Dhadak 2 Review: Shazia Iqbal’s Remake On Caste-Coded Power Has Fluctuating Bite

Dhadak 2 opens with one of the longest-dictated disclaimers in recent memory. It’s mostly platitudes: refrain emphasizes the makers’ unerring sensitivity, an absolute lack of interest in offending or targeting any community. The film stresses its dramatic license, though what license you’ll be curious about as terrible atrocities shoot through the roof. The ghosts of what has been permitted due utterance and elided hang heavy over Shazia Iqbal’s adaptation of Mari Selvaraj’s 2018 searing drama Pariyerum Perumal. The CBFC has axed out critical verbiage in Dhadak 2, some touted 16 cuts, and despite Iqbal’s earnest, sporadically wrenching efforts, the omissions haunt the film.

Like its original, a law college becomes a primary space for the Dalit protagonist to fully encounter the terrifying hierarchy, what is off-limits. It’s the site for his hardening. Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi) hides his surname. Nevertheless, it’s eked out of him. Upper-caste classmates led by the bullying, openly threatening Ronnie (Saad Bilgrami) don’t miss a beat to rub his quota-inflected admission in his face. He’s mocked and hazed. Neither does the college dean repose faith in Neelesh, insisting the latter will waste the opportunity and get into campus politics. But Neelesh is sure of not having the fighting spirit of a politician. He promises to stay far from it. But he cannot escape it. The minute he and his classmate Vidhi (Triptii Dimri) shift from friendship into deeper intimacy, caste lines between them turn doubly rigid. The fact that Vidhi’s cousin is Ronnie means there’s much trouble ahead for the couple. Neelesh wizens up to the desperately bleak situation, not without getting burnt and battered. It’s a question of power, the law of the jungle, his mother reminds him. Fight, or get slaughtered.

Dhadak 2 abjures specificities in its generic North Indian town setting. Obviously, the idea is you could transplant the story to any urban space and the horrors would very much persist. But I’m conflicted whether this key decision to remove a defined geographical underpinning might have flattened the debate. To a considerable degree, the film peeks into segregations within dominant castes. An early scene of a marriage proposal, where the exact sub-caste is immediately laid on the table, establishes this. Dhadak 2 zooms into Neelesh leaning into resistance, the ultimate decision to actively fight instead of being a passive bystander. A string of adaptation issues grate. There’s a lot of talk about his and Vidhi’s relationship marring the honor of her upper-caste community, however the latter’s delineations don’t acutely register–a clear effect of the CBFC’s dilution. Despite the blank-faced menace Saurabh Sachdeva exudes, Dhadak 2’s spin on the assassin who “cleans” the society on behalf of dominant castes is largely diffused. 

Iqbal course-corrects pressing flaws in the original. Selvaraj’s film treated its heroine as mostly clueless and who came across as distinctly second fiddle to the male lead. Dhadak 2 tries to invest Vidhi with agency, mounting disaffection. She’s far more expressive and confrontational. But it’s frequently blunted by the screenplay’s declarative gestures. Dimri’s uncertainty about her character’s genuine grit jars uneasily. She doesn’t quite know how to relay the strength, confusion, misplaced sense of confidence. Instead, she gets caught either tearing up or exhorting Neelesh to look beyond the divide. Vidhi only slowly wakes up to how much she has taken for granted. In a scene, she naively confesses to Neelesh that she thought caste is limited to villages. Iqbal’s firm positioning of Vidhi and Dimri’s reading don’t sit well together. Vidhi gets a whole scene where she rails about the age-old burden of honor women are dumped with.

The film’s speechifying, edifying slant often works against the accretion of self-affirming expression. Yet, the polemical space Iqbal amplifies in an expansion on the original cannot be outright dismissed especially given Hindi cinema’s historic caste-erasure. There’s conviction in Iqbal’s voice when she steps into questions of access, it being skewed generationally for the disadvantaged like Neelesh. In an early scene, as Neelesh recites a mock case study of people turning cannibals in a crisis, someone offhandedly remarks: if there were Dalits in there, they wouldn’t even be touched. Casually delivered truths like this sting in Dhadak 2. Debates on reservation and student fellowships for the marginalised, propelled by a student leader clearly shaped on Rohith Vemula, prop up Neelesh’s gradual turn to proud, seething ownership of his Dalit identity. Yes, it’s all too wordy and tacks on repetitive metaphors. Nevertheless, Iqbal and Chaturvedi’s performance, rising from tentative to surefooted and blistering, fold it compellingly into the film’s tense minefield.

When Iqbal trusts silences to slice, Dhadak 2 lands few indelible moments. In a standout one, Neelesh is hurled muck by Ronnie and his ilk. For few seconds, he staggers about, shook and humiliated. But he regains his composure, allows his fury center-stage and locks eyes with his aggressor, smearing him as well. These bristling minutes have more punch than the film’s most verbose, rallying portions.