Kafas, Adhura, School Of Life: YA Comes Of Age

What Lies Beneath

Three shows in quick succession — Kafas, Adhura and School Of Lies — make a statement about where young adult-themed programming could be headed, writes Manik Sharma.

YOUNG ADULT stories are having a bit of a welcome, if belated, moment. Across platforms, over the last month or so, different narratives have tried to re-frame an age we have seldom addressed with attention or care. In Disney+ Hotstar’s School of Lies, a boarding school becomes the site of unchecked, generational abuse. In Sony LIV’s Kafas, abuse prompts a young kid into acting out before his reluctant parents come into view. In Prime Video’s Adhura, the tropes of horror uncover a mystery that says as much about discrimination and hate as it does about institutional decay. While Kafas largely focuses on the adults, the other two firmly train their eyes on the young, often as mirrors or echoes of the depravity that adults — under the garb of discipline — can come to exact. It’s these two shows really, that while eerily similar in setting, help unearth an unacknowledged world of hurt and enablement in wildly different ways.

STREAM 'KAFAS'

NO CHILDISH HORRORS

What School Of Lifes, Adhura Herald For The Indian Young Adult Genre

By Manik Sharma

Directed by Avinash Arun, School of Lies focuses on a boarding school that unwittingly fosters a culture of abuse and complicity. There is a sense of ritualistic grandeur to just how rigid the setting of the show seems and feels. There is this obvious celebration of discipline, the crude idea that imprisoned by isolation, subjected to make-believe constitutions, eventually well-mannered men are raised. It’s a belief that School of Lies and Adhura contradict. In the former, young boys who are continuously defiled refrain from speaking up because of the fear of betraying a covenant... A covenant that both protects and allows trauma to become heritage, that mythical thing that adolescence simply must put up with, if it wishes to qualify for adulthood.

In Adhura, the school’s culture itself is muted, but its absence as a dictating presence has a contrasting effect. Here, the age-old political dynamics of the outside replays on the inside, as power brokers manipulate the system, discriminate against minorities and come out on the other side looking like populist heroes. It’s a system, the show wants to say, that simply can’t be avoided from replicating on either side of the walls. Not with the most western of curriculums or elitist of charters. It’s as much a human flaw as it is a grave, institutional oversight. The surreal bit here is that both shows require this sense of being stuck in one place, shrouded by the mystique of a hill station that at once hides and candidly swipes aside.

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Beyond the obvious similarities in terms of location and setting, the shows echo other parallels as well. They sport women as resident counsellors, a trope that suggests these narratives want to also desperately instal empathetic, if scarred characters, so it doesn’t feel like a place without hope and comfort. The counsellors – Nimrat Kaur in School Of Lies, and Rasika Dugal in Adhura — do differ in their tone. School of Lies mines horror from the culture of silence, that which Adhura declares is a direct consequence of uncurbed violence. The latter uses the tropes of horror to provoke while the former feels soundless and composed, yet far more tragic in its outcomes. Here silence bears witness to much more than the rancorous cries of a story that is part tragedy and part redemption.

This coming together of similar stories makes sense in retrospect. Most people behind them are now well into their adulthood, to be able to consider their own trauma through the lens of fiction. Whatever little evidence of young adult storytelling exists in our cinematic history, concerns itself with either feisty underdogs or embattled romancers. They rarely exhibit an interiority that says these people are products of what has happened to them as opposed to things that they have set out to do. From Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikander to Udaan, older narratives have always positioned themselves to seize the future. Sure they complicate the present, but refuse to consider the burden of history, the time when the boundaries of sexuality, gender and intimacy begin to take shape. A time in life that cannot be summarised by a tick or a stereotype but can only be analysed. Not all tragedies are born in loss. Some dissolve into the ground underneath, the kind of inheritance that eats into the very thing it provides.

This bold new frontier that views young adults from the prism of prickly, sociological issues, feels empowering. It should however aspire to match the columns of empathy with creativity as opposed to chaos with rudimentary sleaze. The young can just as easily become symbols of nuisance as they can be studied, cautiously, for the weary adults they eventually become. It’s a part of our coming-of-age narrative that cinema has overlooked, cable TV has somewhat experimented with and streaming has now comprehensively stirred. The view from here looks full of possibilities; from kink to kindness, provocation to perspective, a new Indian story, of a largely young country is beginning to emerge. And if School of Lies, Adhura, and the much-awaited Zoya Akthar’s Archies are early signs, then a much-needed reformation might just be around the corner.

Stream Adhura here, and School Of Lies here.

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