Deewar, Chris Norrod

Christopher Norrod

Deewaar Film Review

Screening India

2/28/10

Yash Chopra’s Deewaar is a story of brothers walled apart by the paths they take in life. To escape the poverty they were left in, the older brother, Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) turns to crime.  The younger brother, Ravi (Sashi Kapoor), turns to an education, and ultimately becomes a police officer.  Produced during a particular tumultuous time in Indian history, six months before the Indian Emergency, the film’s emotions reflect those of working class and poor Indians across the nation.  Anger and uncertainty is directed at those who have wealth and those who have power; Amitabh Bachchan embodies these emotions with his angry young man performance.  He has been put down by the world around him, and he is filled with a quiet rage that follows him throughout the movie, and at several points it explodes out in a furious manner.  Deewaar has two major themes: the nature of justice and injustice, and the conflict of duty between family and society.  Leisure suits and leather versus uniforms, the movie comes down in favor of the law, but the angry young man becomes the Bollywood star.     

One notion underlying Deewar is that justice is often harsher towards the poor.  The poor have no rights, but when they advocate for those rights the resulting disorder also causes human suffering.  The Verma family struggles begin when the father attempts to advocate for the rights of coal miners.  The father is threatened into submission by corrupt businessmen into betraying his fellow sympathizers.  The older, innocent son, Vijay, is kidnapped in retaliation, and given a tattoo on his arm saying “My father is a thief”.  That moment is the first most personal taste for Vijay of injustice.  The Verma family spirals down as they flee their home, the father runs away, and the mother is forced to labor in extreme poverty.  She loses her job when she falls down and breaks bricks.  Vijay polishes shoes, sacrificing his own education to support his younger brother.  Another important moment in the film for Vijay is his response to the injustice of turning over a percentage of pay as tribute to organized crime.  Instead of turning to the law, he turns to his fists.  He beats up the mobsters and ultimately turns to crime.  As Vijay becomes more wealthy and powerful, he comes to the attention of the law, and Ravi.

Ravi, too, is no stranger to injustice.  Ravi too grows up on the streets of Bombay, and dealt with the hunger and poverty of street life.  He is refused a job because he lacks connections.  However, he ultimately lands a job in law enforcement.  His job as a policeman leads him to shoot an unarmed young boy for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family.   One important scene in the movie is when Ravi visits the family of the boy he wounded.  The mother cries for him to get out.  She argues that Ravi should be prosecuting the rich and powerful and not her son. However, the father accepts the shooting saying it makes no difference if you steal a little money or a lot.  The father, a humble ex teacher states that millions of Indians die of starvation, and not all turn to theft.  This is a scene that portrays this underlying notion of justice and its meaning.  Ravi bows down to this wisdom he “could only have learned in the home of some teacher.”  The film seems to wrestle with whether the law is a tool for the rich and powerful, and whether or not it can effectively serve justice without bias.

There is also a constant struggle between the men’s duty to their family, especially their mother, and to society.  Vijay’s lifestyle leads to great riches for his family, though at the cost of his mother, a proper Indian woman in a sari, when she discovers the source of her son’s income.  As any frequent Indian cinemagoer would know, the mother is a powerful symbol for the Indian state.  His mother leaves Vijay’s house, and lives with her other son.  Ravi is not as successful as Vijay nor is he as loved by his mother, yet she chooses to stay with him because he leads a more righteous, a more dharmic, lifestyle.  This struggle between duty and family leads to the climatic scenes when Ravi and his mother decide to apprehend Vijay.  Ravi is told by his mother to not let his hand tremble when he shoots, effectively giving him permission to commit fratricide.  Society ultimately prevails as Vijay is gunned down in the streets of Bombay, and Ravi and his mother are awarded for their efforts.