Who’s watching?

Though threatened by censorship, films and OTT originals tackled taboo topics like caste and state excesses, but did the audiences care to watch?

Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed, set during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, looked at caste divides and corruption in the eye. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

A recent report in The Washington Post garnered attention by detailing politically “daring” projects commissioned and then shelved by OTT platforms in India over the last three years. Netflix’s 2021 abandonment of Anurag Kashyap’s adaptation of Maximum City, Suketu Mehta’s celebrated Mumbai book, got the most play in that piece, but there are other instances of well-known Bollywood directors being left in the lurch. Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees (first titled Freedom), reportedly about the discrimination faced by three generations of a Kashmiri Muslim family in India, was announced in 2019 as a Netflix original and delivered to Netflix in May 2022, only to be shelved in 2023. Most recently, Netflix relinquished all rights to Vikramaditya Motwane’s documentary Indi[r]a’s Emergency, in which it had reportedly invested $1 million and which is a superbly watchable telling of an era that young Indians need to know about in all its granular, footage-filled detail.

Several other much-discussed shows—such as Netflix’s 2019 Leila, set in a dystopian future India called Aryavarta; Amazon Prime Video’s Paatal Lok; and Netflix’s Sacred Games—were not renewed for second (or third) seasons. No reasons are given on record by OTT representatives, but it is no secret that all OTT offerings in India are now subject to an intense level of scrutiny to prevent any potential political, religious, or cultural controversy upon their release. This internal scrutiny, most industry insiders agree, dates to January 2021, when Amazon Prime executives and the creative teams of their shows Tandav and Mirzapur 2 had several cases filed against them on charges of offending Hindu sentiments.

OTT platforms had a relatively unregulated run in India until November 2020, when all digital audiovisual content came under the ambit of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. Three years later, in November 2023, the Ministry published the draft Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, which aims to replace the 1995 Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act and bring all digital news platforms and OTT streaming content under its ambit, leading to serious concerns about censorship.

But OTT services, even as they expand into a vast and growing market, are a relatively recent entrant to the Indian entertainment industry. Indian filmmakers, especially those based out of Mumbai, have been dealing with not just the censor board but an expanding range of offence-takers for years now.

Between 2008 and 2020, almost 70 Hindi films were targeted by different groups—from Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil being attacked for showcasing Pakistani heartthrob Fawad Khan at the time of the 2016 Uri conflict, to Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 causing offence to Brahmins. In 2020-21, already battling lockdown-related stoppages in both production and exhibition, Bollywood became ever more the target of moral panics and witch-hunts orchestrated by television anchors in cahoots with a state seeking ways to distract the public from the pandemic. The mass outpouring of grief after a young male star’s untimely death, instead of leading to a sorely needed national conversation about mental health and self-harm, was strategically diverted into a toxic attack on his girlfriend and her community, and then a series of police investigations in a supposed purge of drug-fuelled Bollywood.

And yet, like someone in a co-dependent abusive marriage, Hindi cinema cannot seem to let go of the nation. Between 2014 and 2019, the Mumbai film industry produced 37 films where the main theme was patriotism and nationalism. “Of these, 24 have made positive returns on investment,” writes the journalist Lata Jha in her book Bollywood, Box Office and Beyond: The Evolving Business of Indian Cinema (2023), listing films delivering a wide range of gains depending on their very different budgets, from Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s Rs.190 crore profit to Naam Shabana’s Rs.3 crore profit. Seven of these films were helmed by Akshay Kumar, five by Salman Khan.

Tough times

In the years since 2019, it has become clear that nationalism is not enough to set cash registers ringing, Akshay Kumar-starrers Samrat Prithviraj and Ram Setu being cases in point. But Bollywood is clearly launched on a long-term trajectory where pretty much all its big projects now must have some national or civilisational spin, whether it is the historical action drama (Gadar 2), the grand mythological epic (Brahmastra), or a Marvel-like Indian spy universe (Pathaan, Tiger 3) filled with imaginary heroic RAW agents.

In Jawan, one of the blockbusters of 2023, a theatrically bandaged SRK fakes acts of terror to draw attention to some of India’s most tragic public secrets. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

What changed in 2023 was that several of these patriotic fantasies did pay off at the box office, reviving the fortunes of older male stars like Sunny Deol, Salman Khan, and most visibly, Shah Rukh Khan—and for the moment, the fortunes of Bollywood. But times remain tough for the mass Hindi entertainer. Faced with multiple challenges—the rise of OTT as a contender for the viewer’s screen time, the decreasing attention span of young audiences, the increasing difficulty of finding subjects and treatments broad-based enough to justify a 4,000-screen cross-country theatrical release—big-budget Bollywood is increasingly combining forces to woo audiences into theatres, manoeuvring fan bases across regions. So SRK’s Pathaan has a Salman cameo to bring in Bhai fans, and of course, SRK returns the favour in Tiger 3.

Meanwhile, defying unending editorials about how south Indian cinema is winning the battle and Bollywood is dying, there has been a spate of successful collaborations between Bollywood and the south. To name just two, SRK’s world-record-smashing action drama Jawan was directed by the ace Tamil director Atlee and starred the Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathi as the villain, while Ranbir Kapoor’s controversial box-office success Animal was crafted by the Telugu director Sandeep Reddy Vanga. The year 2023 established that in a post-Covid world, only star-driven extravaganzas would risk a theatrical release, keeping the industry bound to a handful of male stars. So it matters disproportionately what each of them chooses to do.

But what do we make of 2023 on the Hindi screen if we look at successes large and small? Jawan felt like a big-budget A Wednesday! for our time, with a theatrically bandaged SRK faking acts of terror to draw attention to some of India’s most tragic public secrets. On the one hand, government hospitals with abysmal medical facilities, farmers dying of mass indebtedness and suicide; on the other, powerful businessmen with unimaginably large loans that get written off by the government, and huge polluting corporations using us as cheap labour. For good measure, there is also a flashback plot involving the Army: Indian jawans dying of weapons malfunctions. Interestingly, though, this too is a systemic issue resulting from a corrupt polity that continues to reward unethical businessmen like Kali Gaikwad (Vijay Sethupathi as a grandly evil arms dealer who feels like a throwback to the Shakaals and Mogambos of 1980s’ popular cinema).

Much-needed discussions

The idea that “development’’ in India increasingly poses a threat to the lives and health of people has finally begun to percolate into mainstream Bollywood narratives. Jawan’s depiction of corporations getting the green signal in return for political donations is echoed in a much smaller-scale film like Bhediya. A young north Indian contractor (Varun Dhawan) trying to bribe his way into a road-building project in a protected forest area is turned into a werewolf. Despite its choppy storytelling and ill-researched depiction of the north-eastern region, Amar Kaushik’s film is a unique attempt to use the horror-comedy genre to critique our thoughtless destruction of nature.

Amar Kaushik’s Bhediya is unique in its attempt to use the horror-comedy genre to critique the destruction of nature. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

There has been a great deal more discussion of caste in Hindi-language content in the last few years, and 2023 cemented that. A year that contained Bheed, Dahaad, and Kathal (admittedly all small-budget offerings) suggests that the Mumbai-based industry has travelled some distance from 2018, when Dharma Productions felt the need to take inspiration from the Marathi hit Sairat to craft a cross-caste Bollywood romance and then make the caste angle almost unrecognisable. No such queasiness is seen in the chemistry and conversation between Rajkummar Rao’s Scheduled Caste policeman and Bhumi Pednekar’s privileged- caste young medic in Bheed. Their relationship anchors the film’s otherwise bleak take on the social reality of caste in the possibility of individual transformation—and in humour. This is a film in which “Suraj Kumar Singh, son of Gautam Lal Tikas” can address his girlfriend, Renu Sharma, by the ungendered caste moniker “Sharma ji”, and it can feel simultaneously affectionate and sardonic.

Dahaad and, in a zanily humorous way, Kathal, carried on the good work of making caste a no-longer-taboo topic on the north Indian screen (because, of course, it has been a ferocious staple of the south Indian screen for at least a decade and a half). A Dalit policewoman features, heroine-like, in both. Kathal’s Mahima Basor offers us the rare instance of a Dalit woman with an privileged-caste male lover (also a policeman, called Dwivedi), and Sonakshi Sinha’s character in Dahaad ends the series by changing her official name back to the “low-caste’’ name that her father had dropped. But what in these depictions is largely rhetorical flourish had already shown up in Bheed as something integral to Suraj’s character arc. We witness him craft a new kind of identity, not over the course of the film but in one marvellous, fluid scene.

Kathal carried on the good work of making caste a no-longer-taboo topic on the North Indian screen. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

A local thakur from a political family addresses the young cop repeatedly as “Singh Saab”, establishing caste kinship and calling in a favour on its account. Angry both at the assumed privilege and at the fact that the man’s fake-respectful mien is based only on him being a Rajput, Suraj suddenly announces that his full name is Suraj Kumar Singh Tikas.

The film constantly presents existing inequities and people’s assumption of the status quo, occasionally drawing back to suggest the horizon of justice. There is a grandstanding moment when young Tikas schools his boss, Yadav ji, on what change might need: “Apna saara taakat nichod ke bahaa dijiye. Uske baad jo bhi bachega na, wohi nyay hai” (Wring out all your power and let it flow away. Whatever’s left after that, that is justice).

Bheed tells the Indian pandemic story in a way that makes the media very much a part of the narrative. A few minutes into the film, a dominant caste urban journalist with a penchant for pithy aphorisms compares Indian society to an overloaded truck somehow keeping its cargo in place under a jute covering. If the jute gets ripped off or if the truck overturns, the united front that the vehicle presents risks scattering into its many constituents—transitioning instantly from a samaj (community) to a bheed (crowd).

Highlights

• In 2023, several patriotic fantasies paid off at the box office, reviving the fortunes of older male stars like Sunny Deol, Salman Khan, and Shah Rukh Khan.
• But the idea that “development’’ in India increasingly poses a threat to the lives and health of people has also begun to percolate into mainstream Bollywood narratives.
• There has been a great deal more discussion of caste in Hindi-language content in the last few years, and 2023 cemented that.
• Several OTT movies and series provided a perspective on what it is like to be a journalist in these times.

Present dangers

The fear of turning into the crowd—the herd, the lynch mob—is a powerful one and a clear and present danger in the times we inhabit. “Aaj na kal, koi dus saal baad, jab YouTube ke tehkhane mein jaakar dhundega ki yeh log kya kar rahe thhe, toh pata chalega ki koi NDTV bhi thha, jo bheed nahi ban raha thha” (Today or tomorrow, maybe 10 years later, when someone descends into the vaults of YouTube to see what these people were doing, they will find out that there was once an NDTV, which did not become a crowd), says Ravish Kumar at one point in Vinay Shukla’s documentary While We Watched. Ravish is on stage receiving a trophy when he says this, and there is some sense of pride and hope conjured up by the idea of future recognition. But most of the film is bleak—as is the fact that it was leaked on YouTube after a very successful festival run but before it could earn back some money for its creators.

While We Watched is valuable because it lets us hear the journalist’s bafflement in the face of a distracted, distractable viewership. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

We constantly hear about the megaphone media—and there are good reasons for the popular critique of what increasingly feels like a one-way street—reaching its nadir in the figure of the anchor hectoring guests on air as anti-nationals. But there is little in our public culture that depicts the viewpoint of the ethical journalist or represents the dire predicament of a professional communicator in a reduced attention economy and a badly blindfolded polity. While We Watched is valuable because it lets us hear journalists’ bafflement, their sense of weary frustration in the face of such a distracted, distractable viewership: “Jo regular viewer hain unka bhi feedback nahi aata. Kya karein?” (We don’t get the feedback of even regular viewers. What to do?).

Pathological rot

A personal perspective on what it is like to be a journalist in these times is also the primary draw of the web series Scoop, directed by Hansal Mehta (Scam, City Lights, Aligarh) and based on a tell-all memoir by the ex-Asian Age reporter Jigna Vora entitled Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. Vora was falsely implicated and framed in a murder plot against the senior crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey, who was shot down on the streets of Mumbai in the early hours of June 11, 2011. She spent several harrowing months in jail before finally getting bail, during which time most of the media did not give her the benefit of the doubt. The series—and Karishma Tanna as Vora—does a fine job of delineating the dangers of the media as lynch mob.

Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, which is still doing the festival circuit, is a film to watch out for. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

I must mention here Harshad Nalawade’s recent film Follower, though it is in Marathi/Kannada and still doing the festival circuit—it screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in November and at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) earlier in December. Set in Belgaum, Follower features a young man called Raghu who has been radicalised by his town’s linguistic battles between Kannada speakers and Marathi speakers. He represents the new breed of “journalist’’ in India—essentially a hired troll, following a template to churn out a certain number of daily social media posts targeting a particular person or event. Follower is a brilliant film, admirable not just for its intellectual understanding of the mechanics of political polarisation but also for its empathetic inhabiting of Raghu’s world, where any sense of inferiority or rejection is instantly sought to be channelled into resentment and violence.

These are all attempts to understand Indian mediapersons as victims of the pathological rot in their profession and the world, rather than insisting on seeing them as a self-selecting crew of liars, gossips, and petty power-brokers. But this is not to say that they have succeeded in turning the tide of public opinion. The now-popular dismissal of the Indian media as parasites rather than potential saviours of the downtrodden is a running thread in what is otherwise one of the year’s most nuanced series: Kohrra.

The persistent local journo Sodhi comes across as unethical at best and invasive at worst. He uses everything he has—drone cameras, zoom lenses, surveilling the homes of survivors, and practically haunting Kohrra’s grizzled protagonist Balbir, top cop of the small town of Jagrata, where a murder is being investigated. Shown entirely through Balbir’s eyes, there is not a single scene in Kohrra that suggests that Sodhi’s job—informing people about a crime—is a service to the public.

In Kohrra, the persistent local journo Sodhi comes across as unethical at best and invasive at worst. | Photo Credit: PTI

The media comes off a little better in another of 2023’s best-written series, Trial by Fire, with Abhay Deol and Rajshri Deshpande playing Shekhar and Neelam Krishnamoorthy, a couple who lost both their children to Delhi’s 1997 Uphaar Cinema fire and have spent most of the rest of their lives fighting a court case against the Ansals, industrialists who owned the theatre. Neelam’s clear articulation and her ability to leverage her middle-class English-speaking status in the media, in fact, are something that the other side’s lawyers try to use against her, even accusing her of being too dry-eyed for a mother.

Systemic tragedies

The courts come off rather worse. The Ansals, who have largely succeeded in dodging legal punishment and received drastically shortened jail terms, tried the legal route to prevent Trial by Fire from being aired as well. Thankfully, they did not succeed, and the show has been watched and appreciated.

The courts fare badly in Netflix’s Trial by Fire, a film based on Delhi’s 1997 Uphaar Cinema fire. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Perhaps there is something about the distance of time that makes it easier to watch the systemic tragedy of Trial by Fire, though one knows that nothing has really changed, barring a few fire safety norms fought for by the Krishnamoorthys.

A film like Bheed, which deals with a systemic tragedy that is still ongoing, found almost no takers at the box office when it released earlier this year, despite a dramatic denouement and superb turns from well-known actors like Pankaj Kapur, Rajkummar Rao, and Bhumi Pednekar. Nor did Zwigato, Nandita Das’ third directorial venture after Firaaq and Manto, starring comic Kapil Sharma opposite the excellent Shahana Goswami in a film that turns its gaze on a figure increasingly familiar in the Indian city and yet invariably invisible: the food delivery agent. Both Bheed and Zwigato are now on OTT platforms (Bheed in a censored version after the removal of many political references and voiceovers by Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal).

Aamir Bashir’s Maagh: The Winter Within is a searing portrait of Kashmir as a land of bleak winter that shows no signs of ending. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Another of the year’s most devastating films, Maagh: The Winter Within, Aamir Bashir’s superb sequel to Harud (Autumn), has taken some 12 years to make and thus far only had public screenings in India at IFFK and DIFF. It is a portrait of Kashmir as a stark, endless winter; a dark, cold season visited upon its inhabitants by the Indian state that shows no signs of ending. What will it take to create a culture of curiosity and openness, in which the films that do make it to an online streaming service—or end up free on YouTube—are watched rather than prejudged? There is, of course, the crisis of the mass media, of whether it is any longer perceived as a source of education—or only entertainment. But the hatred of the independent media seems particularly virulent in contemporary India, where the stakes of not having any are becoming dangerously high.

In one scene in While We Watched, a group of young north Indian men meet Ravish, asking him to do another programme on the issue of unemployment and delayed entrance test results. A moody Ravish responds by asking them if they have ever seen any other channel except NDTV do a programme on unemployment. “No,” the young men shake their heads. “But those must be the channels you watch, right?” Ravish laughs. “So take your problems to them, too.”

Trisha Gupta is a writer and critic based in Delhi, and a professor of practice at the Jindal School of Journalism.