‘Devastated’: Ashish Avikunthak’s reconfiguration of Indian political cinema
There has been significant discourse surrounding the current state of political cinema, especially after Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest recently garnered widespread attention. It used the concept of a Holocaust narrative to construct a contemporary indictment of Israel and the complacency of the West, a fundamental reading that was either purposely ignored or unintentionally neglected by many. In the case of Ashish Avikunthak’s Devastated, it’s impossible to do that because the urgency is almost palpable.
In the past few years, there has been a noticeable rise in the production of “political content” designed for Indian streaming services. Packaging overarching themes such as corruption into genre frameworks, these releases are inevitably more concerned with entertaining than anything else. That’s exactly why there has been a gaping void for a new form of political cinema within the Indian landscape, having been propped up by powerful documentaries for the most part.
Devastated is the answer to that crisis, emerging as a direct response to the steadily deteriorating Indian political climate and the rise of religio-fascism within both social and governmental spheres. In Avikunthak’s distinct style, it follows the conversations of a state-sanctioned assassin, both imagined and otherwise, whose days are defined by his contributions to the state’s ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population.
Oscillating between his wife who desires for the same kind of violence from him to his lover and sections of dialogue based on the first 38 verses of The Bhagavad Gita’s second chapter, Devastated uses the same texts that were once weaponised by Nazi Germany and now by Indian right-wing conservatives to conduct a stark evaluation of religious fundamentalism. The protagonist undergoes the psychological conditioning that Krishna subjected Arjuna to on the precipice of murder, presenting the act of killing as a moral imperative. There is no theoretical distance between these haunting scenes and Indian audiences, especially because of their regrettable familiarity with Islamophobic discourse along similar lines.
Violence as an institutional apparatus is regularly depicted in new Indian releases, glorified through the performances of superstars who don the uniforms of police officers and embark on missions to ensure national security. Avikunthak’s reconfiguration of this spectacle is not only fascinating but also exigent, delving deep into the horrifying impact of a system that is designed to indoctrinate and exterminate. It’s easy to place the blame on a “few bad apples” whenever news headlines featuring religious extremism in India pop up, but that’s a dangerously superficial analysis of a graver problem.
This thread of the philosophical narrative is brilliantly complemented by the segments that repeatedly reference the CIA’s KUBARK manuals that detail unimaginably perverse interrogation and torture techniques. By placing them alongside the inter-titles of the Gita’s verses, Avikunthak highlights how the ancient text’s views on psychological manipulation, genocidal ratiocination and viewing human beings as dehumanised targets have been appropriated and modernised by governments everywhere.
Interestingly, the menacing philosophical arguments that are presented through both the mythological dialogue as well as the government programming inevitably remind one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on the relationship between authority and violence as a form of social obedience. It’s ritualistic, culturally codified and neatly embedded within a logical structure, supplemented by unsettling visions of animal sacrifice and people engaging in corporeal mutilation.
Devastated’s protagonist is completely devoid of any spiritual enlightenment even though he is devoted to what he believes is his religious duty. He has been completely hollowed out by the morbidly comical contradictions between his ideological viewpoints and his actions. Having routinely dehumanised his victims, he no longer remembers what it means to be human himself.
At its core, political cinema is designed to challenge and attack the societal institutions that it deems worthy of critique. When that very critique is commercialised and swiftly de-fanged at its origin, it’s nothing more than impotent filmmaking masquerading with “political” tags to benefit from streaming algorithms. Devastated is a step towards a potential rectification of that bleak condition, with Avikunthak leading the charge through a film that is not afraid to directly confront the increasingly authoritarian national trajectory while also paving the way for future generations of Indian filmmakers to think in terms of cinematic linguistics that do not conform to the derivative form that plagues contemporary Indian movies.
Dare I say it, Devastated is Avikunthak’s most accessible film yet, and it really needs to be. While it utilises Avikunthak’s familiarly disruptive visual language to change the epistemological foundations of the traditional narrative experience, the material it draws upon and the themes it addresses are not only a major part of the national sociopolitical consciousness but also painfully symptomatic of the way in which they are being warped for mass mobilisation.
At a time when such conversations are being ruthlessly sanitised in India, this is political filmmaking that is defiantly bold in its anti-fascist convictions.