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What Tribhanga tells us about women playing by their rules

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Vandana
VandanaJan 20, 2021 | 13:28

What Tribhanga tells us about women playing by their rules

Choice is a one-word oxymoron.

Choice is a misnomer. A one-word oxymoron. Free choices are more elusive than free lunches. There is always a cost to pay. We decide the cost we are ready to pay when we make a choice, or pick between the only two we have. Is that still called a choice?

Thirty-three years ago actor Neena Gupta conceived out of wedlock. She made a choice to give birth to the child. With her daughter Masaba now 32, the one message Neena has for women in India is: If you want to live in India and in society, you have to marry.

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The cost she incurred on her choice was prohibitive. And yet many women would want the right to make their choice and pay the price rather than live by someone else’s choices.

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Renuka Shahane’s directed Tribhanga is a subtle and sweet commentary on our choices and its high prices through three generations of women – the naani (Nayantara Apte), ma (Anuradha Apte) and beti (Masha). The naani (Tanvi Azmi) leaves her husband, the ma (Kajol) never has one. The beti (Mithila Palkar) has seen what the naani and ma had to go through so she makes a ‘choice’ to not make the difficult choices. She opts for a life that may seem suffocating to many, including her own ma and naani. And yet her ‘regressive life’ is her solace having been on the receiving end of people’s jibes for the ‘progressive choices’ her mother makes.

Debates around burqa, veils, sindoors and mangalsutras have never had easy answers because we have treated choice as a word complete in itself. On a closer look, there is no word as incomplete and as misguiding as choice.

A bikini could be forced on a woman, just as another woman’s burqa. On a different level, both could be treated as props to project a woman’s free will. We can brand one as progressive, the other regressive, but all branding comes off with a little scratching of the word choice.

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Conditioning makes women more susceptible to guilt. It nags them constantly. Men generally have only bouts of guilt, if at all they have any. Tribhanga shows us how women’s choices leave them feeling guilty. An accomplished writer chooses to leave her husband for his mother won’t let her write at peace. She goes on to live with other men even as she sees her children grow. The father abandons his responsibility when the children leave with the mother. If at all he had any when they lived with him.

Tribhanga, however, is the story of how the three women impact each other’s lives even as they try to live their own. There are struggles and hardships, blames and counter-blames, but there is no pathos. Nayantara (writer), Anuradha (dancer and actor) and Masha (housewife) are in control of their lives to the point lives can be under anyone’s control. They are happy in the worlds they have built for themselves. These are the worlds to which they belong and which they own because it is they who created it. Each woman in the story chooses to stand by herself before she stands by the others. The characters aren’t uncaring, but understating of the fact that it is important to love one’s self before showering love on others. Each character understands that the best way to love others is to let them follow their choices.

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They aren’t born with that knowledge; they build their understanding on the way as they stumble, stop and walk on together and alone. They come closest to living by their choices.

Last updated: January 20, 2021 | 13:39
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