In a year shadowed by a troubling rise in communal tempers and gender violence, the best popular Hindi films of 2014 displayed both social conscience and heart in abundance.
Early in the year, Kangana Ranaut stormed her way into our hearts with a gutsy and endearing portrayal of a young woman from conservative West Delhi abandoned by her bridegroom just before her wedding day, in Vikas Bahl’s Queen . Her self-esteem at its lowest, she decides to continue with her plans for a now solo ‘honeymoon’ to Europe. The narrative traces her successive encounters with a hotel worker, three young men sharing her hostel room, a pole dancer and an Italian hotel owner. With them she builds unexpected friendships, overcomes her fears and prejudices, and ultimately discovers herself.
Similar resilient optimism and generous wit illuminate Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistan . A young man irrepressibly in love with Hindi films is mistakenly captured by Pakistani terrorists. Held captive in a border village in Pakistan, simple village residents discover many bonds with the hostage: a shared ardour for Hindi films and songs, a shared love for children, and a shared humanity. The film gently underscores the futility of forbidden borders, and of war, terror and the politics of hatred.
Another film with a large heart that celebrates the politics of love was PK . In his first Munnabhai film, he used the device of an outsider — a small-time crook pretending to be a doctor — to expose the commercialisation and insensitivity of the medical profession. Here Hirani deploys the same ploy of the outsider — but this time he is a round-eyed, large-eared, naked alien, bemusedly trying to make sense of our world — to expose cynical manipulation by organised religion. In a deliberately fable-like narrative, he pokes gentle fun at those the alien describes as self-styled ‘managers’ of God, who fuel fear, irrationality and corruption among their believers. But what makes the film both topical and brave is that he reserves his hardest indictment for the misuse of religion to foster hatred and mistrust. Here Hirani does not choose to be ambivalent or pull his punches. The battle in the climax is between a scheming Hindu godman who claims that Muslims cannot be trusted, and a young Pakistani man who is both constant and loyal in his love. It is hardly a surprise that Hindutva organisations have launched a rash of protests against the film. In a time when small-minded politics is misusing religion to foster religious hatred, Hirani’s parable could not be more apt.
The other two films in my list depart sharply from the effervescent and affectionate humour characterising these films; instead these are dark and brooding. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider combines an aching lyricism with its shadowy tale of betrayal, thwarted desire and revenge. Haider brings to life the urgent contemporary torment of Kashmir in Bhardwaj’s skilful recreation of the timeless melancholy human tragedy of duplicity and retribution, rated as among the most popular, influential and filmed of Shakespeare’s plays. His audacious aesthetic imagination translocated Shakespeare’s Hamlet from 16th century Denmark to contemporary strife-torn Kashmir. Two generations of Kashmiris have been raised under the shadow of military domination, with its forbidding currency of crackdowns, searches, forced disappearances, insurgents and counter-insurgents, destroyed homelands and families, hopeless futures, and an abiding sense of settled sadness. Assisted by Basharat Peer — who authored a moving eye-witness account of Kashmir in its years of militancy Curfewed Night — the film reinvents the gloomy Shakespearian tragedy amid the misfortune of the Kashmir valley.
A similar sense of unassuaged torment underlies my final selection, Imtiaz Ali’s Highway . A wealthy child-woman is kidnapped for ransom a day before she is to be wed. As her abductor, a rough taciturn petty criminal, escapes on a long road journey with her, an unexpected bond develops between them, which forms the emotional core of the otherwise somewhat erratic narrative.
The attachment they acquire is around the torments that both — from opposite ends of the social and economic ladder — experienced in their childhoods. With the young child-woman, it is sexual abuse in the hands of her uncle. With the criminal, it is the repeated battering of his mother by a violent and alcoholic father; echoes of stories I have heard from hundreds of street children.
In this way, popular cinema is growing into a brave and vibrant arena for public discourse about politics of love, hate and inequality, and of the constituents of the good state and society.
The views expressed in this column are that of the author’s and do not represent those of the newspaper.
