Anurag Kashyap teams up with Rajeev Ravi to paint it red in Gulaal, reports Nandini Ramnath.
It isn’t yet the end of the first quarter but it’s already time to designate 2009 as the year of director Anurag Kashyap’s resurrection. Bollywood’s greatest maverick has joined the select group of filmmakers who have come to expect the comfort of regular releases, respectable reviews and positive box-office results. The four-star ratings and healthy ticket sales of the February release Dev D, Kashyap’s hip retelling of the Bengali novella Devdas, transformed him overnight from a jinxed director into a visionary auteur. Just when Kashyap appeared to be settling down in the industry he loves to hate, he has pulled out yet another piece of disruptive filmmaking. Gulaal, an incendiary political drama about corruption and fascism that is set in Rajasthan, opens this fortnight.
Until Dev.D, Kashyap’s filmography was the stuff of juicy stories for journalists and agony for the director: an unreleased debut film (Paanch, 2003); a docu-drama whose release was held up for two years by litigation (Black Friday, 2007); and an experimental allegory that was widely seen as an exercise in professional hara-kiri (No Smoking, 2007). In between, projects were announced, only to be set aside. In Allwyn Kalicharan, Anil Kapoor was supposed to play a police officer in a city that sleeps during the day and wakes up at night. The movie was shelved. Kashyap also announced that he was working on another film, called Gulaal. Production halted after the money ran out, and Gulaal was completed only after a new producer, Zee Limelight, stepped in.
Gulaal reunites Kashyap with two of his favourite actors, Kay Kay Menon and Aditya Srivastava. Menon plays Dukey Bana, a demagogue who wants to create a kingdom of Rajputs called Rajputana, the old conglomeration of princely kingdoms. With an eye on attracting young followers, Bana manipulates a law student, Dilip, into rigging a college election. Bana’s followers rubs red power on their faces (hence the film’s title) to signal their acceptance of what Kashyap described as his “crazed idealism”.
The director set the movie in Rajasthan because of his perception that the state is “caught somewhere between the past and modernity”. It’s also a place where the past can be massaged to suit the present, where ex-royals like Bana valourise the history of their warrior caste to compensate for the loss of their power and privy purses. “KK’s back story is essentially the Rajput’s back story,” Kashyap said. “Their anger has a point, but it lacks direction.”
The ideas contained in Gulaal were developed in 2001 on a double-layered foundation of anger and disillusionment. Kashyap, who is 37, described the movie as a reaction to several developments, including a ragging incident at a medical college in Karnataka in 2001 and the Censor Board’s refusal of a certificate to Paanch because of the violence it depicted. “The movie was about my anger at how the system worked to stop my film,” said Kashyap. “The film deals with my rights and what I can do and can’t do.” The Karnataka incident, in which two students were stripped and confined to a room for three days, is recreated in the movie as a subversion of a typical meeting-cute scenario between boy and girl. Dilip first encounters his future love interest, Anuja, when both of them have been stripped of their clothes and dignity.
The future is red or saffron, depending on your interpretation of Kashyap’s reading of recent incidents of moral policing. Ram Sene chief Pramod “Mutalik and [Maharashtra Navnirman Sena head] Raj Thackeray can exist and thrive today because the law isn’t being enforced,” Kashyap said. “Decisions are being made on the basis of votebanks. Not a single leader goes out on a limb to uphold the law and stop us from regressing. This will encourage the moral police to stand up every now and then. If we don’t act, we’re not far from having a Hindu Taliban.”
Gulaal has been shot by Rajeev Ravi, the man who depicts on the screen the visions Kashyap sees in his head. In Ravi, Kashyap has found a cinematographer who shares his quest for an offbeat visual style. Ravi’s ability to create memorable images and textures has enhanced No Smoking and Dev.D. “Rajeev brings something extra to my films,” Kashyap said. “We both like spaces, geography. We go into a zone together.”
Ravi, who lives in Kochi, worked in the Kerala film industry for a few years before he shot Madhur Bhandarkar’s Chandni Bar in 2001. The Film and Television Institute of India graduate earned accolades for the grittiness he created through his lighting on Chandni Bar, which is about a bar girl’s life. Ravi spent time in several dance bars before the shoot, observing the colours and light. He bathed Chandni Bar in a green tint. “Green can be soothing, it can be the colour of fertility and prosperity,” he said. “It can also be the colour of poison and darkness.”
Despite Ravi’s bravura camerawork, Bhandarkar walked away with the lion’s share of attention. Ravi slipped back to Kochi and returned to Mumbai a few years later on the insistence of Ab Tak Chappan director Shimit Amin to work on a film called Let’s Catch Veerappan. The movie never got made, but Ravi had met Kashyap by then.
If Gulaal had proceeded on schedule, it would have been the first collaboration between Ravi and Kashyap rather than the third. The two argued bitterly during the first few days of the shoot, but then settled into a rhythm. “I feel that I know what he has in mind,” Ravi said about Kashyap. “On other films, I’m limited to a certain kind of work. With Anurag, I can go anywhere.”
Both director and cinematographer share a love for strange inner worlds whose rules differ vastly from the outside world. Whether it’s the netherworld in which No Smoking’s K finds himself or the brothel in which Dev.D’s Dev washes up, Ravi conjures up mood, mystery and depth. “Cinema is about sculpting space and time,” Ravi said, making a reference to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time. “I like to work with inner spaces.”
When he read Gulaal’s script, Ravi decided to move away from the touristy imagery associated with the state and explore architecture and colours instead. Ravi shot Gulaal on 35mm in a widescreen format and shot key characters in particular colours. He used red filters and lights for Bana, golden yellow for another key character, Ransa, and black for Karan Singh, the plot’s dark horse. Yet, Ravi cautioned against excessive planning, pointing that a great deal of filmmaking is a result of coincidence and spontaneity. “Real life itself is full of drama,” Ravi said. “You just have to catch the moment.”
As with other cinematographers who have worked in southern cinema, Ravi is known for shooting quickly and using less stock to achieve more. He said his discipline is a result of working on low-budget Malayalam movies. Mumbai, by contrast, revels in indulgence. “The industry here thrives on wastage,” Ravi said. “Wastage comes when you don’t have clarity of vision.”
Ravi comes to Mumbai only to work on select projects, films for which he feels the director has a vision. He’s also here to do advertising work. “I come to Mumbai only for the money,” he said. “I don’t have a flat here, I stay in a hotel. If you get stuck here, you will be sucked in.”
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