Flight into the wild

My Mirror column:

An evocative new film melds classic Western motifs with a vision of the Chambal wilderness, using a gang of 1970s dacoits to ask existential questions

A group of armed men arrive in a village to commit a robbery. They are on foot, their leader using a megaphone to announce who they are (“Je baaghi Maan Singh ko gang haigo”), why they are here, and what they would like the locals to do (the women and children to go indoors, the men to stay where they are). Then they walk into a wedding, round up the guests, and slide into a bag the several glittering gold sets laid out by the local jeweller for his daughter’s dowry. When the father of the bride starts to sink to the ground, Maan Singh sits the tubby little man down and announces that no jewels are to be taken off the bride’s body. Then, with impeccable gravity, he makes his incredulous deputy Vakila (Ranvir Shorey) hand over 101 rupees to the weeping girl.

This scene from Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya contains much tongue-in-cheek humour: the procession of dacoits that mimics an electoral campaign, the wedding gift delivered earnestly while looting. And Manoj Bajpayee, playing another ‘Maan Singh’ 25 years after his career-inaugurating performance in Bandit Queen, revels in creating characters who can keep us guessing. But Chaubey and his screenwriter Sudeep Sharma (they last collaborated on Udta Punjab) are also using the scene to communicate something that lies at the core of their film: that dakus have a dharam.

That thought isn’t, of course, something spectacularly new. Our memories may have been addled by Sholay overkill, but the uber-villainous Gabbar Singh is really not typical of how dacoits have been popularly seen in India. Pre-colonial bandits like Sultana Daku were immortalised in folk songs and nautankis, and that tradition carried on into Hindi cinema, too: think of Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna (1961), or Sunil Dutt in Mother India (1957) or the underwatched Mujhe Jeene Do (1963). The historical dacoit on whose life Sonchiriya builds its fictional tale, one Malkhan Singh, was one of the last of these admired baaghis, a hero in Chambal because of certain moral codes. As described recently by photographer Prashant Panjiar, who spent some months photographing him for a book in the early 1980s, “he wouldn’t drink or let his men drink, he was a champion of the poor and made temples, and his gang wouldn’t misbehave with women”. More recently, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s superb biopic of Paan Singh Tomar told the stranger-than-fiction tale of a man who is driven to the army by poverty, becomes a great sportsman, and then pushed by humiliation to turn against the state he once represented.

Sonchiriya, though, is more invested than Paan Singh Tomar in paying cinematic tribute to some of the classic tropes of the Western: most obviously, the revenge narrative with a wronged man in pursuit of others, and the damsels-in-distress who must be rescued along the way. What I found exciting, though, is that these fictional characters and tropes inhabit a fully realised Indian universe that feels sociologically and linguistically bang-on. The cyclical Gujjar-Thakur battles of the Chambal region, and the historical entry of the Mallahs, once a caste of boatmen, into the gang wars; an arid rural landscape whose harsh dusty expanses feel part of its unforgiving poverty; a feudal world where women are merely the currency of male honour, set off against a heartfelt belief in local goddess shrines: all these the film evokes, if sometimes only glancingly.

It is gloriously shot and lit, with set-pieces that range from a shootout on a lamp-lit Diwali night to a woman singing on a boat on the Chambal river, evoking an almost mythical sense of heroes in exile. The ravines are put to great strategic effect in the action scenes, but also help to make Maan Singh and his not-so-merry men appear like the lone survivors of a disappearing world. Mostly we see the men walking tall on the outcrops (a heroic sort of framing which, to be fair, the filmmaker makes self-conscious reference in another scene featuring the lighting of a beedi); it is only when we first encounter a woman that the camera lowers itself into a gorge.

That scene, in which Bhumi Pednekar’s Indumati pulls down her ghoonghat before aiming a gun at the strange men who have appeared above, was one of many that drew informed sniggers from a largely male audience in a South Delhi multiplex. “Jeth lage hai uska,” went the snarky response in this case, gesturing to the fact that North Indian upper caste women veil themselves before their husband’s elder brothers. Earlier, when the youthful Thakur ‘hero’ Lakhna (played, interestingly, by Sushant Singh Rajput), steps back in fear at something he sees, a voice from the back said loudly: “Ghabra gayo?”. “Rajput hai,” sniggered his companion. 

Not all the laughter was sociological: when a brilliant delivery of “Bhaiyon aur behenon” by Manoj Bajpayee lifted the film out of its Emergency era setting, the whole hall erupted in chuckles. But Chaubey’s humour can be too dark for his audience: when the final familial crisis unfolded under a sign for ‘Parivar Niyojan’, I might have been the only one laughing.

I have mixed feelings about the film’s use of little girls as symbols of curse and benediction. But it is in turning the landscape into a symbolic terrain that Sonchiriya achieves something haunting. Varun Grover’s lyrics for ‘Saanp Khavega’ use snakes, mice and vultures to conjure a bloody cycle of life, in which each species will meet its match. If the maggoty snake at the film's start foretells death, a fortuitous escape from a gharial is a sign of long life. But like the golden bird of the title, the Great Indian Bustard, freedom in the ravines is both threatened and elusive.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Mar, 2019.

Everything is Illuminated

This week's Mirror column:

Are there more stoners on the Hindi film screen? A short history of filmi drugs, from old-fashioned to uber-cool  

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal in GoW is one of Anurag Kashyap's many pot-smoking protagonists

Earlier this year, we had much brouhaha about showing drug use on screen, in the context of Abhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab. Producer Anurag Kashyap came out swinging against the CBFC, and when Udta Punjab finally released (with just one cut), many people, including myself, noted that its tragic portrait of drug-addled youth and a corrupt state couldn't possibly be seen as encouraging drugs.

The week after Udta, Kashyap released another film, this one directed by himself. Raman Raghav 2.0 was publicised as a portrait of a serial killer. Which it is. But it is equally a portrait of a killer cop, played by Masaan actor Vicky Kaushal. And drugs are crucial to Raghav's character: driving his violence, while also providing a crutch that helps him live with its effects. The introductory nightclub sequence, cut to Varun Grover's marvelous lyrical wordplay about qatl-e-aam, has a psychedelic quality that could rival any of Udta's blazingly coked-up scenes. And unlike in Udta, these scenes in RR2.0 aren't swaddled in a thick layer of anti-drugs messaging. But no-one batted an eyelid.

Not that I wanted them to. Kaushal's coke-fuelled murderous cop can't possibly be perceived a dangerous role model. But there is no doubt that this is a different sort of character from the sort that Hindi movies used to allow in the drug-consuming department.

Through the '70s and '80s, drugs were what the villain's evil empire was built on, along with illicit daru and adulterated dawai. An occasional hero might take on a drug cartel, sometimes for a personal reason: Charas (1976) had Dharmendra falling for Hema Malini's hapless drug mule; Janbaaz (1986) had Feroz Khan avenging the drugged death of his girlfriend (Sridevi); the sparky Jalwa (1987) had Naseeruddin Shah as a cop fighting brown sugar traffickers after his younger brother died injecting it.

Very few Hindi films had protagonists who used drugs. If they did, you knew they had to die for their sins: the hippie Janice/Jasbir of Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), icon of cool though Zeenat Aman and 'Dum Maro Dum' made her, had to commit suicide for shame. That strand of moral comeuppance is still around: think of Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion (2008), in which Kangana Ranaut's reigning supermodel Shonali loses her job and later her life to her addiction, although heroine Meghna (Priyanka Chopra) is allowed to reform herself. And as late as 2011, we had a film like Dum Maro Dum rejigging the old Hindi film villain, with Aditya Pancholi as the white-suited Lorsa Biscuita, whose benevolent industrialist is a front for secret druglord.

Abhay Deol in Kashyap's Dev D (2009) drowns his sorrows in drink and drugs

More recently, though, marijuana-smokers have begun to appear on the Hindi film screen. Anurag Kashyap might have heralded the change, with dopehead heroes as dissimilar as Abhay Deol's Dev D and Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal (in Gangs of Wasseypur 2). He also possibly gave us Hindi cinema's first female smoker-up: Jesse Randhawa's sari-wearing college lecturer in Gulaal, who lights up while laughing about her “bahut buri aadat”.


The new comfort-level with stoners has opened up space for a film like Go Goa Gone, a silly but funny comedy in which a Goa rave produces an outbreak of zombies. Even in a film as harrowing as Udta, the relaxing effect of drugs is allowed a moment: a syringe planted in Diljit Dosanjh's neck brings down his guard enough to voice his feelings to Kareena Kapoor. But the good-drug vs bad-drug line remains zealously guarded. Kashyap himself seems to recognize more serious drug use as part of a dark, dystopic inner world: in his unreleased first film Paanch (2003), for instance, to which the teenage-gang-gone-wrong in Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) paid homage. Even last week's shallow and annoying M Cream, which centres on four rich Delhi brats setting out for the hills in search of a legendary hash—and ostensibly finding themselves, crafts its single moment of drama around Imaad Shah's charsi hero Figaro preventing his silly friend Maggie from shooting up.

The idea of marijuana as harmless and happy-making is making its way into the cool new family film: Shandaar turns not eating meat on Tuesdays into an extended gag involving magic mushrooms, while Kapoor and Sons has a grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) sharing a joint with his warring grandsons.

Jesse Randhawa as Anuja in Gulaal (2009) may have been Hindi cinema's first female pot-smoker

But any conversation about drug consumption in Hindi films should really include the narcotic that Indian civilization has sanctioned since time immemorial: bhang. Unlike cannabis rolled into cigarettes, whose popularity comes via a firang route, bhang is made by grinding cannabis leaves into paste and eaten (see Shrilal Shukla's classic novel Raag Darbaari for a paean to the process). Sometimes mixed into sweets (or milky thandai on Holi), bhang is not just socially licensed but ritually encouraged. And while they may be new to dope-smoking, our films have always treated bhang as a gentle inducement to hilarity. think of Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz singing Jai Jai Shiv Shankar as they careen down temple steps, or Amitabh Bachchan breaking into the rambunctious Khaike Paan Banaraswala in Don, or my all-time favourite: the bhang pakodas in Angoor which make Aruna Irani amorously giggly and Deven Verma imagine a toad to accompany his rendition of Preetam Aan Milo.


Unfortunately, barring 2012's charming Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (in which the family in question isn't exactly 'cool', but the script's use of cannabis undeniably is), bhang seems to have exited the Hindi film universe. Maybe the cool people think it's too old-fashoned. Around the 2011 release of Don 2, Shah Rukh Khan was asked if he enjoys bhang on Holi. “Apart from smoking,” said SRK, “aur koi buri aadat abhi tak nahi hai mujh mein.” As someone who is a fan of its entirely legal (and smokeless) joys, I must confess to being devastated. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31st July 2016.

A River Runs Through It

Yesterday's Mirror column:

Masaan brings to life a Banaras of sweetness and power, melding the ache of the old with the shock of the new.

Masaan ticks many of the boxes people might think of when they think of Banaras. There is a retired Sanskrit teacher, and a drunken dom raja. There is the pulsating excitement of Durga Puja, and the quiet tableau of life along the ghats. But this Banaras is neither the sweetened Yash Raj variety that leavened the teariness of Pradip Sarkar's Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), nor the relentlessly dialoguebaaz version that enlivened the first half of Aanand L Rai's Raanjhana (2013). Rai and his scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma might be said to have specialised in a self-referential, sardonic, streetsmart Banaras - opening their film with Kundan (Dhanush) remembering his first sight of Zoya (Sonam) in childhood as "Banaras's first gift to me", or having Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub wistfully declare, "Mohalle ke laundon ka pyaar aksar doctor aur engineer utha ke le jaate hain" only to have our hero Kundan retort with "Murari, yeh Banaras hai. Agar launda sala yahan bhi haar gaya, toh jeetega kahan?" The masculine energy of the city that the film channelled was perhaps best summed up in the song "Banarasiya", in which Irshad Kamil punned on the word for a denizen of Banaras and the fact of becoming a pleasure-seeker, a lover: "bana rasiya". 

For Masaan, director Neeraj Ghaywan and scriptwriter Varun Grover adopt a very different tone. Here Banaras is not a label to be tossed around for pleasure, or invoked for drama. Grover and Ghaywan are talented enough to deposit us smack bang in the middle of everything that makes the city unique, and alternate wordlessly yet powerfully, between the grand narratives that Banaras makes so effortlessly possible and the small-town self it clings to with such tenacity. 

"Chhoti jagah, chhoti soch," mutters Richa Chaddha's Devi in a moment of disgust at the place she must call home, a place where the Banarasiya hero might take his pleasure, but which can only stifle spirited, curious young women like her. For Devi, Banaras holds no romance. It is a North Indian small town like any other, complete with stultifying sexual morality and venal corruption, and even the internet cannot offer freedom from its terrible lack of anonymity. The virtual world opens up a window - but leads down an abyss. 

In the film's second narrative thread, too, the city shackles its inhabitants. It is the internet - Facebook, to be precise - that enables an otherwise unlikely encounter, bringing the son of a corpse-burning dom into contact with the poetry-reciting daughter of a well-off Baniya family. The astoundingly talented Vicky Kaushal plays Deepak with a haunting mixture of passion and resignation. In what is possibly Deepak's most memorable scene (and there are many) with the charming Shalu (Shweta Tripathi, superbly underplayed), she asks him playfully why he hasn't taken her home, and makes several chirpy attempts to guess where he lives. Unable to deal with her light-hearted banter about a geography that for him is laden with unwanted meaning, Deepak explodes into cruelty. 

The motifs of stagnation and escape, of crossing over and staying put, recur through the film in other forms. Grover makes marvellous use of the Hindi poet Dushyant Kumar's lines, "Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai, main pul sa thartharata hoon" ("You pass by like some train, I tremble like a bridge") to produce an all-new love song. The train passing in the distance comes a little closer when our protagonists take jobs in the railways - and yet, as the railway babu (played wonderfully by Pankaj Tripathi) points out, of the trains that come to the station, only 28 stop. 64 just pass by. 

What flows through everything is the Ganga, churning the lives of all the film's characters into a single swirling stream. It is upon its banks, by the raging fires of Manikarnika, that they must embrace death, and from its murky waters that they must draw a renewed desire for life. 

In what is perhaps the film's most underrated thread, a precocious little boy called Jhonta (the winsome Nikhil Sahni) tries to help his blustering Guruji (Sanjay Mishra, in his finest turn since Ankhon Dekhi) by literally diving into the depths. And here, too, the river offers something like resolution. 

It is fitting, then, that when the film does leave Banaras, it is not to go too far away: not London or New York, nor even Delhi or Bombay. It is to the Sangam in Allahabad - the point where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the hidden, mythical Saraswati. And the Sangam proves worthy of the name. 

Masaan is beautifully conceived, and lyrically shot by cinematographer Avinash Arun (who directed one of the best films of recent years, the Konkan-set Killa. I have two complaints about the film: one about a figure of unrelieved evil, and the second that there is one grand plot twist too many: I felt a bit manipulated. But to have made a film about a city and a river as overdetermined as Banaras and the Ganga, to have taken something so heavily laden with meaning and made it seem fresh, is a huge achievement. To have done so while also making us weep, for our past and our present and our future, is an unmitigated triumph.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.