There are no good guys and bad guys in Prakash Jha’s webseries Sankalp now streaming on Amazon MX Player. Most of the people who overpopulate Jha’s snarled universe of education, politics, and gender discrimination are so dark they can’t find their way through their own messy lives.
The four screenwriters don’t help them much in resolving their crisis. Hence, a lot of what we see in Sankalp is deeply frustrating. This is typical of Prakash Jha’s works: the characters are so rigorously exploited they don’t seem to have a way out. There is hardly a character who gets a decent closure in Sankalp. Some of them remain unofficially de-franchised in the script.
An IAS aspirant, Satyaveer Mishra (Tushar Pandey), and his burgeoning affections for a firebrand activist-journalist, Jayanti Rai (Sheen Das), never grow beyond a hint. The characters get smothered in the seething plot.
Clearly, Prakash Jha and his writers are not in the mood for romance. The protagonist, Kanaiyalal (Nana Patekar), is the kind of self-appointed messiah who doesn’t see the difference between altruism and bullying. Children are snatched away from their natural environment and from their parents… for their own good, of course.
This is the logic that tyrants and bullies, from Hitler to Trump, have applied to undertake their mission of “purifying” the social order. In an early sequence, Kanhailal and his goons(they think they are messengers of God) separate a boy named Manjan from his wailing mother. After a clumsily shot, turbulent river-crossing, the boy is brainwashed into believing he is ‘Amar’ and blessed for being Kanhaiyalal’s chosen disciple.
In his Godlike delusion, Nana Patekar reminded me of Bobby Deol in Prakash Jha’s Ashram, except for the fact that the ones being ‘purified’ here are not young women but little children.
Frankly, Nana in Sankalp , gives me the creeps. What I liked was the way his favourite disciple Aditya Varma (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, reliably rooted) stands up against the anointed bully, questioning Kanhailal’s dubious benevolence. But the confrontation between the mentor/tormentor and the prodigal pupil never quite builds up into the storm that is expected.
The political angle in the storytelling, is propped by Sanjay Kapoor as an evil politician who laces his outbursts with the ‘F’ word. He slaps his son and tells his wife to shut up(which she is happy to do). This qualifies him as a reckless modern-day politician who knows how not to mind his Ps and Qs.
Sanjay Kapoor’s Prashant Singh has only one adviser, mysteriously known as Waqar Saab and played by Neeraj Kabi, who has seen better. So have we.
There is also a fake-currency angle, which doesn’t fit in. The talented Kubbra Sait tries her best to make this subplot look credible. All of this never quite adds up. And yet Sankalp is not a slog. It keeps us watching, probably in the hope that these characters would somehow find a closure and that Kanhaiyal would be exposed to be what he looks like: a closeted paedophile.
