Daayan or Diana?


Brian Mendonça

Konkona Sen Sharma, Emraan Hashmi, Kalki Koechlin, Huma Qureshi.  Names that need no introduction. Konkona Sen is acclaimed for her sensitive roles. I especially liked her in Omkara (2006). Emraan Hashmi got away with Murder (2004) opposite the sultry Sherawat who seems to be a non-entity today. Kalki Koechlin impressed us all with the feminist tract at the India Today conclave on Women’s Day in 2014. Huma Qureshi stars in Dobaara – a horror movie – released this year.

All the above actors are extremely visible to the Indian public and abroad through the visual and print media. So it is a matter of surprise and disappointment that they lend their talent and time for a movie so regressive as Ek thi Daayan. / Once Upon a Time there was a woman who was an evil spirit.

Konkona plays the woman who is the ghost of a person in the past. She returns to live in the house of the people whose members she wants to kill.  Emraan plays Bobo the magician who is haunted by childhood memories. He shares his past with a shrink. It is through him that the narrative unfolds. The film re-enacts his childhood with his sister Misha throught the terrifying experiences of two children, a boy (11) and a girl (6).

‘Tu to Diana nahi, daayan heh,’ says the boy at one point. The collapsing of the identity of a woman with a Catholic name with a witch seems more than a coincidence. Subconsciously the child is always associating the attributes of an evil spirit with that name. There is an adult male voiceover which articulates the thoughts which go in the young boy’s mind.

At the end there is a séance where like in a vampire tale, the dead gather for a human sacrifice of Zubin (Bobo’s adopted son). Emraan thwarts the attempt by briefly assuming the powers of the dead himself. Numerous glimpses of his traumatized childhood assail him. He remembers how he pores over a book about the evil spirits and learns that the strength of an evil spirit lies in her long hair. At key moments in the otherwise tacky film, the long pony tails of Konkona and later Huma as Tamara are severed with a knife to quell their malevolent powers.

It is not surprising that women on the outskirts of Agra are sleeping with helmets for fear of their hair being shorn. How would the illiterate and ignorant separate fact from fiction when the Ek thi Daayan (2013) is repeatedly shown on the boob tube that too on Sony Max HD?

Director Kannan Iyer could have explored the deep psychological insights of Bobo’s paranoia. But the movie, through its posters and promotion, is largely hyped as a hot film with one man caught between three women. No matter that it is co-produced by Ekta Kapoor and Vishal Bhardwaj. It feeds on the popular (male) imagination to see the unknown as fearful. It succeeds in fuelling superstitious beliefs which demean and degrade women.
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Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 3 September 2017.

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