An old cliché has it that India’s philosophical traditions, full of sophisticated reflection on knowledge, reality, logic, language and salvation, have little to say about morality. A helpful response to this observation came from the Indian philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal. Ethics, he argued, can be done in the style of Immanuel Kant, as an abstract inquiry into right and wrong; but it can also be done as commentaries on particular stories: folk tales, parables, tales from the epics. India’s philosophical traditions are rich in such commentary.
Stories are not, as such, arguments. They work in subtler ways on us listeners and readers. They don’t try to persuade us so much as invite us to notice something we tend to ignore. They can bring moral insight even when they assert nothing, by the effect they have on how we think and feel about the central moral questions: How to live? What do we owe each other? What makes a good human being? None of this has to come as part of a lifeless ‘moral of the story’. If the story is any good, it won’t have just one moral; and if the story is told right, the message won’t need to be spelt out.
We can glean things from stories of all kinds, highbrow and popular, serious and comic. Indeed, there’s a style of literary criticism — not much in fashion now — that seeks to do just this: to use stories as provocations to thought about ethics. I was driven to some of these reflections by a recent viewing of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s much-loved comic film
Ramprasad Sharma, the affable young graduate played with intelligence and nuance by Amol Palekar, starts the film as an orphan with a young sister to support. Sent by a family friend to interview at a firm run by the formidable Bhavani Shankar — the finest of Utpal Dutt’s many performances as an inflexible old man — he has to conceal from his future employer the half of his personality that takes pleasure in music, sport and friendship. Ramprasad’s interview goes superbly: there’s no doubt he’s right for the job, but much of what he says to Bhavani Shankar, the austere principles he feigns, the high-flown Hindi, is a pretence. Spotted by his boss at a hockey game when he had pretended to have no interest in sport (as his boss thinks proper in the young), Ramprasad has to complicate the deception and invent a clean-shaven younger brother, the feckless Lakshmanprasad who, naturally, goes by ‘Lucky’. Naturally, things get farcical very quickly.
Amol Palekar once noted that Gol Maal involved him in a triple role: the well-rounded Ramprasad of the film’s opening, the caricature of idealism and integrity he shows his boss at work, and the equally absurd caricature of apathy and self-indulgence that is Lucky. The writer Jai Arjun Singh, in whose excellent recent book on Mukherjee’s films I found the quotation, notes perceptively that Ram and Lakshman are ‘two sides of the original Ramprasad’s personality’. The problem with Bhavani Shankar is his lack of imagination, his inability to see that laughter and seriousness, art and industry, creativity and responsibility can coexist in a single soul. The film’s point, as Singh puts it, is that “you can be light-hearted while also being serious-intentioned”.
This is well said, and bears repeating, for Bhavani Shankar’s is a confused high-mindedness still to be found in the Indian middle-class. Instinctively, we know there’s something missing from his vision of life, something risible about it, but it took the comic artistry of one of our finest filmmakers to expose the poverty of that vision. The film finds regular use for Sanskrit epics, most obviously in the names of the twins. But the real tutelary spirit of Gol Maal ’s proceedings is not Rama but Krishna: flirt, warrior, schemer, statesman and philosopher, all at once.
The social world of Gol Maal is narrow: its characters’ surnames mark them as part of the upper-caste middle-class of suburban Bombay. Mukherjee was not a radical social critic; anyone looking for revolutionary messages in his films will be disappointed. He was a subverter, understated and cunning. His hero is a deceiver, but the film’s target is not the deception but the narrow-mindedness that makes the deception necessary.
It is clear by the end whose side Mukherjee was on: he was on the side of youth, love, freedom and music. He had nothing against the principled, except when their principles became an end in themselves, disconnected from the rest of life. Gulzaar’s delightful lyric to the film’s best song, ‘Aanewala Pal’, captures the nub of this philosophy: The moment to come will soon be past; live your life within it, if you can.
(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)
Nakul Krishna is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge