The Night Manager & Indian Spy Thrillers

A Legacy Of Spies

The Hindi espionage thriller has a unique grammar, antithetical perhaps to the principles of intrigue embodied in the works of John le Carré. The Night Manager fits into a gradual turning point of the genre, writes Manik Sharma.

IN Ramanand Sagar’s Ankhen (1968), a terrorist attack on a train plying through Assam unexpectedly brings together colleagues of ‘Diwan Chand & Co’, an exporting company based out of an undisclosed location. The gathered group discusses this latest tragedy and the threat facing a young nation, with great spirit. “We should do something about it,” one of the men declares.

It’s an eerie, almost puzzling premise, where citizens of an embattled country summon the resources and will to mount a counter-offensive all on their own. It’s a formative vision of espionage, inspired by the James Bond franchise whilst echoing a country’s deepening political anxieties, albeit through the tropes of popular Hindi cinema. It’s a view that evokes the sense of an emerging nationalism. Fast-forward to several decades later, and a stealthier, more contemplative version of espionage has landed on our shores courtesy the excellent adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Night Manager.

Stream The Night Manager S2

SPY-SEE FARE

How 'The Night Manager' Fits Into The Evolution Of The Indian Spy Genre

By Manik Sharma

Aankhen’s wilful optimism — which feels far too naïve in hindsight — had a few traces of reality. India’s premier spy agency, RAW, was founded in the year of the film’s release. The likes of Farz and The Jewel Thief offered alternatives to the Indian spy story in the same decade, but most echoed the typicality of extracting heroism from the template of a love story. The romantic hero came first, the spy later.

The curious absence of the spy in our cinema owes perhaps to the grammar and texture that make it impossible for selectively reticent portrayals to hold a story together. The quiet ones who stand back in the corners, are automatically read with suspicion — even chastised for their inability to hold the centre. Flamboyance is a prerequisite for a film culture that celebrates the public and berates the sneaky and the private.

Think of Shah Rukh Khan’s Baadshah (1999) for example, a spy film that functions as a spoof rather than a serious thriller. Milind Soman’s 16 December (2002), aspired to that vein of seriousness and is unfortunately remembered for wanting to desperately become momentous. After all, this was the age when a spy film starring Sunny Deol was un-ironically titled Hero: Love Story of a Spy.

Carre’s portrayal of espionage has rarely been about the globetrotting/swashbuckling heroism of it all. His literature instead concerns itself with the minutiae of everyday secrecy, the intrigue around personal, human motive as opposed to gargantuan national interests. In a sort of contrarian argument, the writer has even posited that he who hangs onto his humanity may eventually struggle the most to fit in.

It’s a tenet that Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi and Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café also explore. There is a price to be paid for militarising patriotism as an identity, and it is, more often than not, a cost paid in trauma and loss. Carre’s view of espionage is thus monastic — sacrificial by design, sacrosanct by investment and sexy, because it defers violence. The kind of professional space where “a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world”.

The Night Manager is a character-driven drama as opposed to an intrigue-spraying spy story. It draws a clear distinction between good and bad, but embellishes the narrative by emphasising that the road to one can’t quite go through without touching the other.

Shaan, played well by Aditya Roy Kapur, must get his hands dirty long before he can wash them with the relief of having made it to the other side... Reflecting Carre’s belief that only someone damaged and capable of breaking some more, can make that scarring journey from complicity to redemption. Carre’s characters refrain from violence as a form of meditation of the more hazardous territory of will and choice. The glorification of a spy’s repertoire of violence, has in effect, only dehumanised them. Carre’s stories rescue these characters from ecstatic fantasies, to place them in situations where life and its more intimate dilemmas easily contort you into pieces. It’s why The Night Manager is at its most thrilling when its characters study each other with placid looks but troubled, suspecting insides.

Spies — thanks to Manoj Bajpayee’s The Family Man, and now Shah Rukh Khan’s blockbuster Pathaan — are back in vogue, but in the mainstream Indian interpretation they are still larger-than-life mercurial men who stand apart from the crowd. The sexiness, the visual allure of The Night Manager, on the other hand, suppresses all that extroverted energy by asking attractive men and women to limit themselves to the choreography of a sitcom.

The sensual tension of the show, its restraint, exemplify the fact that risk and danger need not only be emphasised by the firing of a gun. It can also be communicated by the sense that the weapon sits in a drawer somewhere. Espionage thus becomes a labour of poise, a pageant of resistance and composure, something that must be endured, rather than exaggerated or enjoyed. Ambiguity and persistence here are the same thing and they result not in swashbuckling action capers, but in studious portrayals of people, as opposed to their competencies.

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