Pataal Lok and Kohrra creator Sudip Sharma is on a mission: Understand the world before it ends

An Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad graduate, Sudip Sharma got his big break with director Navdeep Singh's NH10.

Sudip Sharma is the exception, not the norm. Here is a screenwriter who has managed to keep their authorial voice intact in big-budget Mumbai productions, where writers are rarely accorded respect or control. His work investigates crime as a symptom of India’s patriarchal psychogeography, headlined by angst-bitten protagonists tackling existential crises, all of which is box-office poison. As screenwriter and/or producer, he has made the films NH10 (2015), Udta Punjab (2016) and Sonchiriya (2019), and the series Pataak Lok (2020 - present). His recent creation was Kohrra, a six-episode Netflix series that was out on July 15 and has drawn rave reviews. The Punjab-set police procedural was birthed by Gunjit Chopra and Diggi Sisodia. Sharma gave it its final form.

I have always found cops, criminals, bandits, drug addicts open to the idea of sharing their lives.

Seems like Sharma is our answer to Hollywood’s auteur writers David Simon or Robert Towne. Like Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire (2002-08), Sharma dissects the social roots of crime with journalistic rigour. Like Towne, who won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown (1974), Sharma pumps fresh blood into genre tropes to excavate what is rotten around us.

Contrary to the macho, hard-boiled nature of his work, Sharma, with his slim frame, closely cropped hair, and glasses, looks like a nerdy B-school yuppie. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, graduate left the corporate life in the early 2000s and got his hands dirty for a decade, writing for anybody who could help him get a foot in the door, until a Facebook message sent to director Navdeep Singh brought him his big break, NH10, which followed a woman battling violent criminals in the badlands of Haryana. In Abhishek Chaubey-directed Udta Punjab, Sharma tracked the Punjab drug trade. Sonchiriya was an actioner breathing philosophical heft into the daaku film. Pataal Lok, his first attempt at longform storytelling, featured the fascinating cop Hathiram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat) running through an Indian sociology syllabus with a gun.

Sharma is no Jim Thompson, the alcoholic noir fiction writer with blue-collar roots, nor has he been a crime reporter like Simon. How does this nice uptown boy come up with these blood-soaked stories?

“There are writers of curiosity and writers of familiarity,” Sharma tells Moneycontrol. “Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, who write about their cities and their social milieu, are writers of familiarity. I am a writer of curiosity. Satya and Bandit Queen were my earliest influences. Born in Guwahati, and later studying in Delhi, we had no access to the bandits of Chambal or the Mumbai underworld. I began wondering: how do I explore such stories, which no one talks about, through my work?”

Naturally, this approach requires lot of first-hand conversations with the types that populate his screenplays: cops and criminals.

“I don’t look at it as research,” Sharma says. “The word research feels drab. I write about what I want to know about. The attempt is to understand the world, have as much lived-in experience in the script as possible. Balbir and Garundi, the cops in Kohrra, for example, are modelled on real people. We met a lot of cops outside their call of duty. You follow through like any journalist would: contact a police officer high up in rank, or a local SHO, or journalists in the area, request them to meet or introduce you to others who will talk.”

Sharma has found that everyone wants to be heard. “I have always found cops, criminals, bandits, drug addicts open to the idea of sharing their lives,” he says. “They see merit in the endeavour. For Pataal Lok, many police officers wrote to us and thanked us for talking about their real lives, which get lost in the quagmire of the system.”

The world-weary cop or criminal has become a vessel for Sharma’s concerns and anxieties. “I am almost 45,” Sharma says. “As you turn 40, you struggle to make sense of the world, your failures, your limitations. You want to understand the world before it ends. A lot of that has made it to Sonchiriya, Pataal Lok and Kohrra. These characters are providing you eyes to gain some perspective.”

Surrounding these protagonists is storytelling of specifics: Sonchiriya must happen in Chambal, NH10 in Haryana, Kohrra in Punjab. He points at Paul Schrader’s script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as telling us “about a particular time in American life I have no idea about. What is driving a man to act this way?”

We rarely see such films in India about the here and the now, unless they are polemical projects undertaken with a definitive ideological cause: Bheed, The Kashmir Files.

“I am sure people are trying to make such films but they are difficult to make,” Sharma observes. “We are not a culture of specifics. Old Bollywood storytelling is about stories of familiarity: kids in generic lands, falling in love, with no reference to caste. Malayalam films, which are made for the local industry, can be about a boatman in Cochin. In Hindi, people sitting in Bombay make films about a Vijay Kumar from some Rampur. Is Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Madhya Pradesh? With the need to reach everyone, stories get diluted.”

Sharma brings up one of his favourite films, Rahul Rawail’s Mumbai-based angry-young-man film Arjun (1985), starring Sunny Deol, and written by Javed Akhtar. “Once an old-timer in Bombay told me the film would have worked at the box-office better if Arjun did not have the surname Malwankar,” Sharma says. “Nobody outside of Maharashtra can understand what is Arjun Malwankar.”

His examples continue: “How do we mostly see Punjabis or Bengalis in our films? Khatris or bhodroloks. Stereotypes. People who are making films grow up in big cities, do not understand the difference between caste and class. That lack of awareness shows in the films.”

Storytelling of specifics brings the trouble of addressing sociopolitical realities, which are increasingly losing space in Indian fiction films – concurrent with those stories finding a voice through highly accomplished documentaries now. Sharma has had to narrow his scope. In Kohrra, he tries to unearth the tender mysteries of the heart in the guise of a police procedural. The tricky areas of caste, party politics, and religious fundamentalism, which propelled Pataal Lok, is missing.

Jaideep Ahlawat in Pataal Lok (Screen grab)

"It is getting tougher," Sharma admits. "When I wrote NH10 in 2011-12, there was room for individuality and quirkiness in the Bombay film industry. While the larger industry still played by the rules of Old Bollywood, the newer voices like Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee prepared the ground for people like Navdeep Singh, Abhishek Choubey, and me. Those films were not necessarily working by design, but there was encouragement for such projects. Over the last 10 years or so, it became increasingly difficult to have your own voice, so a lot of us moved to streaming. The only way for streaming to grow was to do something entirely different from Old Bollywood. That's how Sacred Games, Pataal Lok, or Delhi Crime happened."

But then came the pandemic, and with it, Sharma lists: "political pressure, market pressure, censorship, bad returns on investment, resulting in an overall tightening of the screws that happened in the last two-three years".

A particularly horrifying ordeal that spooked the streaming giants was the Hindu Right-wing’s backlash against the 2021 big-budget Amazon Prime series Tandav. The government clamped down on the makers and made moves to ensure regulation of the Indian streaming space. Meanwhile, audiences were quick to realize that streaming offered an endless source of home and mobile entertainment and stopped showing up in theatres, where low-to-mid-budget films, such as NH10 or Udta Punjab are now considered a recipe for financial disaster.

Sharma adds that he does not feel "encouraged or inspired" to write a film anymore, and series are still the only outlet for independent-minded creators now, even though the "room is getting smaller, budgets are tighter, and the kind of stories you can tell is restricted". Perhaps, that’s why his next is an “urban comedy”.

Despite the constraints, Kohrra has hit the bull’s eye in being a deft character study. A bridegroom is found murdered days before his wedding. Heading the investigation are senior cop Balbir (Suvinder Vicky) and his young deputy Garundi (Barun Sobti). The procedural aspect is a smokescreen for a meditation on whether we can choose whom to love - and how obstructing love is the root of all evil.

Suvinder Vicky and Barun Sobti in Kohrra. (Photo courtesy Netflix)

“What attracted me to the story was the sadness and melancholy in it,” Sharma says. “If you understand violence as something coming from toxic masculinity, it is about hiding weakness or inferiority complex. Bullies bully because they hide the fear of being exposed. Tenderness was part of the design. By the end, our protagonist can see through his own ways and his own life, working through years of general conditioning and living in a violent set-up.”

You must detach yourself from the world to be able to step back and reflect on it, otherwise you’re just consuming reality at the speed of light.

“You need a lot of patience and concentration to be a screenwriter,” Sharma says. “You must have the ability to switch off from the world, sit at your desk for eight to ten hours at a stretch. I am completely off social media, which takes away a lot of your energy. I do not work in the fire brigade so I don’t have to stay on top of news all the time. I spend an hour on the internet every morning reading publications I subscribe to, like the New York Times. That’s enough for me. If something’s important, it will come to me. You must detach yourself from the world to be able to step back and reflect on it, otherwise you’re just consuming reality at the speed of light.”

Watching and enjoying Satya and Bandit Queen doesn’t mean one will enjoy the process of being able to write such films. Honing the craft alone takes away years from one’s life.

“I quit my job around 2005-06,” Sharma recalls. “The organized sector in filmmaking was just around the corner, the studios were just coming up. I didn’t know anyone who could introduce me to people, get me started. I spent that phase working with people who weren’t necessarily good, not bothered with your career. Fly-by-night operators would ask you to write a script. Asking you to write a script means nothing. Anyone can call themselves a filmmaker or a producer. But can they make a film?”

Navdeep Singh, director of the Chinatown-inspired Manorama: Six Feet Under (2007), was the first filmmaker to respond to his Facebook message. “He said he has no producer, no money,” Sharma says. “But we clicked. I wrote three to four scripts for him. One became NH10.”

Meeting Navdeep Singh brought him into the circle of Vikramaditya Motwane, Devashish Makhija, Akshat Verma, Anvita Dutt Guptan and Abhishek Chaubey around 2011-12. “We found this little oasis for ourselves and we started reading each other’s scripts, giving feedback, feeling inspired from all the work,” Sharma says. “I finally felt I was on to something here.”

A writer’s initial work is always embarrassing. “My early scripts were a rehash of films I had seen and admired, or had autobiographical touches about myself, friends, college, industry struggles,” Sharma says. “You don’t find your voice until you have given a good five years to it. I really believe that saying about giving 10,000 hours to a craft to be able to have some reasonable expertise.”

We can no longer make whatever we want. The streamers now have data points, algorithms. As long as you are operating within data points, you can make what you want.

“Some of the scripts are terrific but they are few,” Sharma says. “The problems in a bad script can be several. Sometimes, I see a guy knows how to write but I wish they had picked a better story. What touched you deeply, or made you nostalgic, might not do the same to other people. Objectivity comes with experience.”

Sharma’s advice for rookie screenwriters is “Write a lot”.

He continues, “I come across young writers who call themselves writers but have just written two scripts in three years. That’s not good enough. Often, someone just sends across their first draft or something that’s hastily written. You can understand what’s written in a month, and what’s had a lot of time spent on it. If a writer sends a script, and it’s not good, I will obviously never read anything he sends again. Everyone has limited time. I urge all writers to spend time on their material, think everything through before you start sending out scripts.”

But with his gloomy view of the current filmmaking scenario, would young writers and filmmakers hungry to break new ground find success?

“I don’t know if hope is coming tomorrow or five, 10, 20 years down the line,” Sharma observes. “If Hollywood filmmakers got more independence in the '70s, and then in the '90s, there’s a decade in between. It may not seem long in the scheme of things but is long enough for an individual filmmaker. Ten years later, I don’t know if I will have the same energy or drive.”

Sharma says the initial bubble and excitement surrounding streaming in India has died down.

“We can no longer make whatever we want,” he says. “The streamers now have data points, algorithms. As long as you are operating within data points, you can make what you want. If not, it’s about how much clout you have. If Pataal Lok works, I can make a Kohrra. If Kohrra works, I can make something else. The executives will leave you thinking, 'Okay, he knows what he is doing.' I am generally a pessimist about everything. That has worked well for me so far.”