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Cut to Flashback | How Vidya Balan's 'Kahaani' Changed the Story
Director Sujoy Ghosh’s 2012 thriller cleverly blurred fiction and reality, as Vidya Balan’s character dismantled entrenched gender biases.
On a balmy March evening in 2012, I took my seat. The buzz was palpable in Mumbai’s Chandan cinema, an iconic single-screen theatre that would be shuttered seven years later. It was the second Saturday of a movie running to packed houses. A subdued intro shot was greeted with knowing nods. A messy chase was met with the restless rustling of seats. Murders were met with shocked chuckles. Anticipatory gestures suggested that some in the audience were repeat viewers. When the twist came, these viewers glanced around, hoping to catch the gasps and reactions of first-time watchers.
It felt like a different kind of “single-screen experience”. Men observed other men in the hall. Little did they know, though, that this film observed them.
Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani was one of the biggest cultural moments of the 2010s. It remains the primary reason for Bollywood’s tilt towards the commercial viability of women-oriented films. The box-office journey of this Vidya Balan–starrer paved the way for those like Kangana Ranaut and Alia Bhatt to front ₹100-crore hits. They in turn paved the path for a streaming age where female-fronted titles are no longer an anomaly or a risk. Much of the landscape today can be traced back to this moment.
The second innings of Kareena Kapoor Khan, Tabu, Sridevi, Raveena Tandon and Kajol might have been implausible if not for the doors opened in 2012. It’s hardly a stretch to say that non-mainstream performers like Rajshri Deshpande (Trial by Fire, 2023, Netflix) and Shefali Shah (Delhi Crime, 2019, Netflix) might have struggled to land powerhouse shows if not for the Balan influence.
The legacy of Kahaani extends to both sides of the camera. It marked the return of writer-director Sujoy Ghosh after a decade of post–Jhankaar Beats wilderness. It marked the emergence of editor Namrata Rao — a Dibakar Banerjee and Yash Raj Films collaborator — and her grammar of cutting as a geocultural tool. It marked the breakout of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, an actor on the brink of Gangs of Wasseypur–fuelled fame.
For a film with countless Satyajit Ray homages, it felt fitting that Kahaani reintroduced the unique rhetoric of Kolkata into the mainstream space. Anurag Basu’s Barfi! released later in 2012 and further reinstated the diverse character of the city and the diverse city as a character. The rest of India became acquainted with the talent of Bengali actors like Saswata Chatterjee and Parambrata Chattopadhyay. It awoke cinephiles to the charms of location tourism: the Mona Lisa guesthouse, Ballygunge pandals and landmark eateries (Mocambo) became a permanent part of Bollywood lore.
It also sparked a win for movie meme culture: pot-bellied assassin Bob Biswas’s chivalry (“Ek minute”) became the source of grand photoshopped humour.
Commercially, the film wasn’t the first of its kind. There already were female-centric hits starring Rani Mukerji (Black, 2005; No One Killed Jessica, 2011), Konkona Sen Sharma (Page 3, 2005), Priyanka Chopra (Fashion, 2008) and Balan herself (The Dirty Picture, 2011). So what about Kahaani made it definitive?
The answer, of course, had more to do with its thematic relationship with its audience. An uncanny reflection emerged between the story of Kahaani and its storytelling. The film didn’t open well in theatres; nobody expected a pregnant-woman plot to be interesting. But this was precisely the impression that resulted in its slow-burning success.
The social impact of Kahaani crept up on us — the famous twist revealed that a pregnant Bagchi wasn’t looking for her missing husband; she was faking a pregnancy to manipulate a chauvinistic system into leading her to the man whose attack killed her husband.
The core resembled Neeraj Pandey’s 2008 action-thriller A Wednesday, but with the radical religious undertones replaced by a personal mission. (The invisible core is that of a normie training in the spycraft of womanhood, bringing to mind the film’s natural successor, Raazi). The reel smokescreen of Vidya mirrored the real smokescreen of Vidya. Bagchi weaponising the male gaze by pretending to be a damsel in distress tapped into how most moviegoers went in expecting the eroticism of Balan’s The Dirty Picture and Ishqiya (2010).
The reason the twist worked beyond the screen is because Ghosh’s filmmaking did everything to supply its conceit. The texture didn’t just enable the story, it became the movie.
It started with the title: Kahaani alluded to the story and the story within the story. Bagchi’s alibi is so disarming that not once does it occur to anyone — including the audience — that it’s autofiction. The pregnancy gimmick isn’t random; it lets her relive the illusion and anticipation of being a mother after a miscarriage.
Bagchi’s defiant motherhood — where a state of fragile femininity morphs into a statement of vulnerable feminism — is what the film derives its mythological riffs from: the goddess Durga nods, the Durga Puja setting (baddie Milan Damji represents shapeshifting demon Mahishasura), and the real name of Parambrata Chattopadhyay’s Rana being Satyaki (Arjuna’s student in Mahabharata).
When Rana explains to Bagchi the difference between a Bengali “daak naam” (nickname) and “bhalo naam” (official name), it hints at the dichotomy of every element in the film. Everyone and everything has two disparate shades. There’s IB officer Khan (Siddiqui), whose rudeness and performative authority stem from how he might be trying to prove his patriotism as a Muslim man. There’s Bob Biswas, a hitman masquerading as a mediocre insurance agent. There’s the Intelligence boss (Dhritiman Chatterjee), who’s ultimately exposed as the traitor within the bureau. There’s the retired colonel (Darshan Jariwala), who secretly trained Bagchi to achieve both their goals. There’s even the identity of Bagchi’s husband: an agent named Arup Basu who died in the poison-gas attack, not missing civilian Arnab Bagchi.
A criticism of Kahaani revolved around Bagchi’s memories of her husband. The film cheats and uses the face of Milan Damji (Indraneil Sengupta) in these parts so that the audience remains as fooled as the characters. But the subtext is that Bagchi has been the unreliable narrator all along — so committed to her role that she gaslit herself into thinking like the person she plays.
These optical deceptions are a running theme: like when the interval block occurs with Biswas pushing Bagchi into an oncoming train. The jolt of seeing her die distracts the audience from decoding the plot signs; the second half begins with him pulling her back onto the platform. It encourages viewers to distrust what they see, setting the stage for the cheat flashbacks.
Finally, there’s Kolkata itself — a heady mix of tradition and modernity, past and present — where computers in police stations struggle to coexist with the nostalgia of the men operating them. The use of montages as a visual aesthetic — snappy guerilla shots of a festive city — is more tactical than cosmetic. Ambient images of street food, trams, hand-pulled rickshaws and yellow cabs become the ultimate ruse.
The climax sees Bagchi escaping into a sea of women clad in red-bordered white saris on a Pujo night, camouflaging herself in the festival’s gender cape. There’s a deeper meaning too. The curious view of Kolkata reflects Bagchi’s perspective; she processes her surroundings like the editing pattern, trying to understand and miss her husband through the place he came from. The montages become a language of her grief; she goes from being intimidated by the city’s chaos to using it as an emotional reckoning.
Perhaps it’s this disorienting duality — one that cloaks female agency behind the architecture of broad-daylight biases — that distinguished Kahaani as a landscape shifter. The clunkiness of the twist didn’t matter. It’s the courage to call out a nation’s prejudiced notion of both motherhood and moviegoing habits. Vidya Bagchi at once desexualised and reclaimed the revenge template from the everyday altars of masculinity. Getting humbled by the film turned most viewers into Rana, the bhadralok cop who smiles upon realising that he was blindsided by his own conditioning. It felt like a warm, fuzzy kind of humbling.
As viewers shuffled out of Chandan after the end credits on that balmy Saturday, some even circled back to the ticket counter. Passing onlookers would often assume that a Salman Khan actioner was playing. But Ek Tha Tiger was a few months away. A glimpse at the campy poster revealed a name they hadn’t heard of.
Pat came the joke — “Kiski kahaani?” (Whose story?) — unaware that they themselves were the story. Bemused by the housefull signs, they always added: “But who’s the hero?”
Only one answer chimed back in many voices: Vidya Balan.
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