History’s dark chapters have always been chronicled in cinema, whether in documentary or fiction form; even Indian cinema, with its escapist bias, has its fair share of these. But where there are several movies on Partition, the Emergency and the 2002 Gujarat riots, a particularly sordid episode in the history of Mumbai has, to the best of my knowledge, only one feature film based on it. Mani Ratnam’s Bombay .
Twenty-five years ago, the post-Babri Bombay riots engulfed what was till then a secular, cosmopolitan city and changed its character and destiny forever. Ratnam’s film uses this sordid episode as the backdrop to the love story of a Hindu man and Muslim girl to fashion a film that’s ostensibly about communal fault lines in the country, exacerbated by murky politics. But Bombay, in its concessions to the gallery and its unwillingness to tell it like it is, betrays its own very promising premise and ends up as a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.
Love in a dark time
The film begins with Shehla Bano and Shekhar falling in love in their village and, in the face of family opposition, eloping to the cosmopolitan neutrality of Bombay. Seven years later, the couple and their twin boys find themselves in the horror of the Bombay riots and have to deal with it as a mixed-religion family.
Ratnam builds up the real-life political chronology steadily even amid the inevitable song-and-dance interludes. Shehla Bano, almost immediately after her arrival in Bombay, uneasily watches a saffron rally taken out to demand the opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid. Several scenes later, Shekhar’s father deliberately baits Bano’s brick-dealer father with an order for a truckful of bricks with ‘Ram’ inscribed on them; a sharp reference to the real-life clarion call of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad for consecrated bricks from across the country for the Ram temple. On the eve of the riots, members of the Shakti Samaj (the real-life Shiv Sena) knock on Shekhar’s door to solicit donations for the temple, again leaving Bano uneasy and fearful.
The trigger points of the riots too are evocatively depicted; the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the murder of the two mathadi workers that set off the January phase of the violence, the burning of a family in Radhabai Chawl, and the political maha aartis and namaaz, the aggressive stridency of one juxtaposed with the quiet menace of the other. In what is one of the best scenes of the film, Shekhar’s father, going back home from a maha aarti with his grandson, is accosted by armed Muslim thugs but saved in the nick of time by Bano’s father returning from namaaz with the other twin. The initial hostility between the two men has, in the course of the film, transformed into a semi-comedic rivalry over their grandchildren’s religious identities but the shock of the incident is an awakening for both.
Collapsing climax
But despite the fidelity to real situations and build-up of a subtle tension, offset by some lively quotidian moments and humour, Bombay loses its way badly towards the end when the most appalling clichés and contrivances are worked in. In the last half-hour, the film goes into a complete free fall with unbridled hysteria, trite symbolism (a eunuch sheltering one of the twins who’ve been rudely rebuffed by others) and ridiculous situations (Shekhar’s two friends suddenly turn out to be Hindu and Muslim rioters) pushed in to make an ideological point. It’s a consistently high-pitched depiction of frenzy with nothing to leaven it; no sadness, weariness, lonely moments, no subtlety at all. Just overblown melodrama with an overblown background score.
In the last 15 minutes, a song with an almost jaunty refrain, ‘ Ruk jao, ruk jao, (Stop, stop!)’ breaks in unexpectedly over the visuals of murder and mayhem; on cue, the political leaders repent, people stand up to the goons mid-riot, weapons are dropped in slow motion and the rioters depart, leaving everyone to form a human chain. It seriously couldn’t get more embarrassing than this — and while I get that Ratnam’s aim was to uphold the eroding values of pluralism and syncretism, show how ordinary people helped one another, and send forth a peace message, ending such a grim-themed film like a Bollywood potboiler does no service to it.
War and peace
What I also found disquieting about the ‘peace message’ was the role of the two political leaders in it — for the simple reason that this bit of fiction seriously compromised what happened in real life. While the human chain and peace efforts by citizens were actual post-riots events that were back-pedalled into the film’s climax, the overstated remorse on the part of the leaders never happened (indeed, there was no one Muslim leader, the character being a fictitious one created to offset that of the real-life Bal Thackeray). And while Thackeray did issue two ‘appeals’ in his newspaper Saamna to stop the rioting, they were certainly not about remorse; in fact, he had Ratnam edit out of his film the major part of a sequence which showed him repenting.
Against this background, the ruminative and semi-guilty looks of both leaders when Shekhar tells them that ordinary people are dying on account of their instigation is not just laughably naive but in a sense giving a free pass to those who never paid for their actions. The riot victims of Bombay were never given justice; even in 1994, the time that Ratnam must have begun shooting, no rioter or instigator had even been charge-sheeted. A bald and terrible truth like this deserved a less equivocating treatment.
Sure, a director is entitled to his artistic choices — which, I grant, could also have been influenced by the threats and interference of political players in this particular case — but one could still imagine far more appropriate endings for Bombay than the mush served up. Twenty-five years on, it remains the only celluloid narrative of Bombay’s horror; hopefully, some day, someone with the added advantage of hindsight will make a more enlightened film.
