YASH CHOPRA: A SOCIO-POLITICAL READING

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Vi riporto un articolo del 2012 nel quale l'autore analizza la filmografia di Yash Chopra, e nel contempo individua - con largo anticipo sui tempi - il sorgere di una certa ideologia, hindu e integralista, oggi imperante (lontanissima dalla mentalità di Chopra). 

Yash Chopra: A socio-political reading, Amaresh Misra, The Times of India, 23 ottobre 2012:

'Karan Johar is part of the breed of directors who emerged in post-liberalisation India in the 1990s with the uncannily aggressive - but softer than tissue - feel that ended the era of underdog violence, reflected by the angry young man icon, in Hindi-Urdu cinema. (...) Karan Johar regards the Yashraj genre of filmmaking his primary inspiration - by this, it is obvious that Johar restricts Yash Chopra’s legacy to so-called romantic and social films. But Yash Chopra was larger than life. He made huge romantic spectacles, and he also directed ‘Deewaar’ and ‘Trishul’, the two films that provided a new dimension to the subterranean confrontational spirit, apparent in the angry young man.

It is not easy to assess Yash Chopra. If B.R. Chopra, his equally prolific and good filmmaker elder brother, symbolized the pro-Urdu, secular spirit of the Nehruvian era, Yash Chopra represented truly, the nuances of the Indira Gandhi period. Yash Chopra was a centrist. But (...) Yash Chopra’s films, more than movies made by art filmmakers, echo his times. Yash Chopra was a master at combining opposites. Even his romantic films carry social and class contradictions that never get resolved. They are simply, great social documents.

For many of us who belong to the pro-underdog, belligerent, ‘Sholay’ generation, the rise of Sooraj Barjatya, Aditya Chopra, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Karan Johar, and several others in their vein, still signify a hidden political agenda. This was a cinema that made the overseas market look more important than the home one; in its stories of rich NRIs, plush houses and  plastic, semi-westernized ‘beautiful people’, there was no place for dirt, grime, hardboiled action, the working class hero, the earthy, curvaceous Indian beauty, or even the sophisticated glamour of yore.

Especially in the films of Sooraj Barjatya and Karan Johar, the landscape did not reflect even the average Indian cinema reality - family replaced the individuality, displays of jewellery replaced human stories of flesh and blood, mush replaced romance, conservatism replaced liberalism,  masochism replaced machismo, surrender to status quo replaced rebellion, homogeneity of culture replaced celebration of plurality, garishly decorated bungalows - with a vapid, neo-rich, quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial reactionary atmosphere - replaced the smells and sounds of slums, middle class homes, sons of the soil, patriotic villages and the Indo-Muslim - or Anglo-Indian - havelis and bungalows of the traditional elite. Furthermore, soft, infantile sentiments and tears replaced intense, adult emotions; ritualistic wedding music replaced classical and post-classical, original, Indian harmonies of pain, love and longing; soft Hindutva replaced secularism; locales in US and Europe replaced indigenous, regional/local contexts. More importantly, the Muslim social - a genre in its own right till the 1980s - disappeared without a trace. Worse, even the sympathetic Muslim character - an essential ingredient of the average nationalist/patriotic or ordinary Hindi-Urdu film - simply vanished, or was replaced by the Muslim terrorist villain. Needless to add, in this unreal cinema of the 1990s (...) weak, pliable and squeamish values replaced Pan-Indian - Hindi-Urdu belt and South Indian - notions of masculinity that formerly constituted the mainstream.   

  

After going through the elite/middle class fury against old generation values and the corrupt, unfeeling, criminal elite in the 1970s, the note of anger and mutiny, evident in Hindi-Urdu films from the late 1960s onwards, went on to assume by the 1980s the form of an anti-system upheaval. In 1983, Amitabh Bachchan played a working class hero, raised in a Muslim household celebrating composite Hindu-Muslim-Sufi symbols, in Manmohan Desai’s ‘Coolie’, a super hit film. In society and politics, this was the militant trade union/communist/Datta Samant era. It was also around this time that the anti-Muslim, anti-working class lobby in Mumbai woke up. Meetings of cinema personalities - boycotted by secular artistes/stars like Dev Anand - were arranged with Bal Thackeray, the ultimate strike breaker, anti-working class, and anti-Muslim, figure, of Mumbai. (...)

In India, the 1990s thus represented a classic U turn, a betrayal entrenched in class, caste, ideology and notions of taste, made by pro-urban, (...) pro-NRI sections, unleashed by the liberalisation drive that dominated society and Hindi-Urdu cinema by default. These forces did not just overhaul the working or the lower middle class ethos in films. They came down hard on the pre-liberalisation elite - represented by Jawahar Lal Nehru and the communist/Left team of Indira Gandhi - that used revenge, Urdu poetry, and anti-rich anger, as tools, to set a mainstream, secular/composite, pro-poor, Left-of-centre socio-political schedule into motion.

On hindsight, the term Bollywood - criticized heavily by Amitabh Bachchan, the hero of the pre-mush era - clearly seems part of this anti-underdog, anti-Urdu politics. Before 1991, no one had even heard of Bollywood. A cinema which always prided itself on its different/eastern style of narrative, aesthetics and mood, was now being marketed in the west as some sort of an extended VHS footage with twists and turns of a Bania-Gujarati-Marwari wedding.

It is another matter that even as squishy songs celebrating re-invented (for the neo-rich) Gujarati melodies played out in a Sanjay Leela Bansali or a Karan Johar film, Muslim houses were being burned, men killed and women raped, and Indian working and middle class soldiers of all faiths were dying in hundreds in the remote, hilly, frigid battlefields of Kargil. No one ever thought of making a film on these hardboiled issues. Far away from the cushy, comfortable world of these films, Adivasis and Left activists of all faiths were being killed in fake Police encounters. The fact remains that behind (...) lies the story of a whole, ugly, Nazi style/fascist, right-wing shift of Indian society.

It is here that Yash Chopra struck a different note.  Even in the late 1950s, Chopra, in early films like ‘Dhool Ka Phool’ (1959) and ‘Dharmputra’ (1961), celebrated Hindu-Muslim unity and composite culture. In ‘Dharmputra’ Chopra went as far as presenting the only critique of what we know now as Hindutva fundamentalism; with a RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation] style hero - actually the illegitimate son of a Muslim couple raised by a compassionate Hindu family during the pre-Independence days of composite culture, played by Shashi Kapoor gunning for Muslim blood in a puritan frenzy during the partition days - as its centre-piece, ‘Dharmputra’ is simply, too radical a subject. (...)

‘Dharmputra’ generated controversy and violent protests from the far-right. In the mid-1960s - at a time when the post-Independence consensus of an alliance between classes was giving way to violent class conflicts that would change Indian polity for all times to come - Chopra re-introduced the concept of class in the making and unmaking of love and destinies. Earlier, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Shammi Kapoor’s apolitical, pro-rich romances had obliterated all traces of class. Besides inaugurating the trend of multi starrers, Chopra’s ‘Waqt’ (1965), redefined romance as a stylish emotion carrying the vicissitudes of fate, class to class relations - in this, a poor boy’s shy missives to his rich girlfriend gets strangled from within. ‘Waqt’ also brought into focus the behavioural aspect of class; the pain a man, raised in a rich household, undergoes after learning of his original orphan status in which his foster parents found him, as he prepares himself to give up his rich fiancée voluntarily.       

After ‘Waqt’, Yash Chopra made ‘Aadmi aur Insaan’ and ‘Ittefaq’ - the latter, a nerve racking, song-less thriller; earlier, in the 1960s, BR Chopra, Yash Chopra’s elder brother, made the highly successful ‘Kanoon’, another suspense drama without songs. By the 1970s, Yash Chopra set up his own banner. ‘Daag’, his first film as a producer, tackles issues of bigamy and compromises a man has to make in order to shed the burden of past, and to come to grips with the often numbing, varied faces of love; seen today, ‘Daag’ - termed a romantic film - overturns the very idea of a Mills and Boons romance. 

Soon, Yash Chopra - in Deewaar (1975), Kabhi Kabhie (1976), Trishul (1978), Kaala Patthar (1980), Silsila (1981), the films he made one after the other in a tumultuous era of Indian politics - took head on the challenge of exploring the various/multiple/darker shades of the angry young man. ‘Deewaar’ can be seen more as a Salim-Javed script than a Yash Chopra film. Here, Amitabh Bachchan’s anger transcends the status-quo, it becomes a weapon for the underdog to enter the big game, make money and live a good life before tragedy and the strange, idealistic values of a society bound by dated duty, law and rigid morals (a semi-feudal society were notions of good and bad, right and wrong stand twisted in cinematic subtext) strikes him down. Played by Parveen Babi, Amitabh Bachchan’s lover too originates from the lower depths of society. The 1970s were perhaps the only time when the woman from the wrong sides of the track - the prostitute, or the call girl, a word that could have appeared only in those morally ambiguous times - was shown without pity, as an individual in her own right, capable of making or breaking decisions. The absence of maudlin drama was a product of Salim-Javed’s astoundingly encrusted and well-heeled writing. But Yash Chopra’s filming of Parveen Babi’s first encounter with Amitabh - at a time when Amitabh’s character, originally a Bombay dockyard coolie, has literally put his life on the line to rise as a cool, handsome, well-dressed gangster; and Parveen Babi’s character, with the famous ‘I am falling in love with a stranger’ song, playing tenderly and tantalisingly in the background a minute ago, saves him accidentally, through the 786 number, considered auspicious by Muslims, badge which Amitabh’s Hindu character carries from his coolie days - is the stuff of legends. Danger, glamour, the threat of betrayal, inherent everyday secularism of Hindus and Muslims of India, sexual undercurrents, baritone of the base guitar, the elusively posh words from female lips, come together to create perhaps, the most modern of all scenes in Indian cinema as a whole.   

After ‘Deewaar’, Chopra made ‘Trishul’ - in which an ‘illegitimate’ son seeks revenge, in another unforgettable piece of writing from Salim-Javed, the script writers of this film as well, on his ‘illegitimate’ father. To achieve his goal, Amitabh Bachchan’s character is willing to go to any length, even trying to woo with cold but intense, brooding detachment his stepbrother’s fiancée. In this moment of cinema, Amitabh’s character crosses the line reserved for heroes playing negative characters in Hindi-Urdu cinema. ‘Trishul’ harks back to an earlier era - the films of Mehboob Khan, who showed in ‘Amar’ (1955) a perfectly respectable Dilip Kumar character, engaged to a beautiful Madhubala, suddenly raping Nimmi, a village lass, without motive, in an abrupt moment of passion, heat and desire. It is at this point that you finally realize that Chopra knew men. And he knew that like any passion, revenge too carries a darker side. 

After ‘Trishul’, Chopra explored Amitabh’s dark side even in ‘Kabhi Kabhie’, perhaps one of the best romantic films of the 1970s. Starting as a poet, Amitabh’s character turns his passion into a brooding, self inflicted drive of pain and outburst, with vengeance always lurking around in the corner. In ‘Kaala Patthar’, Amitabh plays an ex-naval officer turned coal mine worker; a man (...) haunted by the burden of a past guilt, where, in a moment of weakness, he betrayed his comrades. Then in ‘Silsila’, Chopra extended the line of romance to bring in extra-marital issues, a forbidden topic then, with the dream cast of Amitabh playing the husband, Jaya Bhaduri the wife, and Rekha, the other woman. 

Chopra flirted with unconventional issues even in ‘Lamhe’ (1991), a film about a young girl’s obsession with an older man who once nurtured unrequited love for her late mother; unlike films today, ‘Lamhe’ was not a copy of a Hollywood movie - previously, Chopra made ‘Chandni’ (1989), that ended his post ‘Kaala Patthar’ dry run at the box office during the 1980s. This was a time when Chopra made films like ‘Mashaal’ (a critical success but a commercial failure) and ‘Vijay’. But, and this is important, Chopra did not fall prey to the philistine mayhem of the 1990s. He made ‘Dil to Pagal Hai’, which despite containing candy floss elements still retained a whiff of Chopra’s strong grounding. DTPH also introduced new age jazz dance style in Hindi-Urdu cinema.

With ‘Veer-Zaara’ (2004) - actually a passionate cry at the lost strands of Hindu-Muslim unity dressed as a cross border romantic story of an Indian Hindu man and a Pakistani Muslim woman - Chopra appears to have come full circle. He wanted to retire. Then he thought about making one last time ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’; this film is ready for release. But Chopra is no more. Maybe he would have liked it this way, maybe not; not time, but his last film - which his fans and audiences have yet to see - will provide the answer'.