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One character, the lawyer remembered, “was a politician depicted as a conservative, pushing for the privatization of education, which is one of the Modi government’s issues. When lawyers for Amazon Prime and an external law firm first reviewed “Tandav” ’s scripts-a customary procedure-Shiva’s line had been a full, florid “What the fuck?” One of the lawyers told me that his team had urged the showrunners to prune the expletive, but that there was more concern about “Tandav” coming off as anti-B.J.P. This is especially true of those who make the quintessential Hindi movie-the song-and-dance melodrama, fit for all ages-but the instinct persists in those who aim to be edgier. Like nudity and sex, profanity discomfits the average Indian film or television producer.
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“What the . . . ?” The last word is drowned out by the shriek of mike feedback. How can a call for freedom be controversial? “ Azaadi?” he exclaims. rants in this vein so often that it has turned into a trope. Tweet about something controversial, an accomplice proposes-something about how the university’s students, forever demanding azaadi, or freedom, from their government’s oppression, are “anti-nationals,” traitors to India.
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In the first scene that Ayyub shot, Shiva is onstage in a student skit, playing his namesake deity: a Shiva in a suit, newly risen from a cosmic nap, wondering how to be relevant once more. After being cast in “Tandav,” Ayyub said with a laugh, he had to lose weight to look young enough to be Shiva Shekhar. We sat outdoors, in sweaty, pre-monsoon weather, and Ayyub went through cigarettes and chili-cheese toast with the vim, if not the metabolism, of an undergraduate.
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When we met, in June, he suggested not a luxury hotel or Soho House-the usual, discreet haunts of stars of a certain luminosity-but a café near his apartment complex. He has a magnetic way of speaking Hindi, but he isn’t yet the sort of actor who is mobbed on the street. Since then, Ayyub, now thirty-nine, has earned supporting parts both in blockbusters and in small, sparkling movies. Then he moved to Mumbai and threw himself into its entertainment industry-into Bollywood, to use a term that many of its denizens dislike. “It took me four or five months, with great difficulty, to save enough money to buy a refrigerator,” he said. A little more than a decade ago, Ayyub had been a floundering theatre actor in Delhi. “In fact,” Ayyub said, “I even told the director, ‘If your main character breaks the fourth wall, you will have your “House of Cards.” ’ ”Īyyub played another student leader, a tyro named Shiva Shekhar-not quite the main role, but a key one nevertheless, and a fillip to his career. Mostly, though, “Tandav” aspired to be splashy entertainment-the kind of show in which a Prime Minister dies after drinking a glass of poisoned wine, which happens in the opening episode. had just begun its second straight term in power, and “obviously, when you write, you write about recent things,” Ayyub said. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.).
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In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him.
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In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe-a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics. In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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