Swara Bhasker’s Rasbhari: Problematic gaze that pretends to be progressive

The first episode of Swara Bhasker starrer Rasbhari is honestly quite repelling, but the effect starts wearing off as the episodes go on. The creepiness decreases but the gaze stays problematic.

Swara Bhasker starrer Rasbhari is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Swara Bhasker starrer Rasbhari dropped on Amazon Prime Video last week. The trailer made me a bit curious, and hence I proceeded to watch the eight-episode series. Here, men are creepy, and the women appear to only live for the men in their lives. You are then introduced to the teenage protagonist Nand whose mission is to get laid. In this testosterone-filled world enters a new English teacher Shanu, played by Swara Bhasker.

The first episode of Rasbhari is honestly quite repelling, but the effect starts wearing off as the episodes go on. The creepiness decreases but the gaze stays problematic. The dialogues make you cringe so hard that you are jumping out of your skin with disgust. The camera moves so uncomfortably that watching it makes you feel dirty. But despite all of that, I kept watching, waiting for the silver lining that made Swara Bhasker say yes to Rasbhari. I respect her taste as an artiste and genuinely wanted to see what brought her on-board.

In the show, Shanu (Bhasker) has become the object of male fantasy of the entire town. They are literally lining up outside her door just so she will have sex with them, and so she does. By this point, I was wondering if this is some kind of commentary about gossip culture in a male-led society where women can either be wives who cook for them, or the object of their sexual fantasies, and nothing in between. Shanu being oblivious to whatever was happening around her further convinced me that she wasn’t in on the gossip.

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Rasbhari tries to be too smart for its own good. You expect Shanu to take control of the narrative, but that never happens. She offers some pearls of wisdom that sound extremely preachy in this setting, but somehow they transform the protagonist into a social justice warrior. There’s some half-baked story about dissociative identity disorder which doesn’t even add up. The supporting characters, including Shanu’s husband, look like they were given one line about their character as they walked on set.

The so-called suspense in the last episode looks like an afterthought just so this series could boast of being progressive, even though it is anything but that for the rest of the runtime.

Rasbhari isn’t something I would recommend to others and if you happen to be a Swara Bhasker fan, consider yourself warned.