Opinion Reel politik

Madras Café has many blind spots,but it is a rare Bollywood film. It dives into this period and partially succeeds in reconstructing an era that altered the political discourse in both India and Sri Lanka. But it is not,and this is important to note,fashioned as a “political” film. It is more an action thriller,seen through the eyes of a fictional spy.

Why didn’t it go the whole hog? My colleague and I didn’t ask this crucial question,because we know the answer. Because Bollywood doesn’t make political cinema. Because making that kind of cinema needs an environment where political personalities or their self-appointed acolytes are less prickly about being held up to the light and judged,sometimes harshly.

Naming names is hard enough (the Rajiv Gandhi look-alike in the film is called the ex-prime minister,even though we all know whom the film is referring to). Even the slightest hint of critique causes all kinds of trouble for the filmmaker,from offended parties calling for a ban to cinema halls being vandalised.

Filmmakers are understandably craven. The audience doesn’t do enough to demand such films either. The box office tells us that we are happiest still with colourful spectacle,where song and dance drives non-existent plots,where heroes who have been heroes for 20 years still play the eternal lover boys. We do not ask for as much as we should,so we get what we get. Generic netas who wear khadi and are shown to be corrupt are fine,but real-life leaders,even those who are no longer alive,are off limits. So of course Madras Café is not a political film. It is a film that just about flirts with politics,and that is all Bollywood can do.

Gaudy,splashy make-believe is still the preferred mainstream option in Hindi cinema. Political cinema — films that incorporate the political as a central,intrinsic conceit — has never been a continually flourishing genre in Bollywood. The upsurge of socially aware,politically trenchant cinema of the ’70s,which spilled over into the ’80s,is now a near-forgotten chapter.

Some of those films,the standard bearers of that golden period,are still as powerful as they were when they came out. Mrinal Sen’s Mrigaya,Shyam Benegal’s terrific,unmatched trilogy of Ankur,Nishant and Manthan,Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala,Holi and Bhavni Bhavai,Prakash Jha’s Damul,Goutam Ghose’s Paar,Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh,and one of my all-time favourites Party,in which a bunch of chi chi party-goers are confronted with a way of life they are blissfully and criminally unaware of: pick any one for a repeat watch,and see what I mean.

The bite of these films,meant to yank us out of our comfort zone,was real. But then our filmmaking concerns became geared to fulfilling the nostalgic yearning of NRIs in return for their dollars and our films became receptacles for our own desi middle-class aspirations. The concerns of the other started becoming the preserve of the burgeoning documentary movement,and nearly vanished from the films of the ’90s.

In the 2000s,there has been only one significant political marker in Bollywood,and that is Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. Its characters are all fictional,but they do not live in lala land: they inhabit the Delhi of the ’70s. The “satta ke kooche aur galiyaare” they walk through and the choices they make,or are forced into making,are true of the young people of that decade. The privileged students of tony redbrick Dilli colleges being drawn to the Naxalite movement and the state’s shockingly brutal response are all there. Mishra pulls no punches,though he does include songs: the music in that film,including the haunting “Baawra mann”,is really the anthem of the restless and the damned,the people who left dreams and idealism to others and became corporate raiders,and India became a different country.

This week,Prakash Jha returns with one of his star-driven “political films” constructed out of his unique firebrand activism,blended with co-opted commercialism. Will Satyagraha lead to a revolution,will there be blood on the streets?

Don’t be silly. It’s only a movie.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com