After hitting a few air pockets, Anubhav Sinha’s series IC 814, about the Kathmandu-Delhi Air India plane that was hijacked by ISI agents in 1999 and force-landed in Kandahar, is now cruising well.
The air pockets were due to the ‘hurt sentiments of Hindus’. The terrorists were referred to by code names—Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar. The last two names, associated with Lord Shiva, were ‘politically motivated’, they said, to extenuate the terrorist elements. The OTT platform duly issued clarifications and disclaimers. ‘Sorry’ is the collective password for our times.
IC 814 is not the first such product subjected to a social media boycott: Anubhav Sinha’s own Article 370 ( problem: Kashmir sensitivities), Aamir Khan’s Lal Singh Chaddha (majority community unfairly seen as intolerant of minority rights), Akshay Kumar’s Raksha Bandhan (adverse remarks on sanatan dharma), Ranbir Kapoor’s Brahmastra (hero’s meat-eating habits in real life pitted against the character he portrays), and Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan (SRK being ‘partial’ to Pakistan in the past).
As for the efforts in cancellation sponsored by the liberals: Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Kabir Singh (toxic masculinity), Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files (gaslighting the Muslim community), Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story, (exaggerating the threat of love jihad), Reddy Vanga’s Animal (toxic masculinity), and Vinay Sharma’s JNU (politically unfair and regressive), to name a few recent instances.
A cancellation call is a drumbeat of execution by other means. The underlying motive is always to censor imagination. The objections are limited to political, religious or cultural content. It is rarely about how these movies triumph or fail as art.
The idea of cancellation, pioneered into existence primarily by the liberals and now resorted to by the right, is a movement away from aesthetics that’s a fundamental condition of the arts. The Kashmir Files’ problem, for example, is not so much about truth or its distortion, as it is not a documentary. It is the grossness of form. The poor aesthetics generate distaste, not catharsis. Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi propagandist, but her Triumph of Will is still art.
The culture of cancellation, pioneered by the political and cultural left as a corrective movement and now equally weaponised by the religious and cultural right, is effectively thought-policing. It does not respect the idea of imagination. It resists the idea of the idea. This is an Indian endemic. If patriotism for the right is a means to justify the shackling of the imagination, political correctness for the left serves pretty much the same purpose. Both converge and shake hands on censorship.
Art’s purpose is rarely catechism and mostly inspiration. It is the forum where we play out the human potential to its maximum, the full play to your dark and golden shadows, as Carl Jung might phrase it. A forum for the human mind to find its release, and rehearse its great tragedies.
Aspiration in this direction risks the label of effete decadence. It is not. A beautiful thing, man or woman—perfect form—is precious because he/she inspires. Beauty is an idea. It was Stendhal who said beauty holds the promise of happiness. If art is the approximation towards the idea of perfection, it fulfills its purpose. America, for instance, is all art. Its superpower is ideas. Its wealth is a byproduct of ideas/patents.
The reason why our start-ups do not get anywhere is that the Indian venture capitalist has little respect for ideas. All he wants is the return on his investments in six months. Even in traditional technologies, from cars to computers, roads to rockets, India makes do with borrowed imagination. Besides the idea of satyagraha, what might be a reasonable modern Indian invention?
Why should the general run of our movies be any different? Almost all movies mentioned here fail because they dare not be beautiful, or experientially transformative. Yet, we conduct protest marches in the cause of free speech. Well, we cannot have free speech in a culture phobic of imagination.
Year 2047 is the magic moment when India is supposed to emerge as a fully developed nation. The BJP and RSS believe we were once a great nation—especially in the Gupta period (320-550 CE). This is not without substance.
In a recently-published excerpt from his latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World (which I am yet to read), William Dalrymple talks about the great contribution that Aryabhata (476-550 CE) and Brahmagupta (598-670 CE) made in mathematics. I cannot but observe that this endorsement of the Indian past from Dalrymple, a die-hard liberal, would warm the cockles of the Hindu heart. Especially since the narrative is couched in the currently-fashionable language of apologia flowing from the white male guilt of the coloniser.
But assuming our future, after a fashion, is in the past, a sophisticated return to it still cannot account for the great gaps in the Indian imagination that once invented the 0, but then lost count.
In the 1980s, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind attacked the US university system that encouraged an approach to scholarship based on moral relativism as it undermined critical thinking. Bloom uncannily anticipated the reigning woke culture.
Foreign invasions or otherwise, the Indian mind has been in closure for over a thousand years. It is terrified of the art of ideas. IC 814 was rescued, but its representation as an idea remains endangered.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)