The cry of the wounded in movies reflects real life in India

'Aakrosh' (1981) depicted how India's tribal people, almost 8% of the population, are dehumanised by the state and the law

Earlier this week, a video from Madhya Pradesh showing a drunk man urinating in public on the face of another man went viral on social media, sparking outrage. Acting swiftly, the police arrested the accused and charged him under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and the National Security Act, 1980. His house in Sidhi district, about 620 km northeast of the state capital Bhopal, was partially demolished by local officials, who claimed that it was illegally constructed. The victim, identified as an Adivasi worker, was on Wednesday invited to the house of the state’s chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who washed his feet as a sign of penance. The opposition Congress has alleged that the accused is a member of the ruling party, though the BJP has refuted it. Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh are scheduled in November this year.

 

As I watched the distressing video, I was reminded immediately of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life”, which he discussed in his highly influential book Homo Sacer (1998). Drawing upon ancient Roman law, Agamben defines it as a person who has committed such a crime that all their rights as a citizen are revoked. They can be killed by anyone but cannot be used for ritual sacrifice. Agamben claims that according to Aristotle all humans possessed “bare life” but it became a “good life” only on participation in the political body. In fact, drawing upon Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s idea of the “state of exception”, Agamben argues that it is the sovereign who decides which person will be allowed to be a part of the political body and who will have “bare life”.

Also Read: BJP's anti-Dalit, anti-tribal face exposed with urinating incident: Rahul

Tracing the existence of “bare life” in Western society from Aristotle to Auschwitz, the most notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, Agamben arrives, towards the end of the book, at the figure of der Muselmann, “the Muslim”: “a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic (hence the ironical name given to him).” Agamben borrowed the term from Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived the concentration camp and went on to write books such as If This is a Man (1947). Though Agamben’s use of this term has been criticized by scholars such as Jill Jarvis, who specializes in the politics and aesthetics of North Africa, for its Eurocentrism and lack of linguistic analysis in casually referring to a dehumanized Jewish man as a Muslim, it can help us understand the recent incident in Madhya Pradesh. In committing the act, the accused treated the victim as “bare life”, der Muselmann, who can be humiliated without empathy.

A similar dehumanization of India’s Adivasi and other tribal people—who account for about 8 per cent of the country’s population at 10 million, according to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs—is depicted in the 1981 Hindi film Aakrosh. Written by noted Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, the film was art house director Govind Nihalani’s debut in direction. He had earlier worked as a cinematographer for several Shyam Benegal-directed movies. In Aakrosh, Om Puri plays the role of Lahaniya Bhiku, accused of murdering his wife Nagi Bhikhu (Smita Patil). Naseeruddin Shah plays Bhaskar Kulkarni, a young lawyer appointed for Lahaniya’s defence, and Amrish Puri acts as Dushane, the public prosecutor.

Writing for Film India’s July-August 1981 edition, film critic Elliot Stein commented: “Om Puri’s brooding, impassive face and piercing eyes are the principal assets of Aakrosh.” Throughout the two-hour running time of the film, Lakhaniya says nothing, frustrating Bhaskar’s attempts to defend him successfully in court. This silence is interpreted by Dushane as a confession of his crime; he tells Bhaskar: “These Adivasis are all like that. First, they get drunk and fight and kill each other. Then they go quiet as if they know nothing.”

As Bhaskar searches for evidence to build his case, he learns of how powerful, upper-caste landlords of the village raped Nagi and framed Lakhaniya in a fake case. Ashamed of her fate, Nagi committed suicide. In the climax of the film—SPOILER ALERT—Lakhaniya is taken to the burning ghat after his father’s death. He snatches an axe from a bystander and kills his sister (Bhagyashree Kotnis) when he realises that she will be the next target of the landlords. As he is suppressed by the police, he lets out an earth-piercing cry, giving vent to his outrage and trauma. The film won the Best Feature Film in Hindi at the 1980 National Awards and Best Film Golden Peacock at the 8th International Film Festival of India in New Delhi.

Film scholar Imke Rajamani locates Aakrosh within the subgenre of “angry young man” films that began with Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973) and was best embodied by Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Kala Patthar (1979) — all directed by Yash Chopra — or Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983). Like Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah, too, played the angry young man in films like Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai (Saeed Akhtar Mirza, 1980) and Aakrosh, as did Om Puri in Ardh Satya (Govind Nihalani, 1983). Rajamani claims that the angry young man would be the leading genre of Hindi cinema till the end of the 1980s, reflecting the angst of disenfranchised proletarian youth who flocked to the cinemas to watch these films. “The angry young man films served as an emotional integration for the masses into the Indian nation and shaped the experience and memory of the 1970s as an era of anger,” she concludes.

It is 50 years since Zanjeer was released — 43 years since Aakrosh—but India is still full of angry young men. Annie Gowen of The Washington Post found in 2018 that the country had more than 600 million people under the age of 25 years, with greater access to technology or education than ever before, but little hope of finding decent jobs. These surplus men—“a legacy of generations of a preference for sons and aborting female foetuses”—are easily manipulated by right-wing political forces to target India’s religious and social minorities. If the anger of these young men is provided with a sense of impunity—like in the case of the man from Madhya Pradesh—it threatens to destroy our social fabric. Perhaps it already has.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat.

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