The political animal in Hindi cinema Part IV (2005-2017)

As the first decade of the present century moved to its midway mark, journalist and commentator Thomas L. Friedman summed up the increasingly globalising trade and the culture emanating from it in the evocative phrase of his eponymous book World is Flat. Even if he was carried away by the excitement of the idea, the ever-widening reach of the internet had certainly exposed larger number of people to creative currents from across the world, including cinema. In India, the first post-liberalisation generation was reaching adolescence while the key architect of economic reforms of the Nineties, Dr Manmohan Singh had a year earlier (2004) been entrusted with heading the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government at the Centre.

As Prime Minister, Dr Singh’s chances of carrying forward the reformist zeal of his liberal economics was severely constrained by the Congress leadership’s strategy of going back to its socialist moorings and populist governance.  How was the idea of political change now finding cinematic expression in the country’s most watched film industry? Was it responding to the new political conversations that the information age had shaped in digital space and the realignment of political forces and imperatives in the country?

To begin with, the political films of the period had the element of hindsight. The year 2005 will be known for a film which sought to reinterpret the heady days of the left wing movement in Indian campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. Director Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (released in 2005), clearly on its way to be counted as one of the classics of Hindi screen, was seen mushily (and hence, wrongly) as “a post-dated love letter to that lost generation’’. In weaving the tale of Hindu College radical romantics Siddharth Tyabji (played by Kay Kay Menon) and Geeta Rao (played by Chitrangada Singh), both from well-to-do families, heading to Bihar to shape peasant revolution and the subsequent disillusionment, Sudhir Mishra’s interpretation is actually closer to what journalist and novelist Manu Joseph wrote in The Illicit Happiness of Other People: “The most foolish description of the young is that they are rebellious.”

The only credible revolt, sanctified by self-interest, is led by middle-class power broker Vikram Malhotra (played by Shiney Ahuja) in the film against his rich friends’ fanciful ideas of revolution. Here in this scene, while meeting his college friends who are trying to teach and bring Marxist revolution in a village in Bihar, he mocks his friends abusing their privilege to experiment with fanciful ideas of rural poverty. Instead, as a man of the world, he senses an opportunity to use rural land to make retreat cottages.

Two years later, following the Supreme Court nod, Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday was released in India. A screen adaptation of Hussain Zaidi’s book Black Friday – The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, the film sought to piece together the investigation into the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai (what was then Bombay) which claimed around 250 lives in different parts of the city. Its release was given go-ahead by the apex court only after the accused were convicted by the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act court as they had sought a stay on the release of the film claiming that it will colour public opinion and the court against them.

With Kay Kay Menon playing Deputy Commissioner of Police Rakesh Maria and supported by other compelling performances from a low-profile cast, the film tried to be as clinical as the book in weaving a narrative of the one of the most communally charged phases of violence in the city’s history following the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93. What, however, makes the film gain its political hue is its depiction of the communalisation of Mumbai underworld, and how they opted for bombings in public places rather than going for lethal attacks on political leaders whom they identified as key drivers of identity politics – L K Advani and Bal Thackeray. The active support of Pakistan’s state apparatus to the terrorist act is chronicled in the film. This is one of the scenes giving a clue as to why public places were bombed:

Kashyap wasn’t appealing when he moved from recorded history to fiction for telling a political tale. Gulaal(2009) tried to tell too many things in an imagined mix of student and redundant Rajputana royalty politics set in Rajasthan with a naivete, which became the undoing of the film. In addressing the themes of the impulses of secessionism, the fragilities and the hypocrisy of the powerful and the pull of the glorious legacy as subtext to claims on power, Kashyap reveals too many chinks in his understanding, or fantasies, of what constitutes “the political” in contemporary India.

In fact, three years later in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) Part 1 Kashyap began with promising scenes to chronicle the politics of coal in the mineral-rich part of Jharkhand, with the attendant subtext of stakeholders including the capital-state-labour relations, but frittered it away by making the sideshow of gang wars as the centerpiece of the film.

What Kashyap, obviously, missed is the point that the evolution of 19th century feudal fiefdoms into the skewed labour-capital relations of the modern coal mining sector has many complex historical strands to it, the mafia rivalries can only be a footnote to this complex history, not the expansive leitmotif.

Meanwhile, Prakash Jha had almost turned his filmmaking into an assembly line of films with political themes, but none rising above the formulaic stereotypes that define the sense of the political in Bollywood. He directed Apaharan (2005) on the  crime-politics nexus in Bihar’s kidnapping industry, Rajneeti  (2010) portraying the power play within a political family, Aarakshan (2011) trying to have a melodramatic take on affirmative action, Chakrayuh (2012) trying to cinematically decode Naxalism, and Satyagrah ( 2013) trying to make sense of the agitational politics in the aftermath of Anna movement.

The dilettante’s cinematic analysis of issues in simplistic binaries of right and wrong are evident in Jha’s forays into making political films, and so was the case with Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider (2014). In his Shakespearean take on the Kashmir insurgency and military-citizen equations in the state, Bhardwaj recycles the clichéd narratives of victimhood and coercive state trampling over human rights – all that at the cost of nuanced understanding of the ground situation in the state. When filmmaking degenerates into activism, it becomes a visual agency of polemics – so was Haider. Such dumbing down of multiple strands and aspects enmeshed in political conversations was also evident in Vivek Agnihotri’s Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016). Agnihotri’s dabbles with policy prescriptions and schools of thought only to produce a film which ends up as a vague and cinematic call for ‘revolution’ led by youth – you know you are watching the wrong political film if the film has a political message of its own too.

This year Madhur Bhandarkar, another filmmaker who fancies himself as the creator of an assembly line of theme-based films, came up with Indu Sarkar (2017) a fictional take on the Emergency years of India’s post-Independence democratic journey. Reviewing the film, this author had observed that the film was a failure of ambition. Bhandarkar, predictably, frittered away the opportunity of being a screen chronicler of a testing phase for India’s democracy. What he ended up doing was merely reinforcing stereotypes and popular history with the subtext of a morality play- something disastrous to do in a political tale.

The series began its brief survey of the political landscape of Hindi cinema with the observation that Hindi silver screen’s encounter with political churning in the country has ranged from fleeting glimpses to intense leitmotif. Sometimes it has given impressions of a dabbling dilettante, sometimes that of an engaged visual chronicler and sometimes that of an involved commentator. Seven decades after Independence, the craft of political films hasn’t yet come of age in Bollywood. Whenever that happens, one thing should be quite clear – morality and activism shouldn’t intervene in cinematic tales of politics around us.

This is a four part series on Hindi cinema. Read part I, II and III.