I, The Nation - more on patriotic films!

I love the parallels drawn in this essay, wonderfully written piece!
Austere, inward micro-patriotism: Mother India left a difficult legacy. We mostly need less abstract enemies. by Mukul Kesavan

FROM - Special Issue: 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema

In the calendar of Indian nationalism, landmark dates have a habit of ending with 7. So, 1757 and the battle of Plassey serve as the symbolic beginning of colonial rule while a hundred years later, 1857 marks the last time that colonialism was violently challenged on any scale. Independence ought to have happened in 1957 but history, uninterested in round numbers, arranged for it to occur 10 years earlier in 1947.

However, for the purposes of this essay, which is concerned with the many ways in which nationalism is 'done' in Bombay's cinema, 1957 is a milestone, because it was the year that Mehboob Khan made Mother India.

But the rash of patriotic films we have seen in the past decade, from Border (1998) to Namaste London (2007) with Sarfarosh, Lagaan, Gadar, Rang de Basanti, Mangal Pandey, Fanaa, Swades and Kargil LoC sandwiched in between, aren't the children of Mother India; their family trees lead to the patriotic films of the '60s, films that were made in a darker time than the '50s, in the aftermath of war and defeat.

Patriotic cinema in India was goosed into life by the savage humiliation that India and Nehru suffered at the hands of the Chinese in the war of 1962. The pioneer of the contemporary nationalist film isn't Mehboob Khan: it's Chetan Anand who made India's first (and best) war film in 1964, Haqeeqat. It was a film about the war with China and as such had to be a tale of heroic defeat and martyrdom. It featured Dharmendra in one of his best early roles, but what really marks it out is the quality of its music, specifically the heroic 'Kar chaley hum fida, jaan-o-tan saathiyon', penned by Kaifi Azmi.

If J.P. Dutta's Border has a pedigree, it must begin in this black-and-white film and it's appropriate that Border's main star, Sunny Deol, is Dharmendra's son. If Haqeeqat advanced Dharmendra's early career, Border gave Sunny Deol a new lease of life as a film star by putting his machismo at the service of the nation.

A film made a year after Haqeeqat, in 1965, flagged off the nationalist career of Manoj Kumar, the undisputed pitr of cinematic patriotism. This film was Shaheed, a black-and-white retelling of the Bhagat Singh story, which, 40 years later, inspired Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's 2006 hit, Rang de Basanti. The debt is acknowledged in the title of the later film which refers to a song from Shaheed, 'Mera rang de basanti chola' and one of the notable innovations of Shaheed is the Punjabi inflection of the new patriotism, showcased in the song 'Pagdi sambhal jatta' sung by Mahendra Kapoor.

One possibility was the anti-colonial nationalist film. Shaheed was Manoj Kumar's take on colonial deshbhakti. Since then, in the past decade, we have had Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti in this sub-genre. All three films have Aamir Khan as the main male protagonist, which makes him, along with Sunny Deol, an unlikely claimant to Manoj Kumar's persona of Bharat.

The other way in which nationalism was done was the anti-West film that tried to purge Indians of the permissiveness of the West. Purab aur Paschim (1970) was the defining film here with Saira Bano cast as the deracinated, foreign-returned Indian girl, and Manoj Kumar playing the anchored, authentically Indian foil. The power of this stereotype can be judged by the faithfulness with which Namaste London updates Purab aur Paschim for 2007. Katrina Kaif plays the Saira Bano role: interestingly, the authentic Indian in both cases is the male hero while the rootless cosmopolitan who needs a patriotic enema is the flighty heroine. A variation on this theme is played in Swades where a successful, well-meaning NRI scientist is brought to his nationalist senses by love and an immersion in the collective life of an Indian village.

Finally, the third nationalist formula is the anti-Pakistani film. While Upkar was made in the wake of the 1965 war with Pakistan, it isn't, to be fair to Manoj Kumar, a film powered by anti-Pakistani chauvinism. Manoj Kumar does go to war in the course of the film, but that's incidental to the story, which does a thorough job of glorifying the organically good and patriotic peasant. The full-blown anti-Pakistani, anti-terrorist patriotic film had to wait upon the steady deterioration of Indo-Pak relations through two wars (1971 and Kargil), the worsening crisis in Kashmir and the cycle of pogrom and terroristic violence India experienced in the '90s.

Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) was one of the first films to exploit the patriotic possibilities of terrorism in Kashmir. Sarfarosh (1999) and Fanaa (2006) both deal with the malevolence of Pakistan and its attempts to stoke terrorism in India.
In Sarfarosh, Aamir plays the upright Hindu police officer who defends his Muslim subordinate against insinuations of disloyalty to India and foils a Pakistani plot while in Fanaa he is the Kashmiri nationalist misled by his Pakistani handlers into murderous terrorism. Fanaa's defining patriotic act is left to Kajol, his lover and the mother of his child: she shoots him in the greater cause of India as he tries to reach a nuclear trigger to his terrorist masters.

We began this survey of patriotic cinema with Mother India, only to abandon the film arguing that despite its iconic position in Hindi cinema, the patriotic films that came afterwards didn't take their cue from the difficult, austere nationalism of Mehboob Khan's film. The story of the film centres on Radha (Nargis), a peasant's wife. They are married when India becomes independent and thus Radha's destiny is joined to this life of the young republic. But it's a freedom that gives little to the new couple: their lives are mortgaged from the start because Radha's mother-in-law had taken a loan to finance the marriage and the moneylender's terms meant life-long indebtedness.

The nationalism of Mother India consists of Radha's integrity in the face of relentless adversity. She loses her husband, her mother-in-law, her youngest child, her crops and still she labours on, raising two sons to adulthood. Finally, she kills her own son who had killed the villainous moneylender, Sukhilala. She kills him because violence and vigilantism are immoral in the young nation's brave new world.

Radha is committed to the ideals of the new republic: she tenaciously holds on to the belief that individual integrity helps build a foundation of public virtue on which this nation can be properly founded. And her faith is borne out because at the end of the story she inaugurates a new canal that brings precious water to the village.

Mother India did have nationalist children, only not the films I've mentioned. Perhaps the most rigorous realisation of the idea that individual integrity is public virtue is Hrishikesh Mukherjee's film, Satyakaam. Made in 1969, it has Dharmendra playing an engineer named Satyapriya, a man so idealistic that he can't alloy honesty with even a hint of baseness to ease his way in the world. He marries a woman made pregnant by a villain and challenges corruption with such uncompromising loftiness that he is, inevitably, ground down by a corrupt duniya.

Satyakaam was a fine film but a box-office dud because martyrdom in slow motion is hard to watch. For decades, the Mother India/Satyakaam model had no takers, till a young director, Raj Kumar Hirani, found a way of fusing moral consistency with human fallibility, of taking the martyrdom out of goodness and replacing it with good-humoured swagger. He pulled off this remarkable trick in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, a feelgood film in which a Mumbai goon, Munna, thanks to visions of the Mahatma, finds a method of dealing with the villain that's grounded in a comic, sometimes profane, take on satyagraha: Gandhigiri, not goondagiri. I'm not sure Mehboob Khan or Hrishikesh Mukherjee would recognise Lage Raho Munna Bhai as the spiritual heir to Mother India and Satyakaam, but that's what it is: the reinstatement of private virtue as the glue that holds good nations together.

But in the end, it's worth saying that even in its less satvik, more militant forms, Hindi film nationalism has remained alertly secular. A little over five years ago, Gadar was criticised by liberal critics for a chauvinism which they thought shaded into anti-Muslim bigotry. The film is a love story between a Muslim girl and Sikh man at the time of Partition which morphs into a Ramboesque cross-border adventure as Sunny Deol, the Sikh hero, crosses into Pakistan to rescue his wife from her Pakistani parents who are holding her there against her will. The film opens with the slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs in a train as they flee a world made suddenly murderous by Partition, and the Muslims doing the killing are pictured as ravening devils. Just as you begin to wonder if the film is as bigoted as it was reported to be, Muslim savagery is balanced by a similar scene of Sikh and Hindu violence.

The film is, in fact, a lesson to the secular 'intellectual' who condescends to the ideological reflexes of the Hindi film. Gadar is a pretty crude action film, but it has the implications of communal conflict carefully sorted out. For example, Amisha Patel, who plays the Muslim girl Sakina, marries Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and voluntarily converts to his faith. Later in the movie, when she's being held against her will in Pakistan and Tara Singh has made his way there, her father, who hates the idea of his daughter having a Sikh husband and child, makes Tara an offer that he thinks he'll have to refuse. One, Tara will have to stay on in Pakistan. Sunny Deol thinks for a moment and grimly nods acceptance. Then the father (Amrish Puri) plays his ace: Tara and his son will have to become Muslims. Since the viewer knows that Sakina converted to Sikhism to marry Tara Singh, he's wide awake at this point, tense with wondering what answer Tara will return. Tara trumps the father's ace: I accept Islam, he says in quiet, measured tones. Give the director Anil Sharma credit: in this romance, both Sikh and Muslim are willing to give up exactly the same things for love. The deal-breaker for Sunny Deol is not Islam: it is the perverse demand that he shout Hindustan Murdabad: an insult to his nationalist honour rather than his religious being.

Why is this important? It's important because Gadar was released in 2001, at the end of a decade that had seen horrifying sectarian violence in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. That a film of that time was so scrupulous in crossing its secular t's and dotting its sectarian i's is a tribute to the bred-in-the-bone pluralism of the Bombay film—the unpartitioned homeland of the people of al-Hind.

I, The Nation - more on patriotic films!

I love the parallels drawn in this essay, wonderfully written piece!
Austere, inward micro-patriotism: Mother India left a difficult legacy. We mostly need less abstract enemies. by Mukul Kesavan

FROM - Special Issue: 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema

In the calendar of Indian nationalism, landmark dates have a habit of ending with 7. So, 1757 and the battle of Plassey serve as the symbolic beginning of colonial rule while a hundred years later, 1857 marks the last time that colonialism was violently challenged on any scale. Independence ought to have happened in 1957 but history, uninterested in round numbers, arranged for it to occur 10 years earlier in 1947.

However, for the purposes of this essay, which is concerned with the many ways in which nationalism is 'done' in Bombay's cinema, 1957 is a milestone, because it was the year that Mehboob Khan made Mother India.

But the rash of patriotic films we have seen in the past decade, from Border (1998) to Namaste London (2007) with Sarfarosh, Lagaan, Gadar, Rang de Basanti, Mangal Pandey, Fanaa, Swades and Kargil LoC sandwiched in between, aren't the children of Mother India; their family trees lead to the patriotic films of the '60s, films that were made in a darker time than the '50s, in the aftermath of war and defeat.

Patriotic cinema in India was goosed into life by the savage humiliation that India and Nehru suffered at the hands of the Chinese in the war of 1962. The pioneer of the contemporary nationalist film isn't Mehboob Khan: it's Chetan Anand who made India's first (and best) war film in 1964, Haqeeqat. It was a film about the war with China and as such had to be a tale of heroic defeat and martyrdom. It featured Dharmendra in one of his best early roles, but what really marks it out is the quality of its music, specifically the heroic 'Kar chaley hum fida, jaan-o-tan saathiyon', penned by Kaifi Azmi.

If J.P. Dutta's Border has a pedigree, it must begin in this black-and-white film and it's appropriate that Border's main star, Sunny Deol, is Dharmendra's son. If Haqeeqat advanced Dharmendra's early career, Border gave Sunny Deol a new lease of life as a film star by putting his machismo at the service of the nation.

A film made a year after Haqeeqat, in 1965, flagged off the nationalist career of Manoj Kumar, the undisputed pitr of cinematic patriotism. This film was Shaheed, a black-and-white retelling of the Bhagat Singh story, which, 40 years later, inspired Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's 2006 hit, Rang de Basanti. The debt is acknowledged in the title of the later film which refers to a song from Shaheed, 'Mera rang de basanti chola' and one of the notable innovations of Shaheed is the Punjabi inflection of the new patriotism, showcased in the song 'Pagdi sambhal jatta' sung by Mahendra Kapoor.

One possibility was the anti-colonial nationalist film. Shaheed was Manoj Kumar's take on colonial deshbhakti. Since then, in the past decade, we have had Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti in this sub-genre. All three films have Aamir Khan as the main male protagonist, which makes him, along with Sunny Deol, an unlikely claimant to Manoj Kumar's persona of Bharat.

The other way in which nationalism was done was the anti-West film that tried to purge Indians of the permissiveness of the West. Purab aur Paschim (1970) was the defining film here with Saira Bano cast as the deracinated, foreign-returned Indian girl, and Manoj Kumar playing the anchored, authentically Indian foil. The power of this stereotype can be judged by the faithfulness with which Namaste London updates Purab aur Paschim for 2007. Katrina Kaif plays the Saira Bano role: interestingly, the authentic Indian in both cases is the male hero while the rootless cosmopolitan who needs a patriotic enema is the flighty heroine. A variation on this theme is played in Swades where a successful, well-meaning NRI scientist is brought to his nationalist senses by love and an immersion in the collective life of an Indian village.

Finally, the third nationalist formula is the anti-Pakistani film. While Upkar was made in the wake of the 1965 war with Pakistan, it isn't, to be fair to Manoj Kumar, a film powered by anti-Pakistani chauvinism. Manoj Kumar does go to war in the course of the film, but that's incidental to the story, which does a thorough job of glorifying the organically good and patriotic peasant. The full-blown anti-Pakistani, anti-terrorist patriotic film had to wait upon the steady deterioration of Indo-Pak relations through two wars (1971 and Kargil), the worsening crisis in Kashmir and the cycle of pogrom and terroristic violence India experienced in the '90s.

Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) was one of the first films to exploit the patriotic possibilities of terrorism in Kashmir. Sarfarosh (1999) and Fanaa (2006) both deal with the malevolence of Pakistan and its attempts to stoke terrorism in India.
In Sarfarosh, Aamir plays the upright Hindu police officer who defends his Muslim subordinate against insinuations of disloyalty to India and foils a Pakistani plot while in Fanaa he is the Kashmiri nationalist misled by his Pakistani handlers into murderous terrorism. Fanaa's defining patriotic act is left to Kajol, his lover and the mother of his child: she shoots him in the greater cause of India as he tries to reach a nuclear trigger to his terrorist masters.

We began this survey of patriotic cinema with Mother India, only to abandon the film arguing that despite its iconic position in Hindi cinema, the patriotic films that came afterwards didn't take their cue from the difficult, austere nationalism of Mehboob Khan's film. The story of the film centres on Radha (Nargis), a peasant's wife. They are married when India becomes independent and thus Radha's destiny is joined to this life of the young republic. But it's a freedom that gives little to the new couple: their lives are mortgaged from the start because Radha's mother-in-law had taken a loan to finance the marriage and the moneylender's terms meant life-long indebtedness.

The nationalism of Mother India consists of Radha's integrity in the face of relentless adversity. She loses her husband, her mother-in-law, her youngest child, her crops and still she labours on, raising two sons to adulthood. Finally, she kills her own son who had killed the villainous moneylender, Sukhilala. She kills him because violence and vigilantism are immoral in the young nation's brave new world.

Radha is committed to the ideals of the new republic: she tenaciously holds on to the belief that individual integrity helps build a foundation of public virtue on which this nation can be properly founded. And her faith is borne out because at the end of the story she inaugurates a new canal that brings precious water to the village.

Mother India did have nationalist children, only not the films I've mentioned. Perhaps the most rigorous realisation of the idea that individual integrity is public virtue is Hrishikesh Mukherjee's film, Satyakaam. Made in 1969, it has Dharmendra playing an engineer named Satyapriya, a man so idealistic that he can't alloy honesty with even a hint of baseness to ease his way in the world. He marries a woman made pregnant by a villain and challenges corruption with such uncompromising loftiness that he is, inevitably, ground down by a corrupt duniya.

Satyakaam was a fine film but a box-office dud because martyrdom in slow motion is hard to watch. For decades, the Mother India/Satyakaam model had no takers, till a young director, Raj Kumar Hirani, found a way of fusing moral consistency with human fallibility, of taking the martyrdom out of goodness and replacing it with good-humoured swagger. He pulled off this remarkable trick in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, a feelgood film in which a Mumbai goon, Munna, thanks to visions of the Mahatma, finds a method of dealing with the villain that's grounded in a comic, sometimes profane, take on satyagraha: Gandhigiri, not goondagiri. I'm not sure Mehboob Khan or Hrishikesh Mukherjee would recognise Lage Raho Munna Bhai as the spiritual heir to Mother India and Satyakaam, but that's what it is: the reinstatement of private virtue as the glue that holds good nations together.

But in the end, it's worth saying that even in its less satvik, more militant forms, Hindi film nationalism has remained alertly secular. A little over five years ago, Gadar was criticised by liberal critics for a chauvinism which they thought shaded into anti-Muslim bigotry. The film is a love story between a Muslim girl and Sikh man at the time of Partition which morphs into a Ramboesque cross-border adventure as Sunny Deol, the Sikh hero, crosses into Pakistan to rescue his wife from her Pakistani parents who are holding her there against her will. The film opens with the slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs in a train as they flee a world made suddenly murderous by Partition, and the Muslims doing the killing are pictured as ravening devils. Just as you begin to wonder if the film is as bigoted as it was reported to be, Muslim savagery is balanced by a similar scene of Sikh and Hindu violence.

The film is, in fact, a lesson to the secular 'intellectual' who condescends to the ideological reflexes of the Hindi film. Gadar is a pretty crude action film, but it has the implications of communal conflict carefully sorted out. For example, Amisha Patel, who plays the Muslim girl Sakina, marries Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and voluntarily converts to his faith. Later in the movie, when she's being held against her will in Pakistan and Tara Singh has made his way there, her father, who hates the idea of his daughter having a Sikh husband and child, makes Tara an offer that he thinks he'll have to refuse. One, Tara will have to stay on in Pakistan. Sunny Deol thinks for a moment and grimly nods acceptance. Then the father (Amrish Puri) plays his ace: Tara and his son will have to become Muslims. Since the viewer knows that Sakina converted to Sikhism to marry Tara Singh, he's wide awake at this point, tense with wondering what answer Tara will return. Tara trumps the father's ace: I accept Islam, he says in quiet, measured tones. Give the director Anil Sharma credit: in this romance, both Sikh and Muslim are willing to give up exactly the same things for love. The deal-breaker for Sunny Deol is not Islam: it is the perverse demand that he shout Hindustan Murdabad: an insult to his nationalist honour rather than his religious being.

Why is this important? It's important because Gadar was released in 2001, at the end of a decade that had seen horrifying sectarian violence in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. That a film of that time was so scrupulous in crossing its secular t's and dotting its sectarian i's is a tribute to the bred-in-the-bone pluralism of the Bombay film—the unpartitioned homeland of the people of al-Hind.

The political film - No Poets In The Republic

First, dream was never too far from nightmare. Then we lapsed into pure slumber.
by Sudhir Mishra

From Special Issue: 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema

It is amazing how, whenever you search for anything in popular Hindi cinema, you invariably land up at Guru Dutt's doorstep! There have been other filmmakers, of course, mainly in the '50s and the '60s, who also confront the idea of India handed to them by their forefathers. Isn't that the definition of political cinema? We all inherit a world with its social norms, political systems, traditions and ideas of justice and freedom. Whether we agree or not forms the basis of how we live our lives or make our films.

These filmmakers inherited the compromise of the Congress party with the reigning pro-British Indian establishment, its continuation of the administrative and legal systems of the colonial masters, and the fact that the party joined hands with the most regressive of politico-religious elements on the Indian scene!

In the middle of it all was the ambivalent figure of Nehru, struggling with himself and the more feudal elements in his own party, with whom he had to adjust because he wanted to remain in power. So, in a sense, Pyaasa is Guru Dutt's and Sahir Ludhianvi's question to Nehru: Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahaan hain?

In Guru Dutt's vision, the tragedy of the poet and the prostitute was similar. Both were doomed to destitution, disease, and emotional and social isolation. It is one of the most scathing indictments of post-Independence India. The film, like all good films, political or otherwise, provokes questions and provides no readymade solutions. The minds behind Pyaasa are "independent nationalists". No one rides into the socialist sunset holding hands but by the end the audience has gone through a journey to the heart of the Indian reality.

This is even more evident in the most profound work of the Guru Dutt-Abrar Alvi team, Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam. Through the story of a woman's demand for sexual fulfilment, we see an entire world crumbling. There are no heroes and villains here, only victims unable to cope with the newly emergent India. There is simultaneously a lament at the disappearance of a "world" but also the ability to see its stupidity and the inevitability of its destruction. In the newly emergent India, the Waheeda Rehman character will probably not suffer the fate of the Meena Kumari character. However, these are still middle-class, upper-caste Indians. Pyaasa shows that this India still has no place for the social outcast, like the poet or the prostitute. Guru Dutt is perhaps the only non-Nehruvian and partially non-Gandhian filmmaker of his time.

The rest of them were believers. They may have been critical of the more regressive social structures of that time but seemed to believe that change was possible within the ideology of the ruling party. The struggles they depicted were similar to the one that simmered within the Congress party, between the right and left wings. Raj Kapoor was in that sense the true Nehruvian filmmaker. Filmmakers like him and Mehboob Khan dreamt of a more just and equitable India, which they believed was not being realised because of the remnants of a feudal past.

The failure of this dream probably provided an atmosphere conducive to the cinema of Manoj Kumar. His films glorified a "mythical Indian" past and were a last attempt to hang on to Victorian ideals posing as Indian tradition. This cinema reached its peak with films like Purab aur Paschim in which the enemy were sleazy Indians who had emigrated to corrupt Western lands, and posed a threat to Bharatmata and its culture. In the end, Bharat, personified by Manoj Kumar, rescued both Saira Bano and the motherland from descending into Western hell. The same undercurrent runs through Dev Anand's Hare Rama Hare Krishna, and through our times, in the films of Subhash Ghai It reaches its culmination with films like Gadar on the one hand, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun on the other. Kill the enemies of the motherland, these films seem to say, and India will once again be a paradise where life will be one big celebration, the young will blindly obey their elders, and all the bahus of the household will make laddoos and know their place.

However, in Bengal, and especially in the films of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, a more complex idea of India emerges. It is fashionable to posit these two great filmmakers against each other. However, in both their films, I see a lament for the unfulfilled possibilities inherent in the idea or the experiment called India. Ray, by the '70s, was a disillusioned Nehruvian, and his later films—Pratidwandi, Seema Baddho, Jana Aranya—reflect that.

He was deeply pained by the failure of the Indian state to democratise and to meet the aspirations of its people. But he also saw the futility and, I dare say, the comedy of the response against it.

True nationalist cinema or political cinema is one which allows you to visit a country and understand it in profound ways. In my view, there was only one Indian filmmaker whose entire body of work allows you to do that—Satyajit Ray. The others succeeded, but only partially.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Kerala, though, is an exception, and dealt with the Indian reality in an entirely personal way. His Mukhamukham is one of the most interesting political films ever made in India. It is an extremely complex piece of work and carries within it deep sadness about the failure of every kind of leadership, ideological or charismatic, and its ultimate betrayal of India.

Which brings us to the parallel cinema of the late '60s and the '70s.

If there is any one film of that time that goes where no one has gone before, it is funnily enough, the very funny Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. The Nehruvian dream has soured and the political masters have become monsters. Everyone is totally corrupt and the city has been taken over by corrupt politicians and officialdom. In collusion with gangster-builders, they have turned the place into an unholy mess. In the midst of all this are two young photographers trying to get by in life. However, in this world they can neither find love nor maintain even a basic integrity.

In Kundan Shah's world, the poet and the prostitute of Pyaasa, and his own young photographers, are all doomed. They're all destined for the gallows and we laugh at the tragedy of it all.

The political film - No Poets In The Republic

First, dream was never too far from nightmare. Then we lapsed into pure slumber.
by Sudhir Mishra

From Special Issue: 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema 60 Years Of Patriotic Cinema

It is amazing how, whenever you search for anything in popular Hindi cinema, you invariably land up at Guru Dutt's doorstep! There have been other filmmakers, of course, mainly in the '50s and the '60s, who also confront the idea of India handed to them by their forefathers. Isn't that the definition of political cinema? We all inherit a world with its social norms, political systems, traditions and ideas of justice and freedom. Whether we agree or not forms the basis of how we live our lives or make our films.

These filmmakers inherited the compromise of the Congress party with the reigning pro-British Indian establishment, its continuation of the administrative and legal systems of the colonial masters, and the fact that the party joined hands with the most regressive of politico-religious elements on the Indian scene!

In the middle of it all was the ambivalent figure of Nehru, struggling with himself and the more feudal elements in his own party, with whom he had to adjust because he wanted to remain in power. So, in a sense, Pyaasa is Guru Dutt's and Sahir Ludhianvi's question to Nehru: Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahaan hain?

In Guru Dutt's vision, the tragedy of the poet and the prostitute was similar. Both were doomed to destitution, disease, and emotional and social isolation. It is one of the most scathing indictments of post-Independence India. The film, like all good films, political or otherwise, provokes questions and provides no readymade solutions. The minds behind Pyaasa are "independent nationalists". No one rides into the socialist sunset holding hands but by the end the audience has gone through a journey to the heart of the Indian reality.

This is even more evident in the most profound work of the Guru Dutt-Abrar Alvi team, Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam. Through the story of a woman's demand for sexual fulfilment, we see an entire world crumbling. There are no heroes and villains here, only victims unable to cope with the newly emergent India. There is simultaneously a lament at the disappearance of a "world" but also the ability to see its stupidity and the inevitability of its destruction. In the newly emergent India, the Waheeda Rehman character will probably not suffer the fate of the Meena Kumari character. However, these are still middle-class, upper-caste Indians. Pyaasa shows that this India still has no place for the social outcast, like the poet or the prostitute. Guru Dutt is perhaps the only non-Nehruvian and partially non-Gandhian filmmaker of his time.

The rest of them were believers. They may have been critical of the more regressive social structures of that time but seemed to believe that change was possible within the ideology of the ruling party. The struggles they depicted were similar to the one that simmered within the Congress party, between the right and left wings. Raj Kapoor was in that sense the true Nehruvian filmmaker. Filmmakers like him and Mehboob Khan dreamt of a more just and equitable India, which they believed was not being realised because of the remnants of a feudal past.

The failure of this dream probably provided an atmosphere conducive to the cinema of Manoj Kumar. His films glorified a "mythical Indian" past and were a last attempt to hang on to Victorian ideals posing as Indian tradition. This cinema reached its peak with films like Purab aur Paschim in which the enemy were sleazy Indians who had emigrated to corrupt Western lands, and posed a threat to Bharatmata and its culture. In the end, Bharat, personified by Manoj Kumar, rescued both Saira Bano and the motherland from descending into Western hell. The same undercurrent runs through Dev Anand's Hare Rama Hare Krishna, and through our times, in the films of Subhash Ghai It reaches its culmination with films like Gadar on the one hand, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun on the other. Kill the enemies of the motherland, these films seem to say, and India will once again be a paradise where life will be one big celebration, the young will blindly obey their elders, and all the bahus of the household will make laddoos and know their place.

However, in Bengal, and especially in the films of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, a more complex idea of India emerges. It is fashionable to posit these two great filmmakers against each other. However, in both their films, I see a lament for the unfulfilled possibilities inherent in the idea or the experiment called India. Ray, by the '70s, was a disillusioned Nehruvian, and his later films—Pratidwandi, Seema Baddho, Jana Aranya—reflect that.

He was deeply pained by the failure of the Indian state to democratise and to meet the aspirations of its people. But he also saw the futility and, I dare say, the comedy of the response against it.

True nationalist cinema or political cinema is one which allows you to visit a country and understand it in profound ways. In my view, there was only one Indian filmmaker whose entire body of work allows you to do that—Satyajit Ray. The others succeeded, but only partially.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Kerala, though, is an exception, and dealt with the Indian reality in an entirely personal way. His Mukhamukham is one of the most interesting political films ever made in India. It is an extremely complex piece of work and carries within it deep sadness about the failure of every kind of leadership, ideological or charismatic, and its ultimate betrayal of India.

Which brings us to the parallel cinema of the late '60s and the '70s.

If there is any one film of that time that goes where no one has gone before, it is funnily enough, the very funny Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. The Nehruvian dream has soured and the political masters have become monsters. Everyone is totally corrupt and the city has been taken over by corrupt politicians and officialdom. In collusion with gangster-builders, they have turned the place into an unholy mess. In the midst of all this are two young photographers trying to get by in life. However, in this world they can neither find love nor maintain even a basic integrity.

In Kundan Shah's world, the poet and the prostitute of Pyaasa, and his own young photographers, are all doomed. They're all destined for the gallows and we laugh at the tragedy of it all.

Asha Parekh talks of her leading men!

Asha Parekh was the bubbly leading lady of innumerable blockbusters in the 60s and early 70s. Films like Kati Patang, Teesri Manzil shot her to fame.





link

Asha Parekh talks of her leading men!

Asha Parekh was the bubbly leading lady of innumerable blockbusters in the 60s and early 70s. Films like Kati Patang, Teesri Manzil shot her to fame.





link

Shaheed Divas - remembering Bhagat Singh and other martyrs through film!

23rd March marks the death anniversary of three heroes in the Indian struggle for independence - Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. The lives of these revolutionaries have been immortalized in several films, and have inspired countless poets over the decades. In my humble opinion, the definitive film depicting the life and times of Bhagat Singh is Manoj Kumar's Shaheed (1965). A mesmerizing tale of the fiery passion of a true patriot, the film set up Manoj's later career as Mr. Bharat himself. But this one film defines him and sets his name up among one of Hindi cinema's finest. I find the later Santoshi version a pale mirror image of the original.

The songs in the film are anthems for patriots and still exceedingly popular. Here is one showing the single minded dedication of a young man as he pledges his all to his enslaved country:



After being caught, tried and incarcerated, he fulfills his promise of embracing his death with dignity and honor:



Read more HERE

Shaheed Divas - remembering Bhagat Singh and other martyrs through film!

23rd March marks the death anniversary of three heroes in the Indian struggle for independence - Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. The lives of these revolutionaries have been immortalized in several films, and have inspired countless poets over the decades. In my humble opinion, the definitive film depicting the life and times of Bhagat Singh is Manoj Kumar's Shaheed (1965). A mesmerizing tale of the fiery passion of a true patriot, the film set up Manoj's later career as Mr. Bharat himself. But this one film defines him and sets his name up among one of Hindi cinema's finest. I find the later Santoshi version a pale mirror image of the original.

The songs in the film are anthems for patriots and still exceedingly popular. Here is one showing the single minded dedication of a young man as he pledges his all to his enslaved country:



After being caught, tried and incarcerated, he fulfills his promise of embracing his death with dignity and honor:



Read more HERE