Why global acclaim for Adarsh Gourav is so satisfying: Actor's rise goes against mechanisms of regular Bollywood

In the first three months of this year alone, 26-year-old Adarsh Gourav has racked up a Best Male Lead nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards as well as a BAFTA Best Male Lead nod for his galvanising turn in Ramin Bahrani’s Netflix adaptation of The White Tiger. His competitors in both these categories involve acting powerhouses like Steven Yeun (Minari), Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round), and the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom). Gourav might be a newcomer by comparison but he has as much of a shot at both the awards as anyone else. If being a part of The White Tiger cemented his cachet as a breakout Indian actor of the year, then his unbelievable award run has managed to strip him of restrictive identifiers, placing him in contention as one of the breakout actors of the year.

It’s surreal to think of what Gourav has managed even with these two nominations given that actors working in Hindi cinema don’t usually have a history of successfully and comfortably transcending their cachet to a global platform. The inimitable nature of the achievement is exacerbated by that fact that Gourav isn’t an established actor in India by any measure. He has remained pretty unnoticeable in the last decade that he has worked in Hindi cinema.

Before The White Tiger, the actor for instance, booked supporting roles in movies like Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan (2010), Ravi Udyawar’s Mom (2018) and in web-series like Leila (2019) and Hostel Daze (2019). Even his goosebump-inducing lead turn in Atanu Mukherjee’s Rukh (2018) came in an indie movie that flew largely under the radar. Most important of all, Gourav is a rank outsider, which is Bollywood parlance denotes an unequal playing ground, one that is underscored by lesser second chances and an infinite period of slow-burn struggle.

Nikhil Vijay, Gourav and Shubham Gaur in Hostel Daze

Yet Gourav, despite all logic, seems to have circumvented all of these pitfalls, mapping his own road to acclaim. In the film, the actor plays the ruthless desperation of Balram, a lower-class driver struggling to move up the class ladder, with a kinetic energy. It’s a physically alert turn in which rage bubbles at every intersection, one that conveys the complexities of class politics that the film’s screenplay chooses to conceal. In that sense, there is arguably no actor this year who will be able to match up to the kind of extreme level of recognition that Gourav has garnered almost overnight, even if they’re A-lister led big-budget vehicles. The actor’s unprecedented fame feels all the more satisfying because the mechanisms and attention spans in the Hindi film industry have been designed in a way that it is impossible for something like this to happen.

But here’s a question: Would this all have been possible without the reputational weight that a movie like The White Tiger is able to carry?

That Gourav is an actor of calibre, capable of giving career-defining turns is not up for debate. But I’m inclined to wonder if his performance would have been this unanimously accessible had it not been an Indian-ish outing, essentially a movie that aims to capture the essence of the country for Indians without simultaneously being too alienating for the others. What differentiates a compelling Indian film from The White Tiger is the fact that by virtue of the latter being an Indian-ish production, it holds a significantly larger appeal for foreign audiences than a standard film made in India.

Gourav, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Rajkummar Rao in The White Tiger

For one, The White Tiger is adapted from a Booker Prize-winning novel, that is already considered a marker of credibility in itself. And even though the film features actors who currently work in Hindi cinema, the gaze – the film is directed by Ramin Bahrani, an indie filmmaker who proves to be a global equaliser – is foreign. The film also counts Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ava DuVerney and Indian actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Executive Producers. Ultimately, it is impossible to ignore a film that is effectively a dissection of the contradictions that make up the country, by and for outsiders. Put simply, The White Tiger may look Indian but it is as American as a film can aspire to be.

What Gourav got out of The White Tiger is effectively similar to what an actor like Irrfan Khan took away from Mira Nair’s The Namesake, an Indian-ish production in the same vein: unfettered global recognition, an equal playing ground that isn’t dictated by surnames, and roles that do justice to their talent. Except there seems to be a slight deviation in the nature of the popularity that an Indian actor stands to gain from such American productions. If earlier, the whole point of an Indian actor doing a Hollywood production would be to carve out popularity overseas, today the accessibility of streaming platforms that house such productions means that their presence in them (Danesh Razvi from A Suitable Boy is an example) tend to have more of an effect on the reputation they end up cultivating inside India. Sure, The White Tiger has placed Gourav in the same orbit as any talented Hollywood actor working currently but it has foremost turned him into a familiar face back in the country, something that would have taken an outsider decades to achieve. (The career of Rajkummar Rao, his co-actor in the film resembled that trajectory.)

(Also read on Firstpost —The White Tiger’s Adarsh Gourav on discovering the 'invisibility' of Balram, and learnings from his co-actors)

In many ways, Gourav’s ascent to fame also feels like a direct challenge to the insider-outsider conundrum that perennially plagues the Hindi film industry. Can we still say that outsiders are denied opportunities when the only actor grabbing any eyeballs this year has been Gourav?

If you think about it, the mere existence of The White Tiger, a story about payback, counts as a revenge of the outsiders. The film is executive produced by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, arguably Bollywood's most famous outsider who has now come to possess cultural capital in Hollywood. It makes sense that she chooses to cast two other outsiders, Gourav and Rao, in the first Indian-ish production she mounts.

The White Tiger is what happens when outsiders grow up to become insiders. If anything, Gourav’s rise and the film’s achievement symbolises a future that is shaped by whether insiders who were once outsiders choose to subvert the status quo or not. Will they continue letting Bollywood’s star kids take the centre stage or reclaim it for themselves?

The White Tiger ends with Balram’s triumph to a point where he has assumed the identity of his master. Gourav’s award run makes me wonder: What will happen to Bollywood’s royalty once they can no longer call the shots?