I conclude my personal centenary-year tribute to Indian cinema by remembering films that were significant to me for their social commentary and not just aesthetic merit, since cinema in India has been not just a vehicle for mass public entertainment, but also an important voice of social conscience.
The tensions of changing relations between women and men in new India are finely depicted in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (Big City), his sensitive rendering of the dilemmas of a traditional homemaker in Calcutta who works in an office as the principal bread-earner in the family, after her husband is laid off from his factory in a prolonged strike. In Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha (Threshold), a woman discovers her own identity working in a home for women survivors of violence. Among many films made on widows, the most evocative is Deepa Mehta’s Water , which strings together the lives of a group of widows in an ashram in pre-Independence Varanasi: sadly this forlorn story of loneliness and exploitation of widows could equally have been set in contemporary India.
Caste discrimination and violence is a less frequent theme of Hindi cinema. I recall Bimal Roy’s gentle
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The secular and pluralist idea of India is repeatedly affirmed in many films. In his poetic and understated
Yash Chopra’s Dharmaputra (Adopted Son) builds on an idea in Tagore’s novel Gora , of a bigoted young Hindu fundamentalist during the Partition riots of 1946-47, who leads hate campaigns against the Muslim ‘enemy’. His world collapses around him when he learns that he was actually born to a Muslim unwed mother, and adopted by the Hindu family that raised him. Benegal in Mammo constructs an endearing portrait of a lonely Pakistani woman left childless and friendless in Pakistan after her husband’s death. But Indian authorities deny her the right to live in India with her only relative, her ageing sister in Mumbai who is raising her orphaned grandson. The film gives a human face to demonised ‘Pakistani infiltrators’, often just people battling the human consequences of the division of what was one country. Aparna Sen’s Mr. and Mrs. Iyer begins in a bus journey in the middle of a communal riot. A conventional Tamil homemaker is uncomfortable when she discovers that she is sharing her seat with a Muslim man. But when rioters search the bus looking for Muslims to slaughter, she pretends he is her husband and a bond of understanding and affection grows slowly between them, across religious and cultural differences.
Films have also recreated communal riots, such as Govind Nihalini’s
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Amid mainstream films in every language on retribution and punishment, popular cinema also initiated debates around restorative justice, the conviction that even those who commit the gravest crimes deserve not mere social anger and revenge, but instead the opportunity to discover their capacities for human goodness. A stirring affirmation of this philosophy of the universal possibility of goodness is V. Shantaram’s Do Ankhen Barah Haath (Two Eyes and Twelve Hands). Based on a real-life story, it portrays the successful efforts of a jailor to reform six brutal unrepentant killers in an open jail into responsible and caring citizens, a testimony that deserves to be heeded today in the current resurgence of support for the death penalty. In a far less cinematically accomplished Dushman (Enemy), Dulal Guha explores an interesting idea of a drunken truck driver who kills the sole bread-winner of a farming family in an accident. The judge sentences him not to prison, but to labour to support the hostile wrathful family, which is reduced to penury by his crime.
In this way, even mainstream cinema in India especially in the past has been a voice of social conscience — outspoken or subdued, angry or anguished, sophisticated or simplistic, and frequently compassionate — embedded deeply in our collective imagination of a more just and humane India and world.