In the 1938 Marathi film, Brahmachari , Meenakshi Shirodkar slipped into what was Indian cinema’s first swimsuit ever, as the sultry siren Kishori who seduces the self-avowed celibate, Audumbar (director Master Vinayak), with the playful ditty, ‘Yamuna Jali Khelu Khel’ . A rattled Audumbar, in khaki shorts, feebly fields off her overtures by mouthing hymns from the ‘Hanuman Chalisa’.
A dip in the ghat might only have deepened his self-denial, prompted as it is by ideologue Deshbhakta Jatashankar’s fiery nationalistic speech, which induces him to enlist at the ‘Self-Help Institute’ of Acharya Chandiram (a gentle caricature by Damuanna Malvankar). These fictional trappings, institutional or otherwise, stood in for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), ripe for cinematic lampoon just 13 years after its inception in 1925. The film, a runaway success, was simultaneously made in Hindi, and its focus was the hilarity of its protagonist’s ill-fated flirtation with sexual abstinence. The antiquated methods of proselytising employed by such Hindu organisations were only faintly commented upon.
From the satire in Brahmachari to the specious soft-focus glow of the unreleased Narendra Modi biopic, the journey taken by the Hindu Right in Indian cinema has been one of slow tectonic shifts, the fissures of which are only now visible. In Yash Chopra’s Dharmaputra (1961), one of the earliest Hindu fundamentalists in cinema was played by a debut-making Shashi Kapoor. His fanatical Dileep, tilak and sacred thread in place, is at loggerheads with his progressive family, which Chopra frames as a spirited dialectic between son and mother (Nirupa Roy). Come Partition, in scenes that evoke Ku Klux Klan imagery, Dileep bays for Muslim blood, before he learns he was actually sired by a Muslim woman (Mala Sinha). Adapted from Acharya Chatursen Shastri’s reactionary novel in which Dileep’s anti-Gandhi persuasions were valourised, cinematic liberties saw the film cast instead in the mould of Nehruvian secularism.
Mahesh Bhatt’s Zakhm (1998) also employs the trope of the fanatic son of an infidel. A woman’s imminent death from being set alight during communal riots is sought to be leveraged politically by right-wing politician Subodh Malgaonkar (Ashutosh Rana), mentor to the woman’s younger son Anand (Akshay Anand), who has always believed himself to be a thoroughbred Hindu. But here, discovering his mother was Muslim cannot reverse Anand’s blind hatred of the ‘other’. Similarly, while Dharmaputra ’s ‘Hindi Hindu Hindustan’ spiel isn’t traced to its roots, the visible hand of the Sangh in Zakhm makes bigotry seem much more organised and insidious, in direct opposition to the remarkable syncretism of the dying mother (Pooja Bhatt).
Kamal Haasan and Shah Rukh Khan in ‘Hey Ram’ (2000).
Rana’s piercing eyes and crisp attire are almost archetypal and call to mind another chilling portrayal of a militant Hindu in Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000). Atul Kulkarni powerfully essays the radical Shriram Abhyankar, who exploits the anger and passion of Saket Ram (Haasan), a man whose wife was raped and murdered by Muslim rioters, and sets him on the path of Gandhi’s assassination. Abhyankar is perhaps modelled on Hindu Mahasabha functionary Narayan Apte who masterminded Nathuram Godse’s campaign, a Hollywood treatment of which can be seen in Mark Robson’s Nine Hours to Rama (1963).
The ethos of that film is typically cloak-and-dagger, but the conspiracy in Hey Ram is hatched in hidden chambers that feature framed photographs of Adolf Hitler and Veer Savarkar. The film is rife with Nazi imagery, with Ram frequently hallucinating about swastikas and Gandhi (Naseeruddin Shah). Although Ram does not succeed in his mission, and ends up Gandhian with a vengeance, the film provides space like never before to the Hindutva vision of India. The linking of that vision with Nazi fascism persists in films like Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che! (2013) , an ostensibly fictional account of the Gujarat riots, in which the red-and-black insignia of a rabidly communal ruling party in the State could easily be mistaken for Schutzstaffel (SS) flags.
During a press tour of The World Before Her (2012), filmmaker Nisha Pahuja spoke about how the appropriation of her film by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad made her feel like Leni Riefenstahl, whose cinematic lionising of the Führer did much to further the fascist cause. Pahuja’s film is anything but propaganda, even as she takes us deep into the training practices and militant philosophy of the Durga Vahini, the VHP’s women’s wing.
She extracts candid testimonials from young women being programmed into right-wing ideology, and provocatively juxtaposes the world of the training camp with contemporary beauty pageant culture, exposing the oppression and contradictions inherent in both systems. Pahuja’s deceptively fly-on-the-wall footage clearly shows how Hindutva thinking is deeply embedded in India’s patriarchal mindset, not as fringe as one might imagine, with its grand plans of indoctrinating the most susceptible among us.
Nisha Pahuja’s ‘The World Before Her’ (2012) digs deep into the militant philosophy of Durga Vahini, the VHP’s women’s wing.
The ‘masculinity in crisis’ theme of Brahmachari is echoed in Sharat Katariya’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), where the shakha , in the guise of a youth centre, becomes the friendly neighbourhood haunt for Ayushmann Khurana’s Prem Prakash Tiwari and his cronies, all strangely infantilised by their RSS-style shorts (in grey, rather than khaki). In the absence of any other role models, the shakha head (Shrikant Verma) turns friend, philosopher and guide to the suggestible Tiwari, even if the latter does ultimately throw off the yoke.
While Katariya gently pokes fun at the unit’s enforced discipline and demands of celibacy (incidentally, the same hoary concerns as in Brahmachari ), the film goes a long way towards normalising shakha culture. And the revitalisation of Brand Hindutva is complete in the Telugu film Jawaan (2017), where the knickers are replaced by smart brown trousers, and the RSS recast as nation-builders.
In Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), Salman Khan’s eponymous protagonist emerges from his father’s benign and even endearingly represented shakha in Pratapgarh, with his anti-Muslim bigotry nothing more than just a chip on his shoulder. His essential humanism remains beyond reproach. It’s a bewitching notion no doubt, but looking elsewhere to, say, the growing tribe of vigilante gau rakshaks and other deplorables who emerge from petri-dishes of a similar kind, it is rather hard to laud the mainstreaming of extremist thought as just another form of inclusiveness. Certainly, as liquid seeks its own level, so too these portrayals emerge from real-world situations that cinema is perhaps doing well to hold a mirror to, even if it finally reflects a discomfiting idea of India unfamiliar to many of us.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic.
Published - May 03, 2019 04:00 pm IST
