Taming Tigers, Lions and Jungle Cats was a curious trope that popped up in Emergency era films and though it might look hilariously bullish in retrospect, it may have been masculinity’s not-too-elegant way of retaliating.
In a scene from Mr Natwarlal (1977), Amitabh Bachchan is attacked by a murderous tiger who has been terrorising a village. Natwar, as Bachchan is called in the film, uses a fire torch to evade being ripped apart. At one point in the sequence, Rekha rugby tackles the tiger to the ground. Within the same sequence, Natwar manages to heave the tiger to one side, all on his own. “Main toh khud marte marte bacha”, he says to himself in the quiet of secrecy moments after the confrontation. He is only a survivor, a distillation of his brains, his ability to think in the time of conflict, rather than his brawn. To the villagers though he is a messiah whose penchant for violence is declared by a senior villager, akin the reincarnation of a ‘fakir’. A fakir who brings the ‘message of life’. Sort of to say it takes the conviction of taking a life to protect the longevity of another. There are tigers of the skin and then there are tigers of the heart. This was an India searching for the latter.
As India grew after independence it yearned to find in its men moral anchors to tell tales of aspiration and earnestness from. Cinema without heroism would impugn its own existence, but in the years of and after the Indira Gandhi led emergency, our formative understanding of heroism underwent the surgery of circumstance. These were the days of modulated machoism in the streets, of men being incarcerated and denied their right to speak and act at will. Stifled, suppressed and barricaded, masculinity sought new villains to fight, demons to tame. It’s where the curious years of and after the emergency come into focus. Years when the country’s breakout superstars Dharmendra and Bachchan were found on more than occasion, fist-fighting tigers and jungle cats. As deliriously comedic as it may sound now it was perhaps a subtle – though excessive by design – way of embodying the virility onscreen, that was being denied to men in the streets.
In Adalat (1976) Bachchan plays Dharamchand an innocent villager who saves a couple of urban residents out on a casual hunt. In a truly bizarre and bewitching scene Dharam overpowers a tiger twice his size and holds him hostage like a gangster with a garden knife held against his throat. It’s a stunning image that evokes bravura of the variety that might make your pelvic region thrust with hormonal anguish to leave your body for experiences far beyond your physical capacity. But consider it inside the context of a belittling emergency and it becomes an assertive reaction to the political oppression of the day. With sterilisation drives on the ground, cinema went full-belt in its attempts to beat into the extinguishing flame of Indian manhood, some bloodlust for the throbbing veins of the one animal that struts around without reputational hazards – the flawless tiger.
The mythology around the tiger guarantees it a hallowed place in our culture. The animal represents the manifest idea of a ferocious, faultless form of masculinity. Not to mention its ability to brutally murder is regarded as an extreme expression of commitment – to its territory, its family and so on. The fact that it can literally maim and devour anything in its way. It’s the kind of legend certain generational ideas of masculinity are built on. In fact, the idea of the traditional Indian hero- gainfully good-looking, flawless in his politics, and lazily vengeful (not until the last half of the film) is something we have seen time and again on the silver screen. Even to love this kind of man, our women would have to accommodate the strength and the toxicity that came with it. Men, therefore, demanded to be tamed more than they asked for care or empathy. It’s why we bred screamers before we nurtured the ability to weep as men. You don’t see the tiger crying, do you? Defeat it and that poetic point of replacing his throne can be made.
The man-animal conflict in India echoes the country’s fraught relationship with the environment. I’ve grown up on stories of men killing leopards with their bare arms and the politicisation of this mythical heroism that follows. The tiger is this explicitly exotic animal that represents at the same time brute strength and the awe-inspiring elegance of murdering without flinching. In the years after the emergency it is this regency of vaguely empowering energy that our heroes turned to. In Dharam Veer (1977), Pran stares into the eyes of a tiger, in Khoon Pasina (1977), Bachchan again wrestles a feline into submission. Fast forward Hindi cinema to the new millennium and in Vidya Balan’s Sherni the tiger has become the victim of societal and political degradation. There are no kings in the jungle anymore, just men who want to burn it down to the ground for a couch to come up where the prophetic throne was once kept. The same tiger now lives on man’s little mercies - privileged, precious but caged unto death.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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