Singing from the soul?

My Mirror column:

Gully Boy movingly fictionalises the lives of two real-life Mumbai rappers, but its insistence on authenticity masks as many contradictions as its characters 

In the opening scene of Gully Boy, the film’s protagonist Muraad (Ranveer Singh) is roped into stealing a car by his friend Moeen. It’s clear that Muraad isn’t too comfortable doing this, and yet he goes along for the ride, literally. The scene manages to do several things with superb economy. It marks, first and foremost, the thin line between the legal and illegal that these young men must straddle, a lakshman rekha where the temptations of stepping over are much greater than any benefits that might accrue from staying within. It also returns us to the risky lives of poor young Muslim men in Mumbai, exactly thirty years after Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), evoking an updated version of that youthful urban swag but avoiding the sense of real danger. Specifically, though, Zoya Akhtar’s achievement in the scene is to show us what really matters to Muraad: when the stolen car’s stereo starts playing some generic rap, he mocks the lyrics showing off girls and gaadis. Whoever listens to such “nakli rap” must be a “nakli aadmi”, the boys giggle, and in their heads the stealing of the car is now more than ok.

Given that Akhtar’s consummately crafted film is, after all, an appropriation of the lives and work of real-life Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, there is something audacious about Gully Boy’s frontal claim to authenticity. The unspoken message, in this scene and throughout the film, is that Muraad is asli, the real thing. Some of the most affecting lines in the film are built to bolster this truth-claim: “Teri kahani tere ko nahi bolni toh main kae ko boloon? (If you don’t want to tell your story, why should I tell it?)” MC Sher asks Muraad when he says he’s afraid to actually perform the poem he has written. Or later, before a crucial rap battle, when Muraad seems dejected by his poverty and what he sees as his lack of exposure, Sher tells him, “Tere paas kya hai tu woh dekh (What you have, you look at that)”.

Of course, this is tied to the idea of hip-hop as an autobiographical form, whose discomfiting of its audience draws on the authentic experience and unexpurgated language of African Americans from inner city backgrounds. As Sher tells Muraad in response to his “Comfortable nahi hoon main (I’m not comfortable)”, “Bhai duniya mein sab comfortable hote toh rap kaun banata? (If everyone in the world was comfortable, who would make rap?)”.

And yet Gully Boy itself shows us otherwise. Rap, like any other art form trying to succeed under conditions of late capitalism, must become comfortable receiving the patronage of the comfortably-off. So while the film shows how rap is enabled by the democratising possibilities of the internet, it also acknowledges that the music industry continues to have gatekeepers. Money matters, as does the influence of what Moeen once cuttingly refers to as “the English-talking gang”. A crucial character here is Sky (Kalki Koechlin), who is Indian but studies music in the US, with enough university funding to enable a posher studio set-up than anything Muraad and Sher can imagine. 

There is some symbolic power that Indian rappers can draw from hiphop’s international linkages. But while the film invites us to smirk along with Muraad when he shocks an American tourist by coolly reciting lyrics by the famous rapper on the tourist’s T-shirt, the fact is that Muraad actually lives in a Dharavi jhuggi that’s on the American’s Mumbai slum tour.

But what the film also offers is a clear-eyed vision of how no-one can be a single “asli” self, simply because social and economic and cultural pressures force most of us into inhabiting multiple universes. Muraad must cover over his distaste for his chauffeur father’s decision to marry a much younger second wife, literally playing his own soundtrack on his headphones to block out the traditional shehnai music whose maudlinness feels like a comment on his mother’s (Amruta Subhash) misery. Muraad’s long-time girlfriend Safina (Alia Bhatt) might want to be her authentic self with her loving but conservative father and mother, but she knows that telling them the truth about her desires will only result in them being scotched. So she keeps Muraad’s number on her phone labelled as “Mrs Ahmad” and uses the excuse of imaginary medical deliveries to sneak out and meet him.

Safina and Muraad’s perfectly choreographed romantic assignations, clandestinely conducted in the city’s most public places – trains, buses, bridges – are among the film’s unerring joys. As is the emotional landscape of their relationship, especially in the tear-inducing moment where Muraad explains her shaping influence on him to Sky: “Safina ke bina meri jindagi aisi jaise bachpan ke bina hi bada ho gaya (My life without Safina would be as if I’d just grown up without a childhood).”

Safina is both the aspiring doctor for whom career comes first and the girlfriend reckless enough to risk a police case to keep her man; the headscarf-wearing Muslim daughter and the girl rubbing rouge onto her cheeks on a railway platform. Muraad moves from being the white-shirted employee who must keep his mouth shut to the fit guy with two top buttons open, pouring his angst into a microphone. Like many films about artistic aspiration, Gully Boy seems certain that only one of these selves is the real one, the one worth celebrating. But perhaps it is the very fact of acknowledging multiple selves that keeps us asli. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Feb 2018.