‘Heeramandi’ review: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s series suffocates from good taste

The reigning madam of Heeramandi, Mallikajaan (Manisha Koirala), has come to her rival’s house to gloat. Fareedan (Sonakshi Sinha) had intended the evening to be her nath utrai—a debut mujra for Lahore’s elite. But Mallikajaan has outmaneuvered her, staging another performance that the nawabs couldn’t refuse. Now she taunts Fareedan: “There is some distance between defeat and victory. You won’t be able to walk it.” The younger woman gets up and walks to Mallikajaan—barefoot, over shards of broken glass. “Your hem has drops of my mother’s blood”—a whole other story—“and mine too now”, she says. “This is Mallikajaan’s veil,” the madam spits back. “Its thirst won’t be quenched by so little.”

As you might have gathered, Heeramandi is a lot. A lot of Urdu. A lot of ittar. A lot of Manisha Koirala saying withering things about love. A lot of using 25 words when four would do. It bears the unmistakable imprint of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, whose first series this is. But Bhansali isn’t attempting to make prestige TV, or even modern TV. Heeramandi filters his filigreed style through pre-streaming episodic television, the kind where family members face off in a never-ending battle for power.

This family is Mallikajaan’s—though she’s more despot than matriarch, keeping her coterie of tawaifs in check through constant manipulation and intimidation. She won’t even accept motherly salutations from her own daughters, secret revolutionary Bibbojaan (Aditi Rao Hydari) and dreamy poet Alamzeb (Sharmin Segal), insisting they call her huzoor (madam). Her sister Waheeda (Sanjeeda Shaikh) is treated abysmally, but then so is everyone else in the brothel. Only Lajjo (Richa Chadha), a broken-hearted tawaif addicted to opium, gets away with speaking her mind. Into this already volatile environment comes Fareedan, the spitting image of her dead mother, hell-bent on revenge against Mallikajaan.

You can tell how insignificant the nawabs in Heeramandi will be after the first one we meet, Zulfikar (Shekhar Suman), is shown…umm…vigorously engaging with the blinds of a horse carriage. The nawabs (played by Fardeen Khan, Adhyayan Suman and Ujjwal Chopra) are Heeramandi’s patrons—the only ones who can afford their services. They’re grotesque creatures, vain, stupid and allied to the British, with the sole exception of Baloch family scion Tajdar (Taha Shah), recently returned from England, another secret revolutionary. In one of the weakest Bhansali meet-cutes, he sees Alamzeb at a mushaira and falls hopelessly in love, cozying up to her and receiving demure smiles instead of a slap.

Bhansali and writers Vibhu Puri, Divy Nidhi Sharma and Moin Beg use the Alam-Taj romance as a throughline. It activates Mallikajaan’s pathological, Havisham-like fear of young love, ties up with Bibbo’s clandestine freedom fighting, and gives Fareedan an opening. A pity, then, that the strand itself is so weak. Some of it is down to the writing—it’s far-fetched that Alam would depend on Fareedan, her mother’s sworn enemy, to facilitate her romance, and even less believable that Mallikajaan wouldn’t get to know this was happening. But it’s also Segal. She seems to have difficulty locking eyes with other actors and instead keeps staring dreamily into the middle distance. It's so calculated a performance it renders the only woman in Heeramandi who hasn’t given up on life strangely lifeless. Shah’s soft-serve nawabzada has some charm; how much better it would’ve been had Bhansali paired him with fellow-rebel Bibbojaan.

In an early scene, we see Mallikajaan and her maids stunned, in 1945, by a gramophone demonstration—never mind that the first such recording in India was in 1902. This reminded me of Jubilee (2023), a series that also fluffed its historical timelines but offered up a wealth of fascinating period detail. Bhansali is certainly fascinated by tawaifs—their clothes, jewelry, music, speech—and for all I know this is an accurate depiction of a courtesan’s life in the 1940s. But this interest doesn’t extend to anything outside the gates of Heeramandi. The nawabs are boors; the British are teeth-grinding sadists; the independence struggle is as we’ve seen in dozens of films. And while it’s not insignificant to have a series populated almost entirely by Muslim characters, shouldn’t the Muslim League and the idea of Pakistan at least be a topic of conversation in Lahore in 1945?

Bhansali directs all eight episodes, and composes the stiff, if formally impressive, songs. There are some inspired touches—a prayer for the dead from behind a thin curtain; a jazzy number with Fareedan and moneyed Lahoris filmed as tableau, with a static camera; Mallikajaan laying down in all her finery and placing jewels on her eyes, as cold as a beautiful corpse. More than the obvious touchstones of Pakeezah or Umrao Jaan, the hothouse atmosphere and family psychodrama reminded me of Tennessee Williams. Sanjeeda Sheikh in particular vibrates with a Williams-like febrility—her Waheeda is so unlucky that she takes to announcing her defeats. But it’s Koirala who holds the show together. Her tendency as an actor is towards interiority, yet she’s playing someone who’s inevitably, perpetually the centre of attention. This tension gives Mallikajaan a memorable waspishness, as if it’s Koirala who’s annoyed at having to constantly crank it up to 11.

It's telling that a show about the business of desire remains coy about queer love. There’s a scene where British police chief Cartwright (Jason Shah), wearing only a towel, carries the squat, fluttering local fixer Ustaad (Indresh Malik enjoying himself) out of the frame and apparently has sex with him. Yet, nothing after this suggests Cartwright is interested in men. There’s a scene where Fareedan suggestively beckons one of her tawaifs onto the bed with her. This too is a one-off, a tease.

Each frame is worked over to death, suffocated with good taste. In their sumptuous sameness, they do everything but make the heart leap. There’s nothing transporting about Bhansali’s visions anymore. They could not be more full; they could not be emptier.

‘Heeramandi’ is on Netflix.