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Why does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?
The editorial speculates on the sociological causes for the boom in English fiction writing in India today.
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Two letters responding to the editorial 'The Nation and the Liberal Polemicist' in Phalanx 3 and a reply from the editor.
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How Indian TV Channels Pitched the 2009 elections to their audiences
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| Home > MK Raghavendra |
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Vishal Bhardwaj 's Kaminey
M.K. Raghavendra
Watching the much hyped new film Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey was a new experience. After sitting through more than two hours of gangland killings, drug-dealing, unwed motherhood, gun battles, squalor and corruption in which no social group remains morally untainted I found myself sharing the elevator with three unlikely members of the audience – a sprightly old pensioner perhaps with a son in the software industry, a well-heeled young woman trying to distract a noisy child and a student preoccupied with a quiz book. The three were an ‘unlikely’ audience because I could not believe that they found the film’s message attractive. Yet they appeared at ease as though what they had seen and heard – that, given the chance, each of us will act in the most shameful way possible, that justice is an idle dream and that the law is an agent of corruption – was naturally satisfying.
Kaminey is an unusual experience in Indian cinema – nearly as much of a novelty as Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994). If that film was the first to evict the poor from the domain of the story - providing spaces for them only as servants of the rich - Kaminey may be the first to do the same to law-abiding people who appear to exist only to be taken advantage of. Considering that not long ago the Hindi film was a sanctuary for virtue, its new avatar is bizarre. But this celebratory vision of criminality cannot simply be dismissed as perverse; the fact that it is consumed avidly suggests that one must go beyond lamenting it and inquire into its social and political significance. Indian popular cinema was often regarded as escapist and a ‘collective daydream’ (1) but the ‘fantasy’ taking the shape of rampant lawlessness could be revealing.
Urban criminals, until the mid 1990s, were not glamorous figures in Hindi popular cinema and only people led astray (as in Deewar, 1975) became criminals. The film that changed this was perhaps Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1999). Satya appeared ‘realistic’ but had a discourse interpretable in the context of the economic liberalization initiated by PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in 1991-92 – which also marked the end of Nehruvian socialism. Law enforcement had been treated in different ways by Hindi cinema but Satya was the first film to treat the police as though they were no different from a private agency, made stronger by their indifference to the law. The protagonist of the film casually proposes the killing of the Police Commissioner as though he were a gangland rival and the police respond as another gang might have – by liquidating his group without attention to legality. While many saw Satya as portraying of an actual state of affairs, its world is deliberately depoliticized and its discourse may be interpreted as the ‘privatization’ of the forces of the law in the popular consciousness (as manifested in cinema), perhaps owing to the perceived withdrawal of the State from its own institutions after 1991-92 (2).
There are key dissimilarities between Satya and Kaminey and the chief of this is that while in Satya there was still a world outside the underworld, in Kaminey the underworld is the world and it would appear that everyone is somehow implicated in criminality. There is a view promoted by the media that Vishal Bhardwaj is the Indian Quentin Tarantino because Tarantino is, likewise (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill), preoccupied with criminals, violence and the underworld. But the difference between the two filmmakers is important. Tarantino’s world is make-believe and he identifies no recognizable social groups in his stories. Entities like ‘The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad’ in Kill Bill are essentially playful creations (3). Tarantino avoids subjects that might be taken to be socially pertinent (racism, for instance) (4). Bhardwaj, in contrast, is dealing directly with recognizable socio-political issues. A male protagonist of Kaminey works in a non-government organization and the opening dance sequence involves an AIDS awareness campaign. He marries the sister of a politician/hoodlum standing on a ‘Mumbai-for-Maharashtrians’ plank. Bharadwaj’s film is also steeped in grimy Mumbai – using actual locations saturated with social connotations - and it can hardly protest its innocence as Tarantino’s films can. Where Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill deliberately disengage with social issues Kaminey is culpable for treading a virtual minefield of them but using them only to further a fantasy, one about advancement in a milieu in which enterprise is completely unregulated.
The story of Kaminey is, despite its effort to appear complicated, simple enough. Charlie and Guddu are twins with their family from UP and while Charlie works with a gang that fixes horse races, Guddu works in a non-government agency. Guddu’s girlfriend Sweety is pregnant and the two get married but Sweety’s brother Sunil Bhope, a hoodlum and a politician expounding Marathi chauvinism, takes exception. Charlie, Guddu, Bhope and Sweety are accidentally brought into contact with another gang run by a drug trafficker named Tashi, who is hand-in-glove with the anti-narcotics squad. The object coveted by Tashi and his associates is a guitar case stuffed with cocaine and this falls accidentally into Charlie’s lap. The film ends in a shootout over the cocaine and there is a bloodbath. The police who arrive to arrest the traffickers are tempted by the offer of a share in the drug money but even they cannot save the cocaine. But Charlie, Guddu and Sweety escape the carnage and live happily ever after - Charlie as a prosperous bookie with a glamorous girlfriend and Guddu and Sweety as the parents of twins. There are also two Africans in the story who are negotiating with Tashi to exchange some blood diamonds for the cocaine and the two also perish in the shootout, leaving the diamonds to the protagonists.
To those familiar with the past of Hindi cinema, this account may make Kaminey appear an unusual cultural artefact but the film does not abandon Hindi film convention altogether. Charlie and Guddu are estranged – as the two brothers also were in Yash Chopra’s Deewar (1975). They are also from the working class and their father – a railway employee – took his own life when he was accused of being a thief. This motif carries forward the one in Deewar in which the hero had the legend ‘Mere baap chor hai’ inscribed on his forearm and carried the hurt from the unjust accusation in his heart thereafter. But neither Charlie nor Guddu is a wounded soul (as Deewar’s protagonist was). Charlie is not living a life of illegality because of a deep sense of injustice but is cheerful about ‘shortcuts’ being necessary. Moreover, their dead father was not the morally upright figure that the father was in Deewar and taught the twins that all people were ‘kaminey’.
Kaminey has, by and large, been taken to be a ‘dark’ film and while it must be conceded that it is dimly lit, it is almost celebratory in its approach to corruption and social decay. For instance, Guddu is law abiding but his disinclination to engage in criminal activity is not a moral quality but simply a quirk. In fact, Guddu needs Charlie to save him and Sweety, and the message is that a social ethic is a hindrance. The vision promoted by the film may be roughly described as ‘social Darwinism’ – that society is a lawless jungle in which only the fittest survive. And one’s ‘fitness’ is perhaps commensurable with one’s willingness to shed moral scruples. The presence of the Africans means that the film’s ‘moral vision’ is extended to include the global world in which criminality and thievery is the norm (5).
The portrayal of the law in Kaminey is even unprecedented in Indian cinema. The anti-narcotics squad functions as the handmaiden of drug-runners and when the police arrive at the final exchange, the criminals due to be ‘arrested’ announce on the street their open offers to the men in khaki – 25% of the take increasing gradually to 33% - and thereby make the police waver. This is much more extreme than even Satya because policemen in Kaminey are only acting for themselves - and not even nominally engaged in enforcing the law.
While the law has hardly remained untainted in India and the police have been discredited through their doings, Kaminey is grotesque in the way it exaggerates the prevailing situation. But instead of disturbing the spectators or causing them distress the film is being actually enjoyed; there is apparently some strange kind of satisfaction in the fantasy of a crumbling social structure in which a person has only two options - either eat or be eaten.
Kaminey’s excellent box office showing in its first week is generally credited to big city multiplexes but its showing elsewhere and in single theatres has apparently fallen off (6). The film has received much more unequivocal praise from the elite English language press than the Hindi one, in which the response has been lukewarm. The English press has also been clear that the film is intelligent entertainment – suggesting that it is the ‘intelligentsia’ it is meant for. If all this suggests that it is targeted at the aspiring urban classes the discourse in the film tends to confirm it. For all the showcasing of the squalor and grime of the city – and its male protagonists being ostensibly from the working class - Kaminey does not indicate that making a living in the city is a difficult matter. The figures routinely invoked - crores or tens of lakhs of rupees – are not figures that one associates with working class aspirations. Guddu lives in a chawl but catching a flight somewhere with Sweety seems an easy matter that does not need deliberation. The muscular bodies exhibited by Charlie and Guddu are not working class bodies got through physical labour but bodies acquired at great expense through fancy equipment and gym instructors. All this suggests that Kaminey’s vision is a low-life fantasy lived out by the aspiring, upwardly mobile classes who have no idea of what ‘low life’ really means. Why the aspiring, upwardly mobile urban classes need to live out a low-life fantasy is difficult to explain but it might be the best way to sustain their faith in ‘social-Darwinism’. ‘Clawing one’s way to the top’ is perhaps a self-justifying daydream enacted by those with advantages.
India embracing the market whole-heartedly from 1991 onwards meant a decrease in economic intervention by the State but Kaminey suggests that its meaning to those in the middle to high income brackets has also been a weakening of enforcement. To restate the obvious, the economic liberalization of 1991 was devised essentially to free the economy of the impediments of what was known as the ‘control raj’ but what is apparently not recognized is that there was a miscalculation in the way the State went about its ‘withdrawal’. Even conceding that freeing the economy from the shackles of control was a good thing, it would have been appropriate at that point to strengthen enforcement in those areas where intervention was still necessary. This, unfortunately, did not happen and India today is an enforcement nightmare. But it is apparently a nightmare that allows certain classes to dream.
Hindi popular cinema is now sufficiently differentiated to cater separately to various social segments but much of it still remains a fantasy or a collective daydream and speaks the language of myth. As Roland Barthes argues (7), myth is a kind of language, a set of conventions by which the exigencies of a historical moment are given eternal justification. The world of Kaminey is de-historicised because treats its own vision of ‘people as kaminey’ not as the creation of historical circumstances but as an eternally valid philosophy for ‘pragmatists’. It is a depoliticised world in which even politics is only ‘enterprise’. Kaminey gives us an entrepreneurial fantasy for the upwardly mobile urban classes - disguised as a social dystopia.
Notes/ References
| 1. |
The writer to use this phrase was Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 2. |
See MK Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp270-4. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 3. |
The epithet 'post-modern' used to describe Tarantino's films is largely because of his playful pastiche of other cinema, usually of the violent kind like Kung-Fu action films and spaghetti westerns.( Back to Main Story) |
| 4. |
Marriages in Pulp Fiction are, for instance, deliberately indifferent to the issues of colour and race. Back to Main Story) |
| 5. |
Hindi films like Dhoom 2 (2008) have concluded earlier that global enterprise is advantageous because it promotes thievery. See MK Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, p 296. ( Back to Main Story) |
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M. K. Raghavendra is the Founder-Editor of Phalanx
Courtesy: indicine.com
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