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What does it mean to live by inhabiting a god? Sonali Devnani’s The Divine Hustle poses this question through the lives of Khushi, Gopal, and Abhishek, who dress, paint, and perform as deities across India’s sacred geographies. Filmed in Varanasi, Mathura, Pushkar, and Vrindavan, and opening against the immense spectacle of the Kumbh Mela, the documentary — which made its world premiere at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival on September 21 — refuses easy conclusions. Instead, it unsettles us, pushing us to ask what it means when divinity itself becomes a form of survival.
The film’s strength lies in its refusal to romanticise. Sonali grew up, as she puts it, in a culture where “faith and religion aren’t just part of life, they’re in the air we breathe.” From a young age, she was taught rituals and prayers, but what stayed with her were the contradictions. “People standing in long lines for hours just for a glimpse of a deity, while right outside those same temples, beggars sat in their own kind of line, just trying to survive another day.”
What disturbed her even more was the way money rewrote the rules of devotion. Those with cash could bypass lines and walk straight into the sanctum, while the poor remained invisible. “That double standard between devotion and access, between morality and privilege kept haunting me. The Divine Hustle is really my way of unpacking that discomfort.”
Over two and a half years, she followed Khushi, Gopal, and Abhishek — three performers whose daily transformation into gods is both spectacle and necessity. The film captures the ritual of applying paint, the weight of costumes, the fleeting reverence of passersby. Yet, as Sonali reminds us, “when the day ends, they wipe off the paint, take off the costume, and go back to struggling for food or rent. They’re performing divinity just to survive.” That dissonance becomes a haunting metaphor for the transactional ways in which faith circulates in modern India.
What makes the film quietly radical is its attention to how these performances shape identity. “All three of the main characters don’t really talk about god,” Sonali says. Khushi is mocked, Gopal pitied, Abhishek vilified for daring to embody Kali. “The transformation didn’t always bring dignity. Sometimes it brought judgment, or even humiliation. But they kept doing it anyway… in a strange, haunting way, that made the act even more sacred to me.”
The visual storytelling heightens these tensions. Temple gopurams and crowded ghats form a backdrop to painted faces that command attention, only to dissolve back into anonymity once the crowds thin. Sonali’s background in photography sharpens this contrast, but it is her ethical restraint that gives the film its intimacy. She often chose not to film, aware of the thin line between observation and intrusion: “Sometimes, the most respectful thing you can do is not press record. To back off. To allow them space to simply exist without being observed.”
At its core, The Divine Hustle critiques India’s “spiritual economy.” Religion, Sonali notes, is a mirror of the broader economy. “There’s a whole economy built around devotion. Temples are multimillion-dollar institutions, spiritual leaders have empires, and even rituals have a price tag. At the same time, outside those same temples, you’ll find people like Khushi, Gopal, and Abhishek — those on the fringes, trying to survive off that system by becoming living symbols of the divine. But they’re not profiting, they’re hustling for scraps.”
The contrast is devastating. “The same god that people spend thousands to worship inside a marble temple is being portrayed outside by someone who hasn’t eaten that day.”
Yet the film is not cynical. What lingers after the credits is not despair, but reflection. Sonali insists that her intention was not to attack faith but to interrogate it. “We all know there's a deep disparity in society, but what we often overlook is how that disparity plays out even within religion. With The Divine Hustle, I’m not trying to attack faith. I deeply believe that faith and belief should be an integral part of our lives. But there’s a difference between belief and blind faith.”
She leaves us with a challenge. “If our belief doesn’t make us more compassionate, then what is it really for?”
Through Khushi, Gopal, and Abhishek, The Divine Hustle finds divinity not in gold or marble but in resilience, in the quiet dignity of those whom society renders invisible. That is why the film feels necessary. It confronts us with what we prefer not to see — that the divine isn’t confined to sanctums or rituals, but often stands outside temple gates, waiting for a coin, a glance, or simply recognition.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.
Views expressed are the author’s own.