Hindi films can be regarded as contemporary folklore. And a folk hero, in any period, in any decade, is a personification of the moral values of that decade; he reflects the collective fantasies of the time.
—JAVED AKHTAR (RECORDED IN KABIR 1999: 72)
THE 1975 EMERGENCY WAS A cataclysmic blow to modern India. The suspension of the Constitution and the termination of civil rights evaporated illusions of a democratic open society. The press was censored, opposition parties banned, and opponents of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi jailed and tortured. The nightmare ended with elections in 1977 that routed Mrs. Gandhi. Democracy returned, battered but emboldened. Most Indians around at the time recall the 1970s as a decade marked by grinding poverty, shortages in just about every essential commodity, and widespread labor unrest. Were they to try to study the period, though, they would find scant material to guide them, for a relative silence still surrounds much of the decade.
India’s cinemas, however, did not let the political crisis pass unremarked. The year 1977 saw a burst of films in regional languages denouncing the Emergency, including Mukti Chai (a Bengali documentary, Cry for freedom, Utpalendu Chakraborty), Ram Ram Gangaram (in Marathi; Dada Kondke), and Kissa Kursi Ka (in Hindi; The story of a chair, Amrit Nahata), although these productions appeared to regional audiences and often for very short runs. Because the list does not include feature productions from Bollywood, it would be tempting to conclude that the cinema ignored the Emergency, or, if lore is correct, was effectively silenced by it.
To the contrary. If Bollywood did not directly pillory Mrs. Gandhi and the labia-lipped Sanjay (as novelists such as Salman Rushdie and others have done in memorable epithets), its blockbusters actively archived the culture of the period. In stark, often photographic, fidelity, its hits captured the everyday desperations that erupted in the protests that Mrs. Gandhi described as the “climate of violence and hatred” in her Emergency broadcast of June 27, 1975.1 Unlike Rushdie, who was protected by his residence abroad and a foreign passport (despite which Mrs. Gandhi filed suit for his description of her in Midnight’s Children that she won in a London court), Hindi popular cinema had no such protection.2 It had to tread carefully if it wished to avoid the fate of Kissa Kursi Ka, the film allegedly buried under a Maruti car factory for its critical representation of an unpopular prime minister.3 Bollywood’s commentary on the 1970s, much as its commentary on other moments, is widely present, though it emerges indirectly through the use of highly elaborate symbols that displace the nation’s political crisis and its public fantasies elsewhere.
Popular cinema from the 1970s is very much a cinema of the 1970s. The fashions in the cinema with their exuberant bell bottoms, runway-width collars, shaggy sideburns, and platter-size sunglasses conjure the abandon of the decade. But the faces and features on screen also tell another story, albeit a darker one. In a blockbuster such as Deewaar (The wall, Yash Chopra, 1975), for instance, the face of the dockworker who refuses a payday shakedown is the face of the Naxalite activist from Bengal with his distinct features, complexion, and accent. Likewise, the labor organizer who must be taken down by a corrupt mine owner is shown at a demonstration before a red banner, its color, the honorific after his name (Anand babu), and his industry (coal) all recalling the violent standoffs between labor and management in Bengal during the 1970s. The details are part of Deewaar’s referential illusion: small, almost insignificant signs that gesture toward a familiar reality without fully substantiating it. Other more explicit cues, including plot topoi such as the dearth of jobs for college graduates, are more direct signifiers of the period’s tensions. Sedimented together they reference aspects of the decade and its complexities. Thus, while Deewaar is putatively the story of two brothers in Bombay, cues such as these—some visual, some aural—insert layers of meanings that dramatically expand the narrative canvas, making it also the story of India at a particular moment.
This chapter analyzes the narratives and iconographies of India embedded in a trilogy of blockbuster Hindi films from the 1970s: Deewaar, Trishul (Trident, Yash Chopra, 1978), and Shakti (Power, Ramesh Sippy, 1982). All three were scripted by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar; all three cast Amitabh Bachchan as a character named Vijay; and all three mobilize the family as a topos around which the nation’s imaginary is structured and on which its most pressing anxieties are projected. Deewaar and Trishul were blockbusters; Shakti is regarded as a film to rival Sippy’s Sholay (1975), though it never quite achieved the latter film’s outsize achievement at the box office where Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) remains the #1 all-time top grosser adjusted for inflation (see ibos.network.com). These films represent some of the decade’s aspirations as well as its repressions that together I call its public fantasies. Through a reading of these blockbusters, this chapter explores the extent to which the traumas of the decade were displaced onto the family and the crisis in political culture was recast in social terms as a Family Romance in popular Hindi film. For reasons that will become evident shortly, two dominant myths collide in these blockbuster narratives: the nation as mother and the family as nation. Films such as Deewaar invert the nation’s central political conflicts in terms of the family and reframe it around its most cherished social belief, namely, the sanctity of motherhood.4 In this inversion, the oppositional culture of political life is represented as infecting private life as well, and both are rendered unstable, even combustible. Rather than resolving conflict, the mother is placed as the source of it both in political life (where she is symbol of the nation) and in private life (where she is represented, often in highly sentimental terms, as the center of the family).
The biological family and the symbolic nation-as-family become sites of mutual threat in 1970s Hindi cinema, each destabilizing the other in cinema’s representation of the period. These narratives of popular cinema provide access to the political unconscious of modern India in striking ways, revealing what the political theorist Michael Rogin, in the context of Cold War U.S. cinema, identifies as the “register of anxiety” that pervaded the public culture of the decade.5 The nation’s political unconscious, like that of human subjects, communicates in symbols in order to evade the strenuous repression of the nation’s conscious. Cinema’s use of formal symbolism renders it a medium eminently capable of expressing and evading the apparatus of repression especially characteristic of the decade of the Emergency.
In a series of wildly popular blockbusters such as Salim-Javed’s Deewaar–Trishul–Shakti trilogy, popular Hindi cinema imagined the social geography of India, addressed its problems, idealized their solutions, and—to borrow a phrase from Laura Mulvey—generally became the primal scene of many of independent India’s modern mythologies.6 Appearing a few months before the Emergency when the myth of the nation appeared to have devoured its young, Deewaar’s manifest content initially appears conciliatory if not downright celebratory of the state. It is, after all, the story of a boy who is unjustly rendered homeless, arrives penniless in the metropolis, and makes a home and a fortune for himself. When it is discovered that his wealth is the result of smuggling operations, the state comes down hard, and the man is shot by a policeman who is also his righteous younger brother. Both subject and state get their moments of triumph, though in the end it is the collective, in the form of the state, that prevails over the individual who is punished.
However, rather than restoring the nation’s myth of opportunity and justice, Deewaar exposes its collapse and uncovers a form of violence so grotesque that it is displaced onto the family. Here, the latent narrative is one of a mother who desires her son, commissions his murder when her desire is brought to light, and a state that rewards her for it. In short, the film rescripts the Oedipal drama from Jocasta’s point of view, with her desires and agency at the center. In this script, the victim is criminalized and the criminal rendered the victim. The ironies of such a displacement are cued throughout the film. Deewaar’s family violence on the child is widely understood to symbolize the state’s upon its citizens, and both are rendered culpable in this inversion. Uncovering some of these acts of displacement in Deewaar and their revisions in Trishul and Shakti exposes both the social work that the cinema did in India and the social work it did for the nation.
Amitabh Bachchan’s reprise of the role of Vijay, pioneered in Zanjeer (Chains, Prakash Mehra, 1973) as the man who would break the law to restore justice, assured Deewaar immediate success. Its box office returns placed it #2 for the year, following Sholay.7 Scholars such as Jyotika Virdi, Vijay Mishra, and Ranjani Mazumdar among others regard Bachchan’s role in Deewaar as shaping not just the decade but his entire star persona to the extent that the star, somewhat paradoxically, began to reframe his outsize status in Hindi cinema to what Virdi calls a “story of victimization against which he fought each time with resilience and grit, uncannily matching the characters he played on screen.”8 In readings such as this, Deewaar provides a transformative master plot that reframes both star and audience within an intoxicatingly self-referential narrative.
Attentive to these accounts, this chapter pursues a different text to “read” alongside Deewaar’s. Rather than the actor as a parallel text to the film, as Vijay Mishra named him (V. Mishra 2002:125ff.), I read the film alongside the public fantasies of the nation, which serve as its parallel text. In this approach, Deewaar exposes fissures in the national narrative that might not otherwise be apprehensible. It also reveals efforts at dissolving, if not resolving, differences between public and national fantasies that diverged so spectacularly in the decade.
The chapter proceeds in three parts. It analyzes the dominance of the trope of the family to represent anxieties of the period, explores Deewaar’s tensions at narrating and containing an incendiary critique of the decade, and develops the “revisions” to this film’s master plot as they were rescripted in Trishul and Shakti. The chapter concludes with proposing the social function of cinema as Family Romance.
FILM, FAMILY, AND FAMILY ROMANCE
The persistent use of the family as source and symbol of national tension is not new to Deewaar.9 What is remarkable in Deewaar is how the national traumas of the 1970s are displaced almost wholesale upon the family, which in turn is rendered patently dysfunctional in the film. The hitherto mythologized mother is a murderer; the crime she commits is infanticide; and the state participates in the cover-up. Rather than the family providing solace from the state, it provides solace for the state, which escapes culpability for its crimes through the act of displacement.
Deewaar’s dystopian account of both family and nation had a rawness hitherto unseen in a commercially successful popular film. The story was too intense with its exposure of too many wrongs for its ending to be fully satisfying. And so the scriptwriters Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan rewrote the story and kept rewriting it till they got it right.10 This chapter analyzes Deewaar, its first revision Trishul (1978), which easily outpaced Deewaar at the box office for the decade and in retrospect,11 and Shakti (1982), the second effort to rewrite Deewaar from a different directorial perspective. The rewrites are a structuralist’s dream. The essential elements remain the same: nation allegorized in the family, conflict between parent and child, youth as a problem, the identity of criminality, and the diegetic use of death to accentuate—or to solve—problems. What changes across the films, however, is the role each element plays in creating and solving problems. Thus, in Deewaar the state creates a problem that the family solves; in Trishul, a parent creates the problem that the child solves; and in Shakti, a criminal outside the social order creates a problem for both the state and the family that the two together solve.12 The migration of criminality across the three films from state to a caricatured smuggler external to the social order serves to contain problems and even to render them innocuous by the time they are staged in Shakti where the drama of national conflict has devolved into a family melodrama. In each new script, youth goes from indicating a problem (Deewaar) to being the problem (Shakti). The death of the protagonist halts the future in Deewaar; in Shakti, it enables it.
The three films together form a Salim-Javed trilogy that functions as a Family Romance, and the term deserves elaboration. It was fleetingly outlined by Freud in 1909 as a coping mechanism by which a subject, almost always male, authors fantasies about his origins that are more amenable to him than his real family. Freud postulated that the child’s ability to create an alternate “reality” through storytelling generally involved “getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others who, as a rule, are of a higher social standing.”13 In short, the Family Romance is a liberation narrative that enables the child to master a world in which he is otherwise powerless. The gesture of narrating and telling a story is a way of liberating the subject from his subjection. In Freud’s account, the power of the family is typically inverted in the Family Romance, and its taboos, notably the Oedipal complex, are evaded by the subject’s acts of fantasy and storytelling. Replacing the biological father with a fantasy one allows the child to evade the consequences of Oedipal desire. The romance allows the child to believe that the man he abhors is not really his father, which makes patricide and the guilt associated with desiring it unnecessary.
The Family Romance explains two main functions of narrative. It provides a frame for reflecting on the structure of stories and also for postulating their function, and it is in these contexts that it has such resonance in domains beyond the couch. Despite its apparent manifest violence to the parents, the Family Romance is above all a conciliation narrative. In enabling the subject to fabricate an alternative history to the one he inhabits, the Family Romance enables him to manage and eventually to accept “reality,” even as it liberates him from it. Its biographical fantasy is crucially linked to a sense-making function, allowing the subject to displace perceived traumas of the family onto the realm of fantasy where they can be archived if not fully resolved. In this, the Family Romance is an epistemological project: its act of narration is also one of interpretation that explicates even as it narrates. What matters is not the actual story itself but the act of ordering and telling stories that the Family Romance captures. It is thus both a form of exposure (of the subject’s deepest desires and his “reality”) as well as of subterfuge (in which one reality is covered by another more desirable one).
Applied beyond the individual to culture more widely, the concept of Family Romance probes the work that particularly popular narratives do in a specific cultural moment. It allows one to ask what traumas these narratives mask, what “reality” they seek liberation from, and to explore the kinds of fantasies a culture develops in the process. The application of Family Romance from individual to society enables one to uncover the structure and function of narratives that were particularly popular and to ask what kinds of unconscious they convey and conceal.14
DEEWAAR, THE MANIFEST NARRATIVE
Released on January 24, 1975, Deewaar’s story has a singular preoccupation with provision that captures above all the shortages of the decade. Every character in the film and every conflict is driven by the desire to provide materially for others, or to withhold provision from others. Workers ask management for a share of the profits from their labor to provide for their families; parents sacrifice to provide for their children; children do the same for their parents and siblings; the state proves unable to provide basic amenities such as housing and food; and criminals step in at the breach. The film opens with a labor organizer standing before a red banner: “Hum majdooron ki ek hi mang: roti, kapda, aur makaan” [We workers have only one demand: food, clothing, and housing], a manifesto emphasizing the shortage of fundamental goods during the decade (fig. 3.1).
The slogan “roti, kapda, aur makaan” echoes a widespread cry of the period made famous in a 1974 film of the same name that celebrated its golden jubilee (50-week run) the week of Deewaar’s release and that went on to become #5 at the box office for the decade (ibosnetwork.com, for the 1970s). To quell the demonstration and the workers’ demands, the organizer’s family is kidnapped; he is coerced into accepting a bad contract; and his workers regard him a sellout. They beat him up, tattoo “my father is a thief” on his son’s arm, and make life for the family miserable. Anandbabu, the disgraced organizer, abandons his family and disappears; his wife, Maa (played by the actress Nirupa Roy), takes her children, Vijay and Ravi (played as grown-ups by actors Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor, respectively), from their comfortable bungalow to the streets of Bombay.
FIGURE 3.1 Anandbabu at demonstration before red flag (“Hum majdooron ki ek hi mang: roti, kapda, aur makaan”), in Deewaar (1975).
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
The now-single mother and her sons live under a bridge with other migrants to Bombay. Maa finds work carrying bricks for a high-rise apartment building under construction; Ravi longs to go to a school whose tuition the family cannot afford, so Vijay goes to work polishing shoes so his little brother Ravi can do just that. As young men, Vijay works in the Bombay docks as a coolie to support the family while his brother, now a college graduate, searches in vain for employment. Eventually, Vijay takes on the gangster who brutally exploits the dockworkers, joins a rival gang, amasses vast wealth, and purchases a lavish mansion for his mother and brother. Not long after, Vijay buys the high-rise that his mother’s labor had built two decades earlier. Ravi, meanwhile, like most of India’s youth of the period, has trouble finding work. He joins the police force, which offers him guaranteed pay and a squalid government-issued flat. Eventually, Ravi the policeman discovers Vijay’s underworld connections and pursues Vijay’s gang. Vijay meanwhile plans to end his association with crime and marry Anita in order to give his unborn son a different life than the one he had. The dénouement comes swiftly. Anita is murdered on her wedding day; at Maa’s injunction, Ravi shoots Vijay in the back during a chase, and Vijay dies on his wedding night in a temple in his waiting mother’s arms, breathing “I could never sleep away from you. Today, I’m lying in your arms. Make me sleep again.” The police awards Ravi a medal for his bravery, which he publicly “awards” to his mother, and the film proceeds as a flashback of Maa’s memories of the family’s migration from Bengal to Bombay.
In the course of the film, the family’s economic condition changes quite dramatically and with it their housing situation. Their comfortable Bengal bungalow recedes to a Bombay bridge under which the family resides with other homeless migrants; at some point they move to a room in a tenement. Vijay’s earnings eventually bring them to a single-family home of some grandeur; and Ravi’s police service brings him and his mother to a rundown flat where the water and electricity stop for days on end. Home for the Varmas brothers, though, is not where the hearth is: it is where Maa is. In the most famous scene from the film, all its major preoccupations come together: provision, property, criminality, law, justice, kinship, ideals, idealism, and home. Holding them together is the giant figure of Maa. The brothers meet under the bridge where they had lived during their childhood twenty years previously. Vijay warns Ravi of the underworld’s price on Ravi’s head and urges him to seek a transfer to a different town. Ravi refuses to give up the case against the underworld. “My ideals won’t let me,” he replies.
VIJAY: Your ideals! Bah! What have your ideals given you? A scrappy uniform? A duty jeep? A rundown house? Look at me and look at you. We both came from this same footpath, and now look at what I have today. I have buildings, bank balances, cars. What do you have?
RAVI: Mere pas Maa hain. [I have Maa.]
Countering Vijay’s catalog of possessions with the same economy even while putatively critiquing it, Ravi’s “I have Maa” is an awkward locution in any language. But the rhetoric of possession so permeates the film that it is the only way to claim kinship here. It is not that Maa lives with Ravi that matters; it is that he has her that makes him different from Vijay. At a time when very little could be owned, and much less provided, family relations, like ideals, succumb to the rhetoric of property and ownership. Thus, Ravi has Maa.15
But Maa is not just the biological mother. She is also Hindustan, undivided and free. Not only does the poet Muhammad Iqbal’s patriotic anthem, “sare jehan se achcha,” play each time the brothers are under the bridge, Deewaar’s mise-en-scène inverts the anthem’s jingoistic ethos (“Our Hindustan is the best in the world . . . ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome have all vanished without a trace, but we continue to shine in the firmament”) in a deeply ironic comment on the bridge and on Hindustan. Rather than Hindustan being better than all lands, it is barely as good as them; rather than bringing the brothers closer, the bridge further estranges them. The bridge, thus, stands witness to the betrayals and failures of state and nation that this film marks, and it is in its presence that some of the most egregious betrayals of the film occur. Thus, it is under the bridge when Maa accepts Vijay’s offer to be the man of the house and work so they can together send the baby of the house (Ravi) to school; and it is the consequence of the pact under that bridge that propels Vijay to do the things that men do for their women. But the pact they make is hideously corrupt, far more so than anything the gangster Vijay will do as a grown-up.
In accepting Maa’s call to replace the father, to give her his childhood in order to be her man even though he is still a boy, Vijay is fulfilling not the Oedipal wish, but the Jocasta wish: the desire of the mother for her son. In accepting Vijay’s offer to work so that “their” baby, Ravi, can go to school, Maa has catapulted Vijay from being her son to being her provider. He is the husband she wants, not the husband she married. Her extramarital transgression is monstrous not because it is extramarital, but because it is intrafamilial. In taking her son as her mate, Maa’s domination over him is complete. She is not just Jocasta; she is worse than Sophocles’ doomed mother.
Jocasta’s is the submission of desires for her son that comes from ignorance and avoidance; Maa’s come from will and design. Having unwittingly “married” her son, Jocasta punishes herself with death when she discovers what she has done. Maa, in contrast, punishes her son with death in order to avoid discovery. Jocasta sought to evade her fate when she learns it at Oedipus’ birth. Maa sought to embrace her fate, knowing she could evade its punishment. And the “punishment” has some cruel ironies. If a bride of Vijay’s must die, Maa ensures it is Anita, the woman Vijay wants to marry, rather than herself, the woman who wants to “marry” Vijay under the bridge and cannot bear to share him with others. Maa commissions Vijay’s murder after she learns of his plans to marry Anita, and she places herself at Anita’s wedding altar in the temple to await her son, who spends his wedding night in his mother’s arms rather than in Anita’s.
Maa’s is a terrible demand, far worse than Jocasta’s in every way. Whereas Sophocles’ mother simply took her child’s adulthood away from him, Maa claims her son’s childhood. For this obscene, unspeakable desire, Vijay (not Maa) must be punished. The mother will not accept what she has demanded under the bridge; she will not take responsibility for the violence that she causes. Maa’s disavowal is so complete that it takes two decades and the news that Anandbabu has died riding the rails to permit the stirrings of her repressed to come to the surface. And when it does it is terrible. Her punishment comes brutally, and it is visited upon the son—the object of her desire—rather than on herself, its instigator. Maa conspires with the baby, Ravi, to shoot Vijay. “The woman has done her duty. Now a mother is going to await her son,” she declares, heading off to the temple after handing Ravi his gun (fig. 3.2).
Like Ravi, Maa too objectifies kinship. Ravi regards a mother as something that can be owned. Maa regards kinship duties as something that can be disavowed, displacing the murder of Vijay to “the woman” and “a mother” rather than claiming it herself. Moreover, the twinning of her violence with the sanction of the state (the police force) and the piety of religion (the temple) is almost unbearable. But Maa knows that the perfect crime takes no prisoners. Vijay must die and she must do it in such a way as to make it her sacrifice, not his. For this the state’s participation is crucial. And the state, fully duped, hands Maa a medal for the murder of her son.
FIGURE 3.2 Maa handing Ravi his gun in Deewaar.
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The family’s vulnerability in their refuge under the Bombay bridge are heightened by the predation of their surroundings. Maa finds employment carrying bricks for a high-rise construction project, the only work available for the desperately indigent in megacities. Denied stable housing themselves, migrants are crippled by the labor of building it for others. Subjected to the unwanted attentions of an overseer, Maa is rescued by her new “husband,” the adolescent Vijay, who stones the harasser. Years later, Vijay purchases the same high-rise for his mother at a price he is told is too high. The transaction between bridge and high-rise is not just one between economic orders and the individual’s new purchasing power. It is the journey that signals both the fulfillment of a dream and a nightmare. For Vijay the migrant, purchasing a building signals his accomplishment. He has succeeded in securing a roof and walls (“Deewaars”) to shelter his family. More specifically, he has succeeded in achieving what his father had exhorted in the opening speech before the striking miners: he has achieved the dream of “roti, kapda, aur makaan.”
However, the purchase of a place to call home comes at great cost. Vijay brings the building’s title to Maa but she will not accept it, having just learned of his criminal activities. She moves out of his bungalow to Ravi’s squalid flat, and Vijay is left tearing the title to shreds. The dream that Vijay has offered Maa—a home, respectability, security—covers a nightmarish secret that neither he nor she can speak. Maa’s departure from Vijay’s world marks this rift, though it is not yet one he can recognize. It is only when Vijay returns to the primal scene—the bridge—that the rupture becomes clearest. “I have buildings, bank balances, cars. What do you have?” he asks Ravi. Without missing a beat, Ravi claims Maa as commodity and gloats: “Mere pas Maa hain.” Their conversation about who “has” Maa thus devolves into a contest not just about the rightful heirs of the nation, but the rightful vision of the state. One enables material plenitude (“buildings, bank balances, cars”), the other, purely symbolic substance (“Maa”). In Vijay’s depiction, Maa is the nation, a nurturer. In Ravi’s, she is a menacing figure akin to the state that stands behind her.
This dialogue, possibly the most famous in modern Hindi cinema history, forces a latent content on Deewaar and on its larger narrative of the migrant and home. Ravi’s insistent claim that he has Maa makes explicit a circuit between mother, home, and nation. To have Maa is to have all three. Yet the possession of all three is largely symbolic: Deewaar’s manifest content is a symbolic solution to a problem that cannot be resolved. The dialogue between the brothers underscores the tenuousness of the mother–home–nation circuit. It is unavailable in real, material terms, which is precisely why it must be overstated in such grandiose rhetoric. Maa is neither able to feed nor shelter her children. “Roti, kapda, aur makaan” remain elusive in her domain.
DEEWAAR, THE LATENT NARRATIVE
Scripted during a particularly fraught moment in India’s political and economic history, the migrant’s journey in Deewaar plays a key role in dismantling the earlier nationalist fantasy of nation-as-home. Corrupting the circuit of mother–home–nation, Deewaar’s Maa not only displaces her children from their natal home, she also insists that they sacrifice their lives for her depravity. To confront this depravity head-on in the film, to give it voice and to speak its name, would topple the vulnerable edifice of the nation circa 1975. Moreover, it would be unacceptable in the terms of commercial cinema that Deewaar enjoyed. So Deewaar submerges its critique in a powerful latent narrative that connects the specifics of the Vijay story with the national one. If Deewaar is the story of a dream deferred, it is also a story of a dream that festers like a sore and then runs. The metaphor of “running” is not made in vain. Vijay’s idealistic father, who rouses his fellow miners in a cry for “roti, kapda, aur makaan,” pleas not to topple the system of capitalist wealth but to share it more equitably with labor. His abandonment of the family is in part enforced by the recognition of the terrible price Maa extracts from her citizen-children. Protecting Maa involves selling his brother miners to the mine-owner’s interests; their wrath brings in Maa’s henchmen (the police) to save him. It is an atrocious place to be caught, between the Scylla of ideals and the Charybdis of corruption.
Anandbabu’s departure has conventionally been regarded as a flight from the family, but another way to understand it could be as a flight away from Maa and her impossible demands that no compromise but corruption can resolve. In fleeing Maa, Anandbabu flees not just the mother–home–nation circuit: he also publicizes its fraudulence. His alternative “home” is nowhere and everywhere. From the moment he leaves Maa, the film portrays Anandbabu roaming the ends of the nation in third-class rail compartments in which he eventually dies. His journey-without-destination not only disrupts the settlement narrative Maa promises her children; it also revises it. His is not an alternative to the state’s vision so much as an indication of its impossibility and corruption. Anandbabu’s aimless twenty-year train ride in the temples of industrial modernity testifies to the gulf between the soaring rhetoric and the hopeless reality of his situation. Vijay’s tattoo (“mera bap chor hain”) is not marking a theft by the father, but the theft of the father who is exiled from the family along with his efforts to secure it “roti, kapda, aur makaan.”
And it is precisely Anandbabu’s ideals that the film develops in the figure of Vijay. Unlike the father who flees his family and community when threatened, Vijay stays and fights. He emerges a criminal in Maa’s and Ravi’s eyes because he is willing to serve as their provider when those responsible fail. Early in the film, Maa berates Vijay for fighting back during the dockyard shakedown. “Why can’t you be like your father?” she poses. “Would you really rather I were like him?” Vijay replies. “That I slink away?” She replies with a slap. But when he goes from activist to actor, she shoots him. In this case, he is reviled for being a smuggler, and the figure deserves some scrutiny.
Virtually every Hindi film in the 1970s created a villain called a smuggler in the Anglophone locution. The term’s seventeenth-century origins of someone who conveys goods into a country to avoid paying legal duty is only one part of the Bollywood smuggler’s portfolio. The smuggler that Vijay becomes is more closely allied with the later eighteenth-century meaning of one who “gets possession of something by stealth or clandestinely” (OED). Vijay’s smuggling activities in Deewaar reveal him to be a figure of regulation and redress rather than corruption, as the episodes below adumbrate. Taking on the dockyard gangsters following the payday shakedown, Vijay encounters their operations in a giant warehouse. During a high-testosterone fight, sacks of grain and barrels of oil come crashing down. The gangsters, it turns out, are hoarders who acquire staple foodstuffs that they store in a godown and sell at high prices to the middle classes and the poor during periods of shortage. Rather than wiping out hoarders by providing subsidized staples inexpensively as promised, the state first creates the food shortages by mismanaging the supply chain, and then enables the black market to thrive by failing to stamp it out. India’s considerable agricultural output is sold overseas to prop up its hard currency reserves; its population suffers rising prices and limited foodstuffs, and the hoarder is born.16 Vijay’s “victory” over the hoarder thus regulates and potentially restores a market that neither capitalism nor the socialist ideology espoused by the state can quite control.
In another instance, Vijay joins a rival gang and is commissioned with capturing a boatload of gold from Dubai. Despite being a heavy and cumbersome commodity that is hard to disguise and harder to transport, gold was the commodity of choice among Bollywood smugglers of the decade, including the infamous Robert in Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), who loses crates of gold in a burning car (fig. 3.3).
Smuggling gold in Deewaar, like hoarding staple foods, also reveals a story of state ineptitude and failure. In India’s economy of the period where land ownership was limited in part because land was limited (and in part because credit was hard to access), gold has historically been the investment of choice. There has always been high demand for it among individuals who find in it a security akin to that of real (or landed) property. Because of high demand, gold in India is always priced higher than it is on the world market. Thus, when gold arrives from Dubai as it does in Deewaar, it has been purchased at a lower price to be resold at the market price in India. The transaction is deemed illegal because the state collects no duty on it. However, the transaction also exposes the resistance of the state to free-market competition. In India’s highly protectionist economy of the 1970s, “foreign” commodities were banned, industry remained lugubrious, innovation lagged, and those entrepreneurs (such as smugglers) who provided the masses access to security by procuring goods or services such as gold were criminalized. In this context, smuggling gold has a socialist patina of sorts: the smuggler makes available a security that the state has withheld from its citizens.17
FIGURE 3.3 Crates of gold fall out of a burning car in Amar Akbar Anthony.
(COURTESY DEI ENTERTAINMENT)
Vijay plays a role in the warehouse and during the gold raid in redistributing the resources the state keeps from its citizens. His activities under score the fault lines of state competence and summon a combustible critique of the nation’s myth as public provider. It is for smuggling in this critique in which the state is withheld its “due” that Vijay is eventually disciplined by a death planned by the state in the form of his mother, who hands the state (the police) a gun (fig. 3.2).
Assessing Deewaar two decades after its release, its scriptwriter, Javed Akhtar, offered his perspective on the zeitgeist that the film so starkly captured:
When we were writing Deewaar, we were not aware of the sociological causes, implications, or symbolism. But the fact is that writers are also a part of society, and we were perhaps expressing the need prevalent at that time. The Emergency was imposed and the average Indian was losing faith in the various institutions—the police, courts, the government, the bureaucracy, and so on. When that happens, some kind of aggressive individuality develops. . . . In a society that lacked faith, it was natural that the gangster of Deewaar should take birth.18
Akhtar’s remarks on the period bring a crucial point into focus. Not only did Indira Gandhi’s Emergency evaporate the national ideals spawned during Independence, but she insisted on replacing earlier notions of Indian democracy with her own. Thus, “India is Indira; Indira is India” became her campaign slogan in 1971, and Mrs. Gandhi scripted herself as both mother and nation in speech and image to the extent that the hagiography persisted even after her death in 1984, as the election poster in figure 3.4 illustrates.19
Indira Gandhi’s family psychodrama has unnerving resonances with Deewaar’s: like Maa, Indira Gandhi too prospered after she absented her husband, Feroze, from public life; like Maa, Indira Gandhi too anointed a younger son, Sanjay, her henchman; and like Maa, Indira Gandhi too commissioned the murder of the nation’s young. In this case, the assassinations were accomplished quite literally through Sanjay’s forced sterilization campaigns and more metaphorically by the Emergency and what Salman Rushdie named a “sperectomy: the draining-out of hope.”20 Indira Gandhi’s reign inaugurated the evaporation of Nehruvian ideals and their replacement with corruption and cynicism. In this, Mrs. Gandhi, like Maa, rewrote the father’s legacy and obliterated the father’s inheritance from the child. Mrs. Gandhi’s genius, like Maa’s, lay in displacing responsibility for her crimes upon her perceived enemies and fabricating herself as the only figure equipped to save the nation from itself—and her.
The analysis of Deewaar establishes two kinds of outlaws and two kinds of gangsters. The manifest law that Javed Akhtar’s comments gesture to is that of the state, a law that the executive has broken as the reference to the Emergency highlights. This law must be upheld even if those to do so are the very ones who have corrupted it in the first place. Vijay’s transgression against the state must be punished even though his actions regulate society in a way that the state no longer can or will. Meanwhile, the second law is the law of the family. Here the conflict is sharper but also grayer, for the unit of discipline is the family itself, and it is its unspoken laws against desire and incest that Vijay is accused of disrupting. The real outlaw in this context, however, is Maa, the figure who takes a childhood from a son, a family from its father, a future from a brother, and returns a bullet in exchange.
FIGURE 3.4 Indira Gandhi figured within the map of India in a 1985 election poster.
(COURTESY BEHROZE GANDHY)
Maa’s infanticide was earlier compared with Mrs. Gandhi’s and contrasted with the Oedipal story. In the Greek version, the mother Jocasta is an unwitting spectator to the initial attempt at infanticide (which was initiated by her husband, Laius) as well as of the later union with Oedipus. Her suicide follows the death of Laius and the revelation of the curse upon him for the long-ago rape of the young boy Chrissipus. Deewaar’s version of this story uses the same actors but fundamentally changes the point of view. Like the mythic father, Laius, Anandbabu too is absent for much of the action, though in marked contrast to the pederastic Laius, Anandbabu’s nobility is unquestioned. Whereas the Greek myth focuses on patricide, the Indian version emphasizes infanticide. The difference is key.
According to the folklorist A. K. Ramanujan, there are scant instances of Oedipal narratives in India, and where they do exist, as in Kannada versions, they seldom have tragic consequences. The Jocasta figure marries her son or accepts her fate, and the father figure is never overthrown. From this, Ramanujan concludes that “the modern, Western quest is individualism, achieved through an overthrow of the father, whereas the Indian hero’s quest is to fulfill his father. . . . A traditional culture needs to use and absorb the vitality of its young. . . . An innovative culture needs to overthrow its parents.”21 In the India captured in Ramanujan’s research, stability prevails between the generations, and the father’s power is always preserved in the proto-Oedipal oral folktales.
However, Deewaar’s Oedipal version reveals a very different India from Ramanujan’s. It portrays a society that in Ramanujan’s terms is paradoxically both highly modern (in which the father is overthrown) and deeply conservative (where the vital but renegade son must also be killed). At a time of political and social upheaval, youth in the film are a problem. Educated and unemployed like Ravi or charismatic and capable like Vijay, they represent challenges to a generational hierarchy and are criminalized or eliminated in the film’s conservative plot. At the same time, those elements from the hierarchy (such as the father) that might compromise with youth or share its power with them are exiled, as Anandbabu is. In this, Deewaar presents a notably authoritarian—and eventually unstable—version of the Oedipal drama in which neither generation ultimately prevails. Both father and child are demolished, and power resides in absolutist fashion with a ruthless central authority that is unwilling to cede or share it. Thus, Maa—and Mrs. Gandhi. The oppositional political order has fully penetrated the family, and both are revealed as ruinous.
In its depiction of maternal power, Deewaar’s mother is closer to Kunti than she is to Jocasta—namely, the figure from the Mahabharata who tried to kill her firstborn, Karna, in order to preserve her social status and then, when he was an adult, asked Karna to sacrifice his life again in order to preserve the mother’s future security. It is an impossible sacrifice to demand, and Karna refuses Kunti. The outcome is the apocalyptic battle in which the House of Pandu is destroyed. Much the same occurs in Deewaar’s cautionary fable where no happy ending is possible. Maa’s infanticide destroys the family just as the state’s infanticide deposes the political order and any belief in due process.
Unlike Ramanujan, who sees India’s oral folklore as providing a flexible and comforting set of narratives that preserve the social order, Deewaar’s filmlore exposes a political and social order on the brink of collapse, willing to undertake the most egregious violence to kinship loyalties, as Vijay’s murder depicts. Deewaar exposes the violence covered (up) by the mother-worship narratives so central to India’s political culture and overplayed in cinema at especially anxious moments of national definition such as the 1970s.
DEEWAAR RET OLD, OR TRISHUL AND SHAKTI
I’ll Die for Mama was one of Deewaar’s English titles that captured both the central plot conflict (for mother, with mother) and the thinly veiled allegory of the nation it signals. Vijay’s “transgressions” in the film were described as inevitable by its scriptwriter: “In a society that lacked faith,” Javed Akhtar averred, “it was natural that the gangster of Deewaar should take birth” (interview recorded in Gahlot 53). When asked if a criminal hero like Vijay was “justifiable,” Akhtar riposted: “In this kind of society, what do you expect? . . . A hero at any given time is the personification of contemporary morality and contemporary ambitions” (interview recorded in Gahlot 53–54).
If Vijay was the outcome of his moment, he was also a marked departure from his cinematic predecessors. The criminal hero was hardly new in Hindi cinema: Raj Kapoor had developed him to popular acclaim in both Awara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955). But whereas Kapoor’s heroes eventually repent their crimes (murder and fraud) and are integrated back into society following appropriate penitence, usually in jail, Deewaar’s hero had no such luck. Vijay, who has done all that his mother asked for (provided for her, prayed for her), is nonetheless killed, and his death is meant to signal a sacrifice for Maa. Hence, I’ll Die for Mama.
The state portrayed in Deewaar displaces upon the family the problems it creates but cannot solve. It criminalizes those whose efforts at regulation expose the state’s ineffectiveness, and then calls upon the social order (in the form of the family) to restrain the monsters it has spawned. In this, Deewaar exposes the long-standing conflicts at the basis of Indian nationalism. The state espoused democracy, but the social order (with its caste and class hierarchies) abjured it. Rather than state and society being partners in a shared enterprise, they came increasingly into conflict. Whereas Nehru’s vision tried to develop the state’s institutions to nudge society’s, his daughter’s used the state to divide society. And no film better displays the bitter divisions as they came to a head in the 1970s than Deewaar, in which the menace of public life is reflected in the private.
Javed Akhtar may be correct to insist that Vijay emerged out of his moment, but Vijay’s critical and commercial success notwithstanding, his was an uncomfortable emergence that had to be rescripted. If nothing else, the moment had changed with the fall of Mrs. Gandhi and the end of the Emergency in 1977, even if its legacies remained palpable. So, Salim-Javed killed Vijay in Deewaar, but it was not enough to quell the popularity of a hero who captured the day with his fists and his smoldering eyes. He may not have gotten the best line of the film (“Mere pas Maa hain”), but he became the best thing about the film. “A man who dies before his time lives to be a martyr,” cautions the corrupt mine owner in Deewaar when his henchman offers to kill Anandbabu during the labor strike. Anandbabu is allowed to live but becomes utterly irrelevant. Vijay, on the other hand, achieves his diegetic and extra-diegetic stature by his death.
As if wishing to return the monster to his box, Akhtar and Salim Khan returned to Deewaar and rewrote it twice, revising the basic conflict and looking for more amenable solutions to it. If Deewaar is a raw exposition of conflict with the state, Trishul, which followed it in 1978, places its conflict solely in society and the family. If Deewaar is the story of the mother, Trishul is largely about the father. If Vijay is deemed a criminal in Deewaar, he is a successful capitalist in Trishul. If Vijay’s romantic life follows his doomed family life in Deewaar, in Trishul he gets conjugal happiness along with restoration into a loving biological family. And where Vijay must be sacrificed in Deewaar, he thrives in Trishul. Above all, if the predominant conflict in Deewaar is the Kunti conflict in which Maa authorizes the murder of her firstborn, in Trishul it is a more conventional Oedipal conflict in which the son avenges his mother by killing the father.
While the basic structure of the two films remains the same, the point of view and the outcome vary dramatically. These variations say everything about the decade and the social work of popular film. Above all, the variations index the different “Indias” that popular cinema had to grapple with. In rewriting Deewaar’s master plot, its writers were drawing attention to very different citizen-protagonists in the nation. In this formulation, Deewaar tells the story of the child who bears witness and cannot forget; Trishul the story of an adult who is willing to forgive if not forget in order to move on. In Deewaar, Vijay’s actions seek to regulate all society; in Trishul, they regulate only the family. Deewaar allegorizes the nation; Trishul largely ignores it. If politics and the state are the plot of Deewaar, in Trishul both politics and the state are detachable from the plot, and the film is an almost total retreat into family life and its melodrama.
Trishul softens many of Deewaar’s rawest referential allusions to the faltering state. It opens in Delhi with sepia-toned images of India Gate and Mughal monuments, recalling the two Indias antecedent to the modern nation (fig. 3.5). Here, a young civil engineer named R. K. Gupta (played by Sanjeev Kumar) romances an office worker, Shanti, and promises to marry her. His ambitious mother prefers that he marry the boss’s only daughter, and the son obediently complies. Shanti leaves town and gives birth to a son named Vijay, who finds work as a laborer in a construction site. On her deathbed, she reminds him of his father’s abandonment and makes him promise that he will always remember her, will never be weak, and will remember her life. (The song that plays during her funeral is more strident: “you must avenge my pain and death,” it exhorts, as the flames from the pyre flicker on Vijay’s eyes.) Thus burdened by a history not his own, Vijay moves to Delhi and discovers that his father is the city’s most successful real estate developer. He buys a piece of land from him that has been occupied by squatters. R.K.’s numerous appeals to retrieve the land have been tied in court for seven years; he gladly sells to Vijay, who single-handedly clears the plot in a day and starts an empire. His goal: to best his father in the construction business. Vijay befriends his wealthy half-siblings, and his solicitude to them eventually fractures R.K.’s once-happy family. Facing fiscal and familial ruin, R.K. commissions Vijay’s murder, not knowing Vijay is his son. When he discovers his paternity, R.K. repents and rushes to save Vijay. A showdown occurs in Pragati Maidan, the site of India’s international trade shows where spectacles of national plenitude are routinely staged. R.K. takes the bullet intended for Vijay and dies. Vijay and his half-siblings reunite into a happy family, and the once-rival businesses are combined into a large prosperous one. ShantiRaj Enterprises is born, its name literally meaning the reign of peace.
FIGURE 3.5 The opening credits of Trishul (1978) with India Gate.
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
Trishul’s peace was a triumphant one; it remains today a major all-time grosser at the box office (at #12 to Deewaar’s #11 in figures adjusted for inflation).22 In it, all of Deewaar’s signal preoccupations are replayed into happy endings. The preoccupation with “roti, kapda, aur makaan” is now just a preoccupation with makaan (housing). Both the protagonists are builders, and in Trishul, both Vijay and his father compete for a contract to provide low-cost housing for the middle classes, which they both succeed in providing. The state’s ineptitude is irrelevant in Trishul because Vijay is allowed to prevail and provide security when the state (in the form of the courts) fails to protect R.K.’s title to the land. Vijay’s law brings a widely accepted order. And if Deewaar’s past is a haunted one that provides Vijay neither rest nor respite, Trishul’s past dies out (with the mother) and allows the future to occur and with it a happy ending. In short, Trishul represents a compromise solution to the problem of Deewaar. The earlier film provided a powerful critique of the state and a stark depiction of its dystopian intrusions into private life. Trishul, on the other hand, erases the radical critique and gives the happy ending that was impossible in Deewaar. Deewaar’s vengeful mother gets her way and is honored for punishing her son. In Trishul, the vengeful mother dies early so as to enable a happy ending that her bitterness would have prevented.
Trishul reassured audiences that the problems of Deewaar could be solved. The private could be separated from the political, and if one could be healed then maybe the other would follow. Above all, Trishul diffused the rage of the earlier film and integrated the protagonist not just into the social order, but also as the new head of the order represented by ShantiRaj Enterprises. Vijay is truly a victor in this film, unlike in Deewaar, where his name was profoundly ironic.23
But most happy endings invite one to ask, willfully, what unhappiness awaits around the corner. And in their final take on the “problem” of Deewaar, Salim-Javed scripted Shakti under Ramesh Sippy’s direction. Deewaar’s legacy is scrutinized in a family that is everything that Deewaar was not: nuclear, contentedly middle class, professional, and stable. The public sphere does not just penetrate Shakti’s stable family and ruin it as well: the family is the state in the form of a father, a police chief who zealously pursues criminal elements to the letter of the law.24 The main conflict occurs over whose law best provides justice. The father chooses to observe the state’s laws even when his young son is kidnapped (“I refuse your call for a ransom,” he tells the kidnapper). The boy, who overhears this remark, insists that the laws of kinship have been betrayed, and he strays from his father. Explaining his childhood to a lover, Vijay offers: “My father married twice. My mother and his job. I’m my mother’s son; my stepmother’s son is the law. The law is my stepbrother [kanoon mera sautela bhai hai].”
Rather than depicting the law as something that protects, Shakti reveals it as a weapon that creates a gulf between the weak and the strong, men and women, father and son. Rejecting this law, Vijay offers justice to those whom the law does not reach. A woman on the train being harassed by a gang of drunken men is protected by his presence (and his handy fists) when no cop is around. Unable to believe his son over the woman’s harassers, who sue for injury, Vijay’s father accuses him. Later, when a murder is pinned on Vijay based on circumstantial evidence, his father again believes the charge rather than the evidence. Though the film offers each conflict as a generational struggle, the conflicts also serve as tutorials about law and justice.
At a time when both law and order are shown to have frayed, the policeman’s zeal comes with some irony in that rather than burnishing the law, it reveals that even following the law to the letter cannot bring order. The father cannot tell the difference between charge and evidence. For him, an individual (even his son) is guilty until proven innocent, and in this, the father’s actions unwittingly end up underscoring the widespread view that Deewaar had captured in the previous decade. Rather than the well-intentioned father redeeming the law by “believing” it, he ends up revealing that even those best intentioned to uphold the law cannot conceal its irrelevance. In this, the law is in fact a stepchild to the family and the nation. Vijay’s estrangement from his father in Shakti is a parable of the law’s estrangement from the nation. Vijay chooses fathers in the film who protect him at the cost of biology; the state chooses laws that protect it at the cost of ideology. In both choices, the mother dies. She is literally shot in Shakti, just as the nation and its ideals metaphorically die in the conflict between her son (Vijay) and her stepson (kanoon, the law).
In a pivotal exchange in Shakti, when his father urges him to reform, Vijay replies: “How can I surrender myself before the law that made us strangers?” This law continues to estrange them till the end, when it is Vijay who guns down his mother’s murderer (whom his father, helped by a busload of policemen, is unable to catch). Refusing to stop at his command, the police chief then shoots his son in the back, much as Ravi shot his brother in Deewaar. In a gasping, melodramatic death scene, the father embraces his son and by way of explanation offers:
FATHER: This was to happen one day. That’s why it happened.
VIJAY: I tried really hard to remove the love in my heart for you but I always kept loving you. I tried not to but [pause]—Why did this happen?
FATHER: Because I too love you. I love you too.
VIJAY: So, why didn’t you say so, Dad? Why didn’t you say so, Dad? [No reply. Vijay dies in father’s arms.]
Ramesh Sippy, who used silence to virtuoso effect earlier in Shakti when a handcuffed Vijay in a long wordless sequence pays last respects to his mother’s shrouded corpse, uses it again at Vijay’s death. Vijay’s question to his father gets no reply at the time. Decades later, Vijay’s son asks his grandfather if he can join the police force, and this time the old man gives a voluble “reply.” His memories are the film, diegetically, but the words and the actions are all Vijay’s (and Salim-Javed’s).
While the father cannot answer Vijay’s question, he can answer his grandson’s. And in this answer, we get the justification that is supposed to regulate society by conserving its energies. In Shakti, Vijay has done work that the father cannot. He has avenged both his mother’s murder and restored his father’s career. He can now be disposed of. The film ostensibly celebrates the father’s law and his values in a way that the next generation wishes to emulate—as Vijay’s son does when he determines to join the police force at the conclusion of his grandfather’s story.
If Trishul undid most of Deewaar’s radical politics, Shakti renders those politics obsolete. Shakti’s manifest content is profoundly conservative: youth is co-opted into family, family prevails over romance, the authority of both family and state prevail over the individual, and the father is allowed to prosper and to determine the direction of the following generations. Meanwhile, where Deewaar’s latent content destabilized its manifest order, in Shakti the latent content is harder to discern within the terms of this single film. To do it, one needs Deewaar and the mythologies embedded in its filmlore.
Deewaar’s displacement of national anxieties upon the family exposes key elements of social belief and public concern and transforms them. Far from providing alternatives to a painful present or reconciling with it, it followed the lead of Hindi cinema’s most popular blockbusters of the decade and repeatedly scripted the family as the primary locus for national trauma. The cinema’s blockbuster narratives simultaneously reveal extraordinary mechanisms for repression and renewal, and uncovering them underscores Deewaar’s critical role in a fuller reckoning of the decade.
However, Hindi cinema’s Family Romances, as amplified in Deewaar, are neither typical liberation narratives nor exorcisms as psychoanalysis posited such narratives. The traumas they are intended to heal are paradoxically rendered more real on the screen largely because of their projections upon the familiar intimacy of the family unit. Rather than rendering the state abstract, and thus distant from the subject, these films render it closer to Vijay in the form of the brother who will gun him down and the mother who will authorize the killing, as in Deewaar. Rather than liberating the subject from his nightmares, they bring them to life for him. In this form, the films are a peculiar kind of political tutorial: neither exultant not exculpatory of the national myth, they serve to expose its fraudulence.
Deewaar is notable for embedding its extensive critique of India in the 1970s within the terms of popular commercial cinema. If the situation of the decade “created” the protagonist of Deewaar and ensured his currency at the time, the film’s combustible counter-narrative nevertheless required some form of containment that its protagonist’s death weakly provided. While Vijay’s diegetic death illustrates the incompletely radical nature of popular cinema, it also stands as an indicator of popular cinema’s opportunities. Because while Hindi film seldom provides sequels, it narrates the same story numerous times, with each retelling exposing or addressing anxieties that the previous one missed or was unable to pursue fully. Deewaar’s radical critique kills a semi-criminal Vijay while Trishul’s radical revision brings him back as an unambiguous hero, and Shakti’s radical burial renders him obsolete. Taken together, the three films serve not just as “contemporary folklore,” as Javed Akhtar claimed in this chapter’s epigraph. They also serve as cautionary fables about the power of stories.
Deewaar’s volatile family drama, with its dramatic critique of state and nation, illuminated the corrosion in symbolic kinship units. Revising this story in Trishul generated the happy ending as well as a tutorial on the futility of such endings. In other words, utopia in Trishul proved as unsatisfactory as dystopia in Deewaar. Stories, in this context, have the power both to satisfy and to unsettle. In the tutorial that emerges from Salim-Javed’s cinematic triptych, the pleasures of stories are contingent. They come with attendant cautions to qualify their satisfactions. But stories also expose and reconfigure the world in which they circulate. Deewaar’s critique, refashioned in Trishul then again in Shakti, serves a restorative function that first critiques the master narrative (of nation and family) and then provides a series of commentaries on it in the form of revisions. If Trishul’s ending of a peaceful ShantiRaj embeds a fantasy, it is a fantasy that powerfully underscores the unrelenting somberness in Deewaar. In this cautionary account, Deewaar exposes the corruption that pervades 1970s India as well as the futility of confronting it, even while providing the short-lived satisfaction of Vijay’s Pyrrhic confrontations. Trishul’s ending is no more satisfying than Deewaar’s, even though both speak to the same desire for social justice.
Salim-Javed’s cinematic triptych in Deewaar–Trishul–Shakti illuminates the many acts of storytelling central to all nation-building projects. The triptych provides a way to reconceive—perhaps even to restore—the national narrative even while critiquing its corruption. It purveys the notion that the art of the story carries the craft of life. For this, popular cinema is the nation’s Family Romance, a space where the nightmares of the collective are addressed, where its public fantasies might be retrieved, and where alternatives can be scripted even if they must eventually be dismissed. Reading the manifest and latent narratives embedded in Deewaar and unraveled across the triptych exposes a set of pressing anxieties that found expression in the locus of the family and that required the countering impulse of the Family Romance for dissolution, if not resolution. In the Family Romance that emerges, Vijay becomes a symbol condensing all the forces threatening India—both the state and the nation—in the mid-1970s. Deewaar’s family sanctuary is revealed, like the nation’s, as threatened by invasion from without and seduction from within (a preoccupation keenly observed by Michael Rogin in his work on U.S. Cold War cinema [Rogin 267]). These threats are narratively “undone” across the films that comprise the triptych as the originary film’s murderous plot is rewritten in more conciliatory terms.
Recovering these acts of making and undoing exposes the anxieties of the decade and the powerful role popular Hindi cinema played in producing and then containing the combustible energies of the moment. In countering the brutality of the decade on screen if not on the street, cinema served to remind the state of the nation that preceded it. Both were acts of public fantasy, enabled and underwritten by the Family Romance. Cinema in this context stands for a recovered memory—flawed and faintly gesturing to a truth that cannot be spoken. The cinematic imagination of which the Salim-Javed triptych is a part enables a critique of the nation and the narrative fabrications that propel it. Suspended below the manifest narrative is a combustible latent critique, one that can only find voice in the displacement and hyperbole characteristic of the Family Romance. Popular cinema’s genius lies in providing a space for these narratives that must not be recalled. At best, they have the sharpness and horror of all recovered memories, compared to which reality is neither as bad, nor as real.
