There are problems with the vision of development that the Hindi feature film 'Swades' promotes and its portrayal of the upper-caste educated NRI as the harbinger of social change through quick-fix so
More than a few people who have seen the recent Hindi film Swades speak of the sequences that they experienced as eloquent: for example, when protagonist Mohan Bhargava is returning from a visit to a village, where he apparently grasps, for the first time, the relentless realities of poverty and caste-based exploitation in India. At a small railway station, a young boy comes to the window selling water for 25 paise per clay cup. Mohan, who usually carries bottled water, now drinks this water, unshed tears saturating his face.
Perhaps this is indeed a poignant episode. But why exactly? And who feels moved by it? If the subject-position of the director’s imagined target audience coincides with Mohan -- that is, if the audience see themselves in the image of Mohan -- the scene could be moving because the drinking of presumably infected water by ‘people like us’ is to be read as an act of penitence or compassion. Underlying it is the assumption that when a representative of the entitled middle class does what millions do everyday -- if they have access to that water at all – there’s empathy and magnanimity in his realisation of the daily distress in the lives of others. If, instead, the subject were to be the boy selling the water, if the point of view were his, what meaning could the act of a privileged train-traveller drinking a cup of water have? Gratitude? Indifference? Relief at a sale? Would the sequence then be stirring or simply commonplace?
This premise of the privileged middle class as subject runs through the entire film. The film’s focus is Mohan (Shah Rukh Khan), who works as a project manager with NASA in the US, and comes to India after many years to meet the woman who looked after him as a child. The story Swades tells is of an initially brief visit that gets prolonged as the NRI gets involved in issues in the village he is visiting, and is transformed from a fleeting visitor to a resident interested in contributing towards developing a problem-ridden nation.
The vision of development that the NRI brings with him, and that the film promotes is, however, problematic. The director, Ashutosh Gowariker, initially establishes Mohan’s credentials as the carrier of the message and methods of ‘development’—he is educated, relatively wealthy, and upper-caste. At a meeting with a group of men from the village, where Mohan ostensibly questions the inequities of the caste system, someone asks him what he is, and he replies, Brahmin. It might have been interesting if the film had explored the caste negotiations that arise in the complex process of ‘development’ if the NRI engineer were a dalit: what then would have been the reaction of the dominant castes in the village to Mohan’s developmentalist interventions? Most of the men featured in the film who are given a voice are upper-caste. The voices of a few dalits—such as a family of labourers living on the caste-determined village boundaries—remain marginal in the film.
Another apparently eloquent scene occurs soon after, when the people are watching a film in the village square, where dalits and upper-castes sit separately. To prevent the people from waiting in silence during a break in the electricity, Mohan brings out a telescope and the villagers (who are depicted as never truly having noticed the stars) take turns looking in wonder at a constellation. Mohan then sings a song that gradually has all the children, of all castes and religions, dancing and singing together: the upper-caste educated NRI now emerges as harbinger of quick and stirring social change.
In fact, the voices of most of the villagers remain marginal in terms of what they think development is, how they envision progress, what solutions they conceive of for their community. Instead, the people are typecast as being caught in petty squabbles that get them nowhere; the passivity of the rural poor—the much-used colonial construct—is evoked in the lives of people whose daily struggles with deprivation should speak of anything but passivity. For example, when the electricity fails yet again in the village and a group (mainly of upper-caste men) sits under a tree singing bhajans , a furious Mohan tells them in no uncertain terms to shut up because, he says, their attitude of acceptance (in this case, of the electricity cut) is symptomatic of what perpetuates the underdeveloped state of India’s villages.
Not much is said about the creative strategies people evolve every day. The only acceptable strategy that is presented is for the villagers to take responsibility for their village’s development as envisioned by the NRI with the scientific temperament and quick grasp of complex village dynamics. The symbolic pivot of this development becomes electricity: the engineer-catalyst rouses the villagers into labouring to construct a small hydro-electricity plant on a stream at a nearby hill. When the plant is about to be operational, a moment of high drama in the film, the sequence annoyingly keeps cutting to the creased face of an old sightless woman sitting in dull silence in her hut, with an unlit light bulb strangely dangling very close to her face.
The mini electricity project is financed by Mohan’s NRI dollars. In its pursuit of quick-fix self-determination, the film does not ask any real questions about the role of the State. The source of finance and of State responsibility in the provision and guarantee of basic facilities is not questioned. Questions such as any paperwork and permits that may be required for such experiments are bypassed. The State’s violence is not questioned in its imposition of top-down notions of ‘development’ on people (the Sardar Sarovar project is just one example of very many).
The State is weakly brought in during a discussion between Mohan and Geeta (Gayatri Joshi) where he is critical of its corruption and inadequacy and she briefly defends it by saying the State is doing what it can. With this, the role of the State in a democracy is dispensed with and the film, while ostensibly calling for people to be proactive and while supposedly promoting the idea of grassroots initiatives, of a people’s movement, endorses and reinforces the dominant top-town vision of development: a privileged outsider decides and implements the so-called solution, without integrating the views of the people in the village in any way, rendering them passive yet again, but using their labour to bring the project to life.
Such short-term solutions of course can make a huge difference: a water tap or reliable electricity supply in a community that has none can significantly change lives. But such approaches need to be accompanied by a larger political analysis and agenda. It is perhaps not in the nature of a mainstream Hindi film to question the deeper structural processes that work towards perpetuating exploitation, poverty, the sluggishness of any development, and the very definition of ‘development’. The well-intentioned, idealistic message the film conveys is a middle class dream—if only people like the NRI take on a greater role in nation-building (but without rocking the boat too much) it would lead to ‘progress’ as defined by the privileged outsider.
Implicit in this message is also the project of nationalism. More than once in the film, Mohan is shown countering the tried and tested arguments of tradition and sanskar that are summoned by nationalists of a particular mould when apparently defending India in the face of international comparisons and criticism that it is ‘underdeveloped’. Mohan clarifies his pro-modernisation stand but the film keeps the issue ambiguous. When Mohan leaves the village, Geeta gives him a box of herbs and barks and colours that she says symbolise the (evidently Hindu and homogenous) parampara and sanskar of this country. The box serves as the thread that eventually pulls Mohan back once again to his homeland.
A more radical agenda, a deeper questioning of social and political processes, a more critical look at ‘development’, may have made the film less of a commercial success than it has been. It perhaps did not do as well as the director’s earlier film Lagaan because, unlike in Lagaan, most of the characters in Swades are not distinctive or idiosyncratic or memorable. The three-hour-plus length that works in Lagaan in part due to the eventful cricket match does not work well in a film that alternates between didacticism, romance and nationalism. Swades remains a sincere attempt, but one with many questionable assumptions and analyses.
InfoChange News & Features, April 2005