Behind The Blasts

Black Friday is a film that deconstructs the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993.Black Friday is a film that deconstructs the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993.Black Friday is a film that deconstructs the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993.Black Friday is a film that deconstructs the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993.Black Friday is a film that deconstructs the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993.Based on Hussain Zaidi's book of the same title, it has come a long way from Mani Ratnam's gushy Bombay, which was supposedly on the Bombay blasts, and ended with Hindus and Muslims hugging each other and holding hands to reinstate the threatened nation.
Black Friday was released in 2005, and was available on DVD outside India, but could not be released in Indian theatres till 2007 because of the Supreme Court's ruling that the film might influence the sentence to be passed on the Bombay blasts case.
From a statist perspective, however, one suspects that a primary reservation would be that the film fragments the mould of 'nationhood' that has typically informed the understanding of communal tension in India, and actually makes the nation quite redundant in the overall scheme of things.
In Black Friday, Tiger Memon's plan to blow up Bombay or his operator Badshah Khan's vulnerability to communal propaganda arises not only from the two-nation/ Hindu-Muslim perspective, but, more intrinsically, out of the grounded issues of loss of property and business.
As in the Gujarat riots, where Muslim businesses were pointedly targeted, the film shows that communal ideologies are more often mobilised by material conditions than ephemeral ideas of Hindu or Muslim nation.
Undoubtedly, such a perspective does not coalesce with a statist ideology where communalism is the other of nationalism - a contest between two nations collapsed into one - rather than a question of relative underprivilege and resentment.
The film is significant for its absence of a central protagonist symbolising the nation. It lacks any particular point of view that the audience is expected to identify with.
Its episodic structure and multiple points of view, offered by the blast sites, Tiger Memon, Badshah Khan on the run, or hapless family members of suspects being tortured in police lock-ups, intercepts the single-point agenda of the nation that has been prominent in the cinematic rendering of communalism, as in Ratnam's Bombay.
In Bombay, for instance, we were expected to identify with the Hindu boy-Muslim girl romance that encapsulated the nation.
The only exception one can think of is Deepa Mehta's 1947 Earth, where communal frenzy was paralleled by, and telescoped through the lens of a love triangle, a lover's rejection and revenge.
Black Friday shows a caucus coalescing around the figure of Tiger Memon, whose businesses had been among the worst affected in the post-Babri masjid riots in Bombay. Memon wows that the whole of Mahim will burn as revenge.
Badshah Khan, a key operator in the Bombay blasts, tells Memon in their first meeting that his own business was destroyed in the riots. Instructively, one of the points targeted in the blasts is the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The film also focuses on the money that changed hands in the planning for the Bombay blasts. At the start of the film, Memon, bragging to a cohort in Dubai, says he alone managed to get together the funds for the great task - the blowing up of Bombay.
The business nexus shown to be functional in the Bombay blasts case effectively questions the nationalism-communalism binary.
It becomes more a question of affected benefit, the resentment that grows out of underprivilege and a mafia-patronage network that can be coalesced into a communal ideology.
Black Friday brings into focus the business-commercial complex underlying communal tension in the subcontinent, just as the same inhibits communal conflict in the Indian diaspora.
A study done on the Devon area in Chicago, the centre of South Asian businesses in the city, for instance, revealed that Indians and Pakistanis could sit and watch a cricket match together, each cheering their own teams, and maybe sneering at the other, but only in the rarest instance would there be a fight, because it was considered bad for business.
Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - the subcontinent's Muslims and Hindus - are a relative minority here, all affected by the same issues relating to being a marginal presence in society. Communal tension becomes purposefully secondary to the larger South Asian sentiment.
The fragmenting of the national-communal binary in Black Friday is all the more potent because of the nature of the impact of its realist-documentary style, which possibly explains the Supreme Court's discomfort with the film even though the book it is based on has been available for the last two years.
It is a film particularly relevant to the India of IT and cyberspace, where global capital and international markets have somewhat superseded the nation.
For the Indian who inhabits this space, and whose subjectivity is fragmented by his location in this space, this film is more comprehensive than the bad-communal versus good-national binary of nationalist discourse.
The small-time dealer who becomes embroiled in a plan to blow up Bombay because he wishes to get out of his unhappy existence and go abroad to Pakistan or Dubai as also because he feels a sense of wrong done to his community, gives a human face to the mad frenzy of communal violence. And a way to comprehend what went wrong.
The writer is a PhD student at the University of Chicago.