Sultanat, the Epic of fictitioustan
by Beth Watkins
Sometimes you just want to get engulfed in a film that refuses to be contained. Sultanat (Mukul Anand, 1986) is crammed to the gills with intergenerational conflict, revenge, hidden identities, grand architecture, rippling deserts, and cast members I’m always happy to see. Dharmendra, Sridevi, Sunny Deol, Padma Khanna, and Dalip Tahil populate Sultanat-e-Amaaz, a kingdom contested by Amrish Puri and later Shakti Kapoor. How can a community possibly withstand the onslaught of such villains? Through Dharmendra’s guns and growls, of course! And because Amrish Puri stole Dharmendra’s infant son and raised him as his own, we get the pleasure of Papa Deol going mano a mano with Sunny before their true relationship is revealed.
Sridevi is the haughty princess shrew-tamed by Sunny; this plotline has been objectionable since at least Shakespeare’s time, but the pair is great together, clashing egos and never taking their eyes off each other in their songs, which mostly consist of sinuous Sridevi and stock-still Sunny, perhaps because his Jeet stomp hadn’t been invented yet.
A little caveat to that “always happy to see” stated above: this is the debut film of Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal’s second son, Karan, whose acting is…um… “furniture-like,” as author Diptakirti Chaudhuri describes it in Kitnay Aadmi Thay? Completely Useless Bollywood Trivia. The mistake of putting Karan Kapoor…well, in anything, but particularly in a loud, aggressive film that also contains Dharmendra & Co. It takes a lot more than what Karan had to make yourself felt in a film like Sultanat.
The other cast member I could do without is Jagdeep as the usual odious comic relief, but this time he’s also in blackface. NAHIIIIIIIIIN!
A few other ingredients in Sultanat’s Bigger Is Better Masala formula:
• Tom Alter is the shah, lounging on his velvet throne and crisply, imperiously uttering decrees. Pretty fly for a white guy, no?
• The Eid moon falls on the stolen baby, a portent, the nurse says, of him becoming sultan.
• After being banished by Amrish Puri into the desert to die of dehydration, Dharmendra is nursed back to health by an unexplained blonde woman, to whom he offers any wish as repayment for her service. She cements her place in Sultanat-e-Amaaz by asking him to marry her and later shocks the court by kissing him during their wedding ceremony.
• Kalyanji Anandji’s music is a delicious combination of Middle Eastern-sounding riffs with blaring 80s synthesizers.
• Shots in the actual Amer Fort are complemented by a song filmed in front of an absolutely not-actual Egyptian sphinx and pyramid.
• There’s a heavy dose of attempts at physical pain and humiliation in Sridevi and Sunny’s initial meeting and subsequent…courtship, I guess you’d call it, though really it’s just him relentlessly pursuing her. In one scene, she chains him up to be whipped, and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Really, the only things Sultanat lacks are a named animal friend and locket halves kept by father and son. I cannot count the number of times I exclaimed “Vah! Vah!” or slow-clapped at the screen as I watched. It is loud, it is silly, it has no use for subtlety, and I love it.
Sultanat is a fine entry into that group of Indian films that depict epic adventures in utterly make-believe places and in often unspecified eras. Familiar and exotic, historical and contemporary are layered into a creation both relatable and escapist. They are a complete — not to mention fun — blurring of reality and fantasy. My favourite example is Dharam Veer (Manmohan Desai’s 1977 movie to which Sultanat bears much similarity), a tale of revealed identities and claims to a kingdom set in a time period best described as “yore.” The miniskirted blacksmith and puffy-shirted prince are best friends, a haughty princess and noble gypsy catch their fancy, a valiant falconer seeks justice, and shady courtiers yearn to grab the throne. Another fine specimen is Ajooba (Shashi Kapoor, 1991). Most people tend to dismiss this movie, but before you do, let me remind you that it has Amrish Puri at peak villainousness, a fight on flying carpets, a giant sentient monster made of metal, and a dolphin playing Amitabh Bachchan’s adopted mother.
Far more crackpot, in my opinion, is Salman Khan’s pet project Veer (Anil Sharma, 2010), a movie of such wondrous lunacy that orange jeans appear in the same time period as Victorian/Wild West hoop skirts.
The film that I’ve seen with the most similar tone to Sultanat is Rajput (Vijay Anand, 1982), which is equally earnest in its treatment of rights and wrongs while slightly more grounded in reality through geography and regional stereotypes. Rajput is also interested in exploring an old culture being forced by outside pressures to adapt to new ways; Sultanat has none of that, probably because its world is depicted in total isolation from any other cultures. Even when the film finally meets up with the two members of the younger generation living abroad (Karan Kapoor and Juhi Chawla, both of whom debuted in the film), there’s no mention of how videshi life has influenced them or whether they’ll have any problem learning the ways of Fictitioustan. In fact, the one outsider, Dharmendra’s second wife, converted and learned Urdu, apparently completely through her own volition. All the conflict is internal.
Sultanat and its shouty brethren are the slightly less respectable colleagues of “actual” historical epics like Sikandar, Mughal-e-Azam, and Ashoka. But somehow, the more imaginary the place and culture, the more fun the movie. The epic setting almost automatically cranks the dial to 11, and fictional status enables so much more freedom to entertain. Even sloppily made historical films usually have some lip service to basic facts, but there’s no need — and no expectation — in movies like Sultanat. Such stories give us a fix of palaces and horses and battles, conveniently managed however the writer wants. Ketchup-packet blood is thicker than history. So what if all these energies are being spent in sweeping you off to a place that never existed? Sometimes more is more.
In addition to writing about Indian films, Beth Watkins works in the world cultures museum of a big university in Illinois, has a dog, and likes to read and knit, both of which are hard to do while watching subtitled movies.