Disney+Hotstar’s Sultan of Delhi review: Wholesomely unremarkable period drama

Tahir Raj Bhasin plays Arjun, a descendant of the generation that migrated to the capital region after Partition, in Sultan of Delhi. (Screen grab/YouTube/Disney+Hotstar)

“Dost koi hai nahi, aur pyaar se koi bulaata nahi,” Arjun, the somewhat suave protagonist of Disney+Hotstar’s Sultan of Delhi, says to a man he has just helped gun down a bunch of fake policemen. It’s the kind of corny dialogue that has become par for the course in Hindi cinema’s expanding geography of gangsters. The Mumbai mafia has crowded the imagination for a long time and to its credit, given us some of our finest stories. It has also inspired imitations that though anatomically distinct, follow a similar manual: outsiders break into traditionally twisted businesses, rise dramatically before becoming their own worst enemies and eventually fall. Disney+Hotstar’s Sultan of Delhi erects a new site for the battle between disgruntled royalty and the rags that aspire to its bloody elitism. It’s got the visual scale, the look of a period piece, but a frustratingly jaded pot of ideas to play with.

We follow the story of Arjun, played modestly by Tahir Raj Bhasin. A descendant of the generation that migrated to the capital region after Partition, Arjun is obviously stubborn and courageous. From a young age, he turns to violence to level the scales of fortune and fate. So much so that to liberate himself from the clutches of an abusive father, Arjun quite literally takes life by scruff of the neck and maims it into the thing he is willing to accept. Arjun crosses paths with R.P. Singh played by Nishant Dahiya, the descendant of a princely estate. To Singh, Partition translates to the loss of autonomy and the privilege that a pre-Independence India represented. Both trade stares on the tarred soil of a post-Partitioned Delhi as a sort of primer to them going head-to-head in the future.

Also read: Interview | Sultan of Delhi actors Tahir Raj Bhasin and Anjumm Shharma on working with director Milan Luthria

To decorate Arjun’s image of a homely gangster he is assigned the care of a sister and the support of an equally cocky friend in Bangali (Anjumm Shharma). To contrast the amicability of this goon with a good heart, Singh becomes the snide, lecherous jackal who can’t breathe without being condescending to those around him. He has a puppeteer in his late father’s mistress Shankari (Anupriya Goenka), a deliciously twisted, erotic woman who isn’t reluctant to own her ways. Her relationship with Singh is salacious but also a tad overdrawn, to time and again remind us of the slippery moral ground from where he operates. It’s a bit of a narrative cop-out to quantify good against obvious bad. The two rivals, as is the moat of all gangster wars, compete under the tutelage a common father figure, played decently well here by Vinay Pathak.

Based on Arnab Ray’s book of the same name and directed by the returning Milan Luthria (The Dirty Picture), Sultan of Delhi has a decent sense of scale, a visual palette that fits the wry, burnt landscape of Delhi of the '60s and an endearing battle around class distinctions. Where it fails, is to actually draw those distinctions into palpable, humane insights into post-Independence Delhi. Gangs operate out of the great capital with little cultural rootedness, other than tertiary make-up, to separate one from the other. Arms and ammunition seem to be the business, but little information is dispensed about causality or effect. Just why a three-piece-wearing royal descendant needs to sell illegal arms to make a buck in post-Independence India, should have been contextualized better than a few groans about displacement.

The enthusiasm to visually construct a bygone era here seems to have splintered away from the socio-political education that could have established this series as an introduction to a post-Partition capital region. Nothing of that earnestness is visible, however, in a show that quite simply shows you a postcard before abruptly flipping it to make you read the boring essay describing it. If visual authenticity was the strength here, it isn’t applied to great effect. Nor is the voiceover that though it broadly frames the characters, leaves an entire history of a city to the whims of speculation. Delhi is fought over without ever really being realized or established as an actual place (bar the countless surveying shots of the Qutub Minar). At least the Mumbai Mafia genre knows the city it routinely battles over.

Sultan of Delhi isn’t poor or abject, but it is wholesomely unremarkable. To the gangster genre it brings the soapy language of ‘saas-bahu’ tiffs. To the period piece, it imports the hastened nervousness of something imitative and unoriginal. It’s hardly interested in studying or capturing Delhi’s post-Independence life or contextualizing it for an uneducated audience. Instead it wants to take the cheesy route of a scandalous turf war with generic characters that could have really fought this fight just about anywhere. There are some likeable visual touches, but Delhi’s post-Partition scramble for identity and footing, deserves better. If nothing else, Sultan of Delhi confirms that that story still needs to be told.

Sultan of Delhi is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar.