THR India's 25 in 25: How 'Gangs of Wasseypur' Changed Popular Entertainment in India

Even if he makes greater films in the future, it’s safe to conclude that, with Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap outdid himself. Here was a sprawling crime saga birthed from the mud and muck of North India. It was vast and visceral, a pulsating, picaresque romp of sound and colour and kitsch, relentlessly shooting from the hip as it made poetry out of the perverse. A foul-mouthed, barrel-chested epic, it chronicled six decades of a blood feud that took in dacoits, smugglers, wily politicians, steely mothers, crooked fathers, bad hairstyles, pistols made of pipes and shoes of fake leather.

One way to canonise Wasseypur is as the grandson of Sholay. The film, like Sholay, synthesised far-flung genres and styles, from Sergio Leone Westerns to ‘grassroot epics’ like The Best of Youth and Platform, not to mention the abiding influence of hard-hewn Tamil dramas Subramaniapuram, Naan Kadavul and Paruthiveeran. Underneath its busy, buzzing surface, the film told a sly history of India and the punctured pipe dreams of Independence—as Varun Grover’s lyrics put it, “Bhoos ke dher me raayi ka dana, rang biranga bail seyana (A mustard seed in a haystack, a colourful, smart bull).”

Wasseypur’s cultural imprint runs deep. Deeper, certainly, than its many imitations on streaming. Derring-do blockbusters like KGF and Pushpa borrow its vast scope and underdog swagger. It made household names of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Pankaj Tripathi, Richa Chaddha, Vineet Singh, Faisal Malik…the list is endless. Sneha Khanwalkar’s revelatory soundtrack spawned its own cottage industry: indeed, Kashyap’s own film, Nisaanchi, uses its source code.

There were subtler victories, too. In a severely patriarchal cinematic landscape, Wasseypur brought back the archetype of the backchatting female “Khana khao, takat ayega (eat, you’ll get strength),” Chaddha’s character tells Manoj Bajpayee, a lothario forever loose in the saddle. The film is equally noteworthy for its foregrounding of ordinary Muslim lives, their aspirations and foibles allowed to breathe, unencumbered — for once — by the deadweight of religion. Last but not the least, its boost to fashion: neck scarves, fake Ray-Bans, sweaters.

Anurag Kashyap on Making Gangs of Wasseypur

“I think Black Friday is better,” Kashyap tells The Hollywood Reporter India. Much of Wasseypur, he says, was shaped by his childhood. “I interpreted the relationships based on how I grew up, especially the mother-son relationships in Part 1. I shot in the house I grew up in, and the power houses where my father worked. The mountaintop where young Faizal sits, that's where I used to sit.”

When the film — over five hours long — premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, Kashyap was a bag of nerves. Yet the world lapped it up. Like a wandering samurai, its legend spread. “There was Mr Scorsese’s letter. Sean Baker walked up to me at the Busan Film Festival and said he was a fan. Fatih Akin held a screening in Hamburg, Germany. The validation from my international peers was immense.”

There’s a devastating memory from the shoot that haunts him still — the death of his assistant director Sohil Shah in a freak accident. The incident took place in Varanasi when Shah accidently drove a jeep off a pontoon bridge and was speared by a metal pole. “He died in my arms as we rushed him to the hospital,” Kashyap says. The film is dedicated to Shah’s memory.

Kashyap, working with writers Zeishan Quadri, Akhilesh Jaiswal and Sachin K. Ladia, packed a wealth of cultural detail into the film. In one subtly cutting scene, the gunman Sultan (played by Tripathi) visits the home of Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia). Laying out lunch for the guests, Singh’s wife mentions chini mitti (porcelain) plates. “That’s something the whole of North India is acquainted with. In (Hindu) households, non-vegetarian food was never cooked inside the house. And it was always served in China plates while vegetarian food was served in steel or brass plates.”

Kashyap regards Wasseypur as a mythic hit — in truth, the second part of the film was out of cinemas in five days, replaced by the Salman Khan juggernaut Ek Tha Tiger. “Today you can call it a cult classic or whatever, but the films only blew up on the internet. I owe my entire career to piracy and OTT.”