Wreaking havoc with history
ZIYA US SALAM
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The commercial film industry has repeatedly meddled with history in the name of artistic licence.
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SOME MAKE HISTORY, SOME MOCK IT Scenes from the films "Mangal Pandey".
Bollywood continues to defile history. Now distorting, now disparaging, Bollywood's arthritic treatment of the past goes on. Ketan Mehta's much panned "Mangal Pandey" is only the latest, and probably the weakest, link in the chain which goes back many years, holding such gems as the Bhagat Singh troika and "Vir Savarkar". Filmmakers, with notable exceptions like Shyam Benegal and Jabbar Patel, have been dishonest to their subjects, faithless to the language, the ethos of the era. Midgets have been made of men of stature, just as avoidable gloss has been added to men of substance. Heroes, in no need of bonus points from posterity, bask in reflected glory. In the garb of artistic licence truth is short-changed, and only an honest cinemagoer with a heart for history duped.
All combining to give rise to suspicions that Bollywood with all the money bags and talent at its disposal is incapable of steering beyond the stereotype, of resisting the temptation to pander to the lowest common denominator. And absolutely incapable of stitching together an essay as beautiful as Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi". On the few notable occasions when the market diktats have taken the backseat, realism has become a synonym for a documentary. Result? A three-and-a-half- hour long "Bose: The Forgotten Hero". A profound "Sardar" with no takers. Elsewhere, it is all gibberish though.
"Bose-The Forgotten Hero"
And no freedom fighter, no leader is safe from the dream merchants' dream history. Mangal Pandey, one of the important figures of the First War of Independence, suddenly becomes the first martyr of the freedom struggle! In a single stroke, all the brave soldiers of Barrackpore who gave up their life for refusing to go Burma are forgotten. Worse, Mehta, so bent on creating a lofty hero out of Mangal, dwarfs his contemporaries for no reason except that he treats history as his handmaiden - reproducing the past to serve the purpose of either political dispensation or commerce of the market. Mehta ignores the heroics of the likes of Kunwar Singh and Zeenat Mahal completely, and dismisses others in a shot or two, just like removing some dust particles off a lapel.
Dhanoa and Santoshi too
"Shaheed"
Worse, he treads the Guddu Dhanoa lane when it comes to reinforcing the caste hierarchy. His hero, Aamir Khan is a Brahmin. Thank you very much, but, no thanks. We need no Ketan Mehta to tell us - however, Mehta does not want to take a chance. Hence his hero walks around bare-chested, his sacred thread prominent all the time. Whether coming back from the barracks or walking down the road, he is the only guy without a shirt or a kurta. All other soldiers wear their garments, only the hero is bare! So much so, we wonder if we are watching Aamir Khan playing Mangal Pandey or doing an impersonation of Salman Khan!
This pandering to the caste hierarchy is nothing new though: Three years ago Guddu Dhanoa in "Shaheed", a crass show on the life of Bhagat Singh, deemed it fit to address Chandrashekhar Azad, the revolutionary freedom fighter, as Panditji, though the man opposed the caste system tooth and nail. Worse, he made almost a believer out of Bhagat Singh, the man who read Lenin till his last breath. Needless to reiterate, history recalls him for `militant atheism'. Obviously, Dhanoa had never gone near a history book! If he had he would not have dared to tell us that Bhagat Singh's slogan of unity was "Vande Mataram" whereas the man all along pronounced "Inquilaab Zindabad".
And if you feel Ketan Mehta has taken too many liberties in the name of artistic licence, think again. If Aamir has a Holi dance and visits a courtesan - who speaks the language of a modern-day girl of the sin street and displays none of the tehzeeb associated with such women then - in "Mangal Pandey", Guddu's hero Bobby Deol danced with Aishwarya Rai while playing Bhagat Singh! Similarly if Mehta reduced the First War of Independence itself to a mere footnote in his saga, Rajkumar Santoshi had dared to talk of the Kakori Train Conspiracy in "The Legend of Bhagat Singh" without a mention of Ashfaqullah. All this prompting historian Bipin Chandra to say that talking of Kakori without Ashfaqullah is like a wedding without the groom! And much the same fate was meted out by Dhanoa to Ramprasad Bismil, Sukhdev and Rajguru - all reduced to acolytes rather than being able companions.
"The Legend of Bhagat Singh"
Selective memory, political preferences, amateurish acting all characterise Bollywood forays into the past. If Mehta gives a long yard to Toby Stephens to spin his tale - remember Gordon is just a sidekick in the history books - Santoshi and Dhanoa are guilty of giving short shrift to the likes of Jatin Das, who died on the on the 64th day of the hunger strike and who had people walking for miles behind his bier.
Much worse was the case with Vir Savarkar whose personality was sought be enhanced with a halo, and whose clemency petition from the Andaman jail was ignored to suit the ideology of the filmmakers. Director Ved Rahi's was actually a low-key affair with the little known Shailendra Gaur playing Savarkar, the man worshipped by some for his nationalism and reviled by others for his bigotry. As elsewhere, Savarkar's contemporaries, including Madan Lal Dhingra, were all shadow figures.
Of course, no such problems faced films on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, B.R. Ambedkar or even the most recent, "Bose-The Forgotten Hero" where the only note of debate was about the marital status of the best known face of the INA - Benegal was true to history and deserved credit for showing Netaji Subash Chandra Bose as a human being without chipping away at his greatness.
But that was a rare case of a director being honest to the past even if he compromised on the entertainment quotient in the film. Otherwise, history, freedom struggle and freedom fighters are all prisoners to posterity's ideological predilections. And box office compulsions.
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Chennai and Tamil Nadu
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