Wokay!

Filthy undergrads (and even filthier schoolchildren) cannot recall a time before cable television. They do not recall a time when television consisted of Doordarshan only. When commercials came before programming, not between it. When news was not sensational. When there was only one channel. And when that channel was a mouthpiece for the Congress (I).

And yet, Doordarshan being a propaganda outlet could not prevent some brave filmmakers from striking a blow for liberty and inserting subtle yet trenchant criticism of the ruling dynasty into their work. The most famous of these – yet utterly unappreciated as pro-freedom, anti-Nehruvianism work – is the animated short film ‘एक चिडिया अनेक चिडिया’, which brilliantly wove anti-Congress messages into a propaganda film commissioned by the ruling Nehru dynasty.

When you see this film for the first time, it comes across as a typical piece of propaganda – designed to impose the values of the ruling Allahbadi elites upon the rest of the country in the guise of ‘national integration’. However, when you examine it closer, you discover that the whole short is a brutal attack on Indira Gandhi. I shall now explain this below.

The first thing that points us to the anti-Indira message of the short film is the UP accented Hindi of the voice actors. It is clearly a parallel to the forty-five year long domination of national politics by a small group of UP Brahmins.

This established, it becomes clear that the ‘Didi’ introduced at the very beginning of the film is Indira Gandhi. The choice of symbols is startling – presenting Indira Gandhi as a Big Sister is a parallel to Orwell’s Big Brother, who presided over an equally totalitarian state.

After this, the parallels fall into place. At 2:30, we see the Big Sister figure telling a story about a hunter trying to capture birds. With this segment, Vijaya Mule invokes Indira Gandhi’s insane invocations of the ‘foreign hand’. The mice depicted at the end of the story are a metaphor for the Soviet military assistance provided to Nehru-dynasty India – poor, badly designed hardware, only capable of irritating superior American ordnance, but still good enough to win the 1971 war.

The most powerful indictment of the Indira regime, however, comes in the last segment of the film, beginning at 04:52. We see how the children led by the Big Sister plot to steal mangoes from somebody’s private property. This is an analogy to how Indira Gandhi led the Congress to nationalize banks in 1969, and use the spoils to reward party functionaries with cheap and easy credit. Tellingly, we see that there are no Sikhs receiving mangoes. Even more tellingly, we see that while it is the younger brother who gathers the mangoes, it is the Big Sister who distributes them – and that there is no audit or control to measure who receives how much – referring to the culture of corruption established by Indira Gandhi, which allowed her to grab the vast majority of bribes and extortion.

It is difficult enough to spread an anti-dynasty message on state-owned television. Doing this in the guise of state propaganda is even more remarkable. Vijaya Mule and her team need to be applauded.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.