Page - 86 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

ularism”, to Hindutva, which understands India as innately and essentially Hindu and Hindus as deserving the prerogatives of their dominance. To my mind, there is no better reflection of the secular, pluralist Indian ideology in film than that of Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, IN 1977). It is the story of the disintegration and reunification of an Indian family. Three Hindu brothers are sep- arated in childhood and brought together in adulthood to save their long-lost mother. Significantly, each is raised in a different religion. Amar, the dhārmik exemplar, is raised Hindu and is, tellingly, a policeman; Akbar, the carefree tailor and Qawwali singer, is a boyish, non-threatening Muslim; and Anthony Gonsalves, the irresistible smalltime thief with a heart of gold, is raised by a Catholic priest. As it happens, their mother is named Bhāratī: the female form of Bhārat, that is, “India”. Bereft and hopeless, she attempts suicide. In a twist of fate, all are reunited in a hospital room to save the life of a mother they did not recognize, who through injustice had become a stranger to her own chil- dren. It was the mid-1970s after all, and these were suicidal times. The idealistic dreams of independent India seemed to be fading some 30 years after its “tryst with destiny” beginning. Nehru was dead and his daughter Indira had declared the Emergency. Yes, the trains now ran on time, but at the cost of constitutional civil rights threatening to jeopardize the world’s largest democracy. Meanwhile, Pakistan, India’s shadow Other, likewise founded in 1947 out of British India, was falling into disarray. A military coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq would follow just months after the end of Indira’s Emergency. In Amar, Akbar, Anthony, in a scene deliberately lacking all subtlety, the three titular protagonists offer a blood transfusion to save a blind woman they have not yet recognized as their own mother – she is no one less than Mother India (fig. 1). Like the three famed north Indian rivers forming a saṅgam, or confluence, at Alla- habad to vivify the north Indian plains, so the sons’ intravenous lines commingle in the person of their blind, comatose Mā. In case anyone misses the singular point, this scene is placed in the film’s belated introduction – including the title card in the three scripts of Hindi, Urdu, and English. As the three men lie in three hospital beds, and as their blood flows into a middle-aged woman lying perpendicularly to them, Mohammad Rafi croons the moral, much like a Greek chorus: Mā sirf nāta nahin yeh kuch aur bhī hai. (A mother is not just a relationship, but something more.) Mā se bichad ke bhī yeh tūt jātā nahin. (Though you wander, the mother’s bond isn’t broken.) Yeh sach hai koi kahānī nahin. (This is true, not just some story.) Khūn khūn hotā hai pānī nahin. (It is blood, not water.) Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 85www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102