Ultimate gangster rap!
Gangs of Wasseypur
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Actors: Manoj Bajpai, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nawazuddin Sidiqui, Reema Sen, Huma Qureshi.
One Ramadheer Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia in a cracker performance) is the prominent mafia don in and around Wasseypur, which was once a village, but is now a populated zone within Dhanbad. You can see how the underworld in this town of collieries first took shape within trade unions of mining companies and then gradually merged with the politics of the state, when the coal industry itself got nationalised in the early ‘70s. Ramadheer is a powerful MLA now.
Quite early in his career, he had to get rid of his main “pehlwan” (chief henchman) Shahid Khan. Ramadheer had sensed a threat from Shahid. He asked for him one night, got him into his jeep, and Shahid never returned home after. His son kept waiting. He knew Ramadheer had killed his father.
This little boy Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee, wonderful comeback) grows up with revenge on his mind. He’s shaved his head, sworn that he’ll grow his hair back only when he’s finished Ramadheer off. This is the prologue. So you know Sardar’s the hero, Ramadheer the villain, and the film, a revenge drama seeking poetic justice. And yet the worst mistake you’re likely to make is to walk into this film thinking like that. It’ll kill your fun. In fact, it’s advisable not to even perceive this as a feature film. It’s more of a multi-part mini-series, which is how Kashyap’s Black Friday was also intended to be.
Most movies have a definite beginning (starting point), middle (turning point) and end (high point), or what playwrights call the three act structure in a script. There doesn’t seem to be one here, at least on the face of it. The genre it comes closest to then is an epic, spelt with a capital E, along the lines of say Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, or this film’s immediate inspiration Martin Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York (2002). And, of course, it is like all mythologies are supposed to be. You enjoy them for the parts rather than caring merely for the hero’s final goal.
Sardar Khan, a sexual animal of sorts, has two wives. One (Richa Chadha) gives him kids, he has three children from her. The other, a “Bangalan” from Asansol ((I’d be embarrassed to be from a town by that name!) gives him sex, or is supposed to. He has a child from her as well. Sardar’s father, as we watch, used to be a dacoit in British India, when the name of one Sultan Daku used to cause panic in these parts. By the end of it, even Sardar’s children have grown up. One of them (Nawazuddin, the finest find in recent years), you can tell, nurses ambitions of joining the gangs of Wasseypur. This curry western, set over three complete generations then, extends from pre-independence era right down to the ‘90s. Your patience is likely to wane after a point. And yes, it does. Yet, just as it does, the makers manage to successfully slip in an inspiring scene, an entertaining snippet or a limited twist in the plot and you go back to engaging with the picture all over again.
The story itself is merely an excuse to capture the dusty black-brown landscape and complete lawlessness of the region bordering Bengal and Jharkhand, where dialogue baazi and “rangdari” (extortion) is common preoccupation among boastful goons. The goon is the government itself. The film gets the atmospherics, beats and nuances just right. This is quite rare for movies placed in provincial towns. Traditional Hindi movie audiences apparently don’t prefer cinema of this kind. Their lives are harshly too real for them to expect the same from their movies. As we see in the film, they go nuts over the melodrama of Yash Chopra’s Trishul in the ‘70s. But they would’ve loved as much, if not more, Chopra’s phenomenal Kala Patthar (1979) set again in the coal fields of Dhanbad. The setting for this mafia film in that sense is spot-on. This is the part of India where even now the name of late Surajdeo Singh, a dreaded don I’m told, sends shivers down people’s spines. Vishal Bhardwaj had intended to make a prequel to his masterpiece Maqbool (2004) set in Dhanbad as well, where the script could trace the early life and rise of Don Abbaji (Pankaj Kapur). If that film had been made, it would’ve probably been very different from this.
Gangs Of Wasseypur is fictionalised, blood-soaked, demented history that alternates between sharp grittiness and delicious grotesquery. Movies have a gender. This is animalist, male. Given how easy it is to kill off people in this picture, it’s a miracle that they’re all not dead yet! The community of Qureishis take on other Musalmans. Loud sounds of kattas (country-made pistols), rifles, revolvers, butcher’s knives, ice picks envelope your senses. If it wasn’t a film, this would’ve been a stylised graphic novel. But you would’ve missed a memorable background score and striking sound design. For a film, it’s a manic mini-series, the kinds usually produced by HBO, that you could preserve in a boxed DVD set even years from now. Yeah, this one’s for keeps.
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How much stars for this one mayank???