The shadowy world of Anurag Kashyap

Actor-director Anurag Kashyap’s Malayalam-language film ‘Rifle Club’ (2024) has been receiving tremendous adulation of late. Kashyap, the master of out-of-the-box flicks, is all praise for the Malayalam moviemakers’ flair for condensing the global into the local. He opines that Malayalam movies concentrate on wringing one’s creative juices to the last drop, unlike the “profit-driven” Bollywood, which restricts artistry. Kashyap plans to move to south India in the near future. However, despite his claims of restrictions on creativity in the Hindi movie industry, Kashyap has always been able to deliver unusual, spell-binding works.

In Haruki Murakami’s ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’, the protagonist meets a young man who claims that many useful things can be created out of vacuum or darkness. I would vouch that the same holds true for Kashyap’s works. Owing to the vile experiences he had when young, Kashyap invariably gravitates towards the shadows, whether as the main character’s pedophilic stepdad in Onir’s ‘I Am’ or, more recently, as a dacoit-cum-rapist in ‘Maharaja’. 

Way back in the ‘90s, I remember watching ‘The Last Train to Mahakali’, one of Kashyap’s early works, with horrified fascination. A dedicated but decidedly eccentric doctor who has taken his virology experiments a little too far has been put behind bars. The doctor’s dedication to his work strips him of his moral compass; he sees nothing wrong in injecting his vaccines into unsuspecting people, resulting in their deaths. An exuberant young journalist, on her first assignment, sets up a meeting with the doctor, keen on unspooling his mind, and eventually ends up becoming one of his sacrificial lambs.

The banned ‘Paanch’, which was later released with a myriad of censor cuts, narrates the story of a group of artistes who thrive on music, drugs, expletives, alcohol, whimsical behaviour, dark humour, and a devil-may-care attitude. When they require funds to seal a music deal, the musicians hatch a kidnap plot involving the abduction of one of their cronies, who dies accidentally. Incidentally, ‘Paanch’ was reworked into the more polished ‘Shaitan’, in which five directionless youngsters run over and kill a couple of people during a reckless nocturnal driving spree. Subsequently blackmailed by a slimy cop to hush up the incident, the youngsters concoct a sham kidnap plot to abduct one of their own pals. What transpires is a series of misadventures, at the end of which the group’s plan is foiled by a cop who is battling demons of his own.

Most are familiar with Kashyap’s satirical take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic ‘Devdas’ (‘Dev D’), in which the modern-day Dev isn’t shy about asking if Paro touches herself, and Paro sees nothing wrong with sending nudes to her childhood sweetheart. The scene indelibly etched in one’s psyche is the one where Paro laboriously cycles to the mustard fields with a bulky mattress tied to the backseat so that she can consummate her love with her childhood sweetheart. The scene is hilarious, freaky, and screams of woman empowerment — all at the same time. One is haunted by a paradoxical moment in ‘Raman Raghav 2.0’, which tells the tale of a serial killer who commits a slew of crimes across Mumbai’s suburbs. After ruthlessly bludgeoning a young mother to death, Raman does a recce of the room and finds a bawling infant. Raman picks up the child with great tenderness and starts feeding it with a bottle of milk lying nearby. This act of nurturing, following an irredeemable act of violence and destruction, is so bizarre that it stands out as a defining moment in cinema. There are similar compelling moments in ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ as well.

The USP of Kashyap’s movies is his flair for exploring the heart of darkness with pure authenticity, without resorting to gimmicks to create shock value or titillate his audience. One feels that Kashyap has an unrivalled hegemony over tenebrosity, making him the undisputed Prince of Darkness.

May I point out that a few of Kashyap’s films are devoid of this darkness? Choked is a thrilling story of a weary bank employee who, during demonetisation, finds an unlimited source of money hidden under her kitchen sink. Meanwhile, Radhika Apte’s character in ‘Lust Stories 1’ opts for unusual ways of self-discovery post-marriage.

Kashyap’s work that irrevocably traumatised me is ‘Ugly’. A little girl, Kali, the stepdaughter of a cop (Bose) and a depressed woman (Shalini), is kidnapped from the car her biological father (Rahul) has taken her for a ride in. Suspecting a mask-seller of Kali’s disappearance, Rahul and his friend chase the man down, who is mowed down by a car and dies. What follows is a saga of old, buried personal vendettas, accusations hurled back and forth, fake ransom calls, and extortion. In the adult world of undiluted greed, animosity, and egomania, the case involving an innocent child is not investigated properly. After a few days, Kali’s corpse is found clutching a mask in hand, in the sidecar of a bicycle. The movie serves as a sad reminder that, whether in real or reel life, the human psyche in this era of apocalypse can be described by one word — ‘Ugly’.