In the last week of a departing year, mediapersons normally succumb to a Pavlovian tic. It’s called the List Syndrome wherein the year that was and its elements are compulsively catalogued, put under an analytic microscope, and guesses sometimes hazarded about whether trends will change in the new year. While toying with the second part of the idea and then abandoning it (because cinema trends in Bollywood haven’t changed in a decade at least), it struck me that there was a change worth chronicling — the nature of the film industry itself.
Intolerance debates
Circa 2016, on the heels of the last part of 2015, will perhaps go down in film history as the time when the politicisation of Bollywood reached an alarming peak; when the most innocuous movies and statements were dragged into unseemly controversies, and when some members of the fraternity openly took sides, splitting a once neutral and largely apolitical industry down the centre. True, the advent of the Narendra Modi government polarised the entire country, the disputes amplified through the cacophonous megaphone of social media — but film personalities stepping into the arena to battle one another with such aggressiveness was an unprecedented phenomenon.
If I remember rightly, it was the great ‘intolerance’ debate at the end of 2015 that kicked off the altercations: when film-makers like Dibakar Banerjee, Kundan Shah and Saeed Mirza returned their National Awards and when Shah Rukh Khan added fuel to a raging fire with his statement that India was indeed becoming intolerant. The backlash was swift and overblown: Anupam Kher’s ‘March For India’, in which a few directors and singers participated; Bhootnath director Vivek Sharma’s unintentionally hilarious video film titled DhikkarHai (where a bunch of unknown belligerents waved the national flag, glared into the camera and abused Banerjee and Khan); and a spot of Twitter savaging of Aamir Khan who came in a couple of weeks later with another intolerance statement. The chorus of ‘anti-national’ and ‘traitor’ erupted with renewed fervour in 2016 with the Ae Dil Hai Mushkil episode when Karan Johar was put through hell by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena for having a Pakistani actor in his film. Few film folk stood up for him, and bafflingly, the competing release Shivaay was promoted by right-wingers as a nationalist counterfoil to Johar’s “anti-nationalism”.
What happened/is happening in Bollywood is not entirely unexpected; as a microcosm of India, the film industry is bound to reflect the larger polarisation in the country. But why this is saddening at some level is because the film industry has been widely accepted as a bastion of secularism, perhaps the last bastion in a gradually communalising atmosphere.
Harmonious by default
Bollywood’s famed secularism has sprung not so much from intent as default. Built on the bedrock of the hard work and experimentation of a Hindu, D.G. Phalke, the nascent industry attracted talent from every religious community in the country — if its first two woman music directors, Jaddan Bai and Khorshed Minocher-Homji, were a Muslim and a Parsi respectively, the first acclaimed thespian-superstar Yusuf Khan was a Muslim, while many Christian musician played in orchestras and wrote the western notations for a medley of music directors. Interestingly, while many from minority religions took on Hindu pseudonyms to appeal to the majority Hindu audience (Khorshed Minocher-Homji was Saraswati Devi while Yusuf Khan is, of course, better known as Dilip Kumar), there was, by all accounts, no inter-religious rancour even when the country had just been through Partition.
It was the same for regional communities. Bollywood, as we know it, is not Bollywood without its splendid mix — the Bengalis, Punjabis, Marathis, Tamilians and other communities that created its popular cinema and music, each bringing the flavor of his or her region and religion to the melting pot even whilst preserving the pan-India template that was necessary for the box-office. Creativity also cut across region and religion — while the iconic example is the bhajan ‘ Man tarpat Hari darshan ko aaj’ created by three Muslims, Shakeel Badayuni, Naushad and Mohammad Rafi, there’s also the example of Sahir Ludhianvi, an Urdu poet who wrote the lyrics of Chitralekha in chaste Sanskritised Hindi in keeping with the milieu of Bhagwati Charan Varma’s novel. Or Kaifi Azmi who wrote those immortal lines in that immortal patriotic song Kar chale hum fida jaan-o-tan saathiyon: “Khench do apne khoon se zameen par lakeer/Is taraf aane paaye na Raavan koi/Tod do haath gar haath uthne lage/Chhoone paaye na Sita ka daaman koi/Ram bhi tum, tumhi Laxman saathiyon/Ab tumhare hawale watan saathiyon .” (Yes, it’s depressing that such work, whose creators were never thought of in terms of religion, has to be reassessed thus posthumously.)
Commercial sense
Though liberal/progressive politics played a good part in bringing this syncretism to the Bollywood screen (some of the lyricists who wrote these songs were card-carrying Marxists/socialists or at least enlightened men of letters), the most vital factor that contributed to it was commerce. Decades before the multiplex business model, it was necessary for a film to reach out to every nook and cranny of the country to make money – and hence those stock-in-trade, good-hearted Rahim Chachas, Michaels, Matron D’Sas and Sikh cabbies in mainstream movies. (Parodying stereotypes, regional and religious, also existed but they were never vicious.) The apogee of this naïve but happy secularism was reached with Manmohan Desai’s Amar, Akbar and Anthony blithely giving their mother a simultaneous blood transfusion. And the audience loved it.
Bollywood’s secularism, embodied in lyrics like Allah tero naam, Ishwar tero naam , and Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega/Insaan ki aulad hai insaan banega, began to fall apart as politics took its own course in the real world and as films too began to increasingly reflect reality. The industry’s political loyalties, mostly springing from compulsions other than ideology, naturally split when the monolithic Congress years passed and a powerful new party took over the seat of government. But no one had expected that the rift would be this bitter.
The real question, however, is not so much the bickering as whether the new political ideology gathering ground in the industry will translate into a political or agitprop cinema. Bollywood, to the present day, has largely made apolitical films — the few overtly political ones have come from humanist/socialist/Marxist seed. Circa 2016 brought us two contrarian ideas – one, the baffling but clearly anti-Left Buddha In A Traffic Jam, and two, Pahlaj Nihalani’s announcement that he would make a differently perspectived film on the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Will more such be funded? Is Bollywood’s once-famed Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb heading for oblivion? We’ll have to wait and watch.
The columnist is a freelance writer and editor
