How Bhansali's 'Padmavati' made way for Amitabh Bachchan's 'Deewar
Originally scheduled to be
released today, the film still remains embroiled in controversy. So we watched
Deewar instead
LATEST
NEWS : On
Thursday, a parliamentary panel summoned Padmavati
director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Central Board of Film Certification chief
Prasoon Joshi to discuss the ongoing controversy over the film. The members of
Parliament — with seemingly little to do after the postponement of the winter
session — grilled the hapless director over whether he had distorted history
and if he had fuelled the controversies to promote his film. Already, chief
ministers of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar have declared that
they will not allow it to be released in their respective states, earning a rap
on their wrists from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Originally
scheduled to be released today (Friday), the future of the film now hangs in
uncertainty. Last week, inspired by the claims of some Rajput groups that the
13th-century queen, Padmini, was like their mother, and a fictional depiction
of a love affair between her and Alauddin Khilji was somehow an insult to them,
I had watched Mother India (1957) — the original film that combined the myths
of nationalism and motherhood in post-Independence India. This week, I followed
it up with Deewar (1975), released barely a few months before the Emergency
started and reflecting its contemporary mood of listlessness and political
turmoil.
Like Mother
India, the narrative of Deewar, too, revolves around a mother (Nirupa Roy) and
her two sons (Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor), who find themselves on the
opposite sides of the law — but more importantly, engaged in a moral conflict.
(Some have even argued that the latter is a remake of the former, albeit in an
urban setting.) The family — as the smallest unit of the nation and the economy
— is at the centre of the drama and the source of the melodrama in the film.
But it is not the ideal family of four: The father, a maligned union leader, is
missing; the mother, though not a widow, is the celibate single parent.
(Remember the superbly melodramatic scene where Ravi snatches the sindoor out
of his mother’s hand before telling her about her husband’s death?)
A short
detour: Speaking of mothers and sons, one can hardly ignore the most important
such relationship in India in the 1970s — that between prime minister Indira
Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi. Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv, in some ways, reflect the
mother-and-two-sons structure in the national imagination. But the kind of
influence that Sanjay exerted over his mother could be somewhat alarming. One
of the more sensational reports that came out during the Emergency was how
Sanjay slapped Indira five or six times at a dinner. The person who reported it
was then Washington Post India bureau chief and Pulitzer winner Lewis M Simons.
In an interview with Scroll.in in 2015, the 40th anniversary of the Emergency,
he recollected how the incident had actually occurred before the Indira Gandhi
government suspended civil rights in the country. Soon after his report was
published, Simons was put on a plane and thrown out of India.
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