'''Tarang'''


aka Wages and Profit aka The Wave
1984 171’ col/scope Hindi
d/co-sc Kumar Shahani pc NFDC
co-sc Roshan Shahani dial Vinay Shukla
lyr Raghuvir Sahay, Gulzar c K.K. Mahajan
m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Shriram Lagoo,
Girish Karnad, Om Puri, Jalal Agha, Rohini
Hattangadi, Kawal Gandhiok, M.K. Raina,
Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande,
Jayanti Patel
Made 12 years after Maya Darpan (1972),
Shahani’s biggest film to date is an elaborately
plotted melodrama precisely realising his
theory of epic cinema. An industrial family
headed by the patriarch Sethji (Lagoo) is split
when his son-in-law Rahul (Palekar) falls out
with the industrialist’s nephew Dinesh
(Karnad). Sethji, who became rich as a war
profiteer, regards ‘wealth creation’ as a goal in
itself and ruthlessly administers his personal
fiefdom accordingly. Rahul, regarded by the
family as a mere caretaker until Sethji’s
grandson is ready to take over, is a more
modern ‘nationalist’ capitalist committed to
developing indigenous technology and
minimum welfare arrangements for his
workers. Dinesh, on the other hand, acts
(illegally) on behalf of transnational interests
which stand to profit by destabilising India’s
sovereignity. These conflicts are mirrored in
ironically identical ways within the working
class: the corrupt Patel (Patel) is a trade union
leader presumably aligned to the Congress
Party who sells out to the management; the
worker Namdev (Puri) finds his more radical
union leader Kalyan (A. Deshpande) equally
inclined to opportunism while another worker,
Abdul (Raina), believes the established forms
of political struggle to be inadequate and joins
a more extreme left group which is also
betrayed by his erstwhile leader. The only
figure transcending these mirrored divisions is
the remarkable Janaki (Patil). Widowed when
her activist husband is killed, her commitment
to the nurturing of a progressive force is
repeatedly exploited by different factions and
conflicting ideologies: reduced to prostitution,
she is manipulated by Rahul’s sexually frigid
wife Hansa (Gandhiok) into becoming her
husband’s mistress. The money she thus
obtains from Rahul is used to support the
working-class movement. Forced by Rahul to
become his accomplice in a plot to kill his
father-in-law, she is made the scapegoat when
the family conflict escalates into virtual gang
war. At the end, the film shifts into a mythic
discourse and Janaki becomes the elusive voice
of history. Accusing Rahul of trying to
manipulate what he never understood, she
claims the forces of change to be ‘faster than
the fleeting wind’. This sequence replays lines
from the Urvashi-Pururavas legend from the
Rig Veda as analysed by the historian D.D.
Kosambi in his book Myth And Reality (1962/
1983). The film adheres to Kosambi’s view that
in India, the epic has often been the most
precise language available for history itself, and
much of the plotting is informed by the
structure of the Mahabharata. In a narrower
sense, however, the film is also a definitive
comment on India’s nationalist enterprise, and
on the tradition of cinematic melodrama that
saw itself, and its formal assimilations, as the
cultural vanguard of a modernising nationstate.

[[Film]]