Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Nehru’s Hero is about how you relate politics and cinema, how a non-didactic, non-academic medium reflects a political era. It’s about how film roles change, how the social aspect of life is always changing people’s idea of what India was and the ideal of manhood, what your hero should be like. His early films are tragic, he’s losing the woman and crying and groaning and singing. It’s all about forces beyond his control shaping his destiny. But later he is a do-something hero, facing challenges and getting the girl. He is fighting the world and succeeding. In the mid-50s India became more hopeful, I think. People felt they could do something about their situation.
So your next choice is your own book about the Indian film star, Dilip Kumar?
Yes. Nehru’s Hero is about how you relate politics and cinema, how a non-didactic, non-academic medium reflects a political era. It’s about how film roles change, how the social aspect of life is always changing people’s idea of what India was and the ideal of manhood, what your hero should be like.
The “idea of Indian manhood” sounds very Soviet in a way. Like those posters of chisel-jawed youths holding sickles.
In a sense that’s right. I mean, Indian heroes often come from the Punjab or from Peshawar where people are tall and fair because everybody likes that look and he embodies that. But it’s not a macho ideal of manhood. He always has a soft side, a feminine side and he’s crying and being sorry.
And how did his roles reflect a changing India?
Well, his early films are tragic, he’s losing the woman and crying and groaning and singing. It’s all about forces beyond his control shaping his destiny. But later he is a do-something hero, facing challenges and getting the girl. He is fighting the world and succeeding. In the mid-50s India became more hopeful, I think. People felt they could do something about their situation. The question of “is there justice?”
Is there?
Well, it’s hopeful, yes. Kumar was close to Nehru and his ideals. His heroes are positive Nehruvian men.
And you note that he never plays a Muslim?
He never played a Muslim, no. Even though he himself was a Muslim. It’s just something I noted as being special while I was writing the book. That he never plays a Muslim. Well, he does once play a Muslim, in a historical film – he played Salim in Mughal-e-Azam – but not in any of the others. The film heroes he plays are always Hindu characters and this comes in again and again. The Hindu-Muslim question never quite goes away. Never.
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Lord Meghnad Desai is a British economist and a Labour politician. He was born in Baroda, India and made a life peer as Baron Desai of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster in April 1991. He is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, and the author of Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, a book that predicts that globalization will lead to the revival of socialism. In choosing five books on India, he marvels at the Indian people’s incredible tenacity for democracy and self-advancement since gaining independence from the British in 1947.
