Bambai Meri Jaan: No Gangsta's Paradise

Bambai Blues

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

Bambai Meri Jaan is filmmaker Shujaat Saudagar’s second work this year. In January, his film The Underbug had its world premiere at Slamdance Film Festival. Written by Abbas Dalal, Hussain Dalal and him, it is a haunting work of fiction that examines the cost of lives in the aftermath of a communal riot. The film expertly used the geography of a house to foreground the horror that is religion. His latest series (where he has collaborated with the Dalal brothers again) is nothing like that. The comparison stands because the difference is too vast in terms of basic craft and filmmaking.

Saudagar’s new 10-episode series (each approximately 50-minutes long) centers on the rise and rise of a gangster in Mumbai. His name is Dara (Avinash Tiwary) but it is easy to deduce this as dreaded gangster Dawood Ibrahim’s origin story. Hindi films have remained forever fascinated with this figure, resulting in multiple iterations like Black Friday (2004), Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), Shootout at Wadala (2013). Last year Anirudh Iyer’s An Action Hero posed a sneaky commentary on this collective fixation by including a hilarious depiction of the gangster.

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MUMBAI MASH-UP

Bambai Meri Jaan: Every Bollywood Gangster Tale Ever Made

By Ishita Sengupta

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Bambai Meri Jaan unfolds as a montage of every gangster film ever made. The grammar is jaded, the lingo is dunked in familiarity. There is a rags to riches story, scenes after scenes are filled with bullets raining on the screen, a carefully crafted moment of a don emerging from the shadows and the baton being passed under the cover of the night. Granted the premise is already known but Saudagar does absolutely nothing to revamp it. The treatment is so derivative that hours are spent retelling a story that achieves nothing by another voice.

The show opens in Bombay, 1986. A sense of urgency floats in the air. Dara is hurried by his men to leave the city for Dubai. Things then shift to flashback in 1964, not to him but to his father, Ismail Kadri (Kay Kay Menon). This shift in vantage point remains the most ingenious aspect of a show that otherwise plays everything by the book. It not just offers the possibility of a new perspective on a stale tale but also provides the gifted actor three uninhibited episodes to showcase his merit.

As an honest man caught at odds with uncompromising circumstances, Kay Kay is as beaten as someone can be. Kadri is a devout Muslim and sincere police officer out to destroy the smuggling syndicate spread across the city by the notorious mafia gang leader at that time, Haji Maqbool (a committed Saurabh Sachdeva). It is to the actor’s credit rather than the writing that he essays the role of an upright man as a full-blooded individual who is never above succumbing to filial ties. After an incident costs him his job, he is compelled to join Haji yet retains his spine.

The actor goes through the beats, which could have been one-dimensional on paper, with a humane brokenness. The moment the uniform is taken away from him, his body language changes. His shoulder slouches as he keeps receding in the background, reduced to a bystander in his own household. There is also joy in seeing his character look at his wife Sakina (played by his real-life partner Nivedita Bhattacharya) with an unsaid warmth.

It is only when the inevitable timeline jump happens and the writing takes over (the screenplay is by Sameer Arora and Rensil D'Silva) that Bambai Meri Jaan plummets. Kadri’s three sons (the middle one is Dara) and one daughter Habiba (Kritika Kamra; modelled on Haseena Parkar) grow up. All four turn out to be nothing like their father. They are unruly, volatile and only too keen to be on the other side of law. It makes sense in the way things have unravelled since but for a long-form show that is seemingly committed to tracing the origins of a fearsome mafia, it remains obtusely opaque about all its characters.

With the exception of Kay Kay, all of them talk like they are uttering lines they have heard in passing (Hussain and Abbas Dalal are credited with the dialogues). The dialect is off and they seek compensating for it by adding one expletive at the end of every line. At some point Amyra Dastur enters the frame and her character Pari speaks Hindi like a white person who has lost their way in the country. This sense of artifice leaks into every aspect of the series. For instance, as an expressed Bombay show, Bambai Meri Jaan showcases the city with very little imagination. Most of the story takes place in a set and for the rest, terrible VFX is used to recreate the era. In one scene when the characters are on the terrace, Kamra’s ear is almost subsumed by the background.

This set-bound narrative creates a sense of seclusion which is only exacerbated by the show’s refusal to acknowledge the time it was set. Pop culture references are absent except for one stray Bachchan mention. Cricket and Bollywood, the two main proponents of the 80s’ India, hardly find a place in the story. It is a curious absence because the figure standing at the center is known for his involvement in both.

But then there is little we get to know about him anyway. Created by D'Silva and Saudagar and adapted from journalist S Hussain Zaidi’s book, Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia (the name is omitted in the opening credits), Bambai Meri Jaan remains stringently ambiguous towards its characters (several of them remain absent for many episodes till they surface again) but it is most felt in the outing’s failure to make a person out of its lead character.

As a child, Dara is shown as a mischievous boy. But how he became a bloodthirsty gangster from a cake-throwing young boy is an explanation the series abstains from furnishing. Even as a gangster, his ambition is depicted in a unidirectional, almost santised way. There is no subtext to his hunger except poverty. His interest in a girl is supposed to be a peek into his personal life. Beyond that, there is nothing to suggest his personhood. There is one scene where Kay Kay’s character, his father in the show, asks him if he is doing what he is doing for his family or himself? It opens up an intriguing avenue to understand the character but the show uses it momentarily, as an accusation and not as something to ponder upon.

In fact, Bambai Meri Jaan is replete with such shorthand. As a series based on a family, it never really delves into the filial ties and later makes up for it through shortcut encounters. For instance, although Ismail’s apathy towards his children being outlaws is known, Sakina’s feelings towards them are never clear except for maternal preservation. What their disparate reactions do to their marriage is hardly explored. There is just one scene where they both sit and Sakina gets the words to contemplate. By then it is too late. Something similar happens with Dara and his father. That they are at loggerheads is presented as a given and not as a culmination of a relationship gone sour. It is only later that Dara explains his intent to Ismail which comes across as an undercooked effort from the series to lend some purpose to his actions.

One ought to also mention that it is criminal to cast an actor as gifted as Tiwary in such roles. It is probably his physicality that encourages such casting (last year he played the antagonist in Khakee: The Bihar Chapter) but he is too talented to be wasted like this. As Dara, Tiwary feels too burdened by mannerisms to really be himself. His merit shows up in scenes when he meets the girl he loves and appears outwitted by her. These are lovely moments precisely for the way he looks at her, reminiscent of his crazed eyes from his feature film debut, Laila Majnu (2018).

In Bambai Meri Jaan, such tender moments are rare. What is in excess though is violent scenes which are amped up with such sordidness that they feel gratuitous. Episode five and six have instances which will churn your stomach out of absolute disgust. The outing benefits nothing from their inclusion except maybe reveal the belief of the makers that the community they are depicting is this barbaric. This only points to the larger problem of Saudagar’s new series that is so painfully generic that it does more disservice to who they are portraying than whom they are portraying him for.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)

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