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“Sir! We are like this only!”
Taboo Talk, Masoom Rajwani’s new two-part special, is a stinging critique of this peculiar strain of Indianness that holds us back. A debilitating reverence for faith and superstition, the weirdness around arranged marriage, religious hate fanned with glee by a hysterical media, marital rape, caste discrimination, misogyny, domestic violence—you know, the classics. With a wry smile and a strong commitment to rationalism underpinning his words, Rajwani dissects the bigotries and hypocrisies that are so casually normalised in Naya Bharat.
This is a very bitter and hard-hitting work of comedy, one that shines a spotlight on all the messy stuff that’s laughed off as #JustIndianThings—locked away from sight and not to be spoken of. For this, Rajwani is willing to be crude and vulgar, to use shock and black comedy, go low and petty. And he does it all with an unnerving stillness.
It’s an interesting visual contrast, causing some dissonance. The words are scathing and contemptuous; the picture is calm, almost serene. He’s more bemused than raging. Parts of this set could conceivably fall under the blanket of ‘political comedy’, as many of the things he talks about can be traced—directly or indirectly—to contemporary right wing politics and the fading accountability surrounding it. (In one broad and expertly crafted gag, Rajwani wonders how gay people must feel: On the one hand, they’re forbidden from ever getting married; on the other, you have straight people literally marrying trees.)
Rajwani is willing to be crude and vulgar, to use shock and black comedy, go low and petty. And he does it all with an unnerving stillness.
In that sense, you could count Rajwani among a loose group of comics—including Kunal Kamra, Punit Pania, or Daniel Fernandes—who are unafraid to direct their ire toward current politics and regularly court controversy in the process. There are elements of that in his work here—the first part of the set is structured around “free speech”, and the second half’s “Apolitical jokes” title is more tongue-in-cheek than accurate. But the biggest target of Rajwani’s satire is culture, rather than politics.
He is very much concerned with the here and now—indeed, how could anyone not be?—but Taboo Talk isn’t about BJP’s India today or Congress’s India yesterday or whatever. The goal here is to interrogate the very essence of what it means to be Indian. How we’re so consumed by superstition in the absence of any sort of scientific temper. How we punish stray jokes with disproportionate action while misogyny, harassment, or domestic violence remain unchecked. The absurd realities of arranged marriage, with inexperienced, “virgin” young men and their crass fathers rejecting a prospective bride for thought crimes she may have committed in a distant past. Honking at ambulances. People falling to their death off local trains every single day, each casualty met with cruel indifference.
These absurdities are baked into our everyday existence over generations, rendered invisible by their ubiquity. Rajwani brings them back under the microscope, analysing them with clarity and purpose. He lists them out patiently, one after the next. Some are new, others age old. How could we come up with the idea of the flush before abolishing sati, he wonders. Are we even developing, he asks?
A lot of the material goes right to the edge of acceptability before tailing off. He steers clear of a lot of contentious issues that may be politically or culturally sensitive. For one, this approach allows him to paint across a broader canvas and not limit himself only to Twitter hot takes. But it’s also evidence of a necessary pragmatism in his pursuit of comedy in trying times. Enough comics have run into trouble with the guardians of our moral/religious/political discourse. We don’t need another jail term, or crying apologies, or more vandalism at venues.
Rajwani has, as he told DeadAnt recently, “clear guidelines” in place about what he will or won’t joke about. He will stand up for what he believes in, but avoids treading sensitive religious or political territory. There’s a clear line: “…if the law says that something I’ve said isn’t defensible—which my lawyer advises me on—I remove it.” For Taboo Talks, he’s had to remove around 20 minutes, giving it a crisp runtime of 40-something minutes. “Because you need money to defend yourself. It wasn’t worth risking it.”
But despite this measured, calculated approach to putting it together, the actual experience of Taboo Talk has a freewheeling and biting undercurrent. Rajwani covers a lot of ground and all manner of themes—some hits, the odd misses in there too—but the overarching focus on “Indianness”, and everything that means, is unrelenting. He shows us that, yes, we are being like this only. But maybe, just maybe, we can be a bit more than that.