Paheli

Story:

Paheli is a 2005 Indian Hindi-language fantasy film and is a remake of the 1973 Hindi film Duvidha by Mani Kaul based on the short story written by Vijayadan Detha in Rajasthani. It was also reported to have been partially inspired by the 1997 Kannada movie Nagamandala based on the play of same name by Girish Karnad. Directed by Amol Palekar and produced by Juhi Chawla, Aziz Mirza, Sanjiv Chawla, and Shah Rukh Khan, who also portrays the male lead, the film tells the story of a wife (Rani Mukerji) whose husband (Khan) goes on a business trip and is visited by a ghost, disguised as her husband, who is in love with her and takes her husband’s place. The supporting cast includes Anupam Kher, Amitabh Bachchan, Juhi Chawla and Suniel Shetty. Detha’s story, which had earlier been adapted into the 1973 film by Mani Kaul, is folkloric in origin. Paheli diverges from its source material and the earlier adaptations in giving the plot and its lead female character a more feminist agency.

PLOT

The film is narrated by two puppets, voiced by Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah.
A young, enthusiastic Rajasthani village girl, Lachchi (Rani Mukerji), has an arranged marriage with Kishanlal (Shah Rukh Khan), the workaholic son of wealthy merchant Bhanwarlal (Anupam Kher), from a distant village. While travelling from her home to her in-laws’ home, the party stops to rest at a dharamshala (spiritual dwelling), which is rumoured to be the host to 128 ghosts. At the dharamshala, a ghost sees Lachchi and is taken by her beauty. The ghost follows Lachchi and she can sense a presence and gets really scared. Later, on their marriage night, Lachchi is shocked to learn that Kishanlal, who is a dutiful son, will honour his father’s wish to begin a new, far-away business on a predetermined auspicious date, which happens to be the very next day. On the night, Kishanlal turns away from his wife to finish his bookkeeping, and in the early morning hours, sets off on a business trip to Jamnagar that is to last five years. Lachchi is devastated, but Kishanlal’s sister-in-law, Gajrobai (Juhi Chawla), consoles her, empathising on the grounds that Gajrobai’s husband, Sunderlal (Suniel Shetty), has also disappeared without informing the family.

The ghost sees Kishanlal leaving the village and assumes an human form to speak to Kishanlal at a watering hole. The ghost learns that Kishanlal is leaving on family business for the next five years. The next day, the ghost appears in Bhanwarlal’s house, having taken Kishanlal’s shape and voice because of his own attachment to Lachchi. The ghost tells Bhanwarlal that during his voyage he met a sage and took great care of him. The sage was happy with his treatment and granted him a boon for five gold coins every single morning for the rest of his life. Bhanwarlal forgets everything and accepts Kishanlal back into the house. Despite pretending to be Kishanlal in front of everyone else in the house, the ghost reveals his true identity to Lachchi at night. Lachchi is thus presented with a dilemma between the representation of all of her desires in the form of the ghost who has taken the form of her real husband. She takes this newfound, sensual, magical, social, self-confident version of Kishanlal as hers.
As Kishanlal, the ghost befriends all of the real Kishanlal’s family.

However, his only blunder is in his treatment of Kishanlal’s servant, Bhoja (Rajpal Yadav), who is perplexed by the idea that Kishanlal has sent a letter from his business trip only to receive it himself in his own house, and is offended when the ghost (who appears as Kishanlal) does not offer him a glass of water. Bhoja returns to Jamnagar and confronts the real Kishanlal on how come he is back and forth from Navalgarh before himself. Kishanlal believes Bhoja to be a drunkard who never reached Navalgarh and has hence returned empty-handed without a letter or any supplies. Meanwhile, the ghost wants to make the two young camels of the house participate in a race. Bhanwarlal is against this as he believes that Kishanlal’s brother, Sunderlal, left home after being embarrassed for losing a similar race seven years ago. The ghost convinces Bhanwarlal that if he wins the race, Sunderlal might return home. At the race, the ghost uses his bag of magic tricks to confuse all the other camels and helps the house camels to win, reclaiming the lost family honour.

After two years, the real Kishanlal again sends a message home through Bhoja, but Bhoja’s wife burns the letter this time as she has not forgotten the insult to Bhoja from two years ago.

Lachchi and the ghost live blissfully together for four years, and Lachchi then falls pregnant with the ghost’s child. The real Kishanlal returns to find if the rumours about his wife’s pregnancy are true, and is shocked to find the ghost in his (Kishanlal’s) own form, while Lachchi goes into early labour pain at the same time. The family initially considers the real Kishanlal to be an imposter and disregard him, but he produces many witnesses and evidences of his authenticity. However, the society, specifically the Thakurs who lost the camel race, force Bhanwarlal to ascertain the truth as they are searching for an opportunity to avenge their dishonour at the camel race by slinging mud at Bhanwarlal’s family. While Lachchi gives birth to a baby girl, Lunima, Sunderlal also returns home and apologises to Gajrobai for his disappearance for so long, and reunites with his family.

Kishanlal’s family is unable to determine which of the doppelgangers is the real Kishanlal (the ghost refusing to confess) and decide to visit the raja so that he can arbitrate. On their way to the raja, Kishanlal’s family meets an old shepherd, Gadariya (Amitabh Bachchan), who helps them out by placing three tests in front of the real Kishanlal. He tells everyone that the one who can lift hot coals will prove himself as Bhanwarlal’s real son, the one who can gather his sheep in time will prove himself as the real husband of Lachchi, and the one who can enter his water bottle will prove himself as the real lover of Lachchi. Kishanlal tries his best to perform the first two, which the ghost does not even bother to try. When Gadariya states “the real lover of Lachchi”, the ghost performs the third, impossible feat and enters the water bottle, simply to prove his love for Lachchi. In this way, the real Kishanlal is discovered and Gadariya quickly closes his bottle, so that the ghost would be unable to exit it.

Following this revelation, the real Kishanlal throws away the bottle in the middle of the desert, and everyone returns home. Lachchi is devastated over the loss of the ghost. In a twist ending, it is revealed that the ghost had already escaped from the bottle and taken the possession Kishanlal’s body to live with Lachchi. While Lachchi tries to confess to her husband that the ghost had not actually betrayed her, the ghost exposes his identity to Lachchi by reminding her of the name they were originally going to give their daughter. Thus, Lachchi begins living happily with both her real husband and her ghost lover in the same body. The two puppets end the story, remarking that this is a very old folk tale.