Devashish Makhija’s 2016 short film, Taandav, is the story of a young cop who loses his job after an outrageous public dance that is recorded and uploaded on YouTube. Shame and humiliation follow. But in the process, the cop (played by Manoj Bajpayee) is set free and is ready to navigate life in a different manner.
The 11-minute film, with a superlative performance from Bajpayee, broke the internet the moment it released. As Makhija says, the film was a way to find space for a feature film, Bhonsle, that had been in the making since 2010, but could not be made due to many reasons, mostly financial. It has now. And the word about the film is only picking up. Bhonsle screened at the Busan Film Festival earlier this month, and will be premiering in India at the 20th JIO MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in the India Story section.
It is a story set in tumultuous Mumbai, at a time when scheming Maharashtrian politicians use violence to rid the state of Bihari migrants. Terminally ill Bhonsle, a cop again played by Bajpayee, is retired against his will. Thrown out of gear, he finds himself forging an unlikely companionship with a 23 year-old Bihari girl and her little brother, in the mostly Marathi slum. Harassed for being ‘outsiders’ by the boorish local political goon Vilasrao, they turn to Bhonsle. It gives him one last battle worth fighting for, but it might just be too late.
Makhija, a man of many talents, started his film journey as a research associate and assistant director on Black Friday. He made his directorial debut in 2013 with the Hindi-Oriya film, Oonga, about a young adivasi boy’s fascination with Rama, followed by last year’s Ajji – a heart-breaking revenge drama that unfolds after an unfortunate rape. Makhija has also had a solo art show, Occupying Silence; written Tulika’s bestselling children’s books When Ali Became Bajrangbali and Why Paploo Was Perplexed; and a Harper-Collins collection of short stories—Forgetting. He has a book of poems, Disengaged, coming out too.
He talks to THE WEEK about the idea behind Bhonsle and its subsequent journey, the recurring elements in his films, how he draws a lot from his personal life for the work he creates and why confusion has been a blessing in disguise for him.
I belong to Bihar and I have closely been a witness to Maharashtrians being conflicted about the entire immigration issue. What was the trigger for you to make the film?
It was actually watching a lot of such episodes, back in 2006-07. It was going a little crazy. Then, it seemed like a situation that was unique to Mumbai, but over the last 10 years I have noticed how the same insider-outsider; the [talk about] you are an immigrant, you don’t belong here is happening across the world. Suddenly, it felt like a very useful metaphor to tell a story that is troubling the whole world today, not just delegates to Mumbai alone.
But did it personally affect you in anyway? If you can talk about the research…
It did. Not very directly, but around then I was actively involved with activists and I was working for the rights of the adivasis, in and out of Mumbai. A lot of times that we had gone to police for something or the other, they would not talk to us in Hindi or English. Everything that we said, we got a Marathi response. At the time, either Shiv Sena or MNS (Maharashtra Navnirvan Sena) had told the Mumbai police to speak only in Marathi. If you have to live in Mumbai, you better learn Marathi and that was disconcerting because anything like this is basically anti-constitutional. Constitution tells you that you can reside in any part of the country. But when you are not from that place, it makes you wonder if you should be here. It was just an internal conflict that pushed me to think about the issues that are relevant, like there are too many people in Mumbai, there isn’t enough water to go ground. Is it a genuine problem then? Should we not be here? It becomes very conflicting—thinking that it is anti-constitutional, but you are seeing a point in it. There are too many people vying for the same thing. Do the people who lived here first have the first right to it? There’s no clear answer to these questions. That is what I wanted to explore.
By the end of this journey, were you able to find any answer?
No, how can you find answers to [these questions]. Even in Calcutta, where I come from, when I was young, the Bangaladeshi refugees coming there was a huge problem. Most of the people from Bangladesh, looking for opportunities, would come to Calcutta and the then CPI(M) government would allow them to build slums because that was an easy vote bank. There was a time in the 80s when I think over 30 per cent of the population was Bangladeshi refugees, and almost none of them had voter ID cards. Again, you start wondering if they are outsiders and should they not be here? I remember as a kid sharing the thought with my parents who were both Sindhis from Pakistan and had come to India during Partition. Just because we were here before the Bangladeshi refugees, are we more entitled. Where do you start drawing that line. And how far do you trace this back to understand the insider-outsider concept (laughs). There are no easy answers.
What were the difficulties in making of the film?
Firstly, films like these—Ajji or Bhonsle—the system, the market, distributors, the audience, they do not really want it. You are already up against odds because you are making a film which is not really wanted. There is no need for this film. you want to make it, therefore you are making it. It is also a huge risk. You are not sure whether it will ever release. You do not know if the producers will ever make the money back. Then you start recalibrating your film at every step to make it easier for the producer. Keeping all that in mind, I brought down the shoot of the film from 40 days to 26 days.
During Ajji, you had mentioned that the film’s subject took a toll on your health in order to understand a woman’s pain. Were there similar experiences during the shooting of Bhonsle too?
As a storyteller, I dip into my life a lot. So even if the story of this film, like Ajji is not my own. Even in Bhonsle, this man [the lead character] is a Marathi policeman. I don’t have a first hand experience of either being a woman or a policeman, but the fact that he has lost his job and now he has to live a life that he did not choose—being in the house and doing domestic chores and trying to come to terms at 60 that he may not have his duty ever again. There’s been a recalibration of his dreams and that starts killing him on the inside. I borrowed from my father. My mother passed away before I came to Mumbai and my father has been living alone in Calcutta for almost 16 years now. He used to run a sari shop. But nobody buys saris anymore. So about six-seven years back, I took him out of the shop, which too was not our own but rented. And I have seen him decline since then because he just lost any reason to live. That routine had kept him sane. I gave a lot of that to Bhonsle. The minute you take a lonely person’s routine away, the person doesn’t feel useful. During the making of the film, my father fell very sick and it was quite spooky, which would happen since I was borrowing so directly from my life. I knew it would effect the elements in my life also.
There are some recurring themes in your films—the treatment of the lesser-privileged, the loneliness—which I think came out really well in the short film, Taandav. Was it intentional to tap into these aspects of life?
I had recently given a talk on Voicing The Voiceless, organised by Junoon. We call ourselves mainstream, we are in the cities, we have television, we have got an education. We are being heard. But the people who are on the margins of the mainstream never really get a chance to be really heard. Forget the judiciary or the legislature or police, they don’t have a chance to be heard by the major chunk of the rest of the society. Most of the time when I am talking to my peers about the things that an adivasi is going through or a Dalit is going through, they feel that I am being a little too dramatic. That it can’t be so bad. But they feel so because they haven’t been exposed to how tragic their daily lives can be.
After Ajji, I had n number of people telling me that I made Dhavale too much like a monster. That he is too evil. It isn’t like that in real life. And in this year when a kid got raped and people read about how brutal that rape was, I had two dozen people call me and tell me, ‘Boss, this is exactly like Dhavale’. When you don’t know how bad it can be, of course it will be too dramatic. I took it upon myself to keep putting these themes in my films. People need to be exposed to it and we don’t get enough of it in mainstream discourse. We are constantly buffered. We are constantly being exposed to Dabangg kind of films or romantic comedies where the narrative is escapist. You need that when you go to the movies and spend Rs 500. But you get so much of escape that you start losing any sort of hold on reality. I know it is going to be difficult for me. Most people throughout their lifetime are not going to watch my films, but someone has to keep putting some reality out there. Otherwise, we will be so delusional.
And the loneliness…
Loneliness is something common to a lot of us, especially the migrants to a city. We face it to a very deep level. But a lot of us do not voice it or admit it or explore it. Again, I dip into my own experiences. After losing my mother, the most creative soul of our family, I immediately moved to Mumbai. She used to push me to follow my dreams because hers was not fulfilled. Leaving my life and leaving everything I knew set me free, but there was perpetual loneliness, too. I used to try and fight it. I was working with Yash Raj Films for a few years. And I felt I was lying to myself. It was not my voice. I wanted to tap into my feelings in my stories. Those themes became very recurring as they are deep-seated. I also find it very universal. A lot of people think that it is not universal because they do not admit their deepest fears.
What has the journey of Bhonsle been like?
My co-writer, Mirat (Trivedi) came to me with the story idea in 2010. He was a banker, he left banking and came to me through Sharanya (Rajgopal), the third writer. I told him it is not going to be easy. But then I heard his idea and connected with it because of my father. I appropriated it and started feeding a lot of my father’s motifs into the story. The film was to be made in 2011, it did not. Then in 2013, again it did not. in 2014, I took the script to Manoj (Bajpayee). He reverted within 12 hours saying he wants to do it. He proposed to be a co-producer, too. He said it is the film he has been waiting for. In 2014, we began. There were a couple of producers on it. The casting began but failed before culmination. Since then, he and I have been together and fighting to make this film. So, we made Taandav to prove to the world that such a film can be made and can be good too. Last year, while I was doing the post on Ajji, my casting director, Casting Bay, got me the little boy and girl we were looking for.
You too have had a very interesting journey – journalism to advertising to filmmaking, writing books and what not.
Confusion!
It is surely more than that. How do you look back at the journey now that there is much recognition for the work you do?
I am grateful. A lot of my team members on most of my films are first timers. The more confusion I see in people, the more encouraged I am. The confusion leads to the art. I celebrate it. When I look back, I am grateful that I had that confused trajectory. Because of it, I ended up doing a lot of things I would not have otherwise chosen to do. And a lot of those find a way to my films.