The artist, the ivory tower and the world: on Govind Nihalani’s restored Party

The old man on stage is performing a scene from the play Natasamrat, about a once-great artiste now living in his inner world. “All the greats are within me!” he declaims, lurching about the stage, “Caesar, Othello, Ganpatrao Belwalkar.” A woman – clearly a fan of the actor – watches from behind a curtain, deeply moved. "Caesar" is stabbed – “Brutus, tum bhi?” – and falls to the ground. The scene ends, the audience applauds.

Backstage, the woman meets the actor and voices her admiration. “Kitni vedna hoti hogi, na?” she asks (“There must be so much suffering involved in this performance?”) “Vedna mujhe nahin hoti, jo character mujh mein hai, usse hoti hai,” he replies politely. The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me. Then he returns to the dressing room and removes his heavy makeup to reveal a much younger (and dare one say it, blander, less interesting) face beneath it.

Watching this scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party, I did a double take. The face beneath the mask is that of Shafi Inamdar, whom I mainly remember for his role as the husband in the 1980s comedy show Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, and for a series of workmanlike character parts in movies. It was one of those moments that give you a fresh perspective on a performer whom you have taken for granted.

But this is just one of many startling scenes in an extraordinary film. Party has been a holy grail for many of the movie-lovers I know, its long-time unavailability on DVD one of our abiding cinematic puzzles. Apart from being a cutting social satire, this is the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. And yet it has been out of circulation for years. (I heard from an acquaintance some time ago that Nihalani himself had been searching for a decent print; this is not difficult to believe.)

Well, it’s here now, in an excellent print – one of the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs, which are restorations of NFDC films made in the 1980s and 90s. These discs represent a very important step in film preservation in India and I’ll be writing a longer piece about them soon, but for now here are some thoughts on Party.

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The sequence mentioned above is one of the establishing scenes of Nihalani’s film, but it also touches on a key theme: the divide between an artist’s work and his life. Is it possible for a character on stage to feel intense vedna while the actor playing that character claims to be untouched by the emotions (and afterwards peels off his makeup, puts on a shiny red kurta and leaves for a cocktail party)? Is it similarly possible for a writer to express a powerful social conscience and sympathy for the downtrodden in his work while otherwise leading a privileged life at a vast remove from the subjects of his writing?

Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, Party raises these questions from many different perspectives. In its opening minutes we meet the people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who is constantly “performing” – even in private moments with her husband – and seems incapable of distinguishing between art and life. (No wonder she interprets a line in Barve’s work about “khokhla pyaar” – hollow love – as a personal jibe.) Other guests include Inamdar’s theatre actor Ravindra, who is more adept at separating himself from his roles; the ostentatiously radical Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others; Damayanti’s melancholy daughter Sona (Deepa Sahi), who has a child out of wedlock; and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly even a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly). Meanwhile a group of young partygoers – led by Damayanti’s son Rahul – take over an upstairs room and dance to popular American music, mostly unconcerned with the goings-on downstairs.

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced, confessions made and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but caught in the images they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the talk converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure (whose simultaneous absence from and centrality to the proceedings is reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz) becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to mild annoyance (“This so-called social commitment has become fashionable”) to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world? “Hum likhte hain kyonke humein likhna hai” (“We write because we must”) Barve says, but Avinash insists that every work of art is a weapon and that art and politics are inseparable. “Do we want to live as artists or as human beings?”

Party is a startlingly fresh film both in these big discussions and in its casual chatter about the literary world. Two people debate the relative merits of Rushdie and Naipaul (and I admit to being amused to find that Naipaul had a reputation for being "bitter" even three decades ago). A minor character named Ila (played by Ila Arun) asks Barve why there is so little of the female perspective in his work, and though his reply is an apparently sensible one (he can only convincingly write about the things he knows), we are reminded of his distant, condescending attitude towards his wife. “You English speakers think too much of yourselves,” one person says, provoking the retort that there is such a thing as “vernacular snobbery” too. (Yet this party itself is clearly an aspirational setting where anyone not comfortable in English would be out of place. Bharat awkwardly says things like “She is drunken” just to make small talk and to fit in.) Opposing views are expressed on nearly every major topic. Damayanti (who basks in the reflected glory of artists without being one herself) is called a parasite, but the word becomes equally significant in another context – it can refer to a smug artist living off his early work and reputation, becoming fattened on fame without ever feeling impelled to seek fresh ground or question his own assumptions.

By now it should be clear that this is (like nearly all of Nihalani’s work) an explicitly idea-driven film: politically charged, full of reflection and counter-reflection. Being adapted from a major play in close collaboration with the playwright, it has the discipline and rigour of good theatre (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it). But these things perhaps make it important to clarify that this is definitely not just a static filming of a stage production. There is a strong cinematic sense in the use of space, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them. And there are splendidly orchestrated scenes such as the one where, during a conversation between Barve and Damayanti, the camera repeatedly cuts outside the room to watch the drunk Mohini moving around silently on the porch. Barve will make a key confession about himself at around the same time his wife is shocked by her own image in the mirror.

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Driven though it is by conversation, Party ends with a harrowing wordless sequence where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life; another who is in danger of doing so) share a nightmare vision and face their consciences. The scene ties in with a motif in Nihalani’s early cinema: the voiceless person, someone who is either unable or reluctant to speak up. (See Om Puri’s Lahanya Bhiku in Aakrosh or the silent, suffering wife played by Deepa Sahi in Aaghat.) But it also takes us back to the very beginning of Party – to a lovely shot of Sona reading a letter written by Amrit, so focused on the text that she barely moves, the camera drawing tentatively towards her. (Watching the film a second time, one might consider the light gently streaming in through the silk curtains in the background and think about the irony of this poet-activist’s letter being read in such a refined, unthreatened bourgeoisie setting.)

“Bheenche huye jabre dard kar rahe hain,” says the voiceover (“My clenched jaws are aching”). “Kitni der tak dabaaya jaa sakta hai khaulte laave ko. Kisi bhi pal khopri crater mein badal jaaye.” (“How long can I stay silent and keep this lava inside me? My head feels like it could turn into a crater.”)

[This may be a good time to point out that the shuddh Hindi used in this screenplay is occasionally so dense and layered that you might need to watch some scenes a second time just to fully process what is being said.]

The voice is the familiar one of Naseeruddin Shah and a tinge of amusement enters it when he says “khopri crater mein badal jaaye”, as if to acknowledge the corniness of such an analogy in an otherwise austere monologue. But when the writer of this letter makes his brief appearance in the final seconds of Party, the words will be given a morbidly literal form. It is one of many times in this film where something said in a light vein subsequently acquires a much darker shade. In brightly lit, elegantly furnished rooms people clink glasses and make small talk, but there are storms raging, both in their hearts and in the world outside.

Party isn’t a movie that you can appreciate in just about any mood, but those who open themselves to it will be driven back to it a few times. It is so well written, constructed and performed that it should stimulate even those (I include myself here) who are ambivalent about its ideological position. Wary though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among Hindi cinema's great achievements. And now it has the print it deserves.

P.S. For anyone interested in recurring visual motifs in a director’s work, especially from one film to the next, here’s a little exercise: watch the very last scene of Party, note how a shuffling walk creates the sense of someone weighed down by heavy chains, and then watch the opening shot of the film Nihalani made immediately after it – Aghaat. (I wrote about Aghaat in this post.) The little "link" between the two scenes reminded me of other prominent inter-film connections, such as the similarity between the closing shot of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the opening shot of his next film A Clockwork Orange.