- Films like Mani Ratnam's Yuva and Rang De Basanti portray youth rebellion and political unrest in India
- Arjun (1985) depicts an unemployed youth fighting corruption and injustice in Mumbai
- Early Indian cinema included Gopal Krishna (1929), symbolizing youth defiance against tyranny
Students and Gen Z raging against a paper leak and its repercussions. A nation on edge. But certainly not for the first time. Films, usually treated as vehicles of unalloyed entertainment in this country, have often, over the decades, had occasion to bring us face to face with the discontent simmering on the streets and in the campuses.
What are the titles that instantly spring to mind? The more obvious ones, understandably. And especially those that have had a pan-India footprint.
There is Mani Ratnam's 2004 political thriller Yuva and Aayutha Ezhuthu (Hindi and Tamil respectively, films with the same plot but different casts barring Esha Deol) and Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti (2006), which juxtaposes the freedom struggle and an act of rebellion by contemporary students.
Can we ever overlook Arjun (1985), Rahul Rawail's film that catapulted Sunny Deol to superstardom? More than 40 years on, the action-packed drama scripted by Javed Akhtar, one half of the duo who created Amitabh Bachchan's Angry Young Man persona, has not lost its resonance.
The story of Arjun Malvankar, an educated, unemployed lower middle-class Mumbai lad who battles corruption, apathy and injustice and, in the process, collides with a criminal underworld that operates with impunity under a powerful politician's patronage, feels urgent and relevant to this day.
A year before Arjun hit the screen, first-time director Ketan Mehta made Holi, a grim adaptation (as part of a student project at FTII Pune) of Mahesh Elkunchwar's play of the same name. Turmoil erupts in a college hostel when the authorities announce cancellation of the mandatory day off on Holi.
The boisterous boys played, among others, by Aamir Khan (credited as Aamir Hussain) and Ashutosh Gowariker take on a broken system geared towards snuffing out protests of any kind. The result is complete pandemonium. Their means are unruly and the outcome is anything but salutary.
But Yuva, Rang De Basanti, Arjun and Holi are by no means the only films that have recall value as we think of Indian movies that reflected and presaged how the youth feel when they are up against self-serving administrative machineries that crack down on free thinking and the right to ask questions.
The exercise takes us all the way back to the silent cinema era. In 1929, V. Shantaram made a film titled Gopal Krishna. It was his solo directorial debut and Prabhat Film Company's first production. It wasn't about the political leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale. The title of the silent mythological referred to Lord Krishna as a child.
Why, then, does the film find mention in this article? Here's the reason: Shantaram imagined Krishna as a defiant youth rebelling against the tyrannical King Kansa. Gopal Krishna was informed with anti-colonial sentiment but only in the form of a tangential undercurrent in order to bypass the British censors.
Post-Independence, uprisings did not cease, and several films from across India dealt with students' movements and youth angst far more directly, with several of them hitting box office paydirt and/or garnering critical acclaim.
These films addressed the theme of young people navigating rising unemployment, thwarting of social aspirations, and a growing popular disenchantment with the education and law enforcement systems.
In 1968, Tapan Sinha directed Apanjan (One's Own), a Bengali film about a group of jobless degree holders caught in a spiral of street violence and political disillusionment in Calcutta even as they develop a bond with an aged widow left to fend for herself.
Apanjan was a superhit. It ran for 45 weeks in Calcutta. It was remade in Hindi three years later as Mera Apne. It was Gulzar's directorial debut as well as Vinod Khanna's first film as a lead actor.
Etched in Indian cinema history for many reasons, including Meena Kumari's heart-wrenching performance, Mere Apne also delivered a song that represented the mood - and state - of the nation's youth in the 1960s and 1970s.
Composed by Salil Chowdhury with lyrics by Gulzar, it went: Haal chaal theek thaak hain... kaam nahin hain warna yahaan aap ki dua se sab theek thaak hain. It is definitely not anachronous today either.
Although the 1970s were a period of reckoning for a free India that had just stepped into adulthood, popular Hindi cinema of the decade (in the wake of the golden era spearheaded by the triumvirate of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand) chose to ignore the upheavals sweeping through the nation, opting instead to up the escapist ante. Sheer paisa vasool entertainment became the norm.
But two Bengali maestros - Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen - recorded in their respective Calcutta trilogies the collective misgivings that the young populace of the era had to grapple with day in and day out.
The first film of Ray's trilogy, Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), and the third of Sen's triptych, Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973), depicted the political, social and economic disturbances of the era from the point of view of the youth.
In Pratidwandi, a film as angry as any that agent provocateur Mrinal Sen ever made, an educated middle-class man is forced to quit medical college and look for a job after his father's untimely demise. Caught between a revolutionary activist brother and a career-oriented sister, he is pushed to a corner. He explodes.
In Padatik, Sen homes in on the ethical struggles of two young rebels - a political activist on the run from the police and an idealistic, well-off woman (Simi Garewal) who gives him refuge in her apartment - in a climate in which dissent is suppressed and conformity demanded.
The male protagonists in Pratidwandi and Padatik were played by the same actor - Dhritiman Chatterjee, whose involvement in Bengal's parallel cinema movement deepened and widened in subsequent years.
In more recent years, the action seems to have shifted down South.
In 2021, Sidhartha Siva made the politically charged Varthamanam, starring Parvathy Thiruvothu and Roshan Mathew. Set in Delhi University, where a Malayali research scholar, Faiza Sufiya, works on a dissertation on a freedom fighter from Malabar, Varthamanam stands on the side of the right to dissent, while addressing prickly issues like caste prejudice and religious discrimination.
In 2022, Dijo Jose Anthony released his second directorial, Jana Gana Mana, a Malayalam film centred on the murder of a progressive college professor that triggers a students' agitation.
The protests are suppressed by the police with the use of excessive force. A nationwide outrage forces the government to initiate a probe. Jana Gana Mana explores the role of students in demanding accountability and, more importantly, in fighting for that inalienable right when push comes to shove.
And earlier this year, Sudha Kongara made the Tamil period drama, Parasakthi, which brought to the big screen the 1960s students' protests in Tamil Nadu against the imposition of Hindi. The public fury boiled over. It became one of the factors behind the rise to power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).