Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar Review

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s debut web series, an artful and irresistible female-led period drama, is known for the director’s big-screen venture that is packed with everything. It has huge and lavish sets, visual grandeur, intense emotion, stylistic flamboyance, sustained musical accompaniment and compelling performances. Are there more? Yes, there is.

Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar The enterprise reimagines 1940s Lahore and its red-light district with less intent on accuracy of detail than overall effect. The show has passages of brilliant beauty. It also occasionally devolves into tonally static, cinematically sterile stretches. But in the final analysis, its strengths far outweigh its downsides.

Bhansali is the creator, co-writer (along with Bibhu Puri), editor and music director of the extraordinary eight-episode Netflix show that is nothing but economical. It is filmed in all the ways that it was intended to be in that widescreen spectacle.

Based on a key concept of Moin Beg, Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar Places the day-to-day struggles of Lahore’s fabled but exploited courtesans alongside the rapidly escalating war for independence waged by a group of underground rebels.

Bhansali tempers his extreme approach with restraint. The series is a celebration as well as a lament for the homes of cheerful courtesans yearning for dignity and freedom during the tumultuous last years of the British Raj, an era marked by the rapidly waning influence of the Nawabs who were the main patrons. Nautch for girls Hiramandi.

Bhansali draws the best out of the six main cast members – Manisha Koirala, Sonakshi Sinha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Richa Chadha, Sanjeeda Sheikh and Sharmin Segal.

Manisha Koirala is returning to a Bhansali project after 28 years Khamoshi: The MusicalSonakshi Sinha, its winner Dahdembodies two fair women who represent the two main poles of the battle for control Hiramandi.

But it’s Aditi Rao Hydari, played as the epitome of quiet grace and refinement, who gets the widest emotional spectrum. Sharmin Segal, as an innocent but gifted young woman who seeks to escape her fate, has her moments, as does Sanjeeda Shaikh as a scarred woman on the receiving end of a bitter power struggle between forces far more powerful than her.

Bhansali is just as impressive as he harnesses the potential of the supporting actresses – notably Farida Jalal, Nivedita Bhargava, Jayati Bhatia and Shruti Sharma – in a sophisticated, if self-consciously stylized, portrait of a turbulent time and a unique one. A culture caught in a catastrophe created by the obscurity of history and the myopia of self-serving men.

The male cast — actors playing marginal characters who call the shots in the lives of courtesans or control the city’s law-and-order apparatus — is far less effective. These include Fardeen Khan, making a comeback after a gap of 14 years, and Shekhar Suman, who has also been absent from the screen for years.

The characters played by Khan and Suman are the Nawabs Tawaifof s Hiramandi As a mistress in a give-and-take relationship teetering on the edge of desire and infidelity—peripheral to the larger drama.

Three more male actors – Taha Shah, as a well-connected and strategically flexible London-returned son of an aristocrat who rebels against his father and the British, Jason Shah as a brutal British police officer and Indresh Malik as a brutal, scheming mediator. Girls and their fickle benefactors – greater play is provided. They make the most of it.

one HiramandiIts patron (played by Adhyayan Suman, who also plays the younger incarnation of Shekhar Suman’s essay character), shows that the attention and wealth that a disgraced Nawab Lajjo (Richa Chadha) showers on Tawaif is not permanent. . They are the easy part to violate the Faustian pact.

It’s not just the misguided outsiders who cause misery. The dancing girls themselves are equally capable of tormenting each other with violent outbursts and acts of betrayal that stem from a need for acceptance and self-confidence. D Hiramandi Courtesans are a close-knit community—most of them related by blood—but that doesn’t stop them from exchanging endless verbal and psychological barbs.

The series mainly takes place in two mansions located opposite each other in disreputable neighborhoods frequented by the powerful and wealthy. One is the Shahi Mahal (meaning palace), where a seasoned Mallikajan (Manisha Koirala) is the undisputed queen.

The other, Khwabgah (meaning “dream house”), is a much-desired mansion where Chhota Faridan (Sonakshi Sinha) moves into after being transferred from Benares. Faridan, the only daughter of Mallika’s deceased elder sister, manages to reconcile with the residents of Shahi Mahal.

The illusion of royalty and the lure of dreams sustain Mallikajan and his likes. Dreams, as one woman said, are their worst enemies. We can only see them but never perceive them, he adds. The courtesans’ perennial oscillation between hope and despair is at the core of the drama of their turbulent lives.

Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar maintains its spotlight on women even as it liberally sprinkles its vivid, overflowing canvas with intimate moments of love, jealousy, deceit and rebellion and public processions, street clashes and incidents of custodial torture that leave a trail of blood and unspeakable horror.

At once seductive and tragic, poignant and imperious, the Tawaifs live in the heart of Lahore but languish as novelties on the fringes of a society controlled by nawabs on the brink of oblivion and desperately grasped by ruthless British officials. their authority over an increasingly restless colonial people.

The dice are loaded against courtesans, but they are the ones who mentally control the moneylenders they depend on for their sustenance. But how long can they defend their shaky ground and keep the Nawabs in their thrall?

As the buzz of Swadeshi movement spread Hiramandi – Bibbojan (Aditi Rao Hydari) and Alamzeb (Sharmin Segal), Mallika’s two daughters, are drawn into the freedom struggle, one directly, the other inadvertently – courtesans caught in a cracked stick. They could either side with the Nawabs who dared not resist the British or throw in their lot with the freedom fighters.

Ornately mounted Hiramandi At first blush may seem like a conventional SLB effort. It strains the beautiful images contained in music and poetry in the service of an account of an obscure and fictional chapter in the subcontinent’s history. That it does so with consistent efficiency is only to be expected.

Cinematography is credited to four DOPs – frequent Bhansali collaborators Sudeep Chatterjee and Mahesh Limaye, Huenstang Mohapatra and Ragul Dharuman – and production design by Subrata Chakraborty and Amit Roy. Both teams of technicians contribute flawlessly to the show.

There is, however, more to the series than the blind, and confusingly, gorgeous Mane Bhansali has hired. There is one significant takeaway from the path Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar Describes India’s freedom struggle as a movement that defied the divide and rule policy of the Crown.

Hindus and Muslims marched shoulder to shoulder as they planned a strike against the British. Religious identity does not divide warriors. their promise freedom combines them. In the climate found in India today, the subcontinent’s deep syncretistic inspiration is a significant thematic strand that should not be lost in the hypnotic glow of glitz. Hiramandi The universe that Bhansali has conjured up.

Hiramandi: Diamond Bazaar Not all pomp and show. Both nostalgic and elegiac, it has a core that is worth more than all the glitz and glory of its packaging.