Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar Wastes Its Lavish Potential

Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali is one of Hindi cinema’s best directors. His name is synonymous with sumptuous costumes, opulent production design, vivid female lead characters, expertly directed songs that function like short films, and soaring music. Actresses over the years have spoken with great admiration for the director’s stewardship over their most nuanced and multidimensional performances. So why does “Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar”—Netflix’s newest limited series, directed, scored, and partly written by Bhansali—range from aggressively mediocre to bafflingly bad?

The premise is not without promise: Based on an original concept by Moin Beg, “Heeramandi” takes place in the early 1940s in pre-Partition Lahore. The narrative features an ensemble cast of wealthy tawaifs (courtesans), their nawab (nobleman) patrons, local English policemen attempting to quash independence efforts, and revolutionaries intent on breaking free from British rule. Mallikajaan (Manisha Koirala) is the powerful huzoor (madame) of Shahi Mahal (Royal Palace), presiding over her richly appointed kingdom with the ruthlessness of a general and the style of an empress. Under her thumb are her daughters: talented singer and secret freedom-fighter Bibbojaan (Aditi Rao Hydari), aspiring writer Alamzeb (Sharmin Segal) who is resisting her mother’s attempts to force her tawaif debut, and the perpetually disgruntled Sanjeeda Sheikh (Waheeda). The cast also includes Tajdar Baloch (Taha Shah Badussha), a wealthy young nawab who abandons his post-Oxbridge law career to join the fight against the British; as expected, he and Alamzeb fall in love. Both life choices enrage his father Ashfaq (Ujjwal Chopra), whose plans to maintain his status and riches depend on steady alliances with Alistair Cartwright (Jason Shah), the local police commissioner, who wants to break Mallikajaan’s spirit. 

But an intriguing premise alone cannot provide the substance necessary for a successful eight-part prestige TV series. Perhaps more than any of Bhansali’s other films which depict tawaifs, or their modern iteration, sex workers (“Devdas,” “Saawariya,” “Gangubai Kathiawadi”), “Heeramandi” is far too paranoid about holding the audience’s attention—with songs that lack Bhansali’s usual directorial panache, production design, and costumes—to devote any time to developing its characters. For all the power Mallikajaan boasts of having, she and her daughters are repeatedly vilified, harmed, and shamed by the world around them. Gifted though they are, Koirala and Rao Hydari are wasted in roles that ostensibly seek to assert feminine power in a masculine world but are saddled with dialogue that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman-level screenwriting course. More importantly, the history of tawaifs is rooted in their very real authority as well-educated, land-owning women, whose lives relied on a kind of queering of traditional male-dominated power structures. “Heeramandi” completely elides this crucial aspect of courtesan life.

Another problem is Segal, who is Bhansali’s niece and the miscast of the decade as a supposedly wilful daughter, intent on a career as a poet. The actress is in possession of a single facial expression, so her face looks the same in moments of devastation and elation. There are scores of other Indian actresses better suited to the part, but Segal is the only one related to the director. Even the colonizers get a one-dimensional edit as cartoonishly venal men whose characterization is more reminiscent of men twirling their mustaches while tying women to railroad tracks than the far more nuanced portrayal of insecure, power-hungry British officers in a film like “Lagaan.”