The angry new man

My Mirror column:

Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s film Kabir Singh feels like an unfortunately era-defining film: a familiar alpha male hero with an unfamiliar anger

The Holi scene in Kabir Singh features the devoted friend and sidekick, Shiva (Soham Majumdar), assuring the hero, Kabir (Shahid Kapoor), that his not-yet-quite-girlfriend Preeti (Kiara Advani) is safe: she has been seen in the girls' hostel with not a smidgeon of gulaal. “Don't worry, you'll be the first to put colour on her,” says Shiva. Almost immediately after, though, Kabir gets a panicked call. When he reaches Preeti, she is shaken and weeping, and her white clothes have splotches of colour. Kabir holds her for a few seconds, then tells her to go get changed. Meanwhile, two cowering juniors report, quaking, on where the colour was put on Preeti: her chest. Preeti’s assaulters, it is divulged, are Kabir's football rivals from another medical college, whom he has publicly beaten up during a recent game. The comeuppance of the villainous main rival follows, with Kabir again beating him up in front of his college-mates, hurling abuses all the while.

This single scene encapsulates a great deal of the cultural matrix we live in, whose many assumptions about men, women, sex and gender are the seedbed that throws up a film like Kabir Singh [originally made in Telugu as Arjun Reddy (2017)]. Holi, the film implicitly decides, is only a carnival for men. Or at least Preeti cannot express any desire to participate (although other girls in the hostel seem to be enjoying themselves). The colour/sex metaphor couldn't be more direct: Kabir assumes other men want to colour Preeti, and he has reserved the right to be the first. Meanwhile, Preeti, her virginal fearfulness signalled by the pristine white kurta, is simply assumed to be waiting for him.

Holi becomes the locale for a security discourse created entirely by men. Some men endanger the woman's sexual safety, another designates himself protector. But that protection is premised on his ownership of her. More ironically, her very need for protection is premised on that ownership: Preeti becomes a target only because she is ‘Kabir's girl’.

The other profoundly ironic part of the scene for me is Kabir's rhetorical question, as he bashes Amit's head in: “Teri ma ko chhuega to accha lagega, madarc**d? (Will you feel good if your mother is touched, motherf**er?)”

Women in patriarchy are not people; they are only the most important symbolic signifiers of relationships between men. They are the means by which men compete with each other, hurt and humiliate each other, measure the degree of harm done to each other. And sometimes the ironies are too great for the language to accommodate. (In a later scene, the film does seem to gesture to the ridiculousness of mother-related swearwords – but it’s because the joke is more literal: Kabir, wrestling his brother Karan with a “Teri ma ki”, receives a half-chuckling “Meri ma teri kya lagti hai?” in response.)

Another thing to note in the Holi scene is how Kabir warns Amit never to touch Preeti again – not because molesting a woman is a terrible thing to have done, but 'because I really love her'. All other women, Kabir's behaviour through the film makes clear, can be treated purely as human receptacles for his raging phallus, even potentially against their will – friends’ cousins inquired about with only sexual intent, professional colleagues lunged at in hospital rooms, and in one egregious instance, a woman who changes her mind about having sex told to “open up” at knifepoint. Our hero even persuades a famous actress to “help [him] physically”. The fact that he then gets into a consensual, intimate, talk-y relationship with her is conveniently ignored: he dumps her angrily the moment she utters the L word.

So Preeti is special – but only because she is, as he puts it on more than one occasion, “Kabir Rajdheer Singh ki bandi.” (The word “bandi” is perfect, because it can mean a woman, or a female slave or bondswoman, potentially a servant of God). The “aur kucch nahi” that follows is said in anger, and the film later gives Preeti a chance to turn the phrase back on an errant Kabir. But she has displayed no signs of extraordinariness when she first catches Kabir's eye: when asked what he likes in her, all Kabir can say is “I like the way you breathe.”

Of course, we are meant to know the real reason Preeti is special: because she is capable of loving Kabir back. And the film leaves us in no doubt that its eponymous hero is exceptional: alpha male, ace sportsman, exam-topping medical student, alcoholic but high-functioning surgeon with a brilliant record, and to top it all, rule-breaker extraordinaire.

Kabir's refusal to be controlled by rules can involve moving his girlfriend into a boys' hostel room, or defying the principal's injunction to apologise for his violence. In a world as regimented as this one, where the external world's rules of caste, gender and class combine with centralised exams and institutional seniority to form a stifling hierarchy, Kabir's uncontrolled anger is greeted less with censure than with awe. There is so much suppression around us, the film wants to suggest, that a man who feels anything strongly is a hero.

In this vision of the world, the crazy boy is also the only one who knows how to get his father to cry, or play his grandmother's favourite song at her funeral, its disallowed liveliness triggering real emotion. Kabir Singh is a rebel without a cause – but not if we believe the film's millennial message, in which self-expression is the only cause you need.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Jun 2019

Everything is Illuminated

This week's Mirror column:

Are there more stoners on the Hindi film screen? A short history of filmi drugs, from old-fashioned to uber-cool  

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal in GoW is one of Anurag Kashyap's many pot-smoking protagonists

Earlier this year, we had much brouhaha about showing drug use on screen, in the context of Abhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab. Producer Anurag Kashyap came out swinging against the CBFC, and when Udta Punjab finally released (with just one cut), many people, including myself, noted that its tragic portrait of drug-addled youth and a corrupt state couldn't possibly be seen as encouraging drugs.

The week after Udta, Kashyap released another film, this one directed by himself. Raman Raghav 2.0 was publicised as a portrait of a serial killer. Which it is. But it is equally a portrait of a killer cop, played by Masaan actor Vicky Kaushal. And drugs are crucial to Raghav's character: driving his violence, while also providing a crutch that helps him live with its effects. The introductory nightclub sequence, cut to Varun Grover's marvelous lyrical wordplay about qatl-e-aam, has a psychedelic quality that could rival any of Udta's blazingly coked-up scenes. And unlike in Udta, these scenes in RR2.0 aren't swaddled in a thick layer of anti-drugs messaging. But no-one batted an eyelid.

Not that I wanted them to. Kaushal's coke-fuelled murderous cop can't possibly be perceived a dangerous role model. But there is no doubt that this is a different sort of character from the sort that Hindi movies used to allow in the drug-consuming department.

Through the '70s and '80s, drugs were what the villain's evil empire was built on, along with illicit daru and adulterated dawai. An occasional hero might take on a drug cartel, sometimes for a personal reason: Charas (1976) had Dharmendra falling for Hema Malini's hapless drug mule; Janbaaz (1986) had Feroz Khan avenging the drugged death of his girlfriend (Sridevi); the sparky Jalwa (1987) had Naseeruddin Shah as a cop fighting brown sugar traffickers after his younger brother died injecting it.

Very few Hindi films had protagonists who used drugs. If they did, you knew they had to die for their sins: the hippie Janice/Jasbir of Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), icon of cool though Zeenat Aman and 'Dum Maro Dum' made her, had to commit suicide for shame. That strand of moral comeuppance is still around: think of Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion (2008), in which Kangana Ranaut's reigning supermodel Shonali loses her job and later her life to her addiction, although heroine Meghna (Priyanka Chopra) is allowed to reform herself. And as late as 2011, we had a film like Dum Maro Dum rejigging the old Hindi film villain, with Aditya Pancholi as the white-suited Lorsa Biscuita, whose benevolent industrialist is a front for secret druglord.

Abhay Deol in Kashyap's Dev D (2009) drowns his sorrows in drink and drugs

More recently, though, marijuana-smokers have begun to appear on the Hindi film screen. Anurag Kashyap might have heralded the change, with dopehead heroes as dissimilar as Abhay Deol's Dev D and Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Faisal (in Gangs of Wasseypur 2). He also possibly gave us Hindi cinema's first female smoker-up: Jesse Randhawa's sari-wearing college lecturer in Gulaal, who lights up while laughing about her “bahut buri aadat”.


The new comfort-level with stoners has opened up space for a film like Go Goa Gone, a silly but funny comedy in which a Goa rave produces an outbreak of zombies. Even in a film as harrowing as Udta, the relaxing effect of drugs is allowed a moment: a syringe planted in Diljit Dosanjh's neck brings down his guard enough to voice his feelings to Kareena Kapoor. But the good-drug vs bad-drug line remains zealously guarded. Kashyap himself seems to recognize more serious drug use as part of a dark, dystopic inner world: in his unreleased first film Paanch (2003), for instance, to which the teenage-gang-gone-wrong in Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) paid homage. Even last week's shallow and annoying M Cream, which centres on four rich Delhi brats setting out for the hills in search of a legendary hash—and ostensibly finding themselves, crafts its single moment of drama around Imaad Shah's charsi hero Figaro preventing his silly friend Maggie from shooting up.

The idea of marijuana as harmless and happy-making is making its way into the cool new family film: Shandaar turns not eating meat on Tuesdays into an extended gag involving magic mushrooms, while Kapoor and Sons has a grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) sharing a joint with his warring grandsons.

Jesse Randhawa as Anuja in Gulaal (2009) may have been Hindi cinema's first female pot-smoker

But any conversation about drug consumption in Hindi films should really include the narcotic that Indian civilization has sanctioned since time immemorial: bhang. Unlike cannabis rolled into cigarettes, whose popularity comes via a firang route, bhang is made by grinding cannabis leaves into paste and eaten (see Shrilal Shukla's classic novel Raag Darbaari for a paean to the process). Sometimes mixed into sweets (or milky thandai on Holi), bhang is not just socially licensed but ritually encouraged. And while they may be new to dope-smoking, our films have always treated bhang as a gentle inducement to hilarity. think of Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz singing Jai Jai Shiv Shankar as they careen down temple steps, or Amitabh Bachchan breaking into the rambunctious Khaike Paan Banaraswala in Don, or my all-time favourite: the bhang pakodas in Angoor which make Aruna Irani amorously giggly and Deven Verma imagine a toad to accompany his rendition of Preetam Aan Milo.


Unfortunately, barring 2012's charming Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (in which the family in question isn't exactly 'cool', but the script's use of cannabis undeniably is), bhang seems to have exited the Hindi film universe. Maybe the cool people think it's too old-fashoned. Around the 2011 release of Don 2, Shah Rukh Khan was asked if he enjoys bhang on Holi. “Apart from smoking,” said SRK, “aur koi buri aadat abhi tak nahi hai mujh mein.” As someone who is a fan of its entirely legal (and smokeless) joys, I must confess to being devastated. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31st July 2016.

Post Facto - Why I love Holi: Ritual excess and the joys of reversal

My Sunday Guardian column for March 2013 (and I disclaim the print headline):

I've been a believer in Holi as long as I can remember. Actually, no, I do have one hazy six-year-old memory that would count as anti-Holi: a couple of Defence Colony uncles perched in and on a car, their deep purple and shiny green avatars just slightly less benign than their regular selves. But even then, I don't remember being terrified; only guarded. After that, I spent several Holis in Calcutta. Family formed the core of the celebrations, with close friends of either my parents or my aunt and uncle often being added to the mix. At 10, I was already the bespectacled child with my nose buried in a book. But Holi seemed to bring out all my latent energy: I remember running up and down pretty much all day, armed with one of the grandparental household's old brass pichkaris — a solid, effective weapon, and heavy, too: not one of these childish plastic playthings that get trashed each year. Once I played Holi at my best friend's house, with her cousins and aunts and uncles, and the faux-family ties cemented that day still feel like something, even if the friend and I are no longer close.

Back in Delhi as an adolescent, I discovered the delicious frisson that only Holi offered — water made everyone frisky, and putting colour on people involved actually touching them. I remember crushing on a classmate's elder brother with the perfect filmi Holi persona — colour-spattered white kurta, stubble and beautiful singing voice. His colours, I decided, were reserved for me. The secret love I nursed for a boy could be publicly expressed with gulaal. The festive flirtation could be conducted openly, in front of family and friends, and yet remain unseen. Holi offered other unusual liberties: if you had a colony/building gang, you could roam from house to house all day without parental censure — not something girls often did.

It was years later, reading about carnival in a cultural anthropology class, that I began to recognise Holi in it. A ritual feature of pre-modern European popular culture, carnival at its widest involved feasting and communal drinking, dancing and music and open-air amusements, comic verbal competitions and farces that often enshrined the low forms of folk humour. The Soviet-era theorist Mikhail Bakhtin used the Renaissance writings of Rabelais to think about carnival as an analytic. The excesses of carnival offered liberation from the utilitarian norms that governed agricultural society. Humdrum, everyday time was suspended, everyday hierarchies reversed. Joining the carnival throng, often with the anonymity of masquerade, allowed people freedom from the strictures of being themselves. The profane self, released from work, social rules, or moral boundaries, was given free rein — eating and drinking and sex and laughter — and all this as part of a collective body.

I had to wait many years to experience the adult equivalent of that childhood sense of collectivity, of licensed upheaval, of owning a neighbourhood — and it came via the JNU Holi. Delhi University, where I studied, never gave its women a campus that felt truly free, overrun as it is by the male-dominated street culture of Delhi. In JNU, on the other hand, the practices of Holi, like most things, manage to feel entirely rooted (dare I say 'traditional'?) while actually being quite particular to this unique post-independence campus. So bhaang-filled thandai, unmatchable intoxicant traditionally drunk on Holi across North India, features crucially in the JNU festivities too. But here each hostel mess actually produces a batch, and the re-filled mineral water bottles that circulate across campus often come with the implicit suggestion of which hostel's thandai is better. The night before Holi is devoted to a weird and wonderful contest for the title of Chaat Samraat. "Chaat" (lit: "to lick") is slang for someone who talks on and on, until you're bored to tears. He who is crowned the Emperor of Chaat is placed on a donkey and led on a procession around campus.

Last week, I read a 1966 essay about Holi in Braj, the only anthropological treatment of Holi I've read. McKim Marriott spends his first Holi in Kishangarh befuddled — both by bhaang and by what seems like pandemonium. By his second Holi, everything seems to fall into "an extraordinarily regular social ordering. But this was an order precisely inverse to the social and ritual principles of routine life." The women beat up the men. Lower caste women are the most avid beaters, and the wealthier Brahmin and Jat farmers their chosen targets. A "burlesque dirge" is sung for an unpopular "very much alive moneylender"; the 'King of the Holi' put backwards on the donkey is a famous high-caste bully (the implications for Chaat Samraat are interesting!). Holi functions, in brief, as a carnivalesque rite of reversal.

A very preliminary speculation, but it seems to me that whether Holi works or doesn't work depends on whether it enables a reversal of hierarchies, or simply reinforces the dominant power equations. In the North Indian city, it is certainly not men who need ritual license — and if Holi seems to give them that, it will feel wrong. My Holis, from childhood onwards, have always enabled rather than disabled, letting me embrace the bodily excesses of carnival; do things I might not have done otherwise. Of course, there is no reason why you should need a festival to free you — but for all the other creatures of ritual out there, Holi is waiting for you to claim it for yourself.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.