Homebound: Hindu-Muslim Friendship in the Time of COVID, Government Apathy, Animosity and Casteism (Review 803)

Release date:	September 26, 2025
Director:	Neeraj Ghaywan
Cast:	Vishal Jethwa, Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor, Shalini Vatsa, Harshika Parmar
Language:	Hindi

 

I kept pinching myself while watching Homebound, to be sure I was awake. Was this a dream? Did this film actually come from the Hindi industry that has spent recent decades largely ignoring caste oppression, and the past 11 years pandering to majoritarian forces?  

 

Writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is the story of two impoverished young men from a north Indian village – one Muslim, one Dalit – who hope that a job in the police force will give them the social standing and respect that has so far eluded them. An unexpected rivalry, further financial pressures and the COVID-19 pandemic each add new chapters to their life-long friendship.   

  

Ghaywan is an uncommon presence in contemporary Hindi filmdom, since his understanding of caste has been a hallmark of his slim but impactful body of work, starting with his debut feature, Masaan (Crematorium), that won two awards at the Cannes film festival in 2015. What makes Homebound unusual in this context is that it is produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, a company reputed for glossy films about wealthy Indians. (Dharma also produced Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, which too is an out-and-out anti-caste film – another surprise from the Hindi industry this year.)

 

Homebound was subjected to several cuts by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which is currently on a warpath against cinema that acknowledges caste atrocities, as I’ve learnt during my reporting on the subject in the past two years. Having said that, given the harassment that many other Indian producers have faced at the CBFC in this decade, it is a relief that this film escaped with edits that have not ruined the experience of viewing it.

  

Homebound dwells at length on another topic for which another Hindi filmmaker, Anubhav Sinha, was penalised: Sinha’s Bheed was chopped beyond recognition by the CBFC in a bid to pare down its portrayal of government apathy during the pandemic. Homebound has survived despite this being one of its central themes. 

 

To describe Homebound as brave is, therefore, an understatement. Making it even more noteworthy is its empathy towards Muslims in a decade in which Hindi cinema has unabashedly demonised the community, going so far as to distort history to make Muslim individuals the villains of episodes in which they were, in truth, the heroes. Exhibit A: Kesari released in 2019.   

  

Ghaywan’s film was premiered at Cannes this summer, and won the International People’s Choice Award second runner-up spot at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is also India’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar race, an arena in which it has got itself a starting-point advantage in the form of Hollywood A-lister and international film legend Martin Scorsese, who is an Executive Producer. 

 

Courage is no guarantee of cinematic quality. Homebound is effective and captivating because its political awareness is woven into an intelligently crafted screenplay, and brought to life by the scintillating performances of its young leads.   

 

Vishal Jethwa plays Chandan Kumar, who hesitates to use the surname that would disclose his Dalit identity to those around him, and does not apply for jobs in the reserved category, as is his right, for fear of being ostracised. Ishaan Khatter is Mohammad Shoaib, a hard-working youngster who remains determined and driven despite facing constant suspicion and Islamophobic jibes.

 

Shoaib is filled with a simmering rage at these injustices. Chandan is more hesitant about asserting himself, except when the need arises to defend his friend. When it comes to himself, he requires a nudge from Shoaib to claim what is due to him from the society that conspires to keep him and his people down.

 

Jethwa was chilling as a rapist-killer in 2019’s Mardaani 2 headlined by Rani Mukerji. His unfaltering turn as the immensely likeable Chandan is evidence of remarkable versatility. Ghaywan has not blackfaced him for the role, making this casting choice – of a light-skinned, light-eyed actor – a rebellion against the stereotyping of the physical appearance of Dalits on the Indian screen. 

 

Khatter stood out even when saddled with jaded writing in the streaming shows A Suitable Boy (2020) and The Royals (2025). He’s a natural before the camera, and buries himself completely here in Shoaib’s personality and milieu. 

 

The actors’ chemistry underpins Homebound’s emotional resonance. Despite its grim preoccupations, the screenplay finds space for fun, laughter and relaxation, allowing the actors to generate such warmth towards each other that I found myself willing Shoaib and Chandan to remain friends forever when tension erupts between them. Even in those moments, the writing and acting gently foreground their vulnerability and desperation, thus allowing them to retain audience sympathy. 

 

Many of the conversations in the film are profoundly political, but they are never expository, strained or sermonic.

 

These men feel real, so do their surroundings. The expressive background score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor rises and falls in step with Nitin Baid’s carefully calibrated editing that imbues the events unfolding on screen with the rhythm of lived realities.

 

While the representation of anti-Muslim prejudice and casteism are intrinsic to Homebound, Shoaib and Chandan are written as being not overly conscious of their differing identities except to the extent that each is protective of the other when the environment turns hostile, mirroring genuine friendships in the real world.  

 

Homebound stands by the marginalised without pedestalising them, as films sometimes do when they are created by those who do not realise that positive stereotyping too is a form of othering. For one, it points to gender discrimination in Chandan’s family. It also underlines the heterogeneity among Dalits through the medium of Chandan’s girlfriend, Sudha Bharti played by Janhvi Kapoor, whose better economic circumstances cause her to briefly take a blinkered view of his struggles. 

 

Sudha is a small player in the story, belying Kapoor’s presence in the film’s marketing – but if you ignore the impression created by the promotions, that’s really not a flaw. Small is not trivial. In a sense, she is B.R. Ambedkar’s voice in Homebound, exhorting a fellow Dalit to get an education that she views as a means to securing her and his rightful place in society. She also challenges Chandan in little ways to introspect about his patriarchal attitudes. 

 

So though Homebound is focused on two men, it is not men-centric in the way conventional commercial Indian cinema is. Chandan’s mother and sister, played by Shalini Vatsa and Harshika Parmar – both stand-out members of the solid supporting cast – are pivotal to the plot, and are given well-defined arcs despite their limited screen time.  

 

For the most part, Homebound is a nuanced chronicle of abiding friendship in dire situations, social prejudice, callousness towards the poorest among us, claims of victimhood by those whose communities have a track record of being oppressors, and the continuing victimisation of historically oppressed social groups. The film strays from its subtlety only a couple of times, to emphasise a point already conveyed with clarity. But this is a minor complaint about an otherwise consistently mature narrative.  

 

Shoaib and Chandan’s saga is inspired by journalist Basharat Peer’s news feature titled “Taking Amrit Home” published in The New York Times (it is available online under the headline “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway”). Peer’s article emerged from his search for two men from Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, after a photograph of Saiyub cradling Amrit in his lap on the margins of a highway went viral on social media, at a time when migrant workers in Indian cities had been forced to walk hundreds of kilometers back to their villages after the Central government abruptly imposed a nationwide lockdown in May 2020 without making adequate arrangements for the poor. The film is a fictionalised account of these young men’s lives, with the story credited to Peer, Ghaywan and Sumit Roy, a screenplay by Ghaywan, and dialogues by Ghaywan, Varun Grover and Shreedhar Dubey.

 

“Interfaith friendships in India are not as uncommon as the regnant political discourse might suggest,” Peer wrote simply in his NYT profile of Saiyub and Amrit. Homebound revisits this aspect of Indian life that has been fading away from the Hindi screen in recent years, in addition to confronting the caste system. 

 

Homebound is shorn of Amar Akbar Anthony-style melodrama and overt messaging that once characterised Hindi film portrayals of communal harmony. Like that picture of Saiyub and Amrit on social media, Shoaib and Chandan’s devotion to each other speaks for itself, serving as an urgent reminder of the amity that survives among us against all odds.

 

Running time:

122 minutes in theatre listings

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB 

 

This is a long version of an article published in The Economic Times on September 27, 2025 under the headline "Chronicle of a Friendship in Dire Times"

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/homebound-chronicle-of-a-friendship-in-dire-times/articleshow/124185023.cms

 

REVIEW 741: DRIVE

Release date:	November 1, 2019
Director:	Tarun Mansukhani
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Boman Irani, Pankaj Tripathi, Vibha Chibber, Sapna Pabbi, Vikramjeet Virk Hindi

So it is here at last: the first direct-to-Netflix release by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. 

Produced by KJo, written and directed by Tarun “Dostana” Mansukhani, starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez, Drive is a thriller that follows the tried-and-tested pattern of a heist within a heist within a heist. Film industries across the world have explored this genre to fun effect. India’s Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood proved that it has the chops for wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels crime back in 1978 with the iconic Don starring Amitabh Bachchan, more recently with Abbas Mustan’s Race in 2008 and the SRK-Farhan Akhtar Don films in 2006 and 2011.

The very least you would expect after seeing the poster, the credits of Drive and reading its summary is that it would deliver spadefuls of excitement, pretty people in pretty clothes and swish special effects. Well, lower those expectations right away. 

Sure, Rajput and Fernandez look hot in the film, both have tremendously fit bodies, and if you think back on the story, the original concept probably had the potential to become a slick cops-and-robbers drama. At first it does seem like Drive might prove to be an entertainer but the narrative, like the special effects, steadily declines as the film progresses. The SFX are overall so downmarket that it is hard to believe Drive comes to us from Dharma, whose signature for at least two decades has been glossy visuals. 

Not that anything else in the film is of high calibre. Well suited to the SFX are the generic storytelling style, the overall ordinary production quality, inconsistent audio, a stand-out acting loophole and glaring lack of logic that, among other things, translates into Delhi roads – notorious in reality for their traffic jams – obligingly emptying themselves out to accommodate high-speed car races and chases at all times of day and night. 

The reason why Drive is set in India’s capital city is because a robbery is being planned in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The primary players in this game are a group of car racing aficionados, an outsider who infiltrates their inner circle, a criminal known simply as King – you know, like Don in Don – and corrupt bureaucrats. 

The opening race in Drive is reasonably well done, the song ‘n’ dance that follows is kinda nicely choreographed by Adil Shaikh, and Jacqueline Fernandez has some cute moves in it. From then on it is a downhill descent. 

Gaping gaps in the plotline recede into the background in the face of ordinary car chases that routinely look plastic and an embarrassingly low-brow extended climax that feels like the work of an entry-level animation student. Lightning McQueen’s universe appeared more real than the vehicles and roads in several of this film’s scenes. 

Much has been made of the fact that a portion of Drive was filmed in Israel, making it the first Bollywood venture to be shot there. The media has reported that the film was also partly funded by that country’s government. The true mystery here is why the Israeli sarkar thought this film would be a good ad for them in India. Be assured that what Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is to New York City or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is to Spain, Drive is absolutely not to Tel Aviv. At best the city is treated like the geographical equivalent of an ‘item’ number chucked mindlessly into a bad Bollywood film – it springs up out of the blue and it has no relevance whatsoever to the storyline.

In the face of such mediocrity, analysing the screenplay almost feels pointless. But a job is a job, so consider this. Without giving anything away let us just say the only way the masterplan revealed in the climax of Drive could possibly have worked is if no one in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s entire security department checked a critical character’s ID carefully for several days. 

Granted that this point arises only in retrospect, and granted that this person could have had the world’s top creator of fake IDs backing them, so instead consider this question that comes up quite early in the film. (Some people may consider this paragraph a spoiler) The loot could not have been where it was unless other critical characters managed to easily beat the security system in the Indian President’s residence for what must have been months, if not years. If you have visited Rashtrapati Bhavan and experienced the tight restrictions in place in the complex, you would know how ridiculous this is. How the crooks aced the system is never explained, we are simply expected to accept that they did because we are told so. (Spoiler alert ends)

Or consider this. Person X says in the end that they were expecting to be deceived by Person Y. But in an earlier scene when X realised they had been double-crossed by Y, the facial expression – clearly visible in close-up – is one of shock and not at all “oh well, I knew this was coming”.

Or this. In a key scene in Drive, a quartet of cars zips through an airport runway and the occurrence seems not to be a blip on the radar of Air Traffic Control (ATC), the local police or the news media at that point or for the two months that the story continues. This writing laziness is intentional – having ATC, the police and press notice the breach would have been too much of an inconvenience since it could have meant the kingpins of the gameplan being discovered before the writer wanted them to be, you see. 

Or consider this. Snazzy cars with the words “Delhi Police” emblazoned on them zoom about the city, offering evidence of how little the team of Drive knows the reality of the capital’s ill-equipped force. 

As for the acting, well, Pankaj Tripathi does lend a Pankaj Tripathi touch to his character, but really, how is one to seriously and fairly critique the performances in such a film?

For a moment let us set aside thoughts of the cast though, and Johar, Netflix and Israel. Let us take that moment to mourn the fact that this sub-standard action flick has been made by the same director who gave us Dostana, which, notwithstanding its resemblance to a Hollywood film, was, in its own way, pathbreaking in the Indian social context. From Dostana to Drive is such a fall.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	None
Running time:	119 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/drive-movie-review-sushant-and-jacquelines-prettiness-and-an-under-par-heist-come-wrapped-in-awful-sfx-7588511.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(2019_film)

FEATURE: KUMBALANGI NIGHTS & THE JOURNEY OF INDIAN CINEMA

The Kumbalangi Nights Phenomenon: One small step for Mollywood, a giant leap for Indian cinema 

By Anna M.M. Vetticad

It is now in its 12th week in Kerala movie theatres despite the tsunami effect that Avengers: Endgame has had on most small films, it played for 7 weeks each in Chennai and Bangalore, 6 weeks in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and 5 weeks in the National Capital Region – this is the kind of pan-India spread and longevity that Kollywood, Tollywood and Bollywood’s flamboyant star-laden big-banner ventures hope for but rarely get. Yet the film we speak of here is not a mega project from one of India’s three largest industries, but a little gem called Kumbalangi Nights from the comparatively small Malayalam film industry a.k.a. Mollywood.

Made on a budget of Rs 6.5 crore, Kumbalangi Nights sold its overseas rights for Rs 1.5 crore and had grossed Rs 27.89 crore by April 4 from the box-office across India, according to its producers – it is likely to cross trade pundits’ earlier expectations that it would close at Rs 30 crore-plus. Kumbalangi Nights has none of the grandiose dialogues and lionising camera angles that characterise films starring Mammootty and Mohanlal who continue to dominate Mollywood and rake in big bucks in far larger quantities. Its appeal lies instead in its simplicity and endearing slice-of-life tone mirroring the low-key tenor and realism of the cinema that some observers have come to see as a Malayalam New Wave of the past decade.

These films have been varied in their ambition, storylines and scale but have in common their desire to keep it real, to capture the flavour of the people and the fragrance of the soil in which they are set. Such as in that moment in Kumbalangi Nights in which the curly-haired Babymol (Anna Ben) shakes her head ever so slightly sideways in vintage Malayali style, as she tells her friend in a sing-song Malayalam accent: “Bobby and Baby – those names would look so good on a wedding card, would they not?”

Or later when Babymol has a tiff with Bobby (Shane Nigam) who storms off and boards a boat to escape her, at which point she yells across the pristine water: “I have found a name for a film about my life – Oolaye Premichcha Pennkutty (The Girl Who Fell For An Idiot).” And in the background of that soundscape ruled by stillness and quiet, we hear the boatman giggle.

Everyday lines such as these spoken by Baby & Co. have attained iconic status among audiences in the nearly three months since Kumbalangi Nights’ release. Their allure comes from their ability to transport viewers to the Kerala of reality, peopled by individuals and communities that tourists can expect to bump into on a visit, unlike the make-believe world of larger-than-life Mollywood ventures.

Kumbalangi Nights revolves around brothers Saji, Bonny, Bobby and Frankie from the rural island of Kumbalangi on the outskirts of Kochi. The siblings have a testy relationship. When their paths cross with Baby, her sister Simi and autocratic brother-in-law Shammy, warmth and a parallel discomfort are followed by self-loathing, conflict, mayhem, and finally, redemption and reconciliation.

“I was absolutely charmed by the story of a dysfunctional family like no other and the setting,” says journalist Aseem Chhabra, director of the New York Indian Film Festival who divides his time between India and the US. “The sense of simplicity appealed to me. And gosh, it was so romantic.”

Humour, socio-cultural detailing and unobtrusive political statements are the qualities that have made Kumbalangi Nights a darling of critics and viewers. Collections apart, the film has acquired a pan-India cult following comparable to the respect earned by the Tamil film Aaranya Kaandam (2011), Thithi (Kannada) and Sairat (Marathi), both from 2016, and Malayalam cinema’s own Angamaly Diaries (2017). 

This though is not an account of Kumbalangi Nights’ success alone, but a chronicle of the position at which Indian cinema finds itself right now as exemplified by the journey of this particular film.

Although the exhibition sector nationwide has opened up considerably in recent years, vast tracts headquartered in Delhi and Mumbai continue to treat non-Hindi Indian cinema as subordinate to Bollywood and Hollywood. This pro-Bollywood/Hindi slant led the Maharashtra government, for instance, in 2015 to make it mandatory for the state’s multiplexes to slot at least one Marathi film during post-noon hours.

Tollywood’s Baahubali franchise strategically surmounted this Bollywood bias by getting Bollywood stalwart Karan Johar on board as a presenter-distributor of its Hindi dubbed versions. It was a giant-sized project anyway, but Johar’s association with it made it even bigger because of his clout with northern and western Indian theatres and with the ‘national’ media that is otherwise indifferent to Telugu cinema.

Despite the self-defeating resistance from the exhibition sector that contradicts its own expansion efforts, a Kumbalangi Nights was inevitable for Mollywood on a landscape where scores of viewers nationwide are demanding more than they have been served in previous decades and the snail’s-paced leviathans of India’s film industries – producers, distributors and exhibitors – have been gradually waking up to that demand.

In that sense, Kumbalangi Nights is the right film at the right place at the right time.

Leading the confluence of factors that has led to its triumph is the journey of Malayalam cinema along two co-existing tracks. On the one hand Mollywood churns out bombastic big-budget films like this summer’s Madhuraraja starring Mammootty and the Mohanlal-starrer Lucifer that have created a storm at turnstiles in Kerala and among Malayali fans of these stars outside the state. On the other hand are mood films occupying the same plane as Angamaly Diaries and Kumbalangi Nights – Ustad Hotel, Kammatipaadam, Maheshinte Prathikaaram, Take Off, Mayaanadhi, Eeda and Koode among them – that have in the past 10 years or so sustained Mollywood’s nationwide reputation as a maker of quality realistic cinema that does not necessarily head off into overly artsy, esoteric or dreary territory. Their middle-of-the-road nature – thoughtful yet entertaining in varying ways – has earned them a loyal following not just among Malayalis, but also among non-Malayali cinephiles. 

Kumbalangi Nights’ debutant director Madhu C. Narayanan acknowledges the debt of gratitude that filmmakers like him owe Kerala audiences who have nurtured this movement. “When we made Kumbalangi Nights,” he says, “we did it with the absolute confidence that at least we were guaranteed the audience that had seen Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum.” Narayanan was credited for “creative contribution” in the latter, director Dileesh Pothan’s National Award winning hit from 2017.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation: as a new lot of experimental Malayalam filmmakers like Aashiq Abu and Pothan emerged, viewers hungry for a change from formulaic fare backed them, and these filmmakers returned the favour by taking bigger risks and persisting in making formula-defying films not reliant on reigning megastars, thus whetting existing viewer appetites while simultaneously generating curiosity among others and drawing more people to their works day by day. “With each passing film, the audience for such cinema has increased,” Narayanan adds. “The fact that there is a ready audience for quality cinema in Kerala gives us the confidence to explore more such unusual subjects.”

This confidence complements the digital upsurge that has revolutionised entertainment in India in recent years.

Until about a decade back, conventional ‘wisdom’ in the film exhibition and distribution trades largely assumed that the only Indian films (other than Hindi) that Indians were interested in watching were in their own respective mother tongues. This myopic attitude did not take into consideration people who had for years been visiting film festivals, joining film clubs, buying DVDs or illegally downloading films online in various languages since their local theatres denied them the variety they craved. In the case of films in languages other than Hindi, this group of committed cinephiles was mostly deemed by decision makers to be too minuscule to translate into significant box-office collections if the same films were to be given theatrical releases outside the regions in which their languages are primarily spoken. Barring exceptions such as the multiple dubbed versions of Mani Ratnam’s Roja and Bombay released in the 1990s, little effort was made to build awareness and spur audience growth by resorting to dubbing and/or subtitling and strong marketing.

Producers of films in languages other than Hindi either had a frog-in-the-well attitude and/or were weighted down by a defeatist, fatalistic assumption that they did not stand a chance pan-India. They also faced – and still do – the hurdle of an unabashed pro-Hindi/Bollywood bias in the supposed ‘national’ newspapers and TV channels based in Delhi and Mumbai, a bias that automatically drastically cuts down the number of news platforms on which these films could be promoted.

(Note: Bollywood producers too lacked – and still lack – the vision to subtitle their films in a bid to expand the viewership they already garner outside Hindi-speaking regions. Despite the privileges they enjoy, industry insiders estimate that on an average only 30 per cent of Hindi film collections come from beyond the Hindi belt, so there is indeed scope to extend their reach.)

It did not help that in the pre-digital age of physical prints, dubbing and/or subtitling was logistically tougher. India’s film industries lacked the far-sightedness to realise that the additional inconvenience and investment involved would lead to a long-term widening of audiences for cinema across Indian languages.

Hollywood was much quicker to nose out the potential for its films beyond the traditional audience of English speakers in India. It has been about 20 years since American majors made it a standard practice to release their films – all the tentpole projects and many smaller ones – in dubbed Telugu, Hindi and Tamil versions in India in addition to the original English.

“Hollywood had the foresight to see that localisation was the way forward to expand markets,” says Raj Malik, Vice President – Strategy & Business Development of the Mumbai-based Inspired Entertainment, a content production, distribution and promotion company. An industry veteran who has previously held senior positions at Warner Bros, Eros and Disney in India, Malik recalls that from the late 1990s onwards, long before Indian audiences for Hollywood films had reached the size they are at today, “India offices of the big studios were carpet-bombing the market with dubbed content, ranging from Men in Black to Night At The Museum, from superhero adventures to animation features”. He adds: “Films like those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have achieved their present scale because of the years invested in building and enlarging the worldwide audience for them in this fashion.”

India took a cue from Hollywood much later. In the past decade or so, accompanied by the mushrooming of multiplexes, there has been an increase in Indian language cinema other than Hindi (let’s avoid the marginalising term “regional cinema”, please) being released outside their home bases. Quite fortuitously, the TV media explosion at the turn of the century had led to Hindi dubbed versions of southern Indian films being regularly released on general entertainment channels, which familiarised Hindi audiences with the stars of these industries, thus piquing the interest of some of them at least to sample these films in their original languages whenever they were available with subtitles – the gains in audience numbers in theatres have been a steady trickle ever since.

The more recent rise of the social media has also helped spread the word among film buffs about good cinema across languages that the mainstream news media in the north was/is not covering. The advent of online news platforms has helped too – news websites have by and large been more open-minded in this arena than newspapers and TV channels. At the same time, as theatres have gone digital, the switch to digital prints from physical prints has made subtitling easier.

Mangesh Kulkarni, Business Head of Zee Studios’ Marathi division points out that digitisation has also simplified distribution. “Earlier one had to take prints physically to certain markets, which is no more needed,” he explains. “This is helping us open more territories more feasibly and faster. We are able to catch on another territory while the buzz about a film is very high.”

The road is still long and wearying because the birth of new media and new technology has not necessarily been accompanied by new mindsets in all quarters. So, even today not all producers subtitle their films. Booking websites and listings do not give information about subs. Theatres – including India’s biggest multiplex chain, the PVRs – routinely provide wrong information about subtitles on their helplines and at booking counters. And even when films are subtitled, these theatres often simply skip playing the subs.

This lethal combination of inefficiency, systemic failings, cultural insularity and short-sightedness has persistently stood in the way of all Indian cinema being available to all Indians, yet there has been some notable forward movement on this front. Rajinikanth-starrers, for one, have got bigger and bigger releases outside southern India, in dubbed versions and in the original Tamil, ever since Sivaji caught the imagination of the ‘national’ media in 2007. And though blockbuster status in every corner of the country remains uncommon even for Hindi with all its advantages, a pioneering distribution and promotional gameplan helped the Baahubali franchise – dubbed versions and the original Telugu – to slip through the cracks, ace all hurdles and achieve that rare distinction, with Baahubali: The Conclusion becoming the highest grossing Indian film of all time and Baahubali: The Beginning too ranking among India’s Top 10.

These however are projects with large budgets mounted on a massive scale, designed as mass offerings and with the wherewithal to market themselves heavily. Arguably the more heartening development of the past decade has been the emergence of smaller filmmakers and smaller, thought-provoking films in various languages other than Hindi impacting the pan-India box-office when released with subtitles. This has been enabled, among other things, by social-media-driven word of mouth and the economics of multiplexes, which allows space for films of all sizes.

Riding this trend, directors like Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni (Marathi), Lijo Jose Pellissery (Malayalam) and Raam Reddy (Kannada) have become familiar names among committed cinephiles countrywide with their intimate portraits of specific cultures. Nagraj Manjule (Marathi), Anjali Menon (Malayalam) and Rajeev Ravi (Malayalam) appear to have cracked the mystery of how to turn realistic, issue-driven cinema into large-scale money-spinners. They are all children of an evolving consumer whose existence is slowly compelling Indian producers, distributors and exhibitors to rethink their business plans.

Online platforms on their part have had a dual revolutionising effect on audiences: at one level, they offer easy access to films that were earlier hard to come by for those viewers who never considered language a barrier, at another level they serve to educate new audiences through exposure. This, film industry watchers believe, is further raising footfalls in mainstream theatres for cinema in languages other than viewers’ mother tongues, which demand is then translating into more shows for such cinema in theatres.

“The digital media are preparing people en masse for consumption of content whether it is in their language or any other language with subtitles,” says Zee’s Mangesh Kulkarni

The Marathi film industry, which rivals Mollywood’s reputation for quality, is a good case study here. Kulkarni says that earlier a Marathi movie’s average collections outside Maharashtra would be 5% of the total, but that has changed in recent years with films like Katyar Kaljat Ghusali (2015) and Natsamrat (2016). Small, meaningful Marathi cinema already had a dedicated audience outside the state and beyond Marathi speakers, but the scale of interest in Marathi cinema at large has shot up since Sairat, Nagraj Manjule’s 2016 film about an upper caste girl and a Dalit boy in love: 12% of Sairat’s total collections came from outside Maharashtra, the figure was 10% for last year’s parent-child saga Naal and Anandi Gopal, a biopic of one of India’s first woman doctors. 

“The market for Marathi movies outside Maharashtra was earlier in pockets with primarily Marathi populations. These last few films have broken that,” says Kulkarni. Naal “had a 3-4 week run in Chennai”, while Anandi Gopal “has done exceedingly well in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata. They were not necessarily watched by Marathi folks, they also got huge acclaim from non-Marathis in those areas.”

Kumbalangi Nights’ Madhu C. Narayanan believes video online streaming platforms not only feed intelligent, adventurous audiences, they have also made audiences at large more exacting. “Unlike in our youth, today young people have plenty of opportunities and platforms in their hands to watch films of all languages from across India and the world,” he explains. “When youngsters with exposure to so much quality cinema watch our films, we too have to compulsorily maintain a certain minimum quality.”

It is in this context that Kumbalangi Nights has been embraced by cineastes across the country. As it heads for Delhi’s Habitat Film Festival in May, this film is a timely reminder that while language maybe region specific, emotions and laughter are not.

The country’s film-crazed millions can only hope that their own increasing open-mindedness and this era of online video streaming will deal a final death blow to the misconceptions, prejudices, lack of enterprise and inefficiencies that have for decades stalled the spread of India’s own cinema within India.

This article was published on Firstpost on April 30, 2019:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/the-kumbalangi-nights-phenomenon-one-small-step-for-mollywood-a-giant-leap-for-indian-cinema-6543241.html

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://www.facebook.com/KumbalangiNights/

(2) https://www.facebook.com/ThithiTheFilm/

(3) https://www.facebook.com/koodethemovie/

(4) https://www.facebook.com/Sairatmovie/

(5) Zee Studios