Bandish Bandits: Too many conflicts spoil the show

Bandish Bandits is a series that wants to be about Indian classical music. It wants Gen X to know more about classical music and fall in love with it. Just like Tamanna, a pop star, and Radhe, a student of classical music, fall in love with each other. This is what they probably wanted it to be. At least, this is what I expected it to be. Except, the series becomes conflict-filled chaos.

Pandit Radhemohan Rathod, played by Naseeruddin Shah, opens the door and we’re into the world of music. He is someone who has no doubts about his worldview, who’s very firm in his stance. He is never open to change. And this nature of his affects the way his family functions. His grandson, Radhe (Ritwik Bhowmik), wants to be recognised as the favourite student of his grandfather. Upon recognising so, a sacred thread will be tied to his hand by his grandfather. And this conflict is revealed to us over dialogues at a dining table. This is when I started to get skeptical about the show.

Generally, dialogues in films are used as a device to move the narrative forward. Dialogues are just one of the means to move a narrative forward. It is not the only means to do so. And people don’t exactly say what they are thinking and feeling. These can be imbued in the film with certain nuances and subtexts and visual language. When the makers tend to lean towards dialogues to reveal the main conflict of the film/show, it’s a sign of lazy filmmaking or a sign that one lacks sensibilities towards the audio-visual medium.

This is just one of the problems I had with the show. The main drawback was introducing a new conflict in almost every episode. Usually, the principal characters of a film have a goal which they would want to achieve. And, the characters’ journey from where they are to achieving their goal becomes the film’s central plot. While doing so there are a few hurdles which they will have to cross. These few hurdles sometimes take the shape of a sub-plot. But, Bandish Bandits gets lost in introducing these hurdles. By introducing these new conflicts in almost every episode, the series primarily commits two mistakes. One, it looks like the makers lost track of the central plot. The show could have been done avoiding many of these conflicts. A few of them were so unnecessary. These in no way helped the central plot of the show. Secondly, the sense of satisfaction for the viewers decreases after the characters overcome a problem. And since we have no clear idea about the needs/goals of a character, we don’t root for them as much. This problem mainly began for me from the third episode.

With many conflicts come many other problems. Almost all conflicts are solved through dialogues. I guess it would be fun if somebody kept count on the number of times Radhe easily patches up with Tamanna (Shreya Chaudhary) just by saying, “But I love you Tamanna.” It’s just dialogues, dialogues and more dialogues. The lack of nuance and subtlety was painful to sit through.

The one element, however, that kept me going through each episode is the music. While the editing of the classical music performances was bad, the music and the songs are the winners of the series. There was a cut for almost every three seconds while a character was performing classical music. The editing pattern almost distracted me, while I should have been involved in the performance.

The songs in the series are the ones to look out for. All the artists, including Shankar Mahadevan, have done a terrific job in (probably) introducing Gen X to classical music. But I wouldn’t ask you to watch Bandish Bandits just for the music. I think, for this series, you’re better off with Prime Music than Prime Video.

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