What Secularism is and Where It Needs to Be Headed - Romola Thapar

A secular society and polity does not mean abandoning religion. It means the religious identity of an Indian has to give way to the primary identity of a citizen. And the state has to guarantee the rights that come with this identity, as the rights of citizenship.

Romila Thapar in her study. Credit: The News on Sunday

Romila Thapar delivered the Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture at Jamia Millia Islamia on August 19, 2015. This is the text of her lecture.
In speaking about Indian society and the secular, let me say at the outset, that secularism goes beyond just politics, although our political parties have attempted to reduce it to a political slogan. So one party endorses it in theory but hesitates to apply it properly in practice, the other makes fun of it since the party’s foundational ideology is anti-secular. Supporting secularism or dismissing it, is not just a political slogan. It is deeply tied to the question of the kind of society that we want. This is perhaps why it was widely discussed in the early years of independence whereas now attempts are being made to scuttle it. Questioning the secular would mean seriously changing the direction that we have intended to give to Indian society. If secularism is removed from the constitution then democracy becomes a victim, with an unthinkable future.
If however we want a secular society, then we would have to stop identifying ourselves primarily by religion, caste or language, and start thinking of ourselves primarily as equal citizens of one nation, both in theory and in practice. This involves mutual obligations between the state and the citizens and between citizens, not just in theory as of now but in actuality. The relationship of other identities such as religion, caste, language and region will inevitably become secondary. These latter have to be adjusted so as to ensure that rights of citizenship together with what they entail remain primary. Eventually the state will not be expected to support any religious organisation, even those it is currently supporting.
I would like to begin by trying to explain what I mean by the terms secular, secularism and secularising. Secular is that which relates to the world and is distinct from the religious. Secularism involves questioning the control that religious organisations have over social institutions. This is sought to be justified by arguing that it ensures morality. But the morality fundamental to secularism goes beyond any single religion and extends to the functioning of the entire society. Secularism does not deny the presence of religion in society, but demarcates the social institutions over which religion can or cannot exercise control. This distinction is fundamental. And finally, secularising is the process by which society changes and recognises the distinction.
What secularism is and is not
When the term was first used in 1851, secular had only one basic meaning. It described laws relating to morals and social values as having been created by human society in order to ensure the well-being and harmonious functioning of the society. These laws were neither the creation of divine authority nor did they require the sanction of divine authority. Authority lay in working out – through reasoning and sensitivity – what was best for society in keeping with generally accepted values of tolerance and social responsibility, by those who constituted that society. Authority was exercised through laws. Social values therefore grew out of rational thinking, debate and discussion. This was needed to establish a moral code agreed to by the entire society and was not linked to any particular religion, caste or class.
What this means is that the laws and social values that govern the society should be observed as laws in themselves and not because they carry any divine sanctions. They have their own authority distinct from religion or caste or whatever. Religion involving belief and faith in a deity and in an afterlife continued to exist. However, the civil laws were sanctioned and upheld by secular authority and did not require the sanction of any religion. Secularism therefore is not what it is sometimes said to be  – a denial of religion – but a curtailment of the control that religious organisations have over social functioning. And I would underline this definition repeatedly.
This theory after it came to be widely discussed had various consequences. One was that it allowed people the freedom to think beyond what was told to them as being religiously correct. Again this did not mean throwing religion overboard but disentangling the codes of social behavior from religious control. This did not make people immoral as some had feared at that time, since the threat of punishment for breaking laws was enforced, and punishment came immediately in this life. It was not postponed to the next life as in most religious codes. So it made people think about the purpose of their laws and such thinking is always extremely useful. The observance of the law is strengthened when people understand its purpose.
Having to reason things out meant that people had to learn to think independently. The thinking came from their education. Here too the explanation of everything being part of a divine plan and requiring divine sanction was not always the answer to simple questions. Therefore, education began to involve searching for explanations other than those based on faith and religion, or possibly even honing these explanations if there was evidence to do so. But preferably, social laws began to be drawn from rational enquiry into both the natural and the human world in which we live. Occasionally there might even have been a small leap of imagination ultimately to be explained by reason. So the explanations for the laws and a discussion of these, became an essential part of education, and of thinking about the implications of being secularised.
Religion had originated as a personal emotional need. This was then extended to explanations of how one experienced life and beyond that how the universe functioned. This was all attributed to a supernatural power who was held in awe. Gradually however, this personalised religion became a complex organised religion and took the form of institutions ambitious to control society and politics. With this change, religion became powerful both as the focus of belief and as an authority controlling social institutions through various religious organisations. In some places, its power paralleled that of the governing authority – the state. It is this particular aspect of religion – the control that religious organisations have over social institutions – that the secular person wishes to keep separate from the state. The distinction is important because we often overlook it, in saying that secularism denies religion altogether.
Secularism then takes on an additional meaning. The state having authority over the making and observing of laws by human agencies should be distinct from religion since religion has its sanction from faith and from deity. The authority of each was clearly different.
Social laws are the spine of a society. They should protect the right to live and they should ensure that there should be no discrimination that affects life and work. This is crucial to protecting the points of change in the human lifecycle for which laws are necessary, such as registering birth, marriage, or even divorce, processes of education by which a child is socialised into society, occupation and employment, and inheritance, generally of property. Actions linked to these come under the jurisdiction of civil law. To make this link effective, social laws have necessarily to provide the basic aspects of welfare in a modern state – the absolute minimum of which are equal access to education and to health care for all members of society, and to employment, and this is to be irrespective of religion and caste. If civil laws are to be universal and uniform as they would be ultimately in a secular society, then we must guarantee this endorsement by the state. Discrimination on any count would be completely unacceptable.
So religious authority continues in a secular system but is limited. It extends only to governing religious belief and practice. It has been argued that there should be no rigid barrier between religion and the state, but there can be a negotiated, principled distance between them. This can allow for new alignments within the religion or between religions or between religion and the state. The overall relationship would disallow the dominance of any single religion since each would have equal rights on the state and the state on them and equal status before the law. Nevertheless, there is a degree of stipulated separation in this arrangement in as much as religious authority would no longer be controlling social laws.
‘Indian’ secularism
This is not of course the same as what is sometimes described as the Indian definition of secularism, namely the coexistence of all religions. Mere coexistence is insufficient as religions can still be treated as unequal and some be marginalised, as they often are. The acceptance of coexistence together with equal status before the law can certainly be a first step. But we do have to ask how far does this go and what should be the next step.
This definition based on the coexistence of religions is incomplete in many ways since the question of the jurisdiction of religious authority remains unanswered. The intention would in any case be not to put up barriers between state and religion. It would be to demarcate the activities that come under a civil jurisdiction and those that would continue to be controlled by the organisations representing religious authority. In a democratic system the equality would be essential – as essential as spelling out who controls which laws. In contemporary India, the coexistence of religions exists but their equality has yet to be established. The secular is less evident and some might even say that it is virtually absent. Political and state patronage does not invariably distance itself from religious organisations. In fact, it is sometimes closely tied together as we know.
Some oppose secularism by arguing that it is a western concept not suited to India. Should the same be said about nationhood and democracy, both new to post independence India? And surely our internalising the new liberal market economy is a far stronger imprint of the west. To support the secularising of society does not mean subordinating ourselves to a western concept but rather trying to understand a process of change in our contemporary history. Being a nation-state is a new experience of modern times and is current now in every part of the world. We have chosen democracy as the most feasible system despite its being new to us. I would argue, that a secular society is essential to democratic functioning.
Let me turn now to the specifically Indian aspect of the subject and comment on how I see religion and society in the past in order to compare it with how it is viewed in our times. My argument is that colonialism introduced a major disjuncture in how we perceive ourselves and that we have accepted this without much question. Any deliberate social change with sizeable consequence becomes a little easier to handle if one can see the earlier historical forms of the society and its gradual mutation. The present, after all, does emerge out of the past. In the important area of the relationship between society and religion, we have been nurtured on ideas about how religion functioned in India. These ideas came from colonial views of Indian religion that we have internalised without adequately questioning them. So a brief look at these might be useful.
Colonial view of religion
Colonial perceptions were based on the European experience of religion in the context of European society. With reference to Europe, secularism is often described as the separation between Church and State. This is taken as a one-to-one relationship because generally the religion was a single monolithic religion. This was so strongly asserted that in past times those that questioned Catholic belief and practice in Europe were heavily punished as heretics. Some were burnt, some had to recant as did Galileo and many faced the punitive actions of the Inquisition. Although Protestantism later was more flexible, the earlier experience was not forgotten.
This was the perspective of religion that was familiar to the colonisers. Their reading of Indian religion was through this perspective. Recent writing on Indian religion and society suggests that this was a defective view and therefore needs reinvestigation. The colonial image of Indian society projected two nations – the Hindu and the Muslim – defined by monolithic religious identities and inherently hostile to each other. And because of their mutual hostility, a controlling authority from outside was required. This became one justification for colonial rule. As many historians have pointed out, this image was then imprinted on the history of India – especially on the medieval period – thus enforcing a distancing between the two religions.

Recto title page of The Code of Gentoo Laws, compiled by N.B. Halhed on behalf of the East India Company

The concept of majority and minority communities identified by religion was also introduced by colonial policy. This further consolidated the idea of monolithic religions and these in turn fueled communal politics. Permanent majority and minority communities are of course contrary to the norms of democracy. A democratic majority is formed on each occasion when a large number of people come together in support of a particular opinion. The number has to be larger than of any other group, and those that join it are not restricted to membership of any previous affiliated organisation. Forming a majority, therefore, is not based on any pre-existing religious, caste or linguistic identities. The constituents of the majority change with each issue. There are no permanent members of majority or minority communities.
Anti-colonial nationalism tried to confront this image since broad based nationalism has to be inclusive, has to induct a range of opinion, and has also to draw on a shared history. The shared history is crucial. I would also like to quote Eric Hobsbawm who wrote that history plays the same role in nationalisms as does the poppy in the life of opium addicts. It is the source. It feeds ideas of identity. Anti-colonial nationalism did not question the monolithic nature of religious communities. It focused on denying their antagonism and projecting their coexistence. This became central to its idea of secularism. But this did not fully succeed. One reason was that the colonial view of religion in India was, and it still is, also foundational to the ideologies of what are now referred to as religious nationalisms, Hindu and Muslim, that went into the making of the communal landscape of India. In other words, anti-colonial nationalism and both the religious nationalisms build on the colonial construction of Indian religion, though the first borrows much less so whereas the second make it foundational to their ideologies. A century or so ago, the organisations propagating religious nationalisms were the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. These were not religious orthodoxies but rather ideologies using religion for political mobilisation. Today, religious nationalisms include a range of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other religious organisations, politically ambitious and anxious to continue their control over community laws to ensure a political constituency. History in religious nationalisms is not shared, it is divisive and it becomes the arena of battle. The struggle over history text-books, therefore, is the attempt to ensure the projection of a history slanted towards one religion and a denial of a shared history.
We may well ask was this actually the way in which religion functioned in relation to Indian society from early times? Have we looked analytically at our past? Have we examined the role of religious organisations from that past? What form did these organisations take, how did they exert authority and which sections of society supported which organisation ?
The place of religion in Indian history
I would argue that the historical picture of religions in India was complex. It was not just a simple binary of Hindu and Muslim, because religious groups took the form of an array of sects, and not of a large monolithic community. I see it in terms of two sets of relationships, each required for investigating the link between religion and society. The first was the interaction of sect with a close social linkage through caste connections, present in every segment of Indian society. The second was the mediation with and through political authority that then became a three-way process involving sect, caste and the state. There was no church to bring together the sects into a single entity. In other words, I’m arguing for a much more decentralised way of looking at religion.
In the Indian past, the crucial relationship lay in the connection between multiple religious sects and many castes. The sect propagated belief, the caste often determined its social context. Status was measured through an interdependence of the two. Upper castes across religion – whether they observed caste restrictions strictly or not – tended to be more closely associated with the text-based formal manifestations of the religion, whereas the lower castes, perhaps being less text-based, were far more flexible. Caste determined the social code, maintained formally by those who claimed to be educated and knew the law. For most people, however, it was the hearsay of tradition. The authority of caste and sect over the social code has now to be replaced by civil law applicable to all. This will require looking afresh at the civil law claimed by all religions to ensure its secularity and its endorsement of social justice. Both secularity and social justice are familiar as values but their application in social institutions is new.

Relic depicting Siddhartha Gautama leaving home, i.e. The Great Departure. Credit: Wikipedia

Many valuable and meticulous studies have been made of religious texts that have enhanced our understanding of them. However, less attention has been given to examining the institutions created by various religions both to propagate their beliefs and as agencies of social control. Rather than focusing on monolithic undifferentiated religious society in general, what may be more insightful is if we study the link between caste and sect in order to comprehend more precisely the interface between religion and society in our past. The link between caste and sect had a flexibility, even a fluidity that monolithic religions lack. We could then ask whether the rigidity lay less in religion and more in caste discrimination. In that case, the colonial construction of religion in India, so readily accepted by us, would need to be examined again. Perhaps we need to look more carefully at how caste in past times and now class in its turn, has shaped and is shaping the relations between religion and society. Which groups in society support which politico-religious organisations and why.
In pre-Islamic times, there are no references to any monolithic type of Hinduism. Interestingly, what we today use as labels for religion, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, are not mentioned as such. Instead, there is reference to two broad categories of sects that propagated their distinctive ideas. These were the Brahmana and the Shramana. The basic differentiation was based on belief in or denial of, divinity, and the theories of the afterlife. Brahmana referred to brahmanic beliefs and rituals, Shramana referred to the shramanas or Buddhist, Jaina, and other monks of so called heterodox orders, the nastika/non-believers, and their followers. The latter rejected the Vedas, divine sanctions and the concept of the soul. They were consequently associated with more rational explanations of both the universe and human life. Within each of the two, distinct sects with various beliefs were recognised.
Neither of these were monolithic groups. They were a collection of diverse sects. This duality of Brahmana and Shramana continues to be used in a variety of texts with reference to what we would today call religions, and over a period of 1500 years from the edicts of Ashoka, to the accounts of Megasthenes, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, and Al- Biruni in the 11th century AD. References are made in Brahmanical texts such as the Vishnu Purana, and in Buddhist texts, to occasional hostilities between the two. Interestingly, they use the same abusive terms for each other. The grammarian Patanjali of the early centuries AD, refers to the two and adds that their relationship was comparable to that of the snake and the mongoose.
A third category that is not mentioned was that of those who were discriminated against because of their caste or lack of it. Because of this, they had their own belief systems and forms of worship. This was the category that was intrinsic to caste. The equivalent of what we call the Dalit today is found in every religion under different names, such as, pasmanda, mazhabi, etc;. The Dalit is present even among those religious sects that claim that all men are equal in the eyes of God. Technically all Dalits, irrespective of religion, should have the same rights but this is not generally conceded.
The importance of sects
Among the multiple sects that were emerging over time, some adhered to the orthodox and others were supporters of the heterodox. The advantage of sects over monolithic religions is that sects shade off from the very orthodox to those far less so. This allows the less orthodox to assimilate new beliefs and these are not treated as heresy. The heretics function in a stream of their own.

Nammalvar. Credit: ramanuja.org

Our understanding of conversion would be much clearer if we could focus on sect and caste, wherever the evidence exists or can be traced back. This would provide a far better explanation than merely going on referring to Hindus becoming Muslims. What we understand of historical interactions in the past moulds to a fair extent our thinking about present-day interactions. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us to be far more analytical and precise in our historical exploration and explanation. We should not allow history to be reduced to, or dismissed, as political slogans of various kinds.
The creation of a sect was open and led to a plurality that became characteristic of every religion in India. This constitutes an important aspect in understanding the relationship between religion and society, and these relationships differ from society to society. We cannot assume therefore that the role of religion that emerged for Europe can be applied automatically to India – a mistake made by colonial scholarship. This does not imply that the meaning of secularism can change, but that the manner in which it is introduced into a society may vary.
Since Shramanism in the main was based on historical founders, it takes a fairly linear form with segments referring back to a central teaching. The history of Brahmanism is far more complex. An early phase was Vedic Brahmanism focusing on the ritual of sacrifice, the yajna, invoking many deities and specially Indra and Agni, and performed by upper castes. A variety of heterodox sects, pre-eminently the Buddhists, Jainas and Ajivikas, questioned these beliefs. Heterodox groups tended to provide rational explanations about social institutions and established a critical tradition of questioning orthodoxy, although eventually establishing their own orthodoxies.
By the early centuries AD, Brahmanical ritual became more individualised with a shift to the worship of Shiva and Vishnu. Sects of worshippers came together differentiated by particular deities, as for example the Vaishnava Bhagavata and the Shaiva Pashupatha. From the seventh century, religious belief and worship took the form of devotional sects – what we call the Bhakti sects. They arose at varying times in different parts of the sub-continent. The earlier recognisable ones were the Alvars and Nayannars in the south to be followed by many in the north. Some among the later ones reflected striations of new religious ideas.
Both Brahmanism and Shramanism received hefty patronage and became wealthy, powerful, established religions. This gave them status and enabled them to control social laws. Donations were made to sects and not to a monolithic religious entity because this did not exist at that time. This continued to be the norm even in later periods.
Centres of the wealthy sects became the nucleus of education. This added to their authority and they could induct the elite. Frequently, sects with large followings and authority began to function as castes in themselves as for example the Lingayat in Karnataka, and many others in others parts of the country. They did not necessarily identify with the formal religions, and some actually opposed them. But in colonial records they were assigned to either one or the other.
The arrival of Islam
With the arrival of Islam and more so with the presence of the Sufis, the exploration of religious ideas – orthodox and heterodox – expanded, as did the number of sects. Some took orthodox positions, others held out mixed beliefs and worship. The latter were popular among the larger number of ordinary people.
The new presence was marked by the elaborate mosques and khanqahs built by royal patrons and the wealthy. The religious endowments became richer and richer, as is so in all well-patronised religions. As with Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples and mathas, these endowments tied to Islamic centres also enabled their recipients to participate in the world of scholarship and in politics. Detailed studies of the social institutions controlled by various religious authorities that we refer to as the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh etc. would be revealing.
As in earlier times the sect remained the popular religious identity among the majority of people. This becomes more evident if we look at two processes involved in the coming of Islam – settlement and conversion. Today this event is projected at the popular level largely in terms of invasion and its subsequent political consequences. But there were many other avenues that took different forms, as in the settlements of traders, migrants, Sufis and such alike.

19th century post card showing the Khojas of Bhavnagar, Gujarat

Mohammad bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh is known. But far more interesting were the settlements of Arab traders all down the west coast of India from Sindh to Kerala. Some Arabs entered the service of the Rashtrakuta kings of the Deccan dating to the 8th and 9th centuries. The more senior among them exercised their right to give grants of land to temples and brahmanas as had been the prevailing custom in the area. Arab traders inter-married locally and new communities evolved with a new take on existing religions. Inevitably, these became new sects – such as the Bohras, the Khojas the Navayat, the Mapilla and many others – where belief, ritual, and civil law did not hesitate to draw from existing practice. So no two were identical. Gujarati Bohras had little to do with Malayali Mapillas. Many such sects mushroomed all over but have not been sufficiently studied as part of the history of society and religion.
This pattern continued into later centuries at the level of the wider society. This was despite the emergence of other patterns that arose from political power and administration. Such dichotomies run through history and only their constituents change. The newly emerging teachers of various persuasions attracted supportive followers. Until recently, these remained the essentials of how a major part of Indians experienced religion irrespective of having to declare conformity to formal religions in colonial times. This was prior to the ingress of Hindutva and Islamisation, that have considerably hardened the boundaries and even altered practices. Many people today who identify themselves with the monolithic religion, whichever it may be, when pressed further, will mention the sect that they belong to, or the holy man whom they revere – the baba, guru or sant – who can be of any persuasion. This link is often more pertinent to the lives they actually live. And interestingly, the sects that they identify with are generally those that were established in the last thousand years.
Myth-making about medieval history
In the history of India, medieval history, which colonial historians called the Muslim period, is located in the last thousand years. This history has had a raw deal from religious extremists and politicians in being described as the age when, to quote the slogan, “We were slaves” – the assumption being that Islamic rule tyrannised an oppressed Hindu population. This is a continuation of the British interpretation of Indian history eagerly taken up by religious nationalism. Viewed historically, the scene differs at many levels.
The interaction between what we call Hinduism and Islam had its moments of confrontations and conflicts in the face offs between competing politics and were manifested in various ways, and often through religious organisations. What was a largely political act at that time is often interpreted today as an entirely religious act, with the politics left out. Some confrontation was to be expected. Such confrontations were not new to the Indian scene if in earlier times the brahmanas and the shramans had a relationship comparable to the snake and the mongoose – and this was probably a correct assessment as we know that in some regions Buddhist monks were killed and in others Jaina monks were impaled. In the subsequent millennium, that is the last thousand years, things may not have changed strikingly. It was neither a culture given over to religious aggression as colonial scholars maintained, but nor was it entirely free of such aggression. It was, in fact, a normal culture similar to many others in the world at the time.

An illustration to the Sursagar of Surdas., Mewar, mid-17th century. Credit: Christies

But as was so in earlier times, the medieval period continued to be a time when striking creativity enriched facets of Indian culture and we still live with these. The intellectual liveliness of the time expressed in Sanskrit and Persian and in the regional languages matched that of earlier times, although in different genres. It was precisely this period that gave shape and form in various ways to much, although not all, that we now identify as Hindu in the landscape of present times.
Leaving aside for the moment the interaction of cultures practicing diverse religions, even some of the activities clustered around the Brahmanic tradition are most impressive. Throughout the second millennium AD, that is the last one thousand years, from Kashmir to Kerala and in between, there were scholarly commentaries being composed on Brahmanical texts and religious practice. Sayana’s explanation of the Rig Veda is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a learned scholar of the 14th century with its mix of reality and fantasy. Social change draws out new commentaries on existing social codes. Kulluka’s commentary on the Manu Dharmashastra incorporates a reaction to the social change of the times, as in the debate over the status of temple priests vis-à-vis other categories of brahmanas, a matter of concern only when temples became powerful institutions, at a time simultaneous with the arrival of Islam in the sub-continent. The looting of some of the wealthy temples did not prevent the building of other equally wealthy ones and striking innovations in architecture.
There were many commentaries, digests, discussions on classical Sanskrit poetry and literary compositions. With the gradual switch to the regional languages, grammars required commentaries. New and prior philosophical theories are discussed in texts such as the Sarva-darshana-sangraha of Madhavacharya in the 14th century. Discussions on the Advaita Vedanta and Mimamsa schools of philosophy, to mention some, date to this period. There were explorations into theories in mathematics and astronomy going from Ujjain to Baghdad and beyond, with Indian scholars at the cutting edge of knowledge. Classical Hindustani and Carnatic music was patronised by the courts of Maharajas and Mughals and in the homes of the wealthy.
In addition to Sanskrit and Persian, literary compositions of high quality began to be composed in regional languages that acquired a new standing in the royal courts and in places linked to religious sects. These compositions carried much of the thought and creativity of their own times, as is evident in the Ramacharitamanas, and the Krittibasi, distinct from the Valmiki Ramayana and much revered by Hindi and Bengali speakers. There were even alternate histories sung as legends by folk poets and bards, very different from the court chronicles that we quote. These were the voices of numbers of people as also expressed in the bhajans of Meera and Surdas and the compositions of Tyagaraja. These were not the achievements of enslaved people. We are today unable to look beyond what we have been told by those who colonised us, and those who loyally continue to carry on with that legacy.
The task of secularisation
In this rather scattered attempt to look at some aspects of the past, I have tried to underline the plurality in the articulation of religion in India often in the form of sects and their interface with caste. To eventually disengage religious institutions from controlling the functions of civil society would help us in bringing about a more equitable society. The process of secularising society will have to address both religion and caste, and to that extent it requires a different kind of analysis from that of religions elsewhere. We have internalised the colonial version of the relationship between our religions and our society, and are experiencing its aftermath in the stridency of dominant religious organisations. We have also allowed some of these to become mechanisms for political mobilisation. Secularisation therefore will have to be thought through with sensitivity, care and thoroughness. Although it cannot be a rapid change, nevertheless a serious beginning has to be made to introduce secular values through establishing confidence in a secular society and explaining its necessary link to democracy. The resort to assassination to silence secularists can never succeed – it merely leads to the suffusion of terror that will one day rebound on those terrorising others. If there is one lesson that history teaches us it is this.
A secular society and polity does not mean abandoning religion. It does mean that the religious identity of the Indian, whatever it may be, has to give way to the primary secular identity of an Indian citizen. And the state has to guarantee the rights that come with this identity, as the rights of citizenship. This demands that the state provides and protects human rights, a requirement that at the moment cannot be taken for granted. Such an identity, while adhering to human rights and social justice, would also be governed by a secular code of laws applicable to all.
A beginning could be made in two possible ways. One would be to ensure the secular in education, and the other, the secular in civil laws. Education means the availability of all branches of knowledge to all citizens without discrimination. Knowledge means updated information and training young people to endorse the method of critical enquiry. I would like to add to this the need for young people to know what is meant by a shared history. Given that we are a democracy, we can perhaps work out how best this could be done.
Our civil laws were drawn up in colonial times although we have made some changes after independence. In a turn to the secular, we shall have to comb through the existing civil laws to ensure that they conform to equal rights for all citizens with no exceptions. Resolving the differences between the civil laws and the laws of each religion and caste, will have to be discussed with the communities concerned and not only with those currently controlling religious and caste codes. A uniform civil code does not mean merely doing away with the laws of one religious code. It means reconsidering jointly the social laws of all religious codes and arriving at a common secular civil code. In this process, injustice and discrimination against minorities and against the underprivileged – whether because of religion, gender or caste – will need to be annulled. Law does not remain law if it can be manipulated to allow discrepancies. This is likely to be the most problematic in our turn toward secularising society. Is it not time now to start work on this?
The overwhelming projection of religiosity – not religion but the excessive display of religiosity – in the world that surrounds us sometimes appears to be a surrogate for not coming to terms with real life problems; or perhaps it is due to our having become a competitive society with all its unexpected insecurities. Can we instead consider how we can make the reality of citizenship a guarantee of our social welfare, our well-being, our understanding of our world, and our wish to bring quality into our lives? The secularising of society is not an overnight revolution. It is a historical process and will need time. But hopefully it will be assisted by the recognition that the state and society need to function in a new way. Implicit in democracy is the upholding of the ethic of human action. Secularising society is an advancing of that very ethic.
Romila Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been General President of the Indian History Congress. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds an Hon D.Lit. each from Calcutta University, Oxford University and the University of Chicago. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and SOAS, London. In 2008 Professor Thapar was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize of the US Library of Congress, which honours lifetime achievement in studies such as history that are not covered by the Nobel Prize.

Supporting Star Manish Mundra

I CAUGHT MANISH MUNDRA, by fortunate chance, in June, on the weekday afternoon he was in Mumbai for the launch of the Indian trailer for Masaan. The entrance to the suburban theatre hosting the event was dominated by posters announcing an upcoming big-budget release. In the lobby, a somewhat thin crowd of journalists mingled with Masaan’s cast and crew, as well as several luminaries of what are called Mumbai’s “indie film” circles. 

Masaan has, by the standards of mainstream Indian cinema, an unconventional story—involving a sex scandal, inter-caste romance, and an orphan boy who dives for coins in the Ganges. It was shot in Varanasi, and had a comparatively small budget of Rs 6.5 crore. The film’s credits list several producers and co-producers from India and France, but it was Mundra who provided the initial financing that got the project off the ground. 

 A few weeks earlier, Masaan had premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, under the prestigious Un Certain Regard category, and had won two awards—including one for its debutant director, Neeraj Ghaywan. Mundra was present at that screening, and for the standing ovation that followed it. The film’s rapturous reception in France had created an air of anticipation, and encouraged its backers to release it relatively quickly in India. The trailer release was the first step in that process. 

 I found Mundra standing at a remove from the action, red-eyed but buzzing. He had arrived that morning from Nigeria, where he works, via Dubai, where he lives with his family. He was dressed in a casual, corporate style, and was flanked by a handful of staff from his recently founded production house, Drishyam Films, as well as some old friends who had come out to witness his success. As the crowd moved towards the auditorium, we ascended the stairs together. Voices chattered in the dark: “You must see my film,” I heard, followed by “It’s not good cinema, but it’s fun.” I took a seat at the back of the theatre. Mundra, after a moment of indecision in the aisle, moved towards the front. 

 After the trailer screening, the cast and crew lined up onstage to take questions from the press. The conversation was informal, and sometimes irreverent. Mundra stood at the edge of this assembly, and contributed a few, sober lines. Afterwards, as the television cameras made a beeline for the film’s stars, he took some selfies with his friends, and got himself some coffee. 

 In Mumbai’s hyper-connected film world, Mundra, a youthful-looking 42-year-old, is the quintessential outsider—the managing director of a petrochemical company in Nigeria, a small-town boy with, until his sudden appearance on the scene a few years ago, no links to the industry. In 2011, he backed Ankhon Dekhi, a small indie film by the acclaimed director Rajat Kapoor, which went on to win several important awards. Since then, he has produced 5 more films in India, which have gathered accolades at festivals across the world, including Berlin and Sundance. The recent success of Masaan has only reinforced Mundra’s reputation as a producer with a canny eye for the right projects, and the financial commitment to see them through. Already, he has been written about as the “guardian angel of Indian indie cinema”—a saviour for writers and directors looking to make films whose main appeal is the strength of their scripts rather than their mainstream commercial potential alone. If there was a pantheon of deities such film-makers in Mumbai paid homage to, Mundra would be in it. 

Masaan was released in Indian theatres in late July. It charmed audiences, and brought in over Rs3.6 crore in box-office sales over a six-week run—a respectable showing for an independent film in India. In a market where such “alternative” films have historically struggled, this turned more eyes towards Mundra than ever before. Many are watching to see if Mundra and Drishyam Films can turn making bold, independent cinema into a sustainable enterprise. As Varun Grover, who wrote the script for Masaan, told me, “In Mumbai, nobody likes to be the first in line.” But if Mundra’s “calculations work, people will be ready to queue up behind him.” 

Once the launch was done, we drove to his five-star hotel, near Mumbai’s airport, to continue our conversation. On the way, I asked how he felt about now being part of the film world. In response, he read out some poetry he had written the previous night: 

 Ab lakshyaheen maseeha saa main 

Bheed mein samaahit hua ja raha hoon 

 Vyakul man liye, peedaon ke dansh liye 

 Apne hone ka wajood khoye ja raha hoon ... 

Iss sab ka ab ant hoga 

 Ek baar phir se naya aarambh hoga 

 “In the middle of this crowd,” he translated for me, “people think I am some kind of a messiah, but I don’t feel that way. Already I am searching for the next source of inspiration.” He paused for a beat, then added, “Whatever is going on, will continue. But already my mind is wondering: ‘What next?’

” In his plush hotel room, with a friend who had tagged along from the screening and three members of his production house looking on, Mundra plunged straight into a photo shoot—his first as a producer. He had come to Mumbai prepared, and laid out a small suitcase with several changes of clothes. “This will look very good with the jeans,” he said, arranging shirts and jackets in neat piles. “And this will work really well for the formal look.”

 “Trust me,” he told the photographer, already on his way to change. “This is great.” The photographer just nodded his agreement. 

 Between poses, Mundra multi-tasked furiously: ordering food (“Let’s get veg biryani, then we won’t need anything extra”), making sure everyone had coffee, breaking off to chat in Marwari with his friend. In between all this, he answered my questions. Each time he had to move away for a shot, or to arrange something that needed doing, he apologised for interrupting our conversation. 

 As the shoot progressed, I caught snatches of Mundra’s exchange with the photographer. “Not the collar that way,” he said, “that will look too filmi.” Once in a while, I heard, “Oh, that’s so good!” Finally, at the end of 90 gruelling minutes, Mundra scrolled through the photos on the camera with loud exclamations of delight and praise, while the sweat-drenched photographer beamed. 

“This is great,” he said, stopping at a black-and-white image. He bestowed upon it the ultimate accolade: “This will have to go up on Facebook.” 

 THE MIDDLE SON OF A LARGE MARWARI FAMILY, Manish Mundra grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Deoghar, a small town in what was then south Bihar and is now Jharkhand, sharing a home with five siblings. His father was an entrepreneur, like many other Marwaris. But, when Mundra was still very young, his businesses began to fail, and the family spiralled into debt. At the age of 12, Mundra told me, he was already having sleepless nights. “First the cars vanished, then it became tough to pay our school fees,” he said.

 In the recent past, Mundra has spoken freely about his early hardships to the press. Now, he said to me, he prefers not to dwell on the details. But it is clear his father’s misadventures with profit and risk marked Mundra deeply, and the years of hardship shaped much of what defines him today: his desire for financial security, his ambition and drive, and his soft spot for stories of life in small towns and large families. 

As he tells it, Mundra’s life seems something out of a potboiler. It is a rags-to-riches story, couched in the language of extremes—ironic, for someone who has made a name backing what in the cinema world are referred to as “realistic” stories. By the time he was 15, Mundra said, he was committed to “bringing in the income” for his family. One of the ways he did this was by selling bottles of fruit juice, made by his mother, on the streets of Deoghar. 

In an evocative post on his blog, which he started in 2009, he recalls what he describes as the worst day of his life, “when I had to loan my mother’s only gold ornament to one of my enemies to get some money for my father’s financial woes.” Despite the gulf of time and circumstances now separating him from the incident, when I asked Mundra about it he shook his head, and said, “I really died that day.” He was then 21 years old.

 Despite these troubles, or perhaps because of them, at school Mundra was an exuberant and popular teenager, a provider of film reviews and opinions worth following. Rao Gyanendra Singh, an engineer who still lives in Deoghar, recalled a shared childhood spent running through the gardens of large bungalows left under the care of sleepy watchmen. Many of Mundra’s friends remembered that he used to show off the bottles of fruit juice he sold on the streets. “He always dreamed big, but did small work without any shame,” Seema Sharma, who studied with him through school and college, told me. When her mother was struck by paralysis, Sharma recalled, Mundra learned acupressure so he could come and give her therapy at home. “She still remembers that,” Sharma said. “He was always the helpful boy next door.” 

 Meanwhile, Mundra nourished a secret passion for cinema, and saved up for tickets to the local theatre. When his mother sent him to shop for vegetables, he told me, “I would save a few pennies by buying from the vendors at the back of the market, who charged less.” But he wasn’t allowed to watch movies, and couldn’t be away from home for three hours straight without arousing suspicion. “So I convinced the watchman to let me watch half the movie on one day, half on the next,” he said. The first film he was “officially allowed to watch” was Guide, starring Dev Anand. At this time, like many young men across India, Mundra came to admire Amitabh Bachchan after seeing him in such films as Kaala Patthar and Coolie. To this day, he is happy, on occasion, to quote dialogue and sing a few lines from Bachchan’s films in the star’s trademark style. 

 His need to earn for his family led Mundra to neglect his studies until just a few months before his class 12 exams. At that point, “I realised I would get nowhere without an education,” he said. “So I buckled down and studied.” He passed with the highest grades in his class.

 After school, Mundra left Deoghar for Jodhpur—“the only other place I knew”—where he lived with his maternal grandparents. While pursuing a degree in commerce, he continued to run his own businesses. One of these involved making and selling dahi­—curd. “I would make 20 to 25 kilos every day and pour it into vessels this big,” he said, pointing to a gleaming coffee table in the hotel room. “I couldn’t touch the malai”—the creamy layer that formed on top. “That was the value, so I had a special technique that left it intact,” he recalled, proudly. “It was wow dahi. People really loved it.” 

 At the end of college, Mundra had to choose between studying to be a chartered accountant or pursuing an MBA. As he would often do in life, he took the path that promised the shortest distance to financial stability. “For a CA, it takes too long to start earning,” he said. “So I applied to just one place that I could afford—to Jodhpur University, for an MBA.” What if he hadn’t got in, I asked. He looked at me, surprised, and said, “But I had to,” stressing the “had.” 

 Despite his epiphany about the value of education, Mundra did not go to class much, and once again spent most of his time running small enterprises. “Life is the best teacher,” he told me repeatedly. “A degree is just a passport to get out.” With his “passport,” in March 1997, Mundra headed to Raipur, after being selected for a position with the multinational Aditya Birla Group. It was his first job, and his first step in a rapid rise up a series of corporate ladders. In 2000, he married his wife, Pramila. The following year, the couple arrived in Mumbai. They lived in the suburbs, near Chakala, and Mundra commuted to his corporate office in Nariman Point, at the tip of south Mumbai. 

 In the city, he encountered the cinema world he had dreamed of, and dreamed of being part of, for so long. “I had a passion for film-making that I couldn’t confess for a long time,” he told me somewhat bashfully. But Mundra understood that, as a young man with no clout or means, “I could leave my job, and struggle for years to break into films, or I could secure myself financially, enjoy my life and then pursue my dream.”

 In 2002, he left the country to make “some proper money” in Indonesia, joining the same petrochemical firm he still works with. In 2004, he moved to Thailand, and eventually, in 2005, he landed up in Nigeria. By 2007, aged just 34, he was made the managing director of the company. 

 Finally, in 2011, he returned to his cinematic ambitions. In August of that year, Rajat Kapoor, who had already directed four acclaimed films, took to Twitter to voice his frustration at not finding a producer for his fifth directorial project. “Chhodo yaar,” he wrote, “i am not going to wait forever for bloody producers. i need them to make a film - but not to do a new play.” Mundra tweeted back in reply, “I am ready to produce. What’s the budget”. 

 LIKE MANY IN MUMBAI'S FILM CIRCLES, Mundra is a prolific user of social media. But in an era of carefully crafted online personas, he over-shares with magnificent abandon. On Facebook and Twitter, he posts a steady stream of questions, declarations and poetry—usually his own. Mundra enjoys painting, and often shares his artwork too. A member of his team described him, delicately, as “unfiltered.” In an industry that is heavy with platitude, he comes across as disarmingly vulnerable in his ability to say what he feels. 

Many of the posts on his blog were written long before he turned producer. They give an impression of Mundra as part romantic, part angry young man with a massive chip on his shoulder, with a constant need to “prove himself” to others who were richer, smarter, more attractive—just better.

 In a 2013 post, for instance, Mundra lists “Forty Things You Didn’t Know About Me.” Among them: “I used to die for beautiful girls. They would never give a look at me, that made me frustrated and forced me to do well in life”; “I used to compete with rich and famous, imaginary competition, which I still do to date”; “Pain is my part and parcel, I love being in pain, I still cant digest happiness”; “I used to cry in nights and fight with god during my trying times”; “I did not go for my honeymoon as I did not have money!”; and “Beauty still attracts me, one of my biggest weak link.” 

“Insecurity was a big part of my life earlier,” Mundra told me when I asked about this post. “I have changed a lot over the past few years, as I have achieved everything I wanted to.” 

Also on the blog, he presents numerous and changing bucket lists from over his lifetime. At 25, he writes in a blog post, he recorded that he “had to become the CEO of a company by 32.” In conversation, too, he made constant references to a strict timeline: of “having” to be married by a certain age, “having” to have a family soon after that, and so on. I asked if he had always been serious about following his self-imposed schedule. “Life has to be lived in phases and there is a time for everything,” he told me, with a touch of annoyance. “No one else will tell you how to plan your journey. It’s up to you to figure it out.”

 Mundra’s blog bio reads, “In search for a purpose, the very reason why I exist and what would be my legacy.” Mundra told me he was a spiritual person, and talked of “the energy” that led him on certain paths. “I don’t believe in rituals,” he said, “but I believe in being close to god.” He described making films, and making films of a certain kind, as part of his need to leave behind a legacy of good. He still poses angst-filled questions to the internet on occasion. On Twitter, in June, he demanded, “Life!!! when will I get my answers? Tell me please.” 

While Mundra’s trajectory seems unusual, his success has come as no surprise to many who know him well. In July, I spoke to Ashok Machher, Mundra’s former boss at the Aditya Birla Group and the man he calls his “mentor.” He described the young Mundra as a “risk-taker” and a “dreamer,” with “an artistic side” rare in corporate circles. When I asked him about Mundra’s move into the movie business, he said, “I am only surprised he is not a director. He likes to make people do what he says, order the world around him.” 

Sanjay Sharma, a friend and flatmate of Mundra’s from a brief foray into Mumbai as a student trainee in 1995, put it another way. “He makes others dance,” he told me, “he doesn’t do the dancing himself.” Sharma was with Mundra at the trailer launch, and recalled long bachelor sessions from years ago, when Mundra would share his grand plans of becoming a Bollywood producer. That day in June, he watched with awe the evidence of those youthful dreams become reality. “Bhaari kaam hai Bollywood mein paon jamaana,” he said—it’s tough to get a foothold in Bollywood. “He always said during those days that he will sign Amitabh”—Amitabh Bachchan. “And he will.” 

 The more I got to know about Mundra, the more he seemed oddly familiar. He is an archetypal product of a generation—my generation—that grew up, often outside major cities, in the India of the late decades of the last century. To be young then was to dream of making it out, and making it big—as it still is for many in small-town India. In some ways, then, Mundra’s story is a story of our era, when dreams of living abroad, of making lots of money, suddenly seemed within reach, there for the taking. Where Mundra differs from most of his peers, of course, is in just how far he has come. 

Since he got out, Mundra’s sense of the world has grown, but he seems emphatic about staying close to his small-town roots and values. Shiladitya Bora, the young CEO of Drishyam Films, told me how he had once suggested booking a BMW to pick Mundra up for an event. “He said not to bother, as he would be happy with a simpler car,” Bora recalled. His hopes for his children—he has a daughter aged 13, and a son aged seven—are also informed deeply by his past. He told me he wants them to learn several different languages, and music. “These were things nobody ever told us when we were growing up,” he said emphatically. “I wish someone had told me. We had no idea about this world.” 

RAJAT KAPOOR WAS NOT THE FIRST DIRECTOR Mundra reached out to, but he was the first to react somewhat positively to his overtures. “His first response was to tell me: not here please, let’s talk on email,” Mundra said. Perhaps, he added with a laugh, Kapoor suspected the whole thing was a Nigerian internet fraud.

 “I wrote it and forgot about it,” Kapoor said about his tweet when we spoke, in July. He recalled the speed with which Mundra moved once they connected. “We talked on the phone, and he asked me the budget,” he said, “When I told him, he said, ‘No problem.’” Kapoor, however, insisted that Mundra read the script first. “When we talked next, he said he was ready to invest in the film.” Sensing that the film-maker remained skeptical of his commitment, Kapoor said, Mundra told him, “Sir, you don’t have to prove yourself to me, I have to prove myself to you.” He went on to invest Rs7 crore in the project. 

 It quickly became apparent that Mundra came at projects with a decisiveness and broad-mindedness that set him apart from mainstream producers. Soon after the initial exchange with Kapoor, he made a trip to Mumbai and formally signed on as the producer for what would become Ankhon Dekhi. Mundra told me the film’s plot, which involves a large joint family, appealed to him because it resonated with his own upbringing. The film was released last year, and won several Filmfare Awards. For the producer, it was a dream debut. “Thirty-six members of my family came for the premiere” in Mumbai, he said. “When my name came on the credit roll, they all cheered.” 

 Soon after he committed to Ankhon Dekhi, and as the story of his unusual approach to Kapoor spread, Mundra was approached with another proposal. Again, the first contact took place on Twitter. Swati Shetty, who heads a small production house called Samosa Stories, asked him for help with a stalled project. The film-maker Prashant Nair had written, and wanted to direct, a script about a young man who leaves his village for the big city in search of his missing elder brother. Mundra agreed to produce the film, and this became Umrika. Completed on a budget of R10 crore, the film premiered this January at the Sundance Film Festival, a Mecca for independent cinema, and won an audience-choice award. 

Mundra then agreed to produce Dhanak, directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, which tells the story of a blind boy and his ten-year-old sister on a journey to try and restore his eyesight. Early this year, it won an award at the Berlin Film Festival. Along the way, Mundra also produced X, an experimental film with 11 directors taking charge of different segments of a single storyline, and the drama Waiting, which features Naseeruddin Shah and Kalki Koechlin—both stars known for their commitment to independent film. Umrika, Dhanak, X and Waiting are all awaiting release. 

 Mundra’s most important step after the success of Ankhon Dekhi, however, did not involve producing films at all. It came last year, when he helped rescue the cash-strapped Mumbai Film Festival, run by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image, or MAMI. Srinivas Narayanan, who was then the festival’s director and is now associated with Drishyam Films, recalled how he reached out to Mundra for support. When Mundra heard the total sum of funding required, Narayanan said, “he said the entire amount was too much.” Narayanan asked him to give what he could. “Within a few days, I had Rs50 lakh in the festival’s account.” 

 The donation gave Mundra a reputation for cinematic philanthropy, and helped him get a place at important tables. This year, he became one of the trustees of MAMI—joining the likes of Anand Mahindra, who heads the multinational Mahindra Group, Ajay Bijli, the owner of the PVR cinema chain, and Siddharth Roy Kapur, the managing director of Disney India. 

 By the time of the festival, Masaan was already well into production. Varun Grover, who is a lyricist and stand-up comedian as well as a screenwriter, approached Mundra with his script for the film in the summer of 2014. For almost two years before this, Grover and Neeraj Ghaywan, who went on to direct the film, had been meeting prospective producers, but with no success. “We were meeting some really shady people,” Grover told me when we spoke, shortly before the film’s release. “Like a builder in UP”—Uttar Pradesh—“or someone who used to make soaps. They would have agendas like lyrics hamara beta likhega, ya beti ko role de do” (my son will write the lyrics, or give my daughter a role). The project had the backing of Phantom Films—a production house co-founded by the director Anurag Kashyap, whom both Grover and Ghaywan had worked with earlier—but the two were starting to worry that the film may never be made. 

Grover had worked as a lyricist on Ankhon Dekhi, and sought Mundra out “just to take a chance,” he said. “Within 30 minutes into the meeting, Manish had agreed to back the film. In two weeks, he had formally signed on.” 

 When I spoke to Ghaywan, he recalled how his initial meeting with Mundra went from the formal, one-hour session planned into a freewheeling exchange that lasted much longer. “We could have bonded over our corporate experiences,” said Ghaywan, who abandoned a corporate career to take up film. “But we talked instead of small towns, even talking in Bhojpuri, for over six hours.”

 What really made Mundra a dream producer, both Ghaywan and Grover said, was the freedom that came with working with him. Much of the praise for Masaan centres on its unstinting honesty, and the finesse of Ghaywan’s direction. “It wouldn’t have been possible to make it this way with someone else,” Ghaywan told me. “Another producer may have said, ‘Increase the humour, or add a few songs.’” Mundra, by contrast, visited the sets only once, and first saw footage of the film only in the early stages of its editing. With debut films in particular, Grover pointed out, “People tend to be not so sure of themselves, so if the producer asks you to make changes, you tend to agree.” Mundra, he said, “never did that.” 

 In part, Mundra’s hands-off style could simply be a function of his holding down a demanding job on a different continent. (To attend the trailer launch, he said, he had to take leave from his office.) But Ghaywan, and also Kapoor, said his passion for making good cinema plays a large role in it too. Kapoor described how, midway through shooting Ankhon Dekhi, he shared with Mundra his anxieties about “producers who would give some money and disappear,” and told him he was not sleeping well at night. “He asked me how much I would need to sleep well,” he said, and then “put that amount in the bank.” 

 Of the Rs7 crore invested in Ankhon Dekhi, to date the film has recouped around R2.2 crore—a total that includes earnings from theatres, satellite broadcasts and home-video sales. Mundra hasn’t been fazed by the loss. “I am not doing this to get rich,” he told me more than once. “It is more important to back these ‘brave-heart’ films than make a profit.” He would rather make one Ankhon Dekhi than ten blockbusters, he said. “Ten years later, I will forget its turnover. But I will never forget how I felt at its release.” 

 MUNDRA IS NOT THE FIRST "GUARDIAN ANGEL" of Indian independent cinema. Through the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, the state-run National Films Division Corporation supported landmark films by the likes of Saeed Mirza, Kundan Shah and Sudhir Mishra. More recently, in 2007, the producer Sunil Doshi made a splash with Bheja Fry, which was made on a budget of Rs1.5 crore and netted over Rs12 crore. Meenakshi Shedde, a film critic and South Asia consultant for the Berlin and Dubai Film Festivals, told me its important to put Mundra’s contribution in perspective. “There are hundreds of angel investors helping Indian film-makers make artistic films,” she said, “and many producers currently backing good films in several Indian language cinemas.” 

But, Shedde said, what makes Mundra formidable is the combination he brings to the table: “deep pockets, his astuteness as a businessman, networking on the festival circuit and an insatiable addiction to social media.” The fact that he is “cherry-picking scripts that seem promising, while decidedly not guaranteeing profits,” makes him “a far cry from the corporate system of appointing panels that award points to scripts based on various criteria.” Kapoor told me that in his directorial career, which spans some 12 years, Mundra came as something of a miracle. “It hasn’t become any easier for me to find a producer for my next film,” he laughed. An aspiring director who has submitted a script to Mundra, and so didn’t want to be named, told me, “To have someone with money read your script on the merit of the story alone, without having to pull in connections or present a star to back you, is very rare in this city.” 

 In part, Mundra’s rise to prominence is evidence of a gap in the cinema market for small, niche films. After Ankhon Dekhi, Mundra told me, he received hundreds of pitches over Facebook and Twitter, and scripts flooded his email inbox. If he liked one, he said, he agreed to back it—and that was it. His only other requirement for backing a project—also an unusual one in Mumbai—is that the director be a “good person.” 

 Mundra put his run of winning projects down to the spiritual “energy” that he said guides his life. But his instinct as a viewer plays a role in this success too. A short while after he moved abroad, he started watching cinema from across the world, and realised that “India was a very small part of the things going on.” He now watches two or three films a week, from his large library at home. But he is no festival buff, and wears the status of an outsider like a badge of honour. “My ignorance is my asset,” he said. “I don’t have all this baggage, so I can simply connect to the story as the average member of the audience would.” 

 Clearly, Mundra has a certain knack. As Grover put it, “He is from the petroleum industry. He knows ki yahan pe oil milega.” (He knows where he will strike oil.) 

 Ranjan Singh, an associate producer with Phantom Films, which co-produced Masaan, pointed out another of Mundra’s defining features. “He is putting money on projects back-to-back, and has supported a fair number of films in the last 18 months,” he said. “This has made an impact.” In a market where making a film is only half the journey to its success, he added, Mundra “sees the process through, and released both Ankhon Dekhi and Masaan fairly quickly.” 

Initially, Mundra had no intention of sticking around this long as a producer. “I thought it would be something I would check off my bucket list,” he told me. “I would make one or two such films, and then be done.” But, as any natural entrepreneur would, on realising he’d found a niche in the market, he decided to stay. 

Mundra set up Drishyam Films this February. Its goal, he said, is to create “a system to help nurture content-driven stories—help develop them, make them, release them. We want to complete the whole process, give a commercial touch to the release ... We are hopeful it will get its money back and can also make a profit.”

 I visited the Drishyam office in July, in the heart of the suburb of Andheri—a hub of the Mumbai film industry. It was still a work in progress, with walls coming down and cubicles coming up. From the windows, I could see cars pulling up to the premises of Yash Raj Films, a production house known for churning out big-budget blockbusters.

 Shiladitya Bora, the Drishyam CEO, told me the company’s model draws on those of global icons such as Annapurna Pictures and Miramax Studios, both known for their success at marketing independent cinema. Drishyam, he said, wants to make films that do well “globally as well as at the Indian box office,” and to “be known as the best in our space, distinct, and not necessarily small, but sustainable.” He described the company’s plans to produce four films every year, including one by a debutant director and one international project. Currently, it has three in the works, including a film by the Iranian-Kurdish director Shahram Alidi.

 Like most producers associated with “indie” cinema in Mumbai, Bora has a marked aversion to the term, preferring “good-content cinema” instead. “Indie,” he said, is “an overused term in India. It’s come to mean ghareeb films, with poor aesthetics, that cut corners and are boring. We want to challenge that.”

 So far, Mundra and Drishyam’s financial record has been mixed. Ankhon Dekhi made a loss, but Masaan, Bora said, has recovered close to Rs2.3 crore from international sales alone—“around 30 percent of Masaan’s total budget.” Add on earnings from other sources, such as music rights and DVD sales, “and in Masaan we will easily see profit of 1.5 to 2 crores.” Drishyam’s pursuit of international revenues looks set to continue. Dhanak is scheduled for simultaneous release, in November, in India, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. 

 But Mundra has invested in more than just production. After helping the Mumbai Film Festival, he took over the Screenwriters Lab, an incubator for fresh talent and content run in collaboration with the Sundance Institute, which organises the Sundance Film Festival. In September, Drishyam also opened a post-production and visual-effects facility that it hopes will help generate revenue. All of which has given the company a profile that belies its age. 

 Throughout our conversation, Mundra emphasised that he was in the business of making films “for fun and passion.” “If it doesn’t work out,” he told me during the drive to his hotel, “I will simply shut my shop and do something else.” But despite such talk, there is more at stake. If Drishyam’s efforts succeed, several industry insiders told me, it will be a boost for the current momentum of Indian independent cinema. If not, Mundra may join the ranks of those who created brief moments of change, before fading away. i

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING MASAAN'S RELEASE, Mundra popped up frequently on my social media feeds. He tweeted incessantly, relishing every piece of news and praise, every review and online declaration of plans to watch the film. When Masaan had been in theatres for a week, he put up smiling selfies captioned “Happy.” 

About ten days after the release, I talked to him over the phone. He was in Nigeria, and relentlessly upbeat. “My wife said she liked the film, my paisa is vasool,” he said (I have got my money’s worth). “Nothing matters to me more than my family.” 

Soon after that, he sent me a message on WhatsApp: “We’ll have to think out of the Box (office collection) for film-making. Return on Investment incl(udes) Critical Appreciation n Love.” 

More recently, when three Drishyam films were selected for a prestigious film festival in Busan, he put up a tweet punning on the phonetic similarity between the name of the South Korean city and the Hindi word bhushan: “Bhushan Film Festival! So many Indian films. Happy!!!! ( Ok, Busan Film Festival)” 

 During the telephone conversation, he told me that soon after Masaan hit screens, he returned to Deoghar after a gap of 16 years. As the film gathered accolades, Mundra took photographs with his schoolteachers, and in front of his crumbling old home. The trip was part victory lap, part his way of coming full circle. “I had to go back to the place where I saw all those dreams,” he said.

 Mundra can afford to look back, and insisted to me that he now has “nothing to prove,” but he didn’t seem in the mood for rest. Besides Drishyam and his job in Nigeria, he runs and contributes to several charities, including a school for girls in Jodhpur. The day we met in Mumbai, after the trailer launch and photo shoot, he was due in Dubai to launch Drishyam Films UAE. His wife, he mentioned between shots, was readying to produce documentaries. “I need an Oscar,” he told me, in the same tone as he’d said “I need to be married” and “I need to be rich.” “I need an Oscar. Not for myself, but the film should have it, by 2017.” In every few sentences, I heard new, larger plans. 

 The only thing not expanding, it seemed, was his blog, where the frequency of posts has tapered off. Mundra had a ready explanation. “I am working on a book,” he said, “and if I give it all away for free, who will buy it?” 

As we talked in the hotel room that afternoon, the crowd around us gradually thinned. The photographer left, followed by Mundra’s colleagues. By evening, Mundra was alone, bleary-eyed and exhausted, but gamely holding up under my questioning. In another few minutes, he had an appointment to hear a script for a potential new project. And then he would get on a flight back home. 

I asked about his plans for retirement, if he had those worked out as well. “Of course,” he said, seriously. He will move back to India, he told me, and work on his charitable projects from Jodhpur. “I have 20 to 25 years left on this earth,” he said. “That means about 2,400 weekends. That’s how I plan my life.” In the brief silence that followed, he rubbed his eyes, then gave me a polite smile. “So,” he asked, “what’s next?”

 Taran N Khan is a filmmaker and journalist based primarily in Mumbai.

The Goldie Standard -NasreenMunne Kabeer

Nasreen Munni Kabir shares an exclusive excerpt from an interview with the late Vijay Anand, during which they talked about music, movies, and being different, and how, sometimes, you just had to let Shammi Kapoor be himself

The Anand Brothers—Chetan, Dev and Vijay—were a class act. From the late 1940s, they made Navketan (their production company) into one of the most distinctive banners of its time. Not only were their productions popular, they also nurtured new talent and took risks in their choice of film subjects.

Vijay Anand (known by all as Goldie) was the youngest brother. A student of English literature, he was a formidable screenplay writer, actor, producer and film editor, but it is his work as a director that has made a special place for him in Hindi cinema history. His first film, Nau Do Gyarah (1957), bears all the touches of a delightful storyteller.
His masterly grip over content and form led to a long and varied career. Working with a great team of cinematographers, composers, lyricists and choreographers, Vijay Anand brought out the best in his actors. Few could rival his abilities when it came to writing natural and easy-flowing dialogue or picturising songs. Unlike the enjoyment of most songs that is often divorced from the film for which they have been composed, his music is closely linked to the filmic experience. He knew songs are the glue that bind audiences to Hindi films. Close your eyes and you can see Shammi Kapoor with a scarf around his neck, singing “Deewana Mujhsa Nahin” on a colourful hilltop, or instantly recall the smiling faces of Dev Anand and Nutan as they sing “Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare Pukaar” on the inner stairway of the Qutab Minar.

I met this gifted director in the early 2000s and asked if he would agree to work on a book of conversations about his life and films. He gave me the nod and soon after that we recorded two long interviews in 2001 (a part of which is reproduced here). When he was appointed the chairman of the Censor Board in late 2001, he felt he would not have had the time right then for a book, and so, to my deep regret, it never got completed. Vijay Anand was 70 when he passed away on 23 February 2004.

What is the role of dance in Indian cinema? Do you think it has always been an important element?
There used to be many more songs in the early films and hardly any dancing. Songs had a bit of dancing: the heroine moved her hands around a little, but the actresses as such were not required to be dancers.
The arrival of the choreographers Hiralal and Sohanlal brought about a very big change, and by the 1960s they had become firmly established. They were extremely good dancers themselves, because they were trained in classical dancing. Most directors depended on them to picturise the songs and dances. They did not tolerate a bad director, so some directors would not even be on the set when the song was picturised.

What is the essential difference between composing a stage dance or a film dance?
Cinema choreography is very different. You cannot compose a dance in a film as you would for the stage. Choreographers like Sachin Shankar, who came from the stage, could not succeed in films unless they worked with a very good director who brought a strong cinematic sense and could translate the dance into cinematic language.
I think Sachin Shankar was very good when he choreographed “a performance within a performance”—I am thinking of “Gore Gore O Banke Chhore” (Samadhi, 1950). It takes place on a stage-like setting with the heroines dancing and the other characters, including the hero, looking on.
Yes, but that song was for the stage, even if that stage featured in a film.
In Johny Mera Naam I worked with Sachin Shankar. When he composed the dance, he showed it to me. He had the performers on one side and the audience on the other. We made changes together because finally it is the camera that is the audience and the camera angles must change in every shot. So you cannot have a strict division between performance and audience. Unlike a stage dance, the film director has to divide the dance into shots.
If you compose for the stage, you are also confined to a small space. The dance movements are restricted . . . usually within 20 x 20 feet. And cinema does not want to confine itself to space. It can go anywhere.
How did you work with a choreographer?
If the director is good, he uses the other artists [cameraman, composer, art director, choreographer, etc] as tools. He appreciates their talents and finds out whether they have ideas that can enhance his own vision. If this can happen, the entire team gives themselves into your hands. They flow with your work. But if they find the director has no idea what he wants and just wants an entertaining dance, then the choreographer will compose, film and edit the song.
Some choreographers have a limited understanding of editing. They want too many cuts and do not allow the shot to be held long enough … Nowadays, film editors are in love with the rhythm. They don’t allow you to see the faces of the heroine or hero.
You mean nowadays the rhythm determines the cut, not the narrative of the lyrics?
That’s right. Not the narrative. If the choreographers have understood the filmic situation, they do better work than if they were left alone to conceive a dance. Otherwise they usually come up with a repertoire of moves they have learned from their guru that may be good, but do not necessarily work for the scene.
The story comes first for good directors. When I worked with Hiralal, he knew the song had been written for a certain situation and context in the movie. The choreographer was not really in a position to guide me, because he had to fit his dance moves into my existing concept and narrative.
Sometimes a dance number has no lyrics. Take the snake dance in Guide. There were no words like naina [eyes] or sawariya [beloved]. So what guides the choreographer? The director guides him. In the snake dance I wanted the heroine to express her troubled life. You must explain the emotions that the song or dance is meant to convey.
Can you tell me about the very first song you directed?
It was in Nau Do Gyarah. I did not have a choreographer. I did not need one. I [only] needed a choreographer for Helen’s and Shashikala’s dance—even there the choreographer, Surya Kumar, had to choreograph the dance in a multi-dimensional way. He knew the dance could not be seen from a static viewpoint, as the camera was moving in many directions.
I spent my childhood with people like Zohra Sehgal, Kameshwar Sehgal, Mohan Sehgal and Guru Dutt. They were almost living in our house. So were Balraj and Damayanti Sahni. My brother Chetan brought them to Bombay, and until they found their own places to live in, they stayed with us. Zohra and Kameshwar came from Uday Shankar’s dance academy and started a dance school in our Pali Hill home. A lot of students, including Premnath, used to come to learn dancing. Prithvi Theatre people used to come too. So I imbibed a lot by observing them. I knew what choreography was.
I am wondering if Uday Shankar indirectly inspired the film dances in the 1950s. Like Guru Dutt had Zohra Sehgal  choreograph Baazi.
Yes, they were both [Guru Dutt and Zohra Sehgal] from Uday Shankar’s dance academy and so they clicked together.
Left to myself I would not have used theatre choreographers. They were too stagey. As I said, in earlier times there wasn’t much emphasis on film dancing. Dancing was required as a romantic element in a song, but it did not jump out of the story to show itself. “Look at me. I am part of the story yet not part of the story. I am an entity in myself.”
Coming back to Nau Do Gyarah, which was the first song you shot?
“Hum hain raahi pyaar ke hum se kuchh na boliye.” Then “Kali ke roop mein chali ho dhoop mein kahaan”. I shot those songs outdoors.
At that time I used to think a choreographer ruined songs. They interfered with the characterisation. I felt they imposed their own personalities through their dance steps and didn’t allow the artists to express themselves in the way they should.
I am happy to hear you say this, because I have always thought when your characters sing they somehow stay in character. I am thinking of Dev Anand and Nutan in Tere Ghar Ke Samne. Many of the tunes and dance movements in your films match the personality of your characters.
If the director understands his subject, story and characters well, he will not compromise in any aspect. If he is working on a film like Devdas then he has to have songs for Devdas, not for Shammi Kapoor.
The Teesri Manzil songs were not for Dev Anand or Waheeda Rehman, they were for Shammi Kapoor and Asha Parekh. When I was working on Jewel Thief, we discussed this with the composer. I would tell SD Burman: “Dada, this song is for Vyjayanthimala. I am going to use her talents as a dancer.”

Waheeda Rehman always underplays her scenes, so she needs a different kind of song. If you have a song for Dev Anand, you have to bear in mind that he can’t dance. He has grace but not rhythm. You can’t make him dance.
With Shammi Kapoor, if you don’t make him dance he will make a fool of himself. You cannot tell him: “Shammi, don’t move. Just sit still and sing.” He won’t photograph well if the camera is fixed on him. But he has rhythm—an inborn rhythm that is superior to any movement a choreographer may compose for him.

I have always told my choreographers not to make the hero dance, but to imbibe his character into the choreography.

Imbibe the character or the personality of the star?
The character of the character. When you cast someone like Govinda, for example, you have many choices. When you cast Shammi Kapoor, you have choices, but not too many. Cast Shammi and you want a little bit of the character and more of Shammi Kapoor. You want to use the glamour and inborn talent that he has…
Shammi did not regard himself as a dancer, nor had he ever learnt dancing. But you played a song to him and told him: “Go wild!” He would, because he had such a tremendous sense of rhythm. He just got into the music and every fibre of his body would dance. The only thing you had to make sure was that he did not overdo it. OK, the character is fooling about—this much is allowed, but not beyond that. All the expressions are in the song words: “Dekhiye… naazneen…” It’s all there, so you don’t have to do much more.

What can the actor do beyond portraying the words of the song that has been composed, written and recorded for him? These elements define the limitations. An actor cannot go beyond the camera framing either. If Shammi Kapoor jumped up and down, he would find himself out of the frame… I used to tell him to bring the song alive through his eyes. A little nod was enough.
PL Raj is credited as the choreographer for Teesri Manzil. Tell me more about him.
PL Raj was Hiralal’s assistant. Once Hiralal and Sohanlal had worked with me, they thought of me as a director not to be interfered with. That was the same with all their assistants, including Saroj Khan, who was Sohanlal’s assistant. She would always ask me: “Goldie saab, what do you want?”
I used to sit with the choreographer when they were composing. Sometimes they would get nervous and ask me to come back the next day when they were ready to show me a few moves. Sometimes I would tell them they were going off track. This is not the character. I did not want any artificiality. My characters should not become artificial when they sing. The characters are not supposed to be dancers in the film. They are merely expressing an emotion through a song. Take Govinda, he can do difficult movements. If we have Shammi Kapoor, then keep the moves flexible.

What about Dev Anand?
Dev saab’s biggest problem was that he never rehearsed. He’d say: “Nahin yaar, don’t make me dance.” And you shouldn’t make him dance because he doesn’t know how. But he had a great presence and audiences used to see the film for his songs. He had style and other actors have copied him. Some of the songs may look ridiculous today, but at that time they were his plus points.
In the Kala Bazar song “Khoya Khoya Chand”, Dev sings as he runs down the hill. He is madly in love and believes his dream is coming true. So let him move his hands— white hands against dark clothes—[as] he makes his way down the hill. It suited the scene, so once in a while you let him go.
[In the same movie] there is a scene in a train compartment. Dev Anand is sitting on the lower berth and Waheeda Rehman is lying on the upper berth. The girl’s parents are also in the compartment. Dev saab sings the song: “Apni to har aah ek toofaan hai/ Kya karen woh jaan kar anjaan hai/ Uparwala jaan kar anjaan hai.” Waheeda Rehman is listening to him but she cannot move much because she’s lying on the upper berth. There is a double meaning behind the whole situation, which is beyond choreography.
You mean the double meaning is in the line “Uparwala jaan kar anjaan hai”. The song is directed at Waheeda, while her parents think it’s a reference to God. Very clever. Tell me about that other wonderful song “Dil Ka Bhanwar”.

In Tere Ghar Ke Samne, Dev Anand and Nutan sing the song on the steps of the inner stairway of the Qutab Minar. The sense that they have reached the peak of emotions is in the location, because you cannot get higher than the Qutab Minar.

Were these conscious decisions?
Yes, certainly. Forty years have passed since I made the film. I cannot really analyse how I came to make all these decisions. But I did feel that love was like climbing the Qutab Minar—it’s an effort. When you let yourself go, there is no effort any more.
The film is set and shot in Delhi just after the India-China war . . . so the story of Tere Ghar Ke Samne is about two neighbours who fight with one another. When you use the city of Delhi as a setting, you have to have the Qutab Minar as well.
In “Dil Ka Bhanwar” you make an appearance as an extra. How did that come about?
The space was restricted and we could not get anyone else up there besides the actors, a small crew and myself. We needed government permission to shoot inside the Qutab Minar and we were told to have a small unit and not to use many lights. I needed two or three characters passing them on the stairs and could not find anyone who could give the proper expression, so I thought let me do it.
It sounds like you were a very confident director from the start.
I was arrogantly confident, you know. I didn’t want to be a film director. I just took the chance. I thought if I succeeded or failed, what the hell! I didn’t care about success or failure. I was doing my Master’s, and thought I’d make Nau Do Gyarah and then go back to studying English literature. Unfortunately, I could not go back to studying. I still dream I will someday.
I never cared much for a profession. Even now I don’t. I was not aware of international cinema. I respected my seniors for their contribution to Indian cinema. But somehow I couldn’t be what they were. I did not want actors to perform in a theatrical manner, nor did I care much for larger-than-life stories.
How old were you when you made Nau Do Gyarah?
I was 22. I made it just for the heck of it. I had written a script called Taxi Driver and my brothers made it into a film and it did well. Of course there was more of Chetan saab in it. He didn’t respect the script that much, but he stuck to the theme and characters and kept some of the dialogue. That gave me a lot of confidence.
I used to write one-act plays in college and wrote scripts for the heck of it. So I wrote Nau Do Gyarah and sold it to Shahid Lateef. He liked it very much, but he couldn’t make the film. There was another producer called Nyaya Sharma and when he heard the story, he bought it. But he could not produce it. He was the man who later made Kinare Kinare.
At that time, Navketan needed to produce a film. Raj Khosla, who was working at Navketan, was making Kala Pani and could not make up his mind about what he wanted to do next. In those days people were on the payroll and Navketan wasn’t making the kind of profit that you could wait around for a year before making a film. So they needed a script and needed to produce a film. Our manager, Mr Prashar, told Dev saab: “Goldie has got a very beautiful script. Shahid Lateef bought it and he is no fool. He was going to make it, but couldn’t. So the script is just lying about. Why don’t you listen to the story?”

Dev saab said I could narrate it to him. But I was too young and arrogant, and said I would not give it to anyone else to direct and I would direct it myself. My brother was working with all the leading directors of the time and was shocked, and thought I was too young to direct. Dev saab said: “He hasn’t assisted any director and hasn’t learnt the craft. He may have written a few college plays and the script for Taxi Driver, but Chetan saab was there to direct it. How can Goldie direct? Tell him not to be foolish.” But I refused to budge and Dev saab refused to budge …
Finally, when Dev saab heard the script and the way I had written all the details, he took a chance and said let’s do it.
I had not learnt filmmaking from anyone. In my script I had imagined situations no one had conceived before. I wanted my characters to exchange musical lines and not dialogue in some scenes. Luckily for me, I had such a fantastic composer in SD Burman. He loved me so much that he encouraged me, and instead of saying “You are very young. Don’t make a foolish mistake”, he said, “Let’s try.”
We had a song that worked like a question-and-answer scene: “Aankhon mein kya ji/ Roopehla baadal/ Baadal mein kya ji/ Kisi ka aanchal/ Aanchal mein kya ji/ Ajab si hulchul.” If these words were spoken in dialogue, it would sound very prosaic. But if it is done musically, it becomes very interesting. No one had done this kind of thing before.
Majrooh Sultanpuri wrote the lyrics. He was great at writing in this style. I was too young and will not say I contributed to the song itself. It was Burman saab who made Majrooh saab write these lines. And I, like a child, sat there very excited. They must have felt this boy has something; let’s listen to him. “Aankhon mein kya ji/ Sunehra baadal.” I said: “Majrooh saab, it’s a moonlit night. You can’t say sunehra. Let’s try roopehla.” Majrooh saab said: “Roopehla is a very sweet word. Shabaash! Goldie, tum achhe director banogey. [Goldie, you’ll make a very good director.] I don’t usually listen to anyone, but that’s a good word.”

A lot of people encouraged me when I was young.

You inspired people to think differently.
I was a catalyst. I wouldn’t say I inspired them, but my demands were unlike the usual demands. Plus I would say no if I didn’t like something. I was very young and very proud.
Tell me something about your parents.
My mother died when I was six years old. I don’t remember her very much. All I remember was that she was always ill. I was born in Gurdaspur . . . My father was a lawyer. It was he who loved music and invited musicians home whenever they visited Gurdaspur.
My father passed away in 1970 when I was making Johny Mera Naam. He didn’t adjust to Bombay and did not want to live here.
Who raised you?
I was raised by my two sisters and later by my sister-in-law, Chetan saab’s wife, Uma. She didn’t want me to join films and said: “Chetan has a giant intellect. I suffer when I see how he has to compromise in filmmaking. Since Neecha Nagar, all he has had to do is compromise.” She thought I should become a writer or a playwright.

When I started writing in college, Uma came to watch the plays I wrote. Sometimes Chetan saab accompanied her. Dev never came. She told me to write a script and said she would guide me. That is when I wrote Taxi Driver.
Did you ever consider making a film without songs?
No. I love songs. I never dreamt of making films without them. They asked me to make a film in English, and I said I didn’t want to. I will not do anything beyond my capability. If they like my work, they will accept it as it is. I am not going to become artificial in order to please anyone.

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Nasreen Munni Kabir began her research on Hindi cinema in 1978. Since then she has made over 80 documentaries and written 16 books. Her best known documentaries are In Search of Guru Dutt, Lata In Her Own Voice, and The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan. Her latest book is Conversations With Waheeda Rehman (Penguin Books, 2015).