On June 14, 2020, newspapers broke the story that the 34-year-old male film star Sushant Singh Rajput had been found dead in his apartment in Mumbai (India). The police report submitted on June 25, 2020, concluded that he died by suicide. This, however, was not the end of the story, which has dominated prime time national television since his death, while the hashtag #JusticeforSSR has been trending on Twitter. Rajput was reasonably famous, and starred in some memorable box-office hits during his 8-year career. He was also viewed as an outsider in Mumbai's family-dominated Hindi film industry, popularly known as Bollywood. This strand of the discourse on his death has acquired the moral, political echoes of Prime Minister Modi, who positions himself as a chaiwala (tea-seller) breaking the Anglophone, elite ranks of the Congress Party. Attention surrounding Rajput's death is unsurprising, but the length and intensity of its focus while India became the worst-hit country in the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of August, raises questions about the national conversation about mental health. Online and offline, some have claimed that Rajput could not have killed himself and that his death was homicide made to look like suicide, or that the actor's demise was the result of targeted persecution. Many believe suicide is unlikely since the star looked happy, was seen smiling in recent photographs, and featured in successful box-office hits in 2019.
In response, a psychologist claiming to have treated Rajput, Susan Mofatt Walker, gave an interview to a journalist, in which she stated that Rajput had bipolar disorder. Thereafter, personal WhatsApp conversations, prescriptions provided by other doctors for the young man, and his travel details were leaked and broadcast in the press. In the face of unrelenting scrutiny—and the continuing propagation of conspiracy theories—the Central Bureau of Investigation released a statement on Sept 2, 2020, stating that they had found no evidence of murder.
The media discourse on the death of a young man by suicide has covered murder, drugs, nepotism in the film industry, and the supposedly corrupting influence of his girlfriend—but no substantial discussions about mental health. Yet, in the past half-decade, the Hindi film industry has played a prominent part in sparking public conversation about mental health, both on and off screen. In 2015, the star Deepika Padukone said in a television interview that she had recently suffered from depression. This was the first time that anyone in the public eye in India had spoken about having depression, although there are written accounts from individuals such as the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore reporting feelings of depression and loneliness. Even so, the details of Tagore's depression emerged years after his death, when he was no longer around to experience the backlash that such revelations can trigger. Padukone's interview was a landmark moment: she is a big star, and in 2015, had featured in a number of popular films. The film she was promoting that summer was a commercial success, seemingly unaffected by her disclosure of her mental health history; it seemed that this might be the beginning of a meaningful mental discourse on public health in India.
In 2017, the Indian government passed the Mental Healthcare Act, which guarantees every Indian the right to mental health care provided, or funded, by the government. Notably, the law assures that institutionalisation of a patient would be avoided as far as possible. The objective is to enable people experiencing mental illness to live in the community as productively as possible. The law was refreshingly progressive, especially for a socially conservative society such as India, where mental health awareness is poor. In my extended family, cases of mental illness are viewed with shame, terror, and ignorance, and never spoken of. National data reflect my experience: according to India's National Mental Health Survey 2015–16, 10·6% of India's 1·3 billion population have mental health disorders. Yet 80% of such patients are not receiving treatment.
Around the same time as Padukone's interview and the passing of the Mental Healthcare Act, Bollywood film experienced a shift in its narrative around mental health issues. In 2014, a film called Hasee Toh Phasee was released, in which the heroine (played by Parineeti Chopra) had an anxiety disorder. However, she is also portrayed as a high-achieving, functional person, a post-doctoral scholar in chemistry, who has returned to steal money from her father to fund her research work. This, too is resourceful, I thought, an expression of getting things done. The hero eventually falls in love with her, and they marry. Made on a budget of 270 million Indian Rupees (INR), the film made 980 million INR at the box office: a hit by anyone's standards. 2017 saw the release of Dear Zindagi, in which the heroine (played by Alia Bhatt) suffers from an episode of depression that unsettles her. Bhatt's character is a successful film professional, an independent ambitious woman living alone in Mumbai. Her psychologist is played by Shah Rukh Khan, who guides her to a realisation rooted in a childhood separation, and its happy resolution. This is the film that is most ostensibly about mental health, considering that the therapist is the second most important character in the film and played by a major star. Again, a plotline based around mental illness was no barrier to box office success: Dear Zindagi earned 1300 million INR on a budget of 300 million INR.
Other examples include the independent film Phobia (2016), which addressed issues of sexual assault, trauma, and agoraphobia, and the 2019 film Judgemental Hai Kya, in which the protagonist has a number of mental disorders including acute psychosis and dissociative disorder. Both films featured female protagonists, and had happy endings of sorts, marking a major shift from previous depictions of mental illness in Hindi films. Furthermore, these films were set in the community, rather than asylums or hospitals, in contrast with earlier Hindi films. The first notable film to touch on mental health was Khamoshi (1970), a remake of a Bengali film, in which the heroine is a nurse who cares for two broken hearted patients, jilted in love. But by the end, she is a patient at the institution herself. Another film that featured mental health was Arth (1982), an arthouse project that acquired a cult status. The film chronicles a disintegrating marriage between a husband and wife. The husband's lover, played by iconic Indian actress Smita Patil, has serious anxiety issues and eventually suffers a breakdown. In 2003, blockbuster Tere Naam featured a hero frustrated in love, who develops severe mental illness. His head is shaved, and he is tied in chains—a set-up that looks straight out of a horror film.
In all these films, mental illness is shown as something that is caused by women (failed love) or something that affects women. This is a theme still seen in the more thoughtful films released in the past few years, whereby mental illness seems to affect women, while men stand by as anchors or therapists. Sometimes, the male characters are depicted as manipulators, but remain untouched by mental illness. Although Hindi films suggest that it is largely women who have mental health problems, in reality, the opposite is true. According to data on suicides from India's National Crime Records Bureau, 1 39 106 suicides were recorded in India in 2019 (70·1% among men; 29·8% among women).
Bollywood has missed several opportunities to change the narrative. For example, Darr (2003), which was one of Shah Rukh Khan's breakout roles, is perhaps the first major Hindi film to feature a psychiatrist. Khan's character is a stammering loner who stalks a young woman obsessively, and ends up dead. The film should have led to a public conversation about mental health, especially among young men, but as a result of the strong tradition of heroes stalking women in Hindi film, this behaviour was reinforced as a beloved romantic routine. Khan reprised this obsessive stalker role in a couple of subsequent films, and it became a fashionable anti-hero identity. In fact, in these films, women might be viewed as the reason for Khan's spiral into madness.
Mental health among men has rarely been a focus of popular Hindi film. We see, instead, heroes suffering the ravages of failed love: as such, their dysfunction is seen as grief and not as depression. One of the most enduring characters in Hindi popular cinema (and culture) is Devdas, a young man who cannot marry the woman he loves, becomes an alcoholic, and falls in love with a sex worker. However, he is unable to accept her love because of his own so-called morality about women in the business of pleasure. Devdas has been made and remade at least four times in 60 years with terrific returns. Moreover, the character itself has become a prototype for the self-destructive lover, giving rise to several failed and successful projects. As I see it, in his indecision and rage, Devdas is India's Hamlet.
Sometimes, mental health among men is framed as the result of external factors such as mounting debt or a political crisis. In 2010, a small film called Peepli Live closely examined the problem of so-called farmer suicides, listed in the Indian Government's data as a specific category of suicide. The film is meant to be satirical, and frames suicide as a threat posed to optimise attention in the news. This works beautifully in the film, which is a commentary on the news business in India. But it is also interesting because of the message it portrays about farmer suicide—similar to the news media it criticises, the film views this phenomenon as a result of poor investment in agriculture, drought, and debt. This is possibly because the Indian Government does not consider the role of mental health in the issue: in a 2015 analysis (the last time the Indian Government analysed farmer suicide at length), there was no discussion of mental health with the exception of two mentions in the data chart. Socioeconomic factors are certainly instrumental, but surely mental health also merits consideration? The majority of farmer suicides occur among men, and this is likely to add to the invisibility of mental health.
In 2014, a magnificent interpretation of Hamlet called Haider was released, with Kashmir substituted for the rotten state of Denmark. If Hamlet's madness is related to his relationship with his mother, Haider's madness is caused by the excesses of the Indian state. It is not so much he who is going mad as the entire populace of Kashmir. The madness is not personal, it is political.
If cinema is considered a lens through which we can understand society, then this speaks of a public perception that men are not affected by mental illness. Instead, men suffer grief due to failed love and difficult or unattainable women, or reflect the social and political turmoil in a society. When viewed in this way, the ill-informed narrative unfolding in Rajput's demise makes sense: his death is considered a murder by an industry attempting to keep talented outsiders out, or because of mysterious forces in his personal life. Mental health, which was talked about initially, has fallen out of the conversation.
Another important film to consider, is the English-language film A Death in the Gunj, directed by the actor Konkona Sen-Sharma, which featured an ensemble of actors who are stars in independent cinema. A Kolkata family returns to their ancestral home in the small town of Mcluskiegunj and a fragile young man's mind unravels during the course of the holiday. The family are joined by old friends and lovers, and several of them are complicit in persecuting the young man, Shutu, the protagonist of the film. Shutu might be the one with diagnosable mental health problems; however, the film does a superb job of observing the various forms of bullying that he is subjected to, some of it vicious and some, routine. This bullying manifests as male teasing in particular, and general masculine impatience. This too is illness, the film suggests, referred to as toxic masculinity today.
The film doesn't locate dysfunction in a particular trauma or relationship, in the Hollywood template of psychological diagnosis. Rather, it shows us how much the characters are aware of their own cruelties and a young man's frailty, how much pleasure they take in the bullying, and how much they take for granted. The film is set in 1979, and the language surrounding mental health is missing, naturally for those times in India—as is the language of feminism, of critiquing patriarchy.
A Death in the Gunj holds up a mirror to the audience: we are often aware of our violations even if we don't use the language of mental health to describe them. Or, the specific language that we use today—“toxic masculinity or toxic patriarchy”. But bullying and teasing are not new, and we know when we cross those boundaries of behaviour. We know what we do, we know who needs kindness and yet, sometimes, we chose to say nothing. If Bollywood can introspect about its own silences and omissions on masculinity and gender, it might be able to contribute substantially to the discussion around mental health.
For the Walker video interview see https://youtu.be/u-nc7ytR3aQ
For more on Tagore see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16336774
For India's Mental Healthcare Act see https://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Mental%20Health/Mental%20Healthcare%20Act,%202017.pdf
For the full report on suicide in India see https://ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/ADSI_2019_FULL%20REPORT_updated.pdf
For the report on farmer suicide in India see https://ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/chapter-2A-suicides-in-farming-sector-2015_0.pdf
© 2020 Studioz IDrream and MacGuffin Pictures.