Afwaah (Rumour) is playing in Audi 1; The Kerala Story in Audi 4. Afwaah has two shows a day, The Kerala Story has six. There are about a dozen people in Audi 1—half of them, I recognise, are from the India International Centre, India Habitat Centre or from JNU’s Ganga Dhaba— and we all nod politely. Outside Audi 4 there is an excitable crowd. Both groups are soon going to enter their respective echo chambers.
Good old Sudhir Mishra serves it up loud and thick in Afwaah. There is love jihad, vigilantism, mob lynching, Muslims suspected of carrying beef, fake news, viral videos, feverish TV anchors, WhatsApp university, Twitter trolls, trigger-happy cops, custodial deaths, fake encounters, corrupt politicians, feudal lords, patriarchy, misogyny, impotent intellectuals and armchair activists. He may have missed caste atrocity, Naxalism, LGBTQ+ rights, or maybe those are there too hidden somewhere in this frenetic, breathless and chaotic saga. Mishra holds a mirror to all that has been going on in our country in the last few years, which is not exactly the azadi ka amrit mahotsav as the slogans everywhere would have you believe. His critics can claim he only trains his lens on all that’s wrong with the country, but the fact that this humongous, vast and varied country surges ahead with its 1.42 billion dreams, is lost on him.
It is important for a filmmaker to talk about all that is wrong around him. There is not a single incident or event that is false in Afwaah, unlike the film in the adjoining hall, which apparently claims 32,000 women from Kerala have been radicalised into hardened terrorists to join the ISIS in Syria. If 50 years later someone watches the film they should know this was the filmmaker’s milieu 2023, at least a part of it, if not the whole. As international audiences watching it soon on OTT should know.
Mishra sets the film in Rajasthan, opulent and oppressive, and tells the tale through Rahab Ahmed (an out of sorts Nawazuddin Siddiqui who never really settles into his role), a local hero who has made it big as a marketing and advertising whiz kid in the US and now wants to give back to his hometown Sambalpur, a hell hole in the great expanse of the desert. His cool, red Range Rover is soon entangled in the rough and tumble of an Indian election, fought violently by the rising politician Vicky Bana (a unidimensional Sumeet Vyas who is mostly giving orders to bump someone off, looking either menacing or exasperated, depending on how his orders have been carried out). His fiancé Nivedita ‘Nivi’ Singh, a spunky Bhumi Pednekar, is the only one who invests in her role and rises above the chaos all around her. But would a girl in Rajasthan in a feudal setting be using so many English cuss words? She is on the run from home as she can’t take the violence Vicky unleashes to win at any cost.
Many twists and turns later, Nivi and Rahab end up together, their video goes viral as ‘love jihad’—a Muslim man forcing a would-be bride to elope with him. Meanwhile, the corrupt cop on the take, Sandeep Tomar (Sumeet Kaul), has botched up the killing of Vicky’s trusted aide Chandan (Sharib Hashmi, very good as a bewildered and harried lieutenant)—Vicky wants Chandan eliminated as he knows too much of the dark side of the election campaign. On the run, Chandan’s path crosses Nivi and Rahab. By the middle of the film, a lot of people are chasing a lot many more, there are mad crowds baying for blood and the rumour mill is at full throttle.
Apart from Pednekar, T J Bhanu as the quietly simmering cop Riya Rathod, who is having an affair of convenience with her boss Tomar, egged on by her mother, is excellent. Cool and calculating, the shift in the power equation between her and her pugnacious, thick-headed superior is well-written. The film hurtles towards its climax to Nehergarh Fort where a Jaipur Literature Festival clone is going on, the aesthetics and the high culture within its walls are a striking contrast to the bloodshed and hatred outside in the real world.
Afwaah touches upon too many themes, but it doesn’t dive deep into any of them. There is not a still moment in the film to pause and ponder as to why and how love jihad, vigilantism or fake news are created; how they are fanned; and, what is the social structure which allows them to flourish. It comes across as one of those breathless TV news shows which give 100 stories in 60 minutes.
