Dear Sanjay Leela Bhansali, tell your story, just remove Padmini from title

The controversy about Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie in progress has taken an ugly turn. It is unfortunate that creative people receive threats, blows, and even bans on attending prestigious literary festivals. Writers and movie-makers should be free to tell their stories, and audiences should be free to praise them or to question them lawfully and peacefully.

These are fine sentiments and most of us probably would agree with them. However, this is not always how it plays out. For some people and in some cases the threats and arrests inevitably outweigh their right to free expression, and for others like big movie makers and important scholars, no amount of pain about hurt sentiments will pierce their deaf ears and stony hearts. This is a fact, and everyone but the most insulated and self-deluded defenders of elite bastions of privilege know it.

Given the particular equations of identity that are playing out in Bhansali’s proposed movie, we know exactly what will happen now. No one will stop to think about what our responsibility is as a society not only to our past and shared memories, but to our present and to our future; a present and future where the threat of coercion, violence and complete savagery against women has become an everyday concern. No one, in the Bollywood and Alternative History camps at least, will stop to think about the obvious here.

A glorious and extravagant and colourful exploration of a “gentle side” to Alauddin Khilji, a man who seemingly delighted in the practice of not only mass slaughter of whole cities, but also of fine micro-pleasures such as having babies sliced by swords on the heads of their mothers.

There is no excuse for going to this really dirty place at all, even if the stars and costumes and songs promise much entertainment and profit to the conscience-stunted.

There is no excuse. The fig-leaf of “fiction” doesn’t justify it, nor does the debate about whether Padmini was really real or just a character imagined by poets and now suddenly co-opted by those myth-fact-mixing chauvinistic and intolerant nationalists (there, we have already anticipated several op-eds that will make this pitch now).

Even the weak ploy of dancing around the obvious by calling it an “anti-hero” and not a romantic movie doesn’t work. Why is the casting done the way it is with one part of a real life star pair cast as the supposedly villainous Khilji if that is the case (I thank a student in my Indian Cinema class here in San Francisco for raising this very relevant concern about this movie project long before people on the ground got upset enough to resort to illegal force as they did today).

The core issue here is simply whether it is right to sanitize a history of genocidal violence, fanatical intolerance, and patriarchal normativity under the extremely lame excuse of fictional liberty or not.

Would anyone be so insane as to make a movie about Hitler falling in love with a Jewish woman in a concentration camp? Would anyone be so distracted from humanity as to go into debates whether the woman really existed or not and since some historians say she possibly did not then it may be okay?

Mr. Bhansali, you have no justification for what you are doing here. Even if you claim you are not recreating actual history, or even if your supporters claim there was no Padmini in real history so your liberties are excused, you are fundamentally seeking to cash in on a memory of mass funeral pyres and pain.

The moment you use the name of Padmini, you are intruding into a symbolic universe born in trauma and rage.

Therefore, if you truly believe that yours is just another fictional fancy, and wish to take advantage of that liberty, then, please, make your movie but let go of the names you have in there now. You cannot try to cash in on well-known names with symbolic resonance and also say it's all fiction and do what you want, not when those symbols stand for a moral line against violence, injustice, and misogyny.

By all means, you can and you should still make the same movie with all the palaces, chandeliers, wine goblets, and noble inter-cultural friendships and romances you want. You can put in all the songs you want praising god by one of his syncretic and pluralistic names you want. You can even show how, in the manner of the Rama-revising Ravana-mania sweeping some quarters these days, that love and integrity fail when a man marries a woman and dotes on her, but rise triumphantly when some other man shows up and abducts her against her will. Sure, go right ahead and sing your ode to love, in whatever strange form your artistic soul sees it, sir.

Make your movie, just don’t use the names of Padmini, and that other guy. 

Also read - Padmavati: Shouldn't historical fiction be open to reinterpretation?