If the horrors of mass migration of migrant labourers in the first year of Covid-19 in India can be termed as one of the darkest hours in the nation's history, Bheed sheds a light on that darkness. It puts a human face to the tragedy and shakes you up from the gut in a bid to refresh your memory of what happened in those fateful days when thousands of labourers were left stranded, forced to walk down hundreds of miles back home to their villages, with no provisions for food, water or even basic sanitation.
The story begins thirteen days after the announcement of the first lockdown, in 2021. There are migrant families with little children, women and the aged, who decide to walk back home several thousand miles to their villages in Uttar Pradesh from Delhi, in the absence of any form of transport. Why do they choose to do that? Well, "if we have to die, it's better to die in the presence of our loved ones back home. Here in the city, we have no home because there is no work and no money to pay for rent or for food," says a labourer on screen. On the way, they rest the night on railway tracks thinking that the trains wouldn't ply. The night goes by, but the day isn't forgiving. At the crack of dawn, all of them are crushed to death by a speeding train. This chilling representation right at the beginning sets the tone for the rest of the film. Shot in greyed out black and white format, the film is touching, humanising and deeply moving.
Sinha handles the subject with sensitivity, as his script and direction give voice to the voiceless. He brings to the fore the depravity that leads a civilised society and community to transform into an impersonal, dispassionate and inhuman mass of people, which he calls Bheed (crowd). The narratives are layered - there's caste, class, social stigma and religion at play here, as people go over each other to secure the basics. The setting is placed about 1,200 kilometres from Delhi, near the Tezpur Highway where a checkpost has been placed to stop the movement of people and goods and close all borders. The in-charge of the checkpost is Suryakumar Singh Teekus (Rajkummar Rao), who must ensure that nobody escapes the nakabandhi and that everyone settles down in the dry and deserted areas around. "Apne hi desh mein border laga diye hain?" asks Trivedi (Pankaj Kapur), a security guard who's travelled miles with hundreds others from the city, to enter his village which is barely a few kilometres away. "We've been treated like dogs," he says, infuriated.
Anubhav Sinha, Saumya Tiwari and Sonali Jain bring a crisply edited and tight screenplay to work with hard-hitting visuals by Soumik Mukherjee's and Atanu Mukherjee's sharp editing. Bheed keeps you engaged right from the first scene to the last - you do not want to miss anything because every character is poignant and every story within the story is compelling. Here, there's a Brahmin security guard from Mumbai pitted against a Dalit policeman manning the checkpost, an upper caste politician who looks down upon Muslim samaritans who face humiliation when they distribute food packets among stranded and starving migrants and more.
A follow-up to Sinha's Mulk, Article 15, and Faraaz, a recent Hansal Mehta film which Sinha co-produced, Bheed is as impactful as his previous works were. At the heart of the story is Surya who watches in alarm as hordes of travellers turn up at the barricaded check post. He is assisted by Ram Singh (Aditya Srivastava), and his upper-caste girlfriend Renu (Bhumi Pednekar), works as a medical officer, handling the load of Covid cases that come up. She throws a light on how girls use newspapers as sanitary pads are scarce, how people decide to break into the mall nearby to get food for the starving, and more such stories that continue to pull at our heartstrings as we watch in shock at how the whole episode turned out. The film does not comment on the way it was handled by the governments, but it does show how misinformation and rumours spread fast, far and wide on WhatsApp and Facebook in those tragic times.
Bheed is a must-watch as it throws light on how far we have come as a society and where we are headed.
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Rating: 5/5