Songs of and for the Republic

Come the ‘50s and the songs adopted a celebratory tone reflecting the hopeful mood of a newly independent nation. At a time when leaders of the freedom movement were nationally revered icons, onscreen patriotism too were fashioned as tributes. A case in point is the non-starrer surprise, the hit Jagriti (1954). While its ‘De di hame azaadi bina khadag bina dhal’ makes for a touching tribute to the father of the nation, Jagriti’s other popular song, ‘Hum laaye hain tufanon se kashti nikal ke’ urged young India to take over the reins of a ravaged nation and rebuild it. The patriotic tenor occasionally also went the idealistic way, endeavouring to achieve the dream of an inclusive society, including the weakest of the weak — songs like ‘Woh subah kabhie to aayegi’ (Phir Subah Hogi, 1958).

The developmental focus of the Nehruvian era too got echoed in songs like ‘Chodo kalki baatein’ (Hum Hindustani, 1960) urging people to move away from the past and think big. But it was Kaifi Azmi’s ‘Kar chale hum fidaa’ (Haqeeqat, 1964), on the betrayal and angst of a nation’s shock defeat in the 1962 China war that remains Hindi cinema’s most poignant ode to the soldiers till date.

When Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri gave his ‘Jai jawan, jai kisan’ slogan, Bollywood’s self-appointed Mr Bharat, Manoj Kumar, made Upkar (1967) — a tribute to the farmer and the soldier. Upkar’s popular ‘Mere desh ki dharti’ further showed that patriotism can also be evoked beyond the call for sacrifice, and that the love for a country without any aggression can also make for an inspiring song. Manoj Kumar’s next, Purab aur Paschim (1970), adopted a patriotism with a preachy hue, reinforcing Eastern values in the face of the West’s perceived corrupting moral onslaught.

Onscreen patriotism, however, slowly went out of fashion in the eighties after Manoj Kumar stopped making his kind of movies. Subhash Ghai’s multi-starrer Karma (1986) was perhaps the last gasp. It reinforced the dying-for-the-nation act as the ultimate sacrifice, simultaneously making a reference to ‘external forces’ creating ‘internal instability’. The latter theme caught Mani Ratnam’s creative imagination. In Roja (1991), he depicted the plight of a common man caught in terror’s web. When the film’s hero, Arvind Swamy douses a burning national flag set aflame by his terrorist captors by flinging himself onto it, the patriotic act was freed from being the prerogative of men in uniform alone. A.R. Rahman’s balladic ‘Bharat humko jaan se pyara’ playing in the background only heightened that impact.

But as the focus of the narrative of the late nineties shifted to a generation of Indians who had made it big abroad, patriotism adopted a tone of fond nostalgia a la Pardes’s (1997) ‘I love my India’. Terrorism intermittently kept surfacing through films like Sarfarosh (1999), with its title track ‘Zindagi maut na banjaye’ impressing upon a call to amity by purging the demons within.

Post-2000 films, like Swades (2004) and Rang De Basanti (2006), have further consolidated that introspective approach to patriotism. Picking RDB’s hit songs ‘Roobaroo’ and ‘Khoon chala’ as the voice for contemporary patriotism, its lyricist Prasoon Joshi reasoned that the songs, while being a call for duty and introspection, aimed to rekindle the ebbing passion for the country, especially among the youth. Swades’s ‘Yeh jo desh hai tera’ takes that reconnecting plea to the Indian diaspora, effectively tugging at the hearts of Indians abroad to return home and use their expertise for the country’s benefit.

Bollywood may have finally outgrown the cliche of the chest-thumping brand of bravado against Pakistan (Gadar, 2001, and its myriad Sunny Deol spin-offs) but we are still waiting for a more nuanced and inclusive portrayal of the country from the dream factories of the megapolis.