Muhammad Shamil and Zaki Hamdan
Social media and news platforms are rife with commentaries touting the Malayalam blockbuster Empuraan as a bulwark against the Sangh’s efforts to manufacture collective amnesia and construct a Hindu mythocracy. What these discussions overlook is the spectre of the secular lurking in the background of the movie’s arc, even though it villainises the bestial Babu Bajrangi, and the movie’s thread ultimately leads to revenge against the said character.
Apart from bringing the Gujarat pogrom into popular discourse and the cathartic violence against the prototypical figure of Bajrangi, the movie reiterates the conventional Muslim subject that has to take recourse under the secular saviour characterised by Mohanlal’s Qureshi Abraham, the central character of the series, who is endearingly called Lucifer. He disciplines the Muslim subject, aka Zayed Massoud, from being a potential terrorist to a subject under his watch who would facilitate the right time to take revenge. While such criticisms can be derided by brushing them off as artistic liberty and the only possible imagination available in a society at the helm of a genocide, one must, however, pose the necessary question: are these characterisations innocent of the ethnic sensibility undergirding the concept of secularism in the country? Problematizing the systematicity of secular representations and the narratives they authorise is crucial to understanding why certain representations of Muslims are much vaunted, even though art is presumed to be creative and rapturous, where the regulations and constrictions posed by territorial parochialism and ethnic trepidations are said to transcend. Even more interesting is the image of the devil, Lucifer.
The question begs to be asked: why in the devil would the devil become this figure of the secular saviour, helping and setting up the revenge of a Muslim in the largest democracy in the world? In this article, we look at Empuraan, the second instalment of the Malayalam movie series ‘Lucifer’, directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran from the perspectives of possibilities of imagination and through the analysis of the towering figure of the Secular Saviour, who is supposedly the embodiment of the devil.
What the Devil dares to Show: (im)possibility of a Defiant Muslim Subject
Empuraan stands out in its portrayal of the Gujarat pogrom, not so much in its exposure of the violence. Nonetheless, it takes serious artistic mettle to portray government agencies like NIA and IB, and the workings of the larger deep state that aligns with the actual political reality without resorting to lazy, preachy visualisations. What hits the mark in the movie is how they were able to stretch the storyline of the movie revolving around the reckoning meted out to the RSS-resembling characters in the movie, which was uncalled for even in the secular temple of Kerala. RSS has always been portrayed in movies as an organisation that seldom warrants any attention in the Congress-CPIM political duel or, if dealt with, has always been given an air of respectability that negates their genocidal manoeuvres.
In Empuraan, the shots fired at Bajrangi at the end of the movie illustrate the age-old dictum of “a good Nazi is a dead Nazi”. This is a first for Malayalam movies when compared with Tamil ones, where directors have flexed their artistic liberty in carving a niche with their aesthetic portrayal of violence against caste oppression. Moyukh Chatterjee, in his work on composing violence, elaborates on how the publicity around violence—a mixture of text, genre, plot, and affect—determines power differentials between the majority and minority, following Michael Warner’s discussion on how people address the public by engaging in struggles over the conditions that bring them together as a public.
The conditions that bring people together or the aesthetics that appeal to the “collective consciousness” have always presupposed a Muslim subject who is docile and meek, and if defiance is to be appreciated, it should be from the ethics constituted by Indian secularism. Saba Mahmood, in her work, quotes Agrama to expound on the inherent contradiction of a secular nation-state: “It is part of a broader semantic and conceptual field in which notions of public health, morals, and national security are interlinked, and the referent almost always seems to be the majority religious culture.”
This referent to majoritarian assumptions of Muslimness are evident in Zayed Masood’s eventual salvation at the hands of the secular moral exemplar, characterised by Mohan Lal’s Qureshi, when he saves Zayed from Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although the portrayal of resistance against anti-Muslim violence through Zayed Masood’s character is commendable, the storyline’s reinscription of the supposed latent potential of a Muslim succumbing to Islamic fundamentalism aligns with the ethnic secular panic surrounding the Muslim subject, whose loyalty is always assumed to be directed toward the external Other (Pakistan). What kind of assumptions and narratives does the secular, as an epistemic and political doctrine, authorise when representing Indian Muslims? The nationalist imagination, with its ostensibly benign pretensions, is paradoxical when it comes to the representations and positioning of Muslims in the post-colonial imagination. In India, nationalism and secularism reinforce each other, and hence, even presumably well-intentioned representations necessitate a Muslim joining a terrorist outfit or a Muslim ready to be saved from the throes of religious fundamentalism by secular saviours.
What animates this continuity of a passive Muslim whose agential capacity is determined solely by secularism? The answer to the latter can only be understood by the nature of the secular state and the majoritarian sensibilities it addresses. Similarly, Peter Van der Veer contends in his work on religious nationalism in India that religious nationalism articulates discourse on the religious community and discourse on the nation, ultimately prescribing the secular to align towards the Nation’s [Hindu] sensibility.
In her work on aesthetics, Katya Mandoki draws connections between aesthetics and politics, which are usually seen as opposites. The realm of politics includes both the real and the imaginary, Mandoki emphasises, following Arendt. The stability of the status quo is determined by the concreteness of the political imaginaries that reinforce it, for which aesthetics plays an instrumental role.
Katya Mandoki writes: “Through aesthetics, power messages manage to affect the subjects’ sensibility and resolutely impact their decision-making (where resistance, docility, or admiration, disgust, attraction, or compliance are at stake). Thus a prominent mechanism by which political systems address their subjects is and has been aesthetic in the struggle for political hegemony, legitimization, and idealization of its own class image not only by means of art (as Eagleton 1990 contends in the case of the bourgeoisie) but by all aesthetic resources for heightening and intensifying experience as well as numbing it.”
Similarly, Crispin Sartwell has written about how all kinds of aesthetics impute political ideologies, and it mirrors the political and social contexts within which their manifestation – be it in art or Cinema, occurs. Watching Empuraan with this situatedness of its aesthetics reveals a lot about the political culture underpinned by (Hindu) secular ethics, and its interpellation of a Muslim subject can only be conceived in cinematic imagination as a victim ready to be saved by anything but a Muslim. Such presumed “good-faith” portrayals of violence and resistance against it subsumes and prescribes a different set of norms. In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes that ‘speech is what makes man a political being,’ similarly, how can a Muslim man/ woman in India be a political being where “Killing Muslims is a way of life” (Khan) and the institutionalized riot systems (Brass) exists to domesticate Muslims (Sayyid). In a society where moral disengagement (Anderson) by the state is structured by the creation of a power differential between the perpetrators and victims, the right to resist by a Muslim both physically and intellectually by embracing his Muslimness as a creative possibility is the ultimate transgressive act, that is beyond the secular thought-world, where the norm is Kill the Muslim, Save the Man.
In a different context, MSS Pandian, in his work “The Image Trap,” has written about how folk songs and ballads, and the organic radical embodied history of these art forms, which are part of a pre-existing common sense of the subaltern population, were appropriated by the sedimented elite ideology pervasive in Tamil cinemas that ossify and entrench the credibility of the oppressive power relations through the portrayal of the protagonist played by MGR: “In MGR films, the closure is such that a neat solution is offered for the injustice within the moral economy of the system itself. In other words, the subaltern protagonist in the film, that is, MGR, establishes what is considered to be just within the system, and thus reaffirms and vindicates it instead of developing a critique of it. It is, thus, a world of transformed exploiters with untransformed property and power relations.” (Pandian, 1993).
MSS Pandian employed the Gramscian usage of “common sense” to illustrate how it is a site of constant struggle, and how movies often appeal to the pre-existing assumptions of the spectators (Pandian, 2015). In the case of Empuraan, similar to the action sequences in MGR’s movies, where the hero fights against landlords and upper-caste men, the fight scenes in Empuraan against the reel-life Bhajrangi evoke the real-life physical resistance against RSS by Islamic movements, one reason for the positive reaction to the movie by Muslims. Following the cues from Pandian’s work, the radical praxis of the Islamic movements and the “good sense” of the common sense (Pandian, 1993) created by them in making physical resistance (Kiliyamannil, 2021) against RSS palatable is cut down by the elite-secular cinematic form, where the existing majoritarian common sense decide the terms of defiance of the Muslim subject.
The Devil as the Secular saviour and saviour of the Secular
The movie, while stands out in the portrayal of the political also repeatedly brings up a theological narrative, with the movie rife with theological usages that mirror a christian cosmic structure, portrayed by the themes of a dead God (PK Ramdas), the children of God going astray (his daughter Priyadarshini and son Jathin) and finally the adopted son, Stephen aka Qureshi Abraham aka the Lucifer coming to save God’s own country. It is only natural for one to turn to the interesting field of Political Theology, the pioneer of which, Carl Schmitt, a legal theorist and infamously Nazi, argues: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development — in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver — but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (cite).
Political Theology as a framework is especially helpful in understanding the figure of the devil in democracy and his emergence as the Secular saviour and saviour of the Secular.
In his work on the Devil ‘The Prince of the World’, the political theologian, Adam Kotsko, looks into the dynamics of definition and through it demonisation that the concept of the devil has gone through across the Christian centuries. According to him, the core characteristic of the devil is the concept of freedom, displayed in his acts of rebellion against God. While this concept of rebellion was deemed devilish as opposed to complete unquestioned obedience to the Divine in the earlier ages, this achieves a reversal in Modernity.
Through the fetishisation of the rebel, the devil, the concept of freedom is seen as the essence of human dignity in modernity, giving rise to a world where submission to a higher power is seen as inauthentic and dangerous. This notion of freedom, when expanded into modernity, he argues, resembles the Hobbesian social contract theory. Humans are free to choose or submit to God, and through their freedom, they choose a ruler, going the devil’s way of freedom and accepting the devil’s sovereignty. The Secular city, as opposed to the God chosen heavenly city and the chaotic natural state, was formed on this idea of freedom, neither obedience to God nor rebellion against him, but a freedom based on the community’s consent. One cannot fail to see how much this idea of a secular city based on freedom and choice resembles the neo-liberal nation states of our time, where this idea of freedom is governed by two things, the state (a voluntary submission done to build the secular state) and the market (formed and developed by the collective will). Thus, the sovereign of this world, through Kotsko’s drawing one can be seen as the Devil.
Going back to the movie, it is interesting that the Qureshi Abraham characterised as Lucifer acts like a sovereign, interestingly in ways that Carl Schmitt famously describes one the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception”, building on the theology that, God could perform miracles — suspend the normal “laws of nature” when needed. Similarly, the political sovereign can suspend the law during a state of emergency. In the movie, when God’s own country, Kerala, is threatened during states of political emergency, like the death of the God figure politician or the betrayal and waywardness of the Son who was supposed to lead the way, The figure of Lucifer emerges to restore order, often drawing upon powers beyond the nation-state, extra territorial imaginations, unimaginable amounts of capital and an army that doesn’t care or is not limited by nation-state boundaries. What makes Zayed Masoud, the wronged Muslim, the commander of the devil’s army, capable of revenge is this extra national power supported by Global capital. If we are to take Kotsko’s lead on the idea of freedom in modernity and the neo-liberal nation-state, what the figure of Lucifer does through allowing a dramatic visualisation of a revenge is the regulation and disciplining of the Muslim subject. This freedom is not limitless, as mentioned, but rather governed and regulated by the boundaries of the secular state and the market. Coming back to the possibilities of imagining a defiant muslim subject, even though the movie has come a far way in portraying a wronged and defiant Muslim subject, he is still regulated by the market. Thus, Zayed can’t be a defiant Muslim subject; he is rather an individual muslim whose revenge is supported by a global power. Any mention of Zayed’s formation as a defiant Muslim subject inherently returns to the logic of a Muslim succumbing to Islamic fundamentalism, always assumed loyalty to the external other or Pakistan, and this aligns with the popular ethnic secular panic surrounding the Muslim subject.
What is unsurprising after the movie’s release is the reaction of the state and the Hindutva crowd, in whose imaginations, the popular image of the Gujarat pogrom is supposed to be the image of Qutbuddeen Ansari. One can only say that even in imagination, a seemingly defiant Muslim subject, coming back for revenge, is a nightmare that the Hindutva state vehemently needs to censor. One must remember at this juncture that even the imagination the movie brings up is based on the precedents of actual defiant home grown Muslim subjectivities growing in India, who despite being lawful, constitutional and loyal to the nation is jailed across the nation and put into judicial petrification through the various central investigation agencies named and portrayed in the movie (the names were censored a few days after release).
Zaki Hamdan RN is a cultural studies researcher, writer, and translator from Kerala, currently pursuing a PhD at EFLU, Hyderabad, and Muhammad Shamil is an independent researcher in political thought, with a Master’s from Pondicherry University.
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