Writer-director Abhishek Sharma has named the protagonist of his new film Ram Setu thoughtfully and deliberately. In the lead role, Akshay Kumar plays Aryan Kulshrestha—Aryan refers to a superior race of people believed to have brought Hinduism to India, and ‘Kulshrestha’ is an upper-caste Hindu surname, the word literally meaning ‘the best of the clan’ or ‘the one with great powers’. I assume this, but you will probably agree when you know more about Ram Setu. Sharma’s 144-minute film runs entirely like an advertising film meant to hammer in the idea that it was the Hindu god Ram who built the Ram Setu or Adam’s bridge.
According to common knowledge, Ram Setu is a chain of natural limestone shoals between the Rameshawaram island off the south-eastern coast of Tamil Nadu and Mannar Island off the north-western coast of Sri Lanka, which got submerged in the Indian Ocean. Sharma takes the contested belief that this was indeed the bridge mentioned in the epic Ramayana, which Ram built to go to Raavan’s Lanka in order to bring back his kidnapped wife Sita, to be the truth and argues through its archaeologist hero to cement this view—using overwrought, chest-thumping, unimaginative and crowd-pleasing dialogues to augment the right-wing Hindutva view inexorably till a judge of the Supreme Court also endorses the view the film champions.
In reality, this is the Ram Setu backstory in a gist: A project titled Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project was mooted by the government of India and a feasibility study ordered in the 1990s. In 1997, the government decided to go ahead with the project but only finalised it in 2005. It calculated that successful completion of the project would cut travel by about 350 nautical miles and will save 10 to 30 hours’ sailing time. Environmentalists opposed the idea as they believed it would destroy the natural marine ecosystem of the Indian Ocean. Religious right-wing parties and fringe groups, believing it was built by Ram and anything built by a Hindu god shouldn’t be destroyed, have come down on the plans to destroy something built by Lord Rama.
Mounted on a sprawling scale, the film opens with Aryan planning a mission to prove that the Ram Setu is a formation of nature and Ram or Hinduism has nothing to do with it. Although we know nothing else about Aryan except that he is an Indian Indiana Jones kind of man who is fearless in his stunts as he is with his scientific rigour: “I only believe that which can be proven,” he declares early on.
He has a child who is well-versed in Hindu mythological stories and his wife Gayatri (Nushrratt Bharuccha) is a professor who dissuades her husband to take up the project because it is against the faith of the majority and his going against that grain would land him in trouble. We also know by his own admission that Aryan goes for the jugular.
The rest of Sharma’s screenplay unfolds like an argument chiselled in ancient caves off Jaffna as well as deep underwater—mostly by way of ludicrous providence. A bearded, jumpy man named A.P. (Satyadev Kancharana) helps Aryan and his colleague, an environmentalist and an airhead of staggering proportions, Dr Sandra Rebello (Jacqueline Fernandez) to realise how wrong their premise was.
Will they then succeed in stopping the government and the shipping magnate who benefits from the destruction of the holy bridge, and reaffirm the faith that Ram is part of our ancient history, not myth or epic or literature?
Kumar’s investment as an actor and producer in films that extol the religious right in overt as well as subtle ways is part of his image and currency as a star now—a star hyper-patriot. It’s time we called him Bollywood’s embedded star—embedded with political ideologies that eulogise a Hindu-centric version of our history.
Of course, Bollywood is primarily a fantasy factory. And it has always been a propaganda machine for the political and ruling elite, even though there are several well-known exceptions. But we are in an era of filmmaking now, especially big-budget Bollywood spearheaded primarily by Akshay Kumar, which derives its agency as well as currency only as an ideological mouthpiece. The film’s ideological messaging is so clear—although rarely sharp and smartly delivered—that it’s impossible to judge it on its cinematic merits. Is it a film or a dumbed-down, but bombastic ideological argument? The latter’s the unmistakable aftertaste.
Ram Setu released in theatres on October 25.
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