Celebrating 20 Years Of Sudhir Mishra’s Centrepiece ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’

Death, says one song in this remarkably dense and evocative film, is akin to love. It sure seems like death for Vikram (Shiney Ahuja) every time Geeta(Chitrangda Rao) looks at her idol-lover Sidharth (Kay Kay Menon). And death sure feels like a renewal and assertion of life every time Sudhir Mishra makes a new film. His outstanding understanding of the complex polemics and politics that motivate the mysteries and contradictions of modern Indian society, has given us great pieces of alternative art in the past including the unusual thriller Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin where the characters ran around in pursuit of exits to a door-less existence.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is Mishra’s most complex ambitious and politically driven film to date. He minces no words while castigating the Nehruvian “ideal” that modern India adopted, a model for governance that generated a social order that’s unjust and degenerate. Subsuming the murky and incoherent politics of Kolkata, Delhi and the Bhojpur district of Bihar between the decadent decade that falls between 1969 and 1977, HKA takes us on a strange stirring and reverberant journey into the erosion of the collective conscience in modern India.

Nobody cares. And those who seem to care lose their idealism in the welter of tortuous compromises that chraracterize India’s journey into modernism. And yet, if we look back in anger as Sudhir Mishra does so coherently in this film, what do we see? A social order based on the brutal oppression of the socio-economically challenged.

Sahir Lidhianvi wrote the immortal lines Jinhe naaz hai hind par woh kahan hain to express the fatal disillusionments of Guru Dutt in Pyaasa. HKA is almost a modern day version of Pyaasa, with the protagonist Sidharth’s journey from Marxist jargon to Naxal rebellion to cast oppression being mapped out in the narrative with the harsh inevitability of a cyclone that can bring no relief, only damage.

Sure, Siddharth rages on about injustice. And like the prostitute Gulabo in Pyaasa he sucks the besotted Geeta into his ideological web. It’s interesting to see how in Geeta, the director amalgamates both the Waheeda Rehman and Mala Sinha characters in Pyaasa. Like Waheeda, Chitrangda Singh is willing to sacrifice everything and follow her man to the end of the world. Like Mala Sinha she falls into a marriage of compromise and comfort (with the well-meaning alcoholic richie rich, played by Ram Kapoor) but soon pulls back and re-focusses her priorities.

But does she get her just rewards for her ideological transference? Sudhir Mishra’s pessimistic view of politics and love offers no comfort to the uncompromising. In that sense, HKA reminded me of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam where the ideologue ends up dead on a hospital bed. Sudhir Mishra’s Siddharth nearly ends up the same way. But is saved in the nick of time by a savage twist of irony when Vikram in a bid to rescue Siddharth from the clutches of uniformed Bihari goondas, gets his identity interchanged with his friend’s.

What follows is the most brutal interlude of violence ever witnessed in a political drama where Vikram is almost bludgeoned to dearth by two heartless cops in the green fields of rural Bihar.

The dying moments of this disturbing drama shows Vikram, now reduced to a vegetable, resting his head on Geeta’s shoulder in a place far away from the politics of the city. Love in Mishra’s brutally unflinching scheme of nightmarish dreams, is a commodity that demands exorbitant compensation. The commodious yet compact screenplay (Sudhir Mishra, Shiv Subramaniam, Ruchi Narain) knits the major political upheavals of the times into a love triangle.
Love and politics intermingle in a copulatory clasp, whereby the sweat and heat of one transfers itself into the other domain. Their swift cuts (editing Catherine D’Hoir) and the relentlessly probing cinematography (Jacques Bouquin, Aseem Bajaj) suggests a close link between the politics of the state and the politics of the conscience. Overlapping harshly across the narrative the film’s quivering underbelly never shows up on screen. The characters are monstrously challenged by their destiny. But the narrative is always ahead and unwavering in its perceptions of the blueprint of social revolution and where cinema slips into the scheme of radical change.

The performances are even, though not outstanding. The leading lady Chitrangda has evidently been selected for her resemblance to Smita Patil whom Sudhir Mishra and the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1980s saw as a champion of political grace. All the three protagonists seem to have understood the politics of Mishra’s layered cinema.

Mishra makes no bones about his contempt and cynicism for Nehruvian idealism. This film lashes out at the ‘Congress’ role-model of governance almost to the point of denouncing and demolishing all that the architects of modern India dreamt of. If you’ve ever thought of why our nation is in such a mess, this is a film that tells you where we could have gone wrong. It offers no solutions. But it makes you sit up and think about the politics of a nation governed by self-serving leaders who have never really cared for the country and have left the nitty-gritty of the country to middlemen and power-brokers.

In one hardhitting sequence the wheeler-dealer Vikram strikes a multi-crore deal with an artistocrat while the infuriated scion shoots from the palace roof in protest. This is an image that illustrates the drama of Sudhir Mishra’s politics. A lot of what you will see in Hazaar Khwaishein …will seem unreal and bizarre. Don’t take that to be an exaggeration. It’s the politics we’ve been gifted by the architects of Indian democracy.

Sudhir Mishra is rightfully proud of his rumination on the politics of corruption. “There are some films that emerge out of a filmmaker’s head on account of who he is essentially. These are films only he can make. Hazaaron… was that film for me. I nurtured the script for many years before making and now it nurtured. I am known as the Director of Hazaaron which enhances my stature as a filmmaker but also lessens it, because I have made films like Khoya Khoya Chand, Dharavi, Chameli, Serious Men which are as good as Hazaaron …. I nurtured the script for many years before making it and now it nurtures me. For Shiney Ahuja’s role I went through a very elaborate casting process and conducted auditions in four cities but found him literally next door. Initially we tested him for Kay Kay Menon’s part but one look at the audition and I knew he was Vikram. I just can’t believe that the Shiney is the same person I know. There were so many women on the sets. They never had any complaints about Shiney’s behaviour. In fact, Shiney did a film with my assistant Ruchi Narain called Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow. Shiney was always a thorough gentleman. Eventually, the woman who accused him of rape withdrew her case. But it was too late.Our film industry ostracized him for something he had not done.”

Sudhir feels a huge owner’s pride. “I was born to make Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. Every filmmaker is born to make just one or two films. The rest are all space fillers. K Asif and Mehboob Khan made films other than Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India. But they are known largely for these two films. I do hope I can make something that will take me beyond Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. I think it is one film when the right story found me. It’s right there at the top. Some films change a filmmaker and Hazaaron… changed me. I found a softer side of myself. A more compassionate side

Making it and putting it out in the public was not easy. “It is more difficult in one way but then it was always difficult. Back in 2005 after the UPA government had taken over, my film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi was totally ignored at the National awards. Some of my best friends, filmmaker-colleagues were sitting in the jury. They chose to honour other films. But does anyone even remember the films that won the National award that year? Whereas my Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is discussed for its relevance even today. My point is, you can’t gag what is relevant. The voice will find a way. Watch out for what I am directing now. I am not allowed to speak about it.”