Gadar se Bajrangi tak

“When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old we invent different pasts for others.”
— Julian Barnes in his 2011 prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending

Fifteen years after director Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha’s protagonist Tara Singh went to Pakistan to rescue and reclaim his wife and son from the hostile neighbours, enemies actually, Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which released last week, transgresses the Radcliffe Line, but on a different mission. Sharma’s Gadar invented a different past while Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan invents a different future.

In the 2001 story, Tara Singh (played by Sunny Deol) went to Pakistan to rescue and return with his wife and son whom his in-laws were keeping captive. In 2015, Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan (played by Salman Khan) goes to Pakistan to return the young speech-impaired girl Shahida to her parents (in South Asian parlance, Maa). Both journeys into the “land of the pure” brought pure box-office exhilaration and both films released when the saffron flag of the great Hindu rulers of Hindustan, the Bharatiya Janata Party, was flying high. But, in the retelling of the return of the Bollywood hero to Pakistan, Kabir Khan & Co. deliberately invert the politics of Anil Sharma & Co.

Circa 2001: Gadar’s Tara Singh was a poor and honourable Sikh whose entire family and belongings were claimed by “them” during Partition. He rescues (in South Asian parlance, “marries”) the upper-class Sakina from a murderous mob. By recreating the painful loss and dislocation during Partition, and by clearly establishing the religion and allegiance of the perpetrators, Gadar exploited viewers’ suppressed psychological pain before embarking on the communally divisive narrative that followed so that when his Pakistani in-laws keep Sakina and their progeny, Jeeta, against their will in Lahore, Tara must enter the “barbaric” land to rescue his family, and honour.

Gadar portrayed Pakis-tan as a communal Islamic state that harbours only hatred for India, especially Hindus. Practically every Pakistani is portrayed to be actively hostile to the great secular love of Tara Singh. From father-in-law (Ashraf Ali, played by Amrish Puri) demanding Tara Singh’s conversion to Islam to the “Hindustan-murdabad”-demanding Maulvi (on the plastic set of an imagined Lahore Square), from the back-stabbing Niazuddin to the poor woman who helps them escape for a price, all Pakistanis are evil and anti-India (in Bollywood parlance, anti-love). By the end, the hapless Jeeta must ask his mother, “What is wrong with these Pakistanis?”

Gadar’s politics critiqued Nehruvian secularism by showing an “intolerant Islamic Pakistan” standing against a tolerant, secular India and established that India’s secularism is based on the benevolence of the Hindu majority who “allow” religious minorities to live with them, unlike Pakistan. In this, it establishes the superiority of Hinduism, casting it as a secular religion. Gadar’s evocation of the past imposes on Pakistan the need to either reintegrate into a unified India or cede to the patriarch as a son.

Circa 2015: Bajrangi Bhaijaan (aka Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi) is a devout Hindu — a Hanuman-worshipping Brahmin whose simple brain (in South Asian parlance, a large heart) invites his own patriarch’s scorn.

His multiple malfunctions (reading, writing, wrestling, inability to obey Shakha’s instructions) make him meander towards Delhi. Even as he struggles to find his life’s purpose, Shahida runs into him. Her speech-impairment ensures that the vegetarian Hindu discovers her degrees of separation from him one strand at a time — not Brahmin, not Kshatriya, not Hindu, but Afridi-loving, chicken-chomping Pakistani. The unravelling of the identity onion are quintessentially upper-class Brahmin biases being exposed, albeit with gentility and fantastical acceptance.

Even when Bajrangi faces visa difficulties at the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi, the problem is attributed to an “Indian” representative. And when Bajrangi eventually trespasses into the “land of chicken korma”, the representation reversal from Gadar is stark. Chand Nawab (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the flailing freelance journalist, abandons his hashtag-hungry professional goals to support Bajrangi’s mission. Maulana Sahib (Om Puri) provides Bajrangi sanctuary inside a masjid-madrassa. From the district magistrate to the cops in pursuit, all Pakistanis convert — from RAW anger to warmth — when they discover what his cause is and eventually rescue Bajrangi from the traps of siyasi  (political) vision to ensure his return to India.

The miracle that Shahida’s mother desired (Shahida’s speech) from the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya is finally delivered by the miracle of Bajrangi. So when Shahida finds her voice and calls out to him, “Mama” (my mother’s brother), He forgets his lover waiting on the other side, runs back to embrace the Pakistani girl who gave meaning to his life. They meet symbolically in no-man’s land (in South Asian parlance, Toba Tek Singh land) — on the Radcliffe Line, stretching across the heart of Indo-Pak statist conflict — Kashmir. There is parity in the meeting, and equality in the gains made by both Bajrangi and Shahida. Both rescue each other, and both nation-states and faiths unify as humane.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan imagines an India where even the most turgid overcome identity-based discrimination, particularly communal. It invents an Indian who is able to accept Pakistanis as a social-cultural continuum of self and Pakistan as a separate nation-state whose existence does not threaten India or its secularism. It has been 68 painful years since Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew a line through our hearts. Can we stop sneering at each other across the border and start celebrating the fact that even on crossing an international border we will find ourselves at home?

The box office tells us we are ready. Bajrangi Bhaijaan is poised to be the biggest Bollywood hit till date. It will “bury” Gadar’s astounding box office performance.
Hopefully, it will also give the new generation of Indians the idea of inventing a different future, with their brethren in Pakistan.

The writer is a strategy and leadership consultant who wishes to be a filmmaker