Diamonds and bazaars

Illustration/Uday Mohite

No one can blame us for thinking Sanjay Leela Bhansali made Heeramandi primarily to troll historians. Debates around the show have followed a familiar binary. Despair at its lack of relationship to reality versus contempt at the expectation of reality from a director devoted to artifice and fantasy. Neither is wrong, but neither feel right enough. Fantasy and reality do not exist at a chaste distance. They shape each other like dreams and waking, music and lyrics, sexual desire and ‘respectable' society, tawaifs and Hindi cinema.

If we see Heeramandi in the continuum of recent Hindi cinema, so preoccupied with sex, gender and nationhood, its ambitions become piquant.

If Animal is a film in which men are primarily and primally fixated on each other, locked in desire and combat, Heeramandi is its parallel-- a queendom of tawaifs, where women inhabit a world of art, sex, and power and are primarily involved with each other, savaging and saving each other in a war for dominance over cultural, erotic and material capital. Nothing glitters in this bedecked show as much as Manisha Koirala eyes, she is the hardest diamond of all. Nothing burns as much as Sonakshi's avid hatred.

These are autonomous, professional women with little interest in bourgeois morality. But it is a precarious autonomy, a fading bazaar economy dependent on a fading customer - the pusillanimous nawabs - confronting the challenge of modern technologies and colonial moralities. How can they assert themselves in the impending nation, as both tawaifs and citizens? In a way the show wants to narrate a history of tawaifs as a history of India, in a masala format.

At times Heeramandi works. There is a great scene with Shekhar Suman, where he recounts to Manisha Koirala Sonakshi Sinha's criminal career. With admiration for her rival she says, "alas, my daughters have none of this talent." They both burst out laughing. There is occasional image drama. A mehendified Koirala entering with handmaidens holding her dress, bride and queen. Koirala lies back, covering her eyes with jewels. Occasionally the monochromatic sets make you gasp. In the final patriotic song, Bhansali delivers the masala movie's visceral emotions and goosebumps.

The problem with Heeramandi is not that it is too masala but too little, without masala cinema's emotional saturation and variety items. Bhansali has 8 luxurious hours in which to spin an intricate tale but he is too fixated on the intricacy of zardozi. The Urdu is like Monopoly Money. People say muaf and maaf in one line and read books left to right. Nukhtas crash around like drunken birds in a haveli, landing on wrong words, right words, or merely on curtains, mistaken for sequins. Alamzeb deserves ever meme about her. Fardeen Khan is steadfastly bad. Time is filled by making people walk and talk like Sohrab Modi reading the news at slow speed.

Like the tawaifs Bhansali needs to find a way to re-frame his form for contemporary times. His struggle is real but not in evidence. We accept that Bollywood, not history, is Bhansali's reference point. But Heeramandi feels like only his own films are his reference point, a hermetic Leela land. Scenes, images, meet-cutes, even the beauty, feels recycled from previous films, sometimes embarrassingly so. It is one thing to fetishise tawaifs, ghararas, gota and gauze. But the issue here feels like Bhansali has fetishized himself.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com