Rangbaaz review: The show emerges out of Wasseypur shadow with a brilliant Season 3

A few months ago, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Gangs of Wasseypur, I wrote an essay called ‘The Children of Wasseypur’, about the many contemporary streaming shows and films influenced by Anurag Kashyap’s two-part classic. This essay criticized some of these shows for being too formulaic, a little too keen to project the same stylistic tics that made Wasseypur such a unique and vibrant movie — shows like Bhaukaal, Raktaanchal and so on. It’s perfectly okay to be influenced by a beloved classic, and a certain number of callbacks can be deemed acceptable, even desirable. But when you have blow-by-blow replications, like a gangster blasting the Mithun Chakraborty/Bappi Lahiri song ‘Kasam Paida Karne Waale Ki’ while he sets about committing a murder in daylight (Bhaukaal was guilty of this), the proceedings get too derivative, I feel.

Zee’s Rangbaaz, too, has been influenced by Gangs of Wasseypur (the second season cast Tigmanshu Dhulia, for example, who played the villain Ramadhir Singh in Kashyap’s film), and it makes no secret of this. Every season tackles a new story based on either a gangster-turned-politician or a gangster at the threshold of politics. In the third season which premiered today, Wasseypur alum Vineet Kumar Singh plays Haroon Shah Ali Baig aka ‘Saheb’, inspired by perhaps the best-known gangster politician of 21st century India: Mohammad Shahabuddin, who ruled Bihar’s Siwan district with an iron fist for nearly two decades, from the early 90s to the late 2000s. The action even begins with a Wasseypur-style voiceover about the history of Bihar politics in the 1950s and 60s.

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The similarities end there, though, and led by a commanding performance by Vineet, _Rangbaaz_ delivers its strongest season by a comfortable distance. Showrunner Navdeep Singh (NH10, Manorama Six Feet Under), director Sachin Pathak and writer Siddharth Mishra deserve credit for delivering a thrilling, believable and grounded story structured around real-life Bihar politics.

Baig is a complex, memorable character, a beguiling mixture of brute force, finesse and even vulnerability after a fashion. When he helps two lovers get married despite opposition from their warring parents, you see how the power equation in a hyper-charged room changes through his very presence. The camera hovers near the back of his head and walks with him, a la Ajay Devgn’s memorable entry scene in Omkara (another unforgettable story about strongman politics in the so-called ‘cow belt’ of India). When Vineet says “Saare raaste yahin jaa kar khatam hote hain” (All roads lead here, to me), I had goosebumps. This is a seriously talented actor at the peak of his powers and it’s only in the last few years (since Mukkabaaz, especially) that Bollywood has started giving him his due.

The show gets a lot of other things right, too — most importantly, the socio-political context which explains how a Muslim gangster first enforces the will of powerful upper-caste Hindu landlords (executing a slew of Communist leaders along the way, like Shahabuddin did in real life) and then ends up being initiated into electoral politics by a Bihari subaltern stalwart. In real life, of course, that man was Lalu Prasad Yadav, whose onscreen analogue here, Lakhan Rai is portrayed by the reliably brilliant Vijay Maurya. The Nitish Kumar analogue, Mukul Kumar, is played by Rajesh Tailang who has become one of the most reliable actors in the streaming industry.

In fact, just about every member of this ensemble cast shines, no matter how big or small their screentime is. Geetanjali Kulkarni is hair-raisingly brilliant in a scene where, armed with a good-ol’-fashioned rifle, she stares down an angry, homicidal mob of Hindu fanatics looking to murder the young Baig, her own son Dipu’s friend from school. Sudhanva Deshpande has a small but memorable role as Chhota Babu, Diwan’s (the show has changed ‘Siwan’ to ‘Diwan’, presumably for legal reasons) resident halwai-in-chief who is a Baig loyalist at first but soon sees the monstrous side of the man, especially when his son witnesses a murder in broad daylight committed at Baig’s behest.

The show’s screenplay does not infantilize or talk down to its audience, unlike virtually every other ‘children of Wasseypur’ show I spoke about at the beginning of this review (indeed, even Rangbaaz’s own previous seasons had been guilty of this, to an extent). It doesn’t dumb things down in the service of brevity and that’s a tightrope walk for episodic TV. At its best, it even displays the kind of easy erudition that one associates with some other films helmed by showrunner Navdeep Singh (like his last one, Laal Kaptaan, criminally underrated if you ask me). When Baig meets his future wife for the first time in a library, the brutish strongman surprises her with a mini-lecture on the life and works of Rahi Masoom Raza, who wrote the iconic novel Aadha Gaon but also the relatively frivolous screenplay of Disco Dancer, a fact which Baig uses to remind us “not to judge a book by its cover”.

By the time the sixth and final episode ends, you want to know more about this world and these characters (and not just Baig, but everybody around him) and eventually, that’s the litmus test for anthology-format shows like this one where every season has a fresh set of characters. Rangbaaz Season 3 is a riveting piece of television featuring a super-strong ensemble and some thoughtfully written narrative arcs—highly recommended, on the whole.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.