I was invited yesterday to introduce the Assamese film, Aamis (Ravening) at the 3rd I South Asian film festival in San Francisco. Since I hadn’t watched the film yet (but was very excited for what promised to be in store), I made the usual connection between meat-eating and Hindutva intolerance, hoping the film would go beyond a sociological critique, however. And oh, how it did! All the trailers and reviews had promised horror, so of course, one expected cannibalism, the ultimate gastronomic taboo. But the film went beyond all those expectations into a scintillating examination of female desire and appetite, of the mixing of sensory pleasures – the gastronomic and the sexual, of locating pleasure in other body parts than the usual places, of dreamy (Persona-like but in a different register) sequences of the man’s hands touching the insides of the woman’s stomach, of him luxuriating inside her stomach, her face. The body turns into an extended membrane of pleasure. As a pediatrician, Nirmali is often seen rubbing the stomachs of her patients. The belly becomes activated as a fleshy space of erotic, gustatory delectation.
And so does the mouth. As baideo (older sister)/Nirmali eats rabbit meat, catfish with colocasia, bat meat, and then scrambled bits of Sumon’s thigh, devilled egg style, all exquisitely with a fork, her soft, delicate mouth folds in pleasure; you can see the meat glide down her throat, and warm her belly. We’re invited to delight with her in the voluptuous movement of the meat inside her body as much as we take pleasure in her elegant outside, draped in beautiful mekhla chadors with small embroidered motifs, delicate earrings, a gold chain upon her soft neck. Surfaces fold upon each other, seductive outside but more radically, in the inside of organs. The body becomes an engine for oral, abdominal, tactile pleasures, which no amount of mouthwash can erase the taste of. When the abject is folded back into the realm of the senses, something fundamentally shifts in our conception of the body. Boundaries between inside and outside dissolve. The carefully-built edifice of borders – between meat and skin, our insides and outsides, our bodies and others’, objects and the skin and meat that they pierce, classed bodies of a doctor, a small-town student, a working-class rickshaw-puller – is slowly picked at. It’s not the brutal collapse of shocking body horror (which the reviews had primed me to expect) but a delicate disemboweling, a tender picking apart of these boundaries.
Some reviews found the “moralizing” towards the end disappointing. But I didn’t see any moralizing at all, only a critique of it. The state, of course, rears its sanctimonious head when Sumon is busy carving up a rickshaw-wala’s body, arresting him and later Nirmali (who has spent the night in ravenous anticipation). News channels quickly sensationalize the case as being about two lovers with a disgusting, horrifying secret. Nirmali’s son, Piku watches the news with their maid, and Nirmali’s friend, Jumi. Her husband, Dilip, is seen (not heard, mercifully!) screaming on the phone. We can imagine his obtuse, self-righteous shock. Dilip, also a doctor, works for rural health, with clear ideas about disease and its eradication. The poor and their diseases must be kept at the proper distance for the abject, like the leeches he recounts peeling off his legs. His friends call his work award-worthy. We, on Nirmali’s side, see his dense denial of pleasures, notice his disinterest in Sumon’s long list of non-traditional meats, which has her tingling with craving. If one were to get under Nirmali’s skin, as it were, Dilip’s thick, stocky body begins to feel perfect for her growing appetite (at one point, I wondered if she’d consider her son a fit comestible!). But does she hunger for any human meat or for Sumon’s, the body she cannot have conventional sex with because she’s married? The film overturns taboos with tremendous subversive force – since extra-marital sex is deemed immoral, characters explore other corporeal delights. And they take us to very different, much more interesting explorations of senses and affects. Unlike the reviews I read, I didn’t think Jumi is punished for her affair with a younger man (that she describes as hard and soft in the right places). Rather, she finally is pregnant with a child she’s longed for. Her belly fills with her desire just as Nirmali’s has with hers. Sumon and Nirmali finally let their fingers touch when they’re paraded before the hungry journalists by the police. It’s a profoundly erotic moment (and I wish they’d let it linger there rather than clasp their hands as some sort of joint force against society). Even as their faces are covered, criminal style, one imagines their mouths curling with voluptuous arousal.
(Sent in an email note to the director)
