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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Lounge Opinion | Khaki shots
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Lounge Opinion | Khaki shots

Should the Mumbai Police give Bollywood a medal?

Salman Khan (centre) in a still from ‘Dabangg’. The uniform functions as a cape that lends legitimacy and allows audiences to applaud the indestructible one-man fighting force as he smashes heads and breaks the limbs of various dispensable degeneratesPremium
Salman Khan (centre) in a still from ‘Dabangg’. The uniform functions as a cape that lends legitimacy and allows audiences to applaud the indestructible one-man fighting force as he smashes heads and breaks the limbs of various dispensable degenerates

Last week, the top order of the Mumbai Police summoned film-makers and journalists for an interaction, and nearly everybody on the guest list showed up, as though they had been summoned for a line-up.

Organized by Cineyug Entertainment Pvt. Ltd (the event management company run by the controversial Morani brothers), chaired by commissioner of police Satyapal Singh, and attended by senior officials, the meeting was supposed to discuss ways to improve the portrayal of the khaki force in popular cinema. A related item on the agenda was to “make cinema a more effective way to curb crime, especially crimes against women", according to the invite. The officers tried to defuse the air of wariness that had settled over the roomful of leading directors, writers, producers and distributors by assuring them that the idea was not to upbraid them but to improve the representation of the police. The guests included Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, the men who popularized the angst-ridden policeman archetype, as well as some of the directors who interpreted this archetype in different ways, from Ramesh Sippy (Shakti) and Govind Nihalani (Ardh Satya) to Prakash Jha (Gangaajal) and Apoorva Lakhia (Zanjeer). Actors Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn, both of whom have played uniformed vigilantes over the course of their careers, also signed the attendance muster.

A poster of ‘Rowdy Rathore’
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A poster of ‘Rowdy Rathore’

Comic-book heroes get comic-book adversaries, such as the dim-witted terrorist mastermind from Wanted, who is evil enough to bomb children but not intelligent enough to spot the undercover policeman in his gang, or the rustic politician from Dabangg whose animus against the hero has the sophistication of a street-level brawl.

The trend of the lovable rowdy policeman has been imported from Telugu and Tamil cinema and resold with modifications to Hindi-speaking audiences. The superhero-policeman character has allowed ageing and experienced heroes across language cinemas who might not be known for their physical prowess to reassert their masculinity, whether it’s Mammootty in Malayalam or Ravi Teja in Telugu or Vikram in Tamil. It now seems as though no actor worth his salt can retire from the business without having played a Khaki Man. The superhero policeman is as much about superheroic movie stars, and the day is not far when even the likes of Ranbir Kapoor and Imran Khan will have to bulk up their bodies and slip into inspector roles to appeal to the demographic that steers clear of dramas or romances.

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A still from Govind Nihalani’s ‘Ardh Satya’

By the 1990s, the formula-guided catharsis delivered by the insider-outsider policeman had begun to lose its appeal. Concerns over custodial deaths and interrogation-related excesses might have also caught up with audiences and film-makers. Scores of Indians had moved to live or work in the US, and they were exposed in far greater measure to sophisticated action techniques and visual effects. At the same time, the government-induced economic changes that were shaking up the Indian middle class made angst a dispensable commodity. The hedonism that has only grown since then finds its perfect expression in the topper-of-the-class policeman, who packs guns and grins in equal measure. We now measure catharsis not by how the policeman delivers his punches, but by how much.

The meeting with film industry professionals hadn’t been thought through enough to encourage a discussion about the vigilante policeman. Should we have more or fewer movies like Dabangg? Is the top brass of the Mumbai Police worried about the valourization of the lone policeman whose disregard for rules should send shivers down the spine of any right-thinking person? Writer and lyricist Akhtar, who can always be counted on to set the cat among the pigeons, pointed out that “there is a relationship of fear between the police and the common person", and that if film-makers can romanticize policemen, then they can criticize them too. “Show us one film where we have shown custodial death, where we have shown custodial torture, where we have shown policemen raping women in custody," Akhtar said. “We have rarely shown these. If some of us have faults, so do some of you."

Such nuance is rarely present in most policeman movies, and is unlikely to be articulated at a time when there no clear-cut heroes or villains, every public figure seems to be tainted by some scandal or the other, and the sureties of the past have been buried for good. The Khaki Man is a convenient truth for our morally confused times—the ideology he represents is nebulous at best, and the catharsis he offers is as disposable as an extra-large popcorn tub.

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Published: 19 Nov 2013, 06:19 PM IST
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