Miya-Baniya Bhai Bhai?

My Mirror column:
Raees has its slow bits, but those dismissing it as politically tepid filmmaking are missing the wood for the trees.

Before making Raees, Rahul Dholakia made Parzania whose release was blocked in Gujarat by Sangh Parivar networks. Parzania and Raees have little in common on the surface. Although I thought it came off as distressingly inauthentic – it featured jarring English, with a pointless American character as the witnessing 'I' -- Parzania was pitched as a realistic 'political' film, with Naseeruddin Shah and Sarika turning in affecting performances as the distraught parents of a Parsi boy who went missing in the communal violence of Gujarat 2002, in which over 2000 Muslims were killed. Raees, in stark contrast, is pitched as entertainment: a big-banner Bollywood production with Shah Rukh Khan in the title role of a small-time bootlegger who rises to power and notoriety during an era of Prohibition.

What the two films share, of course, is an investment in the history of Gujarat's present. But the risks they take are very different. Parzania sought to wrangle audience sympathy at the lowest common denominator by constructing an utterlessly blameless victim – a child, and one who belonged to neither of the communities actively involved in the Gujarat violence. With Raees, Dholakia might be said to move in the opposite direction: giving us a textbook antihero.

In Raees, we have a protagonist who must remain both attractive and sympathetic while running a business empire that is entirely illegal and often violent, not to mention based on supplying a socially-disapproved product like alcohol. And most important, whether Shah Rukh Khan wishes to underplay the matter or not, it is absolutely important for the optics of this film that this protagonist is a Muslim in a Gujarat where the Hindutva project is on its way to political and social hegemony. Else why would the makers drive the point home with such marvellous bantering precision, emphasising even in the trailer that what makes Raees admirable is the fact that he combines in himself “Baniye ka dimaag, Miyabhai ki daring”? Miya is colloquial-speak for Muslims in several parts of India including Gujarat, and it is heavily marked – making the very use of the word 'Miyabhai' new for a mainstream Hindi film. But what is so remarkable about the power of Hindi cinema is that it can change the word's valence.

Despite the fact that the gangster film is an accepted genre -- in which such shades-of-gray protagonists are perhaps now the norm -- it seems clear to me that the greater creative-political gamble is Raees rather than Parzania. The rise of the gangster – in life as in cinema – is tied to the rise of organised crime in dense urban settlements. Sharp social and economic inequalities produce systems outside the system, with mob-lords emerging as alternative centres of power who are feared and revered in equal measure. Dholakia's portrait of Raees – modelled loosely on the real-life figure of Gujarati don Abdul Latif – is very much in this vein: a hero shown to live by his own personal code, in which violence is always the last resort, and the poor and innocent must not suffer.

At the centre of the film's construction of our sympathies is the idea of a system whose institutionalised hypocrisies are almost bound to produce crime. Dholakia does well to simultaneously appeal here to our entrenched belief in Gujarat as an entrepreneurial society, in which money will get made if there is money to be made: as SRK's Raees puts it, “Gujarat ki hawa mein byaapaar hai saheb. Aap meri saans ko toh rok lo, lekin is hawa ko kaise rokoge?”

In fact it is this uncompromising business ethic that is offered to us -- a mainstream, largely Hindu audience that might have otherwise little sympathy for the Muslim ganglord supplier of illegal, perhaps immoral daru -- as the reason to respect him. Raees is shown growing up with an independent-minded single mother who teaches him his life lessons even if she isn't in a position to help him with his school ones, and the lesson she teaches him most of all is that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.” This is a thought that resonates both with an old-style Amitabh Bachchan/Salim-Javed appeal to dignity and khuddaari (self-reliance in “Main phenke hue paise nahi uthhata” mode), and allows the otherness of the 'Miyabhai' to be embraced via the familiarity of the 'Baniya'.

The Amitabh Bachchan film referenced in the film is Kaala Patthar, but it was Coolie that came to mind for me. The Apni Duniya dream is exactly the same as Amitabh's in Coolie: of independent little houses for poor working class people. Except that it is no longer a Prem Chopra or a Kader Khan but a Raees who makes that promise – the Muslim boy who dreams for his community is one who has risen up from it. It rings sadly true that that dream, in a film four decades after Coolie, must still fall through the cracks.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Feb 2017.