There was a time when the neta was a staple stock Bollywood character—a kurta-waistcoat, Nehru topi-wearing scheming caricature of corruption. He got lost somewhere between multiplex-friendly plots and a new wave of content-driven cinema. But a resurrection is underway. And as the lines between fact and fiction are overlapping rapidly in our post-reality age, India’s film industries have been busy churning out a new formula—the neta biopic, along with other films with a sprinkling of our politicos. It phases out the stock characters and oblique references to politicians with promise of the real stuff: our netas, up close and fact-fictional. The timing is opportune too.
Ahead of the general elections due this summer, filmmakers of all hues are outdoing each other to rustle up a political biopic or a quickie on a contemporary event, with an ostensible agenda of influencing the great Indian electorate.
While some of them are unabashedly hagiographic accounts intended to lionise the central protagonists, dead or alive, others are downright hatchet jobs...
