A Satyajit Ray Film That Foresaw India’s Descent Into Dystopia With Remarkable Clarity

Today, May 2, is Satyajit Ray's birth anniversary.

Is your family going hungry? Are you worried where the next meal is going to come from? Well, think again, think hard: does it really make sense to obsess about food? Remember this adage: 

        To starve is not so bad/For eating too much can make you fat.

Are you upset that you cannot afford a decent school for your kids? Come to think of it, though, should you really mind? Recall the sage saying:

        He that studies hard / Sure as hell he’ll starve.

Indeed, you could even draw comfort from the following wise distich:

         Knowledge is endless, so why try in vain

         To know still more? It isn’t worth the pain.

A poster for the movie created by Ray himself

If you happen to be a native speaker of Bengali, you would likely hear in these couplets – that populate much of the canvas of Hirak Rajar Deshe  (Kingdom of Diamonds) – echoes of age-old Bengali aphorisms. 

A few are canny take-offs of popular epigrams. “He that studies hard….”, for example, spoofs the old dictum meant to be dispensed for the benefit of kids who neglected their school-work:

         He who studies hard/ Will sure enough ride fancy cars.

At first glance, everything seems to have been turned on its head in the Kingdom of Diamonds.  But, as your field of vision adjusts to the new frames of reference, you begin to understand how the upturned perspective has become the only valid one. So when a scrawny old farmer with a pinched face pipes up with “It’s never a good idea/ To fall behind on taxes/ Even if we were to starve/ We mustn’t grudge the royal cess” – he is not being facetious at all. 

No more facetious, at any rate, than the down-and-out coal miner whose grubby face lights up with a strange glow as he sings: “It does not matter if I live or die/ But Diamond King is God – and that no one can deny”.

Released in 1980, Hirak Rajar Deshe was conceived as a sequel to the hugely popular 1969 musical Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. And it starts off with the promise of playing out as an equally delightful comic opera, a melange of vaudeville, slapstick and farce, with rollicking horseplay thrown in now and then. 

But a peep into the royal court of the Diamond King – as extravagant as it is intimidating – soon inserts a jarring note into the proceedings. We are swiftly led away from the charmed world of two enterprising and very lovable young men with their uproariously funny exploits to be thrust into the nightmare world of a malevolent king and his crazed pursuit of ever more power and pelf. 

The pure joie de vivre, the disarming jauntiness that beats at the heart of Goopy Gyne, makes way here for the troubling themes of pervasive injustice, rank cynicism and rampant corruption – suggestive overall of the mislaying of the moral compass. 

The Diamond King in his court

There was evil in Goopy Gyne…also, but it was of the clumsy, bumbling kind represented by the spectacularly inept Prime Minister of Jhundi, who, despite trying his damnedest to strike terror in others, is always more funny than menacing. 

The viewer was encouraged to laugh at him, not be in awe. But the Diamond King is a very different kettle of fish. The vicious glint in his eye leaves you in no doubt that he means business .In him, you find yourself face to face with the truly sinister. Innocence has taken leave of the world he inhabits. You can laugh at this world only at your own peril.

The interregnum between Goopy Gyne… and Hirak Rajar Deshe  the 1970s was arguably a more unsettling and turbulent period in post-independence India than any other period of comparable time scale – up until we hit the Narendra Modi years. 

The decade was punctuated by massive urban as well as rural discontent, escalating social tensions, the Bangladesh War and the gigantic  problem of refugees it brought in its wake. This was accompanied by the ‘Naxalite’ insurrection and the Indian state’s violent pushback against it, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and the severely repressive political regime of the Emergency years (1975-77). 

Hirak Rajar Deshe captures the zeitgeist of that troubled decade with great panache – with injustice, cynicism, moral depravity and hopelessness threading the film’s narrative together.  A political regime that believes that the common man has scarcely any use for any kind of freedom is unquestionably the film’s thematic pivot. 

The king’s word is law here, and his every wish, however perverse, soon gets written into the nation’s statute books. All manner of dissent is ruthlessly muzzled, every aspect of the community’s life is surveilled and paeans of adoration for the king’s divine benevolence are sung endlessly by citizens – because that’s the basic price for survival. 

Inevitably – because the narrative is constructed as comic fantasy interspersed by satire – there is exaggeration here, but the contours of the Emergency superstructure are clearly discernible.

What is striking, however, is how Hirak Rajar Deshe anticipates things that the India of the 1970s was unfamiliar with but today’s India is not. There are things in the film that at that point seemed somewhat fantastical but are fairly commonplace today. The Diamond King shuts down schools on a whim and wears his antipathy to knowledge on the sleeves of his royal robe, proudly. His reasons? 

                The more they read, they get to know the more,

                And then they thumb a nose at you that much more.

This was not quite in the air then, but it is impossible not to hear echoes of such sentiments in the corridors of power today. The systematic dismantling of public education was not one of the Emergency’s goals, stated or covert, but today it no doubt ranks quite high on the government’s list of priorities. 

In 1980, it felt as though, in sequences showing the tearing down of schools,  Ray was using a bit of poetic licence to embroider an interesting story. Not today, not in Modi’s India. 

Institutionalised anti-intellectualism of the Diamond King’s administration, while not a feature of the Emergency years, is the hallmark of the Modi years: recall ‘Hard work versus Harvard’; or ‘Why believe Darwin when no one has seen a monkey mutate into a human?’; or the deification of ‘cow science’ in post-2014 India; or, more generally, the unashamed witch-hunt of dissenting voices on university campuses. 

From shutting down schools, the burning of books is but a short step, and the king’s stormtroopers make a triumphal bonfire of books and manuscripts in the courtyard of the schoolteacher who has been thrown out of his job. 

Up until recently, mangling books in the name of reviewing or revising them was the current regime’s favourite pastime. Now, however, they have successfully expanded their skill-set to take in book-burning as well. Recall the fire on Ram Navami a couple of years ago that consumed nearly 5,000 precious books and manuscripts of Bihar Sharif’s Azizia Madrasa?

All the sanctimonious verses about the pointlessness of knowledge and learning were appropriate preliminaries to this necessary refining of their talents. Those verses outline the future of a society that promotes obscurantism. That future is playing out before our eyes today.                  

Young students being readied to be pushed into the brain-washing chamber

Hirak Rajar Deshe foregrounds another theme not usually associated with 1970s’ India – a clear nexus between capital and political power. This nexus defines the nature of the Indian state today. For good or evil, Indira Gandhi’s India liked to see itself as a socialist democracy, however flawed, and openly pandering to large business interests was not quite the norm then. 

In the movie, a hugely exploitative business empire sits at the centre of the Diamond King’s absolute power over his subjects. That Big Money-funded power is pretty much what drives the machinery of the Indian state today, a state which has never been more openly aligned with the special interests of the ridiculously rich, an unabashed oligarchy. 

Another brilliant thematic innovation in the film was the introduction of a truly macabre instrument of coercion – the brain-washing machine. It’s a terrifying contraption designed to wipe the human brain clean of all that it held before and replace it with sanctimonious homilies embedded in the machine. Whoever is put through the machine’s ‘cleansing’ cycle for a few minutes ends up as a zombie, endlessly parroting the chant created for them. The verses have been standardised to suit specific needs of designated occupations – a teacher’s, a miner’s, a farmer’s and so on – and every incantation is really another paean to the King’s greatness as it acknowledges the blissful lives his subjects live on his watch. 

This felt like comic exaggeration in 1980, when, despite crippling censorship, dissidence was not unknown. But one really has to be living under a rock to not hear the chorus of such ‘trained’ voices all around us in mainstream as well as social media, and even in one’s own neighbourhood. 

Logic, rationality and even bread and butter issues of people’s lives seem to have as little traction with those ‘treated’ by the machine as  those infected with an unquestioning bhakti for the Supreme Leader today.  

The images of the manipulation of the human mind serve as a powerful allegory of a totalitarian regime run amok and they should resonate much more powerfully with current viewers of the movie than they did with us at its first release.

 Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.