BackCINEMA CURRENT: Police stories
Ardh Satya inspired many cop movies but none came close to the source material
Premium(A still from the movie Ardh Satya. )
There are as many complicated policemen out there as there are crime movies. If we sat down to make a list, we could take all week. We would travel from the United States of America (Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, David Fincher’s Seven) to Japan (Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog) and Hong Kong (Infernal Affairs by Alan Mak and Andrew Lau). We would have to jump through time zones, from the Prohibition era in the USA to the encounter age in Mumbai.
We would also have to make a distinction between cynical but well-meaning cops, Robin Hood cops and plain crooked cops. And we would have to ignore American television, which has produced superb cop dramas like Fallen Angels and The Wire.
Aamir Khan’s forever frowning police inspector in his new movie Talaash is supposed to be deeply tortured by the guilt of having lost his son in a drowning accident. Surjan Singh Shekhawat appears to be more upset than tortured, however. He often appears puzzled by the cards that life (and the screenplay) has dealt him. For dramatic inspiration, his character might want to look at Anant Velankar from Ardh Satya, the angst-in-the-pants classic that is set in a world in which sureties are beginning to crumble and men can’t simply be men. Govind Nihalani’s knockout film was made in the enraged eighties, a decade that seems to have been the worst in the history of independent India if you go by the movies made during that period. Based on a story by Marathi writer DA Panvalkar, the movie assembles an army of talent. Apart from the director, who doubled up as cinematographer as he tends to do with his films, there is Vijay Tendulkar on the screenplay, Vasant Dev writing dialogue, Renu Saluja at the editing machine, and Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Smita Patil, Sadashiv Amrapurkar and Naseeruddin Shah in the cast.
Velankar joins the police force in order to earn the respect of his cop father, an unreconstructed male who beats up his wife and pushes his son into rising through the ranks of the police hierarchy. There are challenges to Velankar’s masculinity every step of the way. The system is spilling over with godfathers and fixers. There are wheels within wheels – behind every petty crook lies a powerful gangster and behind every officer is a political patron. Velankar’s pragmatic seniors have made peace with the system, but the sensitive, poetry-loving cop resists. His heart beats shyly for Miss Gokhale, a mostly white sari-clad teacher who is sensitive, kind and interested in human rights issues. Not quite the ideal match made in heaven, since Velankar isn’t above thrashing criminals who are in his custody. Will the two worlds meet? Fortunately, this is not a love story.
Rather, Nihalani sets out to investigate the complex and deep-seated links between authority and masculinity. Velankar’s problem is that he is suspended in a half-truth between manhood and impotence. He can neither act nor sit by and watch crooks like Rama Shetty (Sadashiv Amrapurkar, making his debut in Hindi cinema after an acclaimed career in Marathi films and plays) mangle the law and order system out of place. Nihalani’s memorable camerawork, especially the close-ups of Puri’s rage-filled face and the custodial torture sequences, further establish the idea that morality in Mumbai is at boiling point.
Ardh Satya’s realistic, no holds-barred portrayal of police work inspired many films in subsequent years, especially the cop dramas directed and produced by Ram Gopal Varma, but none of them came close to turning over Indian masculinity the way the source material did.
(This weekly series, which appears every Friday, looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.)
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