Why Bollywood is wary of tackling 'alternate history'
The more one thinks about it, the more one finds the absence of "alternate history" as a genre from the collective consciousness of storytellers in India across both film and television rather strange. The popularity of Philip K Dick’s seminal classic The Man in the High Castle first as a book in the 1960s and then a popular television series that debuted in 2015, the late Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America that came out in the early 2000s or Stephen King’s 11/23/63 published in 2011 reveal the extent of the genre’s popularity as a source material for television.
Alternate history
What makes the absence of this genre in Indian storytelling overtly conspicuous, is how both the general public and social commentators wax eloquent about the imagined greatness of a unified Indian cricket team or the pictured richness of our literature had the partition of India not taken place. In fact, specific words from one of Mirza Ghalib’s famous couplet, ‘Yun hota to kya hota’ (If this were so then what would have been), have also been oft repeated and yet popular entertainment in India seems to be wary of alternate histories.
One of the factors that might have kept the alternate history genre at bay with Indian filmmakers could be that counterfactual reality often warrants a serious discussion. Like any great story, every tale seeped in a counterfactual premise also starts with the simple question — what if — but soon translates into contextualising more than taking things at face value.
Unfortunately, for mainstream Indian entertainment exploring parallel or alternate history never goes beyond the perfunctory, if at all. The format has gained immense respectability in the last few years and to such an extent that King’s novel 11/23/63, where the assassination of John F Kennedy is averted, is now considered to be alternate history. In the novel, the protagonist is shocked to find that the high hopes that were promised by JFK don’t get translated into the happy reality that one had hoped for.
Interestingly, in the West, the idea of the past being more relevant in today’s times than it ever was has been both explored and exploited with great alacrity. Be it to attract the reader or the viewer, Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle where Nazi Germany and Japan are victorious in the Second World War is pitched as something that is more pertinent in the United States where Donald J Trump is the President. It is not like popular culture in India is entirely devoid of counterfactual realities.
Hackneyed plots
In India, a television series such as Sacred Games that is based on a book originally published in 2006, merrily features liberal dosage of the reported reality within its imagery and narrative ostensibly to make it more suitable to ‘present times.’ The recently-released biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto is already being seen as an indictment of anyone who doesn’t seem to understand the troubling times we are supposed to be living in.
Intriguingly enough, the other side of the argument — if what Manto stood for is missing in today’s India then considering how the so-imagined free Pakistan of Jinnah turned out, would the chronicler of human condition still have migrated? — is not as readily debated.
The ability to give a new spin to the tried-and-tested is a plot device that nearly any storyteller worth their salt in Hindi films and television would die for. The same raw materials can be used to come with up an entirely new product but filmmakers here are not willing to look beyond a successful trope.
Take the revival of the shape-shifting serpent or the ‘nagin’ in Indian television. Distressing as it may be, its continued popularity only empowers production houses to carry on with the ‘tried-and-tested.’ In that aspect, the genre of counterfactual reality as a theme could very well be the shot in the arm that Indian storytelling is desperately seeking.
Counterfactuals
In the book, If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity, author Neal Roese suggests that counterfactuals are an essential part of human psychology and are a basic way of how we understand the world around us. The closest a film came to exploring that was Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai where a goon, Munna Bhai (Sanjay Dutt), imagines an alternate scenario where Mahatma Gandhi is alive.
The film’s popularity and success give you a hint that irrespective of how Indians think of what is real and what would have happened if the inverse were to happen, alternate history is something that we probably indulge in more than what we would ever imagine. Perhaps it’s time that both filmmakers and the viewers begin to think slightly more out-of-the-box and not be bogged down with the version of ‘reality’ presented to us.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)