Bawarchi, meet dusht raakshas: four original artworks for the book

And now, a look at four paintings – all done by the wonderful Gunjan Ahlawat, for the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book.

Scenes from Bawarchi...

Chupke Chupke...

Mili...

and Guddi...

I’m not always a great one for taking initiatives, but I have been patting myself on the back for this decision I made a few months ago. Since I was getting tense about the official cover design being delayed, I decided to independently commission paintings from Ahlawat, whose work I had recently been impressed by. Even if the publisher decided not to use these artworks (or used them and didn’t compensate me for them), I figured they would have promotional and sentimental value – I could use them on social media, on the blog, maybe get a few posters made down the line.

The Ahlawat work that first caught my eye, incidentally, was his design for Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants, especially the little watercolour he did for the author’s profile pic. When I first met him to discuss illustrations for the Hrishi-da book, my head was full of complicated ideas that, I now see, could not have been worked out on short notice (and would also have exceeded my budget). One of them was a drawing of Hrishikesh Mukherjee looking down at his chessboard – he often played chess while a scene was being set up, and I had a photograph of just such a moment – and on the board, in place of pawns, would be tiny but instantly recognizable figures from his cinema: Kusum in her distinctive school uniform in Guddi, Parimal Tripathi in chauffeur’s uniform, Anand on the beach with the balloons. 

Another design idea, which I had discussed with Penguin months earlier and been told wouldn’t work, was the façade of a house (the “makaan” of Hrishi-da’s cinema is a running theme in the book) with different characters and scenes viewed in a few of the windows facing us (and possibly Hrishi-da himself sitting on the roof, alongside the Amitabh character in Mili, looking through his telescope).

Anyway, Gunjan and I toned down these thoughts and streamlined them into four character-oriented artworks that would capture vignettes from the Mukherjee world. The results, which you saw above, have been very pleasing (not least because these were scenes that I had selected as being both iconic and lending themselves to artistic treatment of this sort).
 
This should be obvious, but I’ll point it out anyway: the paintings were intended to be impressionistic rather than realistic representations of the characters’ faces – the whole idea of using very familiar clothes/elements was that anyone who knows Hrishi-da’s cinema would immediately “get” it. In fact, one reason why the Chupke Chupke image is (very marginally) my least favourite of these four is that the two faces come very close to looking like Dharmendra and Sharmila Tagore. (Or Bobby Deol and Saif Ali Khan in drag, if you view it from a certain angle.)

I also enjoy placing the Bawarchi and Mili drawings next to each other, because there is something oddly symmetrical about the tanpura and the telescope. Seen one way, it is almost like a faceoff between the two superstars who worked so often with Hrishi-da: dusht raakshas Bachchan pointing a rifle at the gentle, music-loving Rajesh Khanna; the Angry Young Man vs the Dreamy Romantic Hero. Anyway, the design amuses me (and also makes me feel that something subconscious may have been going on when I selected these two scenes, because I certainly wasn’t thinking of a connection between them at the time).

P.S. we are using these paintings in the book, on a frontispiece page – am looking forward to seeing them in print.

[More of Gunjan Ahlawat's work, especially his book designs, can be seen here]