BREAKING DOWN PATHAAN, THE MOST POPULAR MOVIE IN THE WORLD

Per fortuna i miei timori si sono rivelati infondati: Pathaan sta letteralmente incendiando il botteghino, e non solo in India, frantumando tutti i precedenti record di incassi con la rapidità e la precisione chirurgica e spietata di un raggio laser. Persino nel nostro Paese, grazie alla lungimiranza del circuito UCI, si è guadagnato numerose proiezioni, molte delle quali aggiunte all'ultimo minuto, a testimonianza di un successo non previsto ma reale. 

Purtroppo non ho ancora potuto gustarmi il film, magari è una schifezza, ma inutile precisare che sono in primo luogo superiperfelice per il Re: dopo le batoste familiari e personali subite negli ultimi tempi, una rivincita di proporzioni planetarie era proprio quello che la suprema legge della compensazione multiversale doveva avere in serbo per lui. In secondo luogo, sono felice per l'industria cinematografica hindi, ingiustamente, volgarmente, sproporzionatamente attaccata. In terzo luogo, sono felice perché si è forse accesa una luce in fondo al tunnel: di politica me ne frego, ma chiunque - di destra, di sinistra, di centro, di sopra, di sotto, di lato - osi toccare il cinema indiano, non merita la mia stima. E chiunque osi toccare il Re, sul piano personale, non condivide il mio patrimonio biologico e genetico.

Vi riporto di seguito il magnifico articolo Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world, di Swati Sharma, pubblicato ieri da Vox. Il pezzo include una conversazione con il talentuoso critico cinematografico Rahul Desai.

'One of the biggest movie stars in the world is at one of the most tenuous moments in his career. Bollywood titan Shah Rukh Khan hasn’t made a movie in almost five years, his two most recent films failed to captivate audiences, he’s at odds with India’s ruling government, and his industry has been plagued by pandemic disruptions, boycotts from right-wing activists, and anger over nepotism. His latest film, which was released on January 25, is perhaps the biggest test of his star power in his 30-year career.

But the stakes of Khan’s movie Pathaan go far beyond the actor’s relevance. A Muslim man from a middle-class family, Khan hasn’t succumbed to the growing trend of Hindu nationalism that has dominated Bollywood for the last several years. He’s in fact been a target of the right-wing Hindutva government that has been in power since 2014, due to the charismatic star’s singular influence in India and many other parts of the world.

When the sleek high-budget action film Pathaan came out on the eve of India’s Republic Day, it became the biggest film in the world, knocking down Avatar The Way of Water, which had held the top spot for weeks. (...) The film has broken all sorts of records. It is one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time. (...)

Though Bollywood is facing myriad issues, one thing is apparent: The Indian government’s mission of promoting Hindu nationalism above all else has wounded Hindi cinema’s freedom of expression, influence, and even profits. It seemed possible that these attempts would sink India’s biggest icon as well. But it didn’t. To unpack the significance of this film and the present and future of Bollywood, I spoke to Rahul Desai. (...)

Q. Like Hollywood, Bollywood - the Hindi film industry - was all but shut down during the pandemic. What was the state of the industry leading up to the release of Pathaan?

Before the pandemic, Hindi cinema was already struggling. There was a big nepotism scandal after a famous actor who was an outsider, Sushant Singh Rajput, died by suicide. There was a narrative that mainstream blockbusters from the South had an edge on the Hindi film industry, which is in northern India. The public caught a feeling that, to put it bluntly, Bollywood was the villain in Indian cinema. Covid only made things worse.

To be honest, since 2015 or 2016, I’ve struggled to make annual best movie lists because there have not been enough contenders. So unpopularity wasn’t completely unwarranted, but things got very toxic in the last few years, and Bollywood movies have been underperforming. The Marvel films that release in India and Telugu blockbusters like RRR outperform Hindi movies even in Mumbai, which is the center of the Hindi film industry.

Q. India has also changed a lot politically. The country, though a Hindu-majority nation, was founded on secular principles. But since 2014, the right-wing government has been promoting Hindu fundamentalism. It seems like the government is influencing Bollywood more than ever.

There has been a relationship between Bollywood and the government, but that relationship stopped at freedom of expression. Many film stars may have had their own political opinions, but that did not stop them from making movies that were expressive, and that were brave, and that were secular in many ways. Communalism and religious prejudice have always plagued this country. It’s just that this current particular establishment has weaponized that compared to the previous ones. Why? Because Bollywood has maximum influence over the masses, and they realized very quickly that this medium is how they will get their ideas across.

Because of that, the government has broken many of the powerful people in the industry into some kind of submission. Stars won’t speak up when one of their contemporaries is being harassed or when one of their own is being bullied. I can’t fault them for that, because their livelihoods and careers are at stake. It’s a very precarious situation for a lot of the celebrities to be in.

This has a knock-on effect on the kinds of films that are being made. The government’s hands are in the kind of stories being told and the kind of actors that are propped up, especially if they openly showcase their Hinduism. You see a rise of patriotic films that pretend to be patriotic, but they are obviously preaching a very different kind of nationalism as compared to, say, the films of the past that represented secular ideology and gentle patriotism, saying, We are proud of the country we are in, but it doesn’t have to cross the line. Now a lot of lines are being crossed.

Q. This brings us to the topic at hand: Pathaan has been one of the most anticipated releases in Bollywood over the last few years. There are many reasons why, but one of the biggest is Shah Rukh Khan, or SRK. Give us a sense of who he is.

Khan has been the biggest superstar of the modern era in Hindi cinema, since the early 1990s. He has been the name that a lot of people associate with India. If you go to the most obscure foreign country, the one name people will know is Shah Rukh Khan. They’ll name one of his movies from the ’90s or hum one of his famous songs. He’s been an icebreaker for Indian travelers all over the world. He’s been that icon for three decades.

Q. And, of course, Bollywood has many, many stars! In fact, there are two other Khans - Salman and Aamir. Along with SRK, these three Muslim actors were dominant in the 1990s and 2000s, and are still relevant today. But SRK, who is from a middle-class family and the only non-nepo baby of the group, speaks about secularism, has a father who was a freedom fighter for India’s independence, and transcends other stars in India.

Khan has the ultimate underdog story: He is the most famous outsider in the industry, and it’s always his story that wins cinema. People don’t just go to watch him so much as celebrate his story. He represents what can be accomplished if you just leave everything and travel to Mumbai with your bags, no matter how promising you were in other fields - and you become a superstar. To this day, people still come to Mumbai with him as the example to strive for. That very idea of the India that he and the three Khans represent is an inherently secular idea of India.

The three Khans have been mostly dominant for the last three decades. But for SRK, the last decade or so, as he entered his late 40s and now his late 50s, has been a struggle. His last films stopped working for a bunch of reasons, mostly because they were not very good. They were terrible. And he was not very good in them either, because he was at that awkward age where he didn’t know whether to be Shah Rukh Khan, or to be an actor, or to be a character actor.

It happens to many stars - he was trying to get a box office success, especially as the two other Khans, Aamir and Salman, continued to shine. If you look at the biggest hits in Bollywood, the top five spots before Pathaan were taken by Aamir and Salman Khan. I felt like at some point, SRK got insecure that he never broke records, though he was a safe bet. He was always everyone’s sort of ideal lover, ideal son, and a cultural icon. But he was not the biggest box office draw anymore. I think that got him into the race for box office success, and that’s when he started doing films that were pretty bad. For the first time in his 30-year career, he didn’t have a film release for almost five years, so it’s all built up to a story within a story, and that’s the prelude to Pathaan.

Q. So SRK is a huge star in India, but three decades in, he’s trying to find his way through a changing industry. That part of his story is pretty typical. (...) The thing that’s different with Khan is his relationship with India’s current government.

Funnily enough, a lot of my generation growing up in the 1990s didn’t think of the Khans as Muslim or Hindu superstars; we just looked at them as superstars in Bollywood, and we considered “Khan” the most stylish surname. When I was watching films in Mumbai many years later and focused on the myth of Shah Rukh Khan, I started to get more and more connected with how the narrative of religion is being used by this current establishment. If the new Hindu nationalist ruling party had to really take down the idea of secularity, they had to take down the ultimate symbol of it as well. It’s no coincidence Khan has been indirectly targeted in the last four or five years.

SRK himself is a Muslim actor, and even if he’s playing Hindu characters in these films - which was mostly the case - there’s always a sense in the back of your head that this is a superstar who’s very open about his religion, who’s not ashamed of his religion, who doesn’t hide his religion. The current government has wanted stars to cozy up to its Hindu nationalist narrative. Shah Rukh Khan, though, has resisted and kept his silence, which has become a statement. He hasn’t spoken up for the government as much as a lot of the other celebrities in this country, so you always feel like he hasn’t conformed and he is not broken. 

All this reached a head last year when the saga with SRK’s son unfolded. Aryan Khan [then 23] was arrested and jailed on trumped-up drug charges. As ironic as it may sound, that’s when the tides turned against the right-wing government and toward SRK. People felt the government went too far. It was too blatant. They went after a Muslim superstar and everyone’s favorite hero. That’s part of Pathaan’s success as well.

The movie was a fun one, but let’s be honest: It’s an action movie that we’ve seen a hundred times before. It’s not a masterpiece. I can name three other better Hindi action films in the last 10 years, but the context cannot be divorced from the movie. It’s so important to take it into consideration, because that’s why a lot of us are rooting for the success of Pathaan. When you push your country’s favorite superstar into a corner, people feel obligated to root for that star after a while. I don’t think he still was the biggest star in the country until all the things with his son happened last year. That’s when he was brought back into the limelight.

Once I became a professional film critic, I never really liked to get into this discourse, to talk him up as “the India we need, and not the India we have.” But as it turns out in the last year or so, there’s no escaping that discourse.

Q. As you say, there are a few things happening before Pathaan: Bollywood desperately needs a hit, Shah Rukh Khan’s popularity is being tested. And then - I don’t want to exaggerate this, but it seems like it’s the question - can an actor at odds with the government be successful or not?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see it coming. I actually was preparing for the worst. Seeing what has been happening in this country in the last 10 years, I thought, we are going to see SRK almost begging people to go watch the film, which is not a good look for anyone. To my absolute shock, the film was a huge success.

The patriotism we see in Pathaan - I won’t say it’s brave, I won’t say it’s rebellious in any way. But it’s sort of subversive, because SRK is playing a character called Pathaan, which is the name of the Pashto-speaking group in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are mostly Muslim. He’s not saying he is an Indian Muslim; he says he feels connected to a village in Afghanistan. That has nothing to do with India. You’re not exactly going straight on or hitting the heart of Hindu nationalism here. What you are doing is being Shah Rukh Khan and starring in a film called Pathaan and then releasing it in this atmosphere we are in. After all of Bollywood’s struggles and the state of the nation, it’s a breather. All the stars aligned.

Q. Tell me more about the significance of the title of the movie, and Pathaan the character.

The significance of the title is that patriotism isn’t a Hindu birthright anymore. It’s not tied to a certain kind of religion. I see a lot of people criticizing the fact that SRK’s character doesn’t say he’s an Indian Muslim. We don’t know his real name - Pathaan was given to him by a family he met in Afghanistan. But it’s not about what kind of Muslim you are or where you come from. It’s the fact that your love for your country, your love for film, your love for people, your love for art in general, should not be hijacked by one particular community.

That’s what the film does so smartly. They don’t take potshots at Hinduism, the way a lot of Hindu nationalist films have been taking potshots at Islam for the last 10 years. Instead, what it does is put forward a very different idea of Islam. That’s the more human and more dignified way to make a statement, rather than running down one community to glorify another.

Q. One thing that’s fascinating is the movie had to be a very fun, popcorn action film. If it was a beautiful indie masterpiece and didn’t have mass appeal, it wouldn’t have this kind of impact.

There is no question about the fact that Pathaan was written with Shah Rukh Khan’s particular situation in mind. The director and the writers all but admitted in interviews that of course it was made and designed around Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback. They won’t go so far to say whatever political commentary they wanted to deliver through him, but there is no doubt that all of it was taken into consideration for this to work and for this film to infiltrate the top five Bollywood hits ever. In terms of box office successes, it’s as good as it gets and as timely as it gets.

Q. The movie doesn’t have overt Hindu nationalist themes, but many believe (...) it has a problematic Pakistani narrative. Do you agree?

When I started watching the film, two scenes in the beginning scared me. The first scene shows a Pakistani general vowing to destroy India, and the second is SRK’s introduction, where he tells someone to only speak in Hindi, a metric that this current government has been really pushing down our throats in the last 10 years. I was quite wary.

But then if you read deeper into a silly film like this - and it is silly on its surface - I don’t think the vilification of Pakistan exists as people think it does. The main female actor, Deepika Padukone, plays an ISI [Pakistan’s CIA] agent who rebels against her own government, who does not agree with what the ISI is doing, and says that her people would never agree to biological warfare against India. That Pakistan is the Pakistan that we don’t see in Hindi movies enough.

SRK’s character is more of a rogue agent, because he’s not really working for the Indian government - he’s been brought out of exile. He doesn’t agree with his boss’s, the colonel’s, methods and criticizes him. You see a sense of dissent in the Pathaan character toward his own government and the establishment. He’s more of an individual. That’s why I felt like this sort of patriotism that you see here was the language of rebellion that we’ve all but lost in a lot of Indian movies in the last decade. This kind of nuance may not be for the masses. For them, it’s like any other patriotic film, except Shah Rukh Khan is in it. I’m glad that people are consuming it without really realizing that it’s not the kind of film they think it is.

Q. Let’s revisit what’s at stake. Shah Rukh Khan is thriving - he even spoke about how the movie celebrates unity in India because it stars a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Christian. Is this going to slow down any of these Hindu nationalist plots in Indian films? Is this really a win for secularism in India?

It’s too early to say right now. For now I’d say the one thing it’s done is signal that there is still a place for a very old kind of patriotism and secularism that our country and Bollywood specifically grew up showcasing. Hindu nationalist films that we’ve been seeing over the last decade or so are already losing audiences, even before Pathaan. A lot of that is also because people are out again after the pandemic. Cabin fever has receded, and people have become a little more sane compared to two or three years ago, when everything was supposed to be a war against something else.

What Pathaan’s success has done is given some kind of hope to an entire generation of producers and superstars and actors and technicians, who still want to make the kind of films they want to. I’m not saying they’re good films or bad films, but they make films that are more liberal in their worldview. We had seen a lot of those films recede into the background in the last 10 years, so I’d like to hope that this is a turning point. I’d like to hope that the year of Pathaan is the year that things start to change. At the same time, I’m going to be a little cautious about that, because things don’t change overnight.

I don’t think a lot of the mainstream Hindi film industry has a political ideology. Most powerful people do not subscribe to one kind of political identity. They go where the money goes. Right now, what Pathaan has done is shown that the money is going in a certain direction.

A lot of people say that it’s cruel to talk about box office numbers. I used to look down on these figures for the longest time, but every morning I check them. For better or worse, it’s a measuring stick for the conscience of the nation right now'.

Vedi anche:

- How Bollywood is rewriting history

- Shah Rukh Khan: two decades of pure feeling

BOLLYWOOD SUPERSTARS: A SHORT STORY OF INDIAN CINEMA

Louvre Abu Dhabi

La mostra Bollywood Superstars: A Short Story of Indian Cinema sarà allestita al Louvre Abu Dhabi dal 24 gennaio al 4 giugno 2023. Nel comunicato ufficiale si legge:

'Attraverso più di 80 opere d'arte, tra cui fotografie, tessuti, arti grafiche, costumi e oltre 30 estratti di film, la mostra esplora la ricca storia del cinema indiano dai suoi inizi alla fine del XIX secolo fino ad oggi. (...) La mostra metterà in mostra la profondità e la ricchezza dell'arte e della civiltà del subcontinente indiano attraverso la sua lunga tradizione di creazione di immagini e la diversità dell'industria cinematografica indiana. (...) In qualità di produttore cinematografico leader a livello mondiale, l'India produce attualmente più di 1.500 film all'anno in quasi 20 lingue, che vengono poi esportati in Asia, Medio Oriente e Africa. Attraverso Bollywood Superstars, i visitatori dei musei scopriranno come l'industria cinematografica indiana abbia utilizzato tecnologie di immagine nascenti come la litografia e la fotografia, fino ai primi film ai grandi lungometraggi musicali. I visitatori acquisiranno una comprensione più profonda del successo internazionale di Bollywood e apprezzeranno la diversità della cinematografia indiana. Le opere abbracciano la storia del cinema indiano dalla narrazione, la danza e il pre-cinema all'influenza della religione e della mitologia e l'ascesa delle superstar di Bollywood. (...) Gli appassionati di cinema apprezzeranno in particolare la proiezione di numerosi estratti di film iconici che hanno lasciato un segno indelebile nella storia del cinema indiano. 

I curatori della mostra (...) hanno dichiarato: “Questa mostra è un tributo a Bollywood e può essere apprezzata sia dai fan del cinema indiano che dal grande pubblico. Ci auguriamo che ritragga tutta la ricchezza delle tradizioni asiatiche e racconti le storie che hanno portato alla nascita di questo cinema. La mostra celebra le superstar di Bollywood adorate dai loro fan in India in un modo che raramente si vede in altre parti del mondo”. La (...) direttrice della gestione scientifica, curatoriale e delle collezioni al Louvre Abu Dhabi, ha dichiarato: “Questa mostra offre una visione unica di un genere artistico con una vasta storia e un presente potente. I visitatori della mostra scopriranno la profondità dell'industria cinematografica indiana sin dal suo inizio nel XIX secolo e acquisiranno una prospettiva unica sulla ricchezza delle forme che hanno pervaso la sua creazione. Le influenze incrociate, potenziate dal progresso tecnologico, sottolineano la continua presenza delle grandi narrazioni mitologiche e letterarie nella cultura indiana, e la vitalità delle sue culture regionali. Siamo lieti di dare vita a questa mostra per mostrare la diversità del cinema indiano”.'

Video promozionale

Aggiornamento del 12 settembre 2023: dopo l'allestimento al Louvre Abu Dhabi, dal 26 settembre 2023 al 14 gennaio 2024 la mostra Bollywood Superstars: Histoire d'un cinéma indien approda a Parigi, al Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (clicca qui).

HANIF KUREISHI RICOVERATO AL POLICLINICO GEMELLI DI ROMA

Lo scorso 26 dicembre lo scrittore britannico di origine pachistana Hanif Kureishi, in vacanza con la moglie Isabella D'Amico (nipote della sceneggiatrice Suso Cecchi D'Amico) a Roma, era stato ricoverato d'urgenza al Policlinico Gemelli. Qualche minuto fa Kureishi, tuttora in ospedale, ha condiviso un messaggio nel suo profilo Twitter, aggiornando i lettori circa le sue condizioni di salute:

'Dear followers,

I should like you to know that on Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall. I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa, sipped half a beer, when I began to feel dizzy. I lent forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me. I then experienced what can only be described a scooped, semi-circular object with talons attached scuttling towards me.  Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency. It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to die. Every evening before I go upstairs, put on the dishwasher, open the window and join my wife, I wonder how more opportunities there will be for these domestic felicities. From the floor my wife heard my frantic shouting. She saved my life and kept me calm. For a few days I was profoundly traumatised, altered and unrecognisable to myself. I am in the hospital. I cannot move move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is both humiliating, degrading and a burden for others. I’ve had an operation on my spine and have shown minor improvements in the last few days. I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, and I will begin physio and rehabilitation and soon as possible. I want to thank the doctors and nurses at the Gemelli hospital, Rome, for all their extraordinary kindness, competence and care. At the moment, it is unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen, if there is any assistance that I would be grateful for, it would be with regard to voice assisted hardware and software, which will allow me to watch, write - and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life. If you have any ideas about how you might help, please comment below and my son will be in touch. I want to thank all my readers for their love and support over the years. 

Love Hanif'.

Tutto lo staff di Cinema Hindi augura ad Hanif Kureishi un rapido, sostanziale miglioramento.

Aggiornamento del 31 gennaio 2023 - Hanif sta pubblicando numerosi messaggi dedicati al nostro Paese. Ne riporto solo alcuni:

* 8 gennaio: 'So now, in this somewhat desolate Roman hospital, in a suburb of Rome, I am writing these words to try and reach you, and I am at the same time trying to connect with Isabella, to make a new relationship out of an old one. You’d think I’d have enough on my plate'.

* 9 gennaio: 'Not understanding Italian is frustrating, but I try to ask very simple and straightforward questions like, “When did you know you wanted to be a nurse or a doctor?” or “When was the moment you realised you fell in love?”.'

* 10 gennaio: 'This morning three very beautiful Italian physiotherapists came to my room. They (...) thrust me into a wheelchair. I was turned around and for the first time I was able to see the other side of my room. I saw the Italian sky through the window, some trees and a cloud and few birds. For the first time I believed that things might begin to improve. My heart is like a singing bird. The physios left and another came in. A very gentle man, handsome, who also works for Roma Football Club. (...) He caressed my fingers and my feet, he opened my hands and pulsated them gently. I began to feel that I had a whole body and not just a patchwork of random pieces thrown together as if by Mary Shelley’s imagination. (...) I have become a big admirer of Italian men. I find them very handsome. Their skin is smooth and it glows. Their sharp dark body hair is inspiring. They are neither macho nor mummy’s boys. (...) The women too of course, with their long black hair and magnificent eyes. (...) I’ve enjoyed being in this hospital. Everyone here has treated me with respect and courtesy'. 

* 11 gennaio: 'The second most important event in my early writing life was in 1982. I was working at the Arts Centre, Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. One evening the guest of honour was Italo Calvino, who was introduced by Salman Rushdie, who I met for the first time that evening'.

* 13 gennaio: 'When the male nurse got to me I was delighted to see, for the first time, an array of hot Italian pastries and cheeses and some freshly squeezed orange juice. (...) I will also be able to meet others whose bodies are busted in different ways. My Italian is not so good but I hope to be able to bring some of those accounts to you, my new audience, if the patients agree'.

* 17 gennaio: 'This is when I decide I want to become an Italian citizen. I want an Italian passport. I decide to apply for one tomorrow. How could anyone not want to live in Italy?'.

* 31 gennaio: 'Here in the hospital, I have seen a lot of Italian women - nurses, doctors, patients and visitors. Every day I see many nurses, but because they are wearing masks, I can only study their eyes, hair and eyebrows. I have to confess, I have acquired a knowledge of the Italian eyebrow which is extensive and detailed. (...) I should stress here that the Italian male also attends to his eyebrows with calculated care. This is not something I have noticed in the British male. We are more primitive, except in British soap operas, where the male eyebrow seems to be given particular attention. Italian women take good care of themselves. Everything about them is neat and planned, and the women who are not in work uniform - the visitors - dress brilliantly and vividly, both to express themselves, and to show others who they think they are. They wear a lot of clashing colours, which is very stylish, and confident'.

Aggiornamento del 19 giugno 2023 - Hanif scrive: 'I will be returning to London after six months of hospitalization in Rome at the Santa Lucia IRCCS. I have been treated with professionalism and kindness by all the personnel of the Neurorehabilitation Unit 1. I am grateful to Italy’s national healthcare system for providing free cure and rehabilitation for me and for all other patients'.

RIVER TO RIVER FLORENCE INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022

La 22esima edizione del River to River Florence Indian Film Festival si è svolta dal 6 all'11 dicembre 2022. Fra i titoli in cartellone, segnalo Shabaash Mithu, Devdas, Dobaaraa, Almost Pyaar (pellicola di chiusura) e il cortometraggio The Astronaut and his Parrot di Arati Kadav. Anurag Kashyap ha presenziato, in qualità di ospite d'onore, alle proiezioni di Dobaaraa e Almost Pyaar, rispettivamente il 10 e l'11 dicembre. Dobaaraa si è aggiudicato il premio per il miglior lungometraggio.

RASSEGNA STAMPA/VIDEO

- video Anurag Kashyap ospite d'onore del "River to River" 2022, Elisabetta Vagaggini, InToscana, 9 dicembre 2022. 

- Anurag Kashyap: da Mumbai a Netflix, l'ascesa irresistibile di un outsider, La Nazione, 9 dicembre 2022: '"Dopo che "Black Friday" venne censurato nel mio paese, venni invitato da Marco Muller in qualità di giurato alla Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, dove ho conosciuto Liliana Cavani, Paolo Sorrentino e Luciano Ligabue - ricorda - Da giovane, sono rimasto fulminato dalla visione di 'Ladri di Biciclette' di Vittorio De Sica e 'La meglio gioventù" di Marco Tullio Giordana, a cui mi sono ispirato per la struttura ad episodi di "Gangs of Wasseypur", ma non ho avuto ancora occasione di lavorare con voi: nel 2014 era in cantiere un film con Toni Servillo sul viaggio di Rossellini in India, ma la morte del produttore lasciò il progetto in stand-by".' 

- Anurag Kashyap, incontro con il regista indiano che ama spaziare fra i generi e il Jeeg Robot di Mainetti, Mauro Donzelli, ComingSoon, 9 dicembre 2022:

'Almost Pyaar (...) è nato da un incontro con la figlia. “Ha 22 anni ed è molto nota in India come influencer. Io ho 50 anni, non so neanche bene cosa voglia dire aver successo sui social. Il nostro è un paese conservatore, in cui i cambiamenti ci mettono del tempo ad avviarsi. Una volta abbiamo parlato di un suo amico gay e lei mi ha dato del migrante che sta cercando di adeguarsi ai tempi, dicendo che per lei era un amico e basta e che ai giovani non interessa di definire le persone per la loro sessualità. Ha un podcast molto popolare su Spotify e un canale YouTube e Instagram molto seguiti, tanto che ogni tanto mi fermano per parlare di lei, più che di me. I giovani hanno una percezione diversa della vita, per quello con Almost Pyaar ho voluto raccontarli. Per loro è normale dormire insieme fra amici di sesso diverso, mentre ai miei tempi non capitava. Loro si fidano, sono sereni e per capirli meglio ho raccontato una storia di due coppie, una a Londra e una in un paesino indiano di montagna, interpretata dagli stessi attori”. (...) Ha iniziato con il cinema trasferendosi pieno di speranze dal suo paese nell’Uttar Pradesh nella capitale del cinema indiano, Mumbai, senza conoscere nessuno e cavandosela per mesi con espedienti. “All’epoca l’industria era in mano a poche famiglie, ero un outsider e ho coinvolto nei miei film giovani attori e outsider come me che sono diventati la mia famiglia. Ora in molti hanno successo. Per me è importante cambiare, non essere etichettato. Tutti volevano che continuassi a raccontare storie di gangster, ma voglio sempre fare altro. Il successo distrugge molti registi e molte star, che fanno sempre le stesse cose per rispondere alle aspettative del pubblico. Anche nei miei film di genere inserisco sempre riferimenti al tempo e al luogo in cui racconto le mie storie: l’India dei problemi sociali, delle diseguaglianze e discriminazioni. (...) Poi c’è la censura che crea problemi, devi andare avanti facendoti furbo. Per esempio ho girato un remake, Dobaaraa, perché avevo bisogno di fare un film ‘tranquillo’, dopo aver avuto difficoltà con il governo. Abbiamo lavorato sulla sceneggiatura dell’originale quando ancora non era uscito, tanto che alla fine il nostro è un film diverso”.'

- Anurag Kashyap ospite speciale del River River to River Florence Indian Film Festival, Portale Giovani, 9 dicembre 2022:

'Sulla genesi di Almost Pyaar Kashyap racconta che un ruolo importante è stato giocato da sua figlia, Aaliyah. “L’india è ancora un paese molto conservatore, per quanto sia in transizione. Un esempio: l’omosessualità viene accettata, ma in modo molto accondiscendente, quasi compassionevole. Le persone della mia generazione si sentono progressiste solo perché conoscono il significato della sigla Lgbtqa+. I giovani invece vivono in un mondo completamente diverso, sembrano aver risolto tutti i tabù relazionali e legati alla sessualità che per noi sono ancora così problematici. Quello che per noi è promiscuità, per loro sono contesti tranquilli vissuti con sicurezza. Mia figlia, che lavora come influencer, mi dice spesso che in questo nuovo mondo sono come un migrante, devo affrontare un viaggio per raggiungerlo. Ho girato “Almost Pyaar” per intraprendere questo viaggio, per capire meglio le nuove generazioni e gli antagonisti che vi si oppongono: i padri, le madri, ma soprattutto il sistema patriarcale, in un piccolo villaggio dell’India come nella metropoli inglese. “Almost Pyaar” è un film su ragazze e ragazzi, e sono loro i protagonisti assoluti. Ma è anche un film dove la musica è protagonista, musica elaborata con gli stessi protagonisti per ottenere una soundtrack che fosse giovane davvero, come loro”. Sulla relazione con Netflix racconta: “È iniziata nel 2012, quando il mio film “Gangs of Wasseypur” è stato trasformato in una miniserie per gli Stati Uniti ed ha avuto un successo enorme. Netflix mi ha contattato su Facebook e da lì siamo partiti con “Sacred Games”. Devo dire che la piattaforma mi sostiene moltissimo, dopo l’uscita in sala acquisiscono tutti i miei film. Anche “Almost Pyaar” sarà lì a breve”. Ci sarà una terza stagione di “Sacred Games”? “Purtroppo no - spiega Kashyap - mi sarebbe piaciuto, ma non è prevista al momento”. Riguardo al rapporto col cinema italiano, oltre alla rivelazione dei film di De Sica, Kashyap aggiunge: “Nel 2009 ho partecipato alla giuria della Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia su invito di Marco Müller, e lì ho conosciuto diversi cineasti: Liliana Cavani, Gabriele Mainetti, Paolo Sorrentino. Addirittura nel 2014 avrei dovuto girare un film indo-italiano sul viaggio di Roberto Rossellini in India con Servillo protagonista, ma il progetto è in stop a causa di questioni produttive. Tra i registi contemporanei in Italia quello con cui di più vorrei lavorare è Mainetti: il suo “Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot” è uno dei migliori film di supereroi di ogni tempo per me”. Kashyap è un autore capace di passare dal gangster movie alla commedia romantica, dall’horror al prodotto seriale. “Guardo moltissimi film di ogni genere e tutto ha influenza su di me. Non voglio rimanere chiuso in una specifica categoria e diventare “il regista di film d’azione”, o “il regista di polizieschi”. Dopo il successo di “Gangs of Wasseypur” da me ci si aspettava che avrei continuato su quella traccia, ma proprio per questo ho preferito cambiare. Non voglio rimanere incollato a un’aspettativa specifica, perché sono proprio queste a rovinare gli artisti”. Il genere inoltre è un modo per trattare temi altrimenti difficilmente approcciabili: “In “Almost Pyaar” oltre alla questione del patriarcato si tocca il tema della convivenza tra indù e mussulmani, tema molto caldo in India. Per questo il film ha richiesto del tempo per essere sdoganato dalla censura. Per me è importantissimo riflettere sul mio paese quando faccio film, e per farlo utilizzo lo strumento del genere, che è anche un modo di aggirare certi blocchi”.'

Vedi anche: River to River Florence Indian Film Festival 2012. Kashyap era intervenuto anche in quell'edizione della manifestazione.

(Fotografie: profilo Facebook del festival).

AMITAV GHOSH: LA MALEDIZIONE DELLA NOCE MOSCATA

Un mese fa Amitav Ghosh era in Italia per presentare il suo ultimo lavoro, La maledizione della noce moscata, pubblicato da Neri Pozza Editore (clicca qui). Vi segnalo la recensione del volume redatta da Elena Spandri e pubblicata da Il Manifesto il 13 novembre 2022: Amitav Ghosh, in ascolto di un seme a forma di pianeta. Di seguito un corposo estratto:

'Chi è familiare con la scrittura di Amitav Ghosh sa bene che l’invenzione narrativa, alimentata da una approfondita ricerca storica, antropologica e scientifica, è da sempre il perno della sua militanza critica. Attraverso storie appassionanti di personaggi e luoghi, lo scrittore più cosmopolita della diaspora indiana ammette i lettori nel proprio laboratorio, per coinvolgerli ma soprattutto per scuoterne le certezze e allargarne le prospettive sulle grandi questioni del nostro tempo. Il saggio appena uscito per Neri Pozza, La maledizione della noce moscata, (...) alza ulteriormente la sfida, parlando di cambiamento climatico in rapporto al colonialismo e al nuovo ordine globale, attraverso la storia di una pianta. 

Recluso tra le quattro pareti dello studio di Brooklyn «in un vago stato di intontimento e dissociazione», mentre la moglie assiste il padre malato in Virginia e il coronavirus ostenta il suo potere sull’umanità, Ghosh ritrova per caso degli appunti di un viaggio in Indonesia nel corso del quale si era imbattuto in un volume ottocentesco sulla colonizzazione delle isole Banda, che riportava un massacro della popolazione locale perpetrato dalla Compagnia olandese delle Indie orientali nel XVII secolo. Non conoscendo l’olandese, comincia a leggere il testo compulsando le parole con un programma di traduzione; fino a quando, conquistato dall’argomento, decide di contattare uno storico dell’Asia che gli fornisce un glossario dei termini arcaici e dei loro corrispettivi moderni. 

«Ben presto fu come se due entità non umane, internet e il coronavirus, entrambi operanti su scala globale, si fossero riunite per creare un portale fantasmatico e trasportarmi, attraverso lo spirito di un olandese defunto da secoli, alle isole Banda in quella notte del 21 aprile 1621». Da quel momento epifanico, l’albero della noce moscata diventa il fil rouge di una estesa riflessione sui nessi tra la colonizzazione dell’Asia e delle Americhe e il trauma del cambiamento climatico, ovvero la maledizione di un modello di sviluppo capitalistico basato su un «individualismo patologico». (...)

A fronte della corsa allo spazio caldeggiata dai magnati della terra nell’intento di sfuggire all’incipiente estinzione della specie umana, la suggestiva vicenda di questa pianta esotica e resiliente diventa una «parabola di umiltà» attraverso cui predisporre la mente all’ascolto di voci non umane, silenziate da secoli di «capitalismo estrattivista». Finché Gaia, la «Terra vivente», non si è ridotta a mero «deposito inerte di risorse». (...) Con toni sempre più perentori e apocalittici, il libro mette al bando la concezione meccanicistica della natura ereditata dal razionalismo occidentale e sollecita tutti a un atto di fede nella possibilità di recuperare quella percezione del vitalismo terrestre che è stata cancellata dalla memoria collettiva, dopo secoli di «terraformazione» coloniale, sopravvivendo soltanto presso culture -  come quella dei nativi americani - brutalmente sospinte ai margini della modernità.

«Ciò che la Terra ha realmente esaurito non sono le risorse ma il significato. Sconfitta, inerte, passiva, la Terra non è più in grado di nobilitare, né dilettare né produrre nuove aspirazioni. L’unica cosa che può produrre nelle mente di chi crede di averla conquistata è il disprezzo che nasce dalla familiarità». Non stupisce la nettezza con la quale il saggio imputa alla cultura protestante e alla letteratura inglese un ruolo determinante nella diffusione dell’idea che «l’empatia e la socievolezza sono garbate finzioni che non reggono in circostanze estreme, quando emergono realtà primordiali quali l’egoismo e l’aggressività». 

Tuttavia, il senso di questa scrittura va oltre la denuncia dei misfatti della Storia: la noce moscata, infatti, non compare soltanto nella veste di una merce preziosa che ha scatenato un genocidio ed è sopravvissuta all’agrobusiness imposto dagli ingegneri europei su un minuscolo lembo di Asia. Nelle esperte mani di Ghosh, la vicenda della spezia più ambita del diciassettesimo secolo diventa traccia vocale della pianta dalla quale è derivata, una traccia che l’autore ha colto e tradotto nel linguaggio umano, dando seguito a un programma di re-incantamento della natura attraverso l’immaginazione creativa (annunciato nella Grande cecità e già realizzato nelle opere recenti), che è tanto necessario al benessere collettivo quanto ad alto rischio di fraintendimento e di cooptazione da parte di «ecofascismi» che utilizzano l’ambientalismo per rafforzare le gerarchie sociali e rendere chi sta ai margini sempre più invisibile. 

Ghosh ne è pienamente consapevole, ma è altrettanto convinto che valga la pena correre il rischio. Cresciuto nell’alveo di una cultura politeistica che concepisce gli dei «come intermediari spirituali tra l’umano e il non umano», e in aperta polemica con un’Anglosfera che ha fatto un dogma «dell’idea che l’egoistico conseguimento degli interessi individuali sia un tratto universale della natura umana», Ghosh (...) riesce a far coesistere materialismo e spiritualismo, pragmatismo e vitalismo, con la stessa disinvoltura con la quale abita molteplici mondi'. 

Progetto Scienza 2022 Le Nostre Domande

Aggiornamento del 16 giugno 2023: nel novembre 2022 lo scrittore partecipò alla prima puntata, registrata all'università di Padova, del programma Progetto Scienza 2022 Le Nostre Domande di Rai Cultura. Video.

JHUMPA LAHIRI: RACCONTI ROMANI

Da un paio di mesi è in distribuzione in libreria il volume Racconti romani, di Jhumpa Lahiri, pubblicato da Guanda. Nel sito dell'editore si legge:

'Una Roma mista e metafisica, contemporanea ma eternamente sospesa fra passato e futuro, è la vera protagonista, non l’ambientazione, di questa raccolta. Nove racconti, alcuni di respiro romanzesco, in cui riconosciamo una città contraddittoria che ridefinisce sempre se stessa, trasformandosi di generazione in generazione in un amalgama, in un viavai ibrido di stranieri e romani che si sentono comunque sempre tutti fuori posto. Segnati da un ambiente al contempo ospitale e ostile, i personaggi che abitano questi racconti vivono momenti di epifania ma anche violente battute di arresto. (...) L’andamento della scrittura è riconducibile agli autori italiani del Novecento che Jhumpa Lahiri conosce e profondamente ama, a partire da Moravia che riecheggia nel titolo. Ma i temi di questo libro, il quinto che l’autrice scrive direttamente in italiano, sono tutti suoi: lo sradicamento, lo spaesamento, la ricerca di un’identità e di una casa, il sentimento di essere stranieri e soli ma, proprio per questo, in lotta e vitali'.

RASSEGNA STAMPA/VIDEO

- Jhumpa Lahiri racconta Roma. In italiano, Michele Gravino, Il Venerdì, 26 agosto 2022: 

'Quando, nel 2014, stava per uscire In altre parole, il primo libro di Jhumpa Lahiri scritto direttamente in italiano, un giornale titolò: "Jhumpa ha un amante". L'amante era, appunto, la lingua italiana, oggetto di un colpo di fulmine improvviso quanto totalizzante per questa scrittrice nata nel 1967 a Londra da genitori bengalesi e cresciuta negli Stati Uniti, che di lingue ne aveva già due: il bengalese dei suoi genitori e naturalmente l'inglese, in cui pubblicava con enorme successo. Il suo esordio, L'interprete dei malanni, aveva vinto il Pulitzer nel 2000, dal romanzo L'omonimo Mira Nair aveva tratto un film a cavallo tra Hollywood e Bollywood, la raccolta Una nuova terra aveva debuttato al primo posto nella classifica dei bestseller del New York Times.

Poi, giusto dieci anni fa, l'arrivo a Roma per un periodo di studio all'American Academy: "Voglio vivere almeno un anno in Italia, ho pregato mio marito, solo uno" racconta lei oggi. E una vecchia passione (Lahiri ha un dottorato in studi rinascimentali) si trasforma in bruciante innamoramento, fino a farle decidere di prendere casa qui (l'appartamento con terrazza sulle pendici del Gianicolo in cui la intervistiamo), e di trascorrervi i mesi in cui è libera dal suo lavoro di docente universitaria negli Stati Uniti. Ma l'Italia per lei non è un banale buen retiro. (...) No, Jhumpa si innamora soprattutto della lingua: la sceglie, la studia, la fa sua. Oggi, spiega, l'italiano in cui conversiamo non è più un travolgente amante - come in quel malizioso vecchio titolo - ma il partner di una relazione stabile, "senza la fatica, la noia, la frustrazione che possono complicare un matrimonio. È davvero la mia metà, anzi, come si dice in inglese, my better half, la mia metà migliore".

Da quel 2014 Jhumpa Lahiri scrive e pubblica solo nella nostra lingua: in inglese sono uscite solo traduzioni (di libri suoi e altrui, soprattutto Domenico Starnone) e un'antologia di racconti italiani del Novecento. Dopo i saggi di In altre parole e Il vestito dei libri, il romanzo-memoir Dove mi trovo e le poesie di Il quaderno di Nerina,  il 13 settembre esce (per Guanda, suo storico editore) il nuovo Racconti romani. Il titolo, è, naturalmente, un omaggio ad Alberto Moravia e alle sue due omonime raccolte, pubblicate tra il 1954 e il '59. "Moravia è stato il primo autore che mi ha insegnato a leggere in italiano, il Virgilio che mi ha accompagnato alla scoperta di questo universo letterario" spiega Lahiri. "Di lui amo il linguaggio puro, preciso, e anche la scelta della forma breve per comporre un gigantesco affresco della città, della sua vita quotidiana, delle tensioni tra classi sociali. Il racconto è un genere spesso poco apprezzato, ma io trovo sia molto adatto a Roma: qui tutti raccontano, anche da un incontro per strada di due minuti vai sempre via con una piccola storia, un regalo da riportare a casa".

Nei suoi racconti Moravia diede voce ai romani dell'immediato dopoguerra, proletari o piccoloborghesi alle prese con le difficoltà della ricostruzione e i primi segnali della Dolce vita e del Boom. Lahiri sceglie di raccontare la città con gli occhi di chi, come lei, non le appartiene pienamente, ma l'ha in qualche modo scelta: stranieri soprattutto, migranti di prima o seconda generazione, turisti appena sbarcati, expat benestanti destinati a ripartire al termine dell'anno accademico o dell'incarico in un'organizzazione internazionale. Nell'ultimo racconto, Dante Alighieri, una giovane americana di probabili origini indiane - ma l'ascendenza etnica dei personaggi non è mai esplicitata, solo sottintesa - sceglie per un caso fortuito l'italiano come materia di studi e finisce per diventarne una specialista, dividendosi tra le due sponde dell'Atlantico. "Ma non è l'unica storia autobiografica" spiega l'autrice. "C'è una parte di me in quasi tutti i protagonisti del libro. Sono persone che si sentono sempre un po' fuori luogo, cercano una casa o magari hanno troppe case, troppe vite".

"E comunque per me sono tutti romani" continua. "Roma è questo, una metamorfosi continua, un flusso in cui immergersi, e l'italiano mi dà il ritmo per seguirlo, paradossalmente in inglese sono più misurata, ho più paura". La città è raccontata con grande economia di mezzi, i luoghi quasi mai nominati, i capisaldi della Grande Bellezza solo sfiorati, a vantaggio di angoli meno noti ma più vissuti dall'autrice. Come la Scalea del Tamburino, la rampa di 126 gradini che collega Monteverde con Trastevere, proprio sotto la sua casa romana: Lahiri la mette al centro di una lunga sequenza di racconti, con il suo strepitoso panorama e i cocci di bottiglie di birra - residui dei ritrovi serali dei giovani della zona - che minacciano i piedi di chi vi si avventura.

Già, perché l'innamoramento non impedisce alla scrittrice di raccontare anche una Roma sgradevole, inospitale, a tratti violenta. "È un lato che esiste, come in tutte le grandi città, anche se tanti americani preferiscono averne una proiezione falsa, idilliaca. Quante volte mi sono sentita dire: ma in Italia non può succederti niente di male! No, certo, se ci vai solo in vacanza". Così, i suoi racconti esplorano anche le meschinità di certa borghesia intellettuale, espongono i piccoli e grandi razzismi quotidiani subìti dai migranti. "Mi interessa molto l'esperienza di chi si trasferisce qui e cerca di radicarsi" spiega; "tipicamente arrivano prima i maschi, poi fanno venire la moglie, solo più tardi i figli, è un processo lungo e complicato. Io ho potuto anche osservarlo da vicino, incontrando gli stranieri che lavorano al mercato del quartiere, riuscendo a entrare in contatto anche grazie al fatto che parlo bengalese. In fondo continuo a lavorare sui temi dei miei primi libri: ho solo voluto cambiare ambientazione e prospettiva rispetto alle storie degli indiani trasferiti in America come i miei familiari. Ma non ho messaggi da dare, anche in questo seguo Moravia: la letteratura non è politica, se riesco a far riflettere, a spostare qualche punto di vista è bene, ma non ho un'agenda ideologica, non è quello il mio obiettivo".

Dopo alcuni anni a Princeton, Jhumpa Lahiri tornerà all'università dove ha studiato, il Barnard College della Columbia di New York, per insegnare scrittura creativa, italiano e traduzione. Ma prima trascorrerà a Roma un anno sabbatico: "Dovrò fare un po' di promozione per i Racconti" dice, "ma poi mi dedicherò completamente a Ovidio". Assieme a una classicista, ha cominciato a tradurre le Metamorfosi: il lavoro sarà in inglese, ma lei prende appunti in italiano e usa il vocabolario IL, come generazioni di liceali. "Ovidio è un punto di riferimento fondamentale per me: il poeta che racconta Roma dal di dentro e poi ne viene scacciato e deve ripensarla dall'esilio. Nel mio piccolo mi ritrovo nella sua condizione, esserci e non esserci, presenza e nostalgia. Poi c'è quella parola stupenda che usa spesso, errare, che vuol dire sia sbagliare che vagare... Leggere e tradurre Ovidio sotto il suo stesso cielo è un sogno che si avvera".

Da un punto lontano di quel cielo, dietro la meravigliosa sequenza di cupole e tetti che si vede dalla terrazza, si leva una nuvola di fumo scuro e denso: uno dei tanti incendi che in questa estate hanno devastato la periferia romana. "Alla fine del mio libro" conclude Lahiri, "una donna se ne esce con una battuta, apparentemente dal nulla: 'Che città di merda. Ma quant'è bella'".'

- La scrittrice Jhumpa Lahiri racconta Roma, TV2000, 5 ottobre 2022. 

- "Roma ha tante facce. Io seguo Moravia e le scopro coi racconti", Eleonora Barbieri, Il Giornale, 6 ottobre 2022:

'Jhumpa Lahiri, che Roma è la «sua» Roma?

Una Roma complessa, non facile, strepitosa, problematica. Ha tante facce, tanti strati. La città ci sfugge, e sfugge a tutti: non si può definire. Non puoi descrivere Roma in un gesto solo. Per questo, il tentativo di Moravia di farlo attraverso i racconti è geniale: ha raggiunto una prospettiva molto efficace per capire la complessità della città e dei romani. Io ho seguito il suo esempio.

La Roma di oggi rispetto a quella di Moravia?

È ben diversa. Lui raccontava molto anche uno strato sociale, popolare: io prendo questa vena e la esploro, per esempio vado nelle cucine delle trattorie e scopro chi cucina davvero la pasta, chi non vedi ma c'è, e sta cucinando per te. (...) Persone che vengono da fuori e hanno vite precarie a Roma, e non solo per una questione di classe sociale.

Non si sentono a casa?

Vai a Roma e sei romano, un po' come ti succede quando vai a New York, e questo perché la città è così forte che ti ingloba, ti dà un'identità; ma vedo anche le tensioni che ci sono, per esempio fra i romani di una certa età e posizione e chi è lì per lavorare, mettere nuove radici, creare una famiglia. (...) Sono dieci anni che osservo questo incrocio, da una posizione privilegiata diciamo: sono sempre attenta a chi vive ai margini e non parla, perché non è a suo agio a parlare, e con molti di loro condivido una lingua, il bengalese, per cui posso chiedere, fare domande. E poi noto le dinamiche, le mamme al parco, i giovani, i loro gruppi, come quelli sulla scalinata.

La scalinata, che è anche il titolo di un racconto, è centrale nel libro.

Sì. È quella che collega Trastevere a Monteverde Vecchio: abito lì vicino e la faccio venticinque volte al giorno. La scalinata è l'organo principale del libro: il cuore o, se vogliamo, lo stomaco, che credo sia la vera misura del corpo. (...) È il ventre che raccoglie ogni tipo di personaggio: chi è di passaggio, chi è nato/vissuto/morto lì, chi ci vive per un paio d'anni, chi si lamenta del fatto che il mondo non sia più come una volta, chi vorrebbe appartenere ma non può, o non riesce. Gli altri racconti sono un affresco, la scalinata è qualcosa in mezzo alla sala: un luogo di passaggio, ma molto vissuto. Ci sono tanti giovani, perfino una troupe che gira un film.

Ci sono anche le signore romane. Si è trovata subito bene?

Sì e no. Una parte di me si sente totalmente nel mare giusto; eppure, anche no. Sono sempre in bilico.

Nei suoi racconti ci sono storie dure, ma scritte senza retorica o ideologia.

Non scrivo con ideologia. Anche qui seguo Moravia, che diceva che l'ideologia non dovrebbe far parte della letteratura. Certamente tu, come scrittore, puoi avere un'ideologia, e Moravia l'aveva, come anche io, da cittadina del mondo, non sono indifferente a ciò che accade; ma nella scrittura esploro altre cose, l'anima di un personaggio, il suo mondo interiore e, in questo, l'ideologia non c'entra. (...) Come scrittore non puoi giudicare: devi osservare, interpretare, decifrare, mettere sotto una luce qualcosa che, di solito, non vediamo. Uno scrittore decide: mi soffermo qui, cerco di scavare e di dedicare un po' di attenzione a una certa persona, vera o finta che sia.

Incredibilmente, da anni scrive in italiano.

È un caso, una mossa insolita. Ho iniziato un giorno nel diario e, da lì, ne è sorta una esigenza sorprendente che, piano piano, mi ha conquistato. Ho capito che in italiano riesco a raggiungere una parte di me che non raggiungo in inglese: mi sento più libera, più coraggiosa e in grado di sperimentare ma, allo stesso tempo, anche titubante. Un mix eccitante. Una nuova lingua è un filtro e uno strumento insieme, ma l'italiano mi ha aperto un portone importante: cercavo una nuova chiave ed è stata una nuova lingua, questa lingua.

L'ultimo racconto è intitolato Dante Alighieri e sembra autobiografico.

Ci sono elementi della mia vita, anche se non del tutto. Ho osato, certo, prima col titolo e poi con Dante in chiusura. Ma già il mio libro Dove mi trovo era un dialogo con Dante, il suo titolo è il primo verso dell'Inferno, celato: dove mi trovo?, dove vado?, come procedo? È quella questione lì, esistenziale. E poi Dante è a cavallo fra diverse lingue, culture, epoche, e in lui c'è l'esilio, che è il mio tema.

Esilio in che senso?

Non sono importanti tanto i luoghi per me, quanto la condizione dell'esilio, dello straniamento: tutti ci sentiamo così, tutti. Nei miei racconti, anche quelli che, anagraficamente, sono romani, si sentono completamente fuori luogo.

Scrive sia romanzi, sia racconti. Come sceglie?

Ascolto l'essenza della storia e poi cerco di trovare l'involucro giusto. Credo molto nel racconto come forma, che non considero affatto minore rispetto al romanzo: leggi un racconto per avere una certa esperienza, un romanzo per un altro impatto.

Che cosa ama del racconto?

È più vicino alla poesia: puoi gestire meglio la lingua, con maggior precisione. E il lettore non viene interrotto, può leggerlo in un'oretta, e questo mi piace molto. Leggo racconti da sempre, li amo, ho curato anche una antologia di quaranta autori italiani per Guanda e credo che i racconti siano stati molto importanti, anche se, oggi, spesso sono ritenuti desueti, come forma.

Il racconto è bistrattato?

Dappertutto, anche in America. Tutti vogliono un romanzo perché pensano sia più importante, ma è folle, ridicolo. Un romanzo può nascondere i difetti molto meglio, un racconto no: o è riuscito o fallisce, e te ne rendi conto subito. È molto più esigente. Infatti, molti autori hanno paura a scrivere racconti. È una forma che va amata, rispettata e difesa, contro un atteggiamento che è scollato dalla realtà della storia della letteratura'.

WHEN THE HINDU RIGHT CAME FOR BOLLYWOOD

Vi segnalo l'articolo When the Hindu right came for Bollywood, di Samanth Subramanian, pubblicato da The New Yorker il 17 ottobre 2022. Di seguito vi propongo un corposo estratto:

'In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe - a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics. When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The B.J.P. had just begun its second straight term in power. (...) 

Ayyub played another student leader, a tyro named Shiva Shekhar. (...) In the first scene that Ayyub shot, Shiva is onstage in a student skit, playing his namesake deity: a Shiva in a suit, newly risen from a cosmic nap, wondering how to be relevant once more. Tweet about something controversial, an accomplice proposes - something about how the university’s students, forever demanding azaadi, or freedom, from their government’s oppression, are “anti-nationals,” traitors to India. The audience chuckles; the B.J.P. rants in this vein so often that it has turned into a trope. But Shiva is surprised. How can a call for freedom be controversial? “Azaadi?” he exclaims. “What the...?” The last word is drowned out by the shriek of mike feedback. (...) 

When lawyers for Amazon Prime and an external law firm first reviewed “Tandav” ’s scripts - a customary procedure - Shiva’s line had been a full, florid “What the fuck?”. One of the lawyers told me that his team had urged the showrunners to prune the expletive, but that there was more concern about “Tandav” coming off as anti-B.J.P. One character, the lawyer remembered, “was a politician depicted as a conservative, pushing for the privatization of education, which is one of the Modi government’s issues. We always said, Do it in a way where you can’t match the incidents onscreen to real incidents.” (Amazon broadly disputed this characterization.) 

Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines - the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state - had become a fraught enterprise. The B.J.P. and its supporters were growing intolerant of contrary views and criticism, and they were liable to react badly - through social-media attacks, targeted harassment by government agencies, or endless litigation. Outright violence was rarer, although its threat was never distant. (...)

When “Tandav” premièred, in January, 2021, Ayyub (...) on Twitter, (...) noticed that he was being tagged frequently - sometimes by people praising him, but mostly amid heaps of abuse. In cities and towns far from Mumbai, people filed police complaints, claiming that the portrayal of a foulmouthed Shiva was an insult to Hinduism. (A B.J.P. official told me that, in the large family of Hindu-nationalist organizations, “an enthusiastic worker can always be found who will file these complaints to keep his bosses happy.”) Such cases usually go nowhere, but in the B.J.P.’s India, where the police and the courts are pliant, it’s hard to be sanguine. Recently, a Muslim journalist was imprisoned for three weeks because someone complained that a four-year-old tweet derided Hinduism. The account that reported him was anonymous, had one tweet and one follower on the day of the arrest, and went offline thereafter.

To be safe, Amazon cut the skit scene from “Tandav” a few days after the show began streaming. But the storm raged on. A senior B.J.P. leader wrote to Amazon, accusing its “ideologically motivated employees” of running “vicious programming.” Amazon petitioned India’s Supreme Court to protect the show’s director and producers from arrest while the cases were being heard; the Court refused to grant this reprieve. That felt unprecedented, Ayyub said, and it tipped everyone into a state of high alarm. An Amazon employee who worked on “Tandav” remembers how taxing the experience was. “It took over our days, nights, weeks, months,” he said. “And we were all working from home, because this was peak covid. So I was on calls with the Amazon guys in the U.S. late night my time, early morning my time, because the company wanted to protect its employees.” All the discussions, he said, were about “how to keep our people safe” - but for a few months it really looked as if an Amazon executive might go to prison for green-lighting a cheesy TV show.

Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.

Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate - its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season - as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India. Their nervousness manifests in absurdities - in, for example, how Amazon Prime now discourages characters who share their names with Hindu deities - but also in decisions to put audacious film and TV projects into cold storage. Other filmmakers embrace genres that match the B.J.P.’s tastes: dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings; action films about the Indian Army; political dramas and bio-pics, dutifully skewed. These productions all draw from the B.J.P.’s roster of stock villains: medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan, Islamist terrorists, leftists, opposition parties like the Indian National Congress. Through Bollywood, India tells itself stories about itself. Many of those stories are now starkly different, in lockstep with the right wing’s bigotry.

Governments have tried to control Indian cinema in the past - mostly through the Central Board of Film Certification (C.B.F.C.), a state authority that can order alterations or essentially ban movies by refusing to certify them. But the B.J.P.’s disdain for Bollywood registers as something deeper - as an echo, in fact, of its animus toward the Congress and other rival parties. When Modi came to power, in 2014, he decried national politics as an élite club: upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking politicians, activists, and journalists, all cozied up to one another in the plush pockets of central Delhi. In the eyes of the B.J.P., Bollywood, too, is full of liberals disconnected from the real India. And if the film industry is full of “nepo kids” - the children of actors, producers, and directors - then Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s aspirant Prime Minister and the son, grandson, and great-grandson of earlier Prime Ministers, is the foremost nepo kid of all. (...)

The B.J.P. began with small, typical political moves. In 2015, it appointed a B-movie actor, who was also a longtime Party member, to lead a prestigious, state-run filmmaking institute [credo l'autore si riferisca a Gajendra Chauhan, che guidò il Film and Television Institute of India dal 2015 al 2017]. When a C.B.F.C. chair quit, citing coercion by the government, she was replaced by Pahlaj Nihalani, a director who’d made a campaign video for Modi. (...)

The B.J.P. exhibited another skill as well: an ability to whip up its base - its Internet bruisers, rank-and-file cadre, and ideological allies - into a frenzy so coordinated that it came to resemble popular sentiment. When Aamir Khan (...) admitted, in 2015, that he was worried about growing intolerance in India, a social-media backlash began against Snapdeal, an e-commerce platform that Khan had endorsed on billboards and in TV spots. Within months, Snapdeal decided not to renew his contract; even this year, Khan pleaded with audiences not to spurn a new film because of his past remarks. (...)

Ignoring the mob felt increasingly unwise. In 2016, Sanjay Leela Bhansali (...) started making “Padmaavat.” Bhansali was dramatizing a legend: the story of Padmavati, a Hindu queen from the Rajput caste, who is so renowned for her beauty that Alauddin Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi, attacks her husband’s kingdom to abduct her. Bhansali shot “Padmaavat” with his usual grandiosity. (...) Toward the end, Padmavati and her handmaidens are besieged by Khilji’s army. Instead of submitting, they dress in red and stream through the palace, like blood through an artery, to leap into a pit of fire - a happy ending, in the moral universe of the Hindu right. Khilji is portrayed as half-mad, lustful, and a committed carnivore, stereotypes of the Indian Muslim brought to life.

Before the film’s release, though, a rumor leaked of a love scene between Padmavati and Khilji. This, it appeared, was too great a slight against Hindu honor. A B.J.P. politician announced a reward for beheading Deepika Padukone, who played Padmavati. A posse of young, angry Rajput men stormed onto the film’s set, found Bhansali, and roughed him up; then they destroyed film equipment and, in a later incident, burned down part of the set. According to Bhansali, he had to finish shooting “Padmaavat” under the protection of fifty-two policemen. “At one point, I thought, Enough. Change my profession. I can’t make films anymore,” he said later.

The B.J.P. often ascribes these events to fringe elements or faceless Hindu “patriots.” But the number of such incidents makes filmmakers assume that they’re seeing a bigger transformation, in which the average member of their audience now truly likes everything the B.J.P. likes, and abhors everything it abhors. (...)

“The Kashmir Files” has proved particularly vexing. Released earlier this year, the movie purports to be based on true events: the brutal eviction, beginning in 1989, of tens of thousands of Hindus from the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir. At least two hundred Hindus were killed, according to government data, but the movie inflates the number to four thousand. Armed insurgents were responsible, but, implicitly or explicitly, the film blames many others for enabling the tragedy and for lying about it afterward. Unsurprisingly, they include some of the B.J.P.’s pet antagonists: leftist university professors, the Congress. “The Kashmir Files” has already triggered a riot, and one B.J.P. leader given to casual calls to shoot “anti-nationals” urged his Twitter followers to watch the film “so that there is no Bengal Files, Kerala Files, Delhi Files tomorrow.” Modi praised the film as another bursting of the liberal bubble; B.J.P. leaders distributed free tickets. (...)

In Mumbai, the quotient of Bollywood celebrity is highest in Bandra, a western suburb shaped like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The stars who appear elsewhere in the city on movie posters reside here, amid narrow, winding roads, weathered Portuguese churches, and chic bars that they can never visit. Salman Khan (...) lives in the same apartment building where he and his two brothers (...) grew up. Not far away, the actors Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan, the children of stars themselves, occupy several floors of an apartment block. (...)

Shah Rukh Khan lives with his family in a villa the size of a small hotel, set back from a pair of heavy gates. Above a wall surrounding the compound, Khan has erected a black metal fence with a platform, where he sometimes materializes, in sunglasses, to greet the fans thronging the sidewalk to glimpse him. The pavement is never empty; even late at night, returning to my hotel, I’d see a few straggling devotees taking selfies, talking quietly, or just gazing at Khan’s house in the dark. In those moments, nothing demarcated the gulf between their worlds - between fan and celebrity, outsider and insider - more vividly than the black metal fence.

One morning, a man (...) joined me at my hotel for breakfast. (...) I’ll call him Ramesh, because although he belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of the B.J.P. and other Hindu-nationalist groups, he was keen to stress that he was meeting me in a personal capacity. The R.S.S., a volunteer organization that’s nearly a hundred years old, isn’t a political party. It’s the custodian of a belief that India is, first and foremost, a land for Hindus; it aspires so much to a literally muscular Hinduism that its members often receive paramilitary training. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin was once a proud R.S.S. man. Modi joined the R.S.S. when he was young, as did many other B.J.P. leaders. Ramesh denied, though, that the R.S.S. wields any undue influence over the government. “It’s like there’s a college - let’s say, Harvard,” he said. “A hundred students of Harvard become senators in the U.S. Now, every time they go to their professors to ask something, would you say Harvard runs the government?” He framed this as a rhetorical question, but I suspect that we had different answers in mind.

In 2019, the R.S.S. formed a media unit in Mumbai, ostensibly to liaise not just with the film industry but also with journalists, the music business, and other trades. (...) Ramesh’s work with the R.S.S. involves many meetings - often half a dozen a day, with directors, producers, writers, and studio executives around Mumbai. (...) Ramesh’s mission, he said, is to nudge filmmakers toward subjects close to the R.S.S.’s heart. He wouldn’t care for a drama about conflict between Hindu castes, for instance: “Look at the great history of this country - and what do we show? We show all bad things.” But conflict in itself is not a problem. He often suggests tales of India’s military and intelligence agencies, or stories about the battles won by Hindu kings. (...)

Happy endings are relative, though. If a film conforms to the R.S.S.’s vision of India, Ramesh excuses any manipulations of fact; if it departs from that vision, Ramesh believes that its creators seek to “tarnish” India’s image. He cited “The Empire,” a show on Disney’s Indian platform, about Babur, the Muslim warrior who founded the Mughal dynasty in India, in 1526. Why make a show that humanizes Babur, Ramesh wondered. He doesn’t consider Muslim rulers to be Indian, even if they were born in the country. “They were invaders,” he said. “Sacred Games,” a noirish Netflix series, depicted a Hindu man plotting an act of terrorism. Ramesh thought that it was propaganda: “You want to show Hindus as terrorists because you don’t want to acknowledge Islamic terrorism.” “Tandav”? Also propaganda. But he forgives directors who invert history, depicting Hindu kings defeating their Muslim foes in battles that they actually lost. “You have to show something that will inspire people,” he said. And when I asked him about “The Kashmir Files” (...) he claimed unflappably that it was all fact. “You should know the history,” he said. (...) If Amazon feels daunted by the lawsuits against “Tandav” - if it feels compelled to make shows and movies for Hindu partisans - that doesn’t worry Ramesh: “They must be happy that we do court cases. We don’t go and destroy their buildings.” His own efforts to set Bollywood right were minor, but they represented the importance that the R.S.S. vests in cinema. “We recognize that this is the most powerful medium, which controls minds, which influences the opinions of people,” he said. “A film is a mirror of society,” he went on - a tired, tedious idea, although it struck me that the Hindu right, to obtain the precise reflection it wants, is recasting not just society but also the mirror itself. (...)

“In many ways Bollywood, in its beginning, was one of the most cosmopolitan employers,” Debashree Mukherjee, a scholar of South Asian cinema at Columbia University, told me. In part, this was a political alignment with freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted India to be a plural country. But it was also born out of necessity, Mukherjee said, because the movie industry was created as a patchwork of many other trades. “Some of the earliest financing came from Gujarati Muslims, and some of the earliest writers were from the Parsi theatre scene,” she said. Lyricists wrote songs in Urdu, a language inflected with Arabic and Persian and fostered by Muslim nobles as a medium of high culture. On a set, the dress dada might be a Hindu tailor and the art dada a Muslim painter. “The workforce was diverse, which remains the case today,” Mukherjee said.

Onscreen, Indian Muslims tended to be typecast, but in mainstream Bollywood this wasn’t so unusual: every character tended to be typecast. When Muslims led the story, they often figured as Mughal nobles, as courtesans. (...) The stock of secondary roles included the benevolent Muslim elder (...), the soulful poet or composer, and the best friend.

The Muslim type appeared even in “Amar Akbar Anthony” (1977), a landmark film that enshrined the ideal of religious tolerance. “Amar Akbar Anthony” is unabashed Bollywood - long and exuberant, with a baroque plot and half a dozen musical numbers. Three brothers, separated in childhood, are adopted into different faiths, and grow up to be the film’s dashing heroes, each neatly falling in love with a woman from his own religion. The movie’s conclusion is never in doubt. Its energy springs instead from the question of how its various ends are obtained: how the brothers realize that they’re brothers, how they find their long-lost parents, how they win their women, how they defeat a crime lord who has tried to destroy their family. The film ends in a joyful, syncretic reunion - the Nehruvian nation transposed onto the family in the clearest possible fashion. In this idyll, Akbar, the Muslim brother, could have clerked in a bank or run a magazine; instead, he sings Urdu qawwalis. (...)

“It’s only in the late nineteen-eighties, and really with greater and greater frequency in the nineteen-nineties, that mainstream films start showing Muslims as gangsters, smugglers, and then terrorists,” [film scholar Ira] Bhaskar said. Not by coincidence, she pointed out, these were also the decades when the B.J.P. grew as an electoral force. In 1992, after calling for the destruction of a mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, B.J.P. and R.S.S. leaders watched as their followers tore the building down in a matter of hours. The demolition ignited riots, ushering India toward its present condition of chronic, quivering polarization. In 2010, Bhaskar met the director Yash Chopra, who had made many staunchly secular movies between the sixties and the eighties. “We couldn’t make those kinds of films today,” he told her. The plural ideal had withered too much. “Back then, we had faith in it.” (...)

In 2017, [Dibakar] Banerjee felt an itch. He’d been reading with horror about the lynchings of Muslims and about the murder of a journalist named Gauri Lankesh, all at the hands of Hindu extremists. This was, he said, “a special eruption of the poison” - and yet much of the country seemed not to sense its dreadful import. “The middle class was aware only of a daily, ubiquitous ‘othering’ of people in our lives,” he said. “I really wanted to make a film about it.” The following year, Banerjee signed a contract with Netflix, for a movie tentatively called “Freedom,” and shot the bulk of it in the course of thirty-six days at the beginning of 2020, largely in Mumbai. “We had another five days of exterior sequences left, but that didn’t happen, because the Indian lockdown started,” he said.

Earlier this year, Banerjee sent me a Vimeo link to his finished film, which confronts the bigotry infecting India. Banerjee approaches his theme slowly and sideways, through the story of one Muslim family. The family’s first generation, living in Kashmir during the unrest in 1990, finds itself sundered from its Hindu friends. In the second generation, a young woman wants to buy an apartment in present-day Mumbai, but no one will sell to her. (Muslims in Indian cities commonly struggle to find places to live, a form of discrimination practiced by Hindu homeowners and residents’ societies.) In 2042, the woman’s son, a novelist, lives in an even more ghettoized Delhi - a geofenced city where the state machinery determines what people can do based on their social-credit score. The wretchedness of this future spills out of the movie; later, I seemed to remember every frame as being gloomy and grim, even though several scenes are brightly lit. “We’ve lived through enough history to understand what’s going on now,” Banerjee said. “Now we can extrapolate, which is what my film does.”

During the years that Banerjee wrote and shot his movie, the takeover of Bollywood quickened. By 2019 - an election year - new power brokers had emerged in the industry, seemingly from nowhere. One of them, the son of a legislator allied with the B.J.P., directed “The Accidental Prime Minister”, which pilloried the Congress leader who had governed India before Modi. (“It felt like propaganda even as I was making it,” Arjun Mathur, one of the film’s actors, told me. “I really regret doing it.”) Another produced a fawning bio-pic of Modi. One director told me about Mahaveer Jain, a producer who “was a nobody” but who now partners with some of Bollywood’s biggest studios and filmmakers. Jain, who said that he couldn’t meet me because he was unwell, is often described as the B.J.P.’s chief Bollywood liaison. In January, 2019, he helped choreograph a meeting between Modi and a band of A-listers, which yielded a selfie that blazed through the Indian Internet. Conspicuously, not one person in the photo was Muslim.

Sometimes there are more deliberate flexes of muscle. In the summer of 2020, under the pretext of probing an actor’s suicide, federal authorities launched an investigation into the drug habits of some of Mumbai’s most famous stars. Among them was Karan Johar. (...) Kshitij Prasad, a young executive producer who was then with Johar’s company, was called in for questioning, and he later said that the officers seemed keen to pin something - anything - on Johar or on another celebrity. “They kept insisting I was supplying drugs to the industry,” Prasad said. (The investigating agency has denied Prasad’s version of events.) When Prasad refused to cooperate, he was sent to prison for ninety days, then released on bail. The threat of a tax raid has also become a weapon, one director told me. When he was raided himself, investigators noticed that he’d been donating small monthly sums to news sites like Scroll and the Wire, which often criticize the government. “They said, ‘Don’t contribute to any of these publications,’ ” he said. “So I had to stop.”

Even these events, though, were reduced to mere prologue last October, when drug inspectors arrested Aryan Khan, the twenty-three-year-old son of Shah Rukh Khan. A team of agents, under the orders of the same officer who’d imprisoned Prasad, stopped Aryan in a Mumbai port terminal, where he was preparing to attend a party aboard a cruise ship. The agents found no drugs on him, yet they held him in jail for nearly a month before allowing him bail. Earlier this summer, they dropped all charges against him - which made it impossible not to speculate about what had happened. Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation? Shah Rukh Khan said little during those weeks. The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.

By mid-2021, after a series of lockdowns, Banerjee had finished postproduction on his generational drama. Like a punctilious gardener, he’d offered to trim some of the movie’s nettles himself, unwilling to have Netflix stung more than necessary. (According to an internal memo, these changes included cutting images of the Indian flag. The memo also suggested, “In one of the shots, one person is walking in the background during National Anthem - remove that person.”) Toward the end of 2021, after Banerjee showed Netflix the film, something shifted. “There’d been a discussion about releasing the film in late 2022,” he said. “But an executive told us that they couldn’t commit to a release plan.” (Netflix denied this characterization.) The government had issued new guidelines for streaming platforms, obliging them, for instance, to pull a show or a movie within thirty-six hours if a court or a state agency ordered it. As Netflix kept dithering, Banerjee felt that he had just a few options left. “Wait indefinitely for the release to happen, or look for a producer who has the interest to release it in India - for the audience that I meant it primarily for - or look for a producer who doesn’t release it in India but releases it everywhere else,” he said. That last possibility was “very, very horrible - but what choice do I have?”

Banerjee’s film joins a growing trove of content that studios and filmmakers are reluctant to air. One director told me that he’d shot a love story about a couple who run away from home to be together. No one wants to release the film, he said, because “it just so happens that the boy is Muslim and the girl is Hindu.” According to two sources, a miniseries based on “Maximum City”, the popular nonfiction book that recounts Mumbai’s religious riots in 1992, has been frozen. (The production company denied this.) “Takht”, a Karan Johar extravaganza set in the Mughal period, began gestating around 2018. Two people who worked on the film described it as a celebration of secular values - which, they suspect, is partly why it’s effectively comatose. (Last year, Johar denied that he has abandoned the project.) (...) In a conversation with a former Netflix employee, I asked why Banerjee’s film had suddenly stalled. “There’s a huge sense of fear,” the employee admitted. “No one wants to take the political risk of releasing a project like that.”

In contrast, Bollywood is glutted with movies and TV shows that align with the B.J.P.’s politics. (...) Two vocal Modi supporters, the actors Kangana Ranaut and Anupam Kher, are collaborating on a film about the Congress leader Indira Gandhi and her two-year suspension of democracy, between 1975 and 1977. One director showed me a four-minute video that he’d received on WhatsApp - a teaser for a production about a Congress corruption scandal in the eighties. The clip interleaved old news footage and fresh footage so deftly, the director said, “that you feel like they don’t have an agenda. Then you read the names of the people involved.” At the end of the video, a logo popped up: Anupam Kher Studios. (...)

The first week I was in Mumbai turned out to be a representative one, as far as Bollywood releases were concerned. One new movie, “Major,” was about the life of an Indian Army officer who died trying to rescue hostages from the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, in Mumbai, after Pakistani terrorists seized the building, in 2008. Another film, “Samrat Prithviraj,” sang the glories of a twelfth-century Hindu ruler, Prithviraj Chauhan, who was killed after a battle against Muhammad Ghori, a king venturing eastward from present-day Afghanistan. “Samrat” - or “Emperor” - had been affixed to the title at the eleventh hour, after members of Chauhan’s caste protested that calling the film “Prithviraj” was insufficiently reverential. This was the same group that had vandalized the set of “Padmaavat”; it was perhaps easier to just give in.

I watched “Samrat Prithviraj” on the morning of its release. (...) In the lead role was Akshay Kumar, an aging action star with a face as lean as a greyhound’s. Kumar’s Prithviraj is a self-righteous bore, forever harping on about Hindu tradition and the need for Hindus to stick together. (The film’s obviousness won it tax exemptions in several states ruled by the B.J.P.) His sandstone palace is bathed in a golden light - the perfect venue for his wedding to an ingénue of a princess. But Prithviraj can spare little time, and just a couple of song-and-dance sequences, for love. Most of the film is taken up either by his councils with advisers about battles or by the battles themselves. In the climax, Prithviraj dies - but not before he rewrites history by killing Ghori. (Lions in a coliseum are involved.) The film’s epilogue calls Prithviraj the “last Hindu ruler in north India” (a falsehood) and laments that, after his death, India recovered its honor only when it gained independence from the British, in 1947 - thus conflating homegrown Muslim rulers with European colonists in a sweep of rhetoric.

When the lights came up, there were barely a dozen people left in the theatre, down from the twenty or so at the beginning. In the weeks that followed, “Samrat Prithviraj” proved to be a box-office dud. It’s the sort of fact that some filmmakers cited to me in hopeful tones, as if to say that the Hindu-nationalist playbook doesn’t guarantee a hit - that the whims of the audience will ultimately thwart any ideological conquest of Bollywood. But this idea ignores the sheer volume of oxygen taken up by films like “Samrat Prithviraj,” and their accretive psychic weight. And it overlooks the movies that aren’t being made, the stories that aren’t being told, the things that aren’t being said. “The worrying aspect,” Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub told me, “is that, out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending”.'

Una sintesi in italiano di questo articolo è stata pubblicata da Il Post il 15 ottobre 2022: Bollywood è sempre più di destra.

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