Mass Entertainment Outrage
A still from Leila (2019).
From Paatal Lok and Leila to A Suitable Boy and Deepika Padukone’s films, Indian movies and web series face targeted attacks from the outraged right-wing, hell-bent to shape the national narrative to their own terms. Is there a way forward for true creative voices to survive in the mainstream?
On May 15, around the hottest days of the year in much of the country, Indian audiences in Lockdown were greeted with a brand-new OTT (Over The Top) web television series: Pataal Lok. The crime thriller—created by Sudip Sharma and based on Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins—began streaming on Amazon Prime to near universal acclaim. India’s great auteur filmmaker Anurag Kashyap called it “the best crime thriller to come out this country”. NDTV hailed it as better than Netflix’s recent high-profile Indian series, Sacred Games. The Hindu offered the series a rave review, particularly complimenting the acting performances, cinematography, and a story that bravely tackled India’s prejudices against minorities, lower castes, and the poor. Viewers jumped to offer high ratings on the series’ IMDB page, adding to its soaring popularity.
Within days, however, a different phenomenon began to emerge on the same IMDB site. Suddenly, the show’s rating plummeted on the back of hundreds of low-rated user reviews, most of which were unhelpful and clearly from authors who hadn’t watched the show itself. “Worst”, “Worst and useless”, “A waste of time”, “Utter boring”, and the predictably misspelled “Communal propognda”. On Twitter, a number of users jumped on the trend #BoycottPataalLok, taking offense to the series’ supposed agenda against the right-wing and India’s majority Hindu population. Virtual brickbats were thrown at the makers and at the show’s celebrity producer, Anushka Sharma.
Like Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, an artistic endeavour was declared “controversial” without any real analysis. Offense was taken without experience. A certain segment of the masses decided—or had it decided for their behalf—that Pataal Lok offends their religious sensibilities. Despite the show’s eventual success, Pataal Lok was slotted in the over-stuffed Indian shelf under ‘Anti-National’, i.e., anything that dares to spotlight a narrative different to the narrative promoted by the current ruling government.
With paid social media posts and hashtag activism, the IT Cell is able to create mountains out of molehills, to hijack India’s trending topics to reflect their outrage and narrative. The message travels from Twitter and Facebook to your Uncle’s Whatsapp forwards—a trend winked at in a popular dialogue from Paatal Lok, “Waise toh ye shastro me likha hai, magar maine WhatsApp pe padha tha.”
Rummage through the ‘Anti-National’ shelf and you’ll find the usual suspects of arts and opinions. Aamir Khan’s hits PK (for hurting religious sentiments) and Dangal (for his comments on India’s rising intolerance), Shah Rukh Khan’s 2010 film My Name Is Khan (for the actors comments about Pakistani cricket players), Lipstick Under My Burkha (for its frank display of female sexuality, and yes, hurting religious sentiments), the series Mirzapur (for actor Ali Fazal’s tweets about the anti-CAA protests), Sacred Games (for creator Anurag Kashyap’s politics), Ghoul (branded ‘Hinduphobic’), the aforementioned Pataal Lok, and the series A Suitable Boy (for an interfaith kissing scene in a temple).
In June 2019, Netflix released a bold adaption of Prayaag Akbar’s Indian dystopian novel Leila, a story that shows a segregated near-future society called Aryavarta (named after regions of India from ancient Hindu texts) where a totalitarian regime separates religions and castes, bans inter-faith unions, strives for their form of shuddhi (purity), and targets mishrit (mixed-blood) children—like the eponymous Leila—from their parents. Deepa Mehta’s show, despite its flawed execution, nevertheless served as a warning not of India’s future but of it’s present; many of Aryavarta’s qualities are but tangents of the India that the BJP/RSS regime have already imagined and tried to impose: banning interfaith marriages, the implementation of CAA/NRC, the willing and unwilling compliance of mainstream media, erasure of Muslim/Mughal influences on Indian history/culture, and the compromised state of Supreme Court and judiciary. Needless to say, Leila drew the ire of the angriest subsection of fascists online, with threats of censorship and violence that only further proved the show’s underlying message.
Most of these voices of ban and boycott, targeting everything from TV and films to food delivery apps (like Swiggy and Zomato), comedians (Sanitary Panels) and jewellery brands (like Tanishq) spread from influential sources of the BJP’s IT Cell. With paid social media posts and hashtag activism (usually corresponding to the messaging of primetime news shows), the IT Cell is able to create mountains out of molehills, to hijack India’s trending topics to reflect their outrage and their narrative. The message travels from Twitter and Facebook to your Uncle’s Whatsapp forwards—a trend winked at in a popular dialogue from Paatal Lok, “Waise toh ye shastro me likha hai, magar maine WhatsApp pe padha tha” (Although it’s written in the scriptures, I read it on Whatsapp).
The calls to boycott Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2018 film Padmaavat turned particularly violent, when Rajput caste organisations including the Karni Sena protested and vandalised the film’s sets and sent violent threats to Bhansali and the film’s lead actress Deepika Padukone for allegedly showing the original Rajput queen—Padmavati—in a bad light. Padukone has been a favourite punching-bag for the boycotters, and her presence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University [JNU] in January, after students of the institute were attacked by members of right-wing students’ organisation ABVP, caused an uproar. Predictably, the release of her film Chhapaak (which she produced and played the lead role) was marred with controversy and calls for boycotts.
Padukone’s silent moment of solidarity at JNU was particularly symbolic: Here was one of the country’s most popular and successful film-stars choosing the side of the maligned JNU students, and by extension, of those protesting around the country at that time against the government’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), when few others in India’s lucrative industry would risk their career by drawing the ire of the angry majority. Rare voices of sanity and justice from the industry—including Swara Bhaskar, Anurag Kashyap, Naseeruddin Shah—were the exception, not the rule. The majority of India’s biggest influencers—in sports, film, or entertainment—chose to sit on the fence; or worse, chose majority appeasement.
The majority—or the loud and active voices of outrage claiming to be the majority—thanked this Bollywood appeasement with further vitriol. After the tragic death of up-and-coming actor Sushant Singh Rajput, a number of news-channels in the country framed the debate to blame his girlfriend and actor Rhea Chakraborty, blame nepotism, fixate on the industry’s drug culture, and finally, turn against the industry itself. Now, they wished to #BoycottBollywood altogether; with the exception, presumably, of the few ultra-nationalistic individuals in the entertainment industry who regularly praised the Prime Minister and served as the mouthpieces of the national narrative.
These individuals—including Kangana Ranaut, Akshay Kumar, Vivek Agnihotri, and Anupam Kher—have (generally) survived the wrath of the right-wing crusaders with obvious obeisance to the ruling party and often promoting the neo-fascist messaging of the farthest right. There seems to be a wide division between the “accepted” productions in India—films like Kesari, Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi, and the Prime Minister’s own hagiography, PM Narendra Modi—and films and shows made that are independent of this so-called nationalist narrative.
In mid-November, it was revealed that the government had now roped in all the OTT services available in India—including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, and digital news sites—all under the purview of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The new decision will allow OTT services to potentially come under the moderation and censorship of the government and the censor board (like cinema), reversing the status-quo of self-regulation by Netflix, Prime etc. This is another handicap to creative voices in the country; the ‘creative spring’ of bold and path-breaking OTT shows in recent years could be over even before it fully matures.
We will learn over the next few months what effect this decision will have on Indian media. Will Netflix have to discontinue shows? Will OTT services censor scenes which have been deemed offensive, or rethink working with actors and producers who are critical of the government? Will Indian entertainment become a dull monolith?
Perhaps we will learn over the next few months or years exactly what effect this decision will have on Indian media and entertainment. Will Netflix have to discontinue shows like Leila? Will OTT services censor scenes which have been deemed offensive, or rethink working with actors and producers who are critical of the government? Will Indian entertainment become a dull monolith, where every show reflects the supposed narrow distillation of values perpetrated by the Ramayana / Mahabharata shows from the 80s?
If there’s a silver lining to this impending doom, it’s that—despite the government’s best efforts to intervene—many of the best ideas have always slipped through the cracks, and no amount of intervention has ultimately been able to stop some of India’s brightest and most creative minds from expressing themselves.
In 2019, Zoya Akhtar released the critically-acclaimed hit Gully Boy, the story of a Muslim youth from the slums in Mumbai chasing his dreams of becoming a successful rapper. By and large, the film was non-controversial, featuring marquee film stars and a wide-reaching Indian aspirational story. Gully Boy was particularly praised for becoming the first to introduce a true Indian hip-hop soundtrack to the Bollywood music oeuvre. The real-life inspiration behind the story—Mumbai’s rapper DIVINE—recorded a particularly popular song, “Azadi” (freedom), where he sampled the calls of “Azadi!” chanted by former JNU student-turned-politician Kanhaiya Kumar. In his now-iconic 2016 speech, Kanhaiya extended support to Kashmiris and others underrepresented and suppressed by the ruling government, seeking not freedom from India, but freedom within India.
In the Anti-NRC/CAA protests that spread across the country in late 2019 and early 2020, the chants of “Azadi” and Gully Boy became the soundtrack of the revolution, somehow blending the emotional pain of the most-suppressed with those in mainstream positions of privilege. The slogan that once had Kanhaiya Kumar arrested for sedition was now a remixed Bollywood song on the lips of many Indians. Entertainment had co-opted revolution, and then, revolution had reclaimed its voice.
The platforms may change, the road may become more hazardous, and there may be uncomfortable compromises to be made on the way, but the voice of dissent is contagious; the more an authoritative regime attempts to silence it, but more organic ways it will find to mobilise, multiply, and claim its Azadi.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
