If Richard Attenborough is the face of Mahatma Gandhi then thank God, Irrfan has given a face to that unsung hero… a certain Tomar who abandoned sports for banditry. A sure-shot National award for Irrfan Khan as the disgraced athlete who turns into a Bandit King, yes? Who can snatch away Irrfan’s moment of glory? Except maybe politics. Irrfan’s body language as a sprinter, his expressions of anguish and anger at being treated with scant respect by a society he brought international honour to, were so dead-on as to elicit instant comparisons with the best biographical performances of all times. Paan Singh Tomar is right up there with Robert Downey Jr’s Chaplin. Director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s earlier films were discernibly disabled by budgetary constraints. Here, he assembled Tomar’s story with a finesse which flirted with infinity.
Some films are meant to run that extra mile to go beyond being a mere cinematic experience. As we see names of real-life athletes who died unsung flash across the screen at the end of Paan Singh Tomar, we realize what we’ve just witnessed in the past 190 minutes of taut playing time is not just a film. It’s a treatise on what destiny has in store for people who do not conform to socially acceptable definitions of success.
Indeed, Irrfan Khan, as Paan Singh Tomar, typifies the criminal neglect of all athletes in our country, barring cricketers, who, as we all know by now, are grossly overrated sportspersons.
Tomar was a steeplechase runner. Not that it made any difference to his destiny. In the army for the long innings, Tomar, we are told, took voluntary retirement to look after his family and land in his native village.
This is where Dhulia’s riveting screenplay, where not a moment is squandered in self-indulgent editing, gets truly astounding. Abandoning the manageable hurdles of the steeplechase, Tomar took to the gun to avenge the wrong done to his family.
There are hurdles, and hurdles. And some are impossible to overcome.
The two lives of Paan Singh Tomar, in the army as a celebrated sportsperson and as an outlaw on the run in the Chambal valley (not on a horse, please!) are brought together in a stirring blend of the brilliant and the haunting.
While Dhulia’s earlier works suffered for the lack of a suitable budget, Paan Singh Tomar is technically a polished piece of cinema with the editing (Aarti Bajaj) and background score (Sandeep Chowta) adding a dimension beyond the drama of the driven athlete.
The film is shot by cinematographer Aseem Mishra with an intriguing blend of a bleeding authenticity and a poetic resplendence. Indeed, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s training as a raconteur of a tale of social injustice and damnifying outlawry harks back to the director’s association with Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen.
In portraying Paan Singh’s leap from celebrated athlete to wanted bandit, Dhulia avoids the ostentatious brutality of the circumstances that made Phoolan Devi a social outcast. Paan Singh Tomar has very little on-screen violence. It’s the heart that bleeds profusely and invisibly in almost every frame.
The unspoken question, why do we treat our athletes so shabbily, trails the narrative, as does the other larger question of social inequality and the subversion of law.
Unlike other films with a strong social message, Paan Singh Tomar never stops being a genuinely liberating cinematic experience. Of course, much of the credit for the film’s sledgehammer effect goes to Irrfan Khan’s central performance. As Paan Singh Irrfan is, in one word, flawless. There is not a single shot in the film that he gets wrong. He follows his character’s destiny with an intuitive alertness that leaves no room for ambiguity in the interpretation of the character’s complex life. And it’s not just about getting the character’s spoken language and body language right. Irrfan goes way beyond.
The dialogues range from the terse to the refreshing. Comments on subordination and oppression are often laced in laughter. God knows we need a sense of humour to survive the progressive rampancy of socio-political injustice.
The beauty of watching Irrfan transform into Tomar is the seamless leap the actor takes into the character. Irrfan is blessed with first-rate supporting actors, many of whom we haven’t seen much on screen before. They add to the film’s high level of authenticity by just not looking like and speaking their lines like actors.
The scenes showing Irrfan running with other actors are beautifully captured as moments of metaphorical significance. Somewhere down the line, the scenes showing Tomar jumping over hurdles on the race track merge into the larger picture to tell us that life on the field and life outside the race track have one thing in common: You have to keep running, no matter what the odds.
Paan Singh Tomar is a terrific edge-of-the-seat entertainer. The synthesis of two genres-the sports film and the dacoit drama-is done with such confident ingenuity that we hardly realize when one ends, the other begins.
“No one gave a damn about me when I won medals for the country. Today when I’m a baaghi(rebel), everyone wants to know about Paan Singh Tomar,” Irrfan said caustically.
Hopefully, after this film, we will learn to care for our unsung heroes a bit more.
Oh yes, a word on the stunning soundtrack. From snatches of old Lata Mangeshkar melodies to radio announcements on Nargis Dutt’s demise, time passages are achieved through incidental snatches of voices caught in mid-air.
Life’s life that. You never know what you will experience in that raga we call existence until a snatch of a line hits you from a distance. Playing the outlawed athlete Paan Singh Tomar, Irrfan gave what most Irrfan-o-files feel to be his best performance to date. The nuances that he brought to the performance, the graph that he created for the character from national pride to personal shame was exemplary in every sense. One of the most vividly etched biographical characters in the history of Indian cinema.
His role as the long-distance gold-medalist army deserter Pan Singh Tomar had Irrfan Khan huffing and puffing like never before.
Irrfan told me, “In fact, I pride myself for being quite fit. But playing a gold-medalist marathon runner isn’t same thing. I’ve to get into better shape. And I’ve to look convincing as a long-distance runner.”
Irrfan Khan was elated by the belated National Award for Best Actor for his performance in Paan Singh Tomar. It was the first National Award in the actor’s distinguished career.
Said Irrfan, “I thought I should have got it for Haasil, which was my first film with Tigmanshu Dhulia. Then I thought I’d get it for Mira Nair’s The Namesake. So, it has been a fairly lengthy time span of disappointments. I was amazed at how passionately people wanted me to get the National Award for Paan Singh Tomar. It was almost like a public campaign. Everyone took it personally. And somewhere when I got the honour, they were relieved more than overjoyed. If I had not won it, I think people would have seen it as another indication of the imminent collapse of the ‘system’. In my victory, they feel vindicated.”
Irrfan was happy to share the National Award for Best Actor with Vikram Gokhale. In fact, the actress Usha Jadhav, who won the National Award for Best Actress, messaged to say how honoured she was to be part of the awards with me. I feel the National Awards are important, as they still have a credibility denied to many of the popular awards. Yes, I feel getting a National Award is prestigious.”
