Author: Saibal Chatterjee
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: November 20, 2003
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_466084,00410006.htm
[Note from the Hindu Vivek Kendra:
This article tries to give a negative slant to the positive things that
are happening in India today. Anyway, what is this about patriotism
being the last resort of the scoundrel? Guess the author is saying that
99% of the people in India are scoundrels, and it only people like him
can ensure that society remains sane!]
The steady rise of the rightwing
on the Indian political stage over the past decade has impacted popular
Hindi cinema in two crucial ways. One, it has fuelled a plethora of feel-
good "model Hindu" family dramas. The other is panning out before our eyes
at this precise moment. The next 12 months or so will witness the release
of a larger number of war films than the Mumbai movie machine has cranked
out in its entire history.
It is no coincidence that all these
films deal, in one way or another, with the perfidies of Pakistan while
singing paeans to the courage and commitment of India's brave young soldiers.
No wonder the current rulers of India simply adore Bollywood. An influential
section of the film industry has willingly accepted the onus of furthering
the one cause that is central to the perpetuation of the might of the rightwing
- kindling and sustaining the fire of patriotism in the hearts of the masses.
Hasn't anybody around here heard the old adage about patriotism being the
last resort of the scoundrel?
The grateful government is dying
to hand over one of the last bastions of meaningful Indian cinema - the
country's official international film festival - to the mainstream Mumbai
industry by shifting the annual event to its backyard, Goa. It is obviously
a reward for a job well done. From Sooraj Barjatya's sugarcoated odes to
the pure, selfless Hindu way of life, Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain
Koun, to the all-is-hale-and-hearty-in-good-old-India melodramas produced
by the Yash Chopra school of escapist filmmaking to the brazen jingoism
of Anil Sharma's Gadar - Ek Prem Katha to the upcoming spate of films designed
to fan neo- nationalistic fervour, Bollywood has kept the saffron flag
flying - overtly and covertly.
The leading lights of the mainstream
film industry have clung to political patronage for dear life. A pliant
mass media is exactly what purveyors of Hindutva - or any intolerant, exclusivist
line of thinking - need to propagate their worldview and keep hatred and
distrust of Pakistan on the boil.
In all these years of its existence,
the Hindi film industry had made only four major films that had war in
the backdrop - Haqeeqat, Hindustan Ki Kasam, both helmed by Chetan Anand,
Upkar, actor Manoj Kumar's directorial debut, and the defiantly kitschy
Lalkar, produced by Ramanand Sagar, the man who went on to contribute television's
Ramayan and Shri Krishna to the increasing religiosity of the nation's
popular culture.
Why have Hindi war films been so
few and far between? The primary reason for the reluctance of Mumbai filmmakers
to tackle the genre is the demand for realism that it necessarily makes
on them. Bollywood has rarely been comfortable with anything other than
escapist fare. That perhaps explains why even the few war films that have
been made in Mumbai have allowed, with perhaps the exception of Haqeeqat,
concessions to established narrative conventions and incorporated songs
and comic interludes. Will we ever get to see a no-frills, gritty war film
in Hindi? Highly unlikely unless a Ramgopal Varma rises above his obsession
with the underworld and the twilight zone.
Significantly, the war movies that
Mumbai has produced over the years have all followed a major military face-off.
Haqeeqat was released in 1964, two years after the 1962 war with China.
It pulled no punches when it came to its anti-China stance.
After the 1965 war with Pakistan,
Manoj Kumar unleashed the ultra- nationalistic Upkar, about an upright
farmer who gives up his land and joins the Indian Army. The box office
success of the film emboldened the actor-producer-director enough for him
to recycle the formula all through his career, often with great success.
Chetan Anand was back with another
war film after the 1971 Indo- Pak military confrontation over Bangladesh,
Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973), but this time around, he failed to make much
headway at the box office. A year earlier, Ramanand Sagar had made Lalkar,
a film that extolled the courage of soldiers in the face of extreme adversity
but had little to deliver by way of cinematic excellence. J.P. Dutta's
LOC - Kargil promises to be a super-refined version of the Lalkar
formula.
While the technical attributes of
Hindi cinema may have improved beyond recognition in the intervening years,
the avowed intention of the war films lined up for release in 2003-04 is
no different from what it was when Ramanand Sagar made Lalkaar. It would
be particularly interesting to see how Anil Sharma's under-production Ab
Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyon shapes up. Will the bitter harvest he reaped
with the Rs 55-crore Gadar sequel, Hero, about a bellicose Indian spy who
single-handedly thwarts a Pakistani bid to acquire an Islamic Bomb, force
him to tone down the shrillness of his pop patriotic rhetoric a touch or
will he push for an even higher decibel level?
It won't be surprising if he opts
for the latter course. The climate is just right for stepping up the Pakistan-bashing
exercise a few notches. For the men in power, the situation is ideal -
while one section of the industry churns out cinematic opium for the masses
in the form of designer love stories, another reminds the people how crucial
it is to be ready to lay down one's life for the motherland even as - this,
of course, remains unsaid on the screen -- the politicians cynically and
with impunity exploit the system to feather their own nests.
Until well into the 1990s, one important
film censorship guideline barred the mention of the "enemy nation". Once
that long-standing restriction was lifted - again, it wasn't just a stray
administrative decision but a cold, calculated political chessboard move
- Gadar struck. And now, there is no stopping the you-have-to-hate-
Pakistan-if-you-love-India juggernaut.
The suspicion with which the censors
(and by extension the Information and Broadcasting Ministry) and the Sangh
Parivar view independent documentaries and music videos is of a piece with
the overall attitudinal shift that has occurred in the corridors of power
since the early 1990s. Anybody who nurtures fascistic tendencies has an
innate impatience with truth and independent documentary filmmakers are
an evil he can do without. So he will clamp down on Anand Patwardhan's
War and Peace, but merrily let Gadar slip through the sieve.
The incipient governmental drive
against "raunchy" music videos - granted that some of them are indeed nakedly
exploitative - is another manifestation of the growing intolerance for
any form of counter-culture. Counter-cultures exist beyond the pale of
official control and that's a situation that a rightist government can
never countenance.
The dramatic increase in the production
of war films is a clear sign that the battle for creative freedom may have
been lost. The war, however, remains to be fought.
