How Shashank Soghal made Daredevil Musthafa, a labour of love about hate

Shishir Baikady as Musthafa in Kannada film Daredevil Musthafa. (Screen grab)

Shashank Soghal was 21 when he read Poornachandra Tejaswi’s Kannada short story 'Daredevil Musthafa'. Set in 1973, the story is about a Muslim boy who joins a Hindu majority college in small-town Karnataka. His classmates find everything strange about him – from his long name, Jamal Abdul Musthafa Hussain, to his food and even his topi. They’re suspicious of his intentions, and want nothing to do with him. But slowly, the ice thaws and cracks.

Later, Soghal discovered an audiobook version of the story and listened to it repeatedly when he went on drives. His worldview changed, and he started questioning his own prejudices. Tejaswi’s words pushed him to open his mind, and cease to fear the ‘other’. Twelve years since he first read the story, Soghal adapted it to a feature film of the same title. Daredevil Musthafa is a Kannada film that primarily features new faces, and though it is set 50 years ago, the events in the film and its political commentary are relevant to our times.

The most poignant frame in Daredevil Musthafa appears at the beginning. Ramanjuna Iyengar (Aditya Ashree) is putting on his shoes at home. Under the bench on which he sits, there’s a pair of abandoned sandals, covered in dust and cobwebs. To whom do these belong and where is she now? It’s a frame that foreshadows what happens in the story – the anger of young men, their desire to control the women around them, and the politics of love in a communally charged atmosphere.

“Ramanuja Iyengar’s back story isn’t there in the original. We wrote an extended version of the story for the film,” says Soghal, who co-wrote the film with Rahavendra Mayakonda and Anantha Shandreya. “It was my DoP Rahul Roy’s idea to use that frame because we didn’t have too much time to get into the details of that story. I also didn’t want to make the film sound too serious right at the beginning.”

Soghal wanted to speak of this forbidden love through a single image and that’s how the sandals made their way into the screenplay. While Tejaswi’s original text tells Musthafa’s (Shishir Baikady) story through the eyes of the entire class, Soghal wished to centre it on the perspective of Ramanuja Iyengar, a Tamil Brahmin boy from a conservative family of priests. Of the lot, he’s the most hostile towards Musthafa, and cannot bring himself to be friends with a boy whose community he does not trust.

“I found Iyengar to be very relatable in the story, and I saw Musthafa as a catalyst,” says Soghal. “The film is about both of them, so that’s why the title has the tagline ‘Ramanuja pattalam’ or Ramajuna’s battalion.”

As the credits for the film roll, you notice that there’s an extraordinarily long list of ‘co-producers’. That’s because Daredevil Musthafa was crowdfunded by fans of Tejaswi from across the state. Soghal, who hails from Mysuru, had previously made a few short films, and he started working on Daredevil Musthafa in 2019. But with a cast full of newcomers, it was hard to find a producer who would give him a decent budget to make the film.

“I was inspired by the crowdfunding initiative for Lucia (2013), and I wrote a long, honest post on Facebook about the film I wanted to make. It went viral and I got over 200 emails expressing an interest in being part of the project,” says Soghal. Many film buffs in Karnataka are avid readers who happen to be Tejaswi’s fans and they did not hesitate to jump into the crowdfunding campaign. That’s how Daredevil Musthafa happened, with the love and blessings of many readers across divides.

(Screen grab)

It seems appropriate that this little film with a big heart should have been born this way, for the divides among people are what drive it. In Taika Waititi’s Academy Award winning film Jojo Rabbit (2019), a 10-year-old German boy is an ardent fan of Hitler and is heavily brainwashed by the Nazis to believe in outlandish ideas about the Jewish people. In Daredevil Musthafa, the ‘othering’ is just as palpable. Both the films use a comic approach in establishing this dehumanization of an entire community – and their protagonists gradually change their mind when they interact with someone they thought was the enemy.

Apart from a song that expresses all the fantasies that the students have about Musthafa, there’s also a funny scene in Soghal’s film where a classmate eagerly opens the Muslim boy’s tiffin box hoping to find biryani but gets curd rice instead. “When we don’t talk to others, and we don’t know what they are like and what their lives are like, we make assumptions about them and believe that it’s the truth. That’s what I wanted to break with the film,” says Soghal.

Muslim characters in Indian films rarely appear organically and outside the context of terrorism or communal violence. Most films with Muslim characters also employ the Good Muslim Vs Bad Muslim trope, where the ‘Good Muslim’ is projected to be extraordinarily kind while the ‘Bad Muslim’ is portrayed as a violent bigot. Though Daredevil Musthafa has its heart in the right place, the treatment of its Muslim characters follows a similar pattern. Musthafa is exceptional but the other Muslims who appear in the film are uniformly uncouth and violent. There are no Muslim women either. In contrast to this, the Hindu characters are of different shades – from the rigid Ramanuja Iyengar to the affable Srinivasa.

“I wanted to avoid this trope. I wanted everyone to be grey in the film, just the way it is in real life. But if it has come out that way, it means the characters should have been written better. A few others also told me something similar,” acknowledges Soghal.

It isn’t easy to make a film like Daredevil Musthafa in the communally polarized society that we live in, especially when the film dares to speak of interfaith love. Soghal says that handling this part of the story was tricky – there’s a scene where the Hindu boys circle Musthafa and question him about a possible romance with a girl of their community. Musthafa defends himself but doesn’t ask why interfaith love should be vilified. Would such an assertion have been too much for the audience to take?

“Our intention wasn’t to show interfaith love as wrong, but we definitely had to be careful about it,” says Soghal. “Even the cycle scene with Ramamani and Musthafa, we had to think about how to do it.”

Shishir Baikady as Musthafa and Prerana as Ramamani in Kannada film Daredevil Musthafa. (Screen grab)

Though the story revolves around the male characters’ obsession with controlling the women around them, Soghal candidly admits that his film would fail the Bechdel test. “The female characters only talk about the male characters. I wasn’t too happy with how they were written and I think there is room for improvement,” he says.

Since this is a film that revolves around young people, Soghal and his team launched an extensive search for fresh faces. They visited colleges and theatre groups to identify new talent, and it took them the longest to finalize Shishir Baikady in the titular role of Musthafa. “I wanted to cast a Muslim guy. I wanted to get the dialect right. But whoever I found didn’t have an Arts background to understand the importance of the film. They didn’t have the passion that someone from a theatre group would have. It was not a simple 20-day shoot. We had to shoot for 3-4 months extensively,” explains Soghal. He finally zeroed in on Shishir for the role.

At the beginning of Daredevil Musthafa, there is a video byte of Tejaswi expressing his concern about the communal radicalization of young people. Unfortunately, the problem has only worsened since his time. Soghal believes that young people are drawn to communal radicalism because it gives them a sense of identity.

“Young people want to be at the centre of attraction in their college days. They want to shine. Such ideologies give them the identity they want,” he says. “But if they are exposed to the right people at the right age, there is hope. That’s why Tejaswi’s characters in this story are at the Pre-University Course level (PUC). It’s neither school nor degree college. He has written other stories about older students but there’s a reason why this particular story has people of this age.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s impossible not to think of this proverb when watching Daredevil Musthafa, but Soghal is optimistic about the future. “People are very happy when they walk out of the theatre after watching this film. There’s so much positivity and love in the response. I’m hopeful for this reason,” he says.

Daredevil Musthafa released in theatres on May 19, 2023.