With wit and restraint, Anusha Rizvi’s second feature captures the aspirations and anxieties of a modern Muslim family whose domestic storm lays bare the burdens of identity, tradition, and survival in new India
In her debut feature, Peepli Live (2010), Anusha Rizvi exposed the cannibalistic hunger of the national media stooping and scrounging to turn a farmer’s despair into primetime bait. She is back as a director with her second feature, The Great Shamsuddin Family, an intelligent, delightful dramedy, whose charm is threaded with undertows of sadness and ache that define the life of minorities in India today — their aspirations and anxieties, their quotidian quibbles and creeping crises.
Rizvi handles these tensions without underlining it, letting them pool beneath the humour. She trusts the viewer to read between the lines, to sense the emotional tremors or ingrained and internalised hurt beneath the jokes, quips and repartees, to recognise how a Muslim household absorbs the atmosphere of fear, while still staying fully, sometimes hilariously, alive.
The film, that reminds you of the good old days of cinema, is centred on Bani Shamsuddin, played with aplomb and finely textured control by Kritika Kamra, a divorced academic and the eldest, responsible sibling whose desperate attempt to meet a deadline comes to naught; she has only 12 hours to apply for a job that could relocate her career—and her life—to the United States.
A search for life elsewhere
As we discover this later, it is not ambition in the conventional sense; it is self-preservation masquerading as professional advancement, largely to do with a search for a better life elsewhere, where she has freedom to write and express, something that has been curtailed to a great degree in a country she and her family has called home. The immigration possibility functions on two levels: a personal path toward focus and a political escape from the slow suffocation that leaves her disoriented, helpless, tired.
That fatigue is recognisable even though the screenplay takes time to acknowledge it and reveal it to us. Bani wakes into a day that already wants something from her. Hers is a typical middle-class flat positioned with a clear line of sight to Humayun’s Tomb. The building blocks of her life are unremarkable: a laptop that never gets enough uninterrupted time, morning tea cooling on a table, her doorbell ringing every now and then, and a deadline that grows heavier every time someone presses the doorbell.
In the first 20 minutes, Rizvi lays out Bani’s predicament so precisely that she grabs our emotional and intellectual attention: we notice how her home goes from being a refuge to a clearing house for everyone else’s emotional urgencies. By the time this becomes fully apparent, we are already locked into her story — alert, implicated, and unable to look away. The film has us — mind, senses, and sympathies — firmly in its grasp.
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Bani’s young cousin Iram(a brilliant Shreya Dhanwanthary) storms in carrying a bag of Rs 25 lakh, received in cash as mahar money (dower) from her ex-husband. She has withdrawn the same amount from her mother’s account by getting her elder cousin, Bani’s elder sister Humaira (Juhi Babbar Soni), to forge the signature, and handed it over to her boyfriend who has gone incommunicado since. Her mother has planned to go on Umrah and she needs to withdraw, which leaves Iram agitated and she must deposit the amount lest her mother comes to find out what she has been up to. She does not know the details of Bani’s deadline and arrives with the entitlement of family to seek her help with the expectation that her dependable cousin will help her sort out the mess.
An indictment of the present
But it’s not long when, in the middle of this mess, Amitav (a superb Purab Kohli), Bani’s professor colleague whose brand of intellectual warmth and camaraderie tend to blur into well-meaning intrusion, enters, flanked by Latika (Joyeeta Dutta; they have a thing going), a student who is convinced that fluency in the language of liberalism is the same as understanding its stakes. They enter with the confidence of people who believe education, and some glib talk, inoculates them from social ugliness. The film does not caricature them, but reveals their insulation. Latika abbreviates triple talaq into “TT,” a linguistic reduction that exposes her blind spots more than her intelligence.
Soon after, Humaira’s arrival introduces a new frequency of tension that hides within well-meant advice. The generational axis shifts when Asiya (Dolly Ahluwalia) and Akko (Farida Jalal), Bani’s mother and aunt; both are excellent, which only shows why they remain the prima donnas among senior actors. The crackling chemistry between them gives the film some of its best moments as they proceed with their mission to find the truth of what has been cooking at Bani’s flat, prompting everyone to land one after another. The next arrivals escalate the stakes, and bring us to the underlying theme of the film. Zoheb (a brilliant Nishank Verma), Bani’s cousin, bursts in with Pallavi (the lovely Anusha Banerjee) with the news that they have eloped and want to marry.
It’s not long when Asiya and Akko get to know some hard facts, including their interfaith marriage, which can lead to all hell breaking loose in the times we live in. Moments earlier comfortable in their own authority, they now reconfigure their vocabulary, tone, and even their body language. But no arrival tilts the film’s axis as sharply as Safiya (the in-form Sheeba Chaddha), Zoheb’s mother. The chaos reaches another tier when Iram’s mother Nabeela (Natasha Rastogi) arrives, adding yet another thread of grievance, concern, and emotional surveillance. Every new presence disperses her time, taking her further away from the task at hand.
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Rizvi intercuts the goings-on within the four walls with brief, unromanticised glimpses of Humayun’s Tomb, a remnant of the Mughal empire towering over a community’s shrinking sense of safety, standing luminous while the present displays its darkness and dissension. Perhaps the monument is meant as a metaphor for lost glory, perhaps it is also a counterweight. It stands intact, immune to the anxieties that govern the Shamsuddin family. Rizvi understands that the Muslim middle class in today’s India often lives in two temporalities at once: the shadow of the civilisational past and the volatility of a present that keeps turning hostile without warning. The juxtaposition does not so much romanticise the past as it indicts the present.
Identity, class and gender
This pressure emerges most powerfully in Bani’s own articulation of identity. At one point, she alludes — almost offhand but with unmistakable weariness — to the fact that she does not align with the ‘passive-aggressive’ ways of a typical “liberal” like Joyeeta, who has not seen the world as much as she has. In another scene, when she finally admits to Amitav that she is “tired of everyday fear,” the moment cuts with unusual clarity. She lists nothing specific, but we understand everything. She is tired of checking her words before speaking, tired of checking her tone before writing, tired of wondering how people will misinterpret a remark online.
This exhaustion is also echoed in the film’s quietest and most devastating moment when Amitav sings, almost inadvertently, what was their school anthem: “Bulbul ko gul mubarak, gul to chaman Mubarak / Ham bekason ko apna pyara watan mubarak. (Let the nightingale have the flower, and the flower have its garden. / As for us, the forsaken —may this beloved homeland, too, be ours.” Rizvi stages this without any dramatic emphasis. The nightingale and the flower can celebrate their mutual belonging; the garden can celebrate its own permanence. But what blessing exists for the hapless intelligentsia that finds itself increasingly cornered, watched, and punished for doing the very work they ought to be doing, living and loving freely.
As the drama unfolds, the subtext never dissipates: to be Muslim and middle class is to inhabit a narrow corridor in which upward mobility is allowed but full belonging is not. This sense of conditional stability appears most explicitly in Bina’s decision to apply for a job in the US. The film asks a larger question: what does “home” mean when the idea of home has been turned into a conditional offer? Rizvi integrates these individual dilemmas into the film’s structure without ever resorting to speechifying. The brilliance lies in how Rizvi avoids symbolic over-handedness.
The film, however, is not despairing, only too observant. Its critique is sharp because it refuses melodrama. Rizvi seems to argue that survival itself is a form of resistance. The film does not ask viewers to pity its characters, nor does it ask for admiration. It asks only that the audience observe the conditions under which these characters live. The Great Shamsuddin Family shows in subtle strokes how identity, faith, class, gender, and politics converge in the most mundane corners of domestic life. It is a work of extraordinary clarity: unsentimental, perceptive, structurally elegant, and unwilling to disguise the truth of its moment.
The Great Shamsuddin Family is currently streaming on JioHotstar
