Perhaps it is a symptom of Pakistani cinema’s impending resurgence that Zinda Bhaag, a film that won four awards at the prestigious Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival in Toronto and is expected to break box-office records, couldn’t release as planned on 6 September. There was too large a backlog of unreleased films. After years of decline, 2013 has seen 23 releases already and several more are yet to come. Many of these, like Zinda Bhaag, aren’t, as actor Naseeruddin Shah says, the “thoroughly Z-Grade movies” that Lollywood would churn out with moribund regularity, but honest, independent expressions of what it’s like to be a Pakistani in the 21st century. It’s enough for the phrase ‘new wave’ to be bandied about.
Shah, who stars in the film — his second Pakistani venture after Khuda Kay Liye (2007) — is quick to squash all talk of a new wave. After all, reports of the industry’s renaissance surface after every film that captures the imagination. “One shouldn’t bring out the drums, saying, ‘Hey, Pakistani cinema has arrived,’” he says. “It’s a long way off, but it’s heartening that a beginning has been made.”
That beginning, says Mazhar Zaidi, the producer of Zinda Bhaag, owes a debt of sorts to Bollywood. This sounds counter-intuitive; after all, wasn’t it pirated VCRs of Indian films that killed the Urdu film industry? The bootlegs were the result of a 1965 ban on Indian films. Once the ban was lifted in 2008, it “encouraged the middle classes to actually go to the theatre”, creating overnight a new generation of filmgoers. With a multiplex culture taking hold in the cities and renewed investment in rebuilding cinemas, the infrastructure is being put in place for a resurgence, much like the one India saw in the mid-2000s.
‘Resurgence’ is possibly not the word to use, though. Writing in Dawn, columnist Shayan Shakeel prefers to call it a rebirth “from the ashes of Lollywood and the bowels of the TV industry”. The industry today bears little resemblance to the Bollywood-aping commercial film establishment of the past. The people involved, at least, are different. Almost all Pakistani films of note in the past few years have been made by first-time directors, largely graduates from television, a medium that has seen unprecedented growth of late. (Farjad Nabi and Meenu Gaur, directors of Zinda Bhaag, don’t come from television but are independent filmmakers.)
For a new wave to occur, feels Shah, it needs “a band of young crazies” to build an industry from the ground up. His experience with Zinda Bhaag was reminiscent of his salad days, “something akin to the ’70s, when the National Film Development Corporation of India was backing new filmmakers, when the budgets were tiny, the commitment great and everybody tightened their belts”. That generation was, much like the youth in contemporary Pakistan, deeply disaffected by the direction their country was taking and expressed that angst through their films. Zinda Bhaag, for instance, asks why young Pakistanis emigrate to greener pastures. It does so through an honest evaluation of what would cause so many to want to get out when they can.
New faces, however, also require guidance. During filming, Shah held a workshop to help the young cast grasp their roles better. The film also had a primarily Indian crew, led by National Award-winning cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul, who helped train their Pakistani counterparts. Post-production happened in Mumbai, which meant that it was edited by someone who understands the language and culture, says Zaidi. With the volatility of relations between the two countries, institutional support is far from a given, but Shah feels greater collaboration on a personal level can help the Pakistani fraternity learn from our experience. (Our industry, he adds, is too far gone to do any learning.)
For now, Zaidi hopes to release the film in India. If that were to happen, it might set a precedent for this new wave, when it comes, to be felt on both sides of the border. Either way, Zinda Bhaag sets a more important precedent: a film that can be popular without succumbing to the commercial.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘I try to capture what makes people the artists they become’
Which memories from childhood formed your artistic vision?
There were three portraits in my house — John F Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and my father. My father’s portrait was done by my artist uncle, but I always wondered who could have done the other two. There were other people’s photographs in our house in Kerala, and I never knew where they came from. That spurred my imagination. Also, there was a memorial hall dedicated to poet Kumaran Asan near where we lived. A literary celebration happened there every year. I would participate in story competitions. The scenes from the narratives of Kumaran Asan were an early introduction to visual art.
What feeling could you never translate into art?
I deeply wish I could paint something; paint that twilight moment before the darkness comes in. The threshold between night and day when you become absolutely no one. Even as a child, that experience could never be explained in words or painting. Also, the utter loneliness of the months of March and April. I could never express it in any form until I read Elliot’s The Waste Land. The first line was “April is the cruellest month”. I really hope to paint the same in a work of fiction.
Why do you seek to capture artists in documentary films?
I try to capture what makes these people the artists they have come to be. I try to connect a work of art to the artist’s sociopolitical context in which the artist has grown up. When I write a monogram or a life-related piece, I try to locate the artist within that time-frame — how memories come back to an artist even as they respond to a contemporary issue. When I was doing a project called RAPE — Rare Act of Political Engagement after the Nirbhaya incident, I realised that the women artists were not responding to what happened to Nirbhaya but rather themselves. I look at how these personal traces and inscriptions come back to their work.
Tell us about your short stories for your children.
I created this little boy named Marthandan to read to my daughter. I am a great fan of Ruskin Bond and RK Narayan. I got married to a Marathi woman from Madhya Pradesh, I am a Malayali living in Delhi, our son and daughter have been brought up in Faridabad and speak only English and Hindi. They don’t understand who their father is or was in his formative years. So, I wrote 30 chapters of the Into My Children series for them to read and know about me.
Lalu, Nitish, Modi – Three Men And A Vote
Lalu Prasad Yadav | Narendra Modi | Nitish Kumar
Lalu Prasad Yadav : The Avenger, or Maybe Not
Claim to fame The original social engineer
Current status Domiciled in doghouse
Aspirations To be back with a bang
Chances Too many ifs and buts
Lalu Yadav is ecstatic. Lalu Yadav is panic-stricken. He sees the sun rise — finally! — after a long, dark night. He fears sunlight may never again shine on him. Confused? You would be, too, if you could smell the paint on the finish line, yet wonder if that’s only a desert mirage. Everything in Bihar’s current politics tells Lalu Yadav he will hit the jackpot in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, perhaps doing better than the 22 of Bihar’s 40 seats he won in 2004, a record victory that had made him a kingmaker at the Centre. But everything in today’s Bihar also tells him he is now a shadow of his past bombastic, larger-than-life self, a has-been whose magic spell is broken, perhaps forever.
FALL FROM GRACE
Lalu Yadav ruled Bihar virtually unchallenged for 15 years from 1990, when he became the chief minister for the first time. After he was arrested in 1997 for alleged embezzlement, he made his wife the chief minister and ruled de facto. Yadav’s opponents — the Congress, whose state government he had routed in 1990, the BJP, and his former socialist comrades — failed in repeated efforts to dislodge him.
Until 2005. After a vote that year threw up a hung Assembly, another state election was called in 10 months. This time, Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was summarily booted out. His one-time lieutenant, Nitish Kumar, whose Janata Dal (United) won in a coalition with the BJP, became chief minister. For Yadav, it got worse hereon.
In 2009, the RJD massively lost the Lok Sabha battle, going down to four seats from 22. Yadav himself lost one of the two seats he contested. Three years later, the party clocked its worst defeat in the Assembly election, falling to 22 seats from the 54 of Bihar’s 243 seats it had won in 2005. Next year’s Lok Sabha election would be Yadav’s first in nearly a quarter century when he is in power neither at the Centre nor in the state.
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Yadav’s chances to revive his political career looked up in June when the BJP and the JD(U) ended their 17-year alliance. That coalition had won 32 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in 2009 by combining upper-caste votes, who are 12 percent of Bihar’s 82 million people and traditionally the BJP’s bulwark, plus sections of the backward castes and the worst off among the Dalits, who together are more than a third of the state’s electorate.
But now that the 2014 joust looks every bit a triangular contest, Yadav believes the RJD is spectacularly placed to best the BJP and the JD(U). In their most recent face-off — the 2010 Assembly election — the JD(U) got 22 percent of the total votes cast to win 115 of the 140-odd seats it had contested. The BJP got 17 percent vote share to win 91 of the 101 seats it fought on. Together, the alliance scored 39 percent, a formidable performance.
But the RJD was no pushover. It got 19.5 percent votes, barely three percent behind the JD(U) and ahead of the BJP — although over a higher number of seats. Yadav thinks the BJP and the JD(U) would be easy prey fighting singly. In 2009, the RJD was placed second on as many as 19 Lok Sabha seats, losing six of them by less than 30,000 votes. Two others were lost by 30,000-50,000 votes.
The JD(U), goes the reasoning in Yadav’s camp, would totter without the upper-caste votes of the Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs and Kayasthas and the trader caste of the Vaishyas, who are counted among the backwards in Bihar but back the BJP. And the BJP would be similarly disadvantaged by the loss of the backward, Dalit and some Muslim votes that Kumar, himself a backward, had brought to the alliance.
On the other hand, after the BJP-JD(U) split, Yadav expects his caste brethren, the Yadavs, who are 11 percent of Bihar’s voters, to flock in ever higher numbers to the RJD. He expects the same from the state’s 17 percent Muslims, a section of whom earlier voted for the BJP-JD(U) because Kumar promised and delivered a largely secular administration. As for the upper castes, the RJD spin points to the fact that three of its Lok Sabha MPs besides Yadav are Rajputs. Yadav plans on fielding a number of upper-caste folks as candidates in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Taking no chances still, Yadav has been publicly apologising for his strident anti-upper caste politicking over the past four decades, which worsened inter-caste relations in Bihar and fuelled caste wars.
AND THE ROUGH
But then, there’s the other side. Yadav emerged as a giant on Bihar’s political firmament in 1990 by stringing together a political alliance of backward castes and the Dalits that ousted the upper castes from their decades’ old leadership of the state’s politics. Raising a slogan of MY — Muslims and Yadavs — he exhorted his supporters to literally wipe out the upper castes with the slogan “Bhura baal saaf karo”, bhura baal being an acronym for Bhumihars, Rajputs, Brahmins and Lalas (Kayasthas).
But by creating sub-categories among the backwards and the Dalits, Kumar may well have stolen Yadav’s place as the natural leader of all non-upper castes. In the first, Kumar excluded the Yadavs (and sundry others) as a sort of creamy layer, playing Santa Claus for the rest. These “extremely” backward castes (EBCS) account for 40 percent of all votes. In the second, of Bihar’s 22 Dalit sub-castes, Kumar categorised 21 as “maha” Dalits leaving out the dominant Dalit sub-caste of Paswan to marginalise Rajya Sabha MP Ram Vilas Paswan, who once had substantial political muscle but has been in the dungeon since losing in successive elections.
Moreover, no one in Bihar thinks that Yadav may actually provide good governance. The memory of Yadav’s 15-year misrule that spawned massive crime, lawlessness and corruption still makes people apoplectic. Besides, most backwards are still sore because, during his rule, the RJD leader empowered only his brethren, the Yadavs, providing them with the bulk of government contracts while ignoring all others.
Most ominous is the 1997 criminal case against him pertaining to the embezzlement of Rs 950 crore from government funds for livestock fodder. If the judge, who is scheduled to rule this month, finds him guilty, Yadav’s career may be over for years altogether. His wife, Rabri Devi, is already discredited politically, having lost both Assembly seats she fought in 2010. Two of their older sons have proved to be non-starters.
His only hope may lie in Misa, their eldest daughter, a stay-at-home mom now being seen at RJD rallies. But voters know nothing of her and nine months may be too short a time for her to deliver politically. And Yadav can’t imagine handing the party to a non-family politician.
Narendra Modi : Pied Piper, But Leading Where?
Claim to fame Hindu nationalist icon of development
Current status: Putative prime minister
Aspirations: To be prime minister
Chances: Charisma versus Castes
The frenzy among BJP supporters in Bihar is unmistakable. It cuts across the urban-rural divide, the age divide, the gender divide, and every other divide. Now that Modi is here, they exclaim, the BJP will sweep most of Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats. BJP’s Nand Kishore Yadav, the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly, told TEHELKA he reckons the party would be in the play in at least 15 seats. That is ambitious, given that the most the BJP has ever won is 12 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar — in partnership with the JD(U) in 2009 and with its previous avatar, the Samata Party, in 1999 (excluding the 14 seats that went to Jharkhand when that state was carved out of Bihar in 2000). Can Modi singlehandedly win Bihar for the BJP without the crutch of the JD(U)?
PATCHY PAST
It all depends on how big a leader Modi proves to be. Is he bigger than Lal Krishna Advani was in 1991? In the Lok Sabha election that summer, the BJP drew a blank in Bihar’s 40 seats. (Of Bihar’s 14 other seats that later went to Jharkhand, the BJP had won five.) This, despite the fact that BJP had roused massive public support, especially in Bihar, in the previous two years for its controversial campaign to build a temple in place of a mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, and that the then chief minister Yadav’s government had arrested Advani as he passed through Bihar while on a rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya to drum up support for the temple.
In successive state and Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s performance was at best lukewarm and at worst rather poor. In February 2005, the BJP won only 37 of the 103 seats it contested. In the second Assembly polls of 2005, the BJP’s seats went up to to 55 and in 2010 to 91.
REASON TO HOPE
BJP insiders in Patna believe they can create magic at next year’s Lok Sabha election because of Modi’s leadership, plus a mood of anti-incumbency against the Congress-led Central government, the marginalisation of the RJD, and anger with Kumar’s government over unfulfilled promises — such as raising salaries of contracted school teachers to the levels of the permanent staff.
Indeed, the state’s top BJP leaders claim credit for the achievements of their erstwhile ruling coalition with the JD(U), such as in building roads and improving the state’s finances, saying those departments were run by BJP ministers. On the other hand, they say, the JD(U) ministers were responsible for the mismanagement of flood as well as drought-hit regions or in the running of mid-day meal schemes in schools where poisoned food killed poor students.
Of the claim that the JD(U) would walk away with the votes of the backwards and the maha Dalits given Kumar’s munificence for them, BJP leaders are quick to point out that their party had had more EBC and maha Dalit ministers than the JD(U) did. The BJP parades its commitment to the backwards by giving a shout out to Nand Kishore Yadav, a prominent Yadav leader in the BJP, and Sushil Kumar Modi, who was deputy CM and finance minister in the coalition government and is a backward caste leader. In addition, the BJP is putting ebc and Dalit cadres in charge of most of the party’s 56,000 “booth” committees — which keep track of voters in their area and marshal them on election day — where these communities have sizable presence.
Of course, the biggest excitement in the BJP is over Modi’s emergence as the party’s national campaign head. Apart from projecting him as a backward caste leader, the BJP in Bihar is also playing up Modi’s Hindutva credentials unabashedly. A string of meetings are planned, beginning with a massive rally at Patna in October. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the party’s ideological parent, has pressed all its local units — shakhas — into rallying supporters to join the meetings. Hundreds of village and town hall meetings are planned to bring Modi’s message to the voters. To woo the maha Dalits, the RSS-BJP have organised mass feasts for them across the state.
SHAKY STILL
But, of course, there is always many a proverbial slip between the cup and the lip. Half of the 12 Lok Sabha seats the BJP won in 2009 gave it a margin of victory of less than 50,000 votes, including less than 10,000 on one seat. That could spin dangerously in a three-cornered contest. Three others were won by margins of 50,000-80,000, including the party’s Muslim poster boy, Syed Shahnawaz Hussain’s win from Bhagalpur. In any case, the nationally recognised BJP leaders from Bihar, such as Hussain, CP Thakur, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Shatrughan Sinha, are actually political lightweights in the state, having less sway than most state-level leaders.
And most state leaders themselves are of any reckoning only in and around Patna. Nand Kishore Yadav represents an Assembly seat in Patna, as does the party’s chief whip in the Assembly, Arun Sinha. Sushil Kumar Modi, a member of the indirectly elected legislative council, the Upper House of Bihar’s bicameral legislature, is dismissed by party insiders as a creature of Patna. Moreover, even state BJP leaders concede it won’t be easy to make substantial inroads into the backwards and Dalit votes without heavyweight leaders from those castes at the top. Two of the BJP’s foremost state leaders are Giriraj Singh and Ashwani Chaubey, both aggressive groupies of Narendra Modi, and both of whom are upper castes. Prem Kumar, an EBC leader who was a minister earlier, is angry because he lost out to Nand Kishore Yadav in the race to be the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly.
Will Modi’s charisma override caste loyalties that have traditionally reflected greater clout than Hindutva in Bihar’s elections? Both the BJP and its rivals seek an answer to that question, which will only begin to be answered after Narendra Modi’s arrival in October.
Nitish Kumar: The Dark Knight or the Joker?
Claim to fame: Good governance
Current status: Newly-minted secularism champion
Aspirations: Won’t say but wants to be PM
Chances: Development versus castes
Pavan Varma, former Indian Foreign Service officer and author, recalls asking Kumar last year what he thought of Modi’s chances to become the prime minister. Varma says he got a half-hour “tutorial” on the realities of India, its composite culture, national consensus, the need to carry people along, building and sustaining coalitions, and team spirit. Kumar’s supporters dismiss the charge that his rejection of Modi on grounds of the latter’s anti-Muslim sectarian image is political opportunism. They insist Kumar always kept the BJP in Bihar on a tight leash in their seven-plus years of running a coalition government, earning him the trust of Bihar’s Muslims. Yes, the split with the BJP has made the path to a win in 2014 a tad uncertain. Yet, Kumar is confident that the people of Bihar know his government’s worth and will vote for the JD(U).
THE PROTEAN PRAGMATIST
Kumar has been variously described as cautious, reclusive, non-confrontational and, of course, opportunist. His detractors have called him two-faced and diabolical, alleging that he says things to please in the moment but rarely means it. In 1994, when he broke away from Lalu Yadav’s Janata Dal in Bihar, he continued to play second fiddle to fellow former socialists, George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav among others, who too had broken away to form a rival camp named Samata Party. It was only in 2005, after Fernandes was eclipsed by a defeat of the BJP-led central coalition in 2004 and when Sharad Yadav himself lost the Lok Sabha poll, that Kumar emerged into his own.
And since then, it has virtually been a dream run for him. He has won two Assembly elections back-to-back, the second more spectacularly than the first, and returned for his JD(U) superb results in the 2009 Lok Sabha election on the back of his performance in the state. Now that he has broken from the BJP, good governance is the only card he has to play as the caste combinations are hardly in his favour.
READ THAT SCORECARD
Kumar has been a man in a hurry since becoming chief minister in November 2005. He targeted four constituencies: the EBCs, who alone form 35 percent of the state’s electorate; the maha Dalits; the poorest among the Muslims, known as “pasmanda musalman”; and women. He fired off his first term by reserving 50 percent seats in all panchayats for women, more than the constitutionally mandated one-third. His inducements for the backwards and the Dalits have included financial largesse such as scholarships and hostels, especially for their girls who were also given uniforms and bicycles to ride to school; building boundary walls for Muslim graveyards to protect them; and giving freebies such as radio transistors.
But more than such handouts, Kumar is basing his hopes to be victorious in 2014 on a widespread feeling of political empowerment his government has triggered by officially creating the special categories of the EBCs and maha Dalits. In addition, Kumar hopes that an image of a crime fighter, part true but also part pumped up by a pliant news media in the state, affords him a special place with the state’s electorate that had been fed up with the lawless rule of Lalu Yadav. Also, JD(U) leaders point out, they have the most Yadav MLAs, more than even the RJD.
STEEP UPHILL CLIMB
But that’s about all the chief minister can hope for. Since splitting from the BJP in June, Kumar and his JD(U) have ended up with the weakest caste coalition among the three front-ranking parties. And that, as JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan admitted in a conversation with Tehelka, makes it extremely vulnerable to a dip in electoral fortunes. As noted earlier, the JD(U) is unlikely to gain many upper-caste votes, especially since he has come out openly against Modi, a Hindutva icon.
The fact that Kumar’s own caste, the Kurmis, are a tiny 2.5 percent of the state’s electorate, and hence are politically insignificant, also doesn’t bode well for him. The other prominent backward caste group, the Koeris, who are around 4 percent, may be unsure too as one of their leaders, Rajya Sabha MP Upendra Kushwaha, quit the JD(U) in a huff earlier this year, miffed at being sidelined by the chief minister.
This is not just some cold caste calculation. As a senior BJP leader told TEHELKA in Patna, the JD(U) should worry because it does not have the support of any of the “aggressive” castes. These include the Bhumihars and the Rajputs among the upper castes, the Yadavs among the backwards, and the Paswans among the Dalits. Why is the support of at least one of them important? Because they chaperone the EBCs, the maha Dalits and others at the lower social spectrum to the voting booths. Conversely, the disadvantaged risk violence if they choose to vote against the wishes of these aggressive castes.
Worse still, the JD(U) has never been a cadre-rich party, unlike the BJP and the RJD. Indeed, the joke in Patna has been that in the BJP-JD(U) alliance, the BJP provided the cadre and Kumar’s party supplied the leaders. And this is actually true — many BJP MLAs in Bihar were “loaned” by the JD(U) to the BJP. Several of them are relatives of JD(U) leaders.
And lastly, as Pavan Varma admits, some voters may turn up disappointed as expectations from a government are “bound to outstrip” what it delivers. And lately, Nitish Kumar has had a tough run of luck with schoolteachers up in arms and children dying from mid-day meals at government schools.
ajit@tehelka.com
CORRIGENDUM: An earlier version of this story said that the BJP won 114 seats in the Bihar assembly election of February 2005 and had the most seats of all parties. This is incorrect. The BJP won 37 seats and it stood behind three other parties. The error is regretted. – Editor
The bizarre story of rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Haryana
What does it take for a rape to be declared a rape? A girl gone missing, her mutilated body found on a deserted stretch, an unprecedented three post-mortems? Apparently in Haryana, even that is not enough.
It has been seven days since a 20-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly raped and murdered in Haryana’s Jind city. There are no suspects and the police refuses to give details of their inquiries and investigations. The body has not been cremated; it’s lying wrapped in white sheets, in a refrigerated glass case in the grounds of Jind’s Samanya Hospital. It has for company, the girl’s father and about 300 protesters camped out in the hospital agitating everyday for justice and action from the police and the state.
In the midst of chants against CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the Congress party and the police force, the father Surat Singh sits silent, head downcast, in the centre of the agitation but not quite a part of it. A slight, wiry man, he recalls how his youngest daughter left their home in Baniya Khera gaon at 11 am on 24 August, going to Jind to give her Junior Board Teacher (JBT) exam. It was her final exam. Had she passed, three years of hard work would have finally paid off. She never made it for the exam.
The JBT exam was scheduled from 2 pm to 5 pm. At 4 pm Surat Singh got a call from an unknown man, saying he had found some papers with his number on them. Singh, busy at the time, says it didn’t strike him that anything was amiss. However, when their daughter didn’t make it home by 7pm, the family started getting worried. The father and his two sons went out searching for her, and when they found no trace of her whereabouts they went to the Pillukhera police station in Jind. The cops asked them to call back the unknown afternoon caller. It emerged that the man was a resident of Amarheri gaon, just outside Jind city, and that he had found the papers and a bag lying by the side of the road. They both belonged to Singh’s missing daughter. The family rushed to Jind where they spent all night searching for the girl with the police. They returned home defeated in the morning.
At 8am, passersby informed the police that they had found a girl’s body, lying in the bushes by a dust road that runs by a canal, just out of Jind city, about a kilometer away from where her bag was found.
What happened next is a typical example of a poor man pitted against the system – helplessness, delays in procedure, apathy and finally police violence.
The morning the body was found, precious hours were lost when two police stations kept Surat Singh waiting as they fought over the jurisdiction of the case. The FIR was finally registered in the City police station. The family’s lawyer, Rajat Kalsan, known for taking up cases of Dalit atrocities, says that initially the police did put Sections 302 and 376, pertaining to murder and rape. But they didn’t put the SC/ST (PoA) act as the identity of the perpetrators is yet unknown. Only then did they take the body to the Samanya Hospital, Jind, where the family arrived with some of the villagers.
According to Kalsan, one of the doctors did a cursory examination of the body, accompanied by some women from the girl’s village. These women claim they saw burn and bite marks on the girl’s torso, her neck and hand looked broken, and that her genital area looked injured. “She was fully clothed when they found her, but her salwar was red with bleeding; there was blood down to her legs. We took off her clothes and saw the body. It looked like someone had forced themselves on her,” say Kamlesh Devi and Angrezo Devi, two of the women who were present.
Anger was mounting over the delays by both the police and the medical staff. The villagers, whose numbers were now swelling started agitating. Someone, it is not yet clear who, took the body from the mortuary to the road and the protestors blocked traffic.
The police reacted in the typical fashion – lathi-charging the protestors, hitting men and women alike, arresting three men, pressing charges against 19 others by name and 300 unknown agitators. On 29 August, in a meeting with the press, Rajat Kalsan and Dalit social activists from the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, the DC Rajeev Rattan and the SP Balwant Singh Rana alleged that the protestors where destroying buses. Kalsan says that the women did hit a bus’s windows, but with twigs that could cause no harm.
Moving the body was a sore point. “I don’t think you know who did it. The girl’s father told me himself,” the DC snapped at the activists.
One of the allegations coming out of this violent mess is that the DSP Adarsh Deep Singh kicked the dead body on the road and slapped the father. Kamlesh Devi describes him as a tall sardar in a red pagdi. This was apparently captured by Janta TV and aired before suddenly being pulled off. Though the video is no longer available online, protestors are standing firm on what they saw. The DC and the SP refused to comment on this, and dodged repeated questions asked by Asha Kowtal from NCDHR and Kalsan.
When the postmortem conducted at the Jind hospital on 25 August ruled out rape and murder, the protests intensified and the family refused to cremate the body. A second post-mortem was ordered at Rohtak’s PGIMS. This was on 27 August. Again the authorities released a statement denying both rape and murder. On 28 August, the now decomposed body was sent to AIIMS for a third post-mortem, conducted by a 5-member team lead by Dr Sudhir Gupta, head of forensics, AIIMS. The report was released to the Jind police at 6 pm on 29 August. On the morning of 30 August, an Indian Express article stated that the AIIMS reports ruled out rape and murder, but said that there were traces of celphos poisoning.
Dr Gupta denies this, saying he neither ruled out rape nor mentioned celphos poisoning. According to Kalsan, the news was released by the Jind police to the media on 29th.
Gupta is however, carefully neutral in his words, “I cannot use the term rape, that is a legal term not a medical one. I have written that the police should conduct further investigation.” As this story goes to press, Kalsan is now in possession of the report. According to him it neither confirms nor denies rape.
Meanwhile, a 32 member committee had been formed to look into the matter and decide the future course of action. The members included the lawyer Kalsan, members of Baniya Khera’s panchayat and party workers from the Bahujan Samaj Party, who champion themselves on taking on all cases of Dalit atrocities in Haryana.
In all this talk of multiple investigations, large committees, people baying for the blood of those unknown perpetrators, the quietest voice are those of the mother and the father. Their answers come in short sentences, routinely interrupted by others – be they the village women sitting with the mother, or the committee members with the father. This clamour is all pervasive. The meeting with the DC and the SP quickly dissolved into loud arguments between all parties, with demands about inquiries going unanswered and ending with the DC claiming again and again that the girl was like his sister. Similarly, a meeting between the activists and the accompanying press and the members of the BSP got lost in arguments over Dalit identity and who had greater faith in Ambedkar. And even after all this, one cannot confirm whether that young Dalit girl was raped or not. The fact that after the Jind and Rohtak examinations, which ruled out rape, after statements by the police that tried to say it was suicide, the AIIMS report that ends with a maybe is a step forward, is a sad commentary on the absurd state of affairs. The roads to Jind are still being blocked by protestors, the body is still not cremated, and yet, there are no answers to be had.
Mastertakes
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Gauri Varma on Art
Made by Tripura Devi, a senior village artist of Madhubani, Bihar, this painting ‘Kamadhenu’ (the sacred cow), draws one’s gaze with its serene circular face and hypnotic eyes. Adjacent is a richly coloured Ardhnarishwar (fusion of Shiv and Shakti), while endearing forms of deities nestle beneath. Devi paints in the Mithila Bharni (‘filled-in’) style. The colours are a mix of plant extracts, which the artist prepares herself (notably, browns from the pipal bark), local bazaar powders, and fabric paints. She’s one of the few Maithil artists who uses a ‘pihua’ (bamboo stick with cotton-wool wrapped on its tip) to fill in colours.
Varma is the founder of Lokatma
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Amit Varma on Books
Scandinavian crime fiction is in fashion these days, but it really began 48 years ago, when Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö released the first in a series of 10 crime novels. Roseanna is a masterclass in storytelling, immaculately plotted and written: its protagonist, Martin Beck, is a grumpy policeman who can’t handle relationships or authority, is as much a fictional character as a template.
Varma is a Mumbai-based novelist
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Tushar Prashar on Music
After getting thousands of hits on SoundCloud, London Grammar kicked off last winter with their debut track Hey Now. The London-based progressive art-rock trio also came out with two popular EPs, Metal and Dust and Strong earlier this year. Their style is a blend of ambient, ethereal and classic sounds with melancholic guitar, soaring vocals and plaintive lyrics. Hannah Reid’s powerful vocals are complemented excellently by the experimental sound styles of Dot Major and Dan Rothman.
Prashar is a Beatboxer and Music Writer
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Ansh Ranvir Vohra on Film
Tamas, a controversial mini series by Govind Nihalani, stands out from the usual crop of films on Partition. Based on a book by Bhisham Sahni, the film takes focus away from the trailblazers of the nation’s freedom, and instead tells the story of an untouchable, who inadvertently becomes the cause of a riot in a small town. Nihalani’s characters are relatable, his story simple, and his treatment organic. So instead of rousing a feeling of immense patriotism, it leaves you with an unsettling feeling in the gut.
Vohra is a Mumbai-based Producer
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Vandana Verma on food
Oryzza in Aundh, Pune, is as unique a place as it sounds. It’s a well-lit store with bright coloured interiors giving the place a very warm and welcoming feel. The menu offerings are pre-decided combinations or make your- own, which they call classic or make-your-own Oryzza. My personal favourite would surely be the Thai, which is basically an aromatic Thai green curry layered with garlic coriander rice and sautéed chicken. But the other varieties like Burmese, Makhani and others are equally good. They have been planning to serve more varieties of gravies and appetizers soon.
Kalbag is a Chef and owner of Mini Wok and Eat in Pune
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‘Satyagraha’ is an excellent effort to capture the zeitgeist of contemporary India
At the start of my interview with Prakash Jha before the release of his latest film, Satyagraha, I told him that it was my favourite of his since Gangaajal. “Really? But that was such a simple film,” he said of his 2003 film about the police in a Bihar district indulging in vigilante justice. My point, precisely. Jha’s early films — Damul, Mrityudand, Gangaajal, Apaharan — were ostensibly simple, mainstream movies about life in small towns, but had a lot to say about a rapidly-changing India and its people. Raajneeti, Aarakshan and Chakravyuh, on the other hand, were much more ambitious in scope, setting out to tackle complex political issues, but were watered down by commercial considerations and failed to either say anything substantive about the issues or tell a compelling story.
Satyagraha is, in a way, a marriage of the two styles. It sets out to tackle another major issue — people’s anger against corruption — and does cater to the demands of the Bollywood formula, but cleverly subverts it in the second half to make the points it wanted to. It’s very deftly done. Until the interval, Jha takes his time setting up the pieces, establishing where each of his primary characters is coming from and how they come together. But the paths they take are so obvious, so typically Bollywood, that you go into the break dreading another hour of good triumphing over evil, of a hackneyed plot celebrating idealism and middle-class angst (complete with peppy anthems) but never really putting that idealism to the test. Thankfully, Jha has quite a few aces up his sleeve and the last third, at least, is a fascinating examination of the thin line between a politician channeling the rage of the people and a rabble-rouser, between uncompromising idealism and ossified maximalism.
Though the film is, at first glance, about corruption, it is also a comment on young India and how it engages with politics. The era of privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation has given India’s middle-class youth an unprecedented social mobility, a chance to aspire for something better than a secure government job. For the first decade and a half of that era, this meant an opportunity to make a fortune either within the country or abroad with little thought given to the government of the day or its policies. The system, after all, was heavily skewed in their favour. The political consensus of promoting growth above all else suited them well. But it was a gilded age; the unsustainability of the model is currently playing out on our news channels. The consensus has been, if not discarded altogether, challenged, and the nation’s youth has been forced to engage with the process of building a new one that takes into account the many systemic flaws of the country that cannot be brushed under the carpet any longer. With an election around the corner, no one knows which way, if at all, this massive new constituency of young people will vote.
Jha’s stand-in for young India is Manav (Ajay Devgn), who eschews the idealism of his do-gooder friend Akhilesh (Indraneil Sengupta) and Akhilesh’s father Dwarkanath (Amitabh Bachchan) to go and found a multi-crore business empire. When Akhilesh dies and Dwarkanath, infuriated by the local bureaucracy’s refusal to sanction the compensation for his death, slaps the district magistrate and is arrested, Manav is forced to get involved and start an agitation for his release. (It’s a classic Jha device, getting his characters involved through apolitical, personal motivations.) His skills at running a company comes in handy in organising protests, and soon the agitation evolves into a movement against corruption and the slimy politicians (epitomised by the excellent Manoj Bajpayee) who run the state.
There are parallels aplenty to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement in the film; Jha is at his caustic best when talking about how that agitation lost its bearings. Manav’s movement gains traction because Dwarkanath is, like Anna, a symbol for popular outrage. It is characterised by an omnibus anger for all that’s wrong with India, an inchoate expression of rage against the machine. The politicians’ reactions are also familiar — they first ignore it, then stonewall, then try to co-opt it. Any attempts by the state government to compromise are scuttled by its corrupt coalition partners, making it look weak and ineffectual. But when it comes to taking that anger and using it to create something better, Manav and his lieutenant Arjun (Rampal) refuse to compromise, insisting on a set of demands unilaterally decided and which brooks no alterations. Eventually, the lack of progress rots the movement and people give in to their basest instincts, assuming that their leaders consent.
Creditably, Jha is never hampered by ideology, always trying to understand his characters’ motivations, what makes them good or evil. He does pander to commercial sensibilities by restricting them to black and white — Manav’s shady past business dealings come out in the open, but all it takes is one contrite apology to win him back his credibility — but does not excise nuance altogether. In an era defined by constant arguments between the State and its people, Satyagraha is an excellent effort to capture the zeitgeist of contemporary India. And, perhaps more importantly, a riveting film.
The Hindu Rate of Decline
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) miserable attempt to mount an ill-disguised religio-political procession from 25 August in the temple town of Ayodhya has left everyone astounded. After failing repeatedly in over a decade to reignite the sectarian fire, did the self-acclaimed torchbearers of the Hindu faith really think they had traction with the masses?
“The VHP is a highly discredited organisation with no support among the common people as well as Ayodhya’s religious leaders,” says Mahant Gyan Das, the chief priest of the centuries’ old Hanuman Garhi temple and a formidable opponent of the VHP-led bid to build a Ram temple on the spot where once the 16th-century Babri Masjid stood. Adds Yugal Kishore Shastri, chief priest of another temple nearby and an unsparing critic of the VHP: “Divided along caste lines, the sadhus and saints are aligned with different political parties. Hardly any are with the VHP.” Which means hardly any are with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political arm of the self-styled Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which the VHP is the religious wing.
Indeed, barring the heydays of the VHP-BJP-RSS movement of the late 1980s that culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, the VHP has never succeeded in rousing the hundreds of millions of India’s Hindus. The VHP’s goals to “recover” various other mosques, which the Hindu right claims Muslim “invaders” of the past built after demolishing ancient Hindu temples, never quite gained popular support.
For decades the VHP had been in the vanguard of the RSS’s bid to expand among the poorer tribal and backward communities, especially in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Later, the bogey of Hindus converting to Christianity due to missionary work became its bugbear. Nearly all the violence against Christians and missionaries in the last two decades in these states can be put down to the VHP and its thuggish offshoot, the Bajrang Dal.
The VHP was seeded at a meeting of 60-odd religious heads and Hindu-minded activists that RSS stalwart MS Golwalkar called at Mumbai in 1964 after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to create the states of Punjab with a Sikh majority on the border with Pakistan, and Nagaland with a Christian majority in the northeast on the border with Burma. Thus, the VHP began with the war cry of “Hinduism in danger”.
But the VHP would not develop its fiery and militant approach to “safeguard” the Hindu religion until the 80s. According to historian Manjari Katju of the University of Hyderabad, the VHP could not initially echo the shrill sectarian pitch of the RSS as many non-RSS stalwarts adorned its top ranks, such as Sushil Muni of the Jain community and Karan Singh, a scion of Jammu and Kashmir’s former ruling dynasty.
“[T]he early VHP… was not conceived as a front-ranking, overt and loud political outfit, but as a socio-religious organisation that had to calmly feed into the RSS’s agenda of exclusive Hindu nationalism,” Katju wrote in her seminal book, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics in 2004. “Evidence suggests that it did not have a clear-cut plan to regenerate the Hindus as political community.”
The VHP’s fiery militancy first emerged when hundreds of Dalits embraced Islam in 1981 in Tamil Nadu’s Theni district. The VHP launched a nationwide campaign to “save” the Hindu religion that it claimed faced a serious threat from Islam. Its next milestone would be the dispute over the Babri mosque, which both Hindus and Muslims claimed as theirs but neither had access to. The issue jumped to the centre stage of national politics in 1986 after then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, in an ill-advised move, allowed the doors of the mosque to be unlocked for Hindu devotees.
With some local “saints” and religious heads, the VHP quickly revived its dormant movement to wrest control of the disputed structure. It helped that the outfit had developed an organisational structure in the preceding four years. An assembly of religious heads acted as a central authority, supported by advisory committees of representatives of various Hindu sects. Today, the VHP boasts over 6,700 branches across India. Over 3,000 functionaries work full-time. It claims to have three million primary members around the country.
But the VHP’s glory days are long gone. Time was firebrand leaders such as Ashok Singhal and Praveen Togadia commanded frenzied hordes of thousands. Last week as Singhal was arrested in Lucknow and Togadia at Ayodhya, few bothered to protest. “The VHP has no organisational structure in UP and did no ground work to mobilise support,” says a BJP leader asking not to be named. Admits Mahavir, VHP Organising Secretary for UP and Uttarakhand: “We work hard but sometimes the result is not to our expectations.”
Inevitably, the VHP’s decline has caused that of the BJP’s, especially in UP. Ram temple stalwarts such as Uma Bharati and Vinay Katiyar who brought great electoral success to the BJP are now virtual ciphers. Former party presidents LK Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi, who once competed with each other to lead the Ram temple movement, are struggling to keep their slots in the party.
“People are now wise enough to understand that the Ram temple will never be constructed by such gimmicks,” says Sushil Jaisawal, an Ayodhya resident who represents the traders’ association, which was once the VHP’s bedrock but now bitterly opposes it. “It was possible to demolish the mosque when there was a friendly government in the state. But a temple can never be built with only a few thousand volunteers.”
With inputs from VN Bhatt in Lucknow
ajit@tehelka.com
‘The VHP has taken a beating as an articulator of Hindus’
Manjari Katju, the author of Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics, speaks to Ajit Sahi on the VHP ’s failures and prospects
Edited Excerpts from an interview
The VHP failed to attract the support of the people or of the sadhus and saints for its parikrama. What do you make of it?
In popular perception, the VHP indulges in vandalism and violence for political purposes. I don’t think the people feel that Ayodhya should occupy a high priority in their lives.
The BJP has disassociated itself from the parikrama. Do you accept that contention?
Looking at the BJP-VHP relation in the past few years, it is clear that the BJP is cautious about getting too closely identified with the VHP. Both belong to the Sangh Parivar. A public disassociation does not mean an absence of the BJP’s tacit approval of VHP activities.
You wrote in your book that the VHP had lost its appeal. How do you view its standing today?
The VHP’s standing as a mass forum articulating the views of the majority community has taken a beating. People are now putting a high priority on their economic well-being and material securities. I also think Hindus feel more secure than in the past.
Do you see the BJP making Hindutva and/or the Ram temple an issue in the Lok Sabha elections?
The BJP is caught in a dilemma, not for the first time. I think it will go for the developmental agenda but also include Ram temple somewhere in the fine print. Being in power at the Centre it realised it cannot win elections solely by inflaming religious passions.
Do you see any chance of the VHP’s political revival?
The VHP has also involved itself in issues of education, health, disaster relief, etc., both in urban and rural areas. It is here that VHP’s communalisation takes roots and has serious repercussions. One cannot rule out the rise of the VHP in the future.
ajit@tehelka.com
Jesus and the Technicolour Dreamcoat
Picture The Last Supper. Jesus and his 12 disciples sitting across a table laden with food and drink, not in Leonardo da Vinci’s classical Renaissance style, but painted in the unmistakable tradition of Indian folk art. The eyes are wide, the human figures asymmetrical, the dimensions flat and da Vinci’s decidedly more grand and solemn backdrop replaced by colourful curtains and a smiling sun and moon. The painting is part of The Last Supper series, a distinctly witty reinterpretation of Jesus’ life by artist Madhvi Parekh.
In a career spanning 50 years, Parekh has exhibited in almost 100 solo and group shows, establishing herself as one of the most respected contemporary artists in India. It is tempting to label her art as simple, with folk and tribal accents. However, as critics have pointed out, there’s more to her body of work; she cleverly incorporates her folk art sensibilities into subjects that are, in turn, drawn from her personal experiences. And so, a typical frame would have animals and birds she saw while growing up in a little village in Gujarat, as well as tall buildings from the cities she has travelled to all over the world. As her contemporary, artist Anjolie Ela Menon says, “She has successfully contemporised elements of folk and tribal art.”
The Last Supper is the 71-year-old artist’s latest work in that tradition. The fact that the Biblical theme differs from her repertoire of indigenous content makes it all the more interesting. And though the women that generally populate her works are absent in this series, there is still that element of rustic nature and fantasy. In The Portrait of Christ I, the all-important star that guided the three wise men to Jesus’ birth is accompanied by the sun and the moon, the divine elements in Hindu mythology. To draw a crowd outside of art aficionados, the first viewing of this work was held in Bishop’s College chapel in Kolkata in 2011. For a week, the paintings stayed in the church, open to the public that came for mass. And now, the Seagull Foundation for the Arts has brought the exhibition to Delhi’s Visual Arts Gallery.
Parekh has always had a child-like fascination for Biblical tales. As a young girl in Sanjaya, the village in Gujarat, she and her three sisters would always be excited about Christmas. “I also had a friend. She was Christian. She would tell me stories, about immaculate conception, the birth in the stable. Those were lovely stories,” recalls Parekh. In 2007, she visited Jerusalem with her artist husband Manu, and the interest eventually translated into an idea for a series. It was a portrait of Christ, absolutely serene and beautiful, in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, that left her astounded. She also watched people burst into reverent tears at the Unction Stone, where Christ’s body was laid for anointment, or in churches, and all spots considered holy. “These are stories of miracles. There are many in Hindu myths too. It’s very interesting work,” she now says.
Yet, the shapes on canvas are anything but reverent. They are, in curator Alka Pande’s words, “a cross-cultural translation of Biblical stories”. As Parekh’s interest in Christianity preceded her knowledge, she found herself giving her own meanings to Biblical symbols. Noah’s Ark carries 12 disciples, there is a woman seated at the table in The Last Supper (she may or may not be Mary Magdalene) and Jesus the shepherd in Christ Travelling With Animals could be a shepherd from any Indian village. “The flora and fauna of the Bible is drawn in her own style,” Pande points out. And because her point of discovery has been Jerusalem, the city’s tangled history with the Abrahamic faiths pops up on her canvas, with church spires and domes rubbing shoulders.
As an artist, Parekh does not attach much meaning to what goes where on canvas. “There is no particular reason; sometimes things just happen on canvas. It is fantasy,” she says. Perhaps that’s why watching these frames is liberating for a viewer, as they feel free to draw their own interpretations. “What you see around yourself, in the light and in the shadows, can be art. I want to paint what anyone would understand,” says Parekh. There is no grand vision behind this series, but there is a story, a narrative that makes these works even more engaging and accessible.
Perhaps this irreverence has something to do with the fact that Parekh does not have any formal training. She only started drawing at the age of 24, a time when she was living in Bombay and pregnant with her first daughter, and took to painting as a hobby. Her interest was piqued and soon Manu began to teach her the basics. At the beginning, she’d draw circles and squares, and soon she started attaching limbs to those shapes and drawing figures from her village. Staircases became a running motif, an inspiration drawn from a childhood accident when she fell from the stairs. “It’s quite a progress, from drawing squares on a piece of paper to painting The Last Supper. Sometimes I get embarrassed looking back at my early work,” Parekh laughs. “But it is important to see it, and remember where one comes from.” In this progression, argues Menon, she became one of the first artists of her generation to follow in the tradition of Jamini Roy’s folk and tribal art. The reverse painting technique that Parekh eventually began to use in 2006 was inspired by Nalini Malani, an artist Parekh has collaborated with on group shows.
Parekh is not precious about admitting her influences and borrowings; her originality still shines through. “At a time when Indian art was taking a very serious turn, there was wit and humour in her work,” Menon says. In his essay The Centre and the Periphery, critic Jyotindra Jain writes that “Madhvi was not trained in an art school but it is not that she has had no exposure to the world of modern art or to new materials and techniques. She is poised on the fence between her personal world, ‘unspoilt’ by ‘training’, and the formal history of art, which continuously and consciously explores new possibilities of expression.” In the basement of her south Delhi residence, a massive canvas of a new version of The Last Supper is being finished. The style is the same as her other works, but the colour scheme, she says, has been inspired by Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica.
Today, Madhvi commands both respect and a high price. Her 48”x72” canvas (Portrait of Christ I) is priced 12 lakh. Her standing in the art fraternity is that of an artist unafraid of pushing the boundaries of imagination. Though she admits it was Manu who taught her how to draw, she is careful about demarcating their work. “My husband, my daughter Manisha and I all paint, but our work is different from each other,” she says firmly. The Last Supper is a convincing evidence of her characteristic humour and a very personal, very unique style.
The Last Supper will be on at the Visual Arts Gallery, New Delhi, from 1 to 7 September
aradhna@tehelka.com
‘Classical art needs to be constantly reinvented’
What one incident formed your artistic vision?
Growing up in a liberal family in Ahmedabad encouraged me to think out of the box. My guru, Kumudini Lakhiaji, always questioned set norms. Something written 5,000 years ago needn’t be followed to the letter. That put me on a path of exploration and doubt. With surety, one arrives at a full stop. That Ahmedabad is very different now.
How is Ahmedabad different now?
I’m not a fan of Modi. But politics aside, it has become polarised. There are some progressive pockets, such as the National Institute of Design. Back then progressiveness was spearheaded by certain families, such as the Sarabhais. There was a lot of push for women’s education and empowerment. There was liberalisation, but with a lot of responsibility. That grounding is not there today.
What are the thoughts you try to translate into your dance?
There are many. My dance has always been evolving. My work started with a lot of women’s issues, human issues. That was a form of catharsis. I moved on to more textured approach, then more tangible themes, But the disquiet and the horror of Delhi last December kept brewing. Now I’ve come full circle with Within, which explores the binaries of being human.
Why reinvent Kathak in a contemporary direction?
Classical art is constantly reinvented. It’s how art evolves. The shift of Kathak from temples to courts caused great upheaval. There was a lot of input from the then contemporary practitioners. With contemporary dance, based on Kathak, the dance is from the seed of Kathak, watered with contemporary sensibilities.
How well do cultural institutions support the arts?
Institutions such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi do provide support, but they need to see tradition as a living art form. Remember the moonlight, the firelight, the glistening marble of temples and courts. How does one invoke that in a black-box theatre?
A Fire is blazing
For a country where politics is all-pervasive, there’s precious little to be found in mainstream Indian cinema. When our films do discuss politics, subtlety and nuance are alien concepts, sacrificed easily at the altar of easy questions and answers. Prakash Jha, however, has no fear of complexity. His films over the last two decades have examined the various ways our country has changed, and the decidedly difficult questions those changes ask of who we are.
Satyagraha, Jha’s much-anticipated next film released on August 30, is possibly his most political. But Jha, it can be argued, isn’t a political filmmaker. His films are riddled with political figures who speak in political jargon, but Jha’s area of expertise is human nature. Understanding why we believe in what we do, and what goes into making us who we choose to be.
At one point in the film, Manav (Ajay Devgn) points to a young man, Ravi Kumar, and calls him the future of India. Ravi’s parents, he explains, were labourers who did not want him to go to the ramshackle government school and struggled to pay for a private education. He got a job in a call centre, and wants to take his destiny in his own hands. He doesn’t believe in mai-baap sarkar; he considers himself a client of the government, paying taxes and expecting efficient public services in return. If he doesn’t get those services, he has the right to refuse to pay his taxes.
It’s a characterisation that would make Rousseau roll in his grave. Surely there’s more to citizenship than mere clientelism, more to building a welfare state than giving value for money to the two or three percent of our population who pay income tax. But Jha is a man who’d rather deal with what is than what should be. For all the Leftist handwringing over the demise of empathy in post-liberalisation India, it is a reality that cannot be denied. An aspirational and upwardly-mobile middle class is naturally going to demand efficiency before greater concerns of social justice. “They could be Ravi Kumar,” he says, pointing to the waiters serving us coffee. “They know that if they do not perform, they can be thrown out of the job. So, similarly, they want the people they are paying — that is, the government — to perform. My generation was hugely attached to the State. Depended on it. Lived for it. Aspired towards becoming a part of it. This generation is self-made. The government is its last priority. It has seen, and is bearing the brunt of, the government exiting every institution. So, it’s not loyal to the government, and will naturally approach it as a client.”
“Democracy,” he goes on, “is being renegotiated in this country. I see a new nation-state theory emerging, being born out of the compulsions of young India.” What that theory is, Jha doesn’t know. But he’s fascinated by the way it might play out, by the prospect of a new polity being created through this social churning. “I think it is a tumultuous moment in our history. We are all waiting for it, whatever ‘it’ is, to emerge. I wish there was a Gandhi today. He would have found a way to channel this angst towards some form of political motivation. But I am as clueless as you are about what will happen.”
He is content to observe and analyse, to study the contradictions of human nature without making some sort of pronouncement, or coming to some moral conclusion. His own views don’t factor, or rather they may factor but so do opposing views, so you are never sure which particular set of views is his.
So, in Satyagraha, Manav’s views are not above dispute. In fact, Amitabh Bachchan’s Dwarkanath Anand is the anti-Manav, ranting about a generation of egoists chasing material wealth and not giving a damn about the nation. They eventually reconcile because of a shared personal loss, but throughout the movie continue to stand for very different things. No judgement is passed on either man’s worldview. The film eventually chooses one over the other, but is open-ended enough for two different people to leave the theatre with two very different messages.
We are meeting at Jha’s hotel in the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, a stone’s throw away from 10, Janpath. Jha is in the capital to promote his film, as well as to release a book about the movie, published by Om Books. It seems subversive to discuss revolution in such manicured environs, in a place so secure in its wealth and influence. The past two years have seen the confidence of our rich and powerful shaken by Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement and the tumults that ensued. Much like Raajneeti, Jha’s 2010 film about dynastic politics, was hyped before its release as a biopic of the Gandhi family, most of the pre-release buzz about Satyagraha has centred around the similarities to the story of Anna’s life. It is a charge Jha has refuted every time it’s been put to him. This denial seems disingenuous once you watch the film. Much of Satyagraha’s plot almost identically follows almost entirely the sequence of events in the actual protests; Bachchan’s supporters even wear white Gandhi caps with ‘Jan Satyagraha’ written on them, much like the ubiquitous ‘I Am Anna’ caps from 2011.
Jha is coy about the similarities. It’s not a film about Team Anna, he says; he intended to tell a story of the political milieu of contemporary India. It is, more than anything, a film about anger. The action begins, after all, with Dwarkanath slapping the district magistrate. He is arrested, and Manav attempts to release him by starting a public agitation. The people’s anger, initially manufactured through savvy social networking, soon boils over into a major agitation. The various players attempt to channel that anger to suit their various agendas, until they realise it isn’t something that is within their power to control. The heady feeling of having a mob at their disposal changes the protagonists, alters the course of the movement. There are lessons there for our anti-corruption crusaders. In fact, Yogendra Yadav of the Aam Aadmi Party, who was present at a special screening of the film, told Jha that he wanted his entire party high command to watch it.
Rather than the Anna agitation, Jha looks to the protests in Delhi after last December’s horrifying gang rape as the inspiration behind his film. The “thousands of young Indians assembling day after day, standing up to lathi-charges and water cannons,” was, he feels, the highest point of social unrest in recent Indian history. It is movements like this, leader-less and agenda-less expressions of anger, that Jha sees as the way of the future. “It is what young India has come to epitomise.”
What comes of that anger is, of course, a matter of conjecture. It could be the first step in a major revolution. It could remain a battle of attrition, where the political class stares down every outburst without compromise. It could simply fizzle out. It could lead to the rise of another Gandhi. It could also lead to another Hitler, capitalising on anger and fear to grab power. Whatever happens, however, one can be fairly certain that Prakash Jha will be there, watching, learning, taking notes. Probably with a film crew on hand.
ajachi@tehelka.com
