Besharam Rang: Much Ado About Anything and Everything

In the age of excess information and hype, opinions, and counter-opinions, I used to have this policy of venturing blindly into Friday releases. No first look, teasers, trailers, or songs. No expectations, apprehensions; nothing. Just the experience of a new film in a vacuum of ignorance. Alas, it has become more a fancy than reality, getting steadily challenged in the last couple of years. The innumerable controversies, outrage, and boycott calls, primarily on social media, have forced one, time and again, to not just test the waters but dive into the deep end of a relentless Bollywood-centred hullabaloo.

So, after staying consciously away from the song Besharam Rang from the forthcoming Yash Raj film Pathaan, I finally gave in and watched (when it had already crossed 55 million views) the three-odd minutes of a musical entity featuring Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan that has supposedly outraged the modesty of the Hindus because of the saffron bikini she appears in, not to talk of the purportedly obscene moves that are being seen as an affront to the Indian culture. 

First impression: loved the smooth-as-silk voice of Shilpa Rao. Second: learnt some quick Spanish from the refrain—that translates as “today life is complete”—quite like how I picked up French from Nashe si chadh gayi in YRF’s own Befikre. Third: in the process of hunting for the aforesaid miscreant saffron bikini and sarong (which features only between the last few seconds, 2.50 to 3.10 in the video) I got to see several other shades of swimwear on many sun-kissed, buff and largely foreign bodies and wondered if other colours are also feeling affronted for being called shameless. Fourth: the song grew on me enough to start playing on a loop and humming it even though I disliked the choreography by Vaibhavi Merchant. 

That’s it. I have moved on since then. The nation, it seems, doesn’t want to, even as a song has garnered more attention than it may have deserved in the first place. 

While the media, starved of any other issue of consequence, is fixated on it, I am left wondering about some extraneous issues. Our definition of suggestive, for instance. If these mechanical, programmed gyrations, cold glances, and programmed expressions—leftovers of similar jigs and jives in YRF’s own Neal n Nikki and Befikre—are titillating then I surely am Madhuri Dixit. 

Then again, what does it say of us if these tepid moves provoke us so easily, but the toxic masculinity of our contemporary pan-Indian popular cinema doesn’t make us cringe even a wee bit? We read subliminal, objectionable, communal meanings in the colour of a bikini but have no outrage reserved for the gender disparity and skewed dynamics in the industry, its patriarchal portrayals and the MeToo offenders who continue to thrive within it, not to talk of the lack of any murmur of protest when it comes to the real-life instances of casual sexism and crimes against women.'

Ultimately, it’s a matter of choice. Instead of fuelling constructive debates and discussions on filmmakers’ gaze or objectification of women in cinema, all we end up doing is stoking our pointless collective indignation that gets extinguished just as fast as it gets ignited. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were going ballistic about Ranveer Singh for posing nude for a publication whose name we’d have forgotten by now (New York-based Paper magazine)?

At the end of it, the varied reactions to this supposedly flagrant video have come to expose our own deep-seated prejudices and biases. It has not just been about what we have seen but also about our own warped ways of seeing. Some even took the pains to magnify Deepika’s images, perhaps for a better understanding of anatomical details and I certainly don’t mean this as a compliment. Misogyny, Islamophobia, ageism, obsession with fixed ideas of beauty, you name it, and we have displayed more crudity in talking about the song than the song itself, especially in our tweets and status updates. It has taken a song, and the infantile public discourse surrounding it, to hold a mirror unto us and our incipient bigotry that gets masked as righteousness. 

This proliferation of intolerance was brought up by Khan in his own inimitable way at the inaugural ceremony of the 28th Kolkata International Film Festival, in the presence of Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, when he chose to speak about the “narrowness of view” on social media creating a predominant narrative that is divisive and destructive and “limits human nature to its baser self”. He felt that cinema offers “a collective counter-narrative that speaks to the larger nature of humankind, a narrative that brings to the fore humanity’s intense capacity for compassion, unity and brotherhood”.
It even had an ordinarily noncommittal Amitabh Bachchan intervene for the browbeaten film industry when he addressed the issue of censorship at the same event. While placing it in a historical context, he said that films had a hard time during the hegemony of the empire, adding that “even now, and my colleagues on stage would agree, questions are being raised on civil liberties and freedom of expression”. He invoked Satyajit Ray’s Ganashatru (Enemy of the People) as an indication of how Ray would have reacted to the current times. 

As expected, the specter of extra-constitutional censorship has risen in the case of Pathaan as well. Intolerance had to segue in with matters of religion and nationality with the calls for boycott becoming louder by the day. MP Home Minister Narottam Mishra wants clothes correction, Supreme Court Advocate Vineet Jindal has filed a complaint at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur has urged true Hindus to stay away from cinemas, effigies of Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan have been burnt in Indore, the shoot of his Dunki has been brought to a halt in MP by Karni Sena.

Beyond the censors and the judiciary, it is now back to the moral police to decide what we must not watch. As 2022 rolls into 2023, the forecast for Bollywood is crystal clear: it’ll be more of the same.