Last month, the many articles and social media views that came out in the wake of Amit Masurkar’s Newton had one thing in common: they dwelled on the idealism of the film’s eponymous hero. Some conceded that it was perhaps a flawed idealism but idealism nevertheless, while others celebrated the return of the principled hero to Hindi cinema.
Was Newton idealistic? I’d personally put him in a more ambiguous space, but more on that later. The interesting point here is how his idealism, such as it is, is different from that of his predecessors in Hindi cinema, and how the definition of idealism in films seems to have changed over the decades in keeping with the socio-political trajectory of the country.
Principled protagonists
Hindi cinema, in its early decades, had a slew of famously principled protagonists, and almost every hero, as a matter of course, was a good man. The most well-known example is arguably Satyapriya, a character played by Dharmendra in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam . A man wedded to the truth, Satyapriya sticks obstinately to his idealism even though it causes great upheavals and unhappiness in his life. Even when he dies prematurely of a terminal disease, it is with the emotional satisfaction of seeing his principles upheld in the very last moments of his life.
Set in the period from 1947 to the late ’50s, Satyakam is about the hydra-headed corruption that set in almost immediately after independence and the protagonist’s single-handed battle against it. Satyapriya’s struggle has all the passion of a crusade; it’s a fire that comes from within and wants to burn everything that’s ugly and unjust in its path. Indeed, his idealism borders on quixotism; at one point, his wife mentions how his adherence to rules is rigidly unreasonable, not allowing even for innocuous omissions like letting workers use office space for a celebration.
The Satyakam template was carried forward by screenwriters Salim-Javed in films like Zanjeer, Deewar and Shakti (where Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor and Dilip Kumar played upright police officers) and Kala Patthar , which had an interesting twist on the ethical hero; the upright protagonist here is a man punishing himself for his past cowardice which had caused the death of hundreds. But the one thing that all these idealistic protagonists (and those in other Hindi films) had in common was that their ethical behaviour sprang from an emotional core; from an inner voice that drove them.
Stickler for rules
This is where I found Newton’s idealism a departure from that of earlier heroes. His principles seemed to arise less from moral righteousness and more from a mulish, almost comical, insistence on going by the rule book in every situation, whether he fully understood it or not. Law-abiding, yes (to a fault in fact); crusading no.
Interpretations of cinema are subjective but I do believe that the sense I got of Newton’s character was intended by the director. The screenplay is rife with incidents that illustrate not only his stickler-for-rules obduracy but also his slightly mediocre intellect; take the military man’s snide remark about his intelligence or Newton’s own fatuous question at a pre-poll briefing session about Maoists storming the elections. His persona—poker-faced with a pronounced nervous tic and far removed from the intensity of, say, a Guru Dutt in Pyaasa or an Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer —matches this .
Two sequences in particular bear out my impression. One, the penultimate sequence where Newton maniacally not only holds the security force at gunpoint to allow villagers to cast their vote but refuses to put down the weapon after they’ve left because there are still two whole minutes to the official close of voting hours. Then there’s the closing scene, which has him proudly showing Malko the clock he’s received as an award for coming to office on time every day; not the stuff of rebellious, world-changing heroism by a long shot. There are also his own dialogues: when Malko tells him that an honest officer like him deserved the award, he replies, “ Imandaari ka to pata nahin, bas apni duty nibha raha hoon (Don’t know about honesty but I try to fulfil my duties).”
To my mind there’s possibly a reason behind not making an archetypal hero out of Newton—and that reason is that his character seems to be based on the protagonist of Secret Ballot , the Iranian film Masurkar was supposedly inspired by (though he’s denied it). Conceptually, both Secret Ballot and Newton are the same; satires on the rituals of democracy helmed by honest but myopic protagonists who are pitted against military antagonists serving the same government that they do. The female polling agent in Secret Ballot is Newton’s twin soul; she goes around diligently collecting votes on a remote island because voting is good for democracy, and is as obsessive-compulsive about the rule book as Newton is, not allowing the soldier accompanying her to carry the ballot box “because only the polling agent can carry it”. Like Newton ’s voters, hers too have never heard of their electoral candidates in their lives and want to know why they should vote for them; like Newton, she can only parrot the cliché that if they vote, their life will change. (Of course it won’t; in the epilogue of Newton six months later, a JCB machine is seen gouging the entrails of the mineral-rich tribal area.)
Who’s the villain?
This, then, is why the film has no use for an archetypal hero. The point it’s making is different—that there may be a conflict between the protagonist and antagonist but both are instruments-cum-victims of the State, and it’s the latter that is the real villain of the piece, playing one against the other. In such a concept, a rather mediocre ‘hero’—one who lives by ideals that are limited to his duty, and who in good faith could end up facilitating rather than fighting an unjust State—is not out of place.
Given the demand of this storyline, is the film then really making any purposeful statement about idealism in general? Unlike Secret Ballot , it is (perhaps because a Hindi film has to have a ‘message’). So we have a couple of lines early on about Newton’s honesty and desire ‘to make a difference’; the film also carries the clear message that even uncomprehending devotion to one’s duty is the way forward. “ Koi bhi bada kaam ek din mein nahin hota ,” the tribal woman tells Newton. “ Saalon lag jaate hain jungle banne mein (Big tasks take years to accomplish; a forest doesn’t grow overnight).” The veteran electoral officer has earlier said much the same thing: “ Aap natural tareeke se apni imaandari ka kaam karte rahiye, desh pragati khud-ba-khud karta jaayega (Keep doing your work honestly, the nation will progress out of this).”
Such dialogues actually contradict the irony in the film, but if taken at face value, they seem to endorse a concept of idealism that is far more pragmatic than that in earlier cinema. In the post-independence India of Satyakam , the cancer of corruption hadn’t yet struck very deep roots; seven decades on, cleansing the rot of the Augean Stables will need not an impassioned Hercules but millions of ordinary citizens simply doing their jobs well. That seems to be the message of Newton ; whether or not it makes sense politically is for each one to figure out.
