Two decades after Khosla Ka Ghosla, Dibakar Banerjee remains one of the most original and influential voices in Hindi cinema. The celebrated filmmaker, speaking at The Hindu MIND event moderated by Anuj Kumar, said artists with diverse views are essential for a society to prevent a monolithic, bullying structure. Edited excerpts:
It has been 20 years since you became a household name with Khosla Ka Ghosla. How do you remember the film?
When we were thinking of Khosla Ka Ghosla, both Jaideep Sahni, who wrote the film, and I were angry about being bullied by someone richer and more socially powerful than us. I see Khosla Ka Ghosla as an anti-bullying film, because in the persona of Khurana [a real estate shark], you have the quintessential bully. He comes to you with a system of his own. When Khurana tells Khosla to pay him to get his land back after arbitrarily deciding to acquire it without any reason, he shows he can subvert all social and legal laws. It’s a situation we are all increasingly getting familiar with. In the nearly two decades that have passed, we have come to understand the exact nature and pathology of bullying of the ordinary citizen and how it works.
Yes, but beyond that, the film also nudges art and artists about their role in the real world. It has been a decade since you returned the National Award you won for Khosla Ka Ghosla. Do you see a connection?
There is a strong connection. Any artist embedded in society is invested with the responsibility of propaganda. They are essentially propaganda agents for certain values. Let’s say there’s a cave from 40,000 years ago with paintings of the bison. Artists painted the animal and left their handprints. That’s propaganda for that society to say that we go out together, and we hunt bison, and we live together, and we survive. And that painting ritualises that feeling, which leads them to go and hunt.
Similarly, if you consider a film like Zanjeer, where an angry but honest policeman, trying to uphold the sanctity of the law, fights against certain people and his own demons to uphold the law, that’s also propaganda. Films like Ardh Satya and Satya are also propaganda. I think every artist engages in propaganda, and through it, they keep certain ideas and thoughts alive in the public discourse, which helps a multiplicity of ideas survive, rather than allowing a monolithic idea to dominate. Artists holding diverse points of view are essential for a society to prevent a monolithic or bullying structure. In fact, that’s why in any bullying or monolithic society, it’s the artists and their ability to make their art and to show their art that is prohibited while monolithic bullying propaganda is established.
Your films always had political undertones and an element of subversion, with at least two or three streaming on Netflix. Why do you think your latest film Tees has been put on hold indefinitely?
One of the reasons why Tees has not been released is that Netflix reserves the right not to release it. When a studio today signs a deal with any artist, one of the clauses in the contract states that the artist acknowledges that the studio is under no legal obligation to release the film. So you don’t own your film, which is fine.
The usual thinking is, why would a platform that spends its money on a movie not release it and try to recoup its investment? However, as we have come to understand, financial, corporate, and business concerns are sometimes deeply affected by other concerns — of survival, social proscription and bullying. I was told ‘Look, we love the film, but we don’t think it’s the right time to release it. We’ll come back to you when this film can be released.’ So, after that, I understood what was happening. Having said that, Netflix has actually been quite benign. It hasn’t stopped me from doing screenings for friends, critics and film enthusiasts to spread the word about Tees and, in a way, help the film survive. Because if the film is not seen, then it’s not a film.
You have faced censorship earlier also. How do you see the normalisation of self-censorship?
The proscription now comes in two ways. When a filmmaker makes a film today, there may be state suppression in an indirect way — through corporate companies and studios that survive on profitability and need their movies to sell, theatres to screen their films, and peace when the movies are released on online platforms.
If a company feels that it’s in danger, it resorts to self-censorship. Hypothetically speaking, if this trend continues for 10 or 15 years, we will have an entire generation of writers and filmmakers losing the language of inquiry because the practice of delving into the meaning of things will be taken away from them. We are all being pushed and coerced gently or not so gently into conforming to that trend. Imagine a 25-year-old writer starting his first film, working with a senior director and an executive producer on a platform that constantly receives script notes aimed at suppressing meaning while continuously foregrounding banalities.
At the same time, in our mainstream cinema, we see a surge in the repeated depiction of a tough, bearded male figure out to save the world with violent means… The violent powers of the depicted male hero are increasing… I think it is a reflection of an endangered patriarchal system, which when cornered, doubles down by appropriating other systems such as aesthetics, popular culture, literature and media. It helps spread the culture of bullying, destroys institutions, and highlights the power of one individual — divine, semi-divine, extra-powerful, extra-violent — who will solve society’s problems, and, especially, rescue women. It is like a bully, after being cornered, desperately trying to tell you that you need bullies, you need Bahubalis to survive; otherwise, you’ll be lost.
Your last two films explore how technology is dehumanising us. Isn’t it disturbing that we are becoming less rational despite the advancements in science?
Today in India, the scientific, feudal, and pre-scientific societies exist together. Their clash leads us to living in several systems that are trying to co-opt each other. Social media, which is inherently scientific and algorithm-based, is now trying to tell you how, on a specific date, you have a better chance of finding a girlfriend. Just look at the connections.
This is happening because we are dealing with systems designed for societies tens of thousands of years apart. At the same time, the destruction of our institutions and the system meant to create equality is responsible for this situation. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Until the 1980s, capitalism had a built-in control mechanism that prevented it from trying to buy everything or sell everything to everyone at the same time.
But after the 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism showed that when capitalism and consumerism are left unchecked, because of the collusion between the state and the oligarchy, a huge number of the population is left so deprived and helpless that the first response that comes out is anger. People in India are turning to religion to escape their frustrations of unemployment or loss of homes because of a certain corporate, capitalist, late-stage consumerist world that entices and deprives them at the same time.
Today, you’re constantly being bombarded with exciting images while being confronted with a reality where you can’t climb beyond a certain barrier. We have to understand that religious fundamentalism, identity fundamentalism, hypernationalism, and subnationalism that we see, a large part of it is because of the horrors of absolute rampant consumer capitalism that has left the world in a state of subhuman inequality.
Tees makes a strong case against cultural appropriation of minorities through a Kashmiri Pandit family…
After an informal screening with young people, a 24-year-old Pandit girl stood up and said she had always felt invisible. After seeing the film for the first time, she felt that she was not being categorised, sold, or put in a slot as a victim. It’s the biggest reward for me.
The telephonic conversations between an anxious Kashmiri Pandit man living in Delhi, voiced by you and a confident-sounding Kashmiri Muslim woman played by Manisha Koirala, bring out the fears of the minorities and how the majoritarian voice always keeps saying that all is well.
I’m glad you brought it out because sab theek hai, and all is well is the prerogative of those who have it. I have never seen a situation where those who have it are 100%. Actually, I’ve only seen that those who have it are 15, 20, or 25%, while 75% don’t have it. But the 25% keep on saying we all have it, we all have it. The rest of the 75% who don’t have it, a large part of them follow this leading persona who says we have it, like zombies which, in fact, is the last scene of LSD 2 where you know, there is this leader in metaverse who’s telling them you know bring your pain to me and it’s all going to be good.
One lesser-known aspect about you is that, among your contemporaries, you are the most musically inclined, and you actively contribute to lyrics and background scores.
I have collaborated on writing the lyrics for many songs, but what I enjoy the most is composing the background score. My reason for doing the background music is that it’s very difficult to achieve a good score, as it’s hard to tell a composer to compose and then keep telling them not to add music. So, it’s better that I do the music myself, which allows me to use as little of it as possible. I feel music should be used where it delivers something that images and sounds cannot.
Like the opening credit sequence in Sandeep Aur Pinki Faraar, where you used silence and a sitar sound before the impending violence…
It was a santoor! I like that justification. I wanted something romantic and nostalgic, which talks about the past or hints at the future, and unfolds peacefully until it reaches that moment of violence, which, by the way, is entirely unconnected to those three persons in the car. They have nothing to do with the larger story, yet they get killed. It’s because of their deaths that the story exists, but they had nothing to do with the story. I really enjoyed that process.
Your films are dotted with metaphors, such as that sequence in Shanghai, where the sweeper is seen cleaning the floor outside the office of the inquiry commission, perhaps signifying the evidence that was being methodically destroyed.
Visual metaphors are used less consciously than literary ones. Often, filmmakers employ metaphors without being aware of them, and it is the critics and the audience who define those metaphors. I wanted to show that they were not prepared for that inquiry commission to be set up. It was set up in a day because the government wanted to cover up the evidence, as they often do.
Then the sweeper was cleaning a pool…
An empty pool! I was trying to show the absurdity of the place — that empty pool, a classroom turning into the office of the inquiry commission, a basketball bouncing into a room, and no one, sort of, knowing what to do. I enjoy those moments when a situation intended for one thing unexpectedly turns out to be something else.
You emerged as a success story during the multiplex boom. What do you think is the way out for young filmmakers who want to retain an independent spirit and reflect on the times?
My suggestion to all young filmmakers is to make films as cheaply as possible, which means turning away from the ‘spectacleism’ of Bollywood. In fact, look at Malayalam cinema. What they have done is turn the focus away from the spectacle to the internal, experiential aspects of being. They’re not trying to do a big scene or an elaborate stunt sequence. They’re trying to show what people are going through at a given moment. My formula is this: keep it as cheap as possible and figure out what compelling transactions and struggles are happening between us — for example, a gay woman wanting to rent a flat in Mumbai with her partner.
We have heard that a sequel to Khosla Ka Ghosla is in the works, and you are not part of it?
This is true. In a way, it’s good, at least from my point of view, because the subject, the character of Khosla, and what he represents to the urban north Indian middle class, is larger than me. I’m hoping that something good will come out, especially after 20 years, and that it says something new.
We have also come to know that you are working on a new adventure around Byomkesh Bakshy?
Yes, I’ve always been fascinated by Byomkesh because investigative stories allow you to tell a tale and convey many things without saying a word.
