Harmonious notes – music and manliness in Alaap and Parichay

In one of those coincidences that stalk movie buffs, last week I happened to re-watch two films in which a man is discouraged from pursuing his interest in music. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1977 Alaap, perhaps Amitabh Bachchan’s most low-key and least-seen film in the first few years of his superstardom, has the actor playing a variant on some of his larger-than-life parts of the time. In mainstream movies like Trishul, Shakti and Deewaar, Bachchan was often in conflict with, or defined by the absence of, a father figure. He is in similar straits in Alaap, but the tone of the conflict is from the tradition of the grounded “Middle Cinema” that Mukherjee specialised in – less dramatic and fiery, more rooted in the everyday dilemmas that face a middle-class family.

As the film begins, Bachchan’s Alok Prasad has just returned to his home-town after studying classical music. “Ab toh saadhna ka lamba raasta hai, jo jeevan ki tarah saral bhi hai aur kathin bhi,” Alok’s guru has cautioned the students – meaning they aren’t “finished” with their studies, years of disciplined practice lie ahead and true commitment must span a lifetime. But this is not something Alok’s worldly father could ever understand. Barely greeting his son, he peremptorily asks what Alok plans to do with his life now, as if he had been away just for a lark. The senior Prasad (described as “Hitler”, though he is played by the Teddy-Bearish Om Prakash trying hard to look tyrannical) is contesting local elections and no doubt has firm ideas about what a worthy pursuit for a son is. Some of the early scenes make light of this situation (if I had to argue a murder case in court, I would do it in Raag Deepak, Alok quips to his bhabhi as he mulls his unsuitability to follow in his lawyer brother’s footsteps, “aur talaaq ka case Raag Jogiya mein gaoonga”), but soon there is a parting of ways, and it becomes obvious that the hero’s single-minded dedication to his art could endanger his very existence.

The other film was Gulzar’s 1972 Parichay, which is sometimes described as a reworking of The Sound of Music – and indeed there are similarities in the plot of a teacher who tries to bring joy, including the love of music, into the lives of his sullen young wards. But like Alaap, the story is also about two opposing views of what a man may do with his life. In flashback, we see the music-loving Nilesh (Sanjeev Kumar) playing the sitar in his room early in the morning, going out onto the verandah to sing and to contemplate the beauty of nature, and his clashes with his authoritarian father Rai Saab (Pran), who wants his son to grow out of this dreamy-eyed artistic “phase” and do the things he is supposed to do as his only heir. To, essentially, “be a man”.

Given that ours is a cinema where music plays such a vital role – and where music composers and lyricists have mostly been male – there is something faintly ironical about narratives in which men are looked down on, or disinherited, for pursuing music as a profession. But it is easy to see why music, or art more generally, can be a threat to the status quo of a feudal or patriarchal society. The artist or artiste – with his knack for introspection ("thinking too much", as the lament goes) and his frequent inability to conform to societal expectations of people or groups – can be a problematic creature in a regimented world obsessed with class or power, and afraid of change. (Even in more benevolent contexts, there have been clashes between the pursuit of “soft” interests like art and culture, and the business of engaging with the more practical side of life; the written record of the ideological differences between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore includes an essay where the former repeatedly referred to the latter as “the Poet”, the refrain suggesting that Gandhi was being gently sarcastic about Tagore’s rose-tinted idealism and his disconnect from the hard demands of the freedom struggle.)

In so many films made by directors like Mukherjee and Gulzar, music is a force for egalitarianism, something that helps blur boundaries. Men become more “feminine” when they sing or dance, women can become more assertive and emotionally expressive than the codes of a conservative society would normally allow them to be; gender is transcended in each direction. Music can also be equalizing in the way it erases class and caste lines. Early in Alaap, the well-off Alok bonds over a song with the cart-driver (Asrani in a super performance) who transports him home; later he finds his true home away from his father’s mansion, in the little basti where a classical singer named Sarju Bai resides. Similarly, in another Mukherjee film Aashirwad, the music-loving zamindar Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is never so happy as when he is practicing with his guru, a lower-class man named Baiju. 

For me you are the real Brahmin, says Jogi Thakur, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. Later, the two men sit together on the floor as they watch – and eventually participate in – a lavani dance performance; sitting with them is a Muslim friend referred to as “Mirza sahib”, and the unforced bonhomie between these three men, from very different backgrounds, is a direct result of their enthusiasm for the performing arts.** What they are doing is, within their social milieu, as subversive as Alok supporting the basti-dwellers against his own father’s land-appropriating schemes, and it shows how the performing arts can – temporarily at least – bring some harmony to an inherently unjust world.

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** From Louise Brown's book The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Pleasure District:

Because the emotional power of music was considered raw and uncontrolled, music was deemed, like love, to have the potential to rob a man of his self-control and virtue. It was believed to possess the same subversive erotic power as the beloved. Because of its potentially destabilizing feminine power, music itself threatened the mirza’s masculinity […] for a man to dance was to indicate his receptivity to erotic attention, a passive erotic behavior that was unacceptable for a mirza.

[Related thoughts in these posts: fathers and sons in the anthology film Bombay Talkies; the lavani sequence in Aashirwad. And a post about Mukherjee's lovely film Anuradha, in which the title character must sacrifice her singing career to join her doctor husband as he sets about contributing to the national cause - another pointer to sangeet as something to be reserved for the “gentler” sex, and only so long as it doesn't interfere with more "important" things]

When Sambha danced - on the strange fame of Mac the naif

In his most famous movie role, he sat atop a big rock with a gun in his hand and replied to his master’s calls of “Arre O Sambha”. It was a small part, but it became so iconic that his profile could be used as the sole image on a “minimal Bollywood poster”, and anyone would know instantly that the film was Sholay. Yet what did the actor MacMohan himself feel about being defined and shadowed by that tiny role for the rest of his career?

I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an alternate future for the man, via a song from a 1964 film titled Aao Pyaar Karein. In the sequence (which you can and must see on YouTube here), the young MacMohan dances – daintily play-acting as a woman – with the movie’s leading man Joy Mukherjee, while their friends sit around clapping, shaking their heads and generally being baboons. Minus the distinctive beard and the streak of white hair, dressed in a formal suit with a bow-tie, filmed in black-and-white, MacMohan is unrecognisable from the screen persona he would eventually inhabit. His movements are lithe and graceful even during a strip-tease that ends with him in vest and striped shorts; with the always-affable Mukherjee giving him company, it doesn’t seem in poor taste (the woman who makes occasional appearances in the scene is more problematic).

Watching little Mac here is a reminder that a performer with disparate talents might get so pigeonholed that it becomes impossible to imagine him doing anything else. At this point in his career he was probably a young actor hoping for a big break, and on this evidence he might have had a future as a reliable supporting player: as the hero’s foil or a genial comedian. If he had been more personable and good-looking (whatever those words might mean in the context of the dubious physiognomic history of the Hindi-movie leading man, about which more in Mukul Kesavan’s essay “The Ugliness of the Indian Male”), he may even have hoped for something better. 

Something else that’s amusing about the Aao Pyaar Karein scene: clowning about on the periphery – as one of the other buddies – is the young Sanjeev Kumar, years before his stardom. In other words, here are two bit-part actors on level ground, long before their respective destinies in Hindi cinema were set, and a decade before they found themselves on opposite sides of the law – and at opposite ends of the fame continuum – as dacoit-minion Sambha and upright hero Thakur Baldev Singh.

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In a way it is fitting that one of MacMohan’s last screen appearances – 45 years after he danced with Joy Mukherjee – was in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a film that knows about the serendipitous moment; about the combination of events – a chance encounter, a portfolio that happens to make its way to an office at just the right time, catching the eye of this rather than that person – that can make the difference between good fortune and continuing struggle. It is a film with sympathy for the underdogs, has-beens and never-weres of the movie industry, and it gave MacMohan the respect of a bona fide cameo part (as opposed to the anonymous sidey roles he played in so many films). Playing himself, he visits an acting workshop, where he is asked by enthusiastic students to speak the line that made him famous. He looks down, pauses for a moment, looks up and says “Poore pacchaas hazaar”.

It’s a touching moment, a view of a career summarised in – and frozen by – three words. The cynical might look at his worn expression and at the students' grinning faces and say this is a case of a man invited to participate in self-parody. But you can also see a performer making a serious effort to “act” for the two seconds or so it takes him to say the line. In its quiet acknowledgement of the dignity of labour, the scene reminds me of Satyajit Ray’s fine short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, in which a middle-aged man hired to play a part in a film discovers that he is required to say nothing more than “Oh” in his scene, but then gets over his disappointment by uncovering the possibilities contained in the single word:

Patol Babu uttered the word over and over again, giving it a different inflection each time. After doing this for a number of times he made an astonishing discovery. The same exclamation, when spoken in different ways, carried different shades of meaning. A man when hurt said “Oh” in one way. Despair brought forth a different kind of “Oh”, while sorrow provoked yet another kind. There were so many kinds of Ohs – the short Oh, the long-drawn Oh, Oh shouted and Oh whispered, the high-pitched Oh, the low-pitched Oh, the Oh starting low and ending high, and the Oh starting high and ending low...Patol Babu suddenly felt that he could write a whole thesis on that one monosyllabic exclamation. Why had he felt so disheartened when this single word contained a golden mine of meaning? The true actor could make a mark with this one syllable.

I wonder if MacMohan, in his post-Sholay life, sometimes quietly muttered “Poore pacchaas hazaar” to himself, examining the phrase for depth and meaning, and reflecting on the strangeness of his fame.

P.S. the "Patol Babu" excerpt above is from Ray’s own English translation of the story, most recently published in Classic Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, this is also the story that Dibakar Banerjee has adapted for his short film for the 100 Years of Cinema project. As mentioned in my Banerjee profile for Caravan, Nawazuddin Siddiqi - an actor who struggled for years before breaking into the big league - is playing the lead role in that film, which will incorporate elements from Nawazuddin's own real-life story.

And an anecdote from an email exchange: probably not something one should read too much into, but then again who knows. A few months ago a photo of the young MacMohan from the Aao Pyaar Karein song was doing the rounds on the internet; movie buffs were asking each other to identify the man, “who became unexpectedly famous in the 1970s”. A friend tells me she was astonished by how many of her correspondents wrote back asking if the picture was that of a skinny young pre-stardom Rajesh Khanna, because “the smile is the same”. Perhaps the angle of the photo was particularly flattering to MacMohan, or perhaps this was because Khanna had recently died and everyone had him on their mind. But as my friend put it, “even if they were seeing things, clearly in that snap he did look hero-like enough for them.” (Or nearly as hero-like as Rajesh Khanna, which is not an unequivocal compliment.)

DVD Classic: Shaitani Anand (or Return of Zombie Rajesh)

[Did this piece on a long-forgotten - but now restored - Hrishikesh Mukherjee film for the April 1 issue of Sunday Guardian]

Hindi cinema’s tradition of zombie-love, vampirism and necrophilia has been well-chronicled over the decades, which is understandable, for nearly every major film has splashes of surreal, unexpected horror. The hospital scene near the beginning of Amar Akbar Anthony where Nirupa Roy, in need of a blood transfusion, rips away the tubes and sinks her fangs into the throats of her three sons lying on nearby beds, has been the subject of more Ph.D theses than anyone can count (including a celebrated one titled “Mommie fiercest: the hermeneutics of maternal love and vampirism in popular Hindi film”). Much has similarly been made of the resurrection scene in the climax of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa where the undead poet Vijay escapes his coffin, strikes a crucifixion pose at the entrance of a hall and sings “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai?” (“Who cares about the world of the living? It's cosier underground.”)

For decades, heroes and villains have smacked their chomps and droned “Main tera khoon pee jaoonga” at each other, but the word “khoon” has subtler resonances too: our films are full of people betrayed by their blood (hard-hearted relatives) or by their blood cells (prolonged death by cancer). Narcissistic male stars with crumbling faces play characters one-third their age, suggesting a Mephistophelean trade-off. Entire acting careers (Jeetendra? Mala Sinha?) testify that zombies, if they pick their disguises well, can get high-paying jobs. And has any national cinema anywhere in the world – even the Japanese, with their talent for visceral creepiness – offered horrors to rival the sight of Sanjeev Kumar playing nine roles in a single film? No.


One director steered clear of this ghoulishness for much of his career: in the 1970s, Hrishikesh Mukherjee specialised in gentle, character-oriented scripts and a somewhat narrow definition of “realism” that precluded werewolves and icchadhaari naags. But this is precisely why Mukherjee’s 1980 film Shaitani Anand, lost in the eerie mists of time and recently recovered from film vaults, is such a significant work.

The back-story is as intriguing as the film itself. It began life as a straight sequel to one of the director’s best-loved movies, Anand, but it developed a zombie twist when a young executive producer named Bhootpret Ramsay brought his own ideas to the table. Consequently, the story begins with the beaming cancer patient Anand rising from the grave and setting off to convince his old associates that death, like life, must be lived to the fullest.

This is not typical Mukherjee terrain, but there had been hints of an appetite for morbidity in his earlier work. As the American critic Pauline Kael shrewdly noted, his 1972 film Bawarchi – in which a cook teaches a well-needed lesson to a family intent on devouring each other – anticipated the cannibalistic clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by two years. What exactly was in those innocent-looking pakoras that Raghu the bawarchi was serving the Sharmas?

Raghu and Anand were both played by the same actor, the superstar Rajesh Khanna, whose early filmography – sanguine and twinkling though it appears from a distance – was marked by reflections on life, death and the hereafter. (“Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haaye,” he sang in Anand itself, but there was also “Maut aani hai, aayegi ek din”, crooned in a deceptively upbeat song in Andaz – shortly before the death of his character. And the melancholy number “Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain joh makaam / Woh phir nahin aate”, which loosely translates as "There's no going back / When you're in zombie land".) By the late 70s Khanna’s career was in free-fall; ironically, his replacement as Bollywood’s most successful star was the lanky Amitabh Bachchan who had played a supporting role in Anand. It is perhaps no surprise then that Shaitani Anand developed into a meta-commentary on the star system. There is profound human tragedy in the story of the sweet-natured Anand becoming a vindictive fiend and stalking his friend Bhaskar – who has changed his hairstyle and no longer recognises him – through Hindi-film studios.

Personally I regret the scrapping of the planned ensemble song that had a number of actors turning into zombies and menacing Bachchan: when an assistant writer jumped ship for the Manmohan Desai camp, a “borrowed” (non-zombie) version of the idea was used in the “John Jani Janardhan” number in Desai’s Naseeb. This omission notwithstanding, Shaitani Anand is a fine horror film as well as a remarkable meditation on stardom as a monster that can suck the life-blood out of you until your wax statue in Madame Tussauds looks more alive than you do. In this sense it’s a movie years ahead of its time (as anyone who has watched Shah Rukh Khan in Ra.One will know) and it’s easy to see why vigorous efforts were made to keep it out of sight. Watch it now!

Postscript: The American film Shadow of the Vampire tells a fictionalised account of the making of the horror classic Nosferatu, built on the idea that the enigmatic leading man Max Schreck was a real-life vampire who feasted on the cast and crew during the shooting. One doesn’t wish to cast similar aspersions on a star of Rajesh Khanna’s magnitude, but it may be noted that the credits list of Shaitani Anand includes several names who never again worked on a Hindi movie. One can only politely wonder about their fate. But perhaps they were Mukherjee and Ramsay’s acquaintances who agreed to help out on a low-budget project and went back to their day jobs afterwards. Yes, that must be it.

Up above the world so high...

One of the many pleasing things about Hindi cinema’s multi-starrer culture in the 1970s was the phenomenon of the “And Above All” in the title credits. This was fuelled by ego clashes and by a general tendency to fawn and mollycoddle: when two or more stars were equally popular and had been in the industry for around the same length of time, who would get top billing?

Such insecurity wasn’t peculiar to Bollywood, of course. In his book Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin observed: “Billing appears to be as important as breathing to some actors and actresses. Important films with ideal casts have fallen apart on this issue.” Old Hollywood came up with inventive methods to keep prima donnas happy – for example, two names might be lettered in the shape of an “X” so that neither star could be said to have taken precedence. (If “Humphrey” was placed above “Ingrid”, at least “Bergman” was above “Bogart”.)

But in our movie industry “Above All” was the preferred solution, and if that failed it was always possible to proclaim a “guest” or “friendly” appearance – even when the actor in question had a substantial role. For a good example of title credits gone awry, I offer you Raj Kumar Kohli’s magnificent horror film Jaani Dushman, about a werewolf-like Shaitan with chest hair that would make Anil Kapoor look like the Glaxo baby.

The film’s title sequence begins well enough with straightforward “starring” credits for Sunil Dutt, Sanjeev Kumar and Shatrughan Sinha (the hierarchy of seniority being apparent enough in this trio), but then things get murky. The next credit has Vinod Mehra with a parenthetical “Special Appearance” next to his name, almost as if he were reluctant to get too deeply involved. Likewise Rekha and a bevy of starlets including Neetu Singh, Bindiya Goswami and Sarika (all playing village belles ripe for abduction). But doing a solo number in the middle of all these special appearances is poor Reena Roy, whose name appears without any qualifiers at all. Possibly her agent failed to read the fine print?
 
Then comes a “Guest Artists” series – Yogita Bali, Aruna Irani and suchlike – followed by one of the more intricate credits I’ve seen:

And Above All
Jeetendra
(Special Appearance)

And so it goes. Briefly, here is a movie whose opening titles could be the subject of a thesis. (You can see them halfway through this video, but to get there you’ll have to watch Amrish Puri reading “The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories” and making a monstrous transformation. The scene gives new meaning to the phrase “that book made my hair stand on end”.)

Come to think of it, Jeetendra had quite a romance going with special titles; his “Above All” billing in The Burning Train conjures images of the actor sitting mournfully by himself on the roof of the train compartment while the rest of the cast travels in comfort. (Alas, the credits of this film were so preoccupied with the male stars that they turned the luscious Parveen Babi into a man by spelling her name “Praveen”. Unforgivable.)

In that awful decade commonly referred to as the 1980s, some films exhausted all their creativity within the opening five minutes. Watching something called Do Qaidi on TV, I discovered the title “Dynamic Appearance by Suresh Oberoi” imposed on a still of the thus-honoured actor (who played a fairly inconsequential part in the film). What, one wonders, were these performers and their families thinking as they watched preview screenings? Did little Vivek Oberoi beam with delight when he saw daddy’s name appear on the screen? Did he tell himself, “I’ll grow up and become a movie star too, and then everyone in the whole wide world will call me Dynamic Vivek?” If so, think of the human tragedy unleashed by five words that appeared ever so briefly in a long-forgotten film. It gives new meaning to Larkin's verse about man handing on misery to man.

P.S. Here is Kanin on the subject of Spencer Tracy’s name always appearing before Katharine Hepburn’s in the films they did together:

Tracy’s position as a Metro superstar meant that there was nothing to discuss [...] It was always “Tracy and Hepburn”.

I chided him once about his insistence on first billing.

“Why not?” he asked, his face all innocence.

“”Well, after all,” I argued, “She’s the lady. You’re the man. Ladies first?”

“This is a movie, chowderhead,” he said, “not a lifeboat.”

Mat jaane bhi do yaar: idealism and self-deception in Satyakam

[The full version of my latest film column for Yahoo! India]

When I was doing the research for my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro two years ago, writer-director Ranjit Kapoor (the film’s dialogue writer) told me about an incident that changed his life. It was 1969 and Kapoor was a young man in dire straits, nudging towards a life of crime – “main galat raaste pe jaane wala tha” – when he chanced to see Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam. The film, about a stubbornly honest man struggling with hard realities, wasn’t exactly fast-paced entertainment, but Kapoor was riveted.

“My friend sitting next to me fell asleep out of boredom, but I was weeping silently in the hall,” he recalled. “After that film, the world began to seem like a very different place – I had hit rock-bottom, but I picked myself up.” Forty years later, the experience was still so fresh in his mind that he dedicated his own movie Chintuji to Mukherjee, Dharmendra and Narayan Sanyal (who wrote the novel on which Satyakam was based).

Watching Satyakam recently, I realised that its central theme – the death of idealism, the feeble attempt to cling to it against all odds – is relevant in a wider sense to Jaane bhi do Yaaro, though the two movies couldn’t be more different in tone. The latter is a sharp satire about a world where honesty and integrity are relics of the past, and where the words “Sachaai ki hamesha jeet hoti hai” (“Truth always prevails”) are spoken with ironic venom – and directly into the camera – by a villain who has just sent two innocents to jail.

The people who made Jaane bhi do Yaaro – Kundan Shah, Kapoor and their friends – were part of a generation who were learning to (ruefully) laugh about corruption and other social evils. But Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Narayan Sanyal were from an earlier time, young and sanguine when India’s freedom movement bore fruit, and their film reflects both the headiness of those days – the belief that anything was possible – and the disillusionment that followed. (As a viewer today, it’s easy to forget that Satyakam is, technically speaking, a period film: it was made in the late 1960s and is set between the mid-40s and the early 50s. From our vantage point in 2011, those two time periods blur together – but those 15-20 years certainly represented enough time for the dilution of the idea that independent India would be a Utopia.)

Satyakam begins with a sombre background score and a lovely shot (the first of many in this film) of the sun glimpsed through a canopy of leaves. The opening credits are followed by the Gandhi quote “God is Truth, Conscience and Fearlessness”, which signals that we are about to see a serious-minded movie – though it begins with light-hearted scenes of life at an engineering college where a number of young men, including Satyapriya (Dharmendra) and his friend Naren (Sanjeev Kumar), are looking ahead to the New India. The catchy song “Zindagi Hai Kya” provides some tomfoolery (plus a master class in face-contorting by Asrani, whose expressions as he sings the line “Aadmi hai bandar” are a powerful vindication of Darwinism), and a while later there will be the promise of a sweet, conventional movie romance between Satyapriya and a dancing girl named Ranjana (Sharmila Tagore). But these are temporary breathers in a film that will get ever darker in tone.

After their graduation, as the industrialisation era begins, the engineers spread out across the country, working on construction projects, moving up in life, and gradually learning about the need to make little compromises along the way: pretend not to notice while a small bribe is being taken or offered; use an influential uncle's sifaarish to get a job; allow poor workers to use official material for an annual festival. But Satyapriya is the exception. Compromise doesn’t exist in his world (you can imagine him scoffing at the very words “jaane bhi do yaar”) and more problematically, neither does moral relativism.

At one point, when Naren asks “Woh sach kya jiske peeche shivam nahin, sundaram nahin – jisse kisi ko thess pahunche?” (“What’s the use of speaking a truth that serves no higher purpose and only causes someone hurt?”), Satyapriya’s response is typical:

“Yeh buzdilon ki soch hai. Sach bolne waale ko agar dukh sahne ki himmat hai, toh dukh dene ki bhi himmat honi chahiye. Sachaai angaarey ki tarah hai – haath par rakho aur haath na jale, yeh kaise ho sakta hai?” (“Only cowards think like this. If the truth-teller has the courage to suffer pain, he must also have the courage to give pain to others. Truth is like a piece of burning coal on your hand.”)

Mukherjee’s film lets us see – not through didactic monologues but through the natural, graceful unfolding of its narrative – that such thoughts may be very noble in theory, but that they can be damaging and self-defeating in certain situations. This makes Satyakam a difficult film to watch, as it draws the viewer into a quicksand of uncertainty and despair. (I can sympathise with the boy who fell asleep in the hall next to Ranjit Kapoor, especially if he’d already had a long hard day!) Throughout, there are counterpoints to Satyapriya’s unalloyed idealism, as the film repeatedly places him – and us – in morally hazy situations.

For example, when Ranjana is raped by the ruler of a former princely state, it’s a direct result of Satyapriya’s dithering about the finer points of propriety instead of taking action. Shaken and contrite, he then decides to marry her (he must, after all, do the “right thing”), but only after a revealing scene where we glimpse his reservations. Later, it’s implied that he is unable to achieve intimacy with her after marriage, and in this we see traces of his orthodox upbringing – here is a man so bound to traditional ideas that the woman he loves wishes aloud that she could die and be reborn “pure” so he would accept her wholeheartedly.

At times like this, not even the most naive viewer can see Satyapriya as an unequivocally heroic figure; his self-righteousness can even get annoying. And yet, he is also a man who is willing to learn from his mistakes and look long and hard in the mirror – in this sense, he reminds me a little of Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata, an initially bland hero who grows in stature by confronting his own weaknesses.

It’s possible to see the Satyakam worldview in strictly religious terms: what goes around comes around; there’s someone up there keeping score; “bad” people will eventually get their comeuppance and “good” people will be rewarded. But I don’t think the story can only be appreciated by those who believe in divine justice or in comforting patterns. The film stresses that each individual must find his own meaning in life. At the end, commonsense humanism wins the day and a point is even made about the undesirability of rigidly following scriptures: a narrow-minded old man is so moved by the honesty of a “fallen” woman that he admits his moral defeat and accepts his responsibility towards her and her child – thereby vindicating Satyapriya’s belief in the power of truth.

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There’s so much to appreciate in this film. Note the subtleties of Dharmendra’s unforgettable performance, the way his expressive face gets cagier and more careworn as Satyapriya buckles under the strain of fighting the world – and his own doubts – single-handed. Watch the young and relaxed Sanjeev Kumar (very good as the sprightly Naren) before he decided that being a Serious Actor meant playing much older, tight-lipped characters. Or the wonderful Robi Ghosh (Bagha in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne) in a supporting role as one of Satyapriya’s co-workers. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s dialogue is so rich with subtext that one viewing simply isn’t enough, and nearly every character is carefully shaded. David – the archetypal kindly old man of Mukherjee’s later films – plays a drunken cretin, willing to barter his daughter, but even he gets a brief scene where he gives the hero a dose of self-awareness. And how interesting it is that Mr Laadia (Tarun Bose), who cajoles Ranjana to get Satyapriya’s signature on an important document, turns out to be not a stereotypical villain but a well-meaning man who is genuinely concerned about her family.

But I realise I’ve been going on about the story and the characters while neglecting how elegantly crafted this film is – which really is the thing I love best about it. Many mainstream Hindi movies of that time – even the good ones – often seem to be in a rush to move the plot along, which results in awkward cuts, jarring shifts in tone, and a generally episodic quality; scene transitions tend to be functional rather than carefully thought out. Satyakam, on the other hand, is beautifully paced and structured. It’s unafraid to be slow-moving, it plays like a stately visualisation of a good literary novel, and yet it has a strong cinematic sense too – I can’t think of another Mukherjee film where each scene flows so organically into the next. He makes fine use of dissolves and fade-outs to provide a sense of time passing through Naren’s narration, and cinematographer Jaywant Pathare’s use of space is outstanding.

I particularly admire the compositions in the climactic sequence where Satyapriya’s dadaji (played by Ashok Kumar) blesses his dying grandson with a shloka about the unassailability of the soul. As Satyapriya’s eyes close, the camera pans away, drifting past Naren and the others in the hospital room, moving almost searchingly toward a weeping Ranjana, and then fading into an infinite whiteness. In scenes like these – and in other, less flamboyant but equally lovely shots – you see how personal a project this film must have been for Mukherjee, and how invested he was in it. It’s rare to see such attention to visual detail in his later movies, which stress narrative over form.

A note on Satyakam and Anand; and the beginning of the rest of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s career

It's interesting to compare Satyakam with a much more popular Mukherjee film made two years later – the Rajesh Khanna-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Anand. Both films have a similar framing device – in each, the story is told by a writer (Naren in Satyakam, the doctor-writer Bhaskar Banerjee in Anand) as a tribute to a dear friend who died tragically young but whose life was an inspiration for those around him. However, Satyakam is a hard-edged film that never lets the viewer off the hook, whereas Anand is cheerier, more audience-friendly and makes the most of Rajesh Khanna’s twinkly superstar persona (don’t miss the sudden and incongruous swell of music that marks Anand’s first appearance in the film).

In his essay “Cine Qua Non: An Undergraduate History of Hindi Cinema”, Mukul Kesavan contrasts Satyakam (“the last rigorous celebration of idealism in Hindi films”) with three movies, including Anand, which “instead of examining the consequences of idealism, use idealism to give the narcissism of their male stars a justification”. I think Anand is a good film in its way, with one notable advantage over Satyakam: Salil Choudhury’s lovely music score. But it does depend heavily on the Khanna cult, and on the fanboy’s confusion of the actor with the character. (It’s no coincidence that you regularly find comments on the Internet that use Anand’s personal courage to extol the movie-star who plays him. Sample: “...the jaunty, winsome and death defying personality of Anand is superbly embodied in the vivacious expressions of Rajesh”.) In my view, Satyakam is unquestionably the more nuanced and mature work between the two.

Mukherjee might have agreed. In interviews, he has mentioned that Satyakam was his favourite among his films (which reminds me a little of Raj Kapoor saying that his ambitious flop Mera Naam Joker was his favourite child because it was underappreciated). More intriguingly, he has implied that Satyakam’s failure led to a conscious decision to make lighter movies. As he says here, “I had thought corruption would end once we became independent. But this was not so. Then I thought there was nothing left to do but laugh. Which is why I made Gol Maal, Naram Garam and Chupke Chupke.” (It reminds me of Kundan Shah reflecting – as he wrote the Jaane bhi do Yaaro script – that absurdist comedy was the only reasonable way to deal with the world’s injustices.)

In hindsight, then, Satyakam was a turning point in Mukherjee’s career. His later films suggest a more practical approach to a mass audience’s needs – perhaps it could be said that he chose Naren’s sincere but worldly-wise stance over Satyapriya’s inflexibility. Through the 1970s, he made many fine movies with a stunning lightness of touch (even when they were about serious things), and that’s the period most of us today associate him with.

There is relatively little lightness in Satyakam. It’s almost claustrophobic in places, it doesn’t have beautiful, uplifting songs like “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” and “Aane Waala Pal” to provide the viewer with emotional succour, and at 2 hours 50 minutes it’s significantly longer than most of Mukherjee’s later films were. But it’s a hugely rewarding work for the patient viewer, and for the cine-aesthete (yes, I just made up that word). I love the later Mukherjee films like Gol Maal and Rang Birangi, but I think Satyakam is a monument of Hindi cinema – a movie every bit as dignified and uncompromising as its doomed protagonist.

[Also read: Mukul Kesavan’s superb tribute to Dharmendra, where he proposes that his Satyapriya “is arguably the most affecting and powerful performance by a male actor in that decade”]

Notes on Gulzar's Koshish (including a Dilip Kumar 'friendly appearance')

Watching Gulzar’s 1972 film Koshish the other day, I was reminded that even when a movie's tone is predominantly sombre, a light interlude can be effective and revealing. Koshish is the story of two speech-and-hearing-impaired people (apparently it isn’t politically correct to say “deaf and dumb" these days, though no one told the DVD subtitle-writers this) who meet, get married and negotiate the many challenges of their shared condition. Needless to say, this makes for a film with many emotional scenes, underlined by Madan Mohan’s insistently (and often effectively) melodramatic background score.

And yet, there is an unusually whimsical, carefree moment early in the film. Hari (Sanjeev Kumar) and Arti (Jaya Bhaduri) are getting to know each other, going for walks together and so on. After watching a man talk into a public phone, they enter the booth and make prank calls – dialling numbers randomly, pretending to speak and listen. A succession of befuddled people answer the line at the other end, and finally there is a charming cameo: Dilip Kumar (presumably playing himself) walking down a stairway in a large house, looking around with mild annoyance at having to pick up the phone himself. He listens to Hari making incoherent sounds for a while, then mumbles “Yeh toh mujh se bhi maddham bolte hain” (“This guy speaks even more softly than I do”) and puts the phone down.

I couldn’t help imagining this was Hindi-movie meta-commentary of a sort, with the famously “understated” thespian of an earlier generation (Dilip Kumar) marvelling at the (even more) “understated” actor of the present day (Sanjeev Kumar). (What, I wonder, would these two make of Ajay Devgan acting entirely with his sunglasses throughout Company? But let’s save that for another discussion.)

Subtextual analysis aside, this sequence might seem frivolous, but I think it’s an important scene for the film because it shows us Hari and Arti in a light moment, sharing the sort of intimacy that they can’t share with anyone else – it’s almost like they are waggling their thumbs at the “normal” people who can speak and hear. It makes it easier to believe that these two can grow into a relationship together and that they will be able to have some fun too – that their married life won’t just be a litany of struggles. It shows a side to the relationship that we don’t get to see much of in the second half of the film, as things become increasingly grim.

Koshish has a reputation as one of the more sensitive dramas of its time and indeed there are many good things in it, starting with the heartfelt performances of the two lead actors – Sanjeev Kumar in particular. (As old-time readers of this blog will know, I’m not a big enthusiast of Kumar as a self-consciously Serious Actor, but this role really is a tour de force for him – the movie would be diminished without his dignified, anchoring presence.) There are some lovely scenes early on, notably Arti’s initial turning down of Hari’s marriage proposal and her subsequent change of mind. Nothing is explicitly spelt out here for the viewer, but the impression I got was that Arti feels the proposal is motivated by sympathy – that Hari (who is more self-sufficient and worldly-wise) is offering to take care of her – but changes her mind when she sees him in a moment of vulnerability; she realises that they can look out for each other, that this can be a relationship between equals.

But given all this nuance in the first half, I thought the film was compromised by the abruptness of its final 20 minutes and an unconvincing resolution where the protagonists’ son Amit is emotionally bullied into marrying a deaf and dumb girl (the daughter of Hari’s boss).

It’s obvious that the idea here is to dole out a moral lesson – Koshish was made at least partly to raise social consciousness, and this ending is its way of telling the audience that handicapped people should be allowed the same opportunities as everyone else. And as a beacon for social attitudes, of course this message is appropriate. But at the individual level, surely it should be possible for a young man to turn down a proposal without having to endure his father putting him through a ferocious guilt trip and ordering him out of the house? (“Your mother and I had this disability too,” Hari tells Amit through sign language, “but we brought you up, taught you how to read and write, and this is how you repay us?”) Despite Kumar’s superb performance in this scene, the premise is shaky, and sends out very mixed signals about responsibility and obligation.

Something else I found jarring: when Hari’s boss initially makes the proposal, Hari (who doesn’t yet know about the girl’s condition) firmly refuses, indicating in sign language that the gap in social status between their families is too large. This is an unedifying moment (to say the least) given that the film is shortly about to condemn discrimination in another sphere. Basically, though Hari is stricken by his son’s reluctance to accept a speech-impaired girl for a wife, he himself has been attaching undue importance to the class divide – something that is a much less momentous factor in a situation where two people will be spending their lives together.

It’s discomfiting to see how the power equation quickly gets reversed when the truth about the girl is revealed: Hari kisses her on her head and “accepts” her as his daughter-in-law; it’s as if disability has evened the scales between the two families, bringing the upper-class girl “down” to the level of the lower-class man. All told, I wish the issue of social status had been sidestepped altogether and the proposal had come from one of Hari’s colleagues.

There is much to admire in Gulzar’s work as a filmmaker. He chooses atypical stories and subjects, has a feel for the arc of complex relationships between men and women, and when he’s emotionally invested in a scene it always comes across. ** But some of his work has a hurried, not fully thought out quality to it. I thought Koshish erred on the side of heavy-handed moralising when it could have spent more time showing the growth of the special relationship between its two central characters. In short, I wish there had been a little less preaching and more scenes like the phone-booth one.

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** Given Gulzar’s strengths as a songwriter and his interest in music, I wonder if it’s facile to note that the song sequences in his films – Ijaazat and Aandhi come to mind immediately – are often shot more lovingly, with greater care and attention to detail, than the non-musical passages are. Watch the poetic use of dissolves and the synchronisation between visuals and lyrics in “Katra Katra”, for example, and compare it with the strictly functional camerawork and cutting in the other parts of the film.

Ensemble classics of my boyhood

Not having been to a movie hall in weeks, I suddenly find that the “ensemble film” is hot property in Bollywood, with the release of Salaam-e-Ishq, Honeymoon Travels and Life in a Metro. Haven’t seen any of these yet but I did see – and write about – Naseeruddin Shah’s directorial debut Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota, which had converging narratives about a number of Indians travelling to the US for different reasons.

But this isn’t Bollywood’s first tryst with the ensemble movie. The masala Hindi film has always been episodic by its very nature, requiring pre-formatted doses of comedy, drama, romance and action, neatly measured and sprinkled together like the garnishings on a Burmese dish. So any such film with a large star-cast becomes an ensemble movie by default: if there are three heroes, you know the songs and fight sequences will be divided equally between them. When I was growing up in that magnificently kitschy decade, the 1980s, such films used to be referred to, much more naively, as multi-starrers. Quick notes on some old favourites I’ve rediscovered on TV.

Nagin
Rajkumar Kohli was a master at the forgotten art of gathering a number of heavyweights/has-beens together, giving them the money that might otherwise have been wasted on a script (along with the promise of ego-massaging credits such as “Friendly Guest Appearance By Sanjay Khan”), and convincing them they were participating in something future generations would never forget. In a way, he was right; no one who sees Nagin will ever forget this classic, which begins with Jeetendra, dressed in a short skirt (he’s an ichadaari naag – a snake that turns into a man whenever it wishes to sing Laxmikant-Pyarelal songs – and that’s just how they dress). When he is cruelly shot down by a group of friends (Sunil Dutt, Feroz Khan, Kabir Bedi and other friendly guests) who figured he was just a regular snake in a mini-skirt, his bereaved spouse (Reena Roy) goes on the revenge-trail. This means finding new and innovative ways to dispose of each culprit, but the hardest task is that she occasionally has to disguise herself as her victims’ girlfriends – which means simulating the facial expressions of Rekha, Mumtaz and Yogeeta Bali. Would you wish such a fate on a girl?

Jaani Dushman
Another Kohli epic, billed as India’s first big-budget horror film. A werewolf (we think; it’s hard to tell under all that makeup) goes on a killing spree each time he sees a young bride (dressed in those knee-length frocks that village belles always wore in the 1980s). Since the village people don’t have enough sense to stop holding large weddings, a series of murders occur — until Sunil Dutt, Shatrughan Sinha and others take on the beast in his own backyard, and he turns out to be Sanjeev Kumar, in another of those character roles that he played because he wanted to be “an actor, not a hero”. (Here, as in many of his other films, he’s neither.) Don’t miss the opening scene with Amrish Puri reading a book of “supernatural stories” before abruptly sprouting hair on his back, and the title card that reads “And above all, Jeetendra”.

Kranti
Manoj Kumar’s florid tribute to the patriotic men and women who fought against the evil British Empire in the early 1800s (never mind that the idea of nationalism didn’t even exist back then in the way it does today; people were probably too busy killing each other over caste, state or mohalla to bother with country-love). Kumar plays the anarchist Bharat, whose eagerness to die for the country is indicated by his waggling eyebrows, twitching lower lip, and the way he keeps smearing soil all over his face. Dilip Kumar is his father, “senior Kranti”**, Hema Malini contributes her bit to the cause by writhing about the deck of a boat during a rain-storm while evil British captors, crosses dangling from their necks, leer at her, and Shashi Kapoor is a dashing prince who switches allegiance. Just when you think the British Raj couldn’t possibly deal with any more star power, in struts the ubiquitous Shatrughan Sinha as a brave Pathan who plans to sabotage the Empire’s collective stomach by selling them chana jor garam. Eventually, our stars sing patriotic songs and die heroically ever after. Jeetendra is nowhere to be seen; they couldn’t meet the requirements of his contract, which specified white shoes and/or a snake-dance.

(To be continued)

** In an earlier Manoj Kumar-as-Bharat film, Purab aur Paschim, Dilip Kumar’s real-life missus Saira Banu played a West-corrupted Indian girl who smokes and wears mini-skirts. Bharat redeems this fallen angel, restoring her to the Bharatiya ideal of the pallu-clad bahu (and in the process fulfilling the archetypal Indian male fantasy of possessing a woman by getting her to cover up rather than the other way around). Unconfirmed reports suggest that Dilip Kumar’s appearance in Kranti was a gesture of gratitude.

[Also see this post on The Burning Train]

Disclaimer

Had yet another conversation with a so-called friend who’s known me since long before the blogging days and who completely failed to grasp that a particular post was tongue in cheek. It was the kind of post where if you don’t understand the tone (however subtle), well, you know very little about me – so the miscommunication was quite worrying, because now I’m wondering if maybe this friend was friends all those years with someone she didn’t know. I should stop being be so intolerant of the anonymous commenters/trolls who take everything at face value: if one’s own can be so easily deceived, why expect others to understand? (Note to Karan Johar: it’s all about bluffing your family.)

So here, to make things simpler for everyone: nothing on this blog is to be taken seriously. Ever. (Except this post, of course.) I don’t actually read books or watch films, I just make up things about them for fun. (On the few occasions that I do read or watch something, I invariably dislike it but still force myself to write good things about it just to perpetuate the all-inclusive image.) I’ve never actually driven in Delhi. I love Sanjeev Kumar, PR people, radio jockeys, Rahul Dravid and Julia Roberts, though not in that order. I admire and envy the clever wordplay of Delhi Times and HT City writers and hope to intern for those esteemed magazine supplements someday. I’m deeply religious at heart and I secretly endorse all customs and traditions, even the dangerous ones like rakhi. Every once in a while I write manipulative sensitive posts just so I can sit back and muhaha at all the cloying comments they attract. Everything I’ve written before this has been an outright lie or at least a joke. On the few occasions that I’ve tried to write a sincere, honest post about any topic, it’s backfired because I’ve completely revised my opinion just a few hours after publishing the thing.

Believe nothing you read, all ye who deface this site.

Revisiting Deewar

It’s sad when the films you’ve grown up with, the ones that form some of your earliest memories, turn out to be disappointing, even a little embarrassing, when you return to them. It’s like going back to that big family bungalow you remember vaguely from your childhood and discovering it was just a little cottage all along, with a smallish courtyard.

Bachchan films from the mid/late 1970s and early 1980s are the points of reference in my movie mythology, but I saw almost all of them as an immature viewer, too young for much to register - which means there’s plenty of scope for disappointment on a second viewing 20 years later. I saw some of Silsila on TV recently and while it’s still lovely in parts I was irked by some of the forcedness of the first half -- A.B. and Shashi Kapoor (one nearly 40 when the film was made, the other a couple of years over 40) trying too hard to be young frat-boys; Rekha a little too heavily made up; Sanjeev Kumar a little too constipated, as he so often was, the yellow tulips in the field a little too yellow. Rant rant.

More traumatic was a viewing of one of my most beloved childhood movies, Amar Akbar Anthony, which revealed that it was a rambling, episodic film with a narrative structure that fell victim to a cardinal principle of mainstream Hindi cinema: that screen time, action, romance, comedy must be equally divided between the three heroes.

I’m not claiming to have suddenly discovered that these are bad films, just that some of them have been inflated by our memories. Which is why it’s a solace to turn to the few movies that do come through the prism of time and memory intact. Sholay is the obvious example and I’ve written about it a couple of times, but another such film, one I think always gets short shrift, is Deewar, a movie that has been stereotyped endlessly, and is consequently all but lost today in a sea of parodies.

If you haven’t seen Deewar in a long time and are asked to prepare a list of associations, I imagine it will look something like this: A brooding Bachchan. Dramatic pealing of bells in a temple, followed by a prolonged death scene. Nirupa Roy in yet another teary mother act. Shashi Kapoor bleating “Bhai” and, of course, with nostrils flaring self-righteously, “Mere Paas Ma Hai.” Bachchan’s confrontation with the Shiva statue. “Mera baap chor hai” inscribed on his arm. A litany of familiar images and dialogues that have, with time, turned into cliches.

But watch the film without all this baggage and you might be surprised at how powerful and mature it is - and how its most effective scenes are the quieter ones, the ones that haven’t been handed down to us as typical “Deewar moments”. One scene that sticks with me is when Ma is unwell and the fugitive son Vijay (Bachchan) can’t see her because police have been posted around the hospital. He waits in a van parked a few blocks away while his girlfriend (Parveen Babi) goes to check on the level of security. She returns, shakes her head, tells him it’s impossible for him to go there; and Bachchan (who’s wearing dark glasses - a chilling touch in this scene) says in a completely deadpan voice, face devoid of all emotion, “Aur main apne Ma ko milne nahin jaa sakta hoon.” No overt attempt at irony, pathos or hysteria (and how many other Indian actors would have, or could have, played the scene this way?), just the calm acceptance of a man who is taking the last steps towards his destiny and knows it. The fatalism and despair that mark Deewar’s final scenes is rarely ever commented on, because it wouldn’t fit too well with the popular image of the film as a pro-active, “angry young man” story.

Another scene that comes to mind is the one where Bachchan 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 just puts the phone down instead. The movie’s power draws as much from its silences as from its flaming dialogue, and the writing of Salim-Javed, in conjunction with Bachchan’s incomparable performance, take it to heights Indian cinema has rarely touched since.

Even the Bachchan performance, though iconic, remains mis-appreciated in my opinion, since it’s remembered for all the wrong reasons - for the flashing eyes rather than the dark glasses, for the booming monologues rather than the quieter moments. Rarely again would he ever be so understated; superstardom took over and he fell into the image trap, playing to galleries, playing inside moth-eaten palimpsests. Salim-Javed split up and the writing in the later Bachchan films was never as subtle as it had been in the earlier ones. Contrast the understated beauty of Deewar‘s best moments, for instance, with some shamelessly overwrought scenes in his later movies - in Sharaabi, for instance, when, glycerine firmly in eye, lump in throat, he tells his father (played by Pran) “Aapne meri hansi dekhi, lekin uske peeche chipe aansoo nahin dekhe”. Everything spelt out by a mediocre screenplay.

The power of Deewar, on the other hand, lies in its ability to make us feel the tragedy rather than present it to us all gift-wrapped on a platter. Watch it again and see for yourself.