The Times of India 23 Sep, 2006| Updated at 1618hrs IST
Brand Mahatma
by Shiv Visvanathan
This is the era of Bollywood sequels. Dhoom 2 is threatening to emerge, Hera Pheri is promising a third round. A friend of mine, a perceptive critic, suggested that the sequel to Munnabhai is more than just laughs.
She claimed it was more than a story of a man who enters a quiz contest on Mahatma Gandhi. She contrasted it to Rang De Basanti for its sense of history. Her hints set me thinking.
There are two basic oppositions which mark the Bollywood movie. The first was the opposition between town and country. The opposition was spatial and cultural providing the axis for the great doubles of Hindi cinema like Ram aur Shyam and Sita aur Gita.
The poignancy of town versus country disappeared in the seventies, especially with the rise of Amitabh Bachchan, the first truly urban hero.
The second opposition is that between past and present. The past was represented as history, as heritage, as legacy, as civilisation.
If Amitabh squelched the poignancy of town and country, in Lage Raho Munnabhai, the past is neither a problem nor a problematic.
This city is constructed on the simultaneity of the present. History embalmed in a textbook makes little sense to the city dweller.
If Rang De Basanti shows that history has to be reinvented to be relevant, Munnabhai goes a step further here.
History as conceived in the textbooks does not count. The present is all and the presence in the present is all that counts.
Gandhi as archive, monument, and history remains inaccessible unless he is reworked as a contemporary.
Secondly, history does not appear as knowledge. History is not a value frame or an ideology, it is mere information to be tactically used as and when needed. All information is created as equal before the quiz.
Arshad Warsi (Circuit) explains to a reluctant professor: you know Gandhi as I know my locality. You are expert on one as I am of the other. Knowledge may be withheld but information is transactional.
It is for trading. More crucially, all information is equal. Knowing Gandhi does not make one superior to the expert on bus routes. Each city possesses a variety of such expertise and success belongs to those who can access it.
The movie also suggests that the most democratic and agonistic form of information is the quiz. The quiz packages relevant information and transforms it into a game.
It provides the primordialism of the hunt or search in an information society. Thus Gandhi in the library is inert and meaningless.
Gandhi as part of a radio quiz returns a community ferment back to knowledge. Democracy is reborn when dull catechisms are transformed into quizzes.
Also, once Gandhi exists in the quiz format, he is liberated from history and becomes another contemporary game. It shows that knowledge about Gandhi not only has value but a price or prize. As exchange value you can trade correct answers for a toaster, an iron or a fridge.
Warsi who plays the resident philosopher and commentator provides footnotes to the theory of Gandhi as information through his body language.
Accessing Gandhi or an occupied house is for him two forms of activity. Information is always applied. It is a form of doing.
You need information to do things. There is a second tactic of contemporaneity which Munnabhai develops. It realises that for the new generation Gandhi cannot be history.
As a monument, he is a burden, as an archive he is unvisited. Nor can Gandhi be myth because myth is full of contradictions. Also Gandhi as myth would demand constant reinvention and moral inventiveness is tiring.
Bollywood is always brilliant with questions. It asks that if myth and history are irrelevant, what is the alternative?
The answer that Bollywood claims is branding. Branding is a term that sees the market as a set of niched spaces. To capture a particular niche, the old persona or product has to be vitalised, rechristened, relocated, redefined as value.
Branding reworks the imagination of the product. It is simpler than myth and less contradictory. A brand is consumer friendly and user friendly and it is precisely this that Gandhi becomes transformed into the movie.
Gandhi as information has to work and work quickly. Like instant food, he can't insist on deferred gratification. Gandhi has to work with the immediacy of an agony aunt providing alternative to an impending suicide and a girl running away from a crooked father.
Gandhi like 'Boost'or any magic formula has to demonstrate that he works, Gandhi cannot be comic. He has to be funny in a cathartic way.
Happily, Gandhi is now locatable and consumable in between popcorn and chips, Nescafe and Maggi noodles, Dale Carnegie and Vincent Peale.
>From distant myth he is now part of modern folklore re-engineered in a
new role as agony aunt and management consultant. He appears
practical, effective, gentle and professional. He is not mystical,
religious or political. This new Gandhi is a pragmatic art of life
man.
Munnabhai in that sense is a radical shift, a move away from history and myth. It is more drastic than Rang De Basanti which still carries a sense of history. The former wants to repeat history by reliving it.
The latter wants to rework it as brand, making it comfortable, friendly and facile. It has all the makings of an epistemic blockbuster.
The writer is a sociologist.