Abhishek Chaubey’s first film Ishqiya (2010) has its heroes standing in their own graves within minutes of their introduction. Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad Warsi) are swaying and singing drunkenly in their jammies, celebrating the successful theft of Rs. 20 lacs, before coming face to face with its true owner. Instantly, the two transform, squatting at the thug’s feet and snivelling for their life. We’re not supposed to fall in love with duplicitous bums, but when these two escape certain death by using nothing but a long-winded joke and quick thinking, they win your heart. With this opening, Chaubey flaunted what would become characteristic of his filmography over the next decade: Deft writing, authentic settings and the marriage of masala and substance.
Every director dabbling in realism aims for characters with shades of grey, urging us to see how heroes and villains are in the eye of the beholder. In that sense, Chaubey is no different. Only his anti-heroes are among the most complex and unexpectedly charming characters Hindi cinema has seen in recent years. Ishqiya hinges on an unconventional trio: Two men – a nephew and uncle – plan a kidnapping along with the widow they’re both in love with. When Babban and Khalujaan show up at Krishna’s (Vidya Balan) palatial home, you inadvertently fear for the woman. She’s a lone widow, spending her days cutting up wood or cooking food on the coal stove. But Chaubey turns the tables on the audience in no time. The apparently demure Krishna reveals herself to be a clever and calculating femme fatale who cheerfully flirts with both uncle and nephew. Chaubey never makes her influence on the men too overt, but it becomes clear that she wears the pants in this three-way relationship. Just when your sympathies, indulged by years of rooting for cinematic bromance, begin to side with Khalu and Babban – poor things estranged over a wily woman – Chaubey, once again, turns this on its head. Krishna’s sensuality reveals itself to be a desperate means to a desperate end, a representation of the only form of power afforded to women historically. With her vulnerability laid bare, the femme fatale looks much like a damsel in distress — only she won’t be waiting for a knight in shining armour.
Over a decade, Chaubey has engaged consistently in the questioning of the moral and immoral, with the most elaborate form of this quest emerging in his last feature, Sonchiriya (2019). Set in the Seventies, Chaubey introduces us to a legion of Thakur baaghis (rebels) roaming the Chambal ravines of Rajasthan. They speak of dharma, honour, loyalty and protecting their caste. They’re doggedly escaping Inspector Virendra Singh Gujjar (Ashutosh Rana), who shoves guns into baaghis’ mouths before shooting them and parading their dead bodies through villages.When Lakhna, played by Sushant Singh Rajput, is hell-bent on saving a dying child named Sonchiriya, it is easy to chalk it up to his heroism. It’s seemingly clear who the protagonists and antagonists are. But Chaubey sneaks in clues to a larger picture from the beginning. He opens Sonchiriya with a child’s ghost haunting two baaghis, including Lakhna. The child is dishevelled, bleeding and looks like the reminder of a rotting past. As the film progresses, the very idea of good and bad are turned on their heads, revealing that Gujjar has a heartbreaking reason to hunt baaghis and Lakhna fights for the dying Sonchiriya because she is penance for harm caused to another child. No one is ever what they initially seem to be in Chaubey’s films.
There is something inherently broken about Chaubey’s men. For all their overt machismo, guns and glory, their biggest fight seems to be against their own self. Ishqiya’s Khalujaan is assured in his pursuit of Krishna, almost as if he has been in this position of shyly and slyly passing compliments to a woman many times. But in the face of Krishna’s reciprocation, her laughter as she buries her face in his chest, he is rendered heartbreakingly vulnerable. Naseeruddin Shah delivers an expression of such naked defencelessness that it’s hard not to feel a mixture of endearment and condolence for the man.
Chaubey places his male characters at the crossroads of society’s expectations of them as men, the noir genre’s expectation of a traditional anti-hero and the expectations of their own conscience. What emerges is a crop of wonderfully nuanced characters. In Sonchiriya, the hardened baaghis speak of simple dreams – doing agriculture on a camel and having a woman at home – while staring up at the stars. A man freezes in the middle of a riotous shootout when he sees the body of a bullet-hit cat. Lakhna pulls magic tricks to entertain a wounded child but laughs out loud when called “a good man”.
This incessant inner battle between their conscience and the world’s vices grants Chaubey’s anti-heroes their humanity and makes us root for them. In a brilliant scene in Udta Punjab (2016) coke-loving rapper Tommy (Shahid Kapoor) comes face to face with two young fans, boys who are in his jail cell for killing their mother to buy some cocaine. “The first time I put a needle in my vein, I had your photo in front of me,” they tell him in awe. Later, faces of young boys press against the darkened windows of his car as Tommy sits inside, terrified of the beast he has unknowingly given birth to. This haunting sets him on the path to save Mary Jane, not only because she is the woman he loves but also because she’s ensnared in the web of drugs – a web he played a part in spinning.
In an interview with Times of India, the director recalled seeing a docile-looking woman on a bus journey. He was then 13 years old. When touched inappropriately by a passenger, the pallu-clad woman released a tirade of abuses so vicious, it put the young Chaubey’s ears ring. The experience must have left an impact because much of the feistiness in Chaubey’s films rests on the feminine shoulders of his heroines. His first two films, Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya (2014), both of which result in their lead heroes getting duped by shrewd women, are odes to female power. Even when not on-screen, women command authority in a Chaubey film. Take for instance, loan shark Mushtaq bhai’s wife, featured in Ishqiya. She shows up periodically as a disembodied voice on a cell phone, sweetly calling to check up on her husband. She seems like the epitome of a powerless housewife until she sweet-talks her husband into freeing Khalu and Babban from under his grasp. “In the outside world they play supporting roles, but all major decisions are taken when the husband and wife have their heads on the pillow and she’s telling him what has to be done,” said the director in an interview, recalling his own upbringing in an orthodox Brahmin family.
Offering a contrast to women who fight systemic oppression with crafty ways are Mary Jane from Udta Punjab and Indumati from Sonchiriya – women characters in genres not known for allowing them brazen cheekiness. In a memorable scene, Mary Jane launches into an excruciating vociferation of the horrors that have been done to her, asking Tommy, “Do you know what all has happened to me?” She leans down, kisses him on the mouth and says, “Everything except this has happened.” The simple but radical action hints at a person much bigger than the things that have happened to her. The director once said, “Men need to think from their hearts, not pants while writing female characters.” He definitely took his own advice.
For all his hard-hitting stories, Chaubey loves a hopeful – if not happy – ending. His characters might have lost a battle or three against life, but they fly, swim and claw their way through to better times. Given that Chaubey’s stories are overwhelming sagas that emerge at the intersection of caste, gender and politics, these hopeful endings are an act of grace. They seem, in many ways, an extension of the dignity with which the director views his characters – they may be convention-shattering, immoral lowlifes but that’s what makes them so goddamn interesting. And Chaubey knows that.