Literarily Speaking : DAREDEVIL MUSTHAFA (2023) – Life and times in Abachuru College

The prolific Kannada writer, K. P. Poornachandra Tejaswi, was adored by his fans for his short stories, novellas, novels and essays, and bestowed the acronym ‘Poochante’. His writing has been adapted to stage and screen extensively, and the latest of these adaptations is Shashank Soghal’s 2023 movie, Daredevil Musthafa, admirably made as a fully crowdfunded effort.

The short story is part of Tejaswi’s collection of stories called Abachurina Post Office. Daredevil Musthafa narrates how the students, lecturers, and staff in a college in Abachuru are forced to confront their prejudices about the sole Muslim student in their midst.

In an ingenious move to convey the idea of a collective voice, Tejaswi’s short story is narrated in first person plural by a group of students from Abachuru College. Even before the new student called Jamal Abdul Musthafa Hussain turns up, speculations are rife about his ‘Muslimness’. When Musthafa finally arrives, he turns out to be far different from their speculations, more like them than they would be willing to admit.

Iyengari and his friends are protagonists, just like Musthafa. He mirrors them in his competitiveness and hunger to earn accolades, but they resent this new entrant for disrupting the social status quo of the college. Their petty squabbles escalate and it is Musthafa’s misstep that leads to a resolution in the short story.

In Soghal’s movie, set in the 1970s, the collective voice of the students has been retained, but the focus is on Ramanuja Iyengari (Aditya Ashree), who has been given a backstory that explains his prejudice against Muslims. Along with Kumara (Aashith), Shankara (Abhay), Pulikeshi (Supreeth Bharadwaj) and Seena (Srivatsa), Iyengari hatches several futile plots to get Musthafa (Shishir Baikady) inconvenienced, punished or suspended. For instance, Iyengari flaunts his religious and caste symbols but has a problem with Musthafa's fez blocking his view of the blackboard. This is resolved in a commonsensical manner by the lecturer and the principal in both the story and the movie.

While Musthafa is immune to the stares he receives and the speculations about him, it is the inadvertent damage to his fez during a scuffle among students that sets him off, and he retaliates by playing a prank on Iyengari. While the short story ends with Musthafa apologising to Iyengari for the prank, in the movie, it ends up hurting Iyengari’s pride and his religious sensibilities. This escalates to a series of incidents including a bet to win a cricket match to reclaim the school’s cricket kit lost by Iyengari and his friends in a previous bet to Sulthankeri Usman (Poornachandra Mysuru). Usman, as a character, shows a mirror to the boys’ ineptitude in dealing with the real world outside their college. In the end, does Iyengari’s hatred for Musthafa get resolved, or does it cost them the cricket match that has the college’s reputation at stake?

EXPANDED FILM STORY

Adapting a short story of a few pages to a nearly 3-hour college drama is no mean feat, and Soghal pulls off an ingenious adaptation of a beloved story, even if it feels a trifle too long. Along with Raghavendra Mayakonda and Anantha Shandreya, Soghal builds on Tejaswi’s story by adding new characters and situations while seamlessly retaining the witticism and humanism that are an essential part of Tejaswi’s work. The cricket match introduced by them into the story is a device used extensively in Indian cinema to resolve the primary conflict in the story, but here, it feels apt and appropriate to the story.

The emphasis of the writers has been to stay true to this story by Tejaswi. It could be argued that the women in the story needed more of a voice. Ramaamani (Prerana Gowda), who is not part of the original story, is portrayed as a young woman of some privilege studying with Musthafa and sharing a great camaraderie with him. However, her story remains in some ways unresolved by the end of the movie. Olivia Shobha Kumari or OSK (Chaithra Shetty) is a lecturer who is given to bursting into tears, and is ineffective in fending off the unwarranted advances of the Kannada lecturer Sarpabhushana (Nagabhushana). But her character arc gets some progression when her differences with the Physical Education Instructor, Kusumakar (Vijay Shobharaj Pavoor) are settled. In some ways, the absentee character of Mahalakshmi is a more prominent influence on the storyline than all the other women characters.

But the feather in the director’s cap is that the movie feels like a natural extension of Tejaswi’s short story. It doesn’t suffer qualitatively in any way as a crowdfunded effort. While there have been other fine adaptations of Poochante’s stories, his legacy could not have had a better tribute in recent times than Shashank Soghal’s Daredevil Musthafa.

You can watch Daredevil Mushtafa here. 

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay) (Written by Saritha Rao Rayachoti)