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[Hi all, I wrote this piece for another publication but thought it would be good to have it up on PFC for friends to read. Before you start with 'Oh no, not again!' refrains do go through it. It is all about Black Friday that I wanted to tell Anurag when I met him but couldn't. Cheers, Roshni:-)]

Unique but ephemeral, the precocious foreplay of everyday emotions beckons the hither-tither observer to find the enactment of a thousand scenes in this vast conglomeration of cultures and mores of life that is India. The tilt of the head, the rising of an eyebrow, the mouthing of an obscenity, the raucous but grand standing of routine speech bordering on annotated rip-offs from recently released Bollywood flicks, the furtive glances thrown by lovers at each other, the glorious grace of the ever-so-perfect dance step falls at the right place just in time to draw comparisons with the best in the business of making films and the practice of making the nubile damsels dance to a myriad tunes. Fridays bring with them the excitement of another world being won over; men and women, young and old separated by generations make their way into the glitzy interiors of the many multiplexes popping up everyday in suburban India, creating a new order joined and connected with each other through the act of watching a film.

One has heard a thousand stories of the young and the restless with millions of dreams in their eyes crossing over homes and hearths in search of the perfect launch vehicle often to be turned away. It is only by a quirk of fate that dreams are fulfilled in an unforgiving city. Others remain buried until the next casting couch scandal breaks loose. Television exposes in recent times have blown the lid to reveal a dark, uncompromising underbelly. But people still flock to stardom, to glamour and glory…to the neighbourhood multiplex to catch the latest. It is as if cinema courses through our veins. As we routinely browse through film glossies and lap up all the gossipy tit-bits that the daily news supplement has to offer, films, some good others bad, are churned out in an assembly line formation from the dream mills of Bombay.

Cinema, the idiomatic offshoot of advanced capitalism, forms the primary source of recreation for a large majority which explains the existence of ‘lean periods’ for Bollywood, namely the holy month of Ramadan or periods that preoccupy the attention of people through the other national obsession ¬¬– cricket. Evidence of the fact that cinema has always remained a secular and class-less institution or process even as religion, class and caste become the drivers of modern social change especially through state acts. These are periods when film distributors and producers stay away from putting their products forth for consumption given that a significant part of Indian cine-goers are Muslims and an even larger percentage follow cricket like religion, a rather interesting phenomenon which is outside the purview of this essay.

The Bombay film has historically emulated the rise and fall of the Indian society driven the most by the political formation in power at any given time. The 1980s stand testimony to ideological change sweeping Bollywood as much as it swept the country as a whole. These were times of great churning, political as well as social. The cinematic fate of Amitabh Bachchan, the subaltern icon of the 1980s is irrevocably intertwined with the rise to power of Indira Gandhi and the formulation of her socialist programmes. Deewar, Coolie, Amar Akbar Anthony, Zanjeer, and Sholay established Bachchan as the hero of the powerless. Scripted to perform the act of decimation of the old order on celluloid, these superhit films created the genre of the angry young man, entitled to the highest manner of adulation for everything that he did on screen. Bachchan, for some the Clint Eastwood of the East was the merry man who had the power in his arms, the power to lift the deprived out of a morass, reflecting the political programmes on offer that promised similar tidings for the future – equality, sensitivity, secularism, and peaceful co-existance.

The Hindi film, in the earlier decades, since its inception has undergone spatial, ideological, and generic shifts, pushed and cajoled into embarking on the journey of change through political action. Each of these shifts have been decisive, in effect frontiers have been breached. If the early beginnings were symptomatic of the fear of our white rulers hinged on the fact that the Indian subjects were being exposed to the ideological schisms and sexual deviance of the society in the West through western cinema, the growth of the genre of the family social encompassed within itself the existence of both the voyeur and the viewer.

Parallel genres such as the New Wave and what scholars have termed as middle-class cinema provoked a number of comparisons between the target audiences. Again a rather unique crossing of frontiers is visible in the way in which the commercial mores reacted to films that appealed to the common man. Hindi films have in many ways followed a parallel set of genres each reflecting the perceptions and views of both the writers who script the film and the director who makes the actors perform. With each passing decade, Hindi film script writers and directors (even actors) have found a new calling. If the 1990s saw the rise to fame of the romantic heroes and the chiffon-clad heroines, the early part of the new millennium reacted to events such as the Kashmir insurgency and recurring communal violence reflected in landmark films such as Mani Ratnam’s Roja based on terrorist violence in Kashmir and Bombay (again by Mani Ratnam), an observers take on the fate on love during religious hate and violence, followed by the not-so-successful-at-the-box-office Fiza directed by film critic Khalid Mohammad and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, two rather voluminous treatises on state apathy and the Muslim angst leading to the protagonists rising against the state and society.

Post-2005, the crossing has been complete, and the change seems to have filtered down well into the nerve centres of commercial film making. Even though candy-floss romances and NRI-girl-meets-desi-boy stories flood the Indian film market and every second Hindi film boasts of ten songs, five dances, and a rather irritating ode to the never say die spirit of Punjab, films that address their cause as ‘different’ have found an audience. Film watchers and critics have provided an epithet to this new genre of films – multiplex cinema, a cinema that panders to the classes and not to the hooting and swooning masses. A rather rapacious and onerous distinction, one might observe, something that places the discerning classes at a higher pedestal than the supposedly uneducated, suburban, town-bred (and not city-bred) masses. The response that this literate, globalized, city-dwelling, mall-hopping class of audience gave to a recent film is a cause for concern and scrutiny and will be taken up at a later point in the essay.

The crossing over was facilitated by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s revolutionary (pun intended) Rang De Basanti (2006), a film which would not have had the same impact without the superb editing job by ace editor PS Bharathi. Amalgamating the pessimism of the urban Indian youth with pop patriotism, RDB, as it came to be known, breached a few borders, bent a few rules and brought a few walls down, all in the space of three and a half thoroughly entertaining hours. The excitement of the protagonists filtered through the screens and in the true sense of the term infected the audience sparking a new wave of street protests that led to the reopening and speeding up of cases against the killers of former Delhi model turned bar tender Jessica Lal and law student Priyadarshini Mattoo. The ongoing Nitish Katara trial was injected with new life riding the wave of popular sympathy epitomized by candle vigils and long marches a la Rang De Basanti.

The early part of the year 2007 saw a landmark crossing-over in the history of Hindi cinema (I talk about Hindi films because that is a genre I know best). A rather poignant crossing of cinematic frontiers. Two seminal contemporary events – the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts and the 2002 Gujarat riots – were captured for the discerning audience, another set of players in the process of film making and exhibition that has experienced enormous change, on celluloid by two comparatively new or should we say new-age film makers. While the blasts resulted in the branding of a community as culprits and co-conspirators in the most heinous crime to have been attempted on Indian soil, almost akin to waging war against the state, the riots perpetrated by an unresponsive and convoluted state machinery and by many accounts pre-planned and pre-meditated against the minority community jolted the consciousness of a sleeping society sit up and take notice. The next few sections of the essay shall dwell on one of these films, Black Friday.

Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2007) made the cut finally after a court stay order had prevented its release after its completion in 2004 riding on an appeal filed in the sessions court by one of the accused in the Bombay blasts case– Badshah Khan. The go ahead came after convictions began in the case that has gone on for thirteen years. Khan’s testimony like the testimonies and narrations of many others paved the way for the construction of the case by the Bombay Police and the CBI. Based on Mid Day crime reporter S Hussain Zaidi’s book of the same name, Black Friday is incriminating, dark and stark, the truest obituary to a dying secular ethos. It strings together the chain of events by a thin blood thread.

Interspersed by archival footage of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the scenes of death and destruction after the blasts in Bombay, Black Friday traces the actual doing of the act preceeded and succeeded by the enormously successful planning that went into the operation and the subsequent chase and arrest of the suspects, the torture, interrogation and human rights violations of the large number of persons belonging to a certain minority community. It is direct, curt and bloody. It deals the death blow to the conscience of a nation jolting it out of its self-effacing reverie and challenges it to confront the rot that has set in, gnawing at the entails of the civilizational tolerance that a Hindu-majority India often boasts of.

The film crosses another border, another frontier, in the manner in which the narrative is structured. It does not take sides. It presents facts, cold, blood-spattered facts, mortally closeted with the unnerving history of religious violence in India. In its narrative is ensconced the fact that the riots of December 1992 and January 1993 were the real triggers for the blasts, arguably the most daring act of terrorism on Indian soil. Black Friday says it as it is and that to me is what works for the film. It is easy, given the onus film makers place on cinematic liberty to leave the exigencies of fact and truth behind and go for the commercial kill. Kashyap’s film traces histories, it frames the present, i.e. the blasts and places it in the required context, that of the past bloodied by the riots that swept Bombay after the old mosque was demolished in Ayodhya by Hindu zealots. This is where it is different. This is the point at which Black Friday marks a break from the past. This is the first crack it effects at niminal, fallible frontiers.

The film follows on several parallels leading up to the final act of violence. At no instance, does Black Friday get caught in the quagmire of linearity and that precisely is the reason why the film can be classified as inaugurating a largely uncharted genre of films, perhaps a break from the academic distinction drawn between the Hollywood-style organic film making and the heterogenous mode that has been the signifier of Bombay films.

Black Friday opens with a longish sequence of the bombing at the Bombay Stock Exchange filmed remarkably well using the slow motion to good effect, another first for a film that broke a few stereotypes. The subsequent scenes of the bombings that followed at Worli and Century Bazaar and the aborted attempts at the Shiv Sena Bhawan and Mantralaya are destructive in their impact, they sear through souls and tear down the curtains of obstinacy that the Indian society seems to have drawn up for itself. Primarily effective is the image of the policeman Nandkumar Chougule, sitting among the ruins of the BEST bus that blew up at Worli, stunned and shocked by the tenacity of the perpetrators and dwarfed by the scale of destruction.

Tiger Memon (played superbly by actor Pawan Malhotra), sometime travel agent, bullion smuggler, and the man seen by the police as the mastermind of the Bombay blasts aided and abetted by underworld kingpin Dawood Ibrahim and his henchmen Anees Ibrahim (Dawood’s brother), Mohammad Dosa, and Chhota Shakeel forms the nucleus of the narrative. The initial question that comes to mind is why did Memon do it? Black Friday tells you why. It does not justify man’s actions, nor does it glorify the Muslim angst to portray the perpetrators of the crime as footsoldiers of Islam. The helplessness of a person to fathom the reasons for a particular action arising out of a sense of turpitude and violence sit vacuously with the emotions, pronounced in the enraged but clever words rendered by Memon to solicit the monetary, physical and moral help of his underworld masters. The scene is mind-numbing. One notices the searing rage in Memon’s voice; the cool exterior almost taking the viewer by surprise. The exterior hides the unassuming manner in which Memon planned the blasts in a city that, in many ways had been responsible for taking away his means of livelihood.

Scholars have also advanced the political economy theory to explain why Memon wanted to bomb Bombay. It was only after the burning down of his office by rioters did he put into effect what by far is an act of extreme terror that inspired many in the coming years, the latest being the July 7, 2006 blasts in local trains in Bombay. In a gripping scene, flying into a rage after the fire in his office Memon says, ‘Saara Mahim mein angaar laga dega main.’ The scene is remarkable precisely because I as an audience sensed and felt the menace in Memon’s voice, shivered at the thought of what the man might accomplish. What he actually did accomplish is there for all to see. This is the impact Kashyap was probably looking for.

Memon picked his bombers carefully, men who had either lost their kin or livelihoods in the preceding riots. Black Friday visually documents with finesse and detail the manner in which these men, young Muslim subalterns seething with resentment and dispossession, were put through physical training (in Pakistan as most of whom caught have testified) and mental disintegration. One of these men is Badshah Khan, a cloth shop owner rendered helpless by the riots. Memon, in a chilling sequence in the film, uses his craft with words to lure Badshah into his game. He invokes the killing of Muslims, the rape of Muslim women and the destruction of Muslim property to scissor away his inhibitions. Badshah breaks instantaneously; the scene is brilliantly written and executed.

Badshah Khan, however remained dissatisfied, committing a crime and then circling around the country before being apprehended by the police. He later turned approver and narrated the intriguing tale of expert planning and efficient execution. Badshah’s journey from Bombay to Rampur, from Rampur to Calcutta and in the end in prison is delicately crafted. Black Friday emerges as a genre in itself; as norms collapsed and frontiers were breached, the film went from strength to strength. The agony of a man on the run is directed expertly by Kashyap (aided by a powerhouse performance by Aditya Srivastava), and helped along by sequences like the one in a decrepit hotel room in Jaipur where the men learn that their passports have been destroyed by Memon who had promised them a safe passage to Dubai after the bombings had been carried out. It threw the viewer completely off guard.

Black Friday does not spare the police either, proof of its path-breaking narrative and impact. It goes a few notches ahead of all the previous attempts at indicting the police as an accomplice in crimes against the minorities the best examples being films like Govind Nihalani’s Dev (2004) and Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania (2007). The investigation, in Black Friday is led by Rakesh Maria (played effortlessly by KK), an upright police officer with an exemplary record. The police goes about its business rounding up scores of people from lower-middle class Muslim ghettos; the scenes are precisely organized so that the method the police employs is regimented and portrayed realistically. The torture and interrogation scenes shot through the red filter are ghoulish and effective at the same time. Noir fare.

A moving sequence presents Ram Kumar Khurana, a restaurant owner as a suspect whose eatery was a regular meeting point for Memon and his accomplices. Khurana held by the police is subjected to the most often used interrogation method – mental torture. A young girl is molested by a policeman as Khurana stands by stupefied only to be told that the same fate would befall his wife and child if he does not relent. Out on bail, Khurana first kills is family and shoots himself in the head to avoid police torture. This parallel story within the larger narrative presents the ghastly side of the police to the viewer, a pliant necessity in a film as pointed as Black Friday. Kashyap leaves the rest to the imagination of the audience, a trick of brilliance to keep the audience riveted.

How were the suspects interrogated? Were they tortured? These are questions that are, in another scene from the film, hurled at Rakesh Maria. He tackles them with ease saying that ‘these are exceptional crimes that require exceptional methods of interrogation’. The film, thus shows the police up for what they did in the aftermath of the blasts. It also lends credence to the fact that similar hordes are rounded up after every similar incident without the police having the slightest clue of who the real masterminds are. But to the Mumbai Police’s credit, they managed to haul up most of the suspects including Badshah Khan and Asghar Mukaddam, albeit small fry in the overall plan financed by powerful underworld dons.

All this realism was thrown at, what the maker, producer, distributor, and lovers of realist cinema felt was a grown-up, educated, discerning audience. Let me narrate my experience of watching Black Friday at Delhi’s posh PVR Anupam, one of the first multiplexes of its kind in the national capital. I had a large group of young, ostensibly educated people (and my family) for company. A couple of young girls hurried around, as the film began, tapping at their expensive cellphones, and sat down beside me. Obviously irritated I glared. Fortunately some time later they disappeared. While they were there, the girls stared at the screen disinterestedly, as if pushed into the cinema hall by some bully bent on killing them with boredom. The moving images on the screen failed to cut any ice with them. Probably, Black Friday was not what they expect from a Hindi film. Then slowly these chronic mallrats, and there were lots of them around started giggling, as if laughing at the gravity of what was unfolding on screen.

Badshah Khan’s interrogation scene brought the insensitivity, the non-chalance and the arrogance of this so-called discerning audience out in the open. As Khan said, ‘Hum Musalmanon ko kya mila Hindustan mein?’ someone from the audience retorted, ‘Toh Pakistan kyun nahi chale jaate,’ followed by an invective. The hall exploded in peals of laughter. There were some murmurings of Jai Shri Ram that came in little bursts too. Was I appalled? Not really. It does not take much to know the true face of the discerning Indian audience – nothing short of a brute, incongruous, pathetic, jingoistic, fundamentalist, and fascist group of individuals.

Black Friday is a mind-bending film for precisely this reason. It is a trans-frontier journey into the soul of Indian society. For me the film accomplishes its objectives for exposing the society that we as semi-intellectuals try and idolize as a secular rubric that stands on firm ground. Secularism be damned, the youth, a gutless amalgam of selfish particles, all pawns in the overall capitalist enterprise of cultural and material imperialism have let go of all sensitivity long ago. The grounds shaken enough, the edifice has collapsed. And my experience of watching Black Friday stands testimony to this fact. Anurag Kashyap needs to be complemented on all counts, not the least because he blew the lid. He showed the society for what it actually is. This was the impact the film was supposed to have and here lies the victory for the story teller, the film maker. Not only did Black Friday break boundaries it crushed the thin lines that separate cinematic genres underfoot, and as such made a mockery of all constructed frontiers that engulf cinema. An attempt that will be remembered for long in the history of Hindi films.

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