All aboard the Matinee Express (Gaadi bula rahi hai)

[A vignette-ish piece I did for The Indian Quarterly, about train scenes in Indian cinema. Many more films and sequences could have been mentioned, of course - feel free to add to the list]

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One of the earliest "movies" to be screened – perhaps the most famous of its time – was a 50-second record of a train pulling into a station: the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, made in 1895. There is something oddly apt about this early union of locomotive and celluloid, for trains represent movement, and movement was also the unique selling point of those mystical things called motion pictures, which began to haunt people’s dreams towards the end of the 19th century.

No wonder there is a widely told story about viewers leaping out of their seats in terror as the Lumières’ train seemed to head towards them. The story may be exaggerated, but it sounds like it should be true: as a famous line in an American Western (a movie genre that would make significant use of the railroad) put it, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So let us propose that that train was the first ever movie monster (dare one say “bogie-man”?) – predating filmic depictions of literary characters like Dracula or Frankenstein or Mr Hyde, not to mention the thousands of monsters that were first dreamt up for cinema.

(Illustration by SOMESH KUMAR)

Might Satyajit Ray have had this in mind when he employed train imagery to such sinister effect in the Apu Trilogy? There are scenes in Pather Panchali and Aparajito – visualisations of Ray’s carefully drawn storyboards – where a train seen in the distance, moving across the landscape, resembles a venomous black serpent. In these scenes, the locomotive with its trailing plumes of smoke also reminds me of the hooded Grim Reaper wielding his scythe in another film of the era, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. And indeed, the trains in these early Ray films are closely linked to death: the young protagonist Apu frequently suffers the loss of people he loves, beginning with his sister Durga – with whom he waits in the fields for a glimpse of the passing train.

In the larger context of modern Indian history, trains have another very dark association: the most vivid horror stories about Partition involve ghost trains containing massacred bodies, moving back and forth across the newly created border, and there have been echoes in more recent tragedies like the 2002 Godhra train massacre. Ray’s contemporary Ritwik Ghatak was among the few directors who used trains – in films such as Megha Dhaka Tara – to emphasise fractured relationships in a country divided along communal lines.

However, making trains a representation of a single idea would be folly: it is equally possible to see them as the things that bind a large and complex nation. If they can be tied to death and destruction, they can also stand for development – the development of an individual, or of society itself. Remember that it is on a train that Apu travels to a life with bright new possibilities, from village to city. And consider how one of our most iconic films, Sholay, is book-ended by shots of moving trains. The opening scene has a train coming towards the camera (a nod to the Lumières?) before the camera moves forward to meet it, almost like an impatient family member. Sholay owes a big debt to the Western, and in that genre the railroad was a symbol of progress and civilisation. Little wonder then that the film's first action sequence has Veeru and Jai proving their heroism (and their status as “good guys”) by fighting off bandits who are trying to pillage a train. Not long after this, a train will carry the two men to a station near Ramgarh village, where the epic confrontation between good and evil will take place.

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Incidentally, though trains play an important function in Sholay, I find it difficult to picture Gabbar Singh traveling in one. Being a representation of primal evil, Gabbar inhabits a universe very different from that of the modern railroad. He lords it over his minions in a sun-baked, rocky valley far from the civilised world, trades with gypsies, and is associated with the outdoors; enclosed spaces, be they prison cells or train compartments, cannot contain him.

But let’s stage a little drama of our own now. Let’s imagine a special cinematic train – the Matinee Express? – made up of as many compartments as we could possibly need, and with no attempt at internal consistency. Thus, one section of this train could be a luxurious, velvet-curtained, gliding hotel of the sort that Anna Karenina would make an overnight journey on, but there would also be the squalid, overcrowded compartments that are so familiar to almost anyone who has traveled by train in India. And the people in this imaginary vehicle would represent different character types and situations, all filtered through our cinematic memories.

And let us begin with a contrast in moods, as exemplified by two songs. Sitting in one of the first compartments is Maanav, played by Dharmendra in the 1974 film Dost, and the song in his head is the beautiful “Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai”, which uses a train as an inspiration to draw the best from life: “Chalna hee zindagi hai / Chalti hee jaa rahee hai” (Life means movement / the train keeps moving). As our locomotive enters and exits hillside tunnels, the song exhorts young people to learn the following lesson: the train has fire in its belly, it toils away and bellows smoke (“Sar pe hai bojh / seene mein aag”), yet it continues to sing and whistle (“phir bhi yeh gaa rahi hai / nagme suna rahi hai”). What better analogy can there be for working hard and honestly, and staying upbeat as well?

But further back in another compartment, looking mournfully out the window, is a less sanguine hero from that same year, Kamal (Rajesh Khanna) in Aap Ki Kasam, and a less upbeat tune: “Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain jo makaam / woh phir nahin aate” (In life’s journey, when you leave a place behind / you never see it again). Here again, life is presented as a train journey, but one where each departing station represents something that has been irretrievably lost.

Since time travel is no constraint on our fantasy journey, let’s go back a few decades to the early 1950s and make room for a villager named Shambhu, who is eager to clamber into the cattle-class section. The hero of Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin is on his way to the big city to earn enough money to pay off a debt – at this point the train is for him a vessel to a better, more fulfilling life, so we won’t tell him that his illusions will soon be shattered. Instead, we’ll allow him a few hours of grace in the company of his little son, who is stowed away on our Matinee Express because he wanted to be with his father, but also because of the sheer novelty of being on a train: “Calcutta toh rail gaadi se jaana hoga, na?” he asks. (We can only travel to Calcutta by train, right?)

When hard reality does strike, Shambhu might be demoted to the Bogie of Lost Travelers. This is a purgatory for forgotten souls – for people who are trying to escape from themselves – and here all differences of class and background melt away. Thus, in one corner sit the many Devdases of our movie heritage, accompanied by their faithful but despairing servants. This is the tragic protagonist’s last journey: just as it seems like he might yet be able to redeem himself, the train stops at a station and he encounters his old friend Chunnilal, who does nothing more useful than tempt our hero into another fatal drinking session.

Elsewhere in the Lost Travelers’ compartment is a less central character from another major film, Deewaar: the disgraced trade unionist Anand Verma, father of the film’s heroes Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Ravi (Shashi Kapoor). Anand left his family when his children were little; many years later, when they are young men, their destinies firmly set on opposite sides of the law, his corpse is discovered on a train and we realise he has spent half his life shunting aimlessly from one station to another. This means he has probably covered the country a thousand times over, but it scarcely matters: for Anand Verma, Devdas and their sad brethren, the train is a moving coffin, not the means to a destination but the destination itself.

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Enough morbidity; let’s get some positive energy into our chook-chook now. There is place in this cinematic fantasy for double and triple roles, and so, as we pass under another bridge, we can see another Dharmendra – the Shankar of Yaadon ki Baarat – looking down at us thoughtfully. Just a few seconds earlier, this character was a young boy standing at exactly the same spot on the bridge, but then a 360-degree camera movement (which also showed the train passing below) allowed him to morph into the man. Perhaps this is an example of the train as a metaphor for growth – after all, there is no dearth of scenes in those action-hero-centred movies of the 1970s and 80s where a fleeing child leaps off a bridge onto the train running underneath; when his feet hits the top of the compartment, he is the grown-up hero.

That said, trains might also permit one to go in the opposite direction, to regress into childhood – and who is this man-child in half-pants, licking at a lollipop, hopping aboard our rail-gaadi? It is the Vijay (Kishore Kumar) of Half Ticket, who has disguised himself as a child because he doesn’t have the train fare for an adult. We recognise the deception, but we’ll let him in; his presence will provide some entertainment during our ride, and serve as a reminder that trains can be mobile amusement parks if you have the right company and a sense of humour.

Having stopped briefly at that last station, the Matinee Express is now pulling away, but not at great speed, which is just as well, for a soulful young man is posing dramatically at the door, stretching his hand out. A few suspenseful moments later another, softer hand meets his and a young woman is pulled onto the coach and into his arms. Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) and Simran (Kajol) of Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge are on their way to a bright future together, and it scarcely matters to us (being allies of young romance) that she hasn’t bought a ticket.

Elsewhere, a more discreet romance is being conducted between Vandana (Sharmila Tagore), the demure heroine of Aradhana, and a dashing air force officer named Arun (Rajesh Khanna); she is in a special mini-compartment, reading or pretending to read - Alistair MacLean, no less -  while he is in an open jeep passing on the road outside, and flowing between them is the song “Mere Sapnon Ki Rani”. But Sharmila Tagore must be allowed one more role in our improbable mise-en-scène, so here she is again, more serious-looking, as a magazine editor named Aditi, who confronts a film star named Arindam (Uttam Kumar) and makes him face his private demons. The film is Satyajit Ray’s Nayak, and mark the contrast from the Apu Trilogy: the director appears to have got over his fear of train-travel and is now using one as a setting for personal therapy. Not long after this, he will even set part of his rollicking adventure Sonar Kella – with the detective Feluda pursuing villains from Bengal to Rajasthan – on a train.

Speaking of adventure, one of the most sustained train movies we have ever had – where most of the action takes place in a train and the plot centres on a super-fast train too – is B R Chopra’s The Burning Train, which was a big-budget disaster movie in the Hollywood tradition while also being a shining tribute to the railways and to Indian unity. Having made sure that our magic train has a generous supply of fire extinguishers, I’m now going to allow some of the characters from that film on board.

They represent the many colours of India, so here are a Hindu priest and a Muslim maulvi who initially bicker but later find common ground. Here is a Catholic schoolteacher escorting a tribe of children, and a loud-voiced but genial Sardarji. With this motley crew, who can resist a few songs? But with the arrival of the villains, our heroes are forced to climb outside the speeding vehicle and onto the roof of the compartment, where a battle for life and death will ensue.

Watching them from the distance of a few compartments – and the span of more than 40 years – with a little smirk on her face is Fearless Nadia, who has seen and done all this before these boys were even born. Among the earliest of her films was Miss Frontier Mail (1936), its title derived from the real Frontier Mail of the era, which – as Rosie Thomas puts it in an essay about Nadia – was “the height of glamorous modernity, its name synonymous with speed, adventure and the sophistication of the railways”. Nadia brought an element of chaos to that sophistication as she fought baddies on train rooftops, and her films also drew intriguing parallels between a speedy train and a fast-modernising world, where a woman could do all the things that fell traditionally in the male domain (and do them twice as well).

If the open spaces atop trains are perfect setting for such fight sequences – or for the equally rambunctious performance of such songs as “Chhaiya Chhaiya” (Dil Se...), the interiors of trains can be closed and claustrophobic, and thus effective settings for suspense or intrigue. (Think Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.) One of our fellow passengers – sitting by himself in an overcoat – is an intense young man with a preoccupied look on his face. This is Kumar (Amitabh Bachchan) of Parwana (1971), who is using this train journey as part of an elaborate alibi that will enable him to commit murder without being found out. But in the very same compartment, unbeknownst to him, is his admirer and doppelganger, the title character in Johnny Gaddaar (2007) who was so inspired by the plot of Parwana that he employs a similar technique to pull off a complicated heist. 

Of course, all our characters don’t actually have to be on board – some very poignant movie moments involve people who are seeing off other people but going nowhere themselves. Notable among these is Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) in Garm Hava, standing ramrod straight, bravely concealing his sorrow as one family member after another leaves him for the freshly created country across the post-Partition border. And there is the armless Thakur in a similar pose at the end of Sholay, his own life barren as the desert, but watching others move on with theirs, as the train carrying Veeru and Basanti pulls out of the station. Or think of the metaphoric use of the railway station waiting room as a crossroad: in Gulzar’s Ijaazat, a divorced couple named Mahender (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudha (Rekha) re-encounter each other and exchange memories and revelations. We never see either of them getting on to a train, and we don’t need to.

I’m going to exercise an engineer’s licence here and permit our fantasy train to have a few compartments that are meant only for very short-distance traveling and can be detached from the whole - for these are the local city trains or the metros, and the kinds of plots that unfurl within them are necessarily different from the ones that take place in languid, long-distance travel. The time that passengers get to spend together per journey is limited, but it is possible to meet every day, and for a romance to unfurl slowly: thus the burgeoning of the relationship between working-class boy Tony (Amol Palekar) and the sweet Nancy (Tina Munim), chaperoned by her uncle, takes place on a Bandra-Churchgate route in Baaton Baaton Mein, as they move from passing notes to direct conversation.

There are opportunities, but there are threats too, as we are reminded in A Wednesday, which depicts the frustrations of the train-travelling common man in a world afflicted by terrorist strikes, and in Kahaani, which begins with a scene showing a chemical attack on a metro – and later has a scene where the film’s protagonist almost finds herself hurled before an oncoming train. This is why the staff of our Matinee Express is so meticulous about their security checks. Kindly excuse the inconvenience.

One man who moves freely from one coach to the next is a ticket-collector named Sanjay (M K Raina), from the low-key 1973 film 27 Down, and watching him is a reminder that so few of our movies have had interesting protagonists who work in the railways. (Need one mention the Bachchan-starrer Coolie here?) Sanjay is the quiet, subdued type, but there’s a lot going on inside his head. He didn’t want this job – he had to give up his art studies because of his railway-employee father’s insistence – and now he feels like he has spent his life crossing bridges without really getting anywhere; he lives, literally and figuratively, on the tracks, and measures his life in train sounds and distances. In fact, the first words we hear in the film are his subconscious musings: “Phir koi pull hai kya? Shaayad pull hee hai” (Has another bridge come? Seems like it).

If this hard-working young man were to take a cigarette break by going to the very end of the train and standing outside the last bogie, he might see that the stones on the track are forming words! Unfolding here is the inventive opening-credits sequence of Vijay Anand’s Chhupa Rustam where the names of the cast and crew members are spelt out in white chalk on the pebbles that litter the rail tracks.

It's a very odd sight, but we should be used to that by now. The fact that our train has enough space in it for both the melancholy ticket-collector and for the boisterous hero dancing to “Chhaiya Chhaiya” – along with so many others in between – is a reminder of the variety in both cinema and in rail travel. And so, while the Matinee Express continues on its merry way – picking up and dropping off more passengers along its endless line – I’ll give the last word to that very unlikely rap star, Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar), from the 1968 film Aashirwad.

He isn’t on board our train, but think of him as a sort of ringmaster, perpetually moving alongside it, commenting on the journey, giving voice to the stations that implore us to stop (“Rail gaadi / chuk chuk chuk / Beech waale station bole / ruk ruk ruk”) but also describing the scenery and people outside (“Buddhaa kisaan / hara maidan / mandir makaan / chai ki dukaan” – An old farmer / a green field / a temple and a house / a tea-shop) and ending with a list of cities and towns that this train will pass through. But we could equally think of him as a relic from our cinematic past, asking the train not to move too fast, to not try to compete with a world of jet planes. After all, we live in a time of diminishing attention spans, reduced travel time... and smaller screens too. (Could the audience at those Lumière films have possibly imagined watching movies on a mobile phone?) And so, it’s good to be reminded that life can still occasionally be both leisurely and king-sized – a view of a picturesque landscape through a train's windows, unfolding like an epic film on an old-fashioned 70mm screen.

A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100

(Did a version of this for my DNA column)

With the birth centenary of one of Hindi cinema’s most respected actors just around the corner – May 1 is the date – I came across an amusing little anecdote about Balraj Sahni. In his biography Balraj: My Brother, Bhisham Sahni recalls a Bombay producer saying the young Balraj resembled the Hollywood legend Gary Cooper. “Balraj took this as a compliment, but it was meant to convey that he had grown too lean and thin for the role of a hero in Hindi films; the Indian audiences preferred chubby and round-faced heroes.”

There were other ways in which Balraj would confound expectations of the Indian movie star in the 1940s and 50s. Having trained as a BBC announcer in England, and also being familiar with a relatively “realistic” stage tradition – compared to the Parsi theatre that gave Hindi cinema many of its florid conventions – he had a knack for understatement that recalled the best work of such American star-actors as Spencer Tracy ... or Gary Cooper for that matter, of whom Orson Welles once said: “You’d see him working on the set and you’d think my god, they’re going to have to retake that one! He almost didn’t seem to be there. And then you’d see the rushes, and he’d fill the screen.”

Those who observed Sahni may have felt similarly. Watching him as the idealistic Dr Nirmal in the 1960 film Anuradha, I was most struck by his performance in the scenes where the doctor, doing his rounds on his bicycle, casually chats with patients. Nothing very important or purposeful is happening here in terms of the narrative, but so much lies in the way Sahni listens and responds; you feel that the character has a life and personality that extends beyond the restricted world of the film.

We sometimes label acting as subtle or loud, quiet or exaggerated, but there are variances even within those categories. Dr Nirmal represents a different sort of understated performance from the one Sahni gave in Garm Hava, where you can see that Salim Mirza (losing family and status but holding on to personal dignity as the hot winds of Partition blow around him) is constantly suppressing his feelings; that a reservoir of emotion lies behind the stiff posture, the pursed lips and even the way he grips his cane. For contrast, watch him as the large-hearted Pathan in Kabuliwala: the role is marked by flourishes (for this is a flamboyant man, especially when he is trying to impress children with his wares) and by an accent that draws attention to itself. But though the film sometimes comes close to caricature in its depiction of boisterous Afghanis rolling their eyes and singing jolly songs together in an alien land, Sahni's performance has an internal consistency that transcends the role’s superficial trappings – and everything important about the character comes together brilliantly in his brief look of terror at the end when he realises that his beloved “Mini bacchha”, now grown up, may not have recognised him.

None of this came easily to the actor, if Bhisham Sahni’s book is to be believed. It reveals things about Balraj’s many struggles with film acting and his realisation that even the so-called “natural” performer needed to switch gears when the lights came on; you didn’t simply go in front of the camera and continue to be yourself, the process was more complicated than that. There are descriptions of his fear of the camera (“it was like going before the gallows”), of having to shake off stiffness, even wetting his pants in nervousness between shots – all indicative of how much it mattered to him that he did the best possible job. But there is also a story about how he became less self-conscious after a conversation with a real-life rickshaw-puller whom he met while shooting Do Bigha Zamin; the encounter helped him to stop obsessing about acting methods and to relax into his role, by seeing it as an opportunity to pay tribute to real people undergoing real hardships.

Sahni’s career was not exactly sprinkled with classic films, and most fans will agree that the three movie roles he will be best remembered for are Shambu the farmer who moves to the city to earn money in Do Bigha Zamin; the kabuliwala who travels from Afghanistan to Hindustan for similar reasons and forms a bond with a little girl; and the beleaguered Salim Mirza. These are all men in debt, separated from the people they love, adjusting to new things, watching the way of life they knew passing them by – in other words, tragic heroes. Yet they are also vibrant and multidimensional. Do Bigha Zamin is often thought of a relentlessly bleak film, but Shambu is a cheerful, upbeat sort at heart. Even after he is reduced to a wreck in front of his greedy landlord, he is optimistic enough to think that it doesn’t matter that he knows no one in the big city; he can make friends after getting there. (“Jaan pehchaan wahaan jaane par hee hogi, bapu.”) In a film with a somewhat overblown reputation for De Sica-like realism, Sahni grounds the edifice by playing the character as a well-rounded individual rather than just a victim or a symbol.

Here and elsewhere, it is also worth noting what a fine, attentive lover Sahni could be on screen. His latter-day role as the elderly Lala Kedarnath ardently singing “Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen” to his wife in Waqt is well known (perhaps too well known; it sometimes invites annoyingly patronising attitudes about old people), but he was equally moving in less demonstrative romantic parts. An undervalued aspect of Do Bigha Zamin is the depiction in its early scenes of the love between Shambu and his wife, the playfulness of their banter, which makes onlookers say “They’ve been married for 10 years, why does he still keep whispering to her?” The humour and affection stays intact even in times of stress (“Tujhe khareedne ki himmat hai kissi mein?” he jokes when his wife complains that he should sell her too, along with their other valuables), and much of the film's power comes from watching the gentle smile erased as circumstances become much worse.

It may be a mistake though to judge Sahni only by his work in “respectable” cinema. “He seemed to lend his gravitas to many films that did not seem worthy settings for his talent,” sniffed Leela Naidu in her memoir, but I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Recently I saw him in a tiny, inexplicable part as Rajendra Kumar’s father in Aman, a film that also has a famous special appearance by the then 94-year-old Bertrand Russell. In his one big scene, Sahni – who is chummily credited only as “Gautamdas’s dad” in the IMDB credits – tries to persuade his doctor son to stay in India instead of going to Japan to help nuclear-radiation victims. He then masterfully keeps a straight face - and continues speaking his own pain-soaked lines with conviction - when Kumar likens himself to a sweet-smelling flower whose sugandh isn’t meant only for the maali who tended it.

The scene is a reminder that the measure of actors can lie not just in their obviously great roles, but in their ability to make the best of preposterous situations. A continuing joy for any true Balraj Sahni fan is discovering his performances of integrity in dozens of “unworthy” roles, a reminder that acting in a commercial medium isn’t just an ivory-tower pursuit, and that the true artiste can achieve big things across a range of canvases.

On Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (and Leela Naidu on inflatable bras and excessive makeup)

Pandit Ravi Shankar’s death last week gave me an excuse to dust off a DVD of an old film he had scored for – Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha, about a woman who sacrifices her singing career to move to the village with her doctor husband, and comes to feel marginalised and stifled. It’s a lovely film, one of our cinema’s best depictions of threatened individuality and a marriage under pressure, highlighted by good pacing, a subtly mournful score and excellent acting: Leela Naidu shows sensitivity beyond her years in the title role (she was barely 20 at the time) and Balraj Sahni – though a little too old for his part – brings his trademark understatement to the role of Anuradha’s well-meaning but neglectful husband, Dr Nirmal.

In conjunction, their performances make this an emotionally complex experience, because it is very difficult to “take sides” between the two characters. And it is notable that Anuradha maintains this delicate balance, especially given what we know of the larger world around those people. This was one of a number of 1950s and early 60s films set against the backdrop of a young, forward-looking nation-state undergoing necessary social and economic development. Understandably, these films extolled the importance of such professionals as doctors and engineers, who were the architects of that development, and Nirmal is one of them: early during their courtship, he tells Anuradha that when he was a child his mother died of a routine illness, not because the family was too poor to afford treatment but because there was no doctor for miles around.

Given this story, the societal and national background and the fact that Nirmal is throughout presented as a sensitive, dedicated man, it is hard for a viewer to pass judgement on his shortcomings as a husband. Working long hours in the village, constructing makeshift equipment, teaching himself by studying books (which no doubt further eats into his personal time), he still manages to be a good father, taking his little girl on his rounds and subtly imparting life-lessons to her along the way. Late in the film, when a visiting city doctor exults “Shahar se door, ek gaon mein – aisa doctor!” (“Such a fine doctor in a village so far from the city!”), it becomes almost a celebration of the developmental possibilities in a young republic.

In such a context, what hope for poor Anuradha and her art? How can her music (even if it is composed by Ravi Shankar, and even if her playback singing is done by Lata Mangeshkar!) possibly compete with the urgency of her husband’s work? The conflict as presented here is not just one of equality between a woman and a man in a marriage – it is a clash between the dedication of a doctor trading in life and death, doing everything he can for a community, and the desire of a bored housewife for self-actualisation (in a field where she might bring pleasure to people – mostly privileged people – through her musical performances, but not achieve anything comparable to the social significance of Nirmal's work). 

At times, the film seems clear about what responses it expects from us. Nirmal and Anuradha’s shift to the village is idealised. When the urbanite Deepak, who Anuradha’s father had wanted her to marry, is reintroduced into the story (he is about to shake up her life by reminding her that she can still follow her dreams: “Sona chaahe barson se mitti mein pada rahe, sona hee rahta hai”), he is in a fancy car with loud music playing in it – a contrast to the quiet, dignified tone of the film so far. (Deepak is a good man, but in this situation he is also a threat to social order, and is presented as such.) There is also a faintly patronising tone in the (well-intended) scene where an elderly visitor extols Anuradha’s capacity for saadhna and tapasya and sings paeans to women (“our daughters, sisters, mothers”) who are making sacrifices for the larger benefit of humankind. (Nazir Hussain’s performance in this supporting role is a more sympathetic pre-echo of his ridiculous Colonel Sahab in the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi, about which more here.) In other words: worship the “goddesses” who facilitate the smooth functioning of a society, but also take it as a given that this can happen only so long as they stay in their proper place – the home – and serve as support staff rather than as active participants.

And yet, even as the cards appear heavily stacked against Anuradha and her personal interests, the film manages to never make her seem selfish or less than deserving of sympathy. This is largely achieved through the very nuanced performances, but also through an increasingly complex narrative structure. On paper there might seem a clear divide between the wealthy, vaguely foppish Deepak and the noble village doctor Nirmal, but the film doesn’t encourage cliched attitudes to these characters. The visual design of the song “Kaise Din Beete” tells its own story: as Anuradha sings, the man who is paying rapt attention, giving her the respect and consideration she needs, is the interloper who might, in a more conventional narrative, be the “villain” – and the man immersed in his medical journal, treating her as a tolerable distraction, is our hero, her husband. Watching Nirmal’s forced efforts to show interest in Anuradha’s singing, his eventual getting up and leaving the room (and her eyes following him around, barely even registering her admirer sitting in the other corner), one gets an immediate sense of how her personal confidence must have eroded over the 10 years of their marriage (even if it has in some respects been a successful one, complete with a well-loved and well-brought-up child). There is even a shot where we see Anuradha as she is now, reflected in a photo of a happier time, where she is posing with her singing trophies.

One aspect of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema that is relatively less commented on is his careful, considerate handling of a spectrum of romantic relationships, from the heady thrill of young love to the more measured affection between a couple who have grown old together. (The delightful Rang Birangi is one film that weaves threads from a number of such relationships – in various stages of understanding and misunderstanding – into its tapestry.) Anuradha has a short comic track featuring Mukri as a villager named Atmaram with a constantly ailing spouse (who we never see) – he feels all her aches and pains, so that when Dr Nirmal meets him on the road and sees him limping, he knows that Atmaram’s wife must have injured her leg. This buffoon’s pathological bond with his wife’s medical condition is milked for humour, but it is by no means irrelevant to the film’s larger themes. With hindsight, we can see that if Atmaram represents empathy taken to surreal extremes, the generally admirable Nirmal is sometimes close to the other extreme in his indifference to Anuradha’s needs.

But he does eventually acknowledge this, and the film – almost in spite of its own long-term, big-picture view of things – moves towards an ending where the possibility of genuine understanding in the relationship arises; this is very sensitively done through a series of events culminating in a cross-cutting sequence where Nirmal realises how empty his life would be without Anuradha, and she simultaneously arrives at a realisation of her own. Meanwhile, sitting in his car outside the house, Deepak smiles ruefully and drives away in the last shot (and it occurs to me that Abhi Bhattacharya, who plays Deepak, also played Krishna in the 1965 film version of the Mahabharata. Perhaps Deepak’s place in the Anuradha narrative is akin to that of the natkhat facilitator, contriving away knowingly so that a “happy ending” may be reached. There was certainly no shortage of Krishna figures in Mukherjee’s later cinema).


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A postscript: Made in the Bimal Roy tradition, Anuradha is the sort of gentle film that is easy to hold up as a representation of an idealised era where people conducted themselves with more dignity than they do today. By association, this idea goes with the one that the film industry of that period was consistently higher-minded than it now is – more concerned with crafting grounded, meaningful movies than in being commercial or catering to the “lowest common denominator”. There may be a vestige of truth in this notion when one is assessing the work of directors such as Mukherjee or Roy, but it’s also true that our minds are hard-wired to think of the past as glorious and idyllic, and the present as bleak and corrupted, and that this infects our view of film history. (It helps explain, for instance, why people of all ages are convinced that the songs of an earlier time were more melodious, and that today’s film music is nothing but shrill cacophony. But more on this and related Golden Ageism in another post.)

Shortly after watching Anuradha, I flipped through the relevant sections of Leela Naidu’s feisty memoir Leela: A Patchwork Life (co-written with Jerry Pinto) and found that the industry she describes (one that she was well-placed to look at dispassionately, being an outsider to the Indian film world) doesn’t seem hugely dissimilar from the industry of today. Naidu’s account begins with an anecdote about an assistant director sending her three brassieres with little nozzles for the purpose of inflating them to the required size (and her own amused speculation that she might come out of her dressing room and be told, “No Madamji, in this film you are a 38B cup, remember?”). Later, she refuses to wear makeup that would be too loud for a young woman living in a village (“Why is the bridge of my nose yellow and my nostrils blue?” I asked) – not at all surprising if one has seen Anuradha and noted the tacky scene in which an accident victim’s face is randomly splattered with dark paint.

Naidu also caused consternation on the set when she displayed “communist” tendencies by refusing to sit down until chairs were arranged for “extras”; and she fended off a subtle advance made by Balraj Sahni (“a perfect gentleman...but like many other perfect gentlemen, he was not above trying his luck”). Relating stories from other films she made around the same time, she observes that even a fine, professional actor like Ashok Kumar would show up on the set – for one of three “shifts” in his working day – and have to be told the title of the film and the name of the character he was playing. Or that producers were not above capitalising on a tragic real-life incident such as the Nanavati murder case. None of this is to suggest that all the people who made beautiful movies in the past were cynical hypocrites looking out only for their own profit. But it is a reminder that the old films that we canonise were, to varying degrees, part of a practical, commercial tradition – and that our notions about the innocent “simplicity” of the past can be, well, simplistic and innocent.

Eena Meena Deeka, a patchwork on Hindi-film comedy

Literature on popular Indian films is still so scanty and unorganised, one tends to be grateful for any book that puts some information together, however patchily. And so, the first thing to be said about Sanjit Narwekar’s Eena Meena Deeka: The Story of Hindi Film Comedy is that it contains some decent trivia, especially from the earliest days of Hindi cinema. Even the keenest movie buffs have little or no firsthand knowledge of such comic pioneers as Dixit and Ghory (“the Indian Laurel and Hardy”), Noor Mohammad Charlie(!), Bhudo Advani and V H Desai, which means that the first few chapters of this book have some value as research; literary merit isn't too relevant.

Some of the chapters about specific personalities work fairly well as short profile-essays. In “The Reluctant Comedian”, Narwekar reminds us that Kishore Kumar’s multiple talents sometimes made it difficult for him to concentrate on any one skill, and that comedy was a genre he stumbled into while yearning to become a playback singer. “Play it Again, Johnny!” begins with an anecdote about a bus conductor-cum-raconteur named Badruddin Jalaluddin Qazi who so impressed one of his passengers (the actor Balraj Sahni) that he was invited to join films and given the name Johnny Walker. And “The King of Comedy” examines the phenomenon of Mehmood, who became such a show-stealer that regular leading men were reluctant to appear in films with him.

There are flashes of insight in all these sections (and no shortage of movie stills), but there is hardly any fleshed-out analysis. For example, I wish a little more space had been given to one of the paradoxes of Kishore Kumar’s career – that although he was one of our best-loved movie personalities, there were few takers for some of his most ambitious jaunts into full-blown absurdist comedy (as in the 1974 film Badhti ka Naam Daadhi). Instead, Narwekar hurriedly describes Kumar’s impromptu solution to a continuity problem (he inserted a shot of himself sitting in the director’s chair and telling viewers “I decree that this scene will now continue with different costumes”) and concludes that the idea proved to be “too zany for the conventional audience”. (This same assertion is repeated two paragraphs later.)

In any case, the book’s dominant mode is that of the paragraph-length mini-review: short write-ups on comedy films (or films that can loosely be classified thus, such as the lighter work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chaterji) with plot synopses and a few superficial observations. Little attempt is made to analyse the use and impact of comedy in these works, there are factual errors (the song used in Jaane bhi do Yaaro is not “Saare Jahan se Accha”, it’s “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”), and the careers of outstanding actors like Deven Verma and Utpal Dutt are summarised in a few sentences.

I suppose the thing to be said in Narwekar’s defence is that he’s taken on a giant canvas: to do justice to eight decades of Hindi-movie comedy (along with the hundreds of major and minor talents who worked in the genre), this would probably have had to be a multi-volume series, with more than one author. As it stands, it’s a just-about-adequate reference work.

[Did a version of this for my weekly books column]

The scorching winds of change: rediscovering Garm Hava

I’m sitting in my favourite DVD-browsing space – the shady, lizard-ridden attic of the Palika Bazaar shop that sells “original copies” of world-cinema titles at Rs 150 – when the salesman leans across and whispers, “Saab, mere paas ek bahut special film hai. London mein copy banaaya. Poore India mein aapko sirf iss dukaan mein milegi.” (“I have a very special film, copied from a London print – you won’t get it anywhere else in India.”) So saying, he unwraps a DVD of M S Sathyu’s Garm Hava.

It’s a strange little moment, incongruous to the setting; normally, the man would be using this hushed tone to hard-sell a porn film. More bizarrely, just a couple of days earlier I was speaking with an aunt about the puzzling unavailability of Sathyu’s film in the Indian market. (She saw it a couple of times on its initial release in 1973 and has never been able to get it out of her mind – especially the haunting soundtrack with the “Maula Salim Chishti” qawwali. I saw it as a child on TV and was unable to appreciate it then but was keen to see it again.) For a movie that’s considered one of the key works of the “Indian New Wave” of the early 1970s, it seemed to have gone underground, never to resurface.

Naturally, I bought the DVD. The print was poor – faded colour, spots and scratches, a couple of seconds of film missing here and there – but not as bad as I'd feared. (I wouldn’t have minded subtitles because the Urdu spoken in the film gets a little dense at times; but again, given these experiences, maybe not.)

Garm Hava's opening montage of images about the Freedom Movement and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is followed by a lengthy shot of Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) photographed from a waist-high angle at the Agra railway station, waving at a departing train. His sister is leaving for Pakistan and he’s seeing her off; they’ve spent their whole lives in close proximity, now they are being parted in their old age.

This isn’t the last time we'll see Salim waving goodbye to a member of his family. “A hot wind is blowing,” a rickshaw-driver tells him as they leave the station, “Those who don’t get uprooted will get burnt.”

The garm hava in question is the cruel aftermath of Partition, and Salim and his family are being forced to make wholesale adjustments in their way of life. Because of legal complications, their ancestral house is slipping out of their hands. Salim’s daughter Ameena (Geeta Siddharth, in a much more central role than her two-minute appearance in Sholay's family massacre sequence) is separated from the man she is betrothed to. Everywhere, there are subtle changes in equations between Hindus and Muslims. “Sab azaadi ka phaayda apne tareeke se uthaa rahe hain,” (“Everyone is using Independence for their own gain”) sighs Salim when a rickshaw-wallah asks him for two rupees instead of the customary eight annas. A potential landlord assures him that he is unconcerned with a tenant’s religion, but then asks for a year’s payment in advance, because “aap hi ke mazhab ke koi saat maheene ka kiraaya chhod ke chale gaye” (“Someone from your community left without paying seven months’ rent”). Through it all, Salim remains stoical – God will see us through all this, he believes – but his family members, including his son Sikandar (played by the young Farooque Shaikh), aren’t so sure.

Some of the acting in Garm Hava is uneven – I thought a couple of the supporting performers were miscast, and the old lady who plays Salim’s mother seems constantly to be looking out for the director’s instructions – but there’s no faulting Balraj Sahni’s immensely dignified performance in the lead role. Sahni invests a great deal in little gestures, speaking volumes with a subtle shift of his eyes, or by cocking his head ever so slightly, or tapping his cane nervously on the floor while speaking to a money-lender. (I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, but this portrait of a patriarch trying to retain his dignity while the world he once strode proudly through collapses around him reminded me of Burt Lancaster’s wonderful performance as the Prince in Visconti’s Il Gattopardo.)

Equally notable is the film’s anthropomorphising of the Mirzas’ old haveli. The house is given a life and a personality of its own, with the camera freely exploring its interiors, familiarising us with every corner, pointedly framing characters in doors and stairways as if to stress the relationship of these people to their setting; almost suggesting that one is incomplete without the other. We are reminded that ancestral houses become a part of the people who have lived in them for decades (and the haveli can equally be seen as a symbol for the nation), and this is most poignantly realised in the scenes involving Salim’s mother. When the Mirzas have to leave, she resists, clinging to the walls, crying out that she’d rather die than go away. Later, she insists on sleeping on the terrace of their new accommodation, because from here she can see the haveli in the distance. A scene where the dying woman is carried back to the house, in a palki, is shot to suggest her memories of her first trip to the haveli – presumably as a young bride, in a palanquin, decades earlier.

Most “Partition films” contain moments of strong violence – the movies can’t bring themselves to look away from the horror stories about neighbours killing each other or ghost trains filled with dead bodies, gliding across the fresh borders. And unflinching depictions of this sort can serve a purpose too (although they also carry the danger of trivialisation). But the violence of Garm Hava is subtler: it’s about the uncoiling of the many threads holding together a family, about being uprooted from the only life you knew. This isn’t a flawless film (there’s something a little too convenient, even manipulative, about the way misfortune stalks the Mirzas **) but it’s an important one – a poised, personal, ground-level perspective of a critical time in India’s history – and it’s encouraging to hear that the original print is undergoing restoration. Not a moment too soon, and I hope similar work is done on the under-seen films of other notable Indian directors of that time, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani among them.

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** In an essay in his fine book 50 Indian Film Classics, M G Raghavendra points out that the film tries to distance itself from the melodramatic idiom of mainstream Hindi cinema but succeeds only to an extent, and this compromises its overall tone