Finally, Bollywood fully embraces neurodivergence

Oversimplified & preachy at times, Sitaare Zameen Par produced by Aamir Khan is still a milestone in Bollywood’s often mawkish or harsh portrayal of disability

The critics have had their say. They’ve called the new film from Aamir Khan Productions, with the 60-year-old superstar in the lead role of a much younger basketball coach with a festering father wound, “simplistic”,“moralistic”, “a moral science lesson”. Yes, the script is too eager to hammer in the point. And Khan’s performance is no better than how we’ve often seen him play big protagonist roles — laboured, every dialogue and twitch exaggerated, and ponderous in the way he totes a message about prejudices in Indian society.

Sitaare Zameen Par released in theatres on Friday.

This is not a film review. This is a reflection on the thematic and representative milestone that Bollywood has reached with Sitaare Zameen Par. The ensemble cast that surrounds Gulshan (Aamir Khan), who is on a judicial penalty to teach a group of neurodivergent players to victory in a tournament, is an absolute triumph. Gopi Krishnan Varma as Guddu, Vedant Sharmaa as Bantu, Naman Misra as Hargovind, Rishi Shahani as Sharmaji, Rishabh Jain as Raju, Ashish Pendse as Sunil Gupta, Samvit Desai as Karim Qureshi, Simran Mangeshkar as Golu Khan and Aayush Bhansali as Lotus — these actors, who play the team Gulshan leads in the film, are on the neurodivergent spectrum themselves, which includes Down’s Syndrome and Autism. The relish and sensitivity with which they have played their roles is the most heartfully inclusive thing about the film. Unlike actors who play roles of neurodivergent characters, there is no acting tricks and effort on display. As the linear, simplified narrative unfolds, we begin to love Guddu, Sharmaji and the gang for the way they are. The film, then, is already a success. My teenage daughter was enraptured and in love with this basketball team and called the film “so sweet” — words that I don’t often hear from her these days.

If Sitaare Zameen Par manages to get the box office numbers in an industry going through one of its worst slumps ever—the opening box office numbers, estimated by most trade websites at around Rs11.5 crore — it’s a win not just for Khan and his company, but also for Bollywood. While garnering much-needed revenue, it will break the mould of mawkish and cruel ways in which Hindi films have portrayed intellectual disability and physical appearance.

There are far too many examples in recent times. Among the few that perhaps got it right are Gulzar’s Kosish (1972), in which Jaya Bachchan and Sanjeev Kumar played a deaf and mute couple with elegance and sensitivity. In 2014, Kalki Koechlin played a bisexual woman with cerebral palsy in Shonali Bose’s Margarita With a Straw — raw, emotionally rich and with a wonderfully balanced sense of the character’s inner life and her external mannerisms dictated by her neurological condition.

In most films, the effort shows actors taking on the difficult task of getting into the skin of neurodivergent characters. The Golmaal series (2006, 2008, 2010, 2017) directed by Rohit Shetty — commercially one of the most lucrative comedy franchises in Bollywood — ridicules the speech disorder of one of the lead characters played by Tusshar Kapoor with relentless glee. In Housefull 3 (2016), directed by Sajid Khan and Farhad Samji, the lead trio of men played by Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh, adopt facile impersonations of physically and intellectually challenged people to win over the sympathy of women they desire. Jaideep Sen’s Krazzy 4 (2008), spells out its boorish insensitivity towards mental health literally, in the title itself — and also in the way characters played by Arshad Warsi, Irrfan Khan and Rajpal Yadav use schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder as fuel for shallow comedic propellers. Hrithik Roshan in a paralytic stasis in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish (2010) was an exotic specimen behaviourally; in R Balki’s Paa (2009), Amitabh Bachchan played a person with progeria with a lot of acting effort, all of which as on such magnified display every moment he was on screen, it was more about the actor than the condition he was portraying. In most films where there are neurodiverse characters, they are not given dialogues; only over-gesticulated mannerisms. Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012), in which Priyanka Chopra played a girl with autism, the strain of no-dialogues (most autistic individuals can speak, by the way) led to some really awkward moments of overacted histrionics.

Cut to 2025. RS Prasanna, who earlier directed Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2013) in Hindi after making the same film in Tamil, a film about the socio-personal implications of erectile dysfunction, turns out to be a perfect match to Aamir Khan’s brand of social message cinema in adapting the Spanish language film Campeones (2018) to an Indian context with Sitaare Zameen Par. The film is a spirit sequel of Taare Zameen Par (2007), also an Aamir Khan Productions film with Khan in the lead role of a teacher who uplifts a child with dyslexia.

The production team of Sitaare Zameen Par has revealed that over almost a year, thousands of neurodivergent people were auditioned for the roles. Experts on mental health and the neurodivergence spectrum were consulted at every stage of production. A spokesperson from the team said that among experts who were consulted were Mughda Kalra, an autism activist and parent advocate who focuses on diversity and inclusion, Tayzeen Rasool, an autistic self-advocate who works with Ummeed’s School Inclusion team and Dr Nina Vaidya, a paediatrician and special education consulted who held several workshops with Khan and his team of actors and technicians.

A film close to Sitaare Zameen Par in spirit and intent, certainly not in tone, is the Hollywood comedy-drama The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) directed by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz. Zack Gottsagen plays Zak, a man with Down’s syndrome who dreams of becoming a professional wrestler. After escaping from an assisted living facility, Zak finds himself on a small fishing boat owned by a man named Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), who is on the run himself. The two men form a deep friendship as they share their thoughts on everything under the sun—love, loss, and their dreams. It’s a refreshing take on how disabled characters and their friendships are written and portrayed, because it addresses the critical issue of representation, something that disabled people face both in cinema and in real life as well. Unlike many films that see able-bodied actors play disabled characters, Gottsagen, himself a person with Down’s syndrome, delivers an authentic performance, highlighting what is often missing in such portrayals.

For parents of children in the neurodivergent spectrum, and anyone touched by it, the highest point, the sigh-inducing uplift in Sitaare Zameen Par must have been when the Coach Gulshan realises — and verbalises with notes of peak overacting — that the members of this singular team of basketball players can be exemplarily human than a misanthropic, egotistic man caught up in proving he is always right and the world owes him the success that he hasn’t got. The most emotionally persuasive performers are the neurodivergent actors, carrying through a story plucked out on the audience’s heartstrings. The single dialogue that clearly borders on preachiness and oversimplification, but encapsulates the film’s edifyingly inclusive spirit is, “Aapka normal aapka, unka normal unka (Your normal is yours, their normal is theirs). So audiences, say the stars or sitaares, don’t impose your normal on us.

Sitaare Zameen Par released in theatres on Friday.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based journalist and critic.