We need our Mohan Bhargavas

That said, what the film addresses implicitly is also of equal consequence: what is the responsibility of the country to its thinkers — ordinary Indians who, braving cultural alienation and emigrant loneliness, slave for years in foreign institutions, earn laurels through backbreaking hard work and honesty, or home-grown intellectuals who brave an equal amount of alienation and loneliness on the inside for the sake of that “bigger, nobler cause”? Is Bharat willing to recognise and reward their merit, integrity or idealism? While personal narratives of NRIs who’ve returned to India and settled in successfully abound, there are an equal number of stories about thinkers who’ve wanted to come back but haven’t been accepted/allowed to by India’s professional or political elite. Either their international experience is dismissed as inapplicable to the Indian context, or their academic experience is waved aside as “not-really-work-experience”, or there simply isn’t enough public or private commitment to support their research and projects. Whatever the case, some amount of reverse snobbery, discrimination and condescension — or maybe just plain apathy — towards any kind of intellectualism in general, and foreign-influenced thinking in particular, seems unmistakable in our current public climate. Put another way, while the reasons for Swades’s slow pick-up despite Shah Rukh Khan’s charismatic presence, A.R. Rahman’s music, and Gowarikar’s edifying earnestness are varied, that the non-multiplex-going audiences are already dismissing it as preachy and even boring is a telling sign of the times.

Yet it would be intellectually lazy to interpret this hostility towards thinkers as just sour grapes. Perhaps the real reason they are marginalised in India is that independent, critical thinking itself is so unpopular here. While there’s no denying that a huge slice of the blame rests on the thinkers themselves for not making a greater effort to engage with the larger culture, the real culprits are not those who elect to think. The real culprits are those in our ruling classes who devote their time and money to ensuring that ordinary Indians do not think, know or grow on their own, that they remain in a perpetual state of intellectual and, therefore, political subordination. Maybe that explains why we’re so comfortable sitting on our hands waiting patiently for someone else to be our leader — be it Lord Ram or a Mohandas Karmachand Gandhiesque Mohan Bhargava. Or maybe that explains why the Mohan Bhargavas choose to leave India in the first place.

Whatever the case, it is indeed a sad state of cultural affairs when intellectualism is subordinated to commercialism and the message is subordinated to pot-boiler masala, when Indian cinema is prevented from serving as an instrument for persuasion — from playing out future social and economic scenarios, or raising important political questions that can bring about shifts in values and perceptions. Whether Indian cinema can entertain, inform, educate and yield positive political results all at the same time is something we will never find out if art and culture are constantly reduced to playing the bandar to the audience’s madari, to providing escapism, not wholesome stimulation. Put simply, the fear is that if Swades sinks at the box office, it takes down with it the hope, albeit simplistic, that to extend the agency of critical thought in India is to extend its currency — to make critical thinking itself more accessible and approachable through the medium of Hindi and regional cinema.