Existentialism, the Absurd and Pyaasa

 

A silver lining in the sky forms shadows on an unkempt man’s face. A bird meanders, treading no path in particular bathed in the bliss of nothingness. Flowers sway to the man’s poetry strewn in ailing emptiness while a bee relishes the sweet life and gently perches on the ground.The bee oblivious to reality is squished to death by a passerby. In an unfathomable instant, the utopian world of momentary happiness is broken; the man shrugs and embraces the absurd of life. This masterful act forms the epoch of a young man’s story in which he is wandering to know the purpose of life but only finds himself battered by the brutal absurdity of our existence.

Vijay (Guru Dutt) is a poet who abdicates romanticism as a form of art. He is on a narcissistic exploration to find acceptance of his oeuvre, depicting hopelessness of mankind.His art is only remained by his poetry screaming from dog eared manuscripts, lying in dustbins and being sold for dus anna in scrap. His brothers detest his presence at home as he is an expense to an already impoverished family. He takes refuge at a friend’s house; a friend who is willing to do anything for money and has just returned from giving a false testimonial for a car accident. His publishers consider his nihilistic works inappropriate in a time when a woman’s beauty seemed to be the only topic of poetry. He stumbles upon Meena ( Mala Sinha), his love from the times of bourgeois education. She had walked out on him to marry a rich man.Vijay alienates from this society that is seduced by the stupor of money, greed and materialism.He is finding the meaning of life through a moral teleological exploration, the absurd of life.He is Albert Camus’ Sisyphus who is led in this world to carry a huge rock atop a mountain, all along he is aware of the futility of this labor, the meaning is the bait and that eludes him perpetually. He is gradually discovering the hopelessness of life. The absurd is a juxtaposition of man’s pursuit to find significance, reason and essence of life and the cold, hopeless world he is pitted against.

His art is understood and appreciated by the most unlikely person, a courtesan, Gulabo ( Waheeda Rehman) who buys his poetry off the scrap market. She falls for him and confesses that there is nothing more to know about him after having read his works as though his art speaks more than his ontological frame of existence. Vijay’s mother hides food from his vicious brothers, in the hope that her son would return someday but he drifts in the hope of recognition. Meanwhile Meena’s rich husband hires him as his servant and tries to humiliate him, a reaction to the suspicion of Meena’s alleged affair. Meena’s arrogance is displayed in the elevator when she confronts Vijay and explains her side of the story and at the end of this fleeting conversation says “Mujhe to upar jaana tha” and takes the elevator to the top floor while letting Vijay leave. His unbecoming comes in the death of his mother, when his brothers deprive him of the ceremony of her departure. This scene of final dissent into absurdity is shot magnificently. Through an arch we see the river glistening with light and Vijay’s dark silhouette fills up the space gradually. He gives into drinking, witnesses the tragic dance of survival by a prostitute who has to intentionally ignore her baby crying for food. He meanders in the by lanes of prostitute areas whose world he earlier considered immoral. He finds meaning in their lives and spends a night at Gulabo’s attic, a la Devdas.His existence wallows and pursues the elusive essence.

Camus argues; suicide is a confession that life is not worth living; it is a choice implicitly declaring that life is “too much”. Suicide offers the most basic “way out” of absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe. This is the realization that dawns on Vijay, that sums up the culmination of Vijay’s attempt to end everything. He flees from Gulabo’s attic convoluted by his internal reflections. He attempts to get run over by a train.On his way, he confronts a tramp trembling in cold. He takes off his jacket and puts it around him. This is his philanthropic deed to bring hope, to see life in everything but himself. The tramp realizes his intentions and stalks him to his dissent only to get caught in the tracks himself. Vijay, in his attempt to save the tramp, is pushed off the track. The tramp dies wearing Vijay’s jacket and the world thus knows the end of Vijay. Purists would argue that it is destiny that sends the tramp as messiah. The question then would be, was the tramp ever destined to die wearing a poet’s jacket caught in a train track? It is the existence and the unintelligible truth of life that we are born to experience, born to suffer. We are merely led by our choices and what we make out of them. We are what we can become. This defines the underlying principle of existentialism: existence precedes essence(Jean Paul Sartre).

Gulabo is devastated yet determined to resurrect Vijay’s art which was more crucial than his own existence. She is in contrast to Meena who in her pursuit of money and fame walks out on him while Gulabo begs with all her life’s income to publish Vijay’s works. They are finally published posthumously. His poetry is flying off the racks and he becomes a literary legend. While recuperating in a hospital, he is woken up from a coma by the recital of his works. He claims his poetry and is understood to have gone insane. Here he is again witnessed by the absurdity of his being. He flees the asylum where he has been trapped only to end up at his own death anniversary, a ceremony to felicitate him. He witness the horrifying deed of all his adversaries feasting on his fame, squeezing every penny of his dead worth. His publishers, brothers and friends, all conspire to prove him dead even after discovering him alive. As he is struggling to prove himself alive, in an ironic turn they all turn to become his closestconfidantsand start to own up to their relation with him, hoping for a better royalty off his poetry. This profoundly changes Vijay’s belief in the system that corrupts our morality.

His belief in absurdity peaks at this point which lyrically explodes on the screen with the legendary “ Jaala do ise, phoonk daalo, tumari liye hai, tum hi sambahlo yeh duniya”. The song is shot with brilliant usage of light, as he walks among mortal plebs with spiritual gusto. He realizes he is not the person who was the poet, who was struggling to make his voice heard. He audaciously confesses he is not “Vijay” ( the celebrated poet). He is beaten up and is called an impostor. He gives up his identity which is the futile labor of carrying the burden of being. He renounces the world, is convinced by Meena to own this fame, this new found identity that he yearned for. He finds it meaningless and returns to Gulabo, the only person who truly understood him. He escapes the world with her and an artist turns into a man and existence finds its essence.

Popularly, this film is hailed as a romantic masterpiece and which for me is to brutally disrespect the art and philosophy behind it. If life is so meaningless and absurd as shown in the film, the logical reasoning then would be suicide. Camus’ ideology negates this argument. On the contrary, he suggests, accepting the absurd is a matter of living life to its fullest, remaining aware that we are reasonable human beings damned to live a short time in an unreasonable world and then to die. We remain aware of the conflict between our desire and reality, and so living the absurd is living in a constant state of unceasing conflict. It is a revolt against the meaninglessness of our life and the conclusiveness of the death that awaits us. Suicide, like hope, is just another possible way out of this conflict. Living the absurd is more analogous to the predicament faced by the man condemned to death yet who, with every breath, revolts against the notion that he must die. We may take Vijay to be contemplating suicide as his interpretation of the meaning of life. However, he doesn’t make a conscious choice to live but is saved from a suicide. The confrontation at the town hall felicitation following his death, changes his interpretation of existence altogether. The meaning of life that he comes to know is of higher dimension and he decides to abdicate everything and start with nothingness, as though on a quest of newer absurdities.

Many instances in the film show Vijay spending his time on a bench overseeing ships that are ready to leave the shore. Those who have known the absurdity of life will know what Vijay was waiting for at the harbor in discreet points of his life. You can hear him scream for freedom. You will probably know what went through Guru Dutt’s mind at the last hours of eternal sleep.

PS: On October 10, 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his bed after an alcohol and drug overdose. He was scheduled next day to meet Mala Sinha for his ironically titled film, Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi, and Raj Kapoor to discuss making color films. Pyaasa was a black and white film. I can’t wait to see how Anurag Kashyap adds color to this film. I hear he calls it Gulaal.

I had initially posted this blog on PassionForCinema