S Hussain Zaidi is a veteran in reporting and writing on real-life crime and gang-warfare in Mumbai, India. Many of his books have been adapted into Bollywood scripts, including a masterpiece of a movie called Black Friday, which centered on the chaotic fall-out of the 1993 Bombay explosions.
The film sets in the tumultuous year of 1982, when Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol) , on a reprimand posting at Nashik police training academy starts working with five “backbenchers,” Surve, Jadhav, Shukla, Varde and Aslam, with intelligence, loyalty, and a streak of sovereignty.
Zaidi wrote about the book at a time when Mumbai was plagued by underworld gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim, Iqbal Kaskar and Chhota Rajan, the batch of 1983 from the Police Training School (PTC) in Nashik-trained by the legendary Arvind Inamdar produced a group of prominent encounter specialists who have been credited with bringing back the rule of law in the city.
Famed even within this batch, trigger-happy senior police inspector Pradeep Sharma understood that to save the city from the clutches of the underworld, he would need to dilute rival gangs. Class of ’83 delves deep into the most famous (or infamous) encounters conducted by Sharma and his batch mats.
In the cinematic adaptation, produced by Shahrukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, the class of ’83, and its star cadet alumni, swiftly earn the reputation of being honest and hard-hitting. They become the nemesis of dishonest cops and greedy politicians (mostly CM Manohar Patkar (Anup Soni)), as easy cash and obscurity go hand-in-hand because hey after all even righteous cops are human too.
If you are familiar with Mumbai political circles you will be able to identify the thinly-cloaked references to real-life personalities and incidents making the narrative extremely tenacious and reasonable, distinctive to Zaidi’s writing.
There is a strong sense of practicality and a sense of time and place in the entire pace of the film congruent with the ochre-yellow shades of the Mumbai of that time.
The performances match up. Bobby Deal is stunning. This may still be his best yet. The ensemble cast is so perfectly cast that you really believe them to be those people. Joy Sengupta as DGP Raghav Desai, Vishwajeet Pradhan as a bull-throated instructor at the academy, and Anup Soni as the politician who knows how to play the game: all of these actors just shine in the consummation of their roles.
Class of ‘83 is a comprehensive film. Though we have seen umpteen gangster v cop movies this one does stand apart. Especially in a day and time when we tend to trust our cops a lot less due to the revelations during the BLM protests, this movie just makes us feel good about some honesty in uniform.
