A liberal art

The Govind Nihalani-directed TV series omitted one key incident from the book written by Bhisham Sahni

Tamas, the famous series of the 1980s, had a re-run on television recently. It is the story of a small town in undivided Punjab. Pre-Partition riots disrupt lives and turn friends into enemies almost overnight. The atmosphere is thick with tension, a good mix of evil and good. At the end, peace is restored but not before a lot many lives have been lost and the town has been divided along religious lines. The series was directed by Govind Nihalani and was based on Bhisham Sahni's award-winning 1974 novel of the same name.

When I read the novel after watching the series recently, two things struck me. One, the only set of people who worked seriously and sincerely for peace were the communists, and almost all others were either rogues or opportunists. That's understandable because Sahni had socialist leanings and communism hadn't been discredited in 1974 when he wrote Tamas - that would have to wait for another 15 years. Two, Nihalani has chosen to exclude perhaps the most moving incident of the novel: a young man is chased by a mob; with nowhere to go, he takes refuge in a cave; the crowd pelts him with stones till someone says that he will be pardoned if he converts to their religion. Once he agrees, the same people who were crying for his blood embrace him warmly. Hatred turns into brotherly love in an instant. I don't know why Nihalani kept this out. Maybe the audience of the 1980s wasn't prepared to stomach it. Those were, after all, communally sensitive years.

This brings us to a bigger point: how frequently do film makers in Bollywood deviate from the text? When Satyajit Ray made Shatranj ke Khiladi in 1977 based on a short story by Munshi Premchand, he gave it an interesting twist at the end: while in the short story, the two noblemen kill each other, in the film one merely injures the other and that shocks both of them into realising their uselessness and decadence. Ray, by one account, said that the two were so steeped in debauchery that they had lost the power to pull the trigger at each other.

In Shyam Benegal's 1978 film Junoon, which was based on Ruskin Bond's A Flight of Pigeons, there were subtle changes. Most important, the main character, Javed Khan, portrayed by Shashi Kapoor in what is easily his strongest performance ever, is a ruffian in the book but Benegal chose to portray him as a nobleman of some social stature. But remember that was the time when heroes chose not to experiment with shades of black or grey in their characters, and Kapoor was also the film's producer.

Still, these are wonderful films which one can watch over and over again. The production qualities were outstanding. Compare these with Lagaan (2001), the Aamir Khan starrer: spic and span villages straight out of an Amar Chitra Katha comic book, men in spotless clothes and vests evidently spun on machines, young belles in colourful attires et cetera. Or compare those films Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), another film with Khan in the lead role. Most accounts will tell you that Pandey was just an accidental hero. (Read Rudrangshu Mukherjee's Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?) No doubt there was widespread discontent amongst the sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry, who were high-caste Hindus and Muslims from the Indo-Gangetic plain, over the greased cartridges, but on the day of the incident Pandey was probably high on bhang and religious fervour, not some reformist or nationalist agenda. But then cinema is a liberal art.

bhupesh.bhandari@bsmail.in