It is rather easy to get lost in the quagmire of trading barbed words when it comes to Dhurandhar! Most people I know would swear that it can never be in the league of The Godfather trilogy, even though its maker, Aditya Dhar, was evidently inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, and that too filtered through Ram Gopal Verma’s gleanings from the Italian-American saga! Read between the lines of the aforesaid and you would know that it has become politically incorrect to wax eloquent whether about Dhurandhar’s genius or even its flaws.
That said, the musical experience of Dhurandhar is what lingers for hours, if not days, or perhaps weeks, after watching the duology. The two films’ resurrection of tunes from Hawa Hawa (Hasan Jahangir, 1989), Baazigar o Baazigar (Baazigar, 1993), Rasputin (BoneyM, 1978), and Tirchi Topiwale (Tridev, 1989), among others, constitutes an artistic coup. Now, of course, it is no Downton-Abbey title track! And, just as, my worthy colleagues will be perhaps glad to hear, it is far from Nino Rota’s soundtrack for The Godfather, nor does it even aspire to come close! Nevertheless, it catches the pulse at its sorest, a most nostalgic yearning for a past that almost never was and is yet terribly palpable. It seeks to invoke the spirit of the 1990s, the early years of India’s economic (and many other kinds of) liberalization, and the cosmopolitan energies of a Bombay (of Dawood Ibrahim, Harshad Mehta, Sachin Tendulkar, Lata Mangeshkar, Dhirubhai Ambani, Bombay Stock Exchange, Bollywood, to name a few of the usual suspects) that is still secretly longed for even by the fiercest critics of the machinations of that era.
However, this arguably lowbrow form of musical appreciation, it must be acknowledged, is an acquired taste, that not all might hanker after. Dhurandhar’s music director, Shashwat Sachdev, has an uncanny understanding of India’s musical tastes. So does Aditya Dhar, who began his career as a song-writer. It is funny, perhaps even funnily disappointing, to see fans of Dhurandhar call the duo’s taste in music as “vintage” and “elite.” What is more appropriate, at least in historical terms, is that the majority of India’s population today grew up in the nineties, and was the most ardent recipient of the first notes of the songs that the duology has revived from that mythical past. The musical experience, hence, became intertwined with the cinematic narrative, without much effort by either the screenplay or the audience. For something to be close to a religious experience, it does not need to be vintage or elite; all it needs to be is part of one’s latent and elemental conditioning. Dhar and Sachdev know this far too well.
Meanwhile, one is also reminded of the prodigious talent of Viju Shah, who received no credits for the musical scores for Tridev, whose official music directors, Kalyanji-Anandji, had gone no farther than composing the tracks; it was Shah who, after all, brought the famed electric patina to the film’s music. Shah later received his dues for the tracks he composed for Vishwatma (1992), Mohra (1993), and Gupt (1996), wherein his techno-music, that was best describable as a cross between Bappi Lahiri and Modern Talking, held the nation’s ears hostage as much as A.R. Rehman’s rendition of Vande Mataram.
And so, Dhurandhar, today, is a beneficiary of what is, when seen in hindsight, an almost four-decade-old trend, that had lain dormant like a volcano desperate to explode. It was an era dominated by the likes of the music directors, Nadeem-Shravan, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit, and Anand Milind, with Jagjit-Singh ghazals just about to top the charts. Even India’s Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not far behind; his poetry was set to music and sung by Singh, in the album Samvedna (2002), in what may be said to have marked the end of the long-nineties. It also marked the end of his Prime-Ministerial, and also his political, journey.
Talking of ends, the second part of the Dhurandhar-duology stages the (fictional) paralysis of Dawood Ibrahim, thanks to the “Tirchi Topiwala” of the film, Jameel Jamali (played by Rakesh Bedi, whose comedy series, Shrimaan Shrimati, was another favorite of nineties’ folks). Watching the Bombay-wallah OG collapse on the bed, Indian cinema theatres in India have been bursting into a plethora of emotions, as the Tridev-song lilts in the background. It will soon lead the viewer to a reprisal of the last scene of Casablanca, alas without a Humphrey Bogart! But for the likes of us, there will always be the Bombay of the ’90s. And so, play it again Sam … erm … Shashwat!
Arup K. Chatterjee 