Adipurush in the court, creative freedoms in the balance

This is not a defence of Adipurush, which I haven’t yet seen, but of the right to make and screen any Adipurush. Every single film is a window to countless audience experiences and voyages, every window that is closed forecloses all its possible futures.The Allahabad high court has been hearing a couple of public interest litigation petitions filed against the film this week – similar petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court and other HCs. It said, “Some people had gone to cinema halls and they only forced them to close the hall, they could have done something else as well.”After domestically crossing ₹200 crore over its first weekend, when the film crashed into dirt two Mondays ago, where it has remained since, how are we to separate the damage caused by audience disappointment from that caused by “some people” going into cinema halls over the weekend and scaring others that they would do “something else as well”?The court also said, “Does anyone imagine the religious characters to be in existence in the way they are shown in the movie?” How millennia old characters survive in the hearts and minds of a billion Indians and then all the devotees abroad, is hard to know exactly. But what we do know is that even Dadasaheb Phalke and Ramanand Sagar’s mythological dramas, which are today revered as classical, were extremely experimental. They were wonders of the filmmakers’ imagination.During its first month after premiering in 1987, Sagar’s Ramayan lagged the likes of Buniyaad and Chitrahaar in advertising. Plus, despite the collective memorialisation of how city streets used to empty during its Sunday telecasts or electricity officials were assaulted if there was a power cut during the telecast, in its own time it got brickbats aplenty.One critic mocked the costumes as looking like they had been dug out of a musty trunk in Chandni Chowk’s rental shop, others called its special effects tacky, there were objections to specific scenes and dialogues, to vulgarity and trivialisation. Sounds familiar? Since it is imagination that has been put on test, imagine if some of the critics had succeeded in pulling the shutter on the 78-episode TV series within the first few episodes. That would not have made its quality better or worse. Only, people would have been denied the chance to make up their own minds about it.Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was called anti-Semitic, schlocky, pornographic. Controversy around religious representations is something to be expected and negotiated with, by all filmmakers. Making changes, including to dialogue, after the film’s release is within this remit. Recall that even episodes of Sagar’s Ramayan used to be shortened, lengthened and otherwise adapted in response to viewer reactions. The key is that the state, including the judiciary, should not participate in any form of McCarthyism.Some trolls find it intolerable that Om Raut’s Adipurush has commercial motivations. Even the Allahabad HC noted that “filmmakers earn money as films do business.” It was somewhat understandable that this was said of Sagar accusingly in the pre-liberalisation eighties, when the high art vs low art hierarchy also carried a lot more intellectual heft. But now, when Ramayan and Mahabharat inspired content powers so much of music, podcast, book publishing, television and other businesses, it seems particularly unintelligible. It is terrible for Make in India.Here is a market that’s far from saturated, indeed that can today tap global vistas in a way Sagar would have loved, or even Phalke. Perhaps even Gandhi! The one film the Mahatma saw and approved of was Vijay Bhatt’s Ram Rajya (1943). What if a young filmmaker had been nurturing the ambition to take his Ram story to Netflix world No. 1 like Squid Game, but is now too intimidated to start the project?One anti-film petitioner has complained about the dialogues being such as only “gully boys” would use. This too feels very out-of-time, a complaint from someone who went to sleep watching the news on Doordarshan in the eighties and then woke up to primetime today. Whatever “gully boys” were not allowed to do in India’s hoary past, depending on your interpretation of who they are, they are either already on the mainstage or you cannot deny them the right to do Ramlilas in their own voice anymore.The court suggested that filmmakers are more wary of telling stories around Quran, than Ramayan and Mahabharat. Certainly, from the 1988 ban on The Satanic Verses to more recently not allowing the screening of Iranian film Muhammad: Messenger of God for which AR Rahman has scored sublime music, these are great blots on the country’s freedom of expression. But surely, it is the best not the worst of our behaviours that should be encouraged. Indeed all attempts to import our neighbour’s blasphemy obsession, diminish India’s artistes and audiences.