Why Bollywood can no longer make films on Indo-Pakistani Romance: it’s taboo

Quite a few winters ago, a major force of New Wave Indian cinema approached me to write a script on an Indo-Pakistani romance. The story hinged on a Delhi boy falling in love, head over padded heels, with a Karachi girl. Catch: Neither knew their nationalities till their ogre-like parents intervened.

The director had acquired a greying beard after having made a line-up of successful and unsuccesful agit-prop movies, an interpretation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and also a wild, way out comedy toplining Shah Rukh Khan.

Naturally, I was flattered by the invitation to conjure up a cross border script by none other than Ketan Mehta, who dropped our script and went on to put together the biggie The Rising -- featuring a bemoustachioed Aamir Khan. Nearly 200 pages of the IndoPak romance which we grandly titled Hum Dum have perhaps been fed into a dysfunctional computer or cremated unceremoniously.

Reason for dropping the project was simple. Ketan Mehta couldn’t raise enough finance for a project which cried out loud that wars are made by politicians, and not you and me. Call that a simple or simplistic message but both Mehta and I felt it was the proverbial burning need of the hour. A couple of years after the exhumation of Hum Dum, news trickled in that the estimable director Rahul Rawail was attempting a similar MumbaiKarachi love story. Coincidentally, this romance was shelved too.

The moral of the story, as I could understand it then, was don’t mess around with politics, wars, enmity, the Partition and always, of course, any direct criticism of government. Fine, after all filmmaking is an expensive proposition, it has to recover its investment, it rained cliches in the inner recesses of my perplexed mind and I left it at that.

After all, a story-screenplay I had written earlier for Shyam Benegal didn’t become a Karan Johar-like blockbuster either. The Benegaldirected story was titled Mammo, dealing with a fact-based story of my grand-aunt who arrived one fine day from Lahore, hoped to stay back in her birthplace, Bombay, since she was infirm and widowed, but was deported suddenly to vanish into a limbo forever. The tiny-budget film I am sure recovered its investment and much more for its producers, the National Film Development Corporation, thanks to its frequent TV screenings, but in the larger context, it was not considered a “commercial hit”.

Earlier, M.S. Sathyu had made the deeply moving Garm Hawa, a definitive statement on the divide caused by the Partition. Sadly it continues to be vastly underseen.

What most current film spectators do know about is that Paki-bashing is a gladiatorial-like sport that has yielded a mixed oeuvre of films, ranging from the mega cash earner Gadar to J.P. Dutta’s more recent sore loser L.O.C. Now of course, nation-buidling movies, exemplified by Uri: The Surgical Strike and practically every second or third film starring Akshay Kumar, are a recipe for box office gravy.

Besides its whoppingly rich performance at the box office window, Gadar is also remembered for portraying Pakistanis as gross, chest thumping Lucifers epitomised by the dependably snorting-snarling Amrish Puri who was brought to his knees finally by the super-hero enacted by muscular Sunny Deol.

For sheer jingoism and rabble rousing, Gadar received its share of criticism. Undaunted Sharma belted out Hero, yet another extravagantly produced harangue against the Pakistanis caricatured as freaky felons. Second time around proved to be unlucky, the pseudo patriotic saga laid an egg with the public.

Indeed, it would seem repetition doesn’t bear fruit. J.P. Dutta’s winning war epistle Border sold tickets by the bushel. Not so L.O.C. in which the Pakistani soldiers at Kargil were shown as faceless enemies skulking behind a pretty array of pink boulders. Not surprisingly, Pakistan had issued an official objection to the negative manner in which they were being represented in popular Hindi cinema, a domain which since decades has enticed an obsessive following in Pakistan as well.

Only once in a very indigo moon, Mumbai’s mainstream cinema has touched upon the ingrained suspicion between the two countries with a degree of intelligence and balance.

John Matthew Matthan’s Sarfarosh did not mince its words about the ISI presence in India, achieving that with a rare degree of sensitivity and forthrightness.

Evidently, responsbility and restraint, has to be exercised in spinning film stories tackling the friction between the two neighbouring countries. At one point, the peripatetic Mahesh Bhatt who premiered Paap, the directorial debut of his daughter Pooja Bhatt, in Pakistan, stated he was keen to make an Indo-Pak collaboration film. Rumours had abounded that Balaji Telefilms of Shobha and Ekta Kapoor, could initiate a mega-serial co-production.

At present, of course, Indian cinema is forbidden from featuring any Pakistani artiste, actor, singer or technician.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)