The end of an era, playwright Arthur Miller had once remarked, is marked by the exhaustion of its basic illusions. That partly holds true for the political engagements of Hindi films after the passing away of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964. But, did that imply that the following period had to invent new illusions to distinguish political narratives of a new era on the silver screen? Alternatively, did that mean that the disillusionment and the resultant anger itself became the key political conversation in Hindi films? Such questions also entail the accounts of how the emerging power configuration and policy initiatives intersected with lives of individuals- both as material beings and as social creatures.

The end of the Nehruvian era coincided with the emergence of post-triumvirate (Raj Kapoor-Dilip Kumar-Dev Anand) generation of actors and filmmaking, though the trio hadn’t disappeared yet. That, however, didn’t mean any distinct realisation of the political self in cinematic expression in the Bombay film industry. What, obviously, had changed was the fact that political messaging in Hindi films made in the second half of 1960s was now centered around the crisis in material life of the nation- scarcity of food grains and the challenge of national defence following  the 1965 war with Pakistan. Still the tinsel town, seemingly, found it difficult to keep the political away from the patriotic. The most evocative policy-narrative of the period, Manoj Kumar’sUpkar (1967), restored the centrality of villages as the vanguard of any developmental leap in the country.

Laced with mushy patriotic appeal and led by the didactic protagonist Bharat played by Manoj Kumar, the film was released a year after India’s second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri had passed away. However, it was a cinematic tribute to Shastri’s clarion call of Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. Deification of the military, an institution Nehru was either indifferent to or had a distrust of, and the return of the farmer in the country’s economic imagination was a periodic modification of priorities seen in Nehruvian project of industry-led modernisation.

Though the scientific approach to agriculture was evident in the advent of green revolution in the later part of the decade, the resurrection of the farmer as the flagbearer of national development was a definite point of departure in how films interpreted state goals. The film ends with a scene in which an injured soldier finds a new purpose in life as his foreign-educated brother is reconciled to working on his farm land with the possibilities of high productivity. The new-found confidence in the Green Revolution leading the country to food self-sufficiency is obvious in the scene as it ends with reorienting patriotic energy with mere desh ki dharti.The film is somehow hinged on a plot to put modernity advocated by Nehru at the service of the Gandhian idea of a self-sufficient village in which a soldier gets his due, thanks to the country abandoning pacifist polemics in the light of recent experiences.

Going into the 1970s with a new star system and altered political landscape, Hindi mainstream cinema wasn’t keen to speak its political mind early in the decade. That was surprising given the seminal churnings the political life of the country was witnessing in the period. The rise of Indira Gandhi as the new power centre, intense factionalism within the overarching Congress umbrella (what political scientist Rajni Kothari called the ‘Congress system’), the emergence of non-Congress political forces following the 1967 assembly elections in which the hegemonic status of the Congress suffered a setback and then the definite socialist thrust of the Indira government began with initiatives like the nationalisation of banks in 1969. With material conditions of the major section of a rapidly rising population still swinging between absolute to relative poverty, the Indira campaign call of “Garibi Hatao” for the March 1971 general elections was to find some resonance in cinematic tales only late in the decade. Above all, what was even more intriguing was that the stuff tailor-made for the cinematic sense of the political, namely India’s moment of  glory in clinching the convincing victory over Pakistan in December 1971 war, wasn’t chronicled on Hindi screen. That was ironic because a few years back Chetan Anand had made a landmark film even amid the gloom of defeat at the hands of the Chinese in the 1962 war.

While moments reaffirming India’s sense of territorial security and integrity were not captured cinematically, the context of sovereignty made a film made in 1971 in English too hot to handle for the Indian state. Satyajit Ray’s documentary Sikkim, made in English and commissioned by the Chogyal of Sikkim (the then ruler), was banned in 1975 when Sikkim became a part of India as its 22nd state. Even in parallel Hindi cinema, which came of age in the 70s, such overt political films were not made. As if looking for the hindsight like that of a historian, Hindi films have generally taken a longer response time in addressing the contemporary political events.  In 1973, M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa showed that in being the lone cinematic exploration of the personal, social and political experiences of a Muslim family which opts to stay in India following Partition. Coming after 26 years of Partition, the film goes back to years in the immediate aftermath of Independence and Partition in 1947 to trace the journey of Salim Mirza from a sense of belonging to isolation, and then rediscovery of political engagement and common destiny that they share with the people of the country. Based on a story by Ismat Chughtai, the narrative was adopted for the screen by Kaifi Azmi and Abu Siwani.

In the final scene, the protagonist and his son, played with remarkable grace by Balraj Sahni and Farooq Sheikh, respectively, on their way to leave for Pakistan after years of dilemma, realise the universality of political context as they end their isolation by participating in a march demanding jobs. They seek association with the human condition of material deprivation in a politically structured society, thus forming new contracts of citizenship with millions of people across identities.

One of the overrated political films of the period was Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975). Perhaps its popularity has been a beneficiary of inferred and publicised parallels between the protagonist, played by Suchitra Sen, and the life of Indira Gandhi. What also helped the political label to stick to the film was the fact that in a move to mitigate any negative perception, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency government banned it 26 weeks after its release, only to be re-released when the Janata Party-led government came to power in 1977 and was also shown on state-run Doordarshan. In weaving a tale of a woman politician fighting her emotions to suppress the rekindling of the relationship with her estranged husband, played by Sanjeev Kumar, and the costs of a public life, Gulzar never managed to raise the film to anything beyond a stylised musical take on an old age review of personal relations. The film was let down by a meandering script and Sen’s lacklustre performance while Sanjeev Kumar’s restrained acting and music saved the day.

If at all it sought to portray the leading political figure of the time, it had no insight into her politics or the nature of her regime. Its melodrama, hinged on three memorable numbers, wasn’t distinguishable from routine romantic tales. At most, it had a few moments of clichéd political satire, predictably about politicians wooing voters during an election campaign. That’s what this forgettable number Salam kijiye janab aaye hain from the film, the only one not talking about love, attempts.

The quintessential political movie of the 70s, again a victim and beneficiary of ban alternatively, was made by then Member of Parliament and a little-known filmmaker Amrit Nahata. In a thinly disguised satire on Sanjay Gandhi and his acolytes’ whimsical approach to conducting affairs of the party and government,  Kissa Kursi Ka was more of a visual collage of political cartoons that one found in newspapers before Emergency was declared on June 25, 1975. It followed a narrative style, more suitable for theatre production, in lampooning easily identifiable figures of the Sanjay cabal like Dhirendra Brahmachari, Indira Gandhi’s private secretary R K Dhawan and Rukhsana Sultana, besides Sanjay himself. The film’s trajectory through various institutions of clearance, ban and litigation is perhaps more riveting than the film itself. Pulling out a report from India Today archives dated June 15, 1977, Dilip Bobb writes:

“The prints were submitted in April 1975 for censorship clearance. Along came the Emergency and with it, Sanjay acolyte V.C.Shukla as I&B minister. The prints vanished and nothing more was heard till the Janata Party came to power and Nahata joined their ranks. The Supreme Court found Sanjay guilty of destroying the prints and sent him to jail for a month.

The case, like the petitioner, slid into obscurity thanks to a series of witnesses turning hostile. Only the film’s title acquired permanence as the political musical chairs involving the Janata Party continued to provide entertainment. As did the daily display of muscle power by Sanjay’s goon squad, many of whom graduated to positions of power by eventually occupying the omnipotent kursi themselves.’’

The film used the symbolism of a single person, played by Shabana Azmi as Janata, and the easily malleable-turned-ambitious politician Gangaram, played by NSD stalwart Manohar Singh, to see through the cobwebs of bureaucratic and political corruption, the façade of socialism, the absurdities of policymaking and the subversion of democratic processes. In a highly melodramatic scene in the film, quite in sync with the general tone of its narrative, the chair itself talks back to its new high profile occupant to suggest what the time demands him from him to leverage most from the chair.

In art house cinema, the political themes embedded in persistent structures of exploitation, patriarchy and impoverishment kept finding expression in works of filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen and Goutam Ghose. Benegal’s Nishant (1975) and Ghose’s Paar (1984) were well crafted portrayals of the feudal origins of power relationships that were still shaping politics of rural India. With Naseeruddin Shah making an impressive debut, the film drew from the available talent pool of parallel cinema ranging from Girish Karnad to Smita Patil. Its depiction of the hold of the rural elite and the exploitation of women, under feudal power relationships, was an exercise in exploring how personal could be political in the ordering of relations.

There is a popular argument that the angry man image that catapulted Amitabh Bachchan to undisputed stardom by the mid-1970s was rooted in the political messaging of anti-establishment in his films. Political scientists Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, heading the team of NCERT textbook writing team for political science in 2006, have gone on to the extent of including Zanjeer (1973) as a film reflecting the political mood of the time. Perhaps, they could have made a choice if Bachchan’s body of work in the 70s could be used for political material at all. What, however, is clear is that challenging and questioning of institutions of state power like police and judiciary could be seen as staple diet in the mainstream entertainers which shaped Bachchan’s popularity in the decade.

It was a clear point of departure from the respect and awe with which state authority was treated in the Hindi films of Nehruvian era. The themes of price rise, black marketeering, rampant corruption and the general anger against state authority provided the subtext to the emergence of popular rage which Bachchan was seen as articulating in covert plots of revenge sagas. It’s, however, anybody’s guess whether that was the cinematic catharsis of political rage.

In fact, it was in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983) which was a more definitive piece of cinematic work on the politician-criminal-police nexus that had pervaded body politic as India entered the 80s. Amid the hundreds of cop films being made in this country each year, Om Puri’s performance as a cop wrestling with the disturbing thoughts of moral as well as physical timidity stands out till now. For the sheer intensity of brooding angst seeking a cathartic moment, that defiance of impotence that creeps in with everyday compromises, Om Puri leaves his distinct imprint in this scene from Ardh Satya. His recital of Dilip Chitre’s lines adds to the impact.

Nihalani followed it with Party (1984) the next year. The film gives a peep into the patronage politics of cultural elite and how the eligibility for getting state favours is dictated by membership of particular cabals. In exposing the hypocrisy and opportunism in the world of arts and letters, the film makes a subtle comment on how the politics of favouritism produces a kind of mediocrity which gets normalised as ‘talent’. In perhaps the only political film of his career, Rajesh Khanna played barber-turned-state legislator in Aaj ka MLA Ram Avtar(1984), a melodramatic take on the ills plaguing Indian democracy in general and electoral processes, in particular.

In making cinematic sense of political India in 20 years following Nehru, the Hindi screen showed sporadic spells of engagement. It was, by no stretch of imagination, interested in serving as a creative stakeholder in the political churnings of the times. What, however, enriched its political conversations was the emergence of a parallel cinema in this period and also some elements of democratic response serving as subtext to the general narratives of formulaic mainstream cinema. Towards the end of the period, it revealed some possibilities of speaking the political mind in cinematic language. Such were the mixed signals the period was known for, anyway.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.

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