As its name suggests, Kathal: A Jackfruit Mystery revolves around the search for two missing kathals in small-town India, with the satire, which has Sanya Malhotra headlining it in the role of a cop, touching upon pressing issues like gender bias and caste discrimination, but told through the prism of humour. With Kathal currently streaming on Netflix, The Telegraph spoke to its debutant director Yashowardhan Mishra.

What was the starting point for Kathal?

I came across an incident like this in the news about a decade ago. I was just out of college and the story had me really excited. But at that point in time, it was a pipe dream for me to be able to make a feature film. But I did use my imagination and extrapolate to write a short fiction story.

To be honest, for a long time, I forgot all about it, especially when I started working in advertising. And then I met Guneet (Monga Kapoor, co-producer of the film) three years ago for a different project altogether, but I also narrated this story to her. She was blown by the story. I showed her the news clipping and she told me that I should get cracking on this.There was so much scope to make a satire out of this story. The incident is so bizarre and yet true. It gave us a lot of freedom to use that as a core incident and since it has happened in real life, we had the opportunity to make it all the more believable and also deal with its complexities.

Ashok Mishra, my co-writer, and I met a lot of female cops and many preconceived notions that we had about the police force were shattered. They were incredibly open about telling stories about their personal lives and the gender dynamics in the workplace, as well as the caste and class dynamics. We realised that there could be so many more shades to the film than just the case of the missing kathals. We found that to be a great springboard to build a picture of the society that we live in right now.

There are so many things happening around us that don’t make sense anymore, but in Kathal we have tried to see them through the lens of humour because I believe that humour acts as an icebreaker with the audience... viewers are more willing to trust you and engage in a conversation. So we stuck to the comic tone of the story while also talking about really, really serious issues.

What were the biggest eye-openers that popped up during your conversations while researching the film?

The biggest eye-opener was the fact that we have a certain image of the police in our minds which may not essentially be true. The vardi, so to speak, creates a wall between cops and civilians. One of the officers told us that it was fine that we are making a film on the police, but just to ensure that people are not scared of us. They said: ‘We hate it when people are scared of us. We are real people with real issues.’ The macho image of the police, which they are kind of almost forced to carry in our culture, got broken when we spoke to them.

One of them even told me that she hates hitting criminals because her hands pain after that. This got me thinking as to whether violence is really necessary when it comes to making a film on the police. I felt that we could make a very non-violent film about serious issues. But we didn’t want to make anything frivolous. If your sense of empathy is correct and if there is a sense of responsibility towards the characters and the community that we are talking about, then that makes the job easier and more constructive.

I liked the fact that you told a story of gender and caste discrimination set in the Indian heartland without resorting to the usual tropes of violence, sex and cuss words....

There was a commitment towards telling this story as a comedy. It was a commitment that I had made to myself. As a society, we are forgetting to laugh at ourselves and I think we need to take things a little lightly... that would really help.

We live in such a polarised society where people are always on the verge of a breakdown, and it’s so easy to opt for violence. It’s easy to pick up a gun and shoot a character... that’s the simplest way to deal with it, but is that the only way?

In this film, we tried to find humour in very, very complex situations. For example, in the middle of the film, when Mahima (Sanya Malhotra) and Saurabh (Anant V. Joshi) have a lot of tension between them because of a mistake that Saurabh has made, we have the female constable named Kunti’s (Neha Saraf) husband coming in on his scooter and the potatoes that he has just bought from the market fall all around. In the middle of all that tension, we wanted to include something to ease the dynamic. Through such small things, we wanted to keep coming back to the comedy bit again and again. We didn’t want the audience, at any point in time, to feel that the film was getting dark.

What are the key elements to getting a satire spot-on?

The key element is observation and also approaching the material with a lot of humility. Ten years ago, when the story came to me, I could have just made it out of that exact news piece. But it was important for all of us working on this film to realise that we don’t know enough about this incident, about this material, about that world.

The idea always is to meet real people and to find out whether our hypothesis is correct or not. The idea is to see if there are more stories within that one story that we had never even imagined. The character of the cop Mishra (played by Govind Pandey) whose car gets stolen in the film came from the story of a cop we met whose bike had been stolen... that’s a story that we couldn’t have imagined if we hadn’t met him.

When you tell a satire, you need to know that it’s a document of the times we live in. It cannot completely be a figment of your imagination. A keen sense of observation, reading up a lot on what is happening around us, being aware of the pulse of the nation and also having a sense of humour are essential elements to getting a satire right. We do have a culture of satire in our country. Hindi literature is filled with wonderful writers like Harishankar Parsai and Gyan Bharill, whose writings we have grown up on.

My short film Mandi is also built on such an absurdist incident (a farmer paying to sell his own crop) that one will tend to believe it’s not true. I like surprising the audience, but also making them believe in the story at the end of it.

To end on a humorous note, how big a fan of kathal are you?

I love kathal ki sabzi. Where I come from, Madhya Pradesh, it’s a staple and it’s also kathal season now. Ek kachhe kathal ki sabzi bann ti hain hamare wahan... and I love it! It tastes like meat. Since childhood, I have been a fan of kathal. I also like its achaar...

It’s a very polarising fruit...

It’s polarising for me too because I can’t stand ripe kathal... I can’t tolerate the smell or the taste.