The hate dogged our Oscar entry: Why must India persist in sending the wrong films to the Academy Awards?-Entertainment News , Firstpost

My father, who was a historian, used to say, “History is rewritten so many times by so many successive empires and governments  that it eventually becomes  not what it actually was but what  we want it to be.”

The fascist insinuations of the above observation struck me hard in my face when I read, with growing incredulity, what Indraadip Dasgupta had to say about Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham. Dasgupta is an esteemed member of the 2021 jury, which in all its collective wisdom, selected the Tamil film Koozhangal as the official Indian entry to Oscars 2022.

Sircar’s remarkably adroit film is a trenchant, deeply stirring hard-hitting, though not flawless, delineation of the Sikh revolutionary Sardar Udham Singh’s relentless quest to seek out General Michael O’Dwyer in London. We all applaud Singh’s gallantry, and salute Sircar for making a film on this true-blue national hero, especially at a  time when other filmmakers are busy doing biopics of gangsters and bootleggers.

But Dasgupta does not seem to think much of  Sircar’s admirable biopic. Days after it was rejected as our Oscar entry, he made a jolting statement on why  Sardar Udham was not seen to be the politically correct choice for the honour.

The honourable jury member told Times of India, “Sardar Udham is a little lengthy, and harps on the Jallianwala Bagh incident. It is an honest effort to make a lavish film on an unsung hero of the Indian freedom struggle. But in the process, it again projects our hatred towards the British. In this era of globalisation, it is not fair to hold on to this hatred.”

Significantly, other jury members including chairperson, the distinguished Shahji  Karun,  have distanced themselves from Dasgupta’s disgraceful diatribe.

The choice of words in the above snub-decree (so to speak)  is interesting. Sardar Udham is “a little lengthy.” True,  it clocks at two hours and 42 minutes.  But then, some of the most celebrated Oscar-honoured films from the world over have been pretty lengthy: Gone With The Wind and Mera Naam Joker are nearly four hours long. The Sound Of Music, Dr Zhivago, and Mughal-e-Azam are all nearly three hours in length.

And Steven Spielberg’s 1993 holocaust masterpiece Schindler’s List is three hours and 15 minutes long. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Direction. It also showed our Nazi friends in not such a flattering light. But did we hear the Oscar jury members say, “So what if  Schindler’s List is one of the three greatest films ever made? Let’s not give it any Oscar. Our friends in Germany will be  upset.”

When Dasgupta opines that Sardar Udham projects our hatred of the Britishers, he undermines the sheer sanctity of history. He also ridicules those thousands of Indian Sikhs who were massacred in Jallianwala Bagh.

Are we to forget their sacrifice just because some stiff upper lips are going to get stiffer?

I am not saying Sardar Udham is to the  Jallianwala Bagh carnage what Schindler’s List is to the Nazi holocaust. Certainly not! Sircar’s film has its shares of shortcomings — for one, Udham Singh’s completely fictional romance with a mute Sikh girl, who one suspects is mute because the actress playing the role cannot speak Hindi or Punjabi.

But it dares to open up wounds that never healed. And if some of our British friends are none too pleased about it, then so be it. Are we to tailor our creative arts to pander to imperialistic egos? And besides, as Vicky Kaushal’s Udham says in the film, and not without irony, “Some of  our best friends are British.”

The sun did set on the British empire. And we better acknowledge that historical fact rather than curtsying cutely, a la Victoria & Abdul.

The question of the ‘most suitable’ film as our Oscar entry remains unanswered for years now. Is Koozahangal likely to at least get a nomination in the shortlist of the Best International Film category? I doubt it. This snub has become an annual ritual for us. Like Koozahangal, Village Rockstars, the Indian entry to Oscars 2018, peddled the Great Indian Poverty for Western audiences. For long stretches, nothing happened in this film about an impoverished little girl in Assam who dreams of owning her own guitar. Inert silences are considered a huge asset in films that glorify the Great Indian Poverty for a certain section of the Western audience, which sees India and Indian cinema in two ways: either there is too much singing and dancing or there is too little to eat and to hope for. Village Rockstars fell into the latter category.

In 2016, the Marathi film Court, directed by Chaitnya Tamhane, headed to Los Angeles for the Oscars after being selected by a jury headed by Amol Palekar, and returned home empty-handed. In 2017, the Tamil film Visaranai was similarly snubbed at the Oscars. Ketan Mehta, who headed the jury for the selection of India’s official entry into the Oscars in 2017, had said to me, “We’ve to understand that selection of a film is only a part of the process towards winning the Oscar. Marketing the film in the US, pitching it to the Oscar jury in Los Angeles is very important.”

When will we ever learn? When would we stop sending the wrong films to the Oscars, only to be rejected every time? Each time, we come back looking like fools. And no, it is not because we are being victimised as a third-world country. The truth is we do not make films worthy of international recognition, nothing like Salvador Calvo’s Spanish Adu or Matías Piñeiro’s Argentinian Viola has come out of India in a long long time.

Most of the time, Indian critics — and that includes yours truly — are busy celebrating Indian mediocrity on celluloid. There are so many recent Indian (not just Bollywood) films that  I have praised on release, only to cringe when I returned to them. Most recent Hindi films lack durability.

Jallikattu, the Malayalam film that we sent to the Oscars last year, lacked not just durability, but also universality. As I had written when the film was announced as India’s entry to the Oscars, “There is a ferocious fracas at the heart of this unnerving film. It is original but extremely violent. And to be honest, after a point, I found the gore to be a bore. I have a feeling the Oscars jury would feel the same way.”

The status quo will not change until we send the correct film to the Oscars. Let us face it: We keep sending the wrong films to the Oscars over and over again.

Subhash K. Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough – “because there is Lata Mangeshkar and cinema”-  to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha