What Nawazuddin's Raman Raghav 2.0 says about Bollywood's psychopaths

With Raman Raghav 2.0 set to release in June, the portrayal of sociopaths and psychopaths in popular Hindi cinema is all set to enter a new phase. Based on the notorious serial killer Raman Raghav, who operated in Mumbai during the mid-1960s, the imagery in the film’s trailer displays copious amounts of grit, something that had been missing in the last few films by Anurag Kashyap. A foreign review of the film following its premiere at Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight has even called it a "confrontational alternative to mainstream Hindi cinema".

One of the major reasons for the clichéd portrayal of the misfits in mainstream Hindi cinema is that most of the genres are hero-dependent. Such a narrative rarely allows the protagonist to do something bad and as a result, even the anti-hero has a barrage of heart-wrenching reasons to justify his actions.

Years ago when Abbas-Mustan were in the process of remaking A Kiss Before Dying (1991) as Baazigar (1993) and when they approached Salman Khan to play the lead, Salim Khan, the legendary screenwriter and also actor’s father, advised them to work on the mother’s character and make it more palatable to the Hindi audiences.

Unlike the original where the lead’s desire to attain a better life sees him go on a killing spree, the Hindi version was developed as a vendetta film. This transformed the sociopath into a wronged son whose mission was to avenge his father and infant sister’s death as well as his mother’s troubles caused by the "villain".

While evil has largely been seen in complete black, the gray too tends to get whitewashed in some manner when a leading actor portrays such characters. The trope of the double role in the form of evil twins as in Gora Aur Kala (1972), or the misguided lost identical brother as in The Great Gambler (1979) or the freak of nature similar looking rascal as in Kasme Vaade (1978) or Don (1978) or the anti-hero who transforms as in Kismet (1943) or Jaal (1952), it’s very rare for a leading man to play an anti-social character in its full glory.

Moreover, when popular Hindi cinema began exploring psychopaths and sociopaths with films like Red Rose (1980), a remake of the Tamil Sigappu Rojakkal (1978), or Dhanwan (1981) and Hathyar (1989) it simply attributed their condition to the environment they were nurtured in rather than basic nature.

Mainstream Hindi cinema did take a huge risk of sorts with Red Rose as it got one of its greatest romantic icons, Rajesh Khanna, to play a psychopathic killer unlike the original that featured Kamal Haasan, an actor known to take risks.

Had Red Rose succeeded, it might have expedited the initiation of the misfits in leading roles in mainstream cinema. Ironically, Red Rose found great appreciation from Japanese Pink Cinema, a sub-category of adult films that are also highly artistic and aesthetic, to the extent of being remade in Japanese. With the advent of Shah Rukh Khan in the mid-1990s through box office hits like Baazigar and Darr (1993), the concept of the leading man underwent an overhaul. While on the face of it, Shah Rukh appeared to have changed the moral coding of the hero with the passion of Baazigar’s protagonist, the panache with which he interpreted the obsessive lover in Darr where he was supposed to be the villain also made it possible for secondary characters to become the focus of the narrative.

This opened a floodgate of sorts and the 1990s saw films like Anjaam (1994), Agnisakshi (1996), Chaahat (1996), Gupt (1997) and Kaun (1999) where sociopaths and psychopaths entered mainstream Hindi films. This was also a phase that saw the emergence of the deranged villain and yet the concept of a psychopath was still treated as a Western idea.

Mohan Agashe, who played the menacing Kuka in Mukul S Anand’s Trimurti (1995), and also happened to be associated with the Maharashtra Institute of Mental Health, Pune, believed such characters originated in Hollywood. In an interview published in India Today in 1994, he called a psychopath the “evil product of an affluent society”. By making a character a psychopath the film’s narrative was blessed with the liberty to infuse new things, and for mainstream Hindi cinema that had somewhere got tired of the usual suspects, this was heaven-sent. Had it not been for this alteration a film like Chaahat, in which an industrialist (Naseeruddin Shah) kills a man who cheats on his sister and his obsession for her sees him cut off the vocal chords of a singer whose son (Shah Rukh Khan) rejects her, might not have been possible.

Another factor that added to the surge of films on such characters was the access to LaserDiscs and DVDs that saw Hindi cinema show its appreciation, at times, by simply plagiarising films that it liked. As a result, three versions of a single film, like in the case of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) – Agnisakshi, Yaarana (1995), Daraar (1996) - were commonplace. In the book Mad Tales from Bollywood, a first of its kind that investigates how mental illness is portrayed in Hindi cinema, author Dinesh Bhugra argues that social and political climate in India at particular times influence how psychiatric patients are portrayed on the big screen.

Much like mental illness, social misfits also have for far too long been depicted in a brusque manner. His argument holds weight especially when it comes to such portrayal in the 1980s where the increased political and bureaucratic corruption along with an unstable political climate saw characters becoming harder.

Psychopathy might not have been portrayed as often as a mental illness (read paagal) in traditional Hindi cinema, but with a change in the environment in the 1990s that saw an increase in such characters, the mood today might be more conducive to offering greater realism while portraying the misfits.