Spies are Forever

In 1968, the year Indira Gandhi gave the go-ahead to Ram Nath Kao to create a smart intelligence agency, Dharmendra was playing a spy who was part of a group created by veterans of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Fauj in Aankhen. Directed by Ramanand Sagar, the fictional group was a response to the actual Intelligence Bureau’s abject failures resulting in the wars of 1962 and 1965. The movie journeyed from Tokyo, where our rosy-cheeked hero learnt judo, to Beirut, where he destroyed India’s non-state enemies perpetrated by a monocled Dr X, played with jackbooted relish by the longtime villain Jeevan.

By the 1980s, the spy in Indian films had become a James Bond clone who was as comfortable driving a car with plates saying Gunmaster G9 as he was dancing on a golden disco floor. Such cavorting was strictly forbidden by the late 1990s and early 2000s when terror attacks became war by other means. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) became the byword for hardworking sleuths, often underrated and always undercover, men and increasingly women who were willing to sacrifice anything to maintain national security in the increasingly “securiocratic state”, to use scholar Syed Haider’s characterisation. Its logic, he has written, had a seductive ring to it, frightening political disagreement and making it more subservient to autocratic measures.

By the 2010s, the RAW agent emerged as a desi superhero, his slow-motion action and fast-footed style creating a mixture of James Bond and Iron Man, always at Bharat Mata’s service. He toiled so that India remained at peace, returning from exotic locations and international assignments to his life of cooking rice and dal for his mentor and taking his daily quota of milk from the milkman as a Grade I officer in a government housing locality. It was this dichotomy, of the ordinary man using his extraordinary skills to serve the nation, that made Ek Tha Tiger (2012) so delicious until Bollywood conventions took over. There were no medals to be won or no honours to be announced. Just a cumulative salary of Rs 23 lakh a year in the bank waiting to be used upon retirement. These covert operatives worked underground and often under-appreciated, with the epitome of this conflict being embodied in the streaming hit The Family Man (2019), where Srikant Tiwari of a department called Threat Analysis and Surveillance Wing or TASC was distanced from his wife, disregarded by his daughter and bullied by his son, even as he was a superstar at work, using his mind to triumph over the most evil of masterplans.

So popular has the RAW cottage industry become that Bollywood currently has several movies and webseries in the planning or shooting stage. Dharma Productions is working on a biopic of the original Kaoboy, the ultra-secretive and superswish Ram Nath Kao. Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP is doing a webseries on a series of spy games in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, called Panthers, to be directed by Rensil D’Silva. Sidharth Malhotra is playing the lead in Mission Majnu, an RSVP movie, about a covert operation in Pakistan. And the OG of movie spies, Salman Khan, is said to be in talks to play the RAW spy known as the Black Tiger, Ravindra Kaushik, who infiltrated the Pakistani Army as an officer between 1979 and 1983.

SAMEER NAIR, who runs Applause Entertainment which made the hugely entertaining Scam 92 for SonyLIV, says stories about RAW are always good to tell. Last year, they made the war drama Avrodh, streaming on SonyLIV, and this year they are creating season 2 of Avrodh and the Indian adaptation of the Israeli spy hit Fauda, and writing a movie titled Iftikhar based on the life of Major Mohit Sharma who went undercover as a Hizbul Mujahideen operative. Adds Nair: “Stories of homeland security and military valour, when told right, create a strong sense of patriotic fervour and national pride. It is a unversal emotion, not unique to India, and touches a powerful emotive chord with audiences everywhere.”

Why do we love our spies so much? Anusha Nandakumar has just written a book on the 1971 war, The War That Made R&AW, with Sandeep Saket. The documentary filmmaker says her love for spies started with watching them in films. “My father was a fan of James Bond so that would have also contributed to the fascination. I also remember reading children’s detective novels like Famous Five as a child. So the books, films and the fact that there was so much secrecy around spies made me more curious.” As for RAW, she says, so little is known about them that “we make up our own stories of how our desi agents would be. It is the thrill of them existing around us. We imagine them to be leading ordinary lives but performing extraordinary tasks for the country. As a child, my friends and I would make up stories of who could be potential RAW agents from our everyday lives. Milkmen, teachers, friend’s parents, all fit the bill. The angle of patriotism also contributes to our fascination.”

Tied up with RAW is the emerging nation-state on the global stage. The 1967 Hindi James Bond rip-off, Farz, stars a boyish Jeetendra as Agent 116 who is sent to recover the secret lost with Agent 303. Our introduction to Agent 116 is him leaping about in a field with a very young Aruna Irani, but he gets fairly serious when he has to disrupt the diabolical plans of Mr Wong to spread toxins in India’s farmlands and poison its people. Mr Wong naturally looks Chinese and it was no doubt Bollywood’s response to the battering we received at China’s hands in the 1962 war.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bollywood was preoccupied with internal troubles and had little time for war games. Desi Bonds, when they appeared, were like Gunmaster G9 in Suraksha (1979) and Wardaat (1981), both starring Mithun Chakraborty. When we first meet Mithun in Suraksha, he is surrounded by a gaggle of girls, dancing to a distinctly Bond-inspired tune, set to music by Bappi Lahiri. But he is a mere CBI officer, with a snazzy wardrobe and a nifty dance step (or two). It was the villains in the ’80s, in Shaan (1980) and Mr India (1987), who were more charismatic and Bond-like than the heroes, which suggested the churn that was to come in society.
And the churn resulted in the rise of nationalist, propaganda films. Against the backdrop of Pakistan as Enemy No 1, Bollywood produced Sarfarosh (1999), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) and LoC Kargil (2003), which looked at Pakistan, and indeed, the Indian Muslim, with more than a degree of suspicion.

By the early 2000s, after the Kargil War of 1999, there was no doubt who the enemy was. The World Trade Centre attacks only reinforced that. Enter the spy thrillers, which points out film scholar Krzysztof Lipka-Chudzik, were usually based in Kashmir, where the terrorists had the backing of Pakistan’s ISI. There was The Hero (2003), Asambhav (2004), Mukhbiir (2008) and Lamhaa (2010). The movies looked at the terror perpetrated by Muslim organisations while omitting the possibility of terror by the state.

But it was probably in Fanaa (2006) that one first saw the distinction being made between the Bureau of Intelligence (stand-in for the blundering Intelligence Bureau) represented by the excitable Sharat Saxena playing Susheel Rawat and the more sophisticated RAW embodied by the cool and collected Tabu as Dr Malini Tyagi. While Saxena’s character relied on conventional methods of policing, seeing the terrorist as a common criminal, Tabu’s character was more interested in the psychology of the terrorist, Rehan Quadri (payed by Aamir Khan), in his motivations and his triggers.

Shibani Bhatija, who wrote the film, says at that time, it was quite radical to have a woman (Tabu’s Dr Tyagi) lead a high-profile case of national importance. A pregnant woman no less. And doing so it was important to bring to the investigation what women do best. “Think things through. Read between the lines. Seek answers in actions made by Rehan rather than purely chasing action. And Tyagi represented all of that. So bringing her unique approach meant using the method most suited—the part of psychology that seeks to understand motive. Terrorism will usually involve RAW in one way or other. Also it was knowledge-oriented, not just encounter-led.” By 2018, Alia Bhatt would be playing a RAW recruit who marries into a Pakistani army family in order to spy during the 1971 war, using a combination of intuition and physical smarts to outwit the all-too intimate enemy.

Since 2000, everything is fair in war. In Neeraj Pandey’s Baby (2015), the agent is a ‘deshbhakt’, a patriot, who doesn’t want to die for his nation, but wants to live for it. In film after film, whether Phantom (2015) or Baby, we hear the ‘dushman’ saying the same thing: India can only talk, not do anything in the face of terror. In Baby’s prequel, Naam Shabana (2017), Manoj Bajpayee’s handler tells Taapsee Pannu’s Shabana: “Every one of us who dies does so that hundreds can be safe.”

WHEN BAJPAYEE’S Tiwari asks his boss in The Family Man season 1about the difference between the enemy and them—referring to certain amoral actions—the boss replies: “They have to win once, we have to win every single time.” Tiwari’s TASC is modelled on RAW, and its paramount duty is protecting the state. Empathy is shown for the other, whether it is the wrongly accused young Muslim man, or the litany of atrocities visited upon the Tamil rebel’s body and mind by the Sri Lankan army, but it is understood to be the cost of war.

Eventually it is about honour, for the agent personally and for the nation. In Phantom, the wrongfully disgraced soldier goes on a suicide mission to restore his family honour. In Nikkhil Advani’s D-Day (2013), four unsung heroes, with only three weaknesses—honour, duty and country—help India strike back at its most wanted, a terrorist who calls himsef a businessman, by showing him the face of a new India. It looks down the barrel of a gun, fearless and fierce. And it doesn’t blink when it pulls the trigger. If along the way it has sacrificed dissent, argument and questions about state superpowers, it considers it a worthwhile bargain.

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