



This article investigates why and how the Naxal movement, a Marxist-Leninist- Maoist armed revolutionary movement which emerged in May 1967 in India, has been repeatedly addressed, adapted, and accommodated in Indian cinema. As an organized political movement with speci c manifesto and vision of the nature of the state, the Naxal movement attempted to disrupt and dismantle the quasi- feudal Indian social structure and an oppressive Indian state that functioned still under colonial administrative regulation, as caretaker of interests of the powerful classes. In this article, I argue that the Naxal movement helped Indian cinema to map out the history and internal architecture of political dissent in post- independence India and construct a counter-nationalist discourse. The paper aims to evaluate how the Naxal Movement serves as a resource to represent the politics of dissent in India in the 1970s in parallel cinema and as a critique of the neo-liberal policies of the Indian State in the postmillennial Bollywood lms. It aims to analyse selected lms that deal with the Naxal/Maoist movements in India as a counter historiography.




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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Spring Thunder. Revisiting the Naxal Movement in Indian Cinema
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Sanghita Sen
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The Spring Thunder. Revisiting the Naxal Movement in Indian Cinema
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The Spring Thunder1
Revisiting the Naxal Movement in Indian Cinema
Sanghita Sen, University of St Andrews2




Abstract

    This article investigates why and how the Naxal movement, a Marxist-Leninist-
    Maoist armed revolutionary movement which emerged in May 1967 in India, has
    been repeatedly addressed, adapted, and accommodated in Indian cinema. As
    an organized political movement with specific manifesto and vision of the nature
    of the state, the Naxal movement attempted to disrupt and dismantle the quasi-
    feudal Indian social structure and an oppressive Indian state that functioned still
    under colonial administrative regulation, as caretaker of interests of the powerful
    classes. In this article, I argue that the Naxal movement helped Indian cinema
    to map out the history and internal architecture of political dissent in post-
    independence India and construct a counter-nationalist discourse. The paper
    aims to evaluate how the Naxal Movement serves as a resource to represent the
    politics of dissent in India in the 1970s in parallel cinema and as a critique of
    the neo-liberal policies of the Indian State in the postmillennial Bollywood films.
    It aims to analyse selected films that deal with the Naxal/Maoist movements in
    India as a counter historiography.


Introduction

   The socio-political context of India between 1947 and 1970s was tremendously
tumultuous, marked by several mass movements and peasant uprisings that were
led by different Communist organizations. The most influential among these was
the armed revolutionary movement that began in May 1967, known popularly
as the Naxal movement. It closely followed the Chinese Cultural revolution


1
  Radio Peking on 28 June 1967 and an editorial in The People’s Daily (an organ of the Central
Committee, Communist Party of China) on 5 July 1967 used this allusive phrase to refer to the
Naxal Movement: ‘A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India’ [emphasis added]
<https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/peoples-daily/1967/07/05.htm> [accessed
12 November 2017]
2
  I’d like to thank Dennis Hanlon, Syed Sajjad, Omar Ahmed, Grazia Ingravalle and the two
anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback on the draft of this paper.

                                                  Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                         Sanghita Sen


led by Mao Zedong as its model and incorporated Marxist-Leninist principles,
declaring the 1970s as ‘the decade of liberation’. The Naxal movement was the
culmination of other revolutionary peasant movements such as the Telangana
Rebellion3 (1946-1951) as well as the Tebhaga4 (1946-47) that challenged and
aimed to change India’s quasi-feudal social structure. The 1970s was also a decade
of liberation for Indian cinema. It was during this decade that the search for a
film-aesthetics that was distinct from the mainstream reached its culmination.
This led to the flourishing of an alternative film practice through the Indian
Avant Garde and parallel cinema in subsequent decades. Such a cinematic praxis
seems to have partially influenced post-millennial Bollywood5 and indie films
with political contents.
   This article investigates how the Naxal movement has been repeatedly adapted
and accommodated in Indian parallel cinema and Bollywood, albeit through very
different approaches. Though there are other Indian mainstream film industries
that produced films on the Naxal movement, they are considered ‘regional’ –
unlike Bollywood, which is projected not only as India’s ‘national’ cinema but
also a cultural commodity in the global market broadly.6 Despite considerable
differences in aesthetics, content, funding and target audience, both parallel
cinema and Bollywood share a transnational reach through festival circuits
and global distribution channels respectively, unlike Indian regional cinemas.
This transnational reach prompted me to compare films from these two rather
antithetical film practices. In this essay, I therefore explore Indian film history
through close textual and historical analysis within a Marxist framework, so as to
unravel the socio-cultural impact of these films.
   Chronicles of political movements aiming for social change have provided
a recurring motif in film, as exemplified in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin
(Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925) and October (Oktyabr’,1928), Pontecorvo’s The
Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, 1966), Godards’s La Chinoise (1967),
Littin’s The Promised Land (La Tierra Prometida, 1973), and Brocka’s Fight
for Us (Orapronobis, 1989). In the same vein, Indian parallel cinema from the
1970s on has documented the Naxal movement as a pivotal moment in post-
independence India, archiving/constructing the history of the politics of dissent
through cinema. As a thematic kernel, the Naxal movement helped parallel
cinema to align itself to New Wave movements in different parts of the world
in terms of content and aesthetics. It also helped parallel cinema trigger a


3
   The Telangana peasants’ armed struggle was a rebellion against the feudal landlords in the
Telangana region of Hyderabad.
4
  The Tebhaga movement, led by the Kisan Sabha (the peasants’ wing of the Communist Party of
India) demanded two thirds of the harvests for the sharecroppers while a third being given to the
landowning feudal lords.
5
  Here I refer to the post-1991 Mumbai mainstream Hindi film industry after it was accorded the
industry status following the economic liberalization of India.
6
  Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, ed. by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

54
                                      The Spring Thunder


transnational cinema project prior to its formal shaping as a global conceptual
category. Like ‘transnational cinema’, Indian parallel cinema was also a response
‘to the perceived insufficiencies of existing categories such as National Cinema’.7
The Naxal movement further helped this emerging form to represent dissent
in India, both in terms of political activism and the politics of subversive film
practices. These filmmakers rigorously followed both forms of action, seeking
to create a new cinematic language that was distinct from the mainstream. In
place of mainstream narratives that revolved around individuals, parallel cinema
represented ‘the spirit and life breath of a whole people’.8
   Bollywood began to depict the movement only in the late 1990s, after the
decline of parallel cinema and long after the repression of the Naxal movement
by the Indian state. References to Naxalism are interweaved in the plots in the
mainstream and in parallel cinema in different ways. Both filmmaking practices
address issues of nationalism and counter-nationalism in singular and remarkably
different ways, which merit careful study.
   The first part of this paper focuses on a set of texts that invoke active
spectatorship by inviting critical engagement from the audience, and moreover
come to serve as a repertoire of images and thematic motifs for later mainstream
films on the Naxal movement. The second part examines how Bollywood films
are functional to the maintenance of the state’s ideological apparatus despite
their radical content.9 I restrict my argument to The Adversary (Pratidwandi,
Satyajit Ray, 1970), and Calcutta 71 (Kolkata 71, Mrinal Sen, 1972) from parallel
cinema, as well as Squared Formation (Chakravyuh, Prakash Jha, 2012), and
Newton (Amit Masurkar, 2017) from Bollywood.


Chronicling Revolution, Representing Dissent: Indian Parallel Cinema of the 1970s

   The depiction of the Naxal movement on ‘national’ screen matches the
emergence of the Indian parallel cinema inaugurated by Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan
Shome in 1969. There were several reasons behind the choice to represent the
Naxal movement in parallel cinema narratives. Firstly, filmmakers such as Ray
and Sen were deeply dissatisfied with mainstream cinema’s falling (and failing)
standards in terms of maturity, content, stylistic sophistication, and technique.10


7
   Vijaya Devadas, ‘Rethinking Transnational Cinema: The Case of Tamil Cinema’, in Senses of
Cinema, 49 (November 2006) <http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/film-history-conference-papers/
transnational-tamil-cinema/> [accessed 19 October 2017].
8
  Jorge Sanjines, ‘Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema’, in New Latin American
Cinema, ed. by Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 62–70 (p. 63).
9
   For details see Madhav Prasad, ‘Introduction’, in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical
Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 6-14.
10
   Satyajit Ray, ‘What is Wrong with Indian Films?’, in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures:
A Critical Anthology, ed. by Scott MacKenzie (Berkley: University of California Press, 2014), pp.
117-120 (first publ. in Calcutta Statesman (1948)).

                                                                                                55
                                          Sanghita Sen


This led to the search for an alternative idiom which spoke to the international
audience through form and content, yet remained uniquely Indian in its cultural
representation.11 The potential of film form inspired them to use it as a political
tool to appeal to the domestic audience as well. India’s prolonged history of
anticolonial struggle coupled with the left political movements that sought to
transform its quasi-feudal structure created a formidable intellectual class as well
as proletarian contingencies who were waiting to engage in conversations about
social transformations through artistic means. The parallel filmmakers simply
needed to tap in to this social class to counter the pressure of commodification of
film media. Besides, because ‘Bengal [had] been in an increasing state of political
flux’ since the 1960s,12 it became necessary to document this in cinema. By doing
this they were able to establish a link between film and contemporary reality,
assuming their responsibility as artists and embodying underrepresented history.
In one of his interviews Mrinal Sen comments, ‘[t]hat was a time when there was
a lot of unrest in Calcutta and I cannot just pull myself out of the atmosphere
in which I grew…. That is when … I used to bring the physical reality onto the
screen’.13 It was as much a search for the idiom and form as it was for content,
so as to suitably complement their film practice. The filmmakers that shared
the Naxal movement’s sense of desperation and urgency to transform a stagnant
system found apt cinematic and stylistic content within the movement.
   Secondly, the Naxal Movement — with its far-reaching consequences in
Indian society, echoing the transnational revolutionary waves of the late-1960s —
provided both a metaphor and a statement of alignment which was ambivalent in
the case of Ray, but explicit in the case of Sen.14 It also helped to put Indian parallel
cinema in dialogue with the currents of Third Cinema in the mostly apolitical
world cinema of that period. Although some critics explain the sympathetic
representation of the movement on film in terms merely of an artistic infatuation
of filmmakers, there is more to it than this. Parallel filmmakers sought to capture
the 1970s in their films in order to embody contemporary history; this would be
impossible without addressing the Naxal movement. For Mrinal Sen ‘the most
important purpose of cinema is political commentary and documentation’.15
He mentions serving three mistresses while making films, ‘the text (the subject),
the medium (the language of cinema) and my own time’.16 Such a political
conundrum seems to have moved Ray too, who had avoided political content


11
   Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen, ‘Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement’, in Film Manifestos and
Global Cinema Cultures, pp. 165-168 (first publ. in Close Up (1968)).
12
   Indrani Majumdar, ‘Postscript’, in Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2003), p. 283.
13
    From Mrinal Sen: An Era in Cinema (Rajdeep Paul, 2016) <https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=KnZd-uNXlSk&t=629s> [accessed 9 September 2017].
14
   Ibidem.
15
   Ibidem.
16
   Mrinal Sen, Always Being Born (New Delhi: Stellar Publishers, 2006), p. 85 [emphasis in the
original].

56
                                      The Spring Thunder


in his films before making The Adversary in 1970. The 1970s were, moreover,
the decade in which India witnessed the Emergency for 21 months, between 25
June 1975 and 21 March 1977, which effectively impaired Indian democracy.
It was also the epoch in which Ray ‘embarked in a documentary interlude’,17
making his Calcutta Trilogy: The Adversary, Company Limited (Seemabaddha,
1971) and The Middleman (Jana Aranya, 1976). He used documentary footage
of ‘Calcutta streets and actual political demonstrations’,18 that he filmed along
with ambient sound and montage to represent on screen the spirit of the time.
By representing the Naxal movement, filmmakers, like Ray, chronicled their own
politics of dissent and subversion while creating a cinematic counter-culture that
responded to the viscerally ‘Pavlovian’ mainstream cinema, which either stayed
away from the controversy or made highly clandestine reference to the political
chaos.
   The depiction of the Naxal movement and its impact on people offered these
filmmakers a further opportunity to expose the Repressive State Apparatus
(RSAs)19 such as the police, government, judiciary and its different wings as well
as semi-government organizations. These RSAs followed the colonial model,
albeit used in post-colonial India to forge a consensual equilibrium between the
ruling class and their subjects. For example, in the first interview sequence of
The Adversary, the exchanges between the members of the interview board and
Siddhartha, the protagonist, for a Government job, exposes the strong prejudice
of the Indian state towards the ongoing Communist movements in different
parts of the world (fig. 1). Siddhartha’s opinion, referring to the Vietnam war,
and the people’s remarkable heroism resisting it, as the most extraordinary
achievement of humanity in twentieth century over the moon-landing, makes
the interviewers/authority figures visibly disturbed. Baffled by his answer, one
of the interviewers asks him: ‘Are you a communist?’. The interview sequences
in general and this question, in particular, immediately solicit a reference to
McCarthyism, the communist witch-hunt and the trial of the Hollywood ten
in post-World War II America. Moreover, the interview sequences in the film
resemble custodial interrogation and courtroom trials that elliptically represent
the Naxal activists’ plight under an oppressive regime (fig. 2). This interview/
interrogation motif recurs in other Indian films that depict the Naxal movement.
Ray subtly incorporates his own critique of the nation into the narrative. When
asked who the Prime Minister of Britain was at the time of independence,
Siddhartha casually enquires: ‘Whose independence, Sir?’ (fig. 3), immediately
invoking the communist slogan of the period: ‘Yeh Azadi jhuta hai [This is a false
independence]’.
   The Naxal movement helped parallel cinema unmask the vacuity of


17
   Majumdar, p. 283.
18
   Ibidem.
19
   See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

                                                                                              57
                                Sanghita Sen




         Fig. 1: Hegemonic paranoia towards revolutionary politics




     Fig. 2: Job interviews elliptically represent custodial interrogations

58
                                      The Spring Thunder




                               Fig. 3: This is a false independence


development discourse by the state on one hand, and the condition of the
disenfranchised populace suffering from the trauma of partition, social inequality,
brutal poverty and hunger combined with unemployment, on the other. After
the fateful interview, Siddhartha goes to an airconditioned theatre to avoid
the scorching sun of the Calcutta road. As he enters the hall, the mandatory
propaganda documentary on a five-year plan for national growth, was playing.
Without paying any attention to that, he closes his eyes to take a nap. However,
his siesta is ruined by a blast that references a Naxal bombing.
   Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy, comprising Interview (1971), Calcutta 71
(1972), and The Guerrilla Fighter (Padatik, 1973), similarly represents these
concerns. There is a gradual progression in presentation of Sen’s cinematic
polemic in the trilogy through which he investigates the cause and effect of
the angry outburst through the Naxal movement in Indian society. Interview
foregrounds the collective disillusionment of the disenfranchised Indians about
the nature of the Indian state and its Nehruvian socialist mixed economy, with
the protagonist serving as an allegory of the nation.20 Having introduced the
class-based structural deprivation of ordinary people, Sen goes on to explore


20
  The economic policy of the development model adopted by Nehru, the first Indian Prime
Minister was that of a mixed economy based on socialist ideals, with the private and public sector
coexisting.

                                                                                               59
                                         Sanghita Sen




               Fig 4: Radical revolutionary politics as the language of resistance



further the long history of exploitation in India under colonialism together with
feudalism, and mass movements resisting this coalition, in order to contextualize
the Naxal movement as its vertex (fig. 4). The voice over narration in the opening
sequence of Calcutta 71 epitomizes the spirit of The Communist Manifesto. The
film critiques the colonial nature of the Indian state and advocates the need
for decolonization for a complete social transformation. Through the objective
precision of a documentary, the film represents the ‘dialectics of hunger’21 in
India highlighting the interconnection between the infamous Bengal famine of
1943 and the Food movement of 1959, demanding food security, with other
movements building the base for the Naxal movement in the late 1960s. Sen
points out: ‘I wanted to interpret the restlessness, the turbulence of the period
that is 1971 and what it is due to […]. What we wanted to do in [Calcutta 71]
was to define history, put it in its right perspective’.22 An eclectic interspersing of
contemporary documentary footage, location shooting, jump cuts and montage
marked Sen’s aesthetics of cinema of the oppressed, constructed agitprop; giving
his Calcutta Trilogy the look of a newsreel thereby helped him to archive his
‘time’ and the cityscape in cinema.

21
   Udayan Gupta, ‘Introducing Mrinal Sen’, Jump Cut, 12–13 (1976), 9–10 <http://www.ejumpcut.
org/archive/onlinessays/jc12-13folder/MrinalSen.html> [accessed 20 March 2017].
22
   Ibidem.

60
                                        The Spring Thunder


   The Calcutta Trilogies of Ray and Sen are complementary, with each film
providing important blocks in the counter-historiographic discourses on
contemporary India that they construct. While Sen’s films present the social
and political realities from the perspectives of direct political engagement of
the protagonists, Ray represents the view of those disengaged from political
activism yet equally affected by it. Calcutta 71 represents the memories of
underdevelopment and hunger23 whereas Adversary foregrounds the social,
cultural and ideological discordance that symbolize the rapture within the
nation. Ray’s style is more akin to Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave,
while Sen’s is motivated by the aesthetics of hunger and the imperfect cinema
of Latin America. Their films on the Naxal movement work simultaneously as
visible evidence of the political mayhem and state-sponsored violence against
political dissent in India, and the visual archive of political activism in Calcutta.
   The Naxal movement was instrumental to parallel cinema’s impetus to go
beyond the ‘swadeshi enterprise’24 of that national cinema which sought to
validate the nation-building project, by uncritically recycling cultural stereotypes
of ‘Indianness’ on screen. The political elite considered the Naxal revolt
against the Indian state an anti-national insurgency that destabilized consensual
equilibrium. It is not surprising therefore that national cinema, working as
what Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA),25 abstained from
representing it while the movement was at its helm.


Spectacularizing the Revolution: Bollywood Revisits the Naxal Movement

  While parallel cinema actively ventured to free itself from the ‘swadeshi
enterprise’, Bollywood consistently held onto it. After being accorded with


23
   This film is thematically and aesthetically aligned with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of
Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo, 1968) and Glauber Rocha’s Land in Anguish
(Terra em Transe, 1967), demonstrating Rocha’s influential aesthetics of hunger.
24
   M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 2. The term Swadeshi (literally meaning indigenous, or of one’s own
country) has a close association with India’s nationalist struggle for Independence from the colonial
rule. The term swadeshi enterprise was first used by noted Indian film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha
in 1987; Madhava Prasad borrows the term to refer to specific characteristics of Indian popular
cinema.
25
   ISAs, as Althusser points out are institutions/configurations that remains formally outside the
state control, yet which propagate the ideology of the state. ISAs are different from the RSA in their
apparent detachment from the state. Whereas RSAs are formal instruments through which the
state functions, ISAs function subliminally to realise the same goal, i.e. to establish and perpetuate
the ideology and the hegemony of the state. In addition to education, religious institutions, media,
and family, ISAs also include the social media platforms and cultural festivals that disseminate the
ethnocratic Hindutva ideology of the present regime. However, prior to the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) coming to power with an absolute majority in 2014, Bollywood and Indian TV were the most
potent state apparatuses used for ideological conditioning of the masses towards the Hindutva
ideology.

                                                                                                   61
                                         Sanghita Sen


industry status in the 1990s, following the official denouncement of the Nehruvian
economy in favour of a neoliberal one by the Indian state, Bollywood experienced
a dramatic change in terms of funding, marketing, distribution, exhibition and the
target audience in the process of becoming a global cultural commodity for India.
Multiplexes transformed the film-viewing experience into ‘an elite affair’, and
Bollywood films were gentrified to cater to the changing audience demography.26
Ganti demonstrates how Bollywood began to erase traces of ‘poverty, labour,
and rural life’ from the mid-1990s as part of this gentrification process.27 Post-
millennial Bollywood films use the Naxal movement to bring these traces back
within the visual style to make them ‘realistic’. Like the parallel filmmakers, the
intent of responding to the contemporary political situation was also at work
for some of the directors while depicting the Naxal movement. Prakash Jha
notes: ‘I strive to create realistic images […] content […] weave everything into
a popular grammar […] make it engaging because everybody has to see the film,
and it has to compete with other films. It’s a big battle for me to package my
stories for a commercial audience’.28 During this period people made films with
the overseas market, online exhibition platforms and international festivals in
mind. Unlike the 1990s, these films aimed to reach to audiences beyond the
Indian diaspora. It was therefore imperative for them to break the popular myth
about Bollywood films as musicals, offering fresh perspectives. This led the
scriptwriters and directors to look for ‘realistic’ and relatable issues, to introduce
novelty while representing the ground reality about India. Naxalism and Maoism
— with their long histories of conflict with the Indian state — made Bollywood
films appear realistic and relatable to the international audience, thus acquiring
parallel cinema’s ‘artistic seriousness’ through the co-option of political content,
without disturbing the syntax of cinematic spectacle and attraction. Following
Hollywood, Bollywood too ventured ‘to create a “world cinema” gaze within
a commercial […] framework’, by modifying its representational priority and
pattern.29
   Besides this, a change in the post-1992 Indian political scenario may also be
responsible for Bollywood’s shift in representational priorities. Prasad shows
the outward expansion of the political spectrum during this era in India. Rising
Hindutva nationalism attempted to redefine ‘political unity on a communal
foundation’ by appropriating of the ‘fragile national project,’ whilst rampaging
capitalism accompanying globalization eroded the function of the state as a
political constraint.30 There was also the emergence of Islamist terrorism as a


26
   Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Hyderabad:
Orient Blackswan, 2012), p. 77.
27
   Ivi., p. 79
28
   Samuel Wigley ‘Facing Deadlock: Prakash Jha on Chakravyuh’ (2014), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/
news/prakash-jha-chakravyuh> [accessed on 21 April 2017].
29
   Deborah Shaw, ‘Babel and the Global Hollywood Gaze’, Situations, 4.1 (Fall–Winter 2011),
11-31 (p. 11).
30
   Prasad, pp. 8-9.

62
                                      The Spring Thunder


backlash to Hindutva fundamentalism — its pinnacle being the demolition of
the Babri Mosque by the Sangh combine.31 Outside this religious fundamentalist
politics, the Maoist movement was re-consolidated through the Red Corridor,32
a reaction to neoliberal policies of the Indian state. The representation of
Naxalites as a radicalized group of individuals in Bollywood, such as in Chamku
(Kabeer Kaushik, 2008), Reign of the Overlord (Sarkar Raj, Ram Gopal Varma,
2008),33 Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee, 2012),34 and M.K.B.K.M. (Matru Ki Bijlee
Ka Mandola, Vishal Bhardwaj, 2013) appear as non-communal secular ways of
referencing terrorism and political disruption in India. In this section I discuss
how in two post-millennial Bollywood films, i.e. Squared Formation and Newton,
the Naxal movement is used as the narrative backdrop and the source of drama
contributing to their genericity. Both films represent a balanced picture of the
Naxal movement and the oppressive role of the Indian state, while attempting
to unravel the issue of corruption and the corporation-politician nexus in India.
However, the films are designed in conformity with the nationalist discourse that
promote the idea of the nation as a benevolent family with the government acting
as protective patriarchs.
   As part of its narrative, Squared Formation represents the reinvigoration of
Maoist influences as a counter point to the intensified neo-liberal policies of the
Indian state, leading to a Naxalite declaration of war against the nexus of the
state and multinational-corporations, over the acquisition of natural-resources-
rich land — which seriously impaired the environment and the rights of the tribal
populations, as well as the socially marginalized Indians inhabiting those spaces.
The conflict escalated to such an extent that the Indian Prime Minister declared
Naxalism as ‘the biggest internal security challenge’, seemingly impairing ‘the
country’s growth’.35 In labelling Naxals thus, he echoed his political predecessor,
sharing this opinion as a pretext to declare the Emergency in 1975 to deal with
the projected ‘threat’ from the voices of the dissent. Jha’s film includes the Prime
Minister’s comment and a brief history of the Naxal movement in India, which
is delivered through fictional TV news. This was to introduce the movement as
the backdrop of his film, immediately establishing a foreboding atmosphere to
launch dramatic tension. Instead of a disclaimer, the film begins with a ‘claimer’
that it ‘is based on real-life incidents and characters and nothing is coincidental’.

31
    Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan used the term for the outfit
popularly known as the Sangh Parivar comprising Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Visva Hindu
Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal (BD) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that led the demolition of the
controversial Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992 completely transforming the nature of Indian
political scenario. This event marks the watershed moment for the rise of the ethnocratic Hindutva
fundamentalism in India. See Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan RSS,
School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Sage, 2008).
32
   The name of the extensive area covering more than 100 districts in eastern, central and southern
India, strongly influenced by Maoist insurgency.
33
   Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part 2 (1974).
34
   The film is a Bollywood adaptation of Costa Gavras’ Z (1969).
35
   Manmohan Singh, ‘Naxalism Biggest Threat to Internal Security’, Hindu, 24 May 2010, p. 1.

                                                                                                63
                                        Sanghita Sen


Interestingly, although the film denounces its apparent ‘fictionality’ through a
‘claimer’, the action of the film takes place in a fictional space named Nandighat.
   Squared Formation, a well-researched film on Naxalism in contemporary India,
is a political thriller about friendship, estrangement, fratricide, political solidarity,
corruption and mis-governance, cast in the Mahabharatik mythical mould. The
story revolves around three friends who went to college together. Two of them,
Adil Khan (Arjun Rampal) and Rhea Menon (Esha Gupta) become police officers.
The third friend, Kabir (Abhay Deol) drops out of the police training academy,
unable to cope with the bureaucratic hierarchy, leading to estrangement among the
group of friends. The title of the film, Chakravyuha, a highly complicated military
formation used in the fratricidal battle of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, refers to
a tragic episode in the epic. In it, Abhimanyu, the 16-year-old son of Arjuna, knew
how to break this formation but did not know how to get out of it. Consequently,
after voluntarily getting into it, he was trapped and was killed by seven other great
warriors — all blood relatives. This term acquired proverbial significance in several
modern Indian languages, referring to a situation that does not allow anyone
to escape unharmed. The title of the film plays out the metaphorical meaning,
signifying an inescapable situation that Kabir voluntarily puts himself into to help
Adil, only to be killed by him at the end. The film also uses the fratricidal reference,
associating it to the Naxal movement, which saw the murder of revolting Indians
by compatriots serving the state. Adil and his wife Rhea are posted in Nandighat,
a fictional location in Madhya Pradesh, to subdue the Naxal influence and enable
a multinational corporation to acquire the tribal land for a business project. Kabir,
a talented telecommunication engineer, volunteers to infiltrate the Naxal guerrillas
to provide inside information to help Adil complete his mission. However, after
living with the revolutionaries for some time, Kabir begins to sympathize with their
plight and joins them. This dismantles the plan as Kabir then becomes a threat
to the Indian state. Adil and Rhea lead an attack on the Naxal guerrillas, killing
Kabir along with a lot of his comrades. Though the film did not perform well in
the domestic market, it received the Indian Maoists’ approval for its depiction
of their politics. With objections for certain exaggerations, the Maoists expressed
their gratitude for political representation on the big screen.36
   Masurkar, a successful director of critically acclaimed independent films,
brilliantly blends necessary components from the national context with
‘transnational socio-political issues’37 contextualizing his black comedy, drama
and political satire Newton in alignment with the ‘growing discourse of politics
as an international issue’.38 Though Newton depicts Indian elections as central


36
   Jaideep Deogharia, ‘Maoists Give 4 Stars to “Chakravyuh”’, Times of India, 11 November
2012 <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ranchi/Maoists-give-4-stars-to-Chakravyuh/
articleshow/17176710.cms?referral=PM> [accessed 21 February 2018].
37
   Shaw, p. 12.
38
   Alex Lines, ‘Adelaide Film Festival: Week 2 Report’, Film Enquiry, 24 October 2017 <https://
www.filminquiry.com/adelaide-film-festival-week-2-report/> [accessed 20 February 2018].

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to India’s democracy, it also represents several social issues that Jha’s film also
addresses. The film depicts the Maoist insurgency as politics of disruption
impairing the nation’s growth and subtly pointing to a consequent disillusionment
of the tribal people with the Naxals (fig. 5). Masurkar uses elliptical references
to the Naxal movement in his film. Apart from the opening sequence, in which
a group of masked armed men kill a politician for having ignored the Naxal’s
call to boycott the election, the reference to Naxal/Maoist politics is present
only through graffiti and discussion among characters in the film. In terms of
filmmaking practice, Masurkar seems to do what Alejandro González Iñárritu
does in Hollywood: creating hybrid texts as part of the cinema of globalization,
amalgamating elements from both national and world cinema to ‘create thematic
links’.39 The first postmillennial Bollywood film to receive a government grant of
INR ten million, Newton had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, where
it was awarded the CICAE 40 award for the best film before its release in India.
A massive box office success that received critical acclaim in India and abroad,
this film lauds the electoral systems as a pillar of participatory democracy, leading
to social progress as a binary of the revolutionary politics of the Maoists (fig. 6).
   Despite being critical of the neoliberal policies of the Indian state run by ‘the
coalition of bourgeoisie, the rural rich and the bureaucratic elite’,41 corruption,
the systemic violence targeted against the disenfranchised, these films do not
rigorously challenge the status quo. They fit the fourth category of Jean-Louis
Comolli and Paul Narboni’s classification as films with ‘an explicitly political
content […] but which do not effectively criticize the ideological system in
which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language
and its imagery’.42 Consequently, political dissent is either tokenized without
repercussions or is memorialized as a deviant political action. This helps
Bollywood create a narrative of permissive ‘difference’ while working as the
ISA. For example, Squared Formation represents the Naxal movement as the
rural/tribal India’s struggle against the hegemony of the state (fig. 7). It makes
subtle references to Maoist politics by using Mao Zedong quotes that serve as
slogans. Ironically, a police officer in charge of subduing the movement counters
a crucial slogan to turn the villagers against the revolutionaries and win them
over as abiding subjects of the Indian state (fig. 8). Nevertheless, compared to
other postmillennial Bollywood films on the same subject, Squared Formation
tries to present a balanced picture of reality through its subtly subversive
narrative, representing the contestations of the competitive patriarchy in India.
The subversive masculinity of Maoist activists is shown in combative conflict



39
   Shaw, p. 13.
40
   Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai.
41
   Prasad, p. 7.
42
   Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, ‘Cinema, Ideology, Criticism’, Screen, 12.1 (1971), 27–38
(p. 32).

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                                          Sanghita Sen




         Fig. 5: Maoist politics as an archetype of counter-hegemonic resistance in India




            Fig. 6: Newton: critiquing heavy military intervention by the Indian state




     Fig. 7: Police-politician-corporate nexus working against the interest of the dispossessed

66
                                     The Spring Thunder




       Fig. 8: The Indian state appropriates the revolutionary slogans used by the Naxals


with the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of the state.43 Images of gun-wielding guerrillas
fighting against the state have been repeatedly employed in films thanks to their
spectacular potential to concretize on-screen the invisible political expediencies.
   Unlike parallel cinema, Bollywood films are teleological and ‘Pavlovian’. They
trigger a passive spectatorship and are made in consonance with the ‘conceptual
or belief system’44 of the Indian state, conforming to the mainstream cinema
as part of the Ideological State Apparatus. It is Pavlovian because it elicits
‘conditioned response […] based on the prediction and control of observable
behaviour’.45 These films are pedagogical and authoritarian insofar as they
limit the viewer’s analytic capability while legitimizing an authorized version
of nationalism and proscribe the politics of dissent that strongly opposes
the oppressive regime of the state. As socio-politically conscious filmmakers
repeatedly making films on contemporary issues, both Jha and Masurkar
provide nuanced depictions that are strewn with representational stereotypes
and subtle contradictions. For example, intercommunal friendship (Adil and
Kabir), interstate and intercommunal marriage (Adil and Rhea Menon), a good
Muslim in charge of a counter-terrorist operation working under a corrupt
Hindu minister and complicit bosses, naïve and helpless tribal subjects, a
trigger-happy Naxal guerrilla (the masked figure in Newton), a hapless non-
committal government employee (Loknath in Newton) and an extra-cautious
hypersensitive government official (Newton) are some of the clichés they use in
their films in conformity with the prescriptive nationalism.


43
    R.W. Connell, Gender (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002); R.W. Connell and James W.
Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society, 19.6
(2005), 829-859.
44
   Prasad, p. 7.
45
   Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2001), p. 28.

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                                       Sanghita Sen


   Despite foregrounding crucial issues of gender, oppression, state-sponsored
violence, and the patriarchal nature of the Indian state, these films end predictably
by undermining the dissenting contingents that disrupt the projected ‘consensual
equilibrium’ within the nation. They articulate both the official ‘story’ and myths
of competing masculinities in India, in conformity with the ideology of the State.


Conclusion

   Contrary to parallel cinema, which aimed to create an audience for political
cinema through active engagement, these Bollywood films stick to the usual
Hindi-film formula to weave in political content conforming to popular tastes.
Hence, in such contexts, the Naxal movement is reduced to ‘a backdrop’,
a ‘commodity capital’ in a story that is about individuals and not about the
collective. The radical politics turns into a commodity capital because of its use as
the source of drama to contribute to the films’ genericity while being dissociated
from its immediate historical contexts, incidentally promoting the prescribed
nationalism of Bollywood’s ‘cinema of consensus’.46 Interestingly, revolutionary
politics is appropriated, by Bollywood as the nation’s nemesis on one hand, and
to accommodate a critique of the post-1991 neo-liberal policies of the Indian
state on the other.
   The most distinguishing difference between the parallel cinema and post-
millennial Bollywood films is the presence and absence of history as a continuum.
The former tries to place the Naxal movement as part of the historical continuum
of India and a consequential, collective reaction to the systemic exploitation
and structural oppression of poorer Indians. The latter uses the Naxal/Maoist
movement as an isolated event without a past and a future, merely as a source
of dramatic conflict of the film narrative. Inspired by various counter-cinema
movements, from the French New Wave to Latin American Third Cinema,
parallel cinema found in the Naxal Movement a ready set of political arguments
that were consonant with both their own political alignments and their ambitions
to revitalize Indian cinema. This entailed an explicit rejection of mainstream
film style, in accordance with traditional Marxist views on the interrelationship
between form and content.47 In post-millennial Bollywood films, the revolutionary
content, again as a convenient source of familiar political critiques, was imported
into a wholly conventional aesthetic framework, with the result that the original
critique is reduced into an empty signifier by being evacuated of its ‘ideological
dynamics’,48 and historical decontextualization. While parallel cinema was in
dialogue with the more radical currents of world cinema, the postmillennial


46
   Eric Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus’, in Cinema
and Nation, ed. by Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 260-277.
47
   Sanjines, p. 62.
48
   Ibidem.

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                                The Spring Thunder


Bollywood films share a common premise with cinema of globalization,
representing political repression through more conventional means. As such,
they mostly appropriate content from parallel cinema, and to a lesser extent
its style (deprived of its political import), in the same way that parallel cinema
borrowed from world cinema. In that, Bollywood films with political content are
in league with a number of Latin American popular films such as Pablo Larrain’s
No (2012), Caetano’s Chronicle of an Escape (Crónica de una fuga, 2006) and
Puenzo’s The Official Story (La historia oficial, 1985).




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