In the ecological succession that births a new forest, the competition for light often induces a struggle of survival of the tallest. The young, spry pines race toward the sky, their thick canopy of needles trapping the fallen sunlight and choking out the ferns and shrubs below. As the trees age and die, the little guys get their photosynthetic feast — no longer starved for sun by its brawnier neighbors, the ground-cover flourishes. So it may have been in the life of the coniferous sprawls of Kashmir, whose proud trunks and undulating swells of mossy earth dominate the early moments of Pushpendra Singh’s marvelous The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs. With its episodic momentum — indexed into seven emotive movements — the film probes at the age-old tension of woman-versus-society through Laila (Navjot Randhawa), its fierce Bakarwal heroine on the precipice of a self-exiling inner sea change. But the mountains and forests that Laila inhabits always receive the camera’s privilege, their monumental presence signaling the difficulty of surpassing the bonds of one’s cultural heritage.
“Laila,” a woman prods at our protagonist’s wedding to proclaim her “I do.” “Do you accept?” A sweeping zoom in and Laila covers her face with her red veil, the cacophony of male voices chattering about her as if she were lost in the words of others. Laila is a shepherdess from another town, “abducted” (as the tradition goes) to be married to a man she does not love – the film will follow her voyage to a new home and an unfulfilling new life in which she struggles to maintain a sense of self-possession. Seven Songs sees Laila frequently made diminutive in this way, even in the film’s most emotionally pressing moments. Cinematographer Ranabir Das insists on landscape, it seems: the Kashmiri forest practically glitters in its sunbeams, the tips of cascading mountain ranges illuminate in a golden morning, and Laila disappears into crowds of sheep and their herders on a dusty, terraced hillside. Such an eye for natural mystique extends to the realm of the interpersonal; in one evocative scene, Laila confronts Mushtaq (Shahnawaz Bhat) — the giddily stubborn police officer with whom she develops a playful yet adulterous flirtation in an attempt at escapism — in a silent forest. Standing face to face on a bluff, the two appear small on the rocky slope, the camera’s distance affording little by way of emotional interiority.
An interpersonal tension between characters is reflected in a spatial incongruity on screen — it’s in these parallels where Seven Songs achieves its most powerful and most interesting triumph. Laila is a woman in flux in a similarly upended culture; while she plans midnight meetings with Mushtaq, only to foil them by alerting her husband Tanvir (Sadakkit Bijran) of the presence of an “intruder,” shepherds on the mountain are demanded to obtain new and unfamiliar forms of permit and ID by government authorities. In both Laila and her neighbors, a source of conflict thus opens in two senses: the painful adaptation to a changing way of life, the shepherds to political tides and Laila to an unfulfilling marriage, and the liberating potential of a less predetermined future. Neither process can be fully realized: Laila sabotages the consummation of her infidelity with Mushtaq — a decisive step toward open cultural rebellion — but expresses her political and feminine agency by battering an ogling police investigator. In this way, Laila, the shrub, struggles toward the light obscured by her culture, the trees, but those old trees seem to be coming down soon enough.
Perhaps this is why Singh and Das’ recourse to the sylvan wide shot is so intriguing. Made small in the frame and small in her milieu, Laila in visual and cultural limbo is pushed toward other directions of growth. Seven Songs asserts that in the push-pull of individuality and culture, it is the looming, well-established latter that more often wins the day. Its stunning soundtrack aside, Seven Songs can thus be best described as a visual contemporary folk song; blending elements of mystic fable, naturalist georgic, and feminist tract, the film treads softly on the extremely unstable ground of a woman rendered perpetually out of place in a wondrous but constraining world. For all of the complex weaving it does, Seven Songs is nothing short of masterful.
