Javed Akhtar: An icon of scepticism and openness

Intolerance in India is much greater than one might suppose, but Akhtar’s scepticism is directed everywhere, not only at the other’s viewpoint. And for that, he must be universally respected and lauded.

Javed Akhtar has just made news for having won the 2020 Richard Dawkins Award for his critical thinking, holding religious dogma up to scrutiny.

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who attained fame for his book The Selfish Gene and is known for his opposition to ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’, pseudo-disciplines that try to bring in religious dogma through the backdoor as ‘science’.

In today’s illiberal world, there should evidently be a premium placed on atheism and Dawkins is a professed atheist. If liberal thinking in the true sense is to be upheld, there are few whose credentials are sounder in India than Javed Akhtar’s, whose contribution to Indian cinema has also been immense.

Javed Akhtar is a successful lyricist in Bollywood today, but it is as a screenplay writer and part of the team ‘Salim-Javed’ that he deserves more recognition. Hindi mainstream cinema is not so much a director’s medium as a scriptwriter’s since virtually everything in a Bollywood film rests on the story and dialogue.

Javed Akhtar

Along with Salim Khan, Javed Akhtar dominated Hindi cinema in the 1970s, giving us the ‘Angry Young Man’ (Deewar, Trishul, Shakthi) and making Amitabh Bachchan a household name through the films Sholay, Seetha Aur Geeta and Yaadon Ki Baraat. It would not be an exaggeration to say that few Bollywood talents have understood its formulae as well as Javed Akhtar.

Among the aspects of Bollywood that deserve to be better documented is the contribution of Muslim writers and poets of the 1940s and 1950s to its development, all the more important since they took the social purpose of popular cinema more seriously than most people in the industry take it today and, more significantly, they were involved in the independent nation — as an open society.

They were steeped in the syncretic culture of the sub-continent, did it yeomen service and were often atheists. Saadat Hasan Manto, who migrated to Pakistan, was one of them and he is more cherished in India than Pakistan, which could not stomach his descriptions of Partition since Pakistan as a nation emerged out of it.

It is not a great matter for a Hindu to be an atheist in India because Nehruvian education was devised to inculcate scepticism about Hindu belief after 1947. To just offer the reader a symptom of how this attitude towards the religion prevails in culture, it would be difficult to find arthouse films made in India where philosophical notions connected with the religion are explored, and not necessarily with reverence.

Islam has also not been served well but that is because of certain taboos in the religion pertaining to representations. In contrast, there are a great many Christian ‘spiritual’ filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman who have contributed to culture. A film investigating Hindu practices would more likely be driven along the path of rationality like Pattabhiraa Reddy’s Kannada film Samskara or Satyajit Ray’s Bengali film Devi.

Since Nehruvian education also highlighted secular ideals, the same scepticism encouraged towards Hindu belief by education was not encouraged towards the Abrahamic religions, which is why Hindu-born sceptics in India restrict their scepticism towards their own religion and refuse to apply it to other religions and beliefs.

One cannot countenance the view that any religion in India is better than any other but it is much easier for someone born Hindu in India to question the tenets or practices of his or her own religion than a person of any another religion. It takes a greater degree of effort for a non-Hindu to be sceptical about his or her own religion than it would be for a Hindu because that would imply independent thought, and not simply Nehruvian liberal-secular education imbibed mechanically.

Javed Akhtar is a sceptic who has not only survived but thrived in these conditions; he gives free reign to his views and there are not many like him in any political camp. Intolerance in India is much greater than one might suppose and it is so even among self-styled liberals who are apparently only marking out their political identities since they do not engage in debate with the opposite side and also exclude them from cultural gatherings.

Those opposing them, i.e. ardent Hindus, are even less tolerant and Javed Akhtar has recently become their target. Hinduism prides itself on philosophers like Sankara who debated with agnostics, atheists and materialists like the Buddhists, the Ajivikas and the Charvakas. Debate implies that the other’s viewpoint can be negotiated with, but we have arrived at a situation in India where political debate even among the highly educated is virtually impossible.

One is not sure where India will go from here, but a person with the credentials of Javed Akhtar should be universally respected and lauded. His scepticism is directed everywhere, and not only at the other’s viewpoint.

(The writer is a well-known film critic)