Bulbul Can Sing. But will they let her?
Rima Das’ second film is set in a tiny Assam village but her depiction of patriarchy is universally relatable.
I was once asked by my middle-school class-teacher to be his personal spy and inform him about students from our class who might be dating. A couple of years later, on Valentine’s Day, volunteers made a thorough search of the bags of all the students while they were busy in the morning assembly, in search of gifts people may have brought for or received from their loved ones. The principal and vice-principal routinely kept an eye out for boys and girls hanging out in pairs. Part of this was done to specifically prevent one of the teachers’ relatives from being close with their partner on campus, but most of it was done because “such activities brought a bad name to the school” or weren’t looked upon too kindly by “society”.
This regressive attitude towards the idea of adolescents being attracted to each other went hand in hand with tall claims by students and teachers in classrooms about Northeastern societies being tilted towards progressiveness as women here supposedly enjoyed actual freedom — dowry in marriages was seemingly nonexistent, and people could allegedly choose what they wanted to become and who they wanted to marry. Memories of my progressive school life came flashing back while watching Rima Das’s 2018 adolescent drama Bulbul Can Sing, which is streaming on Netflix. Like her earlier movie, the story is set in a small village near Chaygaon — which is just an hours’ drive away from Guwahati. It revolves around three best friends — Bulbul, Bonny, and Suman — as they come to terms with their adolescence and the changes that it brings about in their lives.
Bulbul is a free-spirited girl whose father — a popular folk singer in the village — wants her to become a good singer, and whose mother rebukes her for wearing short skirts, including even when she is in her own house. Her friends are Bonny — the only daughter of a widow who runs the village sweet shop, and Suman — a boy who is often teased by the name “ladies” by almost everyone in the village because of his unhinged platonic proximity to the girls. Suman is discouraged by the men in the village from even attempting to do anything that is conventionally seen as “masculine” and faces harassment from everyone except his two friends.
Both Bulbul and Bonny are in different stages of romantic relationships with their classmates, and Rima Das captures both the universality of teenage love and the specificity of the geography beautifully in mounting these relationships. She spends a lot of time building the world around her characters, spending ample time with each of them to familiarize her largely non-local, festival audience with her world. Das manages to make this stretch of her film enjoyable by filling it with realist, matter-of-factly conversations.
As our protagonists progress through the various seasons, their relationships grow in intensity and involvement, till one fine day both the couples are caught by jobless twenty-something holier-than-thou moral-policing youths who behave almost in as brute and inhuman manner — if not more — as Bajrang Dal goons in parks and monuments during Valentine’s Day.
In the aftermath of the incident, the students are made to feel shame and guilt for their actions — even as they have to deal with the trauma of being harassed mentally and abused physically, and the girls in both the couples are made to pay for the damages much more than the boys. It is them whose parents feel and project the guilt of the mishap most, and it is only them who are made to leave the school to create an example, a cautionary tale. There are talks by village elders about how young blood is all lust for physical love while being ignorant and unaware about spiritual love, and how physical love before marriage is essentially a sin. The worlds of our protagonists come crashing down, and an initial track about a young adolescent’s unfulfilled ghost makes an eerie comeback.
The events in the movie occur just a little over 50 Kilometers away from the state capital. In reality, similar events occur all the time even in the most reputed schools in the state capital. In fact, similar events actually occur all over the country. In schools, in colleges, in parks and monuments. In local trains, metros, and buses. In hotels and in movie theatres. The self-appointed moral police exist everywhere, freely attacking everyone’s right to live with dignity; and in most cases, they are swift enough to particularly corner, character-assassinate, and publicly shame specifically the women of their “raids”. The men get away and eventually move on because that is how the system is designed. It is a system that is heavily imbalanced towards one gender and their hypermasculine notions of perfection.
Thus while Bulbul Can Sing is marked by the specificity of the geography it is based in, it finds its strength in the universality of the image it paints of patriarchy clawing down on the hopes and aspirations of women, and even men who dare to defy the norm. These aren’t big ambitions to change political and social power structures, just small personal dreams to be able to love freely, without fear. But patriarchy is an all-consuming fire that feeds on fear and tries to nip in the bud any act that remotely challenges its hold over social relations, and thus it attempts to stifle even the tiniest acts of love. For love carries the capability to change everything. For love, in itself, is a revolution. Always.
