FILM
REVIEW India's gangster
nation Gangs of
Wasseypur, directed by Anurag Kashyap,
2012 Reviewed by Dinesh
Sharma
Anurag Kashyap has made history by
offering a "socially realist" view of feudal and
communal structures from colonial times to
post-modern India, playing to standing room
applause at film festivals in Cannes, New York and
London with his critically acclaimed film about
the gangster families of India.
Gangs
of Wasseypur (Gangs) is a testament to what
sociologists and anthropologists have called the
stubborn persistence of archaic social structures
rooted in caste, race, ethnicity and gender. These
structures remain intact despite India's
post-independence legal reforms, social mobility
from rural to urban areas, and the rapid pace of
Westernization.
Of course, portrayals of
traditional India on the big screen stretch
all the way back to the
film Mother India and classic images of
Nargis Dutt as the Indian "Maa", who fights the
feudal landlords to protect her honor, land and
izzat(honor).
However, there are no
archetypal mother figures in this film. This is a
movie by, for and about men, ardent feminists
included. Women are portrayed as strong, gritty,
and wise to the"ways of men". Since this is not a
regular staple of Bollywood dance and drama, the
faint-hearted should not mistake it for a date
flick.
The film is about India's gangster
mind in all its raw and unadulterated form, laced
with raunchy language, muscle, music, blood, gore
and sex. The formula of the movie works because it
shows India's hard-headed social reality, with
sardonic humor and penetrating insights.
Gangs might pass as a visual ethnography
of perennial issues India has struggled with -
hierarchy, communalism, violence, corruption and
sexism. At times the movie takes on the
documentary form to cover the history of land
reforms, labor rights, and exploitation of natural
resources; here it begins to sound like a treatise
on Indian psyche by Sudhir Kakar or Ashis Nandy.
It will be debated that Gangs is an
amalgamation of various other genres reminiscent
of Spaghetti Western, Coppola's The
Godfather trilogy, Tarantino's Reservoir
Dogs, Scorsese's Gangs of New York and
other Bollywood gangster capers. But this is not
your usual underworld movie, most of which are
shot in and around the seedy world of Mumbai, the
maximum city.
Kashyap has presented an
original narrative in an explosively Indian form.
The plot and structure are situated in a small
town in Bihar, North India, revolving around one
neighborhood and essentially two streets of
Wasseypur and its dark, narrowing gullies.
At a London Indian Film Festival, Kashyap
said, "I wanted to make the film about the world I
know well. I grew up on these streets ... The
script is based on a collection of news stories
compiled over many years, chronicling the family
history of a blood feud animated by revenge".
The story revolves around two Muslim
clans, the Qureshis versus the Pathans, and how
the conflict between them is fueled and exploited
by a Hindu landlord to control natural resources
consisting of coal, water, fisheries and scrap
materials.
The driving tension in the film
is between the Pathan clansmen, Sardar Khan
(played by Manoj Bajpai), who wants to avenge his
father's murder by a Quereshi leader (Vipin
Sharma), which was orchestrated by the Hindu
landlord Ramdhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia),the
owner of large coal mines in Bihar. The blood feud
is passed on from one generation to the next,
pushed forward by Sardar Khan's two sons: Danish
Khan (Vineet Singh) and Faisal Khan (Nawazuddin
Siddiqui), who plays the leading role in the
second part.
The scenes of killings and
mayhem seem to mirror the communal violence that
has erupted in India during times of ethnic
tensions. Kashyap, whose earlier film Black
Friday about the1993 Mumbai bombings was also
critically acclaimed, knows how to handle the
material with great skill. When he explores the
genesis of the violence in the life histories of
the various characters, the viewer feels compelled
to follow along with the narrative, even though
the epic is five hours long, shown in two
installments. The first part of the film was
released on June 22 and the second part is due out
next month.
The Hollywood Reporter has
described the film as "a dizzying explosion of an
Indian gangster film, whose epic structure and
colorful, immoral killers capture the imagination
for over five hours".
Kashyap suggests
that what appear to be communal tensions are
instead the struggle for natural resources
orchestrated by landlords and their army of thugs
spilling over into everyday politics. There are
two kinds of individuals in the world, the film
suggests at the outset: the strongman and the
idiot. The strongman knows how to take
things,while a herd of idiots simply follow as
victims.
As a theory of conventional
morality it might not go a long way towards
explaining everyday life in India, but it does
show how in contemporary India competing interests
are always vying for limited resources while
innocent bystanders lose out in the process. In
totality, however, the film makes clear that
Kashyap's vision of today's India is complex,
nuanced and rigorous.
As India powers
towards an economically developed future, there is
an ongoing struggle for sustainability, where
participatory democracy is supposed to lift all
the boats. Recently, successive elections in India
have turned on whether the ruling parties have
been able to provide economic relief to the poor,
the minorities and the tribal populations in
villages and urban cities. While Gangs does not
offer any prescriptions for how to fix the huge
deficits India faces today, it does show on the
Technicolor screen some of the impediments that
are keeping it from advancing further.
India has "a tryst with destiny" indeed,
as the black and white, grainy news footage of
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of
India reminds the audience in the film. In this
over-the-top portrait of an emerging power,
Kashyap shows us why the stars have not been able
to fully align India's tryst with its destiny,
thus far.
Dinesh Sharma is the
author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and
Indonesia: The Making of a Global President, which
was rated as the Top 10 Black history books for
2012. His next edited book, Psychoanalysis,
Culture and Religion, is due to be published
with Oxford Press.
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