Milky ways - the many faces of the Hindi-movie maa

[Here's the full text of the essay I did for Zubaan's anthology about motherhood. The book has plenty more in it, of course, including excellent pieces by Anita Roy, Manju Kapur, Shashi Deshpande and others. Look out for it - gift, spread the word etc.

Note: the "Motherly vignettes" section was meant to be a stand-alone thing, published either as a box or in different font, to mark it from the rest of the text, and perhaps to mirror the detours and interludes so often present in mainstream Hindi cinema. Didn't work out that way, but I've included it here]

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Around the age of 14 I took what was meant to be a temporary break from Hindi cinema, and ended up staying away for over a decade. Years of relishing masala movies may have resulted in a form of dyspepsia – there had been too many overwrought emotions, too much dhishoom dhishoom, too much of the strictly regimented quantities of Drama and Action and Tragedy and Romance and Comedy that existed in almost every mainstream Hindi film of the time. Besides, I had developed a love for Old Hollywood, which would become a gateway to world cinema, and satellite TV had started making it possible to indulge such interests.

One of my catalysts for escape was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film that is – among many other things – about a strange young man’s special relationship with his equally strange mother. I won’t bother with spoiler alerts for such a well-known pop-cultural artefact, so briefly: Norman Bates poisons his mom, preserves her body, walks around in her clothes and has conversations with himself in her voice. In his off-time, he murders young women as they shower.

None of this was a secret to me when I first saw the film, since a certain Psycho lore existed in my family. Years in advance, I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy – apparently, in the early 60s, her school-going brother had returned from a movie-hall and informed their startled mother that he wished to keep her body in a sitting position in the living room after she passed on.

Hitchcock’s film had a big effect on the way I watched and thought about movies, but I must admit that my own relationship with my mother was squarer than Norman’s. We quarrelled occasionally, but always in our own voices, and taxidermy did not obtrude upon our lives. Looking back, though, I think we could be described as unconventional in the context of the society we lived in. I was a single child, she was recently divorced, we had been through a lot together and were very close. But we were both – then, as now – private people, and so the relationship always respected personal space. We didn’t spend much time on small talk, we tended to stay in our own rooms for large parts of the day (and this is how it remains, as I type these words in my shabby freelancer’s “office” in her flat). Yet I always shared the really important stuff with her, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends – even the ones from the seemingly cool, cosmopolitan families – routinely hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette.

Some of this may help explain why I was feeling detached from the emotional excesses of Hindi cinema in my early teens. In his book on Deewaar, the historian Vinay Lal notes, “No more important or poignant relationship exists in Indian society than that between mother and son, and the Hindi film best exemplifies the significance of this nexus.” That may be so, but I can say with my hand on my heart (or “mother-swear”, if you prefer) that even at age 14, I found little to relate to in Hindi-film depictions of mothers.

Can you blame me though? Here, off the top of my head (and with only some basic research to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt up these wondrous things), are some of my movie memories from around the time I left the mandir of Hindi cinema:

* In the remarkably bad JamaiRaja, Hema Malini is a wealthy tyrant who makes life difficult for her son-in-law. Some of this is played for comedy, but the film clearly disapproves of the idea of a woman as the head of the house. Cosmic balance is restored only when the saas gets her comeuppance and asks the damaad’s forgiveness. Of course, he graciously clasps her joint hands and asks her not to embarrass him; that’s the hero’s privilege.

* In Sanjog, when she loses the little boy she had thought of as a son, Jaya Prada glides about in a white sari, holding a piece of wood wrapped in cloth and singing a song with the refrain “Zoo zoo zoo zoo zoo”. This song still plays incessantly in one of the darker rooms of my memory palace; I shudder whenever I recall the tune.

* In Aulad, the ubiquitous Jaya Prada is Yashoda who battles another woman (named, what else, Devaki) for custody of the bawling Baby Guddu, while obligatory Y-chromosome Jeetendra stands around looking smug and noble at the same time.

* In her short-lived comeback in Aandhiyan, a middle-aged Mumtaz dances with her screen son in a cringe-inducingly affected display of parental hipness. “Mother and son made a lovely love feeling with their dance and song (sic),” goes a comment on the YouTube video of the song “Duniya Mein Tere Siva”. Also: “I like the perfect matching mother and son love chemistry behind the song, it is a eternal blood equation (sic).” The quality of these comments is indistinguishable from the quality of the film they extol.

* And in Doodh kaKarz, a woman breastfeeding her child is so moved by the sight of a hungry cobra nearby that she squeezes a few drops of milk out and puts it in a bowl for him. The snake looks disgusted but sips some of the milk anyway. Naturally, this incident becomes the metaphorical umbilical cord that attaches him to this new maa for life.

As one dire memory begets another, the title of that last film reminds me that two words were in common currency in 1980s Hindi cinema: “doodh” and “khoon”. Milk and blood. Since these twin fluids were central to every hyper-dramatic narrative about family honour and revenge, our movie halls (or video rooms, since few sensible people I knew spent money on theatre tickets at the time) resounded with some mix of the following proclamations:

“Maa ka doodh piya hai toh baahar nikal!” (“If you have drunk your mother’s milk, come out!”)

“Yeh tumhara apna khoon hai.” (“He is your own blood.”)

“Main tera khoon pee jaaoonga.” (“I will drink your blood.”)

Both liquids were treated as equally nourishing; both were, in different ways, symbols of the hero’s vitality. I have no recollection of the two words being used together in a sentence, but it would not amaze me to come across a scene from a 1980s relic where the hero says: “Kuttay! Maine apni maa ka doodh piya hai. Ab tera khoon piyoonga.” (“Dog! I have drunk my mother’s milk, now I will drink your blood.”) It would suggest a rite of passage consistent with our expectations of the über-macho lead: as a child you drink mother’s milk, but you’re all grown up now and bad man’s blood is more intoxicating than fake Johnnie Walker.

Narcissists, angry young men and deadly guitars

All this is a complicated way of saying that I do not, broadly speaking, hold the 1980s in high esteem. But that decade is a soft target. Casting the net much wider, here’s a proposal: mainstream Hindi cinema has never had a sustained tradition of interesting mothers.

This is, of course, a generalisation; there have been exceptions in major films. Looming over every larger-than-life mother portrayal is Mother India, which invented (or at least highlighted) many of the things we think of as clichés today: the mother as metaphor for nation/land/nourishing source; the mother as righteous avenging angel, ready to shred her own heart and shoot her wayward son if it is for the Greater Good. Despite the self-conscious weightiness of this film’s narrative, it is - mostly - possible to see its central character Radha as an individual first and only then as a symbol.

But a basic problem is that for much of her history, the Hindi-film mother has been a cipher – someone with no real personality of her own, existing mainly as the prism through which we view the male lead. Much like the sisters whose function was to be raped and to commit suicide in a certain type of movie, the mother was a pretext for the playing out of the hero’s emotions and actions.

Anyone well acquainted with Hindi cinema knows that one of its dominant personalities has been the narcissistic leading man. (Note: the films themselves don’t intend him to be seen thus.) This quality is usually linked to the persona of the star-actor playing the role, and so it can take many forms: the jolly hero/tragic hero/romantic hero/anti-hero who ambles, trudges or swaggers through the world knowing full well that he is its centre of attention. (Presumably he never grew out of the maa ka laadla mould.) So here is Raj Kapoor’s little tramp smiling bravely through his hardships, and here is the studied tragic grandiosity of Dilip Kumar, and here is Dev Anand’s splendid conceit (visible in all the films he made from the mid-1960s on) that every woman from age 15 upwards wants only to fall into his arms. In later decades, this narcissism would be manifest in the leading man as the vigilante superhero.

A maa can easily become a foil for such personalities – our film history is dotted with sympathetic but ineffectual mothers. Though often played by accomplished character actors such as Achala Sachdev and Leela Mishra, these women were rarely central to the movies in question. If you have only a dim memory of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, for example, you might forget that the self-pitying poet (one of the most doggedly masochistic heroes in our cinema) has a mother too – she is a marginalised figure, watching with some perplexity as he wanders the streets waiting for life to deal him its next blow. And her death adds to the garland of sorrows that he so willingly carries around his neck.

While Dutt made a career out of not smiling, the protagonist of Raj Kapoor’s bloated Mera Naam Joker earned his livelihood by making people laugh. Essentially, however, Raju the clown is as much of a sympathy-seeker as the poet in the gutter is. Mera Naam Joker includes a magnificently maudlin scene where the joker continues with his act (“The show must go on!” growls circus-master Dharmendra) just a few minutes after learning that his mother has died. As he smiles heroically through his pain, his friends watching backstage wipe their tears – cues for the film’s viewer to do the same.

Speaking of Raj Kapoor, I often wonder what impression Russian movie-watchers must have of Indian men and their mother fetishes. If Kapoor was the most popular Hindi-film star in the former Soviet Union, an improbable second was Mithun Chakraborty, the stature of whose 1982 film Disco Dancer in that part of the world is among the profoundest cinematic mysteries. (Possibly apocryphal stories are still told about how Indian visitors to the USSR in the Iron Curtain days could clear borders by warbling “Jimmy Jimmy” whereupon stern guards would drop their rifles and wave them through.)

Among Disco Dancer’s many pleasures is the most thrilling mother-related dialogue in a Hindi film. Even today, I would walk many a harsh mile to hear the following words echoing through a movie hall: “Issko guitar phobia ho gaya hai. Guitar ne isske maa ko maara.” (“He has developed guitar phobia. A guitar killed his mother.”)

This demands some elucidation. Jimmy (Mithun) has become so popular that his disco-dancing rivals scheme to electrocute him with a 5000-volt current. But his widowed maa, having just finished her daily puja for his continued health and success, learns about this fiendish saazish. She reaches the venue in time to grab the tampered guitar before Jimmy does, which results in the most electrifying death scene of a Hindi-movie mother you’ll ever see.

The subtext to this surreal moment is that the hero is emasculated by the removal of his mother. As one inadvertently Oedipal plot synopsis I have read puts it, “After his mother's death Jimmy finds himself unable to perform. Will he be able to recover from the tragedy and start performing again?” (Note the contrast with Mera Naam Joker’s Raju, who does indeed “perform” just a few seconds after his loss – but no one doubts that he is now a hollow shell of a person.)

As these scenes and countless others indicate, Hindi cinema loves dead moms. In the same year as Disco Dancer, there was an overhyped “acting battle” between Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan in Shakti. It played out through the film, but never as intensely as in the scene where the mutinous son tries to reach out to his policeman dad in the room where the dead body of Sheetal (wife and mother to the two men) lies. In the context of the narrative, the mother’s corpse becomes the final frontier for a clash of ideologies and life experiences.

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I’m surprised at how long it has taken me to arrive at Bachchan, given that all my early movie-watching centred on him – and also given that no other major Hindi-film personality has been as strongly associated with filial relationships. But perhaps I’ve been trying to repress a memory. One of the last things I saw before forsaking Bollywood in 1991 was this scene from the fantasy film Ajooba. Bachchan (makeup doing little to conceal that he was playing half his age) brings an old woman to the seaside where a dolphin is splashing about, beaming and making the sounds that dolphins will. With sonly fondness in his eyes and a scant regard for taxonomical accuracy, AB says: “Yeh machli meri maa hai.” (“This fish is my mother.”)

This could be a version of post-modern irony, for Bachchan had come a long way from the star-making films in which he played son to the long-suffering Nirupa Roy. Unlike the “mother” in Ajooba, Roy was a land mammal, but she seemed always to have a personal lake of tears to splash about in at short notice.

Was that too irreverent? (Am I failing the test of the good Indian boy whose eyes must lower at the very mention of “maa”?) Well, respect should ideally be earned. The mothers played by Roy are good examples of the ciphers I mentioned earlier, and though she often got substantial screen time, I don’t think it was put to much good use.

Consider an early scene in Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar ka Sikander. When the orphan Sikander recovers Roy’s stolen purse for her, she expresses a wish to be his new mother: “Beta, ab se main tumhari maa hoon.” “Sach, maa? Tum bahut achi ho, maa,” (“Really, mother? You are very nice, mother”) he replies. Having rushed through these lines, they then exit the frame together in the jerky fast-forward style of the silent era’s Keystone Kops. There is a reason for the haste: the audience wants to see the adult Sikander (Bachchan), so the preamble must be dispensed with. But the result is the trivialising of an important relationship – we are simply told that they are now mother and son, and that’s that. It’s a good example of character development scrubbing the shoes of the star system.

Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony is another movie very dear to my heart (and a genuine classic of popular storytelling), but it would be a stretch to claim that Roy’s Bharati (you know, the woman who simultaneously receives blood from her three grown-up sons) is a fleshed-out person. Medically speaking, she scarcely appears human at all: in the first minutes of the film we learn that Bharati is suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis; a while later, she carelessly loses her eyesight and the TB is never again mentioned; years pass and here she is, distributing flowers, haphazardly stumbling in and out of the lives of the three heroes; eventually her sight is restored by a Sai Baba statue.

But it is well-nigh impossible to write about Bachchan and his mothers without reference to Yash Chopra’ sDeewaar (and to an extent, the same director’s Trishul). Deewaar is to Hindi cinema what the James Cagney-starrer White Heat (“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”) was to Hollywood: the most quoted and parodied of all mother-son movies. In no small part this is because the film was a fulcrum for one of our most iconic movie personalities, the angry young man Vijay.

Speaking for myself, childhood memory and countless spoofs on music channels had turned Deewaar into a montage of famous images and dialogues: Bachchan brooding outside the temple; a dramatic pealing of bells and a prolonged death scene; Shashi Kapoor bleating “Bhai” and, with nostrils flaring self-righteously, the famous line “Mere Paas Maa Hai.” But when I saw it as an adult, I was surprised by how powerful the film still was, and how its most effective scenes were the quieter ones. One scene that sticks with me is when the mother – Sumitra Devi – is unwell and the fugitive Vijay can’t see her because police have been posted around the hospital. He waits in a van while his girlfriend goes to check on the level of security. She returns, tells him things aren’t looking good; and Vijay (who is wearing dark glasses – a chilling touch in this night-time scene) says in a deadpan voice, his face a blank slate, “Aur main apne maa tak nahin pahunch sakta hoon.” (“And I can’t even reach my mother.”) There is no overt attempt at pathos or irony (how many other Indian actors of the time would have played the scene this way?), just the stoicism of a man who knows that the walls are closing in.

In another scene Vijay hesitantly calls his mother on the phone, arranges to meet her at the temple, then tries to say something more but can’t get the words out and puts the receiver down instead. The film’s power draws as much from these discerning beats of silence as from its flaming Salim-Javed dialogue. However, little of that power comes directly from the mother’s character. Sumitra Devi is defined by her two sons, and to my eyes at least, there is something perfunctory and insipid even about the moral strength she shows.

There is a tendency, when we assess Hindi cinema, to make sweeping statements about similar types of movies. Frequently, I hear that Deewaar and Trishul are the same film because both are built around the theme of a son trying to erase his mother’s sufferings by rising in the world – even literally, by signing deed papers for new skyscrapers, the constructions she once worked on as a labourer (Vijay, like James Cagney, is trying to make it to “the top”). But there are key differences in the central character’s motivations in the two movies, and I would argue that Deewaar is the superior film overall because it is more tightly constructed.

However, Trishul scores in one important regard: it is one of the few Bachchan films where the mother has a personality. Cynically speaking, this could be because she dies early in the film and isn’t required to hold the stage for three hours, but I think it has a lot to do with the performance of Waheeda Rehman – an actress who made a career of illuminating mediocre movies with her presence.

“Tu mere saath rahega munne,” sings this mother, who has been abandoned by her lover – the song will echo through the movie and fuel her son’s actions. “Main tujhe rehem ke saaye mein na palne doongi” (“I will not raise you under the shade of sympathy”), she tells her little boy as she lets him toil alongside her, “Zindagani ki kadi dhoop mein jalne doongi / Taake tap tap ke tu faulad bane / maa ki audlad bane.” She wants him to burn in the sun so he becomes as hard as steel. He has to earn his credentials if he wants the right to be called her son.

With a lesser performer in the role, this could have been hackneyed stuff (in any case the basic premise is at least as old as Raj Kapoor’s Awaara), but Rehman makes it dignified and compelling, giving it a psychological dimension that is lacking in all those Nirupa Roy roles. It’s a reminder that an excellent performer can, to some extent at least, redeem an unremarkable part. (I would make a similar case for Durga Khote in Mughal-e Azam, which – on paper at least – was a film about two imperial male egos in opposition.)

Motherly vignettes (and an absence)

In discussing these films, I’ve probably revealed my ambivalence towards popular Hindi cinema. One problem for someone who tries to engage with these films is that even the best of them tend to be disjointed; a critic is often required to approach a movie as a collection of parts rather than as a unified whole. Perhaps it would be fair then to admit that there have been certain “mother moments” that worked for me on their own terms, independently of the overall quality of the films.

One of them occurred in – of all things – a Manoj Kumar film. Kumar was famous for his motherland-obsession, demonstrated in a series of “patriotic” films that often exploited their heroines. (See Hema Malini writhing in the rain in Kranti, or Saira Banu in Purab aur Paschim, subject to the controlling male gaze that insists a woman must be covered up – after the hero and the audience has had a good eyeful, of course.) But one of his rare non-patriotism-themed films contains a weirdly compelling representation of the mother-as-an-absent-presence. The film is the 1972 Shor, about a boy so traumatised by his mother’s death that he loses his speech, and the song is the plaintive Laxmikant-Pyarelal composition “Ek Pyaar ka Nagma Hai”.

In too many Hindi movies of that time, ethereal music is played out to banal images, but this sequence makes at least a theoretical nod to creativity. The visuals take the shape of a shared dream-memory involving the father, the little boy and the mother when she was alive; the setting is a beach and the composite elements include a violin, a drifting, symbolism-laden bunch of balloons, and Nanda. Mirror imagery is used: almost every time we see the mother or the boy, we also see their blurred reflections occupying half the screen; occasionally, the lens focus is tinkered with to make both images merge into each other or disappear altogether. Even though the setting is ostensibly a happy and “realist” one, Nanda is thus rendered a distant, ghostly figure.

I’m not saying this is done with anything resembling sophistication – it is at best an ambitious concept, shoddily executed; you can sense the director and cinematographer constrained by the available technology. But the basic idea does come through: what we are seeing is a merging of past and present, and the dislocation felt by a motherless child.

[While on absent mothers, a quick aside on Sholay. Ramesh Sippy’s iconic film was heavily inspired by the look of the American and Italian Westerns, but it also deviated from the Hindi-film idiom in one significant way: in the absence of a mother-child relationship. The only real mother figure in the story, Basanti’s sceptical maasi, becomes a target of mirth in one of the film’s drollest scenes. Most notably, the two leads Veeru and Jai (played by Dharmendra and Bachchan) are orphans who have only ever had each other. We tend to take Sholay for granted today, but it’s surprising, when you think about it, that the leading men of a Hindi movie of the time should so summarily lack any maternal figure, real or adopted.]

In Vijay Anand’s thriller Jewel Thief, a clever deception is perpetrated on the viewer. Early on, Vinay (Dev Anand) is told that Shalu (Vyjayantimala) is pining because she has been abandoned by her fiancé. This provides a set-up for the song “Rula ke Gaya Sapna Mera”, where Vinay hears Shalu singing late at night; we see her dressed in white, weeping quietly; the lyrics mourn her loss; our expectations from seeing Dev Anand and Vyjayantimala together in this romantic setting lead us to assume that what is being lamented is a broken love affair. But later, we learn that though Shalu’s tears were genuine, she was really crying for a little boy who has been kidnapped (this is, strictly speaking, her much younger brother, but the relationship is closer to that of a mother and son, and the song was an expression if it). It’s a rare example of a Hindi-movie song sequence being used to mislead, and changing its meaning when you revisit it.

There is also a lovely little scene in a non-mainstream Hindi film, Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi. Cab-driver Rajkaran, his wife and little son are struggling to make ends meet as one mishap follows another. Rajkaran’s old mother has come to visit them in the city and one night, after a series of events that leaves the family bone-tired and mentally exhausted, there is a brief shot of two pairs of sons and mothers, with the former curled up with their heads in the latter’s laps – the grown-up Rajkaran is in the same near-foetal pose as his little boy. It’s the sort of image that captures a relationship more eloquently than pages of over-expository script.

Breaking the weepie mould: new directions

One of the funniest mothers in a Hindi film was someone who appeared only in a photograph – the madcap 1962 comedy Half Ticket has a scene where the protagonist Vijay (no relation to the Angry Young Man) speaks to a picture of his tuberculosis-afflicted mother. TB-afflicted mothers are usually no laughing matter in Hindi cinema, but this is a Kishore Kumar film, and thus it is that a close-up of the mother’s photo reveals ... Kishore Kumar in drag. This could be a little nod to Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers playing women in Ealing Studio comedies of the 50s, or it could be a case of pre-figuring (since the story will hinge on Kumar posing as a child). Either way, it is a rare instance in old cinema of a mother being treated with light-hearted irreverence.

But as mentioned earlier, the more characteristic mother treatment has been one of deification – which, ironically, results in diminishment. When the maternal figure is put on a pedestal, you don’t see her as someone with flaws, whimsies, or heaven forbid, an interior life. (One of Indian cinema’s starkest treatments of this theme was in Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi, with the 14-year-old Sharmila Tagore as a bride whose world turns upside down when her childlike father-in-law proclaims her a reincarnation of the Mother Goddess.) And so, if there has been a shift in mother portrayals in recent times, it has hinged on a willingness to humanise.

Around the late 1980s, a certain sort of “liberal” movie mum had come into being. I remember nodding in appreciation at the scene in Maine Pyaar Kiya where Prem (Salman Khan) discusses prospective girlfriends with his mom (played by the always-likeable Reema Lagoo). Still, when it came to the crunch, you wouldn’t expect these seemingly broad-minded women to do anything that would seriously shake the patriarchal tradition. In her younger days Farida Jalal was among the feistiest of the actresses who somehow never became A-grade stars, but by the time she played Kajol’s mother in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge, she had settled into the role of the woman who can feel for young love – and be a friend and confidant to her daughter – while also knowing, through personal experience, that women in her social setup “don’t even have the right to make promises”. The two young lovers in this film can be united only when the heart of the stern father melts.

Such representations – mothers as upholders of “traditional values”, even when those values are detrimental to the interests of women – are not going away any time soon, and why would they, if cinema is to be a part-mirror to society? An amusing motif in the 2011 film No One Killed Jessica was a middle-aged mother as a figure hiding behind the curtain (literally “in pardah”), listening to the men’s conversations and speaking up only to petulantly demand the return of her son (who is on the lam, having cold-bloodedly murdered a young woman). It seems caricatured at first, but when you remember the details of the real-life Jessica Lal-Manu Sharma case that the film is based on, there is nothing surprising about it.

But it is also true that in the multiplex era of the last decade, mother representations – especially in films with urban settings – have been more varied than they were in the past. (Would it be going too far to say “truer to life”? I do feel that the best contemporary Hindi films are shaped by directors and screenwriters who know their milieus and characters very well, and have a greater willingness to tackle individual complexity than many of their predecessors did.)

Thus, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na featured a terrific performance by Ratna Pathak Shah as Savitri Rathore, a wisecracking mom whose banter with her dead husband’s wall-portrait marks a 180-degree twist on every maudlin wall-portrait scene from movies of an earlier time. (Remember the weepy monologues that went “Munna ab BA Pass ho gaya hai. Aaj agar aap hamaare saath hote, aap itne khush hote”?) One gets the sense that unlike her mythological namesake, this Savitri is relieved that she no longer has to put up with her husband’s three-dimensional presence! Then there is the Kirron Kher character in Dostana, much more orthodox to begin with: a jokily over-the-top song sequence, “Maa da laadla bigad gaya”, portrays her dismay about the possibility that her son is homosexual, and she is even shown performing witchery to “cure” him. But she does eventually come around, gifting bangles to her “daughter-in-law” and wondering if traditional Indian rituals might accommodate something as alien as gay marriage. These scenes are played for laughs (and in any case, the son isn’t really gay), but they do briefly touch on very real cultural conflicts and on the ways in which parents from conservative backgrounds often have to change to keep up with the times.

With the aid of nuanced scripts, thoughtful casting and good performances, other small bridges have been crossed in recent years. Taare Zameen Par – the story of a dyslexic child – contains an uncontrived depiction of the emotional bond between mother and child (as well as the beautiful song “Maa”). At age 64, Bachchan acquired one of his most entertaining screen moms, the then 94-year-old Zohra Segal, in R Balki’s Cheeni Kum. A few years after that, the somewhat gimmicky decision to cast him as a Progeria-afflicted child in Paa meant he could play son to Vidya Balan, who was less than half his age. There is quiet dignity in this portrayal of a single working mother, though the film did kowtow to tradition (and to the ideal of the romantic couple) by ensuring that she is reunited with her former lover at the end.

One of the last Hindi films I saw before writing this piece – another Balan-starrer, the thriller Kahaani – has as its protagonist a heavily pregnant woman alone in the city, searching for her missing husband. This makes for an interesting psychological study because the quality of the film’s suspense (and the effect of the twist in its tail) depends on our accumulating feelings – sympathy, admiration – for this mother-to-be, laced with the mild suspicion that we mustn’t take everything about her at face value. I wasn’t surprised to discover that some people felt a little betrayed (read: emotionally manipulated) by the ending, which reveals that Vidya Bagchi wasn’t pregnant after all – the revelation flies in the face of everything Hindi cinema has taught us about the sanctity of motherhood.

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Given Vinay Lal’s observation about the centrality of the mother-son relationship in Indian society, it is perhaps inevitable that our films have a much more slender tradition of mother-daughter relationships. Going by all the gossip over the decades about dominating moms accompanying their starlet daughters to movie sets, the real-life stories may have been spicier than anything depicted on screen. And in fact, one of the scariest scenes from any Hindi film of the last decade involves just such a portrayal.

It occurs in Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance, a self-reflective commentary on the nature of stardom in Hindi cinema. The young rose Nikki Walia (Isha Sharvani) is doing one of those cutesy photo shoot-cum-interviews that entail completing sentences like “My favourite colour is ____.” At one point her mother Neena (Dimple Kapadia in an outstanding late-career performance), a former movie star herself, barges into the room and peremptorily begins giving instructions. We see Nikki’s expression (we have already noted how cowered she is by her mother’s presence) and feel a little sorry for her. “Neena-ji, can we have a photo of both of you?” the reporter asks. Neena-ji looks flattered but says no, she isn’t in a state fit to be photographed – why don’t you shoot Nikki against that wall, she says, pointing somewhere off-screen, and then sashaying off.

A few seconds later the shoot continues. “Your favourite person _____?” Nikki is asked. We get a full shot of the wall behind her – it is covered end to end with a colossal photo of Neena from her early days. “My mother,” Nikki replies mechanically.

The younger Kapadia in that photo is breathtakingly beautiful, but as a depiction of a child swallowed up by a parent’s personality, this brief shot is just as terrifying to my eyes as the closing scene of Psycho, with Norman Bates staring out at the camera, speaking to us in his mother’s voice – for all practical purposes, back in the womb. Luck by Chance contains other scenes suggesting that the predatorial Neena is bent on putting her daughter through everything she herself had experienced in the big bad industry. Do these scenes get additional power from the viewer’s non-diagetic knowledge that in real life, Dimple Kapadia herself entered the film industry at a disturbingly early age? You decide. Still, with the history of mainstream Hindi cinema being what it is, we should be grateful for this newfound variety, for stronger character development, and for at least some maternal representations that aren’t drenched in sentimentalism.

We’ve always had the noble, self-sacrificing and marginalised mothers and we’ll continue to have them – in cinema, as in life. So here’s to a few more of the other sorts: more Neena-jis, more sardonic Savitris, a few moms like the hard-drinking salon-owner in Vicky Donor, not-really-mothers like Vidya Bagchi – and even, if it ever comes to that, a desi Mrs Bates staring unblinkingly from her chair, asking her son to please go to the kitchen and make her some chai instead of ogling at chaalu young women through the peephole.

New directions, new treatments (notes on some 2012 movies)

[Did this round-up piece for Democratic World magazine – a look at how some of the better Hindi films of the past year dealt with complexities of life in India]

There is a brief moment in one of the best Hindi films of 2012, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, that almost cries out for subtextual analysis. The title character – once an upbeat army man and athlete proudly serving his country, but now a baaghi driven to a life outside the law – is nearing the end of his personal race. This section of the story is set in 1980, and on a transistor belonging to the policemen pursuing Paan Singh we hear a news item about the death of the actress Nargis. Given the film’s larger themes, it is reasonable to wonder if this scene is an allusion to Nargis’s most famous role: does it reflect the end of the Mother India ideal for the film’s embittered protagonist?

If so, it would be in keeping with this film’s subtle, plaintive tone. Though Paan Singh Tomar is based on a real-life tale that has the resonance of a Shakespearean tragedy, it doesn’t strain self-consciously to be one. It consistently stays in the moment, and even scenes such as the one where our hero remarks that apart from the Army everyone in the country is a thief, or the one where he says “Desh ke liye faltu bhaage hum?” when a policeman tosses his medals away, are handled with understatement – not least thanks to Irfan Khan’s brilliantly measured performance.
 
Our storytelling registers have been changing in small ways. Though mainstream Hindi cinema has always had narratives about the disaffection of the wronged individual with the System, they tended to be presented in highly dramatic terms, accompanied by flashes of lightning and over-expository declaiming. In contrast, some of the better, more provocative Hindi films of 2012 have treated such subjects as patriotism, national integration and the Idea of India with restraint as well as imagination.
 
If Dhulia’s film tells the story of an individual and his times, the claustrophobic gloom of Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai gives expression to a number of different stories – adding up to a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a many-tiered society. (The film’s protagonists include a lower-class man who fantasises about a job where he might one day get to wear a tie as well as a privileged man in a high-profile job who loosens his own tie every opportunity he gets; there are other such polarities and contrasts in the story too.) In some ways, Shanghai is a very “non-Bollywood” film. It has the self-consciously stygian look of a contemporary noir movie – it even makes Mumbai’s busy nightlife seem sinister in a way that has rarely been achieved in our cinema before. And it is adapted from a Greek novel, Z, which was about a very specific political context. But Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar did a thoughtful job of fitting it to the contemporary Indian situation, depicting a world where where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, and the rich indulge the hubris of yanking the country into the First World without looking at its ground realities.

Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you, and then realising that none of it may matter anyway...these are repeated motifs here. At the film's end the bureaucrat Krishnan (played by Abhay Deol) does something that in a more simple-minded story might have resulted in the summary cleaning up of the political order, but here we see that nothing has really changed. So, is Shanghai a cynical film? There is no easy answer. Banerjee himself sees it as an ode to individual conscience in a harsh world, while Juvekar told me during a recent conversation that they didn’t want to tie up loose ends and give the audience any false comfort. No wonder the film, even as it was widely acclaimed, left so many viewers with an uncomfortable, unresolved feeling.

Some other major films don’t deal explicitly with “national issues”, but they do reflect an increasing willingness by Bollywood to visit places that are not often charted by Hindi cinema. The authenticity of the hinterland depiction in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has been called into question, but there is no doubting the film’s ability to establish the mood of a particular setting, and to reexamine stereotypes; while the bulk of the action is in Dhanbad, there are also two scenes set in Varanasi, revealing – with typical Kashyapian humour – an incongruously sinister side to one of our holiest towns. Meanwhile, Sujoy Ghosh’s fine thriller Kahaani – in which a pregnant woman comes up against a calculating Intelligence Bureau as she tries to find her missing husband – made excellent, atypical use of Kolkata as a setting, and even provided solid roles to the popular Bengali actors Parambrata Chatterjee and Saswata Chatterjee (as well as a supporting part for the veteran Dhritaman Chatterjee, who was such an arresting presence 40 years ago in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi). This is not something that would have happened in a mainstream Hindi movie a few years ago.

Bengali characters also featured in cute takes on inter-community relationships in two of the year’s warmest “little” films. In a charming scene in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, a Bengali girl hums a few notes of Rabindrasangeet to her Punjabi boyfriend; they are in a car somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park (two south Delhi colonies located near each other in physical space, but traditionally the bastions of very different communities), and the scene is an important bonding moment in a romance between two people who hail from different universes. There is an interestingly similar moment near the end of Sameer Sharma’s Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, where a young Punjabi man serenades his lover with a Bangla song in the presence of his startled family, who can’t even make sense of what they are hearing. The scene feels a bit like cultural stereotyping at first (“Punjabis masculine, Bengalis effeminate”) but the film is clearly on the side of the young lovers, so it works well.

In any case, both Vicky Donor and Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana simultaneously indulge and overturn conventional tropes of “Punjabiyat”, encouraging us to see their people as individuals - capable of personal growth - rather than as representations of groups, permanently fixed in a way of life and thought. And ultimately perhaps that is the best way to make a film about the many colliding realities of a complex country. It's a lesson Bollywood has shown itself willing to learn in the past 12 months.

[Some longer posts about these films: Paan Singh Tomar, Gangs of Wasseypur, Kahaani, Vicky Donor]

On Bollywood's Top 20: a collection of oddly impersonal essays

[Did this review of Bollywood’s Top 20: Superstars of Indian Cinema (edited by Bhaichand Patel) for Business Standard. It’s another example of a book I would prefer not to have written about - and the exasperation and lack of interest probably comes through in the piece]

To begin with a small quibble, the “Indian” in this book’s sub-title is slightly misleading: this is a collection of essays – by different writers – on iconic Hindi-movie performers. But there are larger problems with this anthology. Given that its subjects are screen legends who have had an immeasurably complex influence (for better and for worse) on the lives of countless fans over decades, it would have been reasonable to expect some personal, passionate writing. Instead, much of it lacks warmth and has a mechanically journalistic tone.

Some of the pieces do begin in a way that suggests they will be firsthand accounts of a writer’s interest in a movie-star. (“When I was invited to write about Madhubala, I was delighted,” says Urmila Lanba, “Madhubala is one of my favourite actresses; my sister and I were only allowed to watch one movie a month and I recall we never missed her films...”) What usually follows, though, is a mix of gossip, second-hand reporting (with long quotes taken from various sources) and throwaway remarks on films that deserve to be written about with much more enthusiasm. Here, from S Theodore Baskaran’s essay on Nargis, is one example of what I mean:

In the Middle East [Awaara] played to packed houses. T J S George, Nargis’s biographer, points out that the duet in the boat scene was one of the best love scenes of her career. Her appearance in a bathing costume was pointed out as one of the highlights of the film. Apart from Prithviraj Kapoor, other cast members included Leela Chitnis and Shashi Kapoor. Helen, then an unknown junior artiste, made an uncredited appearance.

The paragraph is stilted and dull in ways that are too obvious to mention, but as a reader I would also have been interested in knowing what Baskaran himself thought of Nargis in those two scenes rather than learn what other people have “pointed out”.

It’s possible that I’m falling into the old trap of reviewing the book I wish had been written instead of the one that actually was. But my main objection is unevenness of tone: many of these essays veer between being chatty and casual and also trying to be comprehensive in a by-the-numbers, encyclopaedic way. In the Wikipedia age, I’m unsure what value there is in listing most of a performer’s movies with two or three trite sentences about each of them. And when you do commit yourself to providing such information, the fact-checking should be exemplary. Instead there are many careless errors. To mention just two, we are told that by 1954 “a whole new generation of actresses like Asha Parekh, Sadhana and Saira Banu had appeared on the scene and the era of colour films was also ushered in” (this is off by roughly a decade) and that Prithviraj Kapoor was over 30 years senior to Suraiya (22, actually).

That might sound like nitpicking, but when many similar instances of indifferent writing and editing pile up in a book, it’s a reminder that film literature in India is often treated flippantly even by those who engage deeply with cinema. I sometimes hear the defence that essays about mainstream Hindi films should be as accessible and egalitarian as the films themselves are. But in the same way as there are good Manmohan Desai films and bad Manmohan Desai films (how many movie buffs would put Ganga Jamuna Saraswati in the same league as Amar Akbar Anthony?), there are good and bad ways of writing accessibly about popular movies and movie-stars. (For a sample of intelligent, engaged writing in this vein, see Mukul Kesavan’s essay on Dharmendra.)

Of course, it would be silly to claim that there are no high points in such a varied collection. The pieces on K L Saigal and Devika Rani (by Vikram Sampath and Cary Rajinder Sawhney respectively) read smoothly because they make at least a perfunctory effort at a narrative structure. Jerry Pinto’s Waheeda Rehman essay characteristically combines thoughtful analysis with lightness of touch. Shefalee Vasudev’s piece on Madhuri Dixit, though overwritten in places (“Madhubala was mesmerising, Waheeda Rehman engrossingly attractive, Hema Malini the ultimate dream girl and Rekha sensational, but Madhuri – oh, she was something else. An incidental sum total of desirable parts of moh [allure] and maya [illusion]”), does take the trouble to examine the evolution of a star persona against the background of a changing movie-going culture.

The writers whose subjects had relatively short careers are at an advantage, since their pieces lend themselves to more focused analysis (in writing about Meena Kumari, for example, Pavan Varma can devote a generous amount of space to her key role as Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam), but I didn’t envy the task of those saddled with a really big superstar whose career has played out – wholly or partly – during the media explosion of the past two decades: what more is there to say about Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, for instance? Still, Sidharth Bhatia and Namrata Joshi manage a decent, professional job on these two subjects. Bhatia covers well-trodden ground (including Bachchan’s much-analysed shift from the Angry Young Man battling the system to “the settled establishment man” over the past decade), but his observation that the young Amitabh “was an angular personality”, easily cast in edgy or villainous roles, led me to contemplate an alternate universe where the actor might have made an adequate career playing intense second leads like he did in the early films Gehri Chaal and Parwana. And Joshi’s piece on Shah Rukh includes some intriguing thoughts on the private persona versus the public one, and on the cracks that have been appearing in a once-secure image (the essay was written before SRK’s much-publicised brawl with Shirish Kunder).

Also enjoyable is Avijit Ghosh’s wry dissection of Hindi cinema’s headiest, most enigmatic superstar phase – Rajesh Khanna’s dominance in the early 1970s. At one point, Ghosh writes of Khanna’s decline: “With half Rajesh’s acting ability, one-third his waistline and four times the discipline, Jeetendra comfortably ensconced himself as the director’s favourite for weepy socials or mindless entertainers made down South. Rajesh could only watch the water flow.”

This is a sample of the irreverence that comes with being a fan (the attitude that goes “these stars belong to us, we can say what we like about them”). One also sees it in the cheeky ending to Bhaichand Patel’s own (otherwise unremarkable) essay on Ashok Kumar – a reference to Kumar’s affair with Nalini Jaywant and the speculation that they “might have bumped into each other on their evening walks” in their old age.

More of this sort of thing could have made Bollywood’s Top 20 a better, more intimate book. More typical, alas, is the last paragraph of the Madhubala piece – of all things, a quote from Manoj Kumar in 2008, when the long-deceased actress had a stamp issued in her honour. “There can only be one Madhubala in one century,” Kumar said, “Every time I would see her, my heart would start singing ghazals.” This would be a moderately acceptable way to end the essay, but the quote continues thus: “I am happy and want to thank the department for their initiative.”

Yes, THAT is the closing sentence of a piece about one of Hindi cinema’s loveliest performers. Manoj Kumar is happy! He congratulates the postal department! It says something about the peculiarly distant tone of this collection and the sloppiness of its editing.

P.S. the accompanying CD of songs helps make up for some of the uninspired writing, but given this book’s cover price I thought it was naughty of Patel to describe it as “a free disc” in his Introduction.

Dressing up a movie / Bhanu Athaiya's The Art of Costume Design

Even the most attentive movie-watchers – students of cinema, dedicated to exploring the nooks and crannies of the form – sometimes look at a film mainly in terms of its highest-profile elements: script, acting, cinematography. It’s when you spend some time on the sets of a movie, and watch the darn thing being monotonously assembled, that you begin to appreciate the small but vital cogs. 

In Kerala, at the location shooting of Anup Kurian’s The Hunter last month (earlier posts here, here and here), I had a chat with Sarah Eapen, the film’s costumes-in-charge. Sarah’s notebook was full of charts for each day of the shooting, subdivided by scenes and characters, with little icons representing different sorts of T-shirts, scarves and so on. (The scenes involving elephants and cows had little smileys drawn beneath them, because she didn't have to attire those lumbering beasts of the wild.) But her job wasn’t merely to take actors’ measurements and collect outfits. She had to read the script carefully and think about the characters’ personalities: would a flamboyant hitman wear a bright pink shirt without stripes? Would a young medical student use red nail-polish or a more sombre shade? On a small production like this one, she also had to keep an eye on aspects of art direction and continuity. For example, in a scene where two people bury a beloved dog, she decided to use an old tribal shawl to wrap the body in (it chimed with other tribal associations in the script) – but this in turn made it important to establish the shawl as part of the film’s mise-en-scène, so it was shown being used as a makeshift tablecloth in an earlier scene.  

And then there are the mundane tasks such as “ageing” newly bought clothes. Most of us don’t even think about these things while watching a film, but for a designer it entails creativity of a different sort – fraying the edges of trousers just so, ripping pockets delicately, even dipping clothes in tea and coffee to make them seem faded! Sarah, working with a very small budget, joked about how such things are taken for granted on bigger-budget movies, where they have “Ageing Departments”.  

A subsequent meeting with the veteran designer Bhanu Athaiya, Oscar-winner for Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, gave me a more historical perspective on Indian costume design. Still quite active at 82, Athaiya was in Delhi for the launch of her coffee-table memoir The Art of Costume Design, which combines informative text with sketches and photos of her work for films ranging from Shree 420 to Lagaan and Swades. 

“Until the 1950s,” she told me, “Hindi cinema had hardly any costume designers in the modern sense of the term. It was all worked out between the directors and the set directors, who would call in tailors and give them instructions. Once in a while, if there was a very special requirement, they would go shopping for clothes.” No wonder then that Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and other directors of the time were taken with someone like Athaiya, who had not only studied art but had also traveled widely enough to know firsthand about regional trends in clothing and design. “I had an understanding of culture,” she says with quiet pride. Directors would narrate a scene to her and she would make a sketch within an hour and show it to them.  

Given that Athaiya had artistic aspirations from an early age – she gave up a possible painting career in favour of costume designing for films – I was impressed by her pragmatic acknowledgement of costume design as something that must, first and foremost, fit the overall scheme of a movie. “It’s tempting for a talented designer to get carried away,” she says, “but the demands of the story are more important than designing beautiful outfits just to show off your abilities.”  

At the same time, when a costume designer is permitted a high level of involvement in the scene-by-scene planning of the film, the results can be subtly effective. Using brightly coloured outfits for cheerful early scenes and gradually moving to duller shades to reflect the darkening mood of a story (something she did in Raj Kapoor’s Henna, for example) can establish atmosphere and provide visual cues, even if viewers register it only at a subconscious level. Unfortunately, says Athaiya, the star system has begun to interfere with the integrity of her discipline (as it has with so many others). “In the old days the directors made most of the decisions,” she says, “and they were naturally concerned with the overall welfare of the film. But in the past 10-15 years the actors have become more dominant. They end up having their own way when it comes to costumes, even if it conflicts with the film’s needs.”  

As for the book – well, it’s very good to look at, with dozens of movie stills featuring Athaiya’s most iconic costumes: a fish-scale dress worn by Nargis in a dream sequence in Ek Tha Raja Ek Thi Rani (see pic), Sadhana’s form-fitting kurtas and churidaars in Waqt, Sunil Dutt and Vyjayanthimala’s period costumes for Amrapali, Waheeda Rahman’s bridal outfit in Reshma aur Shera. It’s priced at a steep Rs 2,500, but that’s the norm for a publication of this sort. The one thing I definitely didn’t like was the eight-page promotional spread for Tanishq Jewellery, blatantly inserted right in the middle, though it had no direct connection with Athaiya’s work. 

Some photos. Meena Kumari in Bengali sari in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam Mumtaz in a sari that was specially stitched and draped to give her freedom of movement for her dance in "Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche" (Brahmachari) Waheeda Rahman in Reshma aur Shera Some of Bhanu's sketches [Did a version of this for the Sunday Business Standard]

A mosaic of men: Rossellini in India

In this post about the Nargis biography Darlingji, I mentioned the splenetic Filmindia editor Baburao Patel, one of the most feared columnists of the 1950s. Well, here’s this inimitable gent again, holding forth on Roberto Rossellini’s affair with a married Indian woman, in the July 1957 issue of his journal:

This bald, 51-year-old Italian director of the neo-realist film Rome, Open City recently thought that Bombay was as open a city for seduction of married women as was his birth city (sic), Rome. But Bombay made it pretty hot for this obviously sex-obsessed Italian, when in April last year, Roberto was reported to have grabbed and taken to his Christian neighbourhood the 28-year-old anaemic and skeletal Sonali Dasgupta, a married Bengali woman with a husband and two children...

Patel’s diatribe went on in this fashion as he found ways to insult various other people, including Roberto’s estranged wife Ingrid Bergman, Sonali’s husband Harisadhan Dasgupta, and, more generally, “elite Indian couples who roll their hips and masturbate their nerves on the rock-n-roll floors of our clubs and then go home to breed little monsters of modern culture”. (No, I didn’t understand any of that either, but it’s very entertaining and makes 1950s Bombay seem like an exciting place.)

Chunks from this article are quoted by Dilip Padgaonkar in his Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India, a book that is itself a much more balanced and thoughtful account of the famous Italian director’s stay in India in the late 1950s, his acquaintance with Jawaharlal Nehru, his filming of a series of episodes about the newly independent country, and his relationship with Sonali. It was a relationship that caused an uproar in the Indian press at the time, Baburao Patel’s invective being only the most florid example of the many reports that appeared in newspapers and magazines. Eventually, Rossellini had to leave the country under duress (though Padgaonkar says the reports that Nehru had washed his hands off “that rascal Rossellini” were greatly exaggerated; Nehru and Indira Gandhi continued to maintain close ties with Roberto and Sonali in later years, after the two got married) and many critics felt that his film India, Matri Bhumi had an unfinished feel to it – almost as if reflecting the abrupt severing of his ties with the country.

I’ve just finished Padgaonkar’s book. It’s a good, solid read for anyone interested in the people involved, though it doesn’t deal with Rossellini’s career in any detail. The writing is mostly dry and functional; this is very much a reportage-oriented work written by a seasoned journalist. Though Padgaonkar knew Rossellini personally in the 1970s and also spoke to a number of people during his research, he stays discreetly in the background for the most part. (As it happens, I liked the voice that emerged on the few occasions that he does use the first-person: in the Prologue, where he recalls being a young, Hollywood-obsessed boy at the time of Rossellini’s visit to India, more interested in Ingrid Bergman than in neo-realist cinema; and later, when he offers a personal critique of India, Matri Bhumi, relating his own deepening response to the film after a second viewing.)

Perhaps Under her Spell is just a little too dry and restrained though, given that at the centre of this story is a tempestuous affair that complicated the lives of many people. We don't really learn that much about the Roberto-Sonali relationship, what drew them to each other and how the bond gradually deepened, and Padgaonkar is also reticent about their later years together. I thought there was a little too much journalistic detail in places: in the chapters describing the shooting of particularly troublesome segments of film, for example, we are meticulously told exactly how many feet of film were exposed each day – at one point it almost becomes a refrain with which to end every few paragraphs.

As a chronicle of an emotionally stressful time in the life of a famous – and famously complex – person, this book has a lot of merit. But it also feels somewhat disjointed, its chapters resembling little pieces of film – each intriguing in its own right – that haven’t quite been put together. These include vignettes on Rossellini’s earlier relationships; his often hidebound views about what made for “important” cinema (his opposition to “pretty pictures” and dramatic editing were laughably inflexible); his determination to capture facets of life in India as naturally as possible, and not to exoticise or depict tourist-friendly images (in his autobiography, he claimed that he turned his face away when his car passed the Taj Mahal and that he refused to see the Ajanta frescoes); the difficulties of shooting and of getting approval from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (there’s a surreal telephone conversation with a minister, who objects to an episode where a tiger becomes a man-eater); and, of course, the repercussions of the Dasgupta affair. Padgaonkar also underlines Rossellini’s prescient observation that India was destined to take its place in the front rank of nations within a few decades. “Contrary to most other foreign viewers, he argued that Indians were amongst the most rational people in the world. Indeed India was akin to an enormous stomach that swallowed everything, digested everything and provided nutrition for the country’s social and economic development.”

Rossellini comes across as a man ridden with contradictions: immensely generous at times yet capable of mean-spiritedness, warm and unmindful of social divisions yet also off-handed, hard-headed but boyishly vulnerable. Given this, I was surprised that Padgaonkar disapproves of the following description of Rossellini by the biographer Lawrence Leamer:

“Roberto was not a man but a mosaic of men. He was an intuitive genius; he was a fraud; he was a soothsayer; he was a charmer; he was a liar; he was an adventurer; he was a crook; he was a man of saintly generosity; he was a cheat; he loved humanity; he manipulated human beings; he was an egomaniac; he reeked of insecurity.”

Padgaonkar says this description lacks in generosity of spirit, but I think it’s a matter-of-fact recognition of the many qualities that can coexist in a temperamental artist. The portrait of Rossellini that emerges in Under Her Spell is not in its essence all that different from Leamer’s description.