Politics, Crime, and Cinema: The World of Deewar

The Hindi word “Deewar” translates to “wall.” The name is symbolic, representing an invisible wall that gradually forms between brothers Vijay and Ravi. Unaware of it until too late, they find themselves on opposite sides of morality—Vijay as a criminal and Ravi as a police officer determined to make him surrender. When Vijay finally decides to turn himself in to reunite with his mother and build a life with Anita, the prostitute he loves, it is already too late.

Indiatime has ranked Deewaar amongst the Top 25 Must-See Bollywood Films. It was one of the three Hindi films featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, the others being Mother India (1957) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). At the 23rd Filmfare Awards in 1976, Deewaar won seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director (for Yash Chopra), and Best Supporting Actor (for Shashi Kapoor), becoming the most-awarded film that year. Interestingly, Amitabh Bachchan failed to bag the Best Actor Award, which went to Sanjeev Kumar for his performance in Aandhi.

Amitabh Bachchan recalls, “I remember while narrating the script, Salim-Javed stopped after five to ten minutes and said, Deewar would run at least for ten to fifteen weeks. After half an hour, they stopped again and said, it would run for at least twenty-five weeks. And after they completed the narration, they said that it would run at least fifty to seventy-five weeks...all in jest, of course.” For once, the duo was wrong. Deewar went on to run for one hundred and fifty weeks in many centres with daily showings even three years after its release.

The Political Backdrop

The film is set in the seventies when the ‘imagined community’ of the nation was being threatened by a repressive state. This crisis came to a head when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975. Madhava Prasad describes this moment as one of ‘deep disaggregation’ of familiar structures resulting in the ‘de-legitimisation of the authority of the state’. Popular Hindi cinema’s response was thematised in the figure of the ‘angry man’ – an anti-state, if not anti-national figure, embodied in the brooding and angry screen persona of Amitabh Bachan, who became a symbol of urban working-class militancy. Rejecting the state and accumulating wealth via the underworld, Bachchan’s character (Vijay) in Deewaar is supposed to have been modeled on the real-life don, Haaji Mastan. Mastan’s meteoric rise from a humble dockyard worker to a key player in Bombay’s underworld parallels Vijay’s own career in the film.

The hope to unseat Indira Gandhi was lost when she resorted to strong-arm tactics, breaking the back of labour movements and adopting an authoritarian stance in national politics. All this led to the crackdown in 1975 when Indira Gandhi declared a "National Emergency" that suspended all fundamental rights of citizens. It was a nineteen-month period of vicious political persecution, reminiscent of British Rule, directed at anyone who dared to oppose the government, a short-sighted attempt by the Indira Gandhi government to stay in power.

The price of this reign of terror was steep. In the 1977 election after the Emergency was lifted, the Congress Party lost power for the first time in independent India's history, ending its thirty-year dominance after 75 years of political influence. The repression fueled many stories about the arrests of top leaders and powerful figures who had fallen out of favour with the ruling Congress. One such tale involved the legendary smuggler Haji Mastaan. Years later, Salim-Javed believed that after Deewar’s massive success, Mastaan rode on the film’s fame, though Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) bore little resemblance to his life as a coolie in the docks.

We glimpse a Bombay unlike that seen in other mainstream films of the time—one marked by educated youth facing unemployment, rising smuggling, drugs, mafia lords, and people living in shanties under railway bridges, on platforms, or in huts constantly at the mercy of the rains. Slum children are denied education and pushed into labour, while men endure exploitative, weekly contract work at the docks. Meanwhile, uneducated, poor migrant housewives toil under heavy loads at construction sites.

This offers a socio-political reading of the film, except for Anita, the prostitute Vijay meets in a bar. There is no backstory of a family falling on hard times, forcing a daughter into prostitution. Glamour exists only in posh hotels, lavish bars, and luxury apartments owned by underworld figures like Davar, Vijay’s sharply dressed boss and rival in gold smuggling, and Samant, played by Madan Puri. Romance is minimal, with a few songs between Ravi and his girlfriend, reluctantly included by Salim-Javed and Yash Chopra at the producer’s insistence. Fortunately, when the film was made, despite Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and press censorship, politics, crime, and movies remained separate—unlike today, where their nexus is well known.

(The author is a film scholar. Views personal)