The Pretty, Posh, ’Woke’ Politics of ‘Made in Heaven’ Vs the B-Grade, Melodramatic Scream of ‘Taali’

Superficially, Made In Heaven 2 and Taali are not really comparable. One is a series beset by an obsessive disorder requiring branded luxury all the time, while the other is decidedly B-grade, loud, formulaic and lives in grimy narrow lanes of bastis with transgender women who clap hard.

But in some significant ways, the two series are similar, especially in their political intent.

Both are based on the lives of real people — Taali entirely and specifically on the life and struggles of transgender activist Shreegauri Sawant aka Gauri Sawant, and Made In Heaven on the lives of many — dark-skinned girls who face life-long derision, women who marry abusive men, women who are forced to accept their husbands’ second wives, women choosing to be single mothers, lesbian couples who want their parents’ blessings, transgender women looking for love and gay men seeking acceptance of the mother they adore.

Both series are earnest in their attempt to be inclusive, in mainstreaming gays, lesbians, transgenders, and those young, aspirational men and women who come from claustrophobic homes carrying big dreams of “making it”.

But since both are Bollywood products, a cisgender actress plays a transgender character in Taali, and in Made in Heaven an upper caste actress (Radhika Apte) plays a Dalit activist.

Made In Heaven has a stellar cast on the screen and behind the camera. It’s written by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti and Alankrita Shrivastava. And in season 2, the show’s seven episodes are assigned to accomplished directors — one by Nitya Mehra, two by Alankrita Shrivastava, two by Neeraj Ghaywan, and two by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. 

Taali is made by Marathi director Ravi Jadhav whose 2011 film, Balgandharva, on the life of a Marathi singer and actor, won three National awards. 

In Made In Heaven, the leading stars are Sobhita Dhulipala (who plays Tara Khanna) and Arjun Mathur, who is her business partner and bestie, Karan Mehra.

In Taali, Sushmita Sen leads an ensemble of talented actors, including Krutika Deo who plays the young Gauri Sawant.

Apart from a starry ensemble of actors who appear for weddings, Made In Heaven’s recurring cast includes Kalki Kochelin who plays Faiza Naqvi, the woman Tara’s husband, Adil Khanna (played by Jim Sarbh) is in love with. Then there’s the staff at the wedding planning company — Kabir (Shashank Arora) the videographer, Jazz Kaur (Shivani Raghuvansi) the rookie, and two new entries — Bulbul Jauhri (Mona Singh), an unwanted bhenji partner in the company, and Meher Chaudhary (Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju), a new, expensive hire.

The Prime series tackles several issues around all sorts of weddings — there’s a nikah, a middle-aged couple finds love while preparing for their children’s wedding, a Bollywood destination wedding, a lesbian commitment ceremony, a single mother’s self-affirmation at the altar and the series’ most talked about episode, the Buddhist wedding of a Dalit writer.  

Through the show’s seven episodes run several strands about the lives of the wedding planners. There’s Tara’s divorce and alimony negotiations, Jazz’s soft feelings for Kabir, Kabir’s class bias, Karan Mehra’s broken relationship with his dying mother, Bulbul’s struggle to be a good mother and an honest woman at the same time, and Meher’s encounters with violence, prejudice and degrading sex. These involve twosomes, drugs, a threesome, divorce and deaths, endings and beginnings, Bulgari, Sabyasachi, grand parties, pregnancies, violence and abuse of all kinds.

I enjoyed watching Made In Heaven 2. Its extravagant, straight-out-of-glossies luxury was seductive. And the show’s main characters are written nicely with dark shades of grey, especially Tara and Karan. I was invested in them as they spiral out and struggle to find themselves.

Made In Heaven takes up powerful issues. But while the ones encased in the lives of the wedding planners are nicely plotted, the one-issue-per-shaadi episodes are written, plotted and directed in a dull way. Instead of using the unique physical and emotional experience of each one, most have similar plot lines with similar moments of highs and lows. 

In episodes where the writing is better, it shows. Like the deliciously entertaining Bollywood wedding, or the powerful episode about the second marriage of a Muslim man while his wife tries to make space for the new wife, and the Buddhist wedding of the Dalit writer-activist is sublime in ways I can’t even articulate.

But the episode about a lesbian couple is absolutely flat with terrible acting, and the show’s final episode about a young, pregnant woman promising to honor and cherish herself is bizarrely vacuous.

Made In Heaven’s problem is its singular devotion to keeping all things gorgeous and beautiful all the time. 

In its second season, Made In Heaven has moved its office to old Delhi and tries to use Mona Singh and Jazz to inject some normalcy and reality into its posh but antiseptic upper-class world. It’s permanent residence, though, is in La La Land and all its politically-correct statements and posturing are set to the beats of an orchestra called The Echo Chamber.  

Made In Heaven ventures out of its cozy bubble on stilettos to a world where there’s prejudice and injustice. There, it rolls its pretty, kohled eyes at every intolerance and wrong, cheers all demands for rights, and clinks champagne glasses when battles are won. Then it retires, exhausted from its own activism, to lounge on its silky privilege in the backwaters of plush mansions.

This gives an artificial undertone to its politics, which is “woke” but self-involved because there’s very little engagement and authenticity. 

This is apparent in most of its episodes, including the one about a supposedly dark-skinned girl, and the one about a battered woman. Care has been taken to ensure hideous realities don’t spoil the pretty lehengas, the gorgeous flower arrangements and diya-lit piety. All dulhans must glow, no matter how traumatized, to compliment the decor and brands strewn all around.

This self-involvement is also on display in the way the series’ creators, writers and producers have taken some biographical details and events from the life of Dalit activist and author Yashica Dutt to enliven their Dalit character, but did not bother to give her credit. 

As they have clarified, they took what they wanted from an expansive buffet of Dalit issues and accomplishments, and since it was all done for the greater good, no demand is justified and everyone should just cheer them and get on.

Apart from a bad aftertaste, only three things from Made In Heaven have stayed with me: Diya Mirza’s performance as a traumatized and helpless Muslim wife, Haldar’s Meher and Mona Singh’s Bulbul, who grounds the series.

Haldar, who underwent gender confirmation surgery, is Karnataka’s first transgender doctor. She plays Meher with self-assurance that’s affecting, but also feels like a protective cloak she’s learned to wrap herself in after having to deal with questions and constant challenges to who she is. 

Taali on the other hand embraces all that is ugly, tacky and hirsute about the life of a transgender woman.

There’s an honesty with which it tells the story of Gauri Sawant, a transgender woman who was one of the petitioners in the famous NALSA Vs Union of India case demanding that transgender people be recognized as the third gender.

Sawant’s journey to that moment plays out in a flashback after she is attacked at the Supreme Court while waiting for the judgment to be pronounced.

The series’ story is simple. 

A school-going boy, son of a police officer father and a caring mother, is uneasy in his body and struggles to be who he wants to be. But his father won’t have it, so he runs away from home and finds acceptance in the Kinnar community. 

There we see Bahuchara Mata, patron devi of the trans women community. A version of Shakti seated on a rooster, Bahuchara Mata’s is a fascinating story involving some bloody mayhem, a sacrifice, a shraap, a vardan and a legend about roosters bursting out of anti-Indian stomachs to defeat Allauddin Khalji. 

As Gauri Sawant grows up and comes into her own, her father performs her antim sanskar. So Gauri creates her own, separate world. She makes friends and alliances with women who beg for money on traffic signals, are sex workers and continue to use taali as a way to celebrate but also to communicate rage.

Gauri, who lives in a Bombay basti, deals with routine violence against trans women, rescues a young girl who is being sold to a brothel and adopts her. She also takes up a teaching job in a school, sets up an NGO and fights for the right of transgender women to adopt.

Sushmita Sen is not a great actress. But in her second inning on OTT, she has gotten much better. She has a powerful screen presence and has learned to play with silence, even though she sometimes makes it all too heavy and more about herself and her performance than the story and the character. 

In Taali, she often plays transgender activist Gauri Sawant as if every sentence she is uttering is a truth bomb. At times I was irritated with her style of talking, as if she alone holds the answers to life’s many mysteries. But there’s a warmth about Sen and her certitude is inspiring and engulfing. 

From under Gauri’s heavy concealer, an adamant green-grey stubble is always visible. Sen’s Gauri also has sideburns which, together with her big red bindi, shapely eyebrows and Maharashtrian cotton sarees, create a powerful image. And when she has a sex change operation, there’s a lot of pain and a urine bag.

Instead of selling a beautified version of transgender women, Taali is bold enough to show how it often is, mainstreaming not an airbrushed fantasy but reality.

These aesthetics don’t just ring true, they shatter our hard-wired notions of what a woman is and how she/they should look. 

By the end of the series, I was rooting for Gauri and other transgender women as they sat in protest, demanding that a hospital treat them as humans. 

In the show’s last episode, where Sen seems to be channeling a raging, feminine power from within as she fights for the most basic human right, she single-handedly raises the tempo and emotional quotient with her bravura performance that is both chilling and humbling.

Director Ravi Jadhav’s Taali is totally B-grade in its writing, acting, dialogue-baazi and art direction. It has cliched, hammy scenes, but its core is sincere.

That’s why, perhaps, many things from Taali have stayed with me, especially the realization of what it means for transgender women to have absolutely no support from families, the government or people, and being forced to, as a last resort, weaponize and use those very bodies, the ones that pitted them against the binary world, to demand the right to be treated as humans.  

There’s a unique power in Indian B-grade melodramas and Taali uses that to its advantage. This doesn’t just make its story, messaging and politics accessible, but also gives the show transformative power.

Watch Taali. It’s streaming on JioCinema.