The Anatomy Of Violence: Karan Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra, & Abhishek Banerjee Talk 'Stolen'

On Friday evening, June 8, 2018, two young men were beaten to death by a mob in a remote village in Assam's Karbi Anglong district on suspicion of being child traffickers. As rumours that Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath were 'kupadhora' or kidnappers went viral on social media, a mob of around 200 to 250 people vandalised their car, dragged them out, and bludgeoned them to death. Nilotpal, an audio engineer, was 29; Abhijeet, a digital artist, was 30. They were both from affluent families in Guwahati and worked in Mumbai and Goa. The Karbi Anglong lynching case was rare, not because of why it happened or how it happened, but because of who it happened to. Unlike most reported cases of mob lynching across India, the Karbi Anglong case was not the result of by caste, class, or communal tensions. It was directly caused by the viral spread of mis- and dis-information on social media.

The Karbi Anglong lynching case seared itself on filmmaker Karan Tejpal's mind. Tejpal's debut feature 'Stolen', co-written with producer Gaurav Dhingra (Angry Indian Goddesses, Beyond The Known World), takes inspiration from the incident to examine the real-world consequences of online disinformation, xenophobia, commercial surrogacy, vigilantism, and mob mentality.

The film follows a seemingly straightforward plot: when the infant daughter of migrant worker Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) is abducted from a remote railway station in rural India, brothers Gautam and Raman Bansal (Abhishek Banerjee and Shubham Vardhan respectively) find themselves in the thick of it — first as witnesses, and then as victims of a viral video falsely identifying them as the abductors. As they navigate India's opaque law and order apparatus, rural anxieties, xenophobia, and rising paranoia, they also learn deeper truths about class, conscience, and complicity. What looks like a straightforward chase thriller on the surface, soon transforms into a case study about how easily ordinary people can become both victims and perpetrators in a society warped by fear and misinformation.

Earlier this week, I spoke to Karan Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra, and Abhishek Banerjee about the making of Stolen and what makes the film a highway thriller unlike any other.

More Than Just Story

Stolen marks producer Gaurav Dhingra's first foray into screenwriting. "It was a new experience for me... It was the opposite side of where I have been," Dhingra says. "The idea was to work with writers to understand the problems that writers face. Story is one thing, but to write for the screen is different. You can have a good story but it might not be for the screen. There is a specific art that goes into what is visual and what can be said, or what can be shown and should not be said."

Both Dhingra and Tejpal subscribe to the 'show, don't tell' school of thought and the film's fast-paced, kinetic flow reflects this philosophy. Nearly half of the film was shot in long, continuous takes with no alternative angles, and these scenes were used as shots in the final cut, giving it a raw, gritty urgency.

"We cut a lot of dialogue. We wanted it to be sparse," Dhingra says. "It was one of the toughest things I have done in my 25 year career. I had great writers like Karan and Swapnil (Salkar) who really helped and really pushed the boundaries with their writing,"

A Local Story Rooted In Global Anxieties

Stolen navigates a complex web of contemporary issues like misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and the chilling virality of WhatsApp vigilante groups that mete out extra-legal blood "justice" in India. The filmmakers, however, resisted the urge to sensationalise these issues.

"I didn't really find it a challenge," Tejpal says. "We are telling people stories about humans. We're telling stories about our society, our world, and every story has these layers in them. Some more, some less. But eventually, it is an absolute part of every story."

Although the film was shot in and around Pushkar, Rajasthan, because of the region's diverse terrain and close proximity to Delhi, which made it a production-friendly location, the filmmakers were keenly aware of the universality of the themes they were tackling, and they wanted to emphasise this. As a result, they set it in a fictionalised central or western Indian town, rather than a specific real-world location.

"What we wanted to say was this is happening everywhere in India," Dhingra explains. "We didn't want a specific state or a town to be named."

Dhingra also contextualised the problem of viral misinformation as a global issue. "Most of the information out there is not necessarily true," he says. "It's a pandemic of information that we are trying to navigate. Of course, in our film, the challenge was that we don't make it too verbose."

"All of these are layers of the story that take it deeper and deeper," Tejpal adds. "It's a challenge to do anything well and to really find the right tone for it. But I think it's an absolute necessity to have a film that is wholesome with all of this in it."

"This film is made by Gaurav, KT (Karan Tejpal), Shubham (Vardhan), and me," Banerjee says, "and we all are very much connected with what is happening. I think that blends in seamlessly in the screenplay, in the performances, and dialogues. I don't think we were putting any pressure on us to make it a moral story or social story. It just happened that way."

A Kinetic Narrative & Confronting Complicity

At just over 90 minutes, Stolen is a tightly-shot and socially-charged chase thriller in the tradition of NH10, Joram, and Afwaah. With a production schedule of a remarkable 28 days with additional 3 days of patchwork, the film was shot on location in just 31 days. The intense chase sequence at the heart of it was shot within severely limited daylight hours: just four hours a day. Tejpal called the production, "...a bit of a challenge, but a fun challenge and sort of a puzzle to solve".

Despite the film's spartan production and sparse, fast-paced narrative, so much of its tension comes from the character-work by Abhishek Banerjee. In recent years, Banerjee has built a compelling body of work around morally conflicted characters, especially in independent and genre films. In Stolen, he plays the urbane Gautam Bansal as someone driven by "common sense" practicality, but gradually reveals a deeper, conflicted moral core. His redemption arc from someone who'd much rather have walked away from the situation to a reluctant good samaritan is what propels the story forward.

Banerjee found the character deeply relatable, he said. "I didn't have to do any kind of research because in many ways we all live that life. Our parents since childhood, they would always say that don't get into other people's trouble. This is a very common statement in every household. And I think it's because of fear and mistrust of the very society we are living in."

What sets Stolen apart from most Indian social films is its framing: in casting two apparently upper-class and dominant caste men at its centre, the film implicitly challenges the viewers — particularly the affluent, urban, male viewers — to confront their own apathy and complicity in enabling social atrocities like commercial surrogacy, extra-legal blood justice, as well as caste and gender violence.

Of course, Tejpal, Dhingra, and Banerjee are clear-eyed about the direct impact of cinema on society.

"Our idea was to trigger a conversation. Our idea was to provoke people, shake them up to realise what's going on," Gaurav Dhingra says. Banerjee takes an even more direct stance:

"I don't expect my audience to learn anything. I only expect my audience to observe whatever we are doing. That's it."

"I cannot be so full of myself to imagine that my film is going to change people's minds," Tejpal says. "My job is only to tell the honest story about honest characters who are in the story."

'Stolen' is not without its flaws — it still falls victim to Hindi cinema's Savarna saviour complex. But in choosing to centre two upper-class men and placing them at the mercy of the very system their privilege once shielded them from, the film also cleverly subverts expectations — urging viewers to question their own complicity in a society teetering on the edge of paranoia, shaped by fear, apathy, and virulent misinformation.

As producer-writer Gaurav Dhingra said, the film was made to provoke, and in that, it succeeds in more ways than most Indian films. Whether it will lead to any reckoning is beside the point. What 'Stolen' insists on is awareness: that in today's India, truth travels slower than a forwarded video, and complicity often wears the face of silence. And in doing so, it gives us a much-needed glimpse at what a thinking cinephile's Bollywood thriller might look like.

Watch the 'Stolen' official trailer here:

'Stolen' is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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