When cinema becomes a subversive piece of art

There was a moment of irony on Saturday night when I went to watch the new Hindi-indie film Newton. It’s about an election at a remote polling booth in impoverished, forested and Maoist-influenced Chattisgarh, in central India. An idealistic polling officer named Newton locks horns with a smug and overbearing security official. Newton wants locals to freely vote while the para-military officer wants to forcibly round up the villagers for a non-zero turn-out. Caught in the middle is the tribal population which understands neither nation, democracy, electronic voting machines, nor the city-slicker candidates who are distant from reality.

What makes the film transcend ordinariness is its dialogue. It is earthy, it is authentic, it rings true, it is brilliant, it is hilarious. (For instance: “Lal salad!” someone puns on the worn-out communist slogan, while eating sliced tomatoes in the forest.) Full disclosure: dialogue writer Mayank Tewari is a former colleague, and I can vouch for what it is that makes his script a success – his love of the language, and his being rooted in small-town India.

Surprisingly, India officially entered this political film to the American Academy awards (the Oscars). Surprising because Newton is a film of dissent, which is these days is actively discouraged in India. Recently, for instance, an NRI Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper in India was asked to resign – just a few days after the paper’s owner met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Editor’s mistake? The paper was tracking hate crimes in the country, a subject that has attracted no small amount of international negative publicity for Modi, his party and the country. It is safe to say that in India, speaking truth to power is currently not in vogue.

What makes Newton a subversive piece of art? In its narrative, the tribal voters ask Newton what they will receive, in concrete terms, if they vote. They look for immediate gains because for all of their isolation and illiteracy they are canny enough to realise that abstract gains have no meaning in their lives.

Newton uses absurdist humour to show how high politics is often an end in itself: that high politics fails to address the very problems it’s supposed to solve. Development does not help the people it has ostensibly targeted: in fact, at the start of the film, Newton’s parents take him to see a prospective

The national anthem is a potent symbol, but playing it before every film screening is a case of overkill

bride whose father is a contractor (zindagi bhar ghee mein dube rahoge), Newton’s father says, that a bureaucrat marrying the contractor’s daughter will end up rich), making clear where the development funds actually end up.

Enter the irony. Before the film began, as is usual nowadays in India and enforced by a Supreme Court opinion, besides having to sit through a cacophonous trailer of Judwaa 2, the audience had to stand for the national anthem. This is nothing new: as a child in Bihar, the national anthem appeared after the film, and some people actually stood at attention instead of fleeing the hall. When I lived in Mumbai, the national anthem was a regular feature before films, and it did not bother me to stand because it seemed more of a Mumbai curiosity than anything else.

Now, however, I cannot keep standing for the anthem. Not out of disrespect for India: no one who knows I was arrested in a neighbouring country in October 2001, could ever accuse me of disrespect.

My objection is to the National Anthem being forced down my throat. The climate in India is so poisoned that people who are infirm are being attacked in cinema halls (it happened to a wheelchair-bound man in Mumbai).

The national anthem is a potent symbol, but playing it before every film screening is a case of overkill. Also, it makes little sense for a multiplex to play the national anthem at the screening of a foreign film, where art transcends borders.

The irony was that we stood for the flag and anthem before watching Newton, a film which looked at the absurdity of such meaningless abstractions such as nation, democracy, representation and voting. And the next day saw elections to Gurgaon’s Municipal Corporation. Gurgaon is famous as a cyberhub, but voting was scant despite it being a Sunday; the middle-class who demanded the national anthem in multiplexes were sprawled on their couches, watching another time-pass — one-day cricket match. Neither impoverished nor illiterate (but living in a concrete jungle), they proved the hollowness of nation and democracy as depicted in Newton. And they probably didn’t stand for the pre-match national anthem, either.

Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India