The Week India – July 14, 2019

68 THE WEEK • JULY 14, 2019

CINEMA

@LEISURE

nubhav Sinha was 13 and his sister 18, grow-

ing up in Varanasi in the late 1970s, when they

noticed that “Ashraf uncle”—their father’s close

friend—was being served food in utensils ear-

marked for his visits in their house. The reason: His religion.

That was the fi rst time Sinha came in touch with the social

reality of discrimination—the subject he explored in his 2018

fi lm Mulk, and the recent fl ick Article 15.

The siblings convinced their parents to practise equality.

But what appalled Sinha then, and continues to disturb him

even now, is the way people accepted the normalisation of

discrimination based on various grounds. He always wanted

to talk about it. In Article 15—that talks about caste oppres-

sion—his protagonist, Ayan Ranjan (Ayushmann Khurrana), is

an upper caste IPS offi cer. The story was inspired by the in-

famous Badaun gang rape case of 2014. “It was by design to

make my protagonist privileged and have an upper hand in the

caste hierarchy,” says Sinha. He believes that the “privileged

can challenge the privileged”.

But it is not that the oppressed have not got a justifi able

display in Sinha’s fi lms. If it was Rishi Kapoor’s Murad Ali Mo-

hammed who put up a rational Muslim in Mulk, in Article 15,

it is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s dalit revolutionary, Nishad.

“Dalit brothers and sisters questioning me should see how

Nishad makes Ayan feel inferior,” says Sinha. In the run-up to

its release, Article 15 was attacked by many groups for having

a Brahmin protagonist. However, Sinha does not give a heed

to these chatter anymore. Days after the release of Article 15,

when Sinha met his long-time friends in fi lm industry—Anurag

Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra, Subhash Kapoor and a couple of oth-

ers—there was a discussion around the “newfound” language

in his fi lms. When one of the friends asked that question,

Mishra, who knows Sinha since the time he came to Mumbai,

responded that the question is not what led to the change in

the cinematic language of Sinha, but what led him to come

back to it.

Sinha admits that somewhere he was swayed by the idea

of success in Bollywood. He had started playing to the gal-

lery—bigger fi lms, bigger stars. But he was always very much

rooted in the socio-political reality. He recalls the time after

the release of his superhero movie Ra. One (2011). “People

who met me said I did not look like someone who would make

a movie like Ra. One,” he says. Now, through Mulk, and Article

15 , he is talking things he always wanted to discuss. “I love

these fi lms that I can wrap up in 30 days and say what I want,

as opposed to a superhero fi lm that takes months and years

of planning,” he says.

Anubhav Sinha always wanted to talk

socio-political issues in his fi lms

BY PRIYANKA BHADANI

Rooted

in reality

A

HIGHLY POLITICAL

A still from Article 15

FOTOCORP