawaar zaroor hongi par itna samajhti hun ki yahan aapki rakhel banke nahi rahungi.” (I may be illiterate but I fully understand the implication of accepting your proposition, that of becoming a mistress to you). This shocks Ashwin whose heart has expanded with love for her. That which outlives a momentary and instant gratification of lust. Incidentally, Ratna’s appearance has been kept unremarked upon throughout the film. Unlike the centrality of the female body of the upper class woman, the figure of the maid, even when she is dancing tends to capture the joy and laughter of a woman unwinding after a hard day’s labour.
Her sexuality only features as a sub-text, in the self-conscious acts of fixing her saree and rushing to her room as Ashwin accidentally walks in on her trying on a suit she had stitched. The absence of her sexuality from both Ashwin’s and the audience’s purview is what scholars have observed as a de-gendering effect of class that both dehumanises and desexualises the body of the underclass and therefore makes them inviolable in spite of their vulnerability to violence. In fact, it is because their bodies are either muted or mutated into fantastic forms that it very much conceivable to render them as property, whose labour can be instrumentalized and bodies be valorised by hegemonic modes of validation.
She knew he was hoping for her to besought his love as an escape from her structural oppression which restricts her mobility to become a fashion designer, by rendering her as a social other. Recall how Ratna was snubbed and shown the door from a designer’s studio. She knew what he was holding as a promissory dream, a proposition to change that which spatially marks her place of belonging under the same roof as that of a radical other but it was too much for her to accept the consequences of such a love.
Lacan in Seminar VII: On the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1956–60) writes,
“… jouissance is first fully asserted as the impossible/real foreign kernel, irreducible to the symbolic order, it appears as the horrifying abyss of the Thing which can only be approached in a suicidal heroic act of transgression, of excluding oneself from the symbolic community — the Thing is the stuff tragic heroes like Oedipus or Antigone are made of, its lethal blinding intensity forever marks those who enter its event horizon.”
They both knew what they were demanding from each other was an acknowledgement of the repressed real of social antagonisms — the class struggle, which is mitigated by phantasmic projections and rationalisations of society which is unbearable but has to be rendered bearable for survival. The employer while being a “decent man,” and the worker being a “caring and understanding woman,” are still too far apart to ever be seen or even imagined as a couple. The cost of abandoning their ascribed social role entails a fall — which could leave them both nowhere.
Love is not enough under present conditions but it could be
One can debate ‘if love is enough,’ as the film’s director provokes us to discuss. We could also make the case that theirs was a budding relationship that lacked love or argue in favour of love’s inability to overcome social contradictions, more generally. We could castigate Ashwin’s character for his tired resignation into a comfortable New York life after accepting Ratna’s refusal at the very first instance. While he gets to recuperate from the loss of love in an apartment in New York, writing novels, he ensures that Ratna was able to realise her dream of becoming a fashion designer by setting her up for a job with his friend. A critical reading could characterise Ashwin’s proposal as an effect of entitlement and privilege rooted in his material wealth and Ratna’s guardedness, stoicism, pragmatism as an attempt to fortify herself against the invasion of love’s false hope of emancipation. They may like to compare the conditions of both to determine who could “afford” the “luxury” of love and who was to be left fending for herself; and dissect the “politics of love.” Even though politics is irreducible to pragmatism and compromise — which falls short of meeting the moral imperative of love — it is not necessarily overlapping with pure ethics.
Some viewers upon watching the harsh reality of class that separates lovers would have liked to take away from the film, a lesson — the need to build a classless society.The real question in the history of modern political theory has not been as much to contemplate whether or not a society must be classless but about how it could be made so! The most dominant idea of envisioning a classless society (ironically so) remains tethered to the liberal order. It remains to be the philanthropic approach of reconciling differences with representation and recognition, hoping for it to trickle down — following the firm belief in the promised equilibrium of capitalist economics. Therefore it is no surprise that the audience too emphasises with the empty and nice notion of a wonderful classless society and grimace at the pitiable conditions of the present that scaffold love. However, is that enough? Would condemnation of the present change it?
Pure ethics wants love to remove any “hurdles” and“obstacles” that come along its way to happiness by balancing out the hardships of reality with triumphs of moral strength. It fails to grasp the elusive presence of class struggle as the basis of all social interactions and relations. Therefore it misses to see how capitalism is its own travesty. It rather sanctifies capitalism as an eternal and monstrous force, exalting it to a higher plane. It sees liberal democracy’s failure to offer mediation to social contradictions as its own emancipatory ideal. Therefore, they narrowly posit the symptoms of class struggle against bourgeois humanism in order to reconcile these two contrary tendencies.
Yet the critics would be mistaken to hold the radicality of love in its capacity to offer redemption, a postpolitical synthesis to structural contradictions. It is Ratna who refused to accept love from a position of vulnerability and weakness. It is she who did not want to become a liability on anyone. These critics similarly argue for films to not misrepresent social reality but also not glorify it. They also wish to harmonise reality and representation such that it perfectly corresponds to a bourgeois sensibility while also not crushing the particularity of oppressed people’s dreams, needs and wishes. Such idealism is its own reward in a class society, it is appreciated for harbouring (empty) optimism and (rhetorical) radicalism.
The film is bound to leave some people discomforted by the on-screen depiction of structural conflict which is overly glazed with an indigestible niceness of Ashwin’s character. It punctures the metaphysics of social harmony as well as the endless spiral of class conflict. It also questions the notion of a society armed with a pure unleashed love as the only hope for society. Love, reduced to an instrument for emancipation offers itself as a temporal exit from the frame of capital. This fantasy of an escape in love is inherent to capitalism itself in order to repress the reality that love cannot be liberated till the society is.
Therefore, most interestingly the film denies liberals the gratification of seeing love conquering over class difference through a symbolic and social suicide. It negates a happy ending while also not affirming that as the only possible ending. It refuses the viewers to escape their reality, for them to feel good in seeing the triumph of an abstract will to love over an equally abstractly defined reality. The liberal-progressive viewer wants to untangle the good from the bad and deliver that which appeals to all, they imagine a classless society as a class-unity which can be brought about through the double instruments of consciousness and conscientiousness. They refuse to accept the contradictory nature of the capitalist production system which thrives on exploitative labour, which is not accidental but that it cannot otherwise function. Therefore, the hope to reconcile all differences with love is wishful thinking. The film strips us of a false hope for an idyllic happy ending laden in sentimentalism and also denies us the comfort of cynicism which presumes all transgressions of the system as “insufficient.”
The film leaves us to explore the dynamics of class antagonism as the substance which animates the field of love with its quiet manoeuvres — curating interactions that carry ciphered messages, subtly communicating desire that struggles for recognition, that can so easily be mistook something which it is not; politeness for love and respect for desire. The director thus indirectly approaches the question of class contradiction and does posit it as a mere cultural difference. It is interesting to see how Ratna resolutely declines the dream of an illusory perfect love which could repeat itself as a tragedy, leaving her sacrificed at the altar of subversive desire. She recognises the possibility of their capacity to subvert as the very fabric of their desire that keeps them attracted to each other. If he was not “sir,” and she was not Ratna, his domestic help, probably the light of their love would have dimmed out sooner? Leaving them under a pale shadow of the thrill and excitement of transgressing social boundaries and prescriptions.
You may feel what you do and still not be placed outside the social
Ashwin’s disregard of parental authority, public perception, social rejection is a manifestation of a interpellation-without-identification — he is a subject who desperately seeks to attach himself to a structure which could help him find his lost social purpose and meaning in life. He is half a writer, and half of him is in New York. He momentarily finds the half in Ratna. Ratna however, in her staunch refusal to be turned into a laughing stock represents a subject of interpellation through her concrete experience and identification with the ideological apparatus that sustains the social order.
They are both hindered by that which facilitates their participation in the social field — Ashwin must work to repress the fact that the person he loves eats her food sitting on the floor and cannot sit across the table from him at a party in which she serves food to guests. Ratna must repress the reality of his declaration of love in order to avoid taking a reckless decision that could end with a malicious smear campaign against her that would potentially render her both unemployable and loveless.
They must both repress their ontological equality as fellow humans in and through the daily rituals of everyday socialisations in order to function and sustain themselves within the symbolic frames of society. He must promptly deny “dating her” when a friend asks, she must quickly re-adjust to cover herself up at the mere sound of his approaching steps. She must constantly gauge when she can afford to slip in a personal anecdote in the middle of work and when even her prolonged presence in a room and mere utterance could be a cause of discomfort for Ashwin or his guests. They both work to emotionally repress the reality of the possibility of holding any affection for each other, such that the prospect of their togetherness does not destabilise the sensibilities and reality of others and also, their own selves!
While the social implications of their “choice” to love are far-reaching and wide, in fact Ratna ever raises one of them. She anticipates social boycott and ostracisation from the village, possible banishment of her family, permanent loss of her mobility and relative independence from feudal authority, and as for Ashwin, social isolation and exclusion from cosmopolitan lunches and dinners for being an outlier is entirely within the realm of possibilities. At worst, he may even be branded a ‘pervert.’
The encoding of class struggle permeates the socio-spatial-economic and subjective landscape. Thus, what appears to be an intimate and personal encounter between two people can never be reduced to just that — a right to love whoever they want. It is the structural production of dispossession of the labouring force which lays the seeds that builds a capitalist system which thrives on profits that are reaped by a few but its effects engulf us all, albeit differentially. It engulfs by binding us to its invisible logic which can be safely assumed, “What will you tell your parents? In fact you shouldn’t even be telling them anything,” Ratna entreats. She further adds, “Aap jo bhi feel karein, jo bhi kahein aakhir mein toh main aapki servant hi hun.” (No matter how you feel about us, no matter what you say, I am still your servant!) There was however, an unwavering grace and unrelenting dignity in her anger against the much relished triumph of a moral victory of individual defiance against the system that paradoxically diminishes its own chances of socialising love and equality.
It is precisely a function of the reality of caste-based social organisation of labour which produces the conditions for their subjective contradictions. These moral dilemmas tangle us together, and apart and tear us from within and in our relation to the other. Marx called this subjective and social isolation and inner turmoil, a state of alienation. Caste consciousness, patriarchal power-play and capitalist subjectivity animates the process and potential of love, it forecloses the access of some into the dominant frames of desire which exceeds the normative discourses on heterosexuality with the horror of associating with the abject, “You can’t date your maid, Ash!” It is easier to imagine him sleeping with her than to imagine that he is in love with her.
It is we, the agents of capital’s production, who labour to reproduce capitalism. It is through our physical labour as also by our self-deceit, rationalisations, fantasies that we support — if not reconcile — our position within the system. It is we who must perform the withholding of our will to love for considerations beyond anyone’s making. It is we who must make peace with the realities that are unjust but have been rendered indispensable.
That’s why in a crucial scene when Ratna and Ashwin are atop the building’s terrace and having their first intimate conversation, he asks her if she believed in God and she quips, “Karna padta hai Sir!” (I have to believe, sir!)Apropos of Marx, who considered religion, ideology par excellence, Ratna submits that in order to persist in the social field we have to tell ourselves many lies. This is a necessary hindrance and stimulus for us to persist in an unequal world lest we crash. This is the ideological function of capital’s commodity fetishism, it offers us dreams that contradict the structural violence while also impeding its realisation. It tells us, “dream that you have it and you will,” but neither the rich can have all what they like nor the poor. This is the tragedy of class societies.
As Ratna rightly observed, “Mujhe lagta tha ki ameer logon ki life aasaan hoti hai…lekin aap bhi toh…matlab…aap yahan se nikalna chaahein bhi toh nikal nahi sakte hain.”(I used to think that rich people have an easy life…but… you can’t leave this place even if you wanted to.)
How to measure the authenticity of love in a social world?
Them going their separate ways prolongs the problem of class struggle which is deeper than love, it is the very condition of love. It insists that class struggle necessarily creates a chasm between the life worlds of the rich and poor, since the necessary condition for the presence of the ruling class is contingent on its structural differentiation from the working class. That even though the escape from the feudal caste structures of the village are mitigated in the city which provides the capacity for women to labour and find their ‘brave’ autonomous voice, the city is still is a den of wage slavery which displaces the site and forces of struggle from the village to the city but doesn’t eliminate the class difference between the rich and poor. “Pata nahi shahar ke ladke kya chaahte hain,” (who knows what the men from the city want?) Chhoti’s husband is incomparable to Ashwin, despite both being ‘men from the city,’ thus refusing the flattening of class-as-unevenness between rural and urban discourses on inequality.
Tangentially, we cannot qualify the ‘authenticity’ of Ashwin’s love for Ratna by putting them through the test of making the ‘ethical choice of love over class,’ thus making them fully assume responsibility for the consequences of this choice.
“The notion of a subject morally and criminally fully ‘responsible’ for his acts clearly serves the ideological need to conceal the intricate, always-already operative texture of historico-discursive presuppositions that not only provide the context for the subject’s act but also define in advance the co-ordinates of its meaning: the system can function only if the cause of its malfunction can be located in the responsible subject’s ‘guilt.’” (Zizek 1994:5)
While we may or may not arrive at the same ‘verdict’ on the ‘authenticity’ of their love, we will agree that it de-stabilises and escapes the conventional coordinates of the language of love. Some may even conclude that since the two did not actualise the ‘radical act of love’ by risking to take a plunge into the unknown by sticking together, their failure to do so can retrospectively be traced back to ‘prove’ the presence and inevitable culmination of a class-caste fragmented society. However, the failure of their love is not a proof-of-concept of class antagonism rather it is the very condition for failure. If anything the film ends with a radical opening, a potential for love to blossom by unmaking their own conditions. However, I think that his decision to leave for New York and hers to leave his house cannot be a verdict on their (capacity to) love, in fact, her very breaking away from her job enables her to finally, call him by his name from the same spot where he had requested her to drop the title of her address, “sir.”
Both the consolation of capitalism — that promises ‘anything can happen,’ through individual success stories and stories of resilience — and the perfidiousness of the consolation can be optimised to dismantle its fabric. Had their love directly ‘triumphed over class,’ by donning a “fuck the world” attitude perhaps they wouldn’t have survived since the condition of their love was hinged on their structural difference.
Even if love continued to blossom outside of the conditions of its making, at best, they could have circumvented the outcome of their action through careful navigation but not overcome the conditions that breed, nurture and reproduce the conditions that produce class difference. Therefore, love is both not enough and also, radical enough to bring out and render apparent the structural contradictions of capitalism. Love in itself is not a revolution but is the first step towards one, even though it could be equally violent and demanding.
Leaving the village for the city, leaving love for another day
Her experience of widowhood in a village economy governed by caste-order, moral law, feudal authority enables her to observe a dialectical distance towards herself, which manifests as both the a recognition of her ability to “be a fashion designer, despite the structural impediments,” and also, as an acute awareness of her position in the structure of oppression and role in social exploitation. That is why she implores Ashwin to “forget the evening they spent together,” and asks him to not mention to anyone that he had honored her gift, a hand-stitched shirt by wearing it to office. She is aware that once that is disclosed, her design, like herself will get overdetermined by class and caste. That Ashwin’s father would not have appreciated a shirt designed and stitched by Ratna on his son. She cannot afford Ashwin’s callous dismissal of the consequences of being seen with her employer and this is qualitatively different from a scenario of two colleagues dating. At one level her feelings for him haven’t developed and at another level, she did the work of grounding him while also acknowledging the positive potential of the negative conditions that rule her life. She finds hope in her capacity to wear bangles in the city, which as a widow in the village was totally un-imaginable; she takes tailoring classes and has aspirations.
Although she reciprocated his feelings by kissing him, her feelings for him had not matured. She was too preoccupied by other considerations to turn inwards. She wasn’t doting on him and was shown to be pleasantly confused by his sudden burst of attention. This could also have been the case because Ratna is more self-aware and aware of the structural imposition of a symbolic mandate which thrives on her labour and expects her to work towards ensuring the disappearance of its traces. She must labour to preserve society as well as do so self-effacingly. Therefore, she knows that the system that has assigned this role for her must be overhauled to upturn her position. It must be dismantled by rejecting the place it offers while also not being rendered placeless in the system. Its invisible command must be fought with dreams and dreams can be actualised by changing her condition to create the possibilities for love to emerge rather than seek in love, refuge, a protective offering.
She refuses to use love as a locomotive that would provide her an escape to break from her inescapable exploitative reality because the terrifying guilt of singularly escaping an unequal social order — with her people still mired in the same oppressive condition — would have haunted her. She understands that equality-asserting attitudes are inscribed in the logic of capital and is inadequate to eliminate the inequality that is engendered and maintained through niceness. The fear of being accused or even being seen as a social climber, a seductress, a thief would have made it impossible for her to love. Therefore she responds to Ashwin’s declaration of love with, “Main aapki maa ke saath aisa nahi kar sakti.” She declares that she can’t wrong his mother, who had already lost a son to cancer and would be subjected to social ridicule if her other son was to be seen by his maid’s side. The world would continue to impute shame and assume that she lured him for his property.
Capitalist ideology is not an imposition which can be discarded as “old” tradition as Ashwin tries to do. It is neither an illusion which can be debunked or a belief that can be suspended at will. Ashwin implores Vicky to “put aside the fact” that Ratna is his maid for a moment and confesses, “she is the only one who really understands me.” Vicky retorts by saying, “How do you put that aside for a moment, maybe you think you have found your soulmate but that’s impossible!”
His rude and disarming frankness fully exhibits and admits the reality of the structural contradiction which Ashwin, in good faith, tries to conceal with his warmth and regard. This film punctures the narrow frames of the post-political woke. It critiques a neutral function of politics — which insists on re-adjusting our social attitude towards the labouring underclass — to harmonise social relations. It also refuses to offer neutrality to the viewer who can comfortably discern who is more complicit in the production of the system between Ashwin and his friends or the high society they belong to. It deprives the viewer of the entitlement to cast the blame on Ashwin and exonerate themselves by restricting the function of critique of ideology to that of studying and debunking the dominant narratives of power that misrepresent social relations.
It forces us to extend the critique of ideology to ourselves by understanding the structuring role of capitalism which operates as an invisible background against which we live out social relations.The film forces us to reckon with the messiness of approaching love through empty idealism, all without confronting and conducting an analysis of the real of class struggle. As much as Ashwin tries to be a beautiful soul who humanises Ratna he does so at the cost of blurring the reality of their social antagonism which cannot be overcome by mere niceness, good faith and cruel optimism. Capitalist ideology is a materially organised reality which constructs and shapes our subjective and objective social lives, it won’t wither on its own or be kept aside for a moment.
Love cannot be redemptive unless the conditions for its impossibility are recognised for its tragic consequences. The positive condition for love — although never absolutely attainable — gets created by embracing the possibility of great suffering, losses and failure.