ARTS ABROAD
A Brahmin Filmmaker's Battle to Tell India's Story in India
By Amy Waldman
Dec. 24, 2002
When India’s censor board came back with 21 cuts it wanted made before his new documentary, ”War and Peace,” could be shown, Anand Patwardhan girded himself for what has become a familiar battle.
Mr. Patwardhan has been making documentaries that challenge India’s establishment for 30 years, becoming one of the country’s most respected documentarians. For almost as long he has been battling the state in one form or another for the right to show his films uncensored.
”War and Peace” is a nearly three-hour work that ranges from India to Pakistan, Japan and the United States to take a critical look at the phenomenon of ”nuclear nationalism.” It opens with the killing of Mohandas K. Gandhi, then examines the triumphalist reaction within India to the testing of a nuclear bomb in May 1998.
Not surprisingly, the film’s antiwar, antinuclear message did not find favor with censors answerable to a government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, for which the nuclear test was an important achievement.
Among the scenes that the Central Board of Film Certification ordered Mr. Patwardhan to cut was the killing of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist. He was ordered to cut scenes, shot after the nuclear test, of Hindus celebrating by cutting their hands with blades and signing congratulations in blood. Delete, he was told, critical comments about the Bharatiya Janata Party and scenes with the country’s leaders.
The demanded cuts almost all touched on politically sensitive spots, which is exactly why he would not cut them, Mr. Patwardhan said in an interview. For six months he has been battling the censor board through its appellate tribunal, which is asking for significantly fewer cuts. He said he would fight it out in court if the tribunal insisted on cuts.
In India the film was shown at the Mumbai International Film Festival where it won the best film/video award but has since been screened only privately, mostly in the living rooms of the elite.
The New York Film/Video Council in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently showed ”War and Peace” at the Gramercy Theater, and the director discussed the film there the next day.
Mr. Patwardhan, 52, was born and educated in Bombay, where he still lives. His mother is a potter; his father, a retired publisher. His political philosophy was shaped partly by his upbringing in a family of Gandhians and freedom fighters.
He is a Brahmin, which he said imbued him with a sense of social obligation. That sense only became stronger after he returned from the United States, where he studied at Brandeis University in the early 1970’s and joined the antiwar movement. ”I went to jail with my professor and got an A in the course,” he said. He worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and became an unrepentant liberal.
In India his first documentary was about the student movement in the state of Bihar, which led to Indira Gandhi’s imposing a national state of emergency. The film, like the movement, was driven underground. Unable to show it in India, he showed it in Canada, where he went to get a master’s degree at McGill University.
It was the first but not the last time that Mr. Patwardhan would have an easier time showing his films outside his country than inside. One film, on the slum dwellers of Bombay, was shown for the first time on national television in India five years after it was made, and only after Mr. Patwardhan won successive court battles.
”You have to be a filmmaker, and then you have to be a lawyer as well,” he said. But some friends say he may have become too caught up in battling the censors, at the cost of getting his films a timely airing.
Starting in the late 1980’s Mr. Patwardhan trained his lens on the country’s growing Hindu nationalist movement. His film ”In the Name of God” examined the drive by Hindu nationalists to demolish a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya on a site that many Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram. The film was finished in 1991. The next year a mob demolished the mosque brick by brick.
Mr. Patwardhan’s 1995 film ”Father, Son and Holy War” also examined religious fundamentalism, looking at how it oppresses both Hindu and Muslim women. He compared fundamentalist speeches with men selling aphrodisiacs on the street. Both, he said, create insecurity that ”you’re not a real man” and then offer a tonic.
For a man who was heavily influenced by his time in America, Mr. Patwardhan is no fan of America’s influence on India, particularly what he sees as the ”might is right” ethos. He calls ”nuclear machismo” the driving force for the bomb everywhere. India, he argues, is no different. The politicians in his film do not talk about the bomb as deterring a threat to India but about the country’s newfound prestige. ”They’re saying openly, ‘Now we’re on the map,’ ” he said.
He has also made films best categorized as ”antiglobalization” on fishermen losing their livelihoods to big foreign ships, for example.
In the 1990’s India started liberalizing its economy, in fits and starts. Mr. Patwardhan criticizes the current government for moving away from Nehru’s closed socialist economy although most economists agree that is exactly what India needs to do.
”They keep nationalism alive at the rhetorical level while surrendering sovereignty in real terms,” he said of the government. On this point Mr. Patwardhan is in line with the Hindu right, whose attacks on privatization of state-owned companies and liberalization at large have slowed the process.
But on most other issues he is an emblem of a growing gap between India’s secular, liberal elite and Hindu nationalists who say it is they who reflect popular sentiments. The recent landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat, which was the site of deadly Hindu-Muslim riots this spring, would appear to support that contention. The party campaigned on themes of Hindu pride and Hindu vulnerability to Islamic terrorism and Muslim hegemony.
Mr. Patwardhan’s message sits no better with many Indians overseas than it does with his government. Last February a planned screening of two of his films at the American Museum of Natural History was moved to New York University because, museum officials said, the large space needed for the screening was being renovated.
”Indians in America want a perfect image of India,” Mr. Patwardhan said. ”They don’t want the dark side.”