The period between 26 June 1975 and 21 March 1977 is considered one of the most turbulent phases in free India and it affected the entire nation. The then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, requested the then president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare Emergency, resulting in the suspension of elections as well as all other civil liberties and rights. In an article in the Indian Express8, a handwritten note dated 8 January 1975 by the then chief minister of West Bengal, S.S. Ray to Indira Gandhi is quoted which alludes to the possibility that the decision to impose Emergency was pre-decided.
If one looks at the political cauldron from the beginning of that year, one can see things bubbling and simmering. In an exhaustive study of the period, the British sociologist David Lockwood (2016) brought forth the condition of the country during that time, the opposition which slowly gained majority over the ruling party and the actual course of the Emergency. It was on 12 June 1975 that Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court convicted Indira Gandhi of corrupt campaign practices, resulting from a case brought by Raj Narain, her opponent in the 1971 elections.9 On 25 June 1975, at a massive opposition rally in Delhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, one of the fiercest opponents of the ruling party, announced that the Janata Party would not allow Gandhi to function as prime minister, and a massive civil disobedience movement would commence from 29 June.10 However, before such a movement could begin, the government declared the Emergency under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution.
It was in this political backdrop that Aandhi was released. While the other films of the year were released either before or after the Emergency was imposed, Aandhi, although officially released prior to the Emergency, was banned in its twenty-third week during the Emergency. However, it was back in theatres with minor cuts and additions again during the Emergency itself. Gulzar himself was surprised about the ban. At that time he was in Moscow, attending a film festival where Aandhi was also being screened, and he learnt that he would have to pull out of the show as the film had been banned in India. To be sure, it was a film magazine that had published a feature on Aandhi, with the headline, ‘See your Prime Minister on screen’. Gulzar had to rush back to India and remove a few scenes and shoot some new ones. In one of the additional scenes, Aarti Devi, the protagonist, looks at a framed portrait of Indira Gandhi claiming that she was her ideal. William Mazzarella, in his book Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, discusses various issues of censorship in cinema. The key questions he probes are:
What is the place of affective intensities in modern mass-mediated democracies? What is the importance of the fact that we are called upon to belong at once to concrete crowds and to abstract publics? And what happens to political authority when it can no longer reside in the physical body of a singular sovereign and has to find its feet in the intimately anonymous space of mass publicity? (p. 4)11
Gulzar himself asserts that he did not make the film and base Aarti Devi’s character on Indira Gandhi.12 Yes, the character drew on her personality, only with regard to the aspect of how she would descend the stairs, get off the helicopter or walk briskly, but nothing beyond that. Shoma A. Chatterji, in her book Suchitra Sen: The Legend and the Enigma, quotes the actor herself, who insists that she did not fashion the character after Indira Gandhi.13
The 1970s were a turbulent and volatile era with the cinema of the period being associated with the image of the ‘angry young man’14. In fact, writer Nikhat Kazmi in Ire in the Soul: Bollywood’s Angry Years calls the decade ‘Bollywood’s angry years’. The growing desolation and disillusionment of the public had begun to manifest itself in cinema in myriad ways. While the decade saw the rise of Amitabh Bachchan as the angry young man, it also witnessed films that were mellower but had a seething rage within. Aandhi was one of those films. Anger was replacing the socialism of the 1950s and the romance of 1960s. After one war with China (1962) and two with Pakistan (1965 and 1971), the economic resources of the nation were rather drained, resulting in the rise of discontent and anger against the prevailing political establishment at the time.
Starting with the textual analysis of the film, one can say that the opening scene of Aandhi sets the tone of the film. The title credits feature a montage of scenes from a typical election campaign – speeches, banners, canvassing, visits by politicians, slogan shouting through the loudspeakers tied to jeeps, and so on and so forth. The first dialogue is by a politician. He claims:
‘Yakeen maniye, mujhe shauk nahin hai election ladne ka. Aur na hee mujhe kisi doctor ne kaha hai election ladne ko. Lekin mujhe election ladna padta hai apne huqooq ke liye, Janata ke huqooq ke liye…’
(Believe me, it isn’t my hobby to fight elections. Nor has any doctor advised me to do so. But I have to fight elections for my rights, for the rights of the common man…)
How this politician claims that he wishes to contest the elections only for the sake of humanity and not for his personal gain is something that the story further reveals. He plays it dirty, maligning Aarti Devi, his opponent, to win the elections and the entire exercise seems to indicate how in politics, people can reach their goal by all means possible.
In Deewaar: The Footpath, the City and the Angry Young Man, Vinay Lal talks about the political scenario of the country in 1975. Of the many films that became a blockbuster that year, Deewaar was the one of the first, releasing in January. Lal points out, ‘Unrest was widespread: economic productivity had declined precipitously, cities were crippled by strikes and protests, and political unrest would underscore the fragile nature of the Indian state.’15 It is this state of the nation that Gulzar too portrays in Aandhi (released in February that year), where the ‘fragile’ political situation of the country forms the backdrop for the central plot, a love story.
In many ways, Aandhi captures the essence of the political, social as well as economic changes of that decade. It reflects the unrest in a civil society marked by elections, the ill-intentions of various political parties, youth unrest and their dissatisfaction. But the film has a strange equation with reality. Nowhere, through the course of the film, does one see the political theme overriding the love story, or vice-versa. The balance between the two is profound, and the filmmaker successfully communicates both the elements with ease.
Anirudh Deshpande, in ‘Indian Cinema and Bourgeois State’16 claims that Indian cinema is neither politically innocent nor conveys an unequivocal secularism. He tries to trace how cinema in colonial India was affected by censorship and elite preferences. As the end of British colonialism brought the Indian bourgeoisie to power and seriously started the process of nation building, it began to reflect in Indian cinema as well. In Deshpande’s opinion, the more apolitical a film pretended to be, the greater was its political significance. Aandhi was one film where even the undertones of romance were loaded with shades of politics.
An apt example of that is a regular conversation between a man and his wife, in this case Aarti Devi and JK, and one can see their distinct views on patriotism and the idea of revolution. In the scene where JK gets burned by a steaming cup of tea, and Aarti is applying ointment on his feet, she sarcastically remarks:
‘Khud hee kahte the, inqalaabi aag par bhi chal sakte hain, ab kya hua?’
(You yourself used to say, revolutionaries can walk on burning charcoals. What happened now?)
JK – ‘Bina karan koi aag mein nahin koodta. Barah saal ka tha jab apni party ke liye goli khayee thi.’
(No one jumps into fire without a reason. I was only twelve when I had faced a bullet for my party.)
Aarti – ‘Ab kyun party ke khilaaf ho?’
(Then why are you against the party now?)
JK – ‘Us waqt inqalaabi party thi. Inqalaab ke liye ladte the…’
(It used to be a revolutionary party then. We were fighting for a revolution…)
Aarti – ‘Ab bhi to usi ke liye fight karte hain.’
(We still fight for that.)
JK – ‘Huh … hartal, satyagrah, bhala iss tarah inqalaab aata hai?’
(Huh … strike, political resistance … does a revolution happen like this?)
Aarti – ‘Ab tak to usi se aayein hain…’
(That is how revolutions have happened till now.)
JK – ‘Ab tum bahas na karna shuru kar do … kyunki tumne BA, MA politics mein kiya hai … chodo pair mere’
(Now don’t you start arguing … just because you have done some BA, MA in politics … now leave my feet.)
Aarti (smiling) – ‘Badi der laga di aapne pair chhudane mein’
(You took so long in taking your feet away.)
JK – ‘Yeh dekha … yehi politics hai … issi ko politics kahte hain … issi liye mujhe isse nafrat hain … jahan imaandari na chale, wahan mere liye kuch nahin chalta’
(See this … this is politics … this is what politics is … that is why I hate it so much … I can’t stay where there is no honesty)
Through a simple conversation between a husband and wife about the nature of politics and how their points of view differ, Gulzar very poignantly brings out the essence of politics. One might argue that broadly, politics is all about waiting for the opportune moment and taking advantage of the situation. If at one level, JK and Aarti were discussing why JK was now against politics although he himself was a part of it while growing up, on the other level, the ‘politics of a relationship’ also shines through in their conversation.
In another scene in the film, when Aarti tells her father about her intention of getting married, his response is that of shock and disgust:
K. Bose – ‘Padh likh kar agar gul khilane the to Oxford mein jaa kar paanch saal zaaya karne ki kya zaroorat thi?’
(What was the need of wasting five years in Oxford, if you had to end up doing this?)
(Pointing at the photograph of Indira Gandhi) Do you know, what sacrifices were given by this girl? If big ambitions are to be achieved, you have to forgo these trivial pleasures.
Aarti – ‘Yehi to meri ideal hain…’
(She is the one, who is my ideal.)
K. Bose – ‘Main chahta hoon tum politics mein jao. Kuch position haasil karo … taake mere business ko bhi kuch fayda pahunche … tum samjhti nahin ho … tumhari taraqqi hogee, to mere business ki bhi taraqqi hogee. Aaj kal to politics ke bina to kuch…’
(I want you to join politics … have a position of your own … so that even my business profits from it … you don’t understand … my business will improve if you grow … there is nothing without politics these days…)
Aarti – ‘Main rajneeti mein ja rahi thi to desh ki sewa ke liye, aapki dukaan chalane ke liye nahin, aur chod rahi hoon, to apna ghar basane ke liye.’
(When I was entering politics, it was to serve the country, not to run your business. And if today, I am quitting it, it is to set up my home.)
It becomes clear that Aarti is very sure about where she stands with regard to politics and business. She does not wish to be scrupulous; her sole intention is to serve the country and its people.
However, all politicians in the film do not follow her ideology. Her opponent, Chandra Sen, employs every trick in the book to bring Aarti Devi down. When he gets a whiff of her meeting with the ‘hotel manager’, her frequent visits to his house or even going out with him, he tells a photographer to trail her and capture evidence. Sen goes to the extent of getting the photos made into posters and has them pasted all over the city.
Chandra Sen is not the only one who is portrayed as someone who adopts unsavoury methods to get his way. Within Aarti’s political party itself, there is Lallu Laal, who is depicted as someone who often plays games to pull in some votes. He also makes sure that Aarti Devi doesn’t get to know of his doings. One such activity is when he provokes Agarwal, an industrialist, to stand for the elections, so that their party can garner votes not only from the mill workers, but also from the mill owners. To be sure, Lallu Laal’s intention is only to break up Chandra Sen’s votebank. If the votes of both the working class and the mill owners go to Agarwal, it would brighten Aarti Devi’s chances of winning the elections. Interestingly, when Chandra Sen gets to know of Lallu Laal’s manipulative ways, he becomes furious but calms down as soon as he learns of a workers’ strike in one of Agarwal’s mills; in fact, he then tells his party’s workers to make sure that the strike continues.
Such is the situation of the country depicted in Aandhi – the so-called leaders are only concerned about how to win elections. It is Aarti Devi who is surprised when Agarwal contests the elections and wonders if this was all Lallu Laal’s plan. She advises him:
‘Khayal rahe, Lallu Laal ji, jhoot se mujhe sakht nafrat hai. Jhoot bol kar sachchayee kabhi nahin jeeti ja sakti. Janta ko agar meri zaroorat hogee to mujhe apnaye gi. Aur nahin, to nikal ke phenk degi. Janta se koi chaal na chalna.’
(Please remember, Lallu Laal ji, I hate lies. One cannot win over truth with lies. If the public wants me, it will embrace me. And if not, it will just throw me out. Never play games with the common man.)
The viewer gets an insight into Aarti’s political ideology through her various actions and words peppered throughout the film. In another scene, there is a press conference where the exchange of words sums up the situation of the country. Several questions are asked by the members of the press, all related to the concerns brewing in the mind of the common man of that era. A journalist asks Aarti Devi, ‘Is violence a part of politics?’ To which she replies, ‘Certainly, violence is a part of bad politics.’ For the viewer, it is a line as simple as this that clears the air about the difference between good politics and bad politics. Aarti Devi not only accepts the fact that violence is associated with politics, but also concedes that it is a part of bad politics. Another question that she is asked is whether she feels that the leader of the opposition was behind the pelting of stones at her, to which she replies, ‘Yeh kaam nafrat ka hai, chhotepan ka.’ (This is a deed of hatred, of lowliness.)
What Gulzar was trying to emphasize here was that although one sees bursts of violence all around, politics and violence do go hand in hand, although there is no need for it. Aarti Devi, in her reply to the last question, stresses on the fact that the common man has the power to oust anyone in power without resorting to violence.
JK, despite claiming to be someone who wants to stay away from the politics in the country at the time, too loses his temper when he hears Agarwal making derogatory remarks about Aarti Devi behind her back, some replete with sexual innuendo. Enraged, JK gets physical with him and threatens to throw him out of the hotel. While exiting the scene, he tells Aarti:
‘I am not a bloody politician … kisi mai ke laal mein himmat hai to aakar poochhe ki mera tumhara rishta kya hai … main jawab doonga … tumse kyun poochh rahe hain … aise oochhi harkatein tumhari siyasat mein chalti hongi … meri zindagi mein unke liye koi jagah nahin.’
(I am not a bloody politician … anyone who has the guts to find out, should come and ask me … I will respond … why are they asking you? … Such cheap stunts may be acceptable in your world of politics … I don’t have place for such things in my life.)
JK storms out after this outburst.
There is obvious tension after this scene. However, everything falls in place when, at another election rally, Aarti addresses the public, disrupting Chander Sen’s speech as he is mouthing accusations about her, and reveals the truth about her relationship with JK. Chander Sen, in his speech, brings to fore the aspects which in his opinion a good leader must possess:
‘Jo log janta ke leader banna chahte hain, unhe janta ke saamne uncha aadarsh rakhna padta hai. Kuch aise kaam bhi karne padte hain ki janta unki izzat kare, unka aadar kare. Aur jo log aisa nahin kar sakte, unhe janta ke saamne se nikal jaana chahiye.’
(All those who wish to be leaders, need to possess certain qualities. They also need to do certain things so that the public can respect them, admire them. And, those who can’t do this, they should not claim to be leaders, and move away from the lives of the public.)
To this, Aarti responds by appealing to the masses gathered there:
‘Nyay kijiye, aur doshi samjhiye to kadi se kadi saza dijiye mujhe … main inse das baras baad mili kyunki pichle das baras se main aapke saath hoon. Aapki takleef, aapke sukh dukh baatne ke liye … aapke beech rehne ki, aapke saath rahne ki bahut badi qeemat chukayi hai maine….’
(Please do justice. And punish me, if you find me guilty … I met him after ten years because I have been with you for the last ten years, to share your pain and sorrows … I have paid a heavy price for staying amidst you, for being by your side…)
Aarti Devi pleads to the public and asks them to punish her if they think she was at fault, thus winning over the sympathy of the masses. And it is this sympathy that leads to votes and helps her win the elections.
It is important to emphasize here that it is baseless to get into a debate about whether Aandhi has been modelled on the life of Indira Gandhi. Sure, there are similarities. Apart from the fact that the character and features of Aarti Devi are largely borrowed from Mrs Gandhi’s style (including the brisk walk and her large dialed-watch), it is striking that both Aarti Devi and Mrs Gandhi had an estranged marriage. If stones were pelted at Aarti Devi at a rally, they were also pelted at Mrs Gandhi in 1967 at a rally near Bhubaneswar, Orissa. It is this coincidence about the estranged marriage, and the fact that Feroze Gandhi too ran a hotel in Allahabad that led the critics and viewers to connect the dots and begin to believe that Aandhi was the story of Indira Gandhi.
A viewer can see the film at two levels, both mingling with and intersecting each other. One is about the rekindling of lost love between Aarti and JK, and the other as a statement on the political climate of the country. At all points of conflict between the couple (during their early married life or even after their estrangement), the reason has always been the same – the notion of politics and how differently they see it. In his article, ‘Pictures, Emotions, Conceptual Change’, Imke Rajamani points out to a similar fact that no other form of media in the 1970s and 1980s is comparable in its outreach and impact on the male urban population of the lower and middle classes as popular cinema.17 Keeping this theoretical framework in mind, one can easily infer that Aandhi represented the political turmoil that was brewing in the country in the first half of the decade. If there was one political leader who was thinking about the betterment of the society, without indulging in unscrupulous actions, her opponents as well as her own party workers were not thinking on the same lines. The conflict of ideologies is apparent in every frame of the film. The frustration of the common man is evident. They question their leaders and want to know how their leaders are treating them (an apt representation of this is the satirical qawwali in the film, discussed at length in chapter 4). However, they can be easily manipulated and instigated. At one point, when handed eggs to throw at a rally, it is worth noting that each egg is wrapped in a ten-rupee note. Lallu Laal asks the people to keep the tenner and throw the egg at the politician and disrupt his speech. Gullible as they are, people do as told.
Partha Chatterjee opens the essay ‘Indian Cinema: Then and Now’ with the line, ‘Cinema, it is said, is usually a fair indicator of a nation’s psyche, which may possibly be responsible for its (current) state of being, and which in turn, may be affected by the turn of historical, political and economic events in a given frame of time.’18 Aandhi, yet again, follows this as a thumb rule and depicts the political nerve of the country.
The film ends with Aarti Devi walking into a rally by her opponent and and it is here that she wins over the people with her emotional speech about her sacrificing her personal life to serve the country. The people attending the rally are seen wiping tears and it is obvious that there is no looking back for her, as far as winning the elections were concerned. The following scene shows Aarti and JK listening to the news of the election results. She wins by a huge margin.
Aandhi ends with JK seeing off Aarti as she goes back to her professional world. The film completes a full circle – it begins with a scene depicting an election campaign and ends with an election victory.