You had to be earnest and young. Only then would the brooding musicality of mid-2000s Emraan Hashmi feel aspirational — intoxicating almost. For many of us millennials waking up to ourselves in that decade, a specific genre of badboy-sadboi Bollywood captured the senses. These films were indistinguishable from each other, and contained permutations and combinations of the following: Hashmi, Mohit Suri, Vishesh Films, unofficial Korean-movie remake, Pritam or Mithoon soundtrack, Pakistani songwriting and influence, broken Indians in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Seoul, sometimes Kangana Ranaut and Shiney Ahuja.
The Bhatts had mastered the aesthetic of making heartbreak great again. Some of us even strived to be lonely so that we could ‘enjoy’ the music harder. If we hallucinated (or drank) enough, our surroundings would be tinged with blue and overcast hues; grief could be summoned at will. I’ve lost count of the number of late nights one of these lilting ballads echoed from desktop-computer speakers across smoky rooms with empty rum bottles. The vibe was irresistible: a moody ancestor to the man-child and toxic-masculinity heroes strewn across the mainstream landscape today.
Names like Atif Aslam and Mustafa Zahid were mentioned in the same breath as Kunal Ganjawala and KK. Voices and perceptions merged into one another. It was the chartbusters that were remembered more than the movies they occupied. You visualised a 'Woh Lamhe Woh Baatein' (DJ mix) or a 'Kya Mujhe Pyar Hai' more than a Woh Lamhe (2006) or a Zeher (2005); you knew an 'Aadat' more than a Kalyug (2005); you felt a 'Bheegi Bheegi' more than a Gangster (2005).
Chief among these anonymous-pain titles was Awarapan (2007), another Mohit Suri-Emraan Hashmi collaboration that could be heard more than it was watched. When the country went nuts about versions of 'Toh Phir Aao', and then 'Tera Mera Rishta', the film itself felt incidental. Imagine cranking out such banger albums that audiences would rather watch its music videos and fan compilations instead of the actual movies. To be fair, Awarapan gained cult status once we entered the romanticisation-of-nostalgia era. But it’s worth noting that its popularity today stems from more than just its haunting soundtrack.
On the surface, it’s another brick in the wall of that genre. If it were a person, it would be the stubbled guy draped in a black trenchcoat at the corner of a group-therapy session. A depressed gangster in a melancholic South-East Asian city is hired to keep an eye on his boss’ new mistress. Hashmi did virtually the same thing in Anurag Basu’s Gangster, but he was an undercover cop there. Here, he’s a long-haired saddie whose connection with this woman is rooted in his own grief for his dead girlfriend. He turns on his mentor and his spoilt sons to protect the woman’s love story with another man — as an act of penance for the girl he once failed to protect. The music writes itself. The serial misser sacrifices himself for the greater good of star-crossed love.
Rewatching a movie like Awarapan today can be an eye-opening experience. Back then, one could get offended by a few taste-coded things — like it being an uncredited remake of South Korean drama A Bittersweet Life (2005), the underwritten and wooden female characters, the strangely erotic staging of Ashutosh Rana, or the glorious hamming of Purab Kohli (who invokes the spirit of Nirmal Pandey’s villainy in One 2 Ka 4). But as someone shackled by the intolerance levels of the 2020s, I found myself marvelling at the adaptation choices of the storyline.
Because, with context, here’s what the plot of Awarapan reads as. Hashmi is Shivam Pandit, a cheerless gangster who does not believe in God and India anymore. The atheist in him is challenged by the devout faith of Reema, the Pakistani mistress and sex-trafficking victim he’s ordered to watch. Her commitment to Islam reminds him of Aaliyah, his ex-girlfriend whose sincere Muslimness won him over when he had normal hair. The 'Maula Maula' song aside, Shivam used to tease her for loving Allah more than him. He was duly punished. Her small-minded father’s problem was that Shivam was an outlaw, not that they were in an interfaith affair; his profession was the deal-breaker, not his identity. One might fault the film for exoticising other faiths, but this was an era that fetishised everything — grief, love, betrayal, madness, South Asia, plagiarism — for the sake of alt-massy cinema. Either everything was heightened or nothing was.
Beneath its aesthetic, then, Awarapan is essentially a crime drama where religious and cultural plurality becomes the underdog hero. It’s hard not to notice the unwitting symbolism of a scene where Reema cries “I have a right to be free!” to a chaste Shivam, who then decides to betray his Indian bosses and guide her back to Lahore with her lover Bilal; she is referring to her status as a mistress, of course, but the words are loaded. In other words, a Brahmin protagonist finds god through the purism of two Muslim characters, with his journey also involving a healing arc at a Buddhist monastery. He is ‘cured’ by the very godliness he had forsaken.
It’s the kind of democracy-of-pain trope we took for granted two decades ago, back when the exchange of art across borders was determined by commerce rather than politics and history. We were in a position to chuckle at love triangles involving Jesus Christ (Jab Tak Hai Jaan), cool kids embracing traditionalism with secret temple visits (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai), and charmers claiming to pee in a church instead of admitting they offered prayer there (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge). We were also in a position to scrunch our faces and croon lyrics like ‘Aa Bhi Jaao’ four times in any crowded room without seeing these movies as secular statements. It says something that all I could do while watching the grimness of Awarapan 20 years later was gasp at everything but the grimness — and imagine how impossible it would be to make now. After all, a sequel would have to resurrect more than its sullen antihero.