Bandish Bandits Season 2 Is Engaging, If Not Exquisitely Memorable

IN A SCENE from the second season of Prime Video’s Bandish Bandits a singing coach asks her students to sing blindfolded. The performance starts at a peak but as soon as the folds come off, and an undeclared audience comes into view the song tapers off into something else. “As soon as you felt you were being watched, you started showing off,” the teacher tells her dumbfounded students, explaining that the moment an artist acknowledges his or her audience, they stop creating and start entertaining, stop expressing and instead start trying to impress. The scene highlights the reason why this show about family legacies told in the meter of musical heritage has endured and entrenched itself in the world of streaming. In its second season, Bandits continues to trace the battle of tradition vs modernism, told through stellar ballads, decent performances and a story that transcends eras, generations and genres.

Season 2 starts off in the aftermath of Pandit Radhe’s (Naseeruddin Shah) – the patriarch of the Rathod gharana of music – demise. After panditji’s death, secrets about his dark past, his manipulation of the gharanas, and his dire attempts to preserve his progeny begin to tumble out of the closet. The world previously at the family’s feet now reaches for the throat. With the patriarch’s legacy on cold ice (ie, cancelled) his divided family faces the dogs of war. For a disjointed yet dogged bloodline that has only known tradition, what shape will redemption take, the show seeks to answer. There are, obviously, two roads. Radhe (Ritwik Bhowmik), the youngest prodigy of the family sees the one less taken as the only choice – evolution. Join a band, modernise your language and enter reality from the realm of precious fixations. A leap that requires more of letting go than holding on.

The second road demands a familial review, a re-tying of the knot strained by blunders of the past. Radhe’s mother Mohini, played by the dependable Sheeba Chadha must reconcile with estranged lover Digvijay (Atul Kulkarni) to project a united front of a gharana tainted by internal strife and discontentment. It’s an approach that seeks to deepen the roots of a legacy by pretending it has never, not even for second, left the soil. That the only way to revive sullied names is to rewrite them with the same ink, the same rigour and maybe even the same mythology that has sustained generations of honour, respect and relevance. It’s two different ways of selling, or should we say, practising art and each must face its own predicaments and challenges, and exact their own prices.

But while the familial burdens of the Rathod gharana often assume the shape of a daily soap, it’s the show’s analysis and illustration of the art of making music, that gives it the lift of something significant if not seminal. How music is created, packaged, accessorised, sold or thwarted? The ideas of principle and personality sit at the heart of art. These battles, or contradictions offer the show its edge, its path away from the shackles of a soggy family saga. The battle lines between prestige and presentation therefore reveal modern art’s mannerisms, its circuits of production and runnels of consumption. Radhe, invited into a fusion band, for example, must confront the reality of showmanship. A feature of art that away from the strictures of meditation, runs on the fuel of charisma. Something Radhe’s perpetually confused face has rarely radiated.

On the other hand, for everything dripping with heritage and burdens of history, there is the drifting wood of Tamanna (Shreya Chaudhry), Radhe’s ex-girlfriend who, cinched by the rejection of the elite, enrols herself for an education. Her journey offers a coming-of-age viewpoint that parallels Radhe’s ascension from ancestral boy wonder to unknown pulpy sensation. Both are destined for collision, but in their own way, both find that elusive pasture of self-realisation. The only problem with Bandish Bandits is its tepid, texture-less world. For something steeped so deeply in culture, it carries the production value of a run-of-the-mill music video set in the 90s. For the acting talent on display, the show rarely achieves that moment of awe where the script, the sound and the scenery merge as one. It’s always either this or that, and never quite a thrilling whole.

In its second season, Bandish Bandits remains eminently watchable, as a delicate mesh of musical numbers, interludes and sonnets that verve between prickly and precious. The show has a rhythm, a relatable quibble between generational ideas and fleshes out the endless conflict between the many definitions of art. Bhowmick, as the somewhat dull but gifted protagonist fits his shoes but it’s usually the Rathod family seniors who steal the scenes. As a multi-fanged exploration of culture as it has evolved across decades of churn and change Bandish Bandits is engaging if not exquisitely memorable. For all the strain it puts into its vocal cords, there seems to be this visual finesse missing from the world the show inhabits. Almost as if it knows how it must be heard, but not how it must be seen. At times it feels modest, undercooked and raw. Other times, it feels simple yet inspired.

Bandish Bandits Season 2 is currently streaming on Prime Video India.