Will the real hero please stand up?

In Gully Boy (GB), Murad (Ranveer Singh)’s father Aftab Shakir Ahmed (Vijay Raaz) tells him: “Hum garib log hain. Apne sapne aur sachchai mein mel hona chahiye (Poor people like us need to know how to match our dreams with our realities)” Murad replies: “Nahi, mein apne sachchai ko sapne se mel khane ke liye majboor karunga (I’ll force my reality to change and match my dreams).” For Pune-resident film studies expert Anupam Siddhartha, this line is not only about Murad, but also about filmmaker Zoya Akhtar, who did not take the poor commercial response to her Luck By Chance (2009) to heart. “Despite its cinematic superiority and critical acclaim, this journey of an actor who arrives in Mumbai to become a movie star saw a less than lukewarm box office response,” recollects Siddhartha. “Anyone else would’ve shied from making gritty, real content and gone back to the safe and formulaic. But the Murad within Zoya doesn’t want to be swayed by the box office then, which in a sense, symbolises Murad’s Abba.”

Reactions like these began as early as February 10 when GB was screened at the Berlinale. Artistic director at the Toronto International Film Festival, Cameron Bailey, who caught the film with the film’s lead cast and director tweeted that he has never seen a response like this to a film in the two decades he’s been going to Berlin. “Watched the Gully Boy world premiere tonight in a packed house with @RanveerOfficial, @aliaa08 & @ZoyaAkhtarOff present. Biggest cheers I’ve heard in 20+ years at the Berlinale (sic).”

(Still from the movie with leading lady Alia Bhatt)

Watershed moment

The jury is still out on whether GB will be a watershed moment for film-making despite the massive critical-acclaim and word-of-mouth publicity keeping the box office registers ringing. But Siddhartha insists: “The success and reach of Zoya Akhtar’s GB is bound to create a domino effect on several slice-of-life projects in the pipeline. Even if not completely overhauled, both narratives and treatment of these films will be held against GB as a reference point. In that sense, it could well be a turning point for film-making in Bollywood, especially its characterisations, grammar and visual language.”

GB looks at the life of 22-year-old “Dharavi-17” resident, Murad, whose parents want him to have a white-collar job. But he wants to pursue street-style rap. His struggle to chase this dream despite many problems (existential and otherwise) his ghettoised life thrusts on him through the film’s 153-minute run sees him break through the ‘class ceiling’ to emerge a rap star. Siddhant Chaturvedi plays Murad’s mentor MC Sher, while Alia Bhatt crackles as Safeena, his “tod-phod (fiesty)” girlfriend.

Veteran filmmaker Aruna Raje, who echoes Siddhartha’s opinion, says the plot of the underdog fighting all odds already has in it the potential to connect and strike a chord. “To cast one of the biggest stars among the current lot, Ranveer as the lead, was a masterstroke. Getting him to tone down his signature energy to keep his character believably real is also commendable,” she says about GB which is steadily inching to the Rs 100 crore mark. Murad, she feels is the right character in the right place at the right time. “Look around, there’s despair and anger at the widening gap between haves and have-nots. Very often the latter are the voiceless abject poor. Murad articulates their aspirations to make it big, the pain of rejection and exclusion and the struggle even to make both ends meet. For far too long this large swathe of people, who keep big metropolises like Mumbai running, have been kept out of its ‘beautiful’ stretches. But in a city where space is a constraint, it’s inevitable that these otherwise mutually-exclusive worlds sit cheek by jowl and the affluent see how the other side lives and dies.”

The churn is on

Raje, however, cautions against taking this to mean that everybody is now going to go to Dharavi to make a film. “That’s too simplistic a take on what is unfolding. Consecutive flops by the three Khans and the arrival of hit scripts like Badhai Ho, Andhadhun and now Gully Boy give you a sense that the churn’s here to stay. It’ll be great if our stars wake up to this. Nobody grudges them their power to bring people to theatres, but this doesn’t happen in isolation and is definitely not the only thing that makes a film work,” she explains and asks, “How many times and how long can audiences keep on appreciating an accent, a mannerism, a piece of clothing or hairstyle where the same star does the same thing irrespective of which character he’s playing? It may’ve worked in the bygone single-screen era when audiences had little else as an option. But today, when they’re spoilt for choice in content, why will they suffer such shoddy stuff?”

According to her, this has to do with the film industry’s protagonists being a product of their times. “Scriptwriters draw on material from around them to connect. So the predominantly mythological protagonists with which the Indian film industry began later evolved into a socially conscientious hero-fighting colonists. By Independence, he was fighting avaricious zamindars and money lenders. While the good feeling lasted, he was merely fighting rival suitor of his lady love as a doctor, lawyer or poet. But as the dream of freedom soured, the greedy politician became the villain until he was fighting the smuggler in cahoots with the politician.”

But didn’t parallel cinema by greats like Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and others try to break out of this? “To an extent. True, we have some of the most superior cinema that emerged thanks to Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy who set the tone for such work,” explains Siddhartha, “But parallel cinema suffered because of accessibility. There were no multiplexes and hence the movement took a blow. The Indie movement tried to revive this to an extent but it wasn’t able to taste the kind of mainstream success we are now seeing.”

((From top) Still from Gully Boy with Ranveer Singh; Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar; Ayushman Khurana and Neena Gupta in a movie still from Badhai Ho; Amir Khan, Akshaye Khanna and Saif Ali Khan in a still from the movie Dil Chahta Hai)

Angry young man

Lyricist-scriptwriter Javed Akhtar who has been monitoring all the praise coming his daughter Zoya’s way for GB, however, says the surfeit of symbolism, multiple characters and ideas have always been a way for the film industry. “It is the only way for it to make sense of a land as diverse as India,” he points out. He should know. After all, along with fellow-writer Salim Khan, he helped create the ‘angry young man’, which propelled Amitabh Bachchan to super-stardom. “We were ourselves struggling and sensed anger around us in the run-up to the Emergency. There was nothing intellectual or socio-political in the character we created. Just organic.” 

But Khan differs. He says the anger was a reaction to realising that being genteel, polite and awaiting one’s turn was not going to help. “When the poor and hungry find their pleas falling on deaf ears despite waiting in dignified patience, it can lead to a lot of anger. That is what we were getting our character to express. And we sensed that people were tired of warm, sunny films that refused to acknowledge the dark shadow of Partition, the crisis of Emergency and the harsh realities educated unemployment. We were able to tap into that.”

And though the lead character became a smuggler himself (often a golden-hearted Robinhood), decades of genteel storylines in films made it difficult to make him a dark character without making him socially unacceptable. “So the angry young man is often the outlier and even has to die (Deewar) for being one,” Siddhartha explains. He underlines how Akhtar’s son Farhan has also been a legatee of this grammar and language-changing style of film-making. “His Dil Chahta Hai (2001) cast a long shadow on the films that came after. None of the characters here were struggling with existential worries like the next meal or a roof over their heads. They came from privileged backgrounds, lived upper middle-class lives in Mumbai or Sydney and wore expensive brands and hairdos. But their characters just grabbed the nation’s imagination making it a hit. These viewers were earning 10-12 times more than their parents and were living in a day and age when the IT boom had brought about a whole lifestyle and mindset change.”

He shakes his head at how far to the other side the pendulum then swung. “Audiences had to endure several NRI romance meets Punjabi wedding video with dollops of KJo-style melodrama thrown in before Zoya brought back the angry young man with GB. Only this time he’s not at all apologetic about his anger and even revels in it. He grabs centre-stage and raps about the very issues he’s grappling with.” For example, when Murad meets MC Sher for the first time he asks how he met his foreigner friend. Sher replies: “Wilson College ke peeche Shivsagar mein. Yeh foreigner log na jaat, joota aur jabaan nahi dekhte, seedha aankh mein dekhte hain. (Foreigners don’t look at caste, language or style, they only look at the person)”. And just like that the intersectionality between caste, religion, disenfranchisement, exclusion and discrimination comes alive in a powerful cinematic moment!

Praise for this unapologetic and empathising gaze has come the way of Zoya from her five-time National Awardee step-mom Shabana Azmi too. “Having worked in the slums for 40 years I know several such characters closely,” she says and showers praise on the writers Reema Kagti and Zoya. “They look at this world with empathy without getting sentimental. There are no forced justifications for any of the behaviours. The characters just are what they are.”

An overwhelmed Zoya Akhtar admitted that the huge response from cinegoers is taking a while to sink in. “Whether Murad, MC Sher, Safeena or Moeen people want to own these characters. Considering how hard the team worked for GB, it feels good to see people respond like this.”

Suddenly Gully Boy’s Apna Time Aayega seems not only about Murad but the entire sub-altern:

Aayega apna time aayega / Mere jaisa shaana lala / Tujhe na mil payega / Yeh shabdon ka jwala / Meri bediyan pighlayega / Jitna toone boya hai tu / Utna hi to khaayega / Aisa mera khwaab hai / Jo darr ko bhi satayega / Zinda mera khwaab / Abb kaise tu dafnayega

(Our time will come/ you will scarce come by one as wise as me/ the volcanic burst of whose words/ will melt away his fetters/ you will reap as much you’ve sown / just like my dreams  / that are melting my fears/ my dreams are immortal / you can’t bury them.)