WELCOME TO BOLLYWOOD: CRITICA INTERNAZIONALE E NAZIONALISMO

Il numero di maggio 2022 della rivista digitale australiana Senses of Cinema include uno speciale dedicato al cinema popolare hindi, Welcome to Bollywood, con la seguente motivazione: 'This dossier is an attempt to complicate and diversify the monolithic concept of ‘Bollywood’, to break it out of its critical ghetto in Western film criticism and challenge the Eurocentrism of film studies that fails to recognise Bollywood as an artistic phenomenon'. Gli articoli sono decisamente interessanti. In testi diversi, riporto degli estratti, ma vi consiglio di leggere le versioni integrali. 

ONLY THE BRAVE-HEARTED WILL TAKE THE BRIDE: BOLLYWOOD AND WESTERN CINEPHILIA, Darragh O'Donoghue:

'It might seem absurd to claim the popular Hindi cinema as marginalised - Bollywood is a global, billion-dollar industry whose products make the top tens of most countries in the world each week, and are watched by hundreds of millions of filmgoers within India itself; it is an industry that is arguably responsible for side-lining alternative cinemas in that. Nevertheless, it continues to be ignored by Western cinephiles and under-represented in film history. (...) Film history, film canons, and the scope of contemporary cinephilia is (...) decided by (...) a closed circle of programmers and festivals; film magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope; and home entertainment companies such as the Criterion Collection. This circle has expanded in recent years, (...) but it continues to find little room for popular Hindi cinema. (...) 

Since the 1950s, Western cinephilic appreciation of Indian cinema has been restricted to Satyajit Ray (...) and, latterly, Ritwik Ghatak. Both filmmakers were, significantly, Bengali, belonging to a rich cultural, primarily literary tradition long appreciated in the West. (...) Both filmmakers conceived of character, plot, place, and formal design in the individualistic or subjective terms that paralleled the arthouse films of other nations. (...) Popular Hindi cinema generally ignores these Western norms, finding its roots in local religious, mythological, and popular forms (...) that reject the fixed points of Western perspective, plausibility and logic. As a result, it is ignored by Western critics. Only one Hindi filmmaker has been ‘saved’ for the Western canon - Guru Dutt. (...) Dutt is admired precisely because he is held to adhere to the kind of cinema Western cinephiles expect. (...) No (...) mainstream critical attempt was ever made with Hindi cinema. In academia, where critical interest in Bollywood does exist, the focus tends to be sociological, anthropological and ethnographic rather than artistic or intentionalist. (...) This dossier, therefore, was born of frustration at the marginalisation of popular Hindi cinema in the discourse of Western cinephilia'. 

COINCIDENCE AND CATASTROPHE: THE UNSETTLING CINEMA OF MANMOHAN DESAI, Darragh O'Donoghue

DREAM GIRLS UNDER A DIFFERENT MOON: THE HIDDEN MELANCHOLY OF YASH CHOPRA FILMS, McKenzie Clarke

THE SELF AND THE OTHER: RACIALISATION OF THE NORTHEASTERN REGION, Anushka Chaudhuri. Il testo prende in esame Dil Se, Chak De! India e Axone.

AN OMINOUS SHADE OF CRIMSON: ANURAG KASHYAP'S GULAAL, Karthick Ram Manoharan

LIGHTS, CAMERA, NATION-STATE! BOLLYWOOD'S CHOREOGRAPHY OF INDIA'S NATIONAL PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS, Srishti Chatterjee:

'Almost universally in the postcolonial world, the patriotic film genre is loved and makes money. Nationalism, indeed, is an entertainment favourite - featuring a gratuitous nostalgia of violence, a fervent love for the nation-state, and celebrity power - fashioned by [real or imagined] digital technology in an arms race. In India, cinema is one of the centres of community life. Storytelling in general - in bioscopes, transistor radios, television, and the cinema - is a respite from the everyday mundane. Bollywood, India’s largest film industry, based in the western metropolis of Mumbai, offers a 2 billion populated nation where two-thirds live in poverty, a taste of glitz and glamour most of its citizens will never be able to afford. 

Post freedom from British colonisation in 1947, Bollywood has offered Indians a share of captivating love stories, a sprinkle of [hetero] sexual desire, and a chance at building a collective consciousness on shared truths about our history of fighting the British Empire. Movies depicting the Indian struggle for freedom, such as 1942: A Love Story (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994) and The Legend of Bhagat Singh (Rajkumar Santoshi, 2002) have always been immensely popular, and despite being decades old, continue to be popular watches, especially on Independence Day and Republic Day in India. Since 2014, when the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, Bollywood cinema has taken a sharp turn to religious fanaticism and Islamophobia that is subtly [yet coercively] shaping a violent, exclusionary national public consciousness.

Love and the Nation-State

The national borders of India were drawn in tandem with religious separatism. (...) India constitutionally chose to remain secular since it became a republic in 1951. The Partition of India (1947-48) was a mass displacement of nearly 14 million refugees who moved across territories drawn to fit their religious identities, under fear of persecution and loss of life. Families were separated, love stories left incomplete, and people fled and resettled in the hope of easier lives. Millions were killed in the exodus. These love stories, the ones torn apart by the violence of the border, make for good cinema. Bollywood has a long history of movies where a Hindu and a Muslim person fall in love with each other under abusive circumstances from families, communities, and the India-Pakistan border. 

Veer-Zaara (Yash Chopra, 2004), is synonymous with the ultimate star-crossed lovers story - where Indian Air Force pilot Veer falls in love with a lively Pakistani woman, Zaara, and separated by decades, accidents, and borders with sad songs and intense dialogues à la Bollywood, finally reunite and live together. Veer-Zaara was a groundbreaking film in Bollywood’s archive of secular cinema, where love is tasked with serving the political purpose in reuniting people displaced and divided by the border. Unlike in war, you don’t root for India or Pakistan in the movie, you root for the lovers. (...) Veer-Zaara stands out in a long line of films where “love finds a way” in Bollywood, and where the violence of the Partition is a hurdle that is overcome, by love. For a country whose borders were drawn along religious lines, India’s constitutional guarantee of secularism was more of a dream - the fulfilment of which was designed to be a national duty. People line up to watch movies in India, cinema unites us - we cheer for characters and root for them as though they were one of our own. Our duty of secular projection thus came to be fulfilled by ambitious Bollywood cinema - love story and all. (...) Bollywood, post-Independence, took it upon themselves to build the collective memory of the Indian national consciousness as secular.

Especially post-9/11, progressive filmmakers within Bollywood responsibly made movies like My Name Is Khan (Karan Johar, 2010), which is a heartbreaking depiction of the suspicions that a Muslim man was subject to at work, education, and border security, in the aftermath of 9/11. The film is held together by a single, desperate refrain from its protagonist, Rizwan Khan - an autistic, Muslim man: My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist. Rizwan is played by Shah Rukh Khan, one of India’s most globally famous stars, and Bollywood’s favourite success story of a Muslim man who started without nepotism and glamour, and made it big as one of the cinema’s biggest heroes of all time. Of My Name is Khan, SRK said, most articulately, “It’s about a relationship between two people, and between an individual and a country. It has three components: a love story, Islam, and [..] autism”.

To an extent, Bollywood’s love stories were successful in positing a secular teleology for India, nurturing our collective memories to take pride in our diversity and to cinematically develop a collective consciousness that is more progressive and accepting than the violent past that was handed down to us. For an industry most famous for its affinity for romance, Bollywood’s progressive film houses, like Yash Raj Films and Dharma Productions, led to many, many films that romanticised love stories from different religious and ethnic backgrounds where love makes it, against all odds. It is interesting to note that the sentiment in these films are often “They are in love, and that’s all that matters”, rather than - we should reckon with our political history, and not harm marginalised people. It’s almost as though a successful, heterosexual love story is an uncompromisable part of India’s projection of religious harmony. 

In PK (Rajkumar Hirani, 2013), the titular character is an extraterrestrial alien from a different planet, who comes to India and gets lost - and loses a dear friend to religious violence. He seeks to find the truth behind India’s various religious groups, leading to comically sad moments of confusion and revelations about deep theological questions such as this line from one of the songs in the film: 

Jo bhi rasmein hain wo saari main nibhata hoon

in karodon ki tarah main sar jhukaata hoon

Bhagwan hai kahaan re tu?

Translation:

I fulfil all the rituals,

And bow down to you, like millions,

[But] God, where are you?

The focal point of this film, too, apart from theological reckonings of India’s religious diversity, is a misunderstanding between a Pakistani Muslim man and an Indian Hindu woman, who find each other in the end, and live happily ever after. Repeatedly, secular storytellings of Bollywood revolve around successful love stories of heterosexual characters - dead or alive, although over time, the industry’s depiction of religious turmoil got more, and more courageous. The songs, which are the biggest parts of the Bollywood experience, are released as albums, and are sung and danced to at Independence Day and Republic Day parades and festivals, and in progressive circles, there remained constant a celebration of India’s harmony despite it all. 

Films like Veer-Zaara, and My Name Is Khan, gained international popularity, with screenings worldwide grossing millions of dollars. Grappling with difficult themes did not take away from their global commercial popularity, but also worked to position postcolonial India as a harmonious, secular place where research, art, and business thrived. A secular film industry spoke on panels in Cannes and Paris, and globally, Bollywood came to be known as a powerhouse industry with romance at its centre, even from a country that is generally considered quite conservative.

The pivot away from secularism

Since 2014, after the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - under Prime Minister Narendra Modi - was elected to power in the Indian Federal Government, there has been a new wave of Hindu supremacism and Islamophobia, popularly known as the ‘saffron wave’. Saffron is a sacred colour for Hindus - and efforts to Hindu-ise India’s barely secular consciousness, the saffron wave, is creating ripple effects that extend to all facets of India’s political economy and society. Bollywood’s saffron wave comes in the wake of the Modi Government’s inimitable efforts of ethnic cleansing, characterised by media censorship, nationalist concentration camps, and silencing of even Bollywood’s most powerful celebrities, should they be critical of the government.

PK’s protagonist is played by Aamir Khan, whose filmography often grapples with political sentiments about marginalised people. (...) Just after PK’s release and commercial and critical success, Khan, who is culturally Muslim, (...) said in an interview that he was alarmed by the ‘rising intolerance’ in the country post the election of the BJP government, and that his wife had suggested moving away to raise their child. The interview was about a movement of progressive filmmakers, writers, and academics returning national awards to the state after killing of rational thinkers M.M. Kalburgi and Govind Pansare, and mob-lynchings of people suspected to have consumed beef (popular for Muslim people, and immoral in Hinduism). There was national furore about Khan’s comments, with many BJP spokespeople openly calling for Khan and his family, all Indian citizens, to be deported to [the Islamic Republic of] Pakistan. 

Indian cinema personalities have an incredible amount of power over our public consciousness, higher than most politicians. Two-thirds of the Indian population lives in poverty, and the glamour in the lives of celebrities provides a passive respite to the people - an escapade of romance and splendour most of us never get to experience in real life. The character assassination of cinema personalities, therefore, occur in tandem with large, carefully planned, grotesque national campaigning, similar to that of a political personality. Other filmmakers/actors who have commented on the rising religious intolerance in India have faced public vilification, bounties placed over their heads, and national outcry and threats of rape and death to their friends and family. 

There is now, obviously, more fear in the film industry for their lives and livelihoods, leading to an increasing uptake of movies that now glorify war and nation-building in not so secular ways. Bollywood, after all, is one of India’s biggest global industries, with a 139 billion rupees revenue reported per year (as of 2020). To understand the impact of the rising saffron wave washing over the thematic aesthetics of Bollywood cinema, it is imperative to evaluate Bollywood as a political economy that governs the industry’s production and critical episteme. Bollywood, studied as an industry, is just another culture industry, producing and (re)producing content for profit. (...) Like most cultural (re)production (...) the Bollywood cinema is produced in tandem with the tastes of the dominant class of society. Reflective of the dominant class in Indian society as how the average (...) Rahul thinks, Modi-era Bollywood is increasingly producing hypernationalist machismo to suit the tastes of the country’s viewership and netizens - partly in fear of BJP-supported vitriol, and partly to keep turning around revenue. (...) 

Biopics come with a promise of being ‘based on true events’, and with some truths and many lies, paint a picture of the ideal man as a patriot who sacrifices himself for the country, and the ideal woman a submissive woman who mourns him dutifully, forever. The national consciousness is renewed and built on these ideals - like in the recent Shershaah (Vishnuvardhan, 2021), a biopic on Captain Vikram Batra who dies in the Indo-Pak Kargil War, and his love story with his girlfriend, Dimple, who never married after his martyrdom. This is a real story, yes, but the cinematic retelling must unmistakably be read within India’s current political climate of fervent nationalism. Any ordinary viewer would empathise with the late Captain and his girlfriend, but instead of blaming the violence of the border for the war, martyrdom, and romantic grief, will be lauded by the visuals to focus their hatred on Pakistani soldiers. Most viewers watch movies for entertainment, for a respite from their everyday slog - and the passive consumption leads to an uncritical fortification of empathy with nationalists/patriots, and a desire to vilify any “other”. Usually, this “other” is Muslim. 

The aesthetics of nationalism in the BJP era

Since 2014, an overwhelming number of films with similar nationalist aesthetics have been produced. In 2016, India’s favourite patriotic actor, Akshay Kumar, starred in Airlift, depicting a Kuwait-based businessman’s journey of evacuating Indians during the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Airlift was the pivotal start of a fleet of movies that placed Hindu Indians as ‘goodwill ambassador-esque’ characters that save people from bad circumstances, usually caused by Muslim perpetrators.

An interesting study in this teleology of BJP-era patriotism, is Anurag Singh’s Kesari (2019), based on true events. Apart from its title literally meaning ‘saffron’, a signal to the sacred colour for Hinduism symbolising purity, its pivotal characters are actually Sikh people - a minority religious group that have faced genocide under the Indian state (in 1984), and were significantly defamed as a group by the Indian state during the farmer’s protests in 2020-21. The valour of Sikh people is often romanticised in Bollywood’s retelling of Indian history as a projection of some semblance of religious unity - but the antagonist of the films remain Muslim people. Notably, in Kesari, even the British colonisers are portrayed with positive validation - a sharp antithesis from Bollywood’s usual nation-building sentiments of the Indian freedom struggle, which all at least universally agree on British colonisers as the antagonists. Kesari also still has a heterosexual affair at its centre, but the ultimate love is of the nation-state and its paraphernalia - romantic love is easily sacrificed to the country. (...)

Slowly, and steadily, whether the films are about the past or the present, whether they are biopic or fictional, mainstream Bollywood’s vilification of Islam and Muslim people, is getting bolder. Crucial in this episteme is Aditya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), a film that in five chapters tells the story of Pakistan’s attacks on Indian military camps on the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and India’s subsequent revenge. The chapter that depicts Pakistan’s attack is titled Bleed India With A Thousand Cuts, and the subsequent revenge is titled Naya Hindustan (A New India). Striking is the use of Hindustan (the land of the Hindus) as India’s Hindi name, rather than the more common, and the nationally formal name: Bharat. The ‘new India’ is a progressive heuristic - soldiers are planning and training for a covert operation, showing that their valour and machismo is not to be ‘underestimated’. Based on true events of a surgical strike that was front and centre of Modi’s successful re-election campaign in 2019, this movie’s purpose is to position India as an army to be reckoned with. Shortly after, the BJP government passed an overnight bill to take away autonomous protections from India’s only Muslim-majority state - Jammu and Kashmir, and effectively occupy the autonomous territory with coercive internet shutdowns and military violence. Frequently, young people are arrested in the Kashmir Valley under suspicions of ‘supportive Pakistan’ - even in cricket matches. You are no longer rooting for love, you are rooting for a side, and you had better root for India.

In 2022, Hindu-nationalist director Vivek Agnihotri made The Kashmir Files, a fictional drama that incorrectly presents the exodus of Hindu Kashmiri Pandits as a genocide, recasts established history, and vilifies young journalists and student union activists that are fighting the Indian nation-state’s Islamophobia. Despite drawing widespread criticism for promoting conspiracy theories, as of only April 2022, the film grossed US $45 million worldwide, and became India’s highest grossing film of 2022 [yet]. In theatres across India, showings of The Kashmir Files incited Islamophobic hate speech, including calls for genocide against Muslim people. Prime Minister Modi, of course, praised the movie for ‘highlighting history’ - an attempt to create the spiritual principle of solidarity of the Indian collective consciousness as not just “India loving”, but actively Muslim hating.

Where's the trend going, and what does it say?

Bollywood is one of the world’s biggest film industries, and enjoys a wide global viewership. A sharp pivot from the secular nature of many of our inter-religious love stories, religious difference is mostly depicted as antagonistic now - positioning us as a country that is deeply Islamophobic in its global image and foreign policy. Antithetically to the erudite, secular image our postcolonial cinema tried to project, Bollywood’s renewed obsession with war, arms-based superiority, and patriotic carnage is intentionally projecting an image that India is an intolerant nation: almost like a warning. The Bollywood industry is not lying anymore. It is not even trying to project a progressive, secular image, or even being subtle about India’s Hindu-supremacist tendencies. Bollywood is one of the instruments loudly proclaiming to the world that India is drawing inspiration from Hindu-nationalist traditions, and is also motivated towards an ethno-religious future that is marked by technology, innovation and scientific progress that will leave behind and decimate our religious minorities. It is a bit of a loop - the Indian nation-state is trying to go back to the past and rewrite it, and also simultaneously writing a present that is innovative and futuristic, and development that is technocratic and arms-based. (...) 

India’s image is being choreographed by mainstream Bollywood to position India as no longer a country characterised by slums, poverty, and sexual violence. Instead, India’s image is being actively shown as grenades and fighter planes, to inspire a foreign policy characterised by fear. Desperate refrains from Muslim people are no longer featured in Bollywood cinema, and go unheard [or voyeuristically mocked] during mob lynchings on streets. As the Modi Government targets Muslim refugees and builds concentration camps and detention facilities, Bollywood glitter and glamour is being washed over by the Saffron Wave. In turn, it is washing over the real and bitter truth of India’s Hindu-nationalist [public and foreign] policy with a patriotic machismo that is tasked to build a nation whose collective memory erases and forgets its “others” - in film, and then in real'.

Vedi anche:

- How Bollywood is rewriting history

- Welcome to Bollywood: Genere politico-sociale e Lingua inglese, 18 giugno 2022

- Welcome to Bollywood: Caste e Genere NRI, 26 giugno 2022

- Welcome to Bollywood: A Devdas for every generation, 1 luglio 2022

- Welcome to Bollywood: Indian cinemas, Bollywood and the world, 3 luglio 2022

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'.

Vedi anche: 

- Welcome to Bollywood: critica internazionale e nazionalismo, 8 giugno 2022

- Welcome to Bollywood: genere politico-sociale e lingua inglese, 18 giugno 2022

- When the Hindu right came for Bollywood, 24 ottobre 2022

- Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world, 11 febbraio 2023

INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL BOLLYWOOD & BEYOND 2010

L'Indian Film Festival Bollywood & Beyond 2010 si svolge in Australia e in Nuova Zelanda dal 10 marzo al 21 aprile. Le città interessate sono Melbourne, Sidney, Perth e Auckland. Il programma è davvero ricco, e include anche qualche pellicola non hindi, come ad esempio Kanchivaram (tamil) di Priyadarshan, e Harishchandrachi Factory (marathi) di Paresh Mokashi.

Il cartellone dei titoli hindi prevede innanzitutto un'ampia retrospettiva dedicata a Rani Mukherjee: Dil Bole Hadippa!, Black, Bunty Aur Babli, Hum Tum, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Paheli e Saathiya. La diva ha partecipato alle serate inaugurali a Melbourne (10 marzo) e a Sidney (12 marzo).

Fra le altre pellicole, segnalo: Love Aaj Kal, Ghajini, 3 idiots, Dostana, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Paa, Kaminey, New York, Dev. D, Wake up Sid!, Luck by chance, Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, What's Your Raashee? e Rocket Singh - Salesman of the year.

Per quanto riguarda gli eventi collaterali, oltre agli incontri già menzionati con Rani Mukherjee, parteciperanno al festival Rajkumar Hirani, Anurag Singh, Imtiaz Ali e Sohail Khan.

RANI MUKHERJEE È TORNATA

Giorni fa un quotidiano indiano aveva diffuso una sconcertante notizia riguardo le nuove abitudini sociali di Rani Mukherjee. Sembra che la diva stia conducendo una vita da reclusa e che preferisca la compagnia solo dei suoi stretti familiari. Alcuni amici hanno dichiarato che l'attrice non risponde neppure alle loro chiamate telefoniche.

Smentendo queste lugubri voci, Rani, più in forma che mai, ha partecipato alla puntata, trasmessa poche ore fa, di Lift Kara De, il programma televisivo condotto da Karan Johar. Ma non finisce qui. A Rani Mukherjee è dedicata una ricca retrospettiva nell'ambito dell'Indian Film Festival Bollywood & Beyond 2010, che si terrà in Australia e in Nuova Zelanda dal 10 marzo al 21 aprile. La diva, in compagnia di Anurag Singh, regista di Dil Bole Hadippa!, ha risposto alle domande dei fan durante la serata inaugurale (12 marzo) della sezione di festival che si sta svolgendo a Sidney. 

Nel 2009 l'attrice ci ha regalato solo Dil Bole Hadippa!, e nel 2010 dovremo accontentarci della sua originalissima voce prestata al cartone animato Koochie Koochie Hota Hai, sempre che vengano rispettate le previsioni di distribuzione. Consoliamoci quindi con le confortanti dichiarazioni rilasciate dalla regista Deepa Mehta a The Times of India in gennaio, e tradotte (in inglese) da Pushker (che ringrazio):

'Deepa Mehta ha intenzione di realizzare l'adattamento cinematografico de I figli della mezzanotte di Salman Rushdie. Shabana Azmi e Seema Biswas sono già state scritturate per il progetto. Ma la regista, favorevolmente colpita dalle interpretazioni offerte in Hey Ram e in Black, ci terrebbe ad includere anche Rani Mukherjee nel cast. La diva, dal canto suo, ha espresso il desiderio di lavorare in un film diretto da una donna. Rani, Deepa e Salman Rushdie si sono incontrati a Toronto'.

Aggiornamento del 29 ottobre 2010: purtroppo Rani non farà parte del cast della nuova pellicola di Deepa Mehta.

Vedi anche: Indian Film Festival Bollywood & Beyond 2010

ASHUTOSH GOWARIKER E ANURAG SINGH AL TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009

Come l'anno scorso per Heaven on Earth di Deepa Mehta, Singh is Kinng di Anees Bazmee e Firaaq di Nandita Das, i nuovi lavori di Ashutosh Gowariker e Anurag Singh saranno presentati in anteprima mondiale al Toronto International Film Festival. Si tratta di What's Your Raashee?, diretto da Gowariker, una commedia romantica tratta dal romanzo Kimball Ravenswood di Madhu Arya, con Priyanka Chopra e Harman Baweja; e di Dil Bole Hadippa!, di Anurag Singh, con Rani Mukherjee e Shahid Kapoor. Ashutosh Gowariker, Anurag Singh, Rani Mukherjee e Priyanka Chopra sono attesi a Toronto. La trentaquattresima edizione del festival si terrà dal 10 al 19 settembre.

Il sito ufficiale del Toronto International Film Festival