Avatar, Forest Gump, Rain Man, Children of a Lesser God, My Left Foot, Scent of a Woman, are few of the Oscar-winning films in Hollywood. Guzaarish, My name is Khan, Paa, Kaminey, Black, Koi Mil Gaya, Khamoshi, Sholey, are some of the much-admired and celebrated films from Bollywood. All these films have one thing in common. They all portray disability or impairment in one form or another, either through the lead characters or sidelined characters.
Earlier on, disability was a crutch to evoke either pity or cheap laughs. Hardly ever was it the main theme of the film. Be it a limp or stutter, it was an occasion for insensitive comedy. One of the departures, so to say, was Pathinaru Vayathinile in Tamil, where Kamal Hassan played the limping, mentally challenged hero hopelessly in love. It was remade in Hindi, Solva Sawan, with Amol Palekar. There was an attempt at empathy that went beyond sloppy sentimentality. When it came to blindness, we had the person blundering about with arms stretched out. Nirupama Roy often played the blind mother during the 70s.
The recent trend, however, has been to make a disabled character central to a film. This started with films like Koshish and Sadma. Today, there is a rise in educated depictions of disability – mental or physical – with a greater sense of understanding and sensitivity.
Undoubtedly, these films have evolved to take a more optimistic and thoughtful approach. The question however is, why do the film juries in India or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences display such a noticeable tendency to award actors and actresses playing characters with various forms of physical or mental disability? Why are all the newspapers and websites considering the film The King’s Speech as the most likely winner at the Oscars this year? In other words, why do films with disability portrayals attract much more attention from the audience than most other films?
“These films win the awards and get noticed because the subject still has novelty in our formulaic cinema. When a big star plays a character with a disability, it automatically gets maximum attention. I also think our collective guilt, at the way our society treats disabled people with callous indifference or insulting pity, finds expiation by acknowledging cinematic representation of what we don’t empathize with.” opines Maithili Rao, an author, film critic and a member of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards Nominations Council.
According to Krithika Murali, a final year, Disability and Media studies student at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, films with disability are usually the winners because “these films are significantly distinct from the regular genres, and are a result of the filmmakers’ constant attempts to offer something new to the audience.”
In a bid to bring originality in the film, filmmakers often wind up portraying the harsh facts of life with little or no resemblance to reality. This drift from reality is another reason for these films to get noticed. “I find Black offensively insensitive in the way the disabled child is subjected to violence and later, Rani Mukherjee is saddled with a Chaplinesque gait to underline her awkwardness.” comments Ms Rao. She further adds that these films have the right mix to provoke emotions and incite sympathy for the characters and thereby involving the audience in the plight of the actor. “For instance Guzaarish sugarcoats Ethan’s disability by artfully staged flashbacks of his graceful body and manipulates our pity.” she elaborates.
“It is heartening to see that these films have moved away from presenting disabled characters as dependent and helpless to present them as individuals who overcome the difficulties caused by their disability to ultimately emerge as winners, this probably cheers the jury as well, which is why they encourage these films.” suggests Krithika Murali.
Furthermore, there is an effort to inform and educate the audience. The information is given crisply, with humor and appealing drama. “Unlike in Black and Guzaarish where the aim was to create operatic, over the top emotionalism, My Name is Khan and Paa went into the details of what afflicts the protagonists without burdening the characters with self-pity. Once the film gets under way, you see them as particular individuals who are different. This is most encouraging.” explains Ms Rao.
We still have a long way to go before we have an Indian version of the Rain Man or Children of a Lesser God. Disability films should not be awarded because of their intense acting but for their sensibility and adherence to reality. These films have made us realize the existence of these disabilities but this is not enough. “Although films with disability will be appreciated and noticed by our audience, for more pitiful reasons than deserving, the filmmakers must be mature enough to handle these issues so as to make the audience able to comprehend the issue in its entirety. Shahid Kapoor’s stammer in Kaminey should not have become a source of amusement since it may cause for a much greater disgrace for real lifer stammers. Clearly, this was because of the way the film was presented.” believes Krithika. “The effort should be not to capitalize or exploit the ‘novelty’ factor but to treat disabled people and their particular stories with empathy and without condescension.” concludes Ms Rao.
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