Crorepatis, kal aur aaj

[From my Business Standard Weekend column – did this little theme-fitting piece to go with their “Billionaire’s Club” edition]

Old Hindi cinema had an impressive line-up of billionaires (but let’s adjust for inflation and allow them to be mere crorepatis). For the purposes of a short column, it is useful to divide them into two broad categories: the bad guys and the good guys. The former were the ones who eventually became the Bond-style villains of 1970s movies, living in dens with spiky walls, quicksand pits, dancing sylphs and floors that would part to reveal a shark tank into which an inefficient minion or the hero’s beleaguered father could be dipped. The other types of crorepatis were decent – or relatively decent – people. They wore their wealth lightly, called their grown-up daughters “baby” and were good to the less privileged in the indulgent way that people who have never known true hardship can afford to be. In Yash Chopra’s Waqt, Shashi Kapoor as the poor driver walks into a high-society party to ask his employer if he can use the car to take his mother to the hospital. The boss, played by Rehman, looks solicitous, says “haan, le jaao, le jaao” and gets back to his socialising. (And this despite the fact that he isn’t a good guy in the overall scheme of things. He has bigger fish to fry, but he can be nice at a micro-level.)

Some things were common to both sets of wealthy people: the mansions of the Good could be just as vulgarly opulent as the villains’ lairs (minus the shark tanks). In Manmohan Desai’s Parvarish, an underappreciated classic of commercial Hindi cinema, Kishan (Vinod Khanna) takes up smuggling in his off-hours. This was the get-rich-quick profession of the time, but what is perplexing is that he already lives (with his honest police-inspector dad) in an eye-poppingly fancy house. In a confrontation where the father pulls out his gun and shoots about randomly while the wayward son ducks behind a sofa, one worries more for the well-being of the velvety furniture than for any of the human characters.

In fact, there are hundreds of films where the decor interfered with the playing out of real emotion (not always to the movie’s detriment). Take the scene in the Kapoor family’s ego project about generational conflict, Kal, Aaj aur Kal, where Prithviraj Kapoor as the “yesterday” and Randhir Kapoor as the “tomorrow” have their big spat while Raj Kapoor watches despairingly. It’s a tragic moment in its conception, and various hyper-dramatic things are happening at the level of the music, the camerawork and the facial expressions, but who notices? You gape instead at the interior design – the enormous bifurcated staircase, the endless halls – and feel that it would be worth not getting along with anyone in your family if you could only live in a house like this.

It was surprising then that some of these films featured youngsters trying to break out of their stifling ancestral wealth. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s enjoyable but ideologically muddled Asli-Naqli, Dev Anand is a spoilt rich boy who sulks when his grandfather ticks him off, and then sets out to discover How the Other Half Lives. His adventures – which unfold in an idealised basti populated by poor people who are basically good-natured even when they are beating their wives – are shown as fun and games; there is no real sense of danger or sacrifice, no accrual of responsibility. The story amounts to an idealising of both rich and poor, with the suggestion that they are each more or less content in their respective places, and that they can role-play once in a while, when things get dull. (Role-playing would become an important theme in Mukherjee’s cinema, but this is a shallow manifestation of it.)

Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young Vijay would not have approved of such idealising. In the 1970s, Vijay became a symbol for the wronged man working his way up in the world by operating outside the law if necessary: his progression from footpath boy to millionaire is strikingly summed up in the shot where he looks up at a skyscraper his mother once toiled on, and which he has now bought for her. But such were the moral imperatives of this cinema that even while you sympathised with the character at an individual level, the film couldn’t let him go unpunished. The great conceit was that if you have to become a billionaire, do it the “honest” way or else.

Today things are more cynical and perhaps more pragmatic, with many recent films depicting a social landscape where everything is up for grabs – Special 26, for instance, ends with the conmen played by Akshay Kumar and Anupam Kher settling down in the Middle East, having got away with their heists, and the film encourages us to cheer for them. The message is clear: it is okay to be crooked if you do it with panache; the ends justify the means. “Be a billionaire. Accha hai.” The genteel villains of the 1970s might have found it a little distasteful.