Shantaram review: In 2022, Linbaba’s stoner vibe Bombay is jarring

British actor Charlie Hunnam as Lin in 'Shantaram'. The first three episodes of the 12-part series dropped on Apple TV on October 14. 2022.

Bombay of the early 2000s was a city aspiring to be Shanghai—swelling urban malaise of haphazard development on one hand, and economic growth on the other. Vilasrao Deshmukh’s government literally made Shanghai the aspirational template for the city from 2003-04 through 2008. The underworld, which dictated much of where the city’s black money was funnelled through the 1980s and 1990s, was on a low ebb. The Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) seemed to be doing its bit. Culturally, Bollywood had broken some old barriers and was embracing new sensibilities. The art and theatre scenes were thriving with local as well as visiting international talent.

It was during this time that two seminal books about Bombay came out and became breakthrough narratives about the city’s sinews that connect power, poverty, entertainment and culture, and crime in disruptive as well as singular ways. One was Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a journalistic, literary non-fiction biography of the city which came out in 2004, and pissed off some elite power centres and mostly hooked readers worldwide. And the other, a year earlier, was Gregory David Roberts’ Australasian bestseller Shantaram—at a staggering 900-plus pages.

Both books found readers in and outside of India, and both, different in approach, genre as well as rigour, revealed globalised Bombay’s provincial survivors.

Shantaram is a curious mixture of adventure story and travelogue, with too much cod-philosophy that arises when a white man escapes the law in his own country and finds self-gratifying redemption among the poor of a city like Bombay.  The compelling and only real standout quality of the book is its vivid and compassionate panorama of the places and people that its protagonist, Lin or “Linbaba” encounters.

The screen adaptation of the book dropped on Apple TV this weekend. Show-run by Steve Lightfoot, directed by Bharat Nullari, produced by Anonymous Content and Paramount Pictures and filmed in Thailand and Melbourne, Shantaram is visually sumptuous—and busy. It has gorgeous interplay of light and shadow, from sweltering sunlit frames of the day and warmly-lit nights of a sleepless city.

True to the book in every way, the series engages with the city’s “not-people” (a phrase used by one of the novels main characters, Prabhu, played soulfully in the series by Shubham Saraf) living in slums and the half-baked aphorisms that arise out of Lin’s interactions with them in the same way that Roberts did: Largely busy, bursting backdrops which, as if, was waiting for a fugitive white man’s kindness to get back on its feet. Lin's language and observations in the series are mundane exotic: “Bombay felt exhilaratingly free, a place where everyone started new.”

Shubham Saraf as Prabhu in 'Shantaram'.

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears”; “Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.” Relentless triteness suffocates the 900-page narrative of Shantaram. The book’s success was a precursor to the dream run of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire to the Oscars race four years later.

The series comes at a time when Bombay, India and the world have shifted gears out of belonging to community living and embracing strangers. No city can dream of assimilation and integration like it did almost two decades ago. Roberts is on a different path himself. In Jamaica, he is a seller of snake oil ideas about spiritual awakening, a musician who walks bare-feet and projects a Hindu ascetic’s vibe and get-up—substantially removed from Lin’s stoner vibe India.

For those who missed the Shantaram craze, this is the autobiographical novel’s and the series’ gist: Lin (British actor Charlie Hunnam) is in an antipodean jail for drug offences and violent robbery. He escapes prison and lands up in Bombay. Over the next 10 years, he establishes a medical clinic, works in Bollywood, commits forgeries and smuggles for the Bombay mafia and fights with guerrillas in Afghanistan before being recaptured. Lin’s spiritual regeneration is parallel to the action. Lin finds a father figure in a guru-like local mafia boss, an Afghan named Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig), and a lover in Karla (Antonia Desplat), a mysterious Swiss woman who inspires the most pedestrian of the novel's metaphoric interludes. "My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea." Later: “Our tongues writhed, and slithered in their caves of pleasure. Tongues proclaiming what we were. Human. Lovers."

Antonia Desplat as Karla in 'Shantaram'.

There are three episodes on Apple TV so far and rest of the nine of Season 1 will drop every Friday until mid-December. So far, the love story is yet to unfold. Hunnam and Desplat haven’t as much as kissed yet.

Shantaram’s journey since the book’s publication to the series has been fateful. Since 2004, when Warner Bros paid $2 million for the screen rights, there have been multiple failed attempts to film it. Russell Crowe, Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp were all lined up at one time or another to play Lin. Peter Weir was attached to direct before leaving the project in 2006. Mira Nair came in next as director, and she had Depp and Amitabh Bachchan lined up for lead roles, but a screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood nixed that development.

This 12-part version for Apple—the streamer’s first Australian commission—has had shaky beginnings too. Announced with a projected $55 million budget in August 2019 with Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Nitram) as set-up director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle) as showrunner, the production was two episodes in when it was shut down in February 2020 over concerns that the scripts for the remainder of what was supposed to be a 10-part series were “not ready”.

In May 2021, showrunner Steve Lightfoot was brought on to reshape the project into something more palatable for Apple—which, going by most of its originals is less concerned with wide reach than critical success, or quality of production and storytelling. Lightfoot has said in interviews that their foundation and even the blocks over it are straight from the book. The Kurzel-Singer episodes had shot extensively in Mumbai before COVID stopped film production everywhere in the world. The Delta variant that hit India especially hard prevented the return of Lightfoot’s crew. So the slum that is so central to the story was created in Thailand, with many other parts of Mumbai recreated in Melbourne.

The Apple series has done its research and interpretation effectively. The shortcoming of the series, much too obvious, is also the shortcoming of Roberts’ book. In 2022, a white man’s redemption among a “not-people” milieu is unappealing to the woke as well as the un-woke. But as Salman Rushdie eloquently wrote in Imaginary Homelands, neither literature nor cinema can be justified by the author’s or the filmmaker’s seeming worthiness to create them: “There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside.” As a piece of visual storytelling, the Apple series is a riveting watch, if you can take the book’s exasperating premise in your stride.