Manoj Kumar’s Kranti and the ‘masala-national’

At 3 hr 7 min Kranti is arguably the longest masala pleasure in Bombay film history short of the somewhat longer Sholay. Unusually for Salim-Javed a pure masala potpourri with its lost and found twists, its high-pitched drama and hyper-theatrical dialog, its romance and tragedy, is grafted onto the epic political canvas of 1857. The result is not simply a period piece with a masala soul but a profoundly mythic fusion of the heroic and historical, and an all-inclusive ‘pre-figuration’ of the post-colonial nation state. If this last might be considered masala’s secret kernel or that which is always implicated in the masala project Kranti might be labeled the perfect site for launching forth this entire thematic. Manoj Kumar’s film is in essence the culmination or ‘truth’ of the less charitably named ‘formula’ tradition.*


Kranti is a textbook example of everything that the masala mode is at its best and everything that it is ostracized for in the current age. For masala at the present moment is that which cannot be accessed or even remembered squarely on its own terms. The high drama and ‘rousing’ entertainment coupled with all the picaresque qualities that are abundantly on display in Kranti is what defines the very essence of this mode which is remarkably flexible to the exact degree that it highlights all of its ‘bricolage’ elements.** Manoj Kumar’s film then offers a whole ‘summary’ of not just masala core features but also the nod to various Hollywood ones. From Moses-inspired tropes to expressionist horror set designs, from costumes that hearken to the attire of Renaissance European princes as much as they do to more ‘local’ village gear or women rather too erotically clothed in ‘Indian’ wear as opposed to ‘Western’ more or less contemporary gowns elsewhere, from palaces that seem like medieval European castles with forbidding dungeons at one end and royal, gaudily decorated courts suggesting ‘Oriental’ exotica at the other, from naval vessels that jump out of Ben-Hur with their slave ‘rowers’ to chariots and carriages that belong to different histories of the European past, from sword duels to B movie ‘cat-fights’ to William Tell-like archery contests, and of course all the familiar thematic features from love triangles to Rostam/Sohrab-like father-son conflicts or the easy blending of religious and ethnic identity which in addition to offering the obvious melting-pot dream equally exhibited those ‘transitional’ stages from an older system of naming political identity to a newer one, all of this intoxicating ‘collage’ happening as it were on recognizably Indian soil which is itself imagined with a mythic quality which one rarely comes across in the annals of masala cinema elsewhere if at all. Masala derives its soul from such disparate elements. It is as if all manner of anachronism and all modes of representation become naturalized in the masala universe. Everyone is ‘at home’ in this world which as a film form seems able to absorb an infinite and sometimes contradictory set of influences.***

Indian masala cinema has always been profoundly popular in many newly emergent nation-states from Asia to Africa to the Caribbean. This cinematic mode became for many parts of the ‘third world’ the exemplary one to investigate not just the debt to the colonial order of the past but also the means to interrogate the newly formed ‘post-colonial’ nation-states It is quite true to state that masala cinema tends toward the broadest definition of ‘universalism’ but this happens ‘within’ the bounds of the nation-state. This brand of cinema is always on the side of greater representation and ‘more’ democracy. What it subverts however is the ‘statist’ understanding of democracy with its necessarily limited and bureaucratic categories. It does not though seek revolutions within the existing framework which is why those period pieces as precursors of the existing nation state are always so handy as ‘topoi’.

And for this ‘idea’ of an Indian nation-state quasi-mystically imagined as ‘eternal’ and ‘continuous’ in at least the post-Independence period masala becomes the ideal vehicle of cinema. It should also not be forgotten that this cinema gains ascendancy at a precise inflection point in India history. In a sense masala operates after the event. This great ‘universalist’ project is a little late even at its peak. It eventually loses its luster as the politics of the nation lurch evermore toward less fluid categories of social identity. But this dynamic begins much earlier and masala would seem to offer a final Nehruvian resistance to it or a valiant attempt to arrest the political splintering of the age.****

Kranti is perhaps in the final instance a mausoleum. Ironically, ‘1857’, a year of defeat, becomes the ultimate resting place for masala’s last hurrah. Certainly Kranti is a work that caps off an entire tradition. From this film to Ghajini it is a tale of two museum pieces. One premised on the other. What was ‘remembered’ in Ghajini was only the remembrance of Kranti..

[a question to be pondered… inasmuch as masala was ‘repressed’ beyond a point, and one that continues to this day, it was a proper ideological move.. to wish away another conception of the political]

*
Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey therefore was exactly the right idea. Where Mehta erred however was in not going the entire way and uneasily marrying a ‘biopic’ with historical romance. In a film that is otherwise remarkably rich for its themes and so on the ‘mode’ becomes problematic. But this itself isn’t surprising given the inherent critique of capitalism (globalization?) here. It is as if Mehta had to pay homage to the Hollywood Braveheart/Rob Roy tradition to arrive at the ‘Kranti’ of his moment.

**
Therefore to suggest that masala has been borrowing from all sorts of traditions is to completely miss the point. The exemplary film in this regard is again Sholay where from the Hollywood Western to more native traditions everything is a part of the mix.

***
Much would have to be clarified about this but this too is one of the ways in which masala can be connected to the (non)conventions of Shakespeare’s drama.
****
The figure of Amitabh Bachchan as the site of this universalist ‘conceit’ can scarcely be overestimated. Perhaps he was the beginning and end in this sense. Notice how Kranti features Dilip Kumar and not Bachchan. By that point Bachchan had become his own authentic myth and could no longer be circumscribed by the demands of Kranti’s framework. A few years later when Bachchan attempted his own British masala in Mard this was simply the latest exercise in the ‘economics’ of the ‘one man industry’ and not a serious attempt to recode the legacy of masala as Kranti certainly was.