Collective mourning in the internet age

[Did this somewhat slapdash piece for Business Standard’s “Eye Culture” space last week. Putting it here mainly because the BS website still looks as terrible as it did in 2003 when I first trolled it]

A few years ago I used to write a column called Neterati for this paper – basically, a round-up of what denizens of the Internet were saying about a newsy topic, along with slivers of tasteful (or so I hoped) commentary. The column has long been put to rest, but my fingers began itching something fierce last week when my Facebook timeline and every website I clicked on became jammed with eulogies to Rajesh Khanna. The dominant expression of sorrow was an “RIP Kaka” followed, in a few cases, by what I assume was a mistyped smiley face (it appeared to be winking and crying simultaneously) – but what do I know?

Whenever an old-time movie-star dies – even if it now happens every other week – “an era comes to an end”. This we have long known from obituaries in print and electronic media. In the cyber-age, though, the quantum of group-hugging – and the eagerness to share in a collective experience in real time – can be staggering. Much has already been written about how social networking gives us instant outlets for self-expression in times of joy and grief, but a couple of things about the reaction to Khanna’s death were particularly notable.

One was the nature of the nostalgia involved. Among the more self-aware comments I read came from someone who said he disliked Khanna as an actor, but that was beside the point. “My friends and I used to laugh at his mannerisms. Yet, when I heard the news I almost wept. There's so much history – years of watching his movies, talking about how he hammed a scene. He became a part of growing up and in a weird way, almost like a distant family member.” Still more interesting were the displays of yearning for a past that the yearner had never experienced firsthand, along with the Golden Ageist tendency to sentimentalise “a time when things were so much simpler” – it was common to see youngsters shedding virtual tears because Khanna had meant so much to their parents or grandparents, never mind that they weren’t much familiar with his work themselves. (This is easy to relate to: much of my personal interest in Hindi movie stars of the 1960s is tied to my mother’s memories of the time, and to fascinated speculation about what the world was like when my parents were young.)

One thing I heartily approved of was the widespread linking to videos of songs from such films as Amar Prem and Kati Patang; these are lovely tunes, we should use every chance we get to spread them around. But consider some of the accompanying commentary. On my news feed, a link to “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” carried the remark “Kaka knows his death from 1971 and this movie and song says it all.” (Or: how to retrospectively turn a star into a soothsayer.) Interesting discussions can be had – in other spaces – about how a popular movie star with a distinct personality might become the “co-author” of his roles (a post along those lines here), but some of the reactions to Khanna’s passing took this to a new level, giving him credit for the things he said in his films; dialogues and lyrics became meta-commentaries on his life. It was easy to predict that TV channels would endlessly replay the famous death scene from Anand, with its rich possibilities for subtextual analysis: the future superstar (Amitabh Bachchan as Dr Bhaskar) presiding over the passing of the current one (Khanna as Anand); the playing of a tape that reminds us that the dead man will always live on (in much the same way that Khanna’s best screen moments will continue to be accessible to us).

In our more composed moments, we can scoff at all this. But it tells us something important about that beast called superstardom, at whose scaly feet rationality must bow and scrape. The sort of popularity Khanna attained in the early 1970s involves a mysterious and immeasurable connect between viewer and screen persona – a bond that has fuelled commercial cinema since the days of Chaplin, Valentino and Lillian Gish. Such stardom is made up of some permutations of obsessive personal identification, wish-fulfilment, romantic love and platonic crushes (with all the talk about screaming college girls and marriage proposals written in blood, it gets forgotten that Khanna also had a huge base of fixated male fans). And a necessary by-product of this is the inability to separate the star from the roles.

And so, even as a non-fan, I’ll belatedly add to the sentimental chorus. So what if the man himself had been out of the public glare – and basically irrelevant – for most of the last three decades? So what if it’s unlikely that he was a lovable Anand in real life? All that matters now is the chord he struck with millions of people, the joy he spread for so long – and the fact that he had the good sense to shuffle off his mortal coil in the Facebook and YouTube age.

[A post from a few months ago: Zombie Rajesh in Shaitani Anand]

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.

Of red roses and hanky pankies: the strange case of Rajesh Khanna, ladykiller

There are some films so bad that they are just plain bad, and there are some films so bad they are hair-raisingly awesome. Somewhere in the large wasteland between these two extremes (but no one knows exactly where) falls the 1980 Rajesh Khanna-starrer Red Rose, about a psychotic killer who hates women because of the things some of them did to him when he was a boy (or more specifically, when he was the ever-suffering Master Mayur).

What makes Red Rose terrible and sort-of-excellent at the same time is the way it combines disparate elements: on one hand, it’s a cheap rip-off of psychological-horror classics like Peeping Tom and Psycho, presented in the B-movie style of the Ramsay Brothers; on the other hand, you can't fully appreciate this movie without reference to the long-defunct superstar persona of Rajesh Khanna.

Khanna plays a wealthy man introduced to us as “Mister Anand” (not to be confused with Simple and Inspirational Anand), who lives alone in a mansion full of bright red sofas. He has a plush office too; we never learn exactly what his business is, though the words “import-export” are muttered, and at one point someone remarks that “the consignment of 2,000 buckets hasn’t reached Dubai yet”. This invokes immense pity for all those poor labourers toiling to turn a desert settlement into a showy metropolis; how will these sweaty men have their baths now?

However, Mr Anand has other things on his mind. This being an idyllic era in Hindi cinema where everyone worked from 9.30 to 5 and not a second longer, he has plenty of time for a homicidal night-life, and Khanna conveys the tortured mental state of his character by adjusting his glasses every few seconds and looking distracted, as if he has misplaced an important pencil. Our first hint of the general spookiness of things (well, apart from the background score, the grubby gardener played by Om Shivpuri, and the dead rat in the opening scene) comes when one of Anand’s employees tells him that the women who have applied for the post of secretary are in the waiting room. “I’ll interview half of them, you interview the other half,” says Anand.

But there are five girls! This isn’t an even number, and so, for the first time, we begin to worry for the safety of the women in this film.

Snow White and Rose Red

Red Rose is a remake of the Tamil film Sigappu Rojakkal, starring Kamal Hassan and Sridevi. Knowledgeable friends tell me the original is better, and I can imagine Hassan giving a more convincing performance in the lead, but who cares: the use of Rajesh Khanna in this remake is so much more intriguing. For an inexplicable period between 1969 and 1972, Khanna had the loins of every Indian woman (and most Indian men) all a-flutter. Now, a decade later, when his market value had plummeted, this film casts him as a Lothario who slays women immediately after seducing them. It’s the sort of thing that howls out for subtextual analysis.

The main plot of Red Rose begins with Anand meeting the woman who might yet redeem him. (Think Norman Bates and Marion Crane. Or Mark and Helena in Peeping Tom.) This is a garment-shop salesgirl named Sharda and played by Poonam Dhillon (who looks fearful and uneasy, and is possibly wishing she had stuck to maturer assignments like “Gapuchi Gapuchi Gam Gam”). He engages her in double entendre.

“Kya chaahiye aapko?” she asks sweetly.

“Aap...” he says, and after a significant pause that gives her time to gasp, “...ke paas koi roomal hai?”

This scene is creepy because we already know there’s something very wrong with Mr Anand. But note that if exactly the same scene had occurred in a straightforward romantic Hindi movie where the (roguish but basically goodhearted) hero was teasing the heroine, it would have been seen as acceptable, even cute. Heck, if Khanna himself had played it 10 years earlier, everyone in the hall, including the projectionist, would have swooned.

Anyway, Anand asks Sharda for a handkerchief with a rose on it, which she is strategically wearing around her waist. That particular design isn’t available, she says, but it will come soon. “Aap mujhe jaldi de denge na?” he asks pointedly, and she blushes and requests him to wait just a while longer. Perhaps they are still talking about roses on hankies, or perhaps not; the screenplay at this point is what a highbrow critic might call ambiguous and multi-layered. (One is tempted to make a vulgar pun involving the words “rose”, "meri" and “le lo”, though being a genteel culture blogger one shall naturally do nothing of the sort.)

Soon love blossoms in Sharda’s heart. Again, this is very hard to believe within the world of the movie itself (Anand is an oddball to put it kindly), but it makes sense in the old subtextual way: in real life, Poonam Dhillon was on the cusp of adolescence when Rajesh Khanna first appeared, gently bobbing his head, on the personal horizon of the Hindi movie-watching schoolgirl. Now he comes to her shop, engages in innuendo-filled chatter and even hurls a handkerchief at her face. Wouldn’t you fall head over heels?

The romance persists to the point where they get quickly and improbably married, but he turns out to be a (gasp!) atheist who scoffs at the little Durga Ma toys, sorry, idols, that she collects and puts in her playroom. He goes to the temple to make her happy, but only so she will reciprocate by coming to his “temple”, the bedroom. (He also has a library with books titled “Sex Energy” and such, and a games room where he plays table tennis with himself by knocking a ball against the mirror, thus giving a whole new meaning to Mukul Kesavan’s observation about “Rajesh Khanna’s awesome capacity for self-love”.)

There are many other things going on in this film. These include Satyen Kappu as a cuckold, a nasty black cat (though the house has a “Beware of Dog” sign on the gate), a nosy waiter who gets his just desserts in the men's toilet, strange insert shots that suggest Anand’s tormented childhood memories, much misogyny, lots of bad acting, and perplexing dialogue (“Main sab kuch bedroom mein hi karta hoon: I am a very lonely man, you see”). For once, even Master Mayur looks embarrassed.

There is also the theme of a prim young rose holding the monster at bay by refusing to go to bed with him before marriage (the way all those other "forward" women do before her) - it might be said that Sharda's chasteness and piety are the garlic to Anand's vampire. (Picture Bela Lugosi having to take off his shoes before entering his victim's prayer room, and you'll know what I mean.) But to my mind Red Rose is most interesting as a commentary on its star’s fading career. By the time the film reveals itself to be a cry of outrage against depraved women who lust for young boys, you have to wonder if the reference is to all those aunties who turned the baby-faced Rajesh Khanna into a sex symbol in the late 60s, thus inviting damnation on the rest of their kind.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

On Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Namak Haraam (and fading celluloid)

Earlier this month I was having lunch with Rajorshi Chakraborti – a few hours before his book launch – and we were talking about films. Orson Welles, Vijay Anand, Roman Polanski, Basu Chatterji, contemporary Korean directors (about whose work I know almost nothing), you name it. Rajorshi has written a wonderful piece for an anthology of film essays that I’m editing for Tranquebar (more on that soon) and he mentioned that if he were to do another one, he’d consider writing about an aspect of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema that interests him: the idea that role-playing can enrich life, making it unpredictable and wonderful at the same time.

A few days later I happened to watch Mukherjee’s 1973 film Namak Haraam, which I had last seen when I was a child. This film is a key work of its time, for a number of reasons. For starters, it was the second movie, after Mukherjee’s Anand, to bring together Hindi cinema’s incumbent and future superstars (Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan respectively), and it can be argued that the director’s use of their contrasting personalities – Khanna serene and dreamy-eyed, Bachchan abrasive and practical – represents a thematic progression from the way he used them in the earlier film. (This is not to undermine Anand, but simply to point out that Khanna was more obviously the leading man and the focus of attention there, whereas Namak Haraam gives the two actors equal space.) With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that it also marked a passing of the baton - Hindi cinema as dominated by the Bachchan persona in the next decade would be very different from the one that Khanna had reigned over in the previous three or four years.

Further to Rajorshi’s observation, it struck me that Namak Haraam is one in a series of Mukherjee movies that explore how a certain form of role-playing – even one that begins for base or selfish reasons – can turn out to be liberating, cathartic, even ennobling. (Among the others are Chupke Chupke, Rang Birangi, Baawarchi and notably the superb Gol Maal.) The plot of Namak Haraam has Somu (Khanna) taking up a job as a worker in the factory run by his rich friend Vicky (Bachchan) so he can help Vicky get his revenge on a union leader who had slighted him. But Somu’s experiences living with the workers and their families has a transforming effect on him and changes the equations between the friends.

This set-up is used to comment on the master-servant relationship, the class divide and the nature of soft socialism in a country where the gap between the poor and the privileged is huge – and of course, all this is done not shrilly or didactically, but in the characteristic gentle Mukherjee style. In a couple of scenes, the line between reality and play-acting is intriguingly blurred: when Somu first confronts Vicky about workers' rights in front of a large crowd, there's a tiny moment where you're not quite sure if this is part of the plot or whether their ideologies have really begun to clash. Somu and Vicky don’t seem to be acting – they appear to be taking their private little game very seriously.

Namak Haraam marks one of Bachchan’s most interesting pre-stardom performances. It’s possibly the first time he played a character who could be described as a loose cannon. One sees here the seeds of the rage that would become so familiar in his later “Vijay” roles, but the effect is different: the fits of anger are driven not by righteous indignation but by petulance – the petulance of a spoilt rich boy who flies into a tantrum when things don’t go exactly as he wants them to.

On a lighter note, this film is a reminder of a more innocent time, when it was possible for two leading men to lie in bed together and look soulfully into each other’s eyes, caress each other’s arms through soft silk shirts, breathlessly wonder over the phone when they are going to meet again, and participate in an intimate song sequence (“Diye Jalte Hain”) where one man sings while the other lovingly takes a video of him (stroking his camera all the while). None of this is as intense as the furious lovemaking between Dharmendra and Jeetendra in Dharam Veer, but it comes close at times. Little wonder that though this was the first time Amitabh and Rekha were in a film together, they weren’t romantically paired - in fact, their characters appear almost to be romantic rivals!

The reason I’ve listed these points of interest is because I was dismayed by how bad the print of the film was, even on a DVD produced by a respected company. It was scratched or blurred in several places, ugly spots appeared periodically, a couple of seconds of film were missing here and there, the sound quality was poor. Throughout the second half, the sound wasn’t in sync with the visuals – a problem with the DVD recording, one assumes - and this hindered my experience of the last hour of the film (including the beautiful song "Main Shayar Badnaam").

Which returns us to the question: whither film restoration and film packaging? Internationally, the salvaging of movies is being taken very seriously, even though it’s a demoralizing and high-investment job. Restored prints (or superior transfers) are then released in classy DVD packages that whet a viewer’s interest and bring the movies to a new audience. I doubt we’ll have the resources or the technology for the same level of preservation in India anytime soon, but I have to say this: if the print of a film like Namak Haraam (just 36 years old and starring two of the giants of Hindi cinema at vital stages in their careers) is in such a poor state, one shudders to think of the hundreds of low-profile gems that don’t feature big-name actors. Or films of a much earlier vintage. It’s already a matter of record that the original print of Alam Ara, the first Indian talkie, no longer exists. Much of our cinematic heritage could be lost before we realise it.

P.S. Surprisingly, even our most high-profile movies haven’t been given the full DVD treatment yet. Take Sholay. If I were in charge of putting together a DVD package for it (and given whatever resources I needed), I would at the very least include: 1) Three separate audio-commentary tracks, one featuring the surviving members of the cast, the second by Salim-Javed (I know they aren’t on talking terms any more, but this is my fantasy) and the third by Ramesh Sippy and some of the technical crew, 2) A restored, cleaned-up version of the film’s original ending, which had Gabbar being killed by Thakur (and which is available on some DVDs – I saw it on one a few years ago), 3) Anupama Chopra’s enjoyable book about the film. And this is a very basic list – I’m not exercising my imagination at all. Imagine what Criterion might have done.

P.P.S. A friend, Praba Mahajan, writes in to tell me about an unreleased 1971 film titled Yaar Meri Zindagi, with Amitabh in a role similar to the one Rajesh Khanna played in Namak Haraam, and Shatrughan Sinha as the haughty rich friend. Check this link for details - and don't miss the reference to the "pheasant girl" and the description of Amitabh's character as "a messiah for the pheasants". Doctor Dolittle would have been so proud.