Getting to the core of Anubhav Sinha’s political thriller Anek is not easy

Before watching his new work Anek (which is about the isolation of and insurrection in the North East, hence Anek, get it?) I thought of Anubhav Sinha as India’s Costa Gavras. But now after watching Anek I feel it is an insult to liken Anubhav to any other filmmaker dead or alive.

If the truth be told, Anubhav is one   of his kind. Unique, not just for the sake of standing out in the crowd, but because Anubhav tells the story he wants to: no beating around the bush, no hemming and hawing. Most importantly, no spoon-feeding the audience with over-written dialogues which “explain” the plot and the character-relations to the audience. In Anek Anubhav addresses himself to a mature informed audience.  He rightly presumes that we know about the racial and cultural isolation of the North East. That when we enter the world of brutal insurrection, we know what are getting into. Significantly his hero, if we may call him that, Joshua played with tremendous empathy by Ayushmann Khurrana, is uncertain about his loyalties: should he be blindly obeying the Government which aims for control rather than peace in the North East? This control-over-peace argument is   put forward by a South Indian bureaucrat, played with enticing credibility by J D Chakravarthy (the titular hero from Satya).

Chakravarthy is so interesting in his Brahmanical Dravidian-ness that I wished there was more space for him in the narrative. Anek is  a film in a hurry, and  I don’t mean that in a  bad-editing sort of way. It hurls from one point of political discourse to another, because it shows a political situation that is rapidly running out of time, barely giving us time to reflect on what is being said, and why. I bring this up, as the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Anubhav’s powerful political drama is vital to our understanding of what has gone wrong in the North East. If the characters are shown unfurling their own flag and if a decadent political leader insists the North East is not part of India, then there is a reason for it. And it’s  not seditious to say the North East is isolated. Anek explores the underbelly of political opportunism wherein peace accords are much favoured: peace is not. At the end of the film Ayushmann Khurana finally says what we have been waiting to hear for a tense and tactile two hours and 20 minutes: could it be that those who are brokering peace are actually not interested in getting it?

Getting to the core of Anubhav Sinha’s political masterpiece is not easy. Anek is  not for the audience  which thinks Bhool Bhulaiya is  the last  word in cinematic  entertainment. Anubhav is not the least interested in entertaining us. He has something urgent and vital to say, and he says it without trappings or diversions. There is  no romance in the  film and the  only  dramatic episode occurs when a  bereaved local mother accuses Ayushmann’s Joshua  of being  “one of them”.

Among other things, Anek is also about the weaponization of the young in the North East (a similar story is to be obtained in Kashmir, and it is no coincidence that the major peace broker in Anek, played by the ever-dependable Manoj Pahwa, is a Kashmiri). When young Niko (well played by newcomer Thejasevor Belho) takes to insurrection, the narrative is enriched by its nudge towards a kind of futureless despair in a land where blood mingles in the waters of the rivers. Ayushmann Khurrana is powerful as only he can be, straddling the two worlds of   pro-establishment and pro-insurrection. There is only a hint of attachment to the aspiring local boxer Aidi (expressive Andrea Kevichüsa) an aspiring boxer a wannabe Mary Kom who looks defeated even in her triumphant victory at the end. There are no winners in Anek. That’s the whole point of this modern political masterpiece: in a battle of political dominance, only the one with the gun has any fun.

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