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Veteran writer-director Sudhir Mishra’s upcoming release, Inkaar, starring Arjun Rampal and Chitrangada Singh, deals with the social and emotional ramifications of gender politics. The film’s female protagonist is a victim of sexual harassment in the workplace — a figure that has rarely, if ever, been seen in popular Hindi cinema. A dark, unflinching narrative woven around a real issue confronting Indian society is par for the course for a filmmaker like Mishra. His career has been built primarily around films that have addressed questions of social import. The story of Prakash Jha
is pretty much the same. His last film, Chakravyuh, also
featuring Arjun Rampal, alongside Abhay Deol, Manoj Bajpai, Esha Gupta
and Anjali Patil, probed the circumstances that feed Maoist violence
in many remote parts of the country.
For the maker of Gangajal, Apaharan, Rajneeti and Aarakshan, the new political thriller was natural progression. Jha’s next film, Satyagraha, is reported to have been inspired by the anti-corruption crusade that is currently unfolding in the country. The space occupied by commercially oriented Hindi films that address burning socio-political questions is steadily expanding with the likes of Jha and Mishra having been joined by a crop of younger directors, who believe in telling stories that spring from the realities of the land. What is it that is fuelling this dramatic spurt in cinematic tales from the hinterland — is it the changing profile of the audience or is it the altered creative impulses of a different breed of filmmakers? Dibakar Banerjee, whose Shanghai was a trenchant comment on the repercussions of a skewed development paradigm, feels that the truth lies somewhere between the above two inferences. "Yes, audiences
have become more aware of films like these. But it is the enthusiasm
of the makers more than anything else that is driving this trend. I
don’t think the audience would miss Shanghai if it wasn’t
made. But the audience is more receptive to such films when they
actually hit the theatres," he says.
Even as action flicks, romantic comedies and comic romps continue to hold sway over the masses, a certain segment of the audience has certainly developed a liking for films that aren’t mere flights of fancy. One filmmaker who is driving, as well as benefitting from this emerging scenario is, of course, Anurag Kashyap. Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, released as a two-part film earlier this year, is a sweeping saga set in the grimy, lawless and volatile coal belt of Dhanbad and its environs. "Although the film is a work of fiction, all the characters and situations in it are modelled on real people and incidents," he says. And that is true also of films like Paan Singh Tomar, Peepli Live and even Ishaqzaade. These films foray into spaces that are mere specks on the map and narrate stories that are never highlighted in the mainstream media. These films recognise the fact that a pulsating, if perplexing, India lies beyond Mumbai’s underworld and New Delhi’s corridors of power, two domains that dominate the images that the country’s media beams into our homes 24/7. While Paan Singh Tomar brings to the screen the tragic story of a real-life steeplechase champion’s transformation into an outlaw in rural India, Peepli Live goes into the murky darkness that lies at the heart of India’s agrarian crisis. Both these tales are necessarily rooted in a milieu where optimism is impossible. Ishaqzaade, essentially a love story from the Yash Raj Films stable, is an interesting example. The fictional North Indian town that writer-director Habib Faisal set his story in wasn’t the kind of dreamscape that is usually associated with youthful love stories. The film is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet theme and plays out in the boondocks as two warring clans, divide by both religion and political affiliation, battle for supremacy. Given the intrinsic nature of the business, a wide range of Hindi films will always be committed to the cause of mass entertainment, but as directors like Faisal, Onir (My Brother Nikhil, I Am) and Rajkumar Gupta (No One Killed Jessica) find greater opportunities to make their kind of transformative cinema and secure a niche for themselves, the Mumbai movie industry as a whole will never be the same. The fluffy, feel-good scenarios that Bollywood typically thrives on are already increasingly being impacted by the visions of rural and semi-urban dystopia being projected by films like Shanghai, Gangs of Wasseypur and Peepli Live. As the two strands of filmmaking learn to co-exist in greater harmony than ever before, the mainstream Mumbai movie industry is no longer a purveyor of only escapist fare. Today, there is much more to it.
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