Sarkar Raj, the just-released sequel of Ram Gopal Varma’s indigenised The Godfather (no matter how much he disclaims the connection) is a risky piece of goods, as wasthe prequel Sarkar. Only, in this one, the point is driven home twice over, with enough implications for the society that we continue to inhabit. The risk here relates not simply to the surface violence quotient of Hindicinema--that’s been there since donkey’s years and has also been much writtenabout--but rather to the manner in which jingoism and patriarchy get propped up in the name of the nation. That again is not essentially a novel point in relation to Hindi films, but in this film, it is more insidious because of an ostensible"modernity" of vision of the main players--those that constitute the SarkarRaj.
Like the Corleones in Godfather, the Nagres of Sarkar Raj are political players dabbling in big money, but unlike with the Corleones, who, we never forget, are the Mafioso, or even in the indications of mafia network in the originalSarkar, Sarkar Raj is essentially about an alternate center of power which is also the moral locus of a society. InSarkar, we have patriarch Subhas Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan) saying that he sometimes chose to work outside the bounds of law because the situation demandedit--while his workings outside the bounds of law were sought to be justified by his being some kind of de facto representative of the common man, the plot essentially centered upon the politics of power play. In the sequel, however, the power play aspect is appropriated within a moralist,"modernising" and developmental perspective that one could choose to see as extremely dangerous in the society that we inhabit.
In Sarkar Raj, the Nagre family has its muscles flexed in favor of the setting up of a multi billion dollar power plant, a project that promises"development" for the people of Maharashtra. Development is the watchword here, and the battle-lines get drawn between those that unconditionally claim the progress of their society and those for whom'progress' and its profits is the prerogative of those in power. And those that seek to achieve that unconditional progress at all cost are, of course, the Nagres, even though what is effectivelymobilised in the battle for 'development' is the mafia network at their command. In this film, power play not only gets coded in terms of the battle betweenGood and Evil or the Virtuous and Immoral, as is typical of Hindi cinema, it also gets played out in terms of‘Development’ versus ‘Non-Development’, a construction that is particularly sinister for a society wheremodernisation via commercialism has become a watchword in recent times.