Stepping out of Kotha Factory!

Why does watching Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi feel like work? Thankfully, it was work (for me)!

You can sense, or it appears common sense, that Sanjay Leela Bhansali—separately credited as creator, director, executive producer, and for screenplay, music of Netflix’s Heeramandi—has never been to Lahore. The setting of his eight-part series.

Wherein the bookstore is called Lahore. As is the restaurant. Heeramadi, I’m told, is nothing like the dingy red-light area, around a grain market, in the 1940s. 

Even with language, the show’s possibly more Lucknow, along with mention of Malihabad’s mangoes, than Lahore, capital of West Punjab, bordering Amritsar. 

This has evidently pissed off few Lahoris online. Can tell why. Nothing’s ever got my goat than the way Bombay got bamboozled on Apple TV’s Shantaram (2022). Such culturally blind appropriation feels personal. 

That said, Bhansali (Devdas, Gangubai Kathiawadi) was born to build film fantasies—literally, brick by brick, with his production designers (Subrata Chakroborty, Amit Ray), as with Heeramandi. Equally, a kotha/courtesan dream, for a set-and-costume drama. 

If realism alone is your measure of achievement, then why seek the movies, let alone a Bhansali series!

Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali

What might befuddle some Pakistanis more, perhaps, is the historical backdrop of Heeramandi. As per my old reading of M K Aziz’s Murder of History (Vanguard Books, Lahore), Pakistanis aren’t taught about the 1942 Quit India Movement. Because the Muslim League didn’t participate in it. 

Heeramandi, on the face of it, is a song and dance about “ishq” and “inquilab”, “mulk” and “mohabbat”, lust and betrayal. 

A girl, Alamzeb, from the kotha collective—debutant Sharmin Segal, giving off very Alaya F plus Shriya Pilgaonkar vibes—falls for a super-fit, young nawab, Tajdar. 

He’s an underground revolutionary, during Quit India Movement. That’s actor Taaha Shah, who you would’ve admiringly noticed in the Zee5, Mughal, semi-historical, Taj (2023). 

The courtesan/tawaif women appear to be emotionally aligned against the British. In particular, the winsome Aditi Rao Hydari’s character, who seduces to infiltrate their ranks. 

This is besides the internal politics of Heeramandi itself, with a new tawaif (Sonakshi Sinha; solid), taking on Manisha Koirala as the ‘madam’ of her own mansion. None come across as jarringly loud or embarrassingly coy, in this make-believe world, from nowhere.  

There’s suitable ruggedness to Koirala’s demeanour—for someone, who’s been through highs and lows of Heeramandi. Something Alia Bhatt couldn’t equally recreate in Gangubai. She made up for it in other ways. 

What’s it about Heeramandi, though, that it felt like grunt work, in my head, every time I thought of clicking on it? That’s because Bhansali banks on excess for success. 

And you just have to get into the mood—knowing that it’s gonna be seven hours plus! As against three hours of bedazzling lights in a dark hall, when the plot is still sufficient.

The series is like getting to a party, where they’re not serving your drink. You pick what you get. The first gulp (about 20 minutes) is hard. But you ease in, slowly, slowly... The drink does the trick, and it stops to matter, once you start to gently schmooze. 

However boring, otherwise—the party feels consistent with expectations. So is Heeramandi, with all of Bhansali’s films, thus far. The director is more a musician—not just literally—but as a filmmaker, who’s simply mastered a genre. 

You don’t go to a jazz concert, hoping for hip-hop. Play his show on ‘x1.5’ on Netflix, if you find it slow, it’ll seem odd/off. This doesn’t happen, usually. 

Freeze any frame and you sense why any other filmmaker might find it impossible to similarly rehash a severely humourless, dated Islamicate/tawaif culture, that died in Bollywood, by the early 1980s (Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan). J P Dutta remade Umrao Jaan in 2006, with Aishwarya Rai. It was impossible to sit through. 

And I’m sure incomparable budgets wasn’t the only point. Although it is, with Heeramandi, pegged at Rs 350 crore! Much of it spent on the actual making of the series, so you can see it. 

Meaning, the director, plus production. Rather than reigning stars—the top face here, Sonakshi Sinha, I can’t imagine taking home more than a couple of crores.

For whatever it’s worth, this is art, pieced together with rare conviction. Bharat Shah funded Devdas (2002). He never made a huge film after. 

Aditya Birla Group’s Applause produced Bhansali’s Black (2005). They disappeared from film production, only to reincarnate themselves, decades later. Sony Pictures entered India with Bhansali’s Saawariya (2007). It took them a while to re-enter desi films!

Netflix bet the biggest on Bhansali. They will view the results. I’m told it’s topping the streamer’s global charts. They’d similarly pumped in several crores on Baahubali, for a series, and backed off, after watching the rushes. 

Besides detailed work on jewellery, costumes, you can sense why women, in particular, love Bhansali’s period films. For all the trolling, I know no male director, with that convincingly strong a female gaze. 

Which changes everything about an entire show about grey women on the male mart. Haven’t revisited Mughal-e-Azam, Mandi, even Pakeezah, from that PoV; pretty certain, the gaze there is primarily male. 

So, yeah, as you can tell, I just zoomed out of Bhansali ‘kotha factory’ from a fake Lahore. You can’t be in Agra, or a desi on Netflix, and skip the Taj Mahal, no? Well, you can. I can’t!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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