Smartly written, slickly crafted and wonderfully acted, Guns & Gulaabs, created by Raj and DK, is a marvellously wacky crime drama that harks back to the 1990s and sees the darkly piquant side of men (and a couple of women) who derive perverse pleasure from murder, mayhem and meanness.
The deliriously spry Netflix series pans out in a twisted and toxic universe peopled by opium dealers, gun-toting gangsters, a vicious knife-wielding assassin with seven lives, an anti-narcotics officer with a troubling past that catches up with him and two diffident men with debilitating daddy issues.
The gulaabs referred to in the title and in the name of the small town in which the story is set are outnumbered in this amoral world where adults and schoolboys alike thrive on crossing the line. A 'line of control', however, runs through a local dhaba and separates it into demarcated and inviolable spaces for two warring gangs.
The handful of innocents who reside in Gulaabgunj, nestled in the hills and dotted with opium fields, are at the mercy of the two criminal cliques, one of which operates out of a place called Sherpur, 30 km away. They battle for control over the spoils of an illegal opium business that functions outside the purview of the cultivation of poppy under government licence.
Guns & Gulaabs starts off with shots of a poppy farm, a sequence of two schoolboys discussing the girls they are in love with, and a chase scene that ends with a killing in broad daylight. So, all three key components of the plot - opium, love and violence - are packed into the opening moments of the series.
Other secondary elements, including a rivalry between two school students for the class topper's badge, emerge as the plot thickens and culminates in a dizzyingly rollicking, action-packed finale - an episode that is numbered 7 and 8, runs nearly an hour and a half and has an intermission.
Everybody in Gulaabgunj and Sherpur has an ulterior motive and a self-serving plan. These nefarious plans change frequently as the crooked men chase or flee from others of their kind. As small-town noir meets 90s nostalgia in a landscape where the air is thick with intrigue, the soundtrack is laced with snatches Hindi film songs from three decades ago.
The man murdered at the beginning of Chapter 1 is Babu Tiger, trusted aide of Gulaabgunj crime lord Ganchi (Satish Kaushik) and estranged father of motorcycle mechanic Tipu (Rajkummar Rao). Ganchi is furious at losing a key gang member and plots a reprisal. Tipu, in contrast, is almost relieved that his father is dead.
Tipu is rid of his father. Jugnu (Adarsh Gourav) isn't. The latter is Ganchi's only son and reluctant successor to his father's empire. Narcotics bureau officer Arjun Varma (Dulquer Salmaan), who was a deputy commissioner of police in Delhi when a 60-crore scam (Bofors?) rocked the nation, is transferred to Gulaabgunj with a brief to clean up the place.
A hired killer, Atmaram (Gulshan Devaiah), working for the Sherpur gang led by Nabeed (Nilesh Divekar), Ganchi's former protégé, is on the prowl armed with a slasher. Nobody in Ganchi's gang is safe as long as Atmaram - his name has Chaar Cut prefixed to it because of the manner in which he kills - is out and about.
Arjun Verma does not arrive in this crime hotspot a day too soon. Ganchi has just swung a deal with Sukanto (Rajatava Dutta), representing a Calcutta drug cartel. He has a month to acquire seven times the amount of opium that he usually produces.
It is this deal and its shifting dynamics that are at the centre of Guns & Gulaabs. The farmers, the gangsters and the buyers go into overdrive to make sure that Gulaabgunj produces the requisite amount of refined opium for the Calcutta drug mafia. Arjun and his department swing into action to prevent the supply.
Alliances are forged, the police officer's relationship with his wife Madhu (Pooja A. Gor) drifts to the brink when a past liaison Yamini (Shreya Dhanwanthary) returns to haunt him, and matters of the heart come to the fore in uneasy circumstances. Tipu writes a love letter to school teacher Lekha (TJ Bhanu 'Parvati Murty') and it boomerangs on him.
Nobody in Gulaabgunj appears to be high on opium, but whisky, which flows free in Ganchi's den, turns risky at one point, triggers a crisis and pulls a reluctant Jugnu, Chhota Ganchi, into the thick of the action. Talking of reluctance, Tipu, too, is an unwilling inheritor of his father's dodgy legacy although he has two unintended kills to his credit and with his spanner at that. The deed earns him the sobriquet of Paana Tipu.
If Tipu does not remember his father fondly, it is not only because the dreaded gangster left his mother for another woman. Baap ajeeb qism ka jantu hota hai (Fathers are strange creatures), he says in one scene. For Jugnu, the struggle with his inheritance is not so much about hating his father and growing out of his shadow as about earning his old man's validation. I want to make dad proud, he says.
Woven into the narrative and visual design of Guns & Gulaabs is a sustained tribute to the early 1990s, and the Hindi cinema and music of the decade in particular. The plot and the soundtrack are littered with sounds, songs and references of the era. The series is a popular culture geek's delight.
The names of the characters reflect an period that predates the birth of Rahul and Raj on the big screen - Gangaram, Lalkishan, Chandralekha, Mahendra, Atmaram... The titles of several of the chapters are drawn from songs/films of the 1980s and 1990s - Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, Do Dil Mil Rahe Hain and Raat Baaki.... One chapter title takes off from a Bryan Adams number.
Not just that, the series has a love ditty (composed by Aman Pant, who produces a delightfully retro background score) in the voice of Kumar Sanu. Among other things, the series designs the Satish Kaushik credit on a calendar.
And, not to forget, there's a mention of the cult kung-fu film, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which Tipu watches with his best friend Suneel (Goutam Sharma, who also plays one of Suneel's two twins, with his real-life twin Gourav Sharma portraying the other).
Guns & Gulaabs is studded with a quartet of wonderful performances from Rajkummar Rao, Dulquer Salmaan, Gulshan Devaiah and Adarsh Gourav. The larger cast of actors is no less impactful, with TJ Bhanu shining the brightest in a male-dominated series that touches upon the theme of gender and notions of masculinity in surprising ways. Pooja A. Gor and Shreya Dhanwanthary have much less to do, but they, too, make their presence felt. Vipin Sharma as Ganchi's righthand man Mahendra is solid.
Guns & Gulaabs watchable all the way, is a magnificent combination of stylistic elan and storytelling chutzpah.
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Rajkumar Rao, Dulquer Salmaan, Adarsh Gourav, Gulshan Devaiah