Today’s journalistic research on cinema is so PR driven that Airlift’s blatant distortion of an event from contemporary history, extensively documented on camera, has been completely overlooked in favour of just making a gripping hero adventure
Piyush Roy
Airlift, the film everyone is talking about at the moment and which is dedicated to the biggest evacuation of civilians by a country from a war zone, is an acknowledgement long overdue. The film’s backdrop is Kuwait in the autumn of 1990; the villain – Saddam Hussain’s forces, who suddenly invaded the nation August 2, 1990; and the hero – the rescue event of a lakh plus Indians (numbers ranging from 1.2-1.7 lakh).
But does the film really pay tribute to the event’s real stars, or is it a well-made vehicle to promote superstar Akshay Kumar’s onscreen heroism with a more plausible than ‘khatron ke khiladi’ style drama. Every critic worth his mettle has given the film a three plus rating. Raja Menon’s debut film definitely pitches the Indian thriller in the league of some of its better appreciated Western counterparts on the thrill meter.
But is it the truth? And do we really care?
The film’s makers have claimed that its protagonist, Ranjit Katyal, is a mix of a couple of good Samaritans, starting with two Indian businessmen – Sunny Mathews and H.S. Vedi – to more. Post release, the family of Sunny Mathews has been active on the social network claiming that the character of Katyal is a fitting tribute to his situational bravado.
Sureshmal Mathur, second secretary in the Indian embassy in Kuwait during Saddam’s invasion, who was definitely there until the last Indian was airlifted, in an interview to a prominent Hindi daily however has said, “The truth is, no NRI helped us evacuate Indians from Kuwait. The entire operation was financed and executed by the Indian government”. The Indian government, along with the help of its national carrier, Air India, had effected a record evacuation of over a lakh stranded Indians through 488 flights in 59 days. Two of its senior most officials, involved with the event, K.P. Fabian who was the then head of the Gulf Division in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), and Jitendra Bhargava, the then executive director of Air India, have also come on record to deny any one miracle man or few supermen leading the rescue. They instead credit a team of 70 plus MEA officials from Kuwait and Jordan.
Sadly, today’s journalistic research on cinema is so PR driven that Airlift’s blatant distortion of an event from contemporary history, extensively documented on camera, has been completely overlooked in favour of just making a gripping hero adventure only.
Not every genre of cinema is about a wilful suspension of disbelief, and that’s why though Ek Tha Ranjit Katyal (which Airlift could easily have been called) is an ace up on Ek Tha Tiger in the genre of patriotic films, it is not Schindler’s List. And it’s definitely not true that the Indian government did nothing.
Yet, why complain? Haven’t we as a nation been addicted to the distorted reduction of the glorious life and times of one of our greatest kings to saas-bahu level drama sensibilities for over a year now on the telly?
No wonder, a Bajirao Mastani swept the Filmfare awards recently, in spite of its total distortion of one of medieval Indian history’s much documented and fairly accurately remembered love stories. Not a single Indian critic, bothered to question the need for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s flamboyant refashioning of a lie, swayed as they were, by its grandiose visuals.
One of the film’s opening scenes, has Bajirao (Ranveer Singh) blowing up some British East India Company ships. Well, the First Anglo-Maratha War didn’t start until 1775 CE, three decades after Bajirao’s death. The Bajirao and Mastani romance blooms in the war against a Muslim warlord Muhammad Khan Bangash (owing allegiance to the Mughals), who Bajirao kills in a daring triple jump bravado from ground to howdah with the agility and flexibility that would shame an Olympian.
Bangash, in real life, however outlived Bajirao to die at the ripe old age of 78.
One of the film’s highlight song moments, Pinga, in which Bajirao’s wife Kashibai and lover Mastani do a party dance together, had been objected by purists for its impossibility of happening with court ladies revealingly draped in saris like koli fisherwomen. Even if we let go of the sequence as artistic license, the real Kashibai had arthritis and couldn’t have even swayed vigorously, forget doing a full dance in rhythm. That’s why all those smitten fans, who tell me that Bajirao Mastani is a great historical and that I am too cynical to find faults; I reply, call it Bhansali’s Devdas in Maharashtrian costumes and I will be lot more indulgent, but don’t tell me it’s a historical because the film is far removed from any documented truth of the period, be it love or war!
On the screen, both Bajirao and Ranjit Katyal get ample superhero moments where they singlehandedly neutralise more than their supposed superhuman mettle would convincingly permit.
Cinema does call for certain liberties inherent to its medium. Impressive dialogues, riveting drama, heightened realities are necessary to make the ordinary larger-than-life. The telling has to be embellished to make an epic out of a documentary. But isn’t ‘creating histories’ that never existed, stretching imaginations a bit too far? Why can’t we do it like Attenborough’s Gandhi, Inaritu’s The Revenant or even Oliver Stone’s Alexander?
Why do our biopics have to be prefixed by guilty disclaimers like ‘all characters appearing in this film are fictitious’, while those films’ pre-release PR machine keeps harping about the narratives being ‘inspired’ by true events and real people. Why can’t our biopics muster the courage for a more assertive ‘based on a true story’ tag? And why it has to be always about how well an Akshay Kumar played Katyal or Ranveer Singh enacted Bajirao and not about how well those characters were realised to original potential by their interpreting actors. Think about it!
