'Pogaru' and the use of community sensitivities

When a citizenry is divided, as it is now, giving offence to a community benefits both the giver and receiver

The latest film to ‘offend a community’ is the Dhruva Sarja-starrer ‘Pogaru’ which has raised the hackles of sections of Brahmins, not normally known to be so offended when represented poorly on the screen.

One does not recollect Brahmins being upset when G V Iyer played a hypocritical and lascivious priest in ‘Bedara Kannappa’ (1954), although ‘Samskara’ (1970), briefly, did spark protests.

We live in divided times now and identities are constantly being marked out through emblems which once did not have the capacity to divide people. As a particularly bizarre example, the national flag, which was once the marker of an inclusive national identity, is now the marker of ideological difference.

One cannot even heap the blame on a particular ideology because the individual who declines to stand up when the national anthem is being played at the commencement of a film is marking out his or her political identity as much as the person who attacks him or her for the ‘offence’.

India has, historically, always been divided but the identities under which people or groups were subsumed were those of caste (jati) and religion. But while divisions promoted affinities, they did not lead to the kind of excitement based on mutual distrust as is the case today.

The turning point was the Lok Sabha campaigning in 2014 when it was discovered that political excitement can reap benefits. The excitement is, of course, not evenly distributed across India but is largely an urban phenomenon. If it had been evenly spread out, one would have witnessed much higher voter turnouts across constituencies in 2014, but the increase was markedly greater in the metropolitan cities. The message in politics was loud and clear, which is that political excitement pays off.

Once it was recognised that generating excitement need not be confined to politics, but can be used to market virtually any product, entertainment would not be left behind. People feel particularly self-righteous when they take sides politically and political grandstanding frequently comes to the rescue of those who feel disgruntled at not getting their due. If one is not successful at something it can easily be explained away as due to one’s ‘refusal to compromise’. One’s immediate response to social media controversies is to take sides but can one be certain that the person who did or said something controversial was even conversant with the issue?

Most violent disagreements are around facts and not ideas but ‘facts’ today are clouded in doubt. The word ‘post-truth’ which has entered our vocabulary is not a random intruder. If one studies political debates on television, today most fights are around something being insulted — it could be an institution (the army) or a group (a sect) or an entire people (Indians) — and, if anything, it shows that the best way of getting attention is to do such insulting.

Publicity is expensive for films and there is no guarantee that the money spent will even fetch the desired results. An insult, on the other hand, is easily launched and one may be sure that offending someone will immediately create excitement. If damage is done, that is easily set right with an apology and a financial inducement. As regards the demanded cuts, I do not think that there has been any Indian film for the past two decades that would not actually benefit with cuts, and cutting some scenes will not go down badly. The film will at least be remembered for having had scenes cut for offending people, which would translate into larger audiences.

One could say that offending people in a film is (like the ‘quality of mercy’ in Portia’s speech) something that benefits both giver and receiver — the person who offends and the one who is offended.

The government’s move to regulate audiovisual material on OTT platforms may be ‘censorship’ and contrary to the most cherished principles of personal freedom, but it could also be regarded in the above light.

Is something like 'Tandav' or 'Pogaru' even ‘expression’ as we understand the term, or is it a cynical attempt to generate cheap excitement? A strategy used by this kind of film is to present itself as a ‘character study’, so that whatever insult is mouthed, is from the character and not the director, who is only producing ‘fiction’. 'Kabir Singh' (with his ‘toxic masculinity’) was one such and the hero of 'Pogaru' is another. What both characters have in common is an abundance of facial hair (as emblem) to connote ‘unruliness’ and to justify the insulting conduct that issues forth from them. It seems a reasonable guess that there could be interested groups waiting for the next character with unruly facial hair so that a strong protest can be registered and the rewards duly reaped by all those involved.

(MK Raghavendra is a well-known film critic)