At a glance, One Battle After Another, the film by Paul Thomas Anderson, is about revolutions and ideological struggles. But the film resists the familiar temptation of turning these into a contest between causes. Indeed, it focuses on the lives of the individuals living in and fighting for these causes. Their lives are like those of any other person, with competing personal priorities, emotional challenges, difficult choices, and errors made in making those choices.
Significantly, the movie can be used to reflect on how revolutions should be studied in India. In turn, it might persuade a shift in how the government perceives the media and the arts that depict such revolutions.
The way we generally perceive causes globally is shaped by our elementary study of history. Although, Marxist historians may dispute this, history is taught from the point of view of ideologies and wars fought to keep the syllabus manageable. This conditions most people to look at causes as those they might support or be against. Popular cinema reinforces the view that actors are either heroes or villains and their causes
are either good or bad. With this conditioning being structurally ingrained, it is no surprise, then, that our politics often collapses into binary frames: the RSS’s versus M.K. Gandhi’s approach to colonial resistance; Maoist-Naxal versus capitalist approaches to tribal rights; or the azadi versus national security labels that get stamped on every contemporary protest.
This framing creates political divisions. It focuses on causes and revolutions that may have defined an era. In the process, it loses the complexity of the people leading these causes. It forgets that the individuals battling for these causes still had to earn a living, raise families, and make choices that had little to do with the banners they marched under. This was as true of Gandhi as it was of Jaswant Singh Khalra, as true of K.B. Hedgewar as it is of Narendra Modi. It is important to remember that even for revolutionaries, the mundane realities of bread, personal circumstances, and livelihood shaped how they pursued their missions. To see them only as avatars of ideology is to flatten their humanity.
A loss of the human perspective in understanding ideologies or revolutions
creates permanent fractures in politics and makes reasonable engagement inaccessible. It also creates causes that are perceived to be inaccessible. Keeping the human element alive in revolutions makes causes accessible across the spectrum. It reduces the burden on the future citizenry to either wholly identify with or wholly reject a cause. Instead, people can understand it as the messy sum of human experience. This, then, relieves society of the burden of permanent polarisation.
Art acts as a pressure valve not only by allowing resistance but also by reintroducing the human perspective into revolutions. It provides closure to unresolved conflicts not by resolving them politically but by rendering them humanly comprehensible. India’s popular arts industry has the potential to produce such art as well. It has done it, time and again, in movies such as Maachis, Haider and, recently, Paatal Lok. But, far too often, such art faces a lot of trouble. The recent challenges faced by the film, Panjab’95, from the Censor Board are a fresh wound on this front. Such actions discourage artists from engaging with revolutions.
This is precisely why Indian politics should reconsider how it views art and media that depict revolutions. Too often, governments approach such works only through the lens of the cause being espoused: does this film, play, or book align with the ‘national interest’ or does it risk encouraging dissent? This question misses the central point. The deeper value of art lies not in the ideologies it champions but in the lives it depicts.
If Anderson’s film offers one lesson for India, it is this: revolutions are not only the stories of causes; they are the stories of people who lived under their shadow.
Kashish Makkar is a lawyer and a consulting Associate Professor at Jindal Global University. Views are personal