Retake | The snaky feminism of Naagin and Nagina

Shapeshifting snakes and snake charmers have been spotted in Hindi cinema for a long time, but two films stood out for how they might have inadvertently made women their heroes. In a scene from Naagin (1976) a baba who has arrived to break the spirit of an ichadhari naagin exclaims “Insaan badla lena bhul skta hai par saamp nahi.” It’s the idea of revenge that powers this curious little film. Rajkumar Kohli’s Naagin was one of the first forays into the peculiar realm of Hindi cinema obsessing over snakes and snake charmers. Even India’s most popular comic book hero created by the Gupta brothers of Delhi is the inimitable Nagraj. At Independence, a significant proportion of India’s landscape was defined by a rural demographic - harsh, raw stretches of land where man co-existed with animal and peril. It’s why tribal communities of snake charmers flourished across the length and breadth of the country, and of course why it’s why colonial masters condescendingly referred to India as the ‘country of snake charmers’. Independent India, though, twisted this little facet of history to write its own stories about crime, revenge and in the case of the audacious Naagin, even feminism.

In Naagin, two shapeshifting snakes are torn apart when the male nag (played by Jeetendra ) is killed. The better of the two halves, a wide-eyed and chilling naagin ( Reena Roy ) takes it upon herself to kill an entire coterie of handsome men, she deems are responsible for the death of her lover. “Main ichadhari saampon pe kitaab likh raha hun” Sunil Dutt says introducing himself to Jeetendra at one point. Dutt doesn’t do much writing or reading for that matter in the film, but he does somewhat cathartically survive the naagin’s last attempt at comprehensive revenge. Almost exactly a decade later, Sridevi (Rajni) plays a mysterious housewife to Rishi Kapoor’s Rajiv. Rajni’s shapeshifting abilities aren’t announced until half of the film has passed us by before Bhairo Nath – a terrifying Amrish Puri – declares “Iss ghar mein kuch hai, koi zehreele saamp ki chaaya.” In both films, women hold a secret power that though empowering can only be used in retaliation to something. Their existence as naagins might be their truest form but they morph to serve certain wordly purposes. In Nagina, Rajni urges her mother-in-law to trust her. “Main bas apka pyaar jeetne aayi hun.” In Naagin, Roy is forced to apply her human form to the tensile strength of a man’s vulnerability – an attractive woman. In the first film, the female form is a tool, in the second it’s a source of reluctantly imagined redemption. Either way, both women would rather be something else than the women in a man’s world. While the revenge in Naagin is essentially underplayed by a redaction of the film’s vengeful spirit at the death, Nagina ropes in the world’s empathy to help assimilate Rajni into a life where she can probably keep her teeth but will rarely ever bite.

The mythological origins of Naagin are dwarfed by the film’s narrative implications. A woman protagonist, stacked against an entire platoon of hairy, variably demonic gentlemen that this woman takes turns killing. It’s a chilling exercise in fantasy fiction, one that in hindsight, must have created waves in the largely hero-centric world of Hindi cinema. That said Naagin every now and then forsakes the platform it has so cleverly for its protagonist built. The naagin must still dance and entertain like the courtesan in what is a dismissal of her agency to refuse or even be refused. Nagina’s climax is underlined by Sridevi’s iconic performance in ‘Main Naagin tu Sapera’. Does the woman always play to the man’s tunes, or is the man ultimately the controlling, subjugating counterpart of a relationship that if left uncontrolled, can turn poisonous. Because most shapeshifting snakes until recently have always been women, the framing of this gender equation contradicts the thematic bravery of the first and to an extent the second film. Of course, where there is casual feminism there must also be gung-ho sexism. Both films relegate women to being dutiful servants. One serves the sentence of love, the other that of heritage and history. Neither, despite their ability to literally turn into anything they’d like to, choose to abandon the roles they’ve been given. There is a sense of domestic commitment to both. Roy is out to avenge the death of her partner, while Rajni uses her powers every now and then to protect her clueless husband. The sky is the ceiling, and yet the two choose monogamous servitude instead of forthright liberation. It’s where both films, though feministic in structure, undermine their own ideas. The ceiling is cracked but never quite broken to pieces. The bluntness of Naagin and Nagina’s mythological adaptations helped assist me at a young age to learn to root for female characters, to root for their right to stylistically, cleverly kill. The pivot for these stories might be exacted on distant men or shady babas, but they did in their own way communicate the savagery of a woman tasked with something beyond the handling of the kitchen or the family. The avenger or the protector is a role we have always seen men essay with emotionless ease, and though the decibels are turned up, the callisthenics way more prominent in the way naagins have been sensualised, there is still something redemptive about women dissing men, both literally and metaphorically. Ironically, this is coming from someone who is terrified of snakes. Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .