Harsh Mander 
The year that we leave behind was a sombre, troubled one both for India and for much of the world. The politics of hate engulfed more and more people. Bombs pitilessly pounded children and hospitals in Gaza on a scale not seen this century, civilians picked up firearms against each other converting Manipur into an implacable war zone, and lynchings continued in India, barely noticed any more. Democracy faltered, inequality further soared and India fell even further in the Global Hunger Index rankings.
It is fitting, then, that the marker of the worthiest of Hindi films and shows of 2023 was a common strain of dogged humanism – of idealism, courage and hope – even as they acknowledged the crises of inequality, injustice and hate that cobble the lives of ordinary people.
It is instructive that six of the nine films and shows listed here are based on true-life stories. And even those that are fictional are close to life.
In the front line among my favourite films was one that came early in the year, Nandita Das’s Zwigato, a narrative of aching tenderness and gentle rage. Das carefully observes the quiet struggles, the dignity, the resolve, the hurt and the determined love of Manas Mahto, a middle-aged food delivery man, and Pratima who steps out warily to share her husband’s burdens, as a masseuse to rich women in high-rise apartments and as a janitor in a mall. With luminous empathy, Kapil Sharma and Shahana Goswami portray how both try to hide from the other from the humiliations, the insults and disappointments that they endure as they daily grapple with the uncaring, unequal world of rich and middle-class India. Their unostentatious but steadfast love for each other and for those in their care forms the moral core of the film, and in the end its only fount of hope.
Kapil Sharma and Nandita Das on the sets of ‘Zwigato’. Photo: IMDB
It is this same stubborn humanism that drew me to the mini-series The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984, compellingly directed by Shiv Rawail. It chooses to tell the story of the world’s worst industrial disaster that took 15,000 lives and ravaged several hundred thousand others by centre-staging narratives of the heroic exertions of railway officials who risked their lives to save the lives of hundreds of others. The writing and visualisation are emotive and eloquent as they recall the grisly events of that fateful winter night in Bhopal when poisonous gas leaked due to criminal neglect by the Union Carbide and people began to drop dead in thousands. There are at least two points of departure for the miniseries. The first of these is the real-life story of Ghulam Dastigar, the Deputy Station Master of Bhopal Junction who, unmindful of his own safety, did not abandon his post and ensured that several trains to Bhopal that night were diverted. If he had not, hundreds more would have died.
Another real-life story woven into the chronicle is of Rajkumar Keswani, a journalist who had warned authorities after his friend had died of a gas leak about the dangers that the plant posed three years before the disaster. But no one paid heed. There are other stories as well, including of a railway worker on his first day of employment, who dies saving many others. In the retelling of the story of the disaster, the horror of the appalling crimes of those who risked the lives of thousands for the cynical pursuit of profit and the complicity of people in authority is mitigated by the inspiring courage and gallantry of ordinary people.
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A different kind of courage is the moral core of another miniseries Trial by Fire about another tragedy in 1997, in which a fire accident in a cinema hall Uphaar Cinema in South Delhi led to the death of 59 people and serious injuries to 103 others. The story is recounted here through the staggeringly dogged unwavering struggle stretched over two decades of Neelam Krishnamoorthy and her husband Shekhar, who had lost both their children in the fire accident. Their profound loss and sorrow drives Neelam, supported steadfastly by her husband, to relentlessly, even obsessively pursue justice from the courts. The criminal cases against the cinema owners, the Ansal brothers, who had violated elementary safety norms, and the managers of the theatre move at a glacial pace through the Kafkaesque maze of India’s judicial system. In the end the courts let off those criminally guilty of causing so many deaths all too lightly. Justice fails Neelam and Shekhar, but they are victorious in the ways they uphold the tenacity of the human spirit.
A still from ‘Trial By Fire’.
It is idealism and courage again that powers another true-life story of a small-town unassuming lawyer who fought for justice for a girl who was sexually abused by a powerful godman with a huge empire, in Apoorv Singh Karki’s Sirf Ek Banda Hi Kaafi Hai. The film does little to disguise the factual story of Asaram Bapu, one of India’s most influential gurus who founded over 400 ashrams in India and around the world, who wielded formidable political clout. He was charged with rape by a 16-year-old daughter of two of his devotees who he took into his room claiming to cure her of evil spirits. The battle was fought spiritedly by a little-known lawyer in Jodhpur. Manoj Bajpayee plays to perfection this lawyer whose politics leans to the right but who is compelled by a fierce devotion to justice to fight some of the most powerful people in the land to secure ultimately a life sentence for the godman. Among the endearing sequences in the film are when he argues in court against senior lawyers – in real-life Ram Jethmalani, Salman Khurshid and Subramaniam Swamy – hired by the godman. Bajpayee’s lawyer combines in these moments fanboy awe and veneration for these legendary seniors with a brave and robust commitment to his calling and the righteousness of his cause. He is empathetic and supportive to the girl, and he does not flinch even after a series of key witnesses are murdered and it is clear that his life is in danger.
Idealism is what also sustains the central protagonist in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail, another exhilarating real-life story of a young man from a remote village in the Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh (Manoj Kumar Sharma) who fights incredible odds to qualify finally in the most fiercely contested competitive examination in the country to become an IPS officer. As a young man he meets a police officer who is honest, kind and just. This encounter alters the course of his life. It is the dream to become a police officer like him that drives him to the city, where he survives through years of hard manual labour, disappointments and setbacks to study for the examination. He persists to rise again and again against defeat and hardship, to finally overcome. Vikram Massey brings a rare sensitivity and authenticity to his portrayal, raising him to the top rung of our actors. It is hard, for instance, to forget the sequence in the film when his friend tells him that he has qualified in the examination, and he just crumbles into a heap on the ground overcome with emotion. I wanted to stand up and cheer in a scene near the end when, Massey’s character, now a police officer, drives to a police station in Chambal to meet the policeman who years earlier had inspired him. The young officer touches his feet, the older man proudly salutes the man who is now his superior officer, and then they both embrace.
A still from ’12th Fail’.
I am not a fan of police procedurals, less so when these are about serial killers. The reason why the web series Dahaad, directed by Reema Kagti and Ruchika Oberoi, still makes it to this list is because of its central character, a sub-inspector in a police station in a rural outpost in Rajasthan, Anjali Bhaati (Sonakshi Sinha in a persuasive portrayal) and its realistic depiction of rural policing. Bhaati is a Dalit woman, and she is continuously reminded of this when she confronts people who wield the power of caste, class and patriarchy. In a particularly stirring gooseflesh-inducing sequence, when a dominant-caste landlord taunts and humiliates her as he blocks her entry to search his house, she forces her way in declaring, “The Constitution gives me the power to enter your home, and you have no right to stop me.” Memorable also are the final moments of the series, when Bhaati decides to change her surname to Meghwal. As Bhaati, her caste identity was ambiguous. As Meghwal, she is unmistakably, defiantly and proudly Dalit.
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It is the Dalit identity of another police officer that raises Bheed, a searing documentation of the great migrant exodus that erupted after the Indian government imposed with four-hours’ notice a punishing nation-wide lockdown. The police officer hides his Dalit identity with his upper-caste surname, Surya Kumar Singh. But his superior officer never fails to remind him of his caste. Singh is charged with blocking the movement of a crowd of migrants at a rural roadblock erected to prevent hundreds of starving workers desperate to return to their villages. The film’s director Anubhav Sinha deploys the range of characters heaving at the roadblock to depict how the fractures of class, caste and religious identity collapsed solidarities in this time of monumental disaster when people most needed to stand together. I bore first-hand witness to this, the greatest humanitarian crisis since Partition, and feel that Sinha falls short in reflecting the depth and range of the tragedy and the extent of the culpability of the state. But the film is strongest in its depiction of the Dalit police officer Singh’s own struggles as he comes to ultimately embrace both his identity and his inherent duty to stand firmly with the frantic stranded workers.
A still from ‘Bheed’.
There are in my list two significant films that directly confront the politics of hate, one in India and the other in neighbouring Bangladesh. The first of these is Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah, in which Rahab Ahmad, a married Muslim CEO of a telecom country rescues a young Hindu woman, Nivedita as she is escaping from goons sent for her by her violent politician lover. The lives of both are endangered as Nivedita’s estranged lover manipulates social media to depict Rahab as a love jihadi who has fled with his Hindu lover.
Hansal Mehta’s Faraaz is a gritty recreation of the terrorist attack by a group of five young Islamist terrorists on a café in Dacca in 2016. The assault left dead 29 people, including 20 guests in the café, café staff and policepersons. The film tells the moving story of 20-year-old Faraaz Ayaaz Hossein, the grandson of a leading business tycoon. The terrorists offer to let him walk out free because of his Muslim identity, but Faraaz refused to abandon his two friends to die in their hands, and as a result he also dies with them. Both films together depict the horrific visage of religious hatred, Hindu on one side of the border and Muslim on the other, but identical in many ways in their cruelty and mindless violence. But what both films also share in common is that when their central protagonists are endangered by the violence of hate, they choose even at the risk to their lives to hold fast to their values of humanism, friendship and decency.
In every one of the films and shows in my selection this year, when light fades – sometimes through caste and gender oppression, sometimes through religious hatred, sometimes through class inequality – it is each time this moral arc of humanism that pierces through the blackness. In this year of enveloping darkness, I am grateful that the best of popular art celebrates idealism, courage and love so that we still can hope.
Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.