Winds From The East

IA author Manjari Kaul on the latest film of Ashutosh Gowarikar, Film theorist, Andre Bazin, in his essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” notes that if cinema was ‘put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in [its] creation’. Cinema’s preoccupation with history, the spirit and achievements of a particular age, its heroes and its villains, the glory and shame are never a pointer simply to an era gone by but also to a continuum that the filmmakers wish to evoke between the past and the present. The historical film in Hindi cinema has been a genre devoid of imagination for it seems that the only times in the country’s past that seem to get evoked time and again are- the vibrancy of the Mughal era, the heroic freedom struggle and the holocaust of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Ashutosh Gowarikar has, over the years, marked out the Historical as his preferred territory. He has sung his eulogy to M...