THE PRE-RELEASE PUBLICITY for Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti was misleading. It stressed Katrina Kaif’s centrality to the story as a Sonia Gandhi-like figure—a politician’s widow who steps up to re-ignite her party’s dying embers. But Kaif’s role in the film is relatively insubstantial and her sober sari get-up merely a late twist in a long narrative. In any case, despite the film’s title, its focus isn’t as much on politics per se, but a deeply dysfunctional family playing out its private games of one-upmanship.
In that sense, it’s apt that Raajneeti uses the Mahabharata as its palimpsest. More than once, the epic tells us that after exiling his Pandava cousins to the forest, the Kaurava prince Duryodhana—ostensibly the villain of the show—was a just ruler, mindful of the welfare of his subjects. A cynic could suggest, then, that the Mahabharata war—with the Pandavas cast as heroes cleansing the world of sin—was more about settling personal scores than about grand ideas of duty and righteousness.
More seriously, the Mahabharata is a complex, morally ambiguous work of literature. Read well, it allows us to empathise—to a degree—with every character; to understand how small actions, not always malicious to begin with, can lead to a cataclysmic tragedy.
In Jha’s film it’s impossible to root for anyone—with the exception of a revolutionary leader (Naseeruddin Shah) who makes a five-minute appearance during the opening credits, delivers an impassioned speech about politicians’ apathy towards the common man, and is never seen again. His microphone connection is cut off mid-rant, but in a way, the rest of the film is a demonstration of the truth behind his words.
The canvas of characters and their interrelationships is so vast that a ten-minute voiceover is required for the introductions. Once that’s done, we learn that friction is building between the tight-lipped Veerendra Pratap (Manoj Bajpai), who considers himself the rightful heir to a political legacy, and his charismatic cousin Prithvi (Arjun Rampal). As the power struggle escalates, Prithvi’s US-based kid brother Samar (Ranbir Kapoor)—so naïve about political privileges that he rebukes his father for coming to the airport (“Papa, all this security! You’re holding up the traffic!”)—is drawn into the game. Watching him with lovelorn eyes is his childhood friend Indu (Kaif), who dreams of being driven around in a laal batti car someday. Meanwhile, a modern-day Karna shows up in the form of the lower-class Sooraj (Ajay Devgn) who, like his mythical predecessor, wears earrings/kundala and glowers a lot. The illegitimate half-brother of Prithvi and Samar, he has been brought up by the family driver but fiercely refuses to chauffeur anyone around, opting to become a warrior instead; Dalit politics is his battleground, and when he is shunned by Prithvi’s camp he aligns himself with Veerendra.
Raajneeti has a definite vitality. An incisive script, assured editing and a few snappy performances keep things moving, even during the many wordy confrontational scenes where individual pride is shown to trump good governance. But as the film draws on, it loses interest in the growth of its characters and becomes a guessing game: how (and in what order) will these players get their comeuppance?
In the process, it sometimes makes lazy, muddle-headed use of the Mahabharata template. The scene where Sooraj’s real mother Bharati goes to meet her firstborn is an obvious riff on the Kunti-Karna meeting before the war, and it underlines the point bizarrely by using archaic language (“Tum mere jeshth putra ho,” says Bharati, lapsing into Sanskritised Hindi). It hardly carries any dramatic force because these people have little interiority. When Sooraj speaks emotionally (as emotional as Ajay Devgn, in his familiar, brooding anti-hero avatar, can get) about his kinship with Veerendra, it’s unconvincing because we have been given no real sense of a strong relationship between the two men. Further, when he rejects his mother’s claim on him by declaring himself a Dalit representative, it rings false; he may think of himself as a ‘son of the soil,’ but the film isn’t interested in showing us how he’s using his newfound position to help his backward constituency. The scene exists purely as a reference to a familiar text; it’s a ‘connect the dots’ moment.
And there are many such moments, drawing not only on the Mahabharata but also The Godfather and Hindi films, as well as real-life incidents in Indian politics. A shot of a mangled body after a car-bomb explosion is reminiscent of the infamous on-site photographs following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. Bharati can be seen as a Mother India figure: she has a short dalliance with a Leftwing revolutionary (in the film’s first scene, set in the 1970s), produces a bastard child—a Dalit—but then ties the knot with a political dynasty.
These references and symbols are intriguing in their own right, but on a more basic level the film can be read as a boy’s video game, an elaborate playing out of male fantasies about control and vengeance. For most of the men here, political power and brute force are more arousing than sex. Women are marginal figures in their world: Prithvi and Samar manipulate Indu for their own ends, while Veerendra and Sooraj appear to have no romantic attachments at all. I was reminded of the impotent patriarch in Jha’s 1997 film Mrityudand who abandons his wife and becomes
the local temple’s head priest so he can wield power through religious authority (and his perceived moral superiority
as a celibate).
That film, and Jha’s other movies like GangaaJal and Apaharan, dealt with morally slippery situations but stayed rooted in a general sense of right and wrong. One might even accuse them of being too idealistic about the possibility of positive change: in Mrityudand, Ketaki (Madhuri Dixit), a resourceful young housewife who confronts the dirty power games in grassroots politics, is less a believable character and more a symbol of what could be possible. There is no such romanticism in Raajneeti. It embodies the self-absorption of people in power, people whose actions make history. Consider Indu’s words at her first rally: “Kaise bardaasht kar rahe hain aap jo hamaare saath ho raha hai?” (How can you people tolerate the injustice that is happening around us?) You would think she’s perhaps talking about the problems facing the state. Think again: she’s really just complaining to this large crowd about the unfortunate events that have befallen her and her family of goons. It’s a brilliant exercise in narcissism, and naturally her listeners (all of whom no doubt have personal tragedies of their own, minus large mansions to fret about them in) lap up every word. Such is the eternal relationship between the wide-eyed public and its netas on the podium.
“Raajneeti ke khel mein andar ka shaitan nikalta hai—issi se main darta tha” (Politics brings out the Devil in a person—that’s why I was afraid of getting involved in them), says Samar with surprising introspection at the end; but as he flies back to the US (where he’s just completed a thesis on the subtextual violence in 19th century Victorian poetry!) one gets no sense that he regrets the murders, or that he will ever be held to account for his part in them. In any case, he gets the final word—or fires the last shot—not because he is ethically in the right, but because he happens to be the one holding the gun at the right time. Isn’t that what power is all about?
Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film, Kalyug, set the Mahabharata in the cold and ruthless machine age—an age where there are no good guys, only degrees of badness. A benevolent-looking Amrish Puri played a character named Krishna, well-wisher to the film’s equivalent of the Pandava brothers, but the notable thing was how sidelined he was—as if to acknowledge that there was no place in this world for a God-figure showing the protagonists the ‘right path.’
In this context, Raajneeti’s most interesting character is the family advisor Brij Gopal, played with assurance and knowing humour by Nana Patekar. It’s possible to view Brij as a Krishna of sorts, but it’s more revealing to see him as a mix of the two most irreconcilable figures in the epic: the wise Vidura and the manipulative Shakuni. Brij straddles both parts with remarkable ease—he can be kindly, caring and judicious, but he can also be a mafia don, ordering and supervising assassinations when he deems fit—and this schizophrenia reflects the film’s ideology that might is the only right. (Another manifestation of this idea is Prithvi, who combines the noble Yudhisthira with the bloodthirsty, hectoring Bheema, never so alive as when he’s taking a baseball bat to his enemies.)
“Raajneeti mein jeet ko maan milta hai” (In politics, you get respect if you win), says Brij Gopal at a pivotal moment that is intended to evoke Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna. It’s a variation on the Gita’s message that the end justifies the means, with one crucial difference: the end in this case is not universal welfare, it’s individual benefit. Or as someone else puts it, “Raajneeti mein faisle acche ya burre nahin hote, sirf maqsad milne ke liye hote hain” (In politics, decisions aren’t right or wrong—they exist only to lead us to our goal).
All of which means that Raajneeti could well be mainstream Hindi cinema’s closest brush with genuine, unalloyed nihilism. Perhaps, in the final analysis, that makes it a truly honest political film.