The Artist Must Never Give Up the Ability to See: Mahesh Bhatt

History plays out in your house, and you look for it in editorials and newspapers.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Films release. They bomb. You spend hours on the Pilates reformer to keep your body fighting fit. Lovers break up. Script meetings with writers – and wannabe writers – take place in Starbucks because they have nowhere else to work. Life appears ordinary.

And then, slowly, something begins to change.

You notice that people are talking about what is playing out in the country, what erupted at Jantar Mantar, in lowered voices. That is usually how it begins. But you forget that the same thing is already playing out at home, around your own dining table, among family members of celebrities and opinion-makers. Conversations become hushed. Eyes wander before words are spoken.

“Nobody is willing to talk here,” lamented the editor of a fiercely independent news outlet. “They’re all frightened.”

Even retired judges advise you not to stick your neck out. “These are dangerous times,” they say.

Now, I am not asking anyone to become reckless, to make a spectacle of courage or pay a needless price. But it is precisely in moments like these that an artist’s sensitivity is tested. No one is asking the artist to become a politician. The times are asking only one question: Are you still capable of recognising another human being’s pain?

Everything else comes later.

No one has said that the artist must join a political camp; nor does the artist have an obligation to become a hero. He has no duty to squander, through recklessness, everything he has built over a lifetime. But he does have one obligation to himself. He must not lose the ability to see.

Power has always understood something fundamental, and that is why it recruits wordsmiths. It changes reality by changing the language used to describe it. Long ago, those who ruled discovered that if you alter language, you can alter memory.

Students are beaten. The violence is called “necessary force", fear is described as “maintaining order”, brutality is renamed “stability”.

Those close to the machinery of power, people in intelligence agencies and police forces, often tell you that silence is wisdom. Television anchors who have surrendered themselves to the establishment ask, almost innocently, “What else are we doing? We are only reading what is given to us.”

Actors know that feeling. They repeat lines written by someone else. Governments do the same with language.

When Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet, stood outside a prison where women waited to hear the fate of those they loved. One woman asked her, “Can you describe what is happening here?” She answered, “Yes, I can.” She was not trying to overthrow the State; she was not leading a revolution. But her answer changed history, she was stating that she could see. That was enough.

Every government, whatever its ideology or colour, has injured its own people at some point. Every age has manipulated language to serve itself. Language does not merely describe events. It tells people how those events must be remembered.

No artist can stop the boots of power from descending upon ordinary people, but an artist can refuse to help polish those boots. He can record what they crushed.

He does not have to belong to any political party. Power wants you to choose a side. The opposition wants you to join its ranks. The establishment wants you to repeat its vocabulary, rewarding you generously for doing so. That is the real temptation.

The moment an artist accepts borrowed language, he surrenders his own eyes. And what he loses then can never truly be recovered.

So when people ask me, “Whose side are you on in the students’ agitation?” My answer is simple: I am on the side of those kids, and their humanity.

I have always found myself rooting for the underdog. Everything else changes – governments come and go, victories become defeats and defeats become victories. But human suffering remains the same.

History has shown us that every regime eventually manufactures boots and sends them out to crush dissent. The artist may not be able to stop those boots from marching, but he must never become the man who ‘polishes’ those boots. He must always remember the face beneath them.

Because when the dust settles, when the television studios fall silent, and when future generations ask what really happened during these days of agitation, they will not seek answers from those who held power. They will seek them from those who simply bore witness. From those who had the courage to say: This is what I saw.

Mahesh Bhatt is a filmmaker.

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