From Aryan Khan’s debut to Dhadak 2, Heart Lamp, and fifty years of Sholay, this article by Sharad Raj critiques postmodernism, plagiarism, caste commodification, and nepotism—revealing how capitalism distorts culture under the guise of inclusivity.

This article examines the uneasy intersections of Bollywood, literature, and cultural politics through Dhadak 2, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, Aryan Khan’s OTT debut, and the 50th anniversary of Sholay. It critiques how postmodernism and global capitalism celebrate mediocrity, commodify caste struggles, legitimize plagiarism, and glorify nepotism, while sidelining originality and genuine artistry. Highlighting the disturbing dominance of cultural elites—the piece questions the validity of art that prioritizes profit, spectacle, and social tokenism over creativity, depth, and truth. 

These have been fascinating last few months. Banu Mushtaq became the first Kannada writer to win the International Booker Prize for her translated collection of short stories Heart Lamp, Sholay celebrated 50 years, Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 had the audience divided, but what rules social media today is Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan’s OTT debut with Ba**ds of Bollywood*. Nothing can better summarize the cultural landscape today as it exists and its inherent tragedy and misfortune. Sounds blasphemous? Well, of course it does, especially when the world and the entire woke ecosystem celebrates these happenings, a contrary view that is about to emerge is sacrilegious.

Dhadak 2

Producer Karan Johar and director Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, a Hindi remake of Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, is a spiritual sequel to Dhadak which in turn was a remake of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairaat. Dhadak was a watered-down, trivialized version of Sairaat, primarily meant for the regular Bollywood audiences. Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 is a sensationalized representation of caste violence where caste has been completely “commodified” for purposes of consumption and profit alone. The narrative approach of the film and the feeling it generates is as if the whole town is out to punish only one Dalit boy, Nilesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and have pretty much nothing better to do. This does not intensify the atrocity, discrimination and oppression, instead it sensationalizes it with a perverse purpose of milking it for neither aesthetic nor social purpose but to “entertain” alone. And at whose cost is the moot question? At the cost of the very community, whose cause it is championing.

The film could have simply followed the Sairaat pattern where things happen and gradually heat up. Instead, it is so obsessed with its empty rhetoric supported by lack of imagination in writing and making that it is reduced to a commodity. Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s critically acclaimed The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) has similar writing in what is anything but a scene with three women discussing the merits and demerits of the Hijab!

Kudos to Ms. Iqbal for breaking the male bastion and directing a big studio film but unfortunately the film cannot be made to rest on that achievement alone, it must stand on its feet for cinematic reasons. In fact, it is nowhere close to being the “socially committed” film that the makers claim, for not only is the writing poor but also the representation is problematic. In Ms. Iqbal’s world the upper caste learns a lesson and by the act of goodness extends an olive branch, sorry pen, to the lower caste protagonist and all live happily ever after!!! This is what one can call Karan Joharsing caste.

Remember the chilling caste killings in the epilogue of Sairaat? It is in the end the upper class bourgeois bias and lack of understanding of Karan Johar, Ms. Iqbal and team that surfaces the most. And why is Tripti Dimri so naïve? Doesn’t she know her cousin that she exposes Nilesh to them at the wedding instead of ensuring he is well looked after and not left alone? Instead she is made to prioritize a Bollywood wedding song over safe and warm hosting of her lover!

The thing with postmodern criticism and inclusivity is that it doesn’t question the mode of production and is easily pleased with token sensationalism.

Fifty years of Sholay

Sholay and I have a childhood connection.

We as a family were Amitabh Bachchan’s guests on the set of Sholay in Mumbai thanks to his illustrious father Dr Harivansh Rai Bachchan. This was followed by watching the film at India’s finest cinema hall in Bangalore, Santosh, that was renovated with 70 MM projection and stereophonic sound.

I still remember the sound of Jai’s coin rolling across the 70MM screen at Santosh. A die-hard and committed Bachchan fan, Sholay was sexy in 1975 to a 10-year-old. Not only Bachchan, but Basanti, Asrani, Jagdeep and last but not the least Amjad Khan wowed us instantaneously. We returned to Lucknow and continued to watch Sholay whenever possible, remembering the dialogues by heart and even buying the dialogue LP.

Decades passed. The age of the internet and social media arrived and started to dethrone some false gods. And Sholay undoubtedly is one of them. While I may still enjoy the film, its daylight dacoity stealing characters, scenes, soundtrack, motifs and shots cannot be denied. It is a confirmed reality now. It was my elder niece who first made me question Sholay, when she said how can a film so blatantly lifted be called a “great film?” I then saw Raj Khosla’s superbly crafted Mera Gaon Mera Desh that came a year before Sholay. From a one-hand village thakur to the famous Dharmendra teaching Hema Malini to fire, to Jabbar Singh the villain, it is all there!

Long before, when watching Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, I had realized where Gabbar’s costume and his mnemonic soundtrack come from, but today almost all scenes seem to be lifted from even unknown films. At that time, I thought Ramesh Sippy was paying homage to his favourite genre. But no, he was plagiarizing.

The travesty is that 50 years later, this robbery was celebrated at a mass scale on August 15 this year with one and all lauding the film in hyperboles. Never has anyone in any art celebrated theft at this scale. What pains me the most is, that, of all people, Javed Akhtar, a well-read intellectual beyond doubt, who has an opinion on everything these days, defends it in the Amazon series Angry Young Man and laughs it off!

How can a personality like him who treats the finest of artworks and poetry of Mir, Ghalib and Shakespeare with utmost respect, nuance and understanding, be so contemptuous of cinema the art form? He’s a screenwriter, lyricist par excellence. But is he not belittling his own art by passing off plagiarism as good screenwriting, with the end justifying the means?

This Independence Day we legitimized plagiarism by celebrating Sholay in a manner it no longer deserves. Will history be equally kind to other makers who do much the same? I don’t think so.

Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp & The Booker Prize  

To begin with Banu Mushtaq’s winning the Booker for her collection of short stories Heart Lamp translated by Deepa Bhasthi is no small achievement. This also makes Deepa the first Indian translator to win a Booker. A Kannada woman writer reaching the highest echelons of literary circles across the world must have been a huge battle against several fault lines that women must face. It is energy-seeping and takes out a lot from a creative artist. No two ways about it. Having said that, once the book is out in the public domain it must be evaluated on its literary merit for the Booker prize is for literature and not activism.

In my view the book fails completely as a piece of literature. It is banal, lacks imagination and has nothing new or old to offer either formally, intellectually or emotionally. The 3-4 stories I have read at best read like newspaper feature reports in rather ordinary English. The recognition of Banu and her ilk has to do with the ruling atmosphere of wokeism where social commentary and activism precede and are legitimized even if it is at the cost of artistic merit.

Organizations like Wire.in add to this perpetration of activism and mediocrity over artistic merit that should be the only benchmark when one celebrates a creation. But Banu has been celebrated as the greatest gift to literature not for her storytelling but for what she stands for culturally. A sad reflection of our times.

Aryan Khan’s OTT debut B***ds of Bollywood  

My undergraduate and postgraduate students of filmmaking often ask me, “Sir how can we go and pitch to Netflix and Amazon, is it only for Aryan Khan or do we also stand a chance?” I am left speechless for the answer will be very discouraging.

People who interacted with me daily in television do not reply to my messages today. It is a different world out there. No wonder, the rise of the Hindu right wing apart, students are coming up with stories as their exercises on “nepo kids”. Aryan Khan seals the debate once and for all. Agreed that he will have to prove himself hereafter, but that seems like a joke with the head start he is getting, which some don’t achieve even at the peak of their careers. King Khan is his brand ambassador after all.

Sainath, in a wonderful talk recently calls out the “obscenity of the Indian rich”. Here on display is the “obscenity of a neo-liberal film star”. Until the show is launched and much after, there will be talks, panel discussions, podcasts, reels, shorts, which will invade social media and our sanity with it. It has already begun. AI-generated promotions are being thrust down our gullet as well. There is only one relevant event taking place in the debris of a Bollywood fighting for its survival, and that is the Aryan Khan show. Is it not lopsided?

Has Aryan got the series on merit, for I am told by one of my closest friends, a producer, that OTT now needs “names” of people which can be exploited on media and bring the mass coverage they require for their own survival.

The question that arises is, what is Aryan’s standing to be a showrunner? He is SRK’s son! I am not saying the show will be bad, maybe it is a good series, but, in this case, it is not about the quality of the show but that it reveals an obscenely unfair playing ground. And SRK is obviously leaving no stone unturned to promote it.

Postmodernism, aligned with global capitalism, offers the illusion of inclusivity through endless focus groups but leaves the core untouched. Films like Dhadak 2 and Heart Lamp are applauded, while postmodernism’s supposed challenge to originality perversely validates imitations like Sholay. In the end, capitalism bares its ugly face through the Khans, Kapoors, and Venga Reddys who continue to dominate cultural narratives.