It is an unusually warm spring afternoon in London where I am meeting filmmaker Hansal Mehta, who has been in the UK for several weeks now, filming an ambitious series on M.K Gandhi, based on Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India (2013). We meet at a cafe in the hipster but the creatively fervent neighbourhood of Shoreditch, but the cafe in itself bears no markers of its geographical location. If I were to suddenly suffer from a stroke of amnesia, there was nothing in the cafe that would reveal its whereabouts. I promptly present this lamentation concealed in a layer of observation to Mehta who is now settled, as comfortably as one can in a cafe chair. “Do you think it is becoming easier to tell stories based in other countries because of how globalised the world has become?” In preparation for this interview, I acquainted myself with the filmography of Indian filmmaker Hansal Mehta, whose most recent Netflix release Faraaz (2022) was set in a cafe situated in a posh neighbourhood of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

“One of the criticisms I got from some people was that they didn’t feel like the film was set in Dhaka; but the Holey Artisan Bakery was located in Gulshan, one of the most upmarket neighbourhoods akin to your Khan Market in Delhi or Colaba in Mumbai.” However, anyone who has followed Mehta’s trajectory as a filmmaker would attest to his commitment to treating the spaces where his characters live with dignity and honesty. The spaces are not merely created to inhabit the characters but are points of inflection in the narrative.

Take for example, the homes in Mehta’s films, which are detailed with a refreshing accuracy, bearing true testament to the characters’ socio-economic and geographical identities. The house of Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, the deeply tragic protagonist of the critically acclaimed film, Aligarh, presents insights into both his personality and the place it is situated in. The yellow printed bedsheet laid over the single bed pushed to the corner of the room and the off-white cutwork sofa covers in the living room are subtle markers and visual cues of how lower and middle-income families often furnish and decorate their homes in smaller towns in India. “To build a sense of place for the audience, all the things that you mentioned in Aligarh were sourced from Bareilly, where we shot most of the film after not being able to shoot on location in the city of Aligarh.” Mehta and his team faced resistance and threats from local far-right groups in Aligarh when word got out. A major chunk of Aligarh was thus shot in Bareilly College which is built in the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture, resembling the old structures of Aligarh Muslim University. “Aligarh Muslim University is much bigger in scale than Bareilly College, but the same style of architecture allowed me to construct a visual sense of the place on the screen.”

Having obsessively gone through a large chunk of his filmography in a week, I was intrigued by how the prison, for instance, was detailed and shown in completely contrasting ways in his national award-winning film Shahid and his 2023 Netflix series, Scoop. “For Shahid, the jail serves as a place of liberation and learning. Even though he is trapped inside the confines of the jail, his mind becomes free of violence and he finds new ways to fight the discrimination he and his community are facing.” Resultant, Shahid Azmi, played by a dexterous Rajkummar Rao, is never shown inside his cell in the film. He is always outside playing football in the sun or reading inside a classroom and even though he spends seven years inside the jail, there is no sense of confinement. “On the other hand, there is a sense of terse confinement that follows Jagruti (the protagonist of Scoop) everywhere, from her flat that she shares with her parents to the cell in the jail which she has to share with hundreds of inmates. She is always trying to break free of her circumstances.”

There is a lot of subtext in the opposing ways these protagonists interact with the insides of a jail, revealing upon closer inspection, unsettling truths about how Indian society at large has changed in the last 30 years. Shahid, a Muslim man who grew up in the deeply divided and communally charged Mumbai after the riots of 1993, finds freedom behind bars because he grew up in a ghetto-like commune without any open space. “We shot on-location in a house in Shivaji Nagar which was very close to the place where Shahid grew up in his family. There is a sense of claustrophobia in that house which dissipates when Shahid is shown in the jail. For him, life behind the bars accords him simple pleasures like playing and reading which were not available to him outside.” Jagruti Pathak, whose character is based on journalist Jigna Vora, is a middle-class and upper-caste woman, a section of the Indian society which has seen great upward mobility in post-liberalisation India. The middle classes, having completely bought into the neoliberal dream, have championed the case for private property and no longer believe in the welfare state. Scoop captures this through its protagonist’s dissatisfaction with the house she shares with her parents and her dream of owning her apartment.

Space becomes a window into the character’s mind. It is a subliminal way of getting the audience closer to the character. – Hansal Mehta

Mehta calls himself an economical storyteller who doesn’t believe in over-explaining through dialogues or showing too much through elaborate set designs. “Space becomes a window into the character’s mind. It is a subliminal way of getting the audience closer to the character.” When given a choice between shooting on real locations or constructing sets, he leans towards shooting in actual places, but that decision is often also shaped by logistical issues, especially when it comes to re-constructing different time periods in works like Scam 1992 (2020) and Omerta (2017). “Finding locations for Scam 1992 was really tough because Bombay (now Mumbai) has changed rapidly from the '80s and the '90s, the decades the series is set in. We relied heavily on post-production VFX work where I conjured up images from memory to add and remove urban markers of that period.” Mehta is facing similar challenges while shooting Gandhi currently in the UK where even though the architecture of the late 19th and early 20th century exists, the artefacts of modern life will have to be painstakingly removed post-production.

“What is your starting brief to your production designers?” I am curious as to how the filmmaker communicates his language of subtlety to his collaborators. “I don’t like working with fake dimensions. In our film industry, people often create spaces to be able to shoot in them and that is why we often see these big spaces where you are left wondering how a middle-class couple can afford to live in such a lavish space in a city like Mumbai. I always tell my production designer to build my set to scale. Do not make it 1.5 or 2. Keep it as close to 1 as possible,” he states. Mehta credits his cinematographers who can work in tighter spaces without placing additional demands of space on production design. Though I had earlier decided against it, our conversation on scale and proportions opens an opportune moment to ask Mehta about his views on the recently released Heeramandi. “Cinema is about time, place and people. Heeramandi unfortunately is about neither. It is, of course, very beautiful but it stops at just that. And I would not expect this from a filmmaker like Sanjay Leela Bhansali.”

I think adversity paves the way for the greatest of art. I will continue to tell my stories which are all rooted in the societal and political challenges of our times. – Hansal Mehta

“Which is your favourite film when it comes to set design?”

“This might come as a surprise because of what I feel about Heeramandi but it is Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! which I have watched more than 15 times. I love Luhrmann’s operatic vision! I very much enjoy the grand, larger-than-life style of filmmaking. Another filmmaker who uses space in imaginative ways is Peter Greenaway.”

Our conversation is now coming to an end and Hansal Mehta is getting ready to leave for Sussex where his cast and crew are waiting to start filming the next schedule of Gandhi. I ask him how he feels about working in an industry which is constantly being pushed to toe the line inscribed by the ruling party in India. Mehta is refreshingly and rather surprisingly hopeful in his view of current times. “I think adversity paves the way for the greatest of art. I will continue to tell my stories which are all rooted in the societal and political challenges of our times. It doesn’t bother me one bit.”