Indu Sarkar – A casualty of lack of ambition

Morality is a plot device, overused to weave a narrative in crafts ranging from novels to films. Twenty minutes into Indu Sarkar, where sarkar stands for protagonist’s surname and not a prime ministerial regime, you realise that the film is going to end up as a morality play propped up by the polemics of activism. That’s the key failing of this 139-minute movie told with 21 months of the Emergency (June 25, 1975- March 21, 1977), imposed by the Indira Gandhi government, as the backdrop. In making it a visual ragbag of moral commentary on a testing period for India’s democratic journey, Madhur Bhandarkar fritters away the ambitions of curating a political drama which the period deserves.

Perhaps that would be stretching expectations from Bhandarkar. His body of work is replete with films which are overwhelmed by their own topicality. In the process, the themes often get dumbed down to reinforcing popular perceptions and stereotypes – one may recall Corporate (2006) and Fashion (2008). While attempting a thinly disguised portrayal of a phase in contemporary history in Indu Sarkar, he succumbs to the same vice – serving a cinematic collage of moral outrage. That’s a terrible thing to do with a political film.

Bhandarkar’s cast of characters is a mix of fictitious figures and thinly disguised dramatis personae of the Emergency period. The narrative strings, however, are in the hands of a stammering and orphaned girl who grows up to find herself as a collateral damage of the authoritarianism unleashed by the Emergency. In making the eponymous character, played insipidly by Kirti Kulhari, the pivot, Bhandarkar avoids the burden of historical authenticity and contestations.  That doesn’t stop him from revealing where his political heart lies.

In a turn of events, seemingly aimed at showing Indira Gandhi’s controversial call for ‘committed bureaucracy’, Indu marries Naveen Sarkar ( played indifferently by Tota Roy Chowdhury) who is a low-ranking government official working  his way up with the patronage of a key minister in the Emergency government. In using extraordinary powers enjoyed by government with suspension of fundamental rights, Naveen sees ideological alignment with the official purpose and goals of the Emergency regime integral to his ambitions of climbing the social ladder and compensating quickly for a childhood of deprivation. For those wondering about the reach of a mere section officer, not even a secretary drawn from the Indian Administration Service (IAS), the oblique reference is to figures like R K Dhawan, who despite being a stenographer, used sycophancy to be among the close aides of Indira Gandhi.

It’s here that the film starts straying towards a pedantic fable. In revolting against her husband’s indifference to the Turkman Gate police excesses while enforcing sterilisation and demolition of slums, the lead doesn’t evoke sympathy, leave alone rage. As the rest of the film revolves around her crusade against the curbing of democratic rights, the film loses the larger canvas of political churnings of the period. While the much-anticipated portrayal of  Sanjay Gandhi, under the guise of ‘chief’ in the film, flatters to deceive, his functioning style is shown as that of a modern day CEO setting targets of sterilisation and demolition of unauthorised dwellings for his battery of yes men (and women) and officials. With his sharp facial features, Neil Nitin Mukesh is convincing whenever he isn’t mouthing the few lines he has in the film. As if not to spare him the moral compass, he is subjected to a full-length sermonising song – quite predictably about the vagaries of power and the fate of rulers.

Even in the late 1970s, Vinod Mehta had a far more revealing take on Sanjay Gandhi (published as Sanjay Story in 2012) than what Bhandarkar has to offer in 2017, at a time when conditions for any narrative on the younger son of Indira couldn’t get more favourable.

Unsurprisingly, given Bhandarkar’s known political leanings, the film gives primacy to saffron voices as the vanguard of anti-establishment forces. Led by a character called Nanaji (any allusion to Sangh patriarch Nanaji Deshmukh is coincidental, of course) and played by an off-colour Anupam Kher, Himmat organisation’s meetings are expectedly sprinkled with chants of Vande Mataram. In an assortment of political messaging, Nanaji’s organisation vouches for Gandhian values of non-violent struggle for what the film calls “Second Independence Movement”. The efforts at dog-whistling are clear as Muslims are shown as chief victims of forced sterilisation under Congress rule and there is a scene where the saffron outfit functionary is piggybacking a man with a skull-cap.

The familiar templates for chronicling the Emergency in the popular culture are evident as the film opens with a collage of newspaper reports on the declaration of the Emergency on June 25 (reported on June 26) and also the Indian Express blank editorial space on June 27 to protest against press censorship. The curbs on press are dramatically shown with raids on newspaper offices and scrutiny of content.

The geography of Emergency tales is severely restricted by the film’s narrative device – a Delhi-based woman’s fight for democratic space. That never lets the film to explore the Emergency as an all-India event. Even if as a modest attempt at cinematic pop history, the only place other than Delhi which has two minutes of screen time is Mumbai. Delhi, being the site of Sanjay Gandhi’s whimsical experiments in command rule, proves too attractive for Bhandarkar’s idea of history as melodrama.

The periodic setting of the film seems a strained effort –  with Bobby  ruling the cinematic landscape as well as prints on clothes, references to Rajesh Khanna and every second person trying to be very 70s as if the film is keen on drilling the atmospherics of the decade to compensate for  its lack of historical specifics. You have Postman cooking oil hoardings while Dalda could be spotted in the kitchen. What, however, hasn’t undergone much thought is making an Indian Police Service officer with the surname of Mishra speak in a Haryanvi dialect. Quite unlikely a lingual choice for a man with that surname.

In its moral binaries about the Emergency and its victims, the film couldn’t be expected to probe questions about support for it among sizeable sections of the middle class, preferring order to democratic vibrancy or even indifference to it in large parts of the country. What’s also could be news to chroniclers of the Emergency is the realisation that the film shows quite sympathetic judiciary with the judge complaining about limits of law. The fact remains that judiciary was one of the most disappointing institutions in the period and it didn’t earn itself any admirers for its independence.

In many expected ways, Indu Sarkar is a casualty of its lack of ambition. At most, it would end up as a melodramatic footnote to a tome which still would have to wait to find the cinematic language of political narratives. Whenever that’s achieved, morality shouldn’t intervene as a plot.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.