Here I am, quiet in the head, walking slowly down the aisle into the good night, worrying slightly that the 2 hours 50 minutes of a relentless assault of reality that we have just been through may have terrified my little cousin who I had brought along to watch Ramgopal Varma’s Satya at Delhi’s PVR, India’s newly opened first mutlplex. I am about 18. The kid with me is around 8. This is 1998. I should be worried. Some films can hit you really hard. My uncle may have felt the same about me when we’d gone together for a late night show of Bandit Queen four years ago. While the ‘torchie’ (the usher) was still pointing us towards our seat at Sangam – we were slightly late — my head had suddenly jolted itself backwards hearing the words, “Mein hoon Phoolan behnnchod” echoing from the speakers. We weren’t used to watching on the shiny, happy Indian silver screen violent nightmares that pass for reality among this nation’s unwashed under-classes. I couldn’t get sleep that Bandit Queen night.
Satya was an unsentimental, urban film about the Bombay underworld, its connections with real-estate, show-business and politics, its relations with the law, police and the government: all of it falling beautifully into place. Bandit Queen was a rural biopic of a Chambal dacoit Phoolan Devi from a deprived, battered lower caste. When Varma asked actor Manoj Bajpai to play the title role of Satya, he had told him, “I want to make my Bandit Queen.” He probably meant a film as raw and empathetic in its approach to crime and punishment. He had managed to achieve a little more.
Satya was obviously not the first film on the Bombay cop or the mafia. There had been plenty. The one that came close to it perhaps was Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989). Varma had first approached playwright Vijay Tendulkar to script the dialogues for his film. In 1983, Tendulkar had written the screenplay for Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (based on DN Panvalkar’s short story Surya). It was a dark, edgy drama about a Bombay cop who gets sucked into a rotten policing system. It was at par if not better than Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, starring Om Puri in Al Pacino’s character. Fifteen years later, Satya (The Truth) in its marvellous complexity and scope had completed the circle initiated by Ardh Satya (Half Truth).
Tendulkar couldn’t write Satya’s dialogues. He was unwell. Saurabh Shukla got hired instead. Shukla had worked on the underworld thriller, Sudhir Mishra’s Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin (1996), set amongst gangsters over one night in Bombay. In Satya, Shukla also got immortalised as the don’s fat, bald, trusted consigliore Kallu mama (uncle), made famous by the song named after his character, with a gang of Kingfisher guzzlers dancing to, “Goli maar bheje mein. Bheja shor karta hai. Bheje ki sunega toh marega Kallu. Mama… Kallu mama”: Shoot your noisy brains off. You listen to your brain. You’ll go down the drain.
Gulzar had written the rap type lyrics. Vishal Bharadwaj had composed the soundtrack for a film that seemed like it could have done without one. But it couldn’t have. The songs were used as a smart Bollywood device to create relief before and after a series of tense, dramatic moments, or to help establish passage of time – show Satya meeting, greeting, developing interest and then falling in love with his next-door neighbour Vidya (Urmila Matondkar). Done, khallas. Yet, this romance was genuine. It sounded even better in Bhupinder’s gravelly voice: “Badalon se kaat-kaatke… Yeh mujhe kya ho gaya.”
Manoj Bajpai didn’t eventually play Satya. Actor JD Chakravarthy stole that part. In a movie that is named after its central character, it was Bajpai as the likeable Bhiku Mhatre who stole the show. Bajpai went on to establish himself as an unlikely but bona fide Bollywood leading man. Chakravarthy almost fell off the map after playing minor roles in movies of Varma and others, directing a Satya like flick of his own (Durga), finding a lot more work in the Telugu film industry.
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Bhiku is a local don who’s practically grown up inside the Bombay underworld. Satya is a co-inmate he recruits from jail. Their chemistry is compelling. Satya is the quiet, calming polar opposite to the hot-headed, erratic Bhiku. This quality charms the hell out of the emotionally child-like Mob boss. Satya rises almost instantly to become the don’s chief adviser, the brain behind the gang. He talks mostly with his eyes, smiles sparingly, more often than not drops crisp one-liners on life and their trade.
Chakravarthy said he didn’t need to do much to play Satya’s character: “I was trying to play Ramu (Varma, the film’s director). If he wasn’t a filmmaker, he would’ve become a politician or god-man.” Satya is an atheist. We don’t know his last name. He is a fresh migrant to Bombay. His accent suggests Hindi is not his first language. We’re never told where he’s coming from. For the most part he doesn’t care about where he’s going.
His gravitas is slightly misleading. If anything, between him and his brash boss, he is the more reckless one. Satya’s counsel is the reason Bhiku’s gang gets into war, first with a rival faction, then with the political master, and eventually with the police.
Guru Narayan is Bhiku’s counterpart — both of them used to work under the menacing Bhau Thakurdas Jhawle (Govind Namdeo). Bhau became an elected municipal corporator, founded his own political party and peacefully divided his extortion trade between his two protégés. Both groups knew each other’s limits. So did the police. You can see the film from any of the four perspectives. It will make sense. The last time I saw Satya I got mildly teary eyed watching the upright Bombay police commissioner, Paresh Rawal as Amod Shukla (probably named after the Delhi cop Amod Kanth), get assassinated right outside his door. Empathy is complete.
There was enough meat in it for Varma to patiently milk every element of his material further into fine films on their own: the rivalling dons, Company (2001); the cop, Shimit Amin’s Ab Tak Chhappan (2004) that Varma produced; or the politician, Sarkar (2005), which was an adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Satya, to search for a western equivalent if you must, was more ‘Martin Scorsese’, though every major country has had its own ‘Satya’: City Of God (Brazil, 2002), Tsotsi (South Africa, 2005), Gomorrah (Italy, 2008)…
For a film this richly scripted, it’s remarkable that there was no written screenplay when they began the film’s principal photography during the Mumbai monsoons in 1997. A lot of the performances and scenes and dialogues were improvised upon on the set or location. Varma knew his characters. He had the germ of an idea. He said he was once chatting with a businessman who was telling him about how a fellow builder was going about his normal day – he woke up, attended to phone calls, had breakfast etc – when he stepped out of the house and was shot dead. Varma said he was quite bored of the conversation and it got him thinking about what the same day had been like for the assassin.
Satya is that engaging crime thriller set before and after the killings. As the film’s introduction puts it, it is about that intermediate, porous space that gets created when the divide between the rich and the poor is so strong. It is about the underworld. Most people in Bombay saw in the screen in front of them a mirror to their own city.
Satya may have been their neighbour. Bhiku was a devoted family man with two kids. His yappy Marathi wife (stunningly portrayed by Shefali Chhaya) is the woman they would have met shopping at the kirana store down the street. Bhau was most certainly their local municipal rep., one of the many eye sores you find on illegal hoardings that dot the landscape of Mumbai still. Advocate Chandrakant Mule (Makarand Deshpande) was that local lawyer blessed with confidence and cunning to swing anything in the court room. Khandilkar (Aditya Shrivastava) was their cop burning with impatience over a humanitarian justice system that often frees its criminals but ties up hands of the police instead.
Unemployed young boys in central Mumbai, Bhiku’s main territory – Dadar, Parel— who could hit and run for a small sum promised over a call from Dubai were probably sons of old workers who had lost their jobs with the shutting down of textile mills by the early ‘90s. The producer who got gunned down was the music label boss Gulshan Kumar.
Journalist Meenal Baghel who was then editing the city daily Newsline for the Indian Express said with Satya, she was basically watching stories she would play up in her paper being played out on the screen. The sight of recognition was surreal. I hadn’t moved to Bombay yet. For me and a lot of my friends back in Delhi, Satya held the same kind of mythological appeal that must have left filmgoers spellbound with Sholay in the previous generation.
We broke the film down to favourite scenes (stampede during the show of JP Dutta’s Border at Bandra’s Gaiety-Galaxy; shootout at the construction site), minor characters (Chander, Jagga, Yeda, music director Romu Sagar…), trademark moves (Bhiku vigorously dancing with his lower lip placed behind the front teeth; him casually running his hand over his hair with a lit cigarette between his fingers), and choicest dialogues in UP/Bambaiya twang that would punctuate our daily conversations. Sometimes these things had a context: “Chhota sa lagate hain, littil littil” (coaxing someone to get a drink). “Abee drink banana sikkha hoyga” (while making the drink). And “Mumbai ka king kaun? Bhiku Mhatre!” (after having downed that drink).
Okay, we followed no such ritual. We weren’t quite some cultist morons, merely regular movie buffs. We just said it because we felt like it: “Amitavachchan”, “Shabbo ko try kiya, kya?” Shabbo is this popular prostitute that the gang’s lawyer Chandrakant had bedded the night before in Pila House, which I later read in Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, is a Bambaiya corruption for Play House that used to be a theatre once, it is a seedy den in Kamathipura on Grant Road now. None of this back-story about a 10-second clip has any relevance to the story of Satya. It is casual asides such as these that help a movie continually grow ever so gently inside your head 15 years after you first watched that film.
Satya is hardly an undiscovered gem. Even if only a few from the audiences worldwide who collectively spent over Rs 2,300 crore to watch Slumdog Millionaire read a little more about Danny Boyle’s multiple Academy Award winner, they would be able to tell how the British film couldn’t have got Bombay so right without visual referencing from Satya. Boyle rightly acknowledged the influence.
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At the time of its release, the critical thumbs up for Satya were unanimous. Some of the film reviewers weren’t entirely sure of its likely run at the box-office. The apprehension had surely nothing to do with the film’s genre. Mob operas like Chopra’s Parinda (1989), Mani Rathnam’s Nayakan (1987) or Mukul Anand’s Agneepath (1990), had a cult following of sorts in India. They were headlined by top movie stars: Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Kamal Haasan, Amitabh Bachchan….
Satya had two brilliantly cast unknown faces. They were supposed to be regular boys in Bombay. The city was the central character — right from the opening scene of Chakravarthy emerging from VT station, lost in a crowd, down to the climax picturised in both Girgaum and Juhu waterfronts. Gerard Hooper, a university professor of cinematography in Philadelphia, had shot the film for about 40 days. Mazhar Kamran completed the shoot. The camera fully embraced the open, congested spaces. It shied away from dark, closed interiors and fake, expressionistic shadow lighting, the usual markers of ‘noir’. Yet, ‘Mumbai noir’as a genre gained currency with the release and subsequent commercial success of Satya. The film made within Rs 2 crore apparently took home Rs 15.5 crore, close to 750 per cent profit: by definition a major blockbuster. Diamond merchant Bharat Shah, himself known to have had some links with the underworld, must have been pleased with his investment.
Satya’s box-office numbers helped Varma open a fresh fount of young, untested filmmaking talents — a lot of them deluded by one-line movie ideas, many of them sparklingly bright, almost all of them coming from outside the city or its network of film families. They were desperately looking for an alternate space to the safer, star driven drivel of Bollywood. Varma offered them a playground — he, like the press, called it the Factory.
Satya also spawned a series of gang war and mafia movies that later turned all of its images into cinematic clichés. The only ‘Mumbai noir’ that could wildly stare back at its face was the outstanding Maqbool (2003), directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, who had composed Satya’s music. Satya’s co-writer Anurag Kashyap directed Black Friday (2004), a detailed docu-drama on the investigations behind Mumbai serial blasts of 1993, delicately treading the line between non-fiction, journalism and feature film. He went on to make a stellar 5 hours, 20 minutes’ epic Gangs Of Wasseypur (2012), an inter-generational story of the Dhanbad coal mine mafia. Kashyap, the protégé, eventually took over from Varma as the main moviemaking mentor of Versova.
In the ‘80s, Varma used to run a video store in Hyderabad offering film reccos to his customers, many of whom belonged to the Telegu film industry, one of them was the brother of the southern star Nagarjuna. He found overnight success with his debut film on campus politics, Siva (1989), starring Nagarjuna in the lead. He remade that film as Shiva (1990) in Hindi. Rangeela (1995) with Aamir Khan, a phenomenal musical, which was also AR Rahman’s first Hindi soundtrack, marked his proper debut in Bollywood.
He had a decent run for about a decade, which is roughly as long as most filmmaking careers often last. Responding to this piece, Varma sent me an email to say that when people ask him if Satya is the best film he ever made, he always replies in the negative, given the material in hand and what he had managed to achieve with it. “In an overall analysis and considering the above factors,” he wrote, “I feel Rangeela is a near perfect film… whereas (with) Satya, I feel, I just reached (the) half way (mark).”
Rangeela was the sort of movie that had put a spring in our steps the night before tenth class board exams. With Satya, Ramgopal Varma, who later abbreviated himself to RGV, and became Ramu for the even more familiar — a character all by himself — became the lord of films for a large number of Indian urbane movie buffs who hadn’t been categorised as the city, “multiplex” audience as yet. They were more often than not let down by the filmmaker who associated himself with over three dozen films thereafter, one of them being his reinterpretation of Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, titled Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, widely considered a new benchmark in low. Aag, or Ram Gopal Varma’s Indian Flames, remains the highest ranked Indian film on IMDb’s list of the worst rated movies of the world. Varma also recently made Satya’s sequel. I don’t know how many fellow fans of the original would have cared.
I have a poster in my wall with Chakravarthy’s eyes staring from behind the close-up of a Mauser pistol. The personally signed note over the title Satya reads, “Dear Mayank, In spite of fucking most of my movies… Luv, Ram Gopal Varma.” I agree. One unforgettable movie can surpass several filmographies. Satya was that film. I’ve seen it many times over since, and it hasn’t aged much still.