You can tell when a film-maker returns to their comfort zone. There’s something dry and unfussy about the storytelling, as if to say: No big deal, I know what I’m doing. There’s a conventional template and familiar tropes, but the padding is full of little observations, themes, subplots and set-pieces that don’t call for attention. The treatment is casual, confident. It’s almost like watching a tennis player competing on their favourite court after a while: all muscle memory and twitches.
That’s director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s relationship with the hinterland crime drama. More than a decade after Paan Singh Tomar, his latest, Ghamasaan, tells a cop-and-dacoit tale in Bundelkhand of the mid-2000s. It’s soothing to see how relaxed the movie is. The prolific Arshad Warsi plays Maharaj (based on Dadua, the actual ‘Veerappan of Bundelkhand’), a god-fearing jungle king who terrorises villages and slaughters traitors; Warsi has been enjoying quite a second wind lately, and regardless of the tone he occupies — whether sullen cop, comedic gangster or serious don — he always brings something new to the table. The reliable Pratik Gandhi plays IPS Aditya Singh, the all-business outsider tasked with capturing Maharaj and his trigger-happy gang.
Ghamasaan is very much a cat-and-mouse chase and a police procedural featuring a gruesome crew of dacoits and a Special Task Force (STF) squad on their trail. You know there are going to be close calls, sinister threats, rural shootouts, foiled plots, phone taps and human baits. But it keeps zooming out to reveal how such ‘thrilling’ legends do not exist in isolation; the roots are everywhere, as are the consequences. Much like a series, the film finds its footing in the fabric of the India that surrounds them. For instance, Maharaj’s network involves powerful politicians and police commissioners, but there are no dramatic Prakash-Jha-coded swishes of governments falling or systems being exposed. There’s a neat it’s-broken-but-deal-with-it rhythm. The narrative matter-of-factly weaves their opportunism into the big picture of election optics and opposition tactics.
The lack of moral judgment extends to the story’s crowd-pleasing character too, a one-eyed supplier (Rajpal Yadav) and wannabe Bhojpuri star who turns informer for Aditya the second his fears are addressed. Their disarming bond is treated practically, as if to suggest that it’s a common device and not a filmy one. Even as this primary chase unfolds, its triumphs are tinged with the slow-burning tragedy of a parallel arc: the despairing son of a victim who mutates from a newlywed to vengeful informer to cold-blooded dacoit. He represents the endless cycle of oppression in the region, a sobering loop of invisibilised rage and distrust that never ends with high-profile assassinations; most movies might have framed him as a feel-good figure, but not this one. Ditto for a newspaper office that reports on a minor ‘defeat’ of Maharaj only to be punished by the gang; it’s implied, in passing, that there’s not much they can do except blow in the direction of the wind.
I also like the de-cinematisation of the main characters too. (Dhulia’s iconic quote as Ramadhir Singh in Gangs of Wasseypur comes to mind). Maharaj is not your usual Robin-Hood-styled dacoit with soft spots. He’s a psychopath who enjoys power and manufactures the illusion of dissent; he shares some homoerotic tension with his twisted second-in-command (Jatin Goswami), who’s introduced in a scene where he calls Maharaj to describe a man burning alive as if it’s a phone-sex session. He likes music, toys with his prey, but always sounds ‘smaller’ than the ministers he deals with. There’s a sense that the political career he’s vying for is too consumed by his bloodlust; he’s spent too long on the fringes of civilization, in the jungles, to think like a human anymore.
Similarly, Aditya’s personality is fairly simple. There are times he resembles the upper-caste saviour from Article 15, especially when his city-brain processes an Adivasi village and sees the hopelessness of the children there; or when he notices that his local colleagues refuse to drink water from the same utensils. But instead of designing sweeping urban-hero journeys, the film allows him to have his own honest-cop trajectory; he is brought in as a formality, but he just wants to do his duty. There are also times when the background score stages him as someone in a Neeraj Pandey title (Khakee: The Bundelkhand Chapter perhaps), but Gandhi quickly balances it with his muted body language and unadorned leadership, in stark contrast to the excesses of his breakout role in Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story. It’s a restrained performance, one that channels the everyday tedium of being a decent professional.
His team doubts him, but he’s never out to prove a point with a grin. When he plans something clever and tries to draw out the rats from the forest, it’s not like he’s punctuating these moments with know-it-all smirks. His wife, Aparna (Ishita Dutta), is introduced as someone who hates that he’s married to his job. She gets paranoid when he lies about the risks of any mission. She’d generally be the first to emotionally blackmail him into safety-first stances. But when push comes to shove, it’s refreshing to see a partner ask the cop to commit to his obsession rather than stay away from it: eliminating fear is smarter than escaping it.
The film’s strength, though, doubles up as its weakness. The problem with the unsentimental style is that — and this is a habit in many Tigmanshu Dhulia productions — there is no room left for stillness. The story is often too busy to pause, because it knows so much, gets so comfortable, and strives to go places where others cannot. For example, the death of a subordinate is handled in haste; not being melodramatic is one thing, but not letting the viewer absorb the gravitas of the moment in the protagonist’s life is another. This works in the no-music gunfire and killings, but the restlessness takes over if the script isn’t moving ‘forward’.
It’s almost dismissive of any emotion that requires time, a bit like the tourist who wants to hit every spot on the checklist to show how productively they travel. It’s an old-fashioned flaw, and it tends to reduce a wry and well-informed setting to the sum of its motion. Breathe, I found myself requesting the film from time to time: I’m not going anywhere, there’s no need to be so…functional. But Ghamasaan stops for nobody, not even itself; it’s not realism so much as calculated awareness. In lesser movies, this no-big-deal vibe would so easily morph into a no-deal dash. Luckily, this film stays suspended somewhere in between. And that’s a no-nonsense victory in an age of show-and-tell entertainment.