Watched the latest Mohanlal-starrer Malayalam movie EMPURAAN, with English subtitles. Some dialogues were is Hindi and English for which subtitles were in Malayalam.
Created with a lot of negativity the movie casts Hindus as mass murderers, cruel bigots, and unrepentant butchers. The opening scene, without saying so, is an exxagerated depiction of Gujarat riots of 2002. What it conveniently brushes aside by displaying that single location, though lengthy scene of gore, blood, rape, and massacre, is that Hindus too were killed in large numbers (700 of them) in the same Gujarat riots let alone those, who were burnt alive in a train. It also ignores the fact that hundreds have been tried and jailed for those heinous acts of 2002. Perampuraan opens up old, forgotten wounds for reasons beyond the box office, it wants to create a new narrative. It portrays that a sense of revenge has festered for a whole generation. It might well have but the film has stoked the dying embers so crassly and shows that a victim boy, whose family were killed, grows up and becomes an international mercenary eventually descending in Kerala to slay the perpetrator, Bajrangi, in an equally gruesome way.
To fire up the imagination of the audience the grieving Muslim boy, when asked by Mohanlal, the flamboyantly named Lucifer, the anti-Christ yet the son of a sober Christian priest, what he wants most, he says, “BADLA”, in Hindi, so that the healing sense of victimhood raises its head once again and resonates across the land - North, East, West, and South. Upon that Mohanlal says, again in Hindi/Urdu for universal acceptance, “Sahi bola. Rahmat se Allah khush hota hai, Badle se insaan.” Wow! Gandhi Ji must be shedding copious tears in the heaven.
The cleverly named Bajrangi is a Hindu fanatic and viewers are nudged to compare him with the benign Bajrangi Bhaijaan recently played by Salman Khan. Not to leave anything to imagination, the grown up Muslim boy, who is now a semi-Superman (the full Superman is Mohanlal, of course), says in the last scene - Bajrangi is mine, Bhaijaan! You can take the rest.
The movie takes you to Yemen, London, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even a deserted oil-rig, with Mohanlal and his protege traveling seamlessly across international borders. He kills the British, Russians, Africans, and Indians in a drug-and-diamonds war yet he is called upon, via a YouTube video, by conscientious Keralites, to come back and save the peaceful Kerala from a selfish dynastic CM, son of a benign but dead former CM. The rogue CM has sought help from the same Bajrangi, the mass murderer from the North (West?), to form a new party and perpetuate his rule in an imagination-gone-wild political plot. That the dynastic rogue CM must be replaced by the dynastic daughter of the same dead CM is rather easy on the conscience of the storyteller.
If M/S Antony Perumbavoor, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Murali Gopy etc. wanted to present a counter to the largely-true Kerala Story of Vivek Agnihotri, they have miserably failed cinematographically. They have, on the other hand aggravated the sense of victimhood among Muslims and tainted the largely tolerant and peaceful Hindus blackest of black, and widened the chasm that may take years to fill. The suggestion that Muslims and Christian, together, are pitched against malicious Hindus is creation of a new of divide in the peaceful society that prides itself in calling its state God’s Own Country. The film makers have effectively created distinct children of three Gods, two pitched agains the third.
I don’t know how such a divisive film was cleared by the Censor Board. The movie Empuraan should be banned forthwith and the entire Censor Board sacked.
Shame on you, Mohanlal!
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