His films are controversial; his political views strident; and the choices he has made in his personal life anything but conventional. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt now introduces his signature brand of dissent to the theatre with the decidedly anti-establishment play The Last Salute. Rajashree Balaram hears out the rebel and understands why Gandhi’s India needs to make room for more men like him

 
Four out of five doctors around the world recommend Anacin,” announced a popular advertisement of the 1950s. Ten year-old Mahesh Nanabhai Bhatt was not quite ready to stomach the recommendation though, and shared his misgivings with his mother: “Ma, let’s ask the fifth doctor why he doesn’t recommend Anacin. Maybe he has something important to say.”

The precocious dissenter grew up to become one of the most controversial filmmakers of our times who posed a question at every answer. Mahesh Bhatt has an opinion on everything and refuses to keep it to himself—like most of us. But most of us also cannot claim the courage—or arrogance—to speak our mind. When we meet Bhatt at his office in suburban Mumbai, there are no murmured requests on the side to keep things off the record or word things ‘appropriately’.

He calls Anna Hazare a fascist; the Congress spokesperson a moron; and India an aspiring democracy that is not quite secular. He also admits to flinging idols of deities in the ocean; making movies purely for commercial gain; and being a hypocrite when he resorted to Islam to marry his second wife because he didn’t want to divorce his first one.

For all the undiluted harshness he directs towards the world around him, it’s reassuring to know that he has never been lenient towards himself either. The 63 year-old admits to roaming the streets of Mumbai in the predawn hours and hanging out with beggars huddled around a tremulous bonfire: “They are happy to be with me when they find out who I am. What they don’t know is that I was out at that hour because I wasn’t feeling too happy with myself.”

Many people often wonder if he gives controversial statements because he likes the sound of his own voice. There are as many who want him to shut up for a change. Maybe Bhatt needs to be more measured with his comments. Or maybe his is the voice we fear to hear because it reminds us of our own voice that we have lost.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

When I produced The Last Salute, people asked me why I was dignifying a reprehensible deed. The play is about Muntadahar Al-Zaidi, the journalist who flung a shoe at President Bush at a press meet. To me, Muntadahar’s action stands alongside the actions of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Junior, and many lesser known courageous dissenters who raised their voice against tyranny and injustice. And if there is any real function of true art apart from mere entertainment, it is to keep the dissenting spirit alive in man. At a time when we are manufacturing conformists on an assembly line, I think it is my duty to enshrine that human spirit of revolt that is palpable in Muntadahar. He is one of those few men who had the courage to stare into the eyes of death when he hurled that shoe at Bush, whom the world has yet to put into the dock and probably never will. When Muntadahar lands in India he plans to go to Raj Ghat and offer his respects to the greatest dissenter of all time, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; and pray to him to bring about peace in his colonised motherland.

Gandhiji allowed his own deconstruction. I wish Anna Hazare could do the same. In 1942, a temple for Mahatma Gandhi was erected in Chennai. When my friend U G Krishnamurti wrote to him and asked why he was party to such veneration, he closed the temple down. I say three cheers to Anna Hazare for dealing with corruption head on. But if his movement is all about the right to dissent against the power structures, why is he denying me my right to dissent? I was totally in support of him when he flagged off the movement at Jantar Mantar. Then he did something totally unacceptable—he claimed to be a Gandhian yet endorsed what had happened in Gujarat. The Gujarat government is using every trick in the book to cover up the massacre of 2,000 Indians, yet he endorsed Narendra Modi!

I am with Anna Hazare against corruption but is he with me in my fight against communalism? Communal bias is responsible for the most terrible corruption. Crores of Muslims have suffered in this bias. When I asked what we were doing about that, he said I am not interested in that right now. Anna’s version of Lokpal is a fascist document that is dangerous as it revolves around a super construct that is equally vulnerable to corruption. Every fascist, whether it is Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin, said the same thing: you give me all power and I, for your good, will set every wrong right. The architecture of our society’s structures should be such that it distributes power to the people. When I point this out they shout slogans outside my house and terrorise the women in my family. Why does the voice of dissent of one man intimidate thousands of your supporters, Anna? Our freedom movement was fought by people with divergent opinions; Gandhiji did not agree with Netaji’s philosophy. But that doesn’t make Netaji less of a nationalist, does it? The entire discourse of the movement is in absolute terms: ‘We the good, you the bad’. What you don’t realise is that the line that divides good and evil runs through your own heart. The new-age fundamentalist believes that whatever he says is true and what you say is foolish. So you have to be very tough and say NO. This country belongs to everyone and each one of us has a rightful share. Wherever we see human dignity being trampled upon, we need to stand up and shout from the rooftop.

Today, the world rests on the balance of terror. It’s not in the adage ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, but in the realisation that if I hurt you, I too will be hurt. The peace between India and Pakistan is based on the realisation that both hold in their hands a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the other in minutes. It was Nixon who said, we keep talking about love but ultimately it’s the butt end of the gun that controls man.

The popular religion of patriotism is being used as a tool. The quest to retain the sense of ‘you’, to be rooted to a region, is still very much there in the human heart. The yearning to stay in awe of some belief, to prostrate to some deity, some idea, continues. So you have this nation as the new deity whom you want to worship, but the emotions you display are no different than those of people you dismiss as fundamentalists. The guys who blew up the Twin Towers were vibrant, educated men, not savages. The point they drove home was the same: to die for a cause.

I wish India had not lost its empathy. We had large families earlier. We were used to caring about large groups of people. And suddenly we have moved into these nuclear set-ups. We may cocoon ourselves in high rises and palaces but have we succeeded in finding enduring peace? We have only numbed ourselves with pleasure. Through the cracks we can see doomsday awaiting us. I think India needs to rediscover with urgency that feeling of empathy.

I have not lost hope though. I was in Pakistan when the Sachar Committee report came out. The report clearly says that Muslims, the largest minority, have been pushed to the fringes. I was with Hameed Haroon, the CEO of Dawn, and Javed Iqbal, the son of Allama Iqbal, the man who conceived the idea of Pakistan. When the document from the Sachar Committee came out damning the Indian government for pushing Muslims to such pathetic conditions, Javed said, “Ah, the Qaid-e-Azam [Allama Iqbal] was indeed a man of vision. He knew this would happen to Muslims in free India. Thank god, we have a country of our own. Of course we are in a pathetic state, but at least we are not given lesser treatment than somebody else.” To which my friend Hameed Haroon said, “No Javed, it’s only India that can come out with a document like this. It has the power to look at its own hideous mistakes and lock horns with its insufficiencies. That’s what makes India and the Manmohan Singh government worthy of applause. Pakistan would never look in that direction.” I felt so happy. There was a Pakistani who slapped the Indian state and what it stood for and there was another Pakistani who defended it with such fervour.

I feel Gandhiji’s dream has not flowered. But is there anything other than that dream that can keep India glued together? Without that dream, we won’t even walk together towards the idea of India. There was a heartbreaking moment when I was at a peace seminar in Pakistan. The committee member asked me, “Why do you come here and talk about Indo-Pak peace?” I said, because I see this as a reality; my father was a Hindu-Brahmin and my mother was a Muslim and I am a by-product of that shared heritage. I added, “Either India and Pakistan live in a tight embrace or they are both doomed to be miserable.” And then one man in the audience said, “You are right Mr Bhatt. We salute the apostle of peace, Gandhi, because he died for us. He died for Pakistan.” And the greatness of Gandhi dawned on not only me that day but the people there.

In post-Partition India, my mother Shirin Mohammad felt it was better to give her children Hindu identities. She was not western but very modern—these are two very different things. She knew my father would not marry her because of their religious differences, yet she chose to be with him and have his children. And she did not make a statement of her modernity. She never said marriage is an irrelevant institution; she only said it was her compulsion to lead a life like that. What’s more, she kept her faith private. Our home was infested with gods [laughs]. There were pictures of Sai Baba and Shiva, and then my mother would close the door and the Quran Sharif would come out. And during the Ganapati festival, Ganesha would come home.

My gods have died young. I always noticed that the more frightened my mom got, the more she prayed; her gods were born out of fear. As a child, I would pray for things to happen. When they didn’t, I got angry with my god and threw him in the ocean. I discovered very young that there is no power outside you. When I gave up hope, I realised I was not hopeless. The moment you give up hope and there is no help coming your way, you get up on your own two feet and walk. No matter how shaky your feet are, they are your feet; you don’t need crutches. We look up with such great reverence to the sun god. But when the sun sets, there is darkness. That is why Buddha said, swayam pramanam, swayam prakasham—light up your own inner fire. It’s in the harshest winter of your life that you discover that there is an invincible summer in you.

I was soaked with anguish when I made Arth. I made a disastrous start in cinema. I made terrible films in the beginning of my career; my marriage was on the rocks; and I was in an extramarital relationship with a woman who was fighting her own mental demons. So I wrote Arth. I discovered that when you speak of your own wounds it has the power to affect people. I continued in the autobiographical mode with Janam that stemmed from the legitimacy of my own existence. What is this concept of legitimate and illegitimate anyway? I am a ‘bastard’ because you chose to invent the word.

I accepted it when my detractors called me exploitative when Woh Lamhe was made. Mohit Suri asked me if he could make a film on my relationship with Parveen Babi. I had nothing to hide so I gave him the go-ahead. But I admit it doesn’t have the innocence of Arth.

People also ask me why I converted to Islam to marry Soni. It was an eyewash. When I got married the second time I chose to embrace my Islamic side. I wanted to give it some kind of legal garb because I didn’t want to divorce my first wife. She and I were together since we were 15. Divorcing her would be tantamount to amputating a part of my life. So we found a loophole within my own cultural background. It’s just like you agree to the dictates of society at that moment because it brings comfort to a partner who is soliciting that. And to her it was very important that she stay with me as my wife.

I am only going to burn more fiercely with time. My heart is on fire and I am not going to put that out. I learnt a lot from my dear friend U G Krishnamurti. He is my heartbeat, part of who I am. I was with him in Italy during the last eight days of his life. Those days were almost wordless, yet it was his last discourse where he erased all the talks he had given me over a lifetime. What I loved about him was his courage to leave the world unsung, unwept. I know that till I leave, those ageless questions—Who am I? Where am I going?—will always gnaw at my insides. I am never going to be content with the answers.

Photo: Jit Ray
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
October 2011