Dhadak 2

Not all love stories are about roses and wine, even when these come from the house of gossamer romance, Dharma Productions. Many love tales come laden with thorns, especially when the lovers try to cross the class divide — even more pressingly, the caste divide. Thomas Jefferson’s famous words, “when law becomes injustice, resistance becomes your duty”, set the tone of the film. The very first scene establishes that despite two exceptionally good-looking actors, Triptii Dimri and Siddhant Chaturvedi, helming the film, standard notions of romance will take a backseat. ‘Dhadak 2’, the spiritual sequel to ‘Dhadak’, walks the same line of deeply-entrenched caste prejudices and is once again a remake, this time of Mari Selvaraj’s Tamil film. Since one consciously chose not to watch the 2018 ‘Pariyerum Perumal’, comparisons are out of bounds. So, while we can’t say this Shazia Iqbal directorial is as searing, it does cut you through and quick.

A little group, sitting outside their tiny homes, is swapping stories. The tone is civil, but the matter at hand, clearly hypothetical, is deadly serious– about a group of starving humans turning into cannibals, and a victim who gets devoured. Someone says, ‘agar Dalit hota toh bach jaata, koi chhoota tak nahin’ (If it was a Dalit, no one would have touched him). This line hits hard. Or, it should have. But it stays a throwaway, and we don’t really feel the impact as much as we should have. That single dialogue encapsulates centuries of caste-discrimination and exploitation and the almost inhuman resilience that a group of Indian citizens have been forced to live with. But in Shazia Iqbal’s ‘Dhadak 2’, we hear it, and before we could absorb the enormous weight of it, it’s gone.

Flush with pride from having joined law school, Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi), the first in his Dalit family to attend college, brings home a problem from class. He opens it up for neighbourhood discussion—a group of stranded people eat each other in a desperate bid for survival: what would the law say? The residents of Bhim Nagar are aghast. But one man examines it differently. “We’d be fine," he says. “They wouldn’t eat us.” A woman chimes in: “They definitely won’t eat adivasis.” Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, a Hindi remake of Pariyerum Perumal, takes a great deal from Mari Selvaraj’s superb 2018 Tamil film. I don’t remember this scene, though. It’s a throwaway joke, but a telling one. Unlike most Hindi films about caste, which either tiptoe around the issue or are boringly instructional, Dhadak 2 can imagine how people who’ve seen oppression their whole lives might turn it into gallows humour.

SHAZIA IQBAL’S Dhadak 2 stands on dented shoulders. Like its spiritual predecessor, Dhadak (2018) — adapted from Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) — it too borrows the contours from another language film, Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018). This baffling practice of sharing genesis with acclaimed sources renders the franchise open to closer scrutiny and resistant to unbiased engagement. Observations are accompanied by comparisons, and every question heads in a similar direction: did it improve on the primary material? With the first film, the query was easy to resolve. Shashank Khaitan’s Dhadak reduced Sairat’s caste struggle to a homegrown class difference, making even the impending tragedy feel facile. Iqbal’s film, however, puts forth a more complicated proposition. Hers is a more faithful rendition of the original and by virtue of that, a rare mainstream Hindi film to tackle caste politics with central force. Dhadak 2’s distinction then is reiteration — an audacious task still, reflected in the 19 cuts the film accrued from the CBFC, ranging from blurring of casteist slurs to references to caste. The certification board’s cageyness has the most strident representation in the opening disclaimer that claims everything in the film to be fictional — the city it is based in, the depicted violence, mentions of suicide, etc; the denial is no different from Hindi cinema’s long-standing propensity of looking away from caste-based issues. Emerging from this darkness, Iqbal’s film offers a course-correction.

Izzat. A loaded word that, in most parts of Indian society, sits heavy on women. Women need to dress a certain way, behave in a manner that is deemed fit by men (and also other women) and mingle sparingly with those of the opposite gender, mostly under the cognisance of the family. Men claim to be the upholders of izzat, but their actions — no matter how unlawful, bigoted or discriminatory — don’t seem to tarnish it in any way. This, unfortunately, is the truth of a large demographic of our population, fed as it is with archaic, often illegal notions of caste discrimination and pervasive gender roles. The cock-a-snook attitude that Dhadak 2 throws at these ideas and practices hits hard — “bohot hard”. It is a mere coincidence that Siddhant Chaturvedi, who rose as MC Sher in Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy — yet another story of a marginalised talent fighting (or rapping) his way to the top — plays the leading man in this Shazia Iqbal-directed film.

There’s a dialogue by hero Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi) to heroine Vidhi (Triptii Dimri) that goes, ‘Gehri neend mein ho.’ It is like being awakened from deep slumber when director Shazia Iqbal brings Hindi-medium, backward caste Neelesh from the ‘Bheem baja dhol band’ into a law college. It is hard-hitting and if you’re prepared for it, there’s enough going on to draw you in. Neelesh has an interview. There are friends who bring him a pair of shoes. A feisty chawl mother (Anubha Fatehpuria) gives him last-minute instructions, “Listen to your head but speak from the heart.” Ansari (Zakir Hussain), the Principal of the law college, who doesn’t want the reservation quota boy to waste time on ‘Jai Bheem’ politics on the campus. Ahirwar, a surname almost like a slur.