Cinema, art and the truth: Bitter lessons from IFFI controversy

In the summer of 1984, I had the privilege of tagging along with my mother to New Delhi as she prepared to join a group of film industry (and film criticism) stalwarts on the jury to decide on the national awards. On the jury that year were great Tamil film director K Balachander and respected film critic Iqbal Masud, among other veterans. On the list of movies up for consideration that year, were the usual art movies of the sort that won awards, a few commercial movies of the sort that didn’t, and one incredible, unusual movie that went on to win the National Award for Best Picture — India’s first feature film in Sanskrit, GV Iyer’s Adi Shankaracharya. Naturally, I remember this fond and influential memory from my childhood now as a contrast to the ugliness that has exploded around the statements made by an Israeli filmmaker who had been invited to serve as chair of the jury at the International Film Festival of India. As I scrolled through Twitter these last few days, I could not help being bewildered, rather than outraged or assured, by the multiple voices erupting all around. It seemed touching to see an Israeli diplomat chasten his countryman for misreading reality and abusing Indian hospitality (as he put it). It seemed reasonable to read voices otherwise supportive of the Indian government pointing out the absurdity and continuing incompetence on the GOI’s communication front (they noted that no one from the Indian government took a stand, while the Israeli government did). Of course, people normally critical of the present government took the opportunity to point out they had been right all along about how India had become unsafe for minorities because the Israeli diplomat had in his tweet admitted that he feared for his staff in India now! Rather than attempt to nit-pick through the endless explosions of popping balloons which is what the Indian public sphere feels like, with hordes of easily distracted eyes and throats running here and there, I will share a few words for those who like patience and stillness in their communication habits. There are two issues worth thinking about here in my view which might prove to be more productive than attempting to convince anyone to do anything better with their offices, or even their words. The first of course, is actually a word that has itself been in the news and best describes the statement denying the Kashmiri Hindu genocide. That word is “gaslighting,” which, by some coincidence, was in the news recently for having been picked by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as their “word of the year.” Obviously, many people around the world are feeling like they are being deceived and manipulated about many things. In India, or at least in Indian social media, the sense of anger at having been “gaslit” by previous governments is always on boiling point now (the question of course remains: will the angry Hindu one day realise that these last eight years of running on blaming past governments was a form of gaslighting too?). Whatever might be one’s opinions of The Kashmir Files as a film, the sneering disdain with which it was called “propaganda” was seen by Hindus as an attempt at exactly that, gaslighting. Hindus may not be very good with words (or pictures for that matter) these days, probably leaving our ancestors who built temples and composed majestic epic poems to wonder what happened to us, so the “left liberals” still find it easy enough to run circles around Hindu truths with their rabidly hateful lies. We should be used to it. But I suppose thanks to whatever few venting-spaces we have with Twitter, we vent and scream for a while about whatever new outrage we spot. The “gas lighting,” meanwhile, goes on. The second issue I wish to point out now is the need to understand the deeply parasitic relationship between propaganda on the one hand, and polarization, on the other. Historically, propaganda has always been about polarisation, about dividing people into believers and infidels, insiders and outsiders, superior races and “less evolved” ones, us and them. But propaganda also needs polarization in a way. When there is no middle ground, everyone can claim their monopolies on fact-checking, truth-telling, and so on. No matter how much Op India does its brave work, or Alt News does what it does, in the present reality there is no possibility perhaps that anyone sees both platforms as doing anti-propaganda work. Just no way. In fact, the one thing almost everyone told me the last time I was in India was there you cannot be neutral. That it’s almost evil to claim to be neutral. You are either pro-Modi or anti. That’s it. (Well, now that I think about it, it’s almost all anti-Modi people who said that, but anyway). My submission, in the wake of these observations, is that anti-propaganda efforts cannot succeed if we don’t also address the issue of polarization. Here, the “Left” is at a strategic advantage. It knows that it does not need to dilute its beliefs (“gas settings”?) because everyone, Left and Right, or at least their children, will have to partake of its product to simply exist anywhere in the world today, school, college, office, even family. The “Right,” (in India at least), is profoundly disadvantaged meanwhile, for multiple reasons. It has a winning streak, for the moment, in Indian electoral politics, but it has no shared vision of anything beyond a raw sense of anger about the past which can be calibrated by IT cell narratives quite easily to different time zones; long-past for election times (Mughals, the West), and recent past for others (Congress, Nehru, UPA). The “Right” as we know, includes everyone from a few Hindus trying to save temples and traditions to “reformists” who have no clue what the “trads” are talking about and lean rather heavily on the hated “left liberals” again for their anti-trad vocab-quenching. If any of these descriptions sound complicated, I ask for your forgiveness, and patience, while I try to return to my main point. I think memories, especially of an intergenerational nature, are very important to understanding where there is hope and strength in truth today. Our obsession with labels in the moment has left us distracted from where we ought to be looking, and that is in time. There was a time, I tell you, dear readers, when Left and Right had no meaning at all in India, or at least not in the hermetically tribalistic way they do now. My mother, a Congress party member then, yes, fought dantam and nakham for the best picture award to be given to Adi Shankara in that jury dominated by bearded commies back in 1984 (maybe not literally, but you get the picture), who strangely enough, really did not oppose it as much they would today (of course, today it’s not just commies, but the corporate-CEO types too who would perhaps be only too happy to disavow anything Hindu as “communal”). At the same time, I have to also share that my mother did something which the “nationalists” today, RWs, or maybe even “trads” wouldn’t have liked — she also supported whole heartedly the selection of one proper art-house commie movie for one of the best regional language cinema awards that year. Maybe she hadn’t read all of Marx or even any of Marx, but she knew the value of a “socialist” story too. I remember this story from time to time when it seems impossible to believe that truth will ever prevail ever again. I do not know how or when it might happen, but I do know that we cannot hope for truth to prevail if we remain stuck in our own silos on social media, forever demonizing everyone who does not think exactly like us. Social media has by its fragmented nature left us believing that we belong to just one of two wings, with nothing to learn about or from each other. And so we have the tragic absurdity of the communication breakdown we have today despite all the communication technologies at our disposal. Hindus despise the “Left” so much we fail to realize that it is partly our own aversion to learning from their creative and intellectual legacies that have left us lacking a vocabulary and a vision to even tell the stories we want to tell. When almost every story about genocide, exile, colonialism, slavery and oppression in the world today has come from the vision, conscience, and creative sensibilities of what we call the “Left,” how much chance do Hindus have to tell the stories we yearn to share about our suffering and resistance, past and present by following the mirage of the “Right” endlessly? It is not just for lack of patronage that a film about Kashmir took three decades to make, nor the fact that there is really no comparable Indian movie to say, the much-compared Schindler’s List. We are not going to get the sensitivity to tell stories a global audience can understand from the whacky fringes of the Western Right, simple as that. And of course, as for friends on the actual Left who hope to stay relevant in India without either government-electoral or non-governmental foreign patronage, I hope they too will learn from episodes like this to recognise that just because the average Hindu lacks their sophisticated capacities for language and communication, their pain isn’t any less real than that of Palestinians, Rohingyas, or any other group Lefties professionally feel pain about. Why should they complain that only ruling-party-friendly movie makers are talking about Hindu suffering? What stops them from including Hindus as human beings in their human rights crusades too? (Rhetorical questions, nothing more). I hope, in fact, that the next big movie or book about forgotten Hindu genocides comes not from the expected “RW” stable, but from someone on the Left. If Rahul Gandhi can visit Mantralayam and Ujjain, why not an Arundhati Roy masterpiece on what Hindus felt that day on the train in Godhra? That’s what art is about isn’t it? Truth above polarisation-politics? The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘ Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News, Trending News,  Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.