Looking back, it’s not even like GoW brought something strikingly original to the table when it came to telling stories set in the hinterland. Keh ke lenge uski,” we had our own “I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time.”
In Sardar Khan’s “Maarenge nahi saale ko. With GoW, Indian cinema had finally come of age.
Tigmanshu Dhulia makes “bhosdi ke” sound poetic while Manoj Bajpayee takes everyday cuss words and elevates them to something Voltaire would be proud of. It’s also the mark of a great actor, and the GoW franchise has no scarcity of them. This is what makes it sound not like “dialogue” but something a character would naturally say.
#Gangs of wasseypur part 1 cast movie
The dialogues, penned by Zeeshan Quadri, are hyper-realistic, matching the slightly heightened reality the movie itself operates in, but their delivery is surprisingly grounded. There are more such gems, peppered throughout the film, heavy with metaphors. Yahaan kabootar bhi ek pankh se udta hai, aur doosre se apna ijjat bachata hai,” remarks Sultan Qureshi ( Pankaj Tripathi ) at one point in the film. Ultimately a story of revenge, it’s a multigenerational crime saga, elements of which are inspired from the real-life coal mafia of Dhanbad, whose roots were sown back in the early 1940s.īut perhaps even more than the characters, it’s the quotable dialogues that have cemented GoW’s place as a cult classic. But despite its obvious influences, GoW was its own thing – a hinterland story about the coal mafia, revolving around Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee), his arch-nemesis Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia), his son Faizal ( Nawazuddin Siddiqui ), and a host of characters who are now imprinted in our psyche. Here was our very own gangster epic, with all the style of Goodfellas, the violence of Scarface, and the storytelling of The Godfathe r, with a generous splash of Tarantino thrown in. It took me quite a while to process the sheer scope of storytelling in GoW.
And yes, eight years later, I still maintain that the Gangs of Wasseypur franchise is a rare, visceral classic. What GoW also made me realise was that Kashyap’s films don’t have cardboard cutout “heroes” and “villains” who fit perfectly in moulds. I saw the story as a single, carefully crafted mosaic, as it was intended to be. Watching Part 1 made me appreciate the film I’d just seen, even more. I’m sure Anurag Kashyap won’t mind that he’s even admitted that he owes the cult status of his films to torrents. I went back home that night and channeled my inner critic to shower praises on the film, posting statuses like “ Gangs of Wasseypur 2 is a rare, visceral classic.” Then, like every honest-to-God engineer, I went ahead and torrented the hell out of Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 1. I cast a glance at my friend, who had a similar expression on his face. Keh ke lenge uski,” we had our own “I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time.”Īs the theatre lights came back on after two hours of riveting gangland drama, I was staring at the screen with my mouth agape. Kashyap had finally gone on to do what we’d always expected from him – gifted us a gangster epic we could proudly call our own. Its characters achieved cult status in no time at all. But it was Gangs of Wasseypur that changed the tide. Vidya Balan shone in Kahaani, a masterfully mounted thriller by Sujoy Ghosh, and Ranbir Kapoor outclassed everyone in Barfi, Anurag Basu’s delightful ode to innocence. Great storytelling was at the forefront – Ayushmann Khurrana had come out of his Roadies cocoon to give us Vicky Donor. Here was a director who really took chances, and most of all, knew his characters and wasn’t afraid to put them to hell to make them truly shine.Įight years ago, Hindi cinema was going through what can be termed as a renaissance period. We’d watched Dev.D in college and had our minds collectively explode at the ingenuity of the retelling and Black Friday was sacred to us. We were both, however, great fans of Anurag Kashyap’s body of work.
#Gangs of wasseypur part 1 cast series
At that point, we hadn’t seen the first installment of the series and didn’t even bother to glance at the synopsis. Back in 2012 on an unsuspecting Friday, my friend and I decided to watch Gangs of Wasseypur – Part II in the theatre.