Much hue and cry has been raised over the blunders in the script of Om Raut’s recently-released Adipurush. The reactions of those who’ve seen the film range from indifference to shock to condemnation. The response of those who’ve not yet seen the film is worse still. Many people have only fallen short of asking for the beheading of those connected with the creative side of the big-budgeted film. So what’s more outrageous — the mistakes in the story, screenplay and dialogues or the reaction to those mistakes?
The public is shocked that someone could’ve so blatantly twisted the Ramayan, on a chapter of which the film is based. Right from Prabhas and Kriti Sanon’s casting as the revered characters of Ram and Sita to the get-up and facial expressions of Saif Ali Khan (who plays Lankesh (Ravan) in the film) to the animation monkey characters which comprise Ram and Hanuman’s Vanar Sena (army of monkeys), movie-goers have a problem with all this and much more. The attires of the divine characters, the cinematic liberties taken to move the drama forward, the performances of the lead actors… everything seems to have hurt the religious sentiments of the audience. Manoj Muntashir Shukla’s dialogues are said to have riled the viewers no end. Hanuman and other characters are made to mouth such shocking terms as ‘dho daloonga’, ‘tera baap ka’, ‘teri bua ka bageecha’, ‘Lanka lagaa doonga’ (‘Lanka’ in this case being a parliamentary word for a very obvious four-letter word)!
One doesn’t need to be very religious-minded to feel offended by such errors in the story, screenplay and dialogues. After all, the mistakes are in a film based on the epic Ramayan. In a country which thrives on controversies, where people love to flaunt their religious beliefs more on social media than in holy places like the temple, church, mosque or the gurudwara, and where people view platforms like Twitter and Facebook as a place to spew venom, a lot of Hindus have been taking potshots at the film which has cost Rs. 550 crore (including the remuneration of Prabhas, cost of money and publicity budget) to make. Rather than just accepting that he has erred, dialogue writer Manoj Muntashir Shukla rubbed the already riled audience the wrong way when he tried to justify his blunder via a public statement that such dialogues in the film, as ‘Jalegi tera baap ki’, were “not an error… Very meticulous thought process… has gone into writing dialogues for Bajrangbali (Hanuman)”.
Manoj Muntashir’s reaction makes it clear that he never applied his mind while writing the dialogues just as he never took recourse to it while justifying the language he used for some of the dialogues. Miracles and Hindu mythology go hand-in-hand but even a miracle can’t pull Muntashir out of the tight spot he has landed himself in, first by writing such outrageously ridiculous dialogues and then by trying to justify them instead of simply apologising or choosing to remain silent. Muntashir may have felt miserable when, barely after 24 hours of the dialogue writer aggravating the situation by saying that he was not wrong, the makers announced their decision to change the objectionable dialogues in the film. I would love to know who has penned the new dialogues — Muntashir or someone else.
Hindu religious heads can be been losing their heads and their cool on television debates about the many blunders of Adipurush. Right from calling the film an insult to the Sanatana dharma to asking the government to ban the film, the custodians of Hindu religion have been doing it all. But their anger and venom is so anti-Sanatana dharma!
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, followers of Sanatana dharma are supposed to possess virtues such as honesty, refraining from injuring living beings, purity, goodwill, mercy, patience, forbearance, self-restraint, generosity, and asceticism. ‘Forbearance’ is the quality of being patient and sympathetic towards people, especially when they have done something wrong. So what are the religious heads talking about the feelings of the followers of the Sanatana dharma being hurt by Adipurush and, therefore, calling for a ban on the film? Isn’t what they are doing in debates and panel discussions conducted by television news channels, as condemnable as the action of the creative team of Adipurush? Where is their self-restraint, their quality of forgiveness, their patience? While the makers of Adipurush aren’t even custodians of any religion, the religious heads are exactly that. In condemning the makers of the film, the religious heads are forgetting the very tenets of the dharma which they want to protect.
So who is more wrong — those humans who committed the blunders in the film or those religious heads who profess to be speaking in a completely un-Sanatana dharma way about protecting the Sanatana dharma?