Sudhir Mishra’s low-ceilinged two-room office looks like a place that has held its breath for long. Its inner room, where Mishra discusses his current and upcoming projects, is crammed with couches, chairs, tables, stacks of files, film posters, monitors, an LCD screen, a small bed and an array of awards. This restless space is a fair encapsulation of his longevity – 35 years as a writer, 31 as a filmmaker, spanning 14 features, three shorts and two TV series. That diverse oeuvre will see a new member in less than two weeks, Daas Dev, Mishra’s 12th directorial feature.Daas Dev introduces Mishra to a new world: of literary adaptation. It sees him turn to not one but two sources, Devdas and Hamlet. Bookending that unusual combination is the setting, Indian politics. “I found Devdas’s indecisive quality very similar to Hamlet,” says Mishra. Like Hamlet, a prince, his hero is an heir to a political dynasty. “Then I thought, ‘What about Paro?’” In his telling, Paro’s father is a secretary to Dev’s father, whose family continues to live in the same outhouse after the former’s death. “Dev’s uncle – the Hamlet idea – and Paro’s father don’t get along,” says Mishra. “Then I thought, ‘Who is Chandramuhki?’” She is the fixer and the storyteller. “What if she tells the story of Dev, someone whom she fixed, brought back into power when the uncle and the dynasty were in trouble, but realises that she has just replaced his addiction to alcohol with power.”Mishra has been intrigued by Devdas – a character who is “soft”, not much of a “mard [a man]” – for a while. “Women say that he’s a loser,” says Mishra. “Maybe he is, but when he destroys the love of a woman he loves, he destroys himself. So, in a sense, he atones.” Mishra also believes his Devdas is different. “He will not die outside Paro’s door. Today that relationship will mean something else.”Even beyond the fate of Daas Dev, Mishra, 58, has bigger challenges to surmount: He’s battling time. Debuting as a screenwriter and an assistant director with Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro! in 1983, Mishra entered films when Hindi parallel cinema glowed with promise. His friends and collaborators included such filmmakers as Kundan Shah, Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Then there were others such as Govind Nihalani, Shekhar Kapur and Ketan Mehta. These figures, once renowned and prolific, known for many memorable movies, are struggling for relevance today, in an environment where market dynamics and audience’s tastes have changed. Some haven’t made a film in long. (In fact, Nihalani’s last, the 2017 Marathi drama Ti Ani Itar, slipped in and out of the cinemas unnoticed.) Hindi parallel cinema is a story in itself whose most prominent theme has also figured in Mishra’s works: the promise and betrayal of an idea. “It could have been different,” he says. “Maybe we should have tried harder.”The collapse of the movement also intersected with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union. “You could no longer show people walk into the sunset holding hands,” says Mishra. Then, back in India, there was a lack of state funds and alternate exhibition centres. “When the state support collapsed, the radicalism collapsed,” he says. “It’s very odd – almost contradictory.” But unlike his peers, Mishra has been around, attempting different forms, stories and genres, hitting some, missing some.“I got away with being lazy. And that is the thing in India, you get away with being half good,” Mishra said in Baavra Mann, the 2013 documentary made on his life. Talking about cinema and his choices, he sometimes slips into long silences, refraining from eye contact, like someone engaged in an extended dialogue with himself. “I have fallen prey to it at times – of not having taken enough risks,” he says. “Whenever I’ve listened to others, whenever I’ve to tried to become ‘commercial’, those moments are the worst – and the least commercial also.” Including songs in Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin, for instance, or the mishmash of ideas in Calcutta Mail. Then there are others where he “didn’t give a damn”. Those films, Mishra feels, have also lasted better with the audience. “In Dharavi, I didn’t give a damn,” he says. Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi – “didn’t give a damn”. Mishra’s other I-didn’t-give-a-damn films include his debut, Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin, and his favourite, Khoya Khoya Chand. “And now I’m a little proud of Daas Dev.”His latest, in fact, shares some structural similarities with Khoya Khoya Chand, a drama set in the Hindi film industry of the 1950s. “I’ve taken an epic structure, made a big scale film, like the directors of the ’50s and the ’60s,” he says. “What if Bimal Roy was alive, and he had the same script that I did, how would he have structured it?”Flitting from Hamlet to Devdas, from old to contemporary cinema, Mishra exudes the restlessness of an ‘inbetweener’. “As the last well-known guy of parallel cinema,” he is wary of the current trend, which insists on “assimilation”, indie filmmakers craving for mainstream acceptance. “The parallel filmmakers of the ’70s and the ’80s didn’t give a damn about the others,” he says. “I mean if someone from the establishment liked them, they got worried.”Mishra has resisted such temptations. His films aren’t big budget fares and, in the absence of a star, have mostly stayed true to his vision. His earlier works have also foreseen trends. His second film, Main Zinda Hoon, was made a decade before domestic dramas exploded on Indian TV. His Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin – a funny, off-kilter noir that influenced Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya – was released at a time when Hindi gangster films weren’t fashionable. His finest work, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, is yet to find a worthy successor because Hindi filmmakers shy away from politics.But that was more than a decade ago. Since then and before that, Mishra has made movies with impressive consistency, but they have fallen short of his true potential. He is, in some sense, the embodiment of parallel cinema’s new offshoot, ‘New Bollywood’, a filmmaking movement in the aughts that has struggled to maintain its edge, yet which produces sporadically impressive work that keeps you hoping.In his 20s, Mishra had the urge to “change society with cinema”. But more than three decades later, he believes his worldview has evolved. “I think evil wins,” he says, smiling. “And it allows some leftovers in order for them to stay in power. The liberals celebrate these leftovers, but it is actually evil laughing behind their backs, saying, ‘Look at these fools; they’re happy with their morsels.’”Yet he feels his core views have remained the same. “They were never didactic,” he says. “I never believed the government should be in business.” For someone who was influenced by Karl Marx, but was not a Marxist, “I never believed the communist party had the right to dictate my sex life. I always thought communists were hilarious, doing their laal salaam and worshipping Stalin.”What has also remained unchanged is his persistence. Mishra is currently working on three projects – an adaptation of Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men; a movie on Renu Saluja, the renowned film editor and also his companion, who passed away in 2000; and a sequel to Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi.He attributes that longevity to his father, a mathematics professor. He grew up in a small town, Lucknow, but with someone “who was more sophisticated than most fathers in big cities,” he says. “A father who had seen [films of François] Truffaut and [Jean-Luc] Godard and could talk about them, and talk about mathematics and physics.” But Mishra also feels he hasn’t done justice to that upbringing. “So I want to make those two films, and that’s what motivates me,” he says. “I haven’t been able to make the Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool or Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. If all my films are one film of Guru Dutt, then the other two still remain.”