Angry captive goddesses in Madhureeta Anand's Kajarya

[From my Mint Lounge column]

I haven’t watched Pan Nalin's Angry Indian Goddesses yet, but the other day I caught a remarkable, under-discussed film that also has a wrathful “goddess” at its heart. She isn’t just angry though, she is distraught and foul-mouthed and usually in an afeem-fuelled haze of self-loathing. She is the title character of Madhureeta Anand’s Kajarya, a village woman who is saddled with the task of getting rid of the community’s unwanted girl-babies.

Fifty-five years ago, Satyajit Ray’s Devi gave us an indelible visual representation of how patriarchy can simultaneously put women on a pedestal and enslave them: the story centred on young Dayamoyee (played by the 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore) whose life is altered when her father-in-law dreams that she is the Mother Goddess incarnate. In no time, she goes from being a normal girl, playing with her little nephew, to becoming an object of veneration, a living idol effectively imprisoned in the prayer room and brought out for darshan when people come asking for favours and miracles.

Much like Devi, Kajarya begins with goddess images – a clay statue, a painting – that are made to look sinister both by how they are framed and by the given context. We see that the village is dominated by men: most of the children seem to be boys; women are largely invisible; the local police chief has a lady assistant who banters with him, but she seems the exception that proves the rule. And then we meet the flesh-and-blood goddess, Kajarya (a mesmerizing performance by Meenu Hooda), who is a puppet in the hands of her “devotees”. “Jai Ma Kali” these men shout in a frenzy, even as they perpetuate their dominance over women.

Into this rustic setting trips a privileged young journalist from the city named Meera (Ridhima Sud, who played the wealthy ingénue in a very different sort of film, Dil Dhadakne Do, earlier this year). She looks and behaves like a card-carrying citizen of the modern world, she speaks Hindi with an accent and is a misfit in the village, but as the narrative progresses our view of her changes too; we become aware of her vulnerabilities and compulsions, some of which she doesn’t face up to herself. She is no stranger to enslavement and objectification, and she has her own form of nasha to help her cope.

There have been some notable films recently about female-infanticide and the related theme of how a society treats its women in various contexts. Take Anup Singh’s beautifully shot and performed Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost, in which a girl-child is murdered not literally but symbolically (her father, despairing for a male heir, not only raises her as a boy but tells the world she IS a boy and comes to believe this himself). Or Nila Madhab Panda’s layered Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid, in which a city-bred girl travels with her dad to the village of his childhood, a place where both women and water – two sources of nourishment that are linked by this fable-like story – are now scarce. That film had a shadowy “daayan” who strikes fear in people’s hearts but who turns out to be an unfairly maligned outcaste. In Kajarya, things are a little more complicated: the “witch” really is a murderer, even if she has been victimized and manipulated along the way.

The divide between city and village, modernity and tradition, is central to Anand’s film, as the story moves between the spaces occupied by its two protagonists. But are these spaces really so different? In one scene, a high-society Delhi woman says that the villagers should use technology to pre-determine a foetus’s sex, instead of killing it after it has been born (“so barbaric”). In another, Meera tells her boyfriend in a disgusted tone about how a group of village men had playing-cards with photos of scantily clad women on them – “you could barely make out the faces, it was just bodies” – and as she speaks, we see a shot of her body (with her face outside the frame) from the boyfriend’s perspective. He then comments on her short dress, saying “Are you going to office dressed like that, or a disco?”

Some of these scenes may feel a little pedantic – perhaps this is inevitable in a “message movie” that combines fictional narrative with documentary – but Kajarya’s most powerful moments transcend message-mongering. They include a climactic confrontation where two women sit in a room, facing each other as antagonists. One of them is the interrogator, but soon the equations shift; it is the other woman who starts asking the hard questions, while the person who was initially in a position of power is forced to admit “Mere haath mein kuch nahin tha”. Here they sit, two goddesses in shackles, all too aware of how they are perceived and represented in male-dominated arenas.

[Related posts here: Qissa, Jalpari, Devi]

A tribute to Guide in its 50th year

[Did a shorter version of this piece for The Hindu]

If you call yourself a movie buff and haven’t yet seen Vijay Anand’s Guide, or don’t remember it well, you must make up for that lapse soon – but for now, just go to YouTube and search for “Guide snake dance”. Watch the scene where Rosie (Waheeda Rehman), a former dancer “rescued” from a courtesan’s life and now stifled in a marriage to a self-centered man, breaks her shackles during an outing with Raju the guide (Dev Anand).

See the look on Rehman’s expressive face as she watches a village girl perform the cobra dance; how Rosie, initially seated on a cane chair like a privileged memsahib, gets up and perches on the floor as the performance begins; how she begins to sway while still in that position, continues her graceful movements while rising, and then joins in the dance. (Meanwhile Raju goes from being a “mere” guide to occupying that chair himself and supervising her performance – a foreshadowing of what will happen to their relationship later in the story.) Note the long takes that follow – so characteristic of Anand’s cinema – culminating in the scene where the camera follows Rosie dizzily as she circles the arena, and how the sequence as a whole suggests that she is having something like a religious experience, the bliss of self-expression combined with the joy of having transgressed.

Now here is the equivalent passage from RK Narayan’s novel The Guide, two sentences in Raju’s voice: “She watched [the cobra] swaying with the raptest attention. She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm – for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”

Rather terse, isn’t it, compared to that mesmerising scene?

Which is not to imply that the movie is “better”, or that Narayan’s cool, refined prose (more elaborate elsewhere) expresses Rosie’s circumstances less poignantly than the combination of Rehman’s acting, SD Burman’s music and Fali Mistry’s cinematography do – it is just to point out that a good commercial film may achieve its ends in very different ways from the literary work it was based on, and that it can be silly to compare two such disparate forms. Such comparisons are usually more deferential to literature anyway, more sympathetic towards writers whose visions were “ruined” by money-minded filmmakers. In an essay titled “Misguided Guide”, Narayan related, with dry humour, the processes by which his low-key, Malgudi-centered story was transformed into a colourful, pan-India extravaganza. But it is possible to enjoy that essay even while appreciating how Guide uses cinematic form and language.

Those long takes, for instance, add dramatic intensity to many scenes – such as the one where Rosie confronts her husband Marco in the caves, a brilliantly atmospheric setting for the playing out of overwrought emotions – and give the performances the dimensions of good theatre. Music – and the way it plays out on screen – is another of the film’s crowning achievements. (Would it be facetious to point out that the book has no soundtrack?) Look at the “Tere Mere Sapne” scene where Raju plights his troth to Rosie. “Khandaron mein guide khada hai” (“There is a guide waiting for you amidst the ruins”) he first tells her in dialogue, but prose is inadequate to this situation (a woman has just left her husband; a hitherto carefree man is baring his heart to her), so he has to shift to the more exalted meter of song. Though more than four minutes long, the sequence is made up of just three shots – there are only two cuts, each of which occurs after Rosie draws away from Raju; she is still conflicted, and the process of reassuring her must begin anew. This is then done at a dual level, by the song’s lyrics as well as by the camera’s sympathetic, probing movement – leading up to the long, pivotal final shot and a beautiful moment where Raju stands at a distance and holds his hand out, and the camera first tracks from him to Rosie, bridging the large gap between them, and then tracks back, this time “coaxing” her to him by not allowing her the option of “escaping” to another shot (via a third cut).

Music and visuals meld perfectly in other scenes too, such as the shot in “Aaj Phir Jeene ki Tamanna Hai” where Raju emerges from the darkness of a Chittoor Fort ruin as Rosie sings the line “Kal ke andheron se nikal ke”. Or in the heartbreaking contrast between the union of Rosie and Raju in “Tere Mere Sapne”, and the distance that has opened between them in “Din Dhal Jaaye”.

Part of Narayan’s concern was that the film had made something too big-canvas and starry out of his narrative about circumscribed lives. But the expansion of scale and setting doesn’t compromise the story’s essential concerns: how people and their power equations can change over time, how love can fade and be replaced by self-deception or self-interest, and how, despite all this, a form of redemption may still be possible. This is also a rare popular film that comes close to transcending the expectations created by the star system: it is possible to watch Waheeda Rehman and Dev Anand, to be fully aware of who they are, and to still feel how stifled Rosie is, how liberating the very act of walking through the marketplace in her ghungroos is for this girl who loves dancing more than anything else, for whom it is an art (and who has tragically been told that practicing it consigns her to the damned).

Because Rehman’s performance is one of the finest we have ever had, it is easy to overlook Dev Anand. He was at a point in his career where the urbane charm of his early days had begun veering towards the self-conscious, head-bobbing mannerisms that became so common through the 1970s and later. Yet that rarely happens in this film, even with the obvious temptations of the scene where Raju gives Rosie a lecture about self-actualisation. Anand seems to know exactly when to stay in the background: watch his expressions during the snake-dance scene and the ones around it, where he discovers new dimensions to Rosie’s personality and begins to be intrigued. This is a performance made up of finely observed moments, such as the way he doesn’t look directly at Rosie when she comes down the stairs at a party shortly after they have had a bitter argument; or a split-second shot where Raju, reeling after a physical altercation with his friend, tries feebly and fails to shut the door of a car that is about to drive away.

Guide does have minor weaknesses: in its final leg it uses the plot thread about Raju being mistaken for a holy man to indulge the traditional narcissism of the Hindi-movie hero; it seems a pity that a film with such a fascinating, ahead-of-her-time heroine should marginalize her in its final half-hour and end with a close up of its male star looking saintly, his voiceover saying “Sirf main hoon” (words that would define Dev Anand’s later screen work!). Thankfully, that pat ending can’t diminish the power of all that went before it. Now 50 years old and yet timeless, this is one of our cinematic landmarks, and a testament to the possibilities of artistic collaboration within a commercial system.

[A longer post about "Tere Mere Sapne" is here. And more about RK Narayan's "Misguided Guide" here]

Very fragmented notes on Tanu Weds Manu Returns

-- What a goofily ungrammatical-sounding title. Reminds me of the famous promotional tagline for The Birds, which got pedants all worked up: “The birds is coming” (with the “B” deliberately in lower-case).

-- As must already have been noted hundreds of times elsewhere, Tanu Weds Manu Returns is a triumph for Kangana Ranaut as well as for an ensemble of supporting performers, including Deepak Dobriyal, Swara Bhaskar, Eijaz Khan and Jimmy Shergill reprising their roles from the first film. This is one of those rare times where I wished a sequel would expand into a full-fledged franchise, so we can keep revisiting these performers in these roles, not necessarily to see where they will end up (chances are this lot will keep going round in circles, creating new complications for themselves), but to eavesdrop on conversations, observe shifting equations, and see more of those crowded family functions where the less predictable facets of small-town Indian life may be revealed.

-- This film belongs to the tradition of what Stanley Cavell called “the comedy of remarriage” – a reference to the many wonderful screwball comedies in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood where married couples broke up and explored other possibilities as a necessary prelude to the realisation that they couldn’t do without each other in the long run. (And this was something that most people around them could usually see before they could. Though in some cases there was also a subconscious little waltz going on, centred on the thrill of waiting it out, playing the game without quite acknowledging it.)

Classics in that subgenre include His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story and My Favorite Wife. Cary Grant was a vital force in all of those films, and I think this had a lot to do with one of his most distinctive qualities as an actor, which David Thomson drew attention to in a once-infamous essay: Grant’s ability to tap into the light and dark shades of his personality simultaneously, never allowing one to drown out the other. That quality was particularly effective in films like His Girl Friday, where, despite the generally manic tone, you always got a sense of an internal conflict: the man battling with himself, both drawn to and put off by (or intimidated by) the woman; the playing out of that conflict, up to the realisation that one feeling carries more weight than the other. 

In contrast, the Manu of Tanu Weds Manu Returns is bland, hard to read, and something of a non-entity, both at the script level and in R Madhavan’s pleasant but workmanlike performance. And this may have been deliberate. Both Tanu Weds Manu and its sequel often toy with the complexities of gender equations in a seemingly conservative society: how women can be the ones to take initiatives or assert themselves in contexts where you wouldn’t always expect it. But I wonder if the current discourse about empowering and giving more agency to women characters in our cinema is about to lead to a situation where the men in some films have almost no agency or personality. (See the Rajkummar Rao character in Queen, for instance.) Manu is a cipher here; the viewer gets very little sense of what is going on in his head. 

 -- Delightful though it is on many levels, I’m not sure TWM Returns works too well as a remarriage-comedy in the sense that Cavell used the term. One problem being that I was less than convinced by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film: first a dreamy-eyed NRI falls in love with a sleeping girl, then the girl (who turns out to be a madcap whenever she is awake) falls gradually in love with the idea of someone being so much in love with her. If you find that unconvincing, it isn’t so easy to invest in the sequel’s conviction that these two people have to get back together, so what if a vulnerable young college-goer gets caught up in their courtship dance.

The opening of this film pointedly contrasts the noisy camaraderie of a large middle-class Indian wedding (I can’t get “Sun Sahiba Sun” out of my head now) with cold and gloomy England, where Tanu – who draws so much of her energy from being around people – only has pigeons and raccoons for company. If you were truly deeply moved by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film, you’re supposed to be shaken by what they have turned into, by this dark winter of the soul (which can only be healed by a return to sunny, clamorous India). But the quarreling couple we see in the asylum scene is pretty much how I would have expected the two people from the first film to wind up a few years after their wedding. (My wife is bipolar, Manu tells the doctors, and we are invited to read this as a manifestation of his resentment rather than as a balanced diagnosis. But one thing that neither film has ever addressed full-on – though Kangana’s performance screams it out in nearly every scene – is that Tanu is a bit of a nut, and possibly dangerous too. Her expressions during the bonfire scene in the first film still make me shiver.)

-- Though the supporting cast, and most of the dialogue, in TWM Returns is so sharp that the pace is never allowed to flag for long, it comes close a few times: notably in the exasperating scene where Datto’s brother gives a little lecture to his family and community about the need to value women. Again, a byproduct of the New Indian Cinema where the need to be self-consciously progressive and socially responsible is sometimes prioritised over narrative flow or internal credibility. (But since Anand L Rai is the director who got so much flak for Raanjhanaa, I won’t go on about this. Perhaps he just felt the need to spell things out.)

-- There is also a nod to the great cinematic theme of obsessive remaking, casting a lookalike in the mould of your idealised love – a theme that has anchored films as otherwise disparate as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, V Shantaram’s Navrang and Yash Chopra’s Lamhe. Tanu Weds Manu Returns briefly flirts with the idea, as in the scene where Manu scrutinises Datto when she tries on the earrings he has given her; in a different sort of film, this might have been close to the creepy scene in Vertigo where Scottie waits for Judy to emerge from the bathroom, made up as Madeleine. But again, Manu is such a blank slate that you can’t ascribe many such motivations to him. And the film, being essentially lighthearted in tone, isn’t trying to go down that particular vortex; it remains a sidenote.

(But I’ll still use this opportunity to link to this terrific Adam Gopnik story about death, replacement, love, pet fish and Hitchcock’s blondes. Read.)

-- Having begun this post by mentioning pedants, let me be one myself. People, stop calling Tanu Weds Manu the “prequel” to this film. (This means you too, Wikipedia.) A prequel is a specific sort of sequel – it isn’t a synonym for “precursor” or “predecessor”. Look it up. Yes, I know we are living in a world where “anyways” will soon replace “anyway” in the OED, but let’s beat back the gathering ravens for as long as we can.

Good golly, Miss Dolly - my attempts to make sense of Dolly ki Doli

[Did this for The Daily O]

The best thing I can find to say of the new film Dolly ki Doli – about a con-woman using marriage as her playground and decamping with valuables midway through each suhaag raat after drugging the groom-of-the-moment – is that it has the sense to be only an hour and 40 minutes long. This is a definite point in its favour. If they had chipped away another hour and a half, it may even have been a good film.

What is this movie about, I kept wondering, and why does it exist? Some observations that may or may not answer those questions:

It could be a sort of fable (though the thought and energy required to interpret it in those terms probably isn’t worth it) – an allegory about the Revenge of the Dowry Givers; a satire on the socially sanctioned assessment and bartering of young women, their subsequent shackling into married life where they are treated as inflatable sex dolls by husbands and as slaves and jewellery banks by parents-in-law; an exercise in wish-fulfillment that takes women’s empowerment into a new dimension.

If this is the case, the central character is meant to be a blank slate on which men (and their overbearing parents) can scrawl their own fantasies or ideals. “Dolly” is different things to different people – a gharelu ladki, a seductress, and so on – and you’d think such a tabula-rasa role would be well suited to Sonam Kapoor, who is as synthetic and vacant here as anything I have seen her in so far (with the exception of Dilli 6, where she had a few good moments). That isn’t how it works though. Kapoor is passable in the scenes where Dolly is carrying out her charades (because, think about it, what standards do we use to judge her performance in those bits? Anything goes. Every gesture and expression, however broad or unconvincing, can be explained away as being part of an act), but when Dolly is with her own people, being “herself”, there is no sense of a person with any inner life. Instead she mechanically drones lines that might sound meaningful on paper (“I would rather be in an actual jail than in your shaadi ka jail”) but have little overall relevance to this hodgepodge of a film, which doesn’t stay focused on any one thought for more than a few seconds.

But here’s another theory. The pastiche-like feel of the film, the wild tonal shifts, the problems in logic, the lack of continuity, scenes such as the one involving a misplaced dadi, the non-sequiturish incomprehensibleness of the note left behind by Dolly at the end (why do I do what I do, she says, pronouncing Hindi words with the diligence of a child in elocution class. Well, why does a sabzi-wallah sell sabzi and not alcohol?)… all this can be easily explained if one assumes that Dolly ki Doli isn’t a film but the sum of a series of auditions where actors like Rajkummar Rao, Varun Sharma and Pulkit Samrat were asked to try out a few different things – look, here is a role you could be playing in a big-budget film we may or may not be planning, so:

“Speak in a Sonepat accent.”

“Put on a moustache and try to look grown-up and policeman-like.”

“Be sleazy.”

“Look avuncular.”

“Bumble.”

“Do pelvic dance.”

“Say ‘dadi!’ and slap your forehead while looking surprised and sad.”

“And Sonam, no, you don’t have to pronounce ‘वे ’ as ‘Vay’ just because it’s written like that – ‘woh’ will do nicely. Oh well. Whatever.”

And then all those audition clips were thrown together.

Ultimately though, I have decided that this film is best seen in meta terms, as yet another self-examination by the movie industry. What better way to comment on certain feudal-patriarchal traditions in our society than to reference another major feudal-patriarchal tradition, the star system? So here is a savvy con-woman getting the better of a host of men who are clearly out of their depth in her company – and as if to echo this, we have a privileged, glamorous, second-generation actress in the lead role, surrounded by “plainer” actors from more low-key milieus. (“Itni lambi ladkiyan hoti hain?” asks a boy’s mother amusingly, and one is reminded that as a physical specimen of lambaai and gorapan, Sonam Kapoor bears roughly the same relationship to actors like Rajkummar as the elven-queen Galadriel does to the Dwarf Lords in Tolkien.**) No wonder then that when all these non-starry men can’t track down or tame Dolly (she is always out of reach), it needs a cameo appearance by a mainstream star (Saif Ali Khan) to help apprehend her.

And no wonder too that the final, “money shot” cameo – even though it’s only a photograph – is by Salman Khan. Forget all those platitudes about shaadi as a jail, or the “serious” angle of a woman, let down in love, avenging herself on other men. THIS is what the film has been building up to all along: Salman as the ultimate ideal of malehood, the prem rattan, the superstar capable of turning even our opportunistic heroine into a bag of mush. Poor Saif. Despite that grand, star-cameo entrance, even he turned out second best in the end. And as for the film’s ostensible leading man Rajkummar… at least he got an item number.

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** No offence intended to Lady Galadriel or her followers

On Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly - power struggles, mindgames and innocence sidelined

One of my favourite Anurag Kashyap-directed scenes (and one that is a lot of fun to watch and discuss with students) is the chase through the slum in Black Friday. The scene begins in a purposeful, no-nonsense vein – Imtiaz Ghavate may have been involved in the Bombay blasts. He must be apprehended. Senior cops, shouting instructions, and their minions, who will do most of the running, gather to make enquiries. Everyone looks very determined – but then, as Imtiaz keeps eluding the police's welcoming arms and everyone starts tiring, the tone becomes almost comical. There are many stops and starts, the cops-and-robbers theme is deglamorised, we see how mundane and chancy such pursuits can be. A flabby policeman bleats “Imtiaz, ruk ja yaar” (and there is a contrast with Amitabh delivering fiery dialogues from a nearby TV). By the end of the scene, trapped as we are with the characters in Dharavi’s labyrinths, we have lost sight of the Big Picture, the fact that this is part of an investigation into a major terrorist attack. What matters are the little details: what we learn about Imtiaz and these cops and the world they are stumbling around in – a slum so congested that a large pipeline running through it performs the function of an arterial road.

And then he is finally caught, smacked hard by a senior officer – this is as much a bucket of cold water for the viewer, who has been enjoying the circus – and the next scene, an interrogation in a menacingly lit room, returns us to that larger picture and to the razor-sharp focus that is the need of the hour.

Something comparable happens over the course of Kashyap’s powerful new film Ugly. The serious situation that demands our attention is established early on – a little girl has vanished, probably been kidnapped – but then the narrative enters a warren of side-lanes to examine the shadowy back-stories and inner lives of the many people involved. And the thing that matters (or the thing that we thought mattered) is lost sight of and returned to, very unsettlingly, only in the film’s final moments.

When a struggling actor named Rahul (Rahul Bhat) and his small-time casting agent Chaitanya (the excellent Vineet Kumar Singh) realise that Rahul’s daughter Kali has disappeared from his car, they begin a frantic search. A suspicious man is encountered, a chase ends with a gruesome accident… but all this fast-paced action is immediately followed by a protracted scene in The Police Station Where Time Stood Still. Rahul and Chaitanya find themselves being interrogated by cops who are more interested in cracking gratuitous jokes than in recognising the urgency of the situation. They ask what “casting” means, discuss the real names of famous actors, make judgemental noises about talaaq causing problems by breaking up society’s moral fabric, and dwell on frivolities (how is it that Rahul’s daughter’s phone displays a photo of him when he calls her? How does that phone-camera work?).

At first this scene looks like one of those extended Kashyap setpieces that sometimes invite accusations of self-indulgence. After it had gone on for a bit, I thought “Okay, can we get on with the story now?” But later, after seeing the whole film, I felt that the scene’s meandering on was part of the point. We are aware that time could be running out for the little girl, and already the need to find her is being eclipsed by mind-games and irrelevancies. In this case, the game of one-upmanship involves policemen using their position to toy with people who are otherwise more privileged than them, people who can afford to buy shiny pink phones for their children, and who need to be pulled down a peg or two. (“Mere saab tum dono se bahut zyaada padhe likhe hain,” Inspector Jadhav tells Rahul and Chaitanya.) But this isn’t the only such game that will be played here. 

Much of Ugly is about a power struggle between two men who knew each other in college and whose lives have taken very different turns since then. One is Rahul, the other is police chief Shoumik (Ronit Roy), who is married to Rahul’s ex-wife Shalini (Tejaswini Kolhapure), and information about them comes to us in layers. When we first meet Shoumik, he is intoning that women must be kept in their place, and we see that he maintains an iron hand over his depressive wife, tapping her phone calls, even supervising how many litres of petrol she has in her car. His resentment about her falling for Rahul in their college days manifests itself in withering coldness. “Tera first choice bhaag gaya,” he tells Shalini when he hears of Rahul escaping custody, and he also implies that she came to him “second-hand”. (There is a close connection between this character and the part played by Roy in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan – another hard-edged, controlling alpha-male who may once have had a sensitive side but has now settled into a regimented view of social norms and gender roles.) Rahul, on the other hand, comes across as a nicer guy at first, because we see him as a concerned father, the underdog, and a contrast to the autocratic Shoumik. But still waters run deep, it turns out that the man who is now a failed actor may have had the cards in his favour in the distant past, and that he may not have been a likable winner at the time. Our feelings about these people, and the others around them, keep shifting, which adds to the sense of paranoia, the suspense about who is conning or double-crossing whom.

Ugly is, on one level, a police procedural, a view of investigators trying to get their work done while also dealing with a perplexing new world of technology, and learning on the job. But it is more effective in its depiction of wasted lives, and the lengths people will go to so they can break out of their private traps. There are affecting touches, such as a scene where the dowdy Shalini mentions a glamorous red dress she had bought thinking she would wear it at one of Rahul’s premieres when he became a star, but there are also flashes of humour when you don’t expect them: a hood wearing a “Prem Rogue” T-shirt; the priceless expression on Shoumik’s face when he hears the lyrics of “Tu Mujhe Nichod De”, a song performed in a sleazy video by Rahul’s girlfriend.

One easy way of describing this film is to say that it is about innocence lost and forgotten in a world where being hardened and competitive is everything: fending for yourself, battling or nurturing your personal demons, looking for small and big ways of getting back at someone who has wounded you. It leads up to a last scene that is calculated for maximum visceral effect, confronting us with exactly what we don’t want to see (even if we know beforehand that this will be a dark film). Kashyap often deals in excesses, and often overreaches, but I thought that final unflinching scene was absolutely necessary. It is almost as if the viewer is being told, “Remember what all this was originally about? It didn’t really matter all that much to the characters in the story – they were too caught up in themselves and in their adult games. But does it matter to you?"

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P.S. The Inspector Jadhav character in this film (played by Girish Kulkarni) reminded me just a little of one of the most memorable characters in Indian English fiction of the past year, the fat, seething policeman Ram Manohar Pande in Shovon Chowdhury’s novel The Competent Authority, haunted by the thought that rich, English-speaking people are laughing at him behind his back, and determined that the laughter must stop. Consider this a plug for the book.

The joker and his disguises - Raj Kapoor as innocent and masochist

Raj Kapoor, whose 90th birth anniversary was earlier this week, is a polarising figure for many movie buffs. Even those who don’t much care for his screen persona (because it is mawkish or narcissistic), or have reservations about aspects of his films, tend to agree that he was – from a very early age – one of mainstream Hindi cinema’s leading auteurs. And that his important films, beginning with his directorial debut Aag in 1948, and continuing till at least Bobby 25 years later, were deeply personal, even autobiographical in places. If one function of art is to present a particular, individual sensibility – even if it is a discomfiting one – then there is little doubt that Kapoor was an artist working out his compulsions through a commercial medium.

There is plenty in his work for the cine-aesthete too. For a moment, set aside the Chaplin homages, the women in white, the romantic showboating, the father-son conflicts, the idealising of male friendship – and instead watch the brilliantly show-offish dream sequence in Awaara, or the smaller moments in that film, such as the scene where the judge suspects that his wife was unfaithful: the slanted compositions, the use of lighting, the shadows from a rain-soaked window playing across Prithviraj Kapoor’s handsome face. This is style-driven cinema helmed by a young man excited by the tools and possibilities of film; it reminds me of Orson Welles’s description of how he felt when given complete freedom to make Citizen Kane at age 25 (“It was the best toy-train set a boy ever had”). That isn’t to make a facile comparison, but to point out that Kapoor had genuine filmmaking panache, along with a knack for bringing together a team of people whose sensibilities matched his own – from lyricist Shailendra and composers Shankar-Jaikishan to screenwriter Inder Raj Anand and cinematographer Radhu Karmakar – and making them part of his extended family.

And of course, there are the women – from Nargis to Padmini to Vyjayanthimala – and the conflict one senses in Kapoor’s attitude to them. An easy interpretation is that he was a controller, an exploiter or a voyeur: playing caveman by dragging Nargis around in Awaara; draping much younger heroines like Zeenat Aman and Mandakini in semi-transparent clothes in his later films. Yet to look closely at his work is to be fascinated by a duality in his screen image – one that is backed by the revelations made in such books as Raj Kapoor Speaks (by his daughter Ritu Nanda) and Madhu Jain’s The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema.

On the one hand, there is the naïf of films like Awaara and Shree 420 – embodying pastoral innocence, a misfit in a corrupt, modernising world – or the good-hearted clown who makes others laugh while hiding his own sorrow under greasepaint. Yet, within the DNA of this iconic character is also a nastier, sulkier Raj Kapoor – the masochist who seems to expect rejection and disappointment all the time and then, when it comes, almost revels in it. In his extravagant 1964 romance Sangam, one of our most fully realised melodramas, the conventional hero is the sensitive, new-age lover Gopal, played by Rajendra Kumar, while Kapoor’s Sundar is the suspicious, animalistic alpha-male who wants to possess the woman (and seems faintly aware that he isn’t worthy of her). And in Mera Naam Joker, often seen as Kapoor’s emblematic film, his character Raju keeps falling in love with – and idealising – different sorts of women, but the intensity of his feelings is never reciprocated in the terms he requires. (What exactly those terms are, though, is hard to say. Is it something as straightforward as sexual desire? Probably not. In Raj Kapoor Speaks, Kapoor mentions his early attraction towards his mother and says that his interest in female nudity may have begun during his childhood bathing sessions with her. It certainly casts a new perspective on the knotty father-son relationship in Awaara!)

While being mindful of the dangers of pop-psychology, the relationship between Kapoor and his women (both as it was rumoured to be off-screen and as it was in films like Sangam) reminds me a little of Alfred Hitchcock and his blondes. One view of Hitchcock (presented in studies such as Donald Spoto’s book The Dark Side of Genius) is that this short, fat man, constantly surrounded by glamorous actresses who may have seemed to him out of reach, used his films to exorcise his demons – casting Ingrid Bergman (who was on the verge of “leaving” Hitchcock for another director, Roberto Rossellini) as a sickly, dominated woman in Under Capricorn, or putting the attractive Tippu Hedren in real danger during the shooting of the climactic scenes in The Birds. But a more nuanced view comes from Camille Paglia, who responded to the charge that Hitchcock was “clearly a misogynist” with a discussion about the push-pull relationship – adoration mixed with fear – that male artists from Michelangelo downwards have often had with their female subjects. “Any artist is driven by strange and contrary forces,” she said, “The whole impulse is to untangle your dark emotions” – adding that before rushing to make one-dimensional judgments, one should remember that “we are talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created”.

Some of this applies to the portrayal of women in Kapoor’s cinema: the worshipful gaze coexisting with the need to pull down or debase. Watch how lovely and elegant Vyjayanthimala so often is in Sangam (as in the gorgeously shot “Yeh Mera Prem Patra” sequence, where she is courted by the gentle Gopal), and then see how she is made to look outlandish in the “Budha Mil Gaya” scene. By revealing as much of himself as he did in his work, Raj Kapoor also revealed a great deal about the many dimensions – including the uglier ones – of love and romantic obsession. The clown had quite an assortment of masks.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

P.S. Below is the “Yeh Mera Prem Patra” sequence, including a two-minute prelude before the song itself starts – one of Hindi film’s finest depictions of idealised love, where one is left in no doubt about the high-mindedness of Gopal’s love. It makes an interesting contrast with the “Bol Radha Bol” song in the same film, which is much more physically charged – the sangam in that case being not just of the mind and heart but of the body. And there are the lyrics, suggesting two different views of love. Where Gopal puts Radha on a pedestal, comparing her to both the sacred rivers Ganga and Yamuna, Sundar is more worldly and self-absorbed – he likens his own mind to Ganga and Radha’s mind to Yamuna, and calls for a union. But in this story about two different forms of possessiveness, one can also consider that Gopal, for all his decency, is treating Radha as a goddess-statue rather than a human being – which is why it is so easy for him to “sacrifice” his love in the name of friendship, without consulting her.



And here, just by way of a small tribute, is one of my favourite RK songs (which conveniently segues here into another fine song):

Hindi cinema and the Anglophone viewer: MK Raghavendra on the new Bollywood

[Did this review for Biblio]

Conversations involving movie buffs who grew up in the 1980s often touch on the divergence between the mainstream Hindi films of then and the Bollywood of the past decade. This isn’t necessarily an exercise in rosy-eyed nostalgia, nothing as simple as “things were better in our time”, but it involves a recognition that even as our movies have become more sophisticated – more professionally made, with bound scripts, a variety of settings and subjects, and greater attention to detail – something important has been lost too. It is pointed out that even the tackier commercial films of the 1980s often had a raw honesty, a willingness to engage head-on with the non-English-speaking world, to create an immediate identification between the audience and the characters on the screen; the fourth wall had not been pulled down and replaced by a gossamer veil of irony. Indeed this quality is inseparable from the impression one gets, looking back, that the cinema of that time was clumsy, insular, not attempting a discourse with the cinemas of other countries.

In the last decade and a half, the pendulum, propelled by rapid globalisation and the “India Shining” narrative, has swung very far in the other direction. In a shrinking world (or in a world that upper-class Indians can convince themselves has shrunk), our films have elaborate premieres at international festivals; American stars like John Travolta and Kevin Spacey shake a leg to the “lungi dance” at our award shows; the multiplex culture has seen many seminal movies being targeted at an audience that travels widely and for whom English is a first language. MK Raghavendra’s new book The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium is about this shift in Hindi cinema’s idiom in the years following economic liberalisation. Its thesis is that during this period, films have increasingly been made for Anglophone viewers – so that the underprivileged have been marginalised or ceased to be subjects of the new cinema – and that the state’s withdrawal from the public sphere has had notable consequences for the filmic treatment of patriotism, community, aspiration and politics. Raghavendra proposes that even when the films themselves are celebratory, they carry bleak implications for the idea of an Indian “nation”.

Needless to say, this is a very big topic, and he tackles it by looking closely and in an organised manner at a number of key films released between 2001 (the year of Dil Chahta Hai, Lagaan and Gadar) and 2012 (Paan Singh Tomar) – what are their implications and undercurrents, what might they tell us about the post-liberalisation nation? Thus, for instance, the section on the feel-good Lage Raho Munnabhai notes the curious, cynical ways in which Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings have been transformed and re-applied to the imperatives of modern India, while films such as Bunty aur Babli are analysed in terms of how the go-getting entrepreneurial spirit is now celebrated without agonizing much about moral compromises. Overall, the accent is on films that have been successful – to some degree or other – across India, but the choice of movies is also a reminder that the line between the categories “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” is now less clear than it was in the “commercial film vs parallel film” (or Manmohan Desai vs Shyam Benegal) era. There are blockbusters by Karan Johar and Farah Khan (Kabhi Alvida na Kehna and Om Shanti Om respectively) and a stylish, glamorous thriller (Dhoom 2) but also lower-key movies such as Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal and Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live; there are relatively commercial works by respected auteurs (Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, Mani Ratnam’s Guru), alongside the oeuvre of that most self-consciously “socially conscious” director Madhur Bhandarkar.

Inevitably the results are uneven, with some essays being more stimulating and focused than others. Some conclusions are easily drawn: anyone can see that a film such as Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi na Milegi Dobara, populated by posh, cosmopolitan people (three friends on a road trip in Spain), is about and for Indians who are citizens of a global world; largely unconcerned with lives outside upper-class circles. But some of Raghavendra’s sharper observations concern films that, on the face of it, deal with poor people in lower-class milieus – he points out that these films, being made for multiplex audiences, often view the underprivileged with an anthropological (if sympathetic) detachment. Hence Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, though set in a crime underbelly, has the tenor of “a low-life fantasy lived out by the aspiring, upwardly mobile classes”. And though Taare Zameen Par is about an underdog – a boy whose classroom troubles stem from dyslexia – the visuals in an early scene, where little Ishaan imagines aquatic life reminiscent of that in the American animation hit Finding Nemo, are presented in terms that only a well-off, Anglophone viewer can relate to. “The child of a farmer in a hot dry district, for instance, is unlikely to imagine the Sun as a smiling yellow orb.”

Some of these analyses might make you reexamine your feelings about a film. Take Peepli Live, about a farmer in dire straits, who finds himself at the centre of a heartless media circus when he announces he will kill himself. Conventional wisdom has it that this film is empathetic towards the class that the protagonist Natha belongs to – certainly, there is little questioning the filmmakers’ good intentions. Yet, as Raghavendra points out, Peepli Live too belongs to a tradition of Anglophone cinema (the credit titles and the important closing legend are exclusively in English) where a viewer is not encouraged to directly identify with the poor in the way that viewers of an earlier time might have. And in this context he makes an interesting point about the use of movie stars in commercial cinema. “Film stars are naturally people in whom the public projects itself”, he notes – implying that when Nargis plays the destitute Radha in Mother India, or Dilip Kumar plays the villager driven to banditry in Gunga Jamna, or Amitabh Bachchan follows a similar arc in a more urban setting in Deewaar, there is a level of immersion that an audience might not achieve when watching the unknown Omkar Das Manikpuri playing Natha in Peepli Live (no matter how good his performance or how “authentic” the casting).

This is a thoughtful argument, one that extends beyond the scope of this book, in its regarding of stars with established personalities as “signifiers”. In fact, Raghavendra often draws attention to such signifiers – little filmmaking decisions that in some way or the other affect a viewer’s responses to a story and its characters. In writing about Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti, he notes that the central characters – the people whom the audience must, to some degree at least, root for – are played by urbane, westernized actors – Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Arjun Rampal – while the more rustic Manoj Bajpai (“who was born in a small village in Bihar”) plays their adversary. The film itself, being amoral, doesn’t give us any particular reason to think of the former set of characters as “good”, but the casting subtly affects our attitudes.

Elsewhere, he observes that even though Bhandarkar’s Page 3 is “less bleak in tone” than Govind Nihalani’s 1980 film Aakrosh (the former is a stylishly told, mass-audience-friendly narrative; the latter is sombre and hard-hitting in a manner characteristic of the “parallel” movement of the early 1980s), it is Page 3 that is essentially more pessimistic. And this difference has to do with the changed situation, Bhandarkar’s film having been made in a climate where capitalism runs rampant and true justice for the poor – in this case, sexually exploited lower-class children – is a fading dream. (“The characters are implicated in a situation which is irremediable, that is, increasing dominance of the market over the state […] there is no authority to which one might appeal.”) Similarly, 3 Idiots, which presents itself as a “triumph of the underdog” tale, doesn’t attempt to explain how the Aamir Khan character Phunsukh Wangdu has risen from the servant ranks to become an internationally respected scientist; the film simply tells us this has happened and allows us to leave on a feel-good note. “In this inability to imagine Wangdu lies an uncomfortable truth: that such a person is unimaginable. It is unimaginable that a servant’s child in India will become a celebrated inventor. Elite educational institutions are not for his kind even when the institutions have been established by the state.”

These propositions are open to debate, of course. One might paraphrase a famous truism about India: “For every observation you make about Hindi cinema, the opposite can also be shown to be true.” It can also be pointed out that many of the conscientious “art-film” directors of the 80s lived cushy, cosmopolitan lives at a remove from their downtrodden subjects. (Nihalani’s excellent 1984 Party, about a group of bleeding-heart artists and armchair activists at a house party, can be viewed as a caustic self-interrogation.) And if Peepli Live is classified as a mainstream film for the purposes of this study, would this also be true for, say, Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday or Rajkumar Gupta’s Aamir, which do offer a chance to directly relate – in the case of the former, almost to a dangerous extent – with the frustrations of the helpless “common man”?

The fact that each essay must ultimately veer round to the big thesis about the Anglophone audience makes this book heavy-handed and forced at times, and the dry, mostly impersonal writing it represents is not for all tastes. But it is possible to quibble with Raghavendra’s broader conclusions while appreciating the quality of his engagement. Within the broad church of academic work on film, he is one of the better writers and thinkers around, worth taking seriously for the quality of his insights, and his analyses of individual films are always worth reading. Whether making an intriguing connection between two different sorts of movies (the fictionalised Dhirubhai Ambani biopic Guru and the caper film Bunty aur Babli) or pointing out how locales in Gadar are subtly placed at the service of patriotism (“India is always assisted by the film’s cinematography – with views of the countryside in which wheat fields are conspicuous – while Pakistan is portrayed through the city […] India is evidently the more fertile and democratic space”), he is consistently perceptive about the underpinnings of popular cinema. Even if you don't agree with everything he says about the state of the nation, you’ll probably find yourself looking at some of these films through a new prism – and that is one of the most valuable things a critic can do.

Connecting dots (and being underwhelmed by Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug)

Usually, when adapting a book into a film, the scriptwriters don’t take it for granted that their viewers have read the source text; the movie should work on its own terms. But it gets trickier when a film tries to do new things with the template of a very well-known tale and a degree of familiarity is presumed. I enjoyed Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation Haider when I saw it two months ago, but since then I have wondered how I would have felt if I had watched it knowing nothing about Shakespeare’s play. Because the thrill of connecting the dots was central to my viewing experience – noting how Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer had turned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into buffoons who idolise Salman Khan, or anticipating the famous grave-digger scene, complete with the “Aha!” moment where Haider holds up a skull, and the goofy little song (“So Jao” – a take on the recurring links between sleep and death in Hamlet?) that would probably have delighted Shakespeare’s own, plebeian heart.

Would the descent into madness of Haider’s girlfriend Arshia have been credible if one weren’t prepared for it by knowledge of Ophelia’s tragedy? Possibly not: the film is cantering along at this stage, and the abrupt cut to the scene where Haider sees Arshia’s funeral procession might puzzle an unprepared viewer – I remember a few murmurings in the hall – especially since being reduced so quickly to a nervous wreck doesn’t seem consistent with Arshia’s personality (unlike the sheltered Ophelia, she is a journalist working in Kashmir, accustomed to seeing bad things happening).

To some extent the question “How important is pre-knowledge?” applies to all of Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare adaptations (even if the answer to the question is unclear or variable). The first and still arguably the best of them, Maqbool (Macbeth), began with a brilliantly atmospheric scene where two crooked cops gossip about the Bombay underworld and use astrology to predict a gangster’s rise and fall. The scene works well by itself, but gains a new dimension once you realise these are versions of Shakespeare’s witches, commenting from the sidelines while also helping to engineer and direct events. And who can forget Maqbool’s pitiful “Main bachunga ya maroonga?” followed by the witch/cop’s reassurance that he is safe until the “dariya” comes right up to his house, a Birnam Wood drifting to Dunsinane.

Anyway, what started me on this "adapting an over-familiar tale" subject was a recent re-encounter with Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug, a modern-day Mahabharata about a business family split into rival factions. I loved Kalyug when I was 10 (back then it was the only Benegal film I would have touched with a long spoon, much less forced my mother to take me to Palika Bazaar to find a video-cassette of, as I did)... or at least I thought I loved it. Possibly what really stimulated me was the Mahabharata dot-connecting game (then as now, I was obsessed with the epic), and especially seeing my hero Karna sympathetically portrayed by the film’s biggest star (and producer) Shashi Kapoor.

Watching it again now, I was disappointed. It is enjoyable in bits and pieces certainly – the cast is full of interesting people, and the plot is busy enough: the cousins keep raising the stakes passive-aggressively until things get out of control; Amrish Puri plays a Krishna who doesn’t have anything like the agency and influence of the charioteer-God; Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an amusingly priapic Bheema; Rekha and Raj Babbar sleep in separate beds and look unhappy; the smooth Victor Banerjee looks as if he would be perfectly happy sleeping alone forever; Supriya Pathak is sexy. But these elements don’t add up to very much. The film shifts between big-canvas cynicism – with its caution about how, in the machine age, everyone sinks morally into quicksand – and trying to evoke sympathy specifically for one character, the underdog Karan (using Shashi Kapoor’s personality and star-cachet to achieve this without a great deal of help from the actual writing). There is a neither-here-nor-there feel to the whole, which is a reminder of the film’s unusual conception: getting a Serious Director to helm a project that would be backed by money and a cast of well-known names from the mainstream, but would also have the sort of verisimilitude that can be created by Om Puri seething and shaking his fists in a small part as a trade-union rabble-rouser.

Take away the Mahabharata-awareness and this is a confused story with too many characters, most of whom are underdeveloped and don’t get enough screen time. There are tensions and meaningful silences that don’t seem to stem from anything – except, well, as a viewer you are simply supposed to know that Karna was rejected by Draupadi at her swayamvara, or that Yudhisthira is a bit of a non-entity who is over-fond of gambling, or that Abhimanyu may simply have been an overenthusiastic kid who got too involved in adult games. And those who don’t know all this are naturally foxed. A non-Indian friend, who loves old Hindi movies but hasn’t read Vyasa’s epic, had this take on Kalyug: she felt it played like a sort of home video where a viewer has all the relevant information beforehand about the people, and then indolently watches their little dramas play out. Interestingly, in the film itself, there’s a scene where the characters sit together watching a video of themselves at a wedding function. Vanraj Bhatia’s stirring music score aside, I’m not sure that Kalyug on the whole is much more interesting than that footage.

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Update: a follow-up conversation with my erudite friend/fellow Mahabharata nut Karthika Nair helped me articulate another reason why Kalyug didn't work for me this time: the best Benegal films, including the ones that are more "art-house", like Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda or Mammo, are very far from the art-cinema cliche of the "boring", "educative" movie; they are kinetic and have a sense of style, they do interesting things visually (look at Nihalani's cinematography in Bhumika, and how it uses four  different types of film stock to capture different periods in the protagonist Usha's life). Whereas this film, for all its glamorous, "commercial" trappings, is formally static, and content to rest on the Mahabharata references.

[Two old posts about Benegal films I like very much: Trikaal and Charandas Chor. And this one on Junoon, written back when I was trying to sound more knowledgeable about Benegal than I actually was, and which I should probably watch again some time]

Remembering Deven Varma

[A tribute to one of my favourite actors, who passed away yesterday, and whom I had the good fortune of meeting – very briefly – in January. Did a version of this for The Hindu]

Deven Varma looked frail as he walked slowly down the stairs and I worried again that my visit was an intrusion. I had come to his Pune home, and though both he and his wife Rupa had been warm and inviting on the phone, the latter did emphasise that he needed rest and there was only a small window of time available. Evening was best; climbing upstairs was an effort for him, which meant that if he came down to the living room, he had to stay there till after dinner.

Given these circumstances – as well as all those stories about famous comedians being reticent in real life – it seemed too much to expect him to be cheery. Within a few minutes of our introduction though, the old spark was visible, and as he reminisced about his film career, images came flooding back. The pleasant-looking youngster from the Shashi Kapoor-Manoj Kumar generation who might have, with a slight change in fortune, become a matinee idol, but instead settled into respectable second-lead parts in films like Devar. The talent that made him one of Hindi cinema’s finest and most atypical funny men in the 1970s and 1980s, most memorably in the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterji and Gulzar – films where Varma provided a counterpoint to the louder comedy elsewhere in the industry. People who haven’t seen the best of those movies closely, who look at them from a distance or only have hazy impressions of them, think of the “Middle Cinema” as safe, bland and non-transgressive, but that’s an unfair assessment. And while I won’t discuss that subject in detail here, it’s telling to look at the function Deven so often performed in those films: sutradhaar, vidushak, naatak-rachita rolled into one.

When I think of Deven Varma, this is the image that first comes to mind. He is standing near the edge of the frame, one hand raised, mouth half-open as if he forgot what he was going to say at the exact moment his lips parted. He seems worried that he may be interrupting something important. He is not the “cool” guy in the picture, especially when the others populating it include the likes of Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Rekha, or even Utpal Dutt. He is the sidekick, the hero’s friend, the jovial brother-in-law.

But then he speaks, and what he says is so casually outrageous you feel you have been plucked out of the universe of this sweet middle-class film and deposited on the border of Groucho Marx Land. If you can imagine a roly-poly Groucho with an earnest look on his face, saying subversive things as if accidentally.

“Ghisi-hui, purani, bekaar si cheezen – jaise tumhare pitaji” (“Old, faded, useless things – like your father”) he goes in Kissi se na Kehna, explaining the meaning of “antique” to a girlfriend. In Bemisaal, he congratulates a doctor who has opened a new clinic with “Bhagwaan se praarthana karta hoon ke shahar mein beemaari phaile aur aapka nursing home safal ho.” (“I pray to God that illness spreads in the city and your nursing home is very successful.”) And in Naukri, to a lover demanding a compliment: “Tum woh noton ki gaddi ho jinn pe income-tax waalon ki nazar nahin padi.” (“You are a stack of currency notes that has eluded the gaze of the income-tax officials.”) But it isn’t enough to put these lines down on paper, where they can seem like PJs: you have to watch him say them in such an effortlessly genial tone that you want to pinch his cheeks and give him a Parle G biscuit. The “jaise tumhare pitaji” comes out as if the analogy has just occurred to him and it is perfectly natural, not rude at all, to voice it. As Raakesh Roshan once noted, “When Deven says something, it automatically becomes funny. But when one of us says exactly the same thing, no one laughs.”

There are too many other films and scenes to recount here, but I keep thinking of the little moment in the comedy of errors Angoor where the thoroughly frazzled Bahadur – beset by over-familiar behaviour from women whom he has never seen before – responds with childlike delight to the one question he definitely knows the answer to. “Bhang!” he exclaims, beaming like the sun, when Moushumi Chatterjee asks him what he put in the pakoras the previous night. Bhang in a tea-time snack - it could be a symbol for what Varma brought to so many of the films he acted in.


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When he was young, his family was involved in film distribution and exhibition, but he developed an interest in acting – particularly in the work of such performers as Raja Gosavi, and in the Marathi theatre tradition built on wordplay, shabd-phenk and deadpan expressions rather than physical comedy. These qualities, he said, chimed well with the sensibilities of directors like Hrishi-da and Basu-da. “The quality of comedy in a film depends on a director’s tastes. I can’t imagine those men saying ‘Gadhe pe baith jao, ya chhoti chadhi pehen ke bhaago, ya cake mein baith jao’, and I too was very clear about the things I wouldn’t do in the name of comedy. We were on the same wavelength.”

It was pleasing to find that even at age 77, his sense of humour, his shabd-phenk, was intact. When talking about his own directorial ventures, for example, and his run-ins with money-minded distributors who wanted films to have generous doses of “punch” and preferably an action scene involving a snake, “which the whole country can understand – there are no language barriers, it’s a pan-Indian scene”. Mentioning his 1978 film Besharam, he said, “Oh, that was a failure”, but then added, sotto voce, widening his eyes in that trademark style that made him both Fool and foil in so many fine films, “Still, it probably got seen by more people than this new Ranbir Kapoor Besharam did.” Talking about another film he had directed, the Asha Parekh-starrer Nadaan, he recalled being told by some Punjabi distributors – crass, lowest-common-denominator types – to please “put some sex” into the film to help its prospects. Varma looked at me, his face a mask. “Maine socha, ab sex kaise daalein? Asha Parekh! Kuch samajh mein nahin aaya.”

That can sound like it’s in poor taste, but it was really just an aside in the midst of a larger conversation about the compromises demanded of you in the film industry. And even Asha-ji may have tee-hee-heed at Deven’s delivery. You had to be there.

Dry well, foul smell - on Ketan Mehta's excellent Bhavni Bhavai

[Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya, scheduled to release next month, years after its completion, marks a return to alliterative titles in the director’s filmography: Maya Memsaab, Hero Hiralal and most famously the beautifully shot parable Mirch Masala, now available on a restored NFDC print. But my favourite among Mehta’s films is his debut feature, which he made when he was just 27]
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“Our homes are burnt, our women are raped, we are treated like animals, and you don’t feel anything?” the lower-caste man says, looking straight at the camera. I am talking to “all those who are watching from the safety of their darkness”, he tells his wife. The words could refer to the moral blindness of people who practice or tolerate discrimination… or to a darkened movie hall in which some of those people sit in comfortable anonymity, staring and judging from a distance.

This scene in the Gujarati film Bhavni Bhavai – written and directed by Ketan Mehta in 1980 – reminded me of the last shot of a more recent film about caste oppression, Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry. In Manjule’s film, the final image – which implicated the audience in the bigotry faced by the protagonist and his family – was an unexpected Fourth Wall-breaker in an otherwise realistic narrative. Bhavni Bhavai, on the other hand,operates in Brechtian mode throughout (Mehta dedicates it to Brecht too) – it draws attention to its own staging, employs the distancing device of a story within a story, and has more than one scene where a character directly addresses the viewer.

And unlike Fandry, Bhavni Bhavai can be described as a comedy – jet-black, absurdist and slapstick in turn. “Ketan’s vision for the acting in the film was that it should be like the behaviour of the characters in the Asterix comics,” writes Naseeruddin Shah in his memoir, and indeed Shah himself (three years before his role in a more famous dark comedy) has a grand time as the Raja in this film: preening and swaggering but unable to withdraw a sword from its scabbard when required to (either because he doesn’t have the strength for it or because the weapon has rusted from lack of use); giggling like a baby with a new rattle, and doing high-fives with himself when he learns he has won a war and his queen has given birth to a son. He rolls his eyes wildly, makes little grunting sounds, wails “Chhup re! Hamaari jindagi ka sawaal chhe!” when a jester suggests that a dire prediction mustn’t be taken seriously.

This prediction – which has been contrived by a crooked minister (Benjamin Gilani) and a jealous second queen (Suhasini Mulay) – is that the Raja will die if he sets eyes on the newborn prince. Cast away but found and adopted by a member of the local “untouchable” community, the baby grows up to be Jeeva (Mohan Gokhale), whose path crosses with his biological father when the Raja is told that the only way to get water flowing in his stepwell is to sacrifice a man with 32 vital qualities. By this point the allegorical nature of the story is clear, what with the many archetypes – a Brahmin who has to keep bathing because he is repeatedly “defiled” by contact with a bhangi, a self-serving astrologer, the court fool Ranglo, who may be the wisest man in the tale – and the deliberate comic exaggeration. In a society where the “dirty work” can only be performed by lower-caste people, what happens when they take a day’s leave to attend a wedding? The palace starts stinking to the high heavens, of course, because there is no one to clean the human excrement. The Raja has them whipped, but this worsens matters since they are now writhing in pain and incapable of working, and the shit keeps piling up, so to speak. The smell seeps into the very walls, the king is constantly tormented by it – but then, something has long been rotten in a kingdom where an entire group of people have to wear spittoons around their necks and drag a little “tail” behind them to wipe away their offending footprints.

Like Shyam Benegal’s wonderful Charandas Chor, which it often reminded me of, Bhavni Bhavai is rooted in folk-theatre traditions, including the use of scatological humour to address social injustices and hypocrisies. The gags are beguilingly simple at times, and very effective: the Akashvani tune is used when the Raja is shown bathing in the morning as the sun rises; the Pink Panther theme plays in scenes where the court spy makes his little appearances (to the Raja’s befuddlement, since he can’t recognize his own man under his disguises!). The pomposities of royals and their courtiers are mocked: the king emerges importantly from a room and is set to make a grand gesture, but has to pause because a minion has his head bowed right in front of him; the minister becomes an object of mirth whenever he is trying to be dignified – beset by a coughing fit as he laughs derisively, having a prison door hit him on the head as he struts about.

The pace slackens just a little in the second half, but that has to do with the natural arc of the story, with the changes in the Raja’s own personality – he is now middle-aged, a little more depressed and introspective – and with the shift in focus from the shenanigans in the royal court to the lives of the outcastes, including Jeeva, his romance with Ujaan (Smita Patil), and his knowledge of his own doom. And all this builds up to one of Indian cinema’s hardest-hitting closing sequences.

(Spoiler alert, though I don’t really think one is needed) All this while, the story of the king and Jeeva has been told by an old sutradhaar (played by Om Puri) to comfort the children of another group of outcastes who have lost their homes. His song is beautiful and soothing and runs through the film like a river (“Nadi behti jaaye” he sings, assuring the kids that all will be well in the end, that bigotry will be crushed in the same way that the river crushes rocks along its path). But he is confronted by another member of the tribe, who tells him to stop lulling the children with the opium of lies. “Let’s stop pretending. Too slow is your river, too gentle is its flow. It’s now or never, we won’t live forever. Who knows tomorrow?” And the film finally unsheathes its claws with a scene that presents two separate endings or possibilities. 

In the first, idealised one, the king learns that the man he has condemned to death is his own son; he halts the execution in the nick of time, there is a joyful reunion, and water bursts out of a long-dry well, ending decades of drought. In the second, more cynical ending – the real one – no one shows up to enlighten the king. There is a haunting, static shot of the guards standing at attention at the foot of the well’s steps, and between them is an empty passage: no help arrives this time, “Ranglo aave nei (Ranglo doesn’t come)” goes the plaintive chorus. The condemned man’s head rolls on schedule, and water does burst forth, but this time as an apocalyptic flood that will wash away the kingdom and everything in it, bad and good. This magnificently hyper-dramatic finish has the Raja feebly waving his sword at the deluge that is about to destroy him, intercut with visuals from the Indian freedom movement. It’s a call to arms, to immediate activism, but I think it is also a caustic comment on the very nature of storytelling; on the comforting narration-creation that goes along the lines “Things may seem bad now, but they’ll get better – in the long run, everything will work out.” But what can the long run, the big picture, mean to someone who is suffering in the here and now?

This film is a stunning achievement of its kind. My personal preference in “issue-based” films is for the ones that go about their work in subtle ways – not holding up a “solution”, delivering a “message” or being political in an overt, easily identifiable way, but embedding ideas, and maybe raising a few questions, within the fabric of a well-told story. Every now and again though, I come to love a movie that belongs in the other category, because – even though it can seem a bit heavy-handed or preachy – there is conviction, directness, a throbbing honesty in the telling. (It helps if there is some good “cinema” too.) Bhavni Bhavai, along with Govind Nihalani’s Party, is one of those films. Like Party, Saeed Mirza’s Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan (both of which also have unflinching endings) and a few other “parallel” films of the time, this one has been a holy grail for many movie-buffs of my generation: dimly remembered through a Doordarshan screening or two in the 1980s, then unavailable for years while stories circulated about how the original print no longer exists, now available in a passable print on YouTube, and also on the festival circuit once in a while. I hope it makes it to the NFDC restorations soon.

P.S. Do read this 2010 column by Salil Tripathi, where he mentions the film’s dual ending in the context of Narendra Modi and the possible futures of Gujarat.

[Some related posts: Nihalani's Party, Mirza's Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan, the Cinemas of India DVDs, Fandry, Benegal's Charandas Chor]