Gulaal
Synopsis:
Halfway through Gulaal, Dukey bana is sitting in this dusty room just screaming poetry about sheep and slaughter and kings, and honestly, if you haven't seen it, Piyush Mishra's delivery of arrey aisi hai toh aisi sahi just sticks in your brain forever because he looks like a guy who hasn't slept in three decades and drinks way too much chai while plotting a student election that honestly feels way more dangerous than any actual government coup you'd see in standard bollywood movies where the heroes just dance around trees. But to understand why this guy is quoting verse while student politics turn into an absolute bloodbath, you have to look at how this started, which goes back to a painfully polite law student named Dileep Singh who arrives at Rajputana University in Rajasthan, played by Raj Singh Chaudhary, and he's got these massive glasses and a suitcase, and he just wants to study and maybe avoid trouble, except trouble finds him immediately when he's hazed by a bunch of aggressive thugs led by Kiran, who is played by Jesse Randhawa, and they humiliate him right out of the gate by stealing his clothes and making him march across campus wearing just his underwear, which is brutal to watch.
So then Dileep runs into Karan Singh, played by Aditya Srivastava, who is this crippled, bitter royalist living in a crumbling palace, and Karan is obsessed with reclaiming some lost Rajput glory and basically adopts Dileep as his errand boy, teaching him that fear is the only currency that matters in this godforsaken town. It is wild. Kay Kay Menon plays Dukey bana, who is Karan's right-hand man and the shadow power broker controlling the student union through intimidation and absolute grit, and Kay Kay just owns every single scene he's in with that greasy hair and terrifyingly calm smile. Anyway, the plot is basically about student elections getting hijacked by regional politics, caste warfare, and royal paranoia, and deep down, it's easily one of the darkest hindi movies ever made because it doesn't give you a single likable hero to root for, just a bunch of broken people destroying each other over pride and territory.
Dileep gets sucked deeper and deeper into this mess, forgetting all about his law books and his family back home, and he starts wearing crisp white kurtas and smoking cigarettes like he owns the place, and there's this one weirdly specific scene where he's standing in a cramped hostel hallway trying to iron a collar with a heavy coal iron while a ceiling fan is clicking loudly overhead, and the power keeps flickering, and he's arguing with some minor goon about a ballot box key that got lost under a wooden bench, and that tiny, annoying domestic struggle just highlights how small everyone's life is even while they're playing at being revolutionaries. The elections happen, people get beaten up, alliances shift in seconds, and then Dukey bana gets betrayed and killed in a shocking shootout that comes out of nowhere and wipes out half the main cast before you can even blink.
The funny thing is, bollywood doesn't usually make hindi films this cynical, and Gulaal really stands apart from typical commercial cinema because it treats its characters like tragic clowns in a rigged circus where the ringmaster walked out years ago. Right after that carnage, Bansi, played by Abhimanyu Singh, takes over the violent faction and starts purging anyone who looks at him funny, and the whole university becomes an armed camp where professors hide in their offices and students trade textbooks for country-made pistols. Deepak Dobriyal plays Bhati, and he's completely unhinged throughout the whole ordeal, running around with wild eyes and screaming about loyalty and betrayal, adding this frantic, twitchy energy that makes you feel like the whole screen is about to shatter.
We watch as the campus burns, blood spills on the cobblestones, and everything falls apart because nobody knows how to stop pulling triggers once the first shot is fired. Dileep sits in the back of a dusty jeep, staring blankly out the window as the vehicle rolls away from the university gates, leaving behind the smoking ruins of a student revolution.
Deepak Dobriyal wears a pair of oversized wire-rimmed glasses in Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal that slide constantly down the bridge of his nose, and if I'm honest, that tiny wardrobe detail tells you more about student politics in Rajasthan than ten pages of exposition. You watch him push them back up with a sweaty middle finger while reciting lines from obscure Urdu poets, and you realize the movie is operating on a frequency entirely different from typical Hindi movies that usually prefer their campus radicals to look like poster boys for youth empowerment.
Kashyap directs with a camera that feels less like a planned apparatus and more like an unwanted guest at a very bloody wedding. The screenplay, co-written with Raj Singh Chaudhary and Aparna Malhotra, refuses to offer a sympathetic protagonist. You get stuck with Dileep Singh, an accidental freshman who arrives in Rajputana with a suitcase and a head full of romantic notions about democracy, only to be beaten with cricket bats in the dormitory corridors before he can even figure out where the mess hall is. There is no moral anchor here. The villains are charismatic and the victims are petty, and the framing throughout is so jittery and claustrophobic that you keep wanting to wipe the dust off the projector lens even when you are watching a digital file.
Kay Kay Menon plays Dukey Bana with the kind of coiled, dangerous stillness that makes you lean forward in your seat and forget to chew your popcorn. He doesn't raise his voice when he is ordering someone's kneecaps shattered. He just sips his chai and talks about the restoration of ancient Rajput pride while his henchmen hover in the background like restless crows. It is a performance that reminds you of his work in *Sarkar*, though stripped of the theatrical mobster gloss and replaced with something far dirtier and more provincial. Raja Chaudhary, as his chief muscle and psychological liability, plays into the chaos with a manic grin that borders on unhinged, sweating through his khadi kurtas as if the entire state were on fire.
The supporting players fill out this dusty ecosystem with bone-deep conviction. Piyush Mishra delivers poetry that cuts like broken glass while nursing a permanent liver ailment and a grudge against the universe. Aditya Srivastava brings a bureaucratic coldness to his role as the string-pulling professor who treats student elections like a stock exchange. Mukesh Bhatt and Abhimanyu Singh populate the fringes as rival factions, all of them snarling at each other over territory and ideology. Even Jesse Randhawa and Ayesha Mohan, playing women caught in the machinery of this testosterone-poisoned campus, manage to carve out moments of icy agency without the screenplay ever pausing to pat itself on the back for being progressive. They are survivors in a boys' club that eats its own young.
Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography strips the desert of all tourist-brochure romance and turns it into a harsh, yellow-tinted purgatory where shadows offer no relief from the heat. The soundtrack, driven by Mishra's haunting compositions, uses traditional folk idioms to amplify the dread. It’s a small thing, but the mixing on the crowd chants during the election rally scenes bugs me slightly because you can hear the exact loop point where the sound designer pasted forty extra students into the back row. That sort of low-budget seam shows up occasionally, reminding you that this was an independent production that fought tooth and nail for every reel of stock.
Underneath the plot about student unions and royal separatism, the movie is really an autopsy of how young men are turned into cannon fodder for old men's vanities. It asks uncomfortable questions about the mechanics of revolution in modern India without offering any redemptive counter-narrative. The idealism of the opening reels gets systematically ground down into mud and blood until nobody remembers what they were fighting for in the first place, which feels closer to the historical record than most prestige historical dramas ever manage.
Bollywood has long treated university campuses as colorful backdrops for romance and musical numbers, but Gulaal treats them like abattoirs where the machinery is run by teenagers with too much time and too much rage. When the credits finally cut to black over a chilling rendition of "Arre Rula Diya Kya," you don't feel exhilarated. You just feel a profound urge to go wash your hands.