Awarapan 2: The Unpredictable Ways Of The Indian Audience

Something feels almost significant about the success of Awarapan 2. In the history of Indian cinema, it may be unusual to find a sequel whose opening weekend has surpassed the entire box-office run of its predecessor—a film released nineteen years earlier.

Awarapan, directed by Mohit Suri, arrived in 2007, performed poorly at the box office, and seemed destined to be remembered mainly by those who happened to love it.

And yet here we are.

The explanation begins, naturally, with the songs. Awarapan may not have survived as a commercial success, but its music did.

“Toh Phir Aao” and “Tera Mera Rishta” acquired the peculiar immortality that Hindi-film songs sometimes enjoy. They escaped the film that contained them and began living independent lives.

Awarapan 2 brings both songs back in new versions, reopening a drawer in the collective memory. Their recall value alone seems capable of making the cash counter ring.

What makes Awarapan 2 more interesting, however, is the discrepancy between its commercial reception and its screenplay.

Awarapan, written by Shagufta Rafique and directed by Suri, had a comparatively sturdy dramatic architecture, even though its story was adapted, without official credit, from the South Korean film A Bittersweet Life.

Its emotional machinery was carefully assembled, where violence, guilt, redemption and doomed love converged into a persuasive dramatic equilibrium.

Awarapan 2, by contrast, often feels as though its screenplay—credited to Bilal Siddiqui, Vishesh Bhatt and Nitin Kakkar—has moved beyond treatment into a kind of narrative fluidity. Events arrive because the film needs them to, and motivations seem to follow the plot rather than propel it. And yet audiences have turned up.

This is where the familiar impulse to generalise about “the Indian audience” becomes interesting. We often like to think of audiences in neat categories: sophisticated or unsophisticated, nostalgic or discerning, driven by content or by stars.

When a film with a flimsy screenplay succeeds, it is easy to attribute the response to nostalgia or star power. But when a meticulously constructed film struggles, we may wonder whether audiences have simply not connected with it. But the reality is likely more complicated.

Both conclusions are convenient, and both are probably wrong.

Consider Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga. It had a poor opening but subsequently benefited from word of mouth. If audiences were simply looking for spectacle, familiarity or easily consumed stories, how do we explain that trajectory? And are the people who bought tickets for Awarapan 2 necessarily the same people who went to see Main Vaapas Aaunga?

There is no particularly satisfying answer.

The Indian audience is not single. It is an enormous, shifting collection of people whose cinematic desires can contradict one another from one Friday to the next, and sometimes within the same person.

Someone may watch a flimsy sequel for the pleasure of hearing a song associated with their youth and, a week later, recommend a film because its storytelling surprised them.

The same viewer who complains about formula may happily pay for it when the formula arrives carrying a familiar song, a familiar face, or a memory they didn’t realise they still possessed.

Perhaps this is what nostalgia really does. It does not necessarily persuade us that the past was better. It persuades us that the past belongs to us.

That may also explain the unpredictability of Indian cinema-going. Audiences do not always buy tickets for the film that exists.

Sometimes they buy tickets for the film they remember, the actor they once loved, the song that accompanied a particular period of their lives, or simply the possibility that those things might return.

Human beings rarely consume culture according to any consistent theory of taste. We contradict ourselves. We forget selectively and remember selectively, too. We can reject one film and embrace another that seems remarkably similar.

There is no reason to imagine Indian audiences behaving differently. If anything, the scale and diversity of Indian popular cinema only make these contradictions more visible. What one viewer dismisses as formula, another may experience as familiarity, comfort or even nostalgia.

So perhaps the question is not why Awarapan 2 succeeded despite its extremely weak screenplay. The more interesting question is what, exactly, audiences thought they were buying.

Perhaps audiences are responding not just to Awarapan 2, but to everything they remember about it.

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