In December 2008, in the immediate aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, which claimed 166 lives and left over 300 injured, one of the many incidents to whip up public outrage was the so-called “terror tour” of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel by filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma in the company of the then Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. While he was condemned for blatant opportunism, Mr. Varma denied that he was planning a film on the attacks.
However, in 2013 his The Attacks of 26/11 hit the theatres. He issued a statement in defence saying he had never ever intended to make a film on the attacks when he went to the Taj. “Now after all these years, after the whole truth has been uncovered by the investigators and by the virtue of extensive knowledge I have gathered from various sources… I developed a desire to film the actual story of those attacks,” he said.
His fictionalised account, didn’t build on this “truth and knowledge”; nor did it offer any closure and catharsis or solace and healing to Mumbaikars who came face to face with terrorism not just in the iconic public spaces but also in their drawing rooms through 24x7 TV coverage. Mr. Varma may have been quick in responding to a tragedy that’s part of the nation’s recent memory and collective consciousness but in doing so he scratched the wounds afresh. The film wallowed in the gratuitous, graphic detailing of the massacre, was voyeuristic and exploitative rather than a sensitive recreation of a tragedy.
The one impassioned moment was Nana Patekar, as joint commissioner of police Rakesh Maria, in charge of interrogating Ajmal Kasab (played by Sanjeev Jaiswal), delivering a speech on religion, indoctrination and terrorism. The demonisation of Kasab as the radicalised, Islamic terrorist was complete.
In contrast Hotel Mumbai, an American-Australian production directed by Anthony Maras that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September this year, shows both the beastly and humane side of terrorists. It humanises them as poor, illiterate, and misguided youth (played wonderfully by Amandeep Singh, Suhail Nayyar, Manoj Mehra, Dinesh Kumar) who seem to go on the indiscriminate killing spree through the hotel on the instructions of their rabid handlers back home for the sake of money.
Though there have been many documentaries on the tragedy, feature films on 26/11 have been few and far between. In 2015, came a mediocre, forgettable French-Belgian thriller directed by Nicolas Saada. Taj Mahal was about a girl trapped in the iconic hotel during the attacks while her parents are out for dinner.
Hotel Mumbai also zooms in specifically on the siege of the Taj. Unlike Mr. Varma’s film, this is a more clinical representation of violence which works on the audience’s emotions with heart-tugging individual tales, especially those of the courage of the hotel staff led by a sedate Anupam Kher as chef Hemant Oberoi. It also throws light on a very crucial aspect — the ineptness of the State and security forces (the interminable delay in arrival of special forces from Delhi). But instead of exploring it further it prefers to remain squarely within the conventional disaster drama, edge-of-the-seat thriller zone, occasionally puncturing the tension with moments of mirth and banter between terrorists.
Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Arshad Khan, on the sidelines of TIFF, pointed out to us the film’s significance in showing the terrorists multi-dimensionally instead of just as self-assured, violent brutes. He thought that was much more frightening than having them play singularly evil. “What made the horror of the film reach into the depths of my soul was the desperation in the voice of the monster calling his parents and trying to ensure they got the money, thus exposing the entire fiasco of the terrorists to be no different from the terrorists in uniform and on a government payroll. They do it for money more than any god. That is an important difference because it does not implicate an entire religion (of which some with weak minds may be duped into believing they would end up in heaven if they commit such heinous acts) but it also adds the monetary incentive. Desperate people are the most manipulable and they don’t belong to a particular nation or religion,” Mr. Khan wrote in an e-mail.
On the other hand, what riled the Indians most at TIFF was that the film was a “cop out”, “naive” and “factually problematic” in not clearly pointing a finger at the nationality of the perpetrators of violence and their handlers. To do a balancing act on a tragedy of such enormity isn’t so easy indeed.
