How Malegaon’s film superheroes flew low and reached great heights

One recent evening, Nasir Shaikh pulled two carefully maintained albums out of a cupboard. One was filled with collages of posters and stills from popular Hindi films – with Shaikh’s face in place of the hero’s. The other contained scores of articles about Shaikh’s filmmaking career.

“That’s how it began – with copy-pasting and then editing the photos,” Shaikh told Scroll. The films that turned him into a cult figure reflect the same makeshift make-believe approach. They pay tribute to iconic Hindi cinema plots but spoof them too. And they were all made without Shaikh ever leaving Malegaon.

The bustling city in North Maharashtra is known for its textile and plastic recycling industries – and, to fans, its homespun “Mollywood” films. At its peak two decades ago, Malegaon’s Bollywood was producing scores of movies in a year.

Nasir Shaikh played a vital role in giving Mollywood a kickstart in 2000, when he directed his parody Malegaon Ke Sholay. The hyper-localised comic take on the 1975 classic combined homage with fresh imagination.

Shaikh’s chutzpah will be celebrated in a forthcoming movie by Reema Kagti. Superboys of Malegaon is a fictional depiction of Shaikh’s efforts to make his third film, Malegaon ka Superman. Says the official synopsis: “Driven by a passion to create a film for the people of Malegaon, by the people of Malegaon, Nasir rallies his ragtag group of friends to turn his own dream into reality, infusing the town with newfound energy and hope.”

Kagti did not respond to queries about her film. Shaikh too was tight-lipped about it. But as he sat in his home in the heart of Malegaon, he hoped his passion for cinema would be recognised by a much wider audience than the one that has seen his Mollywood productions.

“Films have always been an obsession with me,” Shaikh told Scroll. “I loved films, and I liked the idea of making them.”

Malegaon Ke Sholay created the template that Shaikh used eight years later in Malegaon Ka Superman. (He made Malegaon Ki Shaan in between). Non-professional actors – who included opticians and labourers – played knockoffs of Hindi movie stars. Shaikh and his similarly untrained crew improvised heavily, incessantly and audaciously. Video cameras were rigged to cycles and bullock carts to shoot the angles they wanted.

Irreverent humour and winking self-awareness coursed through the cheeky parodies. In the Sholay spoof, dacoits conduct raids on bicycles instead of horses and chase down a bus rather than a steam train. In Shaikh’s version of Superman, the superhero wears an ill-fitting suit and flies at eye level.

Other Mollywood directors followed Shaikh, making Malegaon Ka Ghajini, Malegaon Ka Don, Malegaon Ka Rangeela, Malegaon Ka Mughal-e-Azam, Malegaon Ki Lagaan.

But even as Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon will be premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the phenomenon it depicts has already long passed.

Malegaon has moved beyond parody. The spoofs have been replaced by generic comedy, produced for YouTube. Shaikh has not made a movie in years. But Mollywood’s do-or-die attitude towards filmmaking is alive and well.

The spark that lit the fuse

A vertiginous flight of stairs leads to Nasir Shaikh’s home in Malegaon, which is perched above a hotel he owns. The terrace opens out to reveal an uneven skyline. “Malegaon used to be like a small village that started here and ended there, but not anymore,” Shaikh observed.

Shaikh is a boyish-looking 50, with the same quicksilver intelligence and nervous energy that was evident in Supermen of Malegaon, Faiza Ahmed Khan’s documentary from 2008. Khan’s acclaimed film followed Shaikh and his team as they shot Malegaon Ka Superman: they line up props, costumes and locations for a madcap adventure about a super-skinny superhero who has asthma because of air pollution.

Khan’s film vividly captures the unique essence and innocence of Malegaon’s proudly raw aesthetic.

For decades, Malegaon’s economy has been driven by its power looms. As visitors stroll through the city’s main cloth market, the clatter of spindles fills the air. Soft fabric cascades off looms sandwiched between houses and stores. A sign on a traffic island in the heart of town proudly declares, “I Heart Malegaon The Textile City.”

Until recently, textile workers flooded into theatres or rushed to video parlours on Fridays, their weekly holiday. Says a character in Khan’s documentary, cinema gives us what life does not and cannot.

Nasir Shaikh said that when he was young, “cinema was the only form of entertainment”. At 15, he went to work in his father’s video parlour, where he taught himself filmmaking by watching movies over and over again. “I would also do my own edits of Hollywood films,” Shaikh said. “I would edit out the intervening dialogue and retain the action scenes.”

Before Shaikh picked up his camera, a few formulaic films had already been made in Malegaon, but they weren’t popular. The breakthrough moment was Shaikh’s realisation that rather than trying to replicate Bollywood standards, Malegaon films needed doses of localised humour .

“I have always liked comedy, so I opted for parody,” Shaikh explained. “Everyone has seen the stars. But a duplicate is always more interesting than the original.”

The sensibility of Urdu poetry helped shape the Malegaon aesthetic, Faiza Ahmed Khan pointed out. “In shayari, you see a lot of satire, what is called tanz in Urdu, and there is a strong influence of this on the films too,” Khan said.

Malegaon’s low-priced theatres showed the latest Hindi film releases or re-runs. Mollywood never entered these spaces, instead circulating entirely through video parlours or VCDs to be watched at home.

Shaikh’s own video parlour was where Malegaon Ke Sholay ran for two months, earning Rs 2 lakh on an investment of Rs 50,000. “From there came the idea that you could make a film that could be successful and even have a black market,” Shaikh said.

Out of thin air

For nearly as long as cinema has been around, there have been meta-movies that have satirised storytelling conventions. Before Malegaon Ke Sholay in 2000, Bollywood produced Ajit Dewani’s parody Ramgarh Ke Sholay (1991), starring lookalike actors.

Over the years, in places like Ladakh, Chhattisgarh and Assam, sub-regional film industries emerged despite inadequate resources, driven by the desire for local representation – of language, cultural practices, character types, music.

In Jharkhand, films are occasionally made in the Nagpuri dialect spoken in the state. Ladakh’s filmmaking circuit was the subject of Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui’s 2010 documentary, aptly titled Out of Thin Air.

In Malegaon too, the parodies came out of nothing, almost miraculously. Despite being only 269 km from Mumbai, Malegaon had little access to the facilities easily available to Bollywood filmmakers – proper equipment, trained actors or post-production studios.

All that Malegaon’s obsessives had was a burning love of cinema and the vaulting ambition to make their own movies any which way.

“There is nonchalance, a chill to the films,” observed Ranjan Singh, a Mumbai-based producer and distributor of independent cinema. In 2012, Singh was the distribution consultant for the theatrical release of Khan’s Supermen of Malegaon.

In January 2010, Singh shot his own footage of Malegaon’s filmmaking hacks, which he shared with Scroll.

Singh said that Malegaon films are better in terms of their technical quality than the movies being made in Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand. “The main thing is the humour, with a slight undercurrent of social messaging,” he said. “Although Malegaon’s filmmakers didn’t have big budgets, they were smart enough to appeal to local audiences.”

Malegaon’s informal work ethic flowed as much from impatience as self-respect, said Asif Ali, a former bakery worker who has played a host of popular characters in local productions under his stage name, Asif Albela.

Ali explained that Malegaon cinema was sparked by the realisation that it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a minnow in the Mumbai film industry.

“Important people don’t give you the space you need, and it’s not within us to flatter them, to hear them say, sure be in touch and we will see what we can do for you,” Ali said. “If nobody is available for the job, we do it ourselves.”

Bollywood calling

As news of Malegaon’s hustle spread beyond its boundaries, Mumbai’s entertainment industry began taking interest in it. Between 2010 and 2014, Nasir Shaikh directed a Mr Bean-inspired series for SAB TV called Malegaon Ka Chintu. Starring Malegaon actor Al Amin, the production ran for three seasons.

“The money was good, but I got bored of it eventually,” Shaikh said. “I never wanted to work in Bombay, since I felt I would lose my way.”

After working on a few more projects, Shaikh stepped back from filmmaking some years ago to manage his hotel. However, one of Shaikh’s collaborators from those years continues to be involved with Mollywood – in an updated avatar.

Analogue to digital

In Malegaon Ka Superman, Akram Khan played the spindly superhero’s nemesis who “loves filth” and sells “Thoo-Thoo Gutka”. Khan also wrote the catchy title song of the film.

Khan was seduced by cinema as a child. “I wanted to be a hero,” he said. “I would get clothes tailored to match the hero’s costumes. In the old days, we had to go to Bombay to develop our photography rolls. We would crash film shoots and take photos with actors.”

Between 1992 and 1997, Khan worked in a video parlour in Saudi Arabia before returning to Malegaon. When Mollywood took off, Khan did a bit of everything: editing, writing, acting, rudimentary special effects.

Khan also pursued projects in Mumbai, but found its famously cutthroat industry unwelcoming.

“I was the only one from Malegaon to come to Bombay,” 55-year-old Khan said. “I kept at it, but it was difficult. Whenever I ran out of money, I would come back to Malegaon.”

Bollywood’s interest in Malegaon was just a passing phase, according to Khan. “The one thing that upset me the most about Malegaon Ka Superman was that everyone loved it but nobody gave us work,” he recalled. “Nobody hired me even for an acting job. So I thought, let’s head back to the pavilion.”

Khan’s return to Malegaon coincided with the shift to online platforms. In the 2010s, video parlours and VCDs began to peter out, undermining the economics of spoofy films. But at the same time, comedy skits from Malegaon started becoming popular on YouTube.

Akram Khan was able to tap into the Khandeshi comedy scene, producing short-form content for Maharashtra’s Khandesh region that comprises the districts of Jalgaon, Nandurbar and Dhule.

Malegaon’s proximity to Dhule – only 52 km away – makes it a suitable hub to create material in the strain of Deccani-inflected Hindi spoken in these parts. “The language is simple but direct – you say what’s on your mind,” Khan said.

Slowly, Khandeshi comedy on YouTube has supplanted Mollywood-style parody. YouTube hosts several Khandeshi channels, one of which Akram Khan has operated since 2017.

“My very first video took off like a rocket,” Khan said. “YouTube gave me what the Bombay film industry didn’t – name, fame, money. I am not upset anymore that Mumbai didn’t work out. My own city took care of me.”

A pivot to podcasting

Some of Khan’s shoots take place in his farmhouse on the outskirts of Malegaon. The complex has a pretty fringe of trees, a swimming pool and residential cottages that double up as production sets.

Here, Khan is working on his next project: Malegaon’s first podcast, Coffee with Khan. Khan will interview Malegaon personalities, from doctors and builders to actors and politicians.

Khan is pivoting to podcasting because video viewership has been plummeting, partly because of the plethora of self-produced comedy on social networking sites like Instagram. “The graph of comedy videos is down – we don’t get the same kind of views anymore,” Khan said.

As he chatted with Scroll, Khan and a small crew conducted a test run for the podcast. Some of the technicians held down other jobs – one of them is an autorickshaw driver.

The two-camera set-up and mics are a vast improvement on the basic equipment used two decades ago in the parodies. “Mollywood was poor but it is a bit better off now,” Khan said. “No more Garib Nawaz productions” – a poor man’s breakfast.

Khan is hands-on, plugging in or tucking away equipment himself. “In Malegaon, all of us work together in unity,” he said. “If I have to sweep the floor myself, I will. That’s the way it has been since the beginning.”

Though Malegaon appreciates its local talent, it discourages adulation. For instance, the comic actor Asif Ali is famous in Malegaon – but not to the point of being mobbed. “People will give you lots of love but also say, be just like me and don’t throw attitude around,” Ali said.

As a consequence, there is no culture of autographs in Malegaon, Nasir Sheikh said. “The appeal of the parodies is that the chap sitting next to me in a cinema also has the potential to be in a movie,” he said.

Mollywood as a counter-narrative

Brotherhood is the foundation of Mollywood – Malegaon’s women almost never featured in the parodies. It is only recently that they have been cast in comedy shows in a city in which most residents are Muslim.

“Malegaon is a conservative place,” Anwar Khan said. “Even now, there are people who don’t approve of what we do. They say films are haram [forbidden]. To that, I say that in the past, even photography was haram. But isn’t everybody getting photos taken for official documents?”

The parodies were largely family-friendly and non-political, preferring broad comedy to pointed commentary. “While the films were apolitical in the conventional way, they were quite political in the way that they were made, in the way they took on Bollywood and Hollywood cultures,” said documentary director Faiza Ahmed Khan.

Malegaon cinema has evolved in trying circumstances. To the city’s residents, Mollywood offers a counter-narrative to Malegaon’s reputation as a communal tinderbox. Through the decades, the city has witnessed several disturbances linked to religion.

Following heavy rioting in 2001, an editorial in Economic and Political Weekly noted that administrators had classified Malegaon as a “sensitive, communally volatile town”. The editorial added, “Malegaon was also the proverbial ‘ghetto’ town, where the communities lived, divided by the Mausam river, in sullen togetherness.”

In September 2008, a bomb blast near a mosque claimed six lives. The terror attack was blamed on the extremist Hindu outfit Abhinav Bharat. However, nobody in Malegaon seems willing to talk about these dark chapters in the city’s history. They would rather focus on the spunky enterprise of local filmmakers.

Mollywood and beyond

Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon promises a throwback to the age of uncomplicated movie mania. For Nasir Shaikh, the film is a reminder not just of his own gumption, but also a viewing culture that locals say has now all but disappeared.

Until a few years ago, Malegaon had at least 15 single-screen cinemas. When the going was good, the crowds were bountiful.

“Back in the 1980s, two films could sustain a theatre for a whole year,” recalled Rakesh Pande, the owner of Malegaon’s pre-eminent single-screen cinema Mohan. “Films like Sholay, Nikaah, Naseeb and Amar Akbar Anthony ran for 30-40 weeks.”

The 946-seater Mohan came up in 1975. Mohan’s veteran manager, Dilip Pawar rattles off the names of Malegaon’s deceased cinemas – Sujan, Aroma, Kohinoor, Subhash, Upkar.

Pawar remembers the time when Sindhi traders, who shut their markets on Thursdays just like the power loom sector winds down on Fridays, would spend their day off in the theatres.

“Not anymore,” Pawar said. “Where there used to be 100 people, there are now 25 and that too only on weekends. A two-week run is considered healthy in Malegaon.”

Over at Central Talkies a few kilometers away, manager Mohammed Ashfaq had a one-word analysis of why his theatre is losing patrons: “mobile.”

Ashfaq summarises the situation: “There used to be a time when the crowds would shove us aside. Now, we wait for crowds. Why will people bother going to a theatre when they have mobiles through which all kinds of entertainment comes to them? Forget audiences, even I don’t go to a cinema anymore.”

It isn’t just the theatres that have gone, said Nasir Shaikh. So too has the “passion, energy and sense of fun” that animated older Hindi films. “Earlier, we used to talk about films for weeks on end,” he said. “Now we click on something and move on if we don’t like it. I don’t seek out films anymore. I just follow the hits.”

Some of the boundless madness for cinema that Shaikh and others channeled to create their parodies will likely be revisited by Superboys of Malegaon.

Reema Kagti has co-written her fourth feature with Varun Grover. Adarsh Gourav plays Nasir, while Shashank Arora depicts Shafique Sheikh, the actor who headlined Malegaon Ka Superman. (Shafique Sheikh and Malegaon Ka Superman’s co-writer Farogh Jafri have since died.)

To coincide with the festival premiere, Mumbai producer Sunil Bohra plans to release Shaikh’s Malegaon Ka Superman on YouTube.

Bohra had bought the rights to Malegaon Ka Superman soon after it was completed. At the time, he didn’t think that the film’s low resolution was technically good enough to be released in cinemas.

“We didn’t have streaming platforms in those days either,” Bohra said. He now plans to upgrade the film and release it on the internet.

Bohra hopes that Shaikh gets his due with Superboys of Malegaon. “Technically speaking, Nasir is one of the craziest people on Earth,” Bohra said. “His process is huge. Nobody else has his vision and philosophy. Look at what all he managed to achieve with such limited resources.”

All photos by Nandini Ramnath.