Wrestling with shadows

My Mirror column:

Sultan is a vehicle crafted for the Salman Khan persona. Our responses to it will be inescapably shaped by that.

A still from Sultan, starring Anushka Sharma and Salman Khan

There's a moment in Sultan when Salman Khan, as the film's eponymous prize wrestler Sultan Ali Khan, after a series of spectacularly bare-faced product-placements doubling up as fictional advertisements, faces the camera and pronounces that he's done enough: “Pehelwan hoon, actor nahi. [I'm a wrestler, not an actor]” It's a scene only Salman Khan can pull off – highlighting his brawny image in the guise of self-deprecation; cocking a snook at critics who might dare suggest that acting isn't his strongest suit, while laughing all the way to the bank.

Ali Abbas Zafar's film about a celebrated wrestler's fall and rise has provided Khan with yet another opportunity to play a variation on his own myth. Given the “bachcha hai, maaf kar do” remarks that greet the 50-year-old superstar's every real-life crime and misdemeanour, the film's presentation of Salman's character -- as hot-headed but pure of heart, eminently fallible but eventually forgiveable, channelling emotion into violence -- feels rather too close for comfort.

Sultan is the prototype of the childish man, whom we must not just absolve but actually applaud for his childishness: “Mera pyaar pakka hai, jaise tera bachpana saccha hai (My love is strong, just as your childishness is true),” says Sultan's estranged wife Aarfa (an impressive Anushka Sharma) as she accepts him back.

Aarfa, on paper, is a textbook 'women's empowerment' character: a sharp talker with impressive wrestling moves and more impressive ambitions. The only daughter of the village pehelwan (Kumud Mishra), Aarfa gets an education in Delhi, but returns to carry on her father's legacy, to represent his Jaanbaaz Akhara to the world. And even as Sultan remains stuck at the standard-issue combination of stalking and relentless hopefulness that is apparently to be accepted as the Indian male's repertoire of wooing tactics, Aarfa departs from the Hindi film heroine's usual imagined response. No coy surrender for her. What we get instead is an impassioned speech about how falling in love with someone is based on admiring them in some way -- and Sultan's clowning doesn't quite cut it. There is a subtext here about love between equals. And yet the film steers clear of making its man-wrestling heroine ever wrestle its hero.

Because this is a film that has carefully calibrated how far it wants to travel up this path. So Aarfa's perfectly justified pronouncement is treated by Sultan as an insult -- and a challenge. It is what incites him to become a wrestler. But while his unprecedented success earns him Aarfa's admiration and love, his return gift to her is an unplanned pregnancy which puts an end to her World Championship dreams. Hindi film viewers have seen pregnancy come in the way of a female athlete's career before, in the biopic Mary Kom. But unlike there, or the recent Ki and Ka, flawed as both films were, Ali Abbas Zafar's narrative has no interest in its heroine's response. So caught up is it with Sultan's point of view that Aarfa isn't given even a single line through which we might imagine how it might feel to crush her ambitions underfoot on her husband's victory march. It is to Anushka Sharma's credit that she manages to make her teary smile (as she watches her husband celebrate the impending arrival) radiate something more complicated than joy.

And of course, it can't be motherhood that she has any ambivalence about, so the film creates a way for her to be the stubborn match to Sultan while also displaying her womanliness. It is not that Aarfa isn't a believable character, sadly, she is. So I suppose my frustration must be explained by Sultan's response to a journalist who asks why his wife left him: “Lugaiyan paida hi ladaai karne ke liye hoti hain.”

The second half of Sultan, which drops the inane gags for a succession of dramatic wrestling matches, is much more watchable than the first, though it does lay on the Salman body-building and sacrifice stuff a bit thick. But then that's true of the film as a whole. For instance, the recurring trope of Sultan as turning himself into a saand, a bull who cannot be broken. Those words are actually used to describe him by his coach (a believably cynical Randeep Hooda). The theme is underlined by the portrayal of Sultan as a man who achieves the impossible twice, out of stubbornness – or to put it exactly, bull-headedness. But what's interesting is how the visual imagery reiterates this idea of Sultan as a bull: not wild, but a strong beast of burden. Sultan's first attempt to train himself involves strapping himself to a wooden plough and dragging it through the fields; later he pulls a tractor, and a cart.

There's some heavily-underlined dialogue about the kisaan and the pehelwaan to add to this. And a dose of present-day patriotism is thrown in, with Parikshit Sahni's mild criticism of his English-speaking son's generation for thinking everything imported is cool. The son-of-the-soil as the underdog who trumps the firangs (white and black, though the final defending champion is of course, white) is a crowdpleasing theme if ever there was one – though of course his desi wrestling style only becomes a buzzword when he's forced to abandon its rules for a televised freestyle contest. As Zafar manages to make his Haryanvi Muslim protagonist say at a moment when he seems at a loss for words: 'Bharat mata ki jai'.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 July 2016.