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]