'Mayasabha' Series Review: Deva Katta's Political Drama Hampered By Weak Writing and Stiff Acting

I suppose the first thing you need to know about Mayasabha is that it is an incomplete show—like most shows these days, hungering for your attention to make you watch their second season, they forget to complete the first. So, before you strap on for this nine-episode saga, know there will be nine more. How has this become common practice among the streamers? Imagine being pushed out of a theatre post interval, and being told that this is all we get to see for now—come later, pay again, for more. They have collectively ruined storytelling as an art form, fracturing it into parts that can be sold cheaply at the marketplace for attention. 

Mayasabha, also like most shows today, is written with a lethargic hand and an unexcited imagination, beginning with a high-stakes, political, livewire moment, only to recede into a long, winding flashback. We will not return to that high-stakes moment in this season—that is for later.

Krishnama Naidu (based on N. Chandrababu Naidu, played by Aadhi Pinisetty) and MS Rami Reddy (based on Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, played by Chaitanya Rao Madadi) are two friends from opposing political camps during a political coup in Andhra Pradesh politics. We are in August 1995. Then, we are quickly pulled back to 1975, and the interlacing of their individual stories, tied to their caste, embedded in a larger story of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and her son Sanjay Gandhi’s mass sterilisation—here, Ira Basu (Divya Dutta) and Sandeep Basu (Sakul Sharma)—and Naxalites who are getting inspired to take to the gun, and whose heads begin rolling just as quickly. It is a thick world rendered flatly. It is not just the way characters and scenes are plumped in quick, blunt flashes of simple dialogue, but the way they are staged with green-screen crowds as a digitally layered image, not one of physical depth, with CGI trains billowing CGI smoke on the platform, a world that looks as weakly built as it is written. The gopurams of temples with a fresh lick of paint look like sculpted cardboard, ready to collapse at the slightest huff of wind. The fake fire on pyres could not even melt a pot of ice. 

Chaitanya Rao in 'Mayasabha'

Everyone is relegated to easy villainy and immediate heroism. Krishnama Naidu wants to rise above his caste, a farmers’ caste, to become more powerful and solve critical problems in the lives of people. Rami Reddy—an outcast in his own Reddy caste for converting to Christianity and his relative marrying into a lower caste—on the other hand, wants to escape the feudal tendencies of his caste, and become a doctor, only to be lassoed into politics.  

The opening episode neatly slots these characters—Krishnama Naidu sees education as a pathway out of farming; Rami Reddy sees farming and labour as a primary form of education. This fascinating distinction wears off. By the third episode, the two meet, by the fourth, they become comrades—not in the Communist sense—and together plot their progress in politics. Hereon, the show finds other dichotomies to fixate on—primarily, that of the centre and the state, but also that between Reddys and Naidus. Caste is the central conflict of their lives, politics, and this show. It is as frustrating as it is heartbreaking, for it becomes the central, moral organising principle.

Mayasabha makes Indira Gandhi not just a vamp for her fascist excesses during the Emergency, but, poor thing, also Bengali, whose dictatorial impulses draw from the past as much as from Mamta Banerjee and Narendra Modi. At one point, she is sternly told, “You will give birth to a line of dictators who will rise using your very methods. They will impose an emergency and not even call it one.” Here, I am reminded of Vikramaditya Motwane’s thrilling documentary Indi(r)a’s Emergency, whose film was essentially a scaffold that both holds together and hides its message—the real fascist is still among us. This is the extent of the show’s gumption. (“Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is unintended and purely coincidental,” the opening disclaimer reads.) 

The problem of such cheap and quick renderings of characters—weakly written, stiffly acted—is that they become silhouettes being pushed around. The story is not driven by them, but they seem driven by the story, pushed along by fate and the arc of history. Agency is a thing these characters lose as they are tumbled around, like kids in a sandpit. The English dialogue is particularly painful, as is the violin that comes in every time humour is forced into the proceedings. 

Mayasabha could have been an Iruvar, Mani Ratnam’s visually and existentially most poignant film about the fictionalised friendship between MGR and Karunanidhi, whose visuals of crowds swarming and disbanding are a masterclass in staging. You get the sense of a larger world out there that is provoked by these personalities. Here, the crowds wave. The same angles. The feckless top shots. NTR—sorry, RCR (Sai Kumar)—makes his entry in the last two episodes, and his theatrics are not one of charisma but caricature. Even their intimacies and romantic desires are buried under the show’s larger preoccupation—how to get power, and once gotten, how to hold onto it. 

Mayasabha gains playful purpose every time it refocuses its gaze on its two primary protagonists and their friendship. But the show does little with this dynamic—it almost misses the point of its show by chasing after larger arcs. They wrestle, and as they grow bigger, they play tennis, and later, circle back to wrestling. But most egregiously, the show does not allow their opportunism to become villainy. They are the young-blooded, hot-headed heroes, divided by caste, not ideology. Maybe we need to wait for the second season to see how this heroism is tested in more troubling ways, the way it did with the real-life counterparts. How does one retain idealism in a world that thrives on its slaughter?

Streaming gave us the illusion of deeper stories. What we got instead were flatter ones, stretched so thin, you can see through their skin. You could spend eight hours and nine episodes with these characters, and you would know little about them save for their caste, preference of moustache, hair, idealism, and speech-making. And if that is enough for people to vote politicians in, it should be enough for people to log into and watch—but maybe someone should raise their voice and affirm that enough is never enough.