Gadar: Ek Prem Katha
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Impact on Hindutva
Amulya Gopalakrishnan, June 21, 2021: The Times of India
After decades of sensitivity about Hindu-Muslim depictions, this 'prem-katha' about Partition was full of coded communal messaging, and interpreted like that. The screening ignited tensions in Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad and Vadodara, and other cities. Muslim groups were outraged at the scene where Sunny Deol, playing a Sikh character, applies sindoor on Amisha Patel who plays a Muslim woman. Meanwhile, Gujarat’s Haren Pandya, the Shiv Sena and others hotly defended the film’s ‘nationalism’, blaming all opposition on ‘ISI’ elements. In many places, it was screened with heavy police protection. Some movies make a big impression on their world, even when they’re casually dismissed at the time. Their powers are only revealed in retrospect. Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, for instance, is now seen as “a masterwork of modern coding” by the US alt-right. It wasn’t recognised as propaganda then, but its violence, anger against a remote government, anti-gay and misogynist messaging, continues to inspire white supremacist groups like Proud Boys, and those who call for re-tribalising “European Christendom” from black and brown infiltrators. Going back further, the racist classic ‘Birth of a Nation’, released in 1915, gave second wind to the Ku Klux Klan's mission of protecting white womanhood and racial purity. A spate of public lynchings and terrorising of black Americans followed for a dreadful decade after. This is not to say that only right-wing movies successfully seed their messages. All art is propaganda at some level; including newly independent India’s socialist-secular tearjerkers that have also left traces on many imaginations. But only a few films stir the spirit of the times, awaken something dormant, and continue.
As the anthropologist Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi wrote in an ethnography of the Gujarat pogrom, it was this very film that figured across conversations, that brought latent feelings to the surface. The newspaper Sandesh then claimed that the Godhra attack was an ISI plan for blood-soaked bodies to be brought back in the train, as happened during Partition.
Gujaratis had not witnessed these Partition horrors first-hand, but the movie had created a synthetic memory for them. Many VHP activists also claimed that 2,000 sword-wielding Muslims had set upon the train, hijacked it and slashed their way through — a claim that investigators found hard to square with the two bogeys burnt. “Through the mediation of a Bollywood film, Partition had become Godhra, and Godhra evoked Partition,” he writes.
When the film was screened, it gave substance to a deep rage. Angry young men broke theatre seats, some burnt cars in Muslim areas. That famous primal scream and Deol tearing out a hand pump from the ground resonated with thwarted young men seeking upward mobility, justifying the Bajrang Dal’s violent extralegal acts, writes Ghassem-Fachandi: “The identification with the hero’s wrath allowed the release from inhibitions to act out violence”. References to Gadar came up in many interviews, he writes. Even during the pogrom, an attacker scrawled on a wall — “Muslims learn arson from us”, a reference to fictional Muslims in the movie writing “Hindustanis learn killing from us”. One striking detail in the Delhi Minorities Commission report on communal violence in northeast Delhi was how Gadar cropped up again. “Bahut si Sakeenaein aaj pakdi jayengi (Many Sakeenas will be caught),” a lathi-wielding mob allegedly yelled at Muslim women.
During the Delhi violence too, fantasies and fears mixed with actual events. If the 2002 Gujarat violence was the first one to be comprehensively covered by TV cameras, the brutalities in Delhi were recorded by smartphone cameras on a much larger scale, and more intimately. Almost in real time, we saw videos of destruction, stone-pelting crowds and gunshots, broken bodies, testimony of victims and witnesses. People pointed to ambiguous videos of masked men in their own neighbourhoods; imaginations overran realities.
“One person’s suggestion is supplemented by another person’s opinion, that in turn to appended to another person’s insinuation, resulting in a tale without closure told repeatedly,” writes Ghassem-Fachandi. In situations like this, the neighbour ceases to be the human you once knew, they are swallowed up by the stereotype of the ‘other’.
These stories swirled in northeast Delhi too. Outside AAP leader Tahir Hussain’s home-office too, we listened to a neighbour describe what he saw on Sudharshan TV, a saffron sari crumpled on the floor, suggesting the violation of a Hindu woman. Was he certain about this claim of a gruesome event that happened next door? He shrugged, “some people have said it’s fake news”.
The Gadar experience shows how fiction and projection enters our world, our dream life shapes our reality. But in each act of violence that followed, there were flesh-and-blood victims and perpetrators, a devastation that cannot be undone.
During the Delhi violence too, fantasies and fears mixed with actual events. If the 2002 Gujarat violence was the first one to be comprehensively covered by TV cameras, the brutalities in Delhi were recorded by smartphone cameras on a much larger scale, and more intimately. Almost in real time, we saw videos of destruction, stone-pelting crowds and gunshots, broken bodies, testimony of victims and witnesses. People pointed to ambiguous videos of masked men in their own neighbourhoods; imaginations overran realities.
“One person’s suggestion is supplemented by another person’s opinion, that in turn to appended to another person’s insinuation, resulting in a tale without closure told repeatedly,” writes Ghassem-Fachandi. In situations like this, the neighbour ceases to be the human you once knew, they are swallowed up by the stereotype of the ‘other’.
These stories swirled in northeast Delhi too. Outside AAP leader Tahir Hussain’s home-office too, we listened to a neighbour describe what he saw on Sudharshan TV, a saffron sari crumpled on the floor, suggesting the violation of a Hindu woman. Was he certain about this claim of a gruesome event that happened next door? He shrugged, “some people have said it’s fake news”.
The Gadar experience shows how fiction and projection enters our world, our dream life shapes our reality. But in each act of violence that followed, there were flesh-and-blood victims and perpetrators, a devastation that cannot be undone.
