Why Parody Is A Legit Art Form
The Reema Kagti film is another reminder that often, spoofing is the first step towards creative self-actualisation
Watching Shaikh Nasir’s ragtag crew of small-town mill workers, shopkeepers and unemployed writers band together to make unironically funny spoofs of Bollywood and Hollywood classics in Superboys of Malegaon, I was reminded of the time I embarked upon a similar escapade in my own dazed and confused adolescence. It was a comic strip—my own subversive spoof of Batman: an anthropomorphic lion whose daily misadventures in a nondescript suburban-adjacent neighbourhood were an exercise in self-inflicted embarrassment.
I’d want to keep the name of this weird lion protagonist to myself out of allegiance to my 15-year-old self. But puncturing the sombre self-seriousness of his vigilante endeavours with humiliating plot resolutions, I now realise, must have been an attempt to address and make light of the awkwardness of my teens.
The shoestring-budget spoofs that the eponymous superboys of the dusty textile town in Maharashtra started out making in the ’90s, hit closer home when I watched Faiza Ahmad Khan’s superb preceding documentary film. Devoid of the melodrama that comes with fictionalising the subject matter of a documentary, Supermen of Malegaon (2008) captured the spirited creative enterprise of a generation of young men growing up to find themselves drawn unretractably towards fame, creative fulfilment and simply leading the charge.
It’s pretty much the same thing that’s now manifested on the smallest screen in our palms. Be it the ‘cringe’ content wave of the pre-pandemic years before TikTok was banned, or the ubiquitous, overwhelming flood of short videos on Instagram and YouTube Shorts in our midst now—it’s a manifestation of the inherent consumer desire to create. Of course, the link between creativity, engagement and quick profit is closer and less organic than the one the Malegaon industry discovered.
What Malegaon’s supermen achieved purely as artists and technicians, was a true realisation of the democratisation of art. In Khan’s documentary, the kind of labour, and sheer force of will, that Shaikh and co. put into their ambition is evident through the grime and sweat, the heat and dust that the camera succeeds in capturing. The industrious bricolage—from chroma screens and moving scaffolds to bicycle-assisted dolly shots—was a helpless cry into the universe (we see Nasir and his younger brother argue about the latter following into his brother’s footsteps—because beneath the attention and fame, the vocation admittedly took away more than it paid). A helpless cry into the universe that they needed to be seen.
The combination of ambition and the lack of resources delivers interesting results. In many ways, the Malegaon films also reminded me of my halcyon college days when all I seemed to need to adapt Shakespeare was a spoofer imagination and a willing bunch of aspiring thespians. The optimism for and vigour towards telling a story despite access to very basic modes of production made us, and indeed, the superboys of Malegaon, even more devoted to our art. We were consumed by the pursuit.
It’s hard, ultimately, to conclude the level of self-awareness that the initial spate of TikTok sketches possessed. Whether their rawness was a product of a preordained cringe culture, one doesn’t quite know. But in the case of the Malegaon crew, it’s now evident that in their case—the so-called awkward humour, shoddy production value and substandard storytelling are all intentional outcomes. For most of their corpus, Nasir and his writer, the baritoned Farogh Jafri, were only borrowing the context of universally understood stories—and subverting them with a lens, idiom and slapstickness that their audience was readily wont to accept. Joy, often in its crudest form, is a universal emotion, especially because of the immediacy that it possesses, and Malegaon was on to it.
The actual Jafri, in the Khan documentary, observes with characteristic poetic melancholia that he had tried unsuccessfully all his life to bridge the 300-kilometre distance between Malegaon and Mumbai, the heart of the mainstream Hindi film industry. At another juncture in Supermen of Malegaon, he notes that he had immersed himself into writing for these films to a point of no return. Indeed, for most of Malegaon superboys, their aspirations for fame and the desire to see themselves on the big screen was consumptive. They pooled money, brought in whatever technical knowhow they could muster with their budgets, and showed up to shoot every day, often at the cost of their own livelihood. If that’s not genuine engagement with the creative process, I don’t know what is. The people of Malegaon found their own way to engage with and reinterpret a school of cinema whose concerns were not sufficiently their own. And the instrument of this democratisation was, undoubtedly, parody.
From Batrachomyomachia’s lampooning of The Iliad to Don Quixote’s dismantling of chivalric romance, from Gulliver’s Travels’ satirical takedown of human folly to Monty Python’s absurdist deconstructions of history and mythology, parody has long been a tool for both critique and reinvention. These works were not merely derivative humour but deliberate acts of subversion, created with intellectual precision to expose the flaws, pretensions or excesses of their subjects.
This conscious intent sets them apart from Malegaon’s films, which, while undeniably inventive, emerge from a different impulse—one of adaptation rather than direct critique. Malegaon’s spoofs are less about dismantling cinema’s tropes and more about reclaiming them, reshaping grand narratives into something local, accessible and personal. If the great literary parodies sought to deconstruct, Malegaon’s filmmakers parodied to belong.