Anubhav Sinha was 13 and his sister 18, growing up in Varanasi in the late 1970s, when they noticed that “Ashraf uncle”—their father’s close friend—was being served food in utensils earmarked for his visits in their house. The reason: His religion. That was the first time Sinha came in touch with the social reality of discrimination—the subject he explored in his 2018 film Mulk, and the recent flick Article 15.
The siblings convinced their parents to practise equality. But what appalled Sinha then, and continues to disturb him even now, is the way people accepted the normalisation of discrimination based on various grounds. He always wanted to talk about it. In Article 15—that talks about caste oppression—his protagonist, Ayan Ranjan (Ayushmann Khurrana), is an upper caste IPS officer. The story was inspired by the infamous Badaun gang rape case of 2014. “It was by design to make my protagonist privileged and have an upper hand in the caste hierarchy,” says Sinha. He believes that the “privileged can challenge the privileged”.
But it is not that the oppressed have not got a justifiable display in Sinha’s films. If it was Rishi Kapoor’s Murad Ali Mohammed who put up a rational Muslim in Mulk, in Article 15, it is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s dalit revolutionary, Nishad. “Dalit brothers and sisters questioning me should see how Nishad makes Ayan feel inferior,” says Sinha. In the run-up to its release, Article 15 was attacked by many groups for having a Brahmin protagonist. However, Sinha does not give a heed to these chatter anymore. Days after the release of Article 15, when Sinha met his long-time friends in film industry—Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra, Subhash Kapoor and a couple of others—there was a discussion around the “newfound” language in his films. When one of the friends asked that question, Mishra, who knows Sinha since the time he came to Mumbai, responded that the question is not what led to the change in the cinematic language of Sinha, but what led him to come back to it.
Sinha admits that somewhere he was swayed by the idea of success in Bollywood. He had started playing to the gallery—bigger films, bigger stars. But he was always very much rooted in the socio-political reality. He recalls the time after the release of his superhero movie Ra. One (2011). “People who met me said I did not look like someone who would make a movie like Ra. One,” he says. Now, through Mulk, and Article 15, he is talking things he always wanted to discuss. “I love these films that I can wrap up in 30 days and say what I want, as opposed to a superhero film that takes months and years of planning,” he says.