Reema Gehi (MUMBAI MIRROR; April 20, 2014)

The country is in the midst of, perhaps, its most important election, and theatre director-filmmaker Feroz Abbas Khan says it’s a happy coincidence that his political satire releases “when we are witnessing a time when my vulgar is better than yours.”

 “Everybody is competing, not on ideology, but on how low they can stoop,” he says when we meet at his Mahim office. Politicians, he says, are smart. They discuss grand ideas but just before polling switch to caste and religion talk. “Sensible voters fall for it too.”

 It’s this very sentiment that the 54-year-old discusses in Dekh Tamasha Dekh, a film he calls “part-documentary, part-absurd drama”.

 Former Mumbai police commissioner Satish Sahney, a regular at Khan’s plays (Tumhari Amrita, Salgirah, Salesman Ramlal) , narrated to Khan an incident that occurred in 1966 during his tenure in Sholapur. It involved a tongawala’s corpse which his Hindu brother and Muslim wife were fighting over. “The brother didn’t want the body to be buried because he said the man had never converted. A stay order was issued, and days after the corpse lay in the morgue, it was eventually handed over to the brother,” Khan says. “When the man’s identity was revealed to me, I was stunned,” he adds, refusing to give it out in lieu of ruining the film’s climax. 

 In this episode, Khan saw a riveting India story, and shared it with playwright Shafaat Khan. “He’s one of the finest satirists I know,” says Khan. “It was a story that had to be told as satire because we need to speak to the audience powerfully.”

 The budget and scale of Dekh Tamasha Dekh are way smaller than his previous film, Gandhi My Father. “The content defines the scale of a movie,” he says. “Whatever the scale or subject is, the film must recover its cost. There’s no space for self-indulgence.”

 In his “most preferred medium of communication”, he faces no such problem. Khan was introduced to theatre while studying to be a chartered accountant at Vile Parle’s N M College. “I knew it wouldn’t make me wealthy, but I knew I would survive,” says Khan whose next play, Iqbal Raj’s Messiah Tonight, surrounds an agony uncle.

 While his association with actor Satish Kaushik, who is the protagonist of Dekh Tamasha Dekh and Salesman Ramlal, a play that’s been running 15 years, continues, the death of Farooq Sheikh last year has robbed him of a comrade. His sudden demise brought Khan’s longest-running play, Tumhari Amrita, to a halt. “I can’t imagine the play without Farooq. I don’t know if I will revive it,” he says, lost.

 “Incidentally, after their (Sheikh and Shabana Azmi’s) last performance outside the Taj Mahal,” Khan shares, “Shabana told Farooq that they should end on this magical note. But he said, ‘we’ll perform for another 25 years!’ That was his spirit.”

 The man who grew up in Dongri at a time “when socio-political engagement was an important part of growing up, and the city could be brought to a halt by the likes of Mrinal Gore and Ahilya Rangnekar” is concerned about how insular urban youth are. “They can drown themselves in escapist cinema and cricket,” he says throwing a look at his son Mahir’s drum kit. “But when I screened Dekh Tamasha... in Patna, Varanasi and Lucknow, I saw youngsters engaged in a socio-political dialogue. Their voice will matter this time.”