The cinema of ‘bad light’

Filmaker Anurag Kashyap had an interesting take on the controversial ban on Prakash Jha's new film, Aarakshan (reservation), enforced by three states. Urging politicians to see cinema in its totality, Kashyap quipped: "Cinema is much more than heroes and villains."

So who's the hero and where's the villain? Here's the real rub. Jha's film explores the dark side areas of caste reservations in university education. However, it has ended up becoming an expose on vote-bank politics. The alacrity with which the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh moved to block the film's release in their states clearly has nothing to do with a perceived law and order problem and everything to do with the fact that all three states are headed for assembly elections in the near future.

Being seen as the villain is less painful, politically, than being a hero to supporters of identity politics. In India, it's always been a struggle to make films with a political content. It is not just chief ministers or party leadership, but usually the lumpen elements, often right-wing extremists, who continue to operate under the illusion that they are the guardians of Indian culture. Their politics is not just targeted at cinema with a progressive political context, but at any form of artistic expression. The late lamented Maqbool Fida Husain was its most prominent victim, as was, of course, Salman Rushdie.

Indeed, if illusion is cinema's greatest weapon, it is also the reason why politicians see artistic expression as a soft target, the illusion of power. India has an unenviable history in banning art with political content. Back in 1988, Rajiv Gandhi, hailed as a progressive, modern-minded leader, was roundly criticised for his ban on Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The prime minister was in a similar situation that the three chief ministers are in now — national elections were less than a year away and his political advisers spooked him into believing that the Congress party was in danger of losing its Muslim vote-bank. He later admitted that he had not read the book and had no intention of doing so. So is the case with Jha's effort. The film released on Friday, but the protests had begun well before, with political groups claiming that it was biased against Dalits. None of them had seen the film but that didn't deter them.

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