Vicky Kaushal took to Instagram to commemorate four years since the release of Masaan. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, with a screenplay by Varun Grover, the 2015 film explores themes of love, death and social constructs. Vicky earned recognition for his role as Deepak Kumar, a boy from the Dom community who falls in love with an upper caste girl.
“For days before we started filming Masaan, I’d sit here for hours at a stretch, quietly watching bodies getting burnt one after the other... dark, fair, beautiful, ugly, rich, poor, fat, thin... All of them turning into the same colour of ash. Leaving behind, just their deeds, teaching me the most important lesson of my life,” he wrote in his post.
“My job was to put life into Deepak, what eventually happened was the other way around,” he added.
His co-stars Richa Chadha and Shweta Tripathi also honoured the occasion with posts of their own. Richa reminisced about the various experiences that she encountered while filming, from the small-town vibe of the ghats of the Ganga to rubbing shoulders with celebrities at Cannes – Masaan was screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival where it won two awards. She also paid homage to the film’s cast and crew, writing, “Masaan is immortalised by the people that were in it – behind and in front of the camera. And now by you, the audience that saw it and became a part of that world. It shall now forever inhabit our collective imagination, in tiny, undetectable ways. Devi will always be alive, long after Richa is gone. Tricky thing to come to terms with.”
For Shweta Tripathi, Masaan was special because it was also her Bollywood debut. “This day, 4yrs back, I made my debut on the big screen. Felt like a big deal,” she wrote.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)