"Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board": Interview with Manoj Bajpayee

A wide-ranging interview with the celebrated Hindi film and OTT actor Manoj Bajpayee, published in Frontline in May 2024.

The team of The Fable was jumping up and down—for joy and for Instagram—in the mid century modernist foyer of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) building. Manoj Bajpayee, 54, stood graciously for the first few photographs, and then sat down a little to the left of where his 34-year-old director Raam Reddy and team continued their youthful photo shoot. Even at rest, Bajpayee exuded a kind of coiled nervous energy—quiet, unfailingly polite, but also watchful.  

Meeting the Mumbai-based actor in Berlin, on the fringes of the Berlin Film Festival where his film The Fable was premiering, felt unusual and yet oddly fitting. Born in 1969 to a farming family in rural Champaran, Bajpayee’s journey to becoming Hindi cinema’s best known ‘alternative hero’ has been nothing if not unusual. Rejected more than once by the National School of Drama, Bajpayee conquered his disappointment by finding work with Delhi’s theatre stalwarts like Barry John and N.K. Sharma, with whom he founded the Act One troupe in 1990. The route to cinema was not easy either. Bajpayee’s first film was Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), which premiered at Cannes and was India’s entry to the Oscars that year. But his minor role as the dacoit Man Singh did not get him any new work. What it did, though, was lodge his performance in the mind of Ram Gopal Verma, who when he met Bajpayee two years later, promised him a role in his next film, a gangster drama set in Mumbai. This, of course, was the era-defining Satya (1998), with Bajpayee’s Bhikhu Mhatre at its incandescent core. 

Fine turns in films like Shool, Kaun, Zubeidaa, Aks, and Pinjar followed. While it has not always been a smooth ride, Bajpayee has successfully stayed the course. In 2024, he is really everywhere, appearing in OTT offerings, in theatres and in film festivals. Bajpayee’s recent roles have run the gamut in terms of power and social position: a middle class lawyer in Sirf Ek Banda Kaafi Hai, a troubled business scion in Gulmohar, a semi-feudal plantation owner in The Fable, a dispossessed adivasi in Joram, and to top it off, a double role as both abusive, womanising husband and clingy, put-upon lover in Killer Soup. Clearly, this is an actor at the peak of his prowess.

Excerpts from an interview:

You were an Amitabh Bachchan fan but began your career in parallel cinema—Bandit Queen, Drohkaal—and were part of creating a more realistic mainstream cinema, Satya onwards. How would you evaluate the state of Hindi cinema today, especially given OTT platforms and the pandemic? 

I think Hindi cinema had reached a good place—experimenting, entertaining but also not compromising on art. So many films—Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Gangs of Wasseypur, Special 26 and many others achieved this mix. Then Covid came and people got out of the habit of going to the theatre. They aren’t completely back yet. During the pandemic, audiences got a chance to explore the new medium [OTT] that had come into their households. Now that option of watching on your phone is always there. Post pandemic, the Hindi mainstream is confused. I see a desperate attempt to entertain that was not there before. Earlier, creators came from a place of conviction. Now they don’t know what will convince the audience to come out of their homes and spend the kind of money needed.

Thus the tilt towards spectacle? 

That is the Marvel effect! It was there before too, but it is much more now. Producers seem to feel that people need an extravaganza to come to the theatre. 

Is that true? 

I don’t think so. The success of Kantara, or a small film like 12th Fail, or the huge critical acclaim for a film like Joram… give me hope. Hindi filmmakers should go back to the drawing board. Before COVID-19, we were doing everything right: women-led films were doing well, films were engaging as well as entertaining… But now the fear of failing is such that there is a push towards extravaganzas. I think we just need to look at Amitabh Bachchan’s films. Larger than life characters, yes, often rags to riches plots, the triumph of good over evil. But the hero was a coolie, or an orphan, or a police inspector who was non-corrupt, or an unwanted child who becomes a multi-millionaire. People related and clapped for him. Replace Marvel-style films with this; you’d save a lot of money on VFX. 

But Hindi cinema no longer tells stories about poor people, they are not the paying audience… 

But the same audience is watching a Telugu film where the protagonist is from a poor background. They are watching Kantara in the non-Kannada circuit and making it successful. Kantara’s story is like a lok katha, with a hero from a village. If we take the lead from there, I think we will find clarity. 

By “from there” what do you mean? 

South India. I do not mean imitate them, but take a cue from them. Heroes should look like us, talk about the problems that the common man is facing. Very few Indians actually make it to the civil services, but when you make something like 12th Fail, the level of identification is huge. The Marvel model might make money once or twice, but that is not a long-lasting solution. I have no problem with larger-than-life films. But stories should be rooted in our society. Because people want hope, and you can’t give them hope by showing life on Mars. 

Has OTT helped or hindered? 

OTT has opened up possibilities for storytelling. You can make things with good intentions and find an audience. Take Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai. A regular lawyer fighting for a minor, fearful that someone might come out of any gali and kill him. It became a streaming phenomenon overnight. So audiences are looking for relatable characters, stories that offer excitement—and hope. 

Sirf Ek Bandaa... is based on a real-life sexual assault case against Asaram Bapu. But are things getting more difficult, the stories that can be told?

The censor situation was as brutal 20 years ago. But filmmakers are intelligent people. You can’t sit down and say you can’t make a film. You are a creative person, right? Then you will find a way. Among just my films, think of Sirf Ek Bandaa… or Gulmohar—that “family film” speaks of so many things so cleverly. Or Joram, about a tribal man who is displaced… and Joram has a U/A certificate. 

Could these be exceptions? 

One can be an exception, not five. I think cinema and theatre has gone through changes and challenges in any decade, and always come out on top. 

Theatre was where you began as an actor. Do you miss it? 

I miss it. So much that I tried going back to it. But theatre does not give you crutches—no takes, editing, background music, or sound. What you see with your naked eyes is the truth. It is an actor’s medium, but the actor has to be completely prepared. I was not. I would have to completely stop working in cinema for a time, to work on myself and be ready for theatre. 

Is that something you might do? 

Yes, I might. 

What is it you miss about theatre? The audience? 

The audience used to be a blur. It was as if nothing else existed. The stage was my safest space in the world. That is what I miss. 

Is the film set not like that?

The film set, you can’t really own it. There are too many factors that own it. 

Do you still watch theatre? 

Yes, I do. Whenever I am free and there is a play by friends—Makarand Deshpande or Danish Husain, so many people—I go to Prithvi Theatre. 

Do you prepare for a role by seeking out real people who resemble your character? 

I have met lakhs of people, thousands of them very closely, from all strata of society. From a village to a Paharganj basti to a Vasant Vihar palace, life has taken me everywhere. Everything is stored in the hard drive of my brain. So no.

I may not have grown up as a rich businessman’s son, but playing Arun Batra in Gulmohar or playing Dev in The Fable was not hard. These people are all around me, I know how they think. What was hard was Zubeidaa. To play a prince is a whole different mindset. I still remember [Shyam] Benegal telling me, “You don’t know anything about poverty. You are raja and they are praja. And you are not an exploiter. Don’t complicate matters too much. From the moment you open your eyes, you have only known this.” 

Do filmmakers write roles for you now?

When you’re dealing with Raam Reddy or Devashish Makhija or Kanu Behl, these are very creatively committed people. They do not write roles for anybody. But if those roles suit me, they do give me scripts to read. There I can compliment myself, I have never led a closed life—and I think they also feel that if Manoj Bajpayee comes on board, he doesn’t go away easily.

Are there roles you want to play? Any historical figures, maybe? 

Oh no, I don’t want to do biopics. See, you need an Attenborough to make a Gandhi. And then Attenborough needs to give Ben Kingsley the time to prepare. We do not give our biopics that commitment of time, money, and energy. Also some shades of grey are needed, which Indian biopics don’t offer. The only biopic I have done is Aligarh. I based the character of Dr Siras on a one-minute interview clip with Barkha Dutt. It was almost nothing to go by. But people who knew Siras told me, “He was just like how you showed him.” 

Does acting ever seem scary to you, its power?

I think acting affects people, though only up to a point. Dev’s journey in The Fable makes people realise the void they unknowingly carry. Siras’ plight in Aligarh affects people because it is hard to see a person trapped in his own house. We relate to it, because we are all the time invaded. 

Have you had that Dilip Kumar experience, of being too close to the character? 

It happened with Shool. But I was very young then. I did not know how to switch off and switch on. But even now, am I ever totally off? How many bruises I carry, I will only know at the end of my life. Until then I am enjoying myself! Maybe my moodiness is also the effect of playing all these characters so deeply. But I love acting. If I love the perks, I have to love the bruises. 

Has acting ever felt strange to you, the combination of intensely feeling something internally but having to perform it externally?

Acting is like stripping yourself in front of everyone. If you are ready for that, then come into this business. But yes, it’s amazing there are many actors like me—people who prefer to be quiet, very shy in many ways—who suddenly feel completely comfortable when the camera is on. It excites me, what art can do to an artist. 

Do you feel like each role teaches you something new? 

Yes. Each role’s humanity affects me. Also, don’t forget that the script is written material. You are finding new meaning as you go through every line, repeatedly.

Are you a reader? 

I am a reader, but not a voracious one. Because I do not have time. I read my scripts on flights. 

Have scripts become more professional? 

They have. When I entered the industry, there was only narration. People looked at me strangely if I asked for a script. Then people started giving me a page. Then ten pages. Now you see professional bound scripts. I ask for them in Devanagari, I am from Hindi medium. To read Hindi in Roman is impossible for me. 

You would be an exception, since most Hindi film scripts are originally written in English, and most actors and even directors are increasingly only English-speaking. Does this disconnect not link to the lack of rooted stories? 

Definitely. Look at all the filmmakers who’ve made an impact, from Vishal Bhardwaj to Rakeysh Mehra to Hansal Mehta to Anurag Kashyap to Devashish Makhija: all of them write in Hindi, though they studied in English-medium. I’m glad you asked me this. If you’re from north India, and coming into this industry, Hindi should be something you practice. Sure, we need English, absolutely, it’s empowering. But the lack of Hindi is a handicap. I sometimes see on a talk show, people making fun of a [Hindi] word that some actor has used. I think, how can you do that? You are making fun of yourselves. And I tell my 13-year-old daughter, sit with me, work on your Hindi, you’ll be at a huge advantage. She gets irritated, but it will have an impact. Especially since she is very active in theatre in school, and she wants to act. We are heading towards a situation in this industry where knowing Hindi will be the exception.

Published in Frontline magazine, May 12, 2024.

The Doctor as Anti-Hero

My Mirror column (this is the fourth piece in my series on doctors in our films):

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Bemisal (1982) can be viewed as a subtle, affecting love triangle, but it is also a rare Indian film about medical malpractice -- and the possibility of atonement.

Bemisal opens with a man in a kurta-pajama cycling between villages, with only a sola topi to protect him from the sun. From the little box affixed to his cycle, one wonders if he is a postman, but the mystery is solved soon: he is a doctor. “The only doctor within a forty mile radius,” as we learn when he gets home for a minute, only to be called away again before he can lunch with his wife.

This vision of the doctor as he should be, or at least could be – a much-needed saviour of the Indian poor – is one of the two faces of the medical profession in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1982 film. And ostensibly Vinod Mehra, as Dr. Prashant Chaturvedi, plays both of them.

A Hindi adaptation of the Bengali film Ami Se O Shakha, Bemisal relocates the writer Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay's original tale of friendship and sacrifice in the world of modern-day medical practice – and malpractice. From its opening rural scenes, the film moves swiftly into flashback -- and into what was still recognizable Hindi movie terrain in 1980s: a holiday in Kashmir. It is there, on a promontory looking down at the Dal Lake, that a much younger Prashant and his friend Sudhir Rai (Amitabh Bachchan), both recent medical graduates from Bombay, first encounter a visiting literature professor (AK Hangal) and his daughter, Kavita. Prashant, the son of a magistrate, has his path cut out for him and follows it: he becomes a doctor, marries Kavita (Rakhee), and goes abroad for higher studies in gynaecology. Meanwhile his friend Sudhir, rescued from a life of juvenile crime by Prashant's father, also becomes a doctor, but chooses to stay in India and work in a regular hospital as a child specialist.

The two remain friends despite these varying choices. But the Prashant who returns from the USA is a very different man from the one who left. “Hamaare profession mein aage badhne ke liye raasta seedha nahi hai, tedha hai [The way to get ahead in our profession isn't straight, it's crooked],” he announces to Sudhir and Kavita. “I came back with such a big degree, did I get a job, have I been able to establish my own practice? No, because in our country it is much easier to go from ten lakhs to eleven lakhs than from ten rupees to eleven rupees.” Bemisal is not one of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's finest films, but what he captures here is the sense of entitlement that had already become the tenor of conversation among educated young Indians in the late 1970s and 80s, a growing frustration with bureaucratic hurdles, a feeling that the country owed them – rather than they it. “My father wanted to see me become a big doctor, and I will fulfil his dream -- by hook or by crook,” says Prashant without the slightest irony. He proceeds, again without irony, to sell his father's house to buy a new private nursing home, which starts to rake in money.

This raging financial success, it turns out, isn't sanguine. What Prashant passes off to his wife as his popularity (“teen maheene se advance bookings”) turns out to be a matter of accepting black money and cooking the books. Second, it is the start of the era of Caesarian deliveries and Prashant is shown deliberately encouraging them, even for what could have been regular births -- each operation and hospital stay bringing in additional moolah. (The film also makes a joke of the new fetish: Deven Verma's character, while getting engaged, buttonholes a gynaecologist to book an advance Caesarian delivery for his wife-to-be.) More complicated is the nursing home's role as a site of expensive, often illegal, abortions: here Mukherjee and his screenwriter Sachin Bhowmick falter. The film mixes up what it considers the morally unethical practice of secret abortions for “the unwed daughters of the rich” with the medically unethical – and dangerous -- business of conducting MTPs past the advisable date, for an under-the-table fee.

A case of the latter sort finally leads to the death on the operating table at Prashant's hands – though we never see the young woman. What we are given instead is the agitated figure of Aruna Irani, a receptionist at the nursing home who reports the death because she is still traumatised by a long-ago unplanned pregnancy and unwanted abortion carried out on the instructions of her callous playboy lover.

I said at the start of this column that Vinod Mehra plays both figures: the doctor as hero, and the doctor as antihero. But this is a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film, so of course we also have a second hero – the film's real conscience, Amitabh Bachchan's Dr. Sudhir Rai. A character with greater spine than the poetry-spouting but easily-swayed Prashant, Sudhir seems on the surface to be a standard-issue mainstream Hindi film protagonist: a doctor who sacrifices his medical practice and his quasi-radical views about the class divide to friendship, the personal weighing in over the political.

But then you think about what Sudhir achieves by going to prison in Prashant's stead – bringing a doctor back from the brink of criminality and making him the model for another possible life, lived in an India “where our rotten civilization has not yet reached”. It may be a message quietly delivered, but it seems to me that Hrishikesh Mukherjee did leave doctors with the rather simple question that Amitabh Bachchan asks Vinod Mehra early in the film: “Ek baat bataa, kya tarakki karne ka yahi tareeka hai? [Tell me something, is this the only way to progress?]”

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Oct 2020.

The faults in our stars - II

The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).

What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.

A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context

One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.

Taparia’s inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker, no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that the only success on IM is the engagement of Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious sub-community.

In Mundhra’s 2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

Motichoor has been much berated for its political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin) first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

The Reel Life of MS Sathyu - II

My Mirror column (a sequel to last week's piece):

In honour of his 90th birthday earlier this month, a look back at MS Sathyu's under-watched 1994 film Galige, currently streaming online.

At the very start of Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni's Salim Mirza waves goodbye to a train at the station and sits himself down in a horse-drawn cart. The Agra of the 1940s is small enough for the tangawalla to be acquainted with each customer. Who have you dropped off this time, he asks. “My elder sister,” says Mirza, adding a gloomy metaphorical remark about how thriving trees are getting cut down in this wind. Yes, agrees the tangawalla, those who refuse to uproot themselves will dry up. Then he adds a Hafeez Jalandhari couplet, rendered in its most charming street avatar: “Wafaaon ke badle jafa kar riya hai/ Main kya kar riya hun, tu kya kar riya hai?” (I'd translate that as “You torment me in exchange for my loyalty/What am I doing, and what are you doing?”)

What's remarkable is the spectrum of moods that the sequence encompasses. There is the sombre farewell, the meditative remark, the deep sense of living through a eventful time -- and yet all of it is leavened by the comfortable chatter of the everyday, by casual acquaintances who make up one's sense of home, and an ear for humour in the minor key that keeps one from dipping into the doldrums. Galige, which Sathyu directed in 1994, attempts to create the same kind of energy.

The film has two narrative threads, both with immense potential for melodrama -- but Sathyu staves off all maudlinness. Currently playing in the Indian section of an international film streaming platform, Galige centres around a young Bangalorean woman named Nithya. She lives alone in a rented house and has a job in the HMT factory, riding a two-wheeler to work each day. One day, the orphanage where she was raised calls her. An old couple has arrived from a North Karnataka village to claim her as their long-lost granddaughter.

Now this is a theme that doesn't just animate popular cinema in India, it forms the matrix for it: the family separated by a calamity and reunited at the end, the pauper who is really a prince, the enemies who are really biological brothers. Whether as the basis of a comedy of errors (think of every single double role film you know), or the underlying theme of the family melodrama from Waqt to Trishul, or even when ostensibly subjected to questioning by the plot -- as in Awara's nature vs. nurture debate, or Yash Chopra's unsuccessful but fascinating Dharamputra, in which a Muslim orphan grows up to be a Hindu fundamentalist, blood ties are assumed to be the ties that bind.

But unlike the hundreds of film orphans we have all grown up on, Nithya does not hanker for a family. She is guarded, unsure if she wants to be co-opted into an identity she has thus far escaped. The orphanage manager's reminder that she was brought in by a fakir, on the other hand, makes the wannabe grandmother baulk: what if she's actually a Muslim? They part company – but on her way back home, Nithya feels bad for the stranded old couple and decides to invite them to stay with her for a while.

A still from Galige (1994)

What Sathyu does is quietly subversive at many levels. By making the young female character financially independent, and the old couple needier than her, he shows how easily existing power equations of age and gender can be reversed. The 'family' becomes something chosen, contingent on mutual desire and supportiveness, rather than a unquestionable given. Within this new space of equivalence, the young woman makes her own decisions, refusing to kowtow to either neighbourly gossip or 'grandparental' interference. She looks out for the old people, and enjoys their companionship, but feels no obligation to live by their rules. The old couple, for their part, learn that their opinions are simply that – their opinions.

Galige's other subplot is even more surprising – the Khalistan movement, and the fate of a reformed terrorist. Girl does meet boy, even in an MS Sathyu film, and Nithya meets hers in a thoroughly charming Antakshari scene on a train. As a girl without a family, she is perfectly comfortable with a boy without a past. And by bringing a Punjabi boy into a relationship with a local girl, of course, Sathyu plays on Bangalore's insider-outsider tensions. In the film, though, the locals' suspicions turn out to have some basis in fact – not all unknown pasts are equally benign.

There are many other moments when the film touches on the question of identity – Nithya's Japanese boss at the HMT factory, the Sikh dhaba owner or the play within the film where Ekalavya's birth becomes the cause of his tragic fate, while Guru Dronacharya shifts all blame onto him: “How can you hold me responsible for your low birth?” In an early aside, the film's resident commentator, one Narhari, asks the rhetorical question: “Do we lack temples, mosques, churches, gurdwara here? Must slap Urban Ceiling on gods – only so many temples per god.” Nithya herself speaks often of not needing to have a religion, of being free to believe in people.

All the threads of Galige don't necessarily come together. The music can feel tacked-on, as can some of the attempts at comedy, and the Punjab segment has the rushed quality of nightmare. The film's uneven tapestry benefits from being woven of low-intensity conversations, like the Bangalore in which it unfolds. In one lovely odd little moment, a drunken Narhari sings a Kannada song by the poet Rajaratnam to a companion in a prison cell: “If you wish to live, escape from this world. Create your own, forget this one.” Words to live by, now more than ever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2020

Mr. Bharat in Bandra

My Mirror column:
Watching the new Salman Khan film at Galaxy Cinema makes the national feel local, and vice versa.

The crowd outside Galaxy Cinema, Mumbai (Photo by Trisha Gupta)

As an outsider who writes about Hindi films, a visit to Mumbai always makes me think: is it Mumbai that created Bollywood, or is it Bollywood that makes the city what it is? The answer is, of course, both. Not only is the history of the city entwined with the film industry to which it lends its name, so is its geography.

Arriving a day after Eid, I found myself in the midst of extended festive revelry in Bandra: an actual Eid Mela, but also a large Muslim family crowd out by the seafront. When I remarked on the late night crowd, my Bandra friend pointed around the corner, and said, as Mumbai people do, “Salman’s house is just here,” with that wonderful first-name intimacy that is directly proportional to a star’s stardom.

Going to see Salman Khan emerge onto his balcony is an Eid pilgrimage specific to Mumbai: A combination of filmi fandom and religious festivity now written into urban space. At one remove from that is going to Gaiety-Galaxy to watch a new Salman Khan film release. I decided it was time for Bharat.

The energy outside G7 Multiplex, as the old Bandra cinema is now officially known, was palpable. Several people posed in front of the poster. There were many women in large family groups, but the multiple all-male groups ahead of me led the man doing the manual frisking to reach for my hips on autopilot. It was only when his older colleague yelled that the errant checker realised: Cargo pants do not make a man.

When I bought my ticket online, there were just nine seats left. At the cinema, it was clear that many tickets ‘sold’ hadn't yet reached their final owners. Two middle-aged men, sweaty in shirtsleeves, were advertising their wares: “Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat, Bhaaarat.” The balcony was half-empty, but the cheers that greeted the entry of the 70-year-old Bharat were still loud enough to drown out the dialogue. By the interval, the hall had filled.

Mumbai may be where the popular screen idea of India is created, but the milieu in which that quintessentially Indian hero operates is still North India, and increasingly often, Delhi. Bharat, too, opens with a grand top shot of the Red Fort, and moves into a very stagey Old Delhi, specifically a shop called Hind Ration Stores. Once owned by Bharat’s bua and phuphaji (Ayesha Raza Mishra and Kumud Mishra, fine actors both wasted here), it now belongs to our 70-year-old hero, who is adamant about hanging on to it in the face of redevelopment sharks trying to buy him out. By the end, he lets it go.

Bharat’s reason for clinging to the store – and later, letting it go – is the crux of the film’s emotional narrative. Adapted from 2014’s massive Korean hit Ode to My Father, Ali Abbas Zafar’s film is a sort of Forrest Gump-lite that takes us from 1947 Lahore into present-day Delhi using a voiceover that feels like Historical Highlights for the (Post-)Millennial Viewer. The death of Nehru (turned into a lame Salman joke) segues into a period of high unemployment, allowing for long detours that send Bharat and his best friend Vilayati Khan into an unnamed oil-rich Gulf country and the Merchant Navy. These attempts to connect with the Indian expatriate worker have our hero battling white racism on one hand and conquering the hearts of black sea pirates on the other. We even get to liberalisation, for which, happily and almost surprisingly in our current political climate, Manmohan Singh not only gets credit but is declared a national hero – as are Sachin Tendulkar and, in rather generous spirit, Shah Rukh Khan.

It's interesting how often Salman Khan films seem to engage with national borders and wars, from spy romances like Ek Tha Tiger and Tiger Zinda Hai to Tubelight, which featured the Indo-China war, to Indo-Pak dramas like Bajrangi Bhaijaan. The sole affecting parts of Bharat, too, involve Partition, which forever separates the child Bharat from his father and little sister. It's to enable that lost father (Jackie Shroff in a guest appearance) to return that Hind Ration Stores must continue to exist.

Towards the end of Bharat, we get a televised cross-border unification of families devised by Katrina Kaif's character, who's gone from being a Salma Sultan stand-in on “Desh Darshan” to "creative head" at Zee TV. Despite the corny fakeness of the TV show-within-the-film, the real memories of subcontinental audiences make sure we get teary.

At one point, Bharat drops a bit of global-style Indian wisdom: Any world problem can be sorted with baat-cheet, pyaar and Hindi film songs. Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but as I watched the rows of sad-faced citizens of India and Pakistan on the film's imaginary TV show, holding Hindi and Urdu placards naming long-lost family members, all I could think was that neither side can any longer read the other's script.

Still, if the hero of a top-grossing Hindi film in 2019 manages to leave the ghost of Partition behind, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 June 2019.

Life in the shadow of death

My Mirror column:
Thinking about how AIDS has been represented on the screen, from the USA to France to India, throws up a set of tragic tropes, with one exhilarating exception

The award-winning actor Nahuel Perez Biscaryat in Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute 

In May this year, a Tamil film called Sila Samayangalil (Sometimes) was released on Netflix. Directed by Priyadarshan, the film is set in the waiting room of a medical clinic. It gets certain things right, deftly establishing situations and characters.


A salwar-kameez-clad receptionist (Sriya Reddy) arrives insensitively late, given that people have been queuing since 6.30 am, and proceeds to talk on her cellphone. The depersonalised waiting room is typically unwelcoming, with its immovable rows of uncomfortable chairs, its notices about rules and timings, and the annoying automated voice-over in which counter token numbers are announced.



As is so often the case in India, however, that sanitised veneer of bureaucratic efficiency stops short of ensuring a functioning water dispenser, or preventing bribery. Despite a tendency to over-dramatise his actors' responses, Priyadarshan produces a sense of how this shared experience (the lack of drinking water, the collective irritation at the receptionist) shapes this rather motley crew into a community – especially as the seven people who’re waiting realise they’re all here for the results of the same thing: an HIV test.

There are six men and one woman, each with different reasons why they think they might have contracted the virus. Ashok Selvan’s relatively calm Balamurugan volunteers his story first, then Prakash Raj’s petrified Krishnamurthy, and so on – until we, the audience, have been given a whole range of possible ways in which AIDS might spread. By making the talkative Bala a pharmacist, the film takes the easy route to information dissemination, telling rather than showing.


I was struck by how wary Priyadarshan seems to be of his viewers’ moral judgement, how little he trusts them to sympathise or forgive anything that might depart from the monogamous heterosexual norm. Some of the male characters – though by no means all – are allowed a single ‘mistake’, but even so, they judge themselves very harshly.


Others have tragic stories about blood transfusions and saving accident victims. As for the sole woman character, she is visualised as being infected in the most non-agentive way possible – as a victim of anonymous sexual violence.


There is, of course, nothing ‘wrong’ with any of these narratives. All of them gesture to real possibilities where a person might get HIV without having, as the film’s characters repeatedly say, “done anything wrong”. But it is worth noting how studiously a film released two months before the Indian Supreme Court decriminalised consensual gay sex by scrapping the relevant parts of Section 377 avoids the slightest mention of men having sex with men.


I came upon Sometimes last week, when thinking about World AIDS Day, which was instituted in 1988 by the World Health Organisation, and thus celebrated its thirtieth year on December 1. And I couldn’t help but think about how far we are from making a film like 120 BPM – Beats Per Minute, Robin Campillo’s award-winning 2017 film about ACT UP activists and the battle against AIDS in 1980s Paris.

120 BPM, among whose many richly-deserved awards is the Golden Peacock at last year’s IFFI, is both a pulsating account of a political movement and a profoundly affecting personal narrative. Campillo moves with consummate fluency between brilliantly detailed scenes of political agitation and intensely intimate scenes that take in love and sex, friendship and family. And yes, death. For death is what hovers over all the AIDS films that have ever been made, right from the originary 1993 moment of Philadelphia. Its early Hindi ‘adaptation’, Phir Milenge (2004), in which Ron Nyswaner’s protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, was split into two characters, played by Shilpa Shetty and Salman Khan, and Salman died. As did Sanjay Suri in My Brother Nikhil (2005), an early AIDS drama in which Onir managed to give Hindi cinema an openly gay and yet sympathy-worthy protagonist, even if it had to be wrapped up inside Juhi Chawla’s saccharine-sweet sister act for public consumption. At this year’s IFFI, I also watched Yen Tan’s painful 2018 drama, 1985, in which a young Texan man goes home for Christmas but cannot bring himself to tell his family that he is gay, let alone what he really needs to, that he has AIDS.


1985 and My Brother Nikhil have many tropes in common: the ultra-masculine unsympathetic father, the clueless childhood girlfriend who can’t understand why the protagonist won’t reciprocate her love, the devoted monogamous partner – and the close sibling who will be the one to remember the hero after he’s gone.

Young people living under the shadow of death: that is what unites these disparate films. In Sometimes, too, it is the possible death of innocents that the film plays on. The AIDS film repeatedly shows how love in these situations comes with the terrible condition of illness: taking care of the one you love is a literal responsibility.


120 BPM, too, is tragic, with perhaps the most excruciating and moving depiction of slow death by disease that I have seen on film. And yet, somehow, what the film leaves one with is a remembered energy, a sense of endlessly articulate debate and endlessly flamboyant action, stretching from past to future.

In one of 120 BPM’s many stunning moments between the protagonists Nathan and Sean, Nathan describes being 19 and driving from Aix to Marseilles with an older man he has just met. The highway is jam-packed with cars, and Nathan imagines dying there, in a car accident, and their blackened bodies being discovered, and people wondering what they were to each other. It is a strange, dark vision, and yet acutely appropriate to the AIDS film – a vision in which desire and death, anonymity and intimacy, past and future are forever, and tragically, intertwined.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Dec 2018.

Screening the World

A personal report from this year’s edition of IFFI: the first of a two-part column.

A still from Beatriz Seigner's haunting new film Los Silencios (The Silences)

I write this column from the middle of the International Film Festival of India, the 49th edition of which is currently on in Panjim, Goa. The festival got under way with its usual quota of frustrating glitches — the shiny new interface for online ticket booking worked smoothly for about a day before giving many users (including myself) trouble; the stated categories of manual ticket booking counters were defied in practice (e.g. numbers of non-media people, even students in film school T-shirts, insisted on standing in the media ticketing queue); the redemption of online bookings on Day One was limited to a single counter, effectively punishing those who’d actually made bookings online. That has thankfully changed, and the young people working the ticketing machinery at Inox, Maquinez Palace and Kala Academy are getting slightly better at it with each day, thus making the queues move faster.

The festival’s programming this year appears to have surrendered more space than usual to Bombay filmdom. Two of these sessions have been dominated by filmi families: producer Boney Kapoor appeared with his and Sridevi’s daughter Jahnvi, who made her debut with Dhadak this year, while David Dhawan will have a session today called Dha-One with his son Varun Dhawan. Singer Arijit Singh, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and actor Kriti Sanon have also had sessions at the festival. These sessions are apparently intended to lure in Bollywood fans who have little interest in the world cinema or regional Indian fare that the IFFI is meant to showcase. But it’s not clear to me what the festival is doing to bridge the gap between Kriti Sanon watchers and arthouse cinema watchers. Merely bunging both categories of people into the same venue only rubs everyone the wrong way. And it’s not about dissing popular cinema: I’m a Hindi film buff, but I don’t see why one particular industry gets so much play on what ought to be an equal platform for all our many cinemas.

For any serious film festival goer, though, the main business of the day remains the choosing of the next day’s films. Many are here to catch Indian Panorama screenings at Inox Screen 2. Others might be tempted by a chance to see the late Vinod Khanna on the big screen (A well-chosen mix of his films features Achanak, Dayavan and Lekin, though Mere Apne would have been even nicer), or watch a (very small and predictable) selection of Ingmar Bergman classics, timed to commemorate his birth centenary this year.


The greater proportion of screenings, happily, remains recent international cinema. Beyond the fiction features in the International Competition section, there is the non-competitive World Panorama section, also consisting of international films made in the last year. The Festival Kaleidoscope section presents films made this year by the world’s most eminent filmmakers — this is where you go to catch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning moving through occasionally mawkish tale of fictive kinship, Shoplifters, or agent provocateur Gaspar Noe’s frenetic dance-and-drugs cocktail Climax, or the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest leisurely three-hour outing, The Wild Pear Tree.


For me personally, this year’s festival has been a revelation for the number of female directors whose superb work I’ve encountered for the first time. The very first film I saw was Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, a portrait of German singer Christa Päffgen, who shot to fame for singing briefly with the Velvet Underground and later had a son with legendary French actor Alain Delon. Nicchiarelli’s film is equal parts melancholy and fierce, like its heroine. I knew nothing about Nico or her music, but Danish actress Trine Dyrholm makes Paffgen’s dark, heroin-fuelled energy a thing of beauty — even as Nico revels in having aged beyond the prime age of physical attractiveness: “I was never happy when I was beautiful.” It is a bravura performance: what we get is a woman who seems gloriously intense but also casually deranged, seemingly unseeing of the risks people around her take to enable her life. Her preoccupation with herself, the bubble in which she seems to live, is only really punctured by her tenderness for her teenaged son.

Another of my favourites so far has been Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios (The Silences). The film opens with a small boat edging slowly towards a jetty, in an inky darkness where water merges into sky. A mother and her two children — a girl and a boy — embark. As Seigner’s film proceeds, we learn that they are “migrants requesting refugee status”, a family fleeing the violence of the Colombian civil war and looking to settle down on this Brazilian island rather too fittingly called La Isla de la Fantasia.


The island is both surrounded by water and built upon it, and the atmosphere is hauntingly evocative: the draughty wooden houses standing on stilts, the women looking out of the square windows in their slatted wooden walls, the row boats gliding silently between them, the rain outside and the hearth fires within. Seigner, whose previous film Bollywood Dream tracked the Hindi film ambitions of three young Brazilian women, has produced here a slow, immersive work of beauty. The simplicity of its approach to its political context did not seem to me to take away from the film in any way. The warmth and attentiveness with which the camera treats both place and people — letting us absorb not just the faces of the central characters but also people who appear briefly, like the boy with one leg —seemed to me emblematic of a politics we need much more of: a humanising politics which sees each missing person as a person.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Nov 2018.

Those Who Dream In Daylight

My Mirror column:

Under the easy symbolism of burkhas, lipsticks and cigarettes, Lipstick Under My Burkha is a film that’s urgently needed, astutely told and deeply felt.

If you ask anyone who's grown up watching popular Hindi cinema, they would probably agree that its most important preoccupation is love. No matter what other themes a film might take up -- the decline of Indian family values or the reiteration of their longevity, urban crime, the crisis of corruption, relations between communities, war, sports, patriotism -- there is invariably a romantic relationship at the centre of the plot. Often more than one.

In a country in which arranged marriages remain very much the norm, romantic love is the fantasy for which real people go to the cinema. Love is our grand narrative of choice, even when the romance is not epic but everyday. And yet, these depictions of love -- invariably heterosexual, almost always battling social obstacles to get to the end-point of marriage -- are too coy to speak of physical desire. If the sexual self is allowed to exist, it must be folded into the romantic, and ideally subsumed by it. You can want love, but to want sex is taboo. This is true even for male protagonists, but it is most certainly true for women, who must remain objects of desire rather than desiring subjects.

Of course, things are changing, slowly but surely: in recent years, we have glimpsed desiring women on screen in the most male-centric narratives, like Anurag Kashyap’s DevD; in films seeking to radically alter our perspective on sex, like Margarita With a Straw or Haraamkhor or Anarkali of Aarah; or character-driven dramas with other social concerns, like Masaan. But Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha still feels astonishing.

Perhaps it is the fact that her women characters are, none of them, aiming for marriage as the happy-ever-after. If one is pre-marriage, another is post-marriage; one has a marriage that offers her only humiliation, and the last doesn't want the right marriage. The 55-year-old Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah) has long been husband-less and has no desire to be controlled by a man again. The teenage Rehana (Plabita Borthakur) wants a hundred things that she feels life behind a burkha can't give her -- and marriage isn't yet one of them. Shirin (Konkona Sensharma) already has a marriage, complete with three children and a sexually exploitative husband who refuses even to use contraception -- it is one she would quite happily do without. Even Leela (Aahana Kumra), on the verge of a marriage that would secure her family’s future, cannot make herself see in it the shape of her present.

Perhaps it is that these women do not circumscribe their desires by what is expected of them; they do not want what they are supposed to want. Or perhaps it is just the frankness with which Shrivastava's characters experience sex and sexuality -- even when they are not speaking of it. One of the useful devices Lipstick's script uses in this regard is to bookend the tales of these 'real’ women with the voice of a properly fictional one called Rosie, who lends her purple prose to each narrative in turn. While she remains trapped between the covers of a steamy Hindi paperback, the unexpurgated quality of Rosie's desires forces us to contend with our squeamishness.
We are so unused to women speaking of sex (or even being acknowledged as wanting it) that sexlessness is the norm -- except within the approved bounds of grihasthashram, when it is duty rather than pleasure. And so whether it is Leela’s ravenous lust for her scruffy photographer boyfriend (the gorgeous Vikrant Massey, last seen in A Death in the Gunj), or the long-celibate Usha's fierce attraction to a man much younger than herself, these are not just unsuitable boys but unsuitable desires. I found particularly moving Shrivastava's telling of Usha's tale: how the physical proximity of a physically fit male body mingles with the giddy excitement of being reminded that she needn't be Buaji to everyone -- the evocative power of merely using her name makes one realise how women are boxed into their relationships, literally losing themselves.

But as the film makes clear, in a country where a widowed old man is generous when he 'considers’ a 40-year-old as a second wife -- and where we have been brought up to giggle at the merest thought of a spinsterish Lalita Pawar believing herself wooed, even by a man of her own age -- what hope can we hold out for Buaji?

Rehana and Shirin's desires are less obviously couched as sexual -- freedom to dress as they please, drink, smoke, work, wander the world, and be treated as an equal. But the sex scenes between Shirin and her husband (Sushant Singh) are the film's most horrifying -- because that stifling experience, of being reduced to being a forced provider of sexual services, is likely the norm for more Indian wives than not.

Given the depressing realities with which Lipstick deals, I am glad to be able to report that it is not itself depressing. The right to pleasure is serious business --but what is serious can also be pleasurable. The film ends with one final nod to romantic fantasy, which I loved. We might have picked the wrong man to be our sapnon ka raajkumar, suggests Shrivastava, but isn't the dreaming what keeps us alive?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 July 2017.

DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.

A Saleable Stardom

My Mirror column yesterday:

A sanitised film on MS Dhoni packages our yearning for heroes into a marketable sense of self-worth.

In 2012, a British magazine called SportsPro ranked Mahendra Singh Dhoni No 16 in their list of the world’s 50 most marketable athletes based on age, home market, charisma, crossover appeal and value for money (boxer Mary Kom at No 38 is the only other Indian in the list). In April 2013, the cover of Business Today magazine portrayed the Indian cricket captain as the Hindu god Vishnu. A blue-skinned Dhoni gazed out at us beatifically, his multiple arms bearing no iconic conch, discus, mace or lotus, but instead a selection of the many brands he helps advertise, from Lays chips to Boost energy drink. “God of Big Deals”, read the headline.

That controversial cover got Dhoni legally embroiled on the charge of 'hurting religious sentiments'. Criminal proceedings in the case were finally quashed by the Supreme Court only in September 2016, a month ago.

All through these years, however, Dhoni has reigned supreme in the realm of endorsements--and not without reason. There is no Indian story more saleable than that of a lower middle class boy becoming an enormously successful sportsman, and apparently achieving this with sheer talent and grit. Dhoni may not have quite started in rags, but he has certainly risen to riches. And Neeraj Pandey's recent film, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, is clearly keen to ride that wave.

Several arguments have unfolded over whether it is or isn't a biopic -- does it truthfully depict Dhoni's life, goes the question. Those who believe that Pandey whitewashes his subject have cited several erasures: the film's total ignoring of Dhoni's (apparently estranged) elder brother Narendra Singh Dhoni, who has been with the BJP and is now an SP politician in Ranchi; the portrayal of him as someone who has only ever had two romantic entanglements (one girl sadly dies, the second he marries), and the removal of all things unseemly or colourful in the cricketer's public life, including the Vishnu avatar case.

There is no doubt that the film forms part of the cricketer's tightly-controlled crafting of a public self-image. This image is public in the way that all of us who are on social media will recognise – i.e., it deliberately includes those glimpses of the 'private' that we think will add to our appeal, and leaves out anything that might be perceived as unsavoury. In the case of the particular form of myth-making that is Bollywood, certain well-known real-life details are elided to create a more heroic hero and a more romantic romance, eg. the fact that Dhoni and his wife Sakshi actually knew each other from childhood is deleted from the film's telling of their relationship.

What the film is interested in doing is to paint the glorious arc of Dhoni's journey as a potential India story. The time and space are crucial to that narrative: the fact that the film’s star is born in the dim sky of Ranchi, in the ordinarily dysfunctional wasteland of what was then Bihar – and ends up (or rather, is still in orbit) in the extraordinarily glitzy new constellation that is post-T20 cricket. As the cricketer makes the slow move from the local sports shop owner to a gazillion nationwide advertising endorsements, from playing school matches whose existence is conveyed to the town population by a small boy on a bicycle to World Cup matches that receive practically nonstop media coverage, this is a liberalisation story if ever there was one.

The film gives us glimpses of much-needed specificity here: the Bihar cricket association head (Kumud Mishra, superb) making a wryly accurate crack about the reason that no young Biharis are being 'discovered' is that the state's adults care more about politics than cricket, or the terrible state of the Ranchi-Dumdum highway becoming a stumbling block for Dhoni's career. And yet the constituents of his supposedly inspiring ascent -- plush hotel rooms and lion-filled safari vacations -- are dull as ditchwater.

Meanwhile, the spaces of the past, which ought to have been more characterful – such as the railway quarters that Dhoni the ticket-checker shared with three other railway employees in Kharagpur – seem flat, at best sincerely documented. The camera jerks uneasily around the box-like bedroom, the tiny kitchen, the Indian-style toilet, as one imagines Dhoni might do if he were taken there today: not quite sure how to inhabit such a space any more. A large chunk of the film unfolds in railway stations, government offices and small-town government colonies, but the sense of atmosphere seemed sorely missing.

Other than Sushant Singh Rajput's quietly impressive turn as Dhoni, the thing that kept the film watchable for me was Dilip Jha's dialogue, from the faintly-Bengali-accented speech of young Mahi's school coach Banerjee Sir to the nicely-done Bihari inflections of most of Dhoni's friends and family. (I particularly loved the fishseller who resists Mrs. Banerjee's bargaining with a plaintively accurate “Kaise posayega Boudi?”)

This is a disappointing film in several respects, and yet there is no doubt that most Indians who enter the cinema will find themselves deeply moved. As we watch Dhoni's old friends and dogged supporters, teachers, even past rivals take a personal pride in his performance on the world stage, we realise how many people's efforts can go into the making of one. In a country so hungry for heroes, letting us feel that we helped create them is a sure-shot recipe for success.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9th Oct 2016.