Quarter Century | Why Anurag Kashyap's 'Gangs of Wasseypur' Still Matters

I don’t think I’ve seen filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s epic two-part revenge saga Gangs of Wasseypur more than once in its entirety. Often on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I find myself revisiting Ayan Mukerji’s Wake Up Sid while I complete chores around the home. It’s comforting and familiar. I rewatch Chak De! India when I’m in need of inspiration and it’s the closest I’ll ever get to Shah Rukh Khan giving me a pep talk. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are constants. Beautiful people in beautiful clothes, falling in love in picturesque locations — a great pick-me-up after a stressful workweek.

Wasseypur is none of these things. It’s over five hours of vengeful men in Bihar brutally hacking each other to death. There’s blood, gore, expletives and sex. There’s also a terrific ensemble cast and a one-of-a-kind killer soundtrack by Sneha Khanwalkar. I watched the first part in awe at a sparsely-filled theatre in June 2012 and then the second part two months later. Kashyap had also written Ram Gopal Varma’s seminal gangster film Satya in 1998 but I wasn’t old enough to experience that in a movie theatre. And while I haven’t rewatched Wasseypur since, I feel that’s probably because I didn’t feel the need to. There are vivid images and scenes from that film that have remained in my head rent-free.

The first among those is the character of Shahid Khan, who sets the tone of the story in the first part. Right after watching the film, I had to do a quick search to find the name of the tall, long-haired actor with piercing eyes in a Pathani suit. It was Jaideep Ahlawat. Then there’s the perpetually aroused Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee) staring at Durga’s (Reema Sen) low-cut blouses with puppy dog eyes as she washes clothes. The flirtation plays to the naughty “O Womaniya” song. Minutes later, the same Khan is seen knifing someone to death in an alley. Another favourite is Sardar Khan’s oddly joyous death scene which had a cool music video feel to it.

The list goes on. But a core memory for me is the song “Hunter” which is shot inside a train. I remember the elderly lady sitting beside me in the theatre, tapping her feet to the catchy Calypso beats of the song which goes, ‘I am a hunter, and she want to see my gun. When I pull it out boy, the woman start to run.’ In the next second, I watched the lady’s expression shift to disbelief and the tapping slowed down, as the lyrics proceeded to, ‘She beg me to see it, she beg me to show it. But when I reveal it, she want to run and hide’. She probably suspected this song wasn’t really about guns. Or hunters.

The real victory of Wasseypur is that it has endured beyond its theatrical run, reviews and Cannes screening. I have no idea what the box office collection of the film was. On the film’s 10th anniversary, I read an interview of Kashyap where he mentioned that Viacom18, the company that distributed it, labelled it a flop. I’m certain no one remembers the film as a failure. Long after the release, we saw boys wearing ‘Keh ke lunga’ T-shirts. I know I’ve appropriated the line, ‘Beta, tumse na ho payega’ several times. And haven’t we all shared memes of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s genius delivery of the line ‘Baap ka, dada ka, bhai ka, sabka badla lega re tera Faisal’. Or to be more accurate, Phaisal.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a fan-made collage on Instagram that pointed out the best shows on Indian streaming are fronted by Gangs of Wasseypur alums. It has photos of Ahlawat in Paatal Lok, Pankaj Tripathi in Mirzapur, Siddiqui in Sacred Games and Bajpayee in The Family Man. With the exception of Bajpayee (reportedly the only actor who got paid for the film), all the others on this list were almost unknown before Wasseypur happened to them. And it’s not just them, Wasseypur was career defining for several talents — actors Huma Qureshi and Richa Chadha, lyricist Varun Grover, filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan, casting director Mukesh Chhabra, and so many others. I love that the IMDb page of the film lists now-Bollywood star Vicky Kaushal, who was an assistant on the film, as — silhouette behind window grille in Manoj and Richa brothel scene.

The true impact of what Kashyap managed to achieve with this film became more apparent to me as I shifted from being a casual viewer to a film journalist. Through numerous interviews of Kashyap, deep-dives on the film, and a book on its making, I realised this was not just a film but more like an event in modern film history in which many absurd things happened. Kashyap had his main producer UTV back out less than a week before the shoot because they wanted bigger faces. He stuck to his guns and shot a seven-hour story on a tight budget and released it in two parts, irrespective of how the first one fared. A creative and financial swing of this magnitude seems unthinkable in the current climate, maybe even for Kashyap. He couldn’t film in Wasseypur so he shot in his hometown in Bihar, pulling favours from old friends and family. Siddiqui, whose most noticeable part till then was the cop in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, was allowed to shoulder the entire second part. The film’s screenwriters Zeishan Quadri, Akhilesh Jaiswal and Sachin K. Ladia had no other credits.

These were giant bets, and they all paid off. And they paid off in a way that not only benefited the fate of this film, but also elevated the future of everyone attached to it. The Hindi film industry today is stuck in what is hopefully only a passing phase of failed bets. In fact, one can argue that not enough bets are being taken. Perhaps this is a good time for disillusioned creators, and even me, to revisit the film for a quick lesson in audacity. In a piece for the film magazine A Rabbit’s Foot, Kashyap wrote about his headspace during the film’s exhausting shoot. “We had ambition, we just didn’t have the money… By the end, we had exhausted our resources, people, and goodwill. And it was worth it.”