Paan Singh Tomar: An unqualified triumph

Cast: Irrfan, Mahie Gill, Vipin Sharma, Rajendra Gupta

 

Unwavering authenticity of location and lingo is the prime strength of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, a gritty tale of the eponymous athlete-turned-brigand whose brief run from the law in the ravines of Chambal ended in dusty death in a police encounter in the early 1980s.

 

Presented as an avowedly fictionalized account of a true story derived from the boondocks of central India, the film isn’t primarily about crime and punishment although the moral compass is an integral part of the narrative.

 

Paan Singh Tomar is an unflinching yet undemonstrative indictment of the impassive and blatantly exploitative law-enforcement machinery that pushes innocents in rural India into the trough of despair and violence. The film, as the end titles reveal, is a tribute to India’s unsung sporting heroes, some that died penniless, and others who were compelled to sell their medals.

 

The protagonist of this film was one such hero who never got his due. He refuses the tag of a dacoit and calls himself a baagi, a rebel. He is indeed a rebel with a cause, a Bengal Sappers subedar and champion athlete on a collision course after he is slighted by his own extended family and a pliant police.

 

“Nobody took note of me when I won medals for the country,” he tells a gawky, cowering journalist in pursuit of the scoop of his life, “but once I took to violence, things changed overnight.” The journey from innocence and achievement to damnation and death after Paan Singh retires from the army is as inevitable as it is ill-fated.

 

Irrfan fleshes out the benighted character with such a deep sense of positive empathy that the protagonist assumes tangible human qualities that are quite at variance with the norms of the dacoit and crime dramas that popular Hindi cinema usually delivers.

 

Dhulia adopts an solidly realistic mode in telling the story of the seven-time 3000m steeplechase national champion and 1958 Tokyo Olympic Games participant who was forced by a land dispute in his village in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena district to take up arms against an apathetic system and put together a band of men willing to fight for him.

 

The film doesn’t resort to any showy theatricality to get its point across. Paan Singh, a simpleton who adheres to an uncomplicated value system but is blessed with uncommon prowess as an athletic and marksman, tells his coach during a national meet not to swear at him. “If anybody shows disrespect to my mother, I will press the trigger,” he says nonchalantly.

 

A little later in the film, his old, infirm mother is attacked with the butt of a rifle by a cousin who has usurped Paan Singh’s small plot of agricultural land. When the protagonist, now a wanted fugitive, confronts the wrongdoer, he does not pump a bullet into the latter’s heart in a fit of rage. Instead, he directs a volley of questions at his prey. He asks: “I used to call you dadda (elder brother), why did you hurt my defenceless mother?”

 

He still retains a crucial part of his inner self: swift vendetta is not what he wants. He wants to simply know to why somebody like him should be so ruthlessly victimized. He is wounded all right but he is anything but an unfeeling animal. Thanks to this layered characterization, Paan Singh Tomar is not a typical vengeance drama. The film’s heart is firmly in the right place.

 

Paan Singh’s only desire is that he be allowed to live in peace with his family: a wife (a deglamorised Mahie Gill), a son and a daughter.Before he becomes an outlaw, he orders his barely-out-of-his-teens son to return to his army unit. “You have your entire life before you, I’ve lived mine,” he tells the young man. The poignancy isn’t lost on anybody.

 

Paan Singh Tomar is an unqualified triumph for both the director and the lead actor.