Kantara - Coming of Age of Indian Cinema and the Troubled Left

And I may add that the last 20-30 minutes leave you in thrall and stay with you for a long. Rishabh Shetty becomes one with his character. You can’t appreciate this till you watch the merging of the actor and the character yourself.

Without revealing too much, I can say that the basic story of Kantara is a staple diet of leftists. It is a story of tribals fighting for their rights over their lands and forests against a powerful landlord and state machinery. An ideal recipe for a number of good and bad movies made over decades by leftist writers and directors. Top of the mind Hindi movies I can recall is ‘Do Bigha Zameen’ and ‘Sagina Mahato’ which brought up the subject of alienation of the true land owners from their lands. One was essayed by one of our finest actors, Balraj Sahni, and the other by the legendary Dilip Kumar.

Then why has the left not liked Kantara, or rather hated it? The answer lies in treatment. The characters are not black and white. The government officers are not lecherous corrupt officers. The landlord doesn’t show his true colours till the end and remains a normal landlord out to protect his ownership of land. Tribals are not submissive weeping folks but fierce human beings ready to fight for their rights till the end. To add insult to injury these real people end up finding the solution within the framework of law, they are one with mother earth, unaffected by the Marxist propaganda. To top it all, their biggest sin is that they believe in their Gods and the storyteller completely believes in their traditions and beliefs.

This is where the left gets upset. Kantara negates the western worldview. It tries to find solutions within our Bharatiya framework. This is simply not acceptable to the left. So, the argument of tribals not being Hindu and tribals being older than Hindu dharma on one side and the idea of spirits being introduced into tribal society by Hindus etc have been brought out as the critics can’t directly tell the tribals that their belief in spirits and traditional pooja is pure hogwash and against modern science”. That would set them up against the tribals, the targets for the conversion mafia and breaking Indian forces.

This brings me to the other controversies created around PS1 (Ponniyin Selvan 1). It is a historical film and a blockbuster by the famed movie director, Mani Ratnam, not identified with Hindutva elements. I have yet to see the movie, but initial reports referred to it not being Hindu enough though Cholas were devoted Hindus. However, the unhappy Dravidianists used the film to argue that Cholas were not Hindus.

The Left Dravidianist alliance did not really celebrate unconditionally the fact that great Chola kings and their empire was finally being given due place in common Indians’ hearts despite them being blacked out by the left historians from the national narrative. It is also known that Raja Raja Chola was not on the favorites list of Dravidianists, because he built big temples in honor of Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, and many other gods. Due to social compulsions they could not, perhaps, disown Bhagwan Murugan as he is the most celebrated God in Tamil Nadu, but they disowned Shiva and Ganesha – his father and brother! Thus, PS1 created a dilemma for them. How to celebrate the great king but yet not celebrate Hindu dharma? Thus, was born the artificial controversy that Cholas were not Hindus. This topic has been debated threadbare, showing the intellectual bankruptcy of the Dravidian Left alliance; so, I will not get into this debate here.

But this controversy showed how Left and breaking Indian forces hate Hindus, Hindu dharma and Hindu culture. Their renaissance destroys the fake narrative of the Aryan Dravid divide, the north-south divide, and so on. It upsets the delicate applecart that has kept them in power for years.

Coupled with these two landmark films, are a series of movies beginning with Bahubali that are rooted in Bharatiya ethos, followed by many like RRR that do not copy Hollywood. On the other side, the rootless cinema of Bollywood (a term I hate, but it represents the slavish mentality of westernized rootless Hindi cinema, wrongly presented as Indian cinema internationally till now) is reeling under disaster after disaster with movies that don’t ring bell for the audience. The project to create a lost generation copying the west blindly in every negative way is losing steam. They are the ideal fodder for the new left that feels anarchy is the ideal way to ride roughshod over state power which they can’t capture through democratic means.

While superhit Bharatiya movies including low-budget Hindi movies are heralding the rediscovery of our Bharatiya roots, most of them are glamorous and larger than life; Kantara is raw, unglamorous, uncomfortably rooted in reality for the left. And this is a pain for them.

There are two ways to solve our problems. One is the Marxist/Maoist way of violent struggle, treating different sections of society as antagonists where one must lose for the other to win. There is perennial conflict in society. There is no place for Sanskriti or culture, emotions and spiritualism. The other way is of harmonious approach, propagated by the Bharatiya way of life or Hindutva or Hinduness that takes every section of society together and tries to resolve the problems like a family. Where exploitation is abhorred as being against dharma, and ‘sarve sukhina santu’ is the ideal for which members of the family and the society sacrifice their bit.

May I volunteer to share the secret with my comrades that this is the nub of their problem; that despite being there for nearly 100 years, you are still nowhere. Unless they realize their disconnect with Bharatiya ethos, they will never succeed.

I am not sure if Rishabh Shetty was conscious of these issues when he made the movie. For him it must have been an urge to tell a story of his people in the Bharatiya paradigm. But his success has brought forth this battle of ideas of looking and solving our problems - through the western paradigm of the perennial struggle for material gains or our own Bharatiya worldview of integral life of harmony.