Kangana Ranaut is the Arundhati Roy of Bollywood
"You can't ask me if Bollywood has accepted me. What you should ask instead is if I have accepted Bollywood."
Thus spake Kangana Ranaut, as she dazzled her interviewer, India Today's Rahul Kanwal, as well as every single person who was watching the actor intersperse words, meaningful provocations and thought experiments of words, between her generous, sparkling laughter. On May 3, as she collected her third National Award for best actress, equalling Shabana Azmi's record that seemed unmatchable for decades, Kangana Ranaut queered the pitch once and for all, turning the question that has long loomed over the Hindi film industry as a shroud-like dogma - the question of acceptance - on its head.
Exactly at a time when the industry had "accepted" her and couldn't stop raving about the "reigning Queen" of Bollywood, the critically celebrated, commercially confident heroine-in-chief wants to invert the order - the mammoth order that sustains this over Rs 138 billion industry. It's a pecking order, and Kangana is, of course, aware that she's ticking off, in fact, openly challenging, the biggest engines of this gigantic system - the male superstars and the nature of their all-encompassing hold on the industry.
She even thinks the Best Actress category is sexist.
Is Kangana Ranaut a compulsive outsider, by design and default? Is the story of her mainstreaming also the story of her movement away from the centre of Bollywood's gravity, the black hole-like pathological reliance on the male hero, and everything that legitimises him?
Perhaps.
Can Kangana not just sit back and enjoy the centre-stage? Why must she attempt the demolition of the very thing that has catapulted her to the very thing she has long defined herself against - the machinery of superstardom, its greased networks of mutual nepotism, its circuits of please-all award shows, its allotted niches for tolerable difference, its guarding of well-kept open secrets, its citadels of genuflection, its cliques and camps of reverence?
Why must Kangana Ranaut question how a superstar is made and what sustains that phenomenon? Why can't she just be a superstar, like the rest of them - male, female - and not try dismantling her own pedestal? Why does she have to be so feisty, so forthright, so "muphat" and a walking, talking hazard to Bollywood code of conduct?
Call her a "witch", and she replies she loves witches. "It's not the witches but the history of witch-hunt that is shameful", she counters. It privately hurts her, but she says "getting dumped" is okay: happens to everyone. She doesn't endorse a fairness cream, as a matter of principle, because that's discriminatory. She breaks the omerta of silence on conditions such as drug addition, schizophrenia, autism, Asperger's Syndrome and pleads us to stop hurling them as abuses. She says she "can't be slut-shamed", or be shamed for her body, her choices in men, her bedroom, her desires.
There's mutiny in every fibre of Kangana Ranaut.
Like another mutinous soul who has been described thus: "Ms ... looked like a free man, as if her happiness did not depend on any lover or novel. The evening sunshine was dancing shamelessly on her body. Her hips were swaying wildly. Her cleavage was exposing her independent spirit. She was smiling to herself, as if in a dream." And also thus: "there was something restless and untamed about her. Her demeanour suggested the recklessness of a suicide bomber. Everyone around looked a bit wary of her. She was like the Osama bin Laden of Words, just beyond our grasp. It was best to just Let Her Be - a literary terrorist."
This is a description of Arundhati Roy. [Mayank Austen Soofi, who blogs as The Delhiwalla, is the author of that beloved description.]
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| Arundhati Roy (L) and Kangana Ranaut. |
Barely a year after she won the Man Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, her debut and so far only novel, Arundhati Roy penned "The End Of Imagination" - an essay published in the Outlook magazine. She was mourning India's nuclear morning, exactly as everyone, almost everyone, was busy celebrating the "explosion of self-esteem", the "road to resurgence".
She wrote: "The bomb is India. India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national but anti-Hindu. (Of course in Pakistan the bomb is Islamic. Other than that, politically, the same physics applies.) This is one of the unexpected perks of having a nuclear bomb. Not only can the government use it to threaten the Enemy, they can use it to declare war on their own people. Us."
Why couldn't Arundhati Roy just sit back and enjoy her literary superstardom in 1998? Why did she have to meddle in overtly political affairs, nit-pick over "national security", insert mutinies of the mind from that moment onwards, go on to pen many an essay-length quantum revolutions, invite nothing less than sedition charges, becoming at once the most reviled antinational among the chest-beating nationalists, while being kept at arm's length by the lit-fest-wallas for being "too controversial"?
In January this year, senior journalist Saba Naqvi lamented the deafening silence over Arundhati Roy's court ordeals from exactly those who were crying hoarse over eroding freedom of expression. Roy was facing contempt of court charges over an article she penned on GN Saibaba, the Delhi University teacher and a 90 per cent paraplegic who was incarcerated because he had "Maoist sympathies".
Other than Naqvi's, there was hardly any noise over Arundhati's predicament - as if she brought it upon herself. As if she embodies the very "reasonable restriction" that even the Indian Constitution poses on our freedom of speech. As if to bat for her is to bat for India's balkanisation (thanks to her stand on Kashmir, Naxalism, Capitalism, National Security and all those Big Words that rankle even the most liberal of neoliberals.)
Arundhati Roy displeases all and sundry. Her ingratitude is infectious because it gets tired of, refuses to enjoy, fawning adulation as a substitute for freedom. Freedom in its truest sense. Freedom to step out of one's newfound definition as a literary novelist and write scandalous, slanderous, nation-state-defying essays and books - on Dantewada, on Pokhran-II, on BR Ambedkar, on a suspected Maoist, on Edward Snowden, on Rohith Vemula - all the while posing the eternal question: what shall we love and what shall we hate?
Isn't Kangana Ranaut posing the same question?
Isn't Kangana Ranaut stepping out of her role as the current flavour of Bollywood and showing a predilection for going supernova? Isn't she being ungrateful to the film industry for stamping her as its own by refusing to join the party, just the way Arundhati Roy, right after her celebrated Booker win, refused to join the nationalism dance by detonating nuclear bombs in our own deserts?
Their defiance is heroic, romantic and rare. Theirs is an intuitive response to unfreedom, come the latter may in markedly different forms - be it the stench of a sexual liaison gone humiliatingly sour and its attendant, industrial misogyny, or the radioactive remains of a nuclear security state.
Both reckless outsiders and fiercely so, Kangana and Arundhati are similar people. That's one thing to rejoice, perhaps.
Will Ranaut play Roy someday? In a movie, at least.