Searching for Sheela review: Netflix's hour-long documentary is a Dharma-style, surface-level profile of Ma Anand Sheela. It brushes aside everything that is interesting about her in favour of fluff.
Only in Incredible India can nationwide protests be mounted against fictional characters, while an actual convicted felon gets the Dharma treatment. Searching for Sheela is an hour-long documentary that pretends it is giving the controversial Ma Anand Sheela an opportunity to present her side of the story, but ends up resembling nothing more than a discarded DVD bonus feature.
Executive producer Shakun Batra — there is no credited director on Searching for Sheela — was said to be working on her biopic a few years ago, and it is very likely that this originated as a side-project. Sheela, who by then had taken a victory lap in the press, had even endorsed actor Alia Bhatt for the role, challenging a rival project being put together by Priyanka Chopra.
She was hot property, a divisive figure hailed as a beacon of bada**ery by urban masses who conveniently decided to ignore the serious crimes that she had pleaded guilty to. Searching for Sheela is pegged as the emotional story of her grand homecoming after years spent in exile in Switzerland, but it is merely a puff piece designed to promote whatever future Ma Anand Sheela project that Batra ends up directing.
We watch as socialites and trust fund kids slice each other’s throats to get a selfie with her, while a prominent journalist virtually prostrates herself before Sheela, looking at her with the sort of devotion that the former aide to Osho reserved for her Bhagwan. They sold a lifestyle to white people back in the day; she’s just selling a different one to desis now.
Sheela in the film is projected as a fierce, independent woman — indeed, that is how she has been portrayed in the press — but I have never seen someone this devoted to a man. When we meet her first, at her house in a Swiss village, her walls are adorned with old pictures of Osho. A few minutes later, when producer Karan Johar asks her in one scene if their relationship was strictly platonic, she replies, “I didn’t have sex with him, if that is what you mean... His eyes were probably more beautiful than his penis…”
Many years have passed since the events depicted in the cracking documentary series Wild Wild Country, but Sheela’s opinion of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh hasn’t changed one bit. Neither has her stance on what transpired between them. Everyone from Bina Ramani to Raghu Rai tries to pry information out of her, but Sheela doesn’t relent. She sticks to her story, which essentially amounts to, ‘I did my time, it’s all in the past’.
Anupamaa
Jhanak
