[For Mint Lounge’s yearend issue, Uday Bhatia and I did a piece that linked some of the best Hindi films of 2017 with earlier works. Here are my three contributions to the package. Full piece here]
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Dance as self-expression in Anaarkali of Aarah, Teesri Kasam and Guide
Hindi cinema has usually represented the courtesan, tawaif or nautch girl (each term linked to the others but also carrying subtle shifts in meaning or implication) as women performing for men, subject to the Gaze. Which is one reason why the final scene of Anaarkali Of Aarah—where the titular character uses a dance 
performance to reclaim her own sexuality, break the Fourth Wall and confront the powerful man who has been harassing her—is so exhilarating. Here is a woman expressing self-worth in a space traditionally associated with male privilege.
This is also evocative of two of Waheeda Rehman’s best roles: as Rosie in Guide and as Hirabai in Teesri Kasam. There are scenes in both films where the male leads—played by two of our biggest stars, the late Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor, respectively—are cowed down by the passion and abandon with which the heroine flings herself into dance. In Teesri Kasam, the naïve Hiraman (Kapoor) idealizes Hirabai (Rehman) and is shaken when he learns that she has been performing in this “disreputable” field since childhood; in Guide, Raju (Anand) wants to heroically rescue Rosie from her shackles, but himself feels insecure and subservient when she moves into the performative realm.
These are not feminist films in the direct, self-conscious way that Anaarkali Of Aarah is (it would be ridiculous to expect this, given that they were made in the mid-1960s), but they are remarkably progressive in their own contexts. And much of this has to do with Rehman’s personality. When in full flight as actor and dancer, she could make everything else in a film swim around her. Watch her magnificent snake dance in Guide and then that last scene in Anaarkali again; though separated by more than 50 years, they are part of the same conversation.
Familial ghosts in A Death in the Gunj and Trikaal
There are many ways in which to talk about Konkana Sensharma’s excellent directorial debut A Death In The Gunj—among them being its examination of the little cruelties and hegemonies that an “unmanly” man may be subjected to, even by a world that thinks of itself as modern. Shutu, played by the mesmerizing Vikrant Massey, has predecessors in our cinema: the many young men, in films like Parichay or Alaap, who prioritized “soft” pursuits like art (mainly music) or love over the family business, causing patriarchal wrath to descend on them.
But A Death In The Gunj is also notable as an example of the ensemble family film. By this I don’t mean a multi-starrer about a large clan, but an intimate, chamber drama-like story where a group of people are together in a relatively small space for a short period, and many mini-tragedies and mini-comedies unfold simultaneously. 
In this sense, it is strongly reminiscent of Shyam Benegal’s Trikaal, another film about a number of individuals with idiosyncrasies, personal demons and complicated interrelationships, and, like A Death In The Gunj, set in an atypical, old-world location (a mansion in 1960 Goa). Both works are marked by soft indoor lighting that makes the night-time scenes ominous and claustrophobic: Cinematographer 
Ashok Mehta made brilliant use of candle-light in Trikaal, while lanterns dominate Sensharma’s film.
Interestingly, both feature séances too—though in the newer film, what seems at first to be a supernatural interlude turns out to be another cruel joke played on Shutu; while in the older film, there really is some form of magic involving Kulbhushan Kharbanda marvellously chewing up the scenery. Which is not to say that A Death In The Gunj doesn’t have its own ghost — albeit a more melancholy one.
The perils of idealism in Newton and Satyakam
Amit Masurkar’s Newton—about an idealistic government clerk, a stickler for rules, sent for election duty in Naxal land—carries echoes of a nearly 50-year-old film with a similarly unbending hero: Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam, about a young engineer, Satyapriya (Dharmendra), who refuses to compromise even if it imperils the people who are dependent on him.
In some ways, the differences are just as important. Newton has a dry sense of humour (a herd of goats obediently bleat “haiii” as if in response to the question, “Do you have voter IDs?”), while the stately 1969 film rarely permits itself a smile. But at the centre of both stories are two earnest men whose inflexible commitment to their principles is often a source of frustration to everyone around them.
And yet, here’s a modest proposal: Neither film is unequivocally supportive of its hero. This is more obvious in the newer film, because it is more multilayered at a surface level and allows for perspectives other than Newton’s—notably that of chief of security Aatma Singh (a terrific Pankaj Tripathi), who understands ground realities and the nature of realpolitik in a complicated country better than Newton does. Or the local girl who tells the clerk, with a quiet smile, “You live only a few hours away but you know nothing about us.”
However, Satyakam—on the face of it a more moralistic film—also has scenes where the protagonist has a mirror held up to him (in one case by a character who might otherwise have been stereotyped as a slimy opportunist). Though Mukherjee repeatedly claimed that it was his favourite work, his career is more noted for protagonists who have a much greater sense of fun than the dour Satyapriya—people like Anand and Gol Maal’s Ram Prasad, who contain multitudes and are more understanding of the chimerical sides of human nature.
Both films allow us to reflect that if the world were made up entirely—or even mostly—of Newtons and Satyapriyas, then yes, it would probably be a better, more ethical place; but it would also be much blander, more robotic, less human. A landscape of clockwork oranges.
[Related posts: Anaarkali of Aarah; Trikaal; Satyakam; Guide]
[did this for Mint Lounge]
To my mind, Nila Madhab Panda is one of our more interesting contemporary directors, even though his output is uneven. Panda’s films tend to be sombre, languidly paced and deal with important social issues, which are all qualities that we associate with heavy-handed message-mongering – and yet his better work finds a way to approach a subject tangentially and to bring to it the ambiguous, shifting texture of a dark fable. This makes it very different in effect from, say, Madhur Bhandarkar’s forays into social commentary, which are glossier, more accessible, and more didactic.
Panda’s Jalpari, for instance, links female infanticide with drought – two symptoms of a barren society – through a mostly realist narrative that alludes to mermaids, witchcraft and a mysterious swamp that everyone stays away from. In I am Kalam, a dhaba bordering a desert land is like a magical space of transition, a portal to a new destiny; a scary close-up of a villain burning the young protagonist’s precious papers might remind you of the witch at her oven in Hansel and Gretel.
And in his latest, Kadvi Hawa, a debt-collector whose appearances herald farmer suicides is feared as a Yam-doot or a messenger of death – though he is really just a morose man with problems of his own, clattering about on a little scooter and carrying files instead of a long noose.
Kadvi Hawa is not an easy film. It is slow to the point of meandering, and announces its intentions to be this way right from the long, poetic opening sequence where an old man taps his way through a beautiful but parched rural landscape until he finally reaches a rundown bank and is then made to wait for hours. But if you have the patience for it and if you’re in the right mood, it is very rewarding, with two wonderful performances by Sanjay Mishra (as the old man, Hedu, who turns out to be both blind and a “seer” – in the sense of clairvoyant) and Ranvir Shorey (as Gunu babu, the callous collector who reveals new sides as the story moves forward). At its heart, the film is a character study of these two people who shoulder different burdens (to put it very simply, one is haunted by a lack of water, the other by an excess of it) and are driven by their desperation towards a moral abyss.
The one scene that seemed forced to me came after this main narrative has ended: before the closing credits, we get text with information about farmer suicides in India as well as the problem of extreme climates around the world caused by human irresponsibility. Here was the moment where – instead of simply absorbing the experience of having watched a quiet, superbly acted slice-of-life story – we could congratulate ourselves on having paid for tickets for a film about Important Things.
I’m not saying Kadvi Hawa isn’t about those big issues (though the way it links them is a bit random and overdone, like a tourist at a buffet breakfast piling bacon and idlis on a single plate). But for most of its running time, “Suggest, don’t tell” is the chief mode. The social and ecological conditions that have caused the characters’ problems aren’t presented to us explicitly – we are allowed to conjecture their importance to the Hedu-Gunu story. 
Information accumulates on the fringes; people speak in muttered half sentences; there are effective little moments such as the one where a girl is called out from her classroom, the teacher casts her a quick concerned look, and we only gradually realise that her father has killed himself.
Given these strengths, that closing information feels like an attempt to inject gravitas and respectability into a film that already had those things. We are being spoon-fed.
Some weeks ago, at a literature festival, I was involved in a discussion about the popularity of “takeaways”, or easy-to-digest ways of understanding creative works. This is based on the expectation that a casual reader (or viewer) should be able to say “Ah! This book/film was about *insert preferred theme or idea*” As if that was the only thing it was about, and as if anything can or should be reduced to a single defining message.
Such simplifications naturally occur when people think of books and films in purely utilitarian terms, focusing on the final takeaway rather than the fullness of the experience. Pandering to such a view, a film version of a famous literary work might end with a scroll saying “Research shows that killing an authority figure produces crippling guilt in 76 percent of people, and causes the breakdown of marriage and the onset of delusions in 17 percent. In many countries, including Scotland, these figures have been increasing since 1372 AD.” Which is useful information, no doubt, but it doesn’t tell us much about what makes Macbeth a good play or Maqbool a good film.
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[Here's a post about Panda's Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid]
[Did this
short review of a new Netflix documentary for India Today]
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Who is
the voyeur in Voyeur?
The obvious answer is Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel-keeper who spent three
decades spying on the sexual and other activities of his guests through vents
installed expressly for the purpose. But the man we meet first in this Netflix
documentary is the celebrated journalist Gay Talese, and this is what he says: “My
life has pretty much been living through other people’s experiences… watching
other people."
A
parallel is thus drawn between Foos and Talese and their interests in
observing, chronicling, hoarding; there is a visual link of sorts, too, between
Talese’s neatly organized “bunker” – where he keeps everything he published as
well as all the notes he ever wrote – and a cute little model of Foos’s (now
demolished) motel. Talese admits that he is a voyeur himself, deciding how to "shade and colour and choreograph" other people’s stories.
In what
feels like a version of Folie à Deux, the paths of these two men crossed in
1980 (spurred by the publicity around Talese’s book Thy Neighbor’s Wife – about American sexual mores post-WWII – Foos contacted
him with information about his own “research”) and they became friends for a
while. Journalistic ethics were muddied (Talese eventually published a New Yorker article and a book, before realizing that Foos’s story had holes larger
than the ones he had cut out in the motel’s ceiling) and the voyeur came to
feel like he had
been exploited, his secrets excavated. “You don’t put that kind of stuff in
there, you don’t write about a man’s money. I’m really mad at Gay,” says the
man who spent years spying on other people in their most private moments.
Despite
this gripping subject matter, and a few stylistic flourishes – Foos creepily
playing a younger version of himself, complete with dyed beard, tinkering about
with the doll-house, lifting the roof to peer inside; an arresting series of
dream-images of his “subjects” looking up, seemingly aware of his 
presence – Voyeur is often a listless
film. Perhaps its banality is part of the point (viewer, you came in
expecting a racy narrative about a man who secretly watched people having sex; instead
see two old guys – their heydays long gone – grumbling and pontificating),
but it also feels unfocused, and doesn’t address important questions. How did Foos
lead a somewhat functional life while spending night after night on his
watching station? What did his two wives think? (The second wife, Anita, is
very much part of this film, but she is usually a cipher, a taciturn presence
lending strained support, vacantly singing Happy Birthday to him.) How did a
journalist as canny as Talese let himself be misled?
For
anyone who has read Talese’s article and heard about the subsequent
controversies, little here will be new or revealing; in fact, the article
contains things that make Foos seem more interesting – a melancholy,
philosophizing scholar manqué – than he comes across in Voyeur. This film offers a mildly
intriguing portrait of the contradictions in a man who wanted to play God and
maintain full control over his private universe but also yearned to share his
story with the world via a famous practitioner of long-form journalism – thus
ensuring that some of the control would be lost. An introvert who spent years
in solitude on a viewing platform, and an exhibitionist who wanted to brag
about his “achievement”. At times, it feels like Foos may have been an apt
subject for another recent (and superior) Netflix production, Mindhunter, which is about
other sorts of attention-seeking sociopaths who were committing much bigger
crimes in the same period.
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[Related piece: journalistic ethics in the context of the Jeff MacDonald murder case]
[Did a shorter version of this piece for India Today magazine]
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“We leap from one life into another, be it imperfectly, and hope […] that the past does not catch up with us. But sometimes it does […] Reminders of our discarded lives can not yet be completely blocked…”
Anyone familiar with MG Vassanji’s writing will know that these lines, from his new novel Nostalgia, could easily have come from any of his earlier narratives. A theme running through Vassanji’s work – starting with the 1989 novel The Gunny Sack – is the imposition of the past on the present: how an individual's many selves interact with each other, how people are shaped by their histories even as they try to evade them.
Perhaps this is unsurprising given his own multi-cultural background; descended from Gujarat’s Khoja community, he grew up in Kenya and Tanzania, went to the US to study at age 20, and has lived in Canada since 1978. The search for self runs through not just his fiction – which made him the first two-time winner of Canada’s Giller Prize – but also such works as the hesitant, moving 2008 travelogue A Place Within: Rediscovering India, about his attempts to understand the complexities of his ancestral land.
However, Nostalgia marks a clear formal departure for the sixty-seven-year-old author. This is a work of speculative fiction, located in a future where technology has made it possible for people to “rejuvenate” – that is, acquire greatly extended life-spans along with the implantation of fictitious new “memories”, thus replacing their earlier lives with new ones. As the story begins, the narrator Dr Sina, himself one of these new-generation people or GNs, meets a patient, Presley Smith, who seems afflicted by visions from a previous life. When Sina tries to solve this mystery, also encountering religious “pro-deathers” along the way, he finds his preconceptions and complacencies challenged.
It’s unusual for a writer, at this stage in his career, to take a right turn into a completely new storytelling mode. But this book began with a single, persistent idea, Vassanji tells me during a phone interview. “Suppose we could get rid of past memories – painful ones, extra baggage as we live longer lives, or for reasons of vanity. I played around with this thought, on and off, began a novel, set it aside.”
Playful and breezy as Nostalgia seems compared to his earlier novels such as The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, it wasn’t easy to write – which is why it took 15 years to finish. “Since this was something I hadn’t done before – creating a world as opposed to dealing with already-known things – I was worried about saying something outlandish. Also, with a futuristic setting, one had to think carefully about the philosophical conundrums faced by these characters.”
It’s doubly intriguing since Vassanji doesn’t seem especially interested in science-fiction, and even appears to share the disdain that many literary writers – from Margaret Atwood downward – have for the more supposedly conventional aspects of the genre. “I am not fond of technology-oriented sci-fi – rockets and men and women with odd features,” he says, reductively; he also tends to blur sci-fi and fantasy, which are very different genres, each with many subsets (during our talk, he brings up Star Wars while listing things he doesn’t like about sci-fi).
But what he wanted to do was to use speculative fiction as a vessel – “without getting into many technical hijinks” – to explore ideas. Many kinds of tensions run through this story: between youth and old age, privilege and lack of privilege, religious faith and scientific progress. “While playing around with the dominant themes – the absence of death and memory – I realized the obvious: as we hang on to life, we hold on to our jobs, hoard our wealth – retirement funds, investments, etc – which leaves younger people at a disadvantage.”
One challenge he set himself was to keep the details of geography abstract, so that the book didn’t come across as a too-obvious allegory for real-world politics. For instance, Maskinia, the “barbaric” war-torn country behind the Long Border – where a young journalist is apparently killed and cannibalised during an assignment – isn’t a readily identifiable place but is presented as “our Other, our id – our constant dark companion on the bright path of our progress”.
And of course, he had some fun along the way -- though perhaps not as much as someone keener on fully fleshing out an imagined world would have. The book’s tongue-in-cheek asides include a reference to three Khans, Salman, Shahrukh, and Aamir: names given to virtual practice partners for tennis players, each programmed with different games and personalities. Many passages feel very cinematic – the juxtaposition of a monkey army (a reference to the Ramayana) with an Apocalypse Now-like helicopter attack complete with a “Ride of the Valkyries” soundtrack; the theme of memory implantation, strongly evocative of the new Blade Runner 2049 – though Vassanji denies any filmic influences on his work.
Most of all, Nostalgia is about the dual nature of memory as something that can bring great pain ("thoughts burrow from the previous life into the conscious mind, threatening to pull the sufferer into an internal abyss") but which is also essential to being human, being able to construct narratives – a theme that might be particularly important to a novelist. “I who implanted idyllic fictions am a fiction myself, and that fiction is falling apart,” Dr Sina says. He could be speaking for every writer who creates worlds, or reminding us that we are all storytellers, forming narratives about ourselves – and then erasing them when they become inconvenient.
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[Two earlier pieces on Vassanji here: a profile for The Hindu, and a review of The Assassin’s Song]
[did this for Mint Lounge]
We had good seats near the front of the auditorium, but Maharani Jodha Bai still looked diminutive. Seated on the extreme left and near the front of the stage, she prayed aloud to a Krishna statue, speaking half to her God and half to herself, trembling in anticipation of seeing her grown-up son Salim after years.
Meanwhile, from the shadows on the far right of the ornate set, the prince emerged, slowly made his way down a stairway and across the stage, came up behind his mother, and gently said the word she was yearning to hear: “Ma”.
Elegant as this scene was, it was one of the few moments in Feroz Abbas Khan’s magnificently ambitious theatre production Mughal-e-Azam – a tribute to K Asif’s classic 1960 film – where I felt underwhelmed. The two people on the stage seemed small and distant, too removed from us to do full justice to this grand reunion. In my mind’s eye, a very different scene was unspooling: the look on Durga Khote’s beautiful, expressive face – seen in extreme close-up – as she played the queen onscreen, while Dilip Kumar, every feature of his side-profile visible, strode regally up to her in medium shot.
But then, the team that brought this production to life probably expected their audience to have some associations with the film. Which is one thing that made watching it such an unusual experience.
Indian cinema has famously derived much of its language – including the floridity and the episodic structures – from the Sanskrit and Parsi theatres of yore. Yet we haven’t had a continuous tradition, like the America and British one, of films being adapted from well-known, widely seen modern plays – something which facilitates studying the differences between the two mediums.
Khan’s production – which reverses the usual process, being a play that is based on a film – thus makes for an engrossing case study. Before watching it (during its September run at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi), I was curious about how a stage production, with obvious limitations of technology and space compared to a big-budget film, would handle the visually spectacular scenes from the original Mughal-e-Azam: the climactic battle with its large cast of soldiers, elephants and horses; the musical numbers such as Madhubala’s famous Sheesh Mahal dance.
I was also thinking of a conversation I had once with Naseeruddin Shah about the stage director Jerzy Grotowski, who believed theatre shouldn’t try to compete with cinema; that films will always do certain things better, and it was a mistake to try to recreate glossy or larger-than-life moments on stage through technical gimmickry.
As it happens, the staged Mughal-e-Azam showed creativity in dealing with the “big” moments. It recognized its limitations, trusted the audience’s familiarity with the source material, and allowed us to use our imaginations at key moments. The one-on-one battle between Akbar and Salim had the actors waving their swords about in much the same way as Prithviraj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar did, but with inventive set design, including line drawings and animation, standing in for the infantry and cavalry; it was arguably more artistic than the somewhat clunky (by today’s standards) scene in the film.
Similarly, the “Pyaar kiya toh darna kya” sequence had dozens of glass panels dangling from the ceiling to evoke the idea of the Sheesh Mahal without trying to precisely mimic iconic moments like the one where Anarkali is reflected in hundreds of tiny mirrors. The knowledge that the actors were really singing, in front of us, added immediacy to the experience, and there were other fine setpieces – such as one where the hall resounded with music created exclusively by the anklets of dancers surrounding Anarkali – that were especially suited to a live performance.
While these passages worked wonderfully, some of the non-musical scenes – where characters simply speak to each other – felt banal. It was also interesting to consider what had been omitted, including two of the most famous scenes in the original Mughal-e-Azam: Salim gently stroking Anarkali’s face with a feather (a scene that is routinely described as being more erotic than a hundred other more sexually explicit movie sequences); and the wistful moment where an armour-clad Akbar, visiting his son-turned-antagonist in his tent, comes up behind Salim and then spontaneously kisses his shoulder.
Both these images have adorned a thousand Mughal-e-Azam film posters, but it’s easy to see why neither was in the play. These are deeply intimate moments, depending for their impact on camera “tricks” such as close-ups and the audience’s ability to register every detail – the moistness of an eye, the trembling of a lip, an almost imperceptible smirk – on a face. Their effect couldn’t be replicated on stage, regardless of how good the actors were.
And so, watching the staged Mughal-e-Azam became a reminder that a well-made film can be both grander than and – in some ways – more personal than an opulent theatre production. As well as a demonstration of how good theatre can use its own strengths, even find its own gimmicks, to hold an audience that has been seduced by an impudent younger medium.
[Some more thoughts about film and theatre in this piece about the 1972 version of Cabaret]
[Did this obituary for Scroll]
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In Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, the self-pitying, drug-addled Faizal, upset about living in an elder brother’s shadow, mumbles these memorable words:
“Hum toh sochte thay ki Sanjeev Kumar ke ghar mein Bachchan paida huwe hai, lekin jab aankh khuli to dekha ki hum Sasi Kapoor hai.” (“I thought I was a Bachchan, born in Sanjeev Kumar’s house, but later realized I was only Shashi Kapoor.”)
Yes, Faizal pronounces the name closer to “Sasi” than “Shashi”, making the sentence sound comically rustic. And the reference is, of course, to Trishul, which we have seen him watching in an earlier scene – one of many films in which “Sasi” was the clear second lead to Bachchan’s intense hero.
Many boys of my generation, growing up in the 1980s, would have understood why Faizal felt he had been let down by fate. As a Bachchan-worshipping child, I always thought of Shashi Kapoor as a pleasing screen personality, but he didn’t figure on my shortlist of favourite heroes – in fact, I probably didn’t think of him as one. He and his nephew Rishi occupied a very different niche from that of the action men, and it felt ludicrous when a film insisted on giving one of them a fight scene where they could trade punches with the heavyweights on equal terms. In a climactic dhishoom-dhishoom in Trishul, when Shekhar (Shashi) gives his half-brother Vijay (Bachchan) as good as he gets, it is not just implausible but also thematically flawed. (Surely part of this film’s point is that Shekhar, the mollycoddled legitimate son, would be much softer around the middle than Vijay the smouldering anti-hero, forged in the fires of abandonment and hard labour.)
My feelings about Kapoor would change somewhat over the years. As an adult watching those films again, I find myself more interested in his characters than I had been before, and more willing to embrace his special charms. Consider an old favourite, the 1980 comedy Do aur Do Paanch. The exuberant song sequence “Tune abhi dekha nahin” is part of a running series of gags in the film’s first half, where Kapoor’s Sunil and Bachchan’s Vijay – rival conmen – get the better of each other in turn; but watch the scene out of context and it feels like a commentary on Bachchan’s stature as a one-man industry, a magician who stayed several steps ahead of his rivals. (“Duniya deewani meri / Mere peechhe peechhe bhaagi / Kismein hai dum yahaan / Thehre jo mere aage.”)
And yet, its effect also depends on how well Kapoor plays sidekick and foil, standing by and watching the superstar perform to the gallery. Shashi gets tripped, takes pratfalls, is elbowed away when he tries to dance with his girlfriend, gets doused by a sprinkler… and in between all this he also holds the stage for a few seconds, not least during a little tap-dance where we see how nimble-footed and graceful he was even in his forties. It’s brief, but it’s as magical 
as the little moment during the opening scene of Merchant-Ivory’s Bombay Talkie 10 years earlier, where Kapoor – playing a version of himself, a Hindi-movie star – dances on a giant typewriter while rehearsing a song.
My own viewing preferences as a child notwithstanding, Shashi Kapoor had a varied existence outside the Bachchan universe and the Hindi-film mainstream. Much has been said and written – notably in Aseem Chhabra’s Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, The Star, and Madhu Jain’s The Kapoors – about his status as one of India’s first international stars, decades before Irrfan Khan or Priyanka Chopra, and this in an era when our film industry was largely cut off from the rest of the world and its dramatis personae didn’t get out very much. We have his work in a range of films, including the Merchant-Ivory productions (The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah and In Custody), Conrad Rooks’s Siddhartha, Stephen Frears’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his own productions Kalyug, Junoon, Vijeta and Utsav, which – sometimes uneasily – bridged the divide between mainstream Hindi cinema and the “parallel film”.
In the mainstream itself – the medium where he did the bulk of his work as a star-actor – it’s astonishing how many films there are, and how integral his presence is to them, even if that isn’t how it might seem at first viewing. From the earnest 12-year-old boy of Awaara, preparing the ground for the adult version of the protagonist Raj, to the toothy swain in songs like “Likhe jo khat tujhe” (Kanyadaan), and the young chauffeur in Waqt, trying desperately to get his mother to the hospital while everyone else sways to “Aage bhi jaane na tu”. And then the 1970s, a decade spent under the shadow of two megastars. (Apart from playing second lead to Bachchan so often, Kapoor was a policeman in Prem Kahani who worries about his wife’s relationship with her ex-lover…played by the era’s biggest romantic star, Rajesh Khanna.)
Though Kapoor did the grinning, romantic-hero parts very well, showed an unexpected flair for comedy, and had a reassuring integrity in serious, dramatic scenes, he could seem a bit one-dimensional in commercial films. Was this because he was usually cast in certain types of roles, or because of a lack of discernment in choosing films, or because he couldn’t fully submit to the higher registers of emotion demanded by mainline Hindi cinema? (Other actors such as Waheeda Rehman and Balraj Sahni have admitted to struggling with this.) Or was it a combination of all these factors? He may have become sheepish about the reactions of his wife and children to some of his work; in the 1970s, he was shooting simultaneously for so many mediocre films that his brother Raj disparagingly called him a “taxi”.
Since he was almost never required to carry a major 1970s film on his own shoulders, one tends to remember him in multi-starrers: the Bachchan films, of course, but also others like Manoj Kumar’s Kranti, in which Kapoor was almost inevitably cast as the pampered, white-suited, colonial-era prince who joins the other, more rough-hewn heroes in their fight for independence. Kranti is an intriguing work in his filmography, though not many credit it as such. What we see over the course of this narrative is a character who is born to privilege but undergoes a reformation and realizes what the “right side” is. It is a reminder of Kapoor’s function as the Moral Hero, as Karan Johar puts it in the Foreword to Chhabra’s book.
The best-known avatar of that moral hero is Ravi the younger brother in Deewaar, an idealistic, well-scrubbed man in a police uniform, eyebrows raised and nostrils flaring with righteous zeal. It is easy, from a distance, to remember Deewaar as a film where Ravi remains untouched by darkness, a smugly goody-goody hero from beginning to end. Up close, though, it isn’t that simple. Kapoor’s most memorable scenes are the ones where Ravi has to look into the mirror and introspect after shooting and wounding a young boy who was stealing food for his starving parents. Or when one gets the sense that for all his righteous posturing, he feels a smidgen of resentment about his mother’s special affection for her errant older son.
A few years later, in one of his best-regarded roles in Kalyug, Kapoor would play a modern-day version of Karna, the Mahabharata’s tragic anti-hero. But good as he was in that part, it was a casting anomaly (Bachchan was the original choice!) and the image that suited Shashi Kapoor much better was the straight-arrow hero Arjuna, vanilla on the outside but capable of showing layers. In a revealing scene in Deewaar, Ravi tells his girlfriend, with a troubled look on his face, that the mythological hero Arjuna had Lord Krishna guiding him, but that he himself doesn’t feel strong enough to be a modern Arjuna. In moments like these, one sees a different sort of internal conflict playing itself out, a subtler, less dramatic one than that of the Angry Young Man.
Here’s another thing about Arjuna: he is comfortable with his feminine side, and he has a strong streak of pacifism: he could tell God “I will not fight”, and briefly at least hold his own in a conversation that ends with a call to arms. As a child, I may have chuckled when I saw Shashi Kapoor flamboyantly holding apart those uber-macho heroes Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha at the end of their fight scene in Kaala Patthar, ordering them to bury the hatchet. Today I think of it as one of the emblematic images of his career, and a reminder of why he was such an appealing hero in a testosterone-fuelled age.
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(And a sidenote: shortly after that Do aur Do Paanch sequence, the Shashi character gets his back on Bachchan and sings a version of the song himself. But the playback singing is done in a deliberately croaky style by Rajesh Roshan. While Bachchan had Kishore Kumar singing for him. Typical.)
performance to reclaim her own sexuality, break the Fourth Wall and confront the powerful man who has been harassing her—is so exhilarating. Here is a woman expressing self-worth in a space traditionally associated with male privilege.
In this sense, it is strongly reminiscent of Shyam Benegal’s Trikaal, another film about a number of individuals with idiosyncrasies, personal demons and complicated interrelationships, and, like A Death In The Gunj, set in an atypical, old-world location (a mansion in 1960 Goa). Both works are marked by soft indoor lighting that makes the night-time scenes ominous and claustrophobic: Cinematographer 
Ashok Mehta made brilliant use of candle-light in Trikaal, while lanterns dominate Sensharma’s film.
In some ways, the differences are just as important. Newton has a dry sense of humour (a herd of goats obediently bleat “haiii” as if in response to the question, “Do you have voter IDs?”), while the stately 1969 film rarely permits itself a smile. But at the centre of both stories are two earnest men whose inflexible commitment to their principles is often a source of frustration to everyone around them. 
And yet, here’s a modest proposal: Neither film is unequivocally supportive of its hero. This is more obvious in the newer film, because it is more multilayered at a surface level and allows for perspectives other than Newton’s—notably that of chief of security Aatma Singh (a terrific Pankaj Tripathi), who understands ground realities and the nature of realpolitik in a complicated country better than Newton does. Or the local girl who tells the clerk, with a quiet smile, “You live only a few hours away but you know nothing about us.”
