Tiger Shroff & Kriti Sanon’s Ganapath shows why Bollywood isn’t ready to tell dystopian stories yet

Dystopia isn’t normally a word you associate with Tiger Shroff. For all the challenges he is up against on screen, you know well the action star will invariably be in control. He’ll bust all danger flaunting six-pack machismo and find time to show off a few groovy dance moves, too. After all Shroff, like any other commercial filmstar, thrives on catering the larger-than-life assurance of infallible heroism to fans.

Casting Tiger Shroff as lead in a film as Ganapath was, therefore, always a tricky deal. You’ve ambitiously billed your film as a dystopian thriller, and yet there is Shroff’s image to contend with. Writer-director Vikas Bahl tried taking a convenient way out. He had his film’s cinematographer Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti set up a visual palette that roughly reminds of The Matrix or Mad Max, or half a dozen other Hollywood dystopian hits you’ve watched, and got down to writing a script that creates scope for Tiger Shroff cliches against the backdrop of gareeb-versus-ameer stereotypes.

Commercial Bollywood’s first dystopian film was thus produced. Officially titled Ganapath: A Hero is Born the film is pitched as first of a trilogy. Trouble is, Bahl’s inability to tackle two unlike tasks at hand ended up with the film falling between stools. Weighed down by the demand to click as a ‘star project’, Ganapath ended up too unimaginative to work as a smart dystopian thriller. And, given the attempt to retain an outlandish premise, the film fails to create scope for Shroff to cater anything new to his fans, beyond what he has already done so far.

Bahl’s failure to balance the dour demands of stardom and the urge to experiment with content is a malady commonplace in the Hindi film industry lately, cutting across genres. If anything, the dismal box office that Ganapath has opened to should serve as a heads-up to the makers of Kalki 2898 AD, the much-hyped upcoming dystopian adventure starring Prabhas, Deepika Padukone and Dulquer Salmaan, with Amitabh Bachchan and Kamal Haasan in pivotal roles.

Ganapath ending up a mess is strictly not about Tiger Shroff, or the demand to accommodate (and waste) Kriti Sanon in a half-baked role for the sake of glamour. Or, Amitabh Bachchan in a cameo sporting a bizarre get-up that makes him almost unrecognisable. It is about the fact that Bollywood’s box office-driven logistics are too restricted by the need to cater formulaic vibes. Mainstream Hindi cinema with its tendency to compromise for the sake of stardom simply isn’t ready to tell dystopian stories yet.

Not surprisingly only a couple of Bollywood films have attempted dystopian themes over the years, before Ganapath — that too in the offbeat and arthouse realms. One recalls Raakh, one of Aamir Khan’s earliest releases as lead actor. The film marked the directorial debut of Aditya Bhattacharya, son of noted filmmaker Basu Bhattacharya. The story is set against a dystopian backdrop where lawlessness prevails amidst police highhandedness and presents Khan as Amir Hussein, a young man from a wealthy, privileged family. One night while returning from a party, Amir’s girlfriend Neeta (Supriya Pathak) is raped by a crime boss and he is forced to watch helplessly. Driven by vengeance and helped by a disillusioned cop (Pankaj Kapoor), Amir slips into a vortex of violence, to the point that he actually starts to enjoy taking lives. Raakh, unlike Ganapath, uses violence with a thematic motive to highlight how a lawless society brings out the beast in even the most contented of people. Made in the late eighties, Raakh is now considered a cult film, too dark even by today’s standards. The film crashed upon release despite Aamir Khan emerging as the nation’s heartthrob shortly before that with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak in 1988.

Violence is the defining feature in almost every dystopian work of fiction. Manish Jha’s 2003 tragedy, Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women, the Hindi film industry’s other authentic dystopian attempt, is extreme in its depiction of brutality while imagining a society that hardly has any women left. The story unfolds in a future where gender imbalance owing female foeticide and female infanticide over the years has led to a drastically diminished female population. The plot is centred on Kalki (Tulip Joshi), sold to a wealthy man and his five sons who are to use her to satiate their desires. Matrubhoomi is a difficult watch, as a gruesome fate awaits Kalki. Not only is she literally reduced to being a slave to the bunch of sex-starved men who ‘own’ her, Kalki becomes a pawn in an ugly game of caste and community politics that men in the village get involved in. The film won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2003 Venice Film Festival, but failed to find much audience upon release.

With the advent of streaming sites, which cater to niche taste, most commendable attempts created around dystopian themes have understandably happened in the OTT space, in the form of series or short films. Leila, Urmi Juvekar’s 2019 series based on Prayaag Akbar’s novel of the same name, is among the most remarkable attempts one can recall. The story is set in the 2040s, in the fictional totalitarian nation of Aryavarta. Leila, toplined by Huma Qureshi, imagines a society divided into communities that are segregated by walls, a world where clean air and water are a luxury. Subjugation of women forms the crux, and the series is unflinching in showing how deeply damaging the impact of such a society would be on the psyche of children.

The horror genre has not surprisingly been a frequent plot pusher for dystopian storytellers on screen, given the grim nature of these tales. But while shows as Ghoul and Betaal used supernatural themes to entertain as well as comment, there has been the odd series as OK Computer, too, that takes a satirical look at what would happen if artificial intelligence (AI) were to go about destroying humanity in the same way human beings have been destroying other life forms on Earth. Among short films that have credibly narrated dystopian stories using AI themes are the Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Carbon and Anukul, starring Parambrata Chattopadhyay and based on a short story by Satyajit Ray.

Instances of the genre being explored in regional cinema have been few, too, owing to its limited appeal. One can recall the 1991 Telugu sci-fi release Aditya 369, in all probability the first commercial Indian film to touch upon dystopian themes. The Tamil dark comedy Jil Jung Juk, the Malayalam dark comedy Gaganachari and the upcoming Assamese thriller Avataran are a few examples. The feel-good world of Indian mainstream cinema has little or no space for provocative dystopian stories.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and journalist who loves to write on popular culture.