“How can you bury the ghosts? Your mind doesn’t let you …,” Sanjay Leela Bhansali responded, and then trailed off in a 2002 interview with Simi Garewal. We also discover through his later interviews that he meditates on the body as a storehouse of trauma (elsewhere, he mentions, “… the discomfort is set into the body.”).
This degree of self-awareness, rare in mainstream Hindi cinema, allows Bhansali to wield a palpable influence on all of his work, and he emerges as one of the few directors whose work can be subjected to the scrutiny traditionally reserved for a film artist – one may scour thus through their body of work to detect undeniable signs of their presence. His filmography offers up a tapestry of exhibits identifiable by their bawdiness, their inherent opera and a morbid propensity for suffering – titles that are doused as much in classical cinephilia as they are in Indian performative traditions.
Stories of…