Ghayal was the mainstream version of protest cinema in 1990. This was a time when we looked not at each other to find fault but at flawed governance. A time when it was heroic to stand up to authority and brutal policing, to the nexus between judiciary, police, politics and big money, to fight for the weak and the unheard.
When film writers did not appease the powerful but blamed the entrenched “systems” for wide-spread corruption and violence.
It is a particularly cathartic film to watch in these times if you fast forward the tired comedy and the rather perfunctory songs including the crass item number. Especially that scene where a police man slaps a bespectacled student across his face and the hero picks up his glasses and says to the sobbing boy, “remember this hurt because it will become a storm and wash away the filth festering in this country.”
Not sure if I agree with the vigilante message in the film but it does remind us that there was a time, when films seemed more frightening than reality. Since then, a lot has changed.
Sunny Deol has joined a majoritarian party. Students are being policed and criminals garlanded. Unemployed young men think, it is heroic to fire at fellow citizens. Om Puri, the clean cut righteous cop delivering crisp come backs in his shredded chocolate voice has passed on. And was branded as an anti-national citizen and hounded in the last years of his life. Rajkumar Santoshi probably chose him for this role because he had assisted Govind Nihalani in Ardh Satya. And Deol was cast , well, because, his father was producing the film.
Mainstream cinema now has largely become subservient to a system where cruelty, oppression and corruption pass off as signs of unbridled power over the other. The wounded have no place to go anymore. Neither in cinema. Nor in life.