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Before the Rains
Deepak Chopra 

What makes “Before the Rains” so touching is that it isn’t what it seems to be about. It seems to be about a quietly good Englishman, a planter in south India, who wants to build a road to the top of a mountain. 

He must complete this road before the monsoon rains arrive and wash away all his hard work. The road will bring money for him, jobs for the locals, and a better future. 

But in Santosh Sivan’s melancholy, lyrical, and intelligent film, this quiet Englishman stands for the tragic twilight of empire, and his “goodness” is rife with betrayal and arrogance beneath the surface.  

He destroys the life of his mistress, unravels his family, and almost causes an innocent man to be found guilty of murder. How can goodness lead to catastrophe? The answer is wrapped up in the complex fate of three people who try to live in two worlds- traditional India and colonial Anglo- India- at exactly the wrong moment, when a fervor for independence is sweeping through the land. 

Fueling the story, which unfolds with the reflective pace of E.M. Forster rather than the robust speed of Kipling, are three gripping performances. Linus Roache as the English planter Henry Moores (no coincidence that he echoes the name of Mrs. Moore from Forster’s “A Passage to India”) is trapped by a crushing moral choice, and his slow, quiet collapse is a symbol for every good Englishman whose moral shortcomings were tested in the era of empire. Nandita Das’s extraordinary portrayal as the mistress Sajani is remarkably sensitive and very poignant. She is luminously in love but also terribly vulnerable. Her natural empathy for her character turns a potential victim into an emblem of feminine struggle. Sajani is overwhelmed by uncontrollable feelings and the forces of history. 

Best of all is the man caught in the middle, T.K., the sahib’s trusted foreman who must choose between the two worlds he can no longer inhabit. Rahul Bose sees more and says less than anyone else in the cast, yet his intensely moving performance is the linchpin of the entire story. It is T.K. who is trapped in the same dilemma as Fielding, the hero of “A Passage to India”: Is it right to betray a friend or one’s own people? How T.K. decides forms the climax of the film when he must either kill the Englishman who gave him a job, a future, and the only dignity he has known, or die for a crime he didn’t commit.  

In America, we’ve enjoyed a spate of films that read like nuanced short stories (“In the Bedroom”, “Little Children”, “The Savages”), and now it’s a delight to find such layered sophistication coming from India. “Before the Rains” fully deserves to stand in that company. It unfolds along expected lines — the classic Merchant Ivory costume movie from which we expect exotic scene-setting and just as exotic love affairs, only to wind up in much deeper waters. Touching and thought- provoking, “Before the Rains” doesn’t set out to change our conception of how conscience came to grief as British imperial glory died, but it achieves even more. It makes us reflect on how we ourselves will feel when the dispossessed of the world rise to ask us for dignity, freedom, and  love without past taints of condescension and guilt.

14 May, 2008
 

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