Diamonds and bazaars

No one can blame us for thinking Sanjay Leela Bhansali made Heeramandi primarily to troll historians Debates around the show have followed a familiar binary Despair at its lack of relationship to reality versus contempt at the expectation of reality from a director devoted to artifice and fantasy Neither is wrong but neither feel right enough Fantasy and reality do not exist at a chaste distance They shape each other like dreams and waking music and lyrics sexual desire and lsquorespectablersquo society tawaifs and Hindi cinemaIf we see Heeramandi in the continuum of recent Hindi cinema so preoccupied with sex gender and nationhood its ambitions become piquantIf Animal is a film in which men are primarily and primally fixated on each other locked in desire and combat Heeramandi is its parallel a queendom of tawaifs where women inhabit a world of art sex and power and are primarily involved with each other savaging and saving each other in a war for dominance over cultural erotic and material capital Nothing glitters in this bedecked show as much as Manisha Koirala eyes she is the hardest diamond of all Nothing burns as much as Sonakshirsquos avid hatredThese are autonomous professional women with little interest in bourgeois morality But it is a precarious autonomy a fading bazaar economy dependent on a fading customer mdashthe pusillanimous nawabs mdashconfronting the challenge of modern technologies and colonial moralities How can they assert themselves in the impending nation as both tawaifs and citizens In a way the show wants to narrate a history of tawaifs as a history of India in a masala formatAt times Heeramandi works There is a great scene with Shekhar Suman where he recounts to Manisha Koirala Sonakshi Sinharsquos criminal career With admiration for her rival she says ldquoalas my daughters have none of this talentrdquo They both burst out laughing There is occasional image drama A mehendified Koirala entering with handmaidens holding her dress bride and queen Koirala lies back covering her eyes with jewels Occasionally the monochromatic sets make you gasp In the final patriotic song Bhansali delivers the masala moviersquos visceral emotions and goosebumpsThe problem with Heeramandi is not that it is too masala but too little without masala cinemarsquos emotional saturation and variety items Bhansali has 8 luxurious hours in which to spin an intricate tale but he is too fixated on the intricacy of zardozi The Urdu is like Monopoly Money People say muaf and maaf in one line and read books left to right Nukhtas crash around like drunken birds in a haveli landing on wrong words right words or merely on curtains mistaken for sequins Alamzeb deserves ever meme about her Fardeen Khan is steadfastly bad Time is filled by making people walk and talk like Sohrab Modi reading the news at slow speedLike the tawaifs Bhansali needs to find a way to reframe his form for contemporary times His struggle is real but not in evidence We accept that Bollywood not history is Bhansalirsquos reference point But Heeramandi feels like only his own films are his reference point a hermetic Leela land Scenes images meetcutes even the beauty feels recycled from previous films sometimes embarrassingly so It is one thing to fetishise tawaifs ghararas gota and gauze But the issue here feels like Bhansali has fetishized himselfParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom