The missing grey in our collective memory

Akshaye Khanna is an enigmatic actor in mainstream Hindi cinema, a little like Abhay Deol. Over time, both have seemed to care little for attention, found a yen to vanish from public sight and tended to restrain their cinematic ancestries in an industry whose byword is nepotism. Khanna has dazzled in Dhurandhar, which this writer watched, and knew instantly that the storyline wouldn’t click without stereotyping the ‘other side’, sticking to the metaphorical ‘black-and-white’ of villains and heroes, and the lip-service of some ‘grey’ thrown into the mix. There was a time when one could dare to say and show more complex things. That looks bygone now.

Yet Akshaye Khanna is an actor I’ve admired for long, and watching him took me back to the monsoon of 2007, when he essayed one of his finest acts, as Harilal, the son of M K Gandhi in Gandhi, My Father. The film delves into the vexed relationship between a man who’d become the father of the nation, and his first-born. Viewed from the son’s vantage, M K Gandhi, for all his revolutionary idealism to free India and the human soul (including the imperial soul) crushing under colonialism, comes across as an insensitive parent, selfish in utilising his eldest born for his experiments with truth. Harilal, like his father, aspires for a British education, but the latter scotches his dreams. Growing up crushed and broken, Harilal, who has almost been used as an unwilling prototype of the future satyagrahi, takes to drink, meat, turns wayward, as the Indian freedom movement takes off. His father disassociates with him.

A year after watching it, I took a stab at Gandhi’s writing. Notwithstanding my several disagreements with him, I couldn’t help being struck at that early moment in My Experiments With Truth, when he confesses lusting for Kasturba, the night his father is dying. The moment is wracked with guilt, shame, and horror at what he’d done. Gandhi calls it his “double shame”. What contemporary politician, public figure, anywhere in the world, would commit to confessing their most shameful behaviours, on the page? At that moment, prima facie, Gandhi knew he was anything but a saint and was telling us so. Actor Anil Kapoor produced a film that could have every chance of some interest pocket seeking to stall it. It didn’t, and Hindi cinema is richer for it.

Some events of late have been bothersome; they’ve pushed your writer to commit a whole column on them. The quality of our collective remembering is taking a hammering. Even if it seems simplistic, reckon with this contrast. Hollywood, in particular, has a strong tradition of cinema on real-life figures that are layered, unshy, and gritty. Raging Bull, Walk the Line, Bohemian Rhapsody, Ray, The Aviator, Milk, Capote, Nixon, and Malcolm X are some classic biopics on major American personalities, who are rarely fully good or bad. Such figures wilfully mess one’s relationship with the past, and yet find a buy-in from producers, actors, writers, often. Some time ago, I watched another actor I admire, Pankaj Tripathi, essay Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Main Atal Hoon, in one of the poorest, most flattering biopics. One hopes it doesn’t discourage a more unflinching future celluloid attempt on him.

Check again on how we remember. An icon as Dharmendra passes away, and the encomia follow. Yes, they capture his pre-Partition life; that first train travel from Punjab to Bombay; the upright man in his early black-and-white roles; the close second to Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan at their pomp; the transition to comedy and action in the 1970s and early 1980s. And what after? Like his peers, Dharmendra (Bachchan too, surely) did a midden of middling films for a decade, before acceding to cinematic old age, in an era that film historians now reckon as the nadir of mainstream Hindi cinema.

In our collective popular memory, the greys, the wrinkles, the shame, the failures, the letdowns, the disappointments, the betrayals, the duplicities, and the evasions find little mention. A public life is often framed as invariably linear, congruent, and steady. It’s a waltz ad nauseam, and it calcifies the quality of arts and expression. The unwillingness to perceive the messiness of our past (and present) besmirches the quality and veracity of our remembering.

The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.