From Print Edition
Bishaldeb Halder
(writer is alumunus of school of media and culture studies, TISS Mumbai and currently working with Film Heritage Foundation)
The FTII imbroglio is following the same imbecilic trajectory that most meritoriously ignorant liberals of this farce called India adopt. I say adopt, because following such a trajectory is an act of conscious willfulness. The one mortal fear that clouds, no, defines the existence of these liberals is the apparent rise of a conservative, militant Hindutva political ethos that would obliterate the decades of hard-earned and charmed liberalness that the liberals have worked for. Or at least, talked about. Before, some liberal throws something Swarovski at me in disapproval, I must clarify that I’m no Hindutva supporter or apologist. The self-proclaimed supporters of Hindutva can drown in cow urine as far as I care.
For decades since its inception, the FTII has had as chairmen, people like Shyam Benegal and UR Ananthamurthy and Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Girish Karnad, whose reformist credentials are seemingly impeccable. Benegal was once so liberal that he was making ‘Bharat: Ek Khoj’ even as the country was falling apart by the day under Rajiv Gandhi. Girish Karnad is so liberal that he proudly declaims that he’s a ‘liberal brahmin’, without the slightest awareness of its oxymoronic extremity. And it was Gopalakrishnan’s meritorious head that cooked up the scheme of regulating entry into film festival based upon one’s cinematic knowledge. Ananthamurthy has, of course, never been directly associated with cinema, so some opposition to his chairmanship is understandable. But then, what is the explanation for the repeated allusions to him being an ex-chairman, while running down Gajendra Chauhan, the current incumbent? Maybe his reputation for taking on the Sanghis might have something to do with it.
The sustained opposition and outrage of the liberals to Chauhan is reminiscent to their fulmination during the days of the Lok Sabha elections, against our current Prime Minister, in their vehemence. But poor Chauhan neither has as efficient a PR-machinery as Modi did, nor is his background as allegedly odious as that of the latter. So what explains the hypochondriacal outrage of the liberals? The answer is a word called ‘saffronisation’, that is completely associated with the Hindutva school of thought. The assumption (whether honest or not) of liberals is that there is a surviving sphere of knowledge- an episteme, if you will- in the country that is untouched by a Hindutva view of things. That episteme supposedly is secular, progressive and- in possession of the greatest virtue of them all- liberal. The sole defenders of the episteme is the Congress party and the biggest threat to it is the BJP.
Or so it was until the Congress set landmines for itself over the years 2009-2014 and saddled itself with a perennial albatross around its neck, Rahul Gandhi. With the absence of any visible defender of the precious episteme, the liberals are seeking the slightest of opportunities to lash out against the saffron army. Never mind, if under decades of Congress misrule, the FTII has become the bureaucratic equivalent of a constipated rhino, keeping dozens of its students inside itself for over 5 years at a time. Never mind if it has systematically eroded the number of reserved seats for backward communites down to 2 under Congress rule.
The liberals need the bogey of saffron terror to allow their own excesses. The saffronites with their strident calls of aggressive Hinduisation hasten things up while calling attention to themselves. Highly inconvenient. They have to be kept at bay so that the liberals can simultaneously exist in the 15th and 21st centuries rather than being hurled lock, stock and barrel back into the 4th century AD as the saffronites are wont to do.
What else could explain their absolutely rubbish arguments against government interference in the FTII? The FTII is established under the Dept. of Information and Broadcasting. Fine, it is an autonomous body, but for anyone to seriously expect it to function as one is at best naïve. The FTII was built to bring the film industry under the ambit of the Government. Ritwik Ghatak, feted the world over fro being an enfant terrible, meekly made a documentary on Indira Gandhi at the height of her power, in 1971. Among Ghatak’s famous feats is his four-year teaching stint at the FTII from 1966-1970. The Hindi film industry, notorious for being avowedly apolitical and insular has jumped in only because the Govt. has struck right at the one sole body that lends them any sort of political and cultural legitimacy. It is surely the primary body that produces technicians that have some standing in the cinematic world at large, so that the appalling poverty of creativity among the industry could be disguised and papered over. No less than Naseeruddin Shah has rightly criticized the directors passing out of FTII as pretentious and plain boring and mostly ineffectual and said that technicians are way superior to them. The more high-profile names of the film industry have joined the debate only very recently almost a month and half since its been underway. Their entry into the debate is usually timed according the dates of their releases. Salman Khan and Kabir Khan’s entry is a case in point.
With such an intellectually and morally compromised bunch of so-called liberals protesting against the Government over a relatively trivial issue, it’s no wonder that an epoch-making issue like the non-release of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census has gone virtually unnoticed. The first of its kind conducted since 1931, the census, even with halfhearted and sloppy execution has thrown up data which would shock the living daylights out of these liberals. It is already giving the saffron sanghis sleepless nights since 2010, the time they’ve been opposing it from. Now that the census has ended and the results are tipped to blow the lid off the monstrous excess of the so-called upper castes, the sanghi upper-caste government and its liberal, upper-caste critics are both silent, trying to wish away the whole matter. Maybe, the whole FTII fracas is simply a diversionary plan hatched jointly by the two upper-caste parties to tide over the SECC.
If all else fails, there’s always ‘Baahubali’ with its kshatriya-dharma abiding protagonists, who will deliver them from the barbaric hordes of dalit-bahujans swarming around the SECC, much like the kalakeyas from the film. The fact that it has smashed box-office records all over is really no surprise. When one tugs at the twin chords of racism/ casteism and misogyny in the minds of Indians, and comfortingly reinforced caste-patriarchal structures, the returns are bound to be enormous.
English