Mahamaya, the villain

Or an expose of our own prejudices.

In the movie Banaras a mystic love story, Mahamaya played a “villain”. But was he really a villain?

Mahamaya, with his obvious limited intellectual faculty, is trying to run a home and maintain his social stature. He was not shown to be a bundle of all virtues but then who is?
All that he could be charged was that he loved his sister, Shwetambari. Yet, somehow, we expected him to be the murderer. Was it his black attire or long “tilak” on the forehead?

We make our judgments at a subconscious level based on the conditioning of our mind, which is a result of our previous “knowledge” through TV, cinema or direct experience.

Just like Mahamaya, we have people around ourselves. They could be nice people yet we have our opinions. They may have never harmed anyone, they may never have ill feelings towards us but because they are loud, they resemble someone who had hurt us in childhood, someone whose behavior doesn’t conform to our knowledge of him being a good man, makes us look at them suspiciously.

Conversely, just as in the movie, you see good looking “decently dressed” people and you conclude them to be nice people. You could never conceive that someone who looked so normal could be so convoluted in the mind. Someone so graceful and well dressed could murder someone.

This how we assign label to people. He is a good man. She is a bad girl. That neighbor of mine is a smuggler. The man in the beard is a terrorist.

Mahamaya was not created as a villain. The character was created to trick your mind and expose its own weakness to you.