Cinema Politico: India’s Art Stifled by its Extremism

Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar nominee set in Mumbai, is a menagerie of many things—social realism, fantasy, and black comedy. In the swirl of all those artistic elements, the film manages to elucidate the complexity of India’s extremist violence.

Thinking of extremism in India today, the most immediate example that springs to mind is the recent three-day siege of Mumbai that shocked the international community. Living in New York, a city only eight years removed from Sept. 11, it is natural to feel a transcontinental solidarity with Mumbai, a kindred global financial center, which, though thousands of miles away, endured the same breed of unrepentant violence. Entering the theater for the Mumbai-based Slumdog Millionaire, the siege was fresh in my mind.

In an early scene in the film, the protagonist, Jamal, is roughhousing in his sprawling slum’s water source while his mother washes clothes. A train passes, and then a band of malevolent men brandishing cudgels charges the slum, killing Jamal’s mother with a thwack to the head. The posse proceeds to burn and beat countless other slum tenants. The police play cards nearby, refusing to bat an eye even while a burning victim screams in the street. These attackers were not invoking Allah, but were hell-bent on attacking Muslims.

Slumdog seems to be dramatizing the Mumbai riots that embroiled the city in 1992. After a mob illegally demolished the Babri Mosque in northern India, Hindu-Muslim violence erupted in cosmopolitan Mumbai, killing hundreds. Bal Thackeray, chief of Shiv Sena, a far-right Hindu nationalist political party, was accused of inciting anti-Muslim violence. One reporter testified that the popular politician was directly orchestrating attacks from his home.

While it is easy to think that extremism in India is only a small part of the post-Sept. 11 War-on-Terror narrative, extremism in India does not exist in the same continuum as it does in the United States. Though certainly connected to international events, it finds roots in national ethnic strife. To the great disadvantage of Indian cinema, that extremism stifles artistic expression.

The best example is the trouble of director Deepa Mehta and her elemental trilogy. Mehta is an Indian-born director who immigrated to Canada. Her three elemental films—Fire, Earth, and Water—probe the darker sides of Indian history and tradition, focusing on the oppression of women. When Fire was released in 1996, riot squads from the Shiv Sena attacked Mumbai theaters showing the film, harassing audiences and burning posters. The film provoked ire because of a homosexual relationship between its two female protagonists named after Hindu deities, Sita and Radha. These religious references enraged the far right. Since the Mumbai riots, the Shiv Sena had joined a right-wing parliamentary coalition controlling the Maharashtra state, which contains Mumbai, and Thackeray was still party chief. Not surprisingly, the government did little to stop the terrorism from the ruling party’s operatives. The violent Sena morality patrols spread to Delhi and then Calcutta, where the audience and ushers finally shooed them from the theater they attacked.

For Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India, Deepa suffered perfunctory denunciation, though nothing on the scale of the first film. But with Water, the extremist attacks became worse than ever. The film profiles life in an ashram, a house for Indian widows, during the late ’30s. The Ashram’s inhabitants, who live to honor their dead husbands, subsist on meager meals and are treated as second-class citizens. Some ashrams still exist today. In 2000, before filming began on Water in Varanasi, a holy city in the north, mobs galvanized by right-wing political parties destroyed all the sets, burned effigies of Mehta, and issued death threats. The second time Mehta attempted shooting, anti-riot squads and nearly 200 policemen protected her. After two short takes, government officials shut down filming, claiming safety could no longer be ensured. The shutdown was instigated in part by a protester who had taken poison and jumped in the Ganges River. It would later be revealed that the man was a professional suicide attempter that often tried to kill himself for political causes. The film would not be released until 2005 after a peaceful filming in Sri Lanka.

The extremist pressure on Indian artists, both filmmakers and otherwise, has only worsened. In the past couple of years, cultural oppression has intensified, epitomized by the threats against Indian painter M. F. Husain, who has not been able to visit India since 2006 despite his renown.

As the threat of terrorism looms ever larger, it is quite possible that far-right parties will garner greater support, thereby emboldening their anti-cultural violence and oppression. As Western viewers, the best response is to cultivate an interest in Indian cinema. If the world is watching subversive Indian films, it will be more difficult to suppress them.

This vigilance is not purely charitable. As the success of Slumdog Millionaire has indicated, film productions may become increasingly global. International filmmaking has the potential to find new and dynamic narratives and increase profits by expanding target audiences, and the latter makes the globalization of filmmaking a strong possibility. Just as toxic mortgages in the United States can cause an international market collapse, so, in the future, can hostility against free expression in India affect art everywhere.