Dev D: Audaciously Masculine – A Feminist Reading! – Editorial

“I have too much consciousness injected in me to break customs without disastrous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.” – The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

Anurag Kashyap’s genius that produced Dev D is a retelling of the classic Bengali novel Devdas by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. The archetypal love story that positions the plot with innocent love shared between Dev and Paro, Dev D does not fictionalize men but brutally assaults the fixated ideology of masculinity. Paro and Chanda are not found at Dev’s feet but are graciously positioning themselves according to their subjectivity in this adaptation.

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Dev’s character played by Abhay Deol centers around the hegemonic normative male who is aggressively antagonistic, a chauvinist by nature who cannot take women to be dislocated in their space but rather wants them oppressed and standardized. Unlike Dev’s hyper-masculine character that weaves him in to submit and become a docile body that stands to be muscular and erect, the women in Anurag Kashyap’s film are given an essence to the rebellion by not directing themselves to fit. We must question the narrative of boldness that is Dev or Paro and Chanda not forming a protective layer to cocoon themselves so as to guard themselves against societal conceptions.

Muscularity offers both cultural assimilation and serves men’s bodies as competitive objects who build themselves to be “symbolically weaponry” that suggests stoicism, toughness, domination, and power. The aesthetic identity rooms men to produce a facade that has been colonially accepted. Dev too adjusts himself in the grid. If masculinity lies in the experience of being upfront and daring it is interesting to note how Dev interacts with his masculinity.

Kashyap intelligently places his women Paro and Chanda to be sexually liberated which not only makes Dev rethink historiography but also for the audience to confront the sociological elitism that the men display. To discontinue the chain, Dev D has been placed brilliantly where women do not vigorously suffuse but rather build a consciousness to become the ‘Other’. The otherness shall not be taken as women subverting the dominant representation, but rather shifting the focus on building a ‘self’.

Having met Dev after a prolonged period of time, Paro and Dev are both desirous of each other. Looking for intimacy, Paro takes active charge and brings forward a mattress in a field. She no longer depends on Dev to make love to her but rather comes ahead as a forward woman taking control of her sexuality and needs. When Paro expresses herself, she is ridiculed by her own lover and is called a slut.

The sexual expression of love is commendable only when men perform whereas women who are fantastical and eroticize the act of loving making are slut shamed only because of deriving pleasure out of the act. On one hand, the act of subjugation creates an identity of elitism in men whereas hypersexuality in women where mutual pleasure is enjoyed, why are women bashed for their greater performance? The need for men to feel threatened stems from their own performance anxiety where they are being culturally challenged.

Dev’s fragile idea of machismo is put to test when Paro stands up to his violent, narcissistic, consuming behavior. Paro aptly puts “You cannot love anyone but yourself.” He cannot take the push that his childhood love will no longer be tolerant of his egoistic conduct. Dev’s resentment and his lack of emotional connection with his mother shows how entitled he feels to hit Paro to cover up for his low self-esteem. His confidence in drugs keeps him then numbed so as to not take responsibility for his internal conflict.

“A creature needs some reference to the beyond of language, to a pact, to a commitment which constitutes him, strictly speaking, as an other, a reference included in the general or, to be more exact, universal system of interhuman symbols. No love can be functionally realizable in the human community, save by means of a specific pact, which, whatever the form it takes, always tends to become isolated off into a specific function, at one and the same time within language and outside of it” – Freud’s Papers 174.

What Freud talks about is the need for a narrative outside the language system where laws and systems are not known to man. Dev similarly is unable to create a space for himself where he can look beyond the human community’s dictatorship and thus ends up isolating himself by abusing drugs.

When Dev meets Chanda, he eloquently expresses himself to find refuge in her to deal with his loss. While Chanda has to deal with her own childhood trauma of an MMS scandal, we have seen her being a caregiver to Dev. After a continued period of time spent together, Chanda falls in love with Dev where her love transcends to emasculate and look at him as a man-child.

In the last scene, Kashyap writes Dev’s character such that Chanda bathes him with a sponge and nurses him like a baby. Do women need to reduce themselves in order to heal men from their past? There is a moral and social gratification in saving and putting a man on the right track. Thus when Dev gives a ring to Chanda, she feels accomplished of not being objectified but rather as a woman with moral status.

Women are rarely qualified as individuals with minds who deserve to live for their own autonomy. It is often that a woman to be recognized as a character of her own has to dissolve herself within a man, by constantly saving herself from the anxiety of being on her own, she takes on the responsibility of a man.

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Therefore, at the end of the movie, we are to contemplate whether men like Dev are worthy of being men or should be reduced to being taken care of where their emotional fragility is weaved through female sensitivity. The film advocates the need for women to be liberated as well as looks into the complicated social structures that organize our lives.