Gulaal: the colour of politics

It’s been long, really long since I watched a film that appealed to not only the senses but also to the intellect. Last weekend was spent viewing two fine pieces of cinema. While one was a taut, Kafkaesque take on the politics of hinterland India, the other documented the fears of characters set in various strata of the boomtown of Gujarat—Ahmedabad a month after the bloodbath of 2002. Let me first talk about the first. Stark, dark, and dismal, the desolate landscape of mofussil India is the backdrop of one of the finest political films made in a while now. Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal is masterful cinema. It jolts you out of your reverie, pulls you out of the comfort zone each of us build of ourselves, hands a slap across our faces and forces us to confront the hard reality, a reality that is both ridden with caste and class differences, a reality that is mottled with the perceived injustices of a few and the sense of deprivation that blankets India, a reality that whacks the daylights out of everyone of us who have never encountered the harsh truths that plague this country, once home to the brave and the mighty.

Gulaal is set against a backdrop of the dusty expanse of modern-day Rajasthan, in a fictional, ostensible town called Rajpur (pun on Jaipur intended) which houses the local university. While the student body remains in the foreground throughout the film, depicting everything from brutal ragging, even of a young female lecturer, the actual protagonists of the drama are its mass of diverse characters. There is the fiery, venom-spewing Duki Bana, played efficiently by Kay Kay Menon, the archetype of the small town chieftain who has his finger on the political nerve centre of the university, a man surrounded by guns and coveted by the attractive nautch girl, the true blue bahubali of Indian politics, the aggrieved descendent of a royal who craves the death of democracy as a concept and as a rule and aims to raise an army of young Rajputs who can avenge their present-day helplessness in the face of the loss of their royal rights; the young, bespectacled student Dileep Singh, another Rajput who arrives in the heat and dust of Rajpur to study law but is sucked into the dirty underbelly of politics, deceit, murder, love and lust; Dileep’s room-mate and friend, Rananjay Singh, an older student of the university who is also the son of the local maharaja but prefers to let his lineage lie low; the maharaja’s illegitimate son, Karan who remains on the sidelines of the plot only to reveal himself in the most important of places in the narrative and his sister Kiran, an ambitious, young student who strums the guitar when not conspiring to engineer the fall of the reigning student union. These sundry characters played by Raj Singh Chaudhary, Abhimanyu Singh, Aditya Shrivastava, and Ayesha Mohan are crucial to the narrative.

Kashyap’s film is a gritty portrayal of power politics. While there is the tavern turned living quarters bordering the railway line, home to Dileep and Rananjay on the one hand, there is the den of debauchery, called laka on the other. Enveloping all of it in its vice-grip is the grinding façade of one-upmanship and that golden rule of real politik—the zero-sum game; power corrupts, yet it is coveted by one and all. That is the thrust of Gulaal. And that is what the film is about. It pits bigotry against legitimacy and power against humanity. The result is a classy political drama with the scenario in the present polity making it even more interesting. Student politics and elections are used by Duki Bana to fuel his own ambition of creating an MNS-style regional army of Rajputana warriors whom he addresses with aplomb, each one of those present have their faces coloured red with gulaal. He convinces Rananjay Singh or Ransa to avenge those who ragged him and his friend in the hostel room, to contest against Kiran who is shattered when she ultimately loses the election to Dileep. In the meantime, Ransa has been killed by his half-brother Karan and his bullet-riddled, gulaal splattered body is hung from the post in the middle of the busy city centre to cock a snook at who else, but Duki Bana. Reason? Karan wants the tag of senapati for himself, the leader of the Rajput clan, the ‘legitimate’ vanguard of the warrior caste. Ransa out of the way, Kiran is unopposed. But wait…the chieftain convinces Dileep to contest in place of his dead room-mate. The rather unconvinced Dileep contests alright, and also wins, leaving Kiran seething. The drama begins then. Under the able guidance of her brother, Kiran seduces Dileep who falls in love with her and ignores his duties as general-secretary of the student’s union. Castigated by his leader, Dileep returns to find his place taken by his lady love who is now bitter with him for having impregnated her. Dileep is lost and unable to digest the events as they unfold while Kiran goes ahead with her political ambitions, this time trying to get the big fish—Duki Bana himself. Having realized that he is more of use than Dileep, she dumps the young man. Heartbroken, Dileep shoots Duki Bana dead only to realize that it was Kiran who nailed him. The film ends in a hail of bullets. Everyone except Kiran succumb.

But the soul of the film is the eccentric bard, Prithvi Bana, played by a brilliant Piyush Mishra. His dual contribution to the film in the form of excellent, stomach churning lyrics and a performance to boot take it to another level altogether.