New Age Hero

Sharmistha Gooptu / Feb 3, 2007, 00:08 IST

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One of the first nationalist biographical films, based on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, was New Theatres Ltd's Pehla Admi, directed by Bimal Roy.

One of the first nationalist biographical films, based on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, was New Theatres Ltd's Pehla Admi, directed by Bimal Roy.
One of the first nationalist biographical films, based on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, was New Theatres Ltd's Pehla Admi, directed by Bimal Roy.
One of the first nationalist biographical films, based on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, was New Theatres Ltd's Pehla Admi, directed by Bimal Roy.
Indian biographical films were typically a post-colonial genre. With the relaxation of censorship codes which prohibited anti-colonial propaganda, this genre drew upon historical events of an anti-colonial nature and narrativised the lives of personalities associated with the freedom struggle.

One of the first nationalist biographical films, based on the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, was New Theatres Ltd's Pehla Admi (1950), directed by Bimal Roy.
Another film was Sohrab Modi's Jhansi ki Rani (1953), with Mehtab and Sohrab Modi in lead roles, and was again a powerful evocation of the recently rested anti-colonial struggle through the kind of symbolism and moralist perspective that was particularly relevant to a newly independent India.

Closer to date, there have been Ketan Mehta's film on Sardar Patel (1993), Shyam Benegal's The Making of the Mahatma (1996) and his latest, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005).
The 'nationalist' mould of the historical-biographical genre has been finally set aside by Mani Ratnam's Guru, which has created a new brand of the biographical film for Indian audiences.
Guru has been hyped as a film based on the life of Dhirubhai Ambani, which at once brings to mind a series of very controversial issues that have been national news at various points.
Without going into the issue of fact versus fiction in the film's narrative, Guru is definitely a close parallel the story of a young man from a small Gujarati village, who built an industrial empire, and in the process fell onto the wrong side of law. Yet, there are other issues with the film, which make it unique.
Guru is a film that creates a new legacy for the nation it does not fit into the familiar nationalist legacy but creates a romance around the individual, Gurukant Desai. Guru's story is based in immediate post-independence India, but his is not so much the idealism that we generally associate with those years.
Rather, the new freedom of India works as a metaphor for the undying optimism and sheer grit of a young man who breaks every convention to enter a world where only the sky is the limit.
Guru arrives in Bombay, an outsider with no connections in the city's business circles, and breaks into this restrictive and rigidly stratified world and gets it working on his own terms.
Yet, Guru's story is also one that implicates the post-colonial state, its restrictive laws, bureaucratic control and red-tapism, and speaks of the tenacity of individual initiative and enterprise in getting past these.
Guru's entry as a dealer into the city's wholesale market is his first successful subversion of the system; thereafter he sets up a parallel network of patronage and privilege to both systematically subvert and make the best of the same system.
A powerful endorsement of his actions is available towards the end of the film when he tells the enquiry commission, instituted to investigate the irregularities of his businesses, that perhaps the path he took was the only way forward for a man who had found all doors barred and discovered his own ways to open them.
The film makes no attempt to take away from the ruthlessness of this rise. Rather, there is an open acknowledgement of subversion of the system and the breeding of parallel networks of corruption in the service of a 'people's' enterprise, the Shakti Parivar, which generates dividends for thousands of middle and lower income people.
It is a significant inversion of the public rhetoric against the culture of corruption.
Guru is an ambiguous figure, representative of the post-liberalisation generation that has outgrown the idealism that was the nationalist legacy, accepts the value of individual enterprise even at the cost of the legal and lawful, and generally wants the best of life.
The film definitely works towards a very overt popularisation of the persona of one of post-independence India's leading tycoons, which might have been part of the film's logic in the first place. And it is not difficult to comprehend the legitimising subtext of Guru's very human story.
Yet, what remains most significant about the film is that it creates a new brand of the national hero one detached from any nationalist association, and projects a new value system, most relevant to the Indian experience post the IT boom of the 1990s.
Gurubhai is a brand relevant for its projection of confidence and competitiveness and aspiration to be part of a global system. At the very end of the film, Guru, though aged before his time and physically afflicted, has beaten the system.
He throws a question at the huge crowd before him: "Should we make the Shakti Parivar the largest company in the world?" Guru is a brand for the multiplex generation of a post-national India where life will no longer be what it was before cyber-age and the IT revolution.
It is most evocative for the generation that has seen the transformation, which has allowed India to compete internationally. For this generation, the Gurubhai phenomenon is too true.
The writer is a PhD student at the University of Chicago.

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