Rediscovering sensibility

For a third of the movies’ 75-year life in India, they were stuck in the rut of expressing the angry frustrations of a disjointed newly-urban working class, but leading lights of Bollywood exult as Hindi movies once more give voice to a vibrant urban youth with contemporary sensibilities
 
David Devadas Mumbai/Delhi

This is not about Jessica Lal, and yet it is. It is about events at the heart of the capital, but not really. It is about reverberations of those events in the heart of the nation – the real events in tandem with celluloid ones. For the two seem to blur at times almost into a continuum, as if a Matrix-like editor had cross-cut life and art into an inter-dimensional montage.

Witness what happened last month. A procession of concerned citizens gathered to demand justice for Jessica, a model who was shot five years ago when she refused to serve a man a drink. They gathered at exactly the spot, India Gate, where a vigil of students and others demanded justice for an air force officer in the film Rang de Basanti, which was running to packed houses at the time.

So was it art imitating life or life imitating art? When that becomes a chicken-and-egg conundrum, one can be sure that a nation’s popular art is pulsating with the rhythms of its heart and mind, the current wavelength of its evolving soul. Several Hindi films of the first decade-and-a-half after independence played a sterling role in moulding modern India (Awara, 1951, Do Bigha Zamin, 1953, Jagte Raho, 1956, Mother India and Pyasa, 1957, Kagaz ke Phool and Sujata, 1959, Mughal-e-Azam, 1960, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, 1962, and many others). Something similar is happening again and, although it has been gradually manifest over the past five or six years, it is becoming more evident in this seventy-fifth anniversary year of Indian movies.

Of course, India is far more complex today than it was half a century ago and most films can at best address a part of its variegated socio-economic reality. Yet commercial films, ranging from Salaam Namaste, which focused on a live-in relationship, to Mixed Doubles, which delved into partner-swapping, or 15 Park Avenue, exploring a schizophrenic’s reality, are dealing with challenging social issues far more than they were for most of the last quarter of the previous century.

Rang de Basanti’s slick editing of SUV drives and its skilful interplay of nationalist history are some reasons for its phenomenal success, but a vital factor is the contemporary chord that it struck among young Indians, disgusted with corruption and cynicism in politics. If it went overboard in plotting a violent dénouement – and most people seemed to think it was great except for the last part – the actual public mood was evident in the response to the acquittals in the Jessica Lal case: anger and disgust directed at bringing the guilty to book through due process rather than through crimes of revenge.