Gangubai Kathiawadi

Gangubai Kathiwadi

Gangubai Kathiawadi is Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and this movie begins with the sounds of Begum Akhtar singing Ghalib’s ghazal "Wisaal e Yaar hota" which depicts the tone of poetry and pain. This film is about the life of a sex worker who thrived in the by lanes of Kamathipura in the 1950s.

 Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali finds gutsy feminism, charm, cruelity,  and  benevolent courage. He tells her story with dramatic flourish, wast emotion, beautiful visuals and always as a beating heart. The character of the sex worker has admired  place in Sanjay’s movies.These broken, women who deny to be confined by their circumstances, personify his operatic tragedy like Rani Mukerji as Gulab in Sawariya, who says  " Jeeney k liye kuch naa kuch to karna hi parta hai " and Chandramukhi in Devdas, in one scene, Paro warns Chandramukhi about her desire of to get Devdas.

She says: " Tawaiyfon ki taqdeer mein shouhar nahi hote" and Chandramukhi replies: 'Tawaiyfon ki taqdeer hi nahi hoti' but Gangu wrote her own destiny. She comes from an affluent family. Her father was a barrister.

Unfortunately, she also has a grand ambition to be a heroine in the movies but her lover betrays her and sells her to a brothel for one thousand rupees. Gangu ends up standing in a door of brothel waiting for customers but her daring, defiance and determination enables her to find another kind of stardom and eventually, even gets her an meeting with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

This movie is based on a true story of Hussain zaidi and Borges book named "Mafia Queens of Mumbai" which gives Sanjay and co-screenplay writer Utkarshini Vashishtha, ample room to embellish. At one point, Hussain writes, although Gangu wasn’t the most attractive girl in her brothel. But Alia Bhatt, draped mostly in white dress, radiates beauty. As does Sanjay and art director Pallab Chanda’s version of Kamathipura. Mumbai’s notorious red-light area becomes a bustling, lively area filled with outsized personalities, like the don Rahim Lala, a stand-in for Karim Lala who Gangu makes her brother, or Gangu’s arch-rival Razia.

These streets filled with movie theaters and colorful hoardings. In one scene, the electricity goes off and the sex workers stand outside holding candles, calling customers it was the breathtaking visual which of course contradicts the cruelty of their circumstances but to accuse Sanjay and DOP Sudeep Chatterjee of making the ugliness aesthetic is like accusing Rohit Shetty of defying the laws of physics and gravity and logic...... (Continue...)