Movie: Asoka

Actors: SRK, Karina Kapoor
Director: , Producer: SRK



The latest film production by Shah Rukh Khan is a bore. Asoka - Love in the Time of War, to gives its official nomenclature, is a bore perpetuated by director Santosh Sivam and an indulgent producer.

Contemporary Indian

filmmakers are simply not able to make historicals. The genre seems to be beyond them.

In recent decades the only cohesive and effective film venture into the Indian past has been Jabbar Patel`s Dr. Ambedkar, which rather typically in the contemporary intellectual milieu in the desh has not been given its due by the local cognoscenti. Otherwise, Satyajit Ray`s Shatranj Ke Khilari, the recent films on Gandhi (two of them), on Sardar Patel, Meera the bhakti poetess, Razia Sultan, the TV series on Nehru`s Discovery of India and so forth have been both artistic and commercial failures. The artistic failure hurts more.

Above all, it hurts to see that Indian filmmakers refuse to learn from the history of the cinema itself. Otherwise Santosh Sivam, a good cinematographer but an unnecessarily over-rated film director, would have been less pretentious in working out this film`s screenplay.

Pretentiousness is the bane of the `serious Indian artist`. Whenever the Indian filmmaker aspires to make a film on a grand theme, pretentiousness is so malevolently pervasive that the filmmaker is out of his depth from the word go, because he simply forgets what cinema actually is! Having chosen a supposedly noble theme or subject, our filmmakers tend to overwork themselves in supplicating their work to that subject`s nobility.

I am disappointed that though Indian filmmakers see so keenly the Hollywood films that make super-grosses, they seem to learn nothing from the common sense and down-to-earth intelligence that goes into the scripting and cinematization of Hollywood films. In the first 15 minutes of Asoka, I for one could have suggested 3 or 4 things that would have been better cinema; and I speak only as a filmgoer!

One does not know whether director Santosh Sivam and actor-producer Shah Rukh Khan were inspired to make their Rs.13 crore Asoka by the stupendous impact of Mel Gibson`s Braveheart, but they should have seen a film like Braveheart or Gladiator more carefully. Instead, because there are some derivative shades of Braveheart in the early battle scenes of Asoka, one feels that the Sivam unit tries to outdo Braveheart and come a cropper! There is also a "tribute" to Kurosawa`s Seven Samurai in the last death scenes, but to no avail in terms of cinematic effectiveness.

It is disappointing that in this film on Asoka, one of the subcontinent`s great emperors, the director, the scriptwriter and the set designer repeatedly commit a major historical blunder, showing huge, Bamiyan-scale statues of the Buddha as part of the backdrop, when the truth is that there were no huge idols of Buddha in Asoka`s lifetime. On the other hand, the Buddha was against idol worship and while history books record Asoka`s rock edicts, after his conversion to Buddhism, they make no mention of gigantic Buddha statues in the moanstaries and vihars in the Asokan era..

It is also disappointing that Sivam`s screenplay is ignorant of other crucial historical contexts as well.

Firstly, while much is made of Asoka`s guile in war there is no mention of the guile that his grandfather Chandragupta Maurya had learnt a few decades earlier from Chanakya, the oriential machiavelli. Surely by the time Asoka grew into his youth, the existence of Chankaya-niti would have been well known among princes and warriors.

Secondly, the plotting of the royal intrigues is caste ridden and much is made of royalty`s pure Kshatriya blood, quite oblivious of the fact that Chandragupta Maurya did not come from pure royal stock himself, nor did the Nanda dynasty which he uprooted.

Thirdly, in an age when the colloquial prakrit was the more popular language, the pseudo-aristocratic dialogues in this film are heavily Sanskritised. Even the film`s Buddhists speak a Sanskritised diction though history textbooks have always said that the Buddha preached in the dialect prakrit.

I am also disappointed that Shah Rukh the actor seems to have misplaced his keen intelligence as an actor and the ability he had shown in the early years of his career for script-selection.

But I am truly amazed by the opinions that the widely popular Indian columnist Shobha De has made on the film. She had seen the film a few days before its release, at Shah Rukh`s private screening, in the star studded company of filmmaker Karan Johar, actresses Rekha and Simi Garewal, actor Salman Khan, the painter M.F. Hussain and a group of India`s top tycoons including Dr. Vijay Mallya and Anil Ambani.

Shobha De`s misguided comment on the film was: "Asoka could still be the one path-breaking film that makes India a serious contender in the international market." (The Times of India, October 24, 2001).

For the truth is that all the pretentious "path-breaking" stuff in this film is the boring part. On the other hand, where the film does show kind of liveliness is when, in typical Bollywood style, it tries to cash in on Johny Lever the bawdy comedian, Danny the Bollywood villain, and the typical Bollywood sex dances choreographed by the likes of Farah Khan.

Indeed, there are not enough "stunning vistas" in this film outside of the bare shoulders and the bare midriffs of the young actresses. The bare midriff is what the contemporary Indian filmmaker seems to cinematize best these days, thanks to the music videos that MTV and V Channel have brought into our life!

The blatant exposition of the female body, in traditional Indian apparels and in the fashion of V. Shantaram`s Geet Gaya Patharon Ne (1964), is what might bring in some money at local turnstiles for Asoka the film. For this is certainly Kariena Kapoor`s film - film as a purveyor of sexual fantasy about the female body. Specially because her co-star, Shah Rukh, seems to suffer from a stiff neck and is less of an actor and more of a fashion model posing in ethnic costumes - perhaps because his director wanted him to demonstrate in all its grandeur the nobility of the emperor Asoka.

When it comes to the genre of costume dramas, Indian filmmakers are good at fantasies and love stories: e.g. K. Asif`s Mughal-e-Azam, Manmohan Desai`s Dharam-Veer, Vidhu Vinod Chopra`s 1942 - A Love Story. Most of them should stick to that, for the time being.