Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.

A sympathetic spirit

My Mirror column:

Do the men haunted by a female ghost learn any lessons in Amar Kaushik’s affable small-town comedy?

One, don’t leave the house alone, especially after dark. Two, if you absolutely must go somewhere, find a group to go with: there might be some safety in numbers. Three, if you encounter an attractive personage of the opposite sex, assume the worst. The more charm the person displays, the more dulcet the tones in which they approach you, the more determined you must be to avoid their advances. Grit your teeth and keep walking — for if you so much as turn around and look at them, your very life is on the line.

These instructions, given to young men in the fictionalised town of Chanderi in the new horror comedy Stree, will seem powerfully familiar to young women in real towns across India. Only here, it is men who must lock themselves into their houses, bidding their wives goodbye as they leave for the sandhya aarti at the temple ghat with a plaintive, “Come back home early, I feel scared.” Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK seem to thoroughly enjoy the role reversal. And so, I’ll wager, will most women — even though these instructions are only applicable for four days in the year, during the annual puja, when the town is said to be visited by a female spirit who preys exclusively on men.

The female ghost (or she-demon) who lures men in with her seductive charm only to reveal her true horrific form later, is a ubiquitous figure in sex-segregated societies that are also profoundly patriarchal. The cupboard of Indian folk belief is crammed unsurprisingly full of monstrous female creatures with highly specific attributes: the chudail, the rakshasi, the petni, the shakhchunni, the pishachini, the yakshi, to name just a few. At least some of the sharpness of Stree is that it takes this premise, so familiar to us as to be completely unremarkable, and turns it — partially — on its head.

The film is based on a clever but simple idea, and its viewing pleasures are simple, too. The first of them is that the particular ghost of Amar Kaushik’s film bears the generic name ‘Stree’: The Woman. This stroke of genius enables some of the best lines in the film, because all references to the scary lady in question can also be heard as statements about women in general. So that Pankaj Tripathi — in top form as Rudra Bhaiya, the town’s bookish authority on all things — has plenty of occasion to advise his quaking townsmen on “Asli stree se bachne ke asal upaay (Real ways to escape the real woman)”. No man, Rudra Bhaiya tells our ‘unspoilt’ bachelor heroes in one hilarious scene, can resist the voice of The Woman — by which he also implies any woman — calling out his name more than twice in a row, in a “swapnasundari” sort of voice. “‘Lag ja gale ki phir yeh haseen raat ho na ho’ waala bhaav aayega,” he warns them, in a nice little in-joke about the 1967 ghostly mystery film Woh Kaun Thi in which that song is sung.


But while never denying this world’s predictable gendered norms (“Suhaag raat ke baad hi fight shuru hoti hai”), Stree tries to stretch its audience in directions empathetic to women. One of these involves the ghost’s reasons for ghosting: she was a tawaif robbed of her one chance at love, on her suhaag raat.

There is something quite charming about the fact that the film’s hero Vicky (played with his usual flair by the brilliant Rajkummar Rao) is a tailor. He may believe that he hasn’t been put on earth to loosen blouses and shorten petticoats, but he has magic in his hands — his father, watching him at the sewing machine, sees in him nothing less than the perfection of Shiv Bhagwan. But it is significant, too, that Vicky is a ladies’ tailor — and a self-proclaimed ‘modern’ one. In the one scene in which we see Vicky interact with an older woman customer, he encourages her, with just the right touch of flirtatious appreciation, to get a slightly deeper neck for her sari blouse. (We have had another tailor-as-sensitive-hero for the modern Indian woman in the recent Hindi film past: Irffan Khan’s character in the Delhi-set Hindi Medium, who managed to marry ‘up’ into the somewhat English-speaking classes by virtue of his open-mindedness about women’s clothes — and thus, bodies and minds.)


Unlike its ghostly star attraction, however, this is not a film interested in floating several inches above the ground —it wants to remain rooted in its milieu. It is keen to suggest that the vrats and pujas on one hand, and all manner of black magic on the other, can happily co-exist in the same world with ‘azaad’ women — and azaad views about women. They may still be suspicious of the girls that rupture their bromances, and puzzle over whether “friendship” is code for sex — but in Amar Kaushik’s affectionately hopeful vision, the boys of Chanderi are on their way to a brave new world — and not just by means of the Ludo apps on their mobile phones.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Sep 2018.

The Art of the State

My Mirror column:

What two films might tell us about Maoists, violence and how different the state looks depending on which end of the stick you’ve got. (Part 1 of a two-part column.)

In May this year, at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi, I saw a Malayalam film called When the Woods Bloom, directed by Bijukumar Damodaran, also called Dr Biju. Having now watched Amit Masurkar’s Newton, I am struck by the extent to which two such different filmmakers, with such widely disparate sensibilities and backgrounds, chose the same motifs to approach their chosen subject: what life is like in those parts of India where Maoists have gained some leverage in their ongoing battles against the state.
What are these motifs? For starters: the jungle, the school, the gun. The action in both films takes place almost entirely inside a forest: in Newton, the location is Chhattisgarh, in When the Woods Bloom, it is Kerala. In both, an armed posse of policemen arrives at a ‘remote’ jungle outpost where the only sign of human habitation is a school building. The site where the state once marked its presence under the benign sign of education now becomes the location where it stakes its monopoly on power. And power, as Mao Zedong famously said, flows from the barrel of a gun.

But let us begin at the beginning. It seems remarkable to me that both Biju and Masurkar begin their narratives with an incident of anonymous violence. When the Woods Bloom opens with an unidentified group of people overpowering a guard at his post. Newton begins with a candidate called Mangal Netam giving a campaign speech whose vision of adivasi children with “a laptop in their right hand, a mobile phone in their left” inspires wry laughter even among the mixed urban film festival audience I recently watched the film with. Soon after, though, the politician is shot by unidentified assailants, and our disbelief acquires a jagged edge. Our cynicism from the sidelines is now asked to choose a side.


It is in contrast to these anonymous guerrilla warriors that both films first present their picture of an armed, uniformed constabulary. In Dr Biju’s film, we see a busload of policemen on a long journey to their new posting: one watches something on his mobile phone, another falls off to sleep. They are ordinary young men with ordinary desires – and this humanising is crucial when one of them (Indrajith Sukumaran) emerges as our protagonist. Masurkar and his screenwriter Mayank Tewari, too, have an ordinary young man as the pivot of their film — but Newton Kumar is not in uniform and he does not have a gun. He represents the Indian state not by laying claim to its monopoly on violence, but by helping to enable that great participatory ritual by which that state is ideally brought into being: a free, fair election.

But of course, in these less-than-ideal circumstances, the conduct of this basic democratic process threatens constantly to turn undemocratic. For the Maoists, the election is as much a symbol of the Indian state as the army or the police. What the film demonstrates is how violence and suspicion on either side produces a tragic vicious cycle, because Newton and his scanty Election Commission team — including the marvellous Raghuvir Yadav as the long-serving Loknath ji, and Anjali Patil as Malko, the local adivasi BDO — can only carry out their ostensibly peaceable mission under the heavily armed auspices of the Central Reserve Police Force. In one of the film’s quotable lines, “Jhande aur dande se hi toh desh banta hai.”


Embodying the state in that militarised avatar is Pankaj Tripathi’s Aatma Singh, in a performance that matches Rajkummar Rao’s superb turn as Newton, move for move. The experienced cop produces a calibrated mix of menace and machismo that is designed to defeat the rookie officer’s seemingly unstoppable zeal. But every rhetorical move Aatma Singh makes is met by Newton with a counter-dose of literalness. So when Aatma says: “Main likh ke deta hoon, koi nahi aayega vote dene [I can write it down for you, no one will come to vote]”, Newton’s response is to take him at his word, holding out a pen and saying, “Sure, write it down.” Later, when Aatma tries to prevent Malko from accompanying them, Newton’s response is once again to keep repeating his rulebook position — “She is a member of the team, she will come with us”.


In When the Woods Bloom, the confrontation between the cop and the suspected Maoist (Rima Kallingal) is based on a set of binaries — state-nonstate, man-woman, civilisation-wilderness, ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ violence – that Biju wishes to turn on its head. Watching that reversal can be powerful. But Newton seems to me to have an edge over Dr Biju’s film because it refuses to deal in binaries at all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Nov 2017.

The second part of this piece is here.

Making and Unmaking Men

My Mirror column:

In films as disparate as Rukh, Bareilly ki Barfi and A Death in the Gunj, games of masculinity are depressingly insistent on dividing men into winners and losers.

Rajkummar Rao in Bareilly ki Barfi

Adarsh Gourav in Rukh

A few months ago, watching Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s Bareilly ki Barfi, I laughed along with the rest of the audience at the transformation of Rajkummar Rao’s character from a meek sari shop salesman to a rowdy, rude ‘rangbaaz’. Rao is a wonderfully talented actor, and there is much pleasure to be derived from watching the mousy, squeaky-voiced, easily bullied Pritam Vidrohi metamorphose, on the back of a few days’ ‘training’, into the sort of neighbourhood thug who might successfully bully the real Pritam. We watch, giggling, as the person we ‘know’ to be quaking internally acts out a certain kind of machismo — parking his motorcycle in the middle of a traffic filled road, ostensibly to buy himself a paan from a streetside shop, and then silencing a jeepful of outraged men with a mere wave of the hand.

The sequence is very funny, but it’s also an acute comment on what we respond to as manly behaviour. What is masculinity but the performance of it? Vidrohi's particular changeover involves a new haircut, a fashionable new jacket-clad look and a put-on Bachchan baritone. But it also depends on a change of body language, from a fluid, unspoken androgyny — one that made the old Vidrohi perfectly comfortable draping saris over himself for the benefit of prospective female clients — to a markedly masculine akad: a strutting display of the self, a performative occupying of space rather than an ability to adapt himself to it.

Worse than this, though, is the fact that the reconfigured Vidrohi is someone who doles out unprovoked rudeness to anyone who might potentially be classed as his inferior in the social hierarchy: women (who may or not be his fans), waiters, anyone really. The alpha male, it seems, is needlessly aggressive, always competing, always out for himself — and despite all this, the heroine’s parents think there couldn't be a better man to marry their daughter. Obnoxiousness, it seems, is proof of successful masculinity.

Watching Atanu Mukherjee's debut feature Rukh last week, I found myself thinking of how the film circles around the same theme: what constitutes masculinity? Rukh's taut performances do not compensate for a shallow plot and not-very-thickly drawn characters. The deliberate gravitas of its silences could not be more different from Bareilly ki Barfi’s crowd-pleasing chatty comedy. But uneven as Rukh is, there are moments when it gets something just right, such as the scene where a lanky young man entering the murky world of real estate tells his friend why a gun is needed. Keep it empty, he says with an air of throwaway confidence. “Koi agar mich-mich karne lage, usko bas dikhane ka [If anyone makes a fuss about something, just show the gun].” Again, performance is all.

The other thing that struck me was Rukh’s toggling between good men and bad, questioning easy definitions of strength and weakness. It doesn’t quite succeed, but Mukherjee’s script seems to want to ask the question of what being a man means, and one of the things it concerns itself with is the idea of running away. At one level, it does this through Kumud Mishra’s character, the ‘friend’ and business partner who abandons ship when his own selfish actions threaten to sink it. At another level, the film forces us to think about whether suicide is necessarily an act of cowardice.

At a more literal level is a startling playground scene in which the teenaged protagonist Dhruv (Adarsh Gourav) retaliates to an unprovoked push with violence. The playground is a microcosm of the world, and it is no coincidence that we so often hear parents — more often fathers, but sometimes mothers — speak of how they want their children to be able to “give it back” if attacked. The capacity to return violence with violence, in this reading, is the ultimate marker of courage. But is it courage, or cowardice? When Dhruv’s father (Manoj Bajpayee) berates him with “And then you ran away!”, it is impossible not to be moved by Dhruv’s answer: “I got scared.”

Vikrant Massey in A Death in the Gunj

Earlier this year, we had Konkona Sen Sharma’s A Death in the Gunj, with Vikrant Massey playing a sensitive 23-year-old who has just lost his father and can’t find the courage to tell his extended family that he has failed an important exam. The quiet, artistic Shutu draws insects and prefers the company of a much younger child to the older men around him. His confusion and anxiety is dismissed with a “He needs to toughen up and take care of his mother”. Tests of bravado emerge as the men’s chosen entertainment — with tragic results.

These films all point to the fact that violence is the externalising of unprocessed fear. The more we applaud aggression in men, and discourage them from expressing hurt or grief or vulnerability, the more likely it is to spill over as violence, towards others and more rarely, towards themselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Oct 2017.

Alone in the Urban Jungle

My Mirror column:

Trapped is a harrowing survival movie, but it also takes a sharp look at the Indian city and our particular isolation in it.

On the face of it, Trapped is a Hindi film experimenting with the survival genre so beloved of Hollywood: a man is stuck alone without food or water and must find the resources to keep himself alive until help arrives. But the classic Hollywood survival narrative tends to place its protagonist at the mercy of the elements: brutal cold, wolves, the ocean, a tiger on a ship in the ocean, you get the picture. The question in those situations is usually a simple one: can we human beings still survive the universe, once the safety net -- or plush carpet -- of modern-day comforts is pulled out from under our feet?

Vikramaditya Motwane's film flips that narrative in two related ways. First, it abandons its hero not in a snowbound mountain crevasse or terrifying tropical wilderness, but in an apartment bang in the middle of the city, fully provided with the basic upper middle class accoutrements of modern Indian urban life: kitchen with built-in cabinets, bathroom with WC, gas cylinder, fridge, airconditioner, television. The space looks familiar to anyone who's lived in a highrise, and Motwane uses the familiarity to his advantage, lulling his protagonist – and us – into a sense of safety, before turning that recognizable 'normal' interior into a site of near-horror. Second, it reverses the role of the elements. Nature, in Trapped, is not something to be conquered, but in fact the only thing that comes to his aid.

In some ways, of course, this film could be set anywhere, in any big city that has tall residential buildings. But on second thoughts, I'd argue that the film works with our knowledge of a dysfunctional urbanity quite specific to India and perhaps particularly to Mumbai. We have seen the frightening isolation of the Mumbai highrise apartment in Hindi cinema before – Ram Gopal Varma, in particular, has explored it in the genres of both horror (Bhoot) and crime (Not a Love Story), as has Kiran Rao in the Aamir Khan section of Dhobhi Ghat. But the narrative bedrock of Trapped is Mumbai's longstanding problem of homelessness, something that has been with us since the 70s with films like Gharonda and was perhaps most recently given cinematic shape in another Rajkummar Rao starrer, Hansal Mehta's 2014 CityLights. CityLights chose a distressed rural family to suffer the malice of the big bad city; Trapped focuses its attentions on a single young man, but in both cases it is the ordinary innocent with dreams of home whom the city seems determined to torture -- down to the exact plot device of a cheating tout who takes the money and hands over a home that isn't.

There's also something particularly third world about how the plot amps up the danger. Instead of the dramatic breakdown that it takes to shatter the edifice of Western modernity -- a shipwreck, or a plane crash -- Trapped's modernity malfunction, the moment which really tips things over the edge, is an electricity connection that can't actually handle the load of the gadgets it has wired to it.

But Motwane's script also goes beyond the survival genre by giving us an emotional landscape, although that also seems intent upon testing our hero. The deftly-sketched romance with which the film begins is in fact pivoted on tests: the girl says he should stop calling her unless he can guess her favourite food on the count of five. (He does. And perhaps that superhuman moment of success is the first sign of his being not quite the dull, ordinary creature he seems to be.)

Expanding outwards from the difficulties of romance in an instrumental world, Motwane gives us a bleak portrait of the urban landscape we now inhabit. This is partially evoked in ways recognizable from recent films like Ruchika Oberoi's Island City – that world of anonymised offices in which human interaction is minimised or automated, where a man must woo his office colleague by making secret, hushed calls to her desk across the maze of identical cubicles they enter each day, and where the person on the other end of a phone directory service has lost the human ability to respond to the panic in the voice of the caller whom he's paid to 'help'.

Trapped also makes the necessary metaphorical gestures towards the ways in which we fail to see or hear each other anymore – but it does so gently. The watchman hanging out under the empty building is almost deaf, he spends his days with his ear to a transistor radio. The building in whose empty upper floors our man is marooned is called Swarg (literally heaven). Most noticeable for me, but perhaps unintended by the filmmakers, was that all the attempts Rao's character makes to communicate with the Indian city around him, he makes in English. He spells 'HELP' out in a million different ways, but it never seems to strike him to write the Hindi word 'Bachaao', or the Marathi equivalent. The moment when the watchman turns his cardboard sign upside down before abandoning it – that was for me a chilling moment of recognition about how precisely how marooned we are, because we have given up on the languages in which we might communicate with most people around us. 

But perhaps I am burying the film under the weight of its metaphors. Trapped preserves lightness amidst melancholy, and that is its achievement.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Mar 2017

Film Review: Shahid

Hansal Mehta’s biopic Shahid released last week, two and a half years after the still-unsolved death of the 33-year-old criminal defense lawyer who earned a reputation representing people accused in terror cases. It’s just about clinging on to the cinemas this week, despite having been released at the same time as Akshay Kumar’s Boss and losing its core audience in Mumbai to the Mumbai Film Festival which also kicked off last Friday. The fact that it’s still around for audiences to see is perhaps a fitting real life parallel to the story of a classic underdog. In a mere seven years of practice, Shahid Azmi secured 17 acquittals in matters that included the Ghatkopar bus bombing case of 2002, the Malegaon blast case of 2006, the Aurangabad arms haul case of 2006, the Mumbai train blasts of 2006, and most famously, the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008.

To those whom he saved from being sacrificed at the altar of an inept but bloodthirsty state, Azmi was certainly something of a hero. But Mehta’s film is scrupulously unheroic, choosing the messiness of real life over the clean arc of drama. Mehta’s directorial style echoes Azmi’s own commitment to a truth in which thoughtless actions produce victims, rather than villainy producing heroes. Azmi’s unglamorous courtroom victories repeatedly make the evidentiary triumph over the rhetorical. In the words of Rajkumar Yadav’s superbly convincing Shahid, “I’m as opposed as you are to terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that we can put innocent people in jail without any evidence.”


But perhaps what really made Azmi’s story compelling was his triumph over himself. Shahid’s impressiveness lay in the distance he had come from his own beginnings – and in never forgetting what that journey had been like. At the age of 14, deeply affected by the Bombay riots of 1992, he had briefly joined a militant training camp in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At 16, Azmi was arrested under TADA, or the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. Later, he was charged with conspiring against the state, specifically with plotting the assassinations of Farooq Abdullah and Bal Thackeray, and placed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. He was acquitted of all charges in 2001, but by then he had spent over seven years in jail.

The film does not turn Azmi into a saint. His fallibility is shown in the depiction of his early years, including his time in jail with Omar Shaikh, who was serving time for the 1994 kidnappings of foreign tourists in Kashmir. But somehow, knowing that he could just as easily have been swayed by the sword as by the pen, gives Azmi’s eventual choice greater impact. It is clear that Azmi’s work was not simply a career for him. It was a vocation.

The poor Muslim men whose cases he took up mirrored his own experience. Mehta’s film makes the connections without underlining them too heavily. While Azmi had been arrested under TADA, which became defunct in 1998, his clients were frequently arrested under POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) or MCOCA (the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act) – all of these legislations allowed confessions in police custody (notoriously extracted through torture or deceit) to be made admissible in court.
Unlike regular criminal lawyers whose professional ethics require them to defend clients regardless of their guilt or innocence, the film suggests that Azmi worked on a personal ethic: he only took on clients he believed to be innocent. 


Mehta’s depiction of Azmi’s life derives much of its power from economy. Apurva Asrani’s editing (he also has partial writing credits) produces a narrative full of sharp cuts, where we must often fill in the blanks. In one of the best examples of this, we see Shahid propose marriage to his client Mariam, a divorcee with a child. She expresses utter shock, picks up her stuff and leave. In the next scene we see them together, very much a couple — leaving us to make up our own version of the interim period. Yet the film doesn’t feel choppy. The quality Mehta strives for — and achieves — is gritty documentary made up of snapshots, rather than orchestrated epic. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see a young Shahid run out of his house in Govandi. He emerges into the smoky dimly, tubelit street only to almost collide with the terrible figure of a man ablaze. It is a shocking moment and a cinematic one; the burning man sets the screen aflame. But instead of trying to chill us with the power of choreographed communal violence as so many films do (Earth, Kai Po Che to name two of many), it jolts us. Much like Shahid himself, we find ourselves very suddenly in a militant training camp. Again, the Kashmiri locale might have felt epic if Anuj Dhawan’s camera didn’t focus on the snow: it’s not pure white, but a dirty brown. 


Later, Mehta shears the judicial process of all the grandeur that Hindi films have traditionally accorded it. Even the recent Jolly LLB did not cut itself off completely from the dramatic confrontation of the big fish and the small fish, though it sought to undercut the court’s aura of justice with biting satire. What makes Shahid unique is its deliberate curtailment of both drama and humour. Instead we get a courtroom where life-and-death decisions are taken while lawyers squabble, cutting into each others’ dialogue to create inaudible moments. The police produce blatantly manufactured evidence; witnesses lie baldly, but seemingly without real malice. 


Shahid Azmi’s legal practice was devoted to defending people who he believed had been put into jail as scapegoats. The perpetrators of despicable acts of terror were still at large, “drinking in an AC room, plotting their next move”, while these ordinary people had been flung behind bars, as he says at one point, only because their names were not “Mathew, Donald, Suresh or More”. 


Names do have a strange power. The root of the word Shahid comes from Arabic and in Urdu, it has split into two pronunciations: 'shaahid' meaning ‘witness’ and ‘shaheed’ meaning ‘martyr’. Shahid Azmi was both.

This review was first published on Firstpost.