Total Recall: Bombay, Gangsters and Satya

Title: Bullets Over Bombay

Author: Uday Bhatia

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 243

Price: Rs 399 (paperback)

Till the early 1990s, Indian gangsters had a reputation of being Robin Hoods. The likes of Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, and Varadarajan Mudaliar were smugglers, contract killers, and lent muscle to political parties, but they were also benefactors of the poor, protectors of the helpless. As a result, their representation in cinema was also often sympathetic — such as Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) in Deewar (1975) or Sakthivel “Velu” Naicker (Kamal Haasan) in the Tamil film Nayakan (1987), which was remade in Hindi as Dayavan (1988). But all this would change forever in the early 1990s, as gangsters such as Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon got involved with terror plots and played a major role in the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts.

Despite this, Bollywood’s romance with the underworld would continue — though it would emerge from the duality of Vat 69-sipping smugglers of the 1970s and 1980s and Hamletian Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) of Agneepath (1990) to something grittier and more realistic. Perhaps no film represents this change more than Satya (1997). Directed by Ram Gopal Varma and starring Urmila Matondkar, Shefali Shah, J D Chakravarthy, and Manoj Bajpayee in a breakout role, the film would go on to define the post-liberalisation gangster film. Varma would go on to direct and produce several more gangster films, such as Company (2002), Sarkar (2005), and D Company (2013), but none of these would be able to recreate the aesthetic appeal of Satya.

Uday Bhatia’s new book on the making of Satya gives us a ringside view of how this ground-breaking film was made and why we should still watch it. Writing a book-length study of an important film is a popular activity for Indian journalists and academics — one is immediately reminded of Sidharth Bhatia’s book on Amar Akbar Anthony, Anupama Chopra’s book on Sholay, Vinay Lal’s book on Deewar, Krishna Gopalan’s book on Don and Jai Arjun Singh on Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Bhatia, who is a film critic for Mint Lounge, makes a significant contribution to this popular genre, but also distinguishes himself with some great research and writing.

Bullets Over Bombay is divided into seven chapters, each of which is a well-considered essay on various aspects of the film. “The Moment of Satya”, “The Hindi Film Gangster”, and “Bombay on Film” provide us with a glimpse of the socio-political and cultural context of the film and locate it in the larger backdrop of Hindi gangster films or films on Bombay (Mumbai). Bhatia traces the origins of Satya to noir classics of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Kismet (1943), which made a superstar out of Ashok Kumar and gave legitimacy to the anti-hero character, as well as Baazi (1951), Taxi Driver (1954), Howrah Bridge (1958), and Kala Bazaar (1960). He takes us through the decades and shows us how the gangster film evolved to darker narratives such as Hathyar (1989), Parinda (1989) and Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin (1996). It is also filled with nuggets of information that cinephiles cherish — such as the title Satya might have been inspired by Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983).

Similarly, in the chapter on how Bombay is represented in Hindi cinema, he traces various influences on Satya, such as how the Mumbai tapori dialect spoken by Bhiku Mhatre and his gangster friends can trace its lineage to the comic dialogues of Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony. Bhatia, of course, is very good at this — one could look at his essay on the history of censorship of Indian cinema or a recent one on how Indian war films have changed over the decades (both published in Mint) . However, what this also does is demonstrate that a “ground-breaking” work must deal with the “anxiety of influence” and locate itself in its milieu. Film historian Sharmistha Gooptu does something similar for even a self-consciously ground-breaking film such as Pather Panchali (1955) by locating it in the Bengali film industry.

Bhatia has also gained access to some of the key players behind Satya, such as Bajpayee and Anurag Kashyap — both Bollywood A-listers — as well as Varma, Saurabh Shukla, and others. (Keep your eyes peeled for the description of Varma’s office, which matches his eccentric personality.) The writer makes us aware that almost all departments on Satya’s sets had teams of two — it was written by Kashyap and Shukla, shot by Gerard Hooper and Mazhar Kamran, edited by Apurva Asrani and Bhanodaya, and its music was composed by Vishal Bharadwaj and Sandeep Chowta. This reminds us of the essentially collaborative nature of filmmaking. There is an entire chapter devoted to the team that made Satya, and the film not only gave Bollywood the new-age gangster film but also some of the best talent who would go on to change the industry itself.

This book is an essential read not only for cinephiles and researchers but anyone who loves Hindi cinema.   

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published in 2020. He teaches at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat