Hindutva Politics and South Asian Cinema ÂŒ Media in the Age of Modi

SAFM 9 (2) pp. 73–77 Intellect Limited 2019

Editorial

Ajay Gehlawat

Hindutva politics and South Asian cinema – media in the age of Modi

Even as the air in India’s capital grows increasingly unbreathable, a larger spectre is haunting the subcontinent today, one just as toxic as the particulate matter floating freely in the air. It is the growing spectre of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, that has overcome India since the ascendancy of Narendra Modi to the post of Prime Minister. While India is not alone in this turn towards a chauvinistic right-wing ideology – witness the rise of strongmen around the globe, including in the United States, Europe, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Russia and the Philippines, to name but a few – the situation in India has grown particu- larly dire since Modi’s election to the top post. In the ensuing time (2014– present) one witnesses a dramatic increase of intolerance manifested through an upsurge of hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims and other minorities, often by extremist Hindu groups and their acolytes, including so-called cow vigilantes, who, in September 2015, notoriously murdered a Muslim man, Mohammed Ikhlaq, on (unfounded) suspicions that he had killed a cow and consumed its meat (Barstow and Raj 2015). In the ensuing years, there have been more than a hundred such cases of vigilante violence perpetrated against Muslims and Dalits in India (Baski and Nagarajan 2017), including nearly 70 attacks against people accused of harming cows, the overwhelming number of

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which have been directed against Muslims (Mohan 2018: 35). In 2017 alone, such vigilantes killed nearly a dozen people, making it the deadliest year for such attacks since 2010 (Mohan 2018: 35). As Rohini Mohan notes, ‘the lynch- ing of [I]khlaq, one year after the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power in New Delhi, has created a sort of attack template’, with intolerance in turn increasingly becoming ‘a fact of everyday life’ (2018: 35). Just as disturbing as these increasing acts of violence is the relative silence that has accompanied them from Donald Trump’s friend and fellow tweeter, Prime Minister Modi, who first addressed the killing of Ikhlaq approximately two weeks after the event had occurred (Barstow and Raj 2015). As in the United States, the mainstreaming of such intolerance in everyday life is directly related to the relative absence of public condemnation of such acts (whether in Charlottesville or Uttar Pradesh) by elected leaders, even as such silences have ‘made clear that there is no automatic political cost to crime or falsehood if it furthers the hegemonic political narrative’ (Saran 2018: n.pag.). Even as Hindu extremism has increased, in other words, it has been legitimized by group’s such as Modi’s BJP who have blatantly asserted their desire to transform India into a ‘Hindu nation’ (Abi-Habib 2018: n. pag.) and who target anyone seen as impeding such a desire. While the mainstream media, both in India and in the West, have frequently colluded in such ‘mainstreaming’ of intolerance (Banaji 2018: 8), the responses of Indian filmmakers have been more mixed. Our special issue examines how such filmmakers and their ensuing films have at times been critical of such ‘modi-fications’ in India and, at other times, complicit with such right-wing ideologies – sometimes, perhaps, critical and complicit. From Rajkumar Hirani’s PK (2014) to the much anticipated and delayed Padmaavat (2018) of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, both popular Hindi cinema, aka Bollywood, and alternative Indian film forms have responded to the proliferation of right-wing Hindu ideologies in myriad, oftentimes conten- tious and frequently innovative ways. While the impact of right-wing Hindu groups on popular Hindi cinema can be traced back to the release of Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995), following the violence surrounding the destruc- tion of the Babri Masjid, this special issue seeks to examine the contemporary manifestations, and fraught interrelationships, of Hindutva politics and Hindi cinema – media during the time of Modi. Accordingly, this issue begins with Pallavi Rao’s study of Shree Narayan Singh’s Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (Toilet: A Love Story, 2017), which was made in collaboration with Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Swachch Bharat Abhiyan’ (‘Clean India Mission’). As Rao argues, this film, based on the true story of a woman who left her husband’s house because of the lack of an indoor toilet, attempts to align itself with the rationale of Modi’s project, which blames ignorance and the lack of access to toilets for the ensuing tendency of citizens to defecate in the open. Rao notes that, in doing so, the film crucially elides the attendant ideologies of (Hindu) caste purity implicit in such an eschewal of indoor toilets, even as the film’s Brahmin protagonist, played by Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, attempts to initiate change in his village through an appeal to the logic of Brahminical scriptures rather than through recourse to notions of sanitation and hygiene. Following this study comes Krupa Shandilya’s examination of the tensions and controversies surrounding Bhansali’s Padmaavat, a lavish re-telling of the tale of the titular Rajput queen and attempts by the Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji to capture her. This film and its director and lead female star, Deepika Padukone, were the targets of several protests by right- wing Hindu groups opposed to ‘love jihad’, in which such groups frame the

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Muslim man as a seducer and rapist of Hindu women. Shandilya argues that the film is animated by a similar discourse and revolves around a deferred scene of desire between the Muslim Khilji and Hindu Padmavati. In analysing the fetishistic scopophilia underlying Khilji’s gaze, Shandilya argues that such impulses, whether actual or imagined, are haunted by attendant fears of the Muslim man as a desirer of Hindu women and are correspondingly used to pathologically frame the former as a rapist, thus aligning with contemporary discourses proliferating in Modi’s India, such as those espoused by the BJP’s Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, who, along with praising Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, has claimed, ‘[i]f one Hindu girl marries a Muslim man, then we will take 100 Muslim girls in return’ (Safi 2017). The next entry in our special issue comes from Omar Ahmed, who examines Rahul Dholakia’s film Raees (2017), starring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan (hereafter SRK), himself the frequent target of attacks by right- wing Hindu groups who have invoked the star’s Muslim religion to question his allegiance to the Indian nation. In analysing Raees, which tells the story of a successful Muslim bootlegger in 1980s Gujarat, Ahmed claims the film utilizes the gangster genre as an apt rejoinder to Hindutva cultural politics. Focusing specifically on the film’s yatra, or Hindu procession, sequence, Ahmed closely examines the film’s use of political iconography and how its titular Muslim figure (played by SRK) simultaneously engages in violent resistance to such a Hindu processional, even as his character, in turn, is punished for his oppo- sition to the Hindu hegemony. Such a narrative similarly played out in real life when, after asserting there was ‘growing intolerance’ in India, SRK was accused by Hindu nationalists, including members of the BJP, of being a ‘Pakistani agent’ and his film Dilwale (Shetty, 2015) was, in turn, boycotted by several of these groups (Sahadevan 2015). Our following contribution, from Anandi Rao, is concerned with the Indo-Canadian documentary The World Before Her (2012) by filmmaker Nisha Pahuja. Although made in 2012, this documentary was released in India shortly after Modi’s election in 2014 and was criticized by some as a form of Hindutva propaganda, concerned as it is with a right-wing Hindu training camp for girls, the Durga Vahini. Through a close examination of the documentary’s queer female protagonist Prachi, Rao analyses the myriad moments of linguistic, translational and affective excess in the film to argue for a more nuanced understanding of how queer politics can operate in the midst of such right-wing Hindu ideologies. Such a positioning, Rao argues, allows the politics of queerness not only to be seen as subversive but also as potentially complicit in reinforcing Hindu hegemonic ideologies. In the following study, Claire Robison looks at the production of counter media productions by India’s International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) communities, in response to films such as OMG (Shukla, 2012) and PK. While acknowledging the contemporary clashes between violent Hindutva forces and liberal civil society, Robison problematizes this political landscape through her examination of such counter media productions and publics, which she argues disavow the more violent protests undertaken in recent years and yet reflect middle-class support for Hindu religious principles, which are seen as coming under increasing attack from films such as PK. Robison closely analyses both the alternative media productions created by ISKCON communities and how such groups and their counter media productions intervene within the larger cultural debates surrounding Hindu religious principles in India today.

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Rounding out our issue are contributions from Ajay Gehlawat and Leela Khanna. In his study of Bhansali’s recent controversy-generating film, Gehlawat focuses on how Bhansali employs fascist aesthetics in Padmaavat to reinforce a Manichaean framing of Hindus and Muslims, in which the former are portrayed as noble figures and the latter as essentially barbaric. Employing and cross-applying Susan Sontag’s and Frank Tomasulo’s theorizations of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, including Triumph of the Will (1935), Gehlawat is concerned with how Bhansali’s aesthetic approach reframes history as myth and presents it as a form of theatre. Such an aesthetic strategy, Gehlawat argues, works to reaffirm contemporary chauvinistic notions of the (Hindu) nation, and positions the filmmaker, in turn, as lending support to such right- wing ideologies. Our final entry, from Leela Khanna, is an extended interview with filmmaker Lalit Vachani, whose films The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002), critically explore the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a right-wing ‘national self-help organization’ that some have labelled a Hindu fascist organization (Banaji 2018: 3). Khanna asks Vahani, whose two films examine how the RSS recruits young boys and, in turn, shapes their lives, to reflect on the ever-shifting power dynamics at play between a filmmaker and his interlocutors, and on how the politics of representation are evolving in light of the contemporary resurgence of such right-wing groups. In the process, Khanna’s interview with Vachani allows for a broader and more complex picture to emerge on the tactics, concerns and effects of such groups. It is our hope that the resulting picture of the contemporary political moment that emerges through these contributions will lead to a deeper understanding of both the broader cultural politics infusing the Indian landscape today and the myriad ways in which contemporary Indian films have at times challenged and, at times, wittingly or unwittingly contributed towards the propagation of such communal tensions. The stakes of such an engagement can hardly be overstated, in light of both the ongoing violence perpetrated against those deemed ‘enemies of the (Hindu) people’ and the upcoming elec- tions, in which Modi’s BJP party will attempt to retain its control of the reins of power. Yet implicit (and complicit) in all of this are the everyday people who patronize the films and attendant ideologies under discussion here, whether those viewing publics do so for pure pleasure or for more doctrinaire reasons. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that several of the films examined here, including, most recently, Bhansali’s Padmaavat, have been incredible successes at the box office, despite or, indeed, due to their polarizing religious and cultural politics. It is precisely such inflammatory tactics that assist those who seek to retain power through division and it is precisely those, to paraphrase Aimé Cesaire ([1955] 2000), who claim to be surprised or indignant at ‘sudden’ subsequent outbursts of violence who wilfully avoid acknowledging their own complicity, whether inside or outside the movie theatre.

References Abi-Habib, M. (2018), ‘Same gun was used to kill two critics of Hindu nationalists in India’, New York Times, 8 June, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/ world/asia/india-lankesh-kalburgi gun.html. Accessed 8 June 2018. Banaji, S. (2018), ‘Vigilante publics: Orientalism, modernity and Hindutva fascism in India’, Javnost: The Public, 25:4, pp. 1–18. Barstow, D. and Raj, S. (2015), ‘Indian writers return awards to protest government silence on violence’, New York Times, 17 October, https://www.

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nytimes.com/2015/10/18/world/asia/india-writers-return-awards-to- protest-government-silence-on-violence.html. Accessed 23 May 2018. Baski, S. and Nagarajan, A. (2017), ‘Mob lynchings in India: A look at data and the story behind the numbers’, https://www.newslaundry.com/2017/07/04/ mob-lynchings-in-india-a-look-at-data-and-the-story-behind-the- numbers. Accessed 17 August 2017. Bhansali, S.L. (2018), Padmaavat, India: Bhansali Productions. Cesaire, A. ([1955] 2000), Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Dholakia, R. (2017), Raees, India: Excel Entertainment. Hirani, R. (2014), PK, India: UTV Motion Pictures. Mohan, R. (2018), ‘A template for hate’, Harper’s Magazine, September, pp. 34–40. Pahuja, N. (2012), The World Before Her, Canada: Storyline Entertainment. Ratnam, M. (1995), Bombay, India: Eros International. Riefenstahl, L. (1935), Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Germany: Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion. Safi, M. (2017), ‘Controversial Hindu priest chosen as Uttar Pradesh chief minister’, The Guardian, 19 March, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ mar/19/uttar-pradesh-yogi-adityanath-hindu-priest-chief-minister. Accessed 10 April 2017. Sahadevan, S. (2015), ‘Shah Rukh Khan on Dilwale boycott’, Indian Express, 15 December, https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/ shah-rukh-khan-on-dilwale-boycott-inshallah-sab-kuch-acha-hoga- hamari-film-ke-saath/. Accessed 23 January 2016. Saran, M. (2018), ‘What the rape and murder of a child reveals about Modi’s India’, New York Times, 17 April, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/ 17/opinion/international-world/india-child-rape-murder.html. Accessed 23 November 2018. Shetty, R. (2015), Dilwale, India: Red Chillies Entertainment. Shukla, U. (2012), OMG: Oh My God!, India: Viacom18 Motion Pictures. Singh, S.N. (2017), Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, India: Reliance Entertainment. Vachani, L. (1993), The Boy in the Branch, India: Wide Eye Film Production. —— (2002), The Men in the Tree, India: Wide Eye Film Production.

Ajay Gehlawat has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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