On a search that unlocks precious little

Searching for Sheela (Netflix)

Executive producer: Shakun Batra

Rating: 2/5

‘Ma’ Sheela was a showstopper. She was the enigmatic right-hand woman of Rajneesh (Osho) in the 1980s, when they established a sex cult in a ‘country’ of their own.

She gave journalists the finger as she tried to defend her ‘Bhagwan’ and his ‘Rajneeshpuram’ — the godman’s commune in the US infamous for nudity and free sex.

‘Searching for Sheela’ picks up right where ‘Wild Wild Country’ left off. If the 2018 Netflix documentary was a no-holds-barred attempt at chronicling Osho and his orgies in Oregon, the new take on Sheela — his one-time assistant who fell out with him — feels like a window display. There is no effort to search for the real ‘Ma Anand Sheela’.

Produced by Dharmatic Entertainment, the film follows the format of Karan Johar’s fluffy talk shows. “I have bigger scandals than show business,” she warns him initially. We buy into that. After all, the Vadodara-born Sheela Birnstiel was convicted of attempted murder, immigration fraud, wiretapping and a bioterror attack.

From a criminal to a caregiver (she now runs two centres for the disabled in Switzerland, where she is settled), Sheela has come a long way. Or has she? The documentary deploys a bevy of star-struck interviewers (including Barkha Dutt) to ask the 70-year-old whether she really did what she was accused of.

In Rajneesh’s own words, Sheela (he called her ‘Seela’) was “just my secretary”; “she will suffer her whole life” for her crimes.

The woman has an agenda now: to erase the “misunderstandings”. The documentary was filmed in 2019 when Sheela returned to India after 35 years for a whirlwind interview tour. She navigates questions (thrown by selfie-seeking socialites) with remarkable ease. Perhaps the only engaging query comes from Johar — whether Sheela’s relationship with Osho was platonic. She tackles it upfront, saying she didn’t have sex with the guru: “His eyes were probably more beautiful than his penis was.”

Barring these few takeaways, ‘Searching for Sheela’ is not quite the search we wanted to embark on. In her own words, “it is Bhagwan’s history, not Sheela’s”.

So, is she really the woman who tried to poison an entire town? A blank stare is the answer.