Bheed: Anubhav Sinha’s movie is a messy, confrontational, and deeply angry response to blasé Bollywood

And India is at a crossroads in Bheed, with its entire ‘population’ trapped on either side of a police check-post — their past, present, and future laid out before them. There’s a lonesome mall on one side — a hulking, impersonal, inaccessible symbol of power, wealth, and on this particular day, safety. To make progress as a nation, the movie seems to be saying — to overcome the hurdles in front of us — we have no choice but to join hands and work together; to empathise with those who don’t have the same beliefs as we do; and to choose kindness even (and especially) when it feels like a difficult thing to do. But as saccharine as this might sound, Bheed is an uncommonly brutal movie.

For instance, while Sinha cuts away from showing a toddler being run over by a speeding train — that would’ve been exploitation — the fact that he chose to open the film with a scene like this in the first place says a lot. It’s a typically on-the-nose statement by the filmmaker, but it gets the point across. “Do I have your attention now?” he seems to be asking.

Stranded on that dusty street, people automatically segregate themselves into groups, divided by their socioeconomic backgrounds, their castes, and their religion. It’s an accurate representation of how ghettoised our cities have become, and how distrusting modern society is of people who don’t look and sound like them. For instance, Kapur’s character, Balram Trivedi, refuses meal boxes just because they’re handed out by a group of Muslims who happened to have extra food and noticed people in his bus were hungry. It’s probably no coincidence that Trivedi is a ‘chaukidaar’. In this difficult situation, briefly relieved from the rules of regular society, he assumes the role of a leader — a position that he would never find himself in otherwise. It’s a nice contrast to Rao’s character, Inspector Tikas, who can’t seem to comprehend being handed control after a lifetime of living under the upper caste’s thumb. In many ways, Bheed is about these two characters coming to the slow realisation that the elected government that they have so much faith in does not care about them.

Towards the end of the film, Trivedi stages an uprising. He threatens to invade the mall — a literal eat the rich moment — and provide for his people. But the same people who pushed him to breaking point are the ones to label him a criminal. Everybody except Tikas, who, after being subjected to a dehumanising tirade by Trivedi, recognises that they have both experienced similar pain in their lives — everybody has masters to serve. Sinha traps these characters in a bubble of sorts, before that term would enter common parlance in a different context during the pandemic. But this allows for simmering tensions and growing resentments to rise to the surface.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Sinha sometimes seems to think that cinema halls are venues for his sermons, but he also has an undeniable knack for spinning a yarn. This is his duality. In Bheed as well, there are a couple of moments in which he turns his characters into mouthpieces — for instance, if Sinha replaced Kamra in that one scene where she talks about how incredible India is, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid — but for the most part, it’s the movie that does the talking.

When people complain about the state of Bollywood, the fashionable thing to say these days is that Hindi movies aren’t ‘rooted’ enough. It’s a vague analysis of a complicated situation. But one thing that nobody mentions is that mainstream Hindi movies are rarely messy. Far too often, they feel like neatly packaged products. They aren’t confrontational; they have no personality. But Bheed is an angry movie; you can feel it in virtually every scene. Despite its unexpectedly uplifting ending — it cuts to black on a shot of a child doing ‘jhoola’ between two police barricades — Bheed can trace its lineage through a series of spiritually interconnected films that sanction armed violence as a valid form of social rebellion because the time for peaceful protest is over. It’s a movie that has a voice, and that’s what we’ve been missing.