Baahubali glorifies war, even the tragic hero is a killing machine
“At night I see their faces: all the men I've killed. They're standing there on the far bank of the river Styx, waiting for me. They say: ‘Welcome, brother’.”
Thus spoke Brad Pitt’s Achilles in the 2004 Hollywood blockbluster Troy. Based on Homer’s Iliad, Troy was American film industry glamourising war in all shades – from its insurmountable glories to its unspeakable cruelties – barely a year after the Iraq invasion of 2003. And in Achilles’ tortured self-reflections, especially to Brisies, but also to King Priam whose son Hector he kills, we find a fleeting acknowledgement of the ultimate impoverishment that war commits on human relationships.
SS Rajamouli’s two-part magnum opus Baahubali, is, however, minus a single line on that fundamental futility of war. Amarendra Baahubali, the central character and the tragic hero of this fantasy gala, doesn’t at any point betray a smattering of remorse on how many men he has felled with his sword, his sharp military acumen, his impeccable stratagems, his elephantine strength. The countless men who are killed and cast aside by Amarendra Baahubali’s tunnel-vision on war and battle, don’t get a passing mention, a casual lament by the good guy, who is a killing machine.
Yet, Amarendra is the nicest character in the whole of Baahubali universe. He saves villagers from being used as bait by the enemy camp; he routinely saves the men, women and children who are in the face of danger; he feels for a sacrificial animal and doesn’t think it needs the blood of the voiceless to make the beginning – especially the beginning of a war where only blood will be spilled – auspicious. He’s undoubtedly a noble character who constantly questions passed on traditions, tries to make them anew by making them better.
But even for Amarendra Baahubali, war, which, as amply illustrated in the two-part cinematic extravaganza, is about imperial misadventures, royal families festering with palace intrigues that spill over and spill a lot of innocent blood, even though they are given the halo of justness and imbued with that divine “call of duty” charade, is noble. Why is Amarendra Baahubali, who is otherwise so self-aware at so many levels, so blind to war’s ultimate pointlessness?
The unabashed militarism of the Baahubali movies, therefore, is at the very core of the Baahubali universe.
Because the good guy, the self-sacrificing tragic hero whose fate literally fathers vengeance as the sole engine of Baahubali’s much-embellished plotline, is devoid of doubt when it comes to war. Even though all of it is in defence of the empire to the throne of which he’s the heir for much of the time, there’s no flickering of remorse in Amarendra Baahubali, the swashbuckling crown prince, the lover, the people’s king, the good son.
That the grandest and most expensive movie ever made in India, that the two-part cinematic tour de force which is expected to gross over Rs 1,000 crore in box-office collections, and which has been released in about 9,000 screens worldwide – mostly to full houses – has such an uncomplicated understanding of wars and battlefields, limited to cartoonish impulses of racially stereotyped enemies, is deeply problematic.
More so because despite the scale and ambition of the Baahubali series, the actors, particularly Prabhas playing Amarendra Baahubali, almost the god-king, to near perfection, the epic sets and lavish visuals, there was no space for dissent on the thorough consent of the necessity of just wars.
Questioning war isn’t a recent invention. One of the most famous scenes in Mahabharata is Arjuna doubting war and giving up his bow and arrow, even if to be lulled back into a pumped-up war mode by Krishna. But the Q&A, otherwise known as Bhagavad Gita, nevertheless allows for the criticism of war to be coopted within a war epic. This is invaluable because it gives space to what war stamps out with its inevitable emphasis on honour and glory, and to some extent fighting to avenge lost love, dignity and many other immeasurable human yardsticks of life.
Characters in William Shakespeare’s plays routinely scoff at war and its demented destructiveness. The more exalted and tormented the hero, such as Othello, Hamlet, even Macbeth, the sharper the observations of those surrounding their gargantuan egos, those at the fringes of their mouse-traps, their obsessive hunt for resolution through blood and gore, fitting philosophies into narrow domestic ends which become national destinies. The pursuit of His-story makes their stories irrelevant, but there’s always a caustic aside, a self-referential acknowledgement that this is a skewed arrangement.
That’s the test of true greatness of art. And art that aspires to be great, needs to accommodate the unsaid and unsung in creative ways. What is unsung in Baahubali is the deafening chorus of those silenced by Amarendra Baahubali’s wars, to be not remembered in his waking dreams, to not haunt him in his nightmares. He can be love-struck and play the fool – Mandabuddhi, but he is not for a moment aggrieved by those who have ceased to exist because his arrow never missed a target. Amarendra’s perfection is fatally flawed, and not in an interesting way.
Why is the militarism in Baahubali more problematic that war scenes in films such as Jodha Akbar, Mughal-e-Azam, and other period films?
Mostly because it has come at a time when war is not confined to the regular exchanges of fire and deaths of soldiers, militant and civilians at the border, but is literally beamed out of our television studios. The ugliest battles happen when newsrooms airbrush the indignities and cruelties of war, offering instead a pornographic pleasure in cheering for war from the sidelines.
Watching Baahubali at an air-conditioned theatre in the national capital, watching everyone stand up for the national anthem as if on cue, watching everyone swallowing in the definition of what constitutes a just war and how it is indeed couched in ideas of honour and duty, watching the good guy never betray a rival sentiment about war itself even though he gives up his empire in a fraction of a second for love, watching Baahubali uncomplicate war the way it did, left me sad. Because a golden opportunity has been missed.