Column

Sotto voce

The movie Naya Daur, when it first came out, was supposed to be about a New India, an India that was slowly shedding off its old, colonially-imposed baggage and moving on to greater horizons. From its name to its theme to even its songs, it was to showcase the robustness of new thinking, which we today call Nehruvian.

It was Jawaharlal Nehru himself who had urged the film industry (there was no Bollywood then) to go forth and make films on “nation building”. His plans for a modern India had caught the imagination of a nation barely coming out of its Partition trauma — by the time Naya Daur was released the talk was about five year plans, building dams, industrialisation and above all, self-reliance. Sahir Ludhianvi’s song, ‘Main Bambai ka Babu’, sung on screen by Johnny Walker, captures that mood well. This was Nehru’s mantra — it soon became the nation’s.

But India was a land of villages and turning that into an industrial giant was not going to be easy. Some of the paradox is visible in Naya Daur — in the plot itself and its thinking. It marries the old, traditional, Gandhian if you will, worldview of the “nobility” of India’s rural life with the forward-looking vision of Nehru.

The plot is fairly simple — a happy village, where people lead simple lives, their time spent singing, dancing and falling in love, and working for a benign factory owner. Enter owner’s yuppie son, full of new management ideas of upgrading the machinery, which will render many old-timers unemployed. He also wants to bring in a bus to improve the local transport service, till then provided by the local hero with his tonga. The villagers protest and the stage for a conflict is set — it all ends happily when, in a race, that tonga defeats the bus. The crowds cheer the hero, the villain is bested and the village goes back to its traditional ways.

Now what is the conclusion that one would draw from this? That modernisation is bad and must be fought tooth and nail. That rustics and not city lickers know everything. And that capitalists are villains. This last idea is helped along by showing the young son as a nasty, brutal and profits-at-any-cost kind of baddie, played in his usual smooth style by Jeevan. But what chance does he have before the Ram-like hero Dilip Kumar?

Capitalists are always shown as venal and villainous in Hindi films, but frankly, what was Jeevan’s crime? That he wanted to invest in the best technology, whether in his factory or in the transport sector? True, some redundancies would follow, but the eventual result would probably benefit the village and the district as a whole. But who had the patience to understand that?

Now Naya Daur itself has been coloured, to bring it to a new, young, multiplex audience. The patina of age lends it a ‘classic’ like status. But I doubt that the popcorn-eating youth are likely to beat a path to see the film their parents raved over, because the film is slow, almost tedious, compared to the fast-edited movies of today. I may be proved wrong of course.

But, whether the film is of current interest or not, the story certainly is, because though we have advanced much in the last 50-odd years, some of the basic conflicts of that era are still being played out. Though India can no longer be described as being a rural society, and that particular Gandhian message is now almost forgotten, we are still confused about how much change we are ready to accept. Because, under all that song and dance, that sloganeering and dialogue-baazi, whether in black or white or in colour, the underlying message was a fear of change — change that might be good, but which would upset a way of life.

The ongoing tussles in several parts of the country — Nandigram and Singur are only the two more high profile cases — tell us that those battles are still being fought though India has been on the road to rapid industrialisation for years now. Villagers, encouraged and abetted by political parties looking for a cause, are on the warpath, this time with their own governments, reluctant to give up their way of life even if the new dispensation will actually improve their standards of living.

Opponents of these projects — a motley crew ranging from political opportunists, to ultra-leftists, to Luddites to general anti-globalists to guilt-ridden urbanists — have many objections to land being acquired for say, a car factory or an export zone. Many of these are valid, no doubt. But these are failings that can and should be corrected; it is difficult to change mindsets so easily. The overarching fear is of modernity, of the great unknown; it’s best to remain wallowing in the old but familiar.

It’s not going to be easy. The certitudes of our policy-makers and urban elites are bound to clash with mindsets that have remained unaltered for millennia. Progress, good or bad, will always win, but the progressive will always remain the villain.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net