When Supermen of Malegaon exists, why Superboys of Malegaon was made

(Top) Bollywood film 'Superboys of Malegaon' and (right) documentary 'Supermen of Malegaon'; (bottom, left) Bollywood film 'Gulaab Gang' & documentary 'Gulabi Gang'; (right) indie film 'Mehsampur' & Bollywood film 'Amar Singh Chamkila'.

On a first day first show of Reema Kagti’s recently released Superboys of Malegaon, I was the sole audience in a theatre in Uttar Pradesh. The week that followed brought in accolades for a well-intentioned film from a currently ideas-bereft Hindi film industry. The moment truly belongs to Nasir Shaikh, 50, aka Shaikh Nasir, and his boys from Malegaon, around 270 km from Mumbai, who built a cottage film industry on parody spoof films a decade ago. In the lack of proper equipment for film shooting, they would convert cycles into trolleys and byail-gaadi (bullock carts) into cranes to show the money-driven Bollywood that to it takes just one thing to make films: passion. A point proven time and time again by independent filmmaker and big-screen advocate Sean Baker, whose Anora, made on a paltry $6 million (around Rs 52 crore) budget picked up five Oscars this year — an unprecedented win for indie filmmaking.

Director Kagti and writer Varun Grover’s film, a romantic narrative of an underdog story, the Amazon MGM Studios, Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby Films production, takes significantly from Faiza Ahmad Khan’s ingenious, funny and entertaining documentary Supermen of Malegaon (2008) — to which it gives a “big shout out” to, too, in its title cards. The documentary, on Nasir Shaikh and friends making Malegaon ka Superman, is reproduced as a segment in the Bollywood film, which begins much earlier in Nasir’s life’s timeline — some of it is a visualisation of Nasir’s reminiscences from the documentary. The Bollywood film was originally titled the same “Supermen of Malegaon”, too, until Supermen became Superboys. Did a negotiation take place?

An early Instagram story by Reema Kagti, director of 'Superboys of Malegaon', before the film's title change.

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain recalls the fiasco that followed when a Bollywood film, Anubhav Sinha-Sohum Shah-produced, Soumik Sen-directed Gulaab Gang (2014) released on the heels of Jain’s Norwegian-Indian-Danish co-produced documentary Gulabi Gang (2012), on Sampat Pal Devi and her gang of vigilante girls against gender-based violence in UP’s Banda district. “I have no idea if the makers of the fiction film ever watched my documentary, which was named after the grassroots women’s group Gulabi Gang. All I know is that the gang leader Sampat Pal raised objections when the Madhuri Dixit-starrer was announced. They had titled their film Gulabi Gang but had to change it to Gulaab Gang. But that tiny change created further confusion. Since their publicity budget was substantial, everyone began to call the group and even the documentary Gulaab Gang!” says Jain.

Delhi-based Faiza has been getting calls, too, on whether they were involved with the Bollywood film Superboys of Malegaon. “We are not,” she says. Bollywood is what Faiza, after assisting Manish Jha on Anwar (2007), left to work with the non-fiction format.

Nasir Shaikh and the late Shafique Shaikh on the sets of Malegaon of Supermen in a still from the documentary Supermen of Malegaon

Responding to all the praise coming his way, Nasir Shaikh spares a thought for his late scriptwriter-friend, “Aaj Farogh Jafri ka time thha (Today’s glory belongs to Farogh Jafri). It was his passion to go work in Bombay from the start, he even went and struggled there, while I always wanted to stay and work in Malegaon. Nobody else in Malegaon could be as happy as he would have been today.” Farogh says in the documentary, “I’ve been trying to go to Bombay for 15 years, but the 300 km to Bombay isn’t getting any closer. One singular moment will make up for 10 years of this (struggle). But when will that moment come? It should, though, it will.” The titular hero of Nasir’s Superman film Shafique Shaikh and writer Farogh Jafri are no more, they died in 2011 and 2020, respectively.

Faiza’s Singapore-India co-produced film had got both a theatrical release, as part of PVR Director’s Rare, and a DVD release. And the satellite rights were bought by NDTV. Subsequently, “it has been publicly available — people have been sharing, uploading and screening it, even now. Groups like Cinema of Resistance have been screening the film for years in small towns and thanks to all of this, the film still continues to find an audience after all these years,” says Faiza, whose documentary is available on YouTube, and will next be screened on the big screen in Mumbai, at Versova’s Rangshila Theatre, 7.30 pm, on March 15, with a conversation with crew members and unseen bonus material.

Faiza’s documentary wasn’t the first to be made on Malegaon. There are, at least, five other documentary films/news films that have narrated the story of Malegaon’s cottage film industry: a short film by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2003, Paul Martin’s news film for British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Nitin Sukhija’s PSBT documentary film Malegaon ke Sholay (2005), Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti’s Malegaon Times (2010), and Sudhir Kasabe’s Malegaon Talks (2012).

How the 2008 Malegaon documentary got made

Stills from the documentary 'Supermen of Malegaon'. (Photos courtesy Faiza Ahmad Khan)

“We went to Malegaon upon reading a news article about the film industry,” says Faiza, “There had been a couple of films and news channel stories about the industry. But we wanted a longer, deeper engagement with it, the milieu it is set in and to really get to know the people. Filming them making Superman was the core idea. Then you start to uncover the dynamics of the place and that starts to form layers around the central idea. The power looms that have been crippled by the 12-hour power cuts. An economy and a town in tatters. A place that is obsessed with cinema, men will queue for hours to get into video halls and movie theatres. Hindu and Muslim populations neatly divided by the river that flows through the centre of the town — the terror attack (2006 Malegaon bombings) had happened just before we had visited. In all of this context — a thriving film industry run largely by these Muslim men with a strict policy about not letting local women work in those films. All of these were aspects that we wanted to explore through the process of making the film. I was influenced by Iranian cinema and wanted to try to work with this form that blurs the boundaries between docu and fiction.”

“The Malegaon ka Superman crew thought we’d leave in three-four days, like many news crews had before. But we stayed for four months. we weren’t only filming the filmmaking process, but their lives as well. So, we’d be there, at Nasir’s — the director of Malegaon Ka Superman — house every morning, with our cameras, ferrying microphones and battery packs and tripods. At some point, he even got a little exasperated with us. But he understood, maybe as a filmmaker himself, that we needed to do this to get under the skin of the city and its people. That’s when many things started to become accessible to us. We became as much a part of their process of making the film, and developed it together,” she adds.

Nasir Shaikh cost-effective indigenous style of film shooting. (Photo courtesy Nasir Shaikh)

So, the question arises, why Bollywood needed to make a film when a popular and well-travelled documentary on it already existed?

The answer lies partly in what Nasir says about his own Superman film, “The film we made could reach within Malegaon only. This Bollywood film is reaching all over the world. It’s a huge deal. Hundred per cent the documentary took our story to different parts of the globe as well. But documentary has a limitation, that its market is not as big as Bollywood’s market. The audiences are different for both. This is the truth. Can’t say the Bollywood film isn’t real, it is real,” he says.

Sound designer Niraj Gera is another common link between the documentary and the Bollywood film. “I had just graduated from the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) campus when I got introduced to Faiza and got the project through cinematographer Gargey Trivedi, who was also a producer on the film. I could not go on location because I was working on Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni’s film Valu (2008). So, the whole shoot happened and we mixed the sound in a small room. Later, I went to Malegaon for some recordings and location sounds, and met Nasir, Akram and Farogh.” Happy with Gera’s work on Daahad, Kagti gave him Superboys…, “For me when I read the script I was not actually comparing at all. I still feel they are films in their own zone, with a completely different take on the whole thing. One is a pure documentary while the other is a fictional take on Nasir’s life. Comparisons are wrong,” says Gera, who also did the sound on Jain’s documentary The Golden Thread (Paat-Katha, 2022).

Comparisons are natural.

The documentary opened up a whole new world

After the documentary released, Nasir got an offer from Deepthi Bhatnagar to produce a televised series Malegaon ka Chintoo (2010), “my only condition was to shoot in Malegaon, not Bombay,” he says. Though he travelled to 10 countries for the shoot. After its success, he made more TV programs like Chintu aur Pintu. After three years, he realised it was all hard work and little return. He gave it up. “I used to make films out of shauq (passion), never for money,” he adds.

In 2012, after watching Faiza’s documentary at the erstwhile Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema in Delhi, filmmaker Zoya Akhtar walked up to Nasir and his Malegaon men to express her desire to make a film on them. “But Zoya ji got busy with her own films. I saw Luck by Chance (2009) and loved her direction,” says Nasir, adding, “Three more parties came from Bombay, including Aziz Mirza and Kundan Shah, who wanted to make a film about my life, but I refused and told them that I only want Zoya ji to make the film.” Six years later, Zoya called Nasir.

“Varun ji came to Malegaon in 2019 to meet everyone and record our stories. He had two plus points: first, the lockdown gave him ample time to write, and, second, I had safely kept all old documents, paper cuttings, video shooting, of parties with friends, premieres of my films, those real footages I gave them for research, I gave them a lot of masala, so, it became a lot easy for them,” Nasir says.

Making of Malegaon-verse

Nasir Shaikh on the sets of the Bollywood film 'Superboys of Malegaon'. (Photos courtesy Nasir Shaikh)

Bollywood researcher Aseem Chandaver (Cinema Marte Dum Tak) says, “Malegaon is the most filmy town I’ve ever visited in my life. I’ve never seen a town with these many video parlours. At almost every kilometre, there was an old-school theatre.” Multiplexes PVR Cinemax and Sandesh, and single-screens Mohan Theatre, Subhash Theatre. “Now, almost every other Indian town has some sort of film industry. Like, in Haryana, there is Uttar Kumar doing his thing. But these Malegaon guys were the OGs,” he adds.

“In this town inside Nashik district, full of power loom guys, these men making films were a full motley crew, but Nasir had a full background. From each account, we got the wild side of Nasir. We knew that the story would be based on Nasir but we had to concentrate on the core team more than even Nasir, the people who made the first Malegaon Ke Sholay. How the heartland enjoys movies and also emulates them in real life was a bigger story to be told,” says Chandaver, reflecting on how “independent filmmakers know how to dodge censorship, fool the system (with spoof remakes), and get a product done. There is so much to learn from these guys who make B-movies.”

The beginnings

Nasir ran his father’s video parlour by sourcing VHS cassettes (Rambo, James Bond, films of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Buster Keaton, etc.) from Bombay. “I used to watch a film several times. So, I used to edit 3-hour-long films from VCR to VCR, cut them down to 2 hours. That’s how I learnt editing,” says Nasir who shot weddings on videocameras as a side hustle. Eventually started shooting films for others: Dahshatgard for Siraj Dular (president of Malegaon Drama, Art & Culture Association, who played the lead in Malegaon’s first ever film Qatil Khazana in 1972); Gang War, Maut Ka Saudagar, Aaj Ka Mughal-e-Azam, “all spoof films I made for others. Now, I wanted to make my own film,” says Nasir, who made Malegaon ka Sholay with Rs 50,000 and made Rs 2 lakh on it. The spoof engendered further spoofs, like Khandesh ke Sholay. He next made Malegaon Ke Shaan, ran around for a year to get the film censored, but the film tanked and he lost all his money. “I lost my courage,” he adds. Chandaver says he “loved Malegaon Ke Shaan. It’s funny as hell.” Nasir’s films engendered an entire Malegaon-verse: Malegaon ka Don, Malegaon ke Karan Arjun, Malegaon ka Ghajini. “It used to be centred around just Malegaon. Now there is a full-fledged industry even in the cities of Dhule and Khandesh,” he notes. After Nasir made Khandesh Ki Baraat and Khandesh Ka Jawahar, he stopped making films. One day, “Faiza ji came and asked me to make a film.”

Even if he’d stopped filmmaking, he kept abreast with new developments, such as Chroma Key shooting technique, with which he says, “I can make Superman fly. I wanted to re-make Superman. I knew that the big Superman addressed the issues of the world while my Superman will raise the issues of Malegaon: Gutkha (tobacco product) causes (oral) cancer, kids drowning in river while bathing, our Superman would save them all. When I narrated the concept to Faiza ji, she liked it and said, ‘let’s work on it’,” says Nasir, adding, “But I was myself drowning in debt. Faiza ji supported us in the making of the film, whose rights I later sold to Sunil Bohra who came to Malegaon after watching Paul Martin’s BBC news on us,” says Nasir. Film producer/distributor Sunil Bohra says, “10 years ago, I bought the distribution rights of Malegaon ka Superman, and now plan to re-release it (in select theatres and YouTube) with updated edit, grading, and a new song (Nasir is re-editing it). The Bollywood film is a biography of Nasir.”

Many of those who worked on Nasir’s Malegaon ke Sholay went on to on to become directors. “Wahan se pura route bann gaya (it became a launchpad for them). There are many directors and producers in Malegaon right now.” Akram Khan, the villain of Nasir’s Superman film, returned from Saudi Arabia in 1997, and started assisting Nasir with camera work for wedding shoots, acting in plays, and co-writing film dialogues. Later, he branched out to make his owns films. “I made my own movie Munna, it was an original,” says Akram, 55.

(Left, top) Akram Khan; on the sets of his film (photos courtesy Akram Khan); (right) Khan in a still from the documentary 'Supermen of Malegaon' during the shooting of 'Malegaon ka Superman'.

From shooting on VHS to VCDs to YouTube, Akram launched his own YouTube channel in 2017, “I have two channels now, with 9 million and 3.5 million subscribers, respectively,” he says, “We made remakes of hit movies. We used to make 10-20 minutes long videos (some with 60-78 million views). This is my source of income. We do all kinds of comedy on YouTube but after Superboys…, our plan is to do a parody on YouTube as well.”

Akram is “thankful to Excel Entertainment (for Superboys...) and especially to Faiza ji who made the documentary. Because of her documentary, Zoya ji reached out to us,” he says, “a Bollywood film on us is a huge deal for us because we used to play dramas on four-wheeled cart in small by-lanes. And it is not just about us but for countless people in India. It is a motivational film for everyone to not lose hope and keep working hard even if it is late in life, reward will definitely come. Some of us still want to go to the main industry (Bombay) and do something big because we have what that this generation wants. I did try my luck and even met Anurag (Kashyap) sir who told us, ‘In whatever format you work, don’t leave your base. That is your identity. Hold on to it. You will definitely succeed in it.’ I haven’t left that base yet but there is a lot of restlessness, I wish to get a chance (in Bombay).”

Chandaver says, “Some of the original Malegaon industry guys (like Akram) are individual stars now. That’s when I think they (Zoya Akhtar’s Tiger Baby) revived the idea that something should be done on this now.”

“The documentary was definitely comprehensive but it was made on the edge of the industry dying. It got Nasir back from a break,” says Chandaver, as Nasir adds, “No one made a detailed documentary based on my life. The rights for the story of my life was taken by Zoya Akhtar ji. Faiza ji made the documentary on the making of our Superman. There will be similarities because it’s my life story, how I made Malegaon’s Sholay, Shaan and Superman, but not the background, my family, story of those people. It’s a different story.”

Unity in Diversity

The 2008 documentary is from a time when we were all over the news, Nasir says. In 2006, Malegaon was struck by a series of blasts. “After that incident, look at the power of unity, people of all faith came together to co-exist peacefully,” he adds, speaking about Malegaon’s syncretism and stand against polarisation, “In Malegaon, a temple and mosque stand side by side. Here, a person of one faith manufactures a thing and a person of another sells it, all of us work together. When we used to go for film shooting [most Muslims are engaged in Mollywood], those guys (the Hindus) would vacate their houses for us to shoot there, and feed us. The sole reason for the success of my films is Malegaon’s public, which comprises both Hindus and Muslims.” While Kagti’s film bypasses that segment of contemporary history, it — unlike what Bollywood is wont to do — eschews negative stereotyping of Muslims.

“I had never seen a demographic that unique in one town. There were Kokani Muslims, UP guys, Dakkhani and Marathi ones,” says Chandaver, “Nasir had to fight the local religious leader to make/screen films, but they crossed every barrier to do this.” Unlike the documentary, which “captures a slice in time, we have gone way back into the past (in Superboys…) and dramatised as much as we could. You’ll see the creative differences among friends, the fights that occurred behind the scene; Nasir’s filmy background; the struggle in one of the most culturally unique towns. Varun has avoided a lot of things that were already shown. But there were things that you had to sort of also show.” Superboys… co-dialogue writer Shoaib Nazeer (Three of Us, School of Lies) mentions how these real characters told him that when they were making Malegaon ke Sholay, in the month of Ramzan, while taking breaks during the long namaz/prayer Taraweeh, sitting inside the mosque, they would do the most serious of things in Sholay’s style. Always in character, they breathed cinema in their daily lives, “They are dramatic people living a dramatic life,” Nazeer says.

Does he feel like returning to making films now, I ask Nasir, as he quips, “100 per cent! Back then, I had no facilities. I was doing everything by myself, handling camera, editing, etc. I couldn’t trust another person with direction. Now, Zoya ji and Reema ji have offered to produce if I make a film.” If that happens, it will be life coming a full circle for Nasir. Because Faiza helped Nasir make Malegaon ka Superman that both the documentary Supermen of Malegaon and the Bollywood film Superboys of Malegaon exist.

Is Bollywood predatory?

Indie filmmakers (from left) Faiza Ahmad Khan, Kabir Singh Chowdhry, Nishtha Jain.

“I was fortunate to release my documentary in India before the release of the Bollywood film. My documentary Gulabi Gang was released in 2012 and it had won critical acclaim and many international awards. Gulaab Gang was released in 2014 but people began to attribute the success of my documentary to the Bollywood film. The confusion remains till today. Even AI is confused between which is the documentary and which is the Bollywood film. The Bollywood film also misrepresented the work of the grassroots group. I have no idea if they ever met the leaders of the group but there was a court case stopping the release of the Bollywood film which was dismissed,” says Jain.

“When my documentary Gulabi Gang won two national awards, DD National showed images of Gulaab Gang! It was distressing, of course. During the release of the documentary, the staff at the box office would warn potential audiences that they are about to watch a documentary and some of them would return the tickets. Bollywood is predatory. They treat documentaries as research material on which they can base their films. I remember after the release of my City of Photos (2004), many ads and films began to show old photo studios. I often received requests from people in the industry people asking me to send them DVDs of my films so they can reference them for their films! Lakshmi and Me (2007), too, started a spate of films on domestic workers. But of course, documentary filmmakers or for that matter journalists who break important stories on which films are based are never acknowledged in Bollywood films,” she adds.

The makers of Superboys of Malegaon changes that narrative with the screen thanks, even if it might have ensued from a good fight. The title change signals one.

As the film underperformed at the box office, it augurs two questions: did it require a huge production budget of Rs 60 crore, ironic since its subject Nasir’s low-cost filmmaking was a ready lesson; and, second, who were their audience? A Hindi title would have worked better, perhaps, along with better marketing in tier II and III cities. But these are mere conjectures. According to some industry insiders, Grover was allegedly supposed to direct the film initially. Grover, Kagti and Excel Entertainment remained unreachable.

“I think it would be stretch to start acknowledging every film made on the artist who was assassinated (during the’80s Punjab militant insurgency),” says filmmaker Kabir Singh Chowdhry, whose film Mehsampur (2018) “people started speaking and writing about again with renewed interest” after last year’s success of Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila (2024). The fate of Mehsampur would have been different if it were not stuck in the courts — over a “rights” fight.
“Films are always based on real events or research and then there is your own point of view and interpretation of things. Before me, several people made films on Amar Singh Chamkila and people will most probably keep making films on similar subjects in the future,” Chowdhry says. A feature film called 22 Chamkila Forever (2022); some unrealised Bollywood scripts floating around since 2013, including that by Navdeep Singh. An incomplete documentary by Gunjit Chopra. Unlike Imtiaz’s Amar Singh Chamkila, “my film was not really about Chamkila but about his ghost and the people he left behind. Chamkila’s dholak player Lal Chand, the only one who survived the assassination, was the hero of my film,” says Chowdhry, who during his research, recognised “how we, as artists, crassly barge into people’s homes, make them relive their dark memories, encourage them to reconstruct brutal moments, to get the material required for the film. This made me ponder over the role of an artist and his intrusiveness in search of information. I wanted to capture these aspects of violation in Mehsampur, stripping away romantic notions of what it means to be a filmmaker.”

Mehsampur is an ethnographic fiction, “a film within a film within a film; using archival material, mixing of real characters with fictional.” It is, what Chowdhry calls, a “cinematic non-fiction”, inspired by Buenos Aires, a photo and diary by Christopher Doyle that documents his experiences working on Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) and Adam Curtis documentary Bitter Lake (2015), replete with found footage (newsreels and archive footage).

Will Bollywood kill the documentary star?

Will the Bollywood film sabotage the documentary? “No way,” says Ranjan Singh, distributor of Faiza’s documentary, “in fact, I think, it will aid it more because it’s a good thing about mainstream Bollywood films that they travel more, it has helped Nasir come into the limelight. The exposure is greater. A lot more people know about him and might want to watch the documentary now. There are so many stories which are made again and again, like Ramayana and Mahabharata. It’s going to be a great thing for the story of the people of Nasir.”

“Superman of Malegaon had a lot of goodwill, most of the senior journalists wrote about it. People really celebrated the film. But unlike, say, ArcLight Cinemas in the US or Blankeneser Kino in Germany, Indian theatres don’t release documentaries, audiences here haven’t really been cultivated to go and watch documentaries,” adds Singh, who has distributed documentaries like the Indian Ocean documentary Leaving Home (2008) and National Award-winning Katiyabaaz (2013).

“We have a tradition of really good documentary cinema in India. There is huge appreciation for our films abroad, then why not here? There is an audience for these films. When we released theatrically, the film ran for a month. Film clubs still screen the film and people are still watching it. What we need is many spaces within the larger space for many kinds of films — documentaries, regional, shorts, experimental, to exist, so there is an overall healthy kind of cinema in India,” says Faiza.