Sex, drugs, politics: how the streaming giants are blowing up Bollywood
New Amazon and Netflix dramas take in themes that India’s established cinema rarely touches, with millions of potential subscribers available
‘The three big ‘no’s in Indian cinema are sexuality, religion and politics,” says Anurag Kashyap. “And in Sacred Games we address all three.” The Netflix series, which Kashyap co-directed, takes viewers to places Bollywood rarely does. It could be seen as India’s answer to Narcos: a dense, tense crime saga that closely tracks real-world history: political and police corruption, organised crime, religious tension, nuclear terrorism. The story switches between the present day, where a Sikh detective (Saif Ali Khan) gets wind of an imminent terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the 1980s, tracking the rise of a charismatic but ruthless gangster (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui). There is blood, sex, and violence, not to mention a trailblazing transgender character. “You cannot do that in mainstream cinema and have an audience,” Kashyap says. “It’s a given that movie-watching in India is a family experience, a community experience. Families didn’t sit together to see Sacred Games.”
Kashyap is a maverick in Indian cinema. For 15 years, he has operated outside the commercial mainstream, writing, directing and producing provocative, relatively low-budget movies at a prodigious rate. But now Kashyap finds himself at the crest of a new wave of Indian content that could permanently alter the landscape. With 1.3 billion people and more than 500 million internet subscribers, not to mention flatlining growth in other territories, the streaming giants have been moving into India big time. Both Netflix and Amazon launched their services there in 2016, taking on larger local rivals such as the Disney-owned Hotstar. Amazon pledged to create 17 original Indian series; Netflix 16 original series and 22 films. Not only are these companies telling stories Bollywood can’t, they are bringing them to audiences Bollywood can’t reach. Sacred Games was a phenomenon in India, but the show was watched by twice as many people outside the country, according to Netflix.
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