The binaries that did not exist

So Ajay Devgan will now be shaving his head to play Chanakya. And the original Chanakya, Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi recently said that when he first pitched the show to DD sometime in the mid-1980s, it was rejected.
He also was at pains to add that this baffled him as historical shows like Tipu Sultan were already on air.
Now there are many things wrong with this statement.
To begin with, he gives the impression that while the state run channel was open to airing Tipu Sultan, somehow it did not respect Chanakya’s story enough to allow it on air.
For the record, Tipu Sultan was aired not in the mid eighties but in 1990.
The first insinuation that Chanakya was rejected because of some ‘liberal’ agenda, is wrong too because in the mid eighties, when Rajiv Gandhi was the PM, Ramayana and Mahabharata were being ideated at the behest of former bureaucrat and information and broadcasting secretary SS Gill .
Gill had written letters to BR Chopra and Ramanand Sagar to reinterpret the epics for a new generation. The “agenda” was to tell stories that would hook people across societal divides. And they did. D. K. Bose, the media director of Hindustan Thompson Associates, once said that the viewership of Ramayana was more than 50 per cent even in the predominantly non-Hindi speaking southern Indian States of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. The show was watched by people of “other” religions as well. In large numbers.
So Dwivedi’s aspersion that somehow his serial did not fit into the “scheme of things, ” of the powers that be is opportunistic. Especially at a time when it is being propagandised that somehow, “leftist, liberal, secular forces” are coming after Hindus and their pride.
Regardless of the pride with which the ruling party is now airing Ramayana and Mahabharat on DD, the fact is that both were created and aired at a time when they were not in power.
Dwivedi also forgot to mention that in the late 1990s, he held the position of a programming division head at Zee TV and tried retelling the Mahabharata (Ek Aur Mahabharat) but had to pull it off air due to a poor ratings.
However when Chanakya was aired in 1991, it was a success on DD even though Tipu Sultan was just concluding around the same time after enjoying a good viewership.
So, the binaries he is hinting at never existed then.
It is just profitable now to say that they did.
And Dwivedi despite the success he enjoyed then now says, “My show ran into so many hurdles and so many people had criticised it at that time, giving it a religious and political colour. Had it not been for the country’s limited intelligensia (sic), Chanakya would not have run its course on TV.”
Well, given that a secular government was in power then, wouldn’t the “intelligentsia” have been more powerful then?Especially when every dissenter then was not labelled as an urban naxal or a member of a mysterious “tukde tukde gang”?
In 2003 in fact, when the current party was in power, Dwivedi himself filmed Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar which was about a tenuous love between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man during Partition.
Chanakya is now being rediscovered as a Hindutva icon when he really was a political strategist, philosopher, and a kingmaker and Dwivedi possibly wants to milk this moment to his full advantage.
It was in fact Gulzar, as Naseer saab had once told me in an interview, who had found it tough to raise money to fund a TV series on the life of Mirza Ghalib. After much struggle, the series was aired in 1998 and is today a cult favourite because of its lead actor, its writing and timeless musical score.
Hence this sudden grudge airing by Dwivedi is just another way to get on the gravy train like so many others in the film and TV industry have in the recent years.
The fact however remains that there really was a time when even on a state run channel, content was diverse and designed to bring people together rather than tear them apart.
And let us please get this straight once and for all.There has never been any “khatra” to majoritarian narratives. Ever.
It was after all a Muslim who wrote BR Chopra’s Mahabharat and when critiqued by bigots, said that nobody was better qualified to retell this story because he loved and understood India better than anyone else. Unfortunately, Dwivedi cannot make the same claim.