Anshu Naharia: Aukat mein nahin rakhenge toh kaam hi nahi karegi sir.
Inspector Ayan Ranjan: Aur aukat kya hai?
Anshu Naharia: Jo hum detein hain, wahi aukaat hai..
The above mentioned dialogues are from the 2019 film Article 15, written and directed by Anubhav Sinha. The conversation takes place between an IPS officer Ayan Ranjan (flawlessly played by Ayushmann Khurrana), who is sent to Laalgaon as the Additional Superintendent of Police and eventually investigates the not-so mysterious disappearance of three Dalit girls, and Anshu Naharia (a performance by Veer Harsh which will haunt me for many years), a local builder and Chief Minister Ramlal Naharia’s son, who gang-raped the three girls and murdered two of them because they demanded a raise of three rupees in their salaries.
If 2019 is marked important in the world of cinema by Joker or Parasite, then I would definitely like to include Article 15 in that list. After coming out of the theatre, Article 15 rendered me speechless for quite some time. The hustle-bustle of a shopping mall, the brands, the advertisements offering one to become sick out of happiness and my own urban, synthetic image seemed like a total misfit. Funnily enough, I felt like a misfit in my own skin.
The story of the film transported me into a world which is too imaginatively realistic, a reality which is right there in front of our eyes, in our own country, inside our manholes, in our families, in our judiciary and most importantly, inside our brains.
Article 15 tells the story of an investigation of the brutal rape and murder of two Dalit girls, which initially is made into an honour killing case, and the search for the third girl who goes missing. Through Ayan’s eyes we realise that our understanding of caste is only through school textbooks, our radical ideology wins in our drawing rooms but has zero effect in a world whose seeds are sowed and nurtured by ‘hate’ and ‘differences’.
Inspite of our awareness about the existence of caste/religious/gender/class differences, we don’t actually realise how carefully the conceptions have been injected inside the nerves of a nation to secure vote banks and keep the game of power and money going.
Anubhav Sinha masterfully unfolds the map of this long history of differences in his film. Like Ayan, I too felt bewildered in the scene where his subordinates and colleagues started explaining their caste identities to him. Brilliantly performed by each and every actor, this scene captures the real scenario of our country, where ‘New India’ is just an eye wash.
As Ayan, completely perplexed, tries to understand the differences in caste, he finds differences not just restricted within Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras, there are subdivisions amidst these categories as well. As Jatav ji (Kumud Mishra) explains that he is a Dalit but a Chamar, whose privileges are a few steps above Pasis, or when Mayank (Ashish Verma) says that he is a Kayastha, who doesn’t belong to either of the categories. Ayan is also made aware that despite being a Brahman he is lower in the staircase than that of Mahantji, who is Kanyakubja Brahman, whereas Ayan is a Saryapurin.
Their intonations, while talking about their castes, seemed as usual as responding to roll numbers in a school or something as habitual as mentioning one’s height, weight and age.
Article 15, layer by layer, unfolds every aspect of a system which has been manipulated by a handful of people for decades. The faces change but the robe of power remains the same.
In the film, the culprits are Anshu Naharia, Circle officer Brahmadutt Singh and police officer Nihal Singh, but overall it’s the system who is responsible for the gang-rape and murder of these two girls.
Why talk about Article 15 today ? The recent incidents taking place in our country is more harrowing than a pandemic. A virus doesn’t have a mind of its own, but we do, that’s what makes us the most unique and the most harmful species. It's not the first time that we are seeing broken human conscience in the world. We have read it in History, we have theorized the policies of hate which Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini created, we have heard about Bengal and Punjab riots, our parents' generation has witnessed few fragments of the emergency period or the 1971 Naxalite movement at a very tender age. They have seen the Gujarat riots, we have seen the police brutality in Nandigram and the mass protest of the NRS doctors in 2019, but for the first time we are seeing the rise of an open dictatorship.
Extremely well articulated in Article 15, when inspector Nihal Singh dies by suicide after confessing he is guilty, his fellow colleague murmurs to himself, "khabar aati hain ki rape Badaun ya Buland sheher mein hua hai.. humse kahin door hua hain. Lekin door kuch hota nahi hai Sir, Nihal toh humse dedh feet door baithta thaa".
This is the reality we are forced to face. Nothing is far in today’s world of internet and social media, and yet we pretend and believe that uttering the word water will drench us, we ignore the violence flooding several homes but we believe that the umbrella of ignorance is going to save us from the rain.
The possibility of students looking back at our history and taking the right way ahead is already bleak because our country is successfully changing history every minute. Demonetization, improper implementation of GST, bringing the NRC, CAA bill, cutting off every means of communication in Kashmir, spending crores for building Ram Mandir, delivering hate speeches in open platforms, crushing the voice of dissent by making baseless arrests (be it Varvara Rao or Dr. Kafeel Khan), putting the farmers in dire straits by bringing the new farmer bill, comparing late Sushant Singh Rajput with Lord Shiva and using his face for Bihar election campaign, the inconsistencies of the government’s lies couldn't be more clearer.
After a very long time our country is witnessing an organized rise of open hatred and unapologetic lies.
A brainwashing device is not an utopian/dystopian idea anymore, governments across the world have successfully launched WhatsApp or Facebook as a brain turner of the masses.
But the incident which shook me and several citizens of our country to the core is the atrocity in Hathras. It’s a nightmare happening in broad daylight, its not a war of shadows anymore. Faces of the devil are not hidden behind black SUV glasses anymore. Hatred now has a face, and it very much resembles us. It's not the first time that we are witnessing an incident like this and that’s exactly the problem. We have seen what happened in Park street, we all were shaken seeing what happened with Nirbhaya, we were sleepless after the Kathua rape, but no amount of atrocity seems to put an end to this violence.
In the name of running a family and using the card of ‘insecurity’ we turn our heads from the root of these problems. Bone-chillingly portrayed in Article 15, the scene where Anshu Naharia is interrogated by Ayan, the confidence in the body language of the character (exceptionally acted by Veen Harsh) while explaining how and why the Dalits should be treated as untouchables denotes the exact unnerving confidence in the veins of today’s India’s system.
One can't help but feel hopeless when the UP police allegedly declared that there was no rape or one fumes with anger and disgust when the girl was reportedly taken to the Safdarjang hospital by the police when strictly prescribed by the JNMS authorities to shift her to AIIMS. We live in a country where BJP MLA Surendra Singh proposes that rape can be prevented by teaching daughters values and ‘sanskaar’ and hundreds of faceless people on social media bark a hackneyed and inhuman point like ‘why protest a rape which didn’t happen in your own city?’.
Time and again these epitome of educated pots of clays prove their inhumanity by measuring and comparing which death/rape/violence is more relevant and horrific in context to their favourite political colors. All these can be ignored but the social media will go berserk if a celebrity consumes drugs or if someone’s son or daughter features in the front page of the Vogue Magazine.
Many of us have watched Article 15, it has grossed an approximate of 771 million just in India, but here lies the tragedy. Even after watching such a film we failed to understand what it tried to tell us. We heard Ayushmann Khurrana’s character tell the CBI officer “humare bathroom mein jet spray lag gaye lekin aaj bhi log manhole mein nange utaarte hain”. We didn’t listen. We will clap and celebrate the idea of India taking revenge on Pakistan and scream "How’s the Josh?" inside our drawing rooms, but we are oblivious to the fact that it is estimated that over 600 sewage workers die every year.
The Supreme Court banned the practice of manual scavenging in 2014 but that’s just a hoax, this will never grab the attention of social media’s newfound cancel culture. India is shining because more than half the nation are celebrating a mythological character called Ram (whose existence has zero scientific proofs) and lynching people in his name, and on the other hand a large section of people are using their caste as an advantage for decades for their own benefits.
Dalits are raped, abused and still used for cleaning up our waste. It is relevant now more than ever why B.R Ambedkar led thousands of his followers and Dalits to burn copies of Manusmriti on 25th December 1927. It is imperative to understand Ambedkar’s difference with Gandhi (though we tend to make it very black and white without fully understanding Gandhi’s philosophy of Hind Swaraj) which prompted the most important dialogue of Article 15, where the character of Nishad, a Dalit activist who understood that the Brahmin politician Mahantji forming an alliance with the Laalgaon Dalit community for showing inter-caste unity is also a political ploy, says ,"Hum kabhi Harijan ho jate hain, kabhi Bahujan ho jaate hain, bas jan nahi ban paate hain taaki is Jan, Gan, Man mein humari bhi ginti ho jaaye".
As Hathras burns today it increasingly reminds me of Article 15, both the film and our constitution and it also draws me to the question- "Has Art failed ?" It's partially everyone’s fault. The media and producers have successfully turned art, especially cinema into a product, most celebrities are too frail-hearted to break their self and media created images. Either they will change their sail as the flag changes or they will use the trump card of ‘I stay away from politics’ to their benefit, whereas the audience will be keen to read about a celebrity’s next affair or covet to see a female celebrity’s wardrobe malfunction on internet and then provide a moral education to their children on how dirty a film industry is.
Thus, amidst all these perspectives, art barely moved beyond the word ‘entertainment’. That’s why an Article 15 or a PK or a Pink grosses millions but nothing changes. COVID-19 came and exposed the dying healthcare infrastructure of our country but we still celebrated the Ram Mandir Bhoomi puja. Overnight the unstoppable Amphan came and uprooted the oldest and strongest trees of Kolkata but for decades millions of deaths couldn’t uproot the seeds of hatred from our brains.
But, still I couldn’t help write about Article 15 today because no matter what, art still shows a way, a play or a song or a poem or a film still does something which a conventional education system can't do. With the resurgence of this trend of fans associating themselves using the word ‘army’ or ‘soldiers’ for showing their support towards their favourite celebrities or using phrases like ‘warriors of cinema’ one should understand that art is the only weapon in the world which is capable of remedying brains.
Maybe we don’t have an officer like Ayan Ranjan, neither do we have a home minister (as shown in the film) with who’s support Ayan continues his investigation and successfully finds the the third missing girl and arrests the accused, but I am proud that we have few artists like Anubhav Sinha who dares to tell such stories and attempts to show a way out during such a dark phase.
Amidst this hysteria of injecting nationalism by playing the National Anthem in the theatres before beginning every movie, by humiliating those who don’t wish to stand up especially when legally its not mandatory to stand up in the theatres, I felt proud of my country and felt like standing up in the scene where Ayushmann Khurrana’s character comes and sticks a printed copy of Article 15 of our constitution outside the police chowki, or the final scene where the police officers subscribing to various castes sit and pass rotis to each other as Khurrana’s character jokingly asks the woman making the rotis, "Kaun jaat ho amma?".
We don’t hear the reply as a truck honks by, we just see the reaction of everyone laughing and enjoying the food, embracing the religion of hunger, abandoning the baseless caste system as ‘Vaishnava Janato’ plays in the background, a song written by Narsinh Mehta, the lyrics of which suggests, “They do not succumb to worldly attachments, They are firmly detached from the mundane, They are enticed by the name of Raam, all places of pilgrimage are embodied in them”. Here 'Raam' is not a hero with a sword in his hand, he is a virtue, a symbol of equality which pushes an individual to find truth and God within oneself - that is our country.
(Riddhi Sen is a National Award winning actor. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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