Wild, wild East

Sherni deals with the man-animal conflict, and a woman forest service officer’s journey to find her way through a male-dominated workplace

When director Amit Masurkar and team began researching for Sherni, they learnt that in conservation circles, the tiger is the flagship species. If you conserve the tiger, the ecosystem and other minor species that inhabit it, are safeguarded. It's how the focus on conserving the tiger became the thrust of the movie.

The film directed by Masurkar, written by Aastha Tiku, stars Vidya Balan in the lead role, and releases on Amazon Prime Video this week. It tackles the complex human-animal conflict. Balan plays an Indian Forest Services officer, who is assigned with the job of finding a solution to a man-eating tigress, who has caused havoc among the villagers and forest officials alike. Masurkar, best known for directing the National award-winning film Newton, says there was a four-pronged process behind making the movie. "Firstly, we wanted to set the philosophy in place. Conservation is a community activity that needs effort by a team. It's what Vidya's character is assigned to manage," he says. Addressing the issue of underlying patriarchy that Balan's character fights while doing her job, the film looks at how she puts systems in place when she realises that a transfer may be imminent. "Second, we had to create the character, which we did after detailed meetings with forest officials. Third was about getting the plot right, which was the easiest bit. And last was to address the little details, which we took care of as we filmed and the actors brought
their own little something to their roles."

Amit Masurkar is also the director of Rajkumar Rao starrer Newton

It is here that Masurkar says Balan's character, whom he chose to name Vidya, was shaped greatly by the actor herself. "She is the strong and silent type, who reacts less, and acts more," Balan says of Vidya, "I met a lot of officers who offered me an insight into their life, how they manage to survive in the jungle for years at a stretch. The hard bit about playing her was that here was a character who is a woman of few words. She is self-assured without making a show of it. There were times I wanted to react, but Amit would say, lesser is better. I actually felt challenged."

To challenge Balan, who has taken on every possible role in her career like a chameleon, is hard. Her last movie was Shakuntala Devi, where she played the famed mathematician known as the "human computer" pat down to the finest detail. "I think the character emerged from her organically. Vidya lives by the sea, and is connected to nature in some way. She dug deep into herself to find that love. And as we lived in the jungle while filming, she would take off on long walks. When you are in the forest, you start listening more, start smelling, using all your senses - you have to be more aware of everything. So, she used all of that."

On the face of it, the movie is about conservation, but the film also addresses the subtle and overt misogyny that women in senior positions face at work. Though Balan says the movie is not trying to preach, she does say that the tag line "Jungle kitna bhi ghana kyun na ho, sherni apna raasta dhoond hi leti hai" speaks to all women. "They could be CEOs, journalists, actors - I think we are all navigating our way through our professions, one step at a time, in this jungle of patriarchy, of which we are perpetrators too. We don't realise it. I think people will take away various things from the movie, and this could be one of them," Balan explains.

Unlike stars who have expressed disappointment at their films not being able to release in theatres during the pandemic, this team is happy that Sherni is getting an OTT release. "It's going to release in 240 countries, and because the issue of conservation is universal, it will find an audience everywhere," hopes Balan. They also say they don't want to saddle the watcher with the hope that the film will change circumstances and their point of view dramatically. "We just want people to watch it, get entertained. It's a layered film; you can watch it a couple of times," says Masurkar.

Balan says that if she had to give audiences a reason to watch Sherni, she would tell them how her mother reacted to it. "My mother said it was a breath of fresh air; it made her feel like she was out in the open again. And that's a plus."