The Agneepath Dossier

[I am collecting all my older thoughts on Agneepath here. These were often parts of longer notes or posts, sometimes on this blog, sometimes on Bachchan’s. Hopefully the contexts are clear in each case though in a few instances I’ve let the comments run longer to make them more comprehensible. I’ve also collected these notes into ‘sets’ for greater thematic continuity.]

I

1) Perhaps this is the best way to approach the film. In rewriting deewar it converts the latter into opera! But it is a problematic moment in the film. And again the Deewar reference is obvious. The hero who must go through such a test of fire to become properly ‘mythic’.

2) Deewar is re-imagined in Agneepath. In a crucial scene Vijay suggests that the ‘writing’ on one’s forehead defines ultimate victory in life. A destiny shaped by an invisible inscription.

3) Agneepath is one of the most iconic Bachchan moments at this point but I think this film too is somewhat dry and doesn’t really have the ‘passions’ of masala. Of course Bachchan here is such a force of nature that he goes beyond mere terms like ‘performance’ and ‘screen presence’. ‘Explosive’ seems to be a term of restraint for what he is here. Having said that there is a ‘risk’ to this performance and I am unsure whether the pay-off is always there. I always like to say though that in some ways this is Bachchan’s most searing character after Lawaaris or rather this is what Heera from the latter film would have become had he not been reconciled with his father at the end!

4) Even by those standards the degree of ‘abjection’ Lawaaris sometimes represents is astonishing. As is of course your searing portrayal. Heera is easily your most bruised character. He looks forward to Agneepath’s Vijay but the latter though itself an important portrayal seems something other than human. But as always I see this as a logical progression. So if Heera had not been accepted by his father at the end he would have become the Agneepath protagonist! Returning to my ‘theme’ once again it is no wonder that your bourgeois audiences often cringed even as they could not resist your films. You were constantly offering a set of polemics against their interests!

5) This was one of the great aspects of Salim-Javed’s scripts inasmuch as these were catalysts for the angry young man’s evolution — that all the films involved that sort of tweaking and of course Bachchan had the gifts to understand this. Deewar’s Bachchan isn’t really like Zanjeer’s while Trishul’s isn’t really like Deewar’s and Kaala pathar’s isn’t really like Trishul’s. So on and so forth. A genealogy here for sure but it’s not the same guy in every film. Abhishek does a pre-Agneepath and post-Agneepath ‘brooding’ deal with his characters. So BM and Sarkar are pre-Agneepath, Yuva and SR are post-Agneepath. The distinction is that in Agneepath Bachchan for the very first time in his angry young man (or not so young when this film was made!) career eschews the ‘rational’. This is something I’ve talked about earlier but the angry young man for all his violence is essentially a ‘rational’ being which is to say that he is always in control of his violence. Whenever he gets close to the ‘irrational’ he either has to die or the script has to take a dramatic turn to in a sense reabsorb him into the ‘normal’ social fold. So in Deewar there is that ‘wild’ moment at the end when he throws Madan Puri out of the window. At that moment he is at the point of no return, if he lives long enough after this perhaps Agneepath is the logical end. But the script skilfully accounts for this ‘excess’ and even while presenting it with one hand takes it back with the other. So at this ‘climactic’ moment the ring of the ‘legal forces’ is really closing in around him. He has to die! In Trishul by making the angry young man’s father the ‘enemy’ a radical move is performed but on the other hand the means to tame this revolution are also left embedded in the narrative. Again the lead character trying to irrationally destroy his father and the father’s family and so on. But at a precise moment one sees his vulnerable side when he slaps Prem Chopra (cannot stand his father being abused by another). So the ‘family’ structure always intervenes. In Deewar he can never enter a temple except when he does so for his mother. In other words it is always the parent (specially the mother) who can always override every revolutionary dynamic. And it is comprehensible to the audience because compromising for a parent seems natural. And yet this domesticates the revolution! Again the larger point is that these scripts have features that allow for a moment of irrationality, hint at it, even play along with it for a while but take it back eventually. Deewar is still open ended in many ways which is why it is the strongest script of this series (Trishul and Kaala Pathar have endings that are narratively justified but problematic in terms of the logic of the original premise in each case). But moving on, Agneepath is the film where despite a relatively weak plot (or one that is content to be an ‘essay’ on Deewar, hence simply shadowing the older film in a different key) Vijay actually does commerce with the ‘irrational’. And this is precisely the hint that Rathnam, shrewd as ever, picks up for Yuva. This is also the mode Abhishek works in with SR, a performance that is much misunderstood but that is entirely ‘logical’. Because the darkness of the Sarkar universe converts the rational being of the earlier film into the much more impenetrable one of SR (a hint that is also available in the closing moments of the earlier film) and which was first developed in Yuva. BM though has a much more reassuring ‘brooding’ figure. But Rohan (who is a fan of Akayla’s Bachchan) injects some of the world weariness of that character into BM and again in a performance that is much underrated Abhishek suggests that ‘mood’ somewhat improbably for that stage of his career (a very young guy as opposed to his father at time of Akayla when he had entered his twilight phase quite definably). So yes it will be interesting to see what configuration Rohan comes up for him here and equally it will be fascinating to discover Rathnam’s own move in Raavana. Lastly, I should add I don’t really hold up this entire critique as a negative for the Salim-Javed films. Those were extraordinary given their contexts, so extraordinary that even with the ‘adjustments’ I’ve been referring to Yuva or what have you are not moreso in this contemporary age. But Salim-Javed’s films were ultimately exercises in romanticism and perhaps revealed the limits of following such a schema. The post-Agneepath manifestations on the other hand are truer to the logic of the character but also run the risk of losing audience investment completely. This is what happened with Agneepath. Vijay was simply too ‘terrible’ a character and could not be loved. Today this film has been reinvented simply as a series of grand gestures decoupled from the emotional content of the narrative. But when it’s Rathnam in Yuva it is precisely the same risk. Lallan is a grand achievement but he too cannot be loved or even liked necessarily. Because the ‘erasure’ of the human which is required to remain true to this logic is also what is most problematic for any sort of commercial film.

6) Note how Agneepath attempted to ‘de-mythicize’ Deewar by ‘updating’ it.. in a sense Agneepath does take Deewar to a certain ‘extreme’ and this gesture must be taken seriously (this is the bridge to Yuva.. Rathnam likes bridges anyway..) but the romantic myth of the earlier film is translated into a Western gangster-inflected gesturality.. enormously potent on its own but with this crucial difference.. the potency is all Amitabh Bachchan’s not necessarily Vijay’s.. it all looks similar, the story is grafted onto the old and so on but it isn’t.. people didn’t like the fact that you changed your voice.. but didn’t this gesture offer a certain truth that was perhaps more unsettling than any literal discomfort felt by the change? That there was a gap between Deewar and Agneepath… insurmountable.. the ‘voice’ which again is so intrinsically a part of your history (as I say on so many other subjects someday there will have to be a proper study of just your voice and how it has functioned in your cinema..) perfectly illustrated this gap.. Vijay in Agneepath was roaming around in a world where all the gods had vanished.. his frustration was understandable.. he was left all alone among mere humans.. the world had changed.. no one realized it.. and in any case Amitabh Bachchan could not have been the bridge to this more secularized order.. there had to be someone else..

7) The most important ‘Vijay’ works in Hindi cinema since I believe Lawaaris are Agneepath, Khakee and Rathnam’s films with Abhishek.

II

1) It is the normalization of the angry young man’s revolution that unhinges him and makes him reappear in rather terrifying form in Agneepath. And it is this hint which Rathnam picks up in Yuva and presumably now in the upcoming Raavana. The last represents an extraordinary wager. The deconstructed mythic married to a stylized realism. This could add a remarkable chapter to the story begun with Awara if indeed Rathnam is upto the task. The angry young man’s cinema is ironically enough the compromise deal offered on Awara. Rathnam retread this space in the more uncompromising Yuva and the rather more compromising Guru. One hopes the Yuva space is opened up even more subversively in Raavana..

2) Abhishek is (and to get a bit theoretical here) the clearest example of the ‘monstrous real’ in contemporary Bollywood and when one thinks about central actors perhaps the only one. Because Abhishek is indeed the ‘monster’ in contemporary Bollywood. But not ‘ugly’ at a literal level. Actually his very (Bachchanesque) and ‘imposing’ persona is precisely not ‘ugly’ because it is otherwise ‘attractive’. The ‘ugliness’ is a function of something else. And this is the ‘authenticity’ he conveys in the midst of the greatest ‘plasticity’. In other words what he represents is ‘monstrous’ within a Bollywood that in just about every way is a ‘fake’ production of superficial movies, superficial actors, superficial audiences. He cannot be assimilated or consumed. His very presence disturbs, causes a bit of a tremor each time. Even those who like him are often a bit uncertain as to how to engage with him. This is why incidentally even proper Bachchan fans sometimes have an ambivalence towards him. Because in an interesting way he even reveals the ‘real’ of the Bachchan signature before the latter was normalized into the ‘one man industry’ consumer God and certainly since the metamorphosis of the same into the transcendental consumption item of the new India. It is not that Abhishek is not like his father. He is too much like his father. Except that Bollywood and Bollywood audiences have spent the better part of two decades repressing the Kaala Pathar character (this is precisely what ‘Bollywood’ means!). He needs to be shut up in the coal mines! Most bourgeois audiences reacted rather badly to Lawaaris, the only such ’searing’ character post-Kaala Pathar. But here the ‘drag’ moment allowed these very audiences to sublimate their annoyance — that the more cosmetically appropriate Bachchan had dared to return to his roots was not ‘wished’ for, however that he dressed up as a woman was worse and this is what ‘apparently’ caused offense. Later still there was of course Agneepath where again Bachchan is at his most ‘monstrous’. A Deewar re-written with Vijay as Frankenstein. This is what the ’system’ produced. Or this hellish character is what the dominant social apparatus made of Vijay’s romantic rebellion (Lallan then follows in this line of Bachchan ‘monsters’). Abhishek keeps returning the audience to this site of ‘repression’.

3) Mutant is a very find word for Bachchan here (referring to GF’s characterization). Because he was a ‘mutant’ for a reason. This is the hint Rathnam picks up in Yuva where Lallan is as ‘rational’ and reasonable a possibility of that universe as Michael or Arjun. In fact Rathnam was too devoted to the tripartite structure. Zizek would have argued that Lallan is precisely the truth of that structure or someone who’s perfectly ‘connected’ to Arjun. The violence of the former is all too obvious. But the inherent structural violence that makes the lifestyle of someone like Arjun possible is always masked in what we then call ‘society’. This violence then finds a counterpart in the more obvious eruptions we see around us of which Lallan is one deep symptom. The new India of the 90s converts Vijay into Lallan and Agneepath is prophetic in this regard. At the same time both moves also share a common weakness in the sense that both are also admissions of defeat. To be Vijay in Agneepath or Lallan is to never be a true revolutionary like Deewar. Perhaps revolution is not even possible in this sort of late capitalism. Might as well join the ‘system’ if you can’t beat it. Hence Guru! But Rathnam can do better. So we will now get the ultimate villain and outsider of the canonized tradition in Raavan and it will be fascinating to see what Rathnam does with the Vijay inheritance here.

4) In an odd sense the performance that Abhishek’s [Raavan] resembles most in some ways is Bachchan’s Agneepath (not because they’re the same ‘kind’). The latter film too took its time finding it’s audience. For a contemporary younger male audience especially this film and role are like Deewar (don’t think there’s any comparison between the films), touchstone moments. At the time many film simply found Bachchan hard to take in that film. True, he didn’t get such reviews but in India no one gives such reviews to an actor who’s been at it for a long time let alone a legend like Bachchan. The voice change of course attracted great negativity (today it’s hard to separate the performance from the voice). Again more in the media and bourgeois audiences. I am unpersuaded it was the same for everyone. In any case this performance could be judged over the top as it was by some. But surely that is the ‘point’ of the performance. It doesn’t necessarily make my list of favorite Bachchan performances but it is a very unique one in his oeuvre. A performance of ‘risk’.. and important precisely because it risks so much. Abhishek’s Raavan falls in that category. There are just very slight hints of this Agneepath ghost in certain portions in the second half of the film, in some of the more restrained moments where Abhishek nonetheless uses a somewhat hoarse voice.

There is another link too. For all the Deewar structure Agneepath’s Vijay is very different from that of the older film’s. Because in Agneepath the entire family history and trauma and tragedy do not quite seem to account for this (also slightly unhinged) character. Which is why I’ve located this role in a Lawaaris genealogy in the past. Vijay is what Heera would have become if his father had not embraced him at the end of that film. A very bruised character become hellish.

III

1) I was revisiting Agneepath the other day. A film which is already a kind of remake or sequel of Deewar (ironic that Agneepath itself is now being remade!). I prefer Deewar infinitely to it but I must admit that this newer film was a remarkable experiment and one that is still rewarding each time I revisit it. First off all one just marvels at Mukul Anand’s visual grammar and expertise. I do not believe he has necessarily been surpassed in some of his ‘representation’ here. I suspect he ‘learned’ from Rathnam’s Nayakan a great deal though he was of course impressive in Insaaf as well earlier one (a film which released around the same time as the Rathnam work). In any case I don’t believe that RGV, who is otherwise so impressive at very many levels, has surpassed Mukul Anand in this sense. Agneepath is really the summa of Anand’s technical vision and one can offer here as example that great claustrophobic moment when Vijay gets into the basti to free his sister. The shots constructed, the frenzy suggested with all the crowds, the fight in the mud, the falling rain and the light being refracted through it, on and on.. I only bring up RGV incidentally because his concerns have often been similar in this sense. But nothing in Satya or Company impresses me as much as some of these very stylized moments in Agneepath. and I say this as a fan of those RGV films. In any case this is but one moment. There is at the opposite end that brightly lit Mauritius entry of yours where even by the standards of your iconic and incredible screen presence this moment is not easily surpassed. Again Anand’s cues are perfect, not least in terms of matching the video to the song (that global hit Yeke Yeke..). It’s a film that takes risks much as your performance does the same. But both are more admired than loved, the strengths and weaknesses of both are perhaps one and the same. The film is a kind of operatic coda to Deewar, updated for a newer age but also very insightful in terms of bringing the ‘angry young man’ phase to a certain ‘end’. Agneepath is a sort of ‘essay’ on Deewar. A film which almost cannot be seen without having the older film constantly in mind as well. One thinks of that great roti scene you have here with Rohini Hattangadi and one can then connect it with Deewar’s own roti moment. Just between these two scenes from the two films an entire world of discourse can be constructed. Your voice was of course controversial at the time but it was the right decision. It has the effect of distancing the viewer from Vijay. One cannot really invest in Vijay, he is a bit too ‘terrible’ to be absorbed, but what ‘disabled’ the film and your performance in a box office sense is precisely that which renders both authentic. Today sadly a young male generation lionizes Agneepath and sees it really as the perfect expression of a certain macho gesturality. The weakest of misreadings.

2) Agneepath is a kind of update on Deewar.. this is a film you should see if you haven’t.. even by Bachchan’s lofty standards he is extraordinarily grand is this rather operatic film. Here’s one of my favorite moments from the film (also in all of Bachchan’s oeuvre):

watch at the 2.35 min mark and then roughly through the 5:30 point…

The moment where he is standing on the boat, he is literally a god!

3) Getting back to the idea of an Agneepath remake though I should say that the mere thought does not sound very preposterous to me. For one I have never considered Agneepath a perfect film. It was somewhat dry and never really struck one’s emotional chords the way many of your great scripts from the past did. The late Mukul Anand had many strengths as a film-maker, unfortunately ’script’ wasn’t one of them. The ambition to ‘update’ Deewar was always more than a little misplaced. The ‘historic’ work or the ‘event’ cannot simply be replicated. At the same time there were many aspects of the work that were politically prophetic in some ways.

The greatest problem of an Agneepath remake does not consist in the narrative itself (which as I suggested could be bettered as could indeed the soundtrack!) but the fact that it is so completely dominated by an Amitabh Bachchan who is simply awe-inspiring in the potency of his signature here. In other words the gesturality on display here is of such a magnitude that it is very hard to conceive of any actor who could take up this challenge successfully. I have to add here that I am not a complete fan of your performance in the film. This might sound paradoxical given what I’ve just said about but I think that this performance ‘risks’ a great deal and I am unsure whether there is always a payoff at the end. It is the very point of this performance to be ‘overblown’. You handle is remarkably well and yet it nonetheless gets to be too much at points. Wherever one stands on this (and I am probably in the minority with this view) it is certainly true that the film today enjoys a prestige that it did not when it initially released. It is now a central part of your canon, more crucial for many audience segments than for example Trishul (I consider this an entirely regrettable development). The lead star in Agneepath displays a transcendence over the text of the film that I think I cannot spot in another film from any tradition I am aware of. But it is also this transcendence that perhaps sinks the work. At the very least the script cannot lift the weight of this signature. Agneepath is a moment of splendor for you but there is also something terrible about this splendor. I invoke here an ancient Greek sense of the marvelous (deinon) which suggests an overwhelming kind of splendor and this is ipso facto a bit terrifying. Who then would want to step into your shoes with this film?

IV

1) Let’s talk about your justly famous ‘walk’. One of the most distinctive ones in the history of the medium and certainly one I am partial to more than any other with the possible exception of Eastwood in some of his Westerns. I am going to isolate two supreme moments of this history. Firstly (though not for the first time) that great scene in the second half of Don when you walk across the bridge where Iftikhar is already waiting for you under the bridge, unbeknownst to the gangsters (this is incidentally a superbly constructed scene even in another sense.. both you and the DCP do not see each other, the voices communicate while the gaze in each instance is directed elsewhere..). This is the greatest such example of your ‘gait’ in your 70s work.

Let’s now introduce its perfect counterexample from Coolie. Your mesmerising introductory scene when you are on top of the train and walk across it, master of all that you purvey. This is the ’summa’ moment of your 80s ‘walk’.

There are however precise distinctions between the two sequences. The Don walk is a distracted, ‘spontaneous’ one. It is about an easy-going style and abandon. It is about a star who is still exploring his signature or developing it in profound ways and enjoying himself thoroughly doing so.

On the other hand the Coolie walk is all about the absolute dominance of your ‘one man industry’ phase. Here on display is the plenitude of your signature in the most total sense. In this sense the falcon is a nice touch because it only enhances this sense of supremacy and plenitude. The star here is no longer in flux as with Don. He is ‘lord and master’ and his walk reflects the confidence of this ‘truth’. Though 1978, the year in which Don arrived, was your greatest single year, you were nonetheless still in a process of discovery. By the time Coolie comes about you are ‘there’ and many films later when you have both exhausted the ‘angry young man’ as well as the Anthony alternative you can only concentrate heavily on the potency of your signature. But in each case you are still completely authentic.

A supplement here. Agneepath, in addition to everything else, also represents the fracturing of the romantic Deewar universe where that walk first came about in a serious way. And this is reflected in how you handle your body in the film. An element of dissonance is introduced, the fluid choreography of your trademark walk seems ‘re-inflected’ to now register an ‘un-hinging’. Also otherwise your shiftiness when you are seated, this marvelously comes through in your introductory moment. Your character is rather uneasy and ‘out of joint’ throughout the film and this is obvious even in his physical comportment. And yet there is enough of the old magic still there. When you get shot early on the way your body recoils and eventually falls, all this is remarkable to behold (to find the ‘repetition’ here one must visit or revisit Abhishek’s death sequence in Sarkar Raj where the character too owes something to Agneepath’s Vijay as do his parts in Yuva and Raavan.. Abhishek is slower, even ‘obtuse’ about bodily injury here but it’s very well done because it is ‘in’ character). Agneepath is as brilliantly done in this physical sense as the earlier Don and Coolie.

V

1) Akayla is a work which is often not ambitious enough when it needs to be and makes a vice out of its modesty. One could be critical about certain aspects of a film which had essentially the right script in place but one which was handled in a very functional way by of all people Ramesh Sippy. Nonetheless there is much that is ‘right’ here. The moodiness and melancholy that always hangs over this film principally through your perfectly pitched portrayal. In fact if I think about all the films that you did between Shahenshah and Khuda Gawah (when you then left for five years) there is perhaps no more affecting performance in this period. Agneepath is rightly the more challenging performance to ‘interpret’ even as it is also one of great risk (there is no other work of yours I can think of where you are always so much in danger of exceeding a certain ‘measure’ even if it all seems attuned to this quasi-operatic work) but Akayla might not be ‘lesser’. In a certain sense it offers a striking contrast with Agneepath. The latter a grand performance pitched consistently a scale or two higher, the former is much more restrained, much more in sync with the twilight feel of the film. But both performances are about the ‘end’ of a history, an era. One might term this your ‘peak period’. If Agneepath doubles the bet and unleashes Vijay with a much more ‘monstrous’ intensity, Akayla is akin to a fadeout. Your performance here is perfectly keyed into everything I’m suggesting here. You are tired at that point and Vijay here exhibits that weariness. If Agneepath’s Vijay descends from the deep lacerated Heera of Lawaaris universe Akayla’s character owes something to the late romantic commentary and ironies of the Sharaabi protagonist. But Mukul Anand still frames a world where Vijay’s resistance is literally possible and where his gestures still animate the sign system of that universe. Akayla though operates with the sadder realization that it isn’t anymore as it once was. And therefore Vijay here is also suffused with that melancholic truth. He is some sort of survivor in a world where the myth of Vijay has perhaps receded.

All of this you bring through in your portrayal. It perhaps required you to have taken a few hard knocks yourself. Just those notes couldn’t have been struck years earlier. It is not easy to represent ‘defeat’ if one has never known it in any true sense in life. Sippy does not allow this character any grandeur but even as you respect the economy needed here the character is for all this deeply individualized and as I said earlier remarkably affecting. I rue the fact that this prortrayal did not get a greater film from Sippy. It might have been one of your singular ones. Even physically I would say that other than Agneepath I do not like you more in any film of this entire period (barring the grand look of Khuda Gawah.. i.e. the younger look here). But it is a film to revisit. It doesn’t get as much attention as it should but I would certain pick this Vijay to Agneepath’s.

VI

1) And the ultimately greatness of a work really rests in the number of times it can be fruitfully opened up to newer questions without the possibilities of the work being exhausted. So for example Shakespeare is endlessly re-interpreted in every age. So this undecidability works in more ways than one. But let me end here with another example, that of Agneepath, something I’ve discussed at length in the past. I’ve often thought of this as a performance of ‘risk’ in the sense that I am unsure if you perhaps do not go too far in terms of a certain gesturality. On the other hand this is quasi-operatic work where your gestures seem entirely appropriate to that world. These aren’t necessarily contradictory propositions. It depends on one’s perspective. But the undecidability is there in the performance because it lends itself to opposing interpretations and you cannot definitively ‘choose’ one way or the other. This is why your work in Agneepath is ultimately great even if one decides to opt for the less flattering interpretation.

2) Notice how the thought of the ‘Agneepath’ is somewhat opposed to that of the ‘Madhushala’. The bridge between the fiery struggle of the former and clam repose of the latter is the poem that you recited in Kasme Vaade and also quite often in other contexts (jeevan ki aapa dhaapi main..). Here there is a question that is laid out before us which I would rephrase in this way: can one get from Agneepath to Madhushala? It is not an easy question to respond to. Using the metaphors of mysticism (from which Madhushala draws a great deal) one could certainly reconcile the idea of ’struggle/striving’ with that of ultimate inner peace. However Agneepath is really soaked in the blood and sweat of revolutionary rhetoric. One can perhaps turn to the climactic battle of the Mahabharata and here discover how these contradictory strands might (or might not) be united. Krishna’s counsel is very philosophical and reflective in very many ways, on the other hand all of this is meant to prevent a certain ’stasis’ on Arjun’s part and push him towards the battle-field and war. But this battle-field is also one where, and in Nietzschean terms, a ‘re-valuation of values’ takes place. In a sense then it is only Krishna’s cosmic philosophy that could survive the ‘re-ordering of the world’ that will take place once the battle is over. To put it differently there might yet be that Agneepath which ends at the Madhushala! Because the time of the two works (and orders) is very different. Actually Krishna does not really have an answer to Arjun. What he does is take things to a higher level. His message is ‘fight the war here and then let those cosmic cycles take care of the rest’! The ethical apparatus of the Bhagavad Gita is immense but it is not necessarily the answer Arjun is seeking. Because a certain switch is performed here. To use a philosophical register the ontic is translated into the ontological. Things ‘in’ this world become the thing ‘of’ the world. But these are not the terms or the ‘evasion’ of the two poems I started out with. Agneepath and Madhushala are linked across the same axis of time. The latter is allegorical but of course such a mode depends on keeping the time of the present intact. Whereas Krishna’s response consists in ignoring the present — ‘act now in this fashion and there will be balance in the cosmic order’! The poet’s wager in those two ‘opposed’ poems is in this sense a braver one. Because each work is authentic and true on its own the two cannot be fused into a single vision. Nor should it be so. Why then do I bring this up? Because I wonder if we often do not lay too much of a premium on inner peace and so on. The ecstatic mode of the mystic is not necessarily more potent than the ‘passage a l’acte’ of the revolutionary. They often even share the same language! Even within yourself there is something of this ‘balance’ if you will — the search for inner calm but also the frenetic activity on all other fronts. I am in any case never sure if the Madhushala is really preferable to the Agneepath as a choice or as an ‘ethic’ of life. It seems to me that the Madhushala is perhaps what one thinks about after one has walked on the Agneepath and emerged triumphant. Perhaps the Mashushala is even something of a retirement plan on the terms of the ‘path of fire’. Certainly this view finds biographical evidence in your life. If one opposes your great work from the past to your current ’stance’ in every sense it certainly isn’t a stretch to suggest that the Agneepath the angry young man walked on has led over time to the Madhushala of this blog…

3) Two of the country’s most astonishing and well known icons therefore juxtaposed. There is an uncanny quality to the picture. So many histories unfold if one thinks about it. Wasn’t ‘Vijay’ someone who was also rebelling against Gandhi’s order? At least against a certain version of Gandhi who all too often could explain injustice in the present using ‘cosmic’ categories. This was not the Gandhi who refused to accept the rules in South Africa. And then there is Anthony, Manmohan Desai’s favorite child. But Desai was Nehruvian not Gandhian and India too has been the former, not the latter. Thankfully so, I would say. But Gandhi was someone who could often ‘wait’ too much, who could find metaphysical meaning in the suffering of the present. And Vijay precisely could never wait. there was never time enough. And where do you (Amitabh Bachchan) fit in? There is a concentration you portray in that image, even a certain determination. How are these histories united? Gandhi-Vijay-Amitabh Bachchan? Gandhian India still exists. It is still the ‘majority’. ‘Amitabh Bachchan’ represents post-Independence India’s biggest brandname. But what of Vijay? What of this crucial link? What about all his anger and all his rebellion? Where is Vijay today? Isn’t the sadness of contemporary India precisely this? That there is no space for Vijay? All those gestures normalized by the consumption economies of the present? Or almost. No victory is total. The specter keeps returning. We saw it recently with Raavan. at any rate there is a rebel Gandhi and a saint Gandhi. The gap is the one between a political leader who could not wait and an icon who could always find virtue in passivity. But it is also the price Gandhi needed to pay to be canonized. He had to check in rebellion at the door. Vijay couldn’t have dreamed of this. His last stand was that final moment in Agneepath with the verse of your father resonating in his mind and on his tongue. That verse also exhibits a certain militancy. It is not a very Gandhian piece of writing.