Director Sudhir Mishra on his latest film Afwaah, rumour-mongering and why he will stand up for Vivek Agnihotri

Mishra has been training his lens on the country’s politics and society ever since he assisted Kundan Shah on Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983), for which he wrote the screenplay too. With its dark humour and biting satire, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron went on to become a cult film. So, would it be possible to make a film like that today? “I wouldn’t write the same film again. Kundan was thinking of doing a sequel but unfortunately he passed away and the idea remained with him. I think the young will make a different kind of film. Already they are. In the South especially, they’re doing very bold stuff. People are doing lots of interesting stuff in Tamil Nadu and Kerala,” he says.

Mishra, whose first film was Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin (1987), went on to make Dharavi (1992), Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005), Yeh Saali Zindagi (2011) and Serious Men (2020). But it is his Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, a film set in the early ’70s, which explores youthful idealism, Naxalism and the Emergency, that continues to hold a special place in the audience’s hearts. “There are some films that only you are meant to make; Hazaaron is that film. It’s about parents and children, it’s also about having a different idea about your own country and claiming it in some way. The film works because, in the end, it is about the vestiges of beauty that are left when passion and youth fade and you hold on to that. There are some ideas, some impulses you hold on to — ideas of beauty and grace in a changing world. It’s about people being faithful to that original impulse,” says Mishra.

Making films on the realities around us comes with its own perils but Mishra is not too concerned about it. “We showed the Emergency in a straightforward way in Hazaaron Khwaishein. There was no pulling of punches, there was no side-stepping,” he says. Mishra has seen power closely — his maternal grandfather (Dwarka Prasad Mishra) was the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, but it was his father, a mathematics professor and the former vice chancellor of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), who set up the Film Society of Lucknow, who influenced him deeply. Unlike his younger brother who went to Film and Television Institute of India, Mishra was doing his MPhil at Delhi University when he met Vidhu Vinod Chopra, a meeting that steered him to a new direction. “He said I’m making a film, come, and I just went. There I met Kundan and he said I’m writing something, come join. It was just so accidental that it’s not even funny,” he says. And the accidental filmmaker was here to stay.

“I’m not here to sensationalise, I am here to make a point and the point is quite limited. I am a filmmaker and more qualified people than me can give an analysis of what’s happening around us now, but for me, the element of fear and the fact that now almost anybody can be a victim… It’s almost absurd. If that happens, society will go for a toss, because anyone can be targeted,” he says.

The right to have a view and also to engage with the other is what Mishra firmly believes in, which is why he recorded a podcast with The Kashmir Files (2022) director Vivek Agnihotri. The meeting came about after a few Twitter exchanges. Mishra had tweeted, “Liberals complain about Kashmir Files. Why? Vivek Agnihotri made a film and his audience came to theatres and saw it. But when we make films our audience who criticise Vivek sit on their a**e and don’t come to the theatre.” Agnihotri had responded saying there should be an open debate on this, an invitation Mishra accepted. “I think it’s good to see films and make films of all sorts. I have a disagreement with how The Kashmir Files has been used. I am a filmmaker who has a different aesthetic but if somebody says Vivek is not allowed to make The Kashmir Files, I will stand with him. Every film should be made,” says Mishra, adding that we should look at what made the audience connect with the film.

“It’s better to know what’s bubbling in a society rather than to not know. There are feelings which are dormant and sometimes, people express those feelings through going to see a film like The Kashmir Files. You cannot reject them. You have to listen to them,” says Mishra. “You have to create an atmosphere where films of a different nature are made and people see them and not necessarily like all of them but interact with different ways of seeing — not merely in formulaic ways or in seeing things only in binaries,” he says.

Binaries have, perhaps, also coloured the perception of the film industry, fuelling recent calls for boycott of Bollywood or the debate on nepotism. “Reading about it, it seems as if the industry is a place of vice and all people do here is get drunk and do drugs. Frankly, I’ve heard of more things happening in Delhi parties than in the industry. I’m not saying everybody’s totally innocent but rumours about the industry cause great harm, especially to women. The film industry is a place where 90 per cent of the people work really hard. Even Shah Rukh Khan gets up in the day to go to work and returns home after packup,” he says.