It’s been a week since Jhund released, marking Marathi director Nagraj Manjule’s Bollywood debut. The film has received its share of both praise and critique. Many of the aspects that have been pointed out as flaws are not unfounded — that it in many ways caters to an upper-caste gaze, though it is a film about Dalit-Bahujan lives. While it is a fair demand to make of anti-caste films, it’s also essential to examine the industry parameters within which Manjule may have been required to operate for Jhund, or the formulaic limitations in Kollywood within which Pa Ranjith or Mari Selvaraj or other even younger filmmakers work in.
Amitabh Bachchan’s outsider role in Jhund for example is hard not to make note of — a plot decision possibly exacerbated by the fact that his Vijay Borade was based on the real-life Vijay Barse, a social worker credited for founding ‘slum’ football. By the time we reach Bachchan’s elongated courtroom monologue towards the end of the film, it’s impossible to wonder why his character has elbowed out of the screen the very people the film is about. With the star filling out the entire screen, facing the audience, it’s a sequence that appears framed for the benefit of his fans rather than the politics of the film.
Bachchan is tasked with delivering the pivotal message of Jhund: that the privileged live inside cocooned walls, gate-keep the entry of Dalit-Bahujan youth into arenas like sports; “but the real India is out there,” outside those walls. It’s an essential point to make, unfortunately one lost to a superstar actor’s screen presence that swallows up everyone else. Even the judge Bachchan is monologuing at, is edged out, because the actor needs to speak to his audience. Perhaps why it seems so at odds in an anti-caste film is because Bachchan’s Borade is an outsider, as mentioned.
While this may be a choice Manjule made, it merits asking if Bachchan or any other star actor of Bollywood would even have been willing to play a Dalit-Bahujan character in an anti-caste film that unabashedly celebrates Ambedkarite culture. For a character who takes up the centrestage in a majority of the scenes, Bachchan has only a single memorable frame in which he prominently appears alongside an image of Dr Ambedkar. During the Ambedkar Jayanthi celebrations shown prior to the intermission, the actor watches with almost paternalistic amusement as the basti youth dance joyfully before a towering photograph of Dr Ambedkar. He later steps up for a few seconds to the photo and offers his respects with folded hands. But not before he is reassured that the procession poses no threat to an ambulance attempting to get through. That reassurance never seems required from the countless wedding or Hindu religious processions depicted on screen. It reads as if the upper caste viewer needs to be reassured that a marginalised group are asserting their agency without inconveniencing anyone.
It would be unfair however to not take into account that Ambedkar Jayanthi is being shown on screen, in such scale, in positive light, perhaps for the first time in a Bollywood film. So it’s unsurprising that a director making his entry into an industry that is yet to have its anti-caste wave, was that cautious with a scene that is otherwise breathtaking. In this writer’s view, it is also the medium and their consumers that influence a director’s choices.
If one looks at Pa Ranjith’s filmography, Dr Ambedkar or Periyar or Malcom X didn’t make it on screen with the same degree of prominence in his first two films as they do in his later work. In Attakathi, his debut, caste is signalled throughout subtly in dialogue or images in the background. If one recalls the final scenes of Madras, the bust of anti-caste icons like Rettamalai Srinivasan are easy to miss. This isn’t to say that they are politically weaker films, but that Ranjith was breaking a mould over time, before doing what he does in Sarpatta Parambarai, his latest film. Attakathi came nearly a decade after caste-pride films on self-styled “bravery and honour” of intermediate landowning castes had ruled Kollywood in the 1980s and 90s. Additionally, Kaala and Kabali must be viewed within the Tamil movie hero formula. This formula still demands a larger-than-life male lead who can send ten fully armed men scurrying for cover — a formula that Ranjith uses in Kabali and Kaala, until he reaches a point after four consecutive hits, that he discards in Sarpatta. Perhaps, it is worth keeping in mind the sheer amount of work and success a Dalit filmmaker, new to a status-quoist industry needs to put in, when we do raise relevant concerns about a film like Jhund.
When Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan starring Dhanush came out last year, it was criticised for the amount of violence the hero indulges in. But isn’t that what is largely expected of our leading men in Kollywood? Doesn’t the actor’s massive fan base expect him to be able to beat up multiple antagonists in a righteous rage? Wasn’t Selvaraj also able to tell a story about systemic violence and criminal neglect of entire communities in the process of sticking to the Tamil movie formula? Wasn’t Ranjith able to question the Hindu-right and the issue of landlessness while simultaneously giving the ageing Superstar his “mass” scenes? Hasn’t Manjule inserted into Bollywood, an industry that so far seemed incapable of progressive anti-caste politics, an iconic on-screen celebration of Ambedkar Jayanthi, despite that one unnecessary scene with the ambulance.
These are some questions we must ask ourselves and the film industries. Just as we quite rightly, register our disagreements with the political and cinematic choices they make.