A graying Ramadhir Singh (director Tigmanshu Dhulia in a performance that ought to make other directors leap to cast him), told by his son JP that he was watching DDLJ, serves him a dismissal that is somehow both weary and brutal: “ Tumse ho nahi payega”.
Quiet familial grief at a man’s funeral is swept into another pitch by the soaring, tinny splendour of Teri Meherbaniyan. In fact, Hindi cinema is the reference point for everything in this world. It is a brilliant tactic, and one that reveals the surety of Kashyap’s grasp of his audience: since the Ekta Kapoor universe is a synonym for fakeness (at least to anyone who watches Anurag Kashyap films), Wasseypur gets automatically coded as ‘real’.Īll the investment in historical-sociological detail that follows is meant to cement that belief, that this is the evocation of a real world – the voiceover that begins grandiosely by recounting the history of coal-mining in the Dhanbad-Jharia belt of Bihar (later Jharkhand) and then narrows its focus to the hard-scrabble battles of two warring families, the barrage of dates, the documentary footage, the marking of place through houses and clothes and the much-touted ‘unapologetic’ language the characters speak and the marking of time quietly through gadgets (fridge, vaccuum cleaner, pager) or more vocally through Hindi film songs. Right from the opening of Part 1, when the camera pulls away from the brightly artificial world of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thhi to the dimly lit room in which a joint family is gathered to watch it, the film effortlessly positions itself as ‘authentic’. There is no denying that Gangs of Wasseypur is an exceptionally clever film.
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