Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani

Laments of an India lost

It was one of the first Bollywood movies to play in a mainstream theatre in our small town, and it seemed that the Desi communities — note the plurals — in their teeming multitudes had showed up, including the bunch I hung out with at the university. This was over a decade before smart phones and ubiquitous social media. We had the internet though, and MTV, so some of my friends knew the songs, and someone told me that I might like it, because it’s very political.

I don’t remember why, but I was a bit late and this had already started:

Trying to sit down in the dark, I heard one of the less-Hindi savvy guys ask — Ei ta ki Nazma Salma gaitese (What is this Nazma-Salma they are singing?).  Na bhaiya, Nazma-Salma na, naghma-kalma, you know, he is saying, she is my music and kalima — the girl-next-seat helpfully explained.  As for me, I kept wondering well into the intermission when the hot train dancer would reappear!

Dil Se is on Netflix and happened to be playing during a recent wine-filled late night adda. I didn’t exactly watch it, hard to do so under the circumstances as you might understand! But it did make me think about how the movie has aged over the years, and yet perhaps is relevant than ever. 

It all made me depressed.

For those coming in late, a quick recap. Shah Rukh Khan works for the All India Radio and is stationed somewhere in North East India. He meets Monisha Koirala on his very first evening there, in a rain-soaked rail junction. He is hooked at first sight, but she isn’t interested. He sees her again at a post office some time later, follows her to a village, and to avoid his persistent overtures she claims to be married. He is then beaten up by her cousins, but learns that she isn’t married.

So far, so very predictable 1990s-era love story, right?

Then the story takes an unusual turn. Koirala disappears again. Khan follows her to Ladakh, in the other corner of the subcontinent, by tracking a phone number she had made a trunk call to from the local post office. What’s that? Trunk call? This is 1997, before cell phones, when long distance phone calls required land lines and operators.

This is 1997, and the country is preparing to celebrate 50 years of azadi from the Raj. Before leaving the eastern valley for the northern mountains, Khan is shown to interview a wide range of people — including the leader of a militant group — for whom the real azadi, from the yoke of New Delhi, is still in future. Arriving in Ladakh, Khan sees the Indian army shooting an alleged suicide bomber, and then finds Koirala, who is clearly not who she appears to be.

Hooked?

I am not sure if I should recommend the movie if you haven’t watched it. Khan’s melodramatic overacting is inexecrable. I understand that the me-too era was still two decades away, but his pursuit of her is at best cringeworthy, if not downright creepy, even by the standards of the time. 

More fundamentally, the movie suffers from an acute identity crisis: is it a political thriller built on a romantic tragedy, or is it a tale of doomed love where the politics is just the stuff at the background? Bollywood has done the latter well, a good example being the loose adaptation of Eye of the Needle set in mid-2000s Kashmir starring Aamir Khan and Kajol. Personally, I wished the former — you know, problems of two star-crossed lovers not amounting to much in this crazy world and all that.

Maybe someone should remake the movie.

Or maybe not.

Can a movie like this be even made in today’s India?  

A movie that does not denounce those fighting against India as terrorists, traitors, and agents of Pakistan?  

A movie where ordinary people are shown to be angry about the failures of the Indian Republic, of independence being a meaningless word?  

And this was no art-house dialectics that only a handful of intellectual types would watch in small campus theatres, but a regular Bollywood blockbuster starring the biggest superstar of his generation.

Were Mani Ratnam, or someone else, to make a movie like this today, would they even receive finances? Anticipating RSS cadres on the street, Arnab Goswami on air, and Amit Shah in New Delhi, producers would probably not even touch such a project!

Is it still a compliment to say that unki zubaan Urdu ki tarah (their words are like Urdu)?

This piece was first written in early 2020, before the pandemic, but after New Delhi erupted in protest against the Narendra Modi government’s blatantly communal policies. I meant to post it on 26 January. On that day in 1950 India became a republic, 20 years after the Indian National Congress adopted the Purna Swaraj resolution. Pundit Nehru had hoisted the tricolour for the first time a few weeks earlier, in Lahore.

The pledge to build the Noble Mansion of India where all her children may dwell was never redeemed, perhaps not even in half measure. But the pledge was serious and sincere. As are those who hack away at that idea like they way they tore down the old building in Ayodhya.

Back in the day, while debating the notions of liberal democracy and pluralist polity, we would inevitably come to the thorny issues of identity politics.  Of course, there were never any clear conclusion to any of those long, smoke-filled addas, except that the entire subcontinent was Desh to all of us irrespective of the colours on and the scripts of our passports — to vulgarise Iqbal, it clearly was not better than the rest of the world, but Muslim or not, Hindustan was ours more than China and Arabia ever would be.

And today?  Today, as Dylan would say: Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

What is most depressing is not that India has taken a majoritarian nationalist turn or fallen under the spell of a demagogue.  That seems to be happening across the world.  And frankly, perhaps it’s not even all that surprising that the Indian experiment in democracy would end this way.  After all, those of us from the former and current Pakistan have been experiencing this kind of stuff for decades.  As Ayub Khan said a long time ago, democracy is not suited to our genius.

No, the depressing stuff is not what happened to Indian democracy.  In Rushdie’s words:

Midnight has many children: the offspring of Independence were not all human.  Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepper pots….

The most depressing are the behaviour of the people I have known for years, people who were in that theatre, people who have no business supporting Modi and his goons, people who should know better, people who should take at least a symbolic stance in their facebook wall.

When pushed, they mumble something about Modi’s economic success, but want to avoid the topic of CAA, Kashmir lockdown, and the mob violence against minorities and dissenters. Since there is no economic success to claim, I suspect such folks are probably too embarrassed to proclaim their Hindutva publicly.

In the tenth year of freedom, in one of Bollywood’s greatest soundtracks, Guru Dutt mouthed Sahir Ludhianvi’s words in Mohammed Rafi’s voice:

Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahan hain?

As a friend put it more forcefully in a facebook post:  Being able to ignore the violence is an enormous privilege. It’s not moral superiority.

And yet.

And yet.

There are those vowing to remember the dark night, those who want to see an unmottled dawn in their City of Djinns.

In their struggles are echoes of Kuch bāt hai kih hastī, miṭtī nahīṉ hamārī (there is something about us that we are never wiped).

In solidarity with them.

Hum dekhenge.

This is the first post in a series to mark the 75th year of the end of the Raj. An earlier version of this was published in the Dhaka Tribune.