Student's Corner: Back to Wasseypur
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In a deconstruction of Anurag Kashyap’s 2012 film Gangs of Wasseypur, Ishan Mukherjee revisits the history, soundtrack, and the work of an inspired auteur director that truly made this saga a cinematic classic.
On TV, an unsuspecting Smriti Irani from Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi welcomes you into her house. Then, she gets shot in the face. The camera pans from a television set to a small army of mobsters. They are led by the fearsome Sultan Qureshi (Pankaj Tripathi), out to exact bloody revenge upon Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) for… well, a crime neither of them was around to witness. The primal cause for this rivalry stretches back generations; revenge, like property and mythology, has been passed down through history.
This is the opening shot of the five-hour-long, two-part saga that is Gangs of Wasseypur. Set in the coalfields of Bihar, the landmark Anurag Kashyap film follows three families entwined in a bloody feud: the Khans, the Qureshis and the stately Singhs. Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) has blood on his hands. He may have eliminated power-hungry Shahid Khan (Jaideep Ahlawat), but how will he keep down his avenger son Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee)? Perhaps he will use the fact that Sardar has enemies of his own: a certain butcher-mobster who resents the change in Wasseypur’s power structures. It is not possible to discuss the plot without giving away the dramatic beats of the story, and honestly, much of it will be irrelevant to the discussion
A lot has already been written about Gangs of Wasseypur—originally released in 2012—so why this, and why now? Well, I am taking a cue from Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times film critic who in his later years wrote reviews of the “Great Movies”. Of course, they weren’t reviews in the traditional sense, since he was writing in measured, retrospective tones to an audience that had already seen and loved the films (as compared to an audience eager for his hot takes on the latest release). My comparison with Ebert ends there; and in the case of GoW, re-watching the film in 2020 springs up interesting new insights, considering everything else that has changed in the world.
The film has a particularly memorable soundtrack, courtesy Sneha Khanwalkar, which borrows liberally from many musical milieus (there’s a Bihari folk song with a raw, memorable chorus; a West Indian chutney tune with deliciously obscene lyrics; and a Manoj Tiwari Bhojpuri song) and is voiced by people as interesting as the characters in the film (“Dil Chhichha Ledar” was sung by Durga, a sixteen-year-old girl who used to beg on a Mumbai train; untrained mandir gayikas sang “Taar Bijli Se Patle”). And then there is the lyricist Varun Grover, sneaking double-entendres galore into his songs, giving us masterpieces like “I Am A Hunter” and “Keh Ke Loonga”.
Kashyap has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and draws inspiration from a wide range of sources. In GoW, Kashyap pays homages left and right to the films that formed him, including The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Bhojpuri cinema.
But if the soundtrack has any hint to offer of the political satirist Grover would later become (as one-third of Aisi Taisi Democracy), it is in the form of “Taar Bijli Se Patle Humare Piya”. On the surface level, it is the lament of a wife whose husband is underfed in his familial home. “O re sasu bata tu ne yeh kya kiya [O mother-in-law mine, what hath thou done?],” she asks. But gradually, the song turns into an admonishment of politicians who “sold” Bihar away at the going rate for coal. Thus, it calls out Gulaabi Chacha, Babasaheb and Aara Chhapra Ke Babuji.
The real star of the film, however, was its director Anurag Kashyap. Seldom does a Bollywood film sell by weight of the director’s name alone. There is Rajkumar Hirani and to some extent Vishal Bhardwaj, but the list ends there, more or less. Hollywood, by contrast, is filled with a gamut of filmmakers, making films where the unique selling point is them more than anything else. There is Quentin Tarantino, who revived the careers of John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, or Christopher Nolan, who makes eagerly anticipated films that invariably do well at the box office.
Kashyap is in that rare class of directors with his own cult following. Like Tarantino, whom he admires, Kashyap has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and draws inspiration from a wide range of sources. In GoW, Kashyap pays homages left and right to the films that formed him. A lead character is killed in a Sonny Corleone-esque ambush (The Godfather), assassins riddling his vehicle with bullets. But in a macabre twist the character walks out dazed, hand plugging an oozing wound, while an ironic ode to Bhojpuri cinema, “Jiya tu Bihar ke lala [Long live o son of Bihar]” plays in the background. Another character poses in front of a mirror and just when you think he will say “Tu mujhse baat kar raha hai? [You talkin’ to me? (Taxi Driver)],” he mock-fires at an imaginary gang of adversaries.
History is important to Kashyap. He deemed it important to explain in GoW that a revolver made from a bicycle handle will backfire; no, you need the steering wheel of a truck. Why settle?
History lessons are thrown in for each decade the film is set in. Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” introduces the late 1940s. Footage of coal-trafficking brings up the era of the nationalisation of coal mines. Characters profess love for Amitabh Bachchan films and for Munnabhai MBBS. Technology comes to mark the passage of time. Kashyap captures the fascination—and, frankly the bewilderment—of upper-class households with refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, when the appliances appear for the first time in the subcontinent.
Kashyap had never been known to churn blockbusters. One of his early films, No Smoking—now a cult classic—lost serious money on release and drove its director to depression. But GoW got a lot right. And more poignantly, it was a herald of things to come in Indian cinema.
“[I] don’t make the kind of movies that the audience waits on a Friday to go and see [sic].” Kashyap said in an interview with VICE. “My audience is a cinema-literate one that also has things to do. I have had Gangs of Wasseypur thrown out of theatres while it was doing very well, because Ek Tha Tiger had to come out… [In Bollywood] the star is the content.”
It is not surprising that Kashyap has more recently turned to streaming services like Netflix for his newer content. Sacred Games (2018-present) has been hugely successful precisely because the cinema-literate population could watch the series in their own time, from the comfort of their home. He is part of a larger, global trend in cinema. Deep-pocketed online services, with their huge releases, are rapidly replacing the moviegoing experience. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was almost a Netflix exclusive, with limited opening in select theatres of America (presumably to qualify for the Academy Awards). Before him, Alfonso Cuarón delivered the beautiful Roma as a Netflix Original.
I find it hard to believe, however, that Kashyap would be too pleased with his new-found success on OTT platforms. Cinema—for most directors who fell in love with it—is a communal experience. Consider the adrenaline shot scene in Pulp Fiction. Or the one where they blow Marvin’s head off. Consider ‘The Dawn of Man’ in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or the war scene in Apocalypse Now. Is it unfair to say that these moments lose some of their grandeur when viewed on a 5-inch-wide LCD screen?
Cinema requires cinema halls. For Indian cinema, it is a sad state that talented contemporary directors like Kashyap have had to eschew the medium so as to continue making their masterpieces. With the pandemic causing a national lockdown, and thus, also effecting the economy of Bollywood and theatres, cinemas and quality films made for the cinematic experience—like GoW—will become a rarer occurrence in the future. It is perhaps an opportune time for us as moviegoers to pause and ponder our choices, to choose films that truly matter.
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Ishan Mukherjee is a student of Class XI from Sunbeam School (Bhagwanpur) in Varanasi.
