Where is the student in Indian cinema?

Campus narratives are rigidly defined in films and student politics is pushed to the background.

Filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra joined Delhi University in 1980 and graduated in 1983. He remembers the volatile times when the nation had just come out of the grip of Emergency and student politics was most vibrant. Mr. Mehra’s next brush with student politics came during the Mandal agitation. This was when he was researching for a film on the Bhagat Singh armed revolution in which many youngsters had dropped the pen and had taken to guns to fight for Independence. Then the MIGs started crashing, charges of corruption began flying around and Rang De Basanti (2006) was born. The film spoke to the youth of the times as it dealt with cynicism and confusion about the idea of India, angst, and an inherent urge to change the country for the better. The philosophy came from Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Bidrohi Kobita (poem of rebellion) and Sahir Ludhianvi’s Khoon Phir Khoon Hai (blood is blood after all), which inspired Prasoon Joshi’s song “ Kuchh Kar Guzarne Ko Khoon Chala Khoon Chala ” (spill the blood to get something done). “The whole idea was that if we repress our youngsters, blood will be shed on the ground,” Mr. Mehra recollects.

Tigmanshu Dhulia graduated from Allahabad University a few years later, in 1986. He portrayed in Haasil (2003) the student politics and gang rivalry that he experienced on the campus, albeit in a dramatic way. “But the heightened drama that I used as a cinematic liberty has become a reality these days,” he says.

Stereotypical representations

Haasil and Rang De Basanti are the rare Hindi films that historian and author Mukul Kesavan can remember for their portrayal of students on screen. As if on cue, Rupleena Bose, assistant professor at Delhi University’s Sri Venkateswara College, asks: “where is the student in our cinema?” Sociologist Shiv Vishvanathan can’t recall a single memorable student character in popular Hindi cinema. For him, on-screen students have always come across as a community rather than as individuals — a reason he finds them the most stereotypical of representations.

“There have been two dominant idioms when it comes to the representation of students in Hindi cinema — that of earnestness and hedonism,” says Mr. Kesavan. Righteousness was on display in the post-Independence films of the 1950s and 1960s — in Jagriti (1954), for instance. They were all about inculcating the right values in students. “These were films with messages; optimistic films that stressed on education,” says Delhi University’s acting Vice Chancellor Sudish Pachauri. Says Ravikant Sharma, assistant professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies: “ NaiUmar Ki Nai Fasal (1966) is an early remarkable film which explored the politicisation of student life and called for ‘back to classes’ for nation-building.”

Hedonism walked into the frame post-liberalisation through the Archie comic campuses of Karan Johar films (think Student of the Year, 2012).

For cultural commentator Sadanand Menon, the formula has been the same across cinema in all languages. “It is about having fun with a gang of friends, having a romantic interest, and rivalry with another gang. The student is never shown involved in intellectual and scholastic pursuits,” he says. Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra concurs: “There is no excitement, no sense of discovery, no real spirit of the youth. The larger conversation with the society, economy and polity is missing.”

Film historian S. Theodore Baskaran says the picture is no different in Tamil cinema. “You see no political involvement, no serious questions are asked,” he says. For him, the two most representative Tamil films about students have been the tragic love story Oru Thalai Ragam (1980) and Nammavar (1994) which looked at the issue of social reforms and aimed at raising social awareness among students. Kamal Haasan played a revolutionary history lecturer in Nammavar .

It has been much the same story in contemporary Malayalam cinema where the recent big hit Premam (2015) starts off as a story of a teenager’s unrequited love for a fellow student and moves on to explore his crush on a teacher in his college years. “ Classroom was all about nostalgia for the student life and triggered the trend of college reunions across Kerala. 4 The People (2004) was about engineering students taking on the system,” says Malayalam writer N.S. Madhavan.

According to Ms. Bose, student life is all about having the power to do the impossible. “Campuses are spaces where everything is possible. This has been celebrated in the West in films like The Social Network and Mona Lisa Smile ,” she says. But not in Indian cinema.

The reel and real

No wonder then, the connections with the real world, the issues we read about in newspapers, are almost non-existent. “Students in Indian films are strangely immune to politics,” says Mr. Pachauri. They are rarely about independent views or ideology. “There have been waves of student uprisings in the country — from the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s to the Jayaprakash Narayan-led Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini which led to the Emergency… But none of this has been explored at length in cinema. There is so much turmoil in Indian campuses right now — Hyderabad, FTII [Film and Television Institute of India], JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University]. Will the turbulence find a reference in popular Indian cinema,” asks Mr. Menon.

There have been a few respectable omissions such as Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003) which was about a bunch of Delhi’s Hindu College students driven by the idea of a revolution for social justice in Bihar. “It was about who they were; their place in the world,” says Mr. Mishra. He also directed Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin (1987) in which three old men look back at their days of student activism. Ketan Mehta’s Holi (1984) was about students’ unrest and their rebellion against the principal. Student politics and a fictitious secessionist movement coalesced in Rajasthan in Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal (2009). While class and ideological clashes on the campus are brought to the foreground in Manish Tiwary’s Dil Dosti Etc (2007), Ram Gopal Varma’s Siva (1989), remade in Hindi as Shiva (1990), explored student politics against a Mafia backdrop. The Aam Aadmi Party could well be following the footsteps of student leader Michael in Mani Ratnam’s Yuva (2004).

For Mr. Menon, Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham’s Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile (This way, students, 1972) tried to understand the restiveness of the students of the ‘70s as did his Amma Ariyan (What I want my mother to know, 1986). Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (Opponent, 1970) had Dhritiman Chatterjee as a medical college dropout who can’t quite fit into the system.

Ms. Bose remembers the Pradeep Kishan-directed Arundhati Roy-scripted In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), about final-year architecture students. For her, it is the portrayal of the students in the film, their political bent of mind and their clash with the authorities that ring a bell. For Mr. Mishra, 3 Idiots was important as it showed dissent as an agency of change. “What else is being a student all about if not that,” he says.

namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in