‘Lahu Munh Lag Gaya’
If the application of gulaal on the face of the lover is a gesture of love returned — in ‘Tum Tak’ from Raanjhanaa, ‘Haule Haule’ in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, and ‘Tere Rang’ in Atrangi Re — Bhansali, in ‘Lahu Munh Lag Gaya’ from Goliyon Ki Rasleela: Ram-Leela (2013), turns this gesture into foreplay, blurring the demands of love and lust.
One of the many mythological stories that underpin Holi, celebrating the love of Radha and Krishna, is of an anxious Krishna, dark skinned, wondering if fair Radha loves him. His mother pushes him to ask Radha to apply color on him, which Radha does, staining his face and validating his love, their love. That this story sees fairness bestow affection on darkness, that the divine dark skinned lover is seeking, in both insecurity and anticipation, a response, is given a fragile interpretation in Bhansali’s cinema, where the actresses are always a few shades lighter, given the politics of desirability in commercial Hindi cinema, inflected by both patriarchy and racism; fragile, because the one seeking validation is not always the darker one.
‘Lahu Munh Lag Gaya’ becomes a peacocking, arousing in the other a heat, through the choreographed gesture of applying gulaal on the self — Leela’s fingers flow as she moves her stained fingers from cheek to neck, like water, fluid, a boneless grace that runs past the ridge between cheek and neck. When Ram mimes, with gulaal that she should color the parting of her hair — a symbol of marriage — and then slips his hands down his face to rub the edges of his lower lip — a symbol of sex — Leela flings the gulaal in the air, creating in the midst of all that chaos, their own sealed cauldron of desire, and kisses him, the red on his lips, now on hers. Applying color on the lover is given a new, more passionate reading. He is dazed. She winks — to the beat, this is a Bhansali stamp where every nip in the muscle is choreographed. In the end, as Ram is pulled away by his friends before the Saneda men pummel him, you see Leela looking back at Ram’s hands as it disappears into the crowd. The look is no longer of lust, but longing. The song, then, became the stretch in which lust is renegotiated as love.
