Anubhuti Kashyap, Abhinav Kashyap and Anurag Kashyap,

Foraying into direction with Doctor G, Anubhuti says she doesn’t feel the pressure of comparison with filmmaker-brothers Anurag and Abhinav
Uma Ramasubramanian (MID-DAY; October 16, 2022)

With Doctor G, debutant director Anubhuti Kashyap looks at the humorous journey of a gynaecology student who becomes the only male in the female-dominated stream of medicine. One’s first film comes with immense pressure. For Anubhuti, the pressure is only multiplied as she will inevitably be compared to her filmmaker brothers Anurag and Abhinav Kashyap. How does she view it? “I think I had that pressure when I joined the industry. In the past 10-12 years, I have learnt to not take that pressure at all. I have spent so much time exploring my own voice. As I started to write more and do more films, I realised my voice is very different from that of my brothers,” she smiles.

Their movies belong to diverse worlds. Anurag’s penchant for dark, gritty films is known—be it Black Friday (2004), Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) or Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016)—while Abhinav has churned out masala films like Dabangg (2010) and Besharam (2013). Anubhuti appears to have taken the best of both worlds. Her Ayushmann Khurrana, Shefali Shah and Rakul Preet Singh-starrer is a light-hearted entertainer that makes a statement about misogyny and gender stereotypes. She says that the three siblings, close as they are, march to their own beat.

“We are not the kind of people who are in touch on a daily basis. But, on a holistic level, we are completely dependent on each other. So from time to time, we take advice from each other and check up on one another. I run my scripts past my brothers, or they will be the first ones to see [my] film. Their opinion matters, but it’s never done with the intention of seeking advice. They never give me advice unless I seek it.”

She is happy with the way her maiden directorial venture has shaped up. As Doctor G hit the screens on Friday, Anubhuti says she has taken care to represent the medical world accurately. “We had to put in a lot of work to understand this world. It is not sanitised or dumbed down; it’s a true representation of how things happen.”