Frames per second: Revisiting nostalgia, Emergency, and lost revolutions

The 2003 film, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, recreated the revolutionary fervour of the 1970s and the Emergency - albeit with a strong tinge of nostalgia

In a letter to his girlfriend Geeta Rao (Chitrangada Singh), Naxalite activist Siddharth Tyabji (Kay Kay Menon) describes a recent experience in a village in Bhojpur, Bihar. In the village, the son of a zamindar is accused of raping  a Dalit woman. All the Dalit workers of the village gather at the zamindar’s house, possibly with the intention of lynching the alleged rapist. In the hullaballoo, the zamindar suddenly suffers a heart attack.

 

“The lower-caste villagers who were screaming for his blood a minute ago were suddenly overcome by a dutiful urge to save him,” writes Siddharth. He continues: “This strange compassion of the villagers towards their oppressor taught me something. What? I am still trying to decipher.” Earlier in the letter, Siddharth describes the difference between New Delhi, where he and Geeta were students at Delhi University, and the village: “Delhi and Bhojpur are separated not only by 500 miles but also 5,000 years.”

 

 

Siddharth and Geeta are two of the three central characters of the Hindi film, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003). The third character is their fellow student, Vikram Malhotra (Shiney Ahuja). Directed by Sudhir Mishra, the film depicts the far-left Naxalite movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the Emergency. It was possibly the first mainstream Bollywood film to depict the Emergency, a period of 21 months from 25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977, when former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution, muzzled the press, imprisoned political opponents and ruled by decree. Political scientists Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil have described it, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, as India’s First Dictatorship in their eponymous book.

 

After the Indira Gandhi-led Congress (R) suffered a shock defeat in the 1977 parliamentary elections and the Emergency was lifted, several films critical of it were released. Gol Maal (1979) and Khubsoorat (1980), both comedies directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, were critical takes on tyrannical behaviour. Even before that, the political satires, Kissa Kursi Ka (1977) and Nasbandi (1977), both of which had been banned during the Emergency, were released — I have written about it earlier in this column.

 

But after 1980, when Mrs Gandhi was re-elected as prime minister, the Emergency disappeared from films — and also from public discourse. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, in her book Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in New Delhi, which was published in the same year that Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi released, describes the Emergency as a “faded moment” of Indian history, which “had slipped out of public discourse”. Tarlo argues that events like the Emergency “do not fit comfortably into national picture of how things are meant to be”. Like Chauri Chaura in 1922 or the Partition violence after 1947, the Emergency threatens the image of India as “essentially non-violent” — and also “implicates the state as the key agent of violence”.

 

It was, however, not only the altruistic project of “a national picture” that led to the silencing of public discourse around the Emergency. Mrs Gandhi’s government made considerable efforts to obscure the official memory of the Emergency while also trying to win back the confidence of citizens. Jaffrelot and Anil claim in their book that after returning to power in 1980, Mrs Gandhi’s government suppressed the report produced by a commission, headed by former Chief Justice of India J C Shah, that was appointed by the Janata Party government in 1977 to investigate the excesses of the Emergency, such as torture of political prisoners and forcible sterilisation.

 

Political scientist Smriti Sawkar has shown how the government also created “state spectacles”, such as the Asian Games in New Delhi (1982), the launch of the Maruti family car (1983), the Festival of India in Britain (1982), and the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in New Delhi (1983), to resurrect Mrs Gandhi’s political image. It is hardly a surprise that a film like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi was released during the tenure of the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance. Nor is it a coincidence that few films on the subject were made between 2004 and 2014, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power at the Centre.

 

Since 2014, a few films have been released on the Emergency — Indu Sarkar (2017), Baadshaho (2017) and Emergency (2025), which released this Friday. But they neither have the chutzpah of the films of the 1970s and 1980s, nor the emotional power of Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. Serving mostly as propaganda pieces for the current political dispensation, they have added to the swirl of myth and misinformation rather than a serious engagement with this very important event in India’s post-independence history.

 

The narrative structure of Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is framed and bookended by letters that Siddharth and Vikram write to Geeta. Though both of them express their love for her, she reciprocates only to Siddharth. The epistolary narrative technique provides the filmmaker with privileged access to the inner lives of these three characters. Siddharth, Vikram and Geeta are not only witnesses to history, but they are also willing and unwilling participants. Siddharth as a Naxalite activist, Geeta as his lover and, later, fellow activist, and Vikram as a powerbroker in Delhi’s political circles.

 

Their letters serve as an archive of the time. Accessing them is a somewhat illicit activity by the filmmaker. By allowing the audience to access them too, he makes us implicit in the moral and emotional struggles of the film. He makes the audience also a witness to history’s tectonic shifts. Scholar Sonya Surabhi Gupta in a 2009 paper argues that Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi “re-memorises the Emergency and the state repression of the 1970s”. But not all commentators on the film find it satisfactory. Pawan Kumar Malreddy, who has written widely on literary and artistic expressions of terror and violence, describes the film as “complicit with the political status quo”.

 

Such a reading, however, does not consider the film’s subtle and effective use of nostalgia. As literary scholar Pallavi Sanyal notes in a 2022 paper, the Naxalite movement continues to evoke considerable nostalgia among the educated middle class. This is possibly because of the involvement of many middle-class young men and women in the movement. Filmmaker Govind Nihalani, who also directed the 1998 film Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, also on the Naxalbari movement, described it as the only political movement since Independence in which the middle-class youth had participated so eagerly.

 

It is only recently that serious scholarly attention has been devoted to nostalgia as a social and political phenomenon — especially in the context of its use by right-wing populists. For most, nostalgia is a ubiquitous but useless emotion, incapable of seriously affecting social or political changes. But as social scientists Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell argue in a 2017 paper, nostalgia is not necessarily only a tool for right-wing reactionaries. “Drawing on the past can help mould the sentiments and nurture the emotional commitment to social justice issues,” they write.

 

Watching a film like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, more than two decades after its release and also half a century since the start of the Emergency, can serve as a nostalgic tool. Not only for the 1970s, when revolution for social change was a serious possibility, but also for the early decades of this century, when a film could critique politicians and political parties without a backlash. Perhaps both these moments of India’s post-Independence history are now irrevocably lost. 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist 

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