Shubhra Gupta on 25 years of Satya: Bullets over Bollywood

For Hindi film audiences, as well as those who made formulaic movies featuring callow young men and women dancing around trees, Satya was like a bullet to the brain, decimating everything in its way. Those streaming out of that first day first day show knew they had seen something special, that would be change-making in a fundamental way. Take no prisoners? Hell, yeah.

RGV had already made inroads into Bollywood with Shiva (1990), a remake of his Telugu actioner. His 1995 Rangeela was a peppy musical whose songs we still hum. It was a huge hit, posting notice that the new boy in town was here to stay. In 1998, he came out with Satya, about a young man who arrives in Mumbai in search of a life, only to descend into grimy gangster-hood, there to survive and thrive, but only for a short while.

It wasn’t as if gangster-giri was new to Bollywood. The mob had attained god-like status amongst Hollywood scriptwriters after the roaring success of the ’70s The Godfather trilogy. Bollywood was, belatedly, paying attention. Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989) gave us a mob movie for the ages, with its achingly beautiful frames circling its characters who live and die on the margins. RGV took the mobster (he has been on record to say that he was fascinated by those who took the law in their own hands) and ran with him, or rather, a brace of them.

Satya was like a scrappy youngster, brimming with the confidence of someone with nothing to lose, breaking convention right and left: its refusal to bow to any accepted notions of hero-giri was a call to arms — the bheja of those involved in the making of this movie had been fried by the doors of legacy Bollywood being firmly closed in their faces for years — the very existence of the film declared that that era was over. If, in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino could make films filled with fast-talking, wisecracking bad guys who could make us laugh despite ourselves, RGV could do it right here, in Mumbai, with the monsoon rain prettifying the muck surrounding Satya and his lady-love Vidya, played by Urmila Matondkar, by then a fixture in RGV flicks.

No one had heard of JD Chakravarthy in Hindi film circles before Satya, his eponymous character acting as a disrupter amongst rival gangs. The array of actors — Manoj Bajpayee (Bhiku Mhatre), still struggling for a firm foothold in the industry after more than a decade, Shefali Shah as Bhikhu’s spirited wife, Saurabh Shukla (Kallu mama), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Anurag Kashyap, Govind Namdeo as the all-powerful Bhau, Makarand Deshpande as the lawyer to the mob, Paresh Rawal as the fearless police commissioner, Aditya Srivastava as the ‘encounter cop’, Sushant Singh as a low-ranking goonda, Manoj Pahwa as a street-side broker, and so many others — created an ecosystem in which kidnapping, extortion and murder flourished. The script included several real-life incidents (a Bollywood producer being shot dead, a stampede in a theatre playing Border, a lecherous music director being shown his place), which helped give it that gritty, realistic edge, amplified by the use of hand-held cameras. Any of the teeming millions in Mumbai could be Satya; and anyone could be Bhiku, whose iconic question, “Mumbai ka king kaun?”, becomes the emblem, post-facto, for the film itself.

So many of the actors in Satya had got their initial leg-up in the movies through Bandit Queen (1994), Shekhar Kapur’s film about a low-caste woman whose journey through oppression and violence became a landmark in Bollywood. Kapur opted for trained actors from the National School Of Drama to give his film the stark realism required to make us believe. RGV’s merry band in Satya kept getting repeated in his subsequent films: he knew how crucial these actors were to his scheme of things, to create a parallel set of ‘stars’ that the paying public would begin to love, and demand more of.

An up-close and very personal look at these “chota mota bhai-logs” who go to the movies about gigantic “chhipkalis” (dinosaurs) and banter with their wives and girlfriends gave us lives we hadn’t seen before: those higher-up on the totem pole of organised crime show up more than half way into the film. This was dramatically different from the fare Bollywood — completely in the grip of the soft-focus romances made by big studios starring the Khan triumvirate — was dishing out. The return to the youthful love story had begun in 1988, with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, rose to a frenzy in 1989 with Maine Pyar Kiya, and was graven in stone by 1995, with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. These were benchmarks, and in their wake came a slew of also-rans which had none of the verve of the originals.

Bollywood was waiting for the truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth. And Satya came in, and rescued it from itself. Given his slide into the beyond-terrible movies he makes now, I often wonder, whatever happened to that RGV?