Teesri Kasam

There are films that entertain, films that impress, and then there are films that seem to acquire a deeper resonance with every passing decade. Basu Bhattacharya’s Teesri Kasam (1966) belongs unmistakably to the last category. Based on Phanishwar Nath Renu’s celebrated short story Maare Gaye Gulfaam, the film is an extraordinarily delicate amalgamation of rural realism, folk culture, romance, humour and quiet tragedy. Produced by the great lyricist Shailendra, and featuring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman, it is less a conventional love story than a poignant meditation on innocence confronted by a world that neither fully understands nor adequately accommodates it.

Directed by Basu Bhattacharya, with a screenplay by Nabendu Ghosh and dialogues by Renu himself, Teesri Kasam possesses an authenticity that is literary without ever becoming ponderous. Its extraordinary visual character owes much to the cinematography of Subrata Mitra, while its musical architecture was fashioned by Shankar–Jaikishan, with lyrics by Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri. What makes Teesri Kasam so remarkable is precisely what makes it so difficult to classify. It is, on the surface, a Hindi film furnished with major stars and memorable songs; in temperament, however, it belongs much closer to the realm of literary cinema, where atmosphere and character take precedence over plot mechanics.

At the centre of the film is Hiraman, a simple, good-hearted bullock-cart driver played by Raj Kapoor. His world may be circumscribed in its material dimensions, but it is by no means impoverished in spirit. He lives according to a code of instinctive honesty, self-respect and uncomplicated morality. After two unhappy encounters involving the transportation of contraband and bamboo, Hiraman makes two vows. The third — and emotionally decisive — vow emerges when he agrees to transport Hirabai, a travelling nautanki performer, to a village fair.

The journey itself gradually becomes the emotional nucleus of the film. Hiraman is fascinated by Hirabai, but his attraction is not, at least initially, sensual in the conventional cinematic sense. He idealises her. To him, she seems almost to have stepped out of another realm: beautiful, cultured, enigmatic and somehow untouched by the ordinariness of his own existence. His innocence prompts him to construct an image of Hirabai that is considerably removed from the social reality in which she actually lives.

Hirabai, by contrast, is considerably more worldly. She understands men, social prejudice and the transactional dimensions of her profession. Yet beneath her sophistication resides an immense reservoir of loneliness. It is this disjunction that generates the film’s extraordinary emotional tension. Hiraman sees Hirabai as she ought to be; Hirabai knows the world as it actually is. Between these two incompatible perceptions, affection slowly and almost imperceptibly flowers into love.

As Hiraman, Raj Kapoor is remarkably restrained. There is considerable humour in his awkwardness, particularly in Hirabai’s presence, but Kapoor never permits Hiraman to degenerate into a caricature of rustic innocence. His shyness, jealousy, pride and occasional flashes of anger emerge organically from the character rather than as theatrical embellishments. His greatest achievement, perhaps, lies in the manner in which he conveys love without sophistication: Hiraman does not possess the vocabulary of romance, but he possesses its emotional truth.

If Raj Kapoor gives the film its innocence, Waheeda Rehman gives it its melancholy. Hirabai is precisely the sort of character who could easily have been reduced to a stereotype — the travelling dancer, the courtesan, the woman whose profession places her beyond the pale of respectable society. Instead, Rehman invests her with extraordinary dignity and interiority. There is neither self-pity nor melodrama in her portrayal. She understands Hiraman’s affection long before he himself comprehends the nature of what he feels, and perhaps understands, even earlier, the impossibility of preserving the world he has imagined for her.

One of the film’s most beautiful conceits is that the physical journey undertaken by Hiraman and Hirabai is simultaneously an emotional voyage. The bullock cart moves slowly through the countryside, almost at odds with the frenetic rhythms of conventional cinema. There is no urgency, and that very absence of urgency becomes essential to the film’s emotional architecture. The road gives the two protagonists time to converse, tease one another, listen to songs, exchange fragments of their pasts and, gradually, lower the defences with which experience has surrounded them.

The film’s depiction of rural India constitutes another of its abiding strengths. It does not reduce the village to an idyllic pastoral paradise inhabited by uncomplicated people. There is gossip, superstition, hierarchy, sexual hypocrisy and social prejudice; but there is also community, folk culture, friendship and an unmistakable warmth. Renu’s literary sensibility is fundamental to this achievement. Teesri Kasam does not offer us an anonymous cinematic “village”; it immerses us in a particular linguistic, cultural and social landscape, alive with its own rhythms, prejudices, humour and traditions.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white proved particularly felicitous. Subrata Mitra gives Teesri Kasam a visual texture of extraordinary atmosphere and subtlety. The monochrome photography transforms the landscape into something almost dreamlike. Mist, moonlight, darkness, open fields and the solitary bullock cart winding its way along country roads cease to be mere elements of setting and become part of the film’s emotional vocabulary. Particularly effective is the contrast between the expansive countryside and the enclosed, theatrical world of the nautanki. The former suggests freedom, innocence and emotional possibility; the latter embodies performance, commerce, spectacle and the relentless judgement of society.

Few films demonstrate as persuasively how songs can advance a narrative rather than merely interrupt it. Shankar–Jaikishan’s music is deeply informed by folk idioms, while the lyrics of Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri complement the rural milieu with remarkable naturalness. Songs such as “Sajan Re Jhoot Mat Bolo,” “Chalat Musafir,” “Sajanwa Bairi Ho Gaye Hamar” and “Aa Aa Bhi Jaa” have long since entered the permanent vocabulary of Hindi film music. And then there is “Paan Khaye Saiyaan Hamaaro” — exuberant, mischievous and earthy, providing a delightful counterpoint to the melancholy that permeates the central love story.

Yet Teesri Kasam is not a film to be hurried through. Its pleasures reveal themselves gradually, much like the landscape through which Hiraman’s bullock cart travels. Its greatest achievement lies in creating a world in which literature, cinema, folk music and human emotion cease to be separate artistic categories and become facets of a single sensibility.

Raj Kapoor contributes one of his most understated performances; Waheeda Rehman supplies the film with its emotional gravity; Subrata Mitra’s cinematography turns the countryside into visual poetry; Shankar–Jaikishan furnish an unforgettable musical landscape; and Shailendra’s faith in Renu’s story gives the entire enterprise an almost disarming sincerity.

Above all, Teesri Kasam understands a truth that many romantic films either overlook or deliberately evade: love does not necessarily culminate in possession. Sometimes its deepest expression lies precisely in its inability to possess, in the ache of an affection that remains unconsummated, and in the indelible memory of having briefly inhabited a world in which two lonely souls believed, however fleetingly, that they belonged together.