Bollywood cannot change: We must look for alternatives

Amid a spate of box office disasters, the Hindi film industry is looking for answers while not even entertainment beat journalists are telling them where they are going wrong. Issues like poor copies of foreign films, bad performances, poor direction, awful VFX and CGI, cinematography, etc do not even scratch the surface. The audience is saying the primary concern is the essentially anti-Hindu content, which may be too politically incorrect a statement to be issued by mainstream commentators. But hypothetically if they were to muster the honesty and courage to spell it out, can the Mumbai-centred trade get its act together? No. For people in the vocation have so far done what they have done as a part of the design that was made soon after its conception.

Following Raja Harishchandra by Dadasaheb Phalke who reportedly sold his wife’s jewellery to make the first silent film in India in 1913; the first Indian talkie came no sooner than Alam Ara in 1931. Clearly, the very first project with sound was based on a Muslim theme. For the entire black-and-white era till the early 1960s, the audience saw a predominance of Urdu — common words from Persian and jargon from Arabic — in the lines mouthed by actors. Two factors were at play here: the inheritance from Parsi theatre and a leftist association of artistes called the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).

The IPTA was established in 1941 as a culmination of actionable decisions taken at the Progressive Writers’ Association Conference that was held in 1936 — when Bollywood was still fledgling. The founder members of IPTA were Prithviraj Kapoor, Bijon Bhattacharya, Balraj Sahni, Ritwik Ghatak, Utpal Dutt, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Salil Chowdhury, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Jyotirindra Moitra, Niranjan Singh Maan, S Tera Singh Chan, Jagdish Faryadi, Khalili Faryadi, Rajendra Raghuvanshi, Safdar Mir, Hasan Premani, Amiya Bose, Sudhin Dasgupta et al. One thing that bound all these artistes together was their faith in communism. As seen in the NCERT textbooks written for schools, this ideology tends to look down upon everything indigenous. And what could be more indigenous than Hinduism in India?

The politics perfectly gelled with the agenda of Islamism that was introduced subtly, with IPTA attracting stalwarts in Urdu poetry like Majrooh Sultanpuri (Asrar ul Hassan Khan), Sahir Ludhianvi (Abdul Hayee), Kaifi Azmi etc. While in the era of Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’, ghazals and nazms mocked Islamic and Hindu beliefs in equal measure, the metaphors preferred by poet-lyricists of Bollywood were heavy on ‘but‘ (idol or statue) and ‘sanam‘ (stone). The analogy sufficed as an insinuation targeting Hindu ‘idolatry’. Like Aamir Khan’s PK made a passing mention of Islam where the protagonist is chased away while trying to enter a mosque with bottles of wine, issues with the Muslim community were largely avoided. Even when handled, as in BR Chopra’s Nikaah, a cleric offered justification for the practice of halala. And even when some Muslims like Gulfam Hassan (Naseeruddin Shah) are terrorists in Sarfarosh, a Muslim police inspector Saleem Ahmed (Mukesh Rishi) would be too good to be true.

PK, which eventually cost Aamir Khan the business of Laal Singh Chaddha, was only a sequel in a long series. If the 2014 film featured an actor who hobnobs with Tablighi Jamaat Pakistan’s maulanas and humours the family of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but projects a Hindu guru in his movie as a fraud, even the ‘Bharat’ of Bollywood, Manoj Kumar, had shown men of three upper castes rape a hapless woman inside a warehouse in Roti, Kapada aur Makaan (1974). One of the violators of Tulsi (Moushumi Chatterjee) was the character of Lala played by CS Dubey, who had been essaying roles of Hindu crooks since Seema (1955). If PK said a Pakistani man-Indian woman’s courtship was “not love jihad”, scores of other Bollywood movies on inter-faith coupling have invariably shown the male character as Muslim and the woman as Hindu. The late Sushant Singh Rajput who played the Pakistani in PK played a Muslim tour guide in Kedarnath. The idea behind naming Manoj Kumar, CS Dubey and SS Rajput is to drive home the point that Hindu actors cannot correct the bias; rather, they play along. This explains why films featuring Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar are not doing well either.

That a writer, director, composer or actor is Muslim was never the point. The communist-Islamist agenda, regardless of the religion of the players, is. Let not anybody be fooled by the apparent proximity of Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That hardly makes them Hindu poster boys. For that matter, the current dispensation entertained the presence of Aamir Khan in the Incredible India campaign too. Samrat Prithviraj tanked because of the ridiculous Islamisation of the plot of a time when Indians hardly knew Islam. After picking the story from the historically unreliable Prithviraj Raso rather than the largely bankable Prithviraj Vijaya, the film depicted a Hindu king mouthing words and expressions like ishq (love), ashk (tears), gustakhi maaf (pardon my audacity) and people of Ghazni chanting “Prithviraj zindabad”. The film twists Hindu epics brutally by eulogising Ravana from the Ramayana and Duryodhana from the Mahabharata. It’s the same Akshay Kumar whose character had told the audience in Mission Mangal that scientists (of ISRO) who perform a brief ritual before launching a rocket are superstitious. The storylines above, coupled with his Canadian citizenship and worsened by the column of his wife Twinkle Khanna where she charts a woke territory, are together killing Akshay Kumar’s market.

Ajay Devgn is similarly ill-fated despite his favourable disposition with the current regime. His character in Gangubai Kathiawadi, Rahim Lala, whitewashed the real-life gangster’s underworld acts while several Hindu men and women who had come to the aid of prostitute-turned-activist-cum-goon Ganga Harjivandas were all omitted from the film. The lead actress Alia Bhatt has been irredeemable since her film Raazi turned the 2008 novel Calling Sehmat by Harinder Sikka on its head.

And Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar together starred in Sooryavanshi where the terrorists said terrorism stems from a valid grievance!

Meanwhile in the history of the industry, as jilted lovers cursed the lost love interest as sanam, long gone was the 19th-century Ghalib who would challenge the clergy to let him drink inside a mosque or tell him a place where God does not dwell. After the decline of the illustrious lyricists and scriptwriters came the celebrated Salim-Javed, whose Sholay plays azan by a muezzin in an unelectrified village — remember Jaya Bachchan lighting lanterns — called Ramgarh that had no Muslim character other than Imam saahab (AK Hangal) and his now-dead son Ahmed (Sachin). The duo’s Ganga ki Saugandh has the wretched Dalit father-daughter Kalu (Pran) and Dhaniya (Rekha) whom the only character that treats well is a Muslim Rehmat Khan played by Anwar Hussain (known better as Nargis’s brother).

That era was followed by gangster movies where even the most wanted lumpen would die, uttering, “La ilaha il Allah Mohammed ur Rasool Allah,” invoking a sense of pity or sympathy in the watchers.

Now the American woke have entered via OTT platforms. It’s going to make matters worse, a glimpse of which was seen in Prithviraj Chauhan played by Akshay Kumar pontificating on feminism. Recently, Mai: A Mother’s Revenge received terrible reviews for showing a mourning Hindu woman forced into the kitchen, which real Hinduism forbid. Netflix had earlier drawn the ire of Hindus by showcasing Leila, where the majority community runs a correction camp for their womenfolk who married Muslim men. Amazon Prime Video ran Saif Ali Khan-featuring Tandav where the Indian government persecutes minorities, the regime is harsh and unfair on the ilk of JNU (named VNU in the web series) and Prime Minister Modi — 7 Lok Kalyan Marg turns 7 Jan Kalyan Marg — is prejudiced against Dalits.

When all this is conveyed to Bollywood, a failed product of nepotism called Arjun Kapoor says the industry would unite and teach the audience a lesson! Not taking the right lesson from Kareena Kapoor Khan’s haughty statement, “If you don’t want to see us, don’t come to the theatres,” today’s crossover film personalities Anurag Kashyap and Taapsee Pannu lampoons the callers for boycott by saying they are “feeling left out”. Because they just don’t get it. These are an asinine lot that raises placards that read “ban rape” as though violating a woman was ever legal in this country. Whether they were intellectuals of the Eastmancolor era or they are nitwits of the modern age, whether the artistes are Muslims or Hindus, they cannot do things beyond the cultural propaganda that they were designed for in the 1940s.

A glimmer of hope shines from Telugu cinema — there is no such thing as “south Indian” films — that unapologetically upholds Hindu mores. The other reason for hope is still on the drawing board: an alternative to the ‘Bombay’ + ‘Hollywood’ portmanteau, Bollywood. It’s in the realm of the future.

The author is a senior journalist and writer. Views expressed are personal.

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