Human beings from the advent of time have always communicated their emotions and feelings with each other through miniatures, stone carvings, symbols, paintings, stories, drama and now add to it, cinema and movies. Man is a social animal and his interactions and emotions keep him sane and calibrated in this vast universe. Literature and art have always been carriers of civilizational values and reflect the ethos and values of the times they represent. It is said that Art doesn’t unravel the path of guidance, but it beautifies the journey, it doesn’t help you reach faith but gives you conviction. It is said, there are multiple touchstones of decision-making. One level is utilitarian, the other is on the scale of truthfulness and the highest form is the level of beauty. This is a brief perspective on art and its influence on human lives. Now let us briefly discuss the role of cinema and its influence on society.
Anyone who has watched the Bollywood movie “Highway” by Imtiaz Ali is a punch to the gut wherein a girl belonging to an affluent family when kidnapped prefers to live her life with the kidnapper, because the cozy home in which she stayed, had horrific incidents of sexual abuse from her relatives. This movie was in a similar timeline to that of the Nirbhaya case when the ugly truth about the safety of women in public was exposed. At a time when women are not safe on the streets, the message that she may not be safe from predators behind the four walls which she calls home was chilling and it was delivered stunningly. There is another movie “Udaan” in which a kid who has been orphaned as his mother passes away is shown on screen. His emptiness as his father also seems to ignore his needs and gets him enrolled in an engineering course when obviously he had a bent for Art is a story of every Indian kid. The kid’s trials, struggles, and finally his rocky relationship with his father make your heart bleed and the sheer emotion tells a larger tale of misfortune and finding semblance.
Udta Punjab was a movie exposing the deep underbelly of Punjab’s drug menace. The new Columbia, as it is taunted, exposes the post-green revolution Punjab society and the systemic rot from Politics to administration and also depicts the dark side of individuals who are even ready to slit their mother’s throat for a puff of magic dust. To take an example from Hollywood, the movie “Into the Wild” traces the journey of a young man who is disillusioned by the capitalistic society and renounces the world in search of seclusion and meaning. Some of the conversations he has, for example on his career as a 20th-century inventor, really hit hard the message, and his final message after he is lost in the wilderness is true happiness is shared. These are the conversations; we need to desperately engage with.
There is a movie by the named “Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare,” in which the debate on gender roles, sexuality, and commerce of evolving adult services are brought into the discussion. There is a female character, whose mother abandoned her during her childhood to be with another man, and she always resents her for deserting her, but at the end of the movie she has to reconsider her position about her mother’s decision of abandoning her to fulfill her needs. This spin throws open many hard questions, and as a society, we need to engage as the family structure is disintegrating between extremities. There is also a character who is working at a call center serving the customers with adult services and many of the grey areas of moralities are brought to the fore. This is one such instance where gender, sexuality, roles, and boundaries are being pushed or blurred. There are topics like the live-in, onslaught of LBGT content, and other such areas that need a counter-narrative to the liberal and hedonistic overdrive. This is on the social front.
Movies also act as a process of preserving collective memory. From Schindler’s list to Parzania which is the story of the Holocaust of Jews to the Gujarat pogrom, to Jogi, the account of the 1984 sikh pogrom to Sardar Udham Singh, recalling the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. This media enables us to keep the memory alive and as a repository and a reference alive. This is also a very important marker of history. The collective sympathy and empathy for the Jewish community were largely enabled through literature and movies. If we are to take stock of our efforts, apart from a few reports and relief activities, there is no effort to preserve and solidify memories.
Movies reflect the bigger debates and discussions of society and are also an enabler of such narratives. We have seen how systematically agendas are pushed and influenced. They also reflect the mood, conscience, norms, and values. It is a canvas of human emotions and aspirations portrayed on screen. Hence, it should be an arena where folks who have a perspective of Truth, goodness, and beauty should also present their work and initiate discussions. There have been efforts in this direction.
“Sudani from Nigeria” by Zakariya is successful in shattering the bias and myth of the Suspect Muslim community and brilliantly “humanizes” a Muslim household and its love and affection on screen. His movie marks the debate in the Muslim community on the issue of movies and a struggle for Halal entertainment or their stories on screen. One of the themes I have deliberately given less space is the role of cinema in Marginalizing the Muslim community, into a box of suspect nationals, or reducing them to crime nut packs of every kind. This also should be a trigger for us to have storytellers and filmmakers who can portray the complexity of characters and not reduce identities to caricatures. Iranian movies of Asghar Farhadi have really introduced us to a new art of storytelling and loving such characters.
In the era of Web series and TV series, there are many more flavors of stories, from regional, ethnic, and subaltern perspectives. It has become a platform where filmmakers are not so concerned with box office numbers and are telling more real themes and stories. Advent of Netflix, Prime has also opened Pandora’s box of content, which also has a few great content such as Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots series which absolutely blow your mind and introduce new ways of engaging with the audience. Thus these are the opportunities we need to engage with.
As we are moving towards a narrative-driven world, where discourse has taken a back seat, more than ever, the complex emotional being of a human responds more to empathy, love, loss, and belonging than logic and rationality alone. Thus this shift requires us to venture into the domain of Art & Culture. The need of the hour is creative and gifted individuals who could provide hope, wisdom, clarity, and a quest for meaning in this liquid modern world. In this post-pandemic world, where the cases of mental health have skyrocketed, there is a need to engage with larger questions of Morality, Death, Life after death, and our purpose in life. Series such as Good Place actually engage with the Metaphysical questions of ethics, morality, death, heaven, etc. This tells us that beyond rom-com, the Mythical world of CIA, RAW, and usual valor and terror stuff, there are themes to be explored and we need to jump on this bandwagon. One of our friends said that the world is blazing at jet speed in this arena and we are still debating whether it is Halal to ride a bicycle is the Analogy he was presenting in our engagement with Art & Culture and in the field of Cinema. Finally, our effort shouldn’t be propaganda driven which ultimately destroys the very soul of Art & Beauty. The recent propaganda WhatsApp university products such as Kashmir files is such an attempt wherein the focus is on the blatant messaging and the quintessential question of Truth, Beneficence, and Beauty is ignored.
At a time when we are under an authoritarian regime where all the institutions are being hollowed out, screenwriter Varun Grover has said, about the growing trend of hate and propaganda in the movies that, unless a UFO strikes the earth and wipes out the collective repository of human civilization, people will remember how art was bent to extract hate and political mileage. Today, when rapists of Bilkis Banu are set free, there is also a broader narrative weaved that there can be no Hindu villain in this new rashtra. When Political prisoners languish behind the state’s propaganda, when houses are bulldozed along with soul and consciousness, there is a need to tell stories to rekindle empathy, and feeling in the numb hearts and souls of human beings. This task falls upon us as a need of the hour.
Once the Prophet ﷺ asked Hasan bin Sabit to recite poetry in response to a Jahaliyya poetry and said it is better than firing a thousand arrows. This incident highlights the importance of proper response in the proper arena. The Quranic guidance of “Repel [evil] by that [deed] which is better” also applies to the field. We envision an egalitarian society built on peace and justice. We need to be able to present this vision in the current language of Cinema. There are a lot of evil, obscenities , and other challenges, but this doesn’t mean we buckle down and withdraw. There are a lot of challenges in society in which we engage and this also should be taken with that spirit. This is an attempt to begin a conversation on the necessity for venturing into the canvas of possibilities, promises, and dreams.
Nihal is from Karnataka, has graduated in Automobile engineering, and hopped on to get an MBA degree. He also has done his Masters in sociology.
