Real North India from ground-level

We all know about there being two Indias blah blah Most of these clicheacutes about the ruralurban schisms while progressively shrinking in uncanny ways continue to hold But who really stands right at the intersection of the gap between these First and Third worldsmdashsimultaneously living in separate centuriesmdash within the same countryMore than anyone elsemdashthe central government bureaucrat They get to these jobs cracking arguably one of the worlds toughest UPSC exams Which covers for its syllabus the General Studies paper in particular practically everything under the sunTheir first posting in their early 20s involve small towns overseeing rural hamlets in thoroughly distant states This when their generalawareness and academic exposure is at its peak But the land they survey is wholly opposite to the books theyve rattofied to get theremdashlet alone cultures they come from Writer Upamanyu Chatterjee played this aspect up charmingly with the young IAS probationer Agastya Sens character in his cult fiction English August An Indian Story 1988 It got made into a film in 1994 by director Dev Benegal with actor Rahul Bose in the lead roleWhats common between Agastya Sen and actor Ayushmann Khuranas character Ayan Ranjan the young IPS officer in the extremely watchable film Article 15 which releases this Friday That they both graduated from St Stephens College in Delhi Which while it has a 50 per cent Jesus Christian quota provides an altogether ethnicallyreligiouslyracially blind environment to grow up in Where really nothing outside your personalityattitudetalents matter to assimilate and thriveThis is true for most if not all quality educational institutions in India including the college across St Stephens named Hindu But the similarities between the Pink Floyd loving oddfellow Agastya in Midnapore and Stephanian Ayan also posted in whats described as Newspaper Page Seven Indiamdashend thereFor Sens book was a tragiccomedy Article 15 is more of a sparklingly moody atmospheric sort of investigative piece along the lines of Alan Parkers Mississippi Burning 1988 which has already been rather superficially remade as Aakrosh 2010 by PriyadarshanArticle 15 is directed by Anubhav Sinha Tum Bin Tum Bin 2 Dus Cash RAOne who since Mulk 2018 on religious prejudices has almost overnight emerged as a filmmaker with an engagingly powerful principled voice The film is named after the Article in the Indian Constitution that guarantees nondiscrimination over accidents of birth such as caste etcOr in fact all other frictionsschismsobfuscations that politicians who publicly swear by the Constitution shrewdly take advantage of to divide and rule The only time a nationwide Emergency 1975 was officially imposed on India also happened within provisions of the same Constitution But thats another matterArticle 15 is essentially a crime thriller Foremost it works because Sinha allows his actorsmdashthe dazzling Manoj Pahwa and othersmdashbreathing space to build a strong moraldrama around gangrape of two women in a Dalit village near a small town At the centre of it is of course the deathly calm and composed Khurana as the conscientious cop shocked by a society so deeply split over caste Hes unable to grasp the dynamicDont think anything sums up caste from a deracinated urbane perspective as Akhil Katyals short poem Poetic Licence Further shortened here it goes One day when he was About ten or twelve He asked his mother What is my castehellip The mother got up In the middle of her supper Beta if you dont know it by now It must be upperKhuranas Ayan Ranjan has a friend in this town who he once studied with called Satyendra whos gone missing Although unrelated reminded me of an IIT engineer Satyendra Dubey whose collegemate was the local investigating SP when he died mysteriously in the same townSatyendra was a whistleblower in the ongoing corruption in the highway project that he was overseeing in Gaya in Bihar Nobody in Gaya had even heard of Dubey or his mysterious death when I went to cover that story soon after in 2004 I spent couple of days with the sympathetic Gaya SP I still couldnt find appointmenttime with the local DIG He was too busy playing golf in a town where even the police wouldnt step out in the eveningsmdashlet alone regular publicmdashfor fear of Maoist and uppercaste Ranvir Sena violenceSimilarly nobody seems to care much for a missing woman and two who have been gangraped in the fictional Uttar Pradesh town Lalgaonmdashdominated by the outlawed Bhim Senamdashwhere this film is set There is complicity dressed up as santulan keeping balance in corridors of power The system I suspect is more likely to eventually change Khuranas young IPS officer than hes ever likely to change it Yeah this is real North Indiamdashfrom groundlevel Hence the incredibly significant filmMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paperCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates