At The Crossroads:
Yash Chopra started his directing career with Dhool Ka Phool (1959) and Dharamputra (1961), both strongly anti-communal films. In both a child born to parents of one religion is adopted by a family of another. It was soon after Partition, communal hate was still in the air; filmmakers then believed in cinema as a means of social change.
The tragedy of our times is that a film like The Great Indian Family needs to be made to give audiences a lesson in secularism. Movies, like the recent Jawan, now have to wear their progressive politics on their sleeve. As to say, if politicians won’t take up the responsibility, cinema will. Pity then, that The Great Indian Family, directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya, remains at the level of a simplistic sermon for the democratically challenged. The word democracy is significant here, because the patriarch of the Tripathi clan (Kumud Mishra), believes in everyone in the family voting for all major decisions. Siyaram Tripathi is a pandit revered in the fictional Balrampur, and invited to perform religious rituals. His brother Balaram (Manoj Pahwa) and son Ved Vyas ‘Billu’ Tripathi (Vicky Kaushal) assist him. Billu is also a popular bhajan singer—he belts out pop devotionals with the energy of a rock star.
The premise of the film is so flimsy, that a lot of padding, back stories, song and dance is needed to bring it to the main point—in Tripathi’s absence, Billu and the rest of the family discover that he was born to a Muslim. A friend resentful of Billu successfully wooing a girl he likes (Manushi Chhillar) spreads the news, and rival pandit, Mishra (Yashpal Sharma), jealous of Tripathi’s position, takes advantage of it to discredit him and grab a lucrative wedding ‘contract’.
Billu is understandably blindsided by the revelation. Fortuitously, he had just befriended Abdul, a Muslim man, and finds shelter there, when his own uncle is not sure whether he belongs with them.
A situation like that can have no clear resolution, if Billu remains a Hindu, he is ‘tainted’ in the eyes of purists and it would mean rejecting his Muslim antecedents; if he accepts Islam, he rejects the beliefs he grew up with. There has to be an “all blood is red monologue” at some point and it predictably drops. In the era of love jihad, and ghettoisation of the basis of caste and religion, it is unthinkable to see a person as a combination of upbringing and social influences. Abdul’s family seem more liberal in that one of them acts in the annual Ram Leela, and nobody objects, but Acharya has to force this point to remind viewers of a syncretic Indian culture that is slowly being eroded.
The film shot with a lot of bright colours and bling that have come to symbolize small town India rests on the performances of Kumud Mishra and Vicky Kaushal and both deliver what is required of them—Mishra brings gravity to his role; Kaushal succeeds in conveying Billu’s anguish and internal conflict. The crisis of faith in the film may have been artificially inflated, but when questions of identity and orientation become crucial to survival, it becomes imperative to raise them. One can just wish The Great Indian Family had been a less superficial film. There was Dharmputra as an existing model.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
