Once upon a time in a land not too far off there was a young boy who grew up in abject squalor and devastating poverty. Both his parents personally betrayed him by failing to succeed in Bollywood. His father lost all their money in a production venture, obviously took to drinking and eventually died. His mother, an aspiring actress never progressed beyond the aspirational part and took to keeping house, sometimes even sewing clothes to provide for her flesh and blood as her first act of heroism.
The little boy soon realised that his story thus far was so ordinary that it doesn’t even need names. The horror of his common denomination became the fuel that propelled him away from a Dickinson novel. He packed his emotional baggage, promised to always romance the ruins of his mother’s CPTSD, and vowed to avenge his father’s melancholy. He decided to decide his own destiny and become a Wikipedia entry, come what may.
And thus Sanjay Leela Bhansali, previously known as The Boy, unveiled a 14-year-long passion project. His directorial debut for a web series on Netflix dropped its first look sometime last month. Or the week before. Or perhaps in 2016. I wasn’t sure since it looks exactly like the many films he makes as a very successful filmmaker with an entire Wikipedia stub to his credit. The fine print, however, reveals it’s a directorial debut on a streaming network, some of the women behind their nose rings are old and one of them is Sonakshi Sinha. They all claim to be actresses, and since they play the roles of sex workers, in Lahore, which is in Pakistan, they all wear mehendi. Like all the time.
Before the time of our lords
The Tawaif, which later became a courtesan was the Mughal version of a Devdasi, the Temple beholden. During medieval Mughal rule, they were upgraded to gatekeepers of arts and cultural authority. Think Anna Wintour meets Bene Gesserit before Dune begins. Under the patronage of an empire untethered to colonialism, courtesans were powerhouses of the literary arts, musical traditions, dance forms, poetry, and cultural etiquette.
These women existed outside the normatives of marital contracts and were largely free to choose sexual partners. The households they ran were a hybrid of women trafficked, plucked out for their talent, or walk-in residents because they wanted to. Sex wasn’t part of their commerce, their sustenance was via their patrons and the varying forms of liaisons they were part of. Unlike the royal harems, they had an active public life and were entitled to laws of inheritance, especially the Devdasis. Respectability wasn’t part of their agenda hence they remained a threat to women of noble birth and good values but that didn’t deter the occasional instance of a crossover into marriage, royal mistresses, or dowager queens. Their livelihood largely depended on their custom but to ensure sustainability, they acquired exclusive power in Lucknow, Oudh, Benares, Uttar Pradesh, and Calcutta to name a few but Lahore never featured on the high profile career list on an aspiring courtesan’s list.
Heeramandi, Diamond Markets and Heera Lal Singh
Heeramandi is named after a Sikh Minister, Hira Lal Singh who was appointed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It was part of an extensive network, spread across the walled city and dedicated ostentatiously to the courtesan culture. By this time, however, the British rule had decided to culturally appropriate the Indian subcontinent to fit their limitations instead of understanding the nuanced social mores of a subcontinent with a diversity that would put any woke Gen Z student of gender studies to shame.
It was unfathomable for women to exist as, well people and run states, command armies and participate in policy decisions without a man to tell them no. Besides young susceptible British officers had started falling in love with these strangely liberated creatures. So along came a ban on houses of (ill) repute and an import of European women bought and sold, much to the outrage of white feminists and brown men who didn’t know how to deal with the sudden scourge of streetwalkers that made for an uncivilised European sex worker. It was only natural then that sex work was assimilated into the Tawaif as a popular motif and, well, outlawed. Heera Lal Singh followed suit and had the semi-brothels conform to a lucrative stock market of women that were naturally close to Lahore’s geography. Hence there is no secret sea route where blood diamonds are smuggled to Lahore but an unresearched faux pax which overlooks Heera Lal’s contribution to human trafficking.
The Last First Impression
Sanjay Leela Bhansali is a staunch believer in first impressions. He never tries to make another one. His imagination remains superior to the entire lived history of the subcontinent. Hence a princess from early Protohistory in a desolate Rajput fort will look entirely, unabashedly the same as a sex worker at the crux of partition in Lahore. A presumably proud woman of the Punjabs will adorn an entire village worth of fabric in the central Indian tradition, abandoning the Lacha and Kurta that are particular to the region in question.
The nose rings will remain a brutal concoction that only exists inside Bhansali’s head and now as a face mask on brides against COVID. Or expressions. Nothing makes any sense if one pays attention to a Lahore where inqilab zindabad is signed off in Hindi placards, old Lahore expands to North American serving proportions, the architecture is resplendent with gushing fountains and suddenly everyone on a street will be wearing the same coloured outfit for no reason at all. And this is just a few minutes of a web series. The dialogue delivery of his Muslim characters had been so cringe-inducing that, at some point, muscle atrophy sets in. I don’t intend to watch the webseries so it’s a thing of nightmares what an entire season worth of Bhansali dialogue delivery will be like.
The courtesans never existed at any point in recorded history. He borrows loosely from various popular culture renditions and Instagram reels but mainly sticks to the visual blueprint of his own imagination. “I find research very boring. As a filmmaker, I do not set out to make a documentary that I make something exact. I want my impressions, child-like impressions, grown-up impressions, heartbroken lovers impressions,” said Bhansali once upon a time. “I want to say things like this and get awards from the state for everlasting contribution to cinema.”
Bhansali, Bollywood and Bharat
Manisha Koirala, Ranveer Singh’s wife in Padmavat, Deepika’s sister-in-law from Ram Leela, Sonakshi Sinha and a half-shadow, half-actress debutante are the five actresses who assemble as part of this onerous visual circus. Sans research, he’s made no effort to make anyone look vaguely unlike themselves. So you see the five Indian women not even trying to look like they live in another time but do emphasise time to time being Muslim by the strange salutation that exists only in Bollywood and makes adaab look like it was made in China. Once vertigo induced by a gazillion whirling dancers, a plethora of fountains and the entire Pantone library flashing before your eyes, the title will read Heeramandi: The Diamond Market. It’s an epic saga of Love, Revenge, Passion, Power, Partition and Political lip service that’s increasingly required of anything Indian. Heeramandi is an exhausting reminder of how desperately insular Bollywood has become. Bhansali has hit the nail with an ensemble cast of B-list or lost celebrities, ensuring a Bollywood-shaped coffin is sealed tight.
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