Film/Stage

Bollywood at War

by SAIKAT DATTA (Outlook)

Back in the summer of 1982, the Indian Air Force had just stepped into its 50th year, and as part of its golden jubilee celebrations, it decided to "actively support" the production of a commercial film that would highlight its "achievements" through the years. Thus was born the Shashi Kapoor-produced and Govind Nihalini  -  directed Vijeta, a film that had the 1971 war as its backdrop.

It was my first full-blooded war film. I have seen many since then, and at times wondered about the need for cinematic portrayals of war. After all, wars are a terrible business. But like all great upheavals, they must be recorded and interpreted for generations to come.

Vijeta did that, on several levels. Its vast canvas was populated with real people. It had a Sikh born and bred in Bombay as its central protagonist, a Muslim from Lucknow, a Christian from Bilaspur, a Hindu from Andhra and a Syrian Christian from Kerala, ensuring a pan-Indian character and identity. But most of all, it had a hero who was on a journey of self-discovery, looking for the demons within himself, and defeating them just as India triumphed over Pakistan.

It was a war film all right, but it was also a lot more. It was neither jingoistic, nor overtly patriotic. Instead, on occasion, the hero, the Sikh flying officer Angad Singh, quietly pulls at his kara for strength and then wonders whether he will be able to bomb Pakistan, the land his forefathers came from. That is the tragedy and triumph of war that Vijeta tried to explore.

To me, this is how war films should be made-show muscle, but do it in a sensible, credible way, and also explore individual dilemmas. But rarely has Bollywood done that  -  Vijeta, and perhaps Chetan Anand's Haqeeqat, and Farhan Akhtar's Lakshya, have come closest.

Each came at a different time, and reflected its milieu. Chetan Anand's film is a tribute to Pandit Nehru and his brand of socialism, Vijeta looks at 1971 from the distance of the 1980s, and Lakshya is like instant coffee, a jazzed up version of India's first TV war-the Kargil conflict.

When Haqeeqat was released in 1964, it was the celluloid record of a national nightmare, the defeat at the hands of China in 1962. Black-and-white images of courageous, dying soldiers, staring blankly at the Chinese hordes with empty rifles, tried to fill a void that we, as a nation, have consistently failed to address.

Unfortunately, public memory has always blanked out the real histories of such wars. We never encourage substantive debate on them, even in the realm of fiction. Which is why Haqeeqat is a bit disappointing, despite its merits. It was too apologetic for a war film and failed to record the fact that the 1962 war was a political and personal defeat for Nehru. Instead, it was a paean to him, depicting him as a father figure, a leader of men, who stood firm even as battalion after battalion was massacred by the Chinese hordes.

Hindi war films have rarely been about history, or even recording it through part-fictional and part-real protagonists. J.P. Dutta's 1997 film, Border, casts real events from the 1971 war in a macho, jingoistic vein. Its semi-fictional dramatisation almost set the tone for the TV coverage of the Kargil war two years later.

As TV channels gleefully lapped up Major Vikram Batra's famous statement, "Yeh dil mange more..."(This heart asks me...) the nation perhaps saw in him a real-life parallel of Sunny Deol's heroics (and not those of Major Kuldeep Singh Chandpuri, the original hero of Longewala, who Sunny plays) in Border. Unsurprisingly, Border was a great success at the box-office, with its lopsided mix of jingoism, pop-patriotism and history.

[Courtesy: outlookindia.com]

All photos on this page are from scenes in the film, Vijeta.  

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