Shazia Iqbal: You can talk about different biases and discriminations in the society while taking the route of a love story

Actually, mentally not. We submitted the international copy this morning. It was a landmark thing for the team. I wanted to get a few hours of sleep before talking [to you].

It might sound cliched, but I had not planned anything. I studied architecture and thought I would pursue a career in it. But somewhere in the internship only, I realized, I was not ok with 9 to 5 desk job. What I didn’t bargain for, at that time, was that as a film professional I’d eventually be working 24 hours. I had exposure to the film industry through my father [Zahid Iqbal, who worked in radio and on Ramayan]. But I had not planned that I’d work in the films per se. In the fourth year of architecture, production designer Sharmishtha Roy had come to our college for a seminar. She talked about how creating spaces in architecture is closely associated with creating spaces in films, and that really fascinated me. After graduation I thought let me give it a shot. That’s it; it has been 18 years now.

Writing and direction happened somewhere in the middle, about six-seven years ago. I was doing a lot of advertising work which is its own world, and it can be very monotonous and banal and can make you start questioning your life. I'd hardly done one or two films as an independent production designer and I just started writing, and then I took a six-month-long break. I did a workshop in Europe. I was just writing for myself. I got obsessed with it. I remember we were shooting in South Africa for Season 2 of Sacred Games and if I would have a 9 o'clock shift in the morning, I’d get up at 5 am, write my script for two hours, and then go for the shoot. I started noticing a pattern—that I liked writing. I have some six scripts ready. None of them have been made. Some of it is very personal, and probably will never get made. But I just wanted to put it down on paper.

Saiyaara just happened 10 days ago, and our team, in the last 10-12 days, has been working on submitting our film copy, literally working 20 hours a day. So, there has been no time to process. But I definitely think that any film and, of course, something closer to the genre is helpful for us also to perform better at the box office. It's not a competition even if the films were getting released on the same day. Somewhere 15-16 years ago the media started pitching films against each other which is not a healthy trend. Earlier two-three films used to release the same day and all would work. There was a culture of going to the theatre rather than wondering whose film should make a 100 crore. Everyone’s film should. Everyone is working hard to make them. It's great that Saiyaara has come and disrupted the box office. I think post Covid, and because of the rise in OTT popularity, people had stopped going to the theatres. If I’d have had a minute to think about it, I’d think that this is good for us. This is good for the films coming after us. It's not about whether our film will work as much. It doesn't need to work as much.

As long as people are coming to theatres, there is money flowing in to make films, it is good for the indie industry, it is good for commercial films. It is good for female filmmakers, male filmmakers. If there's no money, no one is coming, films are getting cancelled, projects are getting cancelled, it's not good for anyone.

I grew up watching films in the ’90s. That was the time when love stories were the most popular genre. Some people have been attacking us online saying Pariyerum Perumal wasn't a love story, they are going to ruin the original. But what is wrong in taking a love story route? You can talk about different biases and discriminations in society while taking this route. I've grown up watching Mani Ratnam and identity and love were never separated in his films. We knew where the girl came from, where the boy came from, and that is how the story was built, and that was the centre of conflict in most of his films. Bombay being the most influential film of my childhood, gave me a perspective about life. It also helped me understand my identity, my roots, my culture. That is what cinema is supposed to do. I would want films to go in that direction. If in the last decade or so we have gone away from that, we need to get back to it. And I'm not saying that every film should deal with inter-caste and inter-faith issues upfront. But the moment you start erasing the identity around the characters to make things more palatable, you lose connection with a large population of the country. People don't find it relatable. There can be anomalies. There are very popular films that are not dealing with identity issues. But I've grown up seeing a society, a country, with people from different faiths and cultures. People may not get married in different sub castes, even if they actually belong to the same larger group. That was such a fascinating thing for me as a filmmaker, especially when I started researching for this film. I realized that I don't know the society I live in. The more I was trying to understand the society and the deeper I was going into it, I was realising that everything actually works around identity, whether it's caste identity, religious identity, gender identity and we are just not tackling this in our films. Love story is not a banal genre where two people come together and sing songs. The common route in it has been to deal with the rich and poor divide. It is safer to deal with class but there can be several layers around it. I want those to reflect in the films that I make. Those are the things that I think about as a person, as a filmmaker, and that is why it has reflected in whatever I have made till now, and hopefully, from here on as well.

Somen Mishra at Dharma Productions had approached me for a script that I had written. It was an adaptation of a very popular book. But things didn’t work out. This was around 3-3.5 years ago and Somen told me that they had another very good film that they wanted to remake. So they were looking for someone who could tackle the subject delicately. They had got a little bit of flak for Dhadak, which was a remake of [Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi film] Sairat. I remember in my first meeting with Karan [Johar], he had said that this should be a Hindi film that should unapologetically talk about identity issues.

When I watched Pariyerum Perumal, there was something about it that really hit me. I thought that I could take this story and adapt it. The general idea is that people copy frame by frame when they adapt and ruin the original. In a way it’s right, people do that. I understand the love people have for the film. We get so emotional about films and books and people that we follow. But it’s a country where Hindi language has a reach. If something is remade in the language, it's only going to take that story forward. People may not spoil the original film. Give them a chance to make an adaptation. If you don't like it, it's fine. Even if you want to go online and hate on that film, hate on that director, hate on the production house, it's fine, but give them a chance.

I don't think any artist, storyteller can put themselves out in the public eye and say, worship me! There will be people who are going to be upset with you. There are going to be people who are going to disagree with your politics, with your gaze, and they have the right to talk about it. But people have started hating us on watching the trailer itself. On the other hand there has also been support from people who had been sceptical about our film earlier.

When I watched Pariyerum Perumal something moved in me, and I felt that I could take the story and put it in another setting. I felt that the story needed to go out to a wider audience, it needed to reach out to people. Our intention has been honest. There are going to be people who’ll say this is not a patch on Pariyerum Perumal which is fine. But there are going to be people, who may not have seen the original film, and this might hit them, and it's worth making the film for just that.

I understand the concern. The original story didn't take a love approach. There was the girl who had more feelings for the boy, and the boy was struggling with his identity. It's the path that even our film takes. But the original film took the route of caste, and we are talking about both caste and gender.

About the rootedness of it, Tamil cinema, or Malayalam cinema seem to have a bigger impact because they try to keep the stories more real, and you come from a thinking that Hindi films are not doing that. It's a correct bias to have. But it's also something you are doing before a film is out. That is my problem. It's basically confirmation bias. So, even if you think that it's not as rooted as the original film, does the story, the characters, the emotions work in terms of where it is set in? We changed the setting in our film. It's more in an urban space. During my research I realised that people have this thought that the caste issue is in the rural areas and then we realised it's just everywhere. It is the central theme of our film; that you can migrate from smaller areas and come to bigger cities. Yet your identity will not leave you.

The film is shot in a certain space. Rootedness doesn't mean it's in a rural setup. Rootedness means that if the story is set in Lucknow, the film has to look like it is set in Lucknow. If the story is set in Goregaon, it should look like the story is in Goregaon.

There’s this bias that Malayalam cinema and Tamil cinema are all great and Hindi films are terrible. I don't agree with that bias. Yes, there are a lot of Bollywood films that seem like they're erasing identity and other important issues. But there are also films in the mainstream that are challenging gender status quo, talking about religion and caste.  

Caste is also a very dominant issue in Tamil Nadu. There are more filmmakers there that come from the community. You see a lot of stories around caste, while you will not see that here, because there are a lot of filmmakers there who've come and built that culture in Tamil Nadu that states “we are here and you cannot stop us from telling our stories”.  That needs to happen in Bollywood.

While growing up, I have really worshipped filmmakers like Saeed Mirza and Shyam Benegal. Benegal has told stories about minorities while being from the other side. He may not have had that lived experience. How then to find that inner voice, how to find that lived experience? It is by empathy first, by being very sure of yourself as a storyteller, what you want to say, and then you have to navigate. I 100% agree that a Dalit filmmaker who is sensitive, who has a lived experience of the story they want to tell, is better positioned to tell the story than a non-Dalit filmmaker. Mari Selvaraj has brought in that inner voice and there is no way anyone can take away from that. But can you navigate the distance between the lived experience and the non-lived experience? Yes, you can with research, sensitivity, and empathy.

I'm not here to solve the caste discrimination issue. You cannot start on the note that you have to overhaul society. You can take it from a more personal space—that I'm telling the story of this boy Nilesh who comes from the Dalit community and how do I make myself the best person in this situation to tell the story. I think that's the only thing I can do. I won't even bring in my own identity here, that I am a minority. I don't think it's the same issue—what a Dalit person encounters, or what a Muslim faces. Also, Muslims are not a monolith. 80% of Muslims also come from backward castes. Our country is so vast with so many different intersections. Can I still navigate that distance and make it seem like I know what I'm saying? If I'm not able to do that, then I fail as a filmmaker.

I feel like I have done justice to Nilesh’s story. How people perceive it is going to be a very individual reaction. But to say that a Muslim person cannot tell a Dalit story and should not tell it, I don't agree with that at all. Yes, Saeed Mirza has told Muslim stories, but so has Shyam Benegal. I worship both of them as filmmakers and storytellers. The fact that I could feel the pain of Zubeida was enough for me to know that Benegal did a decent job with that film. If we just start striking off people, that he's Savarna, he cannot tell a Dalit story, maybe not the best person, but they can still have the sensitivity to tell the story. I don't believe someone has to 100% come from that caste, religion, gotra, region, language to be able to tell that story.

There have been decisions to hire people who are from the community. I felt that was needed. When people are saying that these are a bunch of Savarna people coming and telling our stories, that's not correct because the film is not made by the writer and director alone. A film is made by a bunch of people who come together. Visually, how you see the world, how the costumes are tackled, how the makeup is done, how the film is shot. This all comes together as lensing. It's unfortunate that the director gets the maximum credit for it, but it's always a team effort. I had people in the team, who could bring that in, add to the gaze which feels more internal. They gave us a worldview—the way the film is shot, the way it is edited, the makeup of the actors. There are people from the community in our team, and it was a little upsetting when people started writing that these are outsiders who don't know the story that they're telling.

Casting for films on marginalised communities has been a point of conversation for at least the last few years. Do you take people who are from within, a Dalit person playing a Dalit person. The first criticism that we faced during the announcement itself was that a Brahmin is playing a Dalit boy. Is that a valid criticism? What does an actor do? It is literally embodying another person. So can a Brahmin embody a Dalit person's pain? Yes, they can, if they know their craft. Is a Dalit person better placed to do that? Also a yes to that. We've had three decades of these three to four Muslim superstars who have been playing Hindu characters. Does it also then happen that they should only be playing Muslim characters? Balraj Sahni playing a Muslim businessman in Garm Hava, do we take that away from him? Or the Muslim character Shashi Kapoor played in Junoon. Should we start saying that all of that didn't make sense because they were Hindu actors playing Muslims? And then what about Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan and Salman and Saif? Our industry is built around these four-five legends in the last three decades. So, where do we start? Is that a valid conversation? I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm just saying these are the questions, and I'm also in the middle of questioning all of this and, in that, if you're saying a Brahmin actor cannot play a Dalit character, then should we just discard Masaan as well? Or Nutan playing Sujata? Shabana Azmi played a Dalit woman. She is a great actor. Should we allow her to play a Dalit woman? Will she do full justice to it? These are conversations we have just started having. If we only take people from a particular religion, a particular caste, exactly the same region, language, where will we end? I think Muslim stories would not exist if we had this rule that only Muslim actors will be playing Muslim characters.

I do understand the argument because it comes from a place of representation, which is so important. So what is the way ahead? How do we take affirmative action to ensure that there are Dalit filmmakers and writers and people in the team and actors in the industry, because I have definitely felt while hiring the crew, while building a team, that there aren't enough people from the community, not even Muslims. But there are different ways to bring about this change rather than running down a film [before even seeing it].

Siddhant loved the film, and within four hours he said yes, and was part of the project. It’s a mid-budget film. If you're putting a certain amount of money, I think it's fair that the studio and the producers think that they should have at least a familiar face who has that connection with younger people. That was the thought behind getting him on the project. Of course he is fantastic. He has a fantastic range as an actor.

As for the tanning, do people really think we begin with this thought that this is a Dalit character, let’s turn him brown? Films are not made like this. It's not as simplified. I don't think filmmakers navigate world building with such simplification and biased understanding.

Our film is a high contrast film. So, if people see how Tripti’s [Dimri who plays the privileged female lead Vidhi] skin is, they'll understand that he's only a few shades more tanned than her. She's also a very fair skinned person who's looking four shades darker than her actual skin. That is the look of the film. People don't want to get into that.

I still understand that it comes from the place of being hurt because of the bias of Dalit people being brown which is what you are assumed to end up projecting. But this is again confirmation bias. You watch the film. If you still think that something is wrong and this shouldn't have been done, I'll take your point.

There’s a whole world building. The way his mother is cast, or the way his father and friends are cast. If he were fair, looking completely different from the other actors we have cast, people would have said that this is Dharmafication and that is why the girl is falling for him. If we have to challenge the stereotype and assert that brown people are beautiful and black people are beautiful then here you have a girl falling in love with a boy who is not fair. Generally the colourism that is followed in society is that fair is beautiful and dark is not. We don't believe in that. We have not made the film with that thought.

There were people from the community in the room when we were deciding the look of the film, the look of the character. It's all part of the broader character design. It doesn't come from a place of bias. It comes from a place of telling your story in the pitch that you want to present it. If you see Vidhi and Nilesh in the same frame, you'll realize there is not much of a difference between the skin. Are they standing in light? Are they standing in shadow? Unfortunately the trailer opens with a shot where he is inside a cave and there is no light on him. But what is his skin throughout the film? Are you seeing that in the details?

They are great. The younger people are also really good and I hope people notice and the film also does things for them. Like Priyank [Tiwari], who's playing Shekhar, the college senior, or Saad [Bilgrami] who is playing Ronnie or Manjari [Pupala] or Deeksha [Joshi].

So, when I watched the film, what didn't work for me is that the girl never gets to know what happened to the boy in the timeline of the film. It didn't sit well with me. How are you ignorant of things around? And, if you are ignorant, can that be tackled as an arc? I'm not saying all upper caste women are completely aware of what would happen if they had friends from the backward castes or even if they had a Muslim friend. That they’d have a perspective on what might be happening to them. Yes, you can be ignorant. But can that be tackled in a way that the person seems human and not a prop? That she’s not furniture in the film. She’s a person. How to keep the main plot point the same and completely change one character? That was a struggle. But if I would not have been able to give a certain agency and voice to the female character, I think at some point I would have said no to the film.

All stories, whether they’re dealing with faith or caste, have a very strong gender politics around them. If you are talking about caste oppression, and what minorities are going through, you cannot ignore the fact that there is a very strong patriarchal rule even in the houses where minorities live.

I remember Yashica Dutt in her book Coming Out as Dalit spoke about her father hitting her mother. She's talking about her Dalit identity, and how she came to terms with it, and she took it back to her roots, where she saw her father being abusive to the mother. It can still be looked at in a sensitive way. She wasn't really demonizing her father, but a lot of people criticized that. While you're talking about the larger issue, why do you have to talk about it? But why not? When will this be spoken about?

I did get some flak, I remember, even before Bebaak was made. This was around 2016-2017, when there was a bit of a shift in the political nature of the country, that was the time when the mob lynchings were happening, and friends who had read the script, wondered if it was the right time to tell the story, and I asked them when would the right time be? Why does one set of stories need to be silenced because there is a bigger issue out there? And who decides what is a bigger issue? A Muslim woman in the house, suffering at the hands of her husband, or father, or brother in a patriarchal construct. Why is that story less than a Muslim man being harassed by a Hindu mob outside? If women are suffering at home that’s also a systemic issue.

I felt strongly that Bebaak needed to be told. I have shot in slums where girls as young as 12-13 were telling me how they were treated in their homes,  there was a 9 or 10 year old girl telling me that one should not be doing makeup because the djinn will catch you. It really disturbed me. I needed to make a film about it while there are larger, bigger issues, political issues in the country. This is also a very political issue that you are brainwashing a child. You're basically not giving her a chance to be the person she wants to be.

I have learnt about casteism, patriarchy in my own home. Muslims also practice caste. I come from Bihar, and that is where, as a child, I had seen all of this happening, and have been learning from it.

Sarah Hashmi, who played the lead in Bebaak, and I went to Delhi to play the film, at a few universities and at a particular university there were a couple of hijabi girls who got very offended. They said it was a propaganda film and that we were being feminazi. It is a word that really annoys me because it is used by people who want to completely discard gender and feminism. I was really surprised that these two girls were using the word. I asked them to have a conversation with me. Here’s a Muslim filmmaker who has made the film and two girls from the same community are questioning it. But at least the story came out and there was this talk around it. Stories like that don't come out in mainstream cinema.  

I think gender is at the receiving end. Of course it's much worse to be a Dalit woman than it is to be an upper caste woman. Probably Muslim women come somewhere in between that. But gender cannot be avoided in films, whether it's a Hindi film, a Tamil film, a Malayalam film. You have to have a layer of gender in your film, your understanding of gender, and not do it superficially.

For most people, gender means strong women, fighting on everything and with everyone. Mostly male filmmakers tend to do this. There is a strong woman, and she's perfect, and she's ideal. Her belief system is perfect. That's not how you tell the stories of women. Women are flawed. We can also be the gatekeepers of patriarchy. If a woman is flawed, show her as flawed. You cannot show women as heroes. That is not a feminist film.

I like telling stories about flawed people. There is a certain heroism in our cinema where a hero is already a hero and doesn't become one. But what I liked about Pariyerum Perumal is that the hero is not this perfect person, irrespective of whatever community he's coming from. From not accepting their identity to becoming more assured and assertive about it, that is the route that we wanted to take. Pariyerum has that arc. But we wanted to be more defined with it. That's why we added another character who keeps telling Nilesh to accept his identity. We wanted that arc to be very structured. We have taken the metaphor of the dog but it is not the central thread of the film. Everything is about the boy going through a journey and coming to terms with his identity. It's basically the story of a reluctant hero. I don't mean hero in a Bollywood way, but a hero in terms of him being able to be a complete person in himself.

Of course there's that aspect of the killer which really fascinated me. I am a big follower and a fan of Korean cinema, and that kind of character gave me the feeling of lingering threat.

When a film reaches a point where it goes for certification, you’d have written it 50 times and shot it, you would have shot patchwork for it, you’d have edited it 30 times on the table. So every word in the film is there because it cannot be taken out, every shot, every word, every moment. As a filmmaker, along with your team, you have taken this decision that this is your film. Even if one frame were to be taken out of it, it would irritate and bother you as a passionate filmmaker. Nobody can touch it. Even if the producer were to ask for the length to be reduced, well it has reached that stage after the length has already been shortened.

So, someone coming and telling you that this is not working, this entire thing has to change, this cannot be told, this cannot be said. It is tough, but I faced it for the first time. Bebaak was certified, but they didn't have a problem with it.

It was emotionally, really hard. It took me a couple of months to come around it. The team members around me, like my writer Rahul [Badwelkar], who has been associated with the project very closely. He's been there through the post-production as well. We both were going through a lot because our writing was being attacked. So when the cuts had come we thought that we'll go around it by rewriting and editing and not taking away from what we were trying to say.

But to accept what someone is telling you, you have to do it. That became very difficult for me, because as a person when you're raised, your parents teach you certain values. My father gave me that voice, and my mother has not been a submissive wife. She will talk to my father. She will challenge his ideas if she doesn't agree with anything, even though she comes from a small village in Bihar. I have inherited those qualities. I put my point forward in the most empathetic way. I'm also part of the society, in the last 10-12 years I've seen how things are changing, and I understand the whole nature of censorship. I have even studied how censorship works in Iran and China, and how filmmakers navigate around that and tell their stories. Our film was more direct. We were saying things very openly and loudly, and that got us in trouble. But we have not let it dilute the film, we have navigated around it. We rewrote stuff, re-edited stuff, brought in something else.

People are saying what’s the point of the film if the caste angle is gone. I think they need to watch the film. The film is still saying what the original intention was. But emotionally it was tough to take it all because I'm not a conformist. I don't listen to people, and I'm not saying in a way that I'm very brave or courageous, or anything. If as a filmmaker my intention has been to challenge the status quo and if I have to conform to that status quo in a certain process, that, for me, as a person, was quite difficult.

Karan saw Bebaak, and he thought I was the person to direct this film. That itself actually is a huge deal. Bebaak is a short indie film. But to have that vision that I should give this girl a mainstream film! You know how things are with female filmmakers. People associate a certain kind of storytelling—okay she's a woman, so the protagonist has to be a woman. Not that those stories don't need to be told with a certain lens but to approach a female filmmaker only if the lead is a woman is problematic. We should be allowed to tell all kinds of stories in the mainstream; masala action films also. Why not? They will become better if women tell them.

Karan told me that I’d be the right person to make this film. It will bring in a certain sensitivity that the film needs. That itself is a very remarkable thing to happen. Very rarely would someone have got a mainstream film straight after a short. I got Love Storiyaan after I said yes to this feature, a few months later in fact. I will always be very appreciative of it.

Unfortunately, Dharma and Karan do get a lot of online hate and trolls and still to take this decision not knowing what is going to happen after the film’s release, he's also exposing himself, putting himself in a place of vulnerability. He’s taking such a decision, which is quite courageous, and I think that is what will change the way Hindi films are being told. If someone like Karan puts his money on projects like ours, I think these are significant things that are happening, and they need to happen. I hope more producers and studio heads try to see the value in that.

But apart from that, I want the film to do well, because more stories like that will be told, because there are people who feel that they are not seen and heard on screen. And somewhere, when this film was released, they’d say that it’s their story. Even if there is a small section of people, even if there’s a girl who doesn't have the voice to talk in front of her parents, watches the film, sees Vidhi's character, and says even I should be able to tell my parents if something is going wrong in my extended family. That’s what we make films for.

I want to know what Mari, Vetri [Maaran], Pa Ranjith think of it. If someone makes an adaptation of Bebaak, I would want to see it so I hope Mari also sees the film. Pa Ranjith sees the film. Whatever their opinion might be, I would want to know.