 "votes, counting of votes, elections, polls")
About halfway through Manthan, directed by Shyam Benegal, an election is held to choose the chairman of a newly formed cooperative of milk farmers in the village of Sanganva in Gujarat. The two factions contesting the election are led, respectively, by the village headman (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and an angry young Dalit man, Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah).
As the campaigning heats up, the government officers who have helped the villagers set up the cooperative, veterinarian Dr Rao (Girish Karnad) and his associate Deshmukh (Mohan Agashe), find themselves increasingly beleaguered by the local contests over caste and class.
Earlier in the film, when Dr Rao encourages the Dalits to nominate their own candidate, Deshmukh warns him not to take sides. “We must treat both sides equally,” he says. “One side has power and money, and the other nothing,” says Dr Rao. “Treat both at par? It is not possible.”
Led by Bhola, the Dalits rally, and elect their own candidate, Moti, as the chairman of the cooperative. Humiliated by his defeat, the headman exacts his revenge. The houses of the Dalits are burned down. Dr Rao is falsely accused of raping Bindu (Smita Patil), a Dalit milk farmer with whom he has a suggestion of a romance. He is forced to leave the village.
The scenes of the villagers casting their votes would have been ironic to a contemporary audience of the film, released in 1976. It was the high noon of the Emergency, a 21-month period from 21 June 1975 to 21 March 1977, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution, imprisoned political opponents, muzzled the press, and ruled by decree.
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There are several references to the Emergency in the film – some ironic, but none of it wholly critical. For instance, when Dr Rao reaches the village, along with another official, Mahapatra (Sadhu Meher), the receiving party of local bureaucrats is late in arriving at the station. “We are sorry,” says one of them. “The train arrived on time.” Indian trains, which are still perennially late, running on time was a key metaphor for the Emergency.
Similarly, when Dr Rao turns up at Bindu’s house, early in the film, to take a sample of her buffalo’s milk, she mistakes him to be from the family planning department.
Aggressive family planning and forced sterilisation were pursued by Indira Gandhi’s government, especially her son Sanjay Gandhi, during the Emergency. Science journalist Mara Hvistendahl told the BBC that the Indian government sterilized 6.2 million men between 1975 and 1976, about “15 times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis”. Two thousand men died from blotched operations. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo wrote in her landmark book, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (2003), that many poor men who were subjected to the procedure, remembered the time as nasbandi ka vaqt (the time of sterilisation).
Manthan does not directly criticise family planning, though another Hindi film which did — Nasbandi, directed by I S Johar — was banned by the government. It could get a release only in 1978.
Manthan’s narrative is inspired by the White Revolution, launched on January 13, 1970, that transformed India from a milk-deficient country to the largest producer in the world over the next three decades. Its story was conceptualised by Verghese Kurien, a dairy engineer who set up Amul in the 1950s, and Benegal. Dr Rao is loosely based on Kurien. Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar wrote the screenplay. While Benegal won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 1976, Tendulkar was awarded the Best Screenplay. Preeti Sagar, who sang the earworm song Mero Gaam Katha Parey, later used by Amul for its advertisements, won the Best Female Playback Singer at the 1978 Filmfare Awards.
The film’s attitude towards the state, however, is ambivalent. It recognises how the instruments of the state can be easily manipulated by the rich and powerful, like the village headman or the corrupt owner of a private dairy, Mishraji (Amrish Puri). The police is eager to arrest the Dalits for any trouble in the village. A false case can be used to hound out an honest officer like Dr Rao.
At the same time, the state intervenes in the lives and livelihoods of the villages through bureaucrats such as Dr Rao, Deshmukh, and Chandavarkar (Anant Nag). They not only train the dairy farmers in modern scientific methods of farming, which can help them increase production, but they also intervene in local politics.
At one point, Deshmukh criticises Dr Rao: “You have made caste the issue, whereas the real issue is the setting up of the cooperative.” “You are wrong!” cries Dr Rao. “If the cooperative does not have the poor farmers from the beginning, it will not be of any good. And you know very well, most poor farmers in the village are Dalit.” The purpose of the bureaucracy is not only the introduction of modern agricultural technology but also social engineering.
Film scholar Ruta Dharmadhikari relates Manthan to Mrinal Sen-directed Bhuvan Shome (1969) and argues that the attempts of the state to implement a sort of positivist modernism in the village ultimately fail. The people, she adds, “reject the statist intervention for its textbook approach to reality”. The film ends without resolving any of the problems it brings to the surface. Dr Rao leaves; Bhola, Moti, and Bindu return to their fledgling cooperative and try to revive it.
Though not directly critical of the state, Manthan seems to suggest that statist interventions by outsiders can never provide solutions to the churning at the grassroots. Social change can come only through the efforts of the members of that society, not evangelical bureaucrats.
I watched the film, recently restored by the Film Heritage Foundation and showcased at the Cannes Film Festival, on Sunday (2 June) at a cinema in New Delhi — a day after the last votes were cast in the recent Lok Sabha elections. The exit polls on 1 June predicted an overwhelming majority for Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Some even gave it 400 seats — a supermajority in the 543-strong lower House that the BJP’s triumphalist slogan, “Aabki bar, charso paar” (This time, more than 400), claimed it would get.
The results, declared on Tuesday (4 June), were a different story altogether. While the BJP still emerged as the single-largest party with 240 seats, it fell well short of the 272 mark it needs to form a government. For the first time since 2014, Modi, who is slated to become Prime Minister for the third consecutive term, will have to run a coalition government. A stronger Opposition is also likely to make his government more accountable than it has been previously.
Some international commentators have described it as the beginning of re-democratisation in India. Indian politics and society now promise to be a churning — it remains to be seen how it will be reformed.
(Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat)
