Jai Gangaajal helps one understand Prakash Jha’s reading of the contemporary socio-political environment and his handling of the derived situations. There is a confrontation between Jha, the filmmaker, who has the task of placing events before the audience as they are, and Jha, the individual with strong political opinions that are not necessarily middle-of-the-ground, writes RAJESH SINGH
like an actor, a director is considered only as good as his last venture. To be honest, Jai Gangaajal is not among Prakash Jha’s best films, though it is a paisa vasool one and appears to have sent some reviewers overboard in praise. It has got off to a steady start at the box-office, with its collections expected to pick up. It may not end up in the Rs100-crore league but is unlikely to be a commercial failure either.
Whatever, the film is important in coming closer to understanding Jha’s reading of the contemporary socio-political environment and his handling of the derived situations ever since he established himself as a master of the genre with Gangaajal in 2003. In doing so, we will find a confrontation between Jha, the filmmaker with the task of placing events before the audience as they are, and Jha, the individual with strong political opinions that are not necessarily middle-of-the-ground. This battle plays out via his films nearly as intensely as the drama that he weaves for the cinegoer.
let’s take a recurring theme in context: Vigilante justice. In his many interactions, including the one with The Pioneer recently, Jha said he was mesmerised by the manner in which people have been responding to what they considered as the ‘right approach’ to delivering justice to criminals. He gave the example of citizens of Bhagalpur in Bihar, who had backed the police charged with blinding a bunch of accused in prison in 1980. These otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizens had been driven to the edge by the repeated failure of authorities to contain the law and order situation and had come to believe that only extreme actions, even if unlawful, were the solution. The event formed the backdrop to his Gangaajal.
Jha is, of course, opposed to such forms of punishment, and yet through his films, including Jai Gangaajal, he cannot let the reality escape that vigilante justice pushes the authorised agencies to do their duty and that had they done it earlier, extreme vigilantism could have been pre-empted. Interestingly, in his films, this kind of extra-judicial justice is delivered not just by lay citizens but also by the police, otherwise seen as a prime cause for the prevailing lawlessness and oppression.
The director has a soft corner for the police force, given that he has interacted with many of its members across the country, studied the deep socio-economic constraints under which they are compelled to perform and recorded political interferences that have reduced them to impotent uniform-bearers, with the courageous ones punished with hostile postings or lack of promotions or even death.
Maybe it’s this sympathy, apart from the virtue of dramatic impact, which makes Jha present some of the corrupt police personnel in his films as undergoing a change of heart (for varying reasons), and at times to such an extent that they are seen to be either directly helping the cause of extra-legal measures to deal with criminals or indirectly facilitating it. The director understands the power of the corrupt-turned-reformist police officer; that the cheers this character evokes from the audience far outweigh the jeers he was subjected to earlier.
At an individual level, this would bother Jha (he has one of his characters say, “People may like violators of law but I like those who break law-breakers”), though professionally he may have succeeded in striking a chord with the viewers. He now has ‘personal’ experience. In Jai Gangaajal, he plays the pivotal role of a Deputy Superintendent of Police who has sold his soul to the politician builder goonda mafia. later, though, when circumstances make him discard his dirty thoughts and recognise the shine of khaki, he straddles what is an increasingly blurred line between justice by law and extra-legal vigilantism. This may have been his way of salvaging the authority of the justice system, that includes the police, but it is not bereft of grudging admiration for vigilant justice.
Jai Gangaajal is important for another reason: Tackling gender stereotype. It was nearly two decades ago that Jha made a powerful statement on the issue through his film Mrityudand. Here, the lead female characters in a story set in rural India fight feudal mindsets and seek relief from the bonds that have reduced them to objects. What was a losing battle ends in triumph for women empowerment. Backed by a strong cast having, among others, Shabana Azmi, Madhuri Dixit, Mohan Agashe and Om Puri, it gave a definitive idea of the direction Jha wished to take in his forthcoming films. Though this belief did not quite fully materialise soon after, the theme has returned in a strong and subtle way with his latest film.
After a dedicated Superintendent of Police is given his transfer order from Bankepur because he dared to take on entrenched interests in the constituency, the Minister responsible for the decision picks a young woman officer (played by Priyanka Chopra) as replacement. Apparently, he believes that being a woman, she would be servile and accommodating. He sends her off with a reminder that he had been kind to her family after her father’s death, an assurance that his people were well-placed and under control of the situation there, and advice that she should just relax in her “golden posting”.
Jha could have picked on a male officer as the new arrival in Bankepur, but he would have lost the opportunity to make the gender statement. As it turns out, not only is the force that she gets to command packed with men but also that many of them are compromised. The grit and determination she demonstrates, including literal muscle-flexing within the confines of the law, is a tribute to the woman of today.
But while the filmmaker is busy demolishing stereotypes, he has to be alert to stereotyping himself (and also Bihar). As the film opened in a Ghaziabad hall, I heard audiences murmuring that the story was set in Bihar. The viewers had not paid attention to the acknowledgements flashed on the screen which listed Madhya Pradesh; nor did they, at least initially, see that the police personnel wore uniforms with badges of Madhya Pradesh Police’s initials.
Given that Jha is from Bihar, has made most of his films with Bihar as the battlefield, and even contested two elections (both unsuccessfully) from the State, the Jha-Bihar-politician-criminal-police linkage is understandable. Perhaps, the audience reaction is a hint for the director to more forcefully explore other backdrops, if not genres.
It would be erroneous, though, to confine our understanding of Jha as a filmmaker and writer, to Jai Gangaajal. A better appreciation, in a more holistic sense, has to take on board his journey from the start, as it came to be known to the public at large. He made his first nationally (and internationally) recognised foray in 1985 when a good chunk of the young film-going generation of today was not born. The film was Damul. It won the National Award for the Best Feature Film, besides collecting other accolades and, yes, it was based in an impoverished village of Bihar.
This was not about politics but caste oppression, bonded labour and migration from rural distress to the hoped-for urban utopia. From the present view, associating Jha with Damul is almost as difficult as connecting Mithun Chakraborty of Disco Dancer fame to his award-winning performance in Mrigayaa.
Damul established Jha as a director committed to making films with a social message, and he came to be seen as another rising star on the ‘parallel cinema’ horizon. Though the entertainment quotient was missing in the film. The financial hassles that he went through, partly as a result of the absence of a star galaxy, must have taught him a lesson or two, and he jumped at the opportunity of roping in superstar Madhuri Dixit for Mrityudand, although he had a strong cast in place.
In subsequent years, we saw Jha combine social message, contemporariness and entertainment into one potent mix, churning out hits such as Apaharan, Raajneeti, Aarakshan and Satyagraha, working with the likes of Amitabh Bachchan and Ajay Devgn along the way and with fellow Bihari, the brilliant Manoj Bajpai.
Today, Jha can afford a Damul, but he has travelled too far ahead. Caste oppression has not gone away, but the politician-criminal nexus is the new ‘in thing’. Researchers in malaria may find funding short but those researching cancer or HIV/Aids are flooded with money. Jha has easier access to money when he takes on the corrupt in high places; caste laments are passé.
Jha’s filmography makes for a fascinating study. In the past 10 years, he has directed films that match his image of a saleable filmmaker, while he left the direction of certain films he produced to others; nobody talks of those today because few have heard of them, whether they be Dil, Dosti Etc, Khoya Khoya Chand or Crazy Cukkad Family. But in the initial stages of his career, he was, understandably, less selective, directing Hip Hip Hurray and Bandish, two ordinary films that never let one suspect he was capable of something like Mrityudand orGangaajal.
Here is an instinctive director who knows not just his strength but also ways to harness it to good effect. He understands that people, frustrated with a system that takes too long to punish the guilty if it does at all and angered by a system that gets easily manipulated by influential sections of society to seek personal relief or frame the less-privileged, find sadistic pleasure in ‘instant justice’, even if it comes on celluloid. Anything is better than nothing.
Jha is not the first director to make ‘political’ films in India. Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka was an undisguised portrayal of the evil machinations of corrupt politicians, and was banned by Indira Gandhi’s regime in the Emergency days. Government officials seized the film’s master-print and burnt it to ashes. Gulzar’s Aandhi, a telling story about an ambitious woman politician who parts ways with her husband to pursue her political career, too ran into trouble in the Emergency days because it was believed that the protagonist’s character, played by Suchitra Sen, had shades of Indira Gandhi. The two films could not have been more different, both in their content and treatment.
A third ‘political’ film, very distinct from the above two, is Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal, which combines student politics and the ruthlessness of ‘adult’ politics in a feudal society, to present a dark commentary. The symbolic misuse of colour reminds us of the exploitation of caste and religion by the political system. The film didn’t do well at the box-office, perhaps because it was too complex and dark; nevertheless, it remains one of the best to be made in its genre.
While on student politics, a film that remains a landmark on the subject and will remain for a long time to come is Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil. Set in Allahabad, it shows how even love and romance and everything else that stands for goodness, can end up in ruins in the aftermath of a political storm (a respectable name for inter-gang rivalry) driven by evil winds. The film came more than a decade ago, but even today, every time I visit Allahabad and talk to people about it, they get excited and identify themselves as ones speaking the ‘Haasilmaiy’ tongue popularised by the characters in the film.
A more recent example of a ‘political’ film is Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu. Here, the new generation takes stock after suffering a shock over how parents can manipulate even their children for political ends. There’s not much of optimism, except in the message that the young are disgusted with political corruption both moral and financial and deserve a better world.
Jha’s own wonderful film, Raajneeti, was an unapologetic portrayal of the dirty world of politics where machinations are not restricted to outfoxing the rival but extend to physical elimination of the opponent. The country’s political class has reason to be worried by the fact that the audience accepts such plots as reflecting the real world.
There are other films that tried to cash in on the subject of politics but failed primarily due to lack of conviction and flawed approach. KC Bokadia’s Dirty Politics, for instance, was rejected by the audience, although it had an ‘A’ rating because of its sexual content.Nayak, starring Anil Kapoor, was another juvenile attempt.
Jha’s films do not have the same emotional intensity which Gulzar’s works have. There is also no brazen activism which Nahata demonstrated. The complexities that Kashyap introduces in his films is absent in Jha’s body of work, which otherwise is multi-layered. And yet, Jha does creditably as a no-nonsense story-teller who identifies with the audience’s sentiment, and does not seek to impose a new sensibility to merely achieve some kind of cinematic excellence in his bid to show a mirror to the system. If Amitabh Bachchan ushered in the ‘angry young man’ era, Jha has brought the ‘angry masses’ phenomenon to the fore in his inimitable style, channelling individual frustration into public uprising.
It will be a while before films like Mr Smith Goes to Washington (a Frank Capra political comedy) or Primary Colors (said to be inspired by Bill Clinton’s presidency, though in an unflattering way) or All the President’s Men (on Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal) are made in India in an unfettered way. It’s not that they cannot be made skillfully Jha and others are equipped to handle similar themes with telling impact. There is also no issue with the audience’s taste it has matured enough to, by and large, embrace good cinema.
The problem lies with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which remains as edgy as it was during the Emergency days and since the days when Indian cinema was about the hero, the heroine, the comedian and the villain, all confirming to an anodyne script that gave enough opportunities to the characters to break out into melodies (the only saving grace). There was little attempt, barring exceptions, to boldly comment on socio-political issues.
But as filmmakers like Jha have got bolder and begun to explore new horizons, the CBFC remains flustered as to how to respond to the new challenge. The day it begins to certify and not edit films, we shall have filmmakers touching newer heights.
Meanwhile, Jha will be considering his next move. He is a busy man and now has no time for politics (“I am done with politics and will not return to it; I don’t even want a Rajya Sabha nomination”). In one of his interviews, he had approvingly mentioned the public acceptance of National Award-winning film Court, to indicate the positive changes taking place in audience’s taste.
Will he make the judiciary the theme of any of his forthcoming filmsIJ The Indian judicial system has made and demolished lives, united people and separated them, brought riches and inflicted penury. Accused charged with petty crimes languish in jails as undertrials for years while those who face serious offences are out on bail promptly. It’s a story waiting to be told in Jha’s cinematic language.