‘'Shanghai' was never meant to be a political mobilisation propaganda film’

Dibakar Banerjee tells Aniruddha Guha that his film is a story about the middle class, not a crash course in development politics.

Some people felt you didn’t show any of the tension that is characteristic to a state-people conflict in development projects — protests, evictions, police firings, etc.
That’s because the story isn’t really about the slums. It’s the story of middle-class people, caught up in an alien slum environment, and struggling to come to terms with various things. They are trying to do something even they don’t fully understand. Till Dr Ahmedi (who’s shown fighting for the rights of Bharat Nagar residents) is mowed down, in fact, there’s no real tension in the film. It’s only Ahmedi’s killing that sets the story in motion. Shanghai was never meant to be a political mobilisation propaganda film.

Slum dwellers who saw the film said that the dalaal (tout) — opportunists who eat money from the political establishment and often betray their own neighbours and families for profit — weren’t shown in the film.
This is a valid criticism, and I agree with their point. I believe the character of Damle (the politician’s henchman in the film) is the traitor. But, the insight about the absence of a dalaal is interesting.

Another criticism was that the daily trials and vulnerabilities of the working class and casual labourers weren’t really represented.
Anant Jogue’s character, who mows down Dr Ahemadi, is representing the working class. So is his wife, and the character of Bhaggu (played by Pitobash). I didn’t see the need to have more than one or two characters to represent that strata of society. The film, in the end, has been made for intellectual pleasure; it’s a story. It’s not to push the agenda of any particular set of people, but to ask some pertinent questions instead.

The slum dwellers felt the working class organisers of mass movements weren’t properly represented in the film.
Unfortunately, the perception of city slum dwellers about mass movements in smaller towns is wrong. In a big city, there is a lot of posturing, and a genuine show of strength. Shanghai is set in a fictional city — a small one. The geography of the place (Bharat Nagar) — even the airport shown in the initial part of the film — is supposed to resemble a small city. In a town like that, especially one which is under the control of the ruling political party, the people are comparatively meeker. In a multi-faceted urban city like Mumbai, the stronghold of a political party isn’t exactly imaginable. But that’s not the case in smaller cities. There is a dialogue in the film, where Dr Ahmedi says, “Bharat Nagar toh unka drawing room hai.” (“Bharat Nagar is their drawing room.”) People are shown being evicted from their houses in the film, which they do without much opposition. In any case, Shanghai isn’t about a mass movement, but about a few people (like Dr Ahmedi and his workers) struggling to mobilise a rather weak support.

There were complaints that the character of Dr Ahmedi (played by Prosenjit Chatterjee) wasn’t inspiring enough.
In the film, we aren’t seeing Dr Ahmedi like a group of people see activists on stage. Instead, the entire persona is looked into. In addition to his life as a social worker, or a leader of the people, he’s also shown to have an extra-marital affair. The bent of the film is such that the character’s public image isn’t as important as his personal life. Neither is it a propaganda film, which would prop him as a true people’s person or a revolutionary. The character, instead, is seen through the eyes of Shalini (played by Kalki Koechlin), who’s a besotted student of the man and considers him to be her god. And then sees her god getting killed.

In the film, special thanks is given to Riteish Deshmukh, the son of the man (ex-CM Vilasrao Deshmukh) who the slum-dwellers believe has tormented them the most.
(Laughs) Well, I shot the film in Latur, which I believe is the Deshmukhs’ hometown. Riteish made shooting easier for us at the location. Hence, a note of thanks to him. It shows how close we are to each other in this country — we are not separated to each other by more than two or three degrees of separation.