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When we look back at history with the benefit of hindsight, everything can seem inevitable.
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We can look at a seminal moment and it may seem that it was meant to be that way.
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All the currents of history led up to it.
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And sometimes the future may even have been shaped by that event.
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If there was a story to our existence, that event could seem to be a critical plot point.
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But then we may look closer and realize that it almost didn't happen, that a series of
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lucky accidents took us to that point.
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And indeed everything could be said to be the culmination of a series of accidents.
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You change one variable somewhere and different things happen.
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History changes, humanity changes.
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If you go back far enough, maybe there's no humanity at all.
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Today's episode is about one such event, a film that seemed to be the natural progression
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to all that came before and which shaped all that came after.
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But it almost didn't happen.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Uday Bhatia, author of a wonderful new book called Bullets Over Bombay,
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Satya and the Hindi film Gangster.
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Uday has been a film critic for many years, first at Time Out, then at Mint and also on
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He brings a perspective to his criticism which is shaped as much by world cinema as a love
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and appreciation of his own culture.
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Bullets Over Bombay talks about the importance of Ram Gopal Verma's 1998 film Satya.
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In his narrative, Uday traces two parallel traditions in Hindi cinema.
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One is the tradition of the gangster film, another is that of the city film.
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For Bombay, as it was then, is as much a hero of Satya as Manoj Bajpayee or Chakravarthy.
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And it's fascinating to see how these traditions evolve and come together in this one landmark
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Satya is also important because it brought together a bunch of young, talented people
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who went on to become stalwarts of the industry over the next two decades.
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People like Manoj Bajpayee and Anurag Kashyap and no end of names from the brilliant ensemble
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At the same time, Satya was shaped by circumstances and could even be called a product of a series
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Satya is such a great example of how history can be shaped by serendipity.
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I loved this conversation with Uday in which we also discussed his evolution as a film
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In some ways, this episode is a natural follow up to the episode I recorded a few weeks ago
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with my good friend Jayarjun Singh.
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I'll link that from the show notes.
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Before we get to this conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Uday, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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So I enjoyed reading your book thoroughly and what your book also made me do was it
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made me watch Satya and I was about to say re-watch Satya except that I have no memory
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of watching it in the first place back when it came out.
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But before we kind of get talking about the film and about Indian cinema in general and
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all of that, tell me a little bit about yourself.
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How did you get into UR now because you started off going down a different route, right?
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Just tell me about your childhood.
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Did you always like movies?
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What was it like growing up?
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You could say I fell into film writing sideways.
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I grew up in Lucknow and I wasn't really much of a movie buff growing up.
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Neither were my parents.
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So I just watch as much as your regular movie goer or maybe even less than your average
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And I think this continued through my childhood.
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If there was a big, big film, we'd go and see it in the theater.
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Otherwise it was mostly just on TV or we'd get a video cassette.
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And when I went to college in Delhi, that's when things started to pick up a little bit,
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so even then I wasn't into film as much.
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I was much more into music and music writing than I was into film then.
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But I started to get a little more interested.
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I remember there was this film by Govind Nailani called Dev with Amitabh Bachchan.
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And I remember coming back in a very agitated state after I saw it and I wrote like whatever,
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700 words, and I think then crumpled it up after that.
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But that was, I think, the first time I put down my thoughts about a film.
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But still in college, I would say that even then anyone who knew me well, knew me as a
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music fan and not particularly a film fan.
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Things kind of changed after that when I, two things changed basically, I got interested
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in world cinema and I started my MBA also in Delhi.
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And that kind of, you wouldn't think they would be related, but they were in a weird
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way because we had three or four very serious cinephiles in the batch before me.
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And so they had all the Bergmans and Tarkovskys on a shared drive and you could just pick
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So for the first time, I watched all these films and they sort of blew my mind and started
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opening up my idea of cinema.
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Things kind of went on from there.
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So that's kind of fascinating.
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And what's also fascinating to me is that growing up, and I did an episode with J.Arjun
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Singh, which you mentioned that you heard, and J and I both kind of grew up in the 80s
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and then adulthood in the 90s and all of that.
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And it's almost a dichotomous experience taking in whatever cultural influences you've taken,
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whether it's cinema or music, because it's almost like they're two separate categories,
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like Indian music and Western music and Indian cinema and Western cinema.
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And it becomes, after a period of time, an interesting situation to kind of resolve that,
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because one is you can just code shift and you can enjoy Indian cinema for what it is
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and you can enjoy world cinema as it were for what it is.
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But the other is that, which I think J has done in a very interesting way, is that you
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don't actually see them as different things after a period of time, that your love for
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cinema is just your love for cinema period and so on, and J has done that much better
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And it strikes me that you would, to some extent, have had to do that in terms of music
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as well, which you said you were writing about, you were serious about and all of that.
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And I went through those phases.
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One of the things I boast about is I'm the only person in the world to have my byline
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featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the Rock Street Journal.
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So in the 90s, I did a bunch of stories for the Rock Street Journal and all that.
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But I was heavily into kind of Western music and it's only much later that I grew to sort
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of lose some of that snobbery and gain an appreciation for Indian music.
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So what was that journey for you?
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Because you make it sound really seamless in the sense I discovered world cinema and
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I was watching Bergman and Tarkovsky and all that.
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But at the same time, you write with such deep insight about Indian cinema, like I learned
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so much reading this book, you know, especially the first couple of chapters where you really
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go into the history of gangster movies and Hindi cinema and then city films in Hindi
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I would read something, go to YouTube, see if it's there, watch clips.
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It was like so much deep insight.
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Tell me a little bit about that, you know, were you closer to one kind of films than
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another and was there an analogue of that in music?
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So, I actually approached films a lot in the beginning through film criticism, which was
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almost a byproduct of a lot of music writing, which I was consuming at that time.
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I read a lot of authors like Grail Marcus, Lester Banks, David Frick, Peter Guralnik.
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I really, really enjoyed all their stuff in college.
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I gained an appreciation of how you could write about an art form through those initially.
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And I actually know the turning point from music criticism to film criticism because
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it was in a Lester Banks review of a Stooge's album.
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And he talks about Pauline Kael, the great American film critic.
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And he mentions a review of Bonnie and Clyde, which she did a very famous review of the
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film, which she, it was an early rave for the film and it really sort of made it the
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sensation that it was at that time.
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And he called her style wonderfully epigrammatic.
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And first of all, I had to look up epigrammatic.
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And once I did, I thought that's a really nice thing to say about someone's writing.
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And so I looked up Pauline Kael through that and that was actually my start into film criticism.
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And it just sort of proceeded organically because I was getting interested in world
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And I think at that time, you had just started getting foreign films on DVDs in India.
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So I could buy a few of those.
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You had a lot which you could get secondhand in Palika Bazaar in Delhi.
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And so I'd watch those and I'd print out the Criterion collection booklets because they
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have the essays on their site.
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So I used to print them out and read them.
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So a lot of the film knowledge that I actually had in the early days was theoretical.
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I would have read about say contempt or banned of outsiders or something before I even seen
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So I was coming at it almost backwards in that sense.
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And you speak about buying DVDs at Palika Bazaar.
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And it just kind of reminded me like I've just moved house and a couple of the cartoons
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which the last time we moved house nine years ago, we had these, a couple of cartons full
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of audio cassettes and a couple of cartons full of CDs and DVDs.
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And we were just trying to figure out what the hell do we do with them now because this
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Small flats and all that relatively.
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And they're taking up so much space.
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And eventually we kind of decided that, listen, we're just going to take pictures of the audio
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cassettes or whatever that, just take pictures of the whole pile for nostalgia sake, keep
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a couple of mixtapes we might have made back in the past for each other and just chuck
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the rest because there's nothing you do with that.
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And DVDs kind of feels like that sort of foregone era there.
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So when you sort of start discovering world cinema like this, I mean, one of the fascinating
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ways of discovering it in this manner where you've read the criticism about the film before
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you actually see the film is that you're kind of viewing it in a different way.
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You're viewing it with different eyes and so on.
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Does this carry over then to all the viewing that you do?
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Like I know that when people start writing seriously, for example, it changes the way
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You know, they'll notice all the tools that a writer is using and the way they build rhythm,
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the way they use paragraphs, all of those things.
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And obviously not that you were intending to be a filmmaker, but just shifting your
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gaze and looking at films in this kind of a way.
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Does that number one change the way you look at all the films you've already seen, for
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example, that when you revisit something, you see things that you didn't do.
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And then when you try to apply that gaze to Indian cinema, how easy or hard is it that
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they aren't really too many people who have trodden that path when it comes to say Hindi
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So we can talk about Grayal Marcus writing about Bob Dylan and there's a rich tradition
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of writing happening out there.
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And with Indian classical music, I'm sure there's an equally rich tradition here.
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But when it comes to Hindi films or the kind of work that, you know, you and Jay have done
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in recent years and the kind of book that you have written, does that begin to change?
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And also, when you watch Hindi cinema, having, you know, watched the best of world cinema,
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Is it that you're seeing more or is it that you're thinking of it less?
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In the sense, you realize all the different ways in which it is lacking.
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So that's an interesting question and I think the first thing I can say is that luckily
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for me, in my initial years, when I was getting interested in cinema, I wasn't really looking
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at being a film writer.
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I'd done my MBA so I was working in market research for many years and I was just watching
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films in my free time and I was watching everything then.
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I started, of course, with world cinema, then I just went back.
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I'd already had a reasonable amount of classic Hollywood viewing.
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So I'd seen the Hitchcocks and I caught up on the Fords and Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks.
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I had a bit of those and also 70s Hollywood, I had those 80s, 90s Hollywood, I used to
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watch a lot of TV so I knew a bit of that.
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Luckily, I had to go and re-learn or re-watch a lot of stuff which people already knew simply
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because we weren't much of a film watching family and the default at home were Disney
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animation video cassettes and Tom and Jerry and like a few things like Mary Poppins and
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Sound of Music and stuff.
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So there really wasn't much Cholay or Golmaal or anything lying around the house.
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So I'd seen some of the famous ones, but I hadn't missed entire eras, entire very famous
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So once I started getting interested, I tried to catch up on all of it.
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Not in any planned way, but I just kept watching for about four or five years without doing
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anything much about it.
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And at the same time, I started blogging and about, I'd say a good 60-70% of those pieces
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were about film and I can't read those early pieces now because they're just attempts to
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imitate all the film writers whom I liked at that time and write things which I really
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wasn't in much control of.
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But it was useful in a couple of ways.
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One, it got me writing regularly, which I hadn't done before and two, it allowed me
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to have something to show when I applied for my first journalism job, which was to time
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out because I didn't have any journalism training and I was really raw.
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At that time, all I really had was this blog and I showed it and quite luckily, I think
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I was hired as their film and theatre person in Delhi.
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There were already people in Bombay doing the reviews, so that pressure wasn't there,
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but I was allowed to write at least some stuff on it.
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And how did that shift from sort of doing an MBA to deciding to become a journalist
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Like, you know, pre-MBA, what was your image of yourself?
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What did you see yourself doing?
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And at what point do you then decide that the corporate life is not for me?
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And you know, because we've never met and I don't know you, I therefore have to ask
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that, did you want to be just a journalist and write about movies or did you see yourself
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as making movies at some point in time?
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Tell me a bit more about how your conception of yourself grew and eventually led you to
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So I think the simple answer is I got very bored after about four and a half, five years
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as a market researcher.
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And my heart wasn't in it.
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And I knew that maybe like two years in, I knew that, but I didn't really act on it.
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And I didn't think that after I quit, I would try to be a journalist because I didn't think
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I had no idea how it was done.
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There's no one in my family who was a writer of any kind.
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It didn't seem like a field I could break into, but I quit cold turkey.
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And I just applied on a whim to a couple of places.
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And I think that I got pretty lucky in that sense that something landed.
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My conception of myself as a film writer, I think even that took a few years after joining
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Time Out to sort of solidify because when you get in to something like this, you feel
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that, oh, there's so much I haven't seen.
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How will I, when I get to do reviews of like the next Salman Khan film that's coming out
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on the weekend, how am I going to do it with only four hours to write the review?
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And so it took a while for me to even sort of think of myself as a proper film critic.
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And the learning kept on in the first couple of years of the job.
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So as you started blogging, how did your sort of writing style evolve in terms of writing
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Because as you're blogging, like one thing you pointed out is that one of the good things
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about it, which I sort of will double down on because I felt the same effect happened
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to me is that when you're writing a lot, it just gets easier and more fluent and less
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self-conscious and all of that.
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But did you also kind of begin to feel changes in your craft?
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Think about your craft per se.
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Was the act of then actually writing for a magazine like Time Out and all the people
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you wrote for after I did that kind of affect your writing?
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Can you tell me a bit about thinking about your writing per se during this entire period?
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So in the start, it's a bit difficult to have a style of your own.
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And you're very conscious of that also, if you're a slightly self-aware writer and you
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know that I like Pauline Kael, I like David Thompson, I like Jeffrey O'Brien.
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Then you know that, oh, I'm taking this phrasing from this person, I'm taking this sort of
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approach from so and so.
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And for the first few years, of course, there was a lot of that.
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First few years of the job, I would say there was enough.
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And you kind of grow into your own style, I think, as you said, the more you write.
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And also, I think the more you start thinking about film, you develop more original thoughts
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about it and you don't have to rely on received wisdom about it.
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I saw those changes come slowly for me.
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It took a few years and I was in retrospect, I'm quite happy that I wasn't doing weekly
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reviews at the start, because I think that would be a lot of pressure.
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And I see a lot of young writers made to do that now.
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And it's a tough thing, doing that, like, just when you're thrust into your first job
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and then writing a review and in a few hours, sometimes you just have to watch it on Friday
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because the worst films don't have press shows now, they just release it cold.
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And so you go see it on a Friday morning and by Friday afternoon, your editor is asking
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why isn't the review up?
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So you literally have to go with your first impressions and more often than not, your
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So that would have been a very difficult thing for me to do when I was starting out.
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I'm glad I didn't have to do that.
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I think also just in terms of reading more widely and figuring out how people do certain
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things rather than just reviewing, I think how people approach criticism as a whole.
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There's a British writer named David Thompson, whom I'm a big fan of.
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And he has a book called, Have You Seen 1001 Films to Watch Before You Die?
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And I would recommend that to anybody who is getting into film criticism simply because
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he offers so many strategies of going at a film.
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He writes about all these films, but he never goes at it the same way.
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There are all these different approaches which he tries out in this one book.
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And that really influenced me in terms of that you may be writing reviews, but you don't
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have to start it the same way.
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You can find different ways of getting into it through character or through a particular
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scene or through something in the newspaper or through something that really moved you.
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And those things sort of started becoming more evident to me as time went on.
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And then I guess a certain kind of style started evolving and I started to realize certain
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things that I was interested in, maybe more so than other critics.
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I liked going back into film history and seeing where things fit.
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I like trying to situate things in a certain context of their genre and past people who've
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done something similar.
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And I think the first long freelance piece I did was on Chetan Anand's Nichanagar, which
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is the first and only Indian film to win the top award at the Cannes Film Festival, also
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the inaugural Cannes Film Festival.
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So that was very interesting for me because it allowed me to do some crate digging and
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I realized I really enjoy that.
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And I've done a lot of that since I've written on the very first screening that ever took
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place in India at Watson's Hotel in 1896.
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And that was again great fun for me because I managed to speak to people who had clippings
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and ads from that first screening and it sort of allowed me to recreate what it might have
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been like at that time, which has always been something very interesting for me.
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So I think then you just start learning about your own interests, particularly within criticism
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I realized that I was very interested in the idea of film censorship.
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So I've written a couple of long pieces about that and I continue to be very interested
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in that because India is the place to be if you want to write about film censorship.
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So yeah, I think that it was just something that my style maybe and my approach to film
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criticism sort of evolved over a bunch of years.
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And how much did format and form affect this?
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Because like when you're writing your blog, you have complete freedom, you can do whatever,
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But if you're writing for Timeout or if you're writing reviews for Mint, there is a sort
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of a word count that is expected.
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And also, I would imagine that in Timeout, there would also be some functional expectation
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that you have to kind of tell the listener what to expect and do they have a house style
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there which you have to adhere to.
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How does that then work?
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Does that sort of shape your work and is one way that you can break out of that is one
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way just by also blogging regularly on the site so you can satisfy your other urges sir.
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So even when I was blogging at the start, I didn't really write these long, long essays
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that people were known to do in the glory days of blogging in India.
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I think simply because maybe I didn't have that much to say at that time.
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And when I joined Timeout, if you remember, Timeout really had long word counts for anything.
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Even the covers weren't too long and the pieces were 600, 700 words at the most.
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And reviews were often 400 words, 500 words.
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And I didn't even start off with theater reviews.
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So I did DVD reviews when I was starting out.
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So those could be 250 words.
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So I think that really drilled in me the virtue of being able to say as much interesting stuff
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and in as vibrant a manner as possible in as few words.
#
And I see its effect even today where when I write something, and this was a big issue
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when I was writing the book initially, because I did not have that tendency to expand on
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My approach was always to narrow it down, to get to the essence of things simply because
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Timeout was in print and it had small word counts and I knew I had to finish it in this
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And that became sort of set for me.
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So even later when I moved to places, I worked for Sunday Guardian for a short time in Delhi.
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And since then, I've been in Mint where the word counts are longer.
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It took me a little while to adjust to that.
#
And of course, when I was writing the book, it took me a while to adjust to that because
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I was like, you can't get to the point all the time while writing a book.
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You have to set a lot of scenes at some lengths and you have to talk about everything rather
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than just whatever might be relevant in a narrow sense.
#
So that was something I had to kind of unlearn or maybe an extra skill that I had to learn
#
So format has played quite a role, I think, in my style.
#
You are fascinating and I think one place where I might have noticed this tussle during
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the book is when you're talking about sort of the gangster film of the 1980s and you
#
have a footnote about Subhash Ghai and you kind of apologize for not mentioning his films
#
in the main text, but you put a footnote and you talk about Vidhata and that scene where
#
Dilip Kumar is doing what he does, which immediately made me go to YouTube and kind of look it
#
up and that scene wasn't there by itself.
#
So I had to look for Vidhata and then try to find the scene within that.
#
So tell me also, when one starts reviewing and I sort of say this as someone who's gone
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through the process myself, though I reviewed music much more than films, did much more
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of music and books at a certain point.
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When you are a young writer, you are sort of keen to also in a sense show off not just
#
your writing skills, but also your insights, which you're kind of building into it.
#
And there might be a tendency there to sort of go too far, to stretch too far and to look
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for significance where there is none or to draw connections to show your intimate knowledge
#
So how does one kind of get past that?
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Because I think, you know, one step of getting past that is you become aware that you're
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And the other step is that you learn to kind of put yourself out of the equation and just
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focus on whatever you're sort of writing.
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And I noticed that you've tackled this extremely well in the book, which of course has come
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when you're many years down the line in your career, where one sort of temptation could
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have been to constantly insert yourself in the narrative because part of gathering all
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the information about satya involves you're talking to all these different people with
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their different memories and that's kind of a journey in itself.
#
And I can imagine the temptation to sort of also put yourself there, but you appear really
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extremely sparingly in the book, you just kind of let the story tell itself.
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And I'm not even saying that that approach would necessarily have been wrong.
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These are just different approaches.
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So how do you think about this?
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Like when you look back on your older pieces or your early blog posts or whatever, what
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Is this something that you've kind of consciously thought about?
#
It is a big issue with, I mean, with me it was and with the pretty much every film critic
#
I know starting out that temptation to make blanket pronouncements and to say things like,
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you know, best film you'll see this year or best film you've ever seen in your life or
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I think two or three things help.
#
Maybe as you said, self-awareness, you have to at some level ask yourself when you write
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things like that, do I really want to go on that limb?
#
Am I that sure that it will be the best film that people see?
#
If you are, then go for it because you may as well.
#
If you don't feel strongly about films, about certain films that you think are great and
#
you don't want to say that, then that again, you won't be able to last too long.
#
You have to sort of give voice to your enthusiasm.
#
But again, there should be that self-awareness that if I'm saying this, I need to be able
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to back it up, preferably in the review itself.
#
The other thing is you really benefit from having sympathetic editors at that stage in
#
your career, which I had luckily when I was coming in, not only for Time Out as a whole,
#
but also a film editor who would ask then that, you know, do you really mean this?
#
You know, call him an auteur, he's just a regular director when I was guilty of calling
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some, I don't remember, but it was some Indian director and I just use auteur because I was
#
reading so many pieces which had auteur in it and I shouldn't have and it took someone
#
I don't think I've ever used the word auteur since then in anything, but yeah, so that
#
really helps and also it just helps reading other people after you've written something
#
about a particular film, even if you don't think they're the greatest critics.
#
But if you read other viewpoints on it, you can at least argue with them and say, no,
#
I think the film is still great.
#
But if they are saying something useful, I think you should be able to incorporate that
#
in your thinking and at least if not totally, you know, walk back what you said, keep it
#
in mind for the next time you're saying something similar.
#
And just as an aside, if I asked you to name any auteurs currently in the Hindi film industry,
#
does anyone come to mind?
#
My feelings towards the auteur theory itself have changed very much over the years since
#
I have gone from being very influenced by it to feeling that a lot of it is very suspect.
#
And I don't know, I guess the first name that comes to mind is weirdly a filmmaker who probably
#
isn't my favorite filmmaker, but would fit the definition of an auteur most would be
#
Sanjay Leela Bansali, I think.
#
Not a favorite of yours also, I think.
#
And it's just that you can see his mark on whatever he does.
#
He never makes a non-Sanjay Leela Bansali film since he started.
#
So in that sense, he would be the true definition of an auteur.
#
But I don't know how much that really counts for now.
#
No, that's a fantastic example because you're absolutely right.
#
I mean, you see his vision and everything he does, you and I may not like it for different
#
reasons, but I mean, it is what it is.
#
Now you mentioned sort of always being curious about the history of cinema and going back
#
to see, okay, this was the first showing and your book is of course full of delightful
#
history, which sort of sets so much context.
#
How do you do this kind of research?
#
Because beyond the point there aren't, to the best of my awareness, there isn't such
#
rich literature available in India for Hindi cinema, beyond a few standard books, which
#
will really take you deep back.
#
So how are you gaining all this knowledge?
#
And if a lot of it comes from talking to old-timers, talking to people, dredging their memories,
#
how does that kind of work?
#
Take me a little bit through that and whether this was something that you're used to do
#
deliberately before you set out to write a book like this, because this book, obviously
#
it makes it instrumental to go back into history because you have to give all this context.
#
But apart from this, what was your approach and how would you manage, where would you
#
So as you said, there's a huge stumbling block in the sense that we haven't documented our
#
cinema history well at all.
#
It is very difficult to find material on the old films.
#
It's also very difficult to view the old films.
#
So that is actually the biggest stumbling block.
#
When I had started the book, I was hoping to see that, you know, if I could see some
#
things from the thirties, gangster films from the thirties, because I found mentions of
#
things that were crime films made by Parsi filmmakers and other Bombay filmmakers.
#
And they sounded really interesting, but I didn't want to write about them only in theory
#
if I couldn't even see a still of any of them.
#
In the end, I started the book with Kismet, the chapter on the gangsters with Kismet,
#
which is a 1943 film, which you can actually see it's on YouTube when the print is decent.
#
And so that was as far as I could confidently trace the gangster film.
#
But if there was more access and if we had done more to archive film history, I could
#
have possibly gone further back.
#
I would have liked to go all the way back to the silence, which was not possible.
#
In terms of my work, it does involve speaking to old timers, academics who have that kind
#
There are a couple of writers who have done great work in Indian film history.
#
There's one named B. D. Garga, who's written the definitive account of non-fiction film
#
And he's also written about early film and a history of Indian cinema as a whole.
#
So he is the go-to person for anything that is pre-60s in Indian cinema.
#
Besides that, you just sort of look around, try and get lucky, get newspaper clippings.
#
I managed to do that for my piece on the first film screening and for the censorship piece
#
And for this book, I found some interesting ones.
#
I'd asked a couple of friends in academia to look around for me and they got me a newspaper
#
account of a crime that had been committed in the 50s.
#
And very interestingly, that heist then turns up in Aarpaar in a slightly changed form.
#
And Anurag Kashyap had mentioned that when I had spoken to him for my thing, he got the
#
name of the film wrong, but he mentioned that there was this heist that had happened.
#
And I just took that nugget and I started searching and very luckily things turned up
#
and I could write about that with a little bit of background then.
#
And you mentioned B. D. Garga.
#
I think I have one of his books called So Many Cinemas Lying Around Somewhere, which
#
is a pretty encyclopedia.
#
I get confused with names.
#
So at one point, I was discussing biographies of Indian freedom fighters with a friend of
#
mine and I wanted to refer to B. R. Nanda's biography of Nehru, but instead I said B.
#
D. Garga's biography of Nehru.
#
And there was this sort of person frantically sorting through their mind to figure out what
#
What is this kind of connection?
#
And I can imagine that person then calling their nearest antique bookshop owner and saying
#
dhund ho, kuch bhi karo dhund ho, so anyway.
#
So and I'm guessing a certain part of your job after a period of time and especially
#
when you were writing this book where you had to get in touch with all of these people,
#
you mentioned in the book about how it took you a year and a half or more than that to
#
actually be able to speak to everyone and you'd have to speak to the secretary and somehow
#
get an appointment and this and that, which is both surprising and not surprising to me
#
because it's surprising because you'd imagine that, hey, this is something they'd love to
#
But also not surprising because, hey, Bollywood.
#
So what in general when you speak to film stars, film directors, what is that process
#
Like do you at some level find it, like can happen to young reporters sometimes, find
#
it demeaning that you have to keep chasing people and begging for an interview and this
#
And when you do meet them, is there that pressure that I have limited time with this person
#
and I have to convince this person?
#
And from their part also, there must be a certain distrust because they simply may not
#
get what you do as a film critic like we saw in that recent bust up between Taapsee Pandu
#
and I think Shubhra Gupta, who wrote that review where she said uncomplimentary thing
#
about Taapsee's acting and Taapsee just took off.
#
So how does that equation kind of work out?
#
What have your experiences been like?
#
So luckily I had like at least half a decade or more of film writing and film journalism
#
behind me when I started on this, which was useful because I by then had a very clear
#
idea of how difficult it was to get through to a lot of these people.
#
So the abhi toh hume aur bhi zaleel hona hai was, I started off with that mindset.
#
I knew that it wouldn't be easy and so I just kept doing my own research along with
#
speaking to people and I kept adding my own thoughts on the film and on the gangster film,
#
on the city film, on the nineties, on whatever came after Satya, while I also tried to then
#
keep going through it and I had to try pretty much everything.
#
So luckily I was in Bombay, a lot of these people are in Bombay and are active in film.
#
So at least they had PR agents and people whom I could go through.
#
But yeah, it wasn't particularly easy.
#
I'll say though that once I did get through to them, everyone spoke with great enthusiasm
#
except Ramu, everyone spoke with great enthusiasm about the film, about their time on it, the
#
impact it had on their careers.
#
So it was very fresh in their minds, even though it had been like 20, 21, 22 years since
#
They saw it as some kind of formative experience, most of them because a lot of them were starting
#
So I didn't have to convince them about the importance of the project.
#
I think they were very happy that someone was writing on Satya.
#
I think just the problem was getting through to them and nailing them down, getting them
#
for sufficient amounts of time and in the rare opportunity that I got to follow up with
#
some of them, nailing them down for that also.
#
It was quite a long sort of thing though, I think I wrote one and a half years in the
#
book to interview all of them, but that was just the ones whom I went out and met.
#
Even after that, I was getting hold of people on Skype or on the phone.
#
I think Chakravarthy and I in particular missed so many calls of ours.
#
I think we may have had like upward of 50 small conversations and but the quantum of
#
what we spoke may have been less than what I spoke with Anurag in one session.
#
You know when a critic meets a practitioner, so you know you've seen a film, you've seen
#
it in a particular way, you have your view of it, your theories of it and all that.
#
Then you meet a practitioner and you might feel that, hey, this scene was done like this
#
for this and this is where the tradition comes from and all of that and then that person
#
can just say something like, ki nahi yaar humara trolley kaam nahi kar raha tha isliye
#
isko bola ki shoulder pe rak chal.
#
So does that kind of happen where criticism collides with the view of the practitioner
#
and you are like, wait, there's another layer to it that I don't know about and you know
#
I think I have a healthy self-awareness of my lack of knowledge about film as a practical
#
I mean, I know a bit simply through like reading films and watching them and hearing people
#
speak about them and the little I've seen here and there, the shoots I've seen, but
#
So I am completely receptive to people telling me that, oh, you know, you are coming with
#
all these things, but actually things just sort of fell into place and all, which was,
#
I think to be fair, a lot of Satya was really that, this was to a large extent a film that
#
A lot of the writing was done the day before or on the morning of the shoot or just before
#
lines would be handed to the actors.
#
And that was because Verma wanted it that way.
#
It had an experience early on in the scene where Sushant Singh gets slashed by Satya
#
and he screams and that scream was where the thing was supposed to cut, but it was such
#
a loud scream that Ramu did not cut at that point and he just let the scene play.
#
And because Sushant was a theatre actor, he was smart enough to be able to improvise and
#
the people around him also improvised and the scene became a lot richer.
#
And Ramu liked that so much that he said that I want that energy in the rest of the film.
#
I don't want things to go according to plan and don't worry about the lines.
#
We'll write them on the spot.
#
You can improvise if you want and he let his actors free and his writers free.
#
And I think that sort of informed the way the film is.
#
I think in terms of people saying that, oh, you're a critic, you're overthinking this.
#
I got that mostly from Ramu who would often deflate my bigger theories about things.
#
And at one point he said, you know, I think people went like Satya because it was the
#
first time they heard certain cuss words in the hall.
#
And it was the first time they saw like people, you know, being realistic as gangsters and
#
not because, you know, they thought it was a particularly new kind of film or a different
#
way of seeing Mumbai or something.
#
So yeah, I think that attitude mostly came from Ramu.
#
But the others were pretty much okay.
#
Some of them liked the theories and they were happy to encourage them.
#
And it seems to me that the journey that feels odd for me to call somebody Verma, but and
#
it feels odd for me to call somebody Ramu also because I don't know the guy, but you
#
know, there's a thing with public figures that you feel like you own them.
#
So like Sachin ne ye batting ki, Ramu ne wo kya.
#
So I'll just kind of get over that and call him Ramu or call him RGV.
#
I think that's a good compromise.
#
So one of the interesting arcs that you've also traced is how his own style changed.
#
And in Satya, it kind of seemed to come from one extreme to the other, where his early
#
films are like super stylized and everything is shot in a particular way.
#
And you talk about how there are influences of old Bollywood, there are influences from
#
Hollywood through the 80s of, you know, Hong Kong cinema also started showing its influences
#
and you've traced all of those in the works of various people.
#
But at Satya, it's like he's finally, you know, comfortable in his own skin and peace
#
with himself, just kind of going with the flow and that's great.
#
And I'll sort of come to that.
#
A couple of larger questions though, before we start talking about Satya itself.
#
And one of them is that it seems that in the narrative of your book, which is a great narrative
#
in which I found convincing, but it is still nevertheless one narrative, Satya is sort
#
of a central point in Indian cinema where everything that has happened before in terms
#
of city films and gangster films and all of that, lead up to it, you know.
#
So you have gangster films evolving in a certain way till you reach a point where the gangster
#
is a real person, not a caricature anymore, not over the top with real relationships in
#
the real world as Vikumatre has with his wife.
#
And at the same time, you have city films evolving in a way where cities are shown in
#
a particular way and eventually they are as close to realism as you can get without calling
#
it a documentary style.
#
So your first narrative is about how all of Indian cinema seems to lead to Satya and your
#
next narrative is that whatever happens after that emerges from Satya, that there are these
#
incredibly talented people within the film who become big figures in what is to happen
#
in Hindi cinema later, whether it's, you know, Anurag Kashyap doing the writing or that incredible
#
ensemble cast, all of whom kind of became stars, starting with the stunning Manoj Bajpai
#
himself and even kind of the hangers on like, you know, the Sriram Raghavans and all of
#
So it's almost like an whole ecosystem kind of emerges out of there and this is a narrative
#
and Satya is so central.
#
Now did you, earlier before you conceived of the book, and I'll ask you how you conceived
#
of it as well, because I guess that's part of the story, but did you see Satya as central
#
Did all of these people see Satya as that central?
#
Was it, you know, if there was no Satya, you know, and this is like the great man theory
#
So you could say the great film theory of history, if there was no Satya, would everything
#
still have happened more or less the same way or was it just this stunning serendipitous
#
departure which changed everything and which was sort of at the same time an inevitable
#
outcrop of what had come before?
#
I actually really wanted to look at what had come before Satya, simply because by the time
#
I was into film and writing about it, Satya was fairly well regarded as the origin of
#
a lot of stuff that came after it.
#
The Hindi-Indi film, the birth of the new character actor as it were, obviously the
#
new gangster film went from there and other things that we can come to.
#
But basically, that part of the story was already fairly well established.
#
People knew that Satya was very important and that it was some kind of landmark in Indian
#
Not many people saw Satya as something that came out of a tradition.
#
There are a couple of reasons for that.
#
The gangster film tradition in India, as I have tried to show in the book, is not one
#
that emerged with the force that it did in any of the other countries.
#
It sort of came up in fits and starts.
#
And if you kind of directly try and link Satya to some of the earlier iterations of gangster
#
films in India, there is nothing obvious and Verma definitely did not have any direct inspiration
#
from that as he told me and I completely believe him from that.
#
But at the same time, you do see, say from Ardh Satya onwards, films like Ardh Satya,
#
Arjun, Agnipat, obviously Parinda, Nayakan, films like these are creating a certain sort
#
of the grammar of the Indian gangster film, which Satya can then pick up on in the sense
#
it doesn't have to do all the groundwork itself.
#
So it did build on what these films had, even if it was very different from all these films.
#
And the twin tradition, which is of the city film, was again something that, something
#
I hadn't seen Satya situated in very much.
#
And it sort of occurred to me early on that this might be a fruitful way to think of this
#
because Satya, as we know, is a film shot largely in real locations.
#
There were not many studio sets.
#
There wasn't any extensive lighting.
#
There wasn't much costuming.
#
People got their own costumes or they just bought stuff off the streets and wore it.
#
It's very much ingrained in the daily life of Bombay.
#
You can't really set Satya in another city.
#
It's not just a gangster film.
#
It is a Bombay street film in the purest sense.
#
So I wanted to try and see the other films that had shown Bombay as a real place rather
#
than the cinematic Bombay, which is nearly all of Hindi cinema.
#
But there are films in between which have shown Bombay as a real living place where
#
actual people spend their lives and speak in a certain way and negotiate the city and
#
interact with its administration and with its transport and in the 90s with its underworld.
#
And I wanted to see whether these two traditions came together before Satya and you could see
#
signs of that also by the late 80s with films like Saleem Langde Pe Matro or Salaam Bombay
#
or Raak, which are not gangster films, but they have elements of criminality and you
#
can see how the gangster film and the city film might merge.
#
And Satya was the first time that this was done entirely successfully.
#
Both these historical strands were so illuminating for me and I'm going to have to do a lot of
#
film watching over the next few weeks.
#
My other larger question really has to do with the nature of fanhood and trends.
#
On an unrelated note, seemingly unrelated note, there is this study that looks into
#
why people form sporting allegiances and how that process works.
#
For example, when do fans of premier league clubs become fans of those particular clubs,
#
especially if most Indians have never even been to the city in question?
#
How that theory goes is that when you're a particular age and you start following a sport,
#
when you're say 12 or 13 or whatever it is, I've forgotten the exact numbers, whichever
#
club is doing really well at that particular point in time, you become a fan of one of
#
those clubs and you kind of follow that, which is why if you meet an Arsenal fan, you'll
#
know they are a certain age and kids today are probably city and Liverpool fans and so
#
Now it strikes me that there might be a similar thing happening in terms of artistic trends
#
as well, that what happens in India in a social sense is you have the liberalisation of 91,
#
you have a burgeoning of this middle class, you have many more people consuming cinema
#
from everywhere, books from everywhere, music from everywhere and at this point comes this
#
film Satya, which does some important things so well, which shows people in Bombay talking
#
as people in Bombay talk in the kind of surroundings which people in Bombay immediately recognise
#
and even people in other cities would recognise as actual and real and it's a confluence of
#
so many things and therefore it captures the imagination and therefore it becomes really
#
And one of the criticisms you could then point out is that you have these sort of Satya imitations
#
happening or influences being taken to new places, whether you look at the negative or
#
the positive of it and you know it's almost like before that when you look at the Indian
#
literary novel for example, like I think one of the things with Salman Rushdie getting
#
the Booker for Midnight's Children is too many people in subsequent generations tried to
#
write like him, even after Arundhati won the Booker in 97, which is when Satya was shot,
#
in fact you mentioned her in one of your opening sentences to set the times, too many people
#
started trying to write like her and I've often felt that in Indian cinema one of our
#
problems is that too many people want to be Anurag Kashyap, you know in terms of the stylisation,
#
the setups, the machismo which is kind of there and all of that you kind of get what I'm saying
#
just in terms of that style and that can either be a good thing or a bad thing, it depends
#
on the influence, you know I think maybe Tarantino had a similar kind of influence when filmmakers
#
there and it just leads me to wonder that maybe if instead of Satya there was another
#
kind of film, maybe if Arsatya came out in 1997 at that moment where it is ready to capture
#
the imagination, do you get something better because you know I don't know if you'd agree
#
but I just feel like Arsatya is a far superior film in every way, much deeper characters,
#
just much better made, much sort of everything is just kind of so much better and less on
#
the surface, so I hope I haven't set you off by saying that.
#
So what's your sort of reaction to this kind of trends that we pick up on that at a particular
#
point in time where you are impressionable, you know a Kashyap does something remarkable
#
so you are like I want to be the next Kashyap but it could have been something else, I mean
#
hopefully for today's generation you know Tamane can have that kind of effect, I'd definitely
#
love to see many more Tamane's and Kashyaps but I mean no offence to Kashyap who's such
#
a fine director and writer, what's your response to this rambling of mine?
#
I would actually like it if they get influenced by Paranjeet or some of the very fine Tamil
#
Malayalam cinema makers or Nagraj Manjule in Marathi cinema because they are the ones
#
who are really taking the commercial film forward in a way that it probably hasn't
#
in Hindi cinema for a very long time now.
#
You're absolutely right in how people sort of pick up and then stay loyal to whatever
#
changes their conception of art at a young age and Sathya did have that effect on me
#
though probably not to the extent that you might think simply because as I said I wasn't
#
really watching that much cinema at that time but I did register the force of it even then
#
it did seem like something very new and just the sheer aggression of Golimar bheje me turning
#
up on screens like a month before the film, it worked better than any promo for the film
#
could have because that was just the film in a nutshell out there.
#
And Sathya, I don't think could ever have that effect simply because I'm a big fan of
#
that film also so I say this out of love but it's a very uncomfortable film to watch.
#
I saw it a couple of times during my research of the book and I'd seen it before also and
#
it's just such a difficult knot in the sense that it's boring or badly made at any point.
#
It's just a very stark exploration of masculinity and harshness of the Indian male psyche.
#
I think if it had been made in 1997 perhaps it might have been done at a better scale
#
with a slightly better budget and the film might have looked better and reached maybe
#
a larger number of people though again would you have everyone working at the height of
#
their powers like they were in the early 80s maybe not.
#
But I don't think its influence would have been that much more.
#
I think Arsatya had just the right influence in terms of getting a generation of filmmakers
#
interested in showing a more realistic Bombay and a more realistic police force, more realistic
#
Sinha Shetty who's the antagonist in that played by Sadar Shivam Purkar is a very interesting
#
figure for the gangster film I thought in India because he's after decades of gangsters
#
being like these sates or these tuxedo-wearing people or Ajit or Prem Chopra or Prem Naad
#
no shade on them because they did their thing with great style but there was that image
#
of an over-the-top leering Indian gangster and he was different.
#
He was quiet and he was thoughtful and it really gave options for people who wanted
#
to maybe work in a slightly more commercial format and you can see Ramu run with the idea
#
in his first film which is Shiva the antagonist played by Raghuvaran in that is also soft
#
spoken relatively and doesn't get psychotic till very late in the film which is unheard
#
of at that time and Ramu is of course working in a very different sort of space than Govind
#
Nilani was when he was making Arsatya but you can see that connection run through there
#
and of course then through on and into the more realistic gangsters of Is Raat Ke Subah
#
As an aside you know many years back in 2009 I wrote this mediocre novel called My Friend
#
Sancho and Govind Nilani got in touch with me and he said he wants to make it into a
#
film so we met and it was an amusing meeting because I was trying to convince him it wouldn't
#
be a good film because it doesn't have that kind of narrative arc and all of that and
#
he was saying I want to make it and then it was really sad because he sort of went on
#
this lament about how no one takes him seriously anymore and how the ecosystem and was so much
#
better in the early 1980s when he made the films he did at Satya party and whatever and
#
he also bemoaned how he didn't even have a print of party he said I don't have a film
#
and you know can you get it from somewhere and those were the days you know that was
#
2009 so I remember writing an email to a friend of mine in the US and saying just see if net
#
flix has it net flix was in the DVD rental business so they had it he immediately got
#
a copy and shipped it to me but by that time I think it was available otherwise as well
#
but that film never kind of happened after after a month he kind of got in touch with
#
me and we did a treatment together for a Hindi film and then he said ki nahi abhi Marathi
#
mein banate hain because I think and this is very interesting he said the Marathi industry
#
today is in the same stage as the Hindi film industry was in the 80s to Hindi mein kuch
#
hope nahi hai Marathi mein banate hain and we did a treatment set in Pune but then I
#
just completely dropped off from the map so I don't think he'll be listening to this but
#
if he is apologies I just kind of disappeared on him because I could see it was sort of
#
going nowhere and I just felt very embarrassed about the whole thing but anyway that's an
#
aside let's take a quick commercial break and when we get back let's start talking
#
about Satya and gangster movies and city movies and your wonderful book long before I was
#
a podcaster I was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first heard of me because
#
of my blog India Uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular
#
at the time I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended for various
#
reasons and now it is time to revive it only now I'm doing it through a newsletter I have
#
started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever
#
catches my fancy I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about
#
much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe it is free once you sign up
#
each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox you don't need to
#
go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
thank you welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with Uday Bhatia about
#
his wonderful book on Satya but it's on a lot more than Satya it's also about Indian
#
film history and the evolution of the gangster film in the Hindi film industry and the city
#
film in the Indian film industry let's sort of talk about the gangster film tradition
#
first it's interesting that you also sort of set the historical context of you know
#
post partition Bombay where you know there are 1.8 million people here in 1941 that becomes
#
3 million in 1951 there are migrants as unemployment there's easy access to ports so you have you
#
know an increase in crime but they aren't gangs yet you know there's petty thievery
#
pickpocketing as you point out mugging in the odd heist there aren't gangs yet and you
#
talk about Kismet the 1943 film which very sort of quaintly and something that seems
#
to have tendency that seems to have made a recurrence there is this review of it by Film
#
India which castigates it for setting the wrong example and glorifying the wrong kind
#
of person I'll just read this out because I found this amusing quote Bombay talkies
#
have produced Kismet a picture which glorifies a handsome criminal all throughout makes light
#
of his pickpocketing crimes lends humor to his petty thefts and ultimately restores him
#
to a waiting fortune and parentage not to mention the gift of the charming bride which
#
young man would not like to be a criminal in a pickpocket after seeing Ashok Kumar achieve
#
all this glory and popularity in Kismet stopcode which is kind of hilarious but while this
#
is an early example of sort of the Bollywood gangster film you know you speak about how
#
in Hollywood gangster films have almost you know come up with their own army of cliches
#
you speak about how 1932 was significant in sort of films like the public enemy and Little
#
Caesar and Scarface releasing and they just lead to a bag of cliches to the point that
#
even the public enemy is just in 1932 it's just considered to be just another variation
#
on a trope where the New York Times writes about it and you've quoted this in your book
#
which is where I'm getting it from quote it is just another gangster film at the stand
#
weaker than most in its story stronger than most in its acting and like most maintaining
#
a certain level of interest through the last burst of machine gun fire stopcode which you
#
could say about so many films in the decades since so give me a little sense of how this
#
is sort of evolving like in the sense that we don't have gangs at that time yet everything
#
is nascent we do have petty crime so the criminal that you see in our films early on are sort
#
of these petty criminals while Hollywood has a much greater tradition tell me of how in
#
the early years this kind of evolves and also are Hindi filmmakers looking to Hollywood
#
for inspiration for a direction picking up things from there which may or may not fit
#
here what's the sort of evolution of the gangster film in those early years?
#
So they're absolutely looking to Hollywood for inspiration because anyone who's ever
#
made gangster films has looked to Hollywood for inspiration it is one of the great American
#
art forms the gangster film it is very much an American thing everyone who has ever made
#
it has picked up things from them whether it's the Japanese or the French or Hong Kong
#
or Italy it's all come from those very early 20s 30s and 40s gangster films which then
#
sort of are transmuted into various cultures and interpreted by them but you can see the
#
initial the the Cagney's and the Edward Robinson's and the Ben Heck and those those films those
#
strands sort of survive in all of those and the people who made the first Indian gangster
#
films and it's a little misleading to call them gangster films because as you said there
#
they don't really have bona fide gangsters because there were perhaps not many real life
#
inspirations for those unlike the US in the 20s and 30s where there were a lot of mobsters
#
so you just had to print the legend as it were out here there wasn't that so you see
#
a lot of con men you see a lot of pickpockets Raj Kapoor is a small-time thief in in Awara
#
in in Bazi Dev Anand is a is a card sharp and there's a film called Pocket Mar which
#
is obviously about being a pickpocket and Kismet Ashok Kumar is a pickpocket.
#
So all these films have these small petty crimes even their their rings aren't very
#
big crime rings they're like small little little crime syndicates being run rather than
#
anything large and it's only when I think you start getting real life inspirations that
#
the Hindi gangster film starts taking a bit of shape whether it's Kareem Lala who gets
#
a version of him played by Pran in Zanjeer or it's Haji Mastan who gets a version of
#
him in Diwar by Amitabh Bachchan.
#
These are when things sort of start solidifying as the gangster genre but the initial Hindi
#
gangster films were were of course inspired by Hollywood very much sometimes they took
#
the plot lines from them sometimes they took the look from them also confusingly they took
#
a lot of their look from noir film which is possibly why a lot of the people in the years
#
since have completely conflated the noir and the gangster film in India which is not the
#
case noir is something very different from from well it's not very different because
#
the two intersect all the time but it is different in the sense that gangster film is a self-evident
#
genre film is a gangster film if it has gangsters in it the same way as you know a western is
#
a western you know it's it there's no other way about about it really noir isn't really
#
a genre it's a certain set of psychological and aesthetic conditions as it were which
#
can be applied to various genres so you have noir gangster films but you also have noir
#
westerns like Red River or you have noir science fiction you can have noir melodramas like
#
Mildred Pierce the mix of gangster film and noir was very strong in the 1950s films that
#
kind of started off the genre in India and people like Dev Anand and and Guru that were
#
very big Hollywood fan self-professed Hollywood fans and so they were very happy stealing
#
like little ideas from them and you can see a lot of those the little things that Brando
#
was doing and then earlier what Cagney and Robinson and all are doing a surface in their
#
performances even though these films are a lot sweeter than those where you didn't really
#
get hard-boiled films in the 1950s or 1960s out here but they they had a little of that
#
look and they had some of the tropes of the gangster and the noir film.
#
So you know last week I went out after many months to actually meet a bunch of friends
#
you know in these post-covid times and one of them was someone called Shubrat Mohanty
#
who also does this excellent podcast called Hal Jaal Thik Thak Hai and he gave us like
#
a half an hour talk on the history of cinema and the history of noir and he even spoke
#
about the different sub-genres of noir like there's something called Florida noir apparently
#
which is if you shoot noir with sunshine with a lot of light that's Florida noir.
#
So I got to explore that further to see what that looks like.
#
I want to talk a little bit about actually this early period of noir and what Nav Ketan
#
did and the most striking aspect of that period starting off and you know there were a lot
#
of knock-on effects onto cinema later which come all the way to Satya from there but one
#
of the most startling things about that was the impact of serendipity that Devanand and
#
Gurudhat actually met because their clothes were mixed up by a Dhobi they had in common
#
and that's how they first met and they became friends and then Devanand said okay you got
#
a direct shit for me and the two got together and just sort of made a bunch of films there
#
was Baazi and you know you've spoken about Aar Paar and CID and CID is very interesting
#
because one of the things that you sort of mentioned in your book which took me down
#
a rabbit hole was you spoke about the song Leke Pehla Pehla Pyaar you know which shows
#
marine drivers desolate and empty.
#
So instantly I went on YouTube and it's there and it's a lovely song and it has 57 million
#
views and so just as an aside before we talk about the Nav Ketan period and the noir period
#
what is it fundamentally about so much of this older music that it remains so incredibly
#
popular today is it just a selection bias that we just remember the best songs from
#
all of these decades and we can't really compare it with all the random stuff that comes out
#
or is there something that we have lost in some way maybe in terms of approach or whatever
#
what's sort of your sense of this before you know we go back to Nav Ketan and noir and
#
whatever happened there?
#
I think it may be a bit of both we certainly have lost our way in terms of Hindi film music
#
and I say that as a huge fan of Hindi film music and someone who related to Hindi film
#
music a lot earlier than I related to Hindi films.
#
I was a mega fan of A R Rehman growing up in the 90s it was the most exciting thing
#
like I saw his rise and Sachin Tendulkar's rise as pretty much analogous events happening
#
at that time it was of course there have been one or two good decades even after that but
#
now things are in fairly dire straight so I think we can leave that for other people
#
to try and figure out why that's happening because I have no answers but as far as the
#
older songs are concerned I think a lot of our engagement with Hindi film is through
#
music and that seems like an evident thing to say but I don't think people realise the
#
extent to which people relate to Hindi films through music.
#
I think that has changed maybe in the last one or two decades where if you mention a
#
particular film people will actually talk about things about the film and maybe a few
#
films in history have been lucky that way that you know like if you talk about Sholay
#
or if you talk about Kagaz Ke Phool or Pyaasa or Gol Maal or Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro people won't
#
talk about the songs they'll talk about the film but if you talk about Pakiza or if you
#
talk about pretty much any film from the 1950s or if you talk about some of the early colour
#
Vijayanand thrillers which are superb filmmaking, Teesri Manzil is perhaps unmatched in terms
#
of just fluent commercial filmmaking at its best it's incredible but people will still
#
talk about the songs more likely in conversation and not too many will actually get to the
#
I think it is just something in the way we relate to films maybe because it is you know
#
we hear that on the radio and the radio was such a big part of Indian life for so many
#
years that those were our first impressions of the film those were what sold the films
#
and often they were what got people back to the halls.
#
I think there is just something in that that is very central to our idea of films and we
#
just go straight for the music rather than the filmmaking and that was actually something
#
which I didn't do because I didn't have that much of a background before I got really interested
#
in films so when I was looking at a lot of these older films I managed to see them as
#
a whole without having too much idea about oh this is like a classic song that would
#
always play some of course I knew like CID or whatever these are just albums of which
#
everyone knows all the songs but the less like like the other films that were made by
#
Nav Ketan at that time Aarpaar and Taxi Driver and Baazi I didn't know too many of those
#
songs so I was actually engaging with them when I saw the films and it was very interesting
#
for me because I could appreciate them as craft but within my appreciation of the whole
#
film rather than having an earlier impression of it already in my mind.
#
It's also interesting you know in the context of the songs of Satya there are at least two
#
which are startling departure in different ways like you speak about how Badalo says
#
actually not voiced by actors it's like a montage and that's become common enough but
#
at the time it was very unusual to see a Hindi film song where people are running around
#
trees singing and lip-syncing to it and also of course Golimar Bhejme which as you point
#
out you know Gulzar had written and Ramu didn't like it and or RGV didn't like it as I am
#
supposed to say and went with it nevertheless and then later realized that damn this works
#
because it really strikes a chord like Gulzar just absolutely as so often in his career
#
just nailed the moment and the thing.
#
What also kind of strikes me just sort of going back to the Navketan type was one you've
#
detailed out many of these films and made me want to watch all of them again because
#
there seems to be a lot of spectacular stuff happening there but then you also you know
#
when you write about post noir Bollywood and what's happening after that and it strikes
#
me that there is also an evolution of both the hero and the villain so to say and the
#
relationship between them in the sense that in these early pre noir and maybe that if
#
films of that era your hero is just a poor guy and society has been hard on him and he's
#
just unlucky and therefore he can be the hero even though he's a criminal you kind of understand
#
Later on you have an evolving gangster as well and that also seems to me to be natural
#
to come out of those sort of Nehruvian pre liberalization years so to say where your
#
typical gangster will be the crony capitalist businessman your typical villain rather will
#
be the crony capitalist businessman and you're supposed to root for the hero who is fighting
#
against those odds and this kind of comes to a peak perhaps in the 1970s where even
#
economically things were most dire for us.
#
So how is this now evolving as you pointed out that the noir films that were made by
#
Navketan for example weren't gangster films it was just a stylistic and an aesthetic thing
#
and sometimes just a vibe but they weren't gangster films as such because they weren't
#
gangsters they weren't gangs in India those heroes like Kareem Lala and you know Haji
#
Mastan and later Dawood in the mid 70s they emerged much later so give me a sense of then
#
the evolution of the gangster period through these years how that noir kind of dies down
#
though obviously semblances of it remain and at the same time you have the gangster film
#
So color pretty much wiped out the noir film out here because we didn't make films that
#
were emotionally noir we made films that were aesthetically noir we made films that looked
#
like noir but they didn't have the true pessimism and the altered states of a good noir we
#
didn't really do that much we just made films with a lot of shadows and because it was by
#
really talented cinematographers like VK Murthy and Ratra they looked great and they resembled
#
the noirs that we'd already seen but color I think pretty much wiped that out.
#
In the 70s then the gangster became this slightly cartoonish figure because you usually get
#
these wealthy businessmen cast as gangsters and they weren't really you couldn't really
#
take them seriously even in the early Bachchan films in Zanjeer you can't really take you
#
take Bachchan seriously but you can't take Ajit seriously it's only when you start getting
#
the real life examples that sort of you start moving towards a semblance of the gangster
#
film there's this film called Dharmatma directed by Feroz Khan starring Feroz Khan 1975 not
#
a good film though it was a big hit it was a pretty blatant copy of the Godfather the
#
first Godfather film but it also used a real life example of this guy who was known as
#
the Matka King because he would run numbers which he would pull out of a Matka and that
#
would be the number for the day and then I think his name was Ratan Khatri and that then
#
you had perhaps the Charles Sobrage influence on Don maybe not directly but sort of the
#
Jackal meets Charles Sobrage might have inspired Don.
#
So you could see the gangster look for real life inspiration even though the gangsters
#
were still not very interesting characters at that you could call Vijay of Deewar a gangster
#
a smuggler but he really isn't presented as such you don't really see him as that if you
#
think of Vijay in that you think of him as a brother as someone who had a tough childhood
#
who likes his mother and not really as a gangster because that part isn't really stressed it
#
was like oh society has made it so difficult for this person.
#
It was only in the 80s that the genre sort of started taking shape and when you got actual
#
gangster films you had Subash Ghai make Vidhata you had this other Dilip Kumar film called
#
Mashal in both these films Dilip Kumar is a reluctant sort of gangster.
#
You had Arj Satya which is the cop film but again with a very interesting antagonist and
#
I think that was a huge influence on the rest of thing and then as the decade kind of goes
#
on you get more and more examples of this you have Arjun in which brings in the gangster
#
politician nexus which you see of course then in Shiva and then you see later in Satya and
#
in all the subsequent gangster films really but Arjun was one of the first films that
#
I think did it in a proper way in which Sunny Deol becomes not quite a gangster but he becomes
#
this muscle for hire for Anupam Kher's antagonist in that and it's only by the time you reach
#
the end of the 80s with Hathiyar and Parinda in 1989 that I think you could say that we
#
started making bona fide gangster films.
#
These two films are bona fide gangster films fully realized.
#
A follow up question which sort of strikes me like you've laid out the evolution of the
#
Hindi film Villain very well where you talk about sort of the cartoonish direction that
#
they went in and I'm wondering if there are two impulses here for a Hindi film viewer
#
and one impulse is an impulse towards escapism that hey life is hard and I just want to escape
#
and I want to go I want to listen to songs I want outlandish entertainment which is why
#
even through the 80s you have cartoonish villains like you've pointed out Sir Judah in Curse
#
or Shakaal in Shaan or you know Mogambo in Mr. India while at the same time in the same
#
decade you have this growing realism in films like Arsatya and Arjun and you know at the
#
end of the decade Parinda and Hathiyar as you've sort of pointed out that impulse might be
#
the opposite of the impulse to escapism it's an impulse that when you relate to something
#
when you see something that is real and you can relate to it there is that thrill of recognition
#
and I would imagine a greater involvement and empathy therefore and obviously both these
#
impulses can exist within the same person so I can really enjoy an escapist film and
#
at the same time enjoy you know a real film like enjoy Shaan and Arsatya together if someone
#
All Subhash guys, Curse and Vidhata which had a very cartoonish villain and definitely
#
a slightly different portrayal of a gangster.
#
So what's your take on these two impulses like am I simplifying it too much or is it
#
fair to say that there are these two impulses if there are these two broad kind of impulses
#
has there been a directional shift away from escapism towards actually relating to what's
#
out there and does that then make Indian cinema closer and closer to I mean there's no such
#
thing as a global mainstream but generally cinema anywhere or will there always be this
#
parallel strands where you know even a lot of Hollywood commercial cinema is escapist
#
to some degree so what are your sort of thoughts?
#
The 80s certainly were a weird decade because these two things are happening very much in
#
tandem not only in parallel a lot of the directors who I credit with moving the gangster genre
#
along are also making the most incredibly commercial film stuff that you can imagine
#
Rahul Ravel made Arjun and Chandra made Tezab a little later in 1990 Mukul Anand made Agnipath.
#
These are out and out commercial films.
#
They have no interest in being gritty for art sake.
#
Any concessions that they make towards grittiness, towards violence, towards a certain realism
#
in terms of their sort of psychological aggression is all to the service of getting people to
#
They thought that it would be popular.
#
They thought that it was in tune with the times and so they did that.
#
So I don't see it as very opposed to each other.
#
I think it just became more possible by then to present a slightly more violent, more realistic
#
portrayal of the streets of criminality.
#
They echoed what was happening in world, in the cinema of other countries more honestly
#
I guess than they could in the 70s and it just sort of came about without I think too
#
Arsatya would be an outlier something like in the late 70s Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan
#
which is shows very much the effects of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver on it.
#
And is a very unique view of Bombay in the sense that it really sees it as this giant
#
garbage dump and says as much which was very unusual for any film then or now.
#
But those were films that were made by film school students which did not really hope
#
to reach a large audience.
#
It was actually I think the films that did want to reach a lot of people that managed
#
to push the standard along and make it a little easier for things like Parinda and Hathiyar
#
both of which have extraordinary scenes of violence and are quite stark in between being
#
pure commercial films also to be possible.
#
And you've also sort of written about how you look at Hathiyar and Parinda as very important
#
films at that period in time but you say that you can draw a straight line from Hathiyar
#
to Satya that Hathiyar was much more influential even if people remember Parinda much more
#
Elaborate a little bit on why that is.
#
Primarily because Hathiyar is a film of the streets.
#
It's not as well made as Parinda obviously though it has scenes of great power but Parinda
#
was made by technicians who were at really the peak of their power so it cannot compare.
#
And Vidhu Vinod Chopra is a better technical director at least than JP Dutta but Hathiyar
#
has that rawness in it that you can see in Satya that the violence is the violence of
#
desperation of living on the streets, close to the streets.
#
It's not something that is so much related to one's personal histories as it is sort
#
of larger social condition.
#
In Parinda it's a very specific story of these people who are actually fairly well off if
#
you look at the houses and in Parinda they are quite nice, they are at least upper middle
#
class both antagonist and protagonist and they all drive around in cars and they seem
#
In Hathiyar no one is well off, they are living in a chawl same as the people in Satya.
#
They kill people over food, it is a sort of desperate world and even though Satya doesn't
#
quite have the sort of star quality of a lot of the people in Hathiyar which makes it quite
#
a different feeling film, a lot it feels like an indie whereas Hathiyar still feels like
#
a film that wants to go out to a very large audience.
#
There is that in common that desperation and that feeling of being off the streets and
#
I think it's easier to draw that line.
#
Yeah and there are of course other points along that line you talk about how Israad
#
ki Subhani and Bandit Queen interestingly were also important sort of way stations on
#
the journey to Satya, you know tell me a little bit about that like Israad ki Subhani I remember
#
watching it at the time and being very struck by it but you're right as you mentioned in
#
the book it just got forgotten by most people after that, people don't talk about it anymore.
#
I think it barely got a release in the halls, I've heard stories that say that it got one
#
week or something and then it was just removed so barely anybody saw it, I think it started
#
coming on TV which is where I saw it first and to me it seemed very weird when I first
#
saw it because I wasn't used to that mix of genres because it is a it's kind of a gangster
#
film but it's also a bit of social satire because this world of these yuppie admin mix
#
up with these with these gangsters and the clash is very interesting.
#
It was a important signpost on the way to Satya because you had fully realized gangster
#
characters more than perhaps any film before that you had gangsters who were very much
#
humans first and just incidentally they happen to be gangsters.
#
The Ashish Vidyarthi character, the Saurabh Shukla character, all of them are very much
#
dealing with normal problems, your father is nagging you, your wife is not getting along
#
with your friend, your brother is taking up with some girl that you don't approve of and
#
the phone keeps ringing and these are all like little things, there's this lovely little
#
detail that someone must have added where one gangster has a stone in his shoe, so he
#
keeps limping during a chase which is just such a small little detail and you can see
#
that like those kind of things must have appealed to the writers of Satya, one of whom was Saurabh
#
Shukla and Saurabh Shukla of course was not only played a part in Is Raat Ki Subah Nahi
#
but was rumored to have contributed a bit to the writing even though he said that I
#
was a bouncing board for ideas, I didn't really write anything but I sort of this and but
#
you can see that certain things would have appealed to him and the brotherly relationship
#
between the two gangsters at the heart of that film also is very much echoed in the
#
shooting of Guru Narayan in Satya, the scene on the bridge where he is like, my wife used
#
to tie him a rakhi, my kids used to call him mama, that scene very much has a parallel
#
in Is Raat Ki Subah Nahi where Ashish Vidyarthi is charging Saurabh Shukla's character with
#
similar things, Ramu was a bit non-committal when I asked him directly if it had an influence
#
but Kashyap and Shukla both felt that it was a very big part of it, so I think there is
#
a bit of Is Raat Ki Subah Nahi in Satya.
#
Bandit Queen is a very interesting signpost because it's a decoyed film which is an entirely
#
different genre in India, it really cannot be clubbed under the gangster, the same as
#
the western and the gangster film in America, it cannot be looked at as the same thing.
#
But Ramu saw it as somewhat of a model for him, he wanted that kind of realism, he said
#
that explicitly in an interview that I want realism the way Shekhar Kapoor had done in
#
Bandit Queen and you can see that he picked up a lot of the cast and crew from there,
#
you have Bajpai, you have Saurabh Shukla, you have Ashish Vidyarthi, stunt director
#
Alan Amin was from there, so a lot of people just made, were directly lifted off that production,
#
I think with the idea that they would bring something of the stark quality of Bandit Queen
#
Yeah, and I think you've kind of pointed out how all these guys really knew each other,
#
like apparently which I learnt from your book, Shekhar Kapoor, RGV and Mani Ratnam formed
#
a film company together to make movies, so Dil Say is the only one they made, which is
#
so fascinating and yeah, there's often stuff that we take for granted, but that had to
#
have originated somewhere and for example, the different members of a gang having different
#
personalities and interior lives and all of that, which as you point out, it was not common
#
in Hindi cinema and it was there in Satya and it was there before that in Israat ki
#
Subah Nahi and similarly a gangster having a normal family life, like that very famous
#
scene in Satya where Bhiku Matre goes home with Satya and he has that charming spat with
#
Shefali Shah, his wife over there and you have this little domestic quarrel with this
#
hardcore gangsters being involved and that again, you know, may not seem so unusual today,
#
but at the time it certainly would have been given what came before, you know, before we
#
come back to Satya and zoom down upon it and look at that in detail, let's go to the other
#
historical strand, which is the strand of the city film, which also fascinates me no
#
Like Bombay is of course a character in Satya, in fact, as you point out that the film could
#
not have been made anywhere else, it would fundamentally have been a different film if
#
it was in any other city.
#
So tell me a bit about how have Indian films in that sense, you know, looked at Satya,
#
you've pointed out how again, going back to Navketan, you know, when Chetan Anand made
#
taxi driver, the Indian taxi driver of 1954, you know, in the credits, you have the credits
#
ending with the last cast member, a court and city of Mumbai, Stop Court.
#
So tell me a little bit about how sort of Bollywood looked at or Hindi cinema rather,
#
I don't know if you have a problem with the term Bollywood like Shekhar Kapoor does, it
#
just become standard shorthand, but how, you know, cities evolved in the way that they
#
were sort of portrayed, especially, you know, Bombay slash Mumbai over the years since that's,
#
you know, the base of the whole industry as it were.
#
So it's always been a little difficult to track where real Bombay quote unquote starts
#
and where cinematic Bombay begins or ends because the two are of course linked Bombay
#
is the place or and pretty much the only place where Hindi films are made.
#
So you will get a lot of the city in most Hindi films, but that isn't always anything
#
to do with the real city.
#
It's often just a glimpse of the sea can be a tourist site or it can be a famous landmark,
#
but it doesn't quite have much to do with lived experience.
#
When I was tracking the city film, I wanted to see if I could run through a couple of
#
films over the years that had dealt with this lived experience in one way or the other.
#
And it's not as systematic as the as the gangster film thing where I could go from like one
#
year to the other and say, okay, it went from here to here to here and these gangsters,
#
you know, these are gangster films out here.
#
I think it jumps a little bit because I'm trying to sort of see certain motifs that
#
are emerging, for example, through language.
#
Now, our idea of Bombay is very much determined by the speech that we hear that the Bombay
#
speech, the way it's sort of evolved has very much shaped our idea of the city.
#
And you can see that through films like there's Aarpaar where you have these mixture of tongues
#
and Abrahar Alvi had written that before he wrote Pyaasa and Kagas Ke Phool, which are
#
of course the films that he's remembered for.
#
But in that film, he brought this sort of spokenness as he put it to Hindi film.
#
And Kashyap, interestingly, said that that was the kind of spokenness that he wanted
#
to bring to Satya all those years later because he tried to capture the actual rhythms of
#
And then you see that down through the years, not so much in the Salim Javed Amitabh Bachchan
#
But if you see the films written by Kadir Khan, Mukadar Ka Sikandar and Amar Akbar Anthony,
#
those have that real Bombayer Basha being spoken and those really give that feel of
#
You could also see it in films like Gaman and later in Albert Pinto Guhsa Kyon Aataye.
#
So that was one way in which the city sort of emerges, even if the rest of the film doesn't
#
have, say, a lot of location shooting, then you would mention the 1954 taxi driver, which
#
was largely shot on location simply because they didn't have a lot of money.
#
So their only solution was to strap this lightweight camera that they had got from France onto
#
the Hodever taxi and to go out and just shoot the streets.
#
At that time, it must have seemed a little strange to people.
#
Now it looks really fresh as compared to a lot of the other Navketan films, which are
#
This is shot in the outdoors.
#
You can see a lot of the people and the surroundings and the city and it looks quite incredible.
#
There was another film called Akhari Khat, which was made about a decade later.
#
It's also quite remarkable in the sense that it was a child's eye view of the city.
#
They let this little toddler onto the streets and they just followed it with the cameras
#
as a Chetan Anand film.
#
And it was again a very unvarnished look at Bombay.
#
And these were later picked up by the parallel films and by the films made by the FTII graduates
#
And you get a certain idea, parallel idea of Bombay almost running through these films
#
and running through, say, the more commercial films.
#
Even a middle of the road film like Guddi, which starts off very early on when Jaya Bachchan
#
arrives in Bombay, her experience of this city is through painted billboards of films
#
of her celebrity crush, Dharmendra.
#
And you hear Dedo Pyar, Lelo Pyar playing on the soundtrack.
#
And so this is a film that even though it is in a slightly more realistic frame, she
#
is experiencing Bombay as the cinematic city and not a real city.
#
It's a very interesting play by Rishikesh Mukherjee, which you have an echo in Ramgopal
#
Verma's Sarangeela all those years later, whose opening credits have street noise on
#
the soundtrack and you have stills of film stars on screen with the credits of the stars
#
of Rangeela accompanying them.
#
So you have like the city film as it were running parallel to the cinematic Bombay film
#
at the same time in the opening credits in a film which is about the people who sort
#
of straddle real Bombay and cinematic Bombay.
#
And what I also found fascinating was, you know, you've obviously got such a fine ear
#
You've given so many great examples of this Bombay, how it's come down through the years.
#
Like I was struck by Mehmood in Bombay to Goa saying, tumko kidar jaane ka, which speaks
#
to you at multiple levels.
#
And there's this great example that I actually want to read out from Rangeela because it's
#
a great example of show, don't tell, where instead of just saying something, you kind
#
of show it like that the example that I like to sort of give my writing class of an example
#
of this is when JBS Holden, the scientist was asked why he shifted to India in his sixties
#
after living all his life in England.
#
Instead of saying something like I wanted to live a simple life unconstrained by convention.
#
He said, I don't want to wear socks anymore, which is so beautiful because everybody relates
#
You immediately get it right.
#
And similarly in Rangeela, you quote this lovely dialogue where two touts are talking
#
and one of them asks another one, kaise chal raha hai dhanda?
#
And the other guy says, solid bole to paisa laane ka, taxi mein jaane ka kya?
#
I love this because taxi mein jaane ka, you know, this is what he aspires to.
#
This is that visual image instead of saying like mujhe bohd ameer banne ka hai, yeh karne
#
ka hai, wo karne ka hai, you know, just this simple plain image, which tells you kind of
#
so much and is so evocative, but also, you know, after reading about it in your book,
#
I've tried to find aakhri khat because you know, just to sort of elaborate and I couldn't
#
I just found a song from it on YouTube.
#
And just to elaborate, I mean, I can't believe such film was made in 1966 and you know, what
#
really intrigued me and what I wanted to see was how in the film Chetan Anand cuts back
#
and forth through time, not just how you have the city through the infant's child's eye,
#
but like you point out the basic plot of the film is this woman goes to leave an infant
#
at her lover's doorstep and she leaves a letter to that effect, but she changes her
#
mind and takes a baby away, but he finds a letter and that's aakhri khat and then the
#
woman dies and the infant is alone.
#
So now this guy is out going through the street to look for the infant and simultaneously
#
you have the city of Bombay through the eyes of the infant.
#
You have these constant flashbacks happening and it's cutting back and forth through time
#
where you show their relationship and all of that.
#
And indeed the song that I found on YouTube seems to be one such flashback and shows them
#
in happier times and all of that.
#
And that's fascinating in this interplay of the past.
#
And again, maybe, you know, there's a sense of that in the final scenes of Satya as well.
#
You know, as Satya is climbing the steps to, you know, get to his beloved and he's injured
#
and he can barely climb and then you keep cutting away to this image from earlier in
#
the film where she's on the roof and she's saying, come, come, come.
#
And that was really well done, extremely sophisticated, which I hadn't sort of expected.
#
And they chose those scenes smartly, they chose ones which were outdoors and bright.
#
Ramu explained it this way that he's like the film had become very dark towards the
#
end and I don't think he meant dark emotionally.
#
I think he meant like it was just like very dark.
#
You hadn't seen the sun or the blue sky for a long time.
#
So he's like, I wanted a little bit of brightness in that moment.
#
I think it was the editor, one of the editor, Apoor Vasarani's suggestion to insert those
#
like little glimpses of happier times with Vidya's character just before he dies.
#
And with Agri's cut, what makes it even more audacious is that he folds a flashback into
#
the opening credits, which is incredible.
#
Like if it had been done outside India by some French New Wave filmmaker, they would
#
have been like, oh, this is so audacious and it's just a subversion of opening credits
#
And because it's India and because the film is not available anywhere properly, I was
#
very lucky that I saw it somewhere floating around earlier when there was a good print
#
I can't get a print that you can even see the action underneath all the mark.
#
But it's a fascinating film.
#
And what a tragedy that these are not preserved.
#
Another thing that struck me in the narrative was how so many of these choices, like how
#
do you show the city and all of that are determined by circumstances.
#
Like you talk about how in the 70s, the big Bollywood films starring the big stars could
#
not show the city too much because, you know, you put Amitabh or Shashi Kapoor out there
#
in the middle of Bombay.
#
They're going to get mobbed and it's just not practical that today you could put somebody
#
else there and do a deep fake and put their face, but not then.
#
And therefore the sort of films where the city began to play a really big part were
#
the middle of the road films like the Basu Chatterjee films and Rishikesh Mukherjee and
#
Bhimsen's Garonda and films like that, which really begin to showcase the city as a character.
#
And therefore the struggles of normal people who live there.
#
Because like you said, you know, Amitabh can get mobbed in the market, but Amul Palakar
#
probably won't, though which is sad, Amul Palakar should also get mobbed.
#
So tell me a little bit about that period and therefore how the way that they look at
#
the city evolves because therefore if you have middle of the road films with the kind
#
of middle-class characters that these directors put in their films, you also don't have that
#
elite Bollywood-y look at the city, the South Bombay big houses, all of that.
#
You have very much the common person like in Garonda, these two people who just want
#
a roof above their head, who are struggling to kind of find a place they can call their
#
own, which is something every Bombay person can relate to, right?
#
So tell me a little bit about then the evolution of how the city begins to be shown in Hindi
#
cinema and becomes a character in so many films.
#
Middle of the road cinema, it was instrumental, I feel, at least in bringing Bombay to the
#
forefront of Hindi films.
#
I don't think it could have happened in commercial cinema had that not happened through the 70s
#
and the 80s in middle of the road cinema.
#
And it was done in such an unassuming manner that didn't call attention to itself.
#
Now we look back at Basu Chatterjee films and say, oh wow, this is like the Bombay of
#
We literally cannot see it in any other films.
#
You can see it in Basu Chatterjee films because he really had had an eye more than I would
#
say Rishikesh Mukherjee, who is equal in all other ways and maybe superior in some.
#
But I think Basu Chatterjee did have the better eye and his eye for Bombay is incredible.
#
I think there is no song on the Bombay rains that is better than the one in Manzil, Trimjum
#
And similarly, the double decker buses, best buses would turn up in so many of his films.
#
And now you actually, I had to do a piece on the double decker buses.
#
Someone else was doing a piece in Mint Lounge and I was asked to go and look through Basu
#
Chatterjee films because they needed a still and they couldn't get an image of the double
#
decker buses from anywhere else.
#
And they were like, okay, it must be there in Batu Batu Mein or Rajnikandar or something.
#
So go and look through that, and we did find stills there.
#
And you can see this through paddlers slash middle of the road cinema.
#
The Saeed Mirza films, I think, were also very perceptive about life in Bombay, the loose
#
trilogy of Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan, Albert Pinto ko kussa kyun ata hai and Salim Langde
#
pe mat ro, A, they photograph Bombay very honestly.
#
And you can draw some sort of line from them through to Salaam Bombay, through to Satya.
#
And they're also very perceptive about life in Bombay, about the mills, about the sort
#
of disconnect between the new upper class, the new moneyed class in Arvind Desai and
#
the people whom he deals with, he has great contempt for them.
#
And that's unusual to see in a Hindi film, someone just calling Bombay a trash heap and
#
saying that all these people are sold out and I'm so much better than them, even though
#
it's obvious that he is hardly any kind of virtuous man himself.
#
And these are all very fascinating monuments to Bombay in their particular time period.
#
It's good that they were spaced out by some years because you sort of get an idea of how
#
Bombay evolved through the films of Saeed Mirza, you also have Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho,
#
which is a fantastic black satire on Bombay and housing and corruption and just the living
#
And then you have films like Katha, also indebted to the middle of the road tradition, Sai Paranj
#
Peth Katha, which is a beautiful look at communal living in Bombay.
#
So I think the picture that came through all these films was something that you could not
#
see in the commercial cinema of that time for a very long time until it sort of started
#
to pick up in the mid to late 80s.
#
And the torch was carried by parallel cinema and middle of the road cinema for a very long
#
The thought that just comes into my mind that, you know, where is that middle of the road
#
Like where is the Rishikesh Mukherjee or Vasu Chatterjee of today?
#
It's actually thriving, I would say.
#
A lot of the Ayushman Khurana films, I would classify them as a new middle cinema.
#
The things that Rajkumar Rao is doing, a lot of the films Pankaj Tripathi is doing now.
#
These would definitely slot in that tradition, I would say.
#
There was a film called Aankho Dekhi by Rajat Kapoor, which I think was quite instrumental
#
in bringing back the new middle cinema.
#
And then it sort of took off from there.
#
You had Dum Laga Ke Haisha, which was also very influential.
#
And then it's been one of the brighter spots in my life in the past, say, five or six years.
#
Maybe the better Hindi film, like 50 or 60% of the good Hindi cinema that has come out
#
in recent times has been in and around this tradition.
#
Yeah, and interesting that many of these actors who are acting in these middle of the road
#
films also interestingly acted in Satya like, you know, Manoj Pawar and Sushant Singh and
#
just a whole bunch of these guys.
#
And sort of just an aside for my listeners that, you know, I will just while reading
#
your book, thinking about where do you see Bombay the best today?
#
And it's actually not in cinema, it's in vlogs.
#
So there are a bunch of vlogs I've started following, which I'll link from the show notes.
#
Like they have Daddani, Mohammed Saleem Khan, Satya Sagar, who, you know, and they are the
#
starkest, most real sort of images of the city as it is and the city evolving every
#
day and growing every day as you see.
#
Though, of course, you know, they are possibly more what you would call documentary sort
#
And you've kind of written in the book about the difference between cinematic realism and
#
But it's just that how through the years there is this progression towards greater and greater
#
And that, of course, has to do with the medium as well, because entirely different medium
#
if you're sort of vlogging for YouTube as opposed to actually making cinema, though
#
I think there's a lot of good cinematic talent happening out there as well.
#
Let's start talking about Satya now.
#
We've kind of seen that it's not something that emerges sui generi, right, that there's
#
been this tradition of the gangster film that has gradually come to this point.
#
There's this tradition of the city film, which has come to this point where the city is being
#
And then there is an enormous amount of serendipity and lucky accidents, which kind of happen
#
and which sort of just come together right from, you know, you know, Manoj Bajpayee being
#
one of the really important figures.
#
And the way Manoj sort of runs into RGV or I'll just say Ramu because that's what's coming
#
The way Manoj runs into Ramu is that he auditions for Daud, which is, you know, another film
#
that Ramu happens to be making.
#
And if he hadn't happened to be making that at that point, then, you know, Manoj Bajpayee
#
may not have been associated.
#
And therefore Satya may not have evolved the way that it did.
#
And then there are just a bunch of lucky accidents, which kind of come together.
#
One lucky accident is actually a failure where RGV, because he's influenced by Arsatya, wants
#
Vijay Tendulkar to write the film.
#
And he goes to Vijay Tendulkar and there is some, it's lost in translation and Vijay
#
And therefore, you know, Anurag Kashyap and later they get Saurabh Shukla.
#
And the way all of this is kind of happening where, you know, Manoj goes for an audition
#
for some other film, becomes friends, gets Anurag in, Vijay Tendulkar says no, they get
#
All of this kind of just falling into place is incredible accidents.
#
This kind of happens throughout cinema, right?
#
So even Nafketan, you have, you know, some Dhobi mixes up the clothes of Guru Dat and
#
Dev Anand and that's how they meet and that's how those films happen.
#
So what's your sense of, you know, looking at this that is there a counterfactual where
#
there is no Sathya, you know, where RGV does mix something else entirely and all these
#
people go their own way and perhaps none of us have heard of Manoj Bajpayee and he is
#
in the footnotes of history as someone who played an interesting role in Bandit Queen
#
What does one, when you follow cinema history as keenly as you do, what's your sense of
#
serendipity in the role that it plays?
#
Totally, I think there may not have been a Sathya because Ramu is someone who doesn't
#
If a project is not working out, he is on to the next project and that is something
#
that was true in his heyday and it is still true today where he is juggling four or five
#
projects at any given time.
#
Sathya was something that he really did want to do.
#
He wanted to make his first Hindi gangster film properly and even though, like you mentioned,
#
Vijay Tendulkar didn't work out, obviously he was influenced by Arsathya and he would
#
have liked Tendulkar to be there.
#
I'm not sure he wasn't happy with the way things turned out.
#
Not only because, of course, the script was great, but also because if you see the rest
#
of the cast and crew, there are a lot of people at the start of their careers without the
#
anxiety of influence as it were.
#
For example, he gets Gerard Hooper from the United States who was a professor then and
#
a cinematographer, hadn't shot a feature film, hadn't watched a Hindi film and he
#
got suggested by one of Ramu's friends and he saw his stuff and he brought him over and
#
a lot of these decisions were taken.
#
Sushant Singh was cast out of the blue just because he turned up and Ramu liked his look
#
and he liked his buzz cut and he said, yes, come.
#
And he cast him in that part and then that really changed the way the film was shot.
#
Saurabh Shukla didn't really want to write, he wanted to act but he knew he wouldn't
#
get to act unless he also said, yeah, okay, I'll write.
#
And Ramu also knew he wouldn't get Saurabh Shukla unless he said, yeah, you can act.
#
So both of them did a slight compromise and said, okay, fine, he'll do both.
#
One of the editors, Apul Vasrani, he was 19 years old then, hadn't ever cut a film.
#
These were obviously deliberate decisions by someone who wanted a fresh outlook in pretty
#
much every aspect of his film.
#
So in that sense, every film probably has these slightly serendipitous circumstances
#
where you're like, oh, if these two hadn't gotten together, then how would we have had
#
so and so in this film, so and so in this part, this person shooting the film.
#
It's just that Satya was a very interesting time.
#
All these people were at the start of their careers and there was a director, very receptive
#
and eager to use what they brought rather than seasoned veterans at that time.
#
So I think the quality of the serendipity was perhaps a little different because the
#
intent was to do something slightly different.
#
And it's also interesting how a lot of these sort of newcomers kind of came in pairs.
#
So you had, you know, two writers, you had two cinematographers and there also it seems
#
to be a very lucky accident that first you get Gerard Hooper, who is coming from outside.
#
So he's bringing that outsider's view and he's got that sort of realistic aesthetic
#
and I think rather, and he just wants everything to capture Bombay as he sees it.
#
And cinematographer who takes over from him, Mazhar Kamran also comes from that documentary
#
So, you know, stylistically, they are so suited to each other and so sort of responsible for
#
You also have sort of two editors because one of them is working on an avid, the other
#
one is working on a steenbeck, almost like, you know, again, the film is a literal bridge
#
and Istanbul as it were, you know, between two different traditions, though more a bridge
#
in time than a bridge in geography.
#
And the music, you know, Vishal Bhardwaj and Sandeep Chautha.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what you feel about the music in particular.
#
You know, one of the things I discussed with Jai in that episode, which you also mentioned,
#
which I wonder what your opinion is, is the role of sort of background music in films.
#
Like, I generally don't want to be spoon fed, like where there is background music, I want
#
it to be subtle, not in a sense of, you know, spoon feeding me and telling me how to feel
#
and all of that, but just adding another layer to whatever the storytelling is doing and
#
a layer that is not redundant.
#
And Sandeep Chautha's music here is very interesting because parts of it, I really liked, it seemed
#
to kind of work so much.
#
But you also point out how so many people sort of reacted negatively to the music and
#
said that, hey, you've spoiled it all and, you know, there's too much loud music and
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, what were your impressions of it when you first
#
saw the film with normal eyes, when you're not writing a book on it, and then when you
#
watch it again and again and all of that, and you speak to all the protagonists concerned.
#
How is your sense of it evolving?
#
And is it an important film also for the way the music was approached?
#
So I don't really have a problem with button pushing music.
#
I love John Williams's scores for the Spielberg films and the other ones that he's done and
#
he's the most button pushing composer ever.
#
Morricone also, I wouldn't call him a particularly subtle composer, but he's again one of my
#
I would say that I do not have a fondness for very loud scores, just in terms of the
#
mixing and the way it's used.
#
And Satya can be a very loud score at times.
#
It drowns out dialogues, as Saurabh Shukla pointed out to me when I asked him about the
#
score and it also distracts sometimes.
#
I guess it may be more distracting for people outside India.
#
People inside, people here are a lot more used to loud and blaring music coming out
#
I have mixed feelings about the score.
#
I think it's very effective in a lot of moments.
#
The opening and closing themes when Satya is just arriving in the city is this sort
#
of mournful quality to them, which is a very nice downbeat start to the film and closing
#
It's a very heart-rending kind of flute melody, which is there.
#
But there's also moments where it's just pushed up to 11 and I was asking Ramu about it also
#
and he had said that I know that I do this to my film scores, but it's like after the
#
dialogue is locked and the sound mix is locked, the only thing I can play with is the score.
#
And so I keep fiddling with that and I like to push it quite a bit.
#
Interestingly, someone who we mentioned a couple of times already, Govind Nailani was
#
shown a cut of Satya before it released and he said that Ramu, I think you've gone overboard
#
with the score and I think it's not going to work.
#
And he changed his mind after the film released because he said that the audience could relate
#
to a lot of things that were going on in Satya because they're used to this kind of score.
#
And some of the things in the film that may have been new to them were sort of smoothed
#
over by the fact that they were used to these kind of aggressive, loud button pushing scores.
#
Yeah, and I think you've also pointed out in the book that how Mazhar Kamran, who shot
#
more than half the film, saw a cut of it without the music and he told Ramu that, hey, I think
#
we failed and Ramu said, wait, wait, wait, see the version with the music and then he
#
changed his mind completely.
#
So I guess at certain levels it worked.
#
My other question is about the nature of how the script evolved.
#
Like you've pointed out that one, of course, there is that early scene with Sushant where
#
the power of improvisation came through and Ramu said, okay, you know, let's kind of stick
#
We have the caliber of actor who can do that.
#
But then also Gulshan Kumar was murdered just as the film was underway.
#
Different accounts have it on the second day, the fourth day, as you've pointed out.
#
And I'll ask you a question about memory also a little later.
#
And Ramu decided that, okay, we got to take a break and we got to incorporate what we
#
are learning about this industry and about what's happening in the Bombay underworld
#
and all of that through this.
#
And indeed you have a sort of a similar assassination as one of the plot points of the film and
#
The upshot of this was that, you know, at one point you write, I'll just quote from
#
your book, you say quote, Kashyap is probably exaggerating only a little when he says that
#
after the scene at the tabela, the writing process became a series of one-liners conceived
#
by Verma and fleshed out by Shukla and himself.
#
Ramu would say today we'll shoot this scene.
#
This happens, that happens.
#
And so and so is scaled.
#
We'd go there and write the scene based on the actors available.
#
One can picture Shukla and Kashyap frantically scribbling last minute zingers, handing those
#
to the actors minutes before the shot and saying, forget what we told you earlier.
#
How exhilarating it must have been if you were an actor used to situations like this.
#
How utterly unnerving if you weren't.
#
And it, you know, and this can of course be a strength.
#
You have some incredible actors, though I didn't think so highly of Chakravarthy, but
#
we'll come to that later.
#
But you have some, you have an incredible ensemble cast here.
#
But it can also make for weaknesses where everything doesn't seem to, you know, fit
#
Like, you know, I can both say wow at that scene, the railway footbridge or whatever
#
where Guru is killed and they have that impromptu exchange which tells you that there is a back
#
But it seems sudden and unmoored from, you know, there's no hint of that coming.
#
Had you had a hint that there is a back story, then even the decision to kill this person,
#
the chase of this person would have had an added resonance that is not there because
#
this is just improvised.
#
It's not kind of there.
#
Perhaps actors themselves didn't know it at the time till they actually start talking
#
But, you know, so do you feel that that's a sort of a fundamental weakness of the film
#
and again, an opinion which I think will not go down well with many people and I say this
#
with the greatest of respect.
#
But when I saw Gangs of Vasipur, it just seemed to me that it's a series of brilliant set
#
pieces, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
#
And therefore, there might also then be this approach that are a great scene, great scene,
#
But does it tie together all that well?
#
And I wonder if some of the approach there was similar as well.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
And please don't troll me, Vasipur fans.
#
I'm one of them, but you can come to Vasipur, I'll digress a bit at the beginning because
#
I wanted to bring in something that I had in an earlier draft of the book, but then
#
I cut out for reasons of length and just not really fitting.
#
But Jaws, the Stephen Spielberg Jaws, actually the writing of it had quite a lot in common
#
with what Satya seemed to have been.
#
There was a script by the original author of the novel that just didn't work and it
#
was rewritten by someone, it was rewritten by someone else and finally they decided that
#
none of those would work.
#
And by that time shooting had started and the shark, as you know, was malfunctioning
#
and there were like a whole bunch of problems, but also they really didn't have a script.
#
And so what they did was they wrote it from day to day, Spielberg and two writers and
#
Richard Dreyfus would sit at night after the day's shooting, whatever had been planned
#
for the next day and they would sit and write into the morning and the secretary would take
#
everything down and then they would try and catch up on a few hours of sleep and someone
#
would cycle off and get it typed out and those would be handed to the actors and they would
#
do that and that was apparently how Jaws came about.
#
And it seems that Satya was quite the same.
#
I don't know how much we should believe Kashyap in that when he says that the whole film became
#
a series of one-liners because Satya in many scenes does have a written quality to it,
#
not an improvisational quality, even though people may have improvised within certain
#
But for example, the fight between Bhiku and Pyari does have that quality of a scene written
#
rather than things unfolding on the spot, even though there's a lot of natural energy
#
Whether this worked against the film, I'm not sure.
#
I like the suddenness, you mentioned the Guru Narayan shooting on the bridge, I like the
#
suddenness with which it bursts out of Bhiku because I feel it may be in character for
#
He obviously doesn't want to bring up in front of his gang how close he was to his big rival
#
now, Guru Narayan, and I think it would take something like this huge betrayal and seeing
#
that person sort of begging for his life to suddenly just drag it all out of him at that
#
moment and almost like in a mania.
#
If it had come before, yes, perhaps it would have been a little more resonant, a little
#
more invested in him in the whole chase, the way they run through and the way he's begging.
#
But I think the suddenness also has a virtue to it and a lot of it was apparently Bajpai
#
improvising on a few broad pointers that he'd been given.
#
He'd been told that whatever, that they know each other and they were friendly and their
#
families knew each other, but the specifics just burst out of Bajpai in that moment apparently.
#
And any angry response because of what I said about Vasupur?
#
There's no doubt that Vasupur has a lot of stunning set pieces, but I think it has so
#
much amusing little business happening between these and so many little lanes that it goes
#
down through both culturally, politically, socially, bringing in so many aspects of the
#
life out there that I think it's quite a brilliant screenplay really.
#
So I say that, yeah, it fights with the set pieces simply because Vasupur does have that
#
But I think it's actually as a structured screenplay, it is possibly superior to Satya
#
in that sense that Satya does have a slightly haphazard quality.
#
There's really not so much of a A leads to B leads to C quality about him, whereas Vasupur,
#
if you map the whole thing out over its six or so hours, there is this sort of broad constructed
#
Let's sort of talk about another haphazard aspect of Satya, which is Chakravarthy in
#
Like one of the interesting sort of narrative arcs of your book is how it's kind of understood
#
that Manoj Bajpai will play the main role and then the character of Bhiku Maarte becomes
#
so interesting that RGV tells him that, no, no, no, you play Bhiku Maarte and he's upset
#
and he complains about it to Kashyap to the effect of that, you know, this was my one
#
shot at playing a lead role, yeh kya ho gaya yaar and all of that.
#
And he plays Bhiku and he's just absolutely incredible as he's been through his career.
#
I mean, he was so amazing in Family Man recently as well.
#
But Chakravarthy seems extremely uneven.
#
You know, the only scenes where his acting seems to work is where he's supposed to show
#
restrained because he is, I think, naturally resting face restrained.
#
And there are scenes where you see a combination of his being miscast, I think, or rather acting
#
and also the impromptu script.
#
Like you pointed out that scene between Bhiku and his wife where they're fighting, where
#
if you just look at Satya's reaction, just not reacting and I think you've mentioned
#
in the book also is one of those confusing moments for you and you pointed out it maybe
#
partly because he wasn't briefed on what his character is supposed to be.
#
But it seems like, you know, here is an actor who and I'm perfectly fine with the character's
#
backstory remaining mysterious to us.
#
You don't need to spell everything out and explain everything.
#
But it almost felt to me that the actor doesn't know himself.
#
So interestingly, Ramu took a lot of blame for whatever criticism one might level at
#
Chakravarthy's performance on himself by saying that he didn't have a clear conception of
#
Satya's character from the start and therefore he couldn't give clearer signals to Chakravarthy.
#
And therefore, like the kind of mulish confusion that you see in scenes like the Bhiku and
#
Pyari fight where Satya is just standing there, Ramu at least said that it is my fault.
#
I couldn't tell him that this is how he's feeling in that moment.
#
Chakravarthy, let's face it, is not as deft as an actor as Bajpayee or Saurabh Shukla
#
or Shefali Shah or any number of actors in Satya.
#
And I think his best scenes are when he has to express Satya's personality through movement,
#
He makes very quick darting movements which tie in with Satya's propensity to make quick
#
decisions and bold decisions.
#
I have to slash this random thug in the tabela.
#
We have to kill Guru Narayan.
#
We have to kill Amol Shukla.
#
Decisions that ultimately backfired, but at the time they seemed like good decisions at
#
When he has a lot of words or when he has to do big emotional scenes, it is a bit lacking.
#
His scenes with Urmila don't quite work.
#
And it's interesting because other people have argued that he's sort of the blank slate
#
against which everyone else can be colourful.
#
I buy that argument to an extent.
#
Whether he's miscast or not is, I think, a difficult question.
#
He was cast, I think, partly because of his look.
#
I think Verma just liked that he thought he looked like a gangster.
#
He wanted someone from outside the Hindi industry.
#
He wanted someone from the Telugu film because he'd speak a certain way.
#
He'd bring that sort of man from nowhere quality.
#
I think those are all smart ideas.
#
They work at a theoretical level.
#
Maybe at a practical level, some of them backfired and some of them worked.
#
Maybe I'm being too harsh on Chakravarthy and maybe I think a part of it is that the
#
character was certainly in my mind not drawn out well enough because there are inherent
#
Like one of the things that struck me about the first part of the film is that everybody
#
is stupid in the first part of the film, where Chakravarthy is randomly slashing people and
#
hitting people where he can easily get killed for it.
#
Later in the film, he's portrayed as a kind of Chanakya of action and all of that, a strategist
#
and all of that, but he's doing these really stupid things, taking pangas in the first
#
part of the film with gangsters who could just kill him.
#
These gangsters aren't killing him.
#
That is very much at odds with when he, I forget the first guy's name, after he does
#
that thing where he starts beating him up, you'd imagine that these gangsters will just
#
The rest of the film, that's what you see happening.
#
Gangsters finishing people off, but instead they sent him to jail where he meets Vikumatre,
#
which seems like damn convenient and all of that.
#
So that part of the thing where he feels more like this village idiot who is just responding
#
and not thinking, who suddenly becomes his master strategist in the later part of the
#
film didn't kind of make sense to me, but which is not taking away.
#
I think I'm really quibbling over one tiny aspect.
#
There's so much about the film that is delightful and pathbreaking and all of that.
#
So to go further on that now, tell me about what was the influence of Satya?
#
We've seen why Satya comes at this moment in time and one influence certainly is that
#
these incredibly talented people work on the film and even are sort of part of the extended
#
Like you talk about how, you know, Sriram Raghavan and Tigmanshu Dhulia when they see
#
the film for the first time at the premiere and they're going back in the taxi and they're
#
both just sitting in silence, just taking it in what a powerful film this is.
#
And of course we know what kind of films those two went on to make.
#
So tell me a bit about the influence of Satya on what came later.
#
And does it then justify, you know, the great man theory, we can call it the great film
#
theory here that had it not been for Satya, the industry would have gone in a very different
#
I think that claim can be made for a bunch of reasons.
#
The change or the changes really took maybe a couple of years to start appearing and they
#
were, a lot of them were hidden, which is why I couldn't directly attribute them as
#
easily to Satya as say one could to something like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge.
#
In whatever changes that film brought, and one could argue that that is even more than
#
Satya, you could see on the surface, their entire plot lines picked up, entire types
#
of characters picked up, a look picked up.
#
And you can see that till this day.
#
With Satya, things were a little more at a foundational level, I feel for Hindi film.
#
One was its legacy in terms of just the people who worked on it, what they went out and did
#
Vishal Bhardwaj making his films, Anurag Kashyap making his films, Apoor Vasrani, Shahid and
#
Aligarh, which went on to win the national award and Saurabh Shukla is I think one of
#
the best character actors and definitely one of the most underrated character actors in
#
And Shefali Shah went on to do great things.
#
Sandeep Chauta had a very flourishing career for a decade after that.
#
Definitely you could trace the New Hindi or the New Hindi Indie film movement back to
#
Satya, I think with maybe a few more films that came around around that time.
#
But Satya definitely had an influence on it, not only in terms of showing that a specific
#
sort of film, not pandering to a very large audience, but again, not an art film, could
#
find success and could find cultural resonance.
#
And I think that was picked up by people in the 2000s when they started making their own
#
films, younger filmmakers who came in.
#
Even though their films may not have looked like Satya, I think they took its lessons
#
They took its idea of casting forward.
#
I think the influence of Satya on Hindi film casting has been immense.
#
You speak to a lot of casting directors and they will mention Satya, specifically Manoj
#
Bajpayee as Biku Matri, but also just the idea of the ensemble in that film as something
#
that really brought that idea of a talented group of young actors and not any stars to
#
the forefront, where it was just not common in anything like mainstream Hindi cinema.
#
You would see it in your parallel films, something like a Janay Bidoyaro, but even in Janay Bidoyaro,
#
the people were quite well known at that time, whereas in Satya Ayyu, nobody was known except
#
for Paresh Rawal and Urmila at that time.
#
That idea of an ensemble where people are cast for particular parts and where each part
#
sort of manages to spark and have its little moment, you start seeing pretty early on in
#
the 2000s in Tigvanshu Dhulia's films.
#
In Hasil, you can see that Irfan is surrounded by all these people and they're all fantastic
#
And you can even see it in more mainstream.
#
The first Munna Bhai film, I think, had a beautiful ensemble and going on through the
#
decade then all the way through to Aankho Dekhi and the kind of films that came after
#
that in the new middle cinema really have this idea of the ensemble and very specific
#
casting that has continued till this day.
#
Apart from that, Satya really made space for a particular kind of character actor.
#
It wasn't like they didn't exist before, but you really had a lot of character actors coming
#
through in the 2000s and most of them, if not all, do credit Satya with changing something
#
in the idea of the public and in terms of producers and directors also as to the kind
#
of faces they want, the kind of actors that they want in their things.
#
If you look at Irfan and Nawaz, of course, breakthrough in the 2000s, but you also have
#
KK Menon and then you have Piyush Mishra and then later they're joined by Seema Pawar,
#
Sheeba Chadda, Sanjay Mishra, Pankaj Tripathi and so on and on and on and on and now and
#
Rajkumar Rao and it's just gone on from there and you have this flowering of character actors
#
to the point where now they are no longer seen as character actors and they're carrying
#
their own films simply because they were so convincing in those parts and they stole films
#
from the people who are the stars.
#
So I'll leave it to listeners to kind of read your book and go through the rest of your
#
There's so much detail and nuance in there.
#
I'll end with three final questions, which often becomes more than three because I think
#
of stuff along the way.
#
My third last question is really about the interesting observation you made that while
#
you were talking to people about this film, their memories conflicted so much with each
#
Like nobody seemed to remember the same event in the same way.
#
Like you point out about the voiceover at the start of the film where it's basically
#
all you could figure out is which two people did not write it.
#
But otherwise there are different stories about everybody basically having written it
#
from Ramu to Manoj to Saurabh to so and so and all of that.
#
Obviously nobody is lying.
#
So you know, because why would they do that?
#
And this leads me to kind of thinking about the nature of memory itself, why we remember
#
the things we do and how that evolves.
#
Like one almost cliche on my show, because it's an observation that struck me so much
#
that I keep making it from time to time is how the way memory works is when we remember
#
an incident for the first time, we remember what happened.
#
But after that, we remember the remembering of it.
#
And therefore you can have a kind of Chinese whispers in your brain and you and I might
#
remember something slightly differently to begin with.
#
But that difference magnifies and becomes a whole new thing if you ask us 10 years later.
#
Like is this something that took you by surprise?
#
Like what is happening?
#
Why are they telling me different things?
#
Should I look at their motives?
#
And obviously I think the most simple explanation is that he no one is lying.
#
Everyone's saying it as they remember it, but they remember it so differently.
#
So what have your thoughts been while, you know, going through this process?
#
It completely took me by surprise.
#
And it's not that long ago.
#
I mean, it's 20 years, but books have been written about films that are 40 years older.
#
And I think if people can remember that, then you'd think that events would be generally
#
fresher for Satya, but apparently not.
#
I was in equal parts, very frustrated and quite amused by it.
#
It was very funny, like as you mentioned, the opening voiceover is attributed as people
#
literally saying that, no, that guy wrote it and no one is even claiming it, but everyone's
#
pointing to a different person.
#
But it's even weirder with something like the killing of Gulshan Kumar, which should
#
be a very big event in these people's memory, considering they were working on a gangster
#
They should be able to remember where they were, what they were doing, maybe how many
#
days into the shoot they were, nothing, all different, everything different.
#
Even Ramu gave me two different versions of how he heard the news.
#
It was just incredible to me how much they mismatch.
#
So it was a bit of a challenge for me to try and figure out which were the correct versions
#
or which were the ones that they had sort of told themselves, which couldn't possibly
#
be the truth, but which just sounded like a good story.
#
And there's, I mean, there's a lot of value in a good story.
#
I'll give you an example.
#
There's a Anurag Kashyap blog, which he had done maybe 10 years back in which he had talked
#
about Golimar Bheje Me, and he said that the song wasn't written then.
#
So they were all dancing to Mera Piya Ghar Haiya on the set.
#
And that seemed to me not correct.
#
But I spoke to Anurag fairly early on in the thing.
#
So I didn't have any fun to contradict him.
#
So when I spoke to Vishal, later I asked him that is this thing, he's like Anurag is talking
#
So the song is very much composed and you can see them lip syncing the words in the
#
song, which is what I had noticed before, but I was wondering whether it's just my eyes
#
were playing tricks on me or something like that.
#
So there are some stories which could be debunked a little easier.
#
And there were some where I just had to choose the ones that seemed closest to the truth
#
or present two different versions and tell the reader to just choose whichever one they
#
Or eight different versions as the case may be.
#
So my penultimate question then is that how have you changed in the course of writing
#
Like has it given you a deeper appreciation of Indian cinema and all the currents and
#
subcurrents that lie within it?
#
Has it sort of brought about more humility?
#
Has it improved your workflow, just your work ethic and the way you gather knowledge together
#
and compile it because just writing a book instead of writing a piece would have required
#
far greater rigor and that could just change your methods completely.
#
So take me a little bit through how you feel, what this whole process was like of writing
#
the book and whether you feel it's changed you and if so, how?
#
So I don't know if it's brought a deeper appreciation of Hindi film, though I've learned so much
#
more about it just through researching the various things that I had to.
#
But I will say that it's brought a lot of respect about the filmmaking process and how
#
much can come up through chance and also how much is actually dictated by what people plan
#
and how these two things combine.
#
And it's very difficult to sort of to guess what will come out even if you are a talented
#
bunch of people and you have some idea of what you're doing.
#
And it is interesting that I as my job is to sit in judgment of a lot of these films.
#
And just to me, it was revealing to know that a lot of the time you're not quite sure about
#
what you're doing as a filmmaker, as a cast or crew member while you're in it.
#
And you are just conspiring to try and achieve something without really being able to control
#
And that, I think, has informed my writing recently a little bit, just a little bit of
#
respect for that process.
#
In a more specific sense, I think 80s commercial film was something that I looked on with not
#
much interest and a bit of contempt.
#
And I think I had a renewed appreciation for a lot of that through this book, simply because
#
that was the decade that gangster films started getting solidified.
#
So I had to look at it with some seriousness and I saw a lot of things that I wouldn't
#
And I think if I wasn't looking at it through that lens and that sort of feeling that the
#
80s was a graveyard of Hindi cinema, I feel I have grown out of that now.
#
I think it's a very fascinating decade.
#
And I hope you continue writing books like this and sort of larger works, because I think
#
for readers like me, it's such a rich experience to sort of go down these rabbit holes.
#
And my last question regards those rabbit holes, like typically I usually ask my guests
#
at the end of a show to recommend books they want everyone to read.
#
But in your case, I have something different and more specific.
#
And I know you're incredibly knowledgeable about world cinema and I'll link your blog
#
from the show notes as well, where you have some amazing pieces and maybe next time we
#
can talk a bit more in detail in general about cinema.
#
But right now what I'll ask you to do is recommend Indian films which you feel are underappreciated
#
and people may not have seen, which are available to see ideally on YouTube.
#
So not like Akhri Khat, which is not available anywhere, but which you know, the moment the
#
listener hears the name, she can just go and watch it right away.
#
So I know that I'm you know, I didn't give you time to prepare for this.
#
So just two, three, four, five, whatever films that you strongly feel that hey, everyone
#
should watch this that I was so surprised by this.
#
And you know, why don't you go and watch it and here is where you can.
#
So I'll give a mixture of a couple of city films and a couple of gangster or semi gangster
#
films which I discovered through the writing of this.
#
There is a Shammi Kapoor film called Chinatown directed by Shakti Samant, which I think is
#
the purest early gangster film of the lot.
#
It's a black and white film.
#
It's actually the plot of Dawn, some two decades before Dawn, where Shammi Kapoor plays a double
#
role of a gangster and this musician who's sent to impersonate him so that the police
#
It's a bit of a comedy thriller thing.
#
And a lot of the gangster tropes from the Hollywood films of the 1930s, 40s are there
#
It's a fascinating film and you'll find it online in a decent print on, I think on YouTube.
#
The next one is a city film.
#
It is the only film directed by Aftakrishna Kaul who died very young and this is the one
#
It's a fantastic look at this young man who wants to have like a more artistic life, but
#
because he has a slightly domineering father and he needs money in Bombay, he takes this
#
job as a ticket guy on a railway.
#
And it's a beautiful look at Bombay's trains and it has this slight feel of a new wave
#
film, but also just a very beautiful look at late 70s Bombay and a beautiful photography
#
again black and white by AK Bir and it should be available online.
#
There were a couple of very nice prints floating around.
#
I would recommend anyone who hasn't seen Arvind Desai Ki Aajeeb Daas Naan to check that out
#
because it's Saeed Mirza's first film if I'm not mistaken and it's quite an unusual
#
film in the vitriolic nature of it.
#
We don't quite make these films with such disaffected protagonists and such sheer contempt
#
for our cities and all our institutions.
#
So I think that might be very interesting and you should, if you've seen Taxi Driver,
#
you'll see a lot of parallels with that so anyone who's seen Taxi Driver and likes
#
it would like might want to see what happened two years later when this film was made.
#
The last film I'll mention is this gangster cop film with Arshad Warsi called Seher, very
#
lovely film set in Lucknow.
#
One of the examples of the gangster film slash cop film moving out of Mumbai, which it did
#
very successfully in the mid 2000s and then continued to do so through Vasepur and till
#
the current day Mirzapur and stuff.
#
Excellent, very tight, economical film and a very good example of how the genre became
#
very professional and very rich just a couple of years after Satya and yeah, I think that's
#
Thanks for these recommendations, now I know what I'm doing all night.
#
You know Uday, thanks so much for coming on the show, I love reading your book, I love
#
chatting with you and I hope we have more chats and more books.
#
Thank you so much Amit, this was a lovely chat.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up Bullets Over Bombay, Satya and the Hindi Film Gangster by Uday
#
You can follow Uday on Twitter at Uday, Y-O-O-D-A-Y, Uday, you can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A,
#
you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Happy listening and you know, given the subject of this episode and all the rabbit holes in
#
the show notes, happy viewing.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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