Mythologising Indira Gandhi’s avatars

At first glance mainstream Bollywood has hardly engaged with Indian history and politics as it unfolded. The release of the Kangana Ranaut-starrer ‘Emergency’ has just been postponed but I don’t mean films of its ilk, which are apparently efforts to ride on the political currents in the public space. I mean films actually responding to the history pertinent to that particular time.

The Indian state has made an enormous effort to build a durable mythology out of the freedom struggle but we search in vain for representations of our political leaders — including Gandhi and Nehru. The celebrated Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006) had nothing to do with the historical Gandhi but was about using ‘Gandhian’ methods in everyday life. The absence of the historical element is strange because the popular must embrace the topical to touch a public. 

On undertaking a closer scrutiny, however, I discovered that Hindi cinema is actually teeming with history’s effects but using the language of myth to represent them. For instance, the courtroom becomes a sacred site (where the truth is laid bare) only after 1947 since it is emblematic of the moral authority of the independent nation-state. After the 1965 war with Pakistan, Upkar (1967) portrayed the division of the family land between brothers and the same motif appears in Do Raaste (1969), allegorising Partition. 

Allegory is a symbolic representation done consciously or even unconsciously. And popular cinema is representing history as an instance of myth, perhaps owing to our sense that eternal truths are already known through our sacred texts and not dependent on the immediate context.   

Going on to how Indira Gandhi has been allegorised/mythologised in Hindi cinema instead of ‘pictured’ as in Aandhi (1975). She seemed different politically at various times and there must evidently be different portrayals. The first film that I hit on (accidentally) is the celebrated comedy film Padosan (1968). In this film a group of north Indians are distressed that one of them (Sunil Dutt) is besotted with a girl next-door who is under the influence of a clever south Indian named Master Pillai (Mehmood) who is also bald. 

The obvious mockery is anomalous since Hindi cinema rarely pokes visible fun at regional cultures, which are a sizable market.

Being pan-Indian it does not emphasise ‘north Indian’ characteristics in people either, which is what Padosan does through the group led by their paan-chewing leader (Kishore Kumar). The members of the group are shown as a closely knit community aghast that a South Indian is posing a threat to one of their own who should be rightly paired off with a North Indian man. 

If one wonders how a political message can be detected in something broadly farcical like this, political messages are never actually presented as ‘political’. Here the film is expressing North Indian anxiety at ‘cunning’ South Indian influences becoming intrusive.

South Indians then had no place in public life in the north Indian-dominated Indian politics. But when the film was made, the Congress was controlled by a shadowy group known as the Syndicate in which K Kamaraj was the leader, a South Indian and also bald!       

But within a year of Padosan, Indira had destroyed the Syndicate when she split the Congress and grabbed the reins of power. She had to fight tooth and nail but showed she had more gumption than her own party credited her with since she had been called ‘Goongi Goodiya’. There was apparently another need felt in the late sixties for the mythical representation of an independent, lonely, threatened and yet committed woman — a woman who was also a mother. 

The heroine as represented in the second part of Aradhana (1969) is someone with worldly experience but without any visible signs of a man having ever played a crucial part in her life. Indira had once had Feroze Gandhi for a husband but little was publicly known about her marriage or about him; Rajiv Gandhi was (like the heroine’s son) also a pilot, although not in the air force but on a civilian airline. According to Sunil Khilnani, a popular psychology of Indira was later evoked to explain the Emergency: “lonely, insecure, and believing herself to be persecuted, Indira cast a veil over liberty’s figure, it was said”. In Aradhana, lonely and persecuted is how Sharmila Tagore appears. 

But Indira’s most fearsome avatar appeared when she imposed the Emergency upon India and I will cite only one film that may be responding to it.  Jai Santoshi Maa (1975) was a hit mythological film in which a devout woman incurs the wrath of three goddesses because of her devotion to another, more benevolent goddess named Maa Santoshi.

The mythological had disappeared from Hindi cinema by the 1950s and the sudden appearance of Jai Santoshi Maa was unusual. The film does not take the established shape of the mythological — in as much as it is not simply a section from the epics or the ‘Puranas’ but actually a ‘social’ with a parallel story about the doings of the gods. Sociologist Veena Das noted that the film is about the defeat of fearsome Shakti goddesses by a Sati who suffers on behalf of society. To make a socio-cultural connection, India’s leading painter M F Hussain had then painted Indira as Shakti, and the film’s message could have been reassuring.

To theorise generally about Hindi cinema’s socio-political role, a study of audience reactions to it (by Beatrix Pfleiderer) concluded that it was an instrument of ‘cultural continuity’. Films stabilise the social system by representing new needs and new needs are historically created. An ‘instrument of cultural continuity’ perhaps needs to bridge the gap between the expectations created by traditional belief and the dispensations of history.

Film narrative may be ‘problematising’ the experience of history in a language familiar to tradition and then provide acceptable fictionally reassuring resolutions. Indira was assassinated in 1984 and her death was followed by violent anti-Sikh riots that alienated the community. But the only visible trace left of it in cinema is perhaps in Karma (1986) where a gallant young Sikh sacrifices himself for the nation.

(The author is a well-known film critic)