Director: Mani Ratnam; Writer: Mani Ratnam; Producer: Mani Ratnam, S. Sriram, Jhamu Sughand, Kirit Trivedi; Cinematographer: Rajiv Menon; Editor: Suresh Urs; Cast: Aravind Swamy, Manisha Koirala, Nasser, Kitty, Radhabai, Tinnu Anand, Akash Khurana, Master Harsha, Master Hriday, Sonali Bendre, Nagendra Prasad, Ratnakar, Prakash Raj, M.V. Vasudeva Rao, Rallapalli, Deesh Mariwala, Vinay Malhotra, Pramod Menon, Arun, A.R.S., Vijaya Chandrika, Sheela, Minu Rathod, Padmini Natarajan, Sreesha, Priya, Chetana Das
Duration: 02:20:44; Aspect Ratio: 1.900:1; Hue: 358.264; Saturation: 0.127; Lightness: 0.299; Volume: 0.139; Cuts per Minute: 27.967; Words per Minute: 36.934
Summary: Controversial melodrama set in the 1993
Bombay riots following the destruction of the
Babri Masjid by Hindu zealots in December
1992. In a Tamil village, the Hindu Shekhar
(Swamy) falls for a Muslim woman, Shehla
Bano (Koirala). When the fathers of both
oppose the marriage, the couple elope to
Bombay where Shekhar gets a job as a
journalist, while Bano gives birth to twin boys.
Their personal story is intercut with growing
signs of religious fanaticism around them led
by saffron-clad members of the Shakti Samaj,
an obvious reference to the Shiv Sena.
Following the destruction of the mosque,
Muslim militants kill two workers, and the
Shakti Samaj leader (Anand), referring to Shiv
Sena leader Bal Thackeray, leads his party into
full-scale reprisals against the city’s large
Muslim population. Much of the film’s second
half recreates the riot scenes on sets that
replicate their original locations with
astonishing fidelity. The couple lose their two
children in the riots, who are looked after by a
transvestite. In the end, after a fervent pacifist
plea by Shekhar, the family is reuinted and the
secular-minded common folk of both
communities pacify the rioters. The film was
controversial even before its release, when
Amitabh Bachchan, whose company ABCL
distributed the Hindi version, sought
Thackeray’s ‘approval’ of the film thereby
further legitimating his position as an extraconstitutional
censor. It was later attacked for
its allegedly ‘secular’ credentials, its
misrepresentation of widely reported events in
order to blame the Muslims for having started
the riots, and for its tendency to equate the
‘voice of reason’ with Hindu majoritarianism.
Ravi Vasudevan (1996) has published an
extensive critique of the film and on its
reception.
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