Watching the new Salman Khan film at Galaxy Cinema makes the national feel local, and vice versa.
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| The crowd outside Galaxy Cinema, Mumbai (Photo by Trisha Gupta) |
As an outsider who writes about Hindi films, a visit to Mumbai always makes me think: is it Mumbai that created Bollywood, or is it Bollywood that makes the city what it is? The answer is, of course, both. Not only is the history of the city entwined with the film industry to which it lends its name, so is its geography.
Arriving a day after Eid, I found myself in the midst of extended festive revelry in Bandra: an actual Eid Mela, but also a large Muslim family crowd out by the seafront. When I remarked on the late night crowd, my Bandra friend pointed around the corner, and said, as Mumbai people do, “Salman’s house is just here,” with that wonderful first-name intimacy that is directly proportional to a star’s stardom.
Going to see Salman Khan emerge onto his balcony is an Eid pilgrimage specific to Mumbai: A combination of filmi fandom and religious festivity now written into urban space. At one remove from that is going to Gaiety-Galaxy to watch a new Salman Khan film release. I decided it was time for Bharat.
The energy outside G7 Multiplex, as the old Bandra cinema is now officially known, was palpable. Several people posed in front of the poster. There were many women in large family groups, but the multiple all-male groups ahead of me led the man doing the manual frisking to reach for my hips on autopilot. It was only when his older colleague yelled that the errant checker realised: Cargo pants do not make a man.
When I bought my ticket online, there were just nine seats left. At the cinema, it was clear that many tickets ‘sold’ hadn't yet reached their final owners. Two middle-aged men, sweaty in shirtsleeves, were advertising their wares: “Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat.” The balcony was half-empty, but the cheers that greeted the entry of the 70-year-old Bharat were still loud enough to drown out the dialogue. By the interval, the hall had filled.
Mumbai may be where the popular screen idea of India is created, but the milieu in which that quintessentially Indian hero operates is still North India, and increasingly often, Delhi. Bharat, too, opens with a grand top shot of the Red Fort, and moves into a very stagey Old Delhi, specifically a shop called Hind Ration Stores. Once owned by Bharat’s bua and phuphaji (Ayesha Raza Mishra and Kumud Mishra, fine actors both wasted here), it now belongs to our 70-year-old hero, who is adamant about hanging on to it in the face of redevelopment sharks trying to buy him out. By the end, he lets it go.
Bharat’s reason for clinging to the store – and later, letting it go – is the crux of the film’s emotional narrative. Adapted from 2014’s massive Korean hit Ode to My Father, Ali Abbas Zafar’s film is a sort of Forrest Gump-lite that takes us from 1947 Lahore into present-day Delhi using a voiceover that feels like Historical Highlights for the (Post-)Millennial Viewer. The death of Nehru (turned into a lame Salman joke) segues into a period of high unemployment, allowing for long detours that send Bharat and his best friend Vilayati Khan into an unnamed oil-rich Gulf country and the Merchant Navy. These attempts to connect with the Indian expatriate worker have our hero battling white racism on one hand and conquering the hearts of black sea pirates on the other. We even get to liberalisation, for which, happily and almost surprisingly in our current political climate, Manmohan Singh not only gets credit but is declared a national hero – as are Sachin Tendulkar and, in rather generous spirit, Shah Rukh Khan.
It's interesting how often Salman Khan films seem to engage with national borders and wars, from spy romances like Ek Tha Tiger and Tiger Zinda Hai to Tubelight, which featured the Indo-China war, to Indo-Pak dramas like Bajrangi Bhaijaan. The sole affecting parts of Bharat, too, involve Partition, which forever separates the child Bharat from his father and little sister. It's to enable that lost father (Jackie Shroff in a guest appearance) to return that Hind Ration Stores must continue to exist.
Towards the end of Bharat, we get a televised cross-border unification of families devised by Katrina Kaif's character, who's gone from being a Salma Sultan stand-in on “Desh Darshan” to "creative head" at Zee TV. Despite the corny fakeness of the TV show-within-the-film, the real memories of subcontinental audiences make sure we get teary.
At one point, Bharat drops a bit of global-style Indian wisdom: Any world problem can be sorted with baat-cheet, pyaar and Hindi film songs. Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but as I watched the rows of sad-faced citizens of India and Pakistan on the film's imaginary TV show, holding Hindi and Urdu placards naming long-lost family members, all I could think was that neither side can any longer read the other's script.
Still, if the hero of a top-grossing Hindi film in 2019 manages to leave the ghost of Partition behind, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 June 2019.
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