Shazia Iqbal: in cinema as in life

The Hindu

2 days ago

Shazia Iqbal, 41, wants trolls to know she's from Bihar, not Bandra. She gets what it's like to live outside the bubble of privileged India and yes, she has felt the crippling weight of identity. We speak a week before the release of her first feature film Dhadak 2, headlined by Triptii Dimri and Siddhant Chaturvedi.
It's uncommon for debut filmmakers to get theatrical releases these days as commercial stakes are high. Iqbal also had a long and tricky dance with the censor board and has had to fend off fans who are annoyed that Karan Johar's Dharma Productions is remaking Pariyerum Perumal, Mari Selvaraj's cult anti-caste Tamil hit, produced by Pa. Ranjith in 2018.
But if reviewers called the first Dhadak a watered-down version of Marathi film Sairat, Dhadak 2 is an amped up cry against casteism in higher education and love. 'Don't treat a film or book like religion,' says Iqbal. 'You're emotionally attached and that is fine, but a remake won't hurt the original and it's a chance for more people to watch it.'
Dhadak 2 is not an exact copy of Selvaraj's film. 'I felt we needed to talk about both caste and gender,' Iqbal says, adding that she wanted the female lead to have more agency than in the original. 'People can be flawed and ignorant and yet they can have a voice.' It's an important film for an age when young Indians still don't have the right to choose their life partner.
Full circle moment
Iqbal's award-winning 2018 short film Bebaak (meaning defiance) was about a young woman being told that she would only get a scholarship from a religious trust if she wore the hijab and behaved more 'Muslim'. It's based on something the director, once a quota student in a Muslim-run college, faced when she went to ask for financial assistance with untied hair and her unblinking attitude. Only, unlike the girl in Bebaak, Iqbal complied. 'It rattled me so much,' she says. 'I began looking critically at how patriarchy functions in my own community and family.'
After she graduated as an architect, Iqbal opted for production design. She worked in advertising but was drawn to the Hindi film industry, and has worked on half a dozen movies and web series such as Sacred Games, Lust Stories and Love Storiyaan. Telling her story in Bebaak was healing. 'I overcame that guilt or trauma of being in such a vulnerable position that I had to take that money,' she says.
Iqbal was born in Patna, one of four siblings. Her father Zahid, an RJ who wrote radio plays, was a man with emancipated ideas and he told her, when she was eight, that life was about more than getting married. The idea stuck. It was the age of Salim-Javed and someone suggested that Zahid try his hand at writing for Hindi films, so he moved to Mumbai in the 1970s. At one point, he worked with director Ramanand Sagar on the TV series Ramayan. 'I love to tell people that my father cast Ram and Sita,' Iqbal says. The family followed him in 1988 and lived on the 'fringes of the metro' in Vasai. Iqbal's father never made it as an independent writer and years later, his daughter felt like she had to 'complete that circle' for him.
The personal is political
The issue of identity and marriage is one Iqbal has engaged with since 2008, when her brother informed the family that he was in love with a Hindu woman. 'It was very shocking for my parents and I also thought my brother was doing the wrong thing,' she says. 'Back then, we believed that whatever parents say is right.'
A year later, her second brother announced he was seeing a Malayali woman and then, her sister fell in love with a Gujarati man. All three siblings are in interfaith marriages. 'My mom used to think her children are behaving like this because we are not upper middle class or rich,' says Iqbal. 'I told her Anil Ambani also married someone against his parents' wishes. Being with someone you chose is not about money or disrespecting parents.'
After chaos and cancellations, the family emerged stronger. 'My extended family have become better people because my siblings took a stand,' she says. 'In their way, they made the world a better place.' In an industry that rushes to label itself 'apolitical', Iqbal practises that feminist maxim — the personal is political.
Representation matters
Her expertise in production design means Iqbal is adept at building worlds and backstories. At some point during the making of Dhadak 2, the costume team wanted to know how authentic the film would look. 'It has to look as real as possible,' Iqbal told them. 'We have to buy a ₹100 shirt, not a ₹2,500 shirt and then age it to look like a cheaper shirt.'
She cites the example of Anurag Kashyap's 2018 film Mukkabaaz, about a Varanasi-based boxer, on which she was production designer. 'We would never shoot with new things,' she says. 'We would buy stuff and request the neighbours to give us their old stuff to build a lived-in environment.'
Iqbal makes films because she wants to make a difference. She wants a student in Kota who is feeling bullied in college to see themselves represented in her film. The power of mainstream cinema lies in its reach, and when people watch her film, she hopes they will think: 'I saw myself on screen.'
The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.