Why does Bollywood sometimes make films that seem to have absolutely no interest in behaving like Bollywood? This edition of ‘Weekend Vines’ is about films that refused to follow the formula.
Here, you won’t find a song sequence in Switzerland, hefty designer lehengas, palatial homes, heroic slow-motion entries or villains waiting to be beaten to a pulp by the interval.
And yet, these films stayed with us.
That is perhaps the curious thing about Bollywood. For all its reputation for glamour and heroism, some of its most memorable films have come from filmmakers determined to do things differently, rather than deliver another Friday-night escape.
When small towns and ordinary lives took centre stage
Bollywood has somehow become synonymous with glamour and luxury, a world where even the most pressing problems seem to involve a designer saree with a broken pearl.
But Indian cinema has long found drama in ordinary lives. Filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak explored poverty, displacement, loneliness and survival through characters such as Apu, Durga, Neeta and Shankar. And then there was Anand, affectionately calling Dr Bhaskar “Babu Moshai”, reminding audiences that sometimes a conversation between two people can carry an entire film.
Within mainstream Hindi cinema, too, there has always been room for stories that are less interested in glamour. In these films, the hero is not necessarily a larger-than-life individual. Sometimes, the people and the places around them are just as important.
Khosla Ka Ghosla gave us Kamal Kishore Khosla, a middle-class man fighting to reclaim a piece of land. There is no six-pack hero flexing his muscles to defeat the villain. There is no gloss or glamour to distract us. Instead, there is property, bureaucracy, family and the extraordinary ability of Indian families to turn a simple problem into a complicated affair.
The film finds humour and drama in the everyday struggles of a middle-class family. Suddenly, the ordinary becomes interesting.
Then there is Sardar Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur. A gangster, certainly, but hardly the polished, larger-than-life figure Bollywood was accustomed to. His world is gritty, funny, violent, political and deeply rooted in its local setting.
It feels less like Bollywood telling us a story and more like someone opening a window and letting a part of India walk into the frame.
When Bollywood stopped pretending everything was beautiful
A serene lake where the hero speaks to his love interest. A beach where the heroine and her friends enjoy the sunshine. A picturesque street that seems to bloom as the heroine walks past. These are familiar sights in a Bollywood film.
But some films have refused to make difficult subjects look pretty.
Udta Punjab was not interested in presenting Punjab as a postcard. It explored drug addiction, violence and corruption, bringing the consequences of the drug crisis into focus. It was a film that refused to look away from an uncomfortable reality.
Black Friday went further into difficult territory, reconstructing the events surrounding the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.
These films were not made to help audiences forget the world outside the theatre. They asked them to look at it.
And perhaps that is one of the most interesting things about offbeat Bollywood. Sometimes, the rebellion is not in the style of the film. It is in the subject itself.
When ordinary people became interesting
Some films discovered something Bollywood occasionally forgets: ordinary people have stories too.
Peepli Live, released in 2010, turned farmer suicides and television journalism into dark satire. It follows Natha and his brother Budhia, whose struggle over land and debt becomes a media spectacle when Natha considers suicide. The film exposes the uncomfortable ways in which tragedy can become a spectacle, while the problems behind it remain unresolved.
Then there is Laapataa Ladies, the story of two brides, Phool and Jaya, who get separated from their husbands during a train journey. What begins as a case of mistaken identity becomes a journey of discovery for both women. Set in rural India, the film gives its female characters the space to take charge of their own stories.
And yes, the women run the show here.
Bheja Fry proves that you do not need a superstar or a larger-than-life hero to carry a film. Bharat Bhushan, with his endearing awkwardness and knack for irritating everyone around him, is quite enough.
A Wednesday! takes an apparently ordinary citizen and places him at the centre of a story about terrorism, fear and frustration.
These films find drama in people who could just as easily be sitting next to us on a train.
When the film itself became uncomfortable
And that is perhaps the biggest paradox of offbeat Bollywood: sometimes, the film itself refuses to behave normally.
Smoking is commonplace, and so is the decision to quit. But what if someone decides to make his struggle to quit smoking everyone else’s problem? That is the premise of No Smoking.
The film is strange, surreal and deliberately frustrating. It takes something familiar and turns it into an unsettling experience.
Are you willing to sit through a film that makes you uncomfortable? Then Tumbbad might be for you. A story about human greed, told through horror and mythology, it is both visually grand and deeply unsettling.
And there goes another assumption about offbeat cinema: it does not have to be small or visually modest.
These films do not always tell audiences what to think. Sometimes, they barely tell them what is happening. They trust viewers to do some of the work themselves.
When someone decided these stories were worth making.
When a film chooses to take a different road, someone has to believe in it before the audience gets a chance to.
Laapataa Ladies is an interesting example. Directed by Kiran Rao and produced by Aamir Khan, Kiran Rao and Jyoti Deshpande, the film did not rely on the conventional star-driven formula. Instead, it placed two relatively new actors, Nitanshi Goel and Pratibha Ranta, at the centre of a story set in rural India.
Production houses associated with filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap have also helped make room for films that are darker, stranger and less concerned with pleasing everyone.
The decision to take the road less travelled does not always begin after a film is made. Sometimes, it starts in a producer’s office. Someone has to say yes before the audience gets a chance to say anything.
And perhaps that is what makes these films special. They do not always arrive with blockbuster promises. They come with stories that may be unusual, uncomfortable or simply different. They talk to us, mess with us and make us look at things we may never have noticed before. Sometimes, the road not taken leads to the films we remember the longest.