It was one of the first Bollywood movies to play in a mainstream theatre in our small town, and it seemed that the Desi communities -- note the plurals -- in its teeming multitudes had showed up, including the bunch I hung out with at the university.
This was over a decade before smartphones and ubiquitous social media. We had the internet though, and MTV, so some of my friends knew the songs, and someone told me that I might like it, because it’s very political.
I don’t remember why, but I was a bit late, and Shah Rukh Khan was already dancing a-top a train to the beats of taweez bana ke pehnu use, ayyat ki tarah mil jaye kahin (will wear her as an amulet, if she is ever revealed).
Trying to sit down in the dark, I heard one of the less-Hindi savvy guys ask -- Ei ta ki Nazma Salma gaitese (What is this Nazma-Salma they are singing?).
Na bhaiya, Nazma-Salma na, naghma-kalma, you know, he is saying, she is my music and kalima -- the girl-next-seat helpfully explained. As for me, I kept wondering well into the intermission when the hot train dancer would reappear!
Dil Se is on Netflix and happened to be playing during a recent wine-filled late night adda. I didn’t exactly watch it, hard to do so under the circumstances as you might understand, but it did make me think about how the movie has aged over the years, and yet perhaps is more relevant than ever. It all made me depressed.
For those coming in late, a quick recap. Khan works for All India Radio and is stationed somewhere in North East India. He meets Monisha Koirala on his very first evening there, in a rain-soaked rail junction. He is hooked at first sight, but she isn’t interested. He sees her again at a post office some time later, follows her to a village, and to evade him she claims to be married. He is then beaten up by her cousins, but learns that she isn’t married.
So far, a very predictable 1990s-era love story, right?
Downright creepy
Then the story takes an unusual turn. Koirala disappears again. Khan follows her to Ladakh, in the other corner of the sub-continent, by tracking a phone number she had made a trunk call to from the local post office. What’s that? This is 1997, before cell phones, when long distance phone calls required landlines and operators.
This is 1997, and the country is preparing to celebrate 50 years of azadi from the Raj. Before leaving the eastern valley for the northern mountains, Khan is shown to interview a wide range of people -- including the leader of a militant group -- for whom the real azadi, from the yoke of New Delhi, is still in future. Arriving in Ladakh, he sees the Indian army shooting an alleged suicide bomber, and then finds Koirala, who is clearly not who she appears to be.
Hooked?
I am not sure if I should recommend the movie if you haven’t watched it. Khan’s melodramatic overacting is execrable. I understand the me-too era was still two decades away, but his pursuit of her is at best cringe-worthy, if not downright creepy, even by the standards of the time. More fundamentally, the movie suffers from an acute identity crisis: Is it a political thriller built on a romantic tragedy, or is it a tale of doomed love where the politics is just the stuff at the background?
Just the stuff at the background
A good example of the latter is Fanaa, a loose adaptation of Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle, set in mid-2000s Kashmir. Personally, I wished the former -- you know, problems of two star-crossed lovers not amounting to much in this crazy world and all that.
Maybe someone should remake the movie. Or maybe not.
Can a movie like this be even made in today’s India? A movie that does not denounce those fighting against India as terrorists, traitors, and agents of Pakistan? A movie where ordinary people are shown to be angry about the failures of the Indian republic, of independence being a meaningless word?
Keep in mind, this was no art-house dialectics that only a handful of intellectual types would watch in small campus theatres, but a regular Bollywood blockbuster starring the biggest superstar of his generation.
Were Mani Ratnam, or someone else, to make a movie like this today, would they even receive finances? Anticipating RSS cadres on the street, Arnab Goswami on air, and Amit Shah in New Delhi, producers would probably not even touch such a project!
Is it still a compliment to say unki zubaan Urdu ki tarah (their words are like Urdu) -- I wondered.
Identity politics
Back in the day, while debating the notions of liberal democracy and pluralist polity, we would inevitably come to the thorny issues of identity politics. Of course, there were never any clear conclusions to any of those long, smoke-filled addas, except that the entire sub-continent was Desh to all of us irrespective of the colours on and the scripts of our passports --- to vulgarize Iqbal, it clearly was not better than the rest of the world, but whether we were Muslim or not, Hindustan was ours more than China and Arabia ever would be.
And today? Today, as Dylan would say: Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
It’s not just India
What is most depressing is not that India has taken a majoritarian nationalist turn or fallen under the spell of a demagogue. That seems to be happening across the world. And frankly, perhaps it’s not even all that surprising that the Indian experiment in democracy would end this way. After all, those of us from the former and current Pakistan have been experiencing this kind of stuff for decades. As Ayub Khan said a long time ago, democracy is not suited to our genius.
No, the depressing stuff is not what happened to Indian democracy. This was always a possibility. In Rushdie’s words:
“Midnight has many children: The offspring of independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed, and pepper pots …”
The most depressing is the behaviour of the people I have known for years, people who were in that theatre, people who have no business supporting Modi and his goons, people who should know better, people who should take at least a symbolic stance in their Facebook wall.
When pushed, they mumble something about Modi’s economic success, but want to avoid the topic of CAA and Kashmir lockdown, just attributing the violence to some hardcore violent group. Since there is no economic success to claim, I suspect such folks are probably too embarrassed to proclaim their Hindutva publicly.
Or, as a dear friend put it more forcefully in a Facebook post:
Being able to ignore the violence is an enormous privilege. It’s not moral superiority.
And yet. And yet.
There are those who stay defiant, like poet-activist Aamir Aziz, whose words were relayed by Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd) to the world:
Kill us, and we will become ghosts, and write of your killing, with all the evidence
You write jokes in courts, and we will write justice on the walls
We will speak so loudly that even the deaf will hear
We will write so clearly that even the blind will read
You write injustice on the earth, we will write revolution on the sky
Everything will be remembered
In the struggle to remember the dark night before there is an unmottled dawn in the City of Djinns (William Dalrymple’s name for Delhi), there are echoes of relatively unknown coda to Iqbal’s most famous poem: Kuch bāt hai kih hastī, mittī nahīn hamārī (there is something about us that we are never erased).
Jyoti Rahman reads and watches stuff and writes about them at www.jrahman.wordpress.com.
