Uday Bhatia: Everyone thinks of Satya as a gangster film but it’s actually a film about living in Bombay

It’s been 24 years since Manoj Bajpayee shouted off a cliff overlooking the Arabian Sea, “Mumbai ka king kaun? Bheeku Mhatre!”

After Rangeela, Satya was Ram Gopal Varma’s second breakout hit in Bollywood that catapulted the careers of all its key players. Shefali Shah’s first film, her electric performance in the film bagged her the role of Ria in Mira Nair’s celebrated Monsoon Wedding. Nair was so impressed with Shah’s Pyaari that she cast her without even auditioning her.

Satya also turned out to be a landmark film for Bajpayee, who has never looked back since. Neither have Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap, or Saurabh Shukla. Moreover, it established Urmila Matondkar as RGV’s unrivaled muse. The two went on to collaborate on several films together, some of the finest in Matondkar’s career.

However, over two decades later, Satya’s lasting legacy can be best felt in how it has influenced the gangster film genre in Hindi cinema and how it was among the first films to successfully, hauntingly capture the spirit of a city in a film. In his debut book Bullets Over Bombay, movie critic Uday Bhatia analyses these and the several other ways in which the 1998 RGV directorial has affected our perception of Mumbai and the gangster film.

I spoke to Bhatia at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year after his session with Bajpayee on the book and Satya’s enduring legacy. As the film completes 24 years, right now is as good a time as any other to talk about the movie and the book, which took Bhatia over five years to write.

Excerpts from the interview:

 Why a book on Satya? How did it all start?

When I started my career as a film journalist, the kind of movies that were being made by Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap, Manoj Bajpayee, Saurabh Shukla, and Apurva Asrani was what everyone was talking about. Their films were among the first that I started writing about. For many of these people, if you look at their first breakthrough film, it was Satya. All roads kind of led back to it and you could see how much influence it had on the films that came after it and on the people who worked on it

So I got interested in looking at Satya as a before and after moment for Hindi cinema. I was also keen to place it within two traditions—the Hindi gangster film and the Mumbai city film. Moreover, when we think of Satya, we often think of the great influence that it has had on Hindi cinema. We don’t place much emphasis on what came before it and the traditions it draws on. So I wanted to map that too.

What was Satya to you growing up and how has your reading of the film evolved with multiple viewings as you’ve grown older?

I was fairly young when I first saw it. It just seemed like a very violent, exciting gangster film, very different from the other films. It was ahead of its time in many ways. Once I started writing the book, I had to see it over and over again to analyze everything. For me, the biggest evolution in terms of seeing the film has been how it brilliantly captures the Bombay of that time and how integrated the city-film is within that structure.

Everyone thinks of Satya as a gangster film but it is actually a film about living in Bombay, about loneliness in Bombay, forming bonds, and how even amidst all the craziness that keeps happening in that city, life keeps chugging on at the same time. That’s the emotional core of the film. It’s not possible to take Satya out of Bombay and make it somewhere else. It’d then be a fundamentally different film. This occurred to me over time. Also because I went and stayed there, I understood the film a lot better.

When you told RGV or Manoj Bajpayee that you are writing a book on Satya, what was their reaction like?

Everyone except Ramu was very happy to talk about Satya because they all had very fond memories of it. It was their first film or it was their first film that was successful. Most people I spoke to really warmed up to the task. But Ram Gopal Varma was slightly reluctant to talk about it. He doesn’t like to praise himself too much and kept saying that everything happened by mistake and it all just came together. But everyone else gives him nearly all the credit. I think that’s probably due to him.

How closely did you work with Bajpayee and the rest of Satya’s team for research?

I spoke to pretty much everyone from Satya whom I could get in touch with. Nearly all the actors, both the cinematographers (Gerard Hooper and Mazhar Kamran), the editor, the action director, the assistant director, the writers (Shukla and Kashyap), and of course, Ramu. I tried to get as many accounts of those who worked on the film as possible and then sort of tested them against each other because often the stories would not match.

Was it difficult to find a publisher for Bullets Over Bombay? All of the usual struggles, did you have to face any of them?

It was fairly painless. It started with a different publisher but didn’t work out for some reason. It then came to Harper and here we are. My being a film journalist did help. For example, I had already done a long profile on Bajpayee earlier. I’d spoken to RGV once. A lot of the people whom I ended up speaking to, I’d already spoken to them during the course of my work. I had also written about film a lot. So people knew me enough to recommend me to their friends, saying he’ll come and speak to you, give him some time. That helped. And I knew the PR people. So that also helped. If I was coming in from some other field, getting hold of as many people as I did may not have been as easy.

While writing Bullets Over Bombay, did you have to put in extra effort to not make it too academic or scholarly? Were there any things that you consciously avoided to ensure that it’s an engaging read?

This is probably for the readers to answer because for all I know they may find the book academic. But personally, I don’t like academic film writing and I don’t like a lot of jargon. So I’ve tried to make it accessible for an average filmgoer who doesn’t study film or write about it. They should be able to understand and appreciate it. That was my aim. I don’t know how far I’ve been successful in achieving that. I definitely didn’t want to make it jargon-heavy.

What do you think of books on films? It’s a very new space. The publishing space is inundated with biographies and autobiographies of actors and filmmakers but there aren’t too many books on films as yet.

Yes, you are right. A lot of the film book space is driven by biographies, superstars, and ghostwriters. I hope lot more books on films come out which are non-academic. They don’t necessarily have to focus on one particular film. They could be analytical and yet fun to read. There is still a lot of space for that because right now most of it is superstar-driven stuff. That’s fun but I don’t know how much it adds to our cultural conversations.

When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites.

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