Raja Shivaji, directed by and starring Riteish Deshmukh

The thunderous soundtrack, the armour of machismo, the sound of a war call against the evil Muslim plunderers, the Hindu vow to rescue the country from Islamic dominance… at first, I thought I had walked into ‘Dhurandhar’ with the characters in medieval costumes.

Riteish Deshmukh stars in and directs this bombastic biopic on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the Maratha warrior who dreamt of swaraj and fought till his last breath for it. Deshmukh, with all due respect, hardly seems the right fit for such a valorous part. He is sincere, yes, but not able to convey the luminous legacy of the Great Man, reducing his gallantry to a series of AI-induced battles where beheading is a blood sport.

I am not sure whether Deshmukh wanted to make a ‘Game of Thrones’ out of the Maratha warrior’s life. That’s the way it seems to be.

Abhishek Bachchan appears for a while as Shivaji’s elder brother, bringing gravitas to the storytelling, sadly missing from the core of the film. Some key historic characters are used for comic relief, reminding us that history is what we make of it.

None of the Muslim characters in ‘Raja Shivaji’ is anything but a unidimensional caricature, except the fabulous Vidya Balan, who as the weak Mohammed Adil Shah’s wily Begum is full of toxic sarcasm. She is a hoot even though most of her scenes are shot separately from the durbar politics and interpolated with not half the cleverness the Begum displays.

Balan fits in perfectly in a film that is eventually a historic hiccup, a hysterical hyphen to a much larger political reality which is way beyond the grasp of this project. The aim here is to lead the leading man into a hand-held hagiolatrous haloism. In all the crowd sequences, the junior artistes look at Riteish Deshmukh as though he has just announced a Diwali bonus during Eid.

Barring Balan, the women in the story, the mother (Bhagyashree) and wife (Genelia D’Souza), live only to breathe blessings on their beloved warrior (no prizes for guessing who). Genelia as Shivaji’s dharampatni sports manicured nails in the 17th century. She gets a death sequence longer than Zeenat Aman’s in ‘Roti Kapada Aur Makaan’, the difference being she delivers her adulatory lines for her husband in a perpendicular position. It’s not easy being the Queen of the show.

At three hours and some minutes, ‘Raja Shivaji’ is surprisingly brisk-paced and mostly well edited (Urvashi Saxena), although the scissors stop reverently every time our screen Shivaji has a speech to make on swaraj. The great Santosh Sivan’s cinematography is surprisingly unremarkable. Some of the choreography in the battle sequences seems inspired by ‘Bajirao Mastani’.

The dubbing in the Hindi version is uneven. Was there a need to pan-Indianise the Maratha warrior’s saga?