Gandhi obscured

As Gandhi Jayanti approaches, we are reminded of the freedom struggle. It’s a good time for film students to look at how it has been represented in Indian cinema and how Gandhiji himself has appeared. The surprise is that not many instances are visible, especially given the efforts of the Indian state to build a durable mythology around 1947. But before going on to inquire into the subject we may note that popular cinema from around the world has always had national genres. In Hollywood, for instance, the western revolved around origins of the American state, the white protagonists bringing civilization to a savage land as in the pioneering films of John Ford (The Searchers, 1956). 

Germany after the war tried to forget the defeat of 1945 through a musical genre called the Heimatfilme in which the war was treated as a natural calamity without an author. A film that subsequently drew from this genre was Hollywood’s The Sound of Music (1965). Indonesian and Egyptian cinemas have genres dealing with colonial struggles or other developments in history. The purpose of these genres is to preserve historical memory by mythologising the past as a national project. There is a need to learn from history and elements that are inconvenient (like military defeat) are discarded until a new mythology can be created like that around the Six Day War of 1967 — that Egyptian cinema (Adrift on the Nile, 1971) blamed decadent society for, with drug abuse as rampant.   

Indian cinema’s relationship with history is more difficult to describe and hoary mythology has been the preferred source of film stories ever since D G Phalke. Even with the rise of the ‘social’ in the 1940s the messages were ‘eternal’ and not derived from history. Mughal-E-Azam (1960) is only a love story in costume; Ponniyin Selvan (2022) has too many fictional elements to be a historical film and is only a eulogy of Tamil valour. There is an indistinct dividing line between the evidenced and the believed in India and many of the puranas are read seriously — even by historians — as evidence since little has been recorded of the actual past. We know much more about Rome of 100 BCE than about ourselves. 

When we come to representation of India’s Independence, it is significant that when Mehboob Khan remade Aurat (1940) as Mother India (1956), he had a framing sequence with Rajendra Kumar in Gandhian clothing without finding a place for the freedom struggle in the narrative-as-flashback. The struggle is sometimes represented as in 1942: A Love Story (1994), Lagaan (2001) and RRR (2022) but the films are patriotic — focusing on a sentiment rather than history. When Gandhi appeared in Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), it was not the historical Gandhi but an abstraction preaching personal values. Gandhi’s private life being an issue in India owes to Indians valuing the ‘eternal’ over the historical. This is in contrast to films about Gandhi made by outsiders like Richard Attenborough (Gandhi, 1982) or Gurinder Chadha (Viceroy’s House, 1967), which are only interested in the historical Gandhi.     

This brings us to the larger question of whether history is responded to at all in Indian popular cinema. It must necessarily do so since cinema transforms over time and that can only be due to the changing historical present. I propose that social history features but as allegory – trying to fit history into an eternal value system — and a film that awakened me to this was Mehboob’s Anokhi Ada (1948). In the film two orphans, a young woman and her brother are taken care of by a westernised young man from an affluent background (‘Laat Sahib’) who is estranged from his rich father and lives among the poor, doing good deeds. It is significant that ‘Laat Sahib’ wears a rose in his buttonhole, a sartorial habit associated with Jawaharlal Nehru. There are other elements that also bear interpretation and brother and sister being orphans may be associated with the death of the Father of the Nation early in 1948. What the film is doing is to portray the people of India as entrusted to a caring/loving Nehru after Gandhi’s death and the other, more authoritarian person who also courts the young woman can be interpreted as Sardar Patel who was in a rivalry with Nehru till his death in 1950.  

One could ask if genre films did not all propagate values that are in some sense ‘eternal’. But if one considers only war films (a historical genre), WWI and WWII have different meanings in cinema because of what Hitler and the Nazis represent. The usual approach in a WWI film is to decry war (as in Spielberg’s War Horse, 2011) but in a WWII film (Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, 1998) there is more certainty that the Germans represent evil; the attitudes towards the two wars do not bear reversal. This distinction makes the approach historical in a way RRR is not. Patriotism as an emotion is eternal and does not owe to historical India since we recognize it among the Spartans and among those of the Vijayanagar Empire. But we find that even in a film like Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000) which tries to be historical, what is held up is tolerance as an eternal value with the historical circumstances designed to relay that message. While cinema normally interprets the past through historical narratives, in most Indian ‘historical’ films we find instruction that history is only an instance of timeless myth. 

(M K Raghavendra is a well-known film critic)