Gulaal

Gulaal tarts with a rabble-rousing speech from Dukey Bana (Kay Kay Menon). Bana complains of treachery at the hands of the post-Independence Indian governments. The Rajput kings gave up their estates and royalties in support of a united India and in the process lost both power and wealth. And now the same political class that took away their powers is mismanaging the country. So to save the country (at least their part of it) it is imperative to form a separate Rajputana state. It is this regional variety of patriotism that is being witnessed by Dileep Singh (Raja Chaudhary), a naïve man who has come to Rajpur to study law.

Dileep Singh is the proverbial fence-sitter but gets dragged into the murky world of campus violence when some senior students beat, undress and lock him up with a woman lecturer, Anuja (Jesse Randhawa), facing similar predicament. Dileep’s house-mate Rananjay (Abhimanyu Singh, in a terrific performance) comes to his rescue. A cynical prince rebelling against the debauchery of his father by living an even more decadent life, Rananjay provides an ideal counter-point to the adolescent character of Dileep and the hollowness of macho-sounding Dukey Bana. He accepts to stand for the post of General Secretary (GS) in the college elections (whatever happened to the Presidents in a Union?), while Dileep hangs around him and gets introduced to the dark world of campus politics. Once Rananjay is bumped off before the end of first half, we get frequent narrative shifts – from college to Rajputana to household to “kotha” politics – that is tad disorientating and you start looking for the narrative points.

The marriage of campus politics with the fight for Rajputana results in an unconvincing drama. Dukey Bana calls for separate state but never leaves the dungeon where group of men in gulaal-covered faces gather listening to his speeches. That the erstwhile royals depend on siphoning off the local college’s annual festival funds to fight the Indian state seems an outlandish idea. Nonetheless, serving the director’s purpose of combining the college and Rajput politics is a brother-sister duo – illegitimate children of the local Maharaja (and father of Rananjay). The sister (Ayesha Mohan in a confident debut) runs for GS in college while the brother (Aditya Srivastava) is a contender for the post of Senapati (presently held by Dukey Bana) in the Rajputana struggle. Though convenient and contrived, the brother-sister coup through sex and violence is the most interesting part of the second half of the film.

The stories of college and Rajputana politics do not gel together well (did I say that before?). Also, the politics behind the Rajputana claim is questionable. Dukey Bana argues that ‘sometimes loving one’s country means going against its own government’. But Dukey’s is actually a separatist call where patriotism is limited to one’s community and not one’s country and the government-in-power is illegitimate and thus not one’s own in the first place. Another problem I faced was in identifying with Dileep Singh. The film’s inspiration is credited to the song from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai. Still I feel it was a slip-up to model Dileep Singh’s character after Guru Dutt’s. Dileep’s poker-faced naivette and the dogged stupidity about himself – as against intellectual detachment or cynicism – fails to get sympathy when he is cheated by his comrades and girlfriend. This character invites being a ‘natural victim’ of university ragging, masochistic politics and betrayals in love. One is not surprised when our protagonist is surprised by the worldly ways of the ‘adults’ around him. Ironically, in a classical la Devdas self-pitying moment (Kashyap here eschewing the modernity of Dev D.), the dying Dileep drags himself to Anuja’s doorsteps who truly loved him.

There are half-a-dozen other characters who justifiably attract your attention for their fine performance and/ or presence (Deepak Dobriyal, Jyoti Dogra, Mukesh Bhatt, Mahie Gill [she does look like Tabu, without her baggage], among others). There is often a mix of surreal (characters from Ramayan walking out of men’s hostel, a mute ardhanareshwar, a lone house in the middle of nowhere), and psychedelic imageries (courtesy: Rajiv Ravi’s camera and Wasiq Khan’s production design), with gritty & realist style (violent ragging and gun-dominated politics on the campus). The psychedelic, surrealist and the realist keep alternating for the length of the film. All of these elements render the film with a very interesting palette but also fill the story with lot of clutter, chaff and banter. This treatment is puzzled and complicated rather than complex and studied. And there is the Shakespearean ‘fool’ (Piyush Mishra) who keeps telling the audience the truth. As a one-act piece, Piyush Mishra is in excellent form singing away the story of disenchantment in post-independence India and also the wider world. But the film’s narrative seldom rises to the ideas he versifies.

It might seem Anurag Kashyap had too many things and ideas on his mind and for some reason felt compelled to put it all in one film.