Keep the mashaal burning

By Lakshmi Kamalakar

THE year 1998 has been dismal for the Hindi films, in the sense that ‘the movies which recovered their investment can be counted, literally on one’s fingers. Super hits of course were as rare as rain in the Rajasthan desert. Two titles that come to one’s mind are Pyar kiya to darna kya and Pyar to hona hi tha whose performance at the box office has salvaged the prestige for movies from the mills of Mumbai.

But, there is one film that stands out amidst a heap of flops, more for its artistic excellence and thematic topicality than for its box office performance. The film Satya made by Ram Gopal Varma is undoubtedly; the film of the year. Satya the film with a predominantly Mumbai flavour is doing extremely well in Mumbai, Maharashtra and the south.

Satya, an unemployed youth who goes to Mumbai with dreams in his eyes, gets unwittingly drawn into the underworld, grows to a prominence in it and ends up as a tragic victim of this ‘anti-system’, if it may be called so.

Satya graduates in the world of bullets in the endearing company of Bhiku Mhatre and Kallu mama yearns for the affection of Vidya and ends up losing his valuable life. The message is that the road to the underworld is a blind alley. Yet another attempted eye-opener for the youth being lured by the easy money in mafia and militancy.

Does the story-line ring a bell? Isn’t Satya similar to Chandrachur Singh of Maachis? Doesn’t Bhiku Mhatre remind one of Om Puri? Is Vidya not a perfect foil to Tabu? Yes, Satya, the film reminds one of Maachis. Well, this is not to belittle the excellent work done by Ram Gopal Varma and the world class performances he drew from artistes like Manoj Bajpai and Saurabh Shukla, who lived in; the roles of Bhiku Mhatre and Kallu mama, to say the least.

The similarities do not end there. The lyrics of Satya are penned by Gulzar and set to lilting tunes by none other than Vishaal Bhardwaj. Both Maachis and Satya address the problems of particular regions, Punjab and Mumbai respectively. Accordingly, the reception accorded by the cinegoers has been fragmented, viewed from a national angle. While Maachis took Delhi and Punjab by storm, in terms of box office success, Satya is creating a sensation in Mumbai and Maharashtra.

Then, haven’t the buyers grown wiser with the success of Maachis? The fact that Satya had no takers, at a price demanded by Varma, is more because of the debacle of his earlier film Daud than the inherent commercial potential of Satya. Of course, it is now Varma who is laughing all the way to his bank.

Like Maachis, Satya also became the talk of the nation. While on one hand, it received a very high acclaim even from the most renowned critics of the films, on the other hand it invited the wrath of police commissioner of Mumbai who recommended a ban on the movie. A couple of killings shown in the film were emulated by the underworld in real life. The controversy failed to gain much ground for soon came the exemption of entertainment tax for the film, by the state government. Maachis too had been accorded a tax exemption, while a section of people had asked for a ban

What emerges from the success of is that Varma has definitely towed Gulzar’s line, in that a purposeful theme can be narrated in a commercially viable celluloid format. And, Gulzar and Varma have both succeeded in successfully blending the art cinema and mainstream cinema, for Maachis and Satya belong to both the streams. The mashaal lit by Gulzar with Maachis has been kept burning by Varma’s Satya. It is now upto the other filmmakers of the Bollywood to keep the mashaal of meaningful cinema glowing. Thank you Gulzar. And thank you Varma.