Remembering Deven Varma

[A tribute to one of my favourite actors, who passed away yesterday, and whom I had the good fortune of meeting – very briefly – in January. Did a version of this for The Hindu]

Deven Varma looked frail as he walked slowly down the stairs and I worried again that my visit was an intrusion. I had come to his Pune home, and though both he and his wife Rupa had been warm and inviting on the phone, the latter did emphasise that he needed rest and there was only a small window of time available. Evening was best; climbing upstairs was an effort for him, which meant that if he came down to the living room, he had to stay there till after dinner.

Given these circumstances – as well as all those stories about famous comedians being reticent in real life – it seemed too much to expect him to be cheery. Within a few minutes of our introduction though, the old spark was visible, and as he reminisced about his film career, images came flooding back. The pleasant-looking youngster from the Shashi Kapoor-Manoj Kumar generation who might have, with a slight change in fortune, become a matinee idol, but instead settled into respectable second-lead parts in films like Devar. The talent that made him one of Hindi cinema’s finest and most atypical funny men in the 1970s and 1980s, most memorably in the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterji and Gulzar – films where Varma provided a counterpoint to the louder comedy elsewhere in the industry. People who haven’t seen the best of those movies closely, who look at them from a distance or only have hazy impressions of them, think of the “Middle Cinema” as safe, bland and non-transgressive, but that’s an unfair assessment. And while I won’t discuss that subject in detail here, it’s telling to look at the function Deven so often performed in those films: sutradhaar, vidushak, naatak-rachita rolled into one.

When I think of Deven Varma, this is the image that first comes to mind. He is standing near the edge of the frame, one hand raised, mouth half-open as if he forgot what he was going to say at the exact moment his lips parted. He seems worried that he may be interrupting something important. He is not the “cool” guy in the picture, especially when the others populating it include the likes of Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Rekha, or even Utpal Dutt. He is the sidekick, the hero’s friend, the jovial brother-in-law.

But then he speaks, and what he says is so casually outrageous you feel you have been plucked out of the universe of this sweet middle-class film and deposited on the border of Groucho Marx Land. If you can imagine a roly-poly Groucho with an earnest look on his face, saying subversive things as if accidentally.

“Ghisi-hui, purani, bekaar si cheezen – jaise tumhare pitaji” (“Old, faded, useless things – like your father”) he goes in Kissi se na Kehna, explaining the meaning of “antique” to a girlfriend. In Bemisaal, he congratulates a doctor who has opened a new clinic with “Bhagwaan se praarthana karta hoon ke shahar mein beemaari phaile aur aapka nursing home safal ho.” (“I pray to God that illness spreads in the city and your nursing home is very successful.”) And in Naukri, to a lover demanding a compliment: “Tum woh noton ki gaddi ho jinn pe income-tax waalon ki nazar nahin padi.” (“You are a stack of currency notes that has eluded the gaze of the income-tax officials.”) But it isn’t enough to put these lines down on paper, where they can seem like PJs: you have to watch him say them in such an effortlessly genial tone that you want to pinch his cheeks and give him a Parle G biscuit. The “jaise tumhare pitaji” comes out as if the analogy has just occurred to him and it is perfectly natural, not rude at all, to voice it. As Raakesh Roshan once noted, “When Deven says something, it automatically becomes funny. But when one of us says exactly the same thing, no one laughs.”

There are too many other films and scenes to recount here, but I keep thinking of the little moment in the comedy of errors Angoor where the thoroughly frazzled Bahadur – beset by over-familiar behaviour from women whom he has never seen before – responds with childlike delight to the one question he definitely knows the answer to. “Bhang!” he exclaims, beaming like the sun, when Moushumi Chatterjee asks him what he put in the pakoras the previous night. Bhang in a tea-time snack - it could be a symbol for what Varma brought to so many of the films he acted in.


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When he was young, his family was involved in film distribution and exhibition, but he developed an interest in acting – particularly in the work of such performers as Raja Gosavi, and in the Marathi theatre tradition built on wordplay, shabd-phenk and deadpan expressions rather than physical comedy. These qualities, he said, chimed well with the sensibilities of directors like Hrishi-da and Basu-da. “The quality of comedy in a film depends on a director’s tastes. I can’t imagine those men saying ‘Gadhe pe baith jao, ya chhoti chadhi pehen ke bhaago, ya cake mein baith jao’, and I too was very clear about the things I wouldn’t do in the name of comedy. We were on the same wavelength.”

It was pleasing to find that even at age 77, his sense of humour, his shabd-phenk, was intact. When talking about his own directorial ventures, for example, and his run-ins with money-minded distributors who wanted films to have generous doses of “punch” and preferably an action scene involving a snake, “which the whole country can understand – there are no language barriers, it’s a pan-Indian scene”. Mentioning his 1978 film Besharam, he said, “Oh, that was a failure”, but then added, sotto voce, widening his eyes in that trademark style that made him both Fool and foil in so many fine films, “Still, it probably got seen by more people than this new Ranbir Kapoor Besharam did.” Talking about another film he had directed, the Asha Parekh-starrer Nadaan, he recalled being told by some Punjabi distributors – crass, lowest-common-denominator types – to please “put some sex” into the film to help its prospects. Varma looked at me, his face a mask. “Maine socha, ab sex kaise daalein? Asha Parekh! Kuch samajh mein nahin aaya.”

That can sound like it’s in poor taste, but it was really just an aside in the midst of a larger conversation about the compromises demanded of you in the film industry. And even Asha-ji may have tee-hee-heed at Deven’s delivery. You had to be there.