The environmental thriller is not a frequently visited genre in Bollywood, but Sherni forays into that territory and delivers unrelentin...
The environmental thriller is not a frequently visited genre in Bollywood, but Sherni forays into that territory and delivers unrelenting yet noiseless excitement in addition to food for thought all the way up to its concluding minutes.
By the end of its 2 hours-plus running time, this compact film addresses most questions urbanites ask about why animals attack humans and why tribal communities enter jungles inhabited by carnivorous creatures despite knowing the dangers of doing so. It also runs a magnifying glass over the intricacies and complexities of forest politics, the dangers of being a forest officer in India, and the manner in which violence might well erupt organically yet becomes much more than it started out being when manipulative, mischief-making politicians come on the scene.
The forest is not the only space where Sherni finds harmony in nature. The Christian is a species on the verge of extinction in Bollywood. Up to the end of the 1980s, Christian women were a regular presence in Hindi films, rarely as the leading lady and usually as an ultra-Westernised cabaret dancer or gangster’s moll in a supporting role. In those days, a sexually active Hindu heroine in skimpy clothing was largely deemed unacceptable and Christian women – who were stereotyped as dregs of a permissive foreign culture – were used for both purposes to provide a frisson of electricity to the heterosexual male audience. By the 1990s though, as it became increasingly acceptable to portray Hindu female protagonists as not virginal and not traditionalist, Christians were more or less discarded. Sherni’s heroine is not just Christian, she is a Malayali with a north Indian Hindu husband and comes bearing not a single stereotypical marker this film industry once insisted on associating with Christians.
Her religious and regional identity do not serve any specific purpose either, but are merely an acknowledgement by Aastha Tiku’s screenplay that Indian Christians and Malayalis exist. Just as Indian Muslims exist, and do not have to be vehicles for messaging on secularism; nor do they have to be a means to pander to Islamophobes dominating the public discourse today, as they have been in a small but steady stream of Hindi films in the last half decade. Like Vidya Vincent, Hassan Noorani too just happens to be.
This aspect of the writing is particularly endearing and heartwarming because of the distressing socio-political context in which Sherni is being released.
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