The False Gods We Worship

It is disheartening to see some of the brightest and most respected minds inIndia venting their rage at Amitabh Bachchan for not being what he has neverclaimed he is in the first place. The biggest complaint seems that his recentbehaviour has not been in keeping with his stature as a refined"intellectual." He is being charged with betraying his father, HarivanshRai’s legacy and for displaying his cultural poverty publicly. He is beingchided for going to temples and turning his son’s private wedding into a tamasha.

To the best that one can recall, however, Bachchan has never claimed that heis an intellectual, much less a thinker, in his father’s mould. He has nevermade public utterances of any worth, he have never muttered a word that can beinterpreted as carrying any heft. Yes, he did represent all thingsanti-Establishment on screen in the 1970s and 1980s but that was his job. He wasenacting scripts written by others.

So why should we expect intellectualism and progressivism from him? He hasalways been just an actor and that too not a thinking one. So he’s not atfault. It is we who have been projecting our own sensibilities on to him, we whowant him to behave in a manner that would satisfy our image of him as a nationalhero. He is not, and to his credit he has never claimed that he is. So don’tput him in the dock for a crime he has never committed.

He is a mere mortal like the 99 percent of the Indians. He believes in Godand believes in demonstrating how much he believes in God. Just as most of theIndians go to their gods to seek their blessings, he goes to his. Just as mostof us believe that gods should be pacified time and again by the offerings ofmoney and prasad, so does he. Just as many of us would like to protect our children fromthe "evil eyes" and unfavourable "doshas", so does he. He is a product ofa society that remains conservative to its core despite all the outwardtrappings of modernity.

Similarly, his son and daughter-in-law are also products of a celebrityculture that produces icons that are as shallow as they are inconsequential.First, we make a national icon of a beauty queen and celebrate her as one of thesuccess stories of modern India. And then when she decides to suffer herhumiliation without so much as a murmur even as she is paraded from one templeto another, from one pundit to another, we shake our heads and bemoan herinitiation into her new role as a "demure bahurani". This at a time whenwomen across this country are rejecting the false constraints imposed by theirsociety while here is a woman with all the power at her disposal who chooses to"stand behind quietly" and bask in her husband’s glory. Her husband,another icon of modern India, clearly loves her, but only so much. He wants herto be accepted by his parents and that includes her having to accommodate allthe wishes of her in-laws. These are the brand ambassadors of an emerging,confident India, ranked as the most powerful and influential people in thecountry year after year.

But Amitabh Bachchan and his family do not exist in a societal vacuum.Today’s India is an India where conformism is the new mantra, no one has anytime to rebel, including the Angry Young Man of our films and his progeny. Why shouldBachchans be any different? Why should Amitabh Bachchan be examined through theprism of his father’s ideology? Doesn’t it say enough about contemporaryIndia that Harivansh Rai Bachchan is today known as Amitabh Bachchan’s father?

Harivansh Rai may have been a poet of a progressive, liberal vintage but hisson has been too politically correct to be able to demonstrate hisintellectualism in any form. Nonetheless, he has effectively used his closenessto political power to serve his interests. Once it was the Gandhis, now it’sAmar Singh-Mulayam Singh-Bal Thackeray combine. Can anyone be more politicallyregressive than this trio? Yet we continue to call upon Bachchan to demonstratehis progressive side when clearly there is none.

Only an actor can keep a straight face when claiming that he has nothing todo with politics and at the same time campaign for the Samajwadi Party bydeclaring "Uttar Pradesh mein dumhai, kyuunki yahaan jurm kam hai." Bachchanfinds it hard to shed his political neutrality when events as disturbing as 1984Delhi carnage, 1992 Mumbai riots, or 2002 Gujarat massacres take place lestit disturbs his carefully crafted political balance. Yet he does not find itproblematic to support an administration in UP that has under its belt somethingas horrific as Nithari killings.

Politically inept, perhaps, but professionallyalways in charge, not even hesitating to charge his own company a fee to use hisname. Heck, he apparently has even claimed that the Bachchans have alwaysbeen farmers so as to continue to validate his claims on a piece of farm-land inthe Pavana dam area near Lonavala. On top of that, every time he gets a noticefrom the Income Tax Department for the payment of his dues, we have to bear AmarSingh’s diatribe that the Bachchan family is being targeted due to somepolitical vendetta.

And yet, for this country Amitabh Bachchan is not simply an honourable manbut a national hero. The bitter reality is that he is not, in fact he never was.He has always been an actor with a full-time job of entertaining us, perhapswith a certain political savvy, with the normal contradictions and foibles of ahuman being. And that’s all right. Let him celebrate his son’s wedding theway he wants. Let him dance and enjoy. Let Hindi film songs be his and hisfamily’s reference points. After all, they are the reference points for such alarge chunk of this country.

But let us examine ourselves and what we have made of ourselves as a society.We elevate an ordinary actor to extraordinary heights, call him a national hero,an icon even, and then pull him down. We cry foul when he refuses to behave as a heroor icon should.Leave him alone, let him be an actor. But don’t expect him to lead us out ofregressive ideas and practices. For that we will have to wait for a real hero,someone who gives his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Bertolt Brecht once said, "Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes."India today is a fundamentally unhappy and dissatisfied nation despite its eightpercent rates of growth. And so we will continue to search for our heroes andwill keep getting disappointed.

Till then let’s just give our wishes to the newly weds and their families.