Revisiting J P Dutta’s Hathyar (and reflections on the bad old 1980s)

[Did a shorter version of this essay for the new issue of The Indian Quarterly]

Those of us whose cinematic consciousness was shaped in the 1980s tend to agree that, nostalgia aside, these were poor times for mainstream Hindi cinema. Actors did multiple shifts a day, zombie-walking through barely scripted potboilers (with the end results rarely indicating that they had succeeded in telling one character from the next, or that the films had expected them to). Production design was non-existent, comedy tracks appalling, and there were those ghastly closing shots where an assembly of surviving good guys stood together in a huddle beaming at the camera in the “mahurat” pose (after a few seconds of dutiful glycerine-shedding because one of their number had just sacrificed his life to save the day). Residue from the Angry Young Man films of the 1970s included the very worst of Amitabh Bachchan (from Pukar and Mahaan through Toofan and Jaadugar). In the immediate pre-liberalisation, pre-multiplex era, “Bollywood” operated in its own vacuum.

Today the DVD culture and the work done by NFDC has made it possible to see good, restored prints of the “parallel” cinema of the time, the best work of Benegal, Nihalani, Mishra and others. And so, for those of us of a certain age who like to think we take cinema seriously, it seems natural to focus our energies on revisiting those movies (which we were too young to appreciate when they came out) rather than waste time and effort trying to locate the few scattered gems that may have come out of the mainstream.

As I have written before on this blog, the first two years of the 1990s were when I became distanced from Hindi films (though a part of me loved the dhishum-dhishum and the familiar, reassuring structures) and sought nourishment elsewhere. I hadn’t read much film theory, had no concept yet of auteurs – like most young viewers, I mostly didn’t even think of films in terms of their directors. Yet, even at age 13, turning nastik and renouncing the mandir of Hindi movies, I knew that some of these films had a special energy in them and gave the impression that actual thought was taking place at the level of camerawork, scripting or performance; that an individual sensibility lay behind the whole. Mukul Anand was one such director (while Hum was the only film of his I whole-heartedly liked, there were stand-up-and-take-notice moments in nearly all his work, even in this tiresome thing called Khoon ka Karz). Another such director was J P Dutta, and one of my clearest memories from the summer of 1989 was watching Dutta’s Hathyar and sensing, without being able to articulate it, that I was seeing something more interesting than the regular action multi-starrer. Looking at tacky posters of Hathyar, with red-eyed Dharmendra and droopy-eyed Sanjay Dutt flaring nostrils and brandishing guns, you wouldn’t think it was any different from a dozen other khoon-aur-badlaa films that these actors were doing around the same time, but that would be an injustice to this layered work about the seductiveness of violence.

This month marks 25 years since the film’s commercial release. Though it has a tiny cult following among knowledgeable buffs, it deserves to be better known; along with the director’s earlier Ghulami, it is the high point of an erratic but important career. Dutta’s work has always been prone to flab and overstatement – something that is most obvious in the star-studded Kshatriya and LOC Kargil – but these 1980s films nicely balanced the large canvas with the intimate moment. They used sprawling vistas in ways that did justice to the conceit of the 70 mm screen, while inhabiting these vistas with well-defined characters who had interiority. Looked at from a distance, they can seem like standard uber-macho sagas, but on closer examination they turn out to be thoughtful critiques of violence and how that violence is related to a feudal, patriarchal tradition and passed down until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are strong roles for women as tempering influences or – in some cases – as facilitators for the more unsavoury aspects of tradition. And even while operating within the hyper-dramatic idiom of the commercial Hindi film, they successfully incorporated elements from outside that world. Ghulami has Mithun Chakraborty as a wisecracking action hero (whose trademark line “koi shaq?” was guaranteed to draw front-bench whistles) but also has a side-track featuring parallel-cinema stars Smita Patil and Naseeruddin Shah as husband and wife who weigh mutual respect against ideological differences. And in Hathyar, the voice of conscience is played by someone who usually worked in a very different corner of the mainstream – Rishi Kapoor, whose presence here, in one of his best roles of the time, is a tip-off that this won’t be your regular action film.**

Memory can play tricks on us when it comes to old movies, but the lullaby that bookends Hathyar’s narrative turned out to be exactly as I remembered it when I saw the film again recently. In the opening shot a little boy, initially seen in silhouette, sits on a rocking horse as his thakur father sings to him about a prince who roams the world on a flying steed and returns home when he is tired. (“Ek raja ke bête ko lekar / Udne waala ghoda…”) They are interrupted by an uncle – a more militant member of the thakur’s clan – who gives the child a toy gun, against the father’s protests. Our Avinash won’t grow up to be a coward, the chacha says pointedly. “Aaj kal sharaafat ko hee kaayarta kehte hain,” (“These days decency is mistaken for cowardice”) the father sighs, trying to take the gun away from his boy, but the child is already enthralled, he won’t let go – “Nahin, hum kheleinge” are his chilling words – and the framing of the shot (which dissolves into the adult Avinash’s arms holding a real rifle) makes it seem like the weapon is an extension of his hand. The circle begun by these scenes will be completed in the film's final sequence, set in a toy shop where Avinash realises that running his blood-smeared palms over a plastic globe is the closest he will come to having the world in his hands or flying to exotic lands on a magic horse.

In the casting of Sanjay Dutt as a gun-obsessed young man who becomes a pawn in games played by larger forces, Hathyar weirdly pre-echoes real-world events. In cinematic terms though, it is a forerunner to Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and other sleek, realistic city-crime films that would herald the multiplex era. Dutta’s early work was mostly set in villages and expanses of sunbaked desert where feudalism ran rampant and the line between rebel and daku, victim and aggressor, was erased. (Anyone who had the pleasure of watching Ghulami on a big screen – I have a dim childhood memory of this, though I may have nodded off during the Naseer-Smita scenes – will know how sweeping his visual sense was and how well he used these majestic settings.) But Hathyar was, literally, different terrain for him. Arriving in Bombay to escape village feuds, Avinash’s father is immediately confronted by violence and apathy of a different sort, though the hoodlums here are dressed in jeans and sneakers. “You said we’d move to the city to get away from the jungles, to live with civilised people,” Avinash’s mother (Asha Parekh in a good latter-day role) sarcastically tells her husband, “Well, here we are. Go and hug the cultured people you were so eager to meet.”

The ugly face of the metropolis is omnipresent – they see someone who has fallen off a train and died, and people being casual and indifferent about the tragedy – but new friendships and ties are formed too, and the city's “good” side seems to converge in the personality of one man, their principled and sensitive neighbour Sami bhai (Kapoor). Meanwhile, Avinash gets seduced by the Bombay underworld. This is partly circumstantial, but it could be a natural arc of his personality and upbringing: when we first saw him as an adult, back in the village, he was more interested in the deer at the end of his rifle than in his girlfriend Suman’s talk of romance and marriage; he dashed off while she was mid-sentence, in a scene that played like a variant on a famous episode from the Ramayana (and in this age of epic retellings and reexaminations, it might briefly make you wonder: was Rama’s pursuit of the deer Maricha driven as much by primal blood-lust as by the desire to fulfill his wife’s wish?).

In fact, one possible weakness of Hathyar is that it sometimes appears to blur two separate issues. The first involves the choices that face an unprivileged boy struggling to make ends meet and to support his mother in a predatory world. The second is his own apparent love of violence for its own sake, and the hint that he can prioritise it above his close relationships. At times the film seems undecided about whether to treat Avinash as an amoral sociopath with aggression running in his veins or as a pawn of fate, a cinematic descendant of Deewaar’s angry young man Vijay. But perhaps the two things aren’t mutually exclusive - perhaps what is being suggested is that if Avinash’s background and upbringing hadn’t been so rooted in casual bloodshed, it might have been easier for him to make the “right” choices later in life.

Hathyar doesn’t have the cool, organic sophistication of the gangster films that would come a few years later, such as RGV’s work, but there is an emotional directness in its key moments, and some very striking images, such as a shot of two people huddled together between trains passing on adjacent tracks shortly after the discovery of a dead body. Effective use is made of a minatory background score, and the scene that introduces the adult Avinash has the deliberate texture of gun porn, with loving close-ups of a shiny rifle being assembled, a hand stroking it, loading bullets, cocking it, taking aim. And watching such scenes, an old question in popular-film studies rears its head: is it possible for a powerful visual medium like cinema to meaningfully critique something even as it depicts it? If a film sets out to be a thoughtful commentary on violence but also contains well-executed action sequences – or soulful music to underline the protagonist’s personal dilemmas – does it compromise itself by making the violence “thrilling”?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Personally I don’t believe an objective distinction can always be made between films that are gratuitous/exploitative and films that are well-intentioned: directors and writers bring diverse sensibilities and approaches to the same material, and much depends on interpretation as well as on a viewer’s ability to distinguish between something that might temporarily be stimulating when viewed on a screen while being abhorrent or condemnable in the real world. But this aside, anyone watching Hathyar should be able to see that it accommodates a wide range of attitudes to violence and pacifism, cynicism and idealism.

Dutta’s best work (I’m thinking mainly of Ghulami and Hathyar – and perhaps Yateem, which I don’t remember all that well) sometimes reminds me of the cinema of Otto Preminger, in that it deals with intimate human stories within very large, multi-character frames (so large, in fact, that the films are constantly in danger of being dismissed as bloated epics by a viewer who hasn’t attentively watched them). Like Preminger’s Advise and Consent (a remarkably mature, multi-dimensional political film), Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder, these films present diverse points of view and life experiences without passing sweeping judgements – and yet without getting so fatalistic that they completely abjure notions of right and wrong.
 
In Hathyar, a poetic contrast is made between Avinash’s father putting his life into his toy statues, making something new and creative out of mud, and his son who kills people and watches their bodies fall in the mud. But lines are not clearly defined. There is the implication that the Gandhi-like men of integrity in this cut-throat world can “live by their principles” partly because someone less idealistic, more open to compromise, is looking out for them. And yet the film does this without glamorising those who chose the path of crime. All this adds up to a level of complexity that would point the way ahead to the more thoughtful, grounded screenwriting of the indie film culture.

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** One of Kapoor’s finest moments in the film – a triad of wordless gestures that take up just a few seconds – is a late scene where his character Sami bhai is beaten up by Avinash. Having offered no resistance, the dazed Sami bhai is now clutching a pole, out of breath. When he sees that Avinash is done and is about to walk away, he first holds his hands out in a “what, you’re finished?” gesture, then indicates “come, hit me some more, I’m still standing” and finally, as Avinash makes no move back, Sami – though still visibly shaken and reeling in a way that not many beaten-up leading men of the time seemed to be – waves his hands in an almost dismissive gesture, as if to say "This was the extent of your bravado? You have a lot to learn about real courage."