From Independence to Emergency: A metaphor for Indian cinematic history

Rajashekhara, the Sanskrit dramatist, poet and aesthetician who flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries, dedicates an entire chapter in his classic Kāvyamīmāṃsā treatise describing the environment that a poet (broadly speaking, an artist) must cultivate for himself so that his or her work attains excellence and brings delight to the connoisseur. The exacting standards that he mentions in the chapter, by itself, offers a mirror to the ruin for what passes off as art, literature, drama and cinema today. A similar example is given by the 11th century Kashmiri poet and aesthetician, Kshemendra’s Kavikaṇṭhābharaṇa, another illustrious work on aesthetics.

All such poets and aestheticians deliver a rather straightforward essence: at least a scintilla of culture and refinement is indispensable for anyone aspiring to be a poet or artist. The list of subjects that they all recommend includes but is not limited to a mastery of the following: classic works of literature, prosody, grammar, the 64 arts, lexicography, logic, and life experience. An artist who is not equipped with these qualifications is endowed with Vyutpattimāndya — the broadest meaning of this term is “cultural penury.”

Today, cultural penury is exactly what we observe in the most visual and the most composite of all art forms: cinema.

Actually, “cultural penury” is an extremely mild term to characterise the filth that is being rapidly churned out especially on the OTT conveyor belt of perversion. Depravity, soullessness and nihilism are being actively promoted in the name of cinema. All these are being dictated by a toxic soup made up of wokeism, megalomania and demonstrable insanity on the part of elite production houses and armies of indoctrinated writers and directors.

What are the topics that our contemporary filmmakers select? They mostly revolve around crime, sex, more crime and even more graphic sex. Subtle romance has been replaced by grunts and groans. Depravity has slaughtered sensitivity. Deafening cacophony has triumphed over deliberate silences both in voice and music. Suggestion (Dhvani) is non-existent.

Even movies that have no overt ideological flavour exhibit the same blandness. Of late, most of them are based on newspaper cuttings with familiar themes: gruesome murders, rapes or other crimes… then there is a rush to capture that other new market: biopics. With few exceptions, most biopics that have been made in India till date are uniformly unwatchable. We also have hilarious misadventures like Toilet Ek Prem Katha and Padman, a movie on sanitary pads. What next? Films on handkerchiefs and ties and underwear and the nuances of urine? Fear not. Coming soon at a theatre near you! The power of idiots in large numbers is truly potent.

Small wonder that the current crop of movies has become mock-worthy memes instead of works of art or even plain, old-fashioned mindless entertainment.

All this is a direct consequence of a variety of factors chief of which is the destruction of true education. More specifically, what is the nature and quality of literature that these filmmakers and scriptwriters read, if at all they read anything of value?

Two anecdotes will clarify this point in an oblique fashion.

The first: the central thread in the plot of the 1984 Telugu blockbuster, Bobbli Brahmanna was directly borrowed from the celebrated Sukanyōpākhyāna occurring in the Mahabharata.

Likewise, the whole plot for the 1992 Tamil superhit film Roja is based on another immortal Mahabharata episode: the story of Savitri and Satyavan. Interestingly, the seed for the movie was given by K Balachander, the film’s producer and iconic director. This in itself is a revelation of the solid cultural grounding of our past filmmakers of his calibre. It is also the most pronounced contrast between Balachander and Mani Ratnam. Thus, when Mani Ratnam attempted something similar to Roja sans Balachander’s cultural mooring, the audience was subjected to a confused product called Dalapathi, a movie allegedly based on the story of Karna. We only see Rajinikant in the movie, not Karna. The less said about the appalling Raavan, the better.

In fact, the emergence and rise of new-age directors like Mani Ratnam, Ram Gopal Varma, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Ashutosh Gowariker, Rakesh Omprakash Mehra & Co is just a continuation of a downward phenomenon in Indian cinema.

The phenomenon can be described using this phrase: from Independence to Emergency. 

From Independence to Emergency

The spread, takeover and subversion, especially of Hindi cinema by the Marxist squad, was the primary causal factor working behind this phenomenon. But peddling Marxist propaganda on screen was one side of this coin. The other side has proven fatal. This was the breeding of two generations of writers and filmmakers who consciously ignored and then trashed the ennobling wealth of our classical literature and the finest traditions of Indian theatre. If at all the present generation of filmmakers use our epic and Puranic characters, they use them to condemn the very culture that birthed them.

Without exaggerating, it can be said that there is almost no “mainstream” filmmaker in any Indian language who can make a Pauranic movie. Or even a grand fantasy like the Telugu blockbuster Jagadekaveerudu Atiloka Sundari, released in 1990, drawing heavily from our Puranic lore and motifs and settings. Or even an engaging and thrilling Kannada historical film like Mayura made in 1975 featuring the exploits of the Kadamba ruler, Mayura Varma. 

Our contemporary filmmakers have flagrantly abandoned this classical Indian aesthetic tradition and it is only obvious that audiences are quickly abandoning such filmmakers. As events over the last three years have shown, Karan Johar and company are learning it the hard way.

If the Emergency was the political abyss ushered in by a single dynasty that ran the government like a mafia, the post-Emergency period witnessed the full venomous bloom of the cultural destruction that had been put in motion through the backdoor capture of institutions. Dr SL Bhyrappa’s 1989 novel, Tantu, narrates this ghastly and painful saga with compelling power and the authority of a person who has lived through and experienced those horrors.

[To be continued]

The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed are personal.

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