Jaisa society hai, waisa hi film banega na: Anurag Kashyap

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who was in town on Sunday to attend the screening of his film Kennedy at the ongoing Kolkata International Film Festival, didn’t mince words when asked about a variety of issues, including how he doesn’t believe in censorship and why he thinks Shah Rukh Khan lifted a ‘curse’ from Bollywood. Excerpts:



I’ve read a lot of Sarat Chandra (Chattopadhyay) and I found Devdas to be his weakest novel.It was also made (into films) the most number of times. And by chance I came across a version of the story of his life spent in Bangladesh. Then I realised where Devdas came from. It was a fictionalized version of the life he lived in Bangladesh. So I based Dev.D on the source, not the book, and made it more contemporary.

Maine struggle nahi kiya, main bahut privileged aadmi hoon. Mere pitaji ne mujhe best education diya hai. Main padha-likha aadmi hoon; aur padha-likha hona hi ek privilege hai aaj ke time mein. The struggle I went through was my choice – that I’ll make these kinds of films. For 99% of the people involved with the film industry, it’s a means of livelihood. For 1%, it’s a medium of expression, or something more than that. So, 1% ko 99% ke saath kam karna hai. Sab ka struggle alag alag hai. Hum ko bhi toh funds studios se hi aati hai na? But the same studio that produced Gadar also produced Kennedy.

There’s a duplicity in all of us as human beings. We have to understand that the four people in the censor board, watching a film, are in a very peculiar position. They’re very scared… what they pass or not pass will have some kind of a reaction. Who it will offend where, they don’t know. There’s no law in the country that says that if something is cleared by the censor board, the state has to enforce it, because it has been cleared by a body. Blame inke (censor board) upar aata, aur yeh log aur dar jaate hain. So, film by film, inke rules change hote rehte hain. Kaun si film release huyi, aur uske upar kitna offense, kitna outrage hota hai, uske upar unki next film decide hoti hain.


I have a peculiar relationship with violence. It affects me a lot, so I address it differently in different films. In real life, I faint when I see blood. In most of my films, I keep the violence off screen… in (Gangs of) Wasseypur, it was explicit. I didn’t cut away from it as I wanted to test the limit of how much one can endure. It was, for me, also funny, as it was an outrageous film. In Raman Raghav 2.0, it was always out of the frame because it wasn’t about the violence, but about the man.