Harmonious notes – music and manliness in Alaap and Parichay

In one of those coincidences that stalk movie buffs, last week I happened to re-watch two films in which a man is discouraged from pursuing his interest in music. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1977 Alaap, perhaps Amitabh Bachchan’s most low-key and least-seen film in the first few years of his superstardom, has the actor playing a variant on some of his larger-than-life parts of the time. In mainstream movies like Trishul, Shakti and Deewaar, Bachchan was often in conflict with, or defined by the absence of, a father figure. He is in similar straits in Alaap, but the tone of the conflict is from the tradition of the grounded “Middle Cinema” that Mukherjee specialised in – less dramatic and fiery, more rooted in the everyday dilemmas that face a middle-class family.

As the film begins, Bachchan’s Alok Prasad has just returned to his home-town after studying classical music. “Ab toh saadhna ka lamba raasta hai, jo jeevan ki tarah saral bhi hai aur kathin bhi,” Alok’s guru has cautioned the students – meaning they aren’t “finished” with their studies, years of disciplined practice lie ahead and true commitment must span a lifetime. But this is not something Alok’s worldly father could ever understand. Barely greeting his son, he peremptorily asks what Alok plans to do with his life now, as if he had been away just for a lark. The senior Prasad (described as “Hitler”, though he is played by the Teddy-Bearish Om Prakash trying hard to look tyrannical) is contesting local elections and no doubt has firm ideas about what a worthy pursuit for a son is. Some of the early scenes make light of this situation (if I had to argue a murder case in court, I would do it in Raag Deepak, Alok quips to his bhabhi as he mulls his unsuitability to follow in his lawyer brother’s footsteps, “aur talaaq ka case Raag Jogiya mein gaoonga”), but soon there is a parting of ways, and it becomes obvious that the hero’s single-minded dedication to his art could endanger his very existence.

The other film was Gulzar’s 1972 Parichay, which is sometimes described as a reworking of The Sound of Music – and indeed there are similarities in the plot of a teacher who tries to bring joy, including the love of music, into the lives of his sullen young wards. But like Alaap, the story is also about two opposing views of what a man may do with his life. In flashback, we see the music-loving Nilesh (Sanjeev Kumar) playing the sitar in his room early in the morning, going out onto the verandah to sing and to contemplate the beauty of nature, and his clashes with his authoritarian father Rai Saab (Pran), who wants his son to grow out of this dreamy-eyed artistic “phase” and do the things he is supposed to do as his only heir. To, essentially, “be a man”.

Given that ours is a cinema where music plays such a vital role – and where music composers and lyricists have mostly been male – there is something faintly ironical about narratives in which men are looked down on, or disinherited, for pursuing music as a profession. But it is easy to see why music, or art more generally, can be a threat to the status quo of a feudal or patriarchal society. The artist or artiste – with his knack for introspection ("thinking too much", as the lament goes) and his frequent inability to conform to societal expectations of people or groups – can be a problematic creature in a regimented world obsessed with class or power, and afraid of change. (Even in more benevolent contexts, there have been clashes between the pursuit of “soft” interests like art and culture, and the business of engaging with the more practical side of life; the written record of the ideological differences between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore includes an essay where the former repeatedly referred to the latter as “the Poet”, the refrain suggesting that Gandhi was being gently sarcastic about Tagore’s rose-tinted idealism and his disconnect from the hard demands of the freedom struggle.)

In so many films made by directors like Mukherjee and Gulzar, music is a force for egalitarianism, something that helps blur boundaries. Men become more “feminine” when they sing or dance, women can become more assertive and emotionally expressive than the codes of a conservative society would normally allow them to be; gender is transcended in each direction. Music can also be equalizing in the way it erases class and caste lines. Early in Alaap, the well-off Alok bonds over a song with the cart-driver (Asrani in a super performance) who transports him home; later he finds his true home away from his father’s mansion, in the little basti where a classical singer named Sarju Bai resides. Similarly, in another Mukherjee film Aashirwad, the music-loving zamindar Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is never so happy as when he is practicing with his guru, a lower-class man named Baiju. 

For me you are the real Brahmin, says Jogi Thakur, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. Later, the two men sit together on the floor as they watch – and eventually participate in – a lavani dance performance; sitting with them is a Muslim friend referred to as “Mirza sahib”, and the unforced bonhomie between these three men, from very different backgrounds, is a direct result of their enthusiasm for the performing arts.** What they are doing is, within their social milieu, as subversive as Alok supporting the basti-dwellers against his own father’s land-appropriating schemes, and it shows how the performing arts can – temporarily at least – bring some harmony to an inherently unjust world.

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** From Louise Brown's book The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Pleasure District:

Because the emotional power of music was considered raw and uncontrolled, music was deemed, like love, to have the potential to rob a man of his self-control and virtue. It was believed to possess the same subversive erotic power as the beloved. Because of its potentially destabilizing feminine power, music itself threatened the mirza’s masculinity […] for a man to dance was to indicate his receptivity to erotic attention, a passive erotic behavior that was unacceptable for a mirza.

[Related thoughts in these posts: fathers and sons in the anthology film Bombay Talkies; the lavani sequence in Aashirwad. And a post about Mukherjee's lovely film Anuradha, in which the title character must sacrifice her singing career to join her doctor husband as he sets about contributing to the national cause - another pointer to sangeet as something to be reserved for the “gentler” sex, and only so long as it doesn't interfere with more "important" things]

Suchitra by candlelight

This isn't a high-quality screen grab (it's taken from a mediocre YouTube print), but I love this scene from the 1957 film Musafir where Suchitra Sen's face is revealed in candlelight.
 

The film was Hrishikesh Mukherjee's first as a director, made when he was still very much part of the Bimal Roy camp; the DoP is Kamal Bose, who shot most of Roy's work (this was the only time he worked for Mukherjee), and there are clear visual references to Roy's films. 

For instance, in Devdas, made a few years earlier, Suchitra Sen as Paro got to light the candle that would give us our first view of the grown-up Devdas - Dilip Kumar, making his star entrance into a darkened room. In Musafir, the light (so to speak) has been passed on, and Suchitra is the one who gets that star privilege. She deserved it. I haven't seen enough of her work (and almost none of the Bengali films) to say informed things about her, but I thought her Paro was one of the great Hindi-film performances, pitch-perfect in its depiction of love, concern and despair, expressed jointly as well as in fragments, within the restrictions of a particular social setting. The quiet sadness of the character is such a fine counterpoint to Devdas's more showy masochism, and the role needed an actress who was up to it. If Suchitra had done no other film, it would be legacy enough.

[More on Musafir some other time, hopefully - it's a film that should be better known]

In defence of the song sequence - an essay

[Enjoyed writing this essay for Himal magazine’s special issue on South Asian cinema. Wish I’d had twice the word length though, since there were so many other films and songs I would have liked to mention - including more mainstream ones. Hope to expand on this piece sometime soon]

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One of my most vivid memories of watching Hindi films in the 1980s – inevitably at home, on a video-cassette player – was that almost each time a song came on, someone would get up to press the “fast-forward” button. Or we would let the scene play out but it would be treated as a breather, allowing us to see to other things for five minutes: one of us might take a bathroom break, another would go and check on the food cooking on the stove.

I should add that this was a generally poor time for Hindi-film music, and the movies I mainly watched as a child were revenge-and-violence sagas where music played only a perfunctory role. Many of the songs were tuneless and their picturisation mostly uninspired. Our viewing habits did change a little when melody (some of it admittedly plagiarized) crept back into Hindi cinema in the late 1980s, with teen romances like Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyaar Kiya. But in general, songs were treated as fillers.

Thinking about it, perhaps this attitude wasn’t restricted to that period - perhaps it has always been part of the wider snobbery directed at popular Hindi cinema, even by viewers who enjoy watching it as a guilty pleasure. There is a telling scene in the 1974 film Rajnigandha, a gentle, thoughtful entry in the so-called Middle Cinema, which occupied a niche between the high-voltage drama of mainstream movies and the stark minimalism of “art films”. In the scene in question, the talkative Sanjay (Amol Palekar), having carelessly entered a movie hall long after the film started, wastes little time in getting up again for some fresh air when a song sequence begins on the screen in front of him. "Lo, gaana shuru ho gaya," he chuckles, "Main zara baahar ghoom kar aata hoon." ("Oh look, a song, I’ll go out and walk around for a bit.")

Given how cramped and squalid-looking the hall shown in that scene is – this being decades before the arrival in India of posh mall-multiplexes – you can almost sympathise with Sanjay’s desire to escape. (This was one reason why most of my early movie-watching was done in the comfort of home.) Yet there is an irony here: Rajnigandha itself made very delicate use of songs, which are integral to the story and to a psychological understanding of the principal character. The film is about a woman named Deepa (Vidya Sinha) who finds herself torn between her current romantic relationship – a happy but occasionally monotonous one– and the idealistic memory of an ex-boyfriend Naveen, with whom her path crosses again. Her inner state of mind, and the film’s central theme, finds beautiful expression in the song “Kai Baar Yun”, which includes the lyrics "Kai baar yun hi dekha hai / Yeh jo mann ki seema-rekha hai / Mann todne lagta hai / Anjanee pyaas ke peeche / Anjanee aas ke peeche / Mann daudne lagta hai..."  (“It often happens / that the mind breaks its own boundaries / and starts thirsting after the unknown…”.) The scene has Deepa and Naveen travelling through Bombay in a cab together: he is being polite and distanced, but she throws surreptitious glances his way, clearly wondering about what her life would have been like if they had stayed together. (The fact that the song is in the voice of a male singer adds a note of whimsy and allows us to wonder about the feelings of the otherwise inscrutable Naveen, a question that will again arise near the end of the film.) Any viewer who missed this sequence because they decided to step outside the hall - or fast-forward a video cassette - would have missed a vital part of the film.

It should be mentioned that this scene is – by the standards of the mainstream Hindi movie –a restrained one. There is no lip-synching by the actors, no dancing around trees; the song, which simply plays on the soundtrack while Deepa and Naveen ride together, serves as commentary and interior monologue. But anyone who has grown up watching Hindi films has seen hundreds of far more flamboyant song sequences. Music, and the way it is presented on the screen, are an integral part of this cinema.

And why not, for a great song – where rhythm, lyrics and singing combine to optimum effect – can reach emotional depths and express poetic truths in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Similarly, a well-filmed musical sequence can work within the context of a movie to deepen our attitudes to the characters and situations. In fact, it can be argued that the history of form in the popular Hindi film is inseparable from the history of the song sequence. Very often, directors and cinematographers have experimented with stylistic flourishes in musical sequences – perhaps because these scenes tend to be inherently non-realist – while holding themselves back when it comes to the more prosaic passages. Consequently, at times it is like the film has temporarily entered a magical realm, moving beyond the commonplace of routine, plot-oriented storytelling. To take just one among countless possible examples of such visual inventiveness, the 1968 film Aashirwad has a famous number, “Rail Gaadi”, sung by Ashok Kumar in a rapid-fire style that has often led the song to be categorised as proto-rap music. But equally effective is the use of super-fast zooms in the scene: during the quickest sections of the song, the camera goes from a medium shot of the actor to an extreme close up and back in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The visuals (which are very unusual for a Hindi movie of this vintage) are mimicking, or trying to keep pace with, the music, adding urgency to the moment, and enabling us to relate to and participate in the children's growing excitement.

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Unfortunately, the very use of the song in popular Hindi cinema – its disruption of narrative, its apparent lack of “logic” – often invites derision from those who have narrowly defined views about realism in art. The most literal-minded questions run along the lines: how have the actors’ voices magically changed to those of professional playback singers? Where has the background music come from if they are singing in a garden? But to ask such questions mockingly is to forget not just the origins of Hindi cinema – in the multilayered tropes of Parsi and Sanskrit theatre – but also the very nature of film as a medium grounded in artifice and stylisation, so closely associated with the magic show in its early years. (As the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid said to me once, there is something fundamentally irrational about walking into a darkened hall, sitting amongst hundreds of strangers and watching images flashing before your eyes at 24 frames per second.) In any case, there are many possible modes of cinematic expression. At one extreme is kitchen-sink realism – so spare that even a feature film can be made to look like a stark documentary – and at another extreme is great stylisation, or the expression of emotions through hyper-drama. Both modes, and the many others in between, are equally valid as artistic choices; what should concern the critic is not the mode itself but how well it is executed to realise the internal world of the film.

Popular Hindi cinema has derived its episodic, occasionally disjointed structures from a long tradition in theatre, literature and the other arts. In becoming obsessed with psychological realism and logical continuity, we sometimes forget that art has traditionally never been expected to conform to such parameters. Even someone of Shakespeare’s stature (to take an example of an artist who is universally respected today, even though he was anything but “highbrow” in his own time) inserted bawdy comic asides in his profoundest tragedies: consider the brief role of the porter, rambling on about urination as an effect of drinking too much, at a key point in Macbeth when the drama is about to reach its highest ebb (the murder of King Duncan just having been committed, the body about to be discovered). For the Elizabethan viewer, such passages must have served an important function as breathers – as brief, tension-alleviating changes of tone – but they also work at a literary level, as reminders of one of life’s most essential truths, that deep tragedy and absurdist comedy can exist in the same frame.

In a stylised film, it is entirely valid for a song sequence to be a stand-alone piece of performance art that punctuates two conventional narrative scenes. In such a case, the song itself may clearly be non-realist, being “sung” in an outdoor setting without any visible musical accompaniment, and in the voices of seasoned singers rather than the actors. But depending on the quality of its constituent elements – such as the music, lyrics, performance and cinematography, and how well they come together – such a sequence can work brilliantly on its own terms. There are also the sequences that are explicitly presented as dreams or fantasies – a famous example being a 10-minute-long dream scene in Raj Kapoor’s 1951 Awaara. This partly Dali-esque sequence – in which the film’s hero Raj confronts the key people in his life, his lover and his adopted father – is so well conceived and shot that only the most strait-laced viewer, blind to cinema’s qualities as a visual medium, would fast-forward it. But it also serves an important symbolic function, introducing lyricism into a prose work and subtly commenting on the larger themes within the film: as the writer and Hindi-film scholar Rachel Dwyer observed, “The sequence condenses the film’s themes into a dream about love, religion, women, motherhood, punishment, and crime, and shows how Hindi film enacts these in songs”. It is organic to the film.

One reason why the traditional Hindi-movie song sequence can do with some defending today is that there have been big shifts in Hindi cinema in recent years. Some of the most high-profile directors – such as Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee, whose films are critically praised but also reach good-sized audiences in multiplexes or through the DVD circuit – have been using music in increasingly varied ways. Thus, Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, or Kashyap’s Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur, have brilliant, pulsating soundtracks, but they are used as accompaniments and commentaries to the film’s action; they are not part of the narrative diagesis. In recent times there have also been stimulating examples of familiar old songs being reworked to subversive new ends: in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan, a trippy version of the beloved romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays out during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

During a conversation last year, Banerjee told me he felt the modified international cut of his film Shanghai was better than the version released in India, because the song sequences in the former were more minimalistic. For instance, the Indian version has a rambunctious song titled “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, which features a group of street revelers singing and dancing, and one of the film’s protagonists Jaggu (Emraan Hashmi) joining them. In the sparer international cut, the full song does not unfold on screen, and more importantly Jaggu never joins in. The director was right about the stripped-down version being better, but that is largely because of the type of film Shanghai is. In its look and feel, it is very unlike the mainstream Hindi movie to begin with – it is cooler, more grounded in the contemporary Western sense. And given that the dance is actually happening within the narrative (it isn’t a fantasy), it would be out of character for Jaggu (presented as a somewhat diffident person) to participate in it.

However, it would be short-sighted to suggest that music should only be used in this minimalistic way. With Hindi cinema trying to break free from the shackles of the past and find new directions (a commendable pursuit in itself), there has been an increased self-consciousness about the “silliness” of the earlier type of song sequence, and a championing of the idea that music should always “carry the narrative forward”. But one should be open to the possibility that there are many ways of carrying a narrative forward: after all, even an apparently conventional romantic song sequence can enhance a story or take the place of dialogue scenes simply by recording the growing closeness between two lovers, by poetically indicating that their hearts and minds are becoming attuned to each other.

In fact, the song sequence (not just the song) in Hindi cinema can perform so many varied functions that one is in danger of running out of space trying to list them all. But perhaps the point will be partly served with two examples from the work of directors who are not associated with the most “commercial” cinema, but who still had a basic love for (and lack of self-consciousness about) the classic song sequence. In their work, one can see genuine thought and skill going into these scenes, to make them one of a piece with the film, and as commentaries on character and story.

A notable instance of songs performing a clear-cut narrative function occurs in the under-seen 1966 film Biwi aur Makaan, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, one of the most popular of the “Middle Cinema” filmmakers. This marvelously crafted musical-comedy didn’t do well at the box office, but it is historically important, being the first of many fruitful collaborations between Mukherjee and the poet-lyricist Gulzar (who would go on to become an important director himself). Biwi aur Makaan – about five friends looking for accommodation in the big city and eventually forced into a masquerade where two of them have to pretend to be women – has songs that often take the place of dialogue. Hemant Kumar’s music brings together conflicting idioms, notes and emotions in the same number – for instance, the song “Bas Mujkho Mohabbat Ho Gayi Hai” (“I have fallen in love”) has one of the friends, Shekhar, mooning over a girl while the others try to bring him to his senses. Thus, while Shekhar sings sorrowful, unrequited-lover lyrics, the others plead, scold and cajole; their chorus “Ab kya hoga, yaaron kya hoga” (“What will happen now?”) provides the counterpoint to his song so that we have a symphony of clashing moods.

This establishes a pleasing duality, helps us appreciate the personalities of all the friends, and also adds to the narrative tension. Though the genuineness of poor Shekhar’s feelings are never in question, we also know why his friends are so paranoid and what is at stake, and our own emotions vacillate with the ones being depicted on screen. In mainstream Hindi cinema one is used to seeing “dramatic” tracks alternating with “comic” tracks (a bit like the inebriated porter and the murdered king in Macbeth), but in this case both modes operate simultaneously, as if to acknowledge that one man’s tragedy can be another man’s comedy and the two things can flow together: the tone shifts effortlessly from the melancholy to the ridiculous to the hysterical, and even the two “cross-dressers” begin to acquire shades of the maternal/sisterly figures they are pretending to be. There is more nuance, insight into character, and artistic rigour in this apparently lightweight sequence in a “fun” movie than there is in many films that flaunt their seriousness of intent for everyone to marvel at.

There can also be subtler dimensions to a song sequence, dimensions that only someone who comes to a film with a willingness to appreciate the medium’s own language will grasp. Take the “Bachpan ke Din” (“Childhood Days”) sequence from the 1959 Bimal Roy film Sujata. If you simply listen to the song, you’ll think it is a happy, lilting number sung by two sisters as they recall their carefree childhood – and you wouldn’t be wrong. But watch the sequence as it plays out in the film, and new shades of meaning are revealed.

One sister, Rama, initiates the song by playing it on the piano, while the other, Sujata, hums along, and there are parallels in their movements and gestures: Rama spreads her dupatta playfully across her face, and a second later Sujata matches the gesture with the garments she is removing from a clothesline. But though the sisters’ voices merge and they are clearly tuned in to each other’s feelings, they never share the frame – Rama is indoors throughout while Sujata is on the terrace above the piano room. And this tells us some things about these characters and their story. The unusual composition is visual shorthand for the fact that there is an invisible line separating their lives and that Sujata isn’t, strictly speaking, part of the family. A low-caste “untouchable” by birth, she has been raised by Rama’s parents, whose affection for her has been tempered over the years by their consciousness of social mores and restraints, so that Sujata has grown up yearning to hear them call her “hamaari beti” (“she is our daughter”) rather than the more formal and defensive “hamaari beti jaisi” (“she is like a daughter to us”).

Thus, in the song that introduces the grown-up versions of the sisters (this is the first time we see Sujata and Rama as adults), the real daughter is firmly ensconced inside the house, clearly at ease with her setting, while Sujata – whose demeanour is more reticent – is in an open space, underlining her outsider status. The scene also provides our first view of something that runs through the film: the association of Sujata with the natural world, or the outdoors. Much of her time is spent in the garden and the greenhouse, tending to plants, and we are reminded that she is a child of nature, her true origins unknown, rather than an unqualified, legitimate member of the household (in the “Bachpan ke Din” sequence she literally has no roof over her head, but for the sky). This expert use of space and framing is as important to this film’s mise-en-scene (and the creation of its world) as any of the dramatic scenes.

On the face of it, the two scenes mentioned above – along with hundreds of others – might appear to be merely enjoyable interludes – the sort of distraction that may easily be shrugged aside by the viewer hankering after “serious” cinema. Observed more closely, they are vital and narrative-enriching, and important cogs in the unique storytelling engine that is the mainstream Hindi film.

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[A related post: the Lavani dance sequence in Aashirwad]

More on musical sequences: the pleasures of “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”

[A sequel to the last post, and part of an irregular series about musical sequences in Hindi cinema]

In this post I mentioned one of my favourite recent discoveries, the long song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” from the 1968 film Aashirwad. As far as I know, it is among the only Hindi-movie scenes to make extensive use of the Lavani dance form with its many hallmarks, including sexually aggressive gestures by the performers and banter involving the audience. The full video is below. You might need to watch the song a couple of times to really appreciate it, but it builds in energy, and I especially like how it goes from the 3.45 mark onwards.




Some context: music is central to this film. The lead character Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is the son-in-law of a rich zamindar, but he is also a lover of classical music and never feels happier, more relaxed and more in touch with his finer emotions than when he is practicing with his “guru”, an old villager named Baiju (played by the poet/actor Harindranath Chattopadhyay). In the scene in question, Jogi Thakur, Baiju and their friend Mirza saab go to watch a performance by a visiting dance troupe and end up participating in a musical battle of wits.

Some things I like about the sequence:

– One of the big themes in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema over the decades – in films as varied as Anuradha, Mem Didi, Abhimaan and Rang Birangi – is how men and women move tentatively towards parity in a relationship. This is often expressed in humorous terms, with music as a conduit: for instance, Mem Didi has the dance number “Hu Tu Tu” in which a group of women face off against a group of men during a celebration, singing about the politics of marriage, each group jokingly claiming victimhood for itself. In “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, music becomes an equalizer, blurring roles and mannerisms: the women on stage whistle lewdly, make crude “male” gestures such as scratching under their armpits to mimic a monkey (“Kyun Sikandar, banoge bandar?”), mock their audience (“Aisa lagta hai jaise hum gadhon ke gaon mein aa gaye hain”). And the watching men participate in the performance with a childlike delight, shedding the baggage that they might otherwise carry of being privileged observers or patrons. In both directions, gender is being transcended. (Within the narrative of the film, we have already seen a reversal of traditional roles: Jogi Thakur is a caring father and in general more humane and sensitive than his wife Leela; the implication is that this is because he is more in touch with his artistic side, while Leela – a thakur’s daughter – has grown up obsessed with money and power.)

Music is also an equalizer on another level in this film: it removes class and caste lines. The “guru” is the lower-class Baiju, who recoils in embarrassment when Jogi Thakur tries to touch his feet; for me you are the real Brahmin, says the upper-class man, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. In this scene, the two men sit together on the floor and sitting with them is a Muslim friend; the unforced bonhomie is a direct result of their love for music and the performing arts.

– It took me a couple of viewings to "get into" the song, but I like the way the music shifts register, from the languid, sweet melody when the women describe “Radha” and “Jamuna”, to the strident, challenging notes when they demand the answer to their riddle. And the wordless dance movements near the end, where the dancer conveys a possible answer to Jogi Thakur’s riddle purely through gestures rather than words; the viewer is allowed to interpret her movements, it isn’t spelt out.

– Ashok Kumar’s voice may be rough-hewn and nasal, but how appropriate it is for this song, and how much it adds to the authenticity of the scene. In a regular Hindi-film song – the sort that one can think of in dreamlike or symbolic terms, as taking place outside normal time and space – it isn’t so disconcerting to suddenly have an actor’s voice being replaced by that of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi. (Of course, viewers who are new to Hindi movies do take some time to adjust to this.) But “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” is very much a “realistic” part of the film’s narrative – an actual performance with real Lavani dancers performing on a stage with real musical instruments being played. Given this, how pleasing it is to hear the lead actor sing in his own voice (one of the most recognisable voices in the history of Hindi film, going back to the first decade of sound). Chattopadhyaya, all of 70 years old, does his own singing here too, just as he would in the lovely “Bhor Aayee Gaya Andhiyara” in Bawarchi.

– The sequence is beautifully acted, both by the dancers (especially the lead, whose name I don’t know) and by Kumar and Chattopadhyay, who seem so comfortable with the setting, so genuinely pleased by the opportunity to do something like this on screen. I particularly love the two-second scene near the end where Jogi Thakur, about to reveal the answer to his riddle and seal his triumph, looks back at Baiju and Mirza (who are out of the frame) with an impish, childlike smile; Kumar’s expression is pitch perfect, and so “musical” as well – it has its own beat and rhythm.

– How the answer to the final riddle overturns our expectations – expectations that arise from the innuendo-laden nature of the performance, as well as the naughty way in which Jogi Thakur asks his question. But though the mood here is one of fun and games and laughter, the riddle takes on somber echoes later in the film. “No one gets to see his own wife as a widow,” Jogi Thakur points out gleefully, and the words foreshadow what will soon happen to this jovial man: he will go to jail and effectively be “dead” for his wife and little daughter.

If anyone has further thoughts on this sequence, the film, and on Lavani in general, do weigh in.

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.

DVD Classic: Shaitani Anand (or Return of Zombie Rajesh)

[Did this piece on a long-forgotten - but now restored - Hrishikesh Mukherjee film for the April 1 issue of Sunday Guardian]

Hindi cinema’s tradition of zombie-love, vampirism and necrophilia has been well-chronicled over the decades, which is understandable, for nearly every major film has splashes of surreal, unexpected horror. The hospital scene near the beginning of Amar Akbar Anthony where Nirupa Roy, in need of a blood transfusion, rips away the tubes and sinks her fangs into the throats of her three sons lying on nearby beds, has been the subject of more Ph.D theses than anyone can count (including a celebrated one titled “Mommie fiercest: the hermeneutics of maternal love and vampirism in popular Hindi film”). Much has similarly been made of the resurrection scene in the climax of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa where the undead poet Vijay escapes his coffin, strikes a crucifixion pose at the entrance of a hall and sings “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai?” (“Who cares about the world of the living? It's cosier underground.”)

For decades, heroes and villains have smacked their chomps and droned “Main tera khoon pee jaoonga” at each other, but the word “khoon” has subtler resonances too: our films are full of people betrayed by their blood (hard-hearted relatives) or by their blood cells (prolonged death by cancer). Narcissistic male stars with crumbling faces play characters one-third their age, suggesting a Mephistophelean trade-off. Entire acting careers (Jeetendra? Mala Sinha?) testify that zombies, if they pick their disguises well, can get high-paying jobs. And has any national cinema anywhere in the world – even the Japanese, with their talent for visceral creepiness – offered horrors to rival the sight of Sanjeev Kumar playing nine roles in a single film? No.


One director steered clear of this ghoulishness for much of his career: in the 1970s, Hrishikesh Mukherjee specialised in gentle, character-oriented scripts and a somewhat narrow definition of “realism” that precluded werewolves and icchadhaari naags. But this is precisely why Mukherjee’s 1980 film Shaitani Anand, lost in the eerie mists of time and recently recovered from film vaults, is such a significant work.

The back-story is as intriguing as the film itself. It began life as a straight sequel to one of the director’s best-loved movies, Anand, but it developed a zombie twist when a young executive producer named Bhootpret Ramsay brought his own ideas to the table. Consequently, the story begins with the beaming cancer patient Anand rising from the grave and setting off to convince his old associates that death, like life, must be lived to the fullest.

This is not typical Mukherjee terrain, but there had been hints of an appetite for morbidity in his earlier work. As the American critic Pauline Kael shrewdly noted, his 1972 film Bawarchi – in which a cook teaches a well-needed lesson to a family intent on devouring each other – anticipated the cannibalistic clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by two years. What exactly was in those innocent-looking pakoras that Raghu the bawarchi was serving the Sharmas?

Raghu and Anand were both played by the same actor, the superstar Rajesh Khanna, whose early filmography – sanguine and twinkling though it appears from a distance – was marked by reflections on life, death and the hereafter. (“Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haaye,” he sang in Anand itself, but there was also “Maut aani hai, aayegi ek din”, crooned in a deceptively upbeat song in Andaz – shortly before the death of his character. And the melancholy number “Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain joh makaam / Woh phir nahin aate”, which loosely translates as "There's no going back / When you're in zombie land".) By the late 70s Khanna’s career was in free-fall; ironically, his replacement as Bollywood’s most successful star was the lanky Amitabh Bachchan who had played a supporting role in Anand. It is perhaps no surprise then that Shaitani Anand developed into a meta-commentary on the star system. There is profound human tragedy in the story of the sweet-natured Anand becoming a vindictive fiend and stalking his friend Bhaskar – who has changed his hairstyle and no longer recognises him – through Hindi-film studios.

Personally I regret the scrapping of the planned ensemble song that had a number of actors turning into zombies and menacing Bachchan: when an assistant writer jumped ship for the Manmohan Desai camp, a “borrowed” (non-zombie) version of the idea was used in the “John Jani Janardhan” number in Desai’s Naseeb. This omission notwithstanding, Shaitani Anand is a fine horror film as well as a remarkable meditation on stardom as a monster that can suck the life-blood out of you until your wax statue in Madame Tussauds looks more alive than you do. In this sense it’s a movie years ahead of its time (as anyone who has watched Shah Rukh Khan in Ra.One will know) and it’s easy to see why vigorous efforts were made to keep it out of sight. Watch it now!

Postscript: The American film Shadow of the Vampire tells a fictionalised account of the making of the horror classic Nosferatu, built on the idea that the enigmatic leading man Max Schreck was a real-life vampire who feasted on the cast and crew during the shooting. One doesn’t wish to cast similar aspersions on a star of Rajesh Khanna’s magnitude, but it may be noted that the credits list of Shaitani Anand includes several names who never again worked on a Hindi movie. One can only politely wonder about their fate. But perhaps they were Mukherjee and Ramsay’s acquaintances who agreed to help out on a low-budget project and went back to their day jobs afterwards. Yes, that must be it.

Mat jaane bhi do yaar: idealism and self-deception in Satyakam

[The full version of my latest film column for Yahoo! India]

When I was doing the research for my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro two years ago, writer-director Ranjit Kapoor (the film’s dialogue writer) told me about an incident that changed his life. It was 1969 and Kapoor was a young man in dire straits, nudging towards a life of crime – “main galat raaste pe jaane wala tha” – when he chanced to see Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam. The film, about a stubbornly honest man struggling with hard realities, wasn’t exactly fast-paced entertainment, but Kapoor was riveted.

“My friend sitting next to me fell asleep out of boredom, but I was weeping silently in the hall,” he recalled. “After that film, the world began to seem like a very different place – I had hit rock-bottom, but I picked myself up.” Forty years later, the experience was still so fresh in his mind that he dedicated his own movie Chintuji to Mukherjee, Dharmendra and Narayan Sanyal (who wrote the novel on which Satyakam was based).

Watching Satyakam recently, I realised that its central theme – the death of idealism, the feeble attempt to cling to it against all odds – is relevant in a wider sense to Jaane bhi do Yaaro, though the two movies couldn’t be more different in tone. The latter is a sharp satire about a world where honesty and integrity are relics of the past, and where the words “Sachaai ki hamesha jeet hoti hai” (“Truth always prevails”) are spoken with ironic venom – and directly into the camera – by a villain who has just sent two innocents to jail.

The people who made Jaane bhi do Yaaro – Kundan Shah, Kapoor and their friends – were part of a generation who were learning to (ruefully) laugh about corruption and other social evils. But Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Narayan Sanyal were from an earlier time, young and sanguine when India’s freedom movement bore fruit, and their film reflects both the headiness of those days – the belief that anything was possible – and the disillusionment that followed. (As a viewer today, it’s easy to forget that Satyakam is, technically speaking, a period film: it was made in the late 1960s and is set between the mid-40s and the early 50s. From our vantage point in 2011, those two time periods blur together – but those 15-20 years certainly represented enough time for the dilution of the idea that independent India would be a Utopia.)

Satyakam begins with a sombre background score and a lovely shot (the first of many in this film) of the sun glimpsed through a canopy of leaves. The opening credits are followed by the Gandhi quote “God is Truth, Conscience and Fearlessness”, which signals that we are about to see a serious-minded movie – though it begins with light-hearted scenes of life at an engineering college where a number of young men, including Satyapriya (Dharmendra) and his friend Naren (Sanjeev Kumar), are looking ahead to the New India. The catchy song “Zindagi Hai Kya” provides some tomfoolery (plus a master class in face-contorting by Asrani, whose expressions as he sings the line “Aadmi hai bandar” are a powerful vindication of Darwinism), and a while later there will be the promise of a sweet, conventional movie romance between Satyapriya and a dancing girl named Ranjana (Sharmila Tagore). But these are temporary breathers in a film that will get ever darker in tone.

After their graduation, as the industrialisation era begins, the engineers spread out across the country, working on construction projects, moving up in life, and gradually learning about the need to make little compromises along the way: pretend not to notice while a small bribe is being taken or offered; use an influential uncle's sifaarish to get a job; allow poor workers to use official material for an annual festival. But Satyapriya is the exception. Compromise doesn’t exist in his world (you can imagine him scoffing at the very words “jaane bhi do yaar”) and more problematically, neither does moral relativism.

At one point, when Naren asks “Woh sach kya jiske peeche shivam nahin, sundaram nahin – jisse kisi ko thess pahunche?” (“What’s the use of speaking a truth that serves no higher purpose and only causes someone hurt?”), Satyapriya’s response is typical:

“Yeh buzdilon ki soch hai. Sach bolne waale ko agar dukh sahne ki himmat hai, toh dukh dene ki bhi himmat honi chahiye. Sachaai angaarey ki tarah hai – haath par rakho aur haath na jale, yeh kaise ho sakta hai?” (“Only cowards think like this. If the truth-teller has the courage to suffer pain, he must also have the courage to give pain to others. Truth is like a piece of burning coal on your hand.”)

Mukherjee’s film lets us see – not through didactic monologues but through the natural, graceful unfolding of its narrative – that such thoughts may be very noble in theory, but that they can be damaging and self-defeating in certain situations. This makes Satyakam a difficult film to watch, as it draws the viewer into a quicksand of uncertainty and despair. (I can sympathise with the boy who fell asleep in the hall next to Ranjit Kapoor, especially if he’d already had a long hard day!) Throughout, there are counterpoints to Satyapriya’s unalloyed idealism, as the film repeatedly places him – and us – in morally hazy situations.

For example, when Ranjana is raped by the ruler of a former princely state, it’s a direct result of Satyapriya’s dithering about the finer points of propriety instead of taking action. Shaken and contrite, he then decides to marry her (he must, after all, do the “right thing”), but only after a revealing scene where we glimpse his reservations. Later, it’s implied that he is unable to achieve intimacy with her after marriage, and in this we see traces of his orthodox upbringing – here is a man so bound to traditional ideas that the woman he loves wishes aloud that she could die and be reborn “pure” so he would accept her wholeheartedly.

At times like this, not even the most naive viewer can see Satyapriya as an unequivocally heroic figure; his self-righteousness can even get annoying. And yet, he is also a man who is willing to learn from his mistakes and look long and hard in the mirror – in this sense, he reminds me a little of Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata, an initially bland hero who grows in stature by confronting his own weaknesses.

It’s possible to see the Satyakam worldview in strictly religious terms: what goes around comes around; there’s someone up there keeping score; “bad” people will eventually get their comeuppance and “good” people will be rewarded. But I don’t think the story can only be appreciated by those who believe in divine justice or in comforting patterns. The film stresses that each individual must find his own meaning in life. At the end, commonsense humanism wins the day and a point is even made about the undesirability of rigidly following scriptures: a narrow-minded old man is so moved by the honesty of a “fallen” woman that he admits his moral defeat and accepts his responsibility towards her and her child – thereby vindicating Satyapriya’s belief in the power of truth.

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There’s so much to appreciate in this film. Note the subtleties of Dharmendra’s unforgettable performance, the way his expressive face gets cagier and more careworn as Satyapriya buckles under the strain of fighting the world – and his own doubts – single-handed. Watch the young and relaxed Sanjeev Kumar (very good as the sprightly Naren) before he decided that being a Serious Actor meant playing much older, tight-lipped characters. Or the wonderful Robi Ghosh (Bagha in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne) in a supporting role as one of Satyapriya’s co-workers. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s dialogue is so rich with subtext that one viewing simply isn’t enough, and nearly every character is carefully shaded. David – the archetypal kindly old man of Mukherjee’s later films – plays a drunken cretin, willing to barter his daughter, but even he gets a brief scene where he gives the hero a dose of self-awareness. And how interesting it is that Mr Laadia (Tarun Bose), who cajoles Ranjana to get Satyapriya’s signature on an important document, turns out to be not a stereotypical villain but a well-meaning man who is genuinely concerned about her family.

But I realise I’ve been going on about the story and the characters while neglecting how elegantly crafted this film is – which really is the thing I love best about it. Many mainstream Hindi movies of that time – even the good ones – often seem to be in a rush to move the plot along, which results in awkward cuts, jarring shifts in tone, and a generally episodic quality; scene transitions tend to be functional rather than carefully thought out. Satyakam, on the other hand, is beautifully paced and structured. It’s unafraid to be slow-moving, it plays like a stately visualisation of a good literary novel, and yet it has a strong cinematic sense too – I can’t think of another Mukherjee film where each scene flows so organically into the next. He makes fine use of dissolves and fade-outs to provide a sense of time passing through Naren’s narration, and cinematographer Jaywant Pathare’s use of space is outstanding.

I particularly admire the compositions in the climactic sequence where Satyapriya’s dadaji (played by Ashok Kumar) blesses his dying grandson with a shloka about the unassailability of the soul. As Satyapriya’s eyes close, the camera pans away, drifting past Naren and the others in the hospital room, moving almost searchingly toward a weeping Ranjana, and then fading into an infinite whiteness. In scenes like these – and in other, less flamboyant but equally lovely shots – you see how personal a project this film must have been for Mukherjee, and how invested he was in it. It’s rare to see such attention to visual detail in his later movies, which stress narrative over form.

A note on Satyakam and Anand; and the beginning of the rest of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s career

It's interesting to compare Satyakam with a much more popular Mukherjee film made two years later – the Rajesh Khanna-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Anand. Both films have a similar framing device – in each, the story is told by a writer (Naren in Satyakam, the doctor-writer Bhaskar Banerjee in Anand) as a tribute to a dear friend who died tragically young but whose life was an inspiration for those around him. However, Satyakam is a hard-edged film that never lets the viewer off the hook, whereas Anand is cheerier, more audience-friendly and makes the most of Rajesh Khanna’s twinkly superstar persona (don’t miss the sudden and incongruous swell of music that marks Anand’s first appearance in the film).

In his essay “Cine Qua Non: An Undergraduate History of Hindi Cinema”, Mukul Kesavan contrasts Satyakam (“the last rigorous celebration of idealism in Hindi films”) with three movies, including Anand, which “instead of examining the consequences of idealism, use idealism to give the narcissism of their male stars a justification”. I think Anand is a good film in its way, with one notable advantage over Satyakam: Salil Choudhury’s lovely music score. But it does depend heavily on the Khanna cult, and on the fanboy’s confusion of the actor with the character. (It’s no coincidence that you regularly find comments on the Internet that use Anand’s personal courage to extol the movie-star who plays him. Sample: “...the jaunty, winsome and death defying personality of Anand is superbly embodied in the vivacious expressions of Rajesh”.) In my view, Satyakam is unquestionably the more nuanced and mature work between the two.

Mukherjee might have agreed. In interviews, he has mentioned that Satyakam was his favourite among his films (which reminds me a little of Raj Kapoor saying that his ambitious flop Mera Naam Joker was his favourite child because it was underappreciated). More intriguingly, he has implied that Satyakam’s failure led to a conscious decision to make lighter movies. As he says here, “I had thought corruption would end once we became independent. But this was not so. Then I thought there was nothing left to do but laugh. Which is why I made Gol Maal, Naram Garam and Chupke Chupke.” (It reminds me of Kundan Shah reflecting – as he wrote the Jaane bhi do Yaaro script – that absurdist comedy was the only reasonable way to deal with the world’s injustices.)

In hindsight, then, Satyakam was a turning point in Mukherjee’s career. His later films suggest a more practical approach to a mass audience’s needs – perhaps it could be said that he chose Naren’s sincere but worldly-wise stance over Satyapriya’s inflexibility. Through the 1970s, he made many fine movies with a stunning lightness of touch (even when they were about serious things), and that’s the period most of us today associate him with.

There is relatively little lightness in Satyakam. It’s almost claustrophobic in places, it doesn’t have beautiful, uplifting songs like “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” and “Aane Waala Pal” to provide the viewer with emotional succour, and at 2 hours 50 minutes it’s significantly longer than most of Mukherjee’s later films were. But it’s a hugely rewarding work for the patient viewer, and for the cine-aesthete (yes, I just made up that word). I love the later Mukherjee films like Gol Maal and Rang Birangi, but I think Satyakam is a monument of Hindi cinema – a movie every bit as dignified and uncompromising as its doomed protagonist.

[Also read: Mukul Kesavan’s superb tribute to Dharmendra, where he proposes that his Satyapriya “is arguably the most affecting and powerful performance by a male actor in that decade”]

PoV 10: How to stop worrying and lose your moustache

[The full version of my latest Yahoo! column]

Here’s a trivia question. (Don’t scroll down too quickly.) This popular director helmed two films – call them Movie A and Movie B – in the same year. A sequence in Movie A has the central character visiting a studio where a big star is shooting a nightclub scene. As it happens, this is an actual scene from Movie B, which will be released a couple of months later. Name the director and the two films.

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Answer: Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gol Maal and Jurmana (both 1979).

The Amitabh Bachchan drunk scene from Jurmana that briefly plays in Gol Maal can be viewed as a form of in-film advertising for the director’s next release. But it’s also an example of two Hrishikesh Mukherjee movies (one a modest, middle-class comedy “starring” that most unassuming of leading men, Amol Palekar; the other a more commercial venture with Bollywood’s biggest superstar) in a little jugalbandhi. And there’s nothing unusual about this if you’re familiar with Mukherjee’s career. His films tend to rework and reexamine certain themes, ideas and character types, so that if you watch a few of them over a short period you see many delicious connections – it’s possible to imagine the films conversing across space and time.

Take the varied ways in which the “real” world and the film world intersect in his movies. Playing himself in that Gol Maal cameo, Bachchan signs autographs for a group of schoolgirls and one of them asks him to write “From Anthony Bhai” (presumably a reference to his iconic part in Amar Akbar Anthony). The superstar gives her a wry look. “Accha, toh aapko mera nahin, Anthony ka autography chahiye?” he says. It’s a reminder of an almost identically composed scene from a much earlier Mukherjee film about a starry-eyed schoolgirl being unable to separate Dharmendra the actor from the roles he plays.

A different sort of acting takes place in Gol Maal, which is the story of a young man who can hang on to his job only by pretending to be twin brothers with contrasting personalities. It's among my very favourite Hindi films, and I’m hardly alone in this - say "Gol Maal" during a movie conversation and you’re sure to see people’s eyes light up as they recall its prized comic moments and lines. But when I mention that I also find it a very moving, emotionally satisfying film, I sometimes get puzzled reactions (or polite smiles).

Many movie buffs – even the ones with eclectic tastes – classify films as “Serious” and “Entertaining” as if these are mutually exclusive categories. Often the classification itself is based on a superficial reading: a film that gives a serious subject heavy-handed treatment (holding the “message” up for everyone to see and laud, in the manner of a child’s Aesop’s Fables book) might automatically be deemed “respectable”, even if the writing or acting is mediocre. In such a case, concept counts for everything, execution for little. On the other hand, a light comedy that makes us guffaw or delight in its plot twists is usually discussed in terms of its “entertainment value”. Try suggesting that such a film can have depth as well, and you might be accused of “spoiling the fun” or “seeing things that aren’t there”.

But great cinema doesn’t lend itself to such polarities, and the inability to recognise that a film with popular appeal can also be a “film of ideas” is often rooted in intellectual laziness, or the need to be spoon-fed – like the reader who thinks a biography of an inspirational real-life person is by definition more profound than a genre novel. Meaning can be subtly embedded within the structure of movies whose primary function is to engage a mass audience, and it can add value without interfering with our enjoyment (or making us feel that we have to get all cerebral about the film).

Gol Maal is, first and foremost, a delightfully funny movie, and it isn’t my intention to undermine this quality when I point out that it also contains interesting ideas about identity, the importance of treasuring the present, and not making sweeping judgements about people. None of these are pedantically imposed on the viewer – there isn’t a single scene where you might shift uncomfortably in your seat, braced for a preachy interlude – but they are there all right, and I think they enrich the viewing experience.


Consider the title song “Sab Gol Maal Hai”, which plays over the opening credits as Ramprasad (Palekar, in a wonderful performance that riffs on his established screen persona as the sombre, working-class man) and his goofy friends fool around at music practice. Has Hindi cinema ever given us a more economical, “fun” depiction of young people grumbling about a world where “paisa kamaane ke liye bhi paisa chaahiye” (you need money even to earn money)? It’s a lovely, high-spirited scene that works perfectly on its own terms, and yet it’s also a foundation-setter for the rest of the film: we are never allowed to forget that Ramprasad needs a job to make an honest living for himself and his (unmarried) sister, and that he is forced to go through the twin-brother charade because the man who signs his salary cheque has hidebound notions about how young people of integrity must look and behave.

This man, Ramprasad’s boss Bhavani Shankar (Utpal Dutt in one of the major casting inspirations in Hindi-movie history), has many idiosyncrasies, among the most prominent being that he measures the integrity of a man by his moustache (“Jiski mooch saaf hoti hai uska man saaf nahin hota”). He reckons the country is making no progress because it is being led by old people – the future should lie with the youth – but at the same time he has unreasonably rigid expectations and is quick to make silly judgements. He doesn’t like nicknames (“Jo apna naam short kar de, woh kaam bhi chota karega”) or flashy clothes, and he believes life should be lived in carefully regimented stages: when you’re young, you should concentrate on studies and career at the exclusion of all else; later, there will be time enough for things like music and sports.

In a seemingly flippant but very telling scene, this philosophy is subverted by a co-worker who twists it to his own purposes: “Aaj ka kaam kal karo, kal ka kaam parson / Itni jaldi kya hai beta / jab jeena hai barson.” (“Do today’s work tomorrow, do tomorrow’s work the day after, why hurry to do anything when you have so many years to live?”) That scene is played for laughs, but I never fail to be moved by Gol Maal’s use of the beautiful song “Aane Waala Pal”, especially the lyric that goes “Ek baar waqt se lamha giraa kahin / Wahin dastaan mili, lamha kahin nahin”. And the shot of Utpal Dutt sipping a cup of tea and listening to the opening words (Ramprasad is singing it for Bhavani Shankar’s daughter, in the house’s “music room”!). The lyrics are rooted in the idea that you should live life as fully as possible because even the happiest of moments will soon be past, and who knows what might happen tomorrow. This is a counterpoint to Bhavani’s own view of life, and yet there he is, swaying his head in gentle appreciation; it’s as if, for one moment, music has opened the heart of this mulish man. (Kishore Kumar’s singing and Gulzar’s writing can do that to anyone!)

Character growth – coming of age, learning about responsibility – is a key motif in Mukherjee’s cinema, whether it’s the bad-tempered, class-conscious Vicky in Namak Haraam or the schoolgirl Guddi (whose personal growth is somewhat simplistically mirrored by the changing dress sense of the doll in the film’s opening credits). But I think Gol Maal has a deeper, more complex take on coming of age than those other films. Here, two men simultaneously mature in different ways: while the younger man takes on adult responsibilities (in his first job as well as in matters of the heart), the older man discovers the merits of lightening up and becoming more open-minded.

And so, the film moves unwaveringly towards a great last shot where we see that Ramprasad has entered the “grihastha” stage of his life (which doesn’t equate to losing one’s sense of fun) while Bhavani has swallowed his pride and even dropped his precious moustache (and some of his inflexibility with it). That final image of Utpal Dutt’s unadorned upper lip is a very funny way to end an effortlessly funny film, but it’s thematically apt as well.