Sudhir Mishra’s 2023 movie, Afwaah, almost seems like an update on his 1996 cult classic Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin. Both movies unfold within the span of a night that changes the lives of all involved. “Everybody used to tell me to remake Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin,” explains Mishra. “Then suddenly during the lockdown, this idea struck me: How about replacing the slap that triggers the chain of events in Iss Raat Ki, with a seemingly harmless and inconsequential rumour or ‘afwaah’. Here the monster chasing you is an afwaah but you can’t hide from it because it always gets there before you, especially in this day and age of technology.” 

But apart from being an acerbic social commentary, Afwaah is essentially also a film without a conventional hero. Sudhir Mishra’s Rahab initially reminds you of Swades’ Mohan Bhargava — an NRI who leaves his cushy job in the US and comes back to India to serve his motherland and its people — but soon it turns out that he is hardly the hero that was promised. Almost halfway into the movie, Mishra unceremoniously smudges the halo over Rahab and pricks the bubble of his carefully created backstory.  Rahab’s is a curious case of a Shah Rukh Khan-esque hero landing up in a Sudhir Mishra film. 

“I wasn’t trying to do a take on Swades. This is how I feel about Rahab and how I found him to be interesting. What he goes through makes him realise that he’s not only been lying to the world, but he’s also been lying to himself,” says the three-time National Award winner, when we catch up for a quick chat right after the release of the movie. Excerpts:  

What is a ‘Sudhir Mishra hero’?  

He tries to be fair in an unfair world, he makes mistakes, he fails, but he keeps trying. In Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahi, I posited this pair — a so-called hero with a so-called villain — and then you get confused about who is the hero, and who is the villain. I think in today’s times this whole idea of positing the innocent against the corrupt hardly works. The Chaplin-esque hero, the so-called ‘very nice man’ doing everything in his power and fighting for what is right, hardly exists. We all carry a certain darkness of the world inside us. My heroes are not completely dark but there is a certain internal struggle within them. They see the irony of their situations and know that there is very little chance of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They also know that the light at the end of the tunnel may be of another train, but they carry on. They fall, brush themselves off, make mistakes, and apologize. And for quintessential heroes, that is a cardinal sin! No hero ever apologises. My heroes are frail. And maybe that is why the Bollywood heroes, the big stars, refuse to work with me [guffaws]. 

In Afwaah the hero is frail; he’s supposedly a Muslim, but yet not too much a Muslim. He is suddenly confronting a weird crisis where he’s being hunted for something that he’s not. But yet, he is aware of the fact that so what if he was… why would he be hunted? This is a dilemma that Rahab goes through. It’s a journey of a man who is hunted for something that he’s not. But through that journey, he begins to re-identify himself with those of his kind who are being hunted. 

You have always challenged the notion of a quintessential ‘hero’. But cinema, more so Bollywood, is also about escapism and aspiration. Don’t you think somewhere Bollywood needs those larger-than-life heroes? 

I am not that concerned about if Bollywood accepts my heroes, but the question is, can the audience? The audience should see cinema as an active process, something to interact with, not necessarily agree with all the time, but to have a conversation with. Films should enter an audience’s active mind and the audience uses his/her own mind to make a film of their own in their head with the images and the sounds. We are talking so much about ‘content’, but content happens in the heads of an audience — a film like Afwaah will be different for a prejudiced man, a Muslim guy, and a young individual who’s in the middle of the political divide. You can watch Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi from the point of view of Gita [played by Chitrangada Singh], or Vikram [played by Shiney Ahuja], or Siddharth [played by Kay Kay Menon]. A film happens in the head of an audience willing to interact with it in an active way. And if they do, then they become questioning human beings. They not only question my film but also the politics, and they question those who are trying to manipulate them or rule over them… they question the mutual fund guys, the politician, their elders, and me. And that should be the audience.  

Afwah mirrors this society with brutal honesty, but it never becomes a Twitter rant or personal venting machine. How do you administer the detachment between Sudhir Mishra the person and the filmmaker?  

This is how you respect the audience also… you’re not just trying to force a point of view on anybody, using ‘this happened, now take a call’. Sometimes the audiences don’t like that. They want everything told to them, they want politician to tell them like a parent or a guide almost. They are looking for this figure to find an easy solution with it. What I try and do is to create an open space to leave questions.  

I’m not a filmmaker who likes to sensationalise. I see a situation and a film comes out. If you see, in the film, nothing really happens; it is what people think is happening, the afwaahs in the air, that makes this film. You talk tangentially about a lot of things like love jihad, or this or that, but there is no love jihad in the film. There is no beef in the truck. But then you are talking and you provoke… ‘what if there was?’ I was hoping to provoke questions. 

As someone who had co-written Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and has been associated with biting social commentaries, what are your views on artistic freedom being thwarted by political parties? Don’t you think even if the person in power changes, the power and its misuse to gag its critics remains almost the same?   

True. There will be three stages, it’ll be difficult to make independent movies, it will be very difficult, and will be impossible. From difficult it has become very difficult. But it is still not impossible for artistes to have their voices heard. The authorities will always object/interfere/censor. You have to re-strategise, recalibrate, and keep going.  

Also, I think such challenges are good for art. It makes you think, it provokes ideas in your head; it makes you confront a difficult situation. It’s a good thing.  

You are also working on web series.  Are the OTT platforms giving more creative liberties to filmmakers like you? Or has it become just another side of the same coin? 

I don’t think I could have made Serious Men if not for Netflix. It was on the Dalits. It was about a father trying in his own way to do the best for his son. And it is not necessarily something that is morally correct. There are some films that are possible today only with Netflix or such OTT platforms.  

Like Rahab, we all are susceptible to spreading rumours about ourselves. What’s the biggest afwaah you have spread about yourself? 

Do we really know ourselves?  What we are telling about ourselves is also a version, no? For instance, my childhood from my point of view will be entirely different from my sister’s version of the same incidents. You often create the rumour about yourself as somebody you are not. We are all storytellers concocting stories.  

I used to constantly spread a rumour about myself with my mother that I am this very hard-working person who edits at night and does nothing else. She would get very worried about me otherwise. She thought wherever I was going, I was going for editing. I used to lie to Renu [his late wife and National Award-winning film editor Renu Saluja] that I didn’t smoke.  

What are you currently working on? 

I am doing a series which is about the youth in the ’70s. It is somewhat in the realm of the JP movement (the 1974 student movement in Bihar spearheaded by socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, against misrule and corruption in the state government, which snowballed into a nationwide drive against the Indira Gandhi’s government and eventually led to the Emergency). I am also in the process of writing a comedy because after Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, we haven’t ventured there. It is difficult and it is taking some time.