Padmavati row: A political weapon honed on mythology

A controversy has been raging over the release of the Hindi film Padmavati. As community leaders oppose its release on the grounds of hurt sentiment, others have offered huge bounties for beheading the filmmaker and the female lead. Various political leaders across states have spoken in favour of protesters. What is the political motivation behind this support? In this Business Standard Special, Mrinal Pande looks at why Padmavati has been used as a political weapon in the year 2017.

In today's India, one does not need to ask for history lessons. They come all the time from unexpected places, uninvited and longwinded. All castes, clans Gotras and Khaps seem to have discovered their own fantastical historical heroes and villains whom they would proudly whip out and flash to strangers like friends’ selfies, as filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali discovered – perhaps too late -- in Rajasthan. For the past eight centuries, the blade of Rajput history has been sharpened on the flint of myth and is now a deadly knife that politicians will use shamelessly against films and books based on myths and fairy tales, to carve up vote banks and people. Communities, both majority and minority, have at least one thing in common -- leaders who spare no excess in pursuing violent agendas. In Hindi, they have an evocative phrase gadey murdey ukhadana, or digging up ancient corpses, for the melodrama over an operatic film about a mythical figure, the Rajput queen, Padmavati.

The astounding ease with which public minds are being inflamed and manipulated by playing upon imagined insults and fears, is facilitated by the very nature of our masses still reeling under economic chaos and endemic joblessness among the young. We Indians are prone to taking life as it comes: literally and fatalistically. All the great events in history (wars, revolts, dethronings of tyrants), and in nature (wars, floods, earthquakes) remain to us our unavoidable Karma to which we must adjust. And since we mostly receive, not seek and research history, we become easy game for those who will strike the flints of myths of age old grievances against invaders from the West and light bonfires under the fragile fabric of a state poised for elections. And once the flames roar, no one buys the argument that barbarism in the name of historical justice is still barbarism. Not, it seems, even the Chief Ministers in many states who have taken an oath upon assuming office to maintain