Thar shows an India struggling to contemplate its own transition

In a scene from Netflix’s Thar Inspector Surekha Singh, played by Anil Kapoor tells his colleague (Satish Kaushik) ponderously “Pta nahi mujhe kyun lagta hai ye picture Gabbar ke baare mein nahi hai.” It’s a cinematic reference, of course, to Sholay one of the great western’s  made in the Indian tradition of filmmaking. But what Singh’s confusion also illustrates is the leaps Indian cinema has made since the morally black and white days of those early years. To which effect Thar is both awkwardly compelling and narratively lazy. The things it does poorly it does really really poorly but the few things, it gets right are indicative of the film that Thar could have become. Foremost, it is an arresting image of 80s India where historical and new evils collide. A collision that feels jarring but is in retrospect, the film’s most intriguing subtexts. Because in Thar, India graduates from navigating evil from beyond the border to nurturing it within.

Anil Kapoor is in his element in Thar , supported by a near perfect Satish Kaushik as a low-caste sub-inspector. In one scene, Singh is likened to a dog that cleans after the hunter by a younger but senior officer. Singh has been transferred to Munabao, Rajasthan where a Pakistani ex-soldier is the only identifiable source of mischief. The arrival of the quiet, somewhat jaded outsider in Siddharth ( Harshvardhan Kapoor ) tempts fate in ways that Singh even his worldly wisdom struggles to comprehend. Harshvardhan isn’t memorable in his role as Siddharth but he embodies the contradiction of contemplating violence and its stylised execution. This is an action-hero almost bogged down by the charisma, violence demands in the universe of cinema. He doesn’t punch gracefully, or even effectively, but he struggles as an India does, with its recently discovered violent heart –Indira Gandhi’s recent assassination is mentioned in a conversation in the film.

The brutality of Thar, at times abject like cheerful furnishing, can at times turn a film about the collision of two worlds into a typical western that gave rise to the revenge drama in the first place. Siddharth pretends to be an antique collector – a man querying history along India’s borders to sell its leftovers in the cities so people with money can keep them. It’s sadistic, in one way, to rob an unrecognised place of its own personal history so it can become a keepsake for those fa- off, looking for roots to own. It’s why the outsider is suspected, seen as hostile by the ecosystem that has found, in itself, a way to survive. On the other hand, Singh’s life cannot rid itself of the historic burdens of war and conflict. Pakistani dacoits roam the borders orchestrate an illicit drug trade, while insiders look for uniforms to hide their caste and consciousness.

Thar is splendid to look at. The arid desert contributes to a sense of dread, the lack of shade to a deceptively tired, uninterested grin on everyone’s face. This is a place that switches between rock and hard, for it is a land some people fight for while others look to escape. Women go about life like echoes of things their men say. India is only just learning to think for itself, create borders of ideologies, of trust and morality where none were previously visible. It is a nation only just learning to suspect. As a country that has built itself from scratch, Thar tells us, no young nation can conceive of making a gun, until it is fired upon. No policeman can identify crime, if he cannot perceive context beyond the airy notions of good and bad. As we grew older, we also grew wilder in our interpretation of morality.

These ideas in the film are fascinating but they fail to build tissue around the bare-bones structure of a straightforward revenge. The dacoits in Thar appear and disappear for no reason and it is not until the climactic scene that you understand their role, not because of their presence but because they awkwardly recede out of relevance. It’s a clunky, poorly executed transition that if it had been metered bettered could have found the poetic soul the film aspires too. Within minutes Surekha Singh, transitions between a gunfight with dacoits that have roamed his territory for years to witness, bruised and bemused, the culmination of a narrative his ilk couldn’t have conceived of. This is the cost, time exacts on souls tarred and tattered by evil that did not sneak in from across the border, but crept into our lives from the neighbouring street. The nature of evil has changed, guided now by motivations that the binaries of cop and dacoit struggle to contend with. It’s hard to spot, screen or define. In Thar India lets go of an old adversary and finds its way to new, heady conflicts - sometimes through the evolution of needs, at other times, the nature of the deed.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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