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Very rarely do I recommend movies to people. Even rarer that I forgo my beauty sleep to watch something. But art, occasionally, jolts you awake. And great art makes you fervently write an article at 3 a.m. about its greatness. (Please forgive any typos, dear editor.) Even if you stop reading at this point, I don't mind. Please just scroll down till the end, click on the YouTube link, and watch this film. Sit down with your parents, your grandparents, your politically apathetic work buddy, your disillusioned best friend, your film bro boyfriend — gather the village, really, and watch this. It'll make you see our world a little clearer.
Some films age like fine wine, acquiring new layers of meaning over the decades. Others remain frozen in time, relics of a bygone era. Kissa Kursi Ka, Amrit Nahata’s razor-sharp political satire, belongs to neither category. It is, instead, a film that remains startlingly relevant — perhaps even more so today than when it was first banned, burned, and buried under the weight of state censorship.
Kissa Kursi Ka transports you to a parallel universe where political buffoonery and unchecked power have reached their logical conclusion. Except, of course, that universe is not so parallel after all. Nahata’s film may have been crafted as an exaggerated lampooning of Indira Gandhi’s regime during the Emergency, but its core themes — the cult of personality, bureaucratic doublespeak, and the commodification of democracy — echo with eerie familiarity in contemporary India. If history repeats itself; first as tragedy, then as farce, Kissa Kursi Ka manages to be both at once.
Kissa Kursi Ka tells the story of Gangaram (Manohar Singh), a street performer plucked from obscurity and turned into the puppet leader of a fictional republic, Jan Gan Desh. He is a man who stumbles his way through speeches, feigns concern for the people, and ultimately serves the interests of shadowy power brokers rather than the citizenry. His primary audience is Janta (Shabana Azmi), a personification of the Indian public — mute, helpless, and perpetually at the mercy of politicians who promise them the world while pilfering their pockets.
You don't have to squint too hard to see the real-world parallels. Gangaram is a thinly veiled caricature of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s ambitious and authoritarian son. His grand plans — a populist car-manufacturing scheme, a sterilisation drive marketed as a public good — are ripped straight from the playbook of the actual Emergency years. The film’s supporting cast, including the ruthless political puppeteers Gopal (Raj Kiran) and Meera (Surekha Sikri), are ciphers for the sycophants and cronies who orbited the power centre in the 1970s.
Nahata's approach is not subtle. His style is brash, theatrical, and deeply symbolic. Classical dance sequences, performed by Swapna Sundari, cut through the political jargon with the elegance of a well-timed metaphor. The sterilisation programme is reimagined in the film as a rat-extermination scheme that exists only on paper. When Janta attempts to expose the scam by presenting actual dead rats, she is dismissed, told to produce evidence that she was the one who killed them. It’s a moment of absurdist genius, highlighting the perverse logic of bureaucratic corruption.
The film’s most important critique is its depiction of political opportunism. Gangaram, once a pawn, soon learns that power is its own drug. He begins to wield it for personal gain. When confronted with opposition, he resorts to that age-old trick of tyrants — manufacturing an external enemy. In a speech that lands with devastating weight even today, he declares that his critics must be in league with foreign saboteurs, reducing dissent to treason in a single breath.
Few films in Indian history have suffered as much before seeing the light of day. After being submitted for certification in 1975, Kissa Kursi Ka was swiftly buried under bureaucratic red tape. The censor board, instead of issuing a verdict, passed the film up the chain of command until it landed directly in the hands of Sanjay Gandhi. All prints of the film were confiscated and allegedly transported to the Maruti factory in Gurgaon, where they were incinerated.
Nahata, undeterred, reshot the film after the Emergency was lifted in 1977. But the damage had been done. The film’s sharpest edges had been dulled by time, and its impact was diminished. The very people who might have rallied behind it in defiance had, by then, moved on. The satirist had fired his shot, but the target had already shifted.
Looking at Kissa Kursi Ka today, I'm struck less by how much has changed and more by how little. The mechanisms of power remain the same. The uneasy relationship between art and politics persists. Filmmakers continue to tiptoe around political satire, knowing full well that stepping on the wrong toes could mean career-ending consequences.
But perhaps the most enduring message of Kissa Kursi Ka lies in its final, haunting imagery. As Gangaram clings to his kursi — his throne, his seat of power — he is at once a comical figure and a terrifying one. In politics, the players may change, but the game remains the same.
Nahata may have been exiled to the footnotes of Indian cinema, but his film lingers on — not just in its grainy frames, but in every instance of censorship, every crackdown on dissent, and every leader who mistakes power for permanence.
In the end, the 'kursi' is never truly theirs. It simply waits for the next occupant.
