Gangs of Wasseypur to Raman Raghav 2.0: Understanding the Anurag Kashyap hero
Sardar Khan. Faizal Khan. Dev. K. Luke. Dukey Bana. Johnny Balraj. Ramanna and Raghavan. What is the common strand between Anurag Kashyap's heroes?
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
In an early scene in Raman Raghav 2.0, slum-dwelling serial killer Ramanna (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is describing his modus operandi to the police. He explains that he sees the world as a chessboard; alternate blocks of white and black is how he sees the road he walks on. When one time, he found a drunkard lying on his "black", and he just wouldn't move when Ramanna asked him to, Ramanna was surprised. He couldn't understand how could the man in front of him not know who Ramanna was. So, Ramanna decided to crush his head and kill him, because obviously, no one has the right to come in his way.
Cop Raghavan (Vicky Kaushal), a sleep-deprived coke-head, is the man assigned to the case. He slaps around his girlfriend because he believes that she has no right to cross him. He kills people at will without remorse or consequence because he wears a police uniform. He is the person from the side of the law that Anurag Kashyap pits against the lawless Ramanna.
MOVIE REVIEW: Raman Raghav 2.0
Regardless of which side of the law Ramanna and Raghavan are on, both do as they please, and if in effect, society turns away its face from them (as in the case of Ramanna whose sister has written him off from her life), or they push away society from them (Raghavan pushes away his family, including his girlfriend, who is eventually killed by Raghavan because he can't help being himself), well, so be it.
Anurag Kashyap's heroes live life on their own terms, either by design or by choice, and if that leads them to a collision course with the populace in their immediate geographical space, well, then society just has to deal with them. His heroes are convinced in their ways of life and if their choices drive the people around them to ruin, they just cannot help it.
This was first reflected in Kashyap's debut directorial venture, a TV film called Last Train To Mahakali. There, the protagonist, only known as Sir (Kay Kay Menon), is an AIIMS student who is on death row for picking up random people off the streets and poisoning them to death though he firmly believes that he is actually curing them of all virus-related diseases. He is very self-aware of his destructive abilities unlike Luke (again, Kay Kay), the hero of Kashyap's first feature film, Paanch.
Luke, the rockstar, is a manic, vicious bully with temper issues. Whenever he is in the room, there is an impending sense of doom and tension. Everyone dislikes him but is too afraid to point that out. He forces his ultraviolent machismo down his bandmates' throats and in a fit of rage, he kills a person one day, which takes his bandmates into a downward spiral.
Both Sir and Luke are outsiders, trying to change the world around them. Kay Kay Menon plays a similar role in Gulaal as Dukey Bana, leader of the Rajputana separatist movement. He is convinced that aristocracy should be the order of the world, instead of democracy, and by threatening, intimidation, violence, and murder, he gets his way.
Neither do the three fit into society's scheme of things nor do they feel the need to do so.
This arrogance brings them to their ruin just as in the case of No Smoking's K (John Abraham).
K will chain-smoke even if that habit threatens to take away his family, social status and his belongings from him. Smoking is K's jihad against the system (represented by Paresh Rawal's Baba Bangali) and he will do it no matter what.
Similarly, Dev (Abhay Deol) of Dev D is a menace in whichever space he walks into. He is a menace in his house, where his family has had enough of drugged out bratty ways. He is a menace on the streets where he runs over pavement-dwellers with his car. And he is a menace to the two women in his life, Paro and Chanda.
Like most Kashyap heroes, he is deeply patriarchal, with a strong sense of entitlement to women and a warped sense of manhood. Sometimes, his heroes are aware of this (like Ramanna, who objectifies and lusts for women and is yet aware of what women can do to ego-driven males; the monologue on Raavan and Pushpaka Vimana), sometimes they are not, like the buffoon Sardar Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur.
MOVIE REVIEW: Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 1
MOVIE REVIEW: Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 2
Both Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin) and his father Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee) are unlikely gangsters. Faizal is a thin, small, wiry man, perpetually smoking charas, seemingly incapable of making tough decisions. Sardar Khan cannot control himself in matters of women, and behaves in ways inappropriate to a gangland leader. While both do not fit into Wasseypur's way of things, both challenge the establishment (Ramadhir Singh played by Tigmanshu Dhulia), and ultimately, it is their arrogance and way of life that bring them to their end.
Which brings us to the other gangster in Kashyap's oeuvre, Johnny Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) in Bombay Velvet. He is a classic Kashyap hero in every sense of the word: a lowlife thug with big dreams who challenges the establishment (like Sardar and Faizal), a man prone to bouts of losing temper which threatens his friends and of course, the woman in his life (like Luke and Raghavan), and is masochistic to the core (While Dev self-abused himself through drugs, he goes and gets beaten to pulp inside a steel cage).
Anurag Kashyap, through his films, dissects, deconstructs and criticises a particular kind of patriarchal, bigoted, Indian machismo that unconsciously destroys itself and everything around it. Kashyap's heroes invoke the untamed bad boy real-life icons of today like Donald Trump - politically incorrect to the T, yet completely charismatic. Like gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson wrote, they are too weird to live and too rare to die.