Arguing with Gangs of Wasseypur…

It is fascinating that Anurag Kashyap does not discern or at least chooses not to excavate the much greater film that lies hidden within the husk of his ambitious and in many ways formidable epic. He scatters clues of this more important project throughout the first part of the existing film and yet never quite fleshes out their meaning except in the most desultory ways. As ethnography his efforts succeed admirably. His journalistic choices vividly and often searingly portray what becomes in his telling a singular slice of the Indian hinterland. Kashyap clearly knows this landscape well as he does the lives of those who inhabit it. He is also astutely keyed into many of its socio-economic, cultural and ultimately political fault-lines. He knows the relevant cinematic histories from Hollywood to Bombay. His auteurist eye often creates extraordinary visuals. He has the ironic post-modern distance from his world which perhaps of necessity asserts itself at this late date in the medium’s history and certainly that of the genres he tackles. And yet even with everything perfectly located Kashyap frustratingly misses the encounter with that greater work. The reasons for this will turn out not to be accidental.

When the charismatic and near-mythic Shahid Khan exits the Wasseypur universe things are never the same. More than a quantum of transcendence vanishes with him and the significant figures that follow cannot quite make up for this loss.* Beyond this the film is simply effective docu-drama the journalistic truths and anthropological immediacies of which are purchased at a steep cost. Even when Shahid Khan is a central character Kashyap is strangely in a rush to get through the proceedings. Admittedly this bit of pre-history serves the principal purpose of framing what will become its chief story-lines. But the list of missed opportunities begins as it were with this incomplete beginning. Kashyap correctly intuits that the mythic can best serve the period of British Indian history, itself the repository of so much folklore and legend, and more to the point the world out of which Independent India emerges in very precise formulations. The latter political arrangement does not come after the former one, it in fact follows it as a legatee. It takes up an inheritance that still reverberates in contemporary Indian life. And this is what should have formed the essential contours of Kashyap’s effort. This two-part structure would have very easily rewarded a focus on the Wasseypur region in British India with the ‘sequel’ then being about the aftermath of British rule. In essence two halves centered around two very different eras. Within such a framing it would have made a great deal of sense to move from a more mythic gesturality and representation (vis-a-vis British India) to a less elevated, more realistically downsized one (vis-a-vis the independent nation-state). Kashyap would still have been free to cover different periods of post-British history in the chronological terms he has chosen for his work. The British past would in other words reward a masala (even if auteurist) treatment while the ‘present’ would satisfy the Scorsese-led instincts of the director and in the same fashion open up a more authentic space for his Tarantino-inspired deconstructions. If both the past and the present are mirror images of each other, if there is no discontinuity from one to the other in terms of the mode of access that can be granted to each, what does the passage of time in this world really signify?

In fairness to the director and even if this is a two part film there are three nearly distinct portrayals of the male leads. Shahid Khan’s delineation relies on the mythic, romantic archetype of the bandit-rebel foreshadowing a somewhat nationalist strain. Sardar Khan represents the more populist type taking hold in a relatively young nation and displacing the old guard and finally Faizal Khan occupies a world from which all gods have vanished. All that is left is commentary or the ironic tracing of a vanished gesturality. Ultimately Tarantino is the presiding deity of Kashyap’s work and hence the perspective associated with Faizal Khan is operative even before he actually takes over. Or the Tarantino impulse is the one secretly guiding the film from the very beginning. One of the reasons why Shahid Khan never quite gets a narrative or tone commensurate with his heroic status. Also the reason why Sardar Khan’s Scorsese informed segment does not really exhibit any of the latter’s great emotional immediacy. Finally there is the mock-gesturality of Faizal Khan (his entire persona could be read as a mock-riff on Bachchan’s iconic outings, something the film hints at in a Trishul screening which becomes deeply cathartic for the character) which repeats a problem that also plagued Tarantino for the longest time and that he successfully resolved only in his recent (and superb) Django. In a different register the trick Tarantino did not quite learn from Leone is the ability to deconstruct and romanticize at the very same time. To either fashion mock elegy out of the endgame of epic or alternatively to reign in the nostalgias of cinema by submitting their grander gestures to brutal irony. Leone was always able to manage this improbable mixture. It evaded Tarantino until Django and though Kashyap seems to have understood this solution in Dev D (in a different vein) he has regressed on this score in the current film. His deconstructions are persuasive but they circulate unmoored in the framework he chooses.

The film is evenly narrated through each of its phases by Piyush Mishra’s (also a central character) raspy, salt-of-the-earth drawl instantly creating a sense of native wisdom that transcends any specific history the story is involved with. In other words this voiceover creates an illusion of constancy and permanence. Even as Kashyap’s plot details the changing livelihoods of his characters and goes through all the milestones of the larger history in frenzied fashion the people that populate this world remain predictable and unsurprising once a certain typology of emotional and linguistic response has been created. Furthermore these characters never quite become more than the sum of their gestural tics because the movie never stays long enough with them. The all-important exception is Faizal Khan whose story constitutes half the film but his character by design is too deconstructive to invite the viewer’s investment even in the limited way that Sardar Khan’s does. Kashyap almost throughout his two parts but markedly so in the first one is much more occupied with presenting a history of the nation-state by way of Wasseypur than actually letting his characters breathe and thereby illuminate this history more allusively. Not surprisingly Ramadhir Singh as the story’s arch-villain is another symbol of constancy, a screen against which different inter-Muslim clan fratricides are played out. The religious coding is suggestive but characteristically for the film not optimally developed.

The opposite happens for instance in Iruvar where the central arc of the duo and their relationships gloss an entire history of Dravidian politics without ever outlining things literally. Such an approach keeps the story and its surrounding historical contexts on the same plane of access. History in this scenario is not a super-imposed journalistic vehicle always divorced from the film’s stories but one that that is naturally blended with these. A further clue highlighting the same contrast concerns the use of music as a calendrical tool. Ratnam’s videos locate chronological time within a work that is more profoundly governed by Anandam’s inner clock. His experience of time, his nostalgias tie into the film’s larger economies of memory. Hence those music videos have to be kept relatively subtle. The chronology of these cannot be allowed to destabilize Anandam’s other sense of time which is foundational for the work. On the other hand the music presented in Gangs of Wasseypur, leaving aside the folklorish moments, is brought forth by way of an event singer (for every occasion) who keeps going through iconic songs down the years. The choice in itself is an inspired one but feeds the same deconstructive urge. These punctuations are one more instance of how the postmodern impulse is fed at every point.

The anthropological gaze that forms the truth of this undertaking asserts itself at every turn. In the world of this film we are always in a human menagerie of sorts where the ‘fun’ lies in observing all the specimens on display. The episodic narrative plateaus out relatively early and consequently relies on detailing a whole gallery of characters in all their ‘native’ finery. Kashyap for all his naturalistic thoroughness runs dangerously close to creating a fantasy space of elemental men and women in the hinterland. It is an ‘ethnic’ paradise made resonant by feeding into similar strains in the current global (post-modern) moment. From multiplexes in Bombay to film festivals in Europe there is a decided market for such ethnic exotica. This is a pity because Kashyap is otherwise so careful in delineating many of the social complexities of this world. He is particularly singular in stressing the caste-like divisions within the Muslim communities of Wasseypur. He identifies so many of the key strains and motivating factors only to dissolve them into a somewhat bread-and-butter gangster code which is locally nuanced but not enough to sustain the whole show.

Despite all these objections the workshop that Kashyap puts on display in the first part is remarkable for its visceral depictions, its attention to sociological detail, and additionally a range of dazzling shots that pop up at different points. A few horizon-line shots are especially noteworthy in this context. Wasseypur is in Kashyap’s imagining also a marvelous memory palace devoted to masala cinema though symptomatically the distinctions between A-grade grandeur and B-grade kitsch are often blurred. Undoubtedly and in any number of ways an intricate world is evoked in this film which makes the problems that much more disappointing. Nonetheless this first part is richly suggestive in a variety of ways and is for all its narrative confusions a very absorbing one. The second part however is rather basic and straightforward. It carries over some of these choices but is dramatically inferior in most ways. It becomes routine very early on and its lead presence cannot quite make up for the loss of the first part’s characters. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s is an assured performance but the character can never generate even the limited empathy that Manoj Bajpayee’s Sardar Khan could earlier in the work. This is not really the actor’s fault. More importantly Kashyap as a storyteller has nothing new to add to all the contexts he has already established in the first part. By this point even all the local color starts tiring one out a bit.

Anurag Kashyap is easily one of contemporary Hindi cinema’s leading talents. He has been this for a while. But he has definitely been in better form elsewhere from the early tightly knit Black Friday to the more recent, delightfully subversive (even if somewhat indulgent) Dev D and even including a misfire like Gulal which is very strong on the terrain that it does get right. Gangs of Wasseypur is lengthy without quite being sprawling, it means to be an epic but it does not quite manage the fusion of scale and intimacy that informs all the best examples of this mode, it is often gorgeously shot and brilliant in its verisimilitude but these are delights one gazes at from a half-detached distance. What the film delivers is far less than the magnum opus it has been heralded as in many quarters but what it promises is the outline of a rich terrain that can perhaps be mined more profitably by Kashyap in a future endeavor. It is assuredly a work to be taken seriously and even to revisit but its failures are sadly more instructive than its successes. If Anurag Kashyap were able to shake off the polemical monkey on his back he could fashion a truly great film…

* There is an utterly riveting action sequence involving him and his protagonist caked coal-black.