Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra: ‘Betrayals will occur but churning will also happen’
19 July,2026 08:24 AM IST | Mumbai | Sudhir Mishra
Sudhir Mishra says the story isn’t Sonam Wangchuk’s, but of a generation seeking its voice amid India’s social churning and demanding to be heard
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I don’t belong to the haloed tribe of left liberals who, every time the compromises of their own shitty lives burst up all around them, suddenly find some cause. I think sticking to one’s ideas and making films that allow you to make difficult films is a much more honourable path than farting around on X, which I sometimes do. Beg your pardon. I am who I am.
I have made Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi [2003], and it was about a generation that, in a sense, rejected the idea of a nation, place, and legacy that was given to them by their fathers. They rejected their fathers, both metaphorical and real. In a sense, they felt orphaned. So they latched on to something.
In that churning, there were many wrong things that happened. History is never tidy. Every upheaval carries within it both emancipation and injury. Beneath every settled order lie voices waiting to be heard, lives waiting to be acknowledged, and dignities waiting to be restored. When they finally emerge, they arrive burdened by contradiction, anger, memory, and hope.
So now, there’s another churning, and beyond the shore, I see a man called Sonam Wangchuk. I’ve heard many things about him. I’ve heard about his support for the abrogation of Article 370. There are problems in everybody. There are problems in me, and the man probably has flaws. Some of the demands around him are odd and even undemocratic. They say, “Put so and so in place of so and so!” Not surprising, since most liberals in India are classists.
But the point is not Sonam Wangchuk. The point is, again, these young people feeling orphaned, unrepresented, feeling lost again, and, in a sense, rejecting the ideas that are handed over to them by their parents. To them, we owe something.
If they have felt that someone can hold the lifeline and pull them out of a certain morass, or that at least someone is talking on their behalf when no one else is, then maybe it is our job also to listen and hold their hands, in whichever way we can.
I know that the movement itself needs to answer many questions. However, I still think we need to talk to the young. Even though I know, ultimately, almost certainly, some betrayal will occur. But some churnings will also happen.
21
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