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by Debashree Mukherjee
Okay, so the popular consensus is that Kai Po Che is a good film. Everyone agrees that it’s well shot and
edited, the relatively unknown heroes are excellent, and the narrative is taut
and emotionally resonant. It is competent and follows all the right cues worthy
of a buddy movie about growing up and testing loyalties. But the film is hardly
an event. It has been seized upon as a significant cinematic landmark for its
depiction of the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. It might be worth our while to get
some perspective here.
Today I will look at some other questions about our
collective liberal attitude to this film, and what it indicates about our
memory of select incidents of mass violence in this country. The main question
to ponder is whether there is something dangerous about a historically-contextualized
cultural product that can be coopted by a range of political perspectives? Is
there something objectionable about a film (and the emotions it generates) which
is deliberately toothless in the face of power? Over the last few weeks we have witnessed a range
of informed cultural commentators protest that critics
of the film are making much to-do about what is in fact the first “realistic”
and engaging Bollywood depiction of the Gujarat massacre.
This post rejects that opinion and appeals for responsible film criticism and an alert, active mode of
spectatorship.
I
What really happened in Gujarat in 2002? The
propaganda narrative simplistically maintains that the burning of a train in
Godhra, combined with a history of communal violence in Gujarat, led to a
large-scale eruption of misplaced anger. We’ve seen that before in this
subcontinent. Over and over. We are outraged each time it happens and then we
shake our heads and say that the fury of the mob is irrational. But this view
is a gross, unethical misrepresentation of the event.
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(See
this article for an analysis of how KPC
waters down the pogrom for easy assimilation.
Also Paul Brass
for a theoretical analysis of how the category “Hindu-Muslim
riots” is produced.)-->
Contradicting this propaganda are academics, NGOs, lawyers,
and journalists who have published studies that prove that the Gujarat “riots”
were systematic, large-scale, aided by government lists and electoral rolls and
university attendance charts. The police stood by and watched. Ministers were gheraoed and murdered inside their homes
in broad daylight. Women were brutally raped and tortured in ways that boggle
the mind. Such an event could not take place without the sanction of the state.
The Chief Minister at the time, a man who clearly has blood on his hands, and
mud on his face, is preparing to become Prime Minister of this righteous
republic. He has admitted recently that some “mistakes” were made in the past
but the reasonable citizens of this nation will surely forgive him.
That so many of us have also apparently forgiven and forgotten is scary to me.
Kai
Po Che ably addresses
the propaganda narrative of the genocide. Farhana Ibrahim points out that the earthquake section reveals a gradual build-up of motivated communal tension. And yet, this does nothing except set the stage for the abrupt "flare-up" that is to follow. The real character of the violence,
that it was a state-sponsored systematic purging of a community, is none of the
film’s concern. Apart from some meager references to newly-minted swords and a
call to the police that doesn’t go through, KPC
simply doesn’t want to deal with the facts. You will say, but yaar, it is a fiction film not a
documentary. At least the director has shown the communal politics in an honest
way. What more can you expect of a mainstream movie? I will say, yes, you are partially
right. It’s done a decent job but it is not honest and there are insidious
messages and meta-commentaries that ultimately do more harm than good. There is
a gaping wound bang in the centre of the plot. What happened in that Sabarmati train
coach? Two state-appointed fact-finding commissions were instituted (Nanavati-Mehta
Commission, 2002; U. C. Bannerjee Committee, 2004) to get to the root of the
matter. Both, ironically, had contradictory findings. The matter is still under
dispute. KPC, however, uses a
remarkable sleight of hand to endorse the Muslim-conspiracy version of the
incident. We see the fundamentalist Mamaji say that “the Hindus” will not
tolerate such an atrocity, meaning that the train was torched by Muslim
extremists. Next, Omi’s friends come to take him home, sensing that matters are
going to get out of hand. He turns to them and says, “You mother hasn’t died, has she?” and the friends are silenced. It
is the friends’ silence, dramatically astute though it may be, that rankles.
That is the terrible silence at the heart of the film, a refusal to complicate
the causality narrative. The film just lets the question slide. This is what
they call the moment of “prestige” in a magician’s vocabulary. Causality has
been established and you didn’t even see it. Magic.
There is another magic trick that we in India are fond of.
It revolves around converting an outrageous crime into a tragedy. We have
short-term memory loss when it comes to perpetrators and state actors. Besides,
we have zero memory of anger or a need for justice. KPC delivers this exact-same discourse of mourning and anguish. A
recent review by Trisha Gupta articulates this admiringly, “If Kai Po Che's
segregated universe has a message for us, it is not to applaud the fractured
society it mirrors. It is to force us to see what exists – and grieve for how
it came to be.” That’s cute. A nation that grieves
together stays together. Let’s try two more pithy aphorisms and see if they
make sense: A tragedy heals itself with time. An outrage needs redressal.
Gupta also suggests another argument in favor of KPC:“It also seems clear to me that this
film is more effective in reaching out to its audience—and potentially changing
people's minds—than an imagined filmic naming and shaming of Modi could ever
be.” Is there something patronizing about this position? Every
person who iterates this view is subtly distancing herself from KPC’s ideal “audience”. Because, of
course, we don’t need any
mind-changing. We refer to a nebulous great Indian middle-class - young
bankers, older housewives, middle-aged engineers - which will vote for Narendra
Modi in the coming elections. But are these constituencies really so mindless? All
the film says is that rash acts of violence are bad; stick with your friends;
don’t be swayed by evil politicians. Who wouldn’t agree with that? On the other
hand, if the film convinced you that there are minoritized sections in our
country that have been historically oppressed and we, the protagonists, reap
the benefits of this oppression; or if the film changed your mind about Modi, showed
you that sometimes “development” comes at a price that we might not want to
pay, then we’d have something to
celebrate. But commercial cinema rarely works like that, so please, hold your
applause. Kai Po Che is, as a dear
comrade put it, a children’s film on Gujarat. If adults cheer it on, it’s time
to stop and wonder.
II
Remember how we were all outraged when that Farhan Akhtar
advertisement came out? The one that exhorted all men to “be men” and protect
women from sexual harassment? Remember how you forwarded Kavita Krishnan’s link
to your friends on facebook and said wow, this girl has nailed it? What was the
problem with that advert? It’s heart was in the right place, it was
well-intentioned, in a world full of misogynists it was telling men to be
sensitive to women. Nevertheless, we were offended because we are sophisticated
feminists and we know that such an exhortation belongs firmly within the realm
of patriarchy, a sexist approach that hinges on male power and female lack of
agency. Then why do we not react with equal nuance when something similar but more blatant is
happening in KPC? (For a discussion
of KPC’s representation of Muslim victims
and Hindu heroes see this )
In the same Kafila post, Ibrahim responds to criticism that KPC leaves out many important facets of
the Gujarat violence by asking: “are the[se] the only
ways in which we can memorialize the events of 2002 and after?” No, these
are not. We have precedents like Final
Solution, Firaq, and Parzania. So
let there be a Kai Po Che too. And
may there be other, braver, more honest films in the future. We can only start
to collectively address a recent trauma through a multiplicity of narratives. Coming
back to the question of cinematic memorialization, what are some precedents for
the fictional treatment of traumatic historical events? We’re familiar with the
commercially viable Hollywood holocaust genre, an aesthetically settled form
that directly confronted the post-WW2 ‘radical unrepresentability thesis’ of
the Jewish holocaust. The crucial point is that the holocaust genre and its
cathartic melodrama had some advantages that we don’t have for the
representation of our own subcontinental genocides. For one, our histories are grossly
unsettled. There has been no naming of perpetrators or extended trials. We
don’t pass bills that recommend punishment for “command responsibility”. Our
mass murderers sit in Parliament and are dispersed across every political
party. Two, there are many “facts” and representational tactics in the holocaust
genre that were sacred in its first decades. The genre didn’t come into its own
till the 1960s, a good two decades after the large-scale Nazi persecution of
Jews. It took an even longer time for Hollywood to attempt a good German
protagonist. And even as recently as 2010, there was outrage at Quentin
Tarantino’s fabulist historiography in Inglorious
Basterds, a vengeful fairytale that still maintains the appropriate
distance between the good guys and the bad guys. In India, where there has been
scant cinematic examination of even the Partition, we somehow feel grateful for
any Bollywood crumbs that are thrown our way.
Snigdha Poonam has quoted Chetan Bhagat as saying “The
film depicts the riots in full detail; it just doesn’t take sides. I am still
the only writer who has engaged with Gujarat riots.” He also said in an
interview with the Indian Express, “Nobody can deny what has happened in
Gujarat. Why and how has it happened that really is an opinion. And that the
film doesn’t have.” This statement holds the key to my reading of the film
and the weakly complicit responses to it. For example, Anupama Chopra tells us that compared to the book, the
film “is far more comforting and palatable. But perhaps that is not such a
bad thing,” that as a cinematic experience it is “deeply satisfying,” and
finally, “Great horrors unfold and yet,
when the deeds are done, a sense of redemption remains.” More appalling
words have rarely been printed.
None
of us will accept a film about the Delhi gangrape which has “no opinion”, which
“doesn’t take sides”. Allow me to
take an intentionally vulgar liberty and imagine that film. There are three
friends who live in Delhi. They are working class guys with ambitions for the
future and some hardened cynicism about the city. They have personal crises and
endearing character traits. One day something terrible happens in the life of
one of the friends. He gets unrecognizably drunk and his friends are shocked by
his murderous rage. They try to calm him down. They borrow a friend’s chartered
bus and go for a spin around the city.
Is
this scenario already making you uncomfortable? Is there any way I can make a
girl’s rape-murder seem like a tragic fallout
to you – instead of an outrageous event that must be addressed now? But I
assure you, that film will be made. And we will walk out of the theatres with
our popcorn tubs empty and our hearts full.
