How Mohalla Assi will tease Hindu gods to become a blockbuster
In India, if you’re in the business of making art, the sure shot way to turn famous in a day is by ensuring that you "offend" someone’s "religious sentiments". Make sure someone somewhere notices the same.
The rest of it is pretty automatic. Some little-known someone in some little-known corner of Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan or Haryana (insert whichever place the work is set in, for example) files a police complaint against you. Someone declares a ban on your work. Or on you. The fiercer the protests, the more famous you get.
This time around, the ire of the easily offended is directed at the Chandra Prakash Dwivedi-directed Mohalla Assi. Stuck in post-production since March 2011, the film is yet to release. A trailer of this Sunny Deol-starrer found its way to the internet a couple of days back, and ever since, it has cooked up quite a storm in Varanasi, where the film is set. The reason? Mohalla Assi attempts to portray the daily goings-on at the Assi Ghat and the "mohalla" – minus any rosyfication of the same.
Profanity
Therefore, the trailer that has been leaked is a profanity-peppered one; in which, from Sanskrit teachers' wives to blue-skinned gods, no one bothers to censor their own language. They use "bhos***ke" with gay abandon, while singing paeans to Ganga Ma. They are up to their eyeballs in charas-gaanja, while conducting sandhya-aartis. And all that happens in Varanasi, of course doesn't stay in Varanasi. The stories travel from this country to the West via the numerous firangs, who find solace in the spiralling smoke from their chillums, while Varanasi provides them with the facade of yoga practices and Sanskrit lessons. That, is the problem.
In India, we are conditioned to follow the herd. If someone finds a particular thing in a film or a book or an artwork "offensive" to their easily-offended sense organs, consider half the walk towards fame (read: infamy) accomplished. Before the blink of an eye, half the country will be crying blood at the "hurt" your work might have caused to someone somewhere.
The reason behind the protests in Varanasi this time around is that the trailer of Mohalla Assi depicts a man dressed as Shiva (yes, Lord Shiva) mouthing "The Word" that the mortals of Varanasi do. The same "bhos***ke". Along with a barrage of other expletives. Well, now as far as we mortals are concerned, no matter how much we try and better ourselves, we can never dethrone our gods vis-a-vis perfection. The gods, we have been taught, are perfect. They don't speak the languages that we do. They don't abuse. They aren't guilty of petty crimes like mouthing expletives. They are grand in whatever they do. In destruction, too.
Therefore, even when a god on screen – a man "dressed" as a god, mind you – abuses a character on screen, our sensibilities are offended. People speak out against the act – the act, and ask for a film to be banned. Whatever happened to logic is a topic that would demand a separate, lengthy, inconclusive discussion.
Men dressed as Lord Shiva have been the rallying point of much trouble in the recent past. Among the most famous of the lot is the time when a scared Lord Shiva, running helter-skelter to escape Aamir Khan’s PK in the eponymous Rajkumar Hirani film, had made people bay for the filmmakers' blood.
Secular
The issue was the same: For some reason, seeing a man in the garb of the blue-tinted Shiva in that situation made many tear their hair out in agony. For some reason, the offended ones failed to understand that the person depicted in the film was not the real god. Gods are not real, any which way, but that debate can find its place elsewhere.
Given the fact that India is a secular country, the situation here is still better than that in the numerous staunchly religious nations. No, there are no lynching and lashings in public for hurting someone’s "religious sentiments" here, but there are fires and screams, all the same. And of course, the country of banners that we are, there are those bans.
Controversy
There have been numerous instances when little-known films have made headlines for weeks, thanks to some religious group condemning them. Remember MSG – Messenger of God? That film by and starring the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insaan, which met severe protests and delays in its release thanks to its "controversial" content? Courtesy the unending protests against it, MSG managed to up people’s curiosity, and audiences managed to turn a film, which otherwise might just have come and gone sans much ado, into a hit.
Mohalla Assi, too, seems to be inching towards the same fate. If the protests snowball into gargantuan proportions, it will just help more people watch the film. Something that the easily-offended need to understand. For the only way to ensure an "objectionable" content is consumed is by placing a ban on it. Human nature is conditioned to seek out the things they aren’t allowed to. The charm of the forbidden is just too tantalising to ignore.