There have been quite a few movies about revenge in recent years. Badlapur is steeped in it, with revenge embedded in its very title and spelled out letter by letter in a Scrabble game, in case it wasn't clear. Gangs of Wasseypur plods through many iterations of the pointless and costly cycle of vengeance, the endless dance of an eye for an eye across the generations. Earlier this year, NH10 offered a chilling story of an ordinary woman driven by a horrendous ordeal into a bleak and vengeful space that she never could have imagined. Haider, too, draws on a classic text of revenge, a young man consumed by a mad grief-driven thirst for vengeance.
These modern takes on revenge do not glorify vengeance (well, perhaps Gangs of Wasseypur does, a little, but that is an entire topic in itself). Rather, they flay the impulse for vengeance to expose its raw, animal nerve. In Badlapur, Varun Dhawan's drive for revenge is the irrational product of grief and profound isolation, a wound allowed to fester instead of heal. In NH10, revenge is not calculated or planned, but comes on impulse, in the snap of a traumatised mind. These films show revenge not as a personal triumph, and not even really as an implementation of justice, but as a dark and dysfunctional desperation, the terrible scream of a broken psyche.
This is a departure from Hindi films of decades past, in which revenge has been shown as a noble pursuit, worthy of the most brave-hearted heroes (and occasional heroines). Vengeance has been the prime driver of the action in countless masala films — usually vengeance for the murder of the hero's mother or father, a murder which happens swiftly during the film's prologue, in the hero's childhood. From Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer, to Sridevi in Roop ki Rani Choron ka Raja, this brand of revenge is glorified and exalted; a lifetime's obsession with it is a sign of a pure heroic heart, dedicated and unwavering.
In some films, revenge is closely personal, as in Don, where Roma (Zeenat Aman) takes great risk to avenge her brother's death. Others — like numerous Sunny Deol films — elevate the atavistic drive for vengeance into the grandest expression of patriotism. But virtually none of these films ever question the impulse for revenge, or present its fulfillment as a double-edged achievement. More often, they cut with jarring quickness from the villain's violent demise to a beachfront sunset where the hero and heroine joyfully begin their happily ever after, The End.
In some movies, revenge is presented as a just and expedient alternative to the glacial and corrupt operation of the Indian legal system. In Ghulam, for example, Aamir Khan's character, Siddhu, crusades against the bhai who extorts and terrorises his neighborhood. Siddhu's idealistic lawyer is preparing him for trial, but the case is adjourned for a weekend, and in that brief recess, Siddhu incites a riot among his neighbors that ends in vengeance against the bhai and his gang. And who can blame them? Given the courts' notorious inefficiency and the strings the bhai can be counted on to pull, without our hero's extra-judicial initiative the slow wheels of justice might have crept along for a decade while the bhai's reign of terror continued unfettered.