An absurd canvas: on Padmavati 

An absurd canvas: on Padmavati

Context

• The group formed against the screening of Padmavati, a big-budget period drama, is growing more violent and absurd by the day.
• It is done to raise anxiety about the film’s scheduled release on December 1st.

The coalition

• Uttar Pradesh state government has joined hands with the Karni Sena, a self-styled Rajput organization that uses vigilante methods to uphold its notion of caste honour
• Lucknow has written to the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry requesting that the Central Board of Film Certification be alerted of the “public sentiment” about distortion of “facts” in the film.
• The release of Padmavati , could disrupt law and order in the State, especially with the administration’s energies focussed on the municipal elections in end-November, the U.P. government has said.

What is it endorsing?

• As the Supreme Court observed in S. Rangarajan vs. Jagjivan Ram, a mere threat to public order cannot be a ground to suppress freedom of expression.
• Such statements by Government, on the question of “historical facts” in connection with a film based on a work of fiction, make them appear as endorsing random groups.
• Over in Rajasthan, a Minister, Kiran Maheshwari, has intemperately railed against the film. And the Karni Sena, which vandalised the sets on location in Rajasthan earlier this year and also blocked entry into the Chittorgarh fort where the story is set.
• Artists especially Deepika Padukone, its lead actor have been receiving death threats to the life and well-being of those associated with Padmavati, especially.
• Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the film’s director who is known for his lush sets and high emotion, has been at pains to give an assurance that he has not distorted history.

The story behind Padmavati

• The story of Padmavati draws from a 16th century Sufi poem, ‘Padmavat’, and has over the centuries been retold across north India, and that there is no historical record of Padmavati’s existence.
• The firmness on demanding accuracy in period dramas is acts as an infringement on creativity. Fictionalizing the past has been an ancient way of understanding it, from K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam to Oliver Stone’s JFK.
• The anxieties that are driving the Karni Sena and members of the Sangh Parivar are evidently different.
• The narration according to them is that, Alauddin Khilji, the Delhi Sultan who wages war in the story to try to win the beautiful Padmavati, could be humanised obviously disturbs the Hindutva narrative about ‘evil invaders’.
• The visuals of the heroine singing and dancing evidently militate against the latter-day patriarchal telling of Padmavati’s story, in which she is dutifully bounded by notions of purity and honour. In this, it is not just that the film is fuelling such worries: the film is being used to heighten such anxieties and consolidate a regressive and intolerant world view.