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Almost halfway through the second part of 2012 crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur , the character of career politician Ramadhir Singh gives some insight into his success in overcoming political rivals. He argues, “Kaahe ki hum sanima nahi dekhte … Hindustan mein jab tak sanima hai, log ch***** bante rahenge (I don’t watch films… As long as films are there in this country, people will continue to be fooled).”

Coming from a politician—who is shown in the film as being steeped in the hard-nosed world of realpolitik—that’s an understandable disdain for the melodramatic terrain occupied by Hindi movies. But, has that come in the way of Hindi cinema following the politics of our times? Obviously not. Ramadhir Singh might not be following cinema, but Hindi cinema has been keen on following the power play of the Ramadhir Singhs of the country.

From the many contexts seen in our epics to early portrayals of political ideals, court intrigues and realpolitik in ancient plays like Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa—the subtexts of statecraft, power play, and the ideas and expediency of the key players have been a part of the rich legacy of storytelling in India. Occasionally they have moved from being the subtext to being the leitmotif of the narratives in different forms of performing arts.

It’s no wonder that when Hindi films became one of the most important expressions of Indian popular culture in the 20th century, they couldn’t escape the narrative landscape of democratic politics that unfolded in the later half of the century. If not for anything else, the inextricable links of politics and its cast of characters with everyday India makes it too visible to escape the attention of Bollywood’s sense of histrionic-laden storytelling and contemporary commentary. In seven decades since Independence, the Hindi silver screen’s encounters with political churning in the country has ranged from fleeting glimpses to intense themes. Sometimes it has given impressions of a dabbling dilettante, sometimes that of an engaged chronicler, and sometimes that of an involved commentator. 

There are identifiable fragments of political India in Hindi cinema, but the question remains—has political cinema offered by Bollywood emerged as an entity beyond those fragments? If we take a look at the post-Independence period, what would be worth probing is whether political drama has carved a niche for itself as a regularly-visited genre in Hindi cinema. What we are more likely to come across more often is the weaving of the political as a subtext, or even footnotes, to the narrative canvas of Hindi films.

The tenor of Hindi cinema’s brush with the political in the Nehruvian era was similar to the period—optimistic and creative, but critically aware of the challenges ahead and the disillusionment creeping in. The first response was to see Nehruvian worldview as an extension of the ideological legacy of the freedom struggle: as evident in the quixotic innocence of films like Jagriti (1954) and Ab Dilli Dur Nahi (1957).

But, amid the obvious afterglow of Independence, the sceptical scrutiny of the way the new republic was shaping up began finding expression on the Hindi screen. While following the wave of Italian neo-realist filmmaking, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) was a commentary on the plight of rural India stuck in agrarian indebtedness and the indifference of the state to rural distress, the socialist critique of urban India was obvious in Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955) and Phir Subah Hogi (1958), and even to an extent in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957).

However, it was Dilip Kumar-starrer Naya Daur (1957), a year after the Second Five Year Plan (1956-61) was rolled out, that the cinematic portrayal of some of the implications of the policy could be seen. In some ways, Naya Daur drew the cinematic contours of India’s early experiments with central planning, and Dilip Kumar echoed the debates which Nehruvian India was having with itself.

As the leading site of people’s entertainment of a young republic, it put some bits of key political conversations of the times. While doing so, it ensured the political animal was enjoyable, in its storytelling and the songs it hummed. 

In making cinematic sense of the 20 years of post-Nehru India, marked by the rise of authoritarian impulses and anti-establishment mobilisation in the Seventies, the Hindi screen showed shallow spells of engagement with half-hearted political biographies like Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975), and a string of offerings making the angry young man the mascot of general unrest—as seen in mainstream films like Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975) and Kaala Patthar (1979). The anti-establishment angst generally served as a subtext of defying authority in general narratives of formulaic mainstream cinema. 

The quintessential political movie of the 1970s—again a victim and beneficiary of a ban, alternatively—was made by then Member of Parliament and a little-known filmmaker Amrit Nahata. In a thinly disguised satire on Sanjay Gandhi and his acolytes’ whimsical approach to conducting affairs of the party and government, Kissa Kursi Ka (1977) was more of a visual collage of political cartoons that one found in newspapers before Emergency was declared on June 25, 1975.

In arthouse cinema, the political themes embedded in persistent structures of exploitation, patriarchy and impoverishment found expression in works of filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen and Goutam Ghose. Benegal’s Nishant (1975) marking Naseeruddin Shah’s debut, Ghose’s Paar (1984), and Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983)—arguably Om Puri’s most memorable film—forayed, in their own ways, into the social context of power relationships.

Damul (1985), Aghaat (1985) and New Delhi Times (1986) were some of the offerings from parallel cinema, which sought to explore the power matrix of rural violence, labour politics and media narratives. In mainstream cinema, three years later, Tinnu Anand’s Main Azaad Hoon (1989)—a remake of the Frank Capra film Meet John Doe (1941)—was a tale of how perceptions and projections are manufactured and what could be their hypothetical political consequences.

With India opening 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 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 scaled during their prime. The three Khans kept at a distance from 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 the 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. Other such attempts to chronicle contemporary history were rather shallow, ranging from Gulzar’s Maachis (1996) to Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995), which set a love story in the backdrop of communal riots triggered by the demolition of Babri Masjid.

Even the parallel cinema experiments in narrating episodes in post-Independence political movements were rather contrived—as evidenced in Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa (1998), based on Mahasweta Devi‘s Bengali novel. Limited by the novel’s rather naïve 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 the 1970s.

This genre of students’ politics films—which saw an early attempt in Ram Gopal Varma’s Shiva (1990), the Hindu version of his Telugu film Siva—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.

Two years later, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005) sought to reinterpret the heady days of the Left-wing movement in Indian campuses in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent disillusionment. In 2007, following the Supreme Court nod, Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2007) was released in India. A screen adaptation of Hussain Zaidi’s eponymous book, the film tried to to piece together the investigation into the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai.

Kashyap, however, came across as too naïve when he moved from recorded history to fiction. Gulaal (2009) tried to tell too many things, in an imagined mix of student and redundant Rajputana royalty politics set in Rajasthan with a naïveté which became the undoing of the film. In a rather weak film, Kashyap revealed too many chinks in his sheltered understanding, or fantasies, of what constitutes “the political” in contemporary India. These flaws became even more obvious when he returned to recount slices of contemporary history in his web series Sacred Games (2018). In a rather dumbed-down understanding of the of identity politics as a subtext in a crime drama, the narrative is a poor, and often misleading, guide to unravel the complex facets of the political Indian.

Last year, such flaws were also obvious in Amit V. Masurkar’s Newton, a lazy satire with an activist subtext. In evoking empathy for tribals inhabiting remote forests, the film wears its concerns on its narrative quite well in parts, but in demonising the state apparatus, it ends up being visual polemics draped in satire. If India needed an election day movie, it can wait longer. Newton, with the exceptionalism of India’s electoral experience in an insurgency-hit area, can’t be an introduction to a day in the life of an average Indian voter. In the abnormalities of its case—well-meaning as it may be—Newton isn’t a cinematic primer for our lived elections, but a contentious, and hence coloured, chapter for distress-specialists.

“What is now in the past was once in the future,” wrote Cambridge historian FW 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 known.

The last two decades have also been a rather tame period for Hindi cinema’s portrayals of political conversations in the country, the ironical import of which becomes more pronounced, given the proliferation of new technology-driven platforms of political discourse and engagement.

If the earlier romantic or angry man tales served as the mainstream vehicles for carrying the political sideshows, now crime thrillers and poor attempts at recounting contemporary political history have become Hindi cinema’s idea of making sense of the political Indian. In the process, it’s exposing its naïveté, as well the limits of its political understanding.

What hasn’t changed in such political forays of the Hindi screen is the fact that political narratives haven’t yet come of age to stake their own claims on storytelling, free from a minor story in the larger story. The political animal is still searching for its own fiefdom in its rather unsure turf on the Hindi screen.

Also read our four-part series on the Hindi cinema here, here, here and here. 

You can hear more about netas, abhinetas and the possibility of political cinema in India at The Media Rumble. For the second time, Newslaundry & Teamwork Arts come together to bring you the best of the news media industry. 

Register at themediarumble.com.

Date: August 3 & August 4 

Venue: India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.