Bhansaligate: My perspective

"Art is a reflection of society" goes a popular saying and rightly so. If we think about movies which were made in eighties or early nineties, almost every second movie villain was a "gold smuggler" which was quite relevant in that high import duty driven pre liberalization era. More often than not we as a society fail to see and understand the vice versa impact of the saying. Our society is largely driven by the predominant prevailing art so much so that the much ridiculed "north Indian misogynist mindset" has some bit of its origins from Bollywood drama wherein the "protagonist Hero" tries to stalk his love interest despite her resistance and finally at the end of a song which has quite a lot of teasing in it, the lady develops a never ending love for our hero. That is exactly the reason why our filmmakers should exercise caution while making films as they are going to have a great impact and influence on society. I got to know about the Bhansaligate incident on social media from couple of celebratory status messages from my facebook friends. That's the power of social media, we often get highly opinionated information without even understanding the actual incidents. To be very true, even my first reaction to the incident was celebratory in nature as any other normal person in Rajasthan, I have grown up hearing stories of exemplary courage and valor of Rajput kings wherein some of them refused to accept the sub-ordinanation of mughal emperors against their self respect and in the process ended up living a life of struggle giving up the luxuries which were on platter for them. The queens or the women of that era were never left behind in their courage by going to the extent to immolating themselves rather than going into the hands of mughal emperors. Another queen, Hadi Rani gave her head to her newly wed king husband since he asked for a momento and was reluctant to go to the war due to his love for the queen just to ensure that her husband's entire focus is at the battlefield. Now these are not mere stories of fiction, in fact if you happen to visit places like Udaipur, Chittorgarh or Kumbhalgarh, there is substantial amount of evidence triangulating the facts and stories mentioned above. So if any filmmaker is choosing to direct a film on these sensitive "subjects", they should exercise great restraint and caution as they are not mere subjects of fiction but draw a great amount of sentiments and emotions of the masses. Having said that, though my initial response to the incident was celebratory after giving it a due thought, came a realization that this incident should have been better avoided. This doesn't mean the Bhansali didn't need to be taught a lesson, he indeed had to, if the alleged love scene is there in the film but this definitely was not the best way to handle the situation. This way we have only ended up giving undue sympathy, propaganda and promotion to the upcoming film which in any case is not going to help us anyway. Also, vandalism and taking law into our hands is only going to deteriorate the prevailing lawlessness in our country. There is a very thin dividing line between activism and anarchy. We have seen lot of activist groups losing their cause and becoming a nightmare for our lawmakers and we don't want to add on that list. What I suggest and would have appreciated could have been litigation in Rajasthan High Court and a Police complaint. First of all, this would have ensured that script of the movie is shared with the necessary stakeholders, cleared the rumors on the alleged lover scene and avoided any action based on "rumors". If there was any distorting of history in the script, we would have surely got some respite from the court. Also advocacy and generating opinion in print, visual and social media would have surely helped the and attracted a lot of people towards the cause. Viney Rao