Double

Whether through the unconscious, the uncanny, the imaginary, différance, mimesis, or the simulacrum, figurations of the double – the paradox of sameness in difference, and difference in sameness – trace a long, ramified history within Western post-Romantic philosophy and literature. However, Romantic philosophy also finds its echo in the epic-Puranic tradition of South Asia, where maya generates the illusion of existence out of nothingness through duplication, most wondrously in Krishna’s evanescent 300-thousand-fold manifestation to the gopis in the Bhagavata Purana. Here, God is literally made flesh, doubling the physical and the spiritual, the earthly and the divine. The epic-Puranic tradition contains numerous stories of mistaken identity, where gods assume the appearance of a desired mortal’s husband or suitor, as in the myths of Nala–Damayanti or Ahalya, or take on irresistible appearances to seduce other gods, as in the tales of Mohini. These stories are echoed in popular folk tales and films, where snakes (naga) or tree spirits appear in human forms to deceive and seduce (Doniger, 2000). The classical tradition is also replete with Gods who incarnate and thereby reconcile opposites, like the martial and playful Krishna or the two faces of the mother goddess, which the film star, playing the double role, allegorically incarnates through the ‘magic’ of special effects cinema (Nandy, 1995).

The Western Romantic tradition yielded the figure of doppelgänger, the uncanny double, a demonic psychological projection with a will of its own, and a central motif of German ‘Expressionist’ cinema. Late-Victorian literature and theatre popularised the doppelgänger through the divided-hero melodrama, like Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Wilde’s novels and plays, later adapted by Hollywood. The doppelgänger implies a single self, divided by an interior conflict, and this figure, to a certain extent, finds its way into Bombay cinema through an older tradition of the twin or lookalike, where psychological traits are divided between different characters. In Afsana (1951), Ashok Kumar plays two brothers separated at birth, where the evil twin then assumes the identity of the good twin. The doppelgänger motif grew more prominent with the mainstreaming of horror and the thriller in the 1990s Bollywood cinema, in films like Baazigar (1993), Duplicate (1998) and more recently Fan (2016), a complex reflection on stardom and its publics. All these films, featuring radically contrasting roles, highlight the doubled role as a showcase for star acting (Majumdar, 2009).

Shakespeare’s comedies of mistaken identity (via Plautus) are one source of this older doubles’ tradition. Mediated by the plots of Sanskrit drama, Shakespearean comedy entered Indian cinema in two ways: via nineteenth-century Bengali literary culture and via the syncretic idiom of Parsi theatre, where Shakespeare was freely adapted and remixed with contemporary themes. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors was adapted in Bengali cinema as Bhranti Bilash (1963) and in Hindi cinema as Do Dooni Char (1968), whose credits joke on the cinematic ‘magic’ of the doubled role, and as the popular Angoor (1982) (Allen, 2014). Shakespearean conceits profoundly shaped the middle cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, in films like Chupke Chupke (1975) and Gol Maal (1979), the latter also drawing on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest (1895), where an imaginary double becomes a real one. Mukherjee established a distinctively Indian comedic tradition of mistaken and assumed identity, notably seen in the films of David Dhawan and Govinda Ahuja, like Coolie No. 1 (1995), a reworking of Gol Maal and Bade Miyan, Chote Miyan (1998), a remix of The Comedy of Errors with the Hollywood film, Bad Boys (1995).

Victorian doubles melodramas were equally important to the Indian double tradition, where twinned characters, often from widely different social backgrounds, are switched in an abrupt reversal of social fortune, as in Twain’s Prince and the Pauper (1881), Dumas’s The Corsican Brothers (1844), and Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). Via their Hollywood adaptations, these films entered Bengali and Hindi cinema in straight and hybrid versions. For example, Hollywood’s The Corsican Brothers (1941), a synthesis of twin melodrama (where the brothers feel each other’s pain) and the modernist doppelgänger, was remade by Wadia Movietone as Fearless Nadia’s Muqabala (1942), by S. S. Vasan in Nishan (1949), and as a masala remix in Gora Aur Kala (1972) (where the dark-skinned brother allegorically becomes a Naxalite rebel). It also inspired Bollywood’s Kishen Kanhaiya (1990) and the Dhawan comedy, Judwaa (1997). The syncretic doubles story, Ram Aur Shyam (1967), adapted from Telugu cinema’s Ramudu Bheemudu (1964), established for the Bombay cinema an evergreen double role formula: divided twins grow up with different characters and social backgrounds, exchange lovers in a comedy of errors, and finally join forces to overcome social injustice. Here, cultural appropriation develops its own indigenous historicity through the transformation of mimesis into self-mimesis; the foreign copy becomes an authentically Indian tradition.

A third tradition of the double, with a distinctive form of cultural hybridity, involves reincarnation stories featuring metaphysical doubling. One version, which I call the ‘reincarnation romance’, draws from the storytelling tradition of the Perso–Arabic masnavi and the Punjabi qissa, where star-crossed lovers, unjustly separated by a third party, find happiness only in the ecstasy of death (Sufi fanaa). However, in the reincarnation romance death knows no bounds, and the linear masnavi is yoked to a cyclical plot of reincarnation, delivering karmic justice usually by reuniting the present lovers and defeating their past enemy. Conveniently, the lovers are reborn in their new characters not only at the same time but even with the same appearance, making possible mutual recognition. The star, in a dual role, ensures identity across different characters, perhaps as a quasi-divine essence beneath the play of character appearances. This tradition is established with films like Madhumati (1958), Milan (1967), Mehbooba (1976), Kudrat (1981) and Hameshaa (1997) and celebrated in numerous recent Bollywood films, from Love Story 2050 (2008) to Dangerous Ishq (2012), which provide opportunities for complex flashback narratives, for stars appearing in double or treble roles and for bravura song sequences in which the voice becomes a vehicle for communicating spiritually across space and time (Bhaskar, 2018).

A fourth tradition of the double draws upon Sanskrit myths about mistaken suitors or husbands. Whereas in the myths the gods are purposive and wily, in the Bombay cinema the confusion happens by accident, thereby preserving the women’s honour, as in cinematic adaptations of Tagore’s novel Noukadubi (1906). This trope also finesses the relationship between desire and the arranged marriage, where the courted woman marries a man who turns out to be someone she has previously fallen in love with, as in the Bengali film Agni Pariksha (1954) and its Hindi remakes; or, she does not realise that the man she falls in love with is not her betrothed, as in Basu Chatterjee’s Chitchor (1976). In other stories, a would-be suitor uses deception to win the heart of his beloved, like the trickster ghost in Duvidha (1973) or Paheli (2005), or a double appears in the guise of a husband, either unwittingly, as in Hum Dono (1961), or mendaciously, as in Aasmaan (1984). Not all doubles stories involve lookalikes. In Cyrano de Bergerac stories, like the Bengali film Pasher Bari (1952), remade in Hindi as Padosan (1968), or Raj Kapoor’s more tragic Sangam (1964), a man courts a woman using his friend’s expressive words and voice. In Bollywood, the Cyrano formula, dramatising dosti (friendship) versus love, became ubiquitous in films like Saajan (1991), Na Tum Jaano Na Hum (2002), Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Jaan-e-Mann (2006), Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge (2011) and Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017).

The figuration of the double is more than a metaphysical or textual trope; it is profoundly cultural and historical. In his novel Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman Rushdie uses the cinematic trope of babies switched at birth to express the partition of India at the moment of its conception, and in doing so perhaps identifies an historical subtext for this motif in the movies (Sarkar, 2009). In general, socially contrasting twin roles, as in the Ram Aur Shyam series, at once dramatise social injustice and ritualistically heal it. Furthermore, basic narrative templates, like genres, change according to historical circumstance. For example, the reincarnation story emerges in the abrupt transition to Independence, where the present is haunted by the trauma of a past it seeks to overcome. In Mahal (1949), and fake reincarnation films like Woh Kaun Thi? (1964), the very idea of reincarnation is treated with ambivalence, reflecting a rationalist Nehruvian ethos (Mubarki, 2016; Sen, 2017). However, in the reincarnation romance, crossing class (and caste) lines holds out the utopian promise of future integration once oppression is exorcised. In films like Neel Kamal (1968), the lure of past love retrieves a lost, purportedly authentic, Hindu tradition. In the wake of the Angry Young Man, the quest for restitution becomes a question of revenge, as in Karz (1980) and Karan Arjun (1995). In post-1990s liberalisation films like Ab Ke Baras (2002), the call of the past recovers the expatriate’s relationship to the motherland. In contemporary reincarnation films like Om Shanti Om (2007), the reincarnation romance becomes a self-conscious celebration of Bombay cinema’s own reincarnation and renewal.

One may view the centrality of the double tradition within Bombay cinema as an expression of the mimetic textuality of Bombay cinema itself, defined not simply by bricolage or borrowings but by textual appropriation and copying from Hollywood as well as from itself. The heightened self-reflexivity of Bollywood is especially marked in the doubles film, whether in the reincarnation romance like Om Shanti Om that reworks Madhumati and Karz, in the doubles’ thriller Don (2006), a remake of Don (1978), or in the comedy Bol Bachchan (2012), a sophisticated riff on Gol Maal. It is tempting to theorise this development as the final redemption of Bombay films from their incipiently abject status as derivative, even degraded copies. Instead, the authenticity of indigenous tradition is confidently asserted and redeemed through and as self-mimicry.