Black Friday (2004)

BLACK FRIDAY
Anurag Kashyap
India. 2004. 162 min
Cast : Pawan Malhotra, Kay Kay Menon, Aditya Srivastava, Imtiaz Ali, Pratima Kazmi, Zakir Hussain

Introduction

There are films that dramatise history and films that interrogate it; Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday belongs emphatically to the latter category. Adapted from S. Hussain Zaidi’s exhaustively reported book Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, the film reconstructs the serial explosions that tore through Bombay on 12 March 1993, killing 257 people and injuring more than seven hundred, and the painstaking, often brutal investigation that followed. Yet to describe it merely as a chronicle of a terrorist atrocity is to mistake its ambition. Black Friday is a forensic study of cause and consequence, a film that refuses the consolations of the heroic narrative and instead asks how a city, a community, and a nation arrive at such a precipice. Completed in 2004 but withheld from Indian audiences until 2007 by an order of the Bombay High Court, it occupies an unusual position in the history of Hindi cinema: a work whose suppression became inseparable from its meaning.

Its significance lies partly in what it refused to be. At a moment when mainstream Hindi cinema treated terrorism as melodrama, with clearly demarcated villains and avenging heroes, Kashyap insisted upon ambiguity, procedure, and the slow accretion of detail. The film humanises its conspirators without exonerating them, indicts the machinery of the state without descending into polemic, and treats the 1993 riots and the bombings that answered them as a single, unbroken chain of grievance and retribution. That this approach should have seemed radical is itself an indictment of the conventions it broke from. Black Friday merits attention not only as one of the defining achievements of the so-called new wave of Indian independent cinema, but as a rare instance of a popular medium summoning the rigour of investigative journalism and the moral seriousness of tragedy. It is a film that opens with a confession dismissed and closes with a verdict deferred, and in that frame it locates an entire meditation on justice, complicity, and the impossibility of closure.

Background and Production

The film’s origins lie in a project that was never meant to be a film at all. Arindam Mitra, director of operations at the Bombay tabloid Mid-Day, approached Kashyap with the manuscript of Zaidi’s book, then still unpublished, intending it as the basis for a six-part television miniseries for the news channel Aaj Tak, to be directed by Aditya Bhattacharya. Kashyap, who read an unedited version and was by his own account fascinated by it, wrote the script in episodic form before concluding that the subject demanded the scale and gravity of a feature. When Aaj Tak’s executives read the first episode and withdrew from the venture, the project collapsed; Kashyap then proposed to Bhattacharya that it be made as a film, and Bhattacharya, recognising where the conviction lay, handed him the direction. The timing was fraught for Kashyap personally. His directorial debut, Paanch, had been ensnared in censorship and shelved, and Black Friday arrived as a second attempt to establish himself behind the camera after years of acclaim as the co-writer of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya.

The production was governed by an ethic of fidelity that bordered on the documentary. Zaidi had spent three years researching the bombings; Kashyap added a further year of his own, attending court to observe how the accused carried themselves and how legal procedure actually unfolded, and discovering, as he later remarked, that criminals look unremarkably ordinary, an insight that shaped his casting. He retained the real names of the people involved and drew on the testimony collected in a companion volume, Voices, with research assistance from Devashish Makhija, after which the screenplay was completed in a reported thirty-six hours of concentrated writing. Recreating 1993 in the Bombay of 2003 posed formidable logistical problems: the city had acquired mobile telephones, satellite television, and contemporary signage, none of which existed at the time of the blasts. Kashyap and his crew shot largely from elevated angles to exclude modern hoardings, filmed on actual streets and locations, and resorted to guerrilla methods, including hidden cameras and walkie-talkies, at sensitive sites such as Behrampura, where one of the bombs had been planted. Constrained by a modest budget of around six and a half crore rupees, the unit slept in buses between locations and completed principal photography in roughly seventy days from October 2003.

Story

The narrative opens not with the explosions but with their premonition: on 9 March 1993, a small-time thug named Gul Mohammed, detained at a Bombay police station, confesses to a conspiracy to bomb the city, and is disbelieved. Three days later the bombs detonate. From this ironic overture the film fans outward across four interlocking perspectives, those of the police, the conspirators, the foot soldiers, and the intermediaries, tracing the investigation led by Deputy Commissioner Rakesh Maria, the flight and disillusionment of the henchman Badshah Khan, and the machinations of the underworld financier Tiger Memon, whose office had been burned in the communal riots that convulsed Bombay after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The structure is deliberately non-linear and panoramic, moving between Dubai conspiracies, Bombay interrogation rooms, and the long pursuit of fugitives, so that the bombings appear less as an isolated act of evil than as a node in a continuous history of provocation and reprisal.

Beneath the procedural surface, the film’s central preoccupation is the genealogy of violence. Kashyap presents the bombings as retaliation for the anti-Muslim pogroms of the riots, and the riots in turn as the issue of a poisoned communal politics, refusing at every turn to isolate a single originating villain. The film’s most disquieting suggestion is that terror is not the eruption of an alien malignancy but the logical terminus of cycles of grievance that the state has failed to interrupt or has actively inflamed. Equally unsparing is its treatment of justice. The interrogation sequences, with their casual, systematic brutality, implicate the investigating apparatus in the very lawlessness it claims to suppress, while Badshah Khan’s gradual realisation that there is no justification for his acts arrives only after he has been abandoned by the very men who recruited him. The film thus stages a double tragedy: of the victims of the blasts, and of the disposable instruments of the conspiracy who discover, too late, that they were never anything more than expendable.

Running through these themes is a meditation on disillusionment as the engine of conscience. Badshah Khan turns approver not out of remorse alone but out of exhaustion and betrayal, and the film extends this weary clarity to nearly all its figures, the policemen ground down by the scale of the case, the conspirators stranded in anonymity, the families left to absorb the consequences. By declining to supply catharsis, Black Friday converts the conventional thriller’s promise of resolution into a study of its absence. The verdict that the actual trial deferred for over a decade hangs over the film as an unanswered question, and the work’s refusal to manufacture moral comfort is precisely the source of its enduring force.

Direction and Craftsmanship

Kashyap’s direction is distinguished by a discipline of restraint unusual in Indian cinema of its period. He resists the temptation to editorialise through music or framing, allowing the accumulation of verifiable detail to carry the argument. Natarajan Subramaniam’s cinematography favours a handheld, observational immediacy, frequently shooting from above to erase the anachronisms of the modern city and lending the film the grainy authenticity of reportage. The most celebrated example of Kashyap’s method is the twelve-minute foot chase through the warrens of Dharavi, a sequence that appears in neither the book nor the original script. Kashyap improvised it because he found the depiction of ordinary arrests dramatically inert, and used the pursuit to convey both the topography of the criminal underworld and the sheer physical exhaustion of the police. The sequence has acquired an independent fame; Danny Boyle cited it as a direct influence on the opening chase of Slumdog Millionaire, a measure of its formal audacity.

The film’s craftsmanship is equally evident in its performances and its sound. Kashyap cast actors whose ordinariness reinforced his thesis that evil wears a familiar face: Pawan Malhotra invests Tiger Memon with a chillingly composed conviction, Kay Kay Menon gives the investigator Rakesh Maria a worn, methodical gravity, and Aditya Srivastava charts Badshah Khan’s descent from bravado to despair with unshowy precision. Notably, the ensemble drew on a generation of talent that would shape the next two decades of Indian cinema, including a young Nawazuddin Siddiqui and the director Imtiaz Ali, who appears as Yakub Memon. Aarti Bajaj’s editing sustains the film’s panoramic structure without sacrificing momentum, marshalling its many strands into a coherent forward drive. The score, composed by the fusion band Indian Ocean in their first work for a feature film, with lyrics by Piyush Mishra, eschews conventional Bollywood orchestration for a rawer, rock-inflected idiom that Kashyap sought precisely because it lay outside the pollution, as he put it, of mainstream Bombay film music. Together these choices produce a texture of unvarnished realism that critics likened to the procedural rigour of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

The Cinema of Anurag Kashyap

Black Friday occupies a foundational place in Kashyap’s body of work and in the broader insurgency he came to personify. Having earned early acclaim as co-writer of Satya (1998), a film that itself rewrote the grammar of the Hindi gangster picture, Kashyap had then suffered the suppression of his debut Paanch, an experience of institutional frustration that would recur with Black Friday’s own ban. The film established the preoccupations that would define his subsequent career: a fascination with the underworld and the moral economies of crime, a documentary attentiveness to milieu, a refusal of melodramatic resolution, and an abiding interest in the systemic roots of violence. The works that followed, No Smoking (2007), the Devdas reinvention Dev D (2009), the political fever-dream Gulaal (2009), and above all the two-part epic Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), elaborate these concerns across different registers, but the investigative seriousness and structural ambition of Black Friday remain their common ancestor.

More than any single film of its moment, Black Friday positioned Kashyap as the figurehead of a new wave of Indian independent cinema, a movement that exploited the rise of the multiplex to make edgy, non-conformist films with unfamiliar actors and uncompromising subject matter. His avowed debts to Western neorealism, to De Sica among others, and to politically engaged world cinema, are legible in the film’s method, yet the result is unmistakably rooted in the specific textures of Bombay and the fault lines of Indian communal politics. In situating the film within the director’s oeuvre, one is also charting the maturation of an entire sensibility: the conviction that popular cinema could shoulder the burdens of history and journalism without surrendering its dramatic power. If Gangs of Wasseypur would later bring Kashyap international celebrity, it was Black Friday that first demonstrated, with austere assurance, what that sensibility was capable of, and many critics continue to regard it as his finest achievement.

Reception and Legacy

The film’s reception was shaped as much by the courts as by the critics. Black Friday premiered at the 57th Locarno International Film Festival in August 2004, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard, and it subsequently won the Grand Jury Prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, travelling to festivals in Germany, Estonia, South Korea, and the United States. Its Indian release, however, was halted when one of the accused, Mushtaq Moosa Tarani, petitioned the Bombay High Court on the grounds that the film might prejudice the still-pending trial; the court stayed its release until the verdicts were delivered. The film finally reached Indian screens on 9 February 2007, after a ban of roughly twenty months, once the Supreme Court permitted its release in the wake of the TADA court’s judgment. Kashyap, who has described falling into depression during the long suppression, maintained that the delay could not impair a work he considered timeless in its theme of religious intolerance breeding terrorism. Made for about six and a half crore rupees, the film recovered a modest eight crore at the box office.

Critical opinion, both in India and abroad, was overwhelmingly admiring. Indian reviewers from Rajeev Masand to Nikhat Kazmi praised its hard-hitting honesty, while a few, such as Deepa Gahlot, questioned whether it strayed too far toward justifying Memon’s actions or fell uneasily between documentary and drama. Internationally, Matt Zoller Seitz of The New York Times described it as epic and raw, cut from the same bloody cloth as Salvador and Munich, while The Hollywood Reporter invoked The Battle of Algiers, and other critics commended its refusal of sensationalism. Its long-term standing has only grown. The film featured in IBN Live’s 2013 list of the hundred greatest Indian films and in Shubhra Gupta’s study of fifty films that changed Bollywood between 1995 and 2015. Its influence extends beyond India, most visibly in Danny Boyle’s acknowledged borrowing of its Dharavi chase for Slumdog Millionaire, and it is routinely cited by filmmakers, including Vikramaditya Motwane, as one of the most important Indian films of its decade. For a generation of independent directors it became a proof of concept, evidence that rigour and commercial cinema were not incompatible.

Commentary

What endures about Black Friday is its moral nerve. It would have been easy, and commercially safer, to render the 1993 bombings as a parable of good besieged by evil; Kashyap chose instead to follow the threads of causation wherever they led, into the riots that preceded the blasts, into the interrogation cells where the state mirrored the lawlessness it pursued, and into the disillusionment of men who discovered that they had been used. The film’s greatness lies in its insistence that understanding is not the same as excusing, and that a society which refuses to examine the conditions producing its violence condemns itself to repeat them. In an Indian cinema long accustomed to catharsis, Black Friday offered the more difficult gift of comprehension, and it did so without ever losing the propulsive grip of a thriller.

Seen from the vantage of the present, the film’s stature has, if anything, clarified. The very circumstances that delayed its release, a judiciary anxious that art might contaminate justice, now read as a part of its subject rather than an obstacle to it, for the film is precisely about the long, contested, never-quite-completed work of accounting for atrocity. That its central question, whether justice is finally possible in the aftermath of such violence, remains as unsettled today as it was in 1993 is a measure of the film’s seriousness rather than its limitation. Black Friday is not a comfortable film, nor was it intended to be. It stands as one of the most lucid and uncompromising works that Indian cinema has produced on the relationship between communal hatred, terror, and the apparatus of the state, and it will continue to be studied, long after the controversies of its release have faded, as a model of what a popular medium can achieve when it dares to tell the truth without flinching.

Reference

• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(2004_film)
• IMDb — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0400234/
• Letterboxd — https://letterboxd.com/film/black-friday-2004/
• FilmAffinity — https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/film332198.html
• AllMovie — https://www.allmovie.com/movie/black-friday-am40521

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