J P Dutta’s Ghulami, Bachchan’s Signature

(I extract here an earlier exchange from naachgaana.com: LINK)

“Though I like Hathyar quite a bit the best Dutta by a long shot is Ghulami which to my mind is the greatest Hindi film since Trishul. Haven’t seen a film yet which surpasses Ghulami in this period. But Ghulami has been released on a rather inadequate DVD and hardly does justice to its widescreen compositions. This is a great film on every register imaginable. And some great performances from just about the whole cast. This is also my favorite Mithun role, as well as among my favorite Naseer/Smita roles. Additionally, it is a very prescient work in terms of understanding Indian caste politics. And finally it is much like Sholay (though even more powerfully in some ways) a very powerful representation of an anarchic India. And Dutta’s great achievement lies in fusing the realistic and the mythic. I think there is in fact even a case to be made that this is the greatest Hindi film since Sholay.”

“I always refer to Dutta’s closeups, his obsessive use of this feature, outdone only by RGV in his Sarkar films. But Dutta has something else also. His mangificent widescreen vistas that contrast with his claustrophobic closeups. Ghulami is the finest example of this but to a lesser extent Yateem and Batwara. When he went urban in Hathyar he didn’t have the same foil for his closeups though in a different sense his closeups here work well with the claustrophobic city space.”

“One wonders though if either film really represented the ‘truth’ of the Vijay character. I like Bachchan’s persona in Akayla (in the most inadequate of films!) but is this enervation a logical possibility in that history? Inquilaab also raises similar questions. Because it has the denouement of a ‘revolution’ but it’s unclear whether ‘Vijay’ would ever have had such a rush of blood (pun intended!). Or even if he would have consented to become a sacrificial lamb in the interests of serving the ‘people’.

This is in fact the great correction Rathnam performs on this history with Lallan Singh. The ‘Vijay’ history perhaps leads to an impasse. On the one hand all the de-stabilizing moves, on the other there is still enough ‘respect’ for the state and its traditions. The 80s ‘institutionalization’ where barring a few exceptions Bachchan became rather too ‘friendly’ and therefore more easily consumed is maybe in this sense only a symptom of that impasse as I see it. Inquilaab weirdly is truer to the ‘Vijay’ logic in the abstract even if it deviates from the specific history here. because any revolutionary move must minimally contain that ‘leap’ or that moment ‘without calculation’ or in more theoretical language must operate (an)economically.

Even with Khakee and Dev all these years later we still see the same constraints at work. In this sense the ‘vigilante’ element that has always been much more a part of Tamil commercial cinema in this genre is for its troubling nature more true to a certain logic of revolutionary violence. Let us not forget Andhaa Kanoon in this regard (made by a ‘Southerner’) and weirdly a film where Rajni becomes ‘Bachchan’ for a day (basically evading the law even as he wreaks vengeance) and Bachchan on the other hand potently undermines the foundations of the legal system by playing his double jeopardy game. Of course even Tamil cinema took the ‘Robin Hood’ element too far. The ‘hero’ who was willing to function as the ultimate outlaw to become the ultimate vigilante. This resembles a kind of compromise politics that in the final analysis does not disturb the state very much.

Lallan once again is a bit different.. that bridge scene at the end of Yuva (one of the great moments in Hindi cinema in my judgment and not one equaled in the Tamil version) is therefore crucial for its suggestion of an apocalyptic violence. But what Rathnam gives with one hand he takes away with the other. If Lallan represents subversion and revolutionary violence the other characters temper this with their heavy investment in ‘institutions’. Rathnam can only go so far. Lallan’s final scene is ambiguous as is the film’s but the fact that Rathnam finds it necessary to establish such a symmetry perhaps defeats things at the outset. What if the film had move entirely in Lallan’s sphere?

Consider how much more advanced Dutta’s Ghulami was in its anarchy. Here over the course of the narrative all kinds of political actors get defined by an opposition where one is either for the state and all its institutions of control and dominance and all its ruling classes or ‘against’ it. Hence the farmer and the military veteran and the small town policeman and so on all fall on one side.. The final moment is a very symbolic (and potent) ‘burning of the books’ moment which too as an image is eventually ‘freezed’ by the director and presented as a wager for the future..”

QALANDAR

Perhaps I am not following your reading of Ghulami; if I am, I think I disagree to an extent: “Ghulami” is standard nationalist inasmuch as it presents the (modernizing) state as opposed to the traditional feudal system — in fact it is from service under the state that the youthful rebellion of a Sumair Singh (Dharmendra) is transformed into the general concern with social judtice; the other hero (Jabber (Mithun)) is also a soldier, and does not feel beholden to any existing feudal hierarchy.

Without denying the above, it must be recognized that Ghulami is too capacious to be reductive to simply the reading offered above. For instance, Naseer’s character is also in the service of the state — and one might argue that here, “out there”, the state’s revolutionary promise has been compromised by the incestuous link between feudal privilege and power (caste and marriage ties bind Naseer and Smita Patil’s clan); thus, in order to preserve that revolutionary promise, the men once in uniform (Sumair & Jabber) themselves become rebels. We see here that both soldier and rebel are operating under the same sign, of the state’s emancipatory potential. It is true testament to Dutta’s epic sweep that he never seems to judge Naseer, there is no suggestion that the uniform is being perverted in this way (which is why one cannot be dogmatic about the reading I have offered) — the film is almost Homeric, in the sense that someone (I believe it was Coleridge, but I could be mistaken) said that Homer doesn’t judge, he simply shows. Ghulami doesn’t go the entire distance, but it goes quite a way: unlike with the usual villainous Thakur, the viewer doesn’t really hate Om Shivpuri; he isn’t a wicked man, he is simply a zamindar.

Satyam

“Excellent reading of Ghulami and not one I am opposed to except that I am unsure whether the film’s emancipatory politics can be defined only under the sign of the state. This is not to deny the obvious value of the trope you introduce in the first paragraph. But I was referencing a different kind of split where the rebellion against the existing order is what cuts across all the ‘old’ divides. In other words once the ‘rebellion’ begins can we meaningfully speak of an emancipatory potential of the ’state’? Isn’t the latter what has precisely ceased to function as the normative fiction? Don’t the ‘uniforms’ to the extent that the same are worn on both sides testify to this new ‘truth’? You’re quite right that Dutta does not ‘judge’. As he shouldn’t. Because the divide is not I think between two notions of the state but a quasi-Marxist debate about who has ‘power’ or who can change the essential configuration of the game. Which is why Dutta can fluidly pass from British era to the contemporary feudal one. I don’t think Dutta really prefers one alternative or another very much if it means accepting the same ‘oppressor’ logic. I agree with the characterization of this world as Homeric and I see this element as that which undercuts the otherwise radical moves of the film. Dutta nonetheless relies on some ancient, imagined sense of ‘order’ (and this is a complicated matrix in his film much as it is in Homer) but I don’t believe this framework is that of the ’state’.”

QALANDAR

On Ghulami, another interesting thing is Dutta’s representation of the power of books and the written word: it is the schoolmaster who first drives home to the boy Sumair Singh that he is transgressing the village’s social order. Later on, when we see the adult Sumair Singh we know he’s different because of the revolutionary books he is reading, and the fact that he hangs out at the library — the library is also the only place (especially once she leaves school) that Smita Patil is allowed, and that is where the two meet. And, most crucially (and as demonstrated so vividly in the film’s climax), the written ledgers are almost the source of the zamindars’ power over the peasants — when Sumair Singh burns those ledgers at film’s end, he destroys an entire world.

The broader point is metaphorical: in the final analysis, zamindari’s power perhaps rests on everyone subscribing to a worldview that privileges “destiny” — i.e. “it is written”; more specifically this attitude as applied to the political order. But that which is literally “written” — books, as imbibed by Patil and Sumair Singh — and the destruction of that which is literally written — the zamindars’ ledgers — both serve to show that nothing is “written” (in the sense of pre-ordained)…

Satyam

“Getting back to Ghulami the other example I neglected to bring up the other day when I was trying to make that point about a ‘revolution’ cutting across all the old divides is of course the Smita Patil/Naseer marriage. The politics of the situations cuts through this marriage as well, in other words the ‘(ex)timate’ takes place in the most ‘intimate’ of relationships (and social structures).”