Opinion Picturing the political
Voices from small town India are changing and challenging mainstream cinema from within
In Prakash Jhas new film,Chakravyuh,two friends find themselves on either side of an ideological divide as the film ventures into the hinterlands of the Maoist struggle in India. It is part of a small but growing crop of films that tackle political issues,voices within the mainstream in search of new questions and new stories. For,as Indias growing middle class has come of age,it has changed who the filmmaker is. Often,this new filmmaker is from the middle class,voicing its dissidence. Many of these filmmakers are from small towns Anurag Kashyap is from Gorakhpur,Imtiaz Ali from Jamshedpur,Vishal Bhardwaj from Meerut who bring their sensibilities into stories that subtly subvert the mainstream of Hindi cinema.
Small towns,no longer cut off from the rest of the world,have come into their own,and men and women from these places want to see themselves in cinema. The new breed of directors often tell stories from here,and depict their life struggles. Much like the early filmmakers of post-Independence India,such as Guru Dutt,and unlike the second generation of directors who tended to look to Hollywood for inspiration,they are rooted in a very Indian reality. These new filmmakers have turned their cameras away from the endorsement-addled Indian dream that Bollywood sells and on to the other India outside it. And that is a political act.
In a way,all cinema is political. A very personal love story,for instance,could become a deeply political film. Political cinema is about how we are controlled by the systems we live within. The mainstream of Hindi cinema is committed to the aspirational India,its characters wear a certain kind of clothes and speak a certain kind of language,which is a political choice. Much of the mainstream is dominated by an upper-caste male mentality that comes through in several ways in its treatment of women,for instance,which is still very regressive. The act of taking the woman out of the cloistered space she has been confined to,is political.
But in some films,like my film,Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003),which dealt with the Naxal movement of the 1970s,Anurag Kashyaps Gulaal (2009),on student politics and feudalism in Rajasthan,and Prakash Jhas Rajneeti (2010),which shadows the fortunes of the Congress,the camera is trained directly on political issues,even while mainstream elements like songs are retained. These films,nevertheless,engage with the political very differently from their predecessors.
In post-Independence India,there was a churn of ideologies,both leftwing and rightwing. There was a sense that even though political independence had been achieved,economic independence was still far away. Filmmakers like Mehboob Khan,Bimal Roy and Raj Kapoor were influenced by a mix of Nehruvian socialism and close ties with a thriving Soviet Union. Even a film like Guru Dutts Pyaasa (1957),which most see as a love story,is intensely political. It uses the characters of the poet and the prostitute as metaphors for those who have been left out. At one point,it seems to directly address Nehru: Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe,woh kahaan hai? But in the films of the 1950s and 60s,Bollywoods golden age,there was still a faith in the Nehruvian idea and in political processes,a sense that solutions could be found through them,that all would be well. Even revolts were like celebrations. In a film like M.S. Sathyus Garam Hawa,made as late as 1973,and telling the story of a Muslim family in post-Partition India,the protagonist joins a mass protest in the end,as if to say that when people get together,it will lead to a better world.
But the generation that witnessed the failure of left movements worldwide,and of the JP movement in India,grew up in cynicism. People lost faith in political processes and sought answers outside the mainstream. In the commercial cinema of the 1970s,this sense of disillusionment finds expression in the figure of the angry young man. Gangsters and rebels become popular characters. There was also another kind of cinema,made outside the commercial format and seeking answers beyond it,coming from directors like Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani in the 1970s and 80s. Benegals Nishant (1975) is a dark study of the world of landowners and the bureaucracy in an India on the cusp of independence. Kundan Shahs Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) is a satire on the corruption in politics,bureaucracy and the media. The otherwise hilarious film ends on a chilling note as the two main characters,just out of prison,look into the camera and make a gesture as if they were slitting their throats.
There came a time when people felt so cheated,they turned away from politics altogether. The cinema that grew out of this disenchantment was apolitical,as if there was no point to engaging with politics at all. But now,there is a generation that has not grown up in the cynicism,and is troubled once again by what it sees. The films of Jha,Kashyap,Bhardwaj,Dibakar Banerjee mark a return to questions,to doubt and to challenging the mainstream.
In a sense,the political films today reflect more complex realities than those of the golden age. Didactic political cinema that posits good versus evil and seeks a solution to the conflict is not possible anymore. The conventional narratives have been disrupted,the individual has internalised the world and the systems that control it,carrying both exploiter and exploited in his head. Compare the glorious revolt of the earlier films to the failed revolt of the student leader in Gulaal,where everything disintegrates in a bloodbath. These films are not in search of solutions,they only want to carve out a space for the individual in the world that he inhabits. The individual knows there are no happy endings,but the films are a way of saying,I matter,I exist.
Perhaps this can be traced back to the voice of the small town that refuses to be bullied any longer,that wants its aspirations to be heard and strains for its place in the sun. Cinema today is full of such minor revolutions. Such voices are still few and far between,but they are changing the mainstream by belonging to it and challenging it at the same time.
The writer is a filmmaker,express@expressindia.com
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