Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | How Indira Misread Signs, Failed Morality Test in 1975
Sholay, Deewar, and Aandhi captured the unrest and spirit of 1975 better than news or speeches.

There was no Mood of the Nation poll in 1975. It was to be inferred from other indirect means – the number of street protests, gherao (the word has gone out of circulation), rail roko, and hunger strikes. But there was a subtle, psychological mood reckoner. This was a commercial Hindi film.
But cultural history was not a developed field in India then. It is not so now.
1975 also marks the 50th anniversary of Hindi films: Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, YashChopra’s Deewar and Gulzar’s Aandhi, among others.
These coincide with the 50th anniversary of the imposition of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.
Do these films in some way indicate the mood and atmosphere of the volatile political background of 1975? Those who look at the Emergency, and who do so regularly and ritualistically every June 25, do not take a broader view of Indian society and politics. Most of them have been content to go along the narrow political track. The political track is clear and easy to follow: the Allahabad High Court judgment disqualifying Indira Gandhi for violation of rules in the 1971 election from Rae Bareli on June 12, and the declaration of Emergency on June 25, followed by the arrest of all Opposition leaders. But 50 years after the Emergency, one is dissatisfied with the interpretation that it was the villainy of Indira Gandhi alone that resulted in the Emergency. The questions arise as to what the state of the nation, the mood of the nation in 1975 and the years preceding it?
Srinath Raghavan, who had earlier traced the connections between the Second World War and the definitive role of the Indian soldiers in it, has recently taken a broader view of Indira Gandhi, the Emergency, and the political trends at the time in the country and abroad.
The cultural markers of the time, which are to be found in popular cinema, can reveal the deeper mood of the times. Movies can be a meaningful way in political criticism. Attempts have been made to interpret popular culture, as represented in popular commercial films, in larger social and political terms, but it is done in the obscure language of philosophical and psychological alienation. The esoteric modes are not to be scoffed at. There has to be room for all kinds of interpretation. But a sociological interpretation of the movies of the time could reveal something more interesting than mere political analysis.
The three movies -- Deewar, Sholay and Aandhi -- were shot in 1974 and they were released in 1975. They indicate the general mood and how it must have impacted the filmmakers. Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, who became the successful screenplay and dialogue writers of what has come to be identified with the “angry young man” portrayed in an iconic manner by Amitabh Bachchan, first in the film Zanjeer and continued in Deewar. But the Khan-Akhtar duo did the screenplay and dialogue of Sholay as well. But what was picturised in Deewar and Sholay goes beyond the directors, the actors, the story and dialogue writers. It is about the mood and spirit hanging in the air of the times.
Deewar is known to be loosely based on the Bombay smuggler Haji Mastan. By the time Deewar was made, he was in prison. There is a story that Amitabh Bachchan had met him in prison, and narrated how cold his eyes were. This was the outlaw hero. It showed that India in the late 1960s was drifting. The underworld was at work, and the political idealism of an earlier period had disappeared to a great extent. The police officer played by Shashi Kapoor in the film stands as a lonely sentinel, and he draws inspiration from the shattered and yet defiantly idealistic schoolmaster played by A.K. Hangal. The political system is in the shadows.
The State is ineffective. Sholay again shows that justice -- in this case, the personal revenge of a police officer, played by Sanjeev Kumar, whose arms have been cut off by a notorious outlaw -- had to be got through private initiative. The police officer gets two criminals to carry forward his private war. The political order is invisible.
Aandhi is indeed a different kind of movie, compared to Deewar and Sholay, even as Yash Chopra and Ramesh Sippy are so strikingly different from the poetic sensibility of Gulzar. The story of Aandhi came on the radar, and it was banned after running for 24 weeks
in the cinema hall. The debate whether it was about Indira Gandhi remains inconclusive, despite Gulzar’s weak rationalising that it was indeed based on Indira Gandhi, but only on her traits and mannerisms. The film was about a woman politician who was ambitious and the dilemmas of her domestic life. The politician was shown for the first time as a private individual with a public life. And that is why it remains a watchable film even after 50 years.
These three films do not in any way portend the Emergency. They manage to draw a broader picture of the times. The times were uncertain, troublesome, and even violent. What holds these pictures is not so much their indirect commentary on the politics of the times, and they do provide a strong and subtle political commentary, but human relations and emotional bonds, the bond between a mother and a son in Deewar, the bond of friendship between two desperadoes in Sholay, and the love of a woman and a man caught in tussle of ambition and sentiment.
The self-conscious meditation over the troubling times in the 1976 Satyajit Ray film, Jan Aranya, where the patriarch thinks aloud about how things had gone wrong, even as the sons accept the cynical norms of the day.
But do these movies justify the imposition of the Emergency? Of course, they do not. They help us understand that it was a period of deep unrest.
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was the response of a weak leader to the turmoil of the times. She thought she was restoring order, but she did it the wrong way. Force is the weapon of a weak government. The popular idea that Indira Gandhi was a strong leader because of her 1971 landslide election victory, and her role in India’s military intervention in the birth of Bangladesh in 1972, was misplaced. She failed the real moral test by imposing the Emergency when she felt that she was being personally challenged.
Is history a morality tale? It is indeed in many ways.