Sparing Hindi Medium, Raees and Dear Zindagi, attacking Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for featuring a
Pakistani star – how Mumbai’s first
family of cultural policing cherrypicks their controversies
By
Anna MM Vetticad
(A shorter version of
this article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on June 17, 2017.)
It is
Bollywood’s sleeper hit of the year, having quietly completed five weeks in
theatres and grossed Rs 68 crore-plus at domestic turnstiles so far, in the
midst of the high-decibel hype generated by the marketing teams of more
high-profile films. Hindi Medium starring
Irrfan Khan and Pakistani artiste Saba Qamar appears to have found its popular
appeal with a combination of comedy, charismatic leads and, above all, a theme
that has resonated with the masses.
Wait…
What was
that again, you ask?
She’s
Pakistani, yet the Mumbai-based nationalist crowd has not been up in arms, as
they were last winter over Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil starring her compatriot Fawad Khan?
What
happened to all that rhetoric about “honouring our soldiers dying at the
border” by boycotting talent from the other side, following the Uri terror
strike?
These are
questions the film industry and mediapersons discussed in whispers around the
time Hindi Medium arrived on the big
screen, but avoided raising in public for fear of giving ideas to
violence-prone social and political organisations or bruising their egos to the
point of driving them to action despite their disinterest. Such groups tend to
strike films in the immediate pre-release period, because that is when
producers are most vulnerable and most prone to succumb to unreasonable
demands. That is also when a controversy is prone to attract headlines, which
is any violent protesting group’s primary goal. Now that Hindi Medium is nearing the end of its theatrical run, having been
swept out of most theatres by Hurricane Salman’s Tubelight, it is safe for us to have this prickly discussion.
Between
October 2016 and May 2017, at least four Hindi films starring Pakistanis have
come to Indian theatres, but extremists have obstructed only one: Ae Dil Hai Mushkil released on October
28, 2016. Raj Thackeray and his party
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), with the tacit support of the present establishment
at the Centre and the state, harangued Johar to such an extent over Fawad, that
the panicked producer-director issued an abject apology and went so far as to
rewrite, re-edit and re-dub his film at the last minute to change a crucial
aspect of his storyline: that Ae Dil was
originally an India-Pakistan love story, albeit set in London, in which Anushka
Sharma, Fawad Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Fawad’s fellow
countryman Imran Abbas were all playing Pakistani Muslim characters.
(For
details of the alterations made to the film, please read my column titled “How KJo reworked Ae Dil Hai Mushkil”, published
on November 12, 2016).
Johar also
did nothing to quell rumours that he had donated Rs 5 crore to the Army Welfare
Fund, as “penance” stipulated by Raj for the transgression of casting Fawad in Ae Dil. Contrary to news reports
claiming that the Army rejected this payment, sources in the film industry and
defence establishment tell me that Johar made no such payment in the first
place, therefore there was no question of rejection by the Army. However,
Johar’s silence on the false stories being circulated in the media helped Raj
to further strut his fake bravado.
Just weeks
after Ae Dil, Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi starring Alia Bhatt and
Shah Rukh came out on November 26, 2016. Dear Zindagi starred the Pakistani actor-singer Ali Zafar in a crucial
supporting role, yet did not elicit a whimper of protest from Raj Thackeray and
his goons or his estranged cousin Uddhav Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, who
together form Mumbai’s first family of cultural policing.
India-Pakistan
relations had not miraculously normalised in the four weeks between the two, so
to understand the difference in extremist responses to Ae Dil and Dear Zindagi,
it is important to travel back in time to October 2, 2009. It was the morning
of the release of Johar’s production Wake
Up Sid starring Ranbir Kapoor and Konkona Sen Sharma. On discovering that
characters in the film were referring to “Mumbai” as “Bombay”, MNS threatened
to block it. Hearing reports of vandalism on Day 1 at theatres screening Wake Up Sid in the state, Johar rushed
to Raj’s home to seek forgiveness, thus gifting him and the relatively new MNS
an important political victory in a fracas clearly cleverly created by the
party to gain some mileage just days before the Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Since
Johar had keeled over so quickly, he was marked out as an easy target for any
state leader wishing to stress his regionalist or nationalist credentials. And
so, shortly afterwards, Cousin Uddhav decided to use him to score a point in a
game of one-upmanship with Cousin Raj. The SRK-starrer My Name Is Khan (MNIK),
directed by Johar and co-produced by him with Shah Rukh’s Red Chillies
Entertainment, was scheduled for an early 2010 release. Uddhav decreed that Shiv Sena would not
allow MNIK in theatres unless Shah
Rukh expressed regret for remarks made a short while earlier about the need to
include Pakistani players in the IPL.
Shah Rukh,
not Johar – big mistake.
Bullies
usually avoid attacking unknown quantities, opting instead for tried-and-tested
victims. Where Johar may possibly have complied to save his film, Shah Rukh
refused. MNIK was released despite
hitches, it went on to become one of the year’s biggest hits, and Cousin Uddhav
ended up with egg on his face. Scorecard: Raj – 1, Uddhav – 0.
Now fast
forward to 2016, and you may see why Raj was confident that grandstanding over
Johar’s film would pay off whereas targeting Dear Zindagi (a Shah Rukh-starrer and a co-production between
Johar, Shinde and the star’s home banner) could be risky. What if he or Uddhav
had demanded contrition for the casting of Dear Zindagi and been asked to take a hike? What if… There is nothing a bully
fears more than losing face.
Besides,
both Thackerays understand news cycles and would have known that sustaining the
ruckus for another four weeks after Ae Dil’s
release would have been near impossible. However sensational a headline may be,
the media tends to move on, and organisations like the two Senas are nothing
without the spotlight on their aggressions.
This is
not to say that Shah Rukh is unbendable. The political atmosphere in 2017 is poles
apart from 2009-10 when Maharashtra’s
Congress chief minister Ashok Chavan had expressed disappointment over the Wake Up Sid imbroglio. “Johar
should have approached the police or the government instead of going to any
individual or party for sorting out his grievances,” Chavan had been quoted in
the press as saying back then. The left-of-centre Congress was in power at the
Centre and in the state, and though the party has not always been consistent in
its opposition to fundamentalism, Shah Rukh may have taken a stand on MNIK with a reasonable expectation that
both governments had his back. As it happens, his instincts were right. It
turned out that Chavan was not spewing empty words earlier about Wake Up Sid and did indeed provide My Name Is Khan with security and moral
support.
India in
2017 is a different country, the far right-wing BJP is in power at the Centre,
and a BJP-Shiv Sena combine rules Maharashtra. Not surprisingly then, in the
run-up to this January’s release of his home production Raees in which he played the titular lead, Shah Rukh held a
pre-emptive meeting with Raj. The actor’s team projected it as a courtesy call
unrelated to Raees, no doubt to
assuage the disappointment of Shah Rukh’s constituency of liberals. MNS, on the
other hand, tomtommed their claim that the star had met Raj to assure him that Pakistani
actress Mahira Khan – Raees’ heroine
– would not be coming to India to promote the film.
However
saddened a liberal may feel by Shah Rukh’s decision to legitimise Raj as an
extra-Constitutional authority with punitive powers, it must be acknowledged
that the star managed his dignity far better than Johar did in the wake of the Wake Up Sid and Ae Dil episodes. Besides, the sound and fury that MNS typically
generates over such issues was missing in the case of Raees, making it clear that Raj felt the need to tread on eggshells
around SRK.
News of
their rendezvous and the MNS chief’s reduced chest-thumping reminded me of a
scene from the film Fan last year in
which Shah Rukh’s character Aryan Khanna is warned by his manager about a
particular obsessive fan. She says: “Ek
baar sorry bol do na. Sanki hai voh.” (Just say sorry once. He’s whimsical /
unpredictable / a madcap.) Aryan shoots back: “Acchha, aur main kya hoon?”
(I see, and what am I?) Raj Thackeray knows that when a star has proved himself
to be “sanki” in these matters, a hoodlum would do well to handle him with care.
That then
is a deconstruction of the games the Thackerays play: they are so transparent,
that they would be laughable if they were not dangerous, and they are entirely
reliant on a potent mix of a gullible public, pliable public figures, overt or
covert support from the establishment of the time and – sadly – journalists who
do not ask the right questions.
This brings us to the
silence of both Senas on Hindi Medium. It
is not as inexplicable as you might think.
A spokesperson for the
production company T-Series confirms that during the Ae Dil episode they had informed Raj that they finished shooting Hindi Medium long before the Uri attacks
and promised not to use Qamar for the promotions. The ego massage he got from
that communication notwithstanding, Raj would in any case have known that
raising the same issue within just eight months would yield diminishing returns
in the media – remember he left a gap of eight years between Wake Up Sid and Ae Dil. Besides, Saba Qamar is not as
familiar a face in India as Fawad. To target her film when she and her nationality
are not widely known among audiences would not have been as politically
rewarding as targeting Ae Dil had
been.
Likewise, controversy
over a small Irrfan-starrer would probably get less media space than a massy
KJo production or a Shah Rukh-starrer. Even back in 2009-10, Raj’s clash with
Johar over Wake Up Sid was a whisper
in comparison with Uddhav’s run-in with SRK over My Name Is Khan, a factor
not just of the alacrity with which Johar succumbed in the first case while
Shah Rukh did not in the second, but also of MNIK’s scale, the magnitude of SRK’s stardom and the blockbuster
track record of the SRK-Kajol-Johar hero-heroine-director combination.
In any case, Hindi Medium’s marketing campaign was
cleverly designed by T-Series to emphasise its theme rather than its cast. That
theme – language and class snobbery – is a pet cause of the Sangh Parivar at large and the present
Central government whose spokespersons routinely demean opponents proficient in
English by labelling them the “Lutyens elite”. The ruling BJP is therefore
unlikely to have backed an assault on Hindi Medium, since it could have ended up being a self-goal.
Like the
late Bal Thackeray before them, Raj and Uddhav cherrypick their controversies
with great thought. Keeping all the above factors in mind, sparing Hindi Medium would have been a
no-brainer for them.
Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:
Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “A Lament for Banglawood”
Photographs courtesy:
