In a sequence from SonyLiv’s The Jengaburu Curse, a corrupt local police officer is confronted by his wife for colluding with a greedy mining company. He argues that the money he is bringing into the household, holds greater value than any alms, humans owe to the sanctity of our natural resources. “Jab sab khatam ho jaega, toh kya karoge paise ka. Khaoge?” his wife retorts, angrily. It’s a sequence that highlights the intimate plotlines, that a climate ravaged world must exhibit for its fractures to become apparent. More than our political choices, it’s our concern for the longevity of the human race, that might distinguish us from our jobs, to-do lists and societal obligations. Directed by Nila Madhab Panda, this seven-episode series though it scrutinises this understudied problem, in an under-represented landscape, can’t quite make the leap between intent and execution. It’s a welcome idea, in search of an emotional core that it never quite finds.
We begin the story with the London dwelling financial analyst Priya Das, played ably by Faria Abdullah, being informed of the news of her father’s disappearance. Taken aback, she rushes back to her hometown in Odisha, where the prevailing narrative pins his disappearance on local Naxalite groups. Put under official police protection, with a view to some unclarified risks, Das gradually learns to read the forest of rumour and political manipulation, for the site of opportunism it represents. Her return to her homeland is aided, but also complicated by friends and foes alike. There is the empathetic IAS friend, a father-figure played by the terrific Nassar, a mysterious Naxalite leader and a foreign journalist on the prowl for a good expose. It’s fairly sprawling, visually appealing and supported by a bewitching, broody soundtrack. The problems, however, lie in the plotline and the treatment.
Marketed as India’s first ‘cli-fi’ thriller, The Jengaburu Curse follows Panda’s filmography, by declaring its ecological concerns upfront. It’s a fairly simply story of a rogue mining operation, in the hills of Odisha, that has also become the cover story of something more cynical and dangerous. Part of the Gondria tribe, Das’ affiliations, though they take their time to rekindle, are obviated from the get go. In a scene where a senior mentor dies in her arms she is urged to, rather plainly, ‘protect the land’. The show pits tribal displacement, the paucity of natural resources against the might of capital greed. To heighten, and maybe better serve the tropes of a thriller, the show also attests to this central conflict, the mystery of a potentially treacherous discovery. The only problem is that while the show busies itself, trying to wraps its arms around a runaway thriller, it forgets to contemplate the wreckage of the human story it so obviously spawns from.
Despite the welcome intent, The Jengaburu Curse struggles to wrest emotion from a template that though it huffs and puffs, rarely amounts to something as novel the show’s self-declared positioning. It’s set in a brutal, murderous world that rarely exacts grief, and therefore humanity to earn the stripes of emotion, loss or even fear and guilt. Instead, it straddles between being a cross-border espionage sprint that races through dead bodies like narrative checkpoints. For a story seemingly tethered to the conflict of tribal displacement, it does far too little to humanise their agony as well. They are painted as arrow-spilling brutes, much before they are accessed through the benevolent lens of deprivation and disenfranchisement. Angst prefaces anguish. It’s a ruse that flattens a complex argument to a battle between arrows and bullets, between painfully blunt ripostes about abundance and its justifiable application. Just who does the forest belong to, is a question that though it can use the mainstreaming tools of a thriller, also requires the contemplative gaze that separates entertainment from engagement. Unfortunately, there is far too little of the latter on offer here.
Panda’s ecological concerns have underlined his well-intended but flawed filmography. Here his visual language intrigues, and reveals a landscape we know little about but where he and his creative team struggle are in the macroeconomics of an ambitious project that can’t quite urge the thriller to make room for the emotional baggage of displacement, othering and well, blunt loss. The performances lock in — including a predictably sound turn by Makrand Deshpande — but the landing is far too scattered, unmoved by the costs it claims, the world it at once builds and obliterates. Bodies fall by the wayside, nonchalantly restored as plotlines to be endured as opposed to wounds that must be exposed. In the haste to design something serviceable, The Jengaburu Curse forgets, it could also have been fragile, soft and affecting. As a consequence, its municipal revelations, and inconspicuous ideas feel ordinary. As much as its blind-spots, like the tarred wasteland that was once an Indian forest, might one day, in retrospect, feel extraordinary.
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