When the first drama, Samudra Manthan, was staged, a foundational crisis was recorded: a representative of the world’s distorted forces complained that his community was portrayed in a bad light. The response was definitive: drama was created to be a mirror of the three worlds. The implied meaning conveyed that the art and science of dramaturgy was not conceived to police or moralise from a distance, but to self-introspect the internal reality of the Divine and the Demonic residing within the form of God, Sage and Human “complex”.
Cinema, as an all-encompassing industry of many artistic traditions, is the closest modern mirror of Natya. Today’s column explores the science of drama, its internal reality through two vastly different schools of storytelling: the “transplanted culture” of Western tragedy and the “heritage culture” of contemporary Indian tales. This divergence highlights a fundamental split in the art of storytelling. We will use Martin Scorsese’s lens of ‘investigative tragedy’ — where heroism is an external struggle ending in a redemptive sacrifice and contrast it against Aditya Dhar’s Indic treatment of heroism as an internal alchemical process. While one school asks the hero to die for the cause to prove his worth, the other asks the hero to survive the world without being consumed by it.
As we watch these mirrors of our own reality, let’s see where we stand: Are we an investigation looking for a sacrifice, or an alchemist looking for an alignment?”
Linear tragedy vs The alchemical hero
In Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, protagonist Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a “good guy” playing the role of an undercover operative in a “wrong space.” Billy is a classic American orphan — rootless and untethered. Though trained as a protector, to fulfill his mission, he is forced to wear a deceptive mask, mirroring the chaos of the criminal underworld.
How did the mask sit on him? As Billy reflects the chaos around him, the disguise begins to consume the person. His struggle is rooted in a linear, Western heroic tradition: the idea that bravery ends in a sacrificial exit. Traditionally, in this framework, the hero “dies for the cause” to be validated by a higher judgment — a verdict on whether the life lived is to be celebrated as the ideal memory of a “hero” walking the earthly plane.
True heroism is the ability to walk through a fallen world, ensuring the darkness within never takes root.
Billy, operating in a spiritual vacuum, lacks the multi-generational map that allows a hero to reconcile violent deeds with a higher purpose. Without a silo of ancestral memory to process the trauma, he has no shield against the darkness he mirrors. Consequently, the mask doesn’t just sit on him; it consumes him. He gets “stained” not because he is a bad man, but because he has no mechanism to metabolise the trauma of his actions. His character ends in a terminal, linear collapse.
Contrast this with the protagonist of Dhurandhar, Hamza Ali Mazari. He also wears a mask and walks through the fire of conflict, performing acts of demonic force — the raw, chaotic violence required to survive a fallen world. Yet, he achieves what the undercover cop Billy could not: a state of full-circle restoration.
The Dhurandhar hero succeeds because he is backed by an invisible construct of cultural values rooted in righteousness. This heritage helps him “reason” his way through the violent deed, leaving the core of the individual untouched. He is not a “rootless orphan”; he is a protagonist aware that he is an actor performing a temporary, albeit violent, role in a much larger drama. His character is built on the heritage memory of a lineage of “Warrior-Sages” like Parashurama and Vishwamitra, who performed difficult deeds to restore order. This cultural memory acts as a somatic buffer, allowing the character to return home intact — to his land and to himself.
The Sage Agastya audit
Analysing the difference between Billy and Hamza through the lens of ancient myth provides a definitive audit of their survival. The Ramayana describes Vatapi as a shapeshifter who entered a seeker’s body as food, only to burst out from within and destroy the host. This is the precise anatomy of a dark deed: eventually, the deceptive masks we wear attempt to shatter the spirit from the inside.
To handle a demon like Vatapi, Sage Agastya did not engage in external combat. Instead, his internal fire was so potent that he simply swallowed the demon and commanded, “Vatapi jirno’bhava” (Be digested).
Applying this audit to The Departed reveals that Billy’s lack of a philosophical “home” left him unable to process the underworld’s darkness. The undigested deed became a psychic poison, destroying his identity long before the final bullet arrived. In contrast, the cultural anchors of the hero in Dhurandhar provided a digestive fire fueled by a vision that ensured a fitting end game. While Billy was consumed by his mask, Hamza possessed the internal amunation to swallow the darkness and remain whole.
The heritage advantage
We must realise that Indic wisdom is a blueprint for cleansing the karmic scars stored in our somatic memory. It is clear that the “orphan culture” produces heroes who break under the weight of the world, while the “heritage culture” produces those who, like the lotus, can grow in the mud of a fallen world, braving the demon day-in and day-out, to return to the centre — intact and unstained.