In the winter of 2005 Indians switched on their TV sets to watch yet another “breaking news” story, but one which shocked them. In the town of Meerut, police officers, mostly women, swooped down on lovers in a park and began to beat them up. Along with them they took photographers and news cameramen with the promise of an exclusive sting operation. What is the story of this news story? The film looks outside the frames that weave the frenetic tapestry of Breaking News on India’s news channels to uncover a town’s complex dynamics – the fear of love, the constant scrutiny and control of women’s mobility and sexuality, a history of communal violence, caste brutalization and feudal equations. Assuming the tone of pulp fiction and tabloid features it examines the legacy of this kind of story telling, from the relishing accounts of true crime magazines like Manohar Kahaniyan to the double morality of pulp detective fiction to the tabloid news on Indian TV, to unfold a thrilling but disturbing tale of it’s own. As the salacious media frenzy around violent events takes on ever more unscrupulous forms, the story of the film becomes all the more relevant today.
Ever since I began making documentary films, I have had a troubled relationship with the idea of the expose, the investigation that will reveal and fix the culprits quite finally. It seemed to me that although the self aggrandizement and easy understanding inherent in that position was problematic, it also was a potentially violent idea, one that needed to be enacted with considered seriousness, with some complexity and with an acceptance that we do not in reality inhabit a space of pure justice and democracy. And that in speaking this language one would also speak a language heavy with morality, rather than ethics.
From Tehelka to India TV’s Shakti Kapoor story, the sting operation has become the accepted language of television news. When I saw the Operation Majnoo story I felt as if this language had come to a culminative moment – one that justifies violence in the name of righteous indignation. I also wondered how, in this atmosphere of heavy moralizing – whether political or personal – a young person was to find a true, meaningful, relevant articulation of personal relationships and their intimate journey in the world.
Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani therefore became a film that responded not just to the practice of television around me, but to my ongoing concerns about the language of the political film. The film excavates the language of pulp investigative/detective, fiction and non-fiction to make a comment about how thin the line between the two is, because in the end language and aesthetics are what creates the final, visceral impact from which conclusions also emerge- to look at the world of implication, not information. For me it was an effort to make a film that suggested these things associatively, rather than instructively, winding in and out of different windows onto the commonly understood version – and to take a different turn half way through the narrative to propose a different sort of speech, a different sort of feeling, a different sort of story.
