Sharmi Adhikary
Though Karan Malhotra’s period action drama Shamshera depicted the story of a dacoit tribe and their fight for independence against the British, the Ranbir Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt starrer tanked massively. This failure was symptomatic of the audience’s ire at the rabid anti-Hindu stance in the script. The hero is shown as an atheist, while the villain sports the shikha and the elaborate tilak worn by upper-caste Brahmins. Since soldiers recruited by the colonizers were not encouraged to wear their religion so prominently on their uniform sleeves, this forced maligning of Hindu iconography was clearly directed at expressing Hinduphobia. The audience, Yash Raj Films should have realised by now, would not be duped so easily anymore.
The axe, to be honest, did not fall only on Shamshera. It was just one of the large Bollywood clans to be booted out without much ado for spreading Hindu hatred and channelling Islamist ideologies backed by black mafia money. The upcoming big-ticket release Pathaan seems to be facing flak even before its first show. The diktat is loud and clear without any interest in the storyline. What is this obsession with pathaans since so many years, the same rapacious group that over centuries raped Bharatiya women, brutalized its people and robbed our land! People seem to declare that if a change is to be brought, Indian cinema is to be enjoyed holistically, a civilization salvaged and saved, the entire industry needs to be dismantled and recalibrated. There has to be a start at least!
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