What Amitabh Bachchan's Deewar teaches you about true bhakti
The iconic film Deewar (1975), one of the biggest blockbusters of those decades and irrefutably one of the most talked about movies of Indian mainstream bollywood cinema, had one scene which must qualify for having received the most unprecedented rapt attention followed by unparalleled applause from the audience. In the film, Vijay, the protagonist, played by Amitabh Bachchan, is angry with the god that his mother and younger "good" brother devoutly worship. He "religiously" takes his mother to the temple everyday, but only up to its stairs, which he never ever steps on. So complete is his disagreement with the deity. Vijay was not just angry with the system, he was angry with god too.
Towards the film's end, when Vijay's mother is critically ill and hospitalised, he cannot easily be with her - being an underworld don - and decides to break his vow and go to the temple and confront god for her mother's life. This temple scene, where he has a lengthy monologue with the lord Shiva, is not just about the sheer brilliance of powerful dialogue delivery, more significantly, it captures the quintessential fluidity and diversity of our religious universe - which allows and offers the believer a bewildering range of emotional states within theism. Vijay addresses the deity as "TUM", "Aaj khush to bahut hoge tum", as the famous line goes; his body language completely irreverential and his person full of ego. The scene, which lasts for a good ten minutes, shows just Vijay and the deity, with nobody in between. It was perhaps one of the most profound moments of Bhakti philosophy on celluloid - a school which emphasises the non-mediated relationship between the god and the bhakta. Religion here transcends the ritual of subordination and hierarchy, of messiness and mundanity of organisation - of priestly pompousness. It becomes personal, between me and my god and thus profoundly emancipatory.
It is this "me and my god" space that has been swamped by the organised trappings of religion today, resulting in to erosion of its spiritual kernel. A bhakta today is essentially a state of servitude and subordination. There is no space for a sceptic or a critique or a disenchanted, disgruntled soul in this framework of organization. An angry, irreverential believer like Vijay is an anathema, a blasphemous proposition in today's time. That people make their own sense of god and there is a subterranean grid of everydayness dictated by life altering experiences, such as the one that made RS Dilip Kumar, Allah Rakha Rahman when his sister was critically ill, clearly bulldozes all the grand meta-narratives on religion.
Sadly, this subterranean grid and its strength have not been adequately acknowledged. Understandably, supremacists will lose their political capital if this acknowledgement has to enter our public discourse on religion. The fluidity of this space of everydayness is inherently generous and all encompassing as it incorporates all shades of human emotions towards its gods - anger, taunt, ridicule, conditional praise and admiration - in the making of the universe of religion.
Since much of the bitterness in our democratic polity today seems to stem from religious milieu, it would be worthwhile to watch the scene from Deewar. Thank you Salim-Javed, for conceptualising that scene and writing those lines. You must be credited for understanding the religious pulse of our world more deeply, sensitively and accurately than any academic piece written on the subject. Dissent articulates discontent and that in turn deepens democracy. Atheism of Professor Kalburgi will not die with his death. Deewar's Vijay and that scene had a deep Kalburgi imprint. But the millions then perhaps saw themselves in Vijay's ambivalent engagement with god. There was no ban, no blood thirsty cry for blasphemy. Salim-Javed got the best story and dialogue writing awards for the film.
Are we willing to scratch below the bitter and violence ridden surface to experience the sublime world of sacred fluidity and inter-religious cohabitation of ideas? Our democracy will be enriched if we do.