multi-storied #23: Stardust and jackboots
A couple of months ago, the New Yorker published a piece I’d worked on nearly all year: on the Hindu right’s gradual <noun> of Bollywood.
That <noun> isn’t easy to pin down. “Infiltration”? That suggests a uniformly discreet process, whereas as the piece points out, the government’s tactics are often quite undisguised. “Takeover”? Too reminiscent of military annexation. “Coercion”? Closer, although some filmmakers and producers are pretty damn eager themselves to fall in line with Hindutva’s vision of the Indian state. “Intimidation”? Again, not quite reflective of Bollywood’s own keenness to take its cues from the ideological climate, or of the carrots that the regime holds out with the hand not holding the stick.
Here was my first, quite basic challenge in approaching this assignment—and indeed, in approaching all assignments about big Indian political stories. I’ll be honest: I don’t enjoy writing these, even though they’re vitally important. The context and background are too dense and vast; I have to spend too much energy compressing deep histories in unsatisfying ways. (I like to complain to my editors that I don’t ever again want to try to explain, swiftly but vividly, what the RSS is1.) The magazine writer’s pet device—telling a smaller story that somehow encapsulates larger ideas—feels at its most imperfect and frustrating here. The smaller story, after all, is an entire industry’s response to modern Indian politics. Even if that industry had been the most transparent, it would have been impossible to tell the whole tale. Factor in half-truths, secrets, Bollywood’s own corruptions and compromises, and a hundred years of Hindi cinema—and we still wouldn’t have touched on film industries in other languages. properly speaking, this is a lifetime’s work, not a year’s.
So what does a journalist do, in these situations?
I decided I’d collect stories. Not just summarize them from other media reports, as magazine features of this kind sometimes tend to do, but gather them from first-hand sources, pile them up one on top of the other until they achieved, in their entirety, a kind of critical mass, a weight that went beyond anecdote and into argument. All magazine articles provide a service, however artfully. My service here was to vet the stories I was hearing and then to agglomerate them—in such a way that no one could subsequently be unsure of a story’s veracity or dismiss it as an isolated incident.
Persuading people with plenty to lose to talk to me was…less difficult than I’d expected.
I had setbacks, of course. The most prominent involved the director and producer Karan Johar. Introduced to him by a friend, I started talking to his assistant about setting up a date for a meeting. The assistant was extremely helpful. Could I send him an email laying out what my story was about? So I did: “…yada yada the political climate and how Bollywood is responding yada yada…” The assistant called me back in a couple of days: We had a date, a full hour set aside for an interview. I was thrilled.
A week later, the assistant got in touch again. The interview was still on, but just to be clear, Johar didn’t want to be asked any political questions. I was mystified. That was my whole story. Couldn’t he reconsider? No no, look, the interview is still on, but just nothing on politics. Karan doesn’t want to say anything that could be controversial. In fact, there will be a lawyer in the room during the interview, I hope that will be okay. See you soon!
I reached Mumbai hoping I could still smuggle a question or two in during our meeting. But then Johar caught covid, and that was that: I never spoke to him2.
But there were so many others who talked: nearly 50 people, either on the record or on background. It was as if they were waiting to be asked, as if they’d grown sick of being scared, or as if they had newly realized how dangerous it has become to say nothing. One director remembered how, when he was 24 or 25, his boisterous, funny, liberal mother had told him, “Listen, you can marry anyone”—and here she named one of the lower castes of Hinduism—“but just don’t marry a Muslim.”
“And she laughed when she said, it kind of half-embarrassed, half-serious, half-joking,” the director told me. “Her tempering of her own liberalism with this jokey, embarrassed gaffe of a request stayed with me. It scared me.” He wanted, he said, to rouse people of her generation, so that they’d see how the country was tightening and shrinking around such daily accommodations of bigotry.
One actor met me on a Mumbai beach at noon. She’d responded, on Whatsapp, to my request for an interview, with a formal refusal, then told a common friend that she wanted very much to speak with me. We sat in a patch of shade, but it was still hot. She wore sunglasses so huge I wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d run into her on the street.
Cafes were too public, she said. They all had CCTV cameras, and she didn’t want to be seen talking to me.
After we talked for five minutes, she began telling a story, so I took out my phone and asked if I could record our interview. She looked aghast. Had I not turned my phone off? She made me do it. Then, from a pocket in her jeans, she produced a sheaf of pale-brown pages torn from a diary. She’d already written out all the notes I’d need.
During my time in Mumbai, “Samrat Prithviraj,” a confection of history and propaganda, hit the theatres:
I watched “Samrat Prithviraj” on the morning of its release—“first day first show,” as it’s called in Bollywood—with Nandini Ramnath, the film critic for Scroll. Ramnath was excellent, acerbic company for a movie with plenty to be acerbic about. In the lead role was Akshay Kumar, an aging action star with a face as lean as a greyhound’s. Kumar’s Prithviraj is a self-righteous bore, forever harping on about Hindu tradition and the need for Hindus to stick together. (The film’s obviousness won it tax exemptions in several states ruled by the B.J.P.) His sandstone palace is bathed in a golden light—the perfect venue for his wedding to an ingénue of a princess. But Prithviraj can spare little time, and just a couple of song-and-dance sequences, for love. Most of the film is taken up either by his councils with advisers about battles or by the battles themselves. In the climax, Prithviraj dies—but not before he rewrites history by killing Ghori. (Lions in a coliseum are involved.) The film’s epilogue calls Prithviraj the “last Hindu ruler in north India” (a falsehood) and laments that, after his death, India recovered its honor only when it gained independence from the British, in 1947—thus conflating homegrown Muslim rulers with European colonists in a sweep of rhetoric.
When the lights came up, there were barely a dozen people left in the theatre, down from the twenty or so at the beginning. In the weeks that followed, “Samrat Prithviraj” proved to be a box-office dud. It’s the sort of fact that some filmmakers cited to me in hopeful tones, as if to say that the Hindu-nationalist playbook doesn’t guarantee a hit—that the whims of the audience will ultimately thwart any ideological conquest of Bollywood. But this idea ignores the sheer volume of oxygen taken up by films like “Samrat Prithviraj,” and their accretive psychic weight. And it overlooks the movies that aren’t being made, the stories that aren’t being told, the things that aren’t being said. “The worrying aspect,” Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub told me, “is that, out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending.”
The full article is here.
In this article, fortunately, an RSS source helped me out. All I had to do was quote him on what the relationship between the RSS and the BJP is. “It’s like there’s a college—let’s say, Harvard,” he said. “A hundred students of Harvard become senators in the U.S. Now, every time they go to their professors to ask something, would you say Harvard runs the government?” He framed this as a rhetorical question, but I suspect that we had different answers in mind.
Alas, as a result, I never got to the bottom of a story I’d heard, about his 2016 movie “Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.” Part of the movie had originally been set in Lahore, two people associated with the film told me. At some late point in the project, apprehensive of depicting a love story between people of Indian and Pakistani origin, Johar changed that setting to Lucknow. But he couldn’t re-shoot everything, so the movie still bears traces of an urban presence designed to be Lahori. In one instance, a character weirdly cites the lack of a visa for his inability to visit Lucknow, a line of dialogue that only makes sense in relation to Lahore.