Almost 73 years after Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, where a rich, young couple races two rickshaw pullers like they are battery-operated toys till one of them crumbles and crashes, we recently witnessed something called a Tirri prank. Pranksters remotely shut down e-rickshaws via battery-management apps, leaving drivers desperate and, at times, in tears mid-route. Cruelty is the flavor of the season, and that brings me to Ajay Devgn.
The last shot of The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002) was a close-up of Devgn’s eyes. Resolute. Clear-sighted. Looking into the soul of a nation. To remind us of the sacrifices and bravery that won us our independence. And now the same Devgn is playing a character who is all for pellet guns aimed at the eyes of the Kashmiris. Where partial or total blindness of Indian citizens is a negligible cost to keep the new version of Nationhood ticking. The idea of India, birthed by the unified defiance of a colonizing foreign power, has now been reduced to performative cruelty against Indian citizens. Today, we seem to take pride in a system that demolishes homes at whim, ignores on-camera lynchings, normalizes hate rhetoric and the dehumanization of fellow Indians.
Devgn’s entry into opportunistic cinema is recent, though. His Singham Returns (2014) had dedicated a song to a Sufi peer, and the villain was a corrupt Godman. This was 2014, though, and the penny had not yet dropped. From Lajja (2001) where he played a dacoit out to protect women from the atrocities of upper-caste men, to The Legend of Bhagat Singh where India was equated with all its people, to Halla Bol (2008) where he was the disciple of a street revolutionary reminiscent of Safdar Hashmi, to the full-blown historical revisionism of Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior and now Chauhan, he has been on quite a journey. The success of Tanhaji shows that Devgn has now hit upon a profitable theme with endless possibilities.
The Calculated Shift in Cinematic Archetypes
Don’t also miss the taunt to a Pathan by a Chauhan in the poster. The jibe is intentional. It draws a clear battle line within the film industry and beyond. It is loaded, and its religious and caste connotations are hard to miss.
A far cry from the era of Rahul Rawail’s Arjun (1985) and Ram Gopal Varma’s Shiva (1990). Two heroes with mythological names who were not propagandists or hate vendors but lone warriors battling the nexus between crime and politics. The films had no subtext demonizing the minorities because the two heroes were in a minority like us and outnumbered by corrupt, violent, manipulative power-mongers. Both films showed how the young are lured into goondaism by powerful politicians and then discarded once their purpose is served. Their initial weapons? A cycle chain. And sticks. Not the might of the state.
In 2021, Akshay Kumar’s Sooryavanshi, much like Chauhan, had proudly announced, “Aa rahi hai police” in a poster crowded with faceless figures in combat gear. This was the era post the Jamia library attack, and the role the police had played during the CAA and farmers’ protests.
Such films, much like American Sniper, Rambo, and First Blood, appear to assert a singular identity powered by a simplistic, gun-toting nationalism blind to the root causes of divisions, if any.
The Erasure of Systemic Empathy
Not too long ago, though, empathy came naturally to us and to our cinema. In Arjun, for instance, the protagonist (played by Sunny Deol) finds that the sister of his dead friend has been pushed into prostitution. The man giving him this news chuckles gleefully and uses a cuss word for her. Arjun, as heroes were known to do then, schooled the man for laughing at a tragedy and told him to imagine his own sister in the same situation. We did not laugh at the weak then.
Even Ghayal’s (1990) gun-toting vigilante hero had empathy. This Rajkumar Santoshi film showed openly how a corrupt, politicized “system” defangs the police and protects criminals. In one scene, a police officer slaps a young student, and the hero tells the silently weeping boy, “Conserve these tears. One day, these tears will turn into a sailab and cleanse this country!” In the final scene, he is caught only because he is trying to save a little girl from the villain. A lone man being overpowered by a large cluster of policemen in the climax was also rather symbolic.
Our cinema then helped us to not just escape the toxicity of the world but also connect us to something bigger than ourselves. To the humanity of one another and gave us hope that one day we would find our way to love, friendship, social equity and justice.
The Weaponization of Contempt
This was much before the laughter emoji was weaponized to mock lynched men, raped women, brutalized students and imprisoned activists and journalists. And before Manoj Muntashir strutted on a podium to exhort the audience to plunge bhagva into “ahankar ki chhati.”
Ram Gopal Varma’s Shiva built upon the template Javed Akhtar had created in Arjun. Of a group of boys who decide they will fight and not comply with the system that oppresses the weak. In Arjun, the primary concern was unemployment. In Shiva, it was the weaponization of student leaders by corrupt politicians.
Two scenes in Arjun resonate to date. A young boy is lynched on a rainy day in a crowded street, but nobody notices because everyone is safe within the confines of their umbrellas. The other is when Arjun is running for his life in the end through streets lined with the posters and cutouts of a man who has come into power by using his innocence and idealism. Everywhere he turns, there is this pervasive image with folded hands. Plastered on walls, peering from hoardings.
Still, the film ended on a note of hopefulness. To show that the system works if you insist upon seeking justice. There was no such closure in Shiva. It has many scenes that mirror situations and shots from Arjun, including a cycle chase, but it ends with the realization that if one bully is taken out, another one will erupt because the ground realities do not change for ordinary Indians.
Engineering the “Enemy Within”
Today, cultural, cinematic, and political iconography is largely led by violent male archetypes with sprawling chests, and it has seeped into our consciousness and our cinema via one-sided, repetitive, multi-layered propaganda. The audience may have changed, too. The Chauhans and the Sooryavanshis succeed precisely because they are imperviously cruel. The actors playing such characters have tasted blood as well. They know secularism is no longer the nation’s primary currency. So they are ready to profit from what is.
As for our cinema’s shift to this lucrative ideology, it arguably began with Akshay Kumar’s Baby (2015). Akshay went from a rebellious lover boy in his debut film Saugandh (1991) to a superhuman khiladi to an ensemble star of comedies and then struck gold with films like Singh Is Kinng and Namastey London, where he played the bumbling outsider in foreign climes. Reminding people of what they were missing out on by not being closer to their roots. Whatever was the trend of the day, he encashed it and full points to his resilience.
Baby, however, was a turning point of another kind. Because it started something that has now culminated into a Sooryavanshi cop representing the might of the state. He eyeballs and hectors bearded men who are the “enemy within.” The enemy in Baby was ostensibly Pakistan, but it subtly turned the audience’s gaze towards the crowded Muslim-majority areas in Mumbai for traces of “anti-nationalism.”
In Sooryavanshi, the enemy was a sleeper Lashkar cell with potential terrorists hiding in plain sight among unsuspecting Indians. Throw in some exploding cars, helicopter stunts and punchlines about Mumbai police, and you have another Us vs Them narrative disguised as an entertainer. There was a quote by Gandhi hidden somewhere in the trailer, but that is all he is useful for now. A few quotes, and the symbolic use of his charkha and spectacles on special occasions.
The Monetization of Combative Nationalism
Historically, most successful cop films in India (Zanjeer, Ardh Satya, Khakee, Shool and many more) almost always explored the rot within society, policing and political systems. Introspection has, however, gone out of our mainstream films. And this has happened gradually.
Baby’s core team, exploring a conspiracy, did have a Muslim. A girl, no less. Shabana Khan, played by Taapsee Pannu. The film also had two well-known Pakistani actors in key roles. The nationalism genre was, though, being tweaked subtly and unmistakably. The year was 2015, after all, and it was too early to paint all Muslims with one brush. So we had Danny Denzongpa’s Feroz Ali Khan heading the counter-terrorism unit, just so you knew that the film was NOT against a religion but only the anti-nationals.
There was jingoism even before Baby. There was Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, where an uprooted hand pump took on Pakistan, and the lone hero killed hundreds, if not thousands, on his way to his watan on a burning train with his wife and kid. Then there was John Matthew Matthan’s 1999 hit Sarfarosh, where a nationalist ACP takes on a Pakistani singer called Ghulam Hassan (hint, hint).
But the first was also a love story between an Indian and a Pakistani. And Sarfarosh had a Muslim subordinate of the hero making an important point about always being on the defensive about his religion because he was called upon again and again to prove his nationalism.
A Wednesday!, Neeraj Pandey’s debut, was clear in its intent that the only way to counter terrorism was to blow up terrorists without any legal intervention. But it also had a Muslim cop saving Mumbai from the terror-spreading “vermin.” The danger in the film was contained, but in Baby, Pandey’s narrative took a clear stand like Bush in the post-9/11 era that those who were not “with” us were “against” us.
Also, the security agent played by Akshay had a sense of entitlement almost as heavy as his surname. His name is Ajay Singh Rajput (no mistaking the caste assertion here, just like Ajay Devgn’s Chauhan) and he habitually throws punches because he can. In one scene, he smashes the jaw of a witness willing to cooperate, uproots his tooth, and when asked why he did that, he says, “aadat hai.”
He also mentions helpfully how, during the Gujarat riots, he protected a Muslim family from a trishul-waving mob because he is a proud Indian. Yet, the only people plotting trouble in the film are Muslims. The naive engineer being brainwashed by a community leader, the agent who switches loyalties, the terrorist (Kay Kay Menon wasted in a sketchy role) who wants to be given better facilities in the prison because he has killed more people than Kasab.
Don’t also miss Minister saab, who is called the “face of change” and dresses like someone we know as the harbinger of “achhe din.” Unlike Black Friday, where terror was treated as an all-encompassing tragedy, there was no sociological subtext here. Just terrorists and those who swat them as members of a crack team called “Baby.” Like the awful, bloody makeup you saw on Baby’s victims, and Akshay Kumar’s rather jarringly fake mustache, the ideological territory this film inhabited was hurried and ad hoc.
The new generation of dhuradhars know that timing is everything, and not surprisingly, they are now replacing Akshay as the most successful brand ambassador of combative nationalism. He may have once interviewed the “face of the change,” and endorsed political “masterstrokes” through his films and his tweets, but he is no longer the man of the moment. We now have the next generation of astute actors who don’t really care about a moral compass as long as there are unearned awards and exploding box-office returns to relish.
