Raj Kapoor’s Nehruvian hero, Nargis’s sacrificial mother, Shah Rukh Khan’s consumable hero are all manifestations of national fears and dreams conversing on the communal stage of Hindi cinema. Presumably because the disillusionment with ascribing the Indian nation to the mother figure reached its zenith in the 1970s with Gandhi’s 1971 rallying slogan ‘Indira Is India, India Is Indira,’ a new vessel was in need. Disrupting notions of marginality or integration, the ‘angry young man’ became the visceral embodiment of the democratic national and provided a popular mobilisation through Amitabh Bachchan’s renditions of the troubled figure. Films like Deewaar bridged the gap between what had not been cinematically articulated until that moment: the pre-liberation dreams of decolonisation and the palpable disenchantment with the state.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, that medal will be awarded now, which every police officer desires to wear on his chest.’ These are Deewaar’s first lines of dialogue; a story of two brothers and their radically different life paths.
दीवार
Bachchan’s dispossessed rebel defied the systematic political corruption upheld by his alter ego; his brother birthed by the same mother/nation. Focused on the ruptures of the family, now rendered irrevocably split, Chopra’s film becomes the ground for a civil war between state and community. Eighteen years after Nargis’s ‘Radha’ became the cinematic paradigm of sacrificial matriarchy by killing her own son in order to restore the social order of her village (Mother India), Sumitra is called on stage to participate in the celebration of her son’s killing (Deewaar), calling into question just how benevolent and just an act of filicide can truly be. The sacrifice has not mended any of the nation’s wounds, only allowed for a facade of justice to cover up the schism. The Indian national has been evaluated and found wanting.