‘I don’t think my films Black Friday, Gulaal, Dev D would have been made today,’ Anurag Kashyap astutely remarked in a recent interview with India Today. The depth of his statement resonated with me as I discovered the viral video showing Sunny Deol ‘shushing’ a woman hoping to snap a selfie with him. Many people related Deol’s behaviour to the recent success of his chest-thumping, hand-pump plucking, jingoistic drama Gadar 2, which opened at the box office with a whopping Rs 40 crore on August 11.
The stark contrast between Anurag Kashyap and Sunny Deol’s worlds is hard to miss. While Kashyap grapples with creative restraint due to the prevailing political climate, Deol capitalises on the same to rejuvenate his career. But history never forgets, and nor does the Internet. While propaganda driven films, such as The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story and now Gadar 2, strike gold at the box office, relevant and thought-provoking cinema quietly makes its presence felt thanks to OTT platforms. A powerful example of this is Shoojit Sircar‘s Madras Cafe, which is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
The film turns a decade old today, but it stands unwavering as a testament to the kind of audacious cinema that is gradually fading from the silver screen. Few Hindi films, if any, have explored the subject of the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka and the failure of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Yet, Shoojit delves into this crucial and controversial issue with the ease of a seasoned journalist delivering hard facts during prime time, which again is an increasingly rare sight.
Madras Cafe offers an intricate narrative of India’s involvement in the Sri Lankan civil war, which ultimately led to the harrowing mass genocide of the Tamil ethnic minority and became a catalyst for the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In an era where the ‘josh’ is always high and we are inundated with nationalist films which are only about glorious victories, Madras Cafe depicts the pyrrhic nature of war, while marking the failures in red.
Shoojit refuses to go down the path of arrogant bravado, instead offering a stark depiction of how a corrupt cog in the machinery can derail a nation’s critical mission, tamper its global reputation, put its ex-prime minister’s life threatening risk and, most importantly of all, take the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. And he does this through the character of alcohol chugging Balakrishnan (based on a real-life person KV Unnikrishnan), who took bribes in exchange for top secret information about India’s mission in Sri Lanka.
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Conventionally, when a nation’s fate hangs in the balance on the big screen, a charismatic hero emerges to single-handedly save the day. While Madras Cafe features a massy star, John Abraham, it avoids portraying him as a messiah. Instead, the film opens with John’s character drowning his sorrows in alcohol, recounting the tale of his inability to protect the ex-prime minister. Also to his credit, Shoojit didn’t succumb to the temptation to narrate an alternate history, Inglorious Basterds-style. Instead, he firmly concluded the film with the chilling assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by a sombre note acknowledging the countless innocent lives lost during the unending civil conflict.
Madras Cafe is a poignant work of cinema that needs to be celebrated and promoted, much like other films of its ilk that would likely struggle to see the light of day if released in today’s climate. Some of these include Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti, Pranav Singh’s Shorgul, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider and Hansal Mehta’s Shahid.
In his statement, Anurag Kashyap added, “The things that we need and the things that are done are two different things.” But these ferocious pieces of cinema proudly exist, offering an escape from the cacophony of hatred. All we have to do is put on our headphones and “shush” the noise. After all, their versions seem truer than our present reality.
