A violent reaction to Firaaq’s confused critique

I found this to be a rather disturbing and even somewhat unacceptable film. I understand the director’s (Nandita Das) polemics and the ambition to provide a jolt. These are not unworthy aims with this subject. Having said that the film is dangerously constructed to present basically Das’s version of ‘Modi’s Willing Executioners’. This thesis is deeply wrong. It is to confuse two modes of responsibility to pass over neatly from those who actually planned the pogroms or were willing participants in a very active sense to those who might have ideologically been unsympathetic enough or partisan enough to condone the violence. I am not suggesting that those in the latter group cannot be blamed with the greatest force but that kind of failure finds its mirror image in just about every society on earth. In other words change the names and the places and such pogroms become possible, indeed have been possible in many other parts of the world as well. It is of course not the director’s responsibility to account for every corner of the planet where such violence has occurred. But doesn’t a thesis that provides for a continuum between those who actively organized these acts and those who stood on the sidelines really work toward absolving the real ‘villains’ of this terrifying episode(s) by ‘sharing out’ the blame? In fact the problem with Firaaq is that we only see ordinary lives. We come away with the view that most ‘normal’ Hindus either enjoyed the violence sadistically or felt this was payback for something else. The exceptions prove the rule. Those who however flinched at the events were either somewhat deracinated liberal males or else traditional women in very bourgeois households who cringed as the men in the household ‘enjoyed’ what they saw on TV. The exceptions in the film belong to these ‘schools’. Did not this sort of event also happen in Bombay in ’93? Did not a similar event take place in Delhi in ’84? What of the West Pakistani army’s brutal ravaging of the ‘East’ in its ’71 campaign (in contemporary times the first real instance of ‘rape’ being used as a weapon of war)?

In each instance the other side was demonized and/or ridiculed at a popular level (often this itself fed into a deeper cultural archive). In any case there were reserves of antipathy that could be exploited with the right political trigger. Indira Gandhi’s assassination was one such trigger, Godhra another. But ‘who’ was responsible? People whose prejudices (even if repulsive in many instances) could be tapped into, people whose ‘passivity’ could be counted on for the very same reason or those who issued the orders to the ‘arms’ of the state (the police force, the army, the bureaucratic apparatus, and so on) or those who actually carried out the orders? Firaaq obscures all of this. Because if ordinary Gujarati Hindus are responsible for what really happened there is in fact no need to think about those in greater positions of power. Perhaps Nandita Das is making a ‘human’ story with intimate moments? This does seem to be one of her aims and one could even venture that ‘humanism’ is really this film’s dead end (as indeed it is Goldhagen’s). In the context of her film’s politics though this mode operates on the other side of paranoia. Because it seems the politicians were really unexceptional. Most Gujarati Hindus believe and condone this sort of stuff anyway! Is this fair? Are all Delhi Hindus responsible for the anti-Sikh pogroms? Are all West Pakistanis responsible for what happened in East Pakistan? These questions could be multiplied accounting for different situations.

I am not being naive here. More general attitudes in these matters can hardly be overlooked. People do tend to hold beliefs on questions relating to the ‘other’ (defined ethnically, religiously, politically, racially… perhaps before all on grounds of gender..) that are at best regressive at worst (alas this is all too often) extraordinarily violent in terms of the featured bias. But note how skilfully Kamal Haasan dealt with a similar circumstance in Hey Ram. Even if he definitely engages in polemics at the right’s expense the film more expansively argues against political extremism of any sort. Kamal’s character launches himself into a very militant politics based on a personal trauma. This proposition is ‘understandable’ and the film presents his perspective. But them at some point the character starts getting an inkling of the dead-end he’s heading into. If the crisis begins with one kind of ‘personal’ trigger it is book-ended at the other with a comparable one when the same character is saved from ‘extinction’ by the intervention of his old ‘minority’ friend (it was brilliant to cast Shahrukh for this part). The personal and the political are therefore kept separate here because the purely personal operates at both ends of the equation. So yes Muslims gang-rape the lead character’s spouse. At the same time another Muslim saves his own life. This is the very opposite of what Das does. To frame it in more theoretically precise language Kamal’s film does not confuse the political subject with political subjectivity as such.

Because I know that Das has her heart in the right place when it comes to political issues I am extremely disappointed that she chose to engage in this sort of statement. Dev is another film where the very questions Das raises are configured differently. Again there are strong moments of humanism in that film which are never reducible to the story’s political demarcations. But Firaaq blurs the boundaries completely and does a very great disservice to both ‘sides’ in this tale. This is in the final analysis a film to confirm all kinds of paranoia — of the oppressed and the oppressor. One can legitimately critique the violence of a specific political ideology. One can also do the same for those who one way or the other accept such thinking. But one should never be naive enough or unsophisticated enough to merge such a critique with the interrogation of a political event that occurs in real time and has a specific set of circumstances to it. There can be a correlation between the two but to give it a causative spin is entirely irresponsible. I greatly regret that Das chose only protest of such a dangerous sort and not a genuine cinema of risk..