ANURAG KASHYAP’S HOUSE LOOKED LIKE SOMEONE HAD spent a lifetime collecting stories and then stopped worrying about where to keep them. Parcels sat in corners. Books leaned into DVDs. Films rested on top of novels. The first DVD I noticed was Hitler’s Hollywood (2017). Beside it sat Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. One is about propaganda and power. The other is about intimacy and what happens when people stay with one another long enough to change. I stared at the pairing for a second longer than necessary because it struck me that those are also the two forces constantly wrestling in Kashyap’s films: power and intimacy, violence and tenderness, men and the people who survive them.
Before the interview began, he offered me benne dosa from Rameshwaram Café. I told him I thought Rameshwaram was wildly overrated, which is probably an insane thing to say within ten minutes of meeting Anurag Kashyap. He laughed immediately. That relaxed me more than anything else. Because for all the mythology around him—the enfant terrible of Hindi cinema, the filmmaker who gave us gangsters, addicts, drifters and deeply damaged men in expensive leather jackets—Kashyap is also, as it turns out, a man offering you dosa in his living room while talking about movies. And perhaps that has always been his real subject too: ordinary men and the extraordinary messes they make.
Every generation of women I know has a story about men who could not say what they felt. Every generation of men I know has a story about never being taught how. Somewhere in the distance between those two stories lives Bandar, Anurag Kashyap’s latest film starring Bobby Deol—a film that seems less interested in asking whether a man is guilty or innocent and more interested in asking a question far messier: what happens when the world changes faster than men do? Indian masculinity is in the middle of a public reckoning. Men are being watched differently now—by women, by younger generations, by therapists, by social media and, increasingly, by themselves. The old rules have not disappeared entirely; they have simply stopped working. Masculinity, for perhaps the first time in modern India, is being audited in public.
Kashyap understands this transition because he belongs to the generation caught in its middle. “Bobby in Bandar plays a man from my generation,” he tells me. “We were never taught to say no.” It is a startling sentence because it contains both confession and critique. Men have historically been taught many things: ambition, stoicism, provision, competition, endurance. Emotional literacy rarely made the syllabus. “We only in our fifties understand what ghosting means,” he continues. “Our kids and therapists have taught us to have conversations instead of avoiding uncomfortable closures.” There is something almost tragic about that admission. Women have long been expected to become fluent in male behaviour as a survival skill. Men are only now being asked to become fluent in women’s experiences. Accountability arrived before emotional education did, and the gap between those two things is where much contemporary confusion lives.
The hardest men to talk about are rarely monsters. The difficult men are often decent in ways that matter and damaging in ways that matter more. Every woman I know has, at some point, loved a man who genuinely believed himself to be kind while leaving behind tremendous hurt. Bandar seems interested in precisely this kind of man: someone shaped by an older emotional order suddenly finding himself judged by a newer one. “Our dating days were very different,” Kashyap says. “It meant commitment. Dating apps are a very late phenomenon.” The sentence is less nostalgic than anthropology because intimacy itself has changed. Technology changed it, feminism changed it, language changed it. Men today are being asked to articulate feelings their fathers were rewarded for suppressing.
This tension has animated Kashyap’s cinema for nearly three decades. Across Dev.D (2009), Ugly (2013), Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and now Bandar, his men repeatedly mistake possession for love, anger for honesty and silence for dignity. They are impulsive, insecure, yearning and frequently incapable of understanding the damage they cause. Ask Kashyap why he keeps returning to these men and the answer comes instantly: “Because I come from Uttar Pradesh. I’ve seen my men from UP. And my men are problematic.” There is no defensiveness in the statement. Geography shapes masculinity as surely as family does. Boys inherit scripts long before they inherit language for questioning them. Patriarchy does not only harm women. It also produces men who are often underprepared for intimacy and overprepared for authority.
Then comes the sentence that may explain his entire filmography better than any film school essay ever could. “I bring my men from my world, but I bring my women from their world.” His men come from lived experience; his women come from listening—to daughters, partners, feminism and changing realities. “My daughter is such a strong voice of feminism,” he says. “She teaches me new things every day.” There is something deeply moving about watching a filmmaker who has spent three decades chronicling men admit that his education on gender still continues. Masculinity likes to imagine itself as complete because life has a habit of proving otherwise. Every generation rewrites manhood, some men adapt quickly, others spend decades translating themselves.
This may be why the women in Kashyap’s films often possess greater clarity than the men surrounding them. “My wife, Shubhra, they are very strong people,” he says, speaking of the women in his life. “If the women in my life were not there…” He trails off before laughing: “They are all assholes. From UP.” The joke lands because every joke contains an autobiography. Men are often socialised by other men and corrected by women. Much of modern masculinity feels like an overdue education. Perhaps this is why younger generations speak so easily about therapy, consent and boundaries while older generations still fumble for vocabulary. Emotional intelligence has become one of the few forms of labour women are increasingly unwilling to perform on behalf of men.
Kashyap’s films have never looked away from this discomfort. “The most misogynist character I’ve written is Sardar Khan,” he says, referring to the ruthless gangster and patriarch at the centre of Gangs of Wasseypur. “He’s so loved.” The filmmaker has written some of Hindi cinema’s most magnetic men, but their allure has of ten eclipsed the damage they leave behind. “Dev D, the character, is so f**king misogynist,” he adds. Yet somehow, charisma has always proved more memorable than accountability.
He grows frustrated with censorship that confuses representation with endorsement. “How can I show patriarchy and misogyny if I don’t show a woman being subjected to it?” he asks. “If I don’t show it in a film, how will I tell someone what you’re doing?” Art has always struggled with this contradiction: depicting violence without glorifying it, exposing systems without reproducing them. “India is a misogynist country,” he says bluntly. “It’s a patriarchal country.” Cinema, in his view, holds up a mirror. People often become angry with mirrors because they reveal too much. Men especially are unaccustomed to seeing themselves through the eyes of those expected to accommodate them.
“Then you can see a man in his nakedness,” Kashyap says, and perhaps there is no better description of his work than that. Nakedness here has little to do with vulnerability as performance and everything to do with exposure. Strip away status, power, self-image and inherited scripts, and what remains? His films repeatedly ask this question. The answer is rarely flattering and frequently human. Bandar appears to continue that tradition at a moment when masculinity itself feels caught between generations: one raised to endure silently, another raised to speak. We know these men. Many of us have loved them. Some of us have been raised by them. A few of us may even be them.
To read more stories from Esquire India's July 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.