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.

Crime and Entertainment: Meeruthiya Gangsters

My Mirror column yesterday: 

Zeishan Qadri, who co-wrote Gangs of Wasseypur, makes an interesting directorial debut with small-time crime in another small-town setting. This time, it's Meerut.

Zeishan Qadri's Meeruthiya Gangsters wears its desi-ness on its sleeve, just as the debutante director does his feeling of kinship with mentor Anurag Kashyap, with whom he co-wrote Gangs of Wasseypur (and played a character called Definite). Like the GoW poster, which broke with the now-dominant practice of producing Hindi film posters in Roman font by having 'Wasseypur' appear in Devanagari, here 'Meeruthiya' is written in Devanagari.

Qadri also shares with Kashyap an abiding interest in the world of crime, and like him, much of his interest lies in bringing a very specific locale to the Hindi movie screen. If GoW produced a memorable fictional version of the coal mining and small-town mafia of Bihar and Jharkhand, Meeruthiya Gangsters is keen to capture the particular world of low-level crime on the fringes of Meerut.

In between, Qadri wrote the Kangana Ranaut starrer Revolver Rani (2014), also a gangster film. It tried hard to be 'different' by making its protagonist a sexually aggressive woman—that, too, in the Bhind-Morena badlands of Madhya Pradesh. But Qadri's vision of a man-hunting, brass-bodiced female gangster-politician didn't quite translate into believability, and Sai Kabir's uneven direction took us on a depressingly bumpy ride.

In contrast, with Meeruthiya Gangsters, which he has both written and directed, Qadri largely succeeds in laying out a credible world, complete with pitch-perfect dialogue. His film may have no moral centre, but he manages to achieve a texture quite different from that of Kashyap's in GoW: something quieter, less epic, less sprawling and infinitely droller.

The film's sociological setting is a halfway-house world that feels like the orphaned child of post-liberalisation India—neither rural in the old way, nor quite successfully urban. The plot centres on a group of young Meerut men, caught between the gaping holes of a meagre education and the imagined heights of an aspirational new lifestyle, who are intent upon getting ahead any which way. Qadri seems to know these characters inside-out, and as he takes us through their lives—from carjackings at gunpoint on the highway to doing pretend-presentations for corporate jobs—their seemingly jagged leaps begin to cohere into a depressing whole.

So it makes complete sense that that the gang's hideout is a shed somewhere in an expanse of fields—and it also makes sense that the well adjacent to the shed serves, at least once, as an improvised substitute for a plunge pool, in which they might squat on a hot day with bottles of beer. These are people who are usually to be found sipping chai in dhabas and eating golgappas on the street, and yet they seem to think nothing of spending lakhs of rupees at a time in some swanky new mall. This world has appeared before on screen, but with far less acuity, in Pravin Dabas's Sahi Dhande Galat Bande (2011), set in the similar rurban terrain of Outer Delhi.

Meeruthiya Gangsters stars no well-known faces, other than Sanjay Mishra and Brijendra Kala (both impeccable as always, if a little under-used). But it has a stellar ensemble cast. Jaideep Ahlawat as the self-appointed gang dada Nikhil, Jatin Sarna as the blond-dyed Sanjay Foreigner, Shadaab Kamal (who made a superb debut in Ajay Bahl's 2013 BA Pass) as the hotheaded, slightly crazed Sunny, talented Punjabi theatre actor Vansh Bhardwaj as Gagan, Nusrat Bharucha (Aakash Vani, Pyaar ka Punchnama) as Mansi all make a mark, and in a film crammed with minor characters, there is practically no-one who strikes a false note.

The film's tone is set by its male friendships, which in this world (as perhaps elsewhere) seem to combine bumptious irreverence with occasional bursts of unspoken sentimentality. Some of the men have girlfriends, who are referred to within the group as “settings”--and whenever the girlfriend in question is present, as “bhabhi”. These constant transitions, from nudge-nudge wink-wink to almost respectful familial, are so seamless as to start feeling almost unremarkable by the time you're halfway through. Yet they are revealing of how entirely masculine the film's world is.

We never really see any older women – mothers or aunts or even elder sisters. But the girlfriends are fascinating. Whether it's Nusrat Bharucha's Mansi, who works in a glitzy corporate outfit called Spice Route and has as few compunctions about plotting kidnappings as the men, or Sanjay Foreigner's “setting”, the salwar-kameez clad Mamta who thinks nothing of slapping her boyfriend in public, Qadri's attempt seems to be to show us a new breed of young women: glossy, sharp and as hard as nails.

They may turn out to be less nice than we – or the men – would like. But the film does seem to suggest they're the way they are because they must claw their way up, in a place so uniformly patriarchal that the fact isn't even worth mentioning – let alone protesting. Mansi, for instance, works in an office where male bosses think it perfectly normal to walk by singing suggestive songs, make remarks about her boyfriends, and finally openly solicit sexual favours. Mamta successfully elopes with Sanjay Foreigner, but is later prevented from marrying him by the standard North Indian police trick of declaring her na-balig, a minor.

Qadri deals with this (very real) milieu with dry humour. And he manages to make you smile. At one point in the film, a minor female character called Pooja, who is helping the gang bribe her bosses, notices one of the men peering down her shirt. She barely bats an eyelid. “Mujhe pata hai tu kya dekh raha hai. La Senza 36 B. Acchi hai na?” She ought to be a role model. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sep 20, 2015.

The reality of illusions

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

How can a performance ever be honest, and other thoughts about acting via Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

Acting seems to me one of the most mysterious things in the world. Everyone who's watching knows they're watching someone simulate something. And yet we watch precisely to make ourselves believe in the truth of the performance. There are, of course, as many different kinds of acting as there are kinds of cinema and theatre. In popular Hindi cinema in particular, stardom depends on the ability to produce endless variations on a persona that has already met with approval. Those variations can be riffs on a central theme, but the persona needs to remain recognisable. Our relationships with the stars on screen are profoundly mediated by our relationships with their off-screen personas.

But outside of the pleasures of watching our favourite stars ham, repeat recognizable gestures, and generally entertain us, even Hindi film viewers these days seem to have come round to appreciating 'realist' acting. Though the appreciation of 'realism' comes up against another sort of problem: if acting is visible, it's bad acting - and if it's invisible, it's too ineffable to describe. If you can see it, it isn't working; if it works, you can't really see it. So how do we talk about acting?

Someone who has been a transformative presence in this recent phase of Hindi cinema, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is often asked about acting. An interviewer asked about how the acting bug bit him. He said he had grown up in a religious, rural Muslim milieu where films were frowned upon, and anyway the nearest cinema was 45km away. So as a child there was no question of dreaming of being an actor.

It was much later, when a friend in Delhi took him to a play, that he realised he wanted to act. After that play (Uljhan, with Manoj Bajpayee in it), he watched some 50 plays, and then joined a theatre troupe. And later, the National School of Drama.

What fascinated me was not so much the story of Siddiqui's moment of recognition - though there is something inescapably dramatic about it coming from the first play he had ever seen. What struck me was the reason he gave for why acting appealed to him. Here, he thought, was a profession in which sifaarish (recommendations) or flattery couldn't help you. When you appeared on stage, it would become immediately apparent if you were good or not -- the tomatoes would start to fly if you were not.

What Siddiqui said, in other words, is that acting appealed to him because it was the most honest thing he could do. The direct encounter with a paying audience represented, in the actor's mind, liberation from the inherent artifice of life. But of course as Siddiqui himself found out soon enough, the paying audience does not guarantee the purity of performance that the actor might strive for. It came as a shock to me that during and after NSD, Siddiqui was typecast as a comedian.

He did comedy, he says, in many styles - he did slapstick and he did Moliere, he did grandiose Parsi-style theatricals - but he was largely stuck being the funny guy.

When he upped and moved to Bombay, he found it hard to get any work at all, because he was neither well-connected nor endowed with the gora-chitta good looks that Bollywood demands. As is now well-known, Siddiqui struggled for nearly four years, doing some work in television in true crime shows, while in cinema he got either no work or tiny single scenes in films like Sarfarosh.

When he did start to get mainstream attention, a little bit after Peepli Live and Black Friday, but on a big scale after Kahani and Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW), it was "intense" roles. Siddiqui denies that there is anything in him that is particularly drawn to angry, serious characters.

But in an industry so unused to allowing actors range, the relationship between the self and the screen persona plagues even actors like Siddiqui. And it is not always simple. Recently he has made a bit of a splash with Kick, about which he has said only half-jokingly that his mother is thrilled because he has finally fulfilled her desire to see him as a rich man.

About his GoW role, one of the most interesting things Siddiqui said was that he was thrilled not to be the small time thug getting beaten up, again. "I wanted status-wala role, where I would do the hitting. I had never expressed this wish, this desire to anybody. But [Kashyap] made it happen for me."

On Siddiqui's first day shooting GoW, Kashyap was surprised that he "was very aggressive". "He thought this is the first time he is doing a film where he was the hero so he came on as the hero." It was Kashyap who insisted he tone it down.

Siddiqui has often said that the only way to act "truthfully" is to draw upon an inner part of yourself that's similar to the character you have been called upon to play. But sometimes a character is what you always wanted to be in real life -- and you end up overplaying your part.

Film Review: Gangs of Wasseypur

First things first. There is no denying that Gangs of Wasseypur is an exceptionally clever film. Right from the opening of Part 1, when the camera pulls away from the brightly artificial world of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thhi to the dimly lit room in which a joint family is gathered to watch it, the film effortlessly positions itself as ‘authentic’. It is a brilliant tactic, and one that reveals the surety of Kashyap’s grasp of his audience: since the Ekta Kapoor universe is a synonym for fakeness (at least to anyone who watches Anurag Kashyap films), Wasseypur gets automatically coded as ‘real’.

All the investment in historical-sociological detail that follows is meant to cement that belief, that this is the evocation of a real world – the voiceover that begins grandiosely by recounting the history of coal-mining in the Dhanbad-Jharia belt of Bihar (later Jharkhand) and then narrows its focus to the hard-scrabble battles of two warring families, the barrage of dates, the documentary footage, the marking of place through houses and clothes and the much-touted ‘unapologetic’ language the characters speak and the marking of time quietly through gadgets (fridge, vaccuum cleaner, pager) or more vocally through Hindi film songs.

In fact, Hindi cinema is the reference point for everything in this world. Quiet familial grief at a man’s funeral is swept into another pitch by the soaring, tinny splendour of Teri Meherbaniyan. A graying Ramadhir Singh (director Tigmanshu Dhulia in a performance that ought to make other directors leap to cast him), told by his son JP that he was watching DDLJ, serves him a dismissal that is somehow both weary and brutal: “Tumse ho nahi payega”. The very self-image of GoW 2’s ‘hero’ is based upon the cinematic: “Hum toh sochte thhe ki Sanjeev Kumar ke ghar mein Bachchan paida hue hain. Pata chalta hai hum toh Shashi Kapoor hain,” says Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Faizal at one crucial juncture – and everything that happens henceforth might be said to be driven by Faizal’s desire to become the Bachchan of his own life.

The uber-machismo of this world is undeniable. But so what if his men talk dirty and run guns and kill people at the drop of a hat and always win the women they fall for? They’re real, Anurag Kashyap seems to insist, because they also stutter and weep and occasionally confess to fear, sometimes to failure. It is precisely in the gap between the mythic, larger-than-life aspiration and its often unglamorous factual counterpart that Kashyap seeks to establish the ‘reality’ of Wasseypur. So that when Faizal (or Faijal, as everyone in Wasseypur calls him) twirls a cigarette out of a packet and flicks it into his mouth for the visual pleasure of his love interest Mohsina (Huma Qureishi), who’s watching from her balcony, the trick fails. The lovely Mohsina laughs in delight, and we’re meant to believe that her love for Faijal springs from knowing and understanding that gap, between what her man is and what he’s striving to be.

GoW’s depiction of violence, too, is self-consciously punctuated in this fashion by ‘reality’. A man coordinates a murder on two mobile phones while trying to re-tie his pajama drawstring, a chase scene is slowed down by a scooter spluttering to a stop, a gun jamming. Kashyap’s poker-faced subversion of our expectation of slickness is ceaseless. Much of the first half of Part 2, for instance, centres on the fifteen year old brother of Faizal, named Perpendicular because that’s how he uses the blade he carries in his mouth, who is the terror of the neighbourhood but speaks with a lisp.

The humour is sharp and dry: Perpendicular and his friend rob a jeweller’s shop in school uniforms and—still holding the stash—argue over which rubber chappals are whose. In the next scene, Perpendicular returns home to find the jeweller sitting with the family women, suggesting a set for Mohsina. In an earlier moment, Faizal lists his sins for Mohsina – charas, gaanja, a few murders; then says, now you list yours. Sometimes the humour is silent, contained in ironic visual juxtapositions that are barely, fleetingly there. The ineffectual police station where a central pillar reads ‘Aagyakari, Wafadar, Buddhimaan, Daksh’ (Obedient, Loyal, Intelligent, Dexterous), the school wall with the stencilled inscription ‘Aadhi roti khayenge, phir bhi school jayenge’ (‘We’ll eat half a roti, but we’ll go to school’) – these are quietly brutal jokes in this world where the state seems to barely exist on the sidelines, pointing to another kind of gap between the real and the aspirational.

As I said at the start, there can be no doubt about the stylistic achievements of this film. Its visual flair, its absolutely remarkable performances, its piquant dialogues – these are enough to cancel out any instinctive annoyance one might feel at its maddening refusal to kowtow to any notion of plot.

But my problem with the film is one of tone. Does Kashyap want to show us the desires and sorrows of three generations of a family, or does he merely wish to milk the otherness of these lives—for their unending performance of hyper-violence, and worse, for humour? There is something deeply discomfiting about watching a film in which every supposed tragedy, from a husband’s betrayal to a brother’s death, is offered up as a space for ironic appreciation. Any possibility of emotion is held at bay, as it were, by putting it within quotes. The only parts of the film that seem to be given us without irony are the culminatory deaths of the principal protagonists. But having laughed and cheered and hooted our way through so many deaths, we feel absolutely nothing. That, after five hours of ‘epic’ filmmaking, is the real tragedy.

Read this review on Firstpost here.