Shantaram: Whose Bombay is this anyway?

Apple TV+ has finally brought us a visual adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s novel of the same name. No, it is not a bio-pic on the director of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje. And no , Mr Bachchan doesn’t play the title role. Luckily, he is no longer attached to this dud-on-arrival  project.

Damn, it’s not even a film any more! It is a web series, and a wobbly one at that, where a part of the plot originally located in Mumbai is constructed in Bhopal, and the rest of ‘Mumbai’ rather ‘Bombay’, since the story is located in the 1980s, was built in Australia. This explains why the storytelling rings phoney from the first frame to the last; that is to say, the last  frame of the third episode because I have no wish to watch the rest of this oafish adaptation of a novel that may have been a sensation back in the 1990s. Now, it all looks overdone, and over and done with.

By now, films about a tourist in Mumbai and the underworld are so common, you can yawn, stretch, sleep, and wake up and you can still predict the storyline.

Predictability is the least of the crimes in Shantaram. Puerility and the complete absence of authenticity are what pull this slack, sluggish, and silly adaptation of the bestseller to the level of a death-seller.

The  garbage, the oppressive crowds and the noise of  the chawls in Mumbai don’t come live in Shantaram. The fetid smell of staleness and a debilitating déjà vu is all-pervasive. Director  Bharat Nalluri was chosen to direct the initial episodes, probably because of his Indian origin. However, Nalluri seems to know nothing about the people and culture of the chawls in Mumbai.

The friendship between the  protagonist and the local Bombay/Mumbai tourist guide rings false primarily because Charlie Hunnam and Shubham Saraf give a touristic interpretation to the role of the fugitive tourist and the local tourist guide. Theirs is a strictly textbook rendering of the plot-defining friendship.

Going almost purely by the book, the screenplay misses the street beat and heat of pulsating Mumbai in the 1980s. The songs in the background are all fake retro. How difficult would it have been for the producers to get permission to use some authentic Bollywood music of the 1980s from Saregama?

Shantaram also misses out on the epic cast it deserved. I know this project from the time when it was in the hands of Mira Nair. Johnny Depp and Amitabh  Bachchan were to co-star.

One of the reasons why Mira Nair opted out of the  project was because she wanted to shoot the film on authentic locations in the chawls of Mumbai, whereas the producers felt that shooting in Mumbai slums was no longer a global box-office fetish after Slumdog Millionaire.

Back in 2007 , Mira, in an interview with me, had mourned her departure from the project mainly because she lost the chance to work with Mr Bachchan. “Alas, we have been stalled temporarily due to the crippling nature of the writers’ strike in Hollywood. Johnny Depp assures me that this is just a pause, and that we’ll start again once the strike is resolved. I’ve spent a year of creative endeavour in realising Shantaram, so I look forward to the time when it will all come together.”

All I can say is, Mira and Mr Bachchan had a lucky escape.

The cast, which initially boasted of Amitabh Bachchan and Johnny Depp, also featured Irrfan  Khan and Konkona Sensharma among a host of others at some point or the other.

Back then Mira  had sighed, “I can close my eyes and see Mr Bachchan and Johnny Depp together.”

Look at what it has come to now.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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