SHRAYANA BHATTACHARYA: DESPERATELY SEEKING SHAH RUKH

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Vi propongo una rassegna stampa relativa al saggio del 2021 Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh. India's lonely young women and the search for intimacy and independence, a firma dell'economista Shrayana Bhattacharya. Il volume indaga la condizione socio-economica femminile in India partendo da uno spunto piuttosto bizzarro: se e in quale modo la superstar hindi Shah Rukh Khan ha influito nella vita personale delle sue sostenitrici, in particolare nel periodo della liberalizzazione economica (anni novanta). Viene da chiedersi: esiste davvero qualcosa che il Re non possa fare?

- Taps into the Myth and the Mannat of SRK, Prathyush Parasuraman, Film Companion, 2 novembre 2021:

'Mannat

Shrayana Bhattacharya in her fascinating book, (...) her love letter to both Shah Rukh - not Shah Rukh Khan, not SRK, but Shah Rukh, an invitation to intimacy - and women, calls him "the receptacle of so many of our expectations". Often, she capitalizes the H in He when referring to him, both aware of and buying into his god-like stardom. (...) Is it possible to extract the human from the myth? No? The alternative, which is what Bhattacharya does here, is then to contextualize that myth. (...) In 2017 (...) 60% of the audience members at an Indian cinema hall were men. Even in Mumbai, the single screen theaters are often bastions of male assertion. Most of the women Bhattacharya speaks to - from small towns, villages, big cities, the metropolis - were often dictated to never visit the theater. When they did so secretely, they were punished, slapped. It was an unsafe place, unbecoming of a woman. And yet Shah Rukh emerged in their lives, "divided by class, united by fandom", with pirated copies and music cassettes of his films, the television revolution that brought his cinema into the house, and later the internet, which would bring the entire archive of his films and interviews under the access of a thumb swipe. (...) But Bhattacharya is clear that while he elicits female fandom, he isn't a feminist icon. The characters he plays often champion noxious ideas of entitlement or dated pursuits of love. But his unthreatening gait, his inviting charm, and his interviews where he champions his wife paint an aura of the masculine ideal. (...) Even by measuring the screen time given to the men as compared to the women in his films, Bhattacharya notes how there is more space and time for women in his cinematic universe compared to his contemporaries. (...)

The labour market

Reading Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, I often felt like I was reading two different, often unconnected books - one on the condition of women in the labour market, and the other, about how these women relate to, aspire towards, or seek solace from Shah Rukh. (...) The book on the labour market is cutting, precise, laden with statistics, and then counter-statistics to doubts you might and will have; the kind of careful defensiveness that comes from being surrounded by skeptics. Bhattacharya notes that the labour force participation of women has dropped despite the economic boom. The numbers are shocking. Between 2004 and 2011, while the economy was growing at around 7%, the share of women in the labour force fell to 33%, and thereon even further. In 2017, it hit a historic low of 23,3%. The pandemic further pushed this decline. India is the only middle-income country where economic growth and poverty reduction has not led to more women working outside of their home. India is placed among the bottom 5 countries on gender gap in economic participation. (...) But this isn't just an economic problem. It is a problem of social conditioning, for even among the wealthiest top twenty percent of urban Indians between the ages of 20 and 55, only 6% of married women were employed. But how does this connect to Shah Rukh? The women Bhattacharya speaks to - 80 in-depth interviews - (...) are also fans of Shah Rukh Khan. The tether, as one can imagine, between the labour market and the Shah Rukh fandom, is very thin. It is this part of the book, on Shah Rukh's fandom, that feels awkward and repetitive in its insistence on profundity. The insights are shaky, like throwing ideas at a wall, hoping something will stick. She uses the famous "Shah Rukh or Salman?" question as an icebreaker, and has met many a fan through this. Some of them are confused by her prodding. (...) Often Shah Rukh emerges only on the edges of their story, unimportant, but dressed up to feel central. (...) One of the fans Bhattacharya interviews, facetiously, but also, perhaps, correctly, developed a test to detect misogyny in Indian men using the fandom they belong to, "If a man likes Shah Rukh, he is usually progressive. If a man likes Salman, he is bad news. If a man likes Aamir, he's often a bearded liberal who likes his own voice too much. My test rarely fails".'

- In the sunshine of Shah Rukh's love, Uday Bhatia, Mint, 22 gennaio 2022:

'“I thought I was collecting stories about how women see Shah Rukh Khan and his films. In fact, I was collecting narratives of how they saw themselves and those around them.” This is the crux of Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, an ambitious and impassioned non-fiction book that looks at the lives of women in India through the lens of their fandom. Shrayana Bhattacharya, a senior economist at the World Bank, spoke to women across economic strata for 15 years about love, work, agency, and the actor whose films offer everything from diversion to comfort and encouragement. (...)

Did the realisation that this is a book about Shah Rukh’s female fans, and not about the man himself, arrive at the start?

I think it came towards the middle, to be honest. In 2006, I was sent to collect data, the way any research assistant would. All these women I was sent to survey, when I would ask them about their wages, their working conditions, these were realities they were very aware of. I was uncomfortable that these people were so bored, so I started talking about Shah Rukh. I thought I was asking them about him, about his films, but instead they were talking about their husbands, their lovers, how difficult it is to earn money to watch Shah Rukh. I diligently had these conversations. Some of them knew I was thinking of converting these into an academic book at that time. Till 2013 it was, to me, these women and how they see Shah Rukh. Then, I decided - for personal reasons - that I wanted to broaden the scope of the book to include my own class. It’s when I started to talk to them and went back to look at the old notes that it occurred to me this was no longer a book about Shah Rukh Khan. I realised he was actually a research device. Then I completely restructured the book. (...)

One thing you reiterate is that these women are active creators of the Shah Rukh persona.

Received wisdom was he was the creator of that persona, and everyone else was just a consumer. But I realised that narrative is totally wrong. If you look at what’s usually said about Shah Rukh, it’s that he’s an NRI (non-resident Indian) star, who caters to thirsty housewives. I did not see that at all. I knew that he was the person who narrated the story around social mobility, but the amount he symbolised that to people from an elite background surprised me. And then what really surprised me was the way women in working class and low-income communities thought of him as being an escape when their lives were so difficult, giving them almost a demonstration of what a good man could be. I was shocked about the way women would cry about his films when talking about the lack of romantic agency in their lives. I was really surprised how, for a younger generation of women, he represents opportunity and liberalisation.

Why do you term his best performance that of the “unapologetic middle-class superstar”?

This is where the economy reacts with film. Inequality among our top 10%, the difference between the mega rich and the merely rich, has grown unimaginably. And I think he captures this. When people look at him, they see a merely rich person who has become mega rich. He has been, from his early 20s, the hyper elite of our country. And yet people feel so taxed because of the way network wealth is so important in our economy, that they will all look at him as someone who “made it”, who triumphed over patronage and networks. Another reason I think is important is he came to prominence in that liberalisation period. Suddenly, there were creative spirits of the economy that had been unleashed - he’s one example of that. He capitalised on everything the reform process maintained. (...) We think of him as capturing that original moment. I will say one more thing. If you look at his (early) interviews, I don’t think anyone is talking about money and the need to earn it and hold on to it (as much as he is). Bollywood stars don’t talk about money. But he’s saying openly in interviews that I needed to take loans, I needed to buy a house. He was very open about it.

You write that women who grew up watching Shah Rukh films graduated to watching his interviews in their 30s. Why do you think this is?

I think there are three reasons. One is that he was one of the first actors who, in the 1990s, talked about feeling bad, feeling depressed. I think a lot of women connected with him because he addressed these everyday negative feelings of anxiety, competition, job market issues. The second reason people were very enchanted was that he was a good public speaker. I know so many women, and men also, who said they would take tips on how to talk in public from his interviews. And the third is just that they are really charming and fun. He will entertain you, he will illuminate - it’s a performance. And there’s a fourth thing, which is particularly for women. If you look at the interviews, he was always talking about his mother, his wife. He was talking about marital fidelity, about his female co-stars. We can say some of it might be posturing - but he was saying it. I don’t think any of our male superstars at that time were valorising womanhood.

At one point, you paint, and address, a composite picture of the Shah Rukh fan. It reminded me of how, in market research, one is asked to visualise the target group as a single person.

The way I did that was, there were about a hundred women from my class group whom I spoke to. I wrote up an average. And then I thought, what’s a way to communicate an average? So what’s on the page is the median elite Shah Rukh fan.

Did you debate whether to interview Shah Rukh for the book?

Actually, I never thought of it. (...) This is not a text about Shah Rukh but a text about gender and economy, and he played this research device role to enter into the lives of these women. (...) He doesn’t need to be involved, because, in a way, it’s not him as a person but him as a construct. I realised that if he entered the agency would no longer be with the ordinary fan. He’s so powerful - it would just become him and his voice.

The book was to release around the time the storm over his son Aryan Khan exploded. Were you worried that a narrative you had constructed over so many years might spin out of control?

No, and this is something that’s heartening. I was confident that the love for him superseded whatever internet trollery political agents could buy. Having said that, I faced abuse from right-wing nuts when I put up an innocuous tweet about how I used to stand outside Mannat. I know that because of who he is and where we are as a country, the moment you say this generation of women is in love with a Muslim actor, there are people who will react with extremely hateful views'.

Shrayana Bhattacharya

- In a sea of Indian men, why everyone is seeking Shah Rukh, Sarim Naved, The Wire, 8 febbraio 2022:

'Khan is a unifying factor for women, Adivasi and Brahmin. The author is an accomplished economist and writer, choosing Khan as the constant for her study of Indian women, and to an extent men, born in the ’80s and ’90s. It goes beyond the anecdotal and evaluates its subjects utilising hard data as well. While Khan may be the constant, the variables are many - caste, class, geographical and occupational. The struggles of these women, divided by these variables, are of course very different from each other. Some seek personal fulfilment while others are just looking to make a living. (...) I can fully endorse this work - it is deeply engaging, and as a reader, or at least a male one, will take your minds down many paths which you did not know existed. As an analysis of the world of 30-something metropolitan professionals, regardless of gender, it’s a therapeutic read. It’s just accurate. The Shah Rukh Khan mythos started in the mid-1990s and is still going strong, even if every new release is not a monster hit. Khan is now in the news mostly for the attacks on him and his family. The myth is a dangerous one for the current ruling dispensation. It unifies what they want to divide. This man who flaunts his faith while maintaining an old-world air of accommodative secularism does not conform to the stereotype that they wish to assign to him. A work as detailed as this would obviously have taken years to plan, research and to write. By luck or design, the book has released at a time when Khan has become more relevant than ever. The “idea of India” that is the site of all political contestation these days now incorporates the fate of Shah Rukh Khan as an unavoidable part of its own destiny. Will Khan stay in India? Will he continue acting in films? Will he withdraw from public life? These are questions not only about Khan the person but about the trajectory that the country is on. Leaving one’s own imagined grievances with Khan aside, the man is rather uniquely placed to influence this country and society. We need people who can communicate charm, empathy and kindness. So, I say, Khan for PM. Why the hell not?'.

- recensione di Suman Joshi, The Hindu, 12 marzo 2022:

'Using Shah Rukh Khan’s films and the reforms of 1991 as starting points, Shrayana Bhattacharya makes women talk about their lives, from compromises to outright rebellion. (...) This genre-bending book looking at women in post-1991 India draws you in from the word go. (...) It presents a powerful commentary on the lives of Indian women and the ways they deal with inequities. Most importantly, it provides women a toolkit to navigate the changing landscape of economy and society in their search for freedom and happiness. 

Watershed moment 

The watershed moment of the 1991 reforms serves as an anchor, as the author traces the rise of the Indian economy and the simultaneous arrival of Shah Rukh Khan as a superstar. The author wears her economist hat lightly, but combines hard economic data, such as falling female labour force participation rate, hidden taxes women pay and a whole host of metrics, with surveys and interviews to paint a picture of the state of women. What makes this work special is her ability to use heart-warming, everyday stories to provide a relatable view of complex economic phenomena. The book draws on her work of following the trajectories of a group of women across caste, religion and class groups over several years. It has a generous smattering of songs and dialogues from SRK’s movies, deploying his work as a literary tool to string together stories of women whose paths would otherwise never cross. The magical SRK touch adds to the readability and fun quotient of the book. (...) ‘Fantasies’ give a glimpse into what Shah Rukh inspired in young elite girls growing up in the 1990s. The stories, one of which is the author’s own, and interviews of women bring out the contradictions women confront and the compromises they have to make despite being educated and upwardly mobile. Questions are raised regarding gender relations among the well-heeled. “Why do women resign their love lives to the trappings of male power and prestige? Why do so many successful women acquire a taste and tolerance for inequality in their private lives?” An interesting side story is the ringside view of Delhi drawing rooms with their own codes; and the trappings of power and male chauvinism. Her astute observation about the gaps in confidence arising out of social conditioning - “The upper class mating market seemed neatly divided between males with unwarranted self confidence and women with unwarranted self-doubt” - makes one question and ponder over what can be done to bridge these gaps. The 1991 reforms are estimated to have pulled millions of people out of poverty. A transformation of this magnitude that included structural changes in the economy was bound to have an impact on women. The expansion in large scale manufacturing, urbanisation and the boom in IT services changed the nature of the economic opportunities available, thereby impacting familial relationships too. 

Gambles for a dream 

‘Baazigar’ tackles the changes in the nature of relations within families and the societal contract during this economic boom. It also throws light on the nature of resistance for women in tier two cities, away from the cosmopolitan milieu of the big cities. The stories of women in this section all involve the baazis, gambles that women in tier-II cities take in an attempt to live a life they dream of. The stories ‘The Accountant’ and ‘A Girl called Gold’ are characterised by the struggle and strife at home to gain an education, choose a career and resist the pressures to “settle down”. While Gold makes the ultimate gamble and runs away from her Rajasthan home, The Accountant wages her battle of resistance within the confines of her home, revealing the many shades of pushback against restrictive traditional family structures. Women claim their space in their own unique ways, choosing from a spectrum of options from compromise to outright rebellion. There is no magic bullet to empowerment. No book studying gender in India can be complete without studying the lives of women from the informal economy, who are in the bottom two-thirds of wages, in households at or below the poverty line. In ‘Working from Home’, the author leaves the capital and travels to Gujarat, Jharkhand and the Northeast. She provides insights into the invisible lives of women in home-based industries such as textiles and tobacco as also domestic and field survey workers. The first stop is Ahmedabad. Given the vast socio-economic gap between the author and the women, how does she get these women to open up about their lives, love and aspirations? Through Shah Rukh and his movies and music, of course! The women open up about their struggles after the author uses the ice breaker question: “who is your favourite actor?” Using the metaphor of dialogue from the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai - “a home that is built on the foundations of compromise and not love is not a home (ghar), it’s a house (makaan)” the author demonstrates the give and take that women of the slum struggle with for mobility and economic independence. The second story is from Rampur, U.P., where Manju represents the boredom of women in small town India that have been denied agency for work and leisure. While young men get to ride bikes and watch movies, girls are denied mobility for work or leisure thus experiencing inequality through boredom. 

In her conclusion, the author draws attention to the “crisis of love” and discusses solutions to issues women face. She makes a compelling argument to avoid big bang revolutions or twitter hashtag movements, instead imploring women to attempt “intimate revolutions”, where each one of us looks into our personal equations to address our own disequilibriums'. 

- Read an exclusive excerpt from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, Hindustan Times, 5 gennaio 2023.

Vedi anche How Hindi films saw liberalization

RAJ & DK: MAXIMUM GUYS

Vi segnalo un lungo articolo di Uday Bhatia dedicato al mitico duo di registi Raj Nidimoru e Krishna DK: Raj & DK: Maximum guys, Mint, 11 marzo 2023. Di seguito un estratto:

'Theirs is a comedy rooted in the everyday, born of miscalculations, coincidences and overreaches, but it’s also practical, a consequence of navigating the obstacle course of daily life in India. (...) Their new Amazon Prime series Farzi (...) [is] a ridiculously entertaining series. (...) Farzi had been rattling about in Raj & DK’s heads since the early 2010s. They had planned it as a film, even pitched it to Shahid Kapoor. Had it happened then, it would have been seen as the directors of 99 taking another shot at a caper film, this time with a star. But it never panned out, so they moved on to other projects. “We write a lot, a lot of ideas drop off,” Nidimoru says. “Farzi never dropped off.” (...) The show pulls together strands from across Raj & DK’s career: the madcap underdog energy of 99; the gritty but lovingly realised Mumbai of Shor In The City; the surreal slapstick of Go Goa Gone (2013); the procedural momentum of their wildly popular Amazon Prime series The Family Man. It also marks 20 years of the duo as film-makers; their first feature, the no-budget Flavors, which screened back in 2003. (...)

When I visited their office in Andheri, Mumbai, the walls were covered with post-its: a season broken down, episode-wise, into key scenes. This was for the Indian offshoot of Citadel, an upcoming Amazon franchise produced by the Russo brothers, which will have a US flagship series followed by spin-offs in India, Italy and Mexico. There’s the prospect of further seasons of The Family Man and Farzi, to say nothing of sequels to the other shows they are debuting. Right now, they are, to flip a phrase from The Family Man, Indian streaming’s maximum guys.

Raj & DK’s career was always building up to this moment. They have never been typical Bollywood directors. They are a bit too self-aware. They don’t do masala. They waited till their fourth Hindi feature before including a lip-synced musical number in the main body of the film. All their films have had music (Sachin-Jigar have been a constant) but you never get the sense (...) that the bottom would fall out if you removed the songs. No wonder they have taken so well to streaming. (...)

Their screenplays are written first in English, dialogue and all. Longtime writing partner Sita Menon then does a Hindi version. Then, because neither Raj, DK nor Menon have a writer’s command over Hindi, they bring in someone to punch up the lines. It has been this way since 99 and they still work like this. “For a long time, we were ribbed - these people who write in English and make Hindi films,” Menon says. But just because they don’t supply all the words themselves doesn’t mean they can’t tell when they have the goods. Since they already have dialogue in English, they don’t need top Bollywood writers, just someone with a quick mind who isn’t opposed to doing translations (this might explain why their work sounds unlike most mainstream Hindi film writing). (...)

On the low-budget Shor In The City, they skipped dialogue writers and took a cheaper, if more chaotic, route. “We were calling cousins and friends and asking them, how would you say this line?” Nidimoru recalls. (...)

Unlike, say, Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap, who draw as much from older Indian films as they do from foreign cinema, Raj & DK’s reference points skew towards Hollywood. (...) The tributes in Go Goa Gone are to foreign zombie films, not the Ramsays. (...)

They started out watching homegrown films, though, DK in Chittoor, Nidimoru in Tirupati - both in Andhra Pradesh. They met in Tirupati’s Sri Venkateswara University as engineering students and continued their film-going, “tripling” on Nidimoru’s bike (an image reproduced in Shor In The City) to go see Telugu and Tamil releases and the occasional Hindi or English film. They also started teaming up for quizzes and charades. “By third year, we were a famous team,” DK says. “We could read each other’s minds.” Both moved to the US after college. They kept in touch, and fell in love with American film.

Over the next few years, without much of a plan, they started fooling around with cinema. They had no formal training, so they would “reverse-engineer” films, breaking down the ones they liked until they understood why they worked. The timing was fortuitous, the tail of the indie boom in the US coinciding with the rise of digital shooting. “You could buy a camera, buy a computer, and shoot a film, edit a film, all on your own,” DK says. “And we were watching all these independent directors making films with no money. That was the boost we needed.” They lived in different states, so they would drive down on the weekends to prep and shoot. After a couple of shorts, they embarked on their first full-length feature. Flavors, an English-language film, was a loosely connected series of vignettes featuring a range of Indian-American characters. (...) In an interview around the time of Flavors’ release, they said they were planning “a new kind of Bollywood movie”.

Full of hope, Raj & DK quit their software jobs in the US and moved to Mumbai, where they wrote a version of what would become their first Hindi film, 99. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get it to Aamir Khan. No doors opened. They went back to the US, where they refined 99 and another script, a gritty urban drama with intersecting stories. It was the latter that yielded their first representative work: a short film called Shor (2008). (...) It was their first work written with Sita Menon. She would go on to co-write all their projects apart from Stree [sceneggiatura di Raj & DK, regia di Amar Kaushik] and The Family Man.

“Flavors was our film school,” DK says. “With Shor, it was like, okay, we know how to make this.” The short became a calling card. Actors Kunal Khemu and Soha Ali Khan loved it, which led to them signing up for 99. (...)

These were some of the Hindi releases in 2009: Dev. D, Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year, Gulaal, Luck By Chance, Sankat City, Wake Up Sid, Kaminey. Clearly, there were anarchic spirits coursing through the industry then, a lot of them comic. It was the perfect time for Raj & DK to drop their first Hindi film. Almost immediately, they turned their attention to the original vision from which Shor had emerged - what they were now calling Shor In The City. (...)

With their reputation growing, Raj & DK could have chosen to go full Bollywood. Instead, they opted to make a stoner zombie action comedy. (...) This was largely uncharted territory: Zombies didn’t feature in Hindi cinema outside cheesy Ramsay brothers productions. (...) One of the executives they pitched the film to told them later : “We thought you were mental.” Go Goa Gone was mental-funny and hyperviolent. (...) As with 99, it wasn’t so much that the jokes were brilliant (...) but that there were so many of them that it didn’t matter if a few flopped. (...)

Just when everything was going so well, the wheels came off. First there was Happy Ending. (...) Raj, DK and Menon described it variously as an “anti-romcom”, “very meta”, and a comedy about romantic tropes. But the film, set in an impersonal Los Angeles and California, was neither sufficiently satirical nor subversive in the way it was envisioned. A Gentleman, set largely in Miami, followed: their first all-out action film. For once, the actors felt out of sync with Raj & DK’s style. (...) “It was a big studio film,” Menon says. “Many people had their points of view on it. We tried to cater to all of those and the film suffered.” The action sequences held the promise of things to come but mostly it seemed that in upscaling, Raj & DK had misplaced what made them special.

“That control we had was being lost as we got into a bigger circle,” Nidimoru says. “So we decided, on Stree, we will go back to producing ourselves. Let’s make it out of our pockets and release it. It was back to the Shor In The City model.” They were planning to direct it but Amazon came calling. Once The Family Man became a reality, they knew they had to pass the reins on Stree. Amar Kaushik, first assistant director on Go Goa Gone, took over; Raj & DK stayed on as writer-producers. This unequivocally feminist horror-comedy about an avenging female ghost was a sleeper hit in 2018; made on a budget of about ₹24 crore, it grossed over ₹170 crore. Its success kicked off the modern Hindi horror-comedy cycle - though one could argue that started with Go Goa Gone. (...)

I ask if they reverse-engineered for TV too, the way they had done for film. “Yeah, new beast,” DK says. “In a tiny one-room office, every wall was covered with these notes because we had to figure out how to write a frickin’ series,” Nidimoru adds, pointing to post-its on the wall. They are not sure how they arrived at it but they came up with a five-act structure for each episode and a three-act structure for the series. Here was a chance to write, write, write, create a tapestry of characters and plots in a manner that a film just wouldn’t allow. The initial feedback was positive but a little confused. Why was their gritty spy series also a comedy and a family drama? They fretted over suggestions to trim the family stuff, but eventually decided to leave it as it was. (...)

One of the exciting things about The Family Man’s first season was discovering, episode by episode, just how capable Raj & DK were as action directors. They settled on a complicated but rewarding signature: extended sequences shot in one take. The 13-minute hospital breakout in the sixth episode is the most celebrated, but there’s a dynamic single-take shootout in the first episode itself. (...)

For Raj & DK, the show was the start of something new, and not only because it was long-form storytelling. It was the first time they were directing something not written by Menon (Suman Kumar was co-writer). It was also their first brush with politically charged material. Most spy narratives skew towards order and conservatism, and, on balance, The Family Man does too. (...) Yet, there is also doubt and complexity seeded along the way. (...)

Though “pan-India cinema” has been touted as a silver bullet for the theatrical experience, streaming offers a more genuine - and achievable - vision of pan-India film-making. Its viewers are more likely to watch something with subtitles. And they are more likely to have watched films or series in languages they don’t speak. Raj & DK, Telugu-speakers both, have been particularly committed to pan-India casting. (...) The Family Man is full of actors who work across the southern film industries. (...) Samantha Ruth Prabhu as rebel soldier Raji in season 2 wasn’t just a casting coup but a signal that streaming TV was no longer something mainstream actors in the prime of the career wouldn’t consider.

The second season of The Family Man also allowed actors to speak their own language; a lot of the dialogue is in Tamil. The makers even weave the cultural divide into the story. (...)

Da destra: Krishna DK, Suman Kumar, Raj Nidimoru e Sita R. Menon

Other borders beckon. If Citadel is a success, Hollywood could be on the cards. But there’s also a genuine concern of being stretched thin. Whether they can juggle two ongoing shows, three forthcoming ones, their production work, and whatever plans they have for the future remains to be seen. Perhaps they will build a B-team of co-directors like they have done with writers. (...)

In all this, they can count on the partnership of Menon, and each other. Though DK is more technical and Nidimoru more involved with the actors, they are, by all accounts, uncannily in sync. (...) DK jokes that sometimes Nidimoru would walk onto set and say, “What have you done, you have changed the entire shot!” But though they often split production duties, they always shoot together. They seem to seek out, and encourage, actors with a bent for improvisation. (...)

Twenty years on, Raj & DK have built a neat little filmography. Six features directed, three others produced, two series. Comedies all, yet spanning city films, stoner films, capers, family dramas, procedurals, action, horror, romance. All distinctly, visibly theirs, even the clunkers. Watching them in one go, I could see more clearly the motifs and cross-currents: double lives, fraying marriages, cursed phones, frantic runs, fancy parties that regular folks can’t get into. The considerable visual appeal of their work notwithstanding, theirs is a writer’s filmography. “We are really, really happy to be writers,” Nidimoru says. “Writing for us is half the directing”.'

ALIA BHATT: DIECI ANNI DI CARRIERA

Per la talentuosa Alia Bhatt il 2022 segna il decimo anno di carriera, un invidiabile percorso professionale contrassegnato da successi - solo un paio di passi falsi - sia di pubblico che di critica. Diverse testate indiane hanno dedicato ampio spazio alla giovane attrice. Vi segnalo alcuni articoli:

- Is there anything Alia Bhatt can’t do?, Kaveree Bamzai, Open, 15 agosto 2022:

'Alia [Bhatt] always wanted to be a Hindi film heroine. Her father [Mahesh Bhatt] insists her upbringing was not “filmi”. Alia agrees, “I didn’t grow up on a film set. I knew my parents would go away for a while but it was only much later that I realised my father was related to movies and my mother [Soni Razdan] did theatre and TV shows. Growing up, I remember they would play a lot of music, there would be music sittings for movies. But my relationship with acting started with television. I was in my own la la land, watching Karisma Kapoor, Govinda, David Dhawan movies. I would watch Ekta Kapoor’s TV series such as Kasautii Zindagii Kay. I discovered Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema much later. But by the age of four, I had decided to become an actor.” She was seven when she saw Zakhm (1998) and sent her stepsister Pooja Bhatt a note on it. “I remember Pooja telling me she was stunned by her sensitivity at that age,” says Mahesh Bhatt.

As a child, she got many offers to be an actor. “But my mum wanted me to live the life of a child, and not start so young,” she says. When she was nine, her mother took her to [Sanjay Leela] Bhansali to audition for the role of the young girl in Black (2005) that finally went to Ayesha Kapur. “My mum was very keen on me being part of his movies. I had no clue I was going to that meeting. It was only when we were entering Sanjay Sir’s building that she told me. It was where I met Ranbir for the first time. He was taking pictures of me, very eager, being the assistant. I remember Bhansali telling my mother, ‘This girl will be a heroine one day.’ (...) Life does not go according to plan. And sometimes, as women, we forget to define who we are in our own roles. (...) The way I’ve chosen my roles, the timing for my film releases, nothing has been planned. I got married at 29 - I thought I would not get married until much later. Very early on, in my career and personal life, I realised you had to go with what happens naturally, to go with your gut feeling, to go with what feels right as opposed to what you think is right.”

Her greatest gift is her intuitive ability to understand a script, says her mother, actor Soni Razdan. (...) “Student of the Year hadn’t come out but there was something about this child-woman that struck me. I offered her the role of Veera in Highway and asked her to read the script,” he [Imtiaz Ali] says. She did, and loved it, though she was apprehensive about being in every scene of the movie. “My team was not convinced though,” says Ali, and he asked her to the office one day to tell them the story of Highway as she understood it. They were blown away,” he says. 

Gauri Shinde, who directed her in Dear Zindagi (2016), says she has everything one needs to be a great actor, “She is damn real, unafraid to show vulnerability both onscreen and offscreen; highly sensitive and intuitive at such a young age; is sharply focused on her craft; and has a natural charm, energy and honesty that is so appealing that one can’t help but fall in love with her.” She also has the gift of listening, says her Darlings director Jasmeet K. Reen. “When you tell her about the character, you can see her mentally taking notes. Even in readings, she just reads without expression. When the camera starts, she just explodes,” says Reen. (...) Her mother says Alia has a photographic memory that helps her in her performances. (...)

When she finally did get a role in a Bollywood movie, she was 17. It was after a series of auditions and Alia still remembers going to meet [Karan] Johar in his office after she was selected. “I was still in my school uniform,” she says. Johar remembers it slightly differently. (...) “I had met her when she was very tiny because she would come to the film set as Bhatt Sahib has directed two films for my dad. I had not kept in touch. Then I called up her mom and asked whether I could have a meeting. By then, we had auditioned 300 girls for the lead in Student of the Year. Alia walked in and she was really chubby and cute. She had come in her school uniform (...) and we chatted. There was something extraordinary about her. After that, she did the audition and it was amazing,” he says. He then told her he would want her to get into workshops for fitness and acting. Three months later, when they did photo shoots, he knew she was a “bona fide movie star”. He feels she is the finest actor in the country currently, and he means both men and women. Razdan acknowledges his role - he is really like her second father, she says. (...)

Until Student of the Year happened, Razdan says the family was all set to send Alia to the UK or the US for a year’s acting course. She remembers holding Alia’s hand for the first two years of her career, because she was so young. But after the initial phase, Alia took her own calls, says the mother. How different is her stardom from that of her immediate predecessors, the troika of Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif? Unlike them, she is not a particularly gifted dancer. (...) Unlike the three of them who relied on the Khans for their initial stardom, she didn’t have that choice because of her physiognomy. So, either by choice or coincidence, she challenged the Khan patriarchy. Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi featured Shah Rukh Khan, but in an avuncular cameo. Luck and timing are also on her side. She is in the industry at a time when stories are the priority. (...)

Alia’s stardom is also carefully constructed as a conversation with the audience on social media. When her first appearance on Koffee with Karan revealed her lack of general knowledge, she converted it into an opportunity and made “dumb” her calling card. In 2014, the popular YouTube channel, AIB, collaborated with her to create a video called “Genius of the Year”, a spoof of the event. (...) Around the same time, Alia received both critical acclaim and commercial success for her performance in Highway followed by Udta Punjab (directed by Abhishek Chaubey, 2016), and later, Raazi (Meghna Gulzar, 2018). Suddenly, from an entitled star kid she came to be seen as a real actor. (...)

She lets the world (with 68.3 million followers) into her life with Instagram. It is very different in the case of both Deepika and Anushka, whose stardom was more controlled, the lines between personal and private clearly drawn. (...) Add to that a careful balance of commercial cinema and middle-of-the-road movies. (...) And there is a burgeoning career that keeps her priority front and centre, the desire to entertain. For Alia, the last 10 years have gone by very fast. “When I’ve made a mistake, I’ve moved on. I don’t reflect too much, nothing happens for a second time. It’s a different day, a different step. There’s still a lot of work to do, especially now. Maybe, I have the ability to make things happen. I can make a film like Darlings, act in it, co-produce it. I like the idea of showcasing a new director and a new script. That has always been the endeavour. I loved the experience of putting together Darlings, from okaying the script, to working on the story, to the way the film is presented. It makes me so proud to see the human spirit in collaboration. I love that dynamic,” she says. (...) Alia’s heritage is multicultural. On her father’s side, a Muslim grandmother and a Gujarati Hindu grandfather; and on her mother’s side, a Kashmiri Pandit grandfather and a German grandmother. (...) Alia has the thirst to do much more, says her father. She’s looking beyond the horizon. In a battered Bollywood, perhaps her cooperative way of working will usher in a new era'.

- Aila, Alia!, Mayank Shekhar, Mid-Day, 20 agosto 2022. Il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale:

'[Udta Punjab] Bhatt recalls her trainer [Pankaj Tripathi], whom she’d meet every day, mastering body language, Jharkhandi dialect, down to how her character sits on haunches for hours. It’s the only time in her career that Bhatt confesses she went “method” on herself. Meaning, abandoned cell-phone, never stepped out of hotel room, consumed no entertainment, spent time interacting/empathising with local youth, never switched on the TV, and simply marinated in the character, until the shoot ended. Why? Because she wanted to prove she was “a chameleon as an actor.” To whom? To herself, she says. (...) She had in fact read the said script, through Shahid Kapoor, her co-actor in the romantic fantasy, 'Shaandaar' (2015), that they were shooting at the time. She actively went up to [Abhishek] Chaubey, asking him to consider her for the battered female lead. The initial look-test didn’t wholly convince him either. She even learnt to play hockey for a month, which is only part of the character’s back-story, not even in the film. The effort totally matches the outcome. Although she says, “There is a part [of me] that says I won’t do it again; of course, never say never. I only played that part for 20 days, which was great. I don’t know how I would have survived it for, say, 60 days.” (...)

With Gangubai, Bhatt reveals about Bhansali being the performative inspiration: “I took so much of Sir’s personality and put that into Gangubai’s character - the way he speaks, thinks, has a certain attitude. (...) Because it is in his head. Film is the director’s medium. And then it’s the written word. The actor has to collect all those things and place it in front of the camera.” (...)

“I am very open to people’s opinions. That is the only way a person learns. But there is [this] humbling part [in my personality] that also comes with my upbringing, and the people around me. I am not the first member of my own fan club. I do not believe the sun shines out of my backside. I genuinely believe I am here to do a job, and must continue to do it well, which is a by-product of a lot of people doing their job well. It is not just me. I value that. (...) I recently realised that I have literally not been a ‘present’ friend for 10 years. And they let me be ‘unpresent’, because they knew I was chasing something. And you have to make sacrifices to try and get what you want. I have the same [set of] nine friends I went to (...) school with. At the end of the day, I feel most comfortable with them. There is a certain version of myself that I have to be in a public space, which I don’t, in their company. What matters to them is me, being me. That’s very grounding. The reason I have not lost them, is because of them. Because they have been so understanding, supportive.” (...)

Here’s Bhatt, the actor, with a house, car, checked, before 21; Bollywood debut before 20; started a film company, and then married, and is even expecting a child, before she turns 30! Is she following some timeline - yes/no/maybe?

Bhatt says, “Contrary to the character in Darlings, I don’t have a list. I have never had a plan. In fact, I used to think I will get married very late. I was one of those girls, who didn’t really talk about marriage much. But it is totally different, when you fall deeply in love, and you also feel like, okay, no, you want to get into that next point of your life. That happened very naturally with Ranbir [Kapoor]. I don’t know why. It just happened. And I am not feeling like my work will stop, pause, or change. I will continue to work till the very end. But that [raising a family] section of your life is something that you have to give your time and energy to. It is not going to happen by itself.” As for manifesting life events, here’s something that can’t be denied about her relationship with her now-husband, Ranbir Kapoor. Over the past decade, pick up any interview, especially the rapid-fire round type stuff that’s common on YouTube chats. Every time she’s been asked about a crush, someone she’d like to date on-screen, etc - inevitably, her answer has been Ranbir Kapoor. Which is mildly strange, since both of them had been dating other people, all through. It’s almost like she set her eyes on this guy, and simply announced to the world that that’s the one she’s gonna end up with. Bhatt laughs, “You know, it is really weird. I was saying it as a regular ‘cute girl’. I was not actually chasing Ranbir on the side, or plotting to get Ranbir; none of that was happening. The fact that I was saying it obviously means I was not thinking about it. Sometimes when you think about it, you never say it. It is beautiful how it naturally worked out, when we started working together on Brahmāstra. For the longest time, we were socially meeting each other. But we had our own lives. There was no interaction, nothing. There was not even a friendship. I could not even call Ranbir a friend. But it naturally happened on that one flight to Tel Aviv, when we both were not seeing anybody. Both of us were single. Both of us were like, ‘Oh my God, what were we doing all these years?’ ‘Why aren’t we together?’ It was a question he kinda asked me. I was like, ‘I don’t know!’ So that’s what I was talking about. You cannot plan something like this”.'

KOLKATA EXTREME | DOWN AND DIRTY IN KOLKATA

Cosmic Sex

[Archivio]

Si parla troppo poco di cinema indipendente indiano. Vi ripropongo un testo del 2012 dedicato ai cineasti più trasgressivi della scena bengali. Kolkata Extreme | Down and dirty in Kolkata, Nandini Ramnath, Mint, 12 ottobre 2012:

'There wasn’t an empty seat at the premiere of Amitabh Chakraborty’s Bengali movie Cosmic Sex at the Osian’s Cinefan film festival in Delhi in August. Delegates crammed into the 1,865-seater Auditorium 1 at the Siri Fort complex, seduced by the promise of uncensored sexual intercourse in an Indian film (they weren’t disappointed). The presence of lead actor Rii, easily one of the most uninhibited women in Indian cinema, further electrified the crowd. The diminutive beauty, who hands out lessons in desire and sexual fulfilment to a truth-seeking young man, gamely took on questions after the screening about whether she was “as erotic as her character" and what she thought of Sigmund Freud. A few questions were about the movie’s exploration of the idea of achieving spiritual equilibrium through sex. But people mostly wanted to take a closer look at the actor who is the face of an exciting and promising strain of independent film-making. 

It’s experimental, transgressive, idiosyncratic and phantasmagorical and it is emerging out of the most relaxed among the metropolises - Kolkata. The West Bengal capital has a long-established tradition of radical and independent-spirited film-makers, from Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray to Subrata Sen and Suman Mukhopadhyay. So it is only natural that the city is producing several fascinating experiments in documentaries and features. (...)

Cosmic Sex includes ideas previously explored by 53-year-old Chakraborty in his 2006 documentary Bishar Blues, about Bengal’s Muslim fakir tradition. A young man named Kripa encounters a prostitute, a eunuch and, most crucially, a female ascetic named Sadhana on his journey of sexual self-discovery. Kripa’s experiences unfold as a reverie amid a mythic landscape that is identifiably the Bengal of wandering ascetics and miracle workers. “Cults like the fakirs and the Bauls feel that sexual energy is the most powerful force that flows outwards all the time, because of which there are manifestations of happiness, unhappiness and death," Chakraborty says at his home in Kolkata. “The only way to get out of this is to reverse the sexual energy. You have to go back to the unchanging energy source." Cosmic Sex is only Chakraborty’s second movie in 23 years after his experimental debut Kaal Abhirati. (...)

Bishar Blues

Q’s musical Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards). (...) Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s operatic critique of social rigidity, which was inspired by Lewis Carroll and written in 1933, Q’s fantasy adventure, about a prince who strains at his royal leash, will be premiered at the International Rome Film Festival in November and will be released in India in 2013. Q says Tasher Desh has been in the making ever since he decided to become a film-maker. “Tasher Desh is an immensely popular production that is usually treated as a kids’ play," he says. “In the neighbourhood in which I grew up, the guy who could sing would get the central character, the prince. I was the prince for the neighbourhood, but then I got demoted when the play was performed at school. I was horribly disappointed and vowed that this would be avenged."

A trailer reveals that like in Gandu, Q is jettisoning conventional storytelling modes in favour of an audio-visual head rush through a theatrical acting style, hand-held, highly mobile camerawork and rapid-fire editing. The film has been shot in West Bengal and Sri Lanka. (...) “I didn’t care for the story - it is an experience, with its songs and its exotica," Q says. “I believe in the present moment, not in stories. Tasher Desh is structured like a fairy tale, it’s metaphysical and metaphorical." Tasher Desh has been produced by Q’s outfit Overdose, Kolkata-based recording studio Dream Digital, Belgian company Entre Chien Et Loup, the National Film Development Corporation and Anurag Kashyap Films. The movie brings Q a few steps out of the Kolkata underground and into the mainstream - sort of. “I don’t think Tasher Desh will bring us into a mainstream that means palatable and marketable," Q says. “I am trying to counter the fact that we don’t have channels of distribution for alternate content."

Gandu, made in 2010, was never meant to be released. The experiment in extreme cinema that more people have heard of than seen was a break-out for Q and a breakaway from the realism and restraint usually found in commercial film-making. The mostly black and white movie (...) follows an angst-ridden young man’s journey towards self-fulfilment through highly stylized camerawork, choppy editing and interludes of profane Bengali rap. The protagonist’s claustrophobia, stemming from his sterile surroundings and his sense of emasculation, literally explodes in a no-holds-barred colour sequence of sexual intercourse, which has earned the film eternal notoriety.

Tasher Desh

Q is an agent provocateur with a plan. He has been assiduously working towards creating an alternative system of finance and distribution with Overdose (its business cards promise “explosive Indian content"). He collaborates with a tightly knit group of like-minded souls, some of whom he has grown up with, in the production of “cheap and dirty pictures about sexual, social or political extreme content that otherwise can’t be made", on budgets of ₹ 25-30 lakh [1 lakh = 100.000], that will subsidize each other.

“Since a production house can’t operate on one production, our strategy is to go for two kinds of cinema," he says. “We can make films like Tasher Desh, which is nothing like Gandu but carries the same spirit. If that works out, we have a killer set-up - we can make cheap, extreme films that are not bound by distribution in India. (...) We can recoup the money internationally as well as keep up the fight of pushing the boundaries of viewership." The label Bangla Black has been set up expressly to launch regular attacks on the system. “These are all gambles, high-velocity risks, but they are not uncalculated," Q says. (...)

His partner in cinema and in life [is] Rii, officially Rituparna Sen. (...) When she met Q in 2003, she had spent two years modelling and acting in television. She thought his debut feature Tepantorer Mathe would give her a foothold in the movies. “I thought the film would make me a star, but I was heartbroken when I found it was not going to come out," she says. The two started seeing each other, and Rii got introduced to the film-makers who would turn out to be the leading lights of Kolkata Candid: Shyamal Karmakar, who edited Tepantorer Mathe, and Amitabh Chakraborty, who was making Bishar Blues. “I love films that are challenging and borderline and dangerous," Rii says. “I will do anything for these three film-makers - they are crazy and difficult, but I love their work. Lust is not their prime focus."

Karmakar, an editor who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, is one of Q’s major inspirations. Karmakar’s documentary I Am the Very Beautiful, made in 2006, is a genre-defying exploration of the film-maker’s desire for a bar singer named Ranu Gayen. Karmakar makes no bones about his attraction to Gayen, who is attached to his friend. He asks her to sleep with him and films her semi-naked. Gayen is no shrinking violet either, and as director and subject come dangerously close, the documentary explores the nature of voyeurism and the difficulty of maintaining a pretence of objectivity or distance. Karmakar is in thrall of female sexuality, and unlike many other film-makers, he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“My idea of sexuality was ruptured in Pune," says 48-year-old Karmakar at his office at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata, where he heads the editing department. “I fell in love with women with different moralities and attitudes to morality." Some film-makers explore dreams, some nightmares, while others confront their sexual fantasies, he says. “I want to tell the truth," Karmakar says. “I am very scared to tell my stories, but telling them is important. There are very few places to screen your films in Kolkata," he observes. “But it helps to be under the radar. The less I am seen by people, the better for me."

Q

Perhaps there is no better place than Kolkata to unleash the private into the public. “If you look at what’s happening in Bengali cinema, it’s been brewing for over a decade and a half," says Moinak Biswas, professor at Jadavpur University’s film studies department. “Things have come to a head - there is an all-time record of production in Bengali cinema. Soon, most of these films will find it difficult to get a release." A film like Gandu came as “a slap on the face" of a wave of domestic dramas that were “stifling and didn’t show anything happening beyond well-furnished middle-class homes", Biswas says. “What was unconvincing and disturbing about Gandu was a very male and adolescent expression. I think Amitabh is much more contemplative - whatever one’s disagreements with his film, he has pushed it beyond explicitness and sensationalism into a zone of contemplation."

Kolkata’s advantage is that it isn’t yet facing the pressures of being a centre of global capital, like Mumbai or Delhi. It is in that sweet place between its radical past and possibility-filled present. “This city makes space for us to be here," Q says. “The film-makers here are not contaminated." Kolkata lets an actor like Rii coexist with the poppets and retiring beauties of the mainstream film industry - even though, she says, people still don’t know how to slot her. “My life is so abnormal," she points out. “I live with my boyfriend who is named Q and directs me in films for which he asks me to suck another man’s cock. They are completely head-fucked".'

Vedi anche Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma 2012

HOW BOLLYWOOD IS REWRITING HISTORY

Da qualche tempo riporto quasi integralmente articoli pubblicati da varie testate perché, aggiornando questa sezione del blog, ho purtroppo appurato come molti pezzi interessanti, segnalati in passato, non siano più consultabili a causa della chiusura di quotidiani (ad esempio il Mumbai Mirror, nel cui archivio storico, acquisito da The Times of India, la ricerca per argomenti è lunga e laboriosa), riviste (ad esempio Box Office India o The Film Street Journal, i cui archivi non sono disponibili) o siti (ad esempio DearCinema, nel cui archivio, acquisito da una biblioteca digitale, ad oggi è impossibile effettuare una ricerca per argomenti). 

[Archivio] 

In questi giorni Uday Bhatia, critico cinematografico di Mint e autore del volume Bullets over Bombay, ha conquistato il Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award per l'anno 2019, nella categoria Reporting on Arts, Culture and Entertainment, grazie al magnifico articolo How Bollywood is rewriting history, pubblicato da Mint il primo dicembre 2019. Il pezzo mi era sfuggito, e ve lo propongo ora. 

'There has been an explosion of Hindi historical films in the last couple of years. Some are set in the distant past, others in relatively recent times of turmoil. Most of them place on the nation’s screens, and in the public’s imagination, a version of the past that’s obscured by legend and skewed towards certain narratives.

The blockbuster success of Baahubali (2015), a lavish Telugu action film set in unspecified ancient times, sent the Hindi film industry scurrying for similar epic material. Though the film was not a historical, it would, along with its 2017 sequel (...), have a huge influence on the genre, which adopted its grandiose production values and overtly Hindu iconography. However, instead of inventing its own legends, Hindi cinema turned to history.

Bajirao Mastani arrived at the end of 2015, Raag Desh in 2017. In 2018, Padmaavat brought controversy - and box-office credibility - to the genre; it was followed later that year by Gold and Manto. This year, there’s been Manikarnika and Kesari. Two films about the Marathas are coming up: Ashutosh Gowariker’s Panipat releases next weekend, and Om Raut’s Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior in January. There have also been several works of historical fiction in the last couple of years, with invented characters but based on real events: Begum Jaan, Rangoon and Firangi in 2017, Thugs Of Hindostan in 2018, and Kalank and Laal Kaptaan in 2019. (For the purposes of this piece, 1947 is the broad cut-off point for what qualifies as historical.)

WHEN PAST IS PRESENT

Why is the historical - a genre out of favour for years - suddenly back in Hindi cinema? It may have something to do with the box-office success of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat, a flamboyant look at the 13th century Delhi Sultunate ruler Alauddin Khilji and his obsession with (the possibly fictional) Rani Padmavati, wife of the Rajput king of Mewar. With Hollywood making alarming inroads into the Indian market and streaming platforms drawing audiences away from theatres, Hindi cinema now needs its own big-budget offerings - and history is a ready source. Despite the controversies before its release - or because of them - Padmaavat earned ₹572 crore worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing Indian films ever. Kesari, about an 1897 battle between Sikhs in the British Indian army and Pashtun tribesmen, also earned an impressive ₹207 crore.

There’s another reason. Historical films allow directors to play up present-day beliefs while evoking past legends. On email, Katherine Schofield, senior lecturer in South Asian music and history at King’s College London, says these films are useful for understanding modern values. “Film scholars talk about the historical film as providing a ‘heterotopia’ - literally ‘another place’ - in which to play out the political and social issues of the present day. We should be reading these films not for what they tell us about the past - even the most factually accurate films have to make enormous concessions to telling an entertaining story - but what they tell us about us, now, in the present day."

Take Panipat, a reimagining of the storied 1761 battle - regarded as one the biggest clashes of two armies in the 18th century - between Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali (Sanjay Dutt) and the Marathas under Sadashiv Rao (Arjun Kapoor). The trailer, released on 4 November, comes with an intriguing tag line: “The great betrayal". A clue might lie in historian T.S. Shejwalkar’s 1946 monograph on the battle, which Gowariker has confirmed is the source material for his film. His study says that although the Marathas lost, “on the moral side their record is very clean", and that the “ultimate result of Panipat was to make the way smooth and clear for the English". It seems likely that the “betrayal" will be of India itself - possibly the decision by ex-Mughal serviceman Najib-ud-Daulah to side with Abdali. It’s also a good bet that the Marathas will come out looking saintly, defeat conferring martyrdom on them as it did on the Rajputs in Padmaavat, the Sikhs in Kesari and the rebels in Manikarnika.

What does a battle fought over 250 years ago have to do with the present day? More than you might expect. In January, Amit Shah, Union home minister and president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), declared that the forthcoming general election would be “a decisive contest, like the third battle of Panipat". “The Marathas had won 131 battles," he said, “but lost one decisive battle, which led to 200 years of colonial slavery." While referencing one of the greatest “Hindu" defeats, Shah also spoke of the BJP’s commitment to building a Ram temple in Ayodhya. Less than a year later, with the road to the temple’s construction now clear after the Supreme Court verdict, Panipat is set to release on 6 December, the day of the Babri Masjid’s destruction in 1992.

Every generation makes historical films in its own image. In the years before independence, stories about Indian kings (mostly Hindu) fighting foreign powers (mostly Muslim) were seen as an allegory for protest against British rule. Today, in a time of similarly heightened nationalism but no occupying force or officially declared wars, the same stories take on a more troubling patina. Earlier this month, The Caravan quoted Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh joint general secretary Krishna Gopal as telling an audience of Muslim professionals a day before the Ayodhya verdict: “There came a phase in our history when outsiders destroyed this country’s temples." Fuelling the idea of Muslims as historic outsiders on the big screen may just strengthen this narrative.

NATIONALISM SELLS

Padmaavat and Kesari are set several centuries apart, but in each the protagonists are brave patriots, and the antagonists barbaric Muslims. It remains to be seen how Abdali and his people are portrayed in Panipat but the Afghanistan embassy to India has already expressed concerns about “insensitive/distorted depiction of (Abdali’s) character". The trailer shows the Afghan king with a blood-streaked face, ranting about conquering Hindustan, while Arjun Kapoor’s smooth-cheeked Maratha general talks about defending his land - a juxtaposition reminiscent of Padmaavat, in which Ranveer Singh’s psychotic sultan faced off against Shahid Kapoor’s bland patriot.

Panipat director Gowariker has suggested that the “Indian" army in the film would be an inclusive force. “By the time (the Maratha army) reached Panipat, there were 50,000 soldiers," he said at a press conference earlier this month. “There were Hindus and Muslims. It was a cooperative kind of army, I felt it was important to bring that to the screen." It should be intriguing to see how the Lagaan director’s pet theme of different clans and creeds coming together in the service of the nation plays out.

“Movies are made for the market," says Rana Safvi, an author and historian documenting India’s syncretic culture. “You are catering to what you think is going to sell." What is being sold, by nearly every Hindi film in 2019, is national pride. So much so that patriotism has become just another ingredient, to be inserted at regular intervals like one would a fight sequence or a comic track.

Patriotism is especially prominent in recent historical films. From Padmaavat to Tanhaji, nothing is more important than protecting the motherland. In Manikarnika, the queen’s all-consuming love for her country gives rise to a slur that’s common today, points out historian and Lounge columnist Manu S. Pillai. “There’s a scene where she calls Scindia deshdrohi (traitor to the nation). This is not the kind of vocabulary that existed in that time."

The weight of nation-love has hobbled otherwise sensible films, like Reema Kagti’s Gold, about the building of independent India’s first hockey team. It stars, as the team’s architect, Akshay Kumar, Hindi cinema’s patriot-in-chief in the last couple of years (Hum India ko dekhega - I will look out for India - he says at one point). If you ignore the flag-waving and anthem-playing and assertions that winning the 1948 Olympic hockey final against England would be “revenge for 200 years of slavery", Gold is a good test case for debating what bits of history can and cannot be altered. Is it all right, for instance, to show the score in the final as 4-3 in India’s favour, when in reality it was a one-sided, cinematically unappetizing 4-0?

I ask Rajesh Devraj, credited with the film’s story, about the rules he set for historical invention. Devraj, who stresses he isn’t responsible for the final screenplay, says he wouldn’t have changed the final scoreline. As an example of the sort of thing he would change, he pointed to the scene where the Indian players take off their shoes to counter wet conditions. This might well have taken place; 1948 star Balbir Singh recalls it happening, though other accounts are silent. Even if it didn’t, Devraj says, there’s enough historical precedent for barefoot Indian athletes for this to work as a narrative device. “It’s really a metaphor. When they take off the shoes, they are rejecting colonialism. It’s them saying, this is how I played back in my village, I need to feel that contact with the soil."

Gold offers up a soft vision of Indian glory, achieved by a mix of classes and creeds. Other historical films, however, are dialling up patriotism into a clash-of-civilizations rhetoric.

DEEPENING DIVIDE

In the trailer for Om Raut’s Tanhaji, Ajay Devgan’s titular Maratha general tells a young boy they will defeat the Mughals just as the Pandavas won against the Kauravas (a similar comparison is made in Padmaavat). It goes on to describe the 1670 Battle of Sinhagad as “the surgical strike that shook the Mughal empire". The term “surgical strike" entered the public lexicon after Indian military action against Pakistan in 2016, and was cemented by the success of the film Uri this January (several BJP leaders adopted its famous line, “How’s the josh?"). That a film promo would associate the Mughals with the uber-villains of Indian mythology and then with Pakistan tells you a lot about the nation and its cinema in 2019.

“You can see a change," Safvi says about the Panipat and Tanhaji trailers. “It’s becoming slightly more Islamophobic. It’s a more aggressive tone."

In recent historical films, Hindus are more visibly Hindu. The Tanhaji trailer shows Devgan sitting beside a fluttering bhagwa dhwaja - the saffron standard of the Marathas. But there’s an addition: the Om symbol. This is almost certainly a leap of imagination; the Maratha flag had nothing printed on it. Muslims have also seemed more Muslim on screens in 2019: Kohl-lined eyes followed viewers from Gully Boy to Uri to Kalank to Panipat.

The most partisan contrast was in Anurag Singh’s Kesari, a violent war film in which Akshay Kumar plays the leader of 21 Sikh soldiers who died fighting an army of thousands of Afridi and Orakzai Pashtun tribesmen. The battle took place in 1897 in Sarhagarhi, in the North-West Frontier Province, then part of India. As soldiers in the British Indian army, the Sikhs were fighting other Indians for the British. The film, though, deliberately paints the tribesmen as marauders and the Sikhs as patriots fighting only in name for the British. In one particularly insidious scene, the film’s chief antagonist, a fanatical religious leader named Khan Masud, orders the beheading of a woman who tries to run from her abusive husband. As the execution is about to be carried out, he recites surah Al-Fatiha - a common prayer in praise of Allah. At the last moment, Kumar saves her.

Singh isn’t done labouring the point. He has Masud call for jihad (holy war) and repeatedly take Allah’s name while discussing battle plans. Then he restages the beheading with the same woman, and again the prayer is recited - only this time she’s killed. One of the last scenes, as the last of the Sikhs are dying, is of the tribesmen looting their supplies.

Throughout Padmaavat, we are told of the amazing things Rajputs can do, from walking on burning embers to sacrificing their life to uphold truth and freedom. There are no songs of praise for the Khiljis, even though Amir Khusro, the pre-eminent poet of his age, is in their ranks. They have a reputation for pillaging and raping; they are wild and dusty and dressed in dirty robes, while the Rajputs are perfectly attired. It’s unfortunate that Ranveer Singh’s turn as Khilji is the one spark in a dull film, for his unhinged performance only draws attention to a characterization that leans far too heavily on Muslim invader tropes. The real Alauddin was certainly a tyrant, but the Alauddin of Padmaavat is a sadist, a psychopath and a rapist who stages an eight-month-long siege so he can enslave one woman. The image that seems to have stuck with everyone most is of him biting into hunks of meat (“It seemed very barbaric," Safvi says).

The one thing that Bhansali doesn’t do is link Khilji with any personal religiosity - though in the world of this film, a person who doesn’t believe in God is to be suspected. Alauddin’s object of desire, though, is compared to a goddess several times in the film. By the end, she’s a literal deity; “Today, she’s worshipped as a goddess, destroyer of evil," read the credits. This is similar to Manikarnika, which also elevates its Hindu queen to divine status. As she slashes through British soldiers on the battlefield, her face smeared with blood, she is Durga’s wrath incarnate - which is why we hear a few lines from Aigiri Nandini, a Sanskrit song in praise of Durga, being chanted.

TIED TO TRADITION

Padmaavat’s fraught production is an extreme example of the kind of problems that can accompany the making of historical films in India today. During the film’s shooting in 2017, the Karni Sena, a fringe group in Rajasthan, alleged that the director was shooting a dream sequence with Khilji and Padmavati. They vandalized the sets and later threatened to cut off actor Deepika Padukone’s nose. Release dates were announced and deferred. The Central Board of Film Certification showed the film to a panel of historians, who passed it. The final film was as deferential to Rajput pride as the Karni Sena could have hoped for, but the threat lingered on. Every historical film since has inspired claims of “hurt sentiments".

One can only speculate if the attacks had a role in moving Bhansali towards safe, “respectful" ground, and whether the film might have ended up differently if there weren’t any threats. Between 2015’s Bajirao Mastani and 2018’s Padmaavat, you can feel the genre ossify. The earlier Bhansali film seemed open to possibilities - of poetry; of a certain syncretic tradition of cinema; of love between a Hindu king and a Muslim queen; even the idea that king, queen and new queen might coexist in a respectful, impossibly good-looking triangular relationship. Padmaavat, on the other hand, seems stifled by tradition, dulled by duty, with nothing more to offer than centuries-old ideas of honour and sacrifice.

If service of the nation is the top priority of the modern Hindi historical, upholding traditional values comes a close second. The Tanhaji trailer has an unusually specific shout-out, with actor Kajol saying, “When Shivaji wields his sword, the honour of women and janeu (sacred thread) of Brahmins remain intact." It’s curious that a film about Shivaji’s general (of Koli caste) would make this pointed a reference to Brahmin dignity - and deem it important enough to include in the trailer.

An earlier evocation of the caste system was in Baahubali 2 (2017) - not a historical, but a template in many ways for the genre - when prince Amarendra Baahubali says: “God creates life, the Vaidya (physician) saves it, and the Kshatriya (warrior) protects it." “Kshatriya" turns up twice in Manikarnika, both times to specify that the future Rani of Jhansi, though not herself of the warrior caste, possesses its best qualities. Padmaavat treated jauhar - ritual self-immolation by women so they wouldn’t be captured by the enemy - with reverence. The climactic scenes, with hundreds of stoic women led by Padmavati running towards the fire, are drawn-out and disturbingly triumphant.

Conservative ideas of sexuality hold sway. In both Padmaavat and Kesari, the top soldier in the Muslim army is gay. The sniper in Kesari has long nails with red polish and rouge on his cheeks. In Padmaavat, the character is a historical figure - Malik Kafur, a eunuch presented to Alauddin as a slave, who, incredibly, rose from there to attain the rank of general. Several accounts of the time suggest that Alauddin and Kafur were lovers. In the film, Kafur dresses his king (as Padmavati dresses hers), rubs his feet in a bathtub. The Binte Dil song sequence, where Kafur serenades Alauddin and his female companion for the night, might be the first openly bisexual love ballad in Hindi cinema.

Normally, queer texts turning up in historical dramas would be welcome. But by ascribing feminine traits to the deadliest solider in the enemy camp, the films seem to be inviting a contrast to the manly Rajputs and Sikhs on the opposing side. Moreover, the three queer characters (if you include Alauddin) are shown as sadists and betrayers - a worrying conflation of deviation from the sexual majority with moral deviance. The sniper gleefully shoots a fallen Sikh soldier in the leg. Alauddin stabs his king in the back; Kafur shoots Ratan Singh in the back. “Alauddin’s implied relationship with Kafur is portrayed as yet another sign of his untrustworthiness - a stigma many bisexual men have to contend with in modern life," Schofield says. “In their own time, close romantic, erotic, and even sexual relationships between men of different social statuses were not only commonplace, but often held up as the ideal, as in the beautiful poetry written about the relationship between Mahmud of Ghazni and his slave Ayaz."

FUTURE HISTORIES

Though it’s beyond the ambit of this piece, Hindi cinema has also been scanning recent history for source material. The subjects chosen are, unsurprisingly, either concerned with national pride (Mission Mangal, Pad Man - both with Akshay Kumar) or focused on events that show the present administration in a good light (PM Narendra Modi) or the opposition in a bad one (Indu Sarkar, about the Emergency; The Accidental Prime Minister, about the UPA government) [UPA = United Progressive Alliance, coalizione di centro-sinistra]. Or the military: After Uri’s success, two period war films are in the works - Bhuj: The Pride Of India, about the 1971 war with Pakistan, and a Sam Manekshaw biopic starring Vicky Kaushal as the Field Marshal.

History is amended all the time. This is a necessary churn, allowing suppressed voices to enter the conversation, but it can also give rise to exclusionary narratives. If Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa has his way, a key figure like Tipu Sultan might not appear at all in school textbooks. In October, speaking at a seminar at Banaras Hindu University, Amit Shah said: “There is a need to rewrite the Indian history from India’s point of view, but without blaming anyone." His 30-minute talk presents India’s ancient history as a long string of Hindu achievements, with a stray mention of Sikh gurus and mentions of “hundreds of years of slavery".

This particular vision of history may well match what we see on our screens in the immediate future. Next year there’s Tanhaji, and a Marathi film about Tanaji Malusare’s king, Chhatrapati Shivaji, starring Riteish Deshmukh. There’s a biopic on Prithviraj Chauhan, another Hindu king who fought Muslim invaders, with Akshay Kumar in the lead. Few of these are likely to treat their subjects like flesh-and-blood humans. “Deification clouds a mature historical understanding of these real figures," Pillai says, “but there’s this trend in India that promotes them to divine status because otherwise our confidence will suffer."

There’s a scene in Padmaavat where Ratan Singh tells Khilji: “History isn’t just written on paper which you can burn." For a film whose titular character might be drawn from a poem written two centuries after the events in it took place, this is a bold statement. It seems to suggest that what we think of as history could also include legends passed down from generation to generation, not just words on paper. This gives the film-maker a wide range of crowd-pleasing material to draw on, but what of the impressionable viewer who ends up believing that Manikarnika rode a horse off the edge of a fortress and survived what appears to be a 30ft fall? Perhaps future films could carry, in the style of tobacco warnings, little fact-checks in a corner of the screen, informing us when history is being rewritten'.

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