Where good and bad blur

Sharmistha Gooptu / Mar 29, 2008, 00:25 IST

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Race, the latest multi-starrer Hindi flick, is more than just a slick thriller.

Race, the latest multi-starrer Hindi flick, is more than just a slick thriller. Race is a story of lies, betrayals, sex and more lies.
The characters match the plot: a wealthy breeder of stallions, his jealous scheming brother, a Mata Hari-like girlfriend and a dangerously slick policeman.
It is not a remarkable film in any apparent sense; yet scratch the surface and it is a most remarkable document of our times. Race is a film that is symbolic of the fracturing of the moral universe of Hindi cinema. An ethical subtext of the Hindi film has been most palpable in the figure of the angry young man, which erupted with such force on the Indian screen in the 70s.
This has largely been understood in the terms of the rise of a more populist Indian politics in this period - the projection of a public that demanded a more democratic society. Amitabh Bachchan's angry young man was really the voice of the underdog, originally in the figure of inspector Vijay Khanna of Zanjeer.

The powerful mother figure in most of Bachchan's films was the most obvious vindication of that ethical scheme of the Hindi film: the quietly resilient mother who chose her good son over the bad son she actually loved more. And, of course, Bachchan himself was not really as bad as he was cynical, the boy who had "Mera baap chor hai" written on his hand and became a criminal because that was possibly the only way out for him. Even the woman he loved was not exactly the gangster's moll: in Deewar, Parveen Babi actually has a secret desire to don the bridal trousseau and raise a family.

Both the angry man and bad woman secretly share a wish to be part of the moral universe symbolised by the figure of the mother: thus, Bachchan dies in his mother's arms, and that is his redemption.
Come 2008 and we have Race, a thriller that has completely overturned that ethical premise of the Hindi film, most symbolically in the suave figure of the policeman, RD. He arrives mid-way into the film to investigate a death. He's slick, cynical and super-efficient, with a bimbo of a secretary - a take-off of sorts on the legendary Karamchand of television. He's clearly no crusader against crime, but an out-and-out crook, a master manipulator and a likeable one at that. While we have had Hindi film criminals in seductive avatars, this is the rare case of a cop who gets away with being completely devious. RD is the ultimate antithesis of the Vijay Khanna prototype.
By now there have been too many cop films. Yet, our more contemporary screen cops, whether sadist, alcoholic or encounter specialist, have still retained some part of Bachchan's angry young man - if not the original Vijay Khanna, then the other Vijay of Deewar, who was a criminal but with a cause. The policeman of Hindi cinema has remained an echo of the ethical voice of the Indian state.
Most recently, in Shootout at Lokhandwala, a group of policemen engineering a shootout stand justified for their action against a bunch of criminals, the enemies of the state. This essentially ethical nature of the figure of the cop has finally dissolved in Race. What we get out of this transition is not some kind of villainous figure - the bad cop - but an unusual character. We go along, enjoying every bit of it. At the end of it, however, a question stares at us: Are we, the multiplex generation, an essentially different public from those for whom the Hindi film was part of the story of the Indian nation?
Perhaps, this loses currency in the virtual worlds we now inhabit. It is appropriate that Race is set in South Africa, but the characters are all Indians. Truly, this is a virtual world where it is increasingly easy to dispense with ideologies of the nation.
(The writer is doing a PhD on Indian film at the University of Chicago.)

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