I love my job. As a kid, I used to watch a lot of movies and TV shows. And now I get paid to talk about them. That’s awesome. But sometimes I hit a wall where I spiral into a pit of existential crisis where I keep thinking, on a loop, why am I doing this? What’s even the point? How did we reach here? When is this nonsense going to end? These phases are becoming more and more frequent because the amount of nationalistic “content” has become inversely proportional to the preservation of the aspects that make this country great. I mean, I was just recovering from the poisonous side effects of consuming something that was as vitriolic as Salakaar, which was released last week. Now, I have been slapped by Saare Jahan Se Accha. A few hours later, I have to endure War 2. A cursory view of all these projects will make it seem like they are all about nationalism, spywork, and Pakistan-bashing. It’s only upon closer inspection that you’ll realize that Bollywood, and maybe even the country itself, is running out of things to be actually proud of and has hence made historical fiction their greatest ally. I am sure there’s an audience for that, but I am not a part of that group. Yet, here I am, yapping about this subgenre.
Sumit Purohit’s Saare Jahan Se Accha, written by Gaurav Shukla and Bhavesh Mandalia, tells the story of Vishnu Shankar, a member of the Indian Intelligence Services, who was in charge of safeguarding Homi Jehangir Bhabha from forces who were trying to stop him from making India a nuclear power. When he failed to do so, and Bhabha died in an airplane crash in 1966, he collaborated with R.N. Kao to develop a permanent spy network for India, thereby allowing him and his countrymen to be 10 steps ahead of the enemy. Several years went by, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated, and talks of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s plans to make his country a nuclear power began to flood the rumor mill. Since Vishnu was sure that some, or maybe all, of the gossip was true, Kao gave him the task of going to Pakistan—with his newly wedded wife, Mohini—and doing everything that needed to be done to stop Bhutto’s dreams from coming true. The biggest thorn in Vishnu’s path was Murtaza, a ruthless ISI agent who was an expert at weeding out spies and traitors and putting them six feet in the ground. Since this is a show made in India, I don’t think you need to even guess if Murtaza actually managed to be a worthy adversary to Vishnu. The answer is right there in the title.
Due to the self-serious tone of Saare Jahan Se Accha, I am sure that a lot of people will say that it’s not as jingoistic and hypernationalistic as all the other “controversial” movies and TV shows centered around the armed forces, prominent figures of Indian history, or the mad ramblings of some bigoted storyteller. I’d like to point those people in the direction of the introductory sequences of Vishnu and Murtaza. Around 15 minutes of the runtime of the first episode is used to show that Vishnu bears the pain of Bhabha’s loss on his shoulders all the time, he loves his country, he is nice enough to win the heart of someone like Mohini, and he is brave enough to go to Pakistan to save India. Murtaza’s first scene is him executing a bunch of half-naked dudes, throwing them in pits, and filling up those pits with cement. Make of it what you will. I don’t want to comment too much on the spywork because there are way too many self-proclaimed experts out there to do so. All I will say is that, while most of what you see on screen might be true, the part about Indian spies blowing up a nuclear reactor to save India is absolute nonsense. Also, this is a wild time to see so much shameless Israel and Mossad glazing. Read the room, fellas!
The writing around the women in Saare Jahan Se Accha is abysmal. I don’t know which movie or show started this trope where the wife of a spy has to be suspicious of her husband’s activities until he does something so nationalistic that she forgets the reason why she was upset with him in the first place, but this needs to end. It may sound like I am overexaggerating, but I felt physical and psychological pain while seeing the great Tillotama Shome in such a reductive role. Why would you hire someone as talented as her and then make her do that? I am not saying that they should have hired someone less talented than her for that role; I am saying that the writers should learn to write female characters, period. Just look at Marya, played by Stephanie Schlesser; she is the only female spy in the whole goddamn show, and she has to repeatedly use the power of sex to get intel. I guess the writers had used up all their imagination for that final sequence; that’s why they resorted to the worst cliches to construct a fictional female spy. Kritika Kamra’s Fatima has a faint hint of proper characterization, but even she ends up being forgettable. And the less I say about Diksha Juneja’s Naseem, the better. Oh, in addition to all that, there’s Avantika Akerkar’s Indira Gandhi, whose accent made me cringe every time she appeared on the screen.
Sunny Hinduja’s Murtaza and Suhail Nayyar’s Sukhbir had some semblance of good writing. One represented absolute dedication to “the cause,” and the other underscored how disposable spies are in a country’s pursuit to become the next superpower. But by the time the show needed to wrap up things, they had become forgettable cliches. The usually dependable Pratik Gandhi was surprisingly bad. The writing wasn’t doing him any favors, however; in an attempt to be stoic, he turned Vishnu into a boring sentient block of wood. Rajat Kapoor, Anup Soni, Atul Kumar, Kunal Thakur, Nakul Roshan Sahdev, Hemant Kher, and the rest of the supporting cast were alright, I guess. With all that said, Saare Jahan Se Accha’s worst offender was the lighting. I mean, what happened to that department? Didn’t they bother to check if the frames were well-lit before rolling the camera? Did they expect the power of nationalism to compel viewers to ignore the flaws that exist in terms of visual storytelling? Well, whatever the case may be, I am over these types of stories. I understand that a certain spymaster is very eager to portray himself as the greatest thing that has happened to this country through shows and movies like this, with his magnum opus probably being Dhurandhar. That’s fine. It’s just that I don’t care about his aspirations. I want this trend to come to an end. Either give me complete escapism or tell me stories about the trials and tribulations of the common Indian citizen; no more nationalistic historical fiction, please.
