In Hichki , Rani Mukerji plays a teacher with Tourette syndrome. Mainstream Hindi cinema is not known to be subtle about depictions of class, cultural or racial divides. Hence, she is put in charge of a reputed high school’s Class 9F — the ‘F’ here represents the socio-economic status of the children. They are academic misfits, raucous slum-dwellers, and pariahs in an urban setting defined by the deep-rooted privilege of their “rich” counterparts. Class 9A, taught by an over-sophisticated professor, is composed of well-dressed and supremely clean-looking kids who play basketball and arrogantly symbolise a life of opportunity. It’s often lost on filmmakers that it isn’t quite their fault for simply being born into prosperous households.
This simplistic prism of segregation extends itself to the way we perceive the starry landscape of new-age Bollywood. We are inclined to believe that 9A contains the upholders of snooty nepotism: the silver-spooned likes of Shraddha Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Sonam and Harshvardhan Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Abhishek Bachchan and Tiger Shroff. Their over-sophisticated professor(s): Karan Johar, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Aditya Chopra. Saawariya , Student of the Year and Mirzya are their fancy science exhibitions. Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor are the prefects of class – the rare students who possess the smarts to capitalise on their privilege.
The classroom called 9F contains the talented underdog-ness of Rajkummar Rao, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Pankaj Tripathi, Kalki Koechlin, Irrfan Khan and Radhika Apte. Their self-made teachers are the Anurag Kashyaps of the world, whose unorthodox creativity amounts to the industry version of Tourette’s. The ideal balance of power and purism lies in the ‘middle sections’ rarely shown in films — the 9B, 9C rooms characterised by the all-roundness of Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma, Kangana Ranaut, Vidya Balan and Ayushmann Khurrana.
And it’s to the credit of someone like Varun Dhawan — a career 9A mischief-monger — that he is demonstrating the desire to bridge the gap between these classrooms at the risk of exposing his own limitations. He is the student who, despite automatic integration into the A section, remains naively curious about the chatter in the corridors.
Shraddha Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha mistook access for aptitude last year by headlining Haseena Parkar and Noor respectively. It would be unsurprising to learn that their spectacularly ambitious decisions might have been inspired by the overreaching personality of Varun Dhawan’s professional graph. One could almost imagine them pondering and saying, “If our classmate can do that ‘F’ stuff, so can we!”
Dhawan made his debut in 2012 with Karan Johar’s shiny plastic launch vehicle, Student Of The Year , followed by leading turns in Main Tera Hero (directed by his father, David Dhawan) and Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya . Each of these movies operated as a tribute to the movies, and in each, he played a charismatic brat in a filmy love triangle. They became a platform for him to showcase derivative attributes — grandstanding approach to craft, included — of the modern-day superstar. Between the energy of Shah Rukh and the boyishness of Salman, he mostly internalized a rakish Govinda, whose confidence he inherited across childhood summers on his father’s production sets.
He had flair, fluff and comic timing, none of which suggested that his fourth film would be under the studious tutelage of director Sriram Raghavan. In the dark revenge thriller Badlapur , Dhawan — who plays an unhinged widower in ruthless pursuit of his family’s killers — constantly resembles a 9A boy overwhelmed by the grittiness of a 9F field trip. Like Tendulkar cutting out his impulsive offside game for an entire test innings, the young actor, too, was forced to suddenly abandon his natural form in order to service the mood of his film. It was by no means pretty, but an untested Dhawan held his own opposite gifted actors like Siddiqui, Vinay Pathak, Kumud Mishra and Divya Dutta. When Raghavan described Dhawan’s preparation later, his words exuded the chaotic wisdom of a mentor who may have counted on Dhawan’s soft upbringing to elicit such a shocked performance. He pointed out that Dhawan’s difficulties arose from being someone for whom suffering and grief were alien emotions. An approximate translation: ‘star kid had to ditch his chauffeur’.
That Dhawan himself reacted with the transitional urgency of Rockstar ’s Janardan Jhakhar or Lakshya ’s Karan Shergill — the drifting happy-go-luckiness was almost flushed out of his system — is an indicator of an adaptive inquisitiveness not often seen in heirloom film careers. He needed a Badlapur , just as Alia needed a Highway and Ranbir a Rocket Singh , to realise that there’s more to Indian performance art than charming his way to the top with a glint in his eyes. And that it’s not always enough to love the camera; it’s equally necessary to be uncomfortable with the voyeuristic idea of it.
It took him over two years to even consider emotionally challenging himself again, with Badrinath ki Dulhaniya . That’s not to say movies like ABCD 2 , Judwaa 2 and Dishoom are a waste of Dhawan’s potential. If anything, they are easy advertisements of his infectious screen presence. But being a Badri Bansal in Kota is so left-of-field for Dhawan that he manages to channelise the irrationalism of his own discomfort into the small-town core of such characters. The film allows him to balance his ‘A’ and ‘F’ sides. It’s not until the second half in Singapore – as he sets out for “ badla ” against the girl who dumped him — that he returns to an unsettling zone of juvenile vulnerability. When Dhawan depicts anger or drunkenness in certain scenes, he tends to sharpen his vowels with the air of a tantrum-throwing heir whose toy has been stolen; it’s probably the only pain he knows. This out-of-depth intensity of a star yearning to be an actor actually informs Badrinath’s — or raging Raghu’s — mercurial levels of toxic masculinity. Ignorance, in his case, is theatrical bliss.
These uncontrolled images of Dhawan have a tinge of braveness to them. It reflects in how he thrives as the popular class clown, but simultaneously refuses to lose sight of the toppers. For instance, every time Alia takes a commercial leap of faith ( Highway, Udta Punjab ), Dhawan attempts a similar breakthrough ( Badlapur, BKD ). It also reflects in the way he pursues a culturally sound storyteller like Shoojit Sircar to work — and perhaps grow further — with. In Sircar’s upcoming October , he plays a hotel management intern. His eleventh film will be Sharat Katariya’s Sui Dhaaga , in which he portrays the role of a middle-Indian labourer.
It’s important that Dhawan continues to reach beyond his inherent identity. The masses he usually attracts with his popcorn power will then be directed towards a mindscape not routinely occupied by their stiff idols. This will possibly dilute the ironic mutual exclusivity of the movie business — of ‘A’ stars attracting the escapist wonder of ‘F’ regions and ‘F’ stars captivating the pragmatic attention of ‘A’ centres. There will come a day when a Varun Dhawan film tanks at the box office. By then, the hope is that the empty section he currently occupies — D — will stand for more than just ‘Dhawan’.
