One of Anurag Kashyap’s most direct films on electoral politics, Gulaal, started off as being about college politics. However, it was with the location — Rajasthan — that it found specificity and context in terms of the larger socio-economic politics. Like the fading away of the aristocracy. All the royals the film’s team met during the research retained a sense of pride despite having lapsed into bad days.
“While writing we preempted their palaces turning into heritage resorts and hotels, Neemrana had just been acquired… There was this very local politics of having been betrayed by the Congress, the history of Swatantrata Party. The mainstream politics in the state, however, was not fought on the Rajput identity as much, it was still caste-based. All these came into play [in the film],” Kashyap looks back.
Politics has been an integral part of Kashyap's cinema — be it a Black Friday or Mukkabaaz . “Even Raman Raghav 2.0 was very political... I want to say everything; put it out there. What bothers me, I will say it... I am not offering solutions. Every solution leads to a problem. Democracy was a solution to capitalism. That led to its own problem,” he says. Not just the subjects and the script, the songs in his films have their own political parlance.
“Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and Paash have been my inspirations; Dhumil's “ Sansad Se Sadak Tak ”. Music is the best way to talk politics in this country,” he says. Even in not so overtly political films. “If someone sits down to decode " Taar bijli se patle hamare piya " song in Gangs of Wasseypur, it talks of the political history of Bihar. There are names by which various political leaders have been called. It refers to JP, Laloo, Jagjivan Ram everyone,” says Kashyap.
In Gulaal he decided to look at politics at the most basic level — of a party in formation. The narrative inspiration came from the seminal Nazi documentary, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will . There was also Sahir Ludhianvi’s song from Pyaasa — “ Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai ” . A decade after Gulaal got released, Sahir’s original song and its reinterpretation by Piyush Mishra — “ O ri duniya ” — in the Kashyap film, continue to resonate and sound relevant in today’s times. As do the portrayal of vote bank and separatist politics.
Gulaal lays out a plethora of characters — the innocent student Dileep Singh, the Shakesperean fool and Dukey Bana who Kashyap thinks has a larger relevance in the contemporary electoral politics. “What Dukey Bana talks about is facts but puts them together out of context. It is pretty much like what is happening today. People don’t have a sense of history, history is also being rewritten and manipulated,” he says. They talk about how Hindustan didn’t bow down to Ghazni: “The idea of Hindustan was a region, not a country. It had lots of princely states. British drew the boundary and made it a country. Nobody talks about how the idea of India didn’t exist before 1947.” Historically the leaders have been using the idea of India without giving it perspective, he says. “They use it for their gains, They use caste system. India-Pakistan problem will never get solved because it doesn’t help any political party.”
Similarly, the politicians are using the sense of identity and making people feel that the “outsiders” are taking away their rights, he thinks. “Unequal distribution of any kind of wealth or rights is what politics thrives on,” he says, “So the one who doesn’t have it, is easily manipulated into believing that something that was rightfully his has been taken away.” It’s enough to create resentment and disgruntlement.
Dukey Bana in Gulaal is that quintessential manipulator who is in turn being manipulated by the one holding the threads of the political game. “He is a misguided warrior, a pawn on the forefront [of politics]; he is being manipulated because he believes in manipulation, goes through a systematic process,” says Kashyap. It’s what happens in the shakhas and the madrasas, says the filmmaker. Giving people a different sense of history, catch and train them young, make them believe in some kind of a god or ideology. “A lot of people don’t see through that, they see it as truth,” says Kashyap.
So can the narrative be easily changed in the post-truth world? “One doesn’t know what is the narrative any more. The other day the PM spoke about how stampede happened in 1953 Kumbh. Who is there to contradict that?” asks Kashyap. Everybody’s sense of history is twisted, he thinks.
He looks back at how he was taken in with demonetisation. “Hum sab bewakoof the (We were all stupid). I also said that it was a great move. I didn’t understand the repercussions of it. I assumed that it had been thought through. The larger perspective was shown to me by someone else,” he says.
“There is no alternative” is a narrative he opposes vehemently. “Even within the BJP there are five better candidates,” he says. His biggest problem with the current government is the “lies”. “How simply and easily they propagate the lies and how the media plays along… Koi sach bolta hi nahi hai (Nobody speaks the truth),” he says.
The rabid trolling and attacking, the atmosphere of fear and hate, is another big issue in the times of the rise and rise of the social media. Kashyap says that he has fought battles for many films in various political eras but not in the midst of such hate-mongering. “I fought the Black Friday case when Congress was in power,” he recollects.
As a filmmaker he finds himself dealing with a system that constantly questions his intentions. "They have decided the you are coming with an agenda. If I am questioning some lapses within the government, they have decided I am representing the Congress, talking on its behalf. For me it's very important to see the enemy within than outside," he says.
Kashyap claims that he is not a party-specific guy. “I had to change my Twitter bio: Neither Left not Right or Centre. I am diagonal,” says he. It was because everybody kept asking him that being anti-Modi, is he then pro-Congress? “Why can’t I just focus on the candidate from my area? I am looking for someone who can fix the road outside my building,” he says, adding the final word: “I fight the government, I always will fight the government.”
