Episode 02
Ramanuj, Before Anuj — Anuj Sharma
A companion essay to the two episodes recorded with Anuj Sharma — Padma Shri, actor, UNICEF Celebrity Advocate, singer, MLA Dharsiwa.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube
Watch Part 2 on YouTube
The chair next to him on our set was empty. That is the whole premise of The Second Seat. There is the guest's chair, and there is the chair beside it, kept open for the person who shaped them. The absence is the point. When I asked Anuj Sharma who occupies that seat in his life, he did not pause.
The Sunday Times had put him in the same paragraph as MGR, NTR, and Mohanlal on the list it calls Kings of the Provinces. He had landed in Hyderabad for the first time in his life that morning. None of that came out in the answer. His mother did.
We recorded four hours that day and cut them into two episodes. The first I framed around the janpratinidhi, the elected representative who acts, writes, sings, and directs as a parallel life. The second I framed around something simpler. Apna aadmi, not superstar. The man before the title.
What follows here is the third frame, the one that could not sit inside either episode. The research that walked beside me into the studio and walked back out with me. The questions I held in reserve because they belonged to the page, not the camera.
To take Anuj Sharma seriously is to refuse the easy framings. He is not the unsung hero from a small place. He is not the Bollywood reject who built his own kingdom. The celebrity politician tag fits him even less. He is something more specific and more interesting. He is a man who decided, deliberately and early, that the seat beside him would always be filled before the seat in front of him. The whole shape of his life follows from that decision.
Bhatapara, 1965 to 2000
Bhatapara is a small kasba in Raipur district. Most of India does not know it exists. It enters this story twice, and the second time it enters louder than the first.
In April 1965, the first Chhattisgarhi film, Kahi Debe Sandesh, was released in Durg and Bhatapara. Raipur came months later, after the controversy had cooled. The film was about an inter-caste love between a Scheduled Caste boy and a Brahmin girl. Brahmin groups had demanded a ban. There were threats to torch theatres on fire. The film was rescued from suppression by Indira Gandhi, who watched it and said it promoted national integration.
The first time Chhattisgarhi cinema appeared on a screen, it appeared as a caste question, and it appeared first in a town that most of India had never heard of. Mohammad Rafi had sung for it. The national voice walked into the regional language early. Then Chhattisgarhi cinema went almost completely quiet for the next three decades. Two films between 1965 and 2000.
Eleven years after Kahi Debe Sandesh, in May 1976, Ramanuj Sharma was born in that town.
When his debut film, Mor Chhaihan Bhuiyan, released on the twenty-seventh of October, 2000, exactly five days before Chhattisgarh became the country's twenty-sixth state, it walked into an almost empty room. The room had been emptied by an entire ecosystem that had decided Chhattisgarhi cinema was un-viable commercially and un-serious culturally.
The film opened with three prints, in Raipur, Durg, and Bilaspur. Demand pushed the producer to add twelve more after release. Distributors had refused before release, because nobody trusted a Chhattisgarhi film to run. Twenty scenes and a song were cut during the shoot itself because the budget did not stretch. The director's brother, Tinkoo, sang playback because a singer could not be afforded. Transporters in surrounding villages made small economies out of ferrying audiences to the nearest theatre. The film ran in one cinema hall for twenty-seven consecutive weeks.
Anuj at that point had a marketing job at Godrej. He took twenty days of leave to shoot the film. He arrived at his own premiere half an hour late. The hall was already dark. The film was already running. He found a seat at the back. When his on-screen entry happened a few minutes later, the theatre roared. He thought he had done something wrong on screen.
He left the theatre as a different category of person from the one who had walked in.
He drew the geography of Chhattisgarh for me without prompting on tape. Three regions, three colours.
He did not say it like a tour guide. He said it like a man who has memorised the mineral logic of his state and knows it cannot be separated from its cinematic logic. The white belt was where the theatres clustered. The black and red belts watched their cinema mostly on cable, on VCDs, later on phones.
What he couldn't see
He grew up hearing the songs but not seeing the films. Kahi Debe Sandes had a Rafi number that played on Akashvani. His father kept the radio on, and Lakshman Masturiya and Kavita Vasnik and Kedar Yadav came through the speaker in the kitchen. The films themselves were rumours. Prints had faded, reels were misplaced, the negative of Ghar Dwar developed problems. Decades later, when subtitles arrived as the new technology of regional access, Chhattisgarhi films still didn't get them. Even when the print survived, the language didn't.
Kahi Debe Sandes turned up on YouTube in 2020, uploaded by a channel called Jay Johar Chhattisgarh. Ghar Dwar is harder. There is no Chhattisgarh archive. There is no restored print. The state, twenty-five years into its own existence, has just laid the foundation stone for a 150 crore film city in Mana-Tuta, but hardly any parallel program for the foundational films that gave the language its industry.
What he has, instead, is the band, Aarug. Untouched, sacred, pure, the water offered before anyone drinks. He started it to bring back songs that had stopped being sung. Today, Aarug Music is the label that releases his films. The same instrument that rescues the old songs is publishing the new ones. One man, one band, doing what an archive would do. When he received the Padma Shri and made his three calls, this was the logic underneath. He was calling the people whose work he had inherited as rumour, before his own work could be rumoured back to them.
The three phone calls
In 2014, when the Padma Shri was announced for Art, Chhattisgarh, officially listed as Shri Anuj (Ramanuj) Sharma, he made three phone calls.
The first was to Manu Nayak, the man who made Kahi Debe Sandesh in 1965. The second call was to Satish Jain, the director who cast him without a screen test, after a single conversation about how to roll up a sleeve. The third call was to Laxman Masturiya, the poet and lyricist whose Chhattisgarhi songs Anuj had been singing since he was a child.
Most actors who win the Padma Shri call producers, publicists, stars. Anuj called his teachers. He called the road, not the destination. He called the men who would later be invisible in the public memory of his arrival.
There is a quieter detail underneath that I almost missed. Manu Nayak was born in a village called Kurra. Kurra falls inside the Dharsiwa Vidhan Sabha constituency. Anuj has been the MLA from Dharsiwa since December 2023. The distance between the man who made the first Chhattisgarhi film and the man who became its first popular face is one village inside the same electoral seat.
He named other teachers in passing too. Rahul Singh. Bhupendra Sharma. K.D. Diwan. People who do not appear on Padma Shri citations.
He told a small story about a spotboy on the set of Maya De De Maya Le Le who walked up to him with water before a fight scene and quietly suggested that he land the punch first and then dust his hands. He listened. The take changed because the spotboy had said so.
Maya, and the voice
He told me on tape that his life has three priorities, in this order. Family. Cinema. Politics. He repeated it twice because he wanted me to hear that the order was deliberate.
His cinema does something rare in the Indian regional landscape. It refuses the vocabulary of pyaar. Look at his titles. Maya. Mayaa De De Mayaa Le Le. Maya De De. Mayaru Maar Dare Maya Ma. The word that keeps returning is not love. It is maya.
The word maya in Chhattisgarhi does not mean what Hindi cinema thinks it means. It is not illusion in the spiritual sense. It is attachment. The bond that ties a person to soil, parent, partner, child, neighbour, language. It is the glue of relation. It is the part of an emotional life that is communal before it is individual. If you wanted one word for the operating system of his cinema, it is that word. Not pyaar, which is a private feeling between two people. Maya, which is a public thread between many.
This is why his films climax with return rather than rebellion. The son stays for the mother instead of running to the city. The lover wins the family before he wins the bride. The hero comes back to the village with reputation rather than abandoning it.
Pressed in the conversation, he gives his sharpest formulation. The dialogue from Suhaag that, in his own telling, made him say yes to the film. Chhattisgarhiya mann ke pyaar na, maya hote hain. Dhai akshar ke nahin, do akshar ke hote hain. Yahaa adha-adhura kuch nahin. Sab poora-poora. The frame is Kabir; dhai akshar prem ka, padhe so pandit hoye, but the move is to invert it. Hindi's pyaar contains a half-formed consonant, the प्या conjunct, which is why poets call it two-and-a-half. Maya has no half. Two full letters, poora-poora. The script itself is the argument: Chhattisgarhi affection has no half-forms baked in. It either is or it isn't. Two letters of completeness against two-and-a-half of incompleteness.
He was a singer before he was an actor. He has said this clearly. Music to mera pehla pyaar hai. His biggest video is not from any of his films. It is a Devi Jas Geet called Aarug Kalsa, released through his own music label, which he named after his younger daughter, Aarug. Roughly forty-one million views. The biggest screen of his career, by audience size, is a phone. And what is playing on that phone is not a romance from his prime decade. It is a devotional folk song he sings himself, in a Chhattisgarhi tradition older than the medium that now hosts it.
He refused to dismiss any genre. He said music is a river. If you stop it, it spoils. If you let it run, it corrects itself. Coming from a man who is the most distinctly Chhattisgarhi voice on his state's cinema, that open-handedness is worth marking. Purists do not actually run popular cultures. People who keep a window open do.
The second seat itself
His wife Smita is an Assistant Professor of English. She watches more films than he does. They have a recurring argument about this. Aap film dekhne nahi jaate. She has stopped waiting for him. She goes with the children, or her siblings, or her friends.
When he is testing a story or a cut, he asks her to watch with him, and he watches her watching. Her face tells him what is working and what is not. This is one definition of a second seat. The chair that holds the audience you trust before you trust the public.
I want to say something honest here, because the woman in his life and the woman on his screen are not yet the same conversation. Across twenty-five years of films, Chhattisgarhi women have appeared in his cinema as mothers, daughters, partners, anchors of family duty. They have been the moral memory of the household. They have rarely been the centre of their own interior weather.
Separation of roles is one kind of respect. Granting interiority is another. The second is harder to write. It is also the next horizon.
The MLA file
He is, since December 2023, the BJP MLA from Dharsiwa. He won by 44,343 votes. His attendance in the Chhattisgarh Vidhan Sabha is hundred per cent. He has asked one hundred and thirteen questions on the floor in this term. They are not vanity questions. They are about illegal plotting in his constituency, about CSR fund expenditure, about pollution, about education, about labour conditions.
There is a word that runs through both his cinema and his legislative work. Zameen. In the films, zameen is the soil of belonging. The earth that holds the child, the village, the mother's stove, the lover's footprint. In the Assembly, zameen is paperwork. A revenue record. A disputed boundary. An encroachment file. The same word does two different kinds of work. He has had to learn to live inside both.
Chitrotpala Film City is being built in Naya Raipur on roughly ninety-five acres, with a state commitment of about a hundred and fifty crore rupees. International film trade press has already covered the project as Chhattisgarh's bid to diversify Indian production geography beyond Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
And there is a structural absence on the other side that money cannot fix. Chhattisgarhi is not in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. It is, officially, a dialect of Hindi. There are roughly one and a half crore people who speak Chhattisgarhi as a first language. When a bureaucracy collapses a language into a dialect, cinema becomes the unofficial parliament of that language's public dignity.
Teejan Bai is also from here
She is from Ganiyari, near Bhilai. Pardhi Scheduled Tribe. Padma Shri in 1988, Padma Bhushan in 2003, Padma Vibhushan in 2019. She is the woman who broke the seated Vedamati style of Pandavani and performed Kapalik on her feet, improvising as she went, in a form that until then men had owned.
I am not naming her to subtract anything from Anuj Sharma. I am naming her because the cultural ecosystem he comes from has more than one ancestor, and one of them is a tribal woman from Bhilai who broke a hierarchy by standing up. Any honest map of Chhattisgarhi performance has to include her.
Cinema and Pandavani are not in competition. They are in conversation. And the conversation only becomes audible when both sides are visible on the page.
The arithmetic
He has been, by his own count, three things across three decades. Performer first, civic figure second, party worker third. He insists that each be evaluated separately, by the standards of its own form.
I asked him what makes a superstar. He did not list awards.
The metric is mirror, not throne. The film as a place where a person sees a version of themselves they had not seen before in their own language.
I asked him, near the end, why he had never moved to Bombay.
The chair next to him on our set was empty because that is the show. The chair next to him in his life is full because that is the man. He came to Hyderabad for the first time in his life because we asked. He recorded for four hours in one morning, talked about his mother and his wife and his teachers and the spotboy and the lightman without losing the rhythm of a man who knows he is on camera, then left.
Two episodes carry that morning in different costumes. Janpratinidhi in one. Apna aadmi in the other. This essay is the seam between them, the thread that runs along the underside of both.
Somewhere on the way back to Raipur, between airports, he probably looked up at the seat next to him. I hope it was full.
By Darshim Saxena · All Episodes