The Indian Cinematic Rebels

The Indian Cinematic Rebels

Sons of absent fathers and Iron mothers

 

 

What is common between Mother India (1957), Deewaar (1975), and Rang De Basanti (2006)? Apart from being huge box office hits that portrayed strong maternal figures, the three films climax with death. Unlike typical Hindi films, which end with the murder of the villain, these movies also involve the deaths of those who kill the villains.

This paper intends to chart the on-screen trajectory of these morally ambiguous Karna like villain-killers, who are deemed unworthy of the tag of the hero, through Mother India,  Deewaar , and Rang De Basanti. By looking at the treatment of the rebel figures in these immensely successful films, which span half a century, one wishes to examine how the socio-politico-cultural changes are reflected in and in turn set in motion by Popular Hindi Cinema.

If one takes into account the fact that Mother India’s director Mehboob Khan wanted to release Mother India on August 15, 1957, i.e. on India’s tenth independence anniversary, a surprising connection emerges between the movies. Deewaar was released on January 24, 1975 and Rang De Basanti hit the theatres on January 26, 2006. Apart from the obvious, that January 26 and August 15 are national holidays and there is a greater possibility of the films going House Full on day one, the fact that these films were intended to release on or around the days that mark India’s freedom shows that they were intended to be consumed by the audience in patriotic fervor.

Mother India is the story of Radha (played by the then superstar Nargis) and her struggle to keep her dignity and family intact in the face of hardships. She withstands natural (flood) and man-made difficulties( her husband’s desertion of the family, the lechery of the moneylender who takes away 25 acres of her land and three quarters of the annual produce, hunger, her two children’s death etc) to bring up her two sons. The film ends with Radha killing her younger son Birju (Sunil Dutt) when he kidnaps the moneylender’s daughter. Deewaar tells the story of two brothers: Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) who grow up to become Smuggler and Police Inspector respectively. Vijay’s death from Ravi’s bullet marks the end of the film. Rang De Basanti is the story of five college students who kill a corrupt minister to avenge their Pilot friend’s death, and are killed by the state machinery.

In Mother India after Radha’s husband Shyamu, who is figuratively castrated when he loses his hands, deserts the family, she emerges as the strong-willed morally upright woman, a Durga figure fighting all odds to bring up her children. Birju, her younger son is marked out as a non-conformist- a rebel in his childhood. Birju is introduced sleeping on his father’s legs, with his mother’s head next to his. The camera rests for a while on his face hinting that he is going to play a significant role in the movie. He is portrayed as an instinctive and straightforward character in the movie and the Camera movements refrains from passing any judgement over his mischief as a child. If anything, the Narrative identifies young Birju as the Krishna figure who goes about questioning the moneylender’s right to take away three quarters of the yield and is strongly attached to his mother. Noticeably, the Camera shows only Birju coming to his mother’s rescue when an angry Shyamu is beating her in rage (when she stops him from throwing away the food) and its only when Shyamu stops beating her that Ramu (the elder son) is visible clinging to her on the other side. In addition, the memorable scene where Birju agrees to pawn his eating plate so that Radha may not go hungry, and which is shot in extreme close up of his and Radha’s faces establishes that the mother shares a much more intimate bond with Birju than with any other family member. The Narrative is indulgent of the younger Birju only. It is relevant here to recall that Mehboob Khan practically adopted slum dweller Sajid, who played child Birju. Both the Narration and the Narrative do not accept adult Birju’s morally ambiguous and aggressive nature. Sunil Dutt as Birju wore dark makeup and his body language was a complete contrast to Rajendra Kumar, who plays his elder brother Ramu. While Ramu is mostly smiling in the film, Birju is seen either brooding or laughing loudly, denoting an excess in his nature. Birju establishes himself as rebel when he demands to examine the moneylender’s account book. Irrespective of the fact that he is illiterate, this action on Birju’s part shows his unwillingness, unlike his mother and brother, to continue to be exploited by the manipulative moneylender. However, the Narrative doesn’t stand in favour of Birju when he teases the village girls and breaks their earthen pots. In fact, the song ‘na main bhagwaan hoon…’ (Neither am I God, nor the Devil. Whatever the world may think I am just a human being), pitts him in opposition to the larger-than-life persona of his mother. His refusal, unlike his mother and brother, to forgive the moneylender’s atrocities results in latter’s death. However, Birju is killed by his mother when he tries to abduct the moneylender’s daughter from the wedding mandap because he transgresses his mother’s law: Honour is more important than anything else. The camera in this scene build up the mother’s image a supernatural agent through series of long shot- mid shot-close up and extreme close up. The emphasis is placed on the sacrificing mother who has eradicated evil, even if it meant killing her son. Her agony and resolution are highlighted while Birju, the victimized villain-killer, is marginalized as an anti-social element, by the Camera. The Narrative places importance on Birju’s death only insofar as he is the heroic mother’s son.

 

The mother-son bond is equally crucial to the Narrative of Deewaar. In absence of his father, who has been branded as a thief by the community, Vijay takes up the role of the family’s breadwinner with his mother and polishes boots to ensure that his younger brother can finish his education. Like Birju, when he is abducting a girl says to his mother,” You can’t kill me. You are my mother,” Vijay tells his mother (after she has found about his illegal sources of income) confidently “You can’t leave me. You are my mother.” However, like Radha in Mother India Vijay’s mother too refuses to budge from her moral position for the love of her son. In Deewaar however, the limelight is taken not by the mother but by the brooding ‘angry young man’ as Vijay’s character was to be called later. Amitabh Bachchan’s amazing screen presence and controlled acting style glamorized the social rebel in this movie. Vijay’s transition from an innocent child to a brooding and angry individual is shown early in the movie in the scene where loafers inscribe, “My father is a thief” on his arm. At the beginning of a scene, a young smiling Vijay is shown walking back to home from school; the background score being the same as that which was used to denote morning and promise of a new beginning in the contemporary movies. The Vijay who reaches back home, is a child covered with his own blood and burning with fire of anger ,as reflected in his eyes. Critics have noted that Bachchan’s controlled body language and expression of emotion only through eyes, which was to become the marker of the Angry Young Man, helped him evade the audience’s moral judgement. His ability to present the pain of the character through the eyes evoked a feeling of pathos, which resulted in the success of this phenomenon. Notes as much ‘the eyes serve to underscore the moral dimension of the struggle, even as the patterned nature of the fight’. The Camera seems to be courting Bachchan and a number of behind the shoulder shots and close-ups ensure that the audience does not miss Vijay’s point of view and his pain, which justifies it. It is interesting to note that even before Bachchan is presented as adult Vijay in the film, the dialogues and camera action build up a platform. His mother confesses to Ravi, that she prays to God daily for “Happiness for you and Peace for Vijay.” The camera then shows a long shot of Vijay sitting with his back towards the temple. This one image, for me captured the crux of his character. The long shot establishes a sense of distance between Vijay and his family, the camera and the audience. It is as if this distance is too large and he doesn’t wish to become intimate. His face is ‘turned-away’, as in visually he comes across as somebody who doesn’t wish to mingle with others (and with God of course). As Javed Akhtar, the Javed from the pair of Salim-Javed who wrote scripts for the ‘angry young man’ character said in an interview to Naseeran Munni Kabir “It is very difficult for Vijay to express his love for his mother, brother even the woman he loves. There is a storm raging within him. So he has closed the doors. This is how such characters feel safe. They create a deewaar between themselves and their emotions.” However, the Camera tries to give the audience a sneak-peak in his emotions. In the scene where Vijay’s mother and brother walk out of his home after his refusal to surrender to Police, the Narrative doesn’t immediately show us the tears of his mother after she is separated from him. It rather shows us Vijay tearing away the papers of the building that he had so excitedly bought for his mother. The accompanying audio is in his voice, recalling how proudly he had exclaimed, “My mother had labored for this building’s construction. Today I am going to gift this building to her.” The Narrative evokes pathos as this forces the audience to realize that Vijay did not even get a chance to share his happiness with his mother. However, towards the end of the film, the camera takes a different approach of looking at Vijay. At his father’s funeral, one scene marks this change in technique which prepares the audience for his death. In the frame a slanting bark of a tree divides the onscreen space between Ravi and mother on one side and Vijay on the other side. Diagonals create a sense of disharmony and the obvious imbalance in the frame: with mother hugging Ravi, her face turned away from Vijay who can’t bring himself to console her. The camera at this point doesn’t go for a close up shot of Vijay’s face but rather fixes its gaze on Ravi who is visibly struggling to find a way to break the wall that separates them. However, towards the end the Camera is again seen romancing Vijay as it takes a sympathetic mid angle shot of him dying in his mother’s arms in a temple. The rebel is thus safely incorporated in the society at the end of the movie, as Vijay had resolved to get married and surrender himself to Police and dies avenging his girlfriend’s murder.

 

The rebels at the end of Rang De Basanti however, are not able to achieve unity with the world at large. The five protagonists are introduced as anti-heroes in the movies. In fact Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) is shown doing graffiti on a wall and he is writing: well, the rebel has Arrived. The dialogues reflect their cyncicism; corruption, population, and unemployment are cited are primary reasons of disillusionment with Free India. The movie is largely made up of Sue’s point of view shots and is in that sense at least true to flashback technique, unlike Deewaar in which the mother ( Nirupa Roy) recounts bedroom scenes of  Vijay and Anita(Parveen Babi) in her flashback while she doesnot even know of Anita’s existence and death. Unlike Mother India and Deewaar , which offer meaty roles to the maternal figures, Rang De Basanti highlights the Rebels at the cost of their families( which have come to be identified with mothers in Hindi Cinema). Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s film has three mother figures Ajay’s mother (played by Waheeda Rehmaan), DJ’s mother Mitro(played by Kirron Kher) and Aslam’s mother. While Ajay’s mother emerges as ‘the mother’ in the movie in that she leads the silent protest against the corruption that led to her son’s death and later empowers the protagonists to take action and DJ’s mother is depicted as a superstitious, religious, caring but extremely strong woman, Aslam’s mother is portrayed as a quiet and docile wife. However, the Narrative also points towards Karan’s (Siddharth) mother as an absent presence, at the end of his dry, formal and materialistic exchange with his father( played by Anupam Kher). The rebellious sons, unlike Birju and Vijay, on the other hand, are given importance. The movie glorifies the rebels as revolutionaries. Through clever plot and Camera stunts, the Narrative establishes Bhagat Singh and his comrades’ violent method to achieve freedom as heroic by making the Coloniser, specifically the Police officer who oversaw their execution, brand them as heroic almost super-human individuals who don’t fear death. Later, the narrative draws parallel between past heroes and present day rebels by juxtaposing and matching the scenes  in which Bhagat Singh and others resolve to avenge Lala Lajpat Singh death by killing a Police officer to the scenes where DJ(Aamir Khan) and his friends decide to kill the Defence Minister in order to avenge their friend Ajay’s ( Madhvan) death. Not only does such editing help vindicate the actions of the present generation Rebels by presenting violence as context driven phenomenon, it also places them in a higher league that of Revolutionary heroes – of martyrs.

The representation of the rebels in these three movies is largely context driven, in my opinion, which explains their success at box office. I think that Birju dies an unglorified death because coming at the dawn of Independence, when Nehruvian Optimism was at its Zenith, he represents a potential threat to the new emerging order and is an anachronism in that sense. The acceptance of glamorous smuggler in Deewar was acceptable to the audience of 1970s because by that time India was past its euphoria about Freedom and was hitting reality. The 5 protagonists in Rang De Basanti are acceptable to the audience because they talk of doing away with the corrupt system and reforming it from within. Unlike, the rebels in the earlier 2 movies, the rebels in this movie represent rejuvenation and reform and not anarchy. Maybe later generations , with the advantage of hindsight, will claim that the movie catered to the need of the hour and what the present generation of youth needed was the simple mantra : BE A REBEL.