Speak, don’t shriek: Why do some progressive films tell us how to think?

Fifteen years after the cult film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005) released, I had spoken to its director, Sudhir Mishra, about the making of the film, which was deeply sympathetic to the naxalite cause; about villagers feeling alienated from the powers; police brutality; and deep injustice. Mishra in his trademark slow and sometimes trying thoughtfulness said: “Life has a habit of slipping away from ideology. If Hazaaron still has resonance, it is because I wasn’t caught up with the ideology.” When I asked what would have happened if he had indeed been caught up with the ideology, he replied: “Then it would have been a propaganda film.”

There is clarity of thought here, but accompanying it is something disturbing. The greyness in distinguishing a film with a strong ideological spine from a propaganda film. Is there a distinction to be made?

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The distinction is, perhaps, that of pedagogy. If films dripping with communal acid, like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files, are guilty of telling us what to think, then progressive films such as Mishra’s Afwaah and Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed are fixated on telling us how to think: unsure of villains, but clear about victims. There is a patronising glaze over these films that you can mistake for good intention—or perhaps the patronising tone is the good intention, who knows?

Identity is not character

Afwaah, set in Rajasthan, traces the breadcrumb trail of a false rumour of love jehad and cows being transported for slaughter, reaching a crescendo at a literary festival, a fictional imprint of the Jaipur Literature Festival. The shallow dig is at the progressive glitterati, who prefer performing their politics than inhabiting it; low- hanging fruit that breeds dull cinema. Bheed plays out in black and white—a shrill, rather static ode to Partition footage—about migrants stuck on a border as the uncertainties of the COVID-19 lockdown pile up into a pressure bomb.

“Character, at its best, is that thing which eludes easy adjectives, which gives the sense of a body hurtling through the world...”

Both films do not move the needle narratively or commercially primarily because they forget that a compelling story is not mounted on the foundation of kind intention; that identity is not character—protagonists here are the sum total of their caste, class, and religious identities, and the narrative arc is of them reconciling with this identity. While Sinha is content with the righteousness of identity, Mishra dances around it a little. Either way, identity is the fulcrum of character.

Character, at its best, is that thing which eludes easy adjectives, which gives the sense of a body hurtling through the world, which emerges from the fumes of identity, but not by being inextricably bound to it. Muslim and. Oppressed caste and. Progressive and. And what? A good character answers not with more markers but with a seamless shifting into and out of these various, multiplying markers. Character, at its best, is lodged in the and-ness of being.

Highlights

Progressive Indian filmmakers have excelled at making events into teachable moments, forgetting that a compelling story is not mounted on the foundation of kind intention
This way they are no better than their apparent opposites: films which appeal to communal emotions
Both categories of films desire to teach rather than to tell

Radical acts

The progressives among our filmmakers have excelled at making an event into a teachable moment, to milk morals out of it, contextualise it, historicise it, temper it with ifs and buts. If propaganda films like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files essentialise the Muslim as rapacious, using them as answers for communal questions, films like Afwaah try to counter this by making the Muslim identity not an answer but a question itself. Afwaah has a Muslim protagonist, but it also slits in, rather forcefully, the question of how caste too inflects the Muslim identity.

A still from Bheed. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Bheed has an oppressed caste protagonist, but it complicates this by giving him a privileged caste surname, which he eventually has to discard. These films then burp, satisfied at having postured a question, however dull, leaving the question dangling as the end credits roll. The assumption here is that cinema is a dialectic that is completed when responded to by the audience; that it requires the active participation of the audience to answer what is asked of them.

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There is a significant problem with this. As much as some people would like to believe, it is not asking a question that is a radical act. Demanding an answer is. There is a difference between the two, and that is in the fibre and timbre of the question itself. If it is meek, who would be moved to answer it? If you ask a question and believe that asking it is a moral duty, it also behoves you to ask it in a way that mobilises an answer. What, otherwise, is the point of tossing a question into vacuum?

A still from While We Watched. The distinction between the way the right wing and the progressives tell a story is most clear in this documentary about journalist Ravish Kumar. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

This distinction between the way the right wing and the progressives tell a story is most clear in While We Watched, a documentary that followed the then-NDTV, now-independent news anchor Ravish Kumar as his viewership dwindled, his newsroom shrunk, and threats piled up in the Narendra Modi era. It is a moving document of the increasing, drifting loneliness of a seemingly lone warrior. There is footage of Kumar speaking to his audience—implicating them in the social morass, blaming them, pointing to how they have apportioned their attention. And there is footage of Arnab Goswami shrieking at his audience. On the surface, the distinction seems to be between frenzied anger and calm pathos. Scratch the surface and another, more troubling distinction emerges. The desire to teach as opposed to the desire to tell; to invite the audience to participate versus to nail them with angst; patronising pedagogy as the opposite of flat fascism.

To learn and to know are two very different things; the former is in a state of present continuous, a perpetual flux, the latter is in a state of fixed certainty. And when, as a society, we have lost the will to learn, preferring to know—shielded by a fortress of facts and fiction—how should our storytelling evolve? If people do not want to learn, but the filmmaking is insistent on playing professor, after a point it is not just the failure of the people to learn, but also the failure of the filmmaker to teach.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online. He also authors a newsletter on culture at prathyush.substack.com.