Why Bajirao Singham and Chulbul Pandey don’t vote for the same party!

A few weeks back I made a statement on Devgan’s ‘coding’ which some people took exception to. I am expanding on that comment here…

The best way to understand Ajay Devgan’s recent upswing (with Singham being the key film) is to view it through the lens of ‘machismo’. But this understood in a very specific sense. Devgan is a kind of ‘Dirty Harry’ figure for a post-liberalization ‘new India’ much as the Eastwood character represented the return of blue collar white ‘resentment’ after the counter-cultural 60s. Put differently he is the hero of a certain urban (and perhaps more than this) segment who were left out of this entire national narrative in Bollywood. So it is partly about gaining representation through him but also about a big ‘f… you’ sign to the Yashraj/SRK hegemony where the hero was always seen as a more ‘neutered’ type by the standards of this paradigm of macho posturing.


It is very important not to confuse various brands of masala just because they seem loosely similar. Nor should the same be done for various stars doing these films. Limiting myself to the supreme practitioner of this ‘Southern (Telugu) masala’ at the moment, Salman Khan does not at all have the same coding in his films as does Devgan on comparable terrain. To put it a bit tritely Chulbul Pandey and Bajirao Singham do not vote for the same party! Devgan’s coding is much more along nationalistic and in a similar sense ethnic lines, both part of a set that could be loosely called part of the right-leaning constellation. On the other hand Chulbul Pandey emerges out of Desai’s multicultural universe. He is a populist character in the very same strain. But Desai is useful as a reference both ways. If the Salman persona features a mock element always evident in the heroes of the director’s most picaresque narratives, the Amar-Anthony lineage if you will, then Devgan represents the surliness of the Amar character or the guy who never really signed on to this compact! In Salman’s current manifestation the entire Nehruvian-secular compromise can be discerned whereas in Devgan’s similar outings the 80s counter-reaction of the right is equally evident, even if the Yashraj phase delays this by a number of years in cinematic terms. Of course things are not completely as simple as this because there is the ‘Northern’ coding to be considered here which in the domain of popular culture often transcends these right-left divisions. Much as Devgan is (ironically enough given his heritage) a sort of Marathi warrior which is not a coding Amar is necessarily reducible to.

But Devgan’s Singham persona also reveals in some ways the consequences of the Bachchan one-man industry phase in the 80s. of course no Bachchan character in that period was ever remotely reducible to such exclusionary coding (with the possible exception of the son in Aakhree Raasta who always struck me as a bit of a fascist) but at the same time it must be admitted that by plucking out the angry young man from his very well-defined contexts of the 70s and by making him into an agent of ‘replication’ across all sorts of films this Devgan result becomes possible. Stated differently the grand gesturality of the angry young man was very integrally linked to his world, he emerged in organic fashion from his scripts. In the 80s the same macho posturing became independent of the films (for the most part though there are some notable exceptions) as Bachchan’s ‘parallel text’ became much more hegemonic. Even where the gesturality was strongly linked to a narrative as in Lawaaris one can nonetheless discern just how much greater space was being allowed for this to be played out. In other words Vijay’s gesturality is always precisely indexed to his concrete situation while Heera’s always makes room for itself well beyond the ‘demands’ of a specific scene or moment. There are scenes of pure effect in Lawaaris much as there are so in Leone’s great films. The gesturality ‘is’ the point. This is not a criticism of these aesthetic choices per se but it is important to highlight how the latter could be encoded in a different political register, precisely because Bachchan in this manifestation showed everyone (and one could mention his Southern followers in this regard) how to decouple Vijay from his narratives.

And so Devgan’s right-leaning (and for my political tastes somewhat ‘disturbing’.. note the ethnic politics of Singham.. Salman or for that matter Akshay would never have been credible in this part) persona though derived from the Amar character (Desai was always shrewd enough and sincere enough never to write out this figure even if he vastly privilege the Akbar-Anthony combo and the more inclusive ‘Nehruvian’ India they represented) also owes something to the Bachchan ‘decisions’ of the 80s. But here one must also ponder the box office fate of Devgan versus that of Salman on similar terrain. It’s quite clear that Salman’s coalition is larger here than Devgan’s. Even in gender grounds Salman’s impish persona is far less threatening. Which is why Devgan needs ‘mediation’ from time to time. The Singham logic needs speed-breakers because it is not as universal. Here Bol Bachchan becomes an interesting venture. By introducing Abhishek Bachchan it is that other Akbar-Anthony paradigm that is privileged in this instance. Nonetheless Devgan’s own recent genealogy cannot be ignored so here he appears as the mock-version of his Singham persona! This is at any rate a film that takes place on Desai’s turf, not on the Singham one.

Not all ‘rowdies’ are made equal. One must look closely!

PS: I should add here that even Devgan’s ‘fitness’, much more front and center in Singham than it usually is in his other outings, is again not the harmless Salman ‘male bimbo’ sort (though with greater substance these days because of the masala outings) but more assimilable to a right-oriented discourse where (and in the best historical traditions) the nationalist warrior needed to have the right physique and physical regimen to fight off the internal and external intruders. All the ‘physical discipline’ registers and so on.

Should also add that I’m not saying all those who love Devgan are right-wing nationalists or Marathi chauvinists! There is a class-politics angle here but also this other coding. as there is in Dirty Harry. Zizek would say that the latter is quite often a disguise for the former. In my terms when Vijay’s true revolution is thwarted you get the angry young man co-opted by the right. You get his gestures put at the service of something far less emancipatory (if at all).