(Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead)
Karnataka has seen targeted and deliberate attacks on Muslims and their identity over the last decade. This ranges from the arbitrary hijab ban, boycotts of Muslim street vendors, calls for banning halal meat and the azaan, and much more. This wave of Islamophobia has not left cinema untouched - mainstream cinema often stereotypes Muslims and portrays pet theories of the Hindu right. Blatant anti-Muslim propaganda in films like The Kashmir Files and Kerala Story too sways public opinion. In this climate, Daredevil Musthafa comes as a breath of fresh air. Shashank Sohgal, a first-time director, has chosen a story by Poornachandra Tejaswi focused on communal harmony to make this film.
Set in the fictional town of Abachur in the 1970s, this is a coming-of-age drama around the lives of Musthafa, Ramanujam Iyengari, and his friends. As the lone Muslim in an all-Hindu college, Musthafa’s presence makes Iyengari and friends deeply insecure even as Musthafa’s wit and charisma leave their female classmates completely enamored. Consequently, cohabiting the classroom and building friendships at college are laden with suspicion and friction. With Ramamani, the most popular girl on campus, expressing interest in Musthafa, Iyengari and friends resolve to put Musthafa ‘in his place.’ This piece, while not a film review, seeks to explore the lessons in fraternity that this movie offers us.
The movie opens with a powerful snippet of an interview with Poornachandra Tejaswi where the author shares his fears about the radicalization of our youth. Perhaps this indicates that the film-maker consciously intended a message of social harmony. Nevertheless, the film, although well intentioned, does not fully succeed in carrying this message through.
Given the various misgivings about the Muslim community in the town, Musthafa’s arrival in college is received with confusion, fear, and fascination. Students and teachers carry various assumptions, from the harmless to the bizarre to the outright offensive, about both Musthafa and the Muslim community. Subsequently, Musthafa is shunned by other students even as no one is willing to sit, eat or play with him. This illustrates how schools and classrooms are often early sites of discrimination for those from marginalized communities. Dr Ambedkar too suffered similar social isolation due to caste discrimination. In school, he was required to sit apart from his classmates on a gunny bag, which he himself had to carry to class. He was not even allowed to touch the common water tap.
Food is an important conduit for the construction and enforcement of social taboos. The film while focusing on communal harmony also offers a portrayal of everyday caste prejudice. During a cricket match scene, where Musthafa offers Ramanuja Iyengari dates, the Brahmin boy hesitatingly eats them. At this point, another of the students observes how Iyengari never accepts any food from lowered caste friends.
The tension between Ramanuja Iyengar and Musthafa intensifies in another scene. Musthafa smashes an egg on Ramanuja’s chest during a magic trick and the first reaction from the agitated students is “Neenu Iyenagri Jaathi kedsbitte” (literally translating to “You spoilt his caste”). These incidents powerfully illustrate how caste ascribes notions of purity and impurity to food and touch and therefore, pose a huge challenge to fraternity.
In the age of propaganda around ‘love jihad’, Daredevil Musthafa is a rare work in Kannada cinema that dares to portray interfaith love. Ramamani, Musthafa’s classmate, is thoroughly infatuated with him. Even as romantic tension builds on-screen and viewers begin to invest in it, the story is abruptly cut short and is abandoned with no conclusion. (Sohgal too speaks of the crew’s dilemmas in an interview with Sowmya Rajendran). One is compelled to wonder if the chilling effect stemming from recurrent communal violence in Karnataka makes inter-faith love even in fiction too radical to imagine.
Dr BR Ambedkar, in his radical workAnnihilation of Caste, argued that inter-community marriages are possible antidotes to social divisions as they dissolve separatist feeling and act as a binding force In these times, interfaith romantic relationships can have a disruptive, subversive, and defiant potential to challenge prejudice in both the social and personal sphere. Unfortunately, the film does not go the full mile in its portrayal of interfaith romance and this hesitation is palpable.
To its credit, the film - with an assertive Muslim protagonist (yes, the bar is very low!)- succeeds in breaking certain stereotypes about Muslims. For example, commonly held beliefs that Muslims cannot speak Kannada well or that they always eat Biryani are gracefully undone. However, the film succumbs to majoritarian prejudices and inadvertently plays into the ‘Good-Muslim-Bad-Muslim’ trope.
Case in point is the annual Ganesh Chaturti procession in communally-sensitive Abachur. At the very outset, we are given to understand that the procession is likely to turn violent as it passes through a local masjid. The heavy security presence at the venue is juxtaposed with a row of Muslims watching over the festivities from the wall of the masjid. This portrayal generates a palpable but ambiguous tension in our minds that is left unresolved. Right when the procession reaches the masjid, commotion breaks out - not due to religious strife but due to a bull which runs amok. We are soon given to understand that Musthafa, our Muslim protagonist, has single handedly contained the situation and prevented an untoward incident.
The cricket match too, played between the college team and an all-Muslim team from Sultan Keri in the climax, provokes similar discomfort. While the players from Sultan Keri are depicted as rowdy elements who are cunning and loud, Musthafa -playing for the college team - is shown as the good Muslim who is fighting to defeat the bad Muslims.
Following the magic trick , Musthafa who visits Iyengari’s home to ask after him is rudely chased away by Iyengari’s casteist family. Throughout the film, one sees a good-humored Musthafa reaching out to amend relationships but only facing humiliation in return. Although it does appear at the end that Iyengari moved to mend fences, the film does little to portray such change of heart in a reasonable manner.
Putting all of this together, what emerges is the realization that the film mirrors our society when it comes to Islamophobia. Both in the film and in the world around us, the permanent vilification of certain Muslims allows for the redemption of other Muslims. Similarly, the onus of nursing and sustaining healthy interfaith relationships squarely on the shoulders of minority communities. This is neither fair nor will it take us towards a true fraternal society.
Dr Ambedkar was the one who pushed the Drafting Committee and the Constituent Assembly to include fraternity in our Preamble. For him, fraternity represented associated living and mutual respect. In today’s communally charged society, how we can cultivate such love and empathy between different communities. How can we build a common culture where fraternity becomes a way of life? How do we ensure that feelings of strangeness and ‘otherness’ dissolve?
While Dr Ambedkar asserts that only cultivating love can hold different communities together, he insists that justice alone can open the possibility for such love. The first step towards a fraternal society would then be to acknowledge and address the different injustices around us. Secondly,merely celebrating the virtues of diversity will not translate to a societal value of fraternity. We must actively counter harmful Hindutva propaganda that lies at the root of fractured fraternal relationships. While repeatedly using the motif of ‘sarvajanaanga da shantiya thota’ (a peaceful garden of diverse communities) to celebrate Karnataka’s diversity, the film forfeiting the space to critically interrogate prevalent majoritarian narratives that are dangerous. Thirdly, fraternity cannot be enforced through legislation, our endeavors to achieve it will have to go outside and beyond the law. It cannot therefore, be just theorized but be lived. When the world around us is saturated with violence and hate, culture can act as a forceful medium to re-imagine a radically different, empathetic, and inclusive future. This film had the potential to make a radical departure from hatred, but leaves job half-done.
Daredevil Musthafa joins a modest list of Kannada films such as Palaar and 19.20.21 that, with their relatable storylines, provoke important conversations on constitutional ideals like dignity, fraternity, and equality. They are films that inspire thought on the ethical and political stakes in the practice of these values. In an industry which has refused steadfastly to speak of these values, these young film makers deserve to be congratulated and encouraged. Not only do we need more such films but we also need more conversations on these films. The overwhelming response to these movies is a welcome development in this context. Films like these are calls of action to all of us - the constitution needs its foot soldiers to be out there today. Let us do away with the hand-wringing and instead face the challenges to our constitutional values head-on.
Vinay Kooragayala Sreenivasa and Poorna Ravishankar work for Bahutva Karnataka, a broad coalition formed to uphold the plural values of Karnataka. The organisation is on Twitter as @bahutvaktka.