Bharat’s Hero

LAST WEEK, WE LOST one of the key figures of Hindi cinema of the 1960s and 1980s, actor, producer and director, Manoj Kumar. Born in Abbottabad, North West Frontier Province, in 1937 as Harikrishan Giri Goswami, he was one of the last of the many Punjabis in the Hindi film industry who migrated from areas that are now in Pakistan.

Although Manoj Kumar was established as a major star in the early 1960s, my primary interest is in his films which offered nationalistic responses to India’s social problems. Here, I look at three films set in the contemporary period that he directed where he played a hero called ‘Bharat’. This character, whose name suggests he embodies the Indian nation, had such a popular impact that he also became known as ‘Bharat Kumar’. (Manoj Kumar also directed the massive hit Kranti (1981), about the Indian freedom struggle, which I leave aside as a historical rather than a social film.)

These three films were Upkar (1967), Purab Aur Pachhim (1970) and Roti Kapada Aur Makaan (1974). They were all great commercial successes at the box office as they featured leading actors and stars, and had hit songs with memorable picturisations, but are perhaps most remembered for their stirring speeches where Bharat speaks for the nation to the audience. The films have powerful melodramatic narratives to move the audiences and present an emotional nationalism to engage with political and social issues with a pleasing aesthetic presentation.

In these films, patriotism becomes the entertainment itself and creates an emotion that pervades the whole film. Manoj Kumar’s films may be mocked for their melodrama but the audience responded strongly to them. Perhaps this is because they raised issues of pressing concern to them at the time, and resolved them in a typically Hindi film melodramatic way where politics and economics are subsumed by romance and family melodrama.

Much has been said about a Nehruvian ethos in Hindi film but Manoj Kumar’s films are all made in the post-Nehruvian moment when the socialist postcolonial consensus was breaking down. There were fissures in Congress and new political movements were emerging, notably the rise of Maoist groups which responded to the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi and her developmental policies.

Perhaps a more political cinema might have emerged in India as in other postcolonial societies, often funded by the state, but Manoj Kumar’s films are made in the mainstream Hindi film industry, which is driven by commercial imperatives, with success being judged by appealing to the maximum audience. Like other contemporary mainstream Hindi films, the Bharat films show the individual looking for romance within the family structure, set against a struggle against feudalism and capitalism. Perhaps these films are unusual in presenting the state in a highly positive light through the institutions of the army and the police, rather than the usual motif of the police arriving after the family has resolved an issue. There is also a particular emphasis on the virtues of peasantry and on traditional values in the face of social change.

The first of the Bharat films, Upkar was released only 10 years after Mother India (dir Mehboob Khan, 1957), where there is also an emphasis on the family, agriculture and morality in the face of social problems, though Mother India engages technology as a way forward, such as the building of a dam, a typical Nehruvian project. The similarities between the two films are also felt through the hero’s loss of his hands, the evil of moneylending (the actor Kanhaiyalal reprises the role), and the depiction of the beauty of rural India, but the films are otherwise set in very different worlds.

Upkar was made at the suggestion of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri after seeing Shaheed (dir S Ram Sharma, 1965) in which Manoj Kumar played Shaheed Bhagat Singh. Shastri told Manoj Kumar that he should make a film on the slogan ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’.

Manoj Kumar exceeded this brief. Playing the hero, Bharat, who was both a farmer and a soldier, the film showed some of the major issues facing India at the time, including rural-urban migration, population growth, black marketing and the 1965 war with Pakistan.

While Bharat, a farmer, goes to fight in the war and returns without his hands, his brother Puran, intoxicated by the glamorous city life, wants to divide the family land and sell his share. Bharat says: “Main Bharat hoon. Hamesha hi batware ki khilaf raha hoon. Main batwara hone nahi doonga.” This is a clear call against the Partition of around 20 years earlier and is a further call to Indians to unite to keep the boundaries of India (or Bharat) intact.

In Purab Aur Pachhim, Manoj Kumar plays Bharat, the son of a martyred freedom fighter, who goes to London, on his way to Magdalen College, University of Oxford, to study before returning to India. As soon as Bharat’s plane lands in London, he realises that his family friends who have settled there have adopted what they think are modern, Western ways. Bharat has to educate them in Indian values, in particular Preeti (Saira Bano), who wears minis, smokes, drinks and even has blonde hair. By the time Bharat brings Preeti to India as his wife, she has been fully reformed into a sari-wearing ‘traditional’ Indian woman.

Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (1974) took as its title a political slogan that was used in demands for basic needs. Its origin isn’t clear but it seems that it was used by Indira Gandhi before the 1967 elections in which she first became prime minister. Although Manoj Kumar plays Bharat once again, he is more the Everyman, the ordinary citizen who, although a graduate, cannot find a proper job (in anger, he even burns his degree certificate on his father’s funeral pyre) to keep his family out of poverty. His girlfriend leaves him for a wealthy man; one brother, Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), takes to crime before joining the army while the other, Deepak, becomes a policeman. A series of misadventures leads to Bharat being framed, and then exonerated, with the film ending on a happy note as Bharat finds new love.

This film is about the disillusionment with the new India as youth unemployment and poverty become major issues as is the struggle to just get by in society. However, Bharat always keeps faith in the state, and at one moment is seen contemplating a photograph of Indira Gandhi.

Manoj Kumar’s films show an emphatic and loud patriotism in the context of the issues of his time. They were huge hits at the time of release and the songs are still very much in circulation today. Purab Aur Pachhim is a founding film in the

history of the depiction of the Indian diaspora and how overseas Indians share in Indian values, a genre which flourished from the mid- 1990s well into this century. Upkar, similarly, sets an example for the portrayal of patriotism, a theme which remains popular up to the present, although many nationalistic films today retell historical narratives, often in the genre of the biopic. The themes of Roti Kapada Aur Makaan were revisited often in the 1970s, as the story of the Everyman who has to fight for a place in the world but whose patriotism makes him believe that he will eventually find it.

Manoj Kumar’s films are patriotic but they are not necessarily nationalistic films. He upholds (his interpretation of) Indian values, largely based on tradition, but is critical of the state while also valuing its institutions. His films were made at a transitional moment in both the history of India and also in Indian film history between Nehruvian cinema and the Amitabh Bachchan films of the late 1970s.

family melodramaIndian cinemaManoj KumarnationalismpatriotismPurab Aur PachhimRoti Kapada Aur MakaanUpkar