Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)

Last month I wrote about a film – Lessons in Forgetting – that centres on a protective father and his free-spirited daughter, the latter’s personality colliding with stereotypical ideas about the “good Indian girl”. Coincidentally, a few days ago, while watching the anthology film Bombay Talkies, it struck me that all four short movies in it touch on the relationship between fathers and their children, as well as on changing perceptions of masculinity and “male roles”. And a buried theme is a man’s ability – or inability – to tell stories and to deal with different types of narratives.

In fact, the very first scene in Bombay Talkies – in the short film directed by Karan Johar – has a young man angrily confronting his intolerant father who can’t accept, or perhaps even comprehend, that his son is gay. (The film’s title “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” comes from one of the great Hindi-film songs, a rendition of which is beautifully used here, but it can also at a stretch be translated as “This is a queer tale”.) Later, in Zoya Akhtar’s short film, another middle-class father – more sensitive on the face of it, but also a man who has clear ideas about what a son should grow up to be – slaps his little boy when he sees him dressed in a girl’s clothes.

There is some ambiguity in this child’s obsession with “Sheila”, the Katrina Kaif character in the Tees Maar Khan item number: does it entail a straight crush on Kaif, expressed through joyful imitation (I’m thinking now of my own childhood dalliances with Parveen Babi or Sridevi songs), or does it reflect gender identification, a biological imperative to “be” a girl? Whatever the case, Akhtar’s film ends with an idyllic scene where the boy gets to perform “Sheila ki Jawani” in front of a small, initially bemused but eventually appreciative audience. Beyond this, his future is uncertain; it’s hard to see him pursuing his dancing ambitions in the long run without a serious conflict with his dad.

Watching that scene, I couldn’t help think that exactly a hundred years ago Dadasaheb Phalke was making films where male actors performed in drag (because respectable women weren’t supposed to act in these shady motion-picture things) - and this led to reflections on gender roles and the creative impulse. In a world that encourages easy classifications, artists, performers or creative people are supposed to be particularly sensitive, and “sensitivity” in turn – broadly defined – is a trait associated more with women than with men. But think of gender characteristics and behaviour as existing along a continuing line (rather than clearly demarcated), and there may be something to the idea that when a man performs on stage, or briefly turns storyteller for his child or for a group of people in his train compartment (which are things that happen in Bombay Talkies), he is tapping into his existing “feminine” side. Or that he is temporarily made more introspective, placed at a remove from the aggression that society often demands of men. (Those men in Phalke’s films – some of them might have felt embarrassed in women’s clothes, but the more dedicated actors among them may have felt briefly liberated from gender expectations. In addition to having a grand time preening about the set, or just reveling in the experience of being “someone else”.)

Bombay Talkies has a number of characters who are performers or mimics or tellers of tales, or people who (channeling Eliot) prepare a face each morning before going out to deal with the world. In Johar’s film, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) and her husband are living a lie of sorts; one can easily see the little boy in Akhtar’s film growing up to do the same thing; in Dibakar Banerjee’s film, Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) dreams of getting rich through emu-farming (though the bird is clearly taking more than it gives) while his mundane real-world existence requires that he heads out to find a building-watchman job where (as he himself puts it) you aren’t required to do much more than stand at attention for hours on end. 

Purandar has other dimensions: he is a loving father who unselfconsciously does household work alongside his wife and is apparently comfortable in female presence, hanging about with the women of his chawl as they exchange a salty joke or two. Perhaps these traits are inseparable from his qualities as an actor who brings all his integrity to a bit-part role, and as a storyteller who puts on a silent performance for his little girl at the end. (Banerjee – who is of course a storyteller himself – has said that his own experience with fatherhood informed his treatment of this narrative.)

Finally, in Anurag Kashyap’s film about a son who travels to Bombay to try and meet his father’s favourite film star, I think one can suggest that movie-love has turned both the protagonist Vijay and his father into raconteurs – people who have a feel for the spoken word, for parody, dramatic flow and the right pauses. They are amateur performers, and I’d think this would make them more attentive people and strengthen the bond between them. If violence and intolerance are failures of the imagination, perhaps the problem with the fathers in Johar’s and Akhtar’s films is that never having developed a taste for fantasy and role-playing, they lack the empathy that comes with it.

*****

Sidenote: In reviews and in casual discussions with friends, I have heard Kashyap’s film being described as disappointingly simple – and indeed, on the face of it, there is something pedestrian about the story of a young man trying to get a darshan of Amitabh Bachchan (who eventually “blesses” us viewers with a cameo appearance and underlines His divinity by doing unto a murabba what Lord Rama did unto the berry offered him by Shabari). It might seem even more trite if you recall all the behind-the-scenes talk about Kashyap’s real-life reconciliation with Bachchan, and how gratified he seemed by it. But given this director’s sly sense of humour and the awareness in his earlier work of the subtle ways in which worship and irreverence mingle (see his superb short film Pramod Bhai 23, for example), I think the story invites more than a face-value reading.

Vineet Kumar is very good as Vijay, but also consider the casting in light of the small part Kumar played in Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. There he was Sardar Singh’s eldest son Danish, the heir apparent, with the dialogue at one point likening him to the Vijay played by Bachchan in Trishul – the clear hero of that film, whose smouldering presence made younger brother Shashi Kapoor seem effete in comparison. (Indeed there is an oft-circulated joke that Shashi Kapoor was one of Bachchan’s most convincing heroines. In Trishul, when the two men have a fight scene where they get to land an equal number of punches on each other – the obligatory ego-salve for male stars of the time – you don’t for a minute buy into it.)

But Gangs of Wasseypur’s depiction of life as the banana peel on which the fondest cinematic fantasies may slip included a sequence of events where the limp-wristed younger brother Faisal becomes - to his own surprise - the film's protagonist. “Jab aankh khuli to dekha ki hum Shashi Kapoor hai. Bachchan toh koi aur hai,” Faisal says in an earlier moment of drug-addled self-pity, but this “second lead” ends up as the kingpin after his elder brother is casually bumped off. Watch GoW, then see Vijay’s father in Bombay Talkies mimic Dilip Kumar while telling his story about his own encounter with that thespian decades earlier, and consider the eventual fate of the murabba that Bachchan so self-importantly bites into; I think Kashyap’s film is more than a straight-faced, rose-tinted view of supplicants trying to collect stardust in a glass jar.