In the age of excess information and hype, opinions and counter-opinions, I have had a policy of venturing into Friday releases without being exposed to first looks, teasers, trailers, and songs. No expectations, no apprehensions. The idea is just to experience a new film in a vacuum of ignorance. Alas, this isn’t possible anymore. The controversies, outrage, and boycott calls on social media have forced one, time and again, not just to test the waters but to dive into the deep end of a relentless Bollywood circus.
After consciously staying away from the latest topic of controversy, the song, Besharam Rang, from the forthcoming Yash Raj film, Pathaan, I finally gave in and watched (after it had already crossed 55 million views) the three-odd minutes that have supposedly outraged the modesty of Hindus on account of a saffron bikini Deepika appears in, and her purportedly obscene moves seen antithetical to Indian culture.
My first impression was one of appreciation for the smooth-as-silk voice of Shilpa Rao. Second, I believe I learnt some quick Spanish from the refrain—that translates as “today life is complete”—like how I picked up French from Nashe si chadh gayi in YRF’s own Befikre.
Third, in the process of hunting for the aforesaid miscreant saffron bikini and sarong (which features during the last few seconds, 2.50 to 3.10 in the video), I got to see several other types of swimwear on many sun-kissed, buff and largely foreign bodies and wondered if the custodians of other colours are also feeling affronted. Fourth, the song grew on me enough to make me play it on a loop and hum along, even though I disliked the choreography by Vaibhavi Merchant.
I have moved on, but the nation, it seems, doesn’t want to, resulting in the song garnering more attention than it may have deserved in the first place.
While the media, starved of issues of consequence, is fixated on it, I am left wondering about some extraneous issues. What does it say of us if tepid moves provoke us so easily, but the toxic masculinity of our contemporary pan-Indian popular cinema doesn’t affect us one bit?
We read subliminal, objectionable, communal meanings in the colour of a bikini but have no outrage reserved for the gender disparity and skewed dynamics in the industry, its patriarchal portrayals and the MeToo offenders who continue to thrive within it, not to talk of the lack of any murmur of protest when it comes to the real-life instances of casual sexism and crimes against women.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of choice. Instead of fuelling constructive debates and discussions on filmmakers’ gaze or objectification of women in cinema, we end up stoking our pointless collective indignation that gets extinguished just as fast as it gets ignited. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were going ballistic about Ranveer Singh posing nude for a publication whose name we have forgotten by now (New York-based Paper magazine)?
Ultimately, the varied reactions to this supposedly flagrant video have come to expose our deep-seated prejudices and biases. It has not just been about what we have seen but also about our warped ways of seeing. Some even took the pains to magnify Deepika’s images, perhaps for a better understanding of anatomical details, and I don’t see this as a compliment. Misogyny, Islamophobia, ageism, obsession with fixed ideas of beauty, you name it, and we have displayed more crudity in talking about the song than the song itself, especially in our tweets and status updates. It has taken a song, and the infantile public discourse surrounding it, to hold a mirror unto us and our incipient bigotry that gets masked as righteousness.
This proliferation of intolerance was brought up by Shah Rukh Khan in his inimitable way at the inaugural ceremony of the 28th Kolkata International Film Festival, in the presence of Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, when he chose to speak about the “narrowness of view” on social media creating a predominant narrative that is divisive and destructive and “limits human nature to its baser self”. He felt that cinema offers “a collective counter-narrative that speaks to the larger nature of humankind, a narrative that brings to the fore humanity’s intense capacity for compassion, unity, and brotherhood”.
It even had an ordinarily noncommittal Amitabh Bachchan intervene for the browbeaten film industry when he addressed the issue of censorship at the same event. While placing it in a historical context, he said that films had a hard time during the hegemony of the empire, adding that “even now, and my colleagues on stage would agree, questions are being raised on civil liberties and freedom of expression”. He invoked Satyajit Ray’s ‘Ganashatru’ (Enemy of the People) to indicate how Ray might have reacted to the current times.
As expected, the spectre of extra-constitutional censorship has risen in the case of Pathaan as well. Intolerance had to segue in with matters of religion and nationality, with calls for boycotts becoming louder by the day. MP Home Minister Narottam Mishra wants clothes correction, Supreme Court Advocate Vineet Jindal has filed a complaint with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur has urged true Hindus to stay away from cinemas, effigies of Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan have been burnt in Indore, and the shoot of his Dunki has been brought to a halt in MP by Karni Sena.
Beyond the censors and the judiciary, it is now back to the moral police to decide what we must and must not watch. As 2022 rolls into 2023, Bollywood, as always, seems unshaken in giving us more of the same.
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
An abridged version of this column is available on cinemaexpress.com