Director Ashim Ahluwalia is not a big fan of lines––lines that demarcate, divide and put people, films, actors and characters in boxes. He is most at home in the space between the lines.
A case in point is his latest production, Class.
An adaptation of the 2018 Spanish drama Elite, the eight-episode series that is currently topping the charts on Netflix, follows the lives of a bunch of teenagers, including three underprivileged kids from a slum, in a posh Indian school to expose the divide between the haves and have-nots. Ahluwalia, however, does not pit them against each other. He blurs the lines of distinction and sets Class in the interstice.
This is not to say that the director steers clear of important topics. In fact, Class touches upon almost every possible pertinent issue of the current times. There’s of course the central theme of economic disparity, but there’s also caste, queer rights, crime and corruption and even references to the volatile nature of life in Kashmir that has compelled many to flee the state. “I’m not a fan of flag-waving films.
I didn’t want to monetise these themes. I don’t want to make that the subject of the show, which is about
a school and the haves and have-nots, and the interactions between them,” he says. Ahluwalia’s career too treads the path between commercial and parallel cinema. He grew up in South Bombay, and then trained in filmmaking in the US, before returning to India to make TV commercials. His first film was a documentary drama, titled John & Jane, which captured the lives of Indians working in call centres.
He then went on to make Miss Lovely (2012). The film that revolved around Mumbai’s low- budget sleaze film industry, featured Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead role, right before he rose to stardom with Gangs of Wasseypur 2. It was after the success of Miss Lovely, which went to Cannes, that the filmmaker was able to carve out a niche for himself which was “neither arthouse Indian cinema, nor mainstream Bollywood. It was this new space in the middle”. In 2017, he made Daddy––a biopic of gangster Arun Gawli–– with Arjun Rampal.
Not seeing things in black and white, both in life and work, is what has helped Ahluwalia create Class as a reflection, and not a commentary, on society, something most cinema is guilty of. To this end, he has consciously avoided creating heroes or villains out of his characters—rich or poor, giving all the equal benefit-of-doubt of having baggage. “What I loved about Elite was that it talked about how complex things are… how you can’t just judge somebody that easily. That’s very much my philosophy on life,” he says, adding, “I have never liked films where you have heroes and villains because it creates a belief that genetically people are good or bad. I don’t believe that. I think people are shaped by their circumstances. So my work is about individuals within a context and how it shapes them.”
Despite Class being well-received, the filmmaker insists on keeping distance from commercial cinema. “The audience has changed in the last 10 years. The old Bollywood system has collapsed. Covid-19 destroyed whatever was left of theatrical distribution. Then, of course, streaming platforms have come in because of which we now have an audience that is much hungrier and smarter than most of the creators.”