Wretched of the Nether World — Paatal Lok

The wonderfully directed and spectacularly choreographed Amazon Prime web series 'Paatal Lok' is buzzing on the Indian internet.

It rightly deserves the applause for a riveting cinematic experience with a strong underpinning of social realism and unadorned portrayal of the dark social underbelly, accentuated with a trenchant scraping at the incestuous plexus of power-brokers, gendarmes of the powerful, the chosen minstrels selected to relay the song to the multitude, and the blessed ones themselves.

Oscar Wilde said everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power. In 'Paatal Lok' the heady cocktail of power, sex, corruption, criminality, brutality, marginalization, influence, patronage, violence, barbarism and tweaking the system, all converge. All roads to Rome!

Everything is about power. Either the means to achieve it, walk the tightrope around it, ingratiate and kowtow to it, or keep calm and remain nonplussed in its comforting embrace, as the wise men aver.

Or challenge it head-on and either be consigned to wilderness, or vanish like a Sisyphean poltergeist, as the intrepid prefer.

Power has the mystical capability to be a sharp scimitar, a contraption to be toyed with, and a formidable source of awe, anxiety, trepidation, fulsome reverence, and the supplication it commands. Power and the glory. The two can rarely be separate.

The series is a fairly good attempt at acerbic social commentary about the preordained determinism in the lives of the marginalized. It also highlights the chasm between urban, cosmopolitan India and the badlands where centuries old hierarchy, tradition, and multi-dimensional forms of oppression still rule the day.

Not the noble idea of enshrined liberty, but safeguarding a semblance of it through a mix of humiliation, servitude, cloying, stoic endurance, self-deprecation and, doomsday fatalism is the ultimate resort in these belts.

'The Way We Live Now' – title of a novel by Anthony Trollope – could perfectly and ironically be used as the rubric for a contemporary thesis on Covid-19 and the havoc it has wreaked. But what if the 'now' belongs to an eerie, interminable continuum for a few ?

Could an alternative title be 'The Way we Have Forever Lived’?

The destinies of the four murder accuseds in the series runs along the line of Schopenhauer’s famous dictum 'In the end you are going to be ship wrecked’.

Just that, in this case, the ship scuttled before it embarked on a voyage, and before there was even a dying hope of finding an anchorage.

What proceeded was merely a grandiose chronicle foretold – not of a death, but of inevitable doom, smug callousness, and repulsive duplicity.

Superb direction and enthralling acting are certainly the strongest pillars of the series, and many may hold them as a landmark for future projects, however, what's really unbecoming and rather inglorious and disgraceful on the part of the producers is to not give due credit to the novel that made it possible.

The bedrock of the entire project is 'The Story of My Assassins' – a 2009 novel by the now disgraced and one-time maverick journalist Tarun Tejpal.

It is disingenuous on the part of the producers to acknowledge that the series is an adaptation from his novel only after it was all over on Twitter. And people pointed out what sort of plagiarism it is.

I was compelled to read the Tejpal novel not because it inspired a series, but because of the lavish praise heaped by literary luminaries including VS Naipaul and Hari Kunzru, who ranked it far superior to similar sagas of powerlessness, futility, despondency and deprivation, the Booker-winning 'The White Tiger' and the cult 'Slumdog Millionaire’.

What’s striking about the novel is its casual, freewheeling, uncensored use of hindi abuses, its sardonically brutal exposure of the opulence, blithe indifference, and degeneracy of the 'movers and shakers' of the world, imbued with a pathos for those condemned to bear the brunt.

There is no agitational overtone in the novel. Nor a tenor of the self-righteous yelling from lofty pedestal or dash of dilly dallying social justice brigades on the mission to turn the world anew. It shows the world the way it is: in all its bleakness, abjectness, squalor, horror, despair, absurdity, ruthlessness, wickedness and the dint of human effort against the insuperable odds.