Looking for ‘Reason’ in Modi’s India
The first murder came as a shock; the second suggested
there might be a larger plot; by the third there was talk of government
collusion; and when the fourth happened one felt it would not be the
last. The victims—Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, and
Gauri Lankesh—were all killed in the same way, shot point-blank with a
7.65mm pistol by a gunman who came and fled on a two-wheeler. All
beloved activists and thinkers, who wrote in the vernacular press, they
had been vocal opponents of the BJP and its brand of Hindu nationalism.
Their assassinations were meant to send a message, and far-right trolls
on social media duly rejoiced. “One bitch died a dog’s death,” a man
from Gujarat wrote on Twitter, referring to Lankesh; his account was
followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
These killings, which happened between 2013 and 2017, lie at the heart of Vivek (Reason),
a four-hour documentary by Anand Patwardhan. (The version I viewed was
re-edited and posted to YouTube ahead of India’s general election
earlier this year.) Each chapter opens with an allusion to the crimes—a
motorcyclist is seen driving down a dark road—and some third of the show
is given over to telling the victims’ life stories. Yet the murders are
only the starting point. Behind the grisly events, Patwardhan sees the
broader threat of religious intolerance that is once again spreading
across India. It is this trend that he sets out to chart.
Shot across the country between 2013 and 2018, Vivek is
a work of great ambition, really a report on Modi’s first term in
power. It covers most of the big and small abominations now committed
almost daily in India in the name of Hinduism: from cow vigilantism and
the lynchings of Dalits, to the rewriting of history and attacks on
higher education. But Patwardhan also spends time in the pockets of
secular resistance that have emerged, profiling many activists
(including the four murdered), journalists, students, and politicians.
These are the two poles of the series, the villains and heroes. Their
struggles and clashes are the highlights of an unfolding battle between
faith and reason whose outcome Patwardhan believes will shape the future
of Indian democracy.
*
The series
roughly divides into three parts. In the first Patwardhan travels to
southern Maharashtra, where he speaks to the families and comrades of Dabholkar, Pansare, and, to a lesser extent, Kalburgi.
Mixing interviews with the victims’ families and comrades, and clips of
their own speeches, Patwardhan assembles a memorial to these three men.
They are presented as classic figures in the tradition of the
Enlightenment, promoting rational thinking to fight Hindu superstition,
and the hierarchy of caste (Pansare even conducted inter-caste
marriages, which remain a kind of social taboo). Their stories are
contrasted with portraits of various local Hindu religious and cultural
groups, most with ties to politics, who preach blind adherence to
twisted versions of scripture and a militant hatred of Islam. In one
disquieting sequence, Patwardhan speaks to journalists about the
Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha, a shadowy Hindu “spirituality organization,”
which apparently runs retreats and offers faith healing services but was
found to be storing arms and explosives at their headquarters in 2018.
They are widely believed to have links to the thugs who killed
Dabholkar and Lankesh. (Under interrogation, the accused have admitted
to being inspired by a book brought out by the Sanstha.)
In the second section Patwardhan visits two places that
have become infamous for religious violence. He speaks to the family of
Mohammad Akhlaq, a Muslim man who was lynched by his Hindu neighbors in
the village of Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, for the alleged crime of consuming
beef (this crime sparked huge protests). Later, with the Dalit parliamentarian Jignesh Mevani,
he travels around Gujarat on an inspiring civil disobedience march
sparked by a gruesome incident in the town of Una, where seven Dalit men
were beaten in public for skinning a cow carcass.
The final section is set at two premier Indian
universities. Here the Hindu right’s fear of rational thinking is given
its purest expression. At the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the
BJP’s student wing harasses progressive students and teachers who
question the basis of Hinduism and its caste order; at Hyderabad Central University, they launch a smear campaign of such ferocity against the Dalit students’ association that a brilliant scholar, Rohith Vemula, is driven to suicide in what has been labelled an “institutional murder.”
On the whole Vivek leaves little doubt that
political Hinduism is a dangerous threat to Indian democracy. In scene
after scene, we witness how dogma is manipulated by cynical godmen and
politicians, and how in turn the forcefield of faith pushes us to
indulge our worst instincts. This menace isn’t new—in fact, it has been
building for decades. To understand the rise of modern Hindutva, we have
to look at Patwardhan’s older films.
*
Anand Patwardhan was born in Mumbai in 1950. He grew up
in a family of Gandhian Socialists—several relatives on his father’s
side were freedom fighters imprisoned by the British—and absorbed
progressive ideas at home. After completing a degree in sociology at
Brandeis University in 1972, and briefly volunteering in Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union, he returned to India in 1974 to teach in Madhya Pradesh (Chavez appears in Patwardhan’s 1981 film A Time to Rise,
about migrant farm laborers in British Columbia). Later that year he
joined an anti-corruption struggle led by the Gandhian Jayprakash
Narayan in Bihar, where he “accidentally” fell into filmmaking. Asked to
make some record of the movement, he ended up shooting enough footage
for a full-length documentary, which would become his debut, Waves of Revolution (1975).
“This documentary is made of speeches, interviews and songs” an early title card reads in Waves.
To a good extent this has remained the template of all Patwardhan’s
films. A kind of hybrid activist-flâneur, he embeds himself in social
movements, catching history as it’s made by the people, rally by rally,
meeting by meeting.
Waves itself is a chronicle of the Bihar
agitation. Patwardhan follows as Narayan’s student followers spread his
message among semi-literate peasants, sitting in on their ad-hoc lessons
in village schools and spelling out their ideology through his
voiceover. He also speaks to the locals directly; there is a long and
somber sequence about the persistence of caste. And already here
Patwardhan’s weakness for music is evident. The film is punctuated by
shots of the Gandhians marching between villages, singing a version of
“We Shall Overcome” in Hindi. It is in such sequences of music and
drama, versions of which recur in all of Patwardhan’s documentaries,
that the director’s own idealism is most poignantly expressed.
From the early 1990s, Patwardhan has been at work on an ambitious series about the rise of religious fundamentalism. Though he has looked at radical Sikhism and Islam, his main focus has been the Hindutva movement.In Ram Ke Nam (1991), the director followed L.K. Advani on his infamous “Rath Yatra,” when the BJP president traveled around India in a Toyota remodeled to resemble a chariot, drumming up support for construction of a Ram temple at the site of the Babri mosque. (The Babri Masjid is a mosque built in the sixteenth century in Ayodhya, a town in what is now Uttar Pradesh. In a narrative poem written in Sanskrit a century later, Tulsidas popularized the idea that this town is the birthplace of Lord Ram—who, until then, was not really a major Hindu god.) Patwardhan used the opportunity to observe the electrifying effect Advani had on young men in small towns across the Hindu-dominated north. The film powerfully captures the emergence of a new politics of resentment. At rally after rally, we hear from saffron-clad lumpen youth with little prior feeling for religion drawn like moths to a flame by the lure of a strong “Hindu” identity.
Father, Son, and Holy War (1995), which unfolds
against the backdrop of terrible communal riots in Mumbai, is a study of
the rhetoric of emasculation—virile Islamic invaders conquering
effeminate Hindu men—is cunningly exploited by India’s farright parties (this film focuses on the Shiv Sena, a chauvinist Maharashtran party that appeals to Hindu Maratha pride). War and Peace (2002)
is a sober account of the bizarre theological fantasies woven through
the BJP’s fiscally ruinous decision in 1999 to develop nuclear weapons.
These two films show an evolution in Patwardhan’s style, which grows
increasingly loose and freewheeling. Again and again, there are jump
cuts and long panning sequences—from an aphrodisiac vendor to a
fulminating politician; from murals of war-like Hindu gods to
Swayamsevaks brandishing swords—that go beyond common sense to touch on
the more elusive aspects of Hindutva’s appeal.
*
Patwardhan does not plan his documentaries—he compares
his technique to “stream-of-consciousness” writing—and instead simply
follows his instincts. In the course of making a film he usually amasses
hundreds of hours of footage, ranging from focused interviews to
records of performances to more casual studies of public space. What is
remarkable is that at the editing table he is able to weave this rough,
heterogenous material into fine-grained chronicles that are tense and
gripping.
His procedure resembles Frederick Wiseman’s and also that of Patricio Guzman, whose great, ruminative documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile,
on Salvador Allende’s rise and fall, made a strong impression on
Patwardhan when he was a student. All three of these directors proceed
without assumptions and, with utmost open-ness, rely entirely on their
instincts and conscience—as if seeing through the everyday to the
history concealed behind.
Vivek, however, is more rigidly structured.
Though Patwardhan shot the series without a script, the narrative feels
more premeditated and less inquisitive. This is perhaps because the
director relies too heavily on his Manichean idea that India is facing
another episode in the “ancient battle between reason and belief.” This
stark contrast certainly gives Vivek a grandeur and moral
clarity. But by focusing so acutely on religion and reason, Patwardhan
ends up overlooking the many other factors that are also crucial to
Hindutva’s rise. (Here he comes close to resembling those Western
critics who blame all of the Middle East’s problems on “Islam”).
The obsession with reason also has another drawback,
which has been noted by the critic Kamayani Sharma in her recent review
of the series in Artforum. While acknowledging Vivek’s moral seriousness, Sharma wonders
whether the director’s sober, logical style of cinema has any traction
in our “post-truth” world. If people on the right are really so lost in
belief, can any reasoned argument, based on historical evidence and hard
facts, win them over? If not, is Patwardhan simply preaching to the already converted?
Many viewers have been frustrated by Patwardhan’s mulish commitment to old-fashioned reason. Yet it would be unfair to reduce Vivek to
its guiding idea. Despite its sometimes simplistic and didactic
perspective, the series on the whole retains a rich texture and is
brimful with vivid scenes and details—middle-class people chanting
Modi’s name at a temple; a young man who has the letter “Om” shaved at
the back of his head—that convey just how deep the roots of Hindutva
have spread. By looking unflinchingly at the country’s public life,
Patwardhan has given us yet another disquieting portrait of India. Even
if it does not raise all the right questions, Vivek is a powerful account of the problems confronting the world’s largest democracy today.
The eight-chapter, four-hour film version of Vivek was released in 2018. The re-edited sixteen-part, three-hour version can be viewed on YouTube. This article has been updated to clarify this distinction.