'Nukkad Naatak' Movie Review: A Spirited Indie That Bridges Art and Activism

It’s bittersweet when you learn of an independent film releasing against all odds. The more inspirational the journey is, the more complicated it gets for film critics who must approach it objectively. What if it’s not good, despite the sincerity and courage? What if the inventive process of making it is the best part of its legacy? What if the craft is consumed by underdog hype and passion? What if the behind-the-scenes story is more interesting than the film’s story? What sort of euphemisms might one have to use to be kinder to gutsy ‘outsider’ art? The anxiety is more heightened with a film like Tanmaya Shekhar’s Nukkad Naatak: a crowd-funded, self-promoted and self-distributed indie whose guerrilla marketing campaign features a recent cross-country road trip in a rented caravan. It wears its defiance on its sleeve. The premise is even designed to be curious and socially expressive — a sign that commentary might be used to offset a lack of depth.

The film revolves around two engineering students in Dhanbad who rediscover the grassroots nature of street theatre after a life-altering mistake in college. Molshri (Molshri) is the firebrand activist in a hurry to change the world. Her idealistic view of justice involves raging against the oppressors and helping the marginalised by hook or crook. For instance, she teaches a rude canteen manager a lesson by stealing his supplies at night and giving them to the poor peon he mistreated. The friend she ropes in for this ‘vigilantism’ is Shivang (Shivang Rajpal), the studious and closeted boy who gets bullied for his sexuality and spends nights on gay cam-sex websites. Shivang is all brains and nerves, and even though she’s his rock, he resents her for getting him into trouble. When they are expelled, the strangely humane director of the institute gives them a chance to redeem themselves: if they enrol five children from the nearby slum settlement into school, the expulsion will be reversed. The two friends go about their task, but find it harder than expected; the parents are unwilling to educate their kids because it cuts off a source of income. Naturally, both Molshri and Shivang inch towards their own personal transformation arcs. Given that such subjects are largely predictable in Hindi cinema, what matters is the lens employed.

I like that Nukkad Naatak (“street play”) chooses to unfold around its own blind spots. The self-doubt is neatly baked into the script. The NRI gaze is evident (it’s usually a high-flying engineer leaving their big-money job abroad to run a local NGO), but this gaze has more to do with the protagonists themselves being non-residents of the India they encounter outside their college walls. They are urban characters whose concept of rural struggles and faultlines is derived entirely from bleeding-heart documentaries and internet archives. Molshri means well, but you can tell that her empathy is more performative than lived-in. She helps the peon so that she feels good about herself; she protects Shivang for the same reason. The plays she makes stem from things she’s read and appropriated, not experienced or seen; it caters to the keypad-activism demographic that treats change as a cultural aesthetic. When they go about enrolling the slum-kids, too, they’re doing it to save themselves and get un-expelled. All they care for is the incentive, not the aftermath. It’s why the sequence of Shivang resorting to desperate measures to earn cash isn’t corny. It makes sense because these are youngsters who are yet to realise the authenticity of purpose. It’s the equivalent of a Gen-Z reporter sitting at the laptop and typing cleverly-worded opinions on sociopolitical issues without a single hour of fieldwork.

So when the film does get preachy, it’s also the protagonists who are learning to practice what they preach. It’s them going from “naatak” (play) to real-world application; from the optics of art to the consequences of activism. I also like that their improvement is calibrated, not sudden. Molshri has to earn the erasure of her restlessness through her experience with a little girl; something keeps bringing her back to check in on the school and her ward. Shivang’s surrogate dreams of an American tech future clash with his inner battle to accept his own identity. Some of these transitional moments are a bit naive and convenient (like his integration into a LGBTQ+ community), the campus drama is too brief, and the cast is a tad raw. The voiceover — believe it or not, Shivang writes a confessional email to his dead grandfather at daduinheaven@gmail.com — insists on spoon-feeding the viewer and spelling out the subtext. Like: “Molshri realised that she didn’t need to change the world; she could change the life of one girl” or “she wanted to win college competitions through street-plays, but now she could return to its roots”.

Yet, despite the familiarity of these shortcomings, there’s a sense that the movie itself is growing up as it’s being made. The two friends are schooled by the margins that featured in their plays, and it would’ve been tempting to inject their evolution with a track of patriotism. Especially because this is an independent film looking for pockets of commercial accessibility. When youngsters choose to stay back and fix the cracks instead of leaving for greener pastures, most stories harp on the importance of being loyal to your flawed nation. But Nukkad Naatak keeps it grounded, allowing the viewer to cull their own notions of philanthropy and optimism from the story. It may be about walking the talk and being more responsible. But it’s also about self-actualisation, personal integrity, and just being more alive to the world we pretend to inhabit. At times, the film inherits the curated feel-goodness of an Aamir Khan-starring social entertainer. Still, at no point did I feel guilted into appreciating its message. It doesn’t quite resist all the pitfalls of the intent-over-storytelling genre.

Having said that, there’s something irresistible about the irony of a movie titled after artistic activism, only for so much of it to be indistinguishable from the streetplays within. I would like to believe it’s intentional, even if it’s not (it’s not). But even its flaws are baked into the theme. That’s one way to reframe budgetary constraints as narrative gimmicks.