Hazaar Chauraasi Ki Ma

No, this is not a critique of the movie. Cinematically there seems to be nothing wrong with it. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I can spot a good movie when I see one. My definition of a good movie is one that makes people think.

I watched the movie over the weekend after borrowing the DVD from the local public library. It set off many thoughts in me.

This movie (based on a book of the same name by Mahashweta Devi) is the story of the mother of a Naxalite. I don’t remember the name of the guy who played the Naxalite. But Jaya Bachchan plays the mother’s role. One does not need to explain her acting skills to anybody. Indeed, the rest of the cast including Seema Biswas, Anupam Kher and Nandita Das also do an excellent job of portraying their characters, though Nandita Das seems a bit raw.

But what is wrong with the movie? Nothing it would seem. But there is something that does not seem right. What is it?

The message. This is a movie that attempts to justify the communist ideology that gave birth to the Naxalbari movement using the anguish of a mother who has lost her favourite son, killed in an encounter by the “other side”. This was an ideology that said, “It is right to do whatever it takes to achieve revolution”. In my opinion, it is a very selfish and foolhardy ideology.
Firstly, it assumes that everybody wants the same things that the followers of the ideology want. Secondly, it maps human relations in very black and white terms – a kind of “You are with us or against us”. Thirdly, it believes that there is only one “true way” to achieve their aims – their own.

The first two points are interconnected. The gang of youth in the movie are fired by the passion for achieving justice and equality in society. They also passionately believe that “revolution” and a “class struggle” is the only way to do it. They believe that all existing institutions have to be uprooted or destroyed before starting afresh. Their thinking does not take into consideration the various factors that make people think the way they do. The very people whose cause was being championed by these people may not have wanted justice and equality to the exclusion of everything else. People are always willing to make tradeoffs. No one desire can overwhelm everything else. Maybe such ideologies were created by individuals who saw the injustice in the world and thought, “Ah, the best way to have justice and equality is to ensure that everybody has exactly the same things that everybody else has.” This seems like a logical thing, but it is too simplistic. We have to find out what makes people happy rather than telling them “Listen to me, this is what is going to make you happy. And if it does not, you are a traitor to the cause!”

The movie shows that these people had their hearts in the right place. The most basic ideas of communism itself are quite harmless – equality, justice, power to the people etc. But, where they lose track is in how they want to achieve it. Civilisation is not written using a pencil for it to be erased and rewritten easily. It is etched deep into people and no “revolution” can make it disappear completely. There is a meeting scene shown in the movie where some of the revolutionaries are discussing their course of action. They talk about going to the villages to “get the people to our side”. Don’t the people know what they want? What relevance does Lenin have to the poor villager who is only concerned with getting two square meals a day? On the other hand, these educated youth are more interested in implementing an idea that sounds good and rational. No one stops to think whether it is sensible.

The movie is about the mother discovering her son after his death by meeting his acquaintances. But there is a strange quirk in the movie. Based on her son’s philosophy, she starts thinking about herself more now while previously, she thought about the entire family. While on the one hand, her new found assertion is in keeping with her coming out of the “oppressed” class, on the other hand, this does not go well with the ideology that abhors individualism. How are these two reconciled? There are no answers in the movie, at least, none that I could see.

The best part of the movie comes at the very end during the engagement of one of the daughters. It shows a “revolutionary poet” dressed in fine silks, hobnobbing with the elite. And quite rightly, the mother draws the conclusion that all the “revolution” is a farce. But, the impression that is left behind is that the problem is in the people and not in the ideology, and this is carried through to the end of the movie.

While on the subject of ideologies and “right ways” and “wrong ways”, I also came to think about the ideology on the other end of the spectrum – the kind espoused by the RSS and its affiliates. These people are dead against the communists. But come to think of it, is there really any difference between them?

They too divide society between “us” and “them”. They too assume that whatever they want is what everybody wants. And finally, they seek to tell everybody else what they should think. They have simplistic answers to complex problems, and the wrong answers to the right problems. Most importantly, both ideologies draw their inspiration from a persecution complex – the communists in terms of justice and these people in terms of religion. What then is the difference?

Both of them appeal to the basest, most primordial of human instincts, for who could ignore the cry, “We are in danger! We have to save ourselves!”

Most of these ideologies are self-serving in a way. They draw attention to a danger that nobody would have noticed before, but then they also say that they have a solution to it. The surest way of keeping clear of these people is to say “I am not committing myself to any ideology. I will judge them by their actions and my own standards of right and wrong. Most importantly, nobody is going to tell me what those standards should be.”