'Dhadak 2': Director Shazia Iqbal on Censorship, Brownface and Remaking 'Pariyerum Perumal'

Shazia Iqbal hasn't known sleep in weeks. Her directorial debut feature, Dhadak 2, starring Siddhant Chaturvedi and Triptii Dimri, is on release, and Iqbal has been swamped with last-minute quality checks, deliveries, and screenings. She’s also had to contend with a fair share of online trolling—the film, an official remake of Mari Selvaraj’s landmark 2018 Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, has raised all kinds of pre-release alarm bells. Is the movie (backed by Dharma Productions) prettifying a hard and harrowing anti-caste story? What about Dalit representation? Why is Chaturvedi in brownface?

Making a start as a feature director, she finds the alarmism surprising. "A film is not a religion,” she tells THR India. “You can touch it, adapt it, make it your own.”

Iqbal, of course, is no stranger to questions of identity and belonging. Her acclaimed short film, Bebaak (2020), was about a Muslim architecture student, Fatin (Sarah Hashmi), and the concentric rings of conservatism she must navigate to pursue her dream. Dhadak 2 also looks at disparities in educational spaces in India, examined through the lens of both caste and gender. That the trailer emphasises and gives breathing room to the central love story is no reason, Iqbal says, to fear obfuscation.

“It’s not people’s fault,” Iqbal observes wryly. “There is no identity attached to the love stories being made in today's mainstream Hindi cinema. I have grown up on Mani Ratnam’s films where love and identity are very closely linked; you cannot separate the two.”

Edited excerpts from a conversation…

How did you come on board to direct Dhadak 2?

Somen Mishra, Head of Creative Development at Dharma Movies, had a conversation with me after he saw Bebaak, and he really loved the film. He asked me if I had a script that I could pitch to the studio. At the time, I was adapting a book called An Association of Small Bombs, by Indian-American author Karan Mahajan. It is quite a political book. Somen liked the script and he was trying to pitch it to OTTs, but it did not materialise at the time.

He then told me that they had rights to a Tamil film that they were trying to adapt. To be honest, it being my first film, I wasn’t very keen on doing an adaptation. But then I watched Pariyaram Perumal and it moved something in me. I could also see that I could find myself in the film.

The first Dhadak, a remake of Sairat (2016), faced criticism for soft-pedalling the caste conflict at the centre of the narrative. Your film seems like an effort to redress that error.

Dhadak had faced a bit of a flak because the caste issue was brushed aside. Like Sairat, Pariyerum Perumal is one of those Indian films that speaks very strongly about caste. We could not just turn it into a love story and ignore the identity issue. Karan (Johar, Producer) was very clear that we were unapologetically going to talk about identity issues and caste.

In India, people fall in love on the basis of caste and religion. It’s a way of negotiating familial and social pressures and affirming the status quo. We have addressed it in our film.

Growing up in a middle-class Muslim household, how did your understanding of caste broaden over time?

Caste hierarchy is a dominant social practice across all the religions in the Indian subcontinent. It exists among Muslims as well. My family migrated from Patna, Bihar when I was eight years old. I grew up in Vasai. At home, we speak in Maithili with a strong influence of Urdu. As a child, when I used to go to Patna for our vacations, I would observe the household help would come and sit on the floor and eat in separate utensils. As they say, there is no caste in Islam, but there is caste in Muslims.

During the writing of this film, Stalin K’s documentary India Untouched was the first point of research. It took me two days to watch the documentary because it really breaks you to understand the kind of society you live in. I read Yashica Dutt’s book Coming Out as a Dalit and Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters. There was also a lot of fiction watching — Satyajit Ray’s Sadgati, Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh, and Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan.

Did real-world atrocities inform or influence your process in some way?

While we were in prep, in early 2023, a first-year student from the Dalit community had died by suicide in IIT-Bombay. That affected me a lot. In fact, we had gone to join the protests, but we were not allowed into the campus. Later, when we were shooting in Bhopal, one of the incidents that happens with our central character, it’s exactly what played out in real life. A man had peed on a tribal labourer, which obviously became a big issue. It was shocking because we were shooting a similar scene three days later. It was emotionally daunting, and yet, in a way reassuring, because we were not away from what the reality is.

What is a key tweak you and co-writer Rahul Badwelkar made to the original script?

I saw the girl's character in Pariyerum Perumal and thought she could have been involved more in the narrative, rather than being outside of it. The story played out between the two communities without the involvement of the girl. This is what I thought needed fixing. It’s not about making her more ‘strong’ or ‘socially aware’ or a ‘krantikari’. Even if she’s ignorant of her privilege, she can still be part of the story. Even if she is flawed, she needs to realise she is flawed, otherwise it doesn’t seem like I am treating her with humanity.

The casting of Siddhant, a Brahmin boy from Ballia with a hip and urbane screen persona, as the Dalit protagonist of your film has raised eyebrows.

Look, an actor's job is to literally become somebody else. 95 per cent of our films around minority stories, be it of Muslims or Dalits, will be erased if you say an upper-caste or Hindu person cannot play these characters. Conversely, for the last three to four decades, we have had legendary Muslim superstars like Shah Rukh, Salman and Saif playing Hindu characters. Should that also not happen? Ajay Devgn in Zakhm (1998) played a half-Muslim character. Should Mahesh Bhatt have cast a Muslim actor for that role? Where will we go if we take this direction?

A still from 'Dhadak 2'

The conversation is not so much about segregation but representational casting, to give actors and voices from the community a chance to tell their own stories.

I am all for representation and affirmative action. But this is my first film. This is not an industry that I have built. I don’t dictate its forces. Sure, can a Dalit actor embody this character better than a non-Dalit person? Absolutely. In fact, if it were in my hands, I would like the writer and the director to also be from the community. But that is not how the film industry currently works. It’s far from ideal. That change will happen incrementally. But if we attack every film this way, studios and filmmakers will be demotivated to take up stories that tackle identity issues.

You have also been accused of brownfacing your hero, an underprivileged law student.

There were people from the Dalit community in the room where the decision of the tanning was taken. If someone thinks that Savarna people have appropriated their story and darkened the Dalit character, this is not how films are made. In my film, it’s Vidhi (Dimri) who falls for Neelesh (Chaturvedi). Dark-skinned people face this prejudice that they are not beautiful. My idea was to challenge that norm. Unfortunately, you can ask why not cast a brown-skinned actor then? But the factors that decide casting are often not ideal.

Factors like… popularity?

It has to be. When a film is made on a certain budget, it needs certain faces to bring in the audience, at least to a certain point. It’s still a risky decision for producers and studios to cast unknown newcomers. It was only Sairat that bucked that trend and made over ₹100 crore at the box-office. It was an anomaly for its time. I am not saying these conversations aren't important. But these corrections will happen gradually.

The film received 16 cuts by the CBFC. Several pointed scenes, caste references and lines have been altered. Are you happy with the version going out in theatres?

Whatever censorship we faced, it did not impact the core emotion of the film. There's a lot that it still manages to say. Of course, some of the cuts were heartbreaking. I am someone who was raised not to fear authority. I work from a place of of empathy and sensitivity but I don't let anyone control how I think or talk. So it was something new that happened. But ultimately, you live in a society and you are part of a system. So you conform to it. I am thankful to my producer Karan for making sure the film comes out. He attended the CBFC meetings and was not letting the film get shredded. He became a wall to protect the film. Any lesser producer would not have been able to release this film.