THERE
ARE NO “HINDU ACTORS” & “MUSLIM ACTORS”, PLEASE!
The past three years have witnessed a blatant effort
by communal forces to infiltrate viewer and reviewer responses to Hindi films
By Anna MM Vetticad
“Is not this
same white missionary beach that gave 4 stars to raees, a movie on an
anti-national Moslem terr0rist? Any Hindu actor’s movie, this hater tries to
pull it down!” (sic)
This comment
was one of many that appeared below my review of the Hindi film Jolly LLB 2, starring Akshay Kumar, published on Firstpost this month. If it weren’t so
venomous, it would be funny. A friend with a vivid imagination says “missionary
beach” conjures up visions of hanky panky in the sand — an experience I cannot
claim to have had. Just as I did not give Raees a four-star review, I rated it 2.5 stars. Whatever. The truth, as you know, is irrelevant to
propagandists. They prefer what Donald Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway describes
as “alternative facts”.
So what’s new?
After all, falsehoods and personal attacks against critics in the virtual world
are as old as the day websites first opened their comments sections to the public.
The preceding paragraphs signal a relatively recent trend in online animosity
though, evidenced by the pigeon-holing of Kumar.
“Hindu actor” — what does that even mean? A
man may simultaneously be Hindu and an actor, but to place the two words side
by side is as reductive and demeaning to his craft as tags like “woman
journalist”, “gay filmmaker”, “Dalit writer” and “black singer” when used
outside discussions on discrimination.
If you have
been around long enough, this labelling may remind you of Hrithik Roshan’s
smashing debut in 2000, which led to some distasteful right-wing cheer at the
arrival of a “Hindu superstar”. The dominance of the three Khans in the Hindi
film industry had been a sore point with the Hindu Right for a while, but the
political atmosphere was different back then, and the attempt to celebrate an
actor’s religious identity remained on the margins of our collective existence.
That began to
change with the BJP and Narendra Modi’s general election victory in 2014. The
subsequent flow of the ruling party’s Internet battalions into the film
criticism space turned into a flood in 2015, when Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan both publicly condemned religious intolerance. Since then, these trolls have
unrelentingly exhorted viewers to boycott — and critics to slam — films
starring “Muslim actors” Aamir and Shah Rukh, and to back “Hindu actors” Ajay
Devgn, Hrithik Roshan and Kumar.
How can we
know that these are BJP supporters, you ask? Because their vocabulary and
behaviour patterns have consistently mirrored BJP trolls, and mimicked the
party and government’s reaction to these stars. For instance, online workers goaded “nationalists” to boycott Snapdeal, since Aamir was its brand
ambassador, and Dilwale, since it starred Shah Rukh, even as the sarkar engineered the termination of
Aamir’s association with the Incredible India campaign and bullied Snapdeal into leaving him.
Meanwhile,
these trolls have largely spared the other Khan, Salman. BJP insiders admit
that this is one of Salman’s many rewards for his proximity to the PM and
silence on the government’s shenanigans.
The repulsive communal
profiling of Hindi film stars peaked this January
when the SRK-starrer Raees
clashed in theatres with Kaabil featuring Roshan. Online troops demanded that “nationalists”
should skip Raees and make Kaabil a hit, while BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya batted for Kaabil with
this
obtuse tweet he claimed
was about demonetisation: “The #Raees who are not for
the coun
try are of no use. We should all
stand with a #Kaabil (worthy)
patriot.”
As I write
this column, I call up fellow critics to ask what they make of this ugly
scenario. Raja Sen, whose reviews began appearing on Rediff in 2004, tells me, “The
Hindu-Muslim divide among fan responses existed earlier too, but it was only
one of many polarities including regionalism which one encountered as a
journalist online. Now though, religion dominates responses to reviews. It is
often clear that these people are not even paying attention to what you have
written and that they are not necessarily film fans or mobs hired by some star’s
PR, but may well be members of Chairman Modi’s orange army.”
Suparna
Sharma, film critic for The Asian Age, offers this analysis: “Today’s
online trolls attacking critics based entirely on the religion of certain stars
are simply an extension of the ongoing campaign to communalise everything — the
food we eat, the clothes we wear, how we vote, whether we stand for the national
anthem or not... Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, box-office is
secular. So while politicians and their Sanghi trolls can hound out, say,
Pakistani actors from a film, they can’t really keep people out of theatres.
I’d like to believe that critics, but more than them, audiences who queue up to
buy tickets with their hard-earned money and commit two-three hours to a film, are
above this sort of bunkum.”
Still, it is
important to vocally condemn this well-strategised endeavour to infiltrate our
reactions to cinema, because we cannot risk having well-meaning viewers and
reviewers go the way of many political journalists, and subconsciously
self-censor their public statements to avoid abuse. We live in a world where
even shamshaan ghats (cremation grounds) and kabristaans (cemeteries) are being politicised. In this world, more than ever, it is important too to
remind bigots that for a true cinephile, there are no “Hindu actors” and
“Muslim actors”; there are only actors, characters, stories and films.
(This article
was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on February 25, 2017.)
Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:
Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Ignoring the jana in Jana Gana Mana
Photographs courtesy:
