Understanding the labyrinth that Anurag Kashyap is

Introduction

Inspiration is pivotal to transforming a young musician from a mere instrumentalist to a true artist expressing a unique voice. And where do these roots stem? The central unequivocal source of rejuvenating and endlessly contributing inspiration and ideas is what we see around us: the people, the society. Having said that, cinema unlike the other arts like poetry, painting etc. is a collective art and includes contributions from other artists to make it a completed film and is not the work of a sole artist. Surely however, there are oppositions to this postulate. Francoise Truffaut (one of the fathers of French New Wave) argues that ‘there is one prime force that leads to the creation of the film and that individual guides all the processes of filmmaking’_[1]. This creates a central demand of respect for the director who is to be treated as an independent artist, thus enabling her/him to create a body of work and developing her/his own style. When analysing the Indian narrative, examples of strictly fictional and fictional to the extent of mythical storylines, are frequent. Bollywood is proud to be producing more than 1000 titles a year, heavy on melodrama, romance, action and song and dance - all in the same movie._[2] But is this all that Indian cinema is about?  There is but one Indian New Wave_[3] which defied the tactical similarities of the ‘masala’ genre and attempted to start a different race. Drawing from their French and Italian contemporaries, Satyajit Ray, Hritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen led the movement in the 1960s. But, usually the sad fact of life is that we might be living and experiencing a circumstance, but when shown or confronted with the truth, we refuse to accept. The factors which made this brand of ‘New Wave’ maverick different from the commercial system was: the rejection of the studio system, the realism and the authenticity that these films carried, the rejection of the usual song and dance sequence, and the presentation of the actors as part of a governing space with natural realistic dialogues and setting reflecting largely the socio-political plane of that era._[4] Unsurprisingly, their films weren’t distributed like other films, the marketing was ineffective, suffered insurmountable losses. Many gave up and the parallel movement seemed to have no inherent future. And that is where a change creped in. Anurag Kashyap ran away from his Entomology honors class to Mumbai after watching Bicycle Thieves and decided to make his own films._[5] Completely unaware of the paradigm, he soaked and struggled through the 90’s in the wave of liberalisation in the country, doing absolutely whatever he could’ve done to help his immediate cause.

As Allama Iqbal writes,

खुदी को कर बुलन्द इतना कि हर तकदीर से पहले

खुदा बंदे से खुद पूछे बता तेरी रजा क्या है

And then he got the opportunity to write Satya. The rest is history. The leading film critic, Roger Ebert, calls him ‘leader of a growing independent movement in India’. So WHO is this man? And why all this noise around him? The purpose of studying in detail one man’s contribution to the whole filmmaking community sounds fairly odd. And yet when the reality tells that yes, some tectonic shift has definitely been evoked by this obsolete looking man, he deserves to be understood more than what the surface offers.The purpose of this series of essays is to analyse the ‘Kashyapesque’ wave that followed, to study his body of work and what it did for young aspiring Indian filmmakers and even more importantly, to the layman Indian audiences.

(This piece is a collection of information from various sources that have been listed wherever necessary. There might be areas which are debatable and non-verified and hence the reader should think twice before citing the same.)