Alarming similarities between Dharmendra’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Rishab Shetty’s Kantara are a sorry commentary on state of Indian cinema

In another scene, we see Ajit getting drunk and misbehaving with everyone he encounters. When trying to hit on his love interest, he pretends to be a sadhu so he can ‘trick’ her into falling for him. This is another thing he has in common with Kantara’s Shiva. Both these films introduce the protagonists with these traits and never put any effort into making the audience realise that these actions aren’t heroic. The films, however, seem to be winking at the audience as they know that watching women take a bath in the river is excessively creepy but they choose to let their heroes get away with it. Shortly after Ajit is confronted by Asha Parekh’s Anju for hiding behind a tree and watching the women, he asks her to not bring it up in front of her family members. He knows it’s wrong but he just doesn’t want to get punished for it, much like Kantara’s Shiva who does not want to face any consequences for inappropriately touching Leela in one of their earlier encounters.

Vinod Khanna plays villain Jabbar Singh in Mera Gaon Mera Desh.

Mera Gaon Mera Desh puts Ajit on a pedestal as he takes on the responsibility for saving the village from the bandits, led by Vinod Khanna’s Jabbar Singh. Jabbar is one of those traditional villains who mercilessly kills people just for the heck of it. This is the kind of the film where the bandits roam around in laughable disguises but the cops who are trying to find them in a fair are walking around in uniforms and guns in their hands. In the end, however, only Ajit comes out victorious.

The 1971 film was one of the biggest hits of the year and launched the career of Vinod Khanna in a big way. Dharmendra was at the peak of his action-hero era in those days and the moviegoers enjoyed a simplistic film where they were directly told that Ajit was the hero and Jabbar was the villain. 51 years later, not much has changed. Kantara made a villain out of Kishore’s Murlidhar, who was just trying to do his job as a forest officer, and treated Shiva like a hero with a god-complex who could just hit on Leela when he wanted and destroy the jungle as he saw fit.

Until a few years ago, one would have said that films like Mera Gaon Mera Desh are dated but considering the regressive turn that popular Indian cinema has taken in the last few years, it feels like heroes with questionable morality are back in vogue, and now we are calling them ‘rooted’.