Indian culture places a heavy premium on grief. It’s all too serious and rarely personal. Still, a handful of filmmakers have been merrily chipping away at the grim taboo of death. In 2019, we had the resolutely upbeat The Sky Is Pink. In Ram Prasad Ki Tervi (2021), a family bickers through the 13-day wake of their patriarch’s death. And now we have Pagglait, an equally barbed comedy-drama releasing on Netflix. Directed by Umesh Bist, the film centres on Sandhya (Sanya Malhotra) a young woman who, for whatever reason, is unable to mourn her dead husband.
One of the first scenes is Sandhya’s parents pitching up to console their daughter. Her mother-in-law, played by Sheeba Chaddha, offers to send up some tea. “I won’t drink tea,” Sandhya says. “A Pepsi, please?” Umesh, who also wrote the screenplay, says he wanted to reinterpret death as a celebration, ‘not an end but a beginning in itself ’. “Our ancient texts specify 16 sanskaras (rites of passage) of human life. The last one, antim-sanskara, is a part of them.
Our goal in each is the pursuit of pleasure or happiness. And so it should be with death.” The chirpy title, thus, was a fit. For Sanya, it signaled a character willing to strike out on her own. “I was really happy when I learnt the film was going to be called Pagglait,” the actor says. “My character, Sandhya, has spent her life waiting for others to validate her. She’s been seeking love externally and not internally. It’s only after her husband’s death that she realises this and does what she really wanted to.” Pagglait, in Awadhi, is not an insult but a term of endearment, explains Umesh.
“It’s used for anyone who rises above her limitations and dares to find a new horizon.” While focusing on Sandhya, the film surrounds her with several oddball characters at her in-law’s place. In addition to Sheeba Chaddha, there are wonderful turns by Ashutosh Rana, Raghuvir Yadav, Rajesh Tailang and Meghna Malik. And yet this isn’t a family drama in the strictest sense. The most potent arc, for instance, involves an outsider. As it turns out, Sandhya’s husband was in a relationship with a colleague before his marriage. The woman, Akansha (Sayani Gupta), turns up at the funeral, where she is confronted by Sandhya.
The uncomfortable friendship that grows between them informs the rest of the film. “Akansha comes in almost like a ray of hope in Sandhya’s life,” Sayani says. It’s a welcome change, given Hindi cinema’s constant suspicion of ‘the other woman’. “In mainstream movies, we always see either the heroine or the vamp,” Sayani notes. “Here they are both presented as people. Their worlds might be different but ultimately they share the same reality.” With so many undercurrents to the story, the project turned into a technical challenge.
Lighting specific scenes, for example, cinematographer Rafey Mehmood had to evoke the gloomy mood of a house in mourning. “At one point, he tried to match my breathing pattern for a shot,” Sanya recalls. In one scene, Sandhya, in a fit of rage, sneaks out of the house and feasts on gol gappas. Her compulsive munching is match-cut with funeral rites being performed. Sanya laughs when we compare it to the baptism sequence i n The Godfather. “Sometimes, your act of rebellion is not going out and sleeping with someone or smoking and drinking,” Sayani adds. It could be something as simple as eating a gol gappa. “For Sandhya’s world, that’s being blasphemous.”