You don't Want to Know the Vaastav

In 1999 a group of Hindi film-makers chose to put together something very different in regards to gangland cinema. Mahesh Manjrekar takes the helm as director and writer, with the help of veteran writer ImtiazHussain, and creates a film that looks at the Mumbai criminal underworld in a brand new, eclectic way.

The result, Vaastav, which means The Truth, is to this day the measuring stick for Hindi mob movies. Sanjay Dutt fits like a glove intohis role as Raghunath Namdev Shivalkar, called Raghu by his friends and suffering parents. Growing up in the slums, he starts out as a layabout who cares little for work or anything that involves responsibility. His days are spent with his similarly carefree friends, doing close to nothing as the days go by.

If anything, Dutt creates an almost too lazy portrait of Raghu, around whom the film revolves. With his sleepy eyes and drawling speech, Dutt looks more like a drunk than a lafangha (layabout), as his father callshim. Also the actor looks a tad too old to play the youth at the beginning of the movie, being well into his forties.

This wanton and somewhat unbelievable life changes in one short but intense scene, where Dutt slips into the role he was born to play with ease. When his friend Shorty is attacked by a group of small-time gangsters, Raghu strikes at the man with a cast-iron skillet, and asecond later his assailant lies dead in front of him.

From here begins Raghu’s unstoppable rise to the top of the Mumbia criminal world, leaving in his wake a trail of bodies that at first seem a necessity but quickly become a business. On his way he is protected by a state minister who wants to use him to strong-arm political opponents and really anyone who wants to try and create stability in the socio-religious quagmire that is Mumbai.

Manjrekar’s work does not preach a Robin Hood moral, which is the short-fall of most such endeavours where the heroic mob boss is also greatly loved by his community, which in turn he protects and loves. Raghu kills with impunity people like religious-political preachers who want to bring tolerance to the state political system, but also kills the men who try to harass his sister-inlaw. He visits brothels, but marries the prostitute bearing his child. He is hence not loveable or heroic, but definitely human, and therefore relatable.

Manjrekar shows that the world, encased in Mumbai’s slums, is not one where one can distinguish black and white, but only the controllers and the controlled. Raghu, dressed in opulent silk salwaar and gold chains, tries to control the world around him as much as he can. Unfortunately, the entire mechanism is set against him because he is not rich or well-bred; he always must return to the dark grimy slums he came from. The honour of true control is reserved solely for people like the minister, who drops Raghu like anout-of-style hat when the don brings too much police attention upon himself.

Ultimately Vaastav can be looked as a story of economic stagnation. Raghu simply wants to control his life after a childhood spent in the slums. Being a part of the lower class, he can do nothing to get to that level except fight his way in. Even when he finally can just touch the sky, he must invent his own niche because the middle and upper classes will never let him exist on their level. Irreverent of the fact that he can have almost anyone in Mumbia killed, he is of the criminal class and never the middle or upper classes.

In a quest to control his life, Raghu tries to control the very environment around him. He launches a campaign against the middle and upper classes, and that is one that he cannot win.

Manjrekar outlines Raghu’s rise and fall so quickly that one is left breathless at the end of the movie. The don’s life is barely a flicker in the blaze engulfing the slums. After his quest for control, Raghu is the victim of a society that will not let the hierarchy change, a patsy for a power-hungry politician. Ultimately the ruling classes take back any real controlhe wrested from them, and the world’s largest and most powerful gang, the police, finish him off for their patrons.

(Image Source: Adishakti Films)