In Nishaanchi, Mehboob Khan meets Yash Chopra, as Anurag Kashyap takes a detour into melodrama

Like most Anurag Kashyap films, Nishaanchi begins not with an image, but with sound. Before we fade in, we hear the azaan. It’s an intentional choice, for obvious reasons. First, because in post-2014 India, that sound has largely disappeared from popular cinema. When it does appear, it’s often framed with unease and suspicion. (The title of the film appears in Urdu, something again we forgot we lost). Second, the sound fits the setting. The film is rooted in Uttar Pradesh, now seen as one of the communally charged regions in the country. But here’s the irony: this is also a place where the sound of a Muslim prayer still overlaps with the ringing of temple bells. It might be the most honest image of what India used to be or is behind the noise. (Note how characters greet each other with “Jai Siya Ram” — a phrase that, too, has taken on a very different lens in recent years). Third, it signals a return to the kind of storytelling that once defined Bombay cinema, where religion was never a battlefield, but a backdrop. (Where conflict was domestic, among brothers, parents, lovers.) That’s where Nishaanchi seems headed.

But before we get there, Kashyap directs an opening scene that feels straight out of an Anurag Basu playbook. Aaishvary Thackeray (playing twins, Babloo and Dabloo) teams up with Rinku (a terrific Vedika Pinto) to loot a bank. But it isn’t tense; it’s chaotic, clumsy, and comedic. The kind of staged messiness you’d expect in a Basu caper (think of the robbery scenes in Barfi! and Jagga Jasoos). It’s no surprise, then, that Kashyap cuts from this straight into a credits sequence, set to a song whose lyrics go like, “Yeh film dekho.” (Think of Basu’s opening numbers: “Picture shuru, ho gayi picture shuru” — from those very films.) But here’s where it deepens. In the middle of this playful song, Kashyap slips in a line: “Zulmi ka hum pe zulm dekho, yeh film dekho.” This is the line that changes everything. It signals what kind of film this will be; something closer to Mehboob Khan in tone, in spirit. But Kashyap doesn’t stop there. He takes Khan’s rooted, earthy moral weight, and blends it with Yash Chopra’s operatic madness; swerving, for the first time in his career, into full-blown melodrama. So, arguably, this isn’t so much a typical Kashyap film, but rather a fusion of all the films Kashyap grew up on.

However, Kashyap can’t help being himself either. So you don’t just get a film full of cinephilic tributes, in parts, you also catch glimpses of Kashyap at his best. A lot of that credit goes to his long-time collaborator, the razor-sharp editor Aarti Bajaj (who shows a fantastic transition of time passing through a train moving along a track; much like how decades pass in Deewaar with Satyen Kappu standing by the rails in that iconic shot). Together, they show a middle finger to the audience (especially in this age of shrinking attention spans) by crafting scenes that are long, indulgent, and unapologetically drawn out. It’s an operatic device. (Think of how early Chopra, in films like Waqt and Dharmputra, used to stage moments: slow-burning, emotionally loaded, and theatrical.) The point is to make you feel the weight of the exhaustion that characters must bear because of their own foolish choices. The film, in that sense, plays out almost like a novel, divided into chapters (again, vintage Kashyap). It begins with a prologue, hinting at the larger conflict already tightening its grip on the characters. Then it moves into a flashback, and then into flashbacks within flashbacks, peeling back layers of past decisions, until we return to the present timeline. And it ends not with resolution, but with a promise of Part 2. The crime has been committed. Now characters await consequences.

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While it’s difficult at first to locate the film’s central premise, a deeper look into its structure reveals a surprisingly straightforward core: this is a love triangle — in fact, two of them. The first unfolds in the earlier half, between Manjari (Monika Panwar, delivering perhaps the performance of the year in a role modelled on the nurturing, tragic grace of Nutan), her husband Jabardast (Vineet Kumar Singh), and his close friend Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra). The second one appears in the latter half, between Babloo, Dabloo, and Rinku. Think of Khan’s Andaaz, Jagirdar, or Hum Tum Aur Woh; you can sense the spirit of those films throughout. But what’s even more present is the theme of familial breakdown, the slow dissolution of a family unit, seen in Khan’s Manmohan, and later picked up by Chopra in films like Daag, Silsila and Chandni. Viewed through this lens, the film is essentially about a woman caught between love and loss, between a lover who disappears (or dies), and the shadow he leaves behind in the form of a brother, a friend, an acquaintance, who threatens to take his place.

Monika Panwar delivers perhaps the performance of the year in a role modelled on the nurturing, tragic grace of Nutan.

Staying true to this, the film brings together the strangest of lovers (as even one of the songs proclaims). Both halves of the narrative end with a betrayal; a man letting down a woman. In the first half, Jabardast, who presents himself as righteous, the kind of man who scolds his son Babloo for killing a bird with a slingshot in jest, ends up killing his rival during a wrestling match. The act leaves Manjari devastated, unable to understand how someone she thought was sensible could do something so violent. (There’s a devastating line earlier in the film where Jabardast says his wife once told him that the only sindoor she needs is the one marked in his own blood; a line that later comes eerily true.) In the second half, it’s Babloo who mirrors that same betrayal, this time towards Rinku, who, like Manjari, cannot comprehend what he’s done.

This doubling, of action, of consequence, is a classic Chopra touch, where lovers are doomed by choices that strike at the very core of the other’s trust. Their relationships are tested when the truth emerges, and, as is often the case in such cinema, it’s the women who bear the brunt of the men’s failures. They’re left suspended in a moral dilemma, the central condition of all melodrama, forced to choose between right and wrong, between reason and feeling. Just like, at one point in the film, a character is asked to choose between Mughal-e-Azam and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. The character doesn’t answer. But given the way the film unfolds, and especially the way it ends, it’s clear that Kashyap, in the promised second part, is headed towards Deewaar, which is nothing but another Mother India. After all, the real nishaanchi all along was the mother.

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