THE CINEMA OF INDIA EDITED BY LALITHA GOPALAN • WALLFLOWER PRESS LO NOON. NEW YORK First published in Great Britain in 2009 by WallflowerPress 6 Market Place, London WlW 8AF Copyright © Lalitha Gopalan 2009 The moral right of Lalitha Gopalan to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-905674-92-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-905674-93-0 (hardback) Printed in India by Imprint Digital the other �ide of 1 TRUTH l Hl:SE\TS IU\ffi(W.\tYEHl\"S 1 11,i:1111111,1:11'1111;1111111 11111111:U 1\ 11.IZII.IH 11.1\lli I 111 ,11 I ISll.lll. n1,11, UH.Iii 236 24 FRAMES SATYA 13 RAM GOPAL VARMA, 1998 On 3 July, 1998, a previously untold story in the form of an unusual film came like a bolt from the blue. Ram Gopal Varma'sSatya was released all across India. A low-budget filmthat boasted no major stars, Satya continues to live in the popular imagination as one of the most powerful gangster filmsever made in India. Trained as a civil engineer and formerly the owner of a video store, Varma made his entry into the filmindustry with Shiva in 1989. Oftenreferred to as a maverick, eccentric and one of India's 'most innovative directors: Varma's oeuvre has been diverse. Satya is his most enduring filmto date, described by the Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema as the 'most remarkable release of the decade'. Many talents came to the forewith the release of the film:actor Manoj Bajpai shot to prominence forhis outstanding performanceas a gang functionary; Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh Shukla were recognised for the quality of their script; the main cinematographer, Gerard Hooper, was hailed for the look of the film;at the 44th Filmfare awards, editors Apurva Asrani and Bhanodaya, sound recordist H. Shridhar and music director Sandeep Chowta won the top awards. In short, Satya was a team effortthat became both a popular and critical success. In reviews and articles about the filmreprinted in the Encyclopaedia of Hindi Film, writer Shobha De wrote, 'Satyaspoke the language of the streets - rough, crude, brutal, and yet it did not offendsensibilities. It perfectly captured the savagery of what has become our daily reality while also uncovering the final futility and pathos of mindless gang wars: Another reviewer referred to Satya as a 'no punches pulled movie mirroring, authentically, the visage of a sick society'. In an interview after the release of the film, Ram Gopal Varma said: Mumbai has always attracted me because it is a fascinatingcity. In the process of making an action film,I bumped into some of the people in the underworld. And I realised that the human side of theirs attracted me much more than what they did. It never occurs to us that anyone who is shot dead in an encounter with the police has a face. To us he is just a name in print to be forgottenthe very next day. Satyais the story of people who are put in a position that the average man may not be able to identifywith. THE CINEMA OF INDIA 237 While Varma himself has dabbled with the romantic musical (Rangeela (1995), Mast (1999)), the road movie (Daud (1997), Road (2002)) and horror (Raat (1992), Bhoot (2003)), his real passion and talent is most visible in the gangster genre. Two filmshave been central to Varma's cinematic imagination - Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Ramesh Sippy's Sholay/Flames (1975). In a sense, the combination of the gangster myth with the use of violence as a series of shock effects,comes from these two very different films. Varma's second gangster film Company (2002) was mounted very differentlyfrom Satya. Thedirector claimed that while Company was like The Godfather, Satya was more like Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Its point of view is that of the street while Company is crafted with an aerial perspective. This knowledge of international genres, a desire to be different and a deep interest in the city of Bombay, made Varma put together a team of filmprofessionals to craftSatya's urban vision. Satya tells the story of a new immigrant to Bombay who slowly becomes part of an accelerated flow of sporadic and random events that make him join the underworld. Gang wars, extortion and 'encounter' killings are staged in the film against a landscape of urban detritus. The city's wasteland saturates the mise-en-scene, formingthe heart of the city, not its periphery. The gangsters thrive within this urban decay and dereliction. As Bombay becomes a gangland, the desire for home, domesticity and peace continue to elude its citizens. The remarkable feature of Satya is its play with space and bodies to craft an urban jungle where the idea of the 'spectacular global city' is completely erased. The filmrevels in claustrophobic spaces, chawls (working-class tenements), crowded streets and traffic to embark on a spatial journey that moves fromprivate to public worlds, constructing a city of modern ruin. Bombay's disorder and crisis dominates narratives of contemporary Bombay in both jour­ nalistic and popular perceptions of the city. While some point to the loss of Bombay's cosmo­ politan imagination afterthe riots of 1992-93 when 'citizens' turned into 'strangers: others look at the city's overcrowding and trafficas root causes. Still others focuson the underworld to refer to the city's decay and degradation. In the multiplicity of narratives that evoke the decline of India's premier city, no single narrative can explain the exact nature of the contemporary crisis. Crisis is then both an intense experience as well as a metaphor forthe contemporary cityscape. Anurag Kashyap claimed that central to their scriptwriting strategy forSatya was the explora­ tion of urban space, rather than offeringa moral position or providing an analytical structure to the story. On the contrary, inhabiting the experience of Bombay's disorder was more impor­ tant than charting the causal reasons forit. Satya opens with visuals of the Bombay skyline, the boats, the sea and the city at night, followed by visuals of police officers arresting people. The soundtrack that accompanies this 238 24 FRAMES montage tells us in the 'objective' voice of a documentary-maker that Bombay is a city that does not sleep; it is a city where the underworld is powerful. The narrator moves from the 23 broader context of the city and its current problems to Satya (J. D. Chakravarthy), a man whose story the filmseeks to narrate. Crime becomes the framingdevice used to tell the story of a city with Satya emerging as a man who belongs to the crowd of this huge metropolis. Satya gets involved with the underworld afterhe clashes with an egotistical gangster, Jagga (Jeeva). Using his contacts with the police, Jagga ensures Satya is sent to prison on the falsecharge of pimping. In prison Satya meets the gangster Bhiku Mahatre (Manoj Bajpei), thus setting the stage foran interesting male friendshipand Satya's entry into the underworld. Most cities coexist with a series of spaces on the margins that cannot be incorporated within a master design plan. As described in the Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema, such spaces, the leftovers and the discarded, have been referred to as residual space for they take a life of their own. It is this space of the residual that is inventively evoked in Satya's mise-en-scene with the stylistics of television reportage, candid camera visuals and a deliberately shabby aesthetic all combined with the dramatic use of Steadicam and editing strategies that evoke spectacle. Gerard Hooper, the main cameraman on Satya, saw the film's shooting style as something that resembled the work of American independent cinema. Hooper used very little light and tried to create a dynamic movement of the camera in claustrophobic situations. He was struck by Bombay's extreme congestion, its appearance as a city bursting at the seams and yet bustling and functioning, unkempt and out of bounds. Entering the city from the airport, Hooper was astounded by the packed streets where people would be sleeping and working in the same place. Bombay did not appear sprawling but compacted. According to the Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema, Hooper, drawing on these perceptions, gave a distinctive look to the film - an experi­ mental documentary style using very little artificiallight. As the emblematic spatial symbol of the city, the street becomes a place of violent crime, with gangs seeking to make their home on its margins. This is why Satya's architectural mise­ en-scene is so interesting. The convention of placing consumer products in the mise-en-scene of 'family films' is prominently absent in this film. At no point in the film are we dazzled by light. We move instead through the alleys and dark interiors of slums, half-constructed buildings with very little light, dingy rooms, street corners, a car park and a prison. In one of the major chase sequences early on in the film, two members of the gang on a scooter kill a film producer in his car at close range. As they run from the police, the camera follows them moving across spaces of Bombay that look horrifyingly shabby.