by PARTHA CHATTERJEE
There is more of the withered state of contemporary India to be found in commercial films, particularly those in Hindi, produced in Mumbai, or Bollywood, than in daily newspapers, magazines or even television news channels. If news channels give you a slice of life, commercial films give you a slice of cake disguised as a slice of life! India’s chaotic economic and political condition gets best reflected in the paranoia that passes for intensity in commercial cinema. A case in point is Gangs of Wasseypur, directed by Anurag Kashyap. He is believed to be one of the leading lights of what might be called the “neo-progressives” among Hindi film-makers of Bollywood. His latest production is a huge hit – his first – and is being compared by neophyte film critics with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), which chronicles the rise of the Mafia in the social and political life of the United States between the two World Wars in the last century.
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Gangs of Wasseypur-Part I is indicative of the fact that it is going to be an ongoing saga. In its intention and politics it appears to be inspired by the Godfather Trilogy (Coppola) and Kill Bill I and II (Quentin Tarantino), both films espousing, of course without intending to, hard-line right-wing politics. The irony suggested is intentional, not many American film-makers have had the guts to be openly political since the McCarthy witch-hunt in the late 1940s. Coppola’s study of the Mafia in The Godfather is not critical enough, and, at times, without intending to, is admiring of the gangsters of Italian origin, who well-nigh pulverised social and political life in the U.S. Tarantino’s Kill Bill is nothing more than a tale of blood, gore and revenge; utterly nihilistic.
It is nihilism that has permeated Indian social (read also religious) life, for the two are entwined, and has brought about an overwhelming desperation among the poor and the middle class. There is an unexpressed feeling that despite godmen fleecing all and sundry and promising prosperity and peace of mind to all the faithful, God, that bribable judge, may after all not deliver. There is also an increasing awareness among the marginalised that the rich and the super rich have robbed them blind to reach where they are. These are some of the considerations that come into play when the success of Gangs of Wasseypur-I is to be analysed. It makes the poor as well as the middle class happy, but for different reasons.
It gives (false) hope to the poor to see a man like Sardar Khan, who has risen from among them, overcome and terrorise all upper-class, upper-caste opposition, symbolised by the equally villainous Ramadhar Singh, who earlier controlled the economic and, therefore, political life in the region. The middle-class people, with their stomachs full and with money to spend even in these times of high inflation, are titillated by a character like Sardar Khan and the tale he inspires. In a perverse way, Sardar Khan makes them feel good! Gangs of Wasseypur manages to kill two birds with one stone.
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