Move over, sarson ke khet

The badlands of UP are the locale of choice on screen.

I remember distinctly the time I had to ask someone what Daler Mehndi and Amitabh Bachchan meant when they sang, Sadde naal rahoge te.... There had been such a glut of Punjabi in the filmi and pop music market in the ’90s, I had needed translation for what is now mainstream lingo. As a context-less South Indian, I remember faintly resenting the easy dominance of the Punjab over our national tastes — permeation so complete and insolent, it didn’t need to come with subtitles.

It wasn’t only the music, it was also the images. The sarson ke khet, for instance, were so badly flogged, they should be sore still. Even before Aditya Chopra set Shah Rukh Khan in the middle of the obligatory mustard crop with a mandolin, the yellow fields were something of a symbol. Since then, the landscape — though distorted, candified, glossified — has formed the rural backdrop of choice in our collective cinematic consciousness.

Punjab, however, is conceding space to another milieu. And nothing confirms it like Dabangg: Uttar Pradesh is the new Punjab. Or, to be more precise, eastern UP — the badlands with ubiquitous country pistols, violent university politics; young men roaming the gallis and dusty trails, involved in a complex hierarchy of power — a matrix both dynamic and unchanging. The land of the bhaiyya and the bahubali where societal structures of power are so strong, the law retreats in wary watchfulness.

Tigmanshu Dhulia tried it in 2003 with his low-key Haasil. A love story set in an atmosphere of seething university politics, it didn’t make box-office waves, but it is something of a cult among those who saw it.

Then came the great Vishal Bharadwaj. His Omkara and Ishqiya dripped with the essence of the land, replete with its bawdy, charismatic expressions, its unique flavour. Then, cherry on top, there is Dabangg. Even the name is reflective of attitudes there — not merely power, not just dominance, the word includes a sense of psychological hold over a dominion.

But movies have only a couple of hours to impress our minds. For a detailed, leisurely taste of this culture, you must go to television. To Star Plus’ reigning soap, Pratigya. It is set in Allahabad, and deals most interestingly with power, chauvinism and ideas of respectability. Frequent invocations to Alopi maiyya (a goddess obscure to all but these parts), and sprinkled mentions of Illahabadi localities add considerable texture. With soaps relying so heavily on dialogue, the robust dialect used plays no small part in the success of this series. But even more steeped in the world of eastern UP is Imagine TV’s new soap Gunahon ka Devta. This is, for once, a hero-centric show, supposedly inspired by UP’s famous gangster Shri Prakash Shukla. Hero Avdesh Singh is the ‘ruler’ of Lallanpur, running and directing illegal commerce, influencing authorities, dispensing rough-and-ready justice. The locales are fresh, there is spontaneous outburst of song to the accompaniment of beat and harmonium; the tone is determinedly earthy, sometimes so coarse as to burn the ears of more sheltered citified folk.

This movement to UP could be because of the influx of immense talent from the heartland — Dhulia, Bharadwaj, Abhishek Chaubey, the brothers Anurag and Abhinav Kashyap are all from the cow belt. Not all their movies are set in their home state but the most evocative of them seem to be. It is no coincidence in television either; Pratigya and Gunahon ka Devta share the same writer, Shanti Bhushan, who comes from there as well.

Or, perhaps it’s simply Uttar Pradesh’s time in the sun, ka kehte ho?

[Sheetal Vyas is a Hyderabad-based freelance writer]