When travelling in mofussil Bengal, one is likely to encounter statues mostly at the fork where a road might bifurcate. It would be of someone who, with some variations, is emaciated, hunched, stubby, bearded and in muddled clothing, with his hands clenched together at his back in a state of poised contemplation. For a moment, one is not entirely sure who this could be, even though he looks familiar. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the risible stone likenesses are of none but Bengal’s most recognisable public figure – Rabindranath Tagore. To date, no one has ever bothered to find out who could be the craftsmen behind these public displays, or who could be their eminent Medici-like patrons. They appear overnight and then, unattended, wither away.
I was reminded of this when Anupam Kher made the grand announcement that he will play Tagore in a forthcoming film. The Bengali social media sphere was abuzz with the news and there was immediate and almost universal disapproval. Bengalis should protest, it is an insult, said one. It is sacrilege, said another. Many others were in a similar vein.
Delighted to portray #Gurudev #RabindranathTagore in my 538th project. Will reveal the details in due course. ये मेरा सौभाग्य है कि मुझे गुरुदेव को पर्दे पर साकार करने का सौभाग्य प्राप्त हुआ है! जल्द ही इस फ़िल्म की अधिक जानकारी आपके साथ संझा करूँगा! 🙌🙏🫶 pic.twitter.com/qnLqduSPq3
— Anupam Kher (@AnupamPKher) July 7, 2023
The foremost reason was Kher’s politics; he is an unabashed right-wing, Hindutva apologist and how could he play the ‘bard of Bengal’, went the criticism. Kher was last in the news as a performer-publicist for the cringe-worthy, propaganda vehicle The Kashmir Files. We well remember how he defended the film’s brazen bending of facts, showing every Muslim in Kashmir as a villain, and claimed that his being a Kashmiri stood testimony to the film’s ‘authenticity’.
As far as the Tagore film goes, it is unclear yet what this film is about and what is the context of Kher playing the poet. But given the timing of the film, some amount of dread is natural and understandable. The rightwing ecosystem is now relishing, with frightening regularity, the misuse of popular cinema as brazen propaganda. Kher’s inclusion provokes the possibility that this could be another despicable sample of cinema that will undertake one more attempt to retrofit history and brainwash the gullible public into buying a work of fiction as some kind of truth so far hidden from them.
This much is understandable. But should this mean he is proscribed from playing Tagore? Kher is a veteran thespian and even those who dislike him wholeheartedly for what he has done to the liberal ethos of Hindi popular cinema, cannot look away from some of his tall performances: Saransh (1984), Karma (1986), Pestonjee (1987) and the more recent Khosla ka Ghosla (2006) for example. There is no reason to believe, from a performative standpoint, that Kher is ‘unsuitable’ to play Tagore.
But the much more important question is, should an actor’s ideology and politics be a defining factor in acting out a role, particularly in a scenario of a biopic? Or is there something more?
Is the disapproval something to do with Kher not being a Bengali and not knowing the language? This was seen as a travesty and came up among many Bengalis who tut-tutted about the Mumbai actor playing the role.
That would be somewhat self-defeating. Cinema’s unique appeal has been historically to neutralise an actor’s native language to enable him or her to aim for performative participation. Otherwise, Burt Lancaster would not have played a Sicilian aristocrat in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), Alain Delon would not be in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) or Joaquin Phoenix could not act as Napoleon in the forthcoming Ridley Scott epic. Closer home, there are other examples, where the actors do not share any identifiable resemblance, except maybe a passing physical one, with the roles they would be enacting.
The two best actors to have played Mahatma Gandhi among numerous others – Ben Kingsley on screen and Naseeruddin Shah on stage – are not particularly in the mould of being a ‘Gandhian’. The same goes for the numerous actors who have played Jawaharlal Nehru, Roshan Seth included. Mammootty, who played B.R. Ambedkar in Jabbar Patel’s eponymous biopic, is neither a Maharashtrian nor from any of the caste groups championed by Ambedkar. So far there has been no major disapproval from Gujaratis, Kashmiris or Ambedkarites respectively.
These three are the most recognisable political figures in all of India’s history. The nature of their iconicity could have provoked deep dismay about the actors’ own beliefs or linguistic background. But that did not happen. One would like to believe that the functional need to have a performer of some talent and screen presence were the decisive factors here, not their person. Whether Kher is as talented as those named earlier is not the question here; the criticism has been not being either a liberal or a bonafide Bengali is what is troublesome.
Anupam Kher. Photo: PTI
Moreover, one may note that several actors have played Tagore in Bengali cinema, and almost all those films are rather forgettable. The most recent of them is Thinking of Him (2022), an Indo-Argentinian film based on Tagore’s late-life friendship with the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo. No one saw the film, let alone create a fuss about Victor Banerjee playing Tagore, he being one of the earliest actors in Bengal to have fought an election on a BJP ticket. Shall we then say that Bannerjee and his politics are acceptable because he is a Bengali?
Parambrata Chatterjee’s young Tagore in Kadambini (2015) was somewhat watchable, something that cannot be said about Sanjoy Nag’s version in Rituparno Ghosh’s quasi-documentary on Tagore life- Jibonsmriti (2013). There are other examples of much lower sensibility and talent. Why no disapproval of them?
The more sensible response would be to ignore the criticism or just to pass them with a mix of laughter and a sigh, like one does when passing by those god-awful mofussil statues. There one is likely to bemoan the lack of street aesthetic and the perversion of public art, not really if that statue is suitable for the stature of Tagore. Evidently, they aren’t. The yardstick should be the same for another film on Tagore, whether it has Anupam Kher or Shah Rukh Khan playing the Nobel-winning literary titan.
Finally, there is also ‘that’ question of letting Tagore out of the grasp of claustrophobic Bengali stranglehold, something that Ramchandra Guha has written about time and again. One of the most fractious issues in the dogged and continuing ownership of Tagore by Bengalis is to keep him both close to the chest while at the same time desiring his global approbation. Both cannot happen. Bengalis must learn to let go of Tagore simply being one of them and accept him as a man of the world, a cosmopolitan polymath, which he was. To do so, Bengalis must let a thousand Tagores bloom – good, bad and ugly. Like Shakespeare.
What one must hope is that Kher, while playing Tagore, gets to learn the values of empathy, universality and humanism that Tagore propounded, most famously in his remarkable lectures on nationalism and fascism. The petrified and rather pathetic mofussil statues would be hard to put life into, but Kher, with his narrow-minded politics, may want to make a course correction and return to life by playing Tagore. Let us hope that by enacting the great man, a bit of Tagore rubs off on Kher.
Sayandeb Chowdhury is an academic.
