Carnage In Carpet Land:
When the first season of Mirzapur started streaming, it brought to the small screen the kind of gore, profanity and sex that had not been seen before, because content on television had some control, if not outright censorship. However, shows like Mirzapur and Sacred Games broke the barriers, and challenged earlier notions of what was acceptable on a home viewing platform.
Mirzapur was set in a carpet-weaving town of North India, where Akhandanand Tripathi, aka Kaleen Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi) runs his drugs and guns criminal empire under the guise of a legit carpet business. The stunning opening credits, that had threads in the loom soaked in blood, gave an indication of what was to follow. Kaleen Bhaiya wants his trigger-happy son Munna (Divyendu Sharma) to inherit the ‘gaddi’ (seat of leadership) of Mirzapur, under which the other Baahubalis (gang leaders) of Purvanchal function in relative peace.
Guddu (Ali Fazal) and Bablu (Vikrant Massey), sons of an upright lawyer Ramakant Pandit (Rajesh Tailang), start by opposing Munna, who has carelessly killed a bridegroom, and end up working for Kaleen Bhaiya. Pandit’s troubles start when he takes on the case against Munna, which no lawyer would touch.
Kaleen Bhaiya has an opponent in the Shukla clan, and when Guddu kills his father, he maked an enemy of Sharad Shukla (Anjum Sharma). There another gangster Dadda Tyagi (Liliput), with twin sons (Vijay Varma), who join up with Shukla.
In Season 1 and 2 of Mirzapur, the body count was alarmingly high, as gangsters go about killing with abandon, cops and politicians safely in their pockets. By the time the smoke clears to make way for Season 3 (coming so long after Season 2, that a recap is needed to recall who is who), Munna, Bablu Guddu’s pregnant wife (Shriya Pilgaonkar), Kaleen Bhaiya’s randy father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and one of the Tyagi twins are dead, and a wounded Kaleen Bhaiya is spirited away by Sharad. The gainers are Guddu, who snatches Mirzapur and gets a loyal ally in his wife’s sister Golu (Shweta Tripathi Sharma), and Munna’s wife Madhuri (Isha Talwar), who took over the chief ministership of the state after her father’s death, leaving her uncle (Pramod Pathak) in the wilderness.
Season 3— with 10 episodes directed by Gurmeet Singh and Anand Iyer individually or jointly—has a profusion of characters, and a vague road map on which to let the streams of blood flow (there is literally a map with UP towns frequently popping up, and they are joined by thick red lines), but otherwise it keeps going without purpose. The havelis are grand and there is s bleak beauty to the exteriors, but the show does not do UP Tourism any favours.
Madhuri wants to avenge Munna’s murder, and Sharad his father’s, so they form an alliance with Guddu as their shared foe. Ramakant Pandit confesses to the murder of a cop who was in the process of shooting Guddu in an encounter and goes to jail. There are so many scenes that may be well written and shot, but serve no purpose except to bloat the show, which has no likeable characters to begin with. Except for Ramakant Pandit, and to some extent his daughter’s boyfriend (Priyanshu Painyuli), there is not one decent man in the series. The women, who are not innocent wives and mothers, are not wallflowers either—Kaleen Bhaiya’s wife, Beena (Rasika Dugal), had given birth to an illegitimate son and has hopes of taking over Mirzapur. Golu becomes a gunslinger, deal maker and Guddu’s lover. Shabnam (Shernavaz Jijina), daughter of incarcerated opium dealer (Anil George) takes over his business; Sharad’s mother (Meghna Malik) is his advisor, dancer Zarina (Anangsha Biswas), is a pawn in the schemes of the dignified-looking Madhuri, who is as wily as any politician has to be to survive in the jungle of UP.
Again, dozens are killed and there are horrifying—and needless—scenes like a woman being whipped with a belt, pigs eating a charred corpse, a man’s eyes being gouged out with thumbs, a chopped head being gifted. Every form of gruesome violence is used, as treachery and revenge become the fuel for the show in which everybody covets the gaddi of a nondescript town, as if it were more precious than the leadership of a country.
There are action sequences that are well choreographed and shot—like the jail attack on Guddu, and a shootout in the Mr Purvanchal contest, but there are also baffling bits like a cop listing the vegetables he has bought, or an arrested poet killing a key character in prison, or a gambling scene in Nepal where Guddu has gone to make a drug deal and chatters interminably.
UP and Bihar are notorious for their lack of law and order, but Mirzapur makes it look like people routinely kill and maim while the cops look away. In a show replete with all kinds of violence and no pretence to restraint or good taste, there is mercifully no rape.
Pankaj Tripathi anchored the first two seasons with his performance, here he is made to sit it out for most of the show, and none of the actors, except for a fiery Ali Fazal, have the charisma to hold the viewer’s attention. Even Vijay Varma looks listless. What also takes away from the series is, ironically, its past success, which kicked off a spate of me-too series so full of bloodshed and crude language, that it really has reached the point of overkill.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
