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Journalism of Courage
The warning comes early, but Rumi misses all the signs. In Manmarziyaan, Anurag Kashyap’s latest film, the hot-headed Punjabi girl (played by Tapsee Pannu) is still riding the oxytocin wave fuelled by frenzied lovemaking, when she asks her boyfriend Vicky aka DJ Sandzz (Vicky Kaushal) to elope with her. Vicky is game but it will have to wait: his mother is making gobhi parathas and he can’t leave without eating them. This scene sets up multiple instances of indecisiveness that has divided critics and viewers of the film.
“I wouldn’t call my film a love story or a love triangle — it is a choice story. That’s determining the way young Indians approach love in this day and age,” says Kanika Dhillon, 33, who wrote the story, screenplay and dialogues of Manmarziyaan. The smell of pyaaz ke pakore fill up the living room of her pristine white-themed Juhu apartment, and just like it was for Vicky in the film, the choice is simple: the interview must wait because pakoras must never be allowed to go cold.
Manmarziyaan is set in Amritsar, Dhillon’s hometown, where Rumi and Vicky meet on Tinder. There’s nothing “pure and pious” about their love, because it’s not pyaar but “fyaar” — a feverish, wanton lust that doesn’t wait for the stars to align, but looks for a bed to break in. But Vicky isn’t ready for marriage and Rumi can’t wait for him to come around. Things get tricky when Robbie (Abhishek Bachchan) offers her a shot at something respectable, but is it possible to find fyaar and pyaar in the same person?
“I wanted to talk about what happens when you have a choice in deciding whom you want to marry. This story is about modern love in India, where most of the population is below 30, smartphone penetration is rapidly increasing in tier II cities, India is Tinder’s largest market in Asia, and I don’t think Indian men are looking for virgins anymore. If they are, they should get their heads checked,” says Dhillon. And yet, recent studies and surveys show that over 80 per cent of marriages in India continue to be arranged by families. “So there’s a conflict there. While this generation is swiping left or right on dating apps, they’re also trying to figure out what kind of love works for them. They are quickly realising that it is impossible to find everything they want in a single person. Both men and women receive flak for not wanting to commit to marriage but why should that negate what they feel about each other? What I want to say is that it is okay to not know what the heart wants,” she says.
Dhillon dedicated Manmarziyaan to the late Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam, with a tip of the hat to her immortal poem Main Tainu Phir Milangi (I will meet you yet again). There’s also a reference to Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009) but instead of running to the fields for a romp, Rumi and Vicky paint the town red with their love. “I set my story there not only because I know the milieu but I really wanted to show Bollywood that Punjab aur Amritsar mein love stories kheton se bahar aa chuki hai (Love stories in Punjab and Amritsar have left the fields). We still have a patriarchal setup concerned with family honour but we also have Tinder now. Purana culture, nayi soch (old culture, new perspectives),” she says.
Manmarziyaan is the first of three films written by Dhillon that will be released in this financial year — Abhishek Kapoor’s Kedarnath is out in November, and Mental Hai Kya is due for release in February 2019. “I joined Red Chillies entertainment right after I returned from the London School of Economics in 2007. I worked non-stop for the next couple of years, first as an intern, then a script supervisor, an assistant director for Om Shanti Om (2008) and Billu (2009). I write novels, too, and my third, The Dance of Durga, came out in 2016. But it was the loss of my father a couple of years ago that really made me want to take some time off,” she says. Her grief led her to suffer from crippling anxiety, a subject she touches upon in Mental Hai Kya.
The film will also be her second collaboration with her husband, Telugu filmmaker Prakash Kovelamudi, who directed Size Zero (2015), written by Dhillon. Since she married him in 2014, Dhillon has made it a point to not discuss her personal life in interviews. “The reason I choose not to speak about my husband is because the press is prone to erase the individual identities of women who work in the industry. I don’t want that to happen to me,” she says.
