Abhishek Chaubey is one of Hindi cinema’s most underrated directors. Even after pathbreaking landmarks like Ishqiya, Udta Punjab, and Sonechidiya, he is not rated as high as some of the other acknowledged greats of contemporary Indian cinema. Ishqiya, released in 2010, is the kind of cinema you can love or hate but not be indifferent to. The dusty, parched, sexually and spiritually arid hinterland renders itself effectively to the character’s unique dimensionality. The uncle-nephew pair of Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi provides the kind of sweaty, grimy male bonding that we last saw in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where Brad Pitt’s anti-Nazi soldiers urinated a toxic violence into the script. Ishqiya, too, breeds a blur of violence from the rough material of boredom.
The two protagonists in Ishqiya represent the acme of reprehensibility. Come to think of it, there isn’t one character in the plot that you can begin to like, let alone admire. Like with the Naseer-Arshad-Vidya triangle, the other characters are either hazy or horny, or both. There’s a businessman who sells steel on the surface and supplies illegal arms underneath. He’s supposed to represent the clan of the corrupt in the backwaters.
So, pray tell, what happened to all the glorious heroes who once formed the core of our cinematic experience? And the heroine? Vidya Balan’s Krishna is a conniving victim. And if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it is purposefully projected into a plot that pulsates with a seedy tension and a freewheeling virile humour.
Ishqiya is the aesthetic version of toilet graffiti. The writing on the wall is very clear. Hate these characters who live by the gun and, yes, the gaana (Vidya Balan often hums Lata Mangeshkar’s evergreens and Rekha Bhardwaj’s fresh recordings under her warm, sweaty breath). But we can’t but look at them as a product of an ambiance that breeds deception, duplicity, and a desperate craving to survive the sufferings of a senselessly violent society.
How the film finds a central core of gentleness in this milieu of murky machinations and sleazy cerebrations, is another story. Or maybe it isn’t. Debutant director Abhishek Chaubey tries to create two different worlds, one of criminality and the other of compassion, within one range of vision. It’s a tall order. And there’s little time or no space for the characters to stop behaving as though auditioning for a reality show based on how to embrace crime in a lawless no man’s land.
Some of the sex and power play among the Vidya, Arshad, and Naseer characters, as played out in her manless home, is intriguing and arresting in its swift shifts of dramatic tension from one to the other of the three characters.
Towards the second overture of this untried symphony of antipathy, the writer and director conspire to create a bizarre climactic spiral involving a shady business tycoon of the area whom our trio of protagonists decide to kidnap. This time, the kidnapping plan goes horribly awry, and the narrative, too, loses its bearings and begins to quiver and mutate like a hovel on a stormy night.
If the film holds you until the end, it’s because of the principal performances. Naseeruddin Shah confers a rock-solid tenderness to his aging criminal-lover’s role. Arshad Warsi, one of the most underrated actors of our cinema, gets a rare opportunity to sink his skills into a part of raunchy randy rogue, out to get the neighbourhood widow to hit the sack.
But the film belongs to Vidya Balan. Her face and eyes convey a determination to make her way through a rough patriarchal order. Vidya is tender, brittle, cunning, and cool—all rolled into a bundle of bewildering emotions that unfold more through her body language than the script. She rises above the narrative’s self-indulgent realism.
A triumph for the actress.
But what of the film? How do we evaluate Ishqiya beyond its politically charged, verbally lurid lunge at realism? Is the film to be applauded for forging a new language of expression? Or should that language have been used with more restraint and tact? Frankly, there are no clear and simple value-judgements to be applied to Ishqiya. It’s partly an homage to the rugged Westerns from Hollywood and an attempt to penetrate the North Indian small-town hinterland where people don’t just live with violence; they even enjoy it. But did this film have to follow them?
This is a very strange film. Strange, not so much in terms of content (pretty weird, unless you really believe there are sleepy, dusty towns in North India where boys learn to use a gun before they learn to wash their own bottoms) as in terms of the way the three main characters are thrown against each other in combustions that suggests a brutal bonding between the libido and the landscape.
The censor board members nearly fell off their chairs on hearing the colourful language of Ishqiya.
Says the film’s director, Abhishek Chaubey: “Frankly, I expected I’d be asked for some kind of an explanation for the language and content and why they were necessary. I had gone prepared with dossiers on every graphic word and shot. To my surprise, I wasn’t asked for any explanation. I was given an ‘Adults’ certificate with no cuts at all. I guess it’s a sign of how far censorship has come in our country. I never claimed the film was for children. The content is adult. So I’ve no problem with the ‘A’ certificate. I feel the profile of the audience is changing swiftly. It’s not about creating shock value. It’s the way these people in the small North Indian towns live.”
Vidya Balan, who never touches alcohol, has shot a special risque number entitled Ibn Batuta in Ishqiya with her co-stars Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi. “We shot the song last month after the entire shooting was completed. I don’t drink, and I had to act sozzled along with Naseer Saab and Arshad. Arshad is a fabulous dancer. And Naseer Saab was having a ball dancing to the song Vishal Bhardwaj had composed. I think the last time he danced was for ‘Oye oye’in Tridev. But you can’t tell. He’s so good. Both the guys were having so much fun, and I had to join in pretending to be totally drunk,” said Vidya.
That isn’t the only daredevil thing Vidya has done in Ishqiya. She had to suck Arshad’s thumb in the movie. “Fortunately, Arshad is a friend. We’ve gotten along well from the time we did Lage Raho Munna Bhai together. I don’t know if I’d have been able to do a scene like putting my co-star’s finger in the mouth with someone else. That gesture of sucking Arshad’s thumb was so raunchy and sexy, so not me; I couldn’t connect with it all. I play this rustic, voluptuous woman. All my weight-loss happened after I did this film. I had to look filled up for this part. In Ishqiya, everything – from the way I wore my sari to the way I looked at men – was alien to me. The role exposed me to a new way of interpreting a liberated woman. My character in Ishqiya may not know about feminism. But she’s truly liberated. Abhishek Chaubey had to constantly keep giving me a pep talk. Quite often, I was stuck because of the language and content.”
