“What is now in the past was once in the future,” wrote Cambridge historian F W Maitland. If one observes such caution in taking a look back, it would be unfair to judge the political journey of Hindi cinema from what we know or have experienced about Indian politics and the Hindi screen now. That, however, can’t stop one from being tempted to lament the possibilities Hindi cinema missed in mapping the political landscape of the country as it entered the mid-Eighties.

Having lost Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the rise of the Punjab insurgency, the new and young Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had to grapple with the separatist movement in Assam while Sri Lanka, the southern neighbour, was imploding under the Tamil secessionist surge. The Indian nation-state, seemingly, was going through spells of self-doubt as its territorial integrity was being tested in intense ways. Irrespective of being armed with a historic high of 404 Lok Sabha seats, the new Prime Minister couldn’t take the mandate for granted as the disillusionment with the political class was fast setting in and being expressed in popular culture. In fact, his “one rupee from Delhi becomes 15 paise when it reaches the poor” remark has almost become an admission of corrupt governance.

Later in the decade, perceptions about minority appeasement in the Shah Bano case and the movement for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya also made it clear that in addition to the challenges of defending the nation-state and manoeuvring political economy for poverty alleviation, the assertion of identity politics would also define the politics of time to come. Moreover, there were indications that the next decade might witness the political mobilisation over the Mandal Commission recommendations across caste lines within Hindu society.

All this coincided with the expansion of Doordarshan as an all-India network in the early 1980s, taking it beyond the metro cities. However, seen with prism of political content in general entertainment, being a state-owned broadcaster limited its political function to government propaganda or delivering homilies about national integration to an insurgency-battling country (remember Mile sur mera tumhara?) Obviously, with the albatross of state patronage around its neck, Doordarshan could never have the credibility required for independent political narratives. Such potential competition for telling political tales was neutralised by nature of the ownership of competitor. So was Hindi cinema, the independent and popular source of general entertainment in the country, responding to currents of political ferment?

It didn’t address the immediate political churnings. What it actually did was to use indirect plot techniques to prop up political drama in Hindi films. The first was to serve the middle class moral porn on corruption as seen through an orgy of politician-criminal-police nexus (with the media, corporates and the bureaucracy also chipping in sometimes). The second was to embed activist agenda of social and political justice in the narratives by highlighting oppression and skewed nature of power equations. In 1985, the imprint of activist zeal was visible on a film which established, rather deceptively, Prakash Jha as one of the few political filmmakers in Hindi cinema. Damul wove a tale of the plight of bonded labour, caste atrocity and political patronage to feudal forces in a village of Gaya district in Bihar. Despite being from the state, Jha has never managed to portray Bihar with any semblance of authenticity in the three films he has made with his home state as the backdrop. Damul also suffers from similar stereotypes and clichés film makers serve when they seek to present rural Bihar for the festival circuit abroad or critical acclaim among urban activists in India. Putting that aside, it had its political moments.

Here is a scene from the film in which on a visit to the caste massacre-inflicted village, a minister is briefed on the situation by the alleged mastermind of the killings, the upper caste landlord. The minister accepts his invitation to have a brief halt at the landlord’s house for tea and to address a press conference there while the state paraphernalia (including the magistrate who was there to record eyewitnesses’ account) are behind him. On his way back to the state capital, the minister assures construction of a bridge on the landlord’s request.

In the same year, Govind Nihalani’s Aghaat (1985) explored the terrain of trade union politics with Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah playing rival leaders – set apart by a different set of leadership values. With labour organisation politics making inroads into the industrial setting of urban India, the film pitted an idealist and passionate trade union leader, played by Om Puri, against his pragmatic and ambitious rival, played by Naseeruddin Shah.

Thrusting default villainy on the politician, mainstream Hindi cinema was using politician-bashing as the collective moral catharsis of the yawning gap that had already set in between the people and their representatives. Amid this routine exercise, Ramesh Sharma’s New Delhi Times (1986) tried to invest moral capital in media as a tool to unravel the layers of power complex in which politics and crime were getting  inextricably mixed. Shashi Kapoor plays the role of Vikas Pandey, the executive editor of New Delhi Times, who writes an investigative report on a political murder in Ghazipur only to find that were other murky sides to the political conspiracy than what he had concluded. In the final two scenes of the film, Kapoor’s character introspects on the role of journalism in seeing through this intricate web of corruption and erosion of democratic values.

Three years later, Tinnu Anand’s Main Azaad Hoon (1989), a remake of the Frank Capra film Meet John Doe (1941), is a tale of how perceptions and projections are manufactured and what could be their hypothetical political consequences. With Amitabh Bachchan playing Azaad, a ploy to personify a fictitious character created by a journalist, played by Shabana Azmi, the film tries to blend the imperatives of political issues with that of the possibilities and dangers of political communication – the machinery and lure of public expectations and propaganda. In the process, it also reveals how perceptions often become captives of their own smokescreen. In what could have been a sharp satire, Tinnu Anand fritters away the opportunity by resorting to unnecessary melodrama in the later part. Perhaps he seems too desperate to show what German sociologist Max Weber had identified as one of the three sources of leadership – charisma.

With India deciding to open its economy to the world in the early 1990s and the gradual liberalisation which followed, the lure of NRI-driven foreign markets for Indian films made a section of filmmakers even less engaged with the idea of political cinema. That seems evident in how the new star system led by the three Khans – Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh, though they never came close to the dizzying heights of stardom that Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan had scaled during their prime. The three Khans kept a distance from the themes that were overtly political. In fact, their body of work in the period are replete with films which had pink bubblegum feel of all is well with the world. Working in the times of massive expansion of mass media, satellite television channels and eventually the internet, they hinged their public persona (including their screen roles) on a cultivated isolation from political world outside the maudlin sweet nothings.

The Nineties, apparently, didn’t produce remarkable political films in mainstream cinema. However, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), based on Mala Sen’s biography of dacoit-turned-politician Phoolan Devi, proved to be a major breakthrough for Indian cinema in weaving political subtexts while chronicling contemporary lives. The film had a running theme of caste-based political structures, power play and state apathy. Studded with great performances by almost the entire cast, led by Seema Biswas playing Phoolan, the film was the coming of age of biographical filmmaking on the Indian screen. Though it wasn’t a political film at its heart, its narrative sweep carried with it the power anatomy of oppression and backlash in rural pockets of Uttar Pradesh.

Major events like the Mandal agitation and its fallout, or the Babri Masjid demolition and the communal riots that followed had no or only fleeting encounters with the Hindi screen. Tamil filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) had a Hindi version which engaged with the communal strife in the city. The engagement, however, didn’t elevate the film to any form of gripping political narrative. It ended up peddling cinematic sermons on co-existence. It is now remembered more for its music, and if one may add, for capturing the monsoon most evocatively on Indian screen. It had courted its own share of controversy as a few Muslim groups had protested against showing a Muslim girl (played by Manisha Koirala) eloping with and marrying a Hindu boy (played by Arvind Swamy).

After the dust had settled on Punjab’s experience with separatist militancy, Gulzar’s Maachis (1996) looked back at the years of mobilisation, violence and the state’s high-handedness in rooting it out. With the narrative device of human relationships taking different turns in response to the political externalities of the time, the film strays into cinematic polemics against alleged human rights abuses perpetrated by the state police against militants – real, suspected and framed. In these last few moments of the film, the extent of police torture is laid bare quite evocatively as two key characters of the film Kripal Singh (played by Chandrachud Singh) and Veeran, lovers for long, are unable to have a conversation when Veeran comes to visit him in jail. Kripal has a swollen (perhaps toothless too) jaw apparently inflicted by police torture, and Veeran, unable to bear his plight anymore, offers him a poisonous chemical mix to end his life.

Making another cinematic foray into post-Independence India , Govind Nihalani made Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa (1998), based on Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali novel Hazar Churasir Maa. The film draws its political context from the fictional account of a mother exploring her dead son’s Naxal past. Limited by the novel’s rather naive understanding of political economy and the nature of the Naxal movement, the film ends up being captive to a rather romanticised worldview of left wing rebellion in Bengal of 1970s.

Before the turn of the century, two filmmakers made unimpressive attempts at telling political tales Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu (1999) rambles only to provide clichéd homilies on corruption, while Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998) failed in embedding the subtext of separatist rebels and human rights violations by security forces with a regular romantic musical (bits of its plot could be construed as ‘stalking’ too). Mani Ratnam returned six years later to make Yuva (2004) – an insipid take on youth and politics. The film meanders, and fritters away the early promise of a portrayal of the drivers of youthful political engagements in a country which could easily be described as gerontocracy too.

This genre of students’ politics films, which saw an early attempt in the form of Ram Gopal Varma’s Shiva (1990) had a tryst with the campus politics of the hinterland in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil (2003). Though a bit muddled up with a parallel love story, Haasil portrayed the rivalry of Brahmin- Thakur lobbies in university politics of Uttar Pradesh. With his fine performance as Thakur student leader Ranvijay Singh in Allahabad University, Irfan Khan found a gateway to make a mark on mainstream cinema after years of excellent performances in parallel cinema. A few bits like these show how muscle power in campus give a violent character to caste-driven university politics in some pockets of Uttar Pradesh.

In being a visual narrative of testing political times of the period, Hindi cinema couldn’t be said to have been any reliable narrator of political churnings of the time. Its early political innocence was reinforced by new imperatives of catering to a global NRI  market which had the least political stake in the country, and was happy to see Bollywood’s cinematic imagination-either disengaged from or indifferent to the politics of the country. That, however, didn’t stop some promising possibilities of political narratives finding their way to the Hindi screen. By the turn of the century, the idea of the political was still searching a cinematic idiom as Hindi films spun millennial tales.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.

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