Heeramandi
Drama War & Politics Hindi
The scheming Mallikajaan rules over an elite house of courtesans — but a new rival threatens her reign as rebellion brews in British-ruled India.
| Cast: | Manisha Koirala, Sonakshi Sinha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Sharmin Segal, Sanjeeda Sheikh, Richa Chadha, Taha Shah Badussha, Farida Jalal, Shekhar Suman, Adhyayan Suman, Fardeen Khan |
|---|---|
| Director: | Sanjay Leela Bhansali |
| Camera: | Mahesh Limaye, Sudeep Chatterjee |
All Guild Reviews of Heeramandi
Glossy TV Soap Opera
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series flunks in every department, bar opulence.
With Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar—the new eight-episode miniseries about the life of courtesans, set in the eponymous district of pre-independence Lahore—Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been handed the biggest budget Netflix has ever greenlit for an Indian series. By industry estimates, at over ₹200 crore (about $24 million), it’s more than double what it spent on the highly-awaited second season of Sacred Games, Netflix’s first-ever Indian original. That’s huge. More so as budgets have dried up across the country, with the streaming wars—and as a result, the Golden Age of TV—waning.
A Spotify Review
Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s big-budget streaming debut, is yet another high-profile Netflix failure. A summation and culmination of Bhansali’s lifelong ambitions, the show represents everything that is wrong with his sensibilities and style-over-substance storytelling. We discuss the show’s flawed understanding of feminism, aestheticisation of female suffering, and haphazard structure. We also talk about why the immaculate visuals and costumes that Bhansali is known for don’t contribute to his narratives.
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