Cinema reflects society and its virtues in all its limited capacity and reach. As an impactful tool to impress upon the minds of people, it serves with the experiences and exposure it absorbs from the ecosystem it thrives in and often subjects to prove its point. While it often succeeds with Peepli Live’ depicting farmers suicides and Aligarh’ portraying individual sexual orientation and Pink’ debating about importance of female consent, it fails miserably while representing cast equations. It did more than once with Bandit Queen’ and Aarakshan’ and Serious Men’ and now, with the epically hollow Shamshera.
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This Ranbir Kapoor starrer is about a lower caste tribe called Khamiran’ which is fighting its battle with upper cast Authorities which serves British. This tribe is a warrior tribe which eventually is betrayed by the upper cast counterparts and is banished and subjected to prison and is aligned into menial work. Showing them as sewage workers and dead animal carriers, this tribe is led by Shamshera and then his son who fight against the upper caste fellows as well as Britishers. The upper caste villain is Sanjay Dutt who sports Tripundra Tilak and recites mantras with his Brahminical visual identity and boasts of absurd theory of shudras being born from the feet of Hindu God. Ranbir Kapoor fights against Sanjay Dutt and is often supported by British Officer. This allegory is indeed Hindu phobic with a lower caste protagonist and a manipulative Brahmin antagonist, but it again seems like a chicken running haywire when its head is chopped.
Serious issues or statements need serious execution. Strangely, Shamshera starts with this caste-angle in the beginning with furor and suddenly get dissolved into a masala routine of dance, action, and visual wizardry. It somewhere looses the steam and eventually the equation. The loud production design and some tacky visual effects with a patchy and illogical drama stretches the ordeal too hard for the audience to sustain. By the time film ends, you have forgotten the caste-war and come out of theatre with almost nothingness. It fails to offer you a healthy and engaging entertainment, leave only the cast angle.
The paper-thin storyline acts like a tokenism in new age grammar of caste-based narratives. It needed to take a clue or some from hard hitting Article 15’ which dissects the gangrape and murder of three lower caste teenage girls in Uttar Pradesh. Also, Nagraj Manjul’s Fandry, Sairaat and Jhund needs to be revisited and Mari Selvaraj should be studied in all its glory in Tamil Pariyerum Perumal and Karnan. The work of Pa Ranjith in Kabali, Kaala and Sarpatta Parambarai could have also brought them tremendous significance of the affair. These are the new age Filmmakers who have got the gist and have worked accordingly. The old torch bearers being Bimal Roy with Sujata, Basu Chatterjee with Chameli Ki Shaadi, Satyajit Ray with Sadgati and Shyam Benegal with his directorial debut Ankur in 1974.
These Cinematic gems are not referred by the makers of Shamshera for sure. They are still in awe of Thugs of Hindustan and Bunty Aur Babli and Jayeshbhai Jordaar and Samrat Prithviraj. Their entire exercise of caste depiction in Shamshera’ looks scandalous. The narrative is peripheral and is just beating around the bush. It shows-off its historical inaccuracy, lack of homework and its ineptitude to deal with a serious issue like caste and the immaturity to call spade a spade. If it is talking about a Dalit Hero which is in fact yes, then it should proclaim it and own it with diligence. If not, then it turns out to be another quest of Hindi Cinema to be at its formulaic best.
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