Your world is your research

The first of the three stories in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha ( LSD , 2010) starts out deceptively funny. Set in north India, a film student has to trick his girlfriend’s grouchy father and testosterone-filled brother into approving of him. He does this by offering the father a part in his tacky diploma film Mehendi Lagake Rakhna , an ode to his idol ‘Adi sir’. Eventually, the young couple has to elope in filmie style, channelling their inner ‘Raj’ and ‘Simran’. At no point in this love story does Banerjee prepare you for what happens next. At the dead of the night, the newly-weds are dragged out of a car and mercilessly hacked to death. The images are dark and camerawork deliberately jerky. All we can see are the brother’s eyes as he batters them with what looks like a hockey stick… until their shrieks go silent.

“I was at there PVR when the film released. This family sitting in front of me had just ordered pizza. When the poor kids are beheaded, this man puts the pizza down and says, ‘ Yeh kya film hai ? Pura pizza hi bigaad diya ’ (What kind of movie is this, it has ruined my pizza),” recalls Banerjee, perfectly impersonating a Punjabi accent.

The 45-year-old filmmaker has always stood apart for his unsettling and undiluted representation of modern India and its realities. In LSD it was honour killings. In Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) it was Delhi’s land sharks. If we’ve been trained to believe that Bollywood equals escapism, Banerjee has proved the opposite can also be true. “My films have usually confronted people. In India there is a very limited tradition of consuming something that makes you uncomfortable. In LSD , when you see a mirror of your own life, it makes you fidgety and uncomfortable,” he explains.

Banerjee’s new film, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! — that Punjabi family will be happy to know — is unlikely to ruin anyone’s appetite. Instead it is a good old-fashioned yarn that he has nursed for years now. It gives expression to his childhood diet of Bengali literature. “The house that I grew up in is a stack of books. The house that I live in now is essentially a mountain of books,” he says, with a laugh. Writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay holds a special pride of place on his bookshelf. The author’s greatest and most enduring gift to Bengali literature has been the dhoti-clad criminal investigator Byomkesh Bakshi, whom he created in 1932. “We were told that Byomkesh is for kids who are 14-plus. That’s the surest way to get a 12-year-old to pick up the book. You could see Byomkesh books are deep, they go into the relationship between a man and a woman, they are a little more sensual and a little more complex. Feluda (by Satyajit Ray) was written keeping only children and pre-teens in mind. They were moral stories. But Sharadindu was writing for adults,” he says, wide-eyed. Like a fanboy he rattles off, “I’ve read every Sharadindu story. His historical and social novels, his bhooter boi (ghost stories), his horror stories… I still read his occult stories.” With almost child-like enthusiasm he asks, “Do you know that Sharadindu has written stories about pravasi Bengalis (Bengalis with roots outside West Bengal) in Gole market (Delhi)?”

Filmmaker Kanu Behl, whose debut film Titli (2014) was produced by Banerjee, has been working with the director for several years now and considers him a mentor. Behl was an assistant director on Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye (2008). “We’ve been hearing about Byomkesh since Oye Lucky days. The initial drafts of the film were different from what he’s made now. I’m guessing that Dibakar knew something was missing,” he says. In hindsight, Banerjee feels that had he made this film earlier, he may not have been able to pull it off. “I think this is the right time to make it because I couldn’t have made it this well without the experience and knowledge of what to do. Byomkesh is a very smartly planned, medium-budget Bollywood film. It doesn’t throw money, it invests in planning and research,” he says.

The first and only Byomkesh made for the Hindi audience was the memorable Doordarshan series with actor Rajit Kapoor. In Bengal, the literary sleuth has had a continued presence with numerous Bangla versions. For purists who have been consuming Byomkesh stories for decades, Banerjee admits that his re-imagining of the character may come as a bit of shock, especially the contemporary rock music he’s used in the soundtrack. “When you try something new, you have to be prepared for a reaction that’s new,” he says.

Actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who plays the lead role, was instructed to read all 32 of Sharadindu’s books as preparation but was told to stay clear of the film versions. When he ended up watching them after Banerjee had finished filming, he understood why. “This is very different. You would have never seen a Byomkesh like this. This is Dibakar’s Byomkesh, keeping the essence of Sharadindu alive,” says Rajput.

By all accounts, Banerjee is said to be unusually composed and patient on set. “In all my years of working with him, I must have seen him lose his temper just once or twice,” says Behl. But he has a reputation of being a compulsive planner. Since this film is set in ’40s British-occupied Calcutta, a city he doesn’t know as deeply as Delhi, he began his research almost two years before the film went on floors. Last year, he got in touch with Iftekhar Ahsan, whose company Walking Tours conducts heritage walks around the city. “One walk led to another, till he had exhausted all my routes and there was nothing left to show,” says Ahsan. “Dibakar is quite anal about little details. He would suddenly stop and ask, ‘Was this building there in the 1940s or do you think this lamppost existed back then?’ It was very interesting for me, but also challenging because he’s very well-versed in Bengali literature, which I am not.”

Actor Anand Tiwari, who plays Ajit, Byomkesh’s sidekick in the film, was astounded by the meticulous detailing that went into every frame of the film. Shot in some of the city’s busiest commercial areas, Banerjee had wiped out all traces of elements that did not fit the ’40s. “He had spoken to local authorities much before we arrived on set. He knew exactly how much of the road we were going to need and what trams to use. He would pick the exact dhoti and the shoes and socks to go with it. There are few directors, especially in Bollywood, who pay such great attention to detail,” he says.

Through a lens deeply

The surest way to understand Banerjee is through his films. They are by-products of his childhood memories, literary influences and silent observations made from his office in central Mumbai. Though we meet at the Yash Raj Films’ office in Andheri, Banerjee’s strong distaste for the area where the bulk of his filmie comrades thrive is now common knowledge. “Your world is your research. If you don’t get up in the morning and watch the world, then you’re closing the easiest, cheapest, and most fascinating book,” he says. His first two films — Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye — are proof of that. The precision with which he nails Delhi, an important character in both films, can be credited to his upbringing in Karol Bagh in west Delhi. He studied at Bal Bharti Public School, where he befriended halwais and traders. Studying at an “RSS dominated” school, he quickly picked up Punjabi and a fair amount of Haryanvi. While his childhood in Delhi might have anchored him to the Capital, his world “exploded” when he joined the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. His stint there was cut short because he was expelled for incomplete coursework, but he remains indebted to the college.

hose who’ve worked closely with Banerjee say that his knowledge of different art forms gives him an edge over others. He has a successful career in advertising behind him, a deep understanding of architecture and is a gifted sketch artist (he sketched the poster of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! ). He was pushed into learning an instrument at a young age, as his mother and sister are classical music teachers. “My mother’s dream was that she and my sister would sing on stage and I would play the tabla,” he says. Though he never considered music as career, he jokes that it saved him from being bullied in a Punjabi neighbourhood. “Some big Punjabi guy would take me in his arms and say, ‘ Yeh Bangali yaar tabla bahut achcha bajaata hai. Isko tu kuch mat bol (This Bengali plays the tabla very well. Don’t harm him in any way)’.”

Banerjee’s anecdote about watching LSD with the audience takes me back to a similar incident I witnessed while watching his 2013 film Shanghai , a bleak tale on urban development. The title ‘Shanghai’ is a metaphor for the aspirations we harbour to surpass China. This eluded the two teenagers seated beside me. They patiently waited through the entire film for Shanghai, the city, to appear. And when it didn’t, they declared, rather peeved, “ Yeh Dibakar bahut hi intellectual hai .” It’s an accusation he’s heard once too often. And judging by his vigorous head-shake, he strongly refutes it. “Usually when we call someone an intellectual, it means that he’s obscure and boring. I might have screwed up on a scene here and there, but generally as a filmmaker I don’t think I am boring. If they mean that Dibakar is thick and impenetrable, I don’t agree with it.”

He may deny being an intellectual, but he’s without doubt intelligent. With six films behind him, he has never repeated a genre, which is no small achievement in a Bollywood that thrives on tried and tested formulas. Behl adds, “My first job outside film school was with Dibakar and it was massively interesting. He has a different way of doing things. What surprised me was how the same film could be made differently in terms of process.”

The only criticism, if one can call it that, thrown at Banerjee is that while each of his films is well reviewed, they cater to a niche audience. Banerjee agrees but doesn’t intend to address it. He has a larger vision. “At its core, I’d like to change the taste of viewers and show that this also is possible. This can also be entertaining... And look, a new road has opened.”

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