Once upon a time…Boy met girl

Those who go into the question of authenticity in historical/ period films in Hindi cinema overlook this basic fact: all the lead characters who sweep through these films are larger-than-life figures. In a country where large tracts of history are still retold orally, and it is hard to tell where documented history ends and where embroidered myths begin, it is pointless to point fingers at our moviemakers who rely upon part-research, part-artistic license to tell their stories.

There was no way on earth that Ashutosh Gowarikar, whose Jodhaa Akbar is releasing today, could have saved himself the recent grief he’s been having: was Jodhaa Akbar’s wife, or was she Jahangir’s? Was she a Rajput princess? Was she from Jaipur? Or from Jodhpur?

Gowarikar has repeatedly said that he relied on research, yes, but he also went largely with his imagination. He calls his film 30 per cent researchand 70 per cent imagination. He’s also been saying that it is not a history lesson. As he has envisioned it, it is a love story of two young people from very different backgrounds, Akbar aka Jalal, who just happens to be the emperor of a deeply fractious country, and a Rajput princess. When a character in the film says, “ab humein mukkamal Hindustan chahiye”, you can actually imagine Hrithik looking into Aishwarya’s doe-like eyes and declaring, “humein hamara jahaan mil gaya”.

Useless rabbiting on about Jodhaa Akbar, which the director has declared more a ‘prem kahani’ than an ‘aitihasik gaatha’. It is only a good little Bollywood film. And this is not to hold a brief for moviemakers who use imagination when veracity is hard to get hold of. But it is interesting to see how Hindi cinema keeps largely away from recent history and period films (with the exception of a Border here, and a Hey Ram there), which would necessarily rely upon realism: if you delve into the recent past, there may be people who may have vivid memories of it, and that’s always harder to refute than contentious histories, which rely more upon where the historian is coming from, and his bent: is he or she the purveyor of recorded facts that will not rock any boats, or is he or she a subaltern warrior, ready to go to battle for an alternative point of view?

Risk-averse Bollywood doesn’t get into any of this. It’s much too complicated, and much too problematic. It would mean turning our backs on decades-old movie-making and acting processes. Tacking on surnames, instead of the generic Vijay and Raj, happened as late as the mid-’90s. To actually submerge a whole film and a saleable superstar into a character is asking for way too much: can you think of a single A-list star doing a Bollywoodian Capote, like Hollywood’s super chameleon Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

Or an actress getting so credibly into a man’s skin, like Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in the Oscar-nominated I’m Not There? Yes, we’ve had the superb Bandit Queen and the less-than-great Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, but those are more exception than rule.

It’s hard enough to do an Asoka, without padding it up: an item number in the first five minutes, and ample displays of Kareena Kapoor’s alabaster skin. It’s harder to get people into theatres. Who wants the Asoka of history books?

Who wants history in our movies, when we live with it all around us? Stretch your arm out, and you will strike a two-hundred year old mouldering monument, even if you live in India’s largest cities. Who wants period films, with their emphasis on the authentic (Satyajit Ray had to counter criticism of ‘nothing happening’ when his nawaabs played chaupar for endless minutes in Shatranj Ke Khiladi), when real India is in a long march, eyes fixed firmly ahead? Who wants the past when the future is all there is?

Give us this day our popcorn, and our bubblegum romances. Bring on the Tanishq maang-tika. And the heavyweight Neeta Lulla achkans. Jodhaa and Jalal, yay. Just right for Valentine’s Day.