{"id":3822,"date":"2016-03-12T22:40:02","date_gmt":"2016-03-12T17:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=3822"},"modified":"2016-03-12T22:40:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-12T17:10:02","slug":"20-years-of-zakhm-a-film-about-communalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=3822","title":{"rendered":"21 Years of Zakhm: A Film About Communalism That is Just as Relevant Today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\nI<\/span>\n\n<\/div>\nn a scene from Mahesh Bhatt\u2019s <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i>, when a young Ajay (Kunal Khemu) tries to reach his father over the phone, he is greeted by the slur \u201crakhyel ki aulaad\u201d (son of a concubine). Ajay shudders, his <\/span>skin<\/span><\/a> having crawled into the back of his eye socket, waiting to pour out. But he keeps his resolve, at least for the first crucial moments in which his mother interjects. It is, after all almost true, perhaps even undeniable, the thing he has just been called. <\/span>\n\nThat knowledge, and the desire to react to it at his tender age is evidence that Ajay isn\u2019t just the love child of a <\/span>forbidden<\/span><\/a> relationship, sequestered from its truths. He is in partnership with this machine the sole product of which may be loss, and loss alone. At this point in the film, it is clear that <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> is a thoroughly adult world, its maturity born out of circumstance rather than wisdom. Wisdom that continues to elude India, amidst its sectarian politics and priorities. \u00a0<\/span>\n\nZakhm<\/span><\/i> is set during the <\/span>Bombay<\/span><\/a> riots. It opens with a poignant Ajay in his mid-thirties, played with a gloomy countenance by<\/span> Ajay Devgn<\/span><\/a>, trying to meet the city\u2019s turmoil half-way. Despite the fact that he is now a celebrated music artist of the Mumbai industry, Ajay\u2019s wife Sonia (Sonali Bendre) cannot help but feel insecure. \u201cI don\u2019t want our child to take his first breath in a country where people kill over faith. Is that too much to ask?\u201d she says to her husband. To Ajay it is. As providence would have it, Ajay\u2019s younger brother has just joined a rightist mob, lead by the scene-stealing Ashutosh Rana. Both brothers quibble over the phone over the nature of the <\/span>country\u2019s politics<\/span><\/a>, much like we\u2019d do today, or tomorrow. But when their mother is attacked and burnt by a mob, Ajay\u2019s past, the one that never let him be a child, catches up. This time, though, he decides to write for it an elegy.<\/span>\n\nBhatt, born out of wedlock to a <\/span>Muslim<\/span><\/a> mother (Shirin Mohammed) and a Hindu father (Nanabhai Bhatt) based large parts of the film on his own life. In an <\/span>interview <\/span><\/a>earlier this year he unhesitatingly stated, \u201cI am a bastard child.\u201d Bhatt\u2019s bluntness has been near thematic to his life and work, which is marked by an absence of <\/span>father<\/span><\/a> figures \u2014 in films like <\/span>Arth <\/span><\/i>(1982), <\/span>Aashiqui<\/span><\/i> (1990) and obviously <\/span>Daddy <\/span><\/i>(1999) \u2014 and the macabre conservativeness of the country\u2019s pettiest feuds: sex and faith. It is no wonder Bhatt has often exaggerated, overshot the runway on one more than one occasion. But there is also no denying that he sees conflict like no other director from the industry. <\/span>\n

Throughout its running time, through its characters and actions, the film whispers secular advisories, bemoans symbolic separations and at times even overdoes its elemental placements.<\/blockquote>\nIn one scene in <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> a young friend of Ajay\u2019s from school, upon watching a film extra dressed as Hanuman promptly joins his hands together in <\/span>prayer<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s a whimsical moment, comic in construction, tragic if deconstructed. It, of course, refers to the post-Ramayana years after Ramanand Sagar\u2019s brand of Hinduism had seeped further than most educations in the country could hope to, neatly paving the way for the violence what would follow in the next few years. <\/span>\n\nA film like <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> feels relevant even today because of the rigidity of this country\u2019s communal compass. Cast in stone, it seems, this needle exists only to mislead, as we remain ready to follow its basest insinuations, perpetually lost to the anger and hatred its maps are drawn with. <\/span>\n\nZakhm<\/span><\/i> fetched both the older Ajay (Devgn) and the younger one (Kunal Khemu) National Awards for acting. Throughout its running time, through its characters and actions, the film whispers secular advisories, bemoans symbolic separations and at times even overdoes its elemental placements. But it also does things that films in <\/span>Bollywood<\/span><\/a> seldom did at the time. It travels back in time to the impressionable years of childhood; to an age where conflict claims its price in the little things it teaches \u2013 fear, social stature. To children born amidst trauma, there is no referendum that grants them their innocence back. In the film, despite its cathartic end, the only thing Ajay gets to do is bury his trauma, rather than reclaim anything from it. It\u2019s a price young children pay and have paid for the politics that is played around them.<\/span>\n\nAs a child, your <\/span>villains<\/span><\/a> are cast before you feed any ink to the empty page. Though it is this past that accrues evil with time, it is the people hopelessly stuck in the present who pay the price. Even though <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> evaporates in the romanticism of oracular wisdom by the end, it remains bloodied by the loss not of life alone, but of lives that could never be lived. I remember watching <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> as a young teenager, bitter for the father figure none of its men ever become. I watched it as an adult for the innocence it can never achieve, because there is none. Our divisions, the islands we want to live on, <\/span>Zakhm<\/span><\/i> tells us, come with a price. A price we will never know each digit of.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahesh Bhatt\u2019s Zakhm completes 21 years today and feels even more relevant because of the rigidity of this country\u2019s communal compass. The film is proof that Bhatt sees conflict like no other director from the industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":3823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3114],"tags":[7158,7159,3990,7160,7161,7162,7163],"class_list":["post-3822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bollywood","tag-ajay","tag-bhatt","tag-communalism","tag-devgn","tag-kunal","tag-mahesh","tag-zakhm"],"yoast_head":"\n21 Years of Zakhm: A Film About Communalism That is Just as Relevant Today<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mahesh Bhatt\u2019s Zakhm completes 21 years today and feels even more relevant because of the rigidity of this country\u2019s communal compass. 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