When ELITE’s Indian adaptation ‘Class’ was announced, several fans of the original Spanish show were apprehensive about what the Hindi version will have in store. However, ever since its release, the series has been receiving rave reviews not just from the people who have watched it for the first time but from the ELITE fandom as well. Behind it is Ashim Ahluwalia, who has given three years of his life to fit the show perfectly in an Indian context.
In a freewheeling chat with News18, the independent filmmaker talks about his ideas and vision for the show which deals with several relevant issues plaguing our society, such as casteism, class divide, homophobia and Islamophobia, among others. The series also introduces a series of fresh faces, which the director says was a very conscious decision.
Excerpts from the interview.
How is the terrific response making you feel?
I’ve been on this show for three years, over three waves of the pandemic. I have spent the last few years of my life making something of this scale. And it was a huge risk because I don’t come from Bollywood, I don’t come from the OTT world, I come from independent cinema. I wanted to make a much more intense and real show. Netflix was very supportive of me. But it could have backfired also when it came out. So while making it, I just thought that let’s make it authentically and the way it should be made and see how people respond. Let’s not second-guess our audience. I did expect people to say it’s too much or this sort of stuff does happen in India but the response has been so overwhelming. People are picking up the subtleties, the real meat of the show and what it’s really about.
What were the challenges of adapting it in an Indian context?
I watched ELITE only because I was asked to do this. I had been really interested in doing something about young people and teenagers, especially the rebellious, wild ones because I don’t think we have enough of that. We only talk about the good kids and never see the crazy and emotional side of the kids when they are completely breaking down. So when this project came to me, I thought this could be something that I have always wanted to do. When I watched it (ELITE), I thought the arches were very Indian. This is almost better said in India than in Spain.
All of this stuff gets much crazier with rich kids in India. There’s no law for them. They can buy their way out of anything. All these stakes actually get much more intense compared to Spain where you can’t just run over someone. Here you can still get away with things if you are well-connected. It was funny but this show in India was even more intense than the original because of the way our society works or the caste or class system works.
Why was it important to set it in Delhi and not in any other tier 1 city?
It had to be Delhi and I’ll tell you why. I’m a Bombay boy and in Bombay, because of the density, it doesn’t matter if you are the wealthiest or the poorest person. Everyone ends up on top of each other because of how the city is constructed. You might be in the most expensive real estate and there can be a slum below you. There’s no geographical separation between the rich and the poor, whereas in Delhi it is detailed. If you’re rich, you live in a certain area and if you are poor you live in a different area. Everyone’s separated from each other and there is very little interaction.
And the rich can live in a bubble in a way that they cannot live in any other city. I thought that’s very important for this because Hampton International is a bubble. I spent two years in Delhi and I can guarantee that it’s very real in the sense that you can be in a total bubble and not have to deal with anybody who’s not from your class.
Initially, a lot of people were questioning the authenticity of the behaviour of the characters and claimed their lifestyles were exaggerated.
If you ask me, it is a toned-down version of what really happens. When I work on something, it comes from a place of research. I never work on something where I don’t know the environment so we got a lot of kids who just graduated from international schools and talked to them. They were sharing their WhatsApp messages and scandalous stories from their schools. That’s a lot of the stuff we used when we were detailing the show. Whether it’s the drug use or the sexual stuff, a lot of it was actually coming from real stories. You just have to google Delhi school scandals and you’ll see stuff online. That’s crazy. None of this is fiction and in a way just disguised facts.
While you were interacting with these students, how aware did they seem about issues such as casteism or classism?
Caste is something that almost none of the rich kids are aware of. They don’t know the difference between class and caste. I have used that line in the show where Suhani (Anjali Sivaraman) says to Dheeraj (Piyush Khati) that nobody cares about your caste, everybody thinks of you as poor. That was a line that actually came from a lot of the kids I was talking to. For them, you are either poor or rich. There’s an element where if you’re very wealthy, especially in a tier-one city, you could just be interested in class and you don’t understand the nuances of caste. But if you are from a space where you’re dealing with casteism on a daily basis then there’s an intersection there. If you are poor and come from a different environment then caste might be a very big thing in your life.
The show talks about casteism, classism, homophobia and Islamophobia without sugarcoating these issues. How important was it to speak about these topics openly?
I didn’t want to discuss something that doesn’t exist in real life. I just want to look at it like looking at a newspaper. You just see stuff all the time without necessarily giving an opinion or judgement or even a moral lesson. None of the characters for me is bad or good and that’s very important in my work that I don’t become the moral judge of anything. The audience has to watch and decide what they feel about the characters. These are things that are happening in our everyday lives. We read about them all the time. So I thought let’s just put everything out there and let people make of it what they want to.
Was it a conscious decision to cast all new faces instead of going with already-established actors or starkids?
Yes, it was a totally conscious decision. I absolutely refused to cast anybody who was already well-known or who had any baggage from a different show or a different film. I wanted people who were very open to becoming those characters. I didn’t want any baggage of fame.
Out of all the responses you have gotten, which one stayed with you?
I can’t think of a specific reaction, but I really like the fact that people are talking about the making of the series such as the cinematography or the sound design or the way it is made. It is not just about the plot or story, there is a certain way of telling that story. This has picked up. The complexities of our society have picked up whether it is class, caste or homophobia. I was never intending to make a preachy show, I just wanted to make a show about the things that we see in our everyday life.
On the original ELITE fandom loving CLASS
What’s really interesting is that a friend of mine in Spain has been sending me reactions from a Reddit thread of the original ELITE fandom who have really gotten into CLASS. It is doing incredibly well in Spain, it’s number one in Brazil. It’s got a different life elsewhere outside of India. And what’s interesting is the Spanish people are talking about how the Indian show explains so much of the motivation that they never understood in the original.
Update on the second season of CLASS.
We’ve all just been a bit hit with the success of the first season. I don’t think anybody expected it to be honest. So the conversation for season 2 hasn’t even started yet. It’s one of those things that I can’t comment on right now because nobody could expect this would go down like this.
CLASS is streaming now on Netflix.
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