Rooting for the screen version of a plunderer named Khilji

The trailer of Padmavati is out. The film releases only in December. Ranveer Singh, wearing long hair and a menacing presence, is cut out to play Alauddin the invader Khilji. Now where does that leave Shahid?

The trailer of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati has just hit the ground running (there’s a hopelessly intriguing story doing the rounds that since Alauddin Khilji invaded Chittor in 1303 AD, the trailer was released at IST 13.03 on October 9 — 1.03pm). And though the film’s title may lead you to believe it’s hinged around Padmavati (or Rani Padmini of Chittor) — played by Deepika Padukone — for me, there was only one takeaway from the trailer. Ranveer Singh. He plays Alauddin Khilji, the invading marauder who takes the glorious kingdom of Chittor apart (and Chittor was only one stop in his serialised rampage).

So there I was, watching Ranveer play a man who made massacres his calling card, and I thought, “It’s going to be so difficult to hate Alauddin Khilji from this moment onwards.” Ranveer sports long, unkempt hair (not too many men can carry that off) that he tosses around like a boss; he has battle-weary scars running across his pretty face; he’s shown tearing into chunks of meat and stuffing his face — caveman-like (also, probably a symbolic reference to his human butchery); there’s a ferocious crassness writ large over him — face and body — even when he’s smelling a flower. All in all, he’s fantastic. I can’t get over how good he looks, even with all the implied ghastliness.

Alongside, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for Shahid Kapoor — who plays Rawal Ratan Singh, the doomed king of Chittor and Padmavati’s husband — for being pitted against Ranveer. Shahid is a damn fine actor, I concede, but the visual spectacle that this Bhansali number promises to be makes Ranveer larger than life: the lithe boyishness vs masculine magnificence is a die-has-been-cast kind of a situation.

When the battle-lines are drawn on the big screen (with or without Padmavati adding to the ambience), I have a feeling I will be rooting for the reel Khilji.

I am in thraldom of a man who — as essayed on screen — is a plunderer and mass murderer.

But then, I’ve always been fascinated by bad boys. Like Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork

Orange. Or Bruno Antony in Strangers on a Train. Helped greatly by the fact that they were played by Malcolm McDowell and Robert Walker respectively. Those guys imbued their roles with so many layers that you could never really end up hating them… in absolute terms. Unlike, say, a Gabbar Singh (in Sholay) or an Anton Chigurh (in No Country for Old

Men), played — breathtakingly, if I may add — by Amjad Khan and Javier Bardem, who made it their business to be focused on pure evil, no redeeming quality whatsoever. I’m sure they had been given a brief by their directors: Be Hateful. Period.

There’s a term for characters like Gabbar or Anton: villain.

But what happens when the “hero” is villainous but still the leading man as far as opening credits, screen time and impact are concerned?

You have the anti-hero. In Hollywood, there have been unapologetic anti-heroes. In A Clockwork

Orange, Alex, for instance, despite his dystopian villainy, was still the hero/leading man; or Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs.

Bollywood, on the other hand, has never really had an “anti-hero”. Yes, there were Darr and Baazigar, both huge hits, but those antiheroes were not to be taken very seriously. Darr had Shah Rukh Khan playing an unstable man (mental health was still a nascent sector in India back then; there was just one scene where a man wearing a doctor’s coat says, “He needs his tablets”), who kept trying to bump off those who stood in the way of his pursuit of (imagined) “true love”. Baazigar was the case of a man morphing into a ruthless manipulator/killer because he was seeking revenge for wrongs wreaked on his parents. Even films like Vaastav — probably Sanjay Dutt’s best film till date, where he plays an underworld don — is too apologetic about the dark side, with too many “justifications” being strewn across the way.

Mainstream Bollywood cinema, it turns out, may be on the verge of being ushered into a watershed moment. It’ll go either of two ways. Ranveer Singh could become the first “hero” in a Hindi film who’s painted black — an opaque shade of it — and audiences hate his guts, even more than they hated Gabbar Singh, because Gabbar’s fictionalised tyranny was only in Ramgarh and its surrounding areas, whereas Khilji’s real atrocities were across an entire nation.

Or maybe, just maybe, Ranveer — and, by extension, Alauddin Khilji — will be imparted shades of grey, revealing a softer side when he falls in love with Padmavati. How does one do that, you may ask. Well, it’s up to Ranveer now.