Tough love: in which good guy Dharmendra serenades bad guy Amjad Khan

[the first entry in my Lounge mini-series about Hindi-film song sequences]
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If you know the mainstream Hindi film of the early eighties, this scene should be familiar. A villain’s ornate lair, stocked with henchmen, dancing girls, Vat 69 bottles and gaudy wall art. The good guys – including the second hero, the heroine and a long-suffering mother – trussed up together like chickens in a coop. Everyone dutifully waits for the arrival of the rescuer, the main hero – and here he comes, right on cue, and he’s played by Dharmendra, which leads one to expect much dhishoom-dhishoom preceded by blistering dialogue-baazi.

However, the climactic sequence of the 1982 film Teesri Aankh has a surprise in store. Forgoing his usual “kuttay-kameenay” tirade, Dharmendra launches into song – and continues singing for the next six minutes as he takes the minions down one by one.

“Salaam, Salaam, Salaam, Salaam, Main Aa Gaya” he begins, and the rest of the number is as polite and good-natured, even affectionate, as those lyrics would suggest – though it is punctuated by the sound of fists meeting noses and elbows pounding abdomens. Directed at the lair-meister – played by a very surprised-looking Amjad Khan – it includes respectful lines like “Mere laayak koi khidmat ho toh phir farmayeeay (Please let me know if I can be of service to you)”. And it is all in Mohammed Rafi’s gentle voice. Imagine Pete Seeger smacking the Ku Klux Klan about with his guitar while crooning “If I Had a Hammer” and you might start to get a sense of how otherworldly this scenario is.

But that still wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t prepare you for the game-show quality of this scene – how the hero must negotiate his way through antechambers in a multi-level art-deco nightmare, menaced by dangers: chubby men in their underwear, wielding spiky weapons; giant incendiary golden owl statues with red eyes; and most memorably, a bevy of lethal dancing girls led by Helen, their nails long and sharp as knives, sparks flying as they caress the walls. (If Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 classic of the Surrealist movement, was the result of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel throwing their dreams together to construct a film, this Helen vignette might easily have come from a collective dream by Russ Meyer and Quentin Tarantino.)

For this series about Hindi-film song sequences, I had in mind the elegantly crafted work of auteurs like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and Vijay Anand. In deference to my baser instincts, though, I begin with this scene from a not-very-good movie.

Calling Teesri Aankh formulaic would be kind: it pivots around such tropes as lost-and-found siblings and revenge as a dish served twenty years late, and it is usually content with being derivative. A scene where Amjad Khan, being led to jail in handcuffs, threatens the cop who caught him, is a straight reprise of the Gabbar-Thakur confrontation in Sholay, with none of the intensity of the original. This film’s “prose” sections are barely worth sitting through.

The glorious exception is the “Salaam Salaam” song, which represents everything that is brassy and unrestrained about the masala movie of the era, yet goes further than you’d expect. Even with hyper-dramatic movies that mix emotional registers, there are (narrow) concessions to structure: it is understood that a song-and-dance sequence occupies a separate space from a fight scene. But here, both things come together, and the conception is so bold that you’re willing to overlook the tackier moments (such as the many insert shots of Khan in a neon-lit chamber looking worried and gloating in turn).

Watching it, I get the impression that everyone, from set decorators to actors, was having fun during the shoot. Many old-time Dharmendra fans rue the generic action films he made in the 1980s, but his energy here is infectious, and the scene provides a good showcase for his ability to mix goofy comedy with the demands of being an action hero. The song itself is catchy and robust, without being anything close to a classic. And if you’re offended at the thought of the great Rafi’s voice having to share space with fight sounds, you might console yourself with the reminder that the singer was a fan of boxing and Muhammad Ali; he probably enjoyed this too.

Musical numbers in these tense climactic scenes are usually the preserve of the heroine, who tries to buy time by performing for the leering villain (while also catering to the audience’s predominantly male gaze). On the rare occasions where the heroes do this (think “Yamma Yamma” in Shaan), they are undercover. But in Teesri Aankh, we have a male lead openly singing a sort of love song to the villain, even as he coaxes him out of his hiding place. “Mere saahib, chhup gaye kyun, saamne aajayeeye,” he sings, and the “mere saahib” here feels like a close cousin to the “mere mehboob” of other songs.

And this makes an odd kind of sense. In popular literature, good guys and their nemeses share a mutual dependence – a Batman needs a Joker to define or complete him – and this has also been the case in the archetypes used by mainstream Hindi films. So why can’t a lavish song sequence – one of our cinema’s distinguishing features – be used to underline the bond between hero and villain? Why not let them waltz together for a while, until the ticking time-bomb – or in this case, the golden owl – explodes?
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P.S. One might note that Amjad Khan in this scene seems just as reluctant to be “wooed” as most of the heroines in those "thrill of the chase" songs of the time were.

P.P.S. Here is the sequence, minus an important bit at the end where the owl explodes:

Revisiting J P Dutta’s Hathyar (and reflections on the bad old 1980s)

[Did a shorter version of this essay for the new issue of The Indian Quarterly]

Those of us whose cinematic consciousness was shaped in the 1980s tend to agree that, nostalgia aside, these were poor times for mainstream Hindi cinema. Actors did multiple shifts a day, zombie-walking through barely scripted potboilers (with the end results rarely indicating that they had succeeded in telling one character from the next, or that the films had expected them to). Production design was non-existent, comedy tracks appalling, and there were those ghastly closing shots where an assembly of surviving good guys stood together in a huddle beaming at the camera in the “mahurat” pose (after a few seconds of dutiful glycerine-shedding because one of their number had just sacrificed his life to save the day). Residue from the Angry Young Man films of the 1970s included the very worst of Amitabh Bachchan (from Pukar and Mahaan through Toofan and Jaadugar). In the immediate pre-liberalisation, pre-multiplex era, “Bollywood” operated in its own vacuum.

Today the DVD culture and the work done by NFDC has made it possible to see good, restored prints of the “parallel” cinema of the time, the best work of Benegal, Nihalani, Mishra and others. And so, for those of us of a certain age who like to think we take cinema seriously, it seems natural to focus our energies on revisiting those movies (which we were too young to appreciate when they came out) rather than waste time and effort trying to locate the few scattered gems that may have come out of the mainstream.

As I have written before on this blog, the first two years of the 1990s were when I became distanced from Hindi films (though a part of me loved the dhishum-dhishum and the familiar, reassuring structures) and sought nourishment elsewhere. I hadn’t read much film theory, had no concept yet of auteurs – like most young viewers, I mostly didn’t even think of films in terms of their directors. Yet, even at age 13, turning nastik and renouncing the mandir of Hindi movies, I knew that some of these films had a special energy in them and gave the impression that actual thought was taking place at the level of camerawork, scripting or performance; that an individual sensibility lay behind the whole. Mukul Anand was one such director (while Hum was the only film of his I whole-heartedly liked, there were stand-up-and-take-notice moments in nearly all his work, even in this tiresome thing called Khoon ka Karz). Another such director was J P Dutta, and one of my clearest memories from the summer of 1989 was watching Dutta’s Hathyar and sensing, without being able to articulate it, that I was seeing something more interesting than the regular action multi-starrer. Looking at tacky posters of Hathyar, with red-eyed Dharmendra and droopy-eyed Sanjay Dutt flaring nostrils and brandishing guns, you wouldn’t think it was any different from a dozen other khoon-aur-badlaa films that these actors were doing around the same time, but that would be an injustice to this layered work about the seductiveness of violence.

This month marks 25 years since the film’s commercial release. Though it has a tiny cult following among knowledgeable buffs, it deserves to be better known; along with the director’s earlier Ghulami, it is the high point of an erratic but important career. Dutta’s work has always been prone to flab and overstatement – something that is most obvious in the star-studded Kshatriya and LOC Kargil – but these 1980s films nicely balanced the large canvas with the intimate moment. They used sprawling vistas in ways that did justice to the conceit of the 70 mm screen, while inhabiting these vistas with well-defined characters who had interiority. Looked at from a distance, they can seem like standard uber-macho sagas, but on closer examination they turn out to be thoughtful critiques of violence and how that violence is related to a feudal, patriarchal tradition and passed down until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are strong roles for women as tempering influences or – in some cases – as facilitators for the more unsavoury aspects of tradition. And even while operating within the hyper-dramatic idiom of the commercial Hindi film, they successfully incorporated elements from outside that world. Ghulami has Mithun Chakraborty as a wisecracking action hero (whose trademark line “koi shaq?” was guaranteed to draw front-bench whistles) but also has a side-track featuring parallel-cinema stars Smita Patil and Naseeruddin Shah as husband and wife who weigh mutual respect against ideological differences. And in Hathyar, the voice of conscience is played by someone who usually worked in a very different corner of the mainstream – Rishi Kapoor, whose presence here, in one of his best roles of the time, is a tip-off that this won’t be your regular action film.**

Memory can play tricks on us when it comes to old movies, but the lullaby that bookends Hathyar’s narrative turned out to be exactly as I remembered it when I saw the film again recently. In the opening shot a little boy, initially seen in silhouette, sits on a rocking horse as his thakur father sings to him about a prince who roams the world on a flying steed and returns home when he is tired. (“Ek raja ke bête ko lekar / Udne waala ghoda…”) They are interrupted by an uncle – a more militant member of the thakur’s clan – who gives the child a toy gun, against the father’s protests. Our Avinash won’t grow up to be a coward, the chacha says pointedly. “Aaj kal sharaafat ko hee kaayarta kehte hain,” (“These days decency is mistaken for cowardice”) the father sighs, trying to take the gun away from his boy, but the child is already enthralled, he won’t let go – “Nahin, hum kheleinge” are his chilling words – and the framing of the shot (which dissolves into the adult Avinash’s arms holding a real rifle) makes it seem like the weapon is an extension of his hand. The circle begun by these scenes will be completed in the film's final sequence, set in a toy shop where Avinash realises that running his blood-smeared palms over a plastic globe is the closest he will come to having the world in his hands or flying to exotic lands on a magic horse.

In the casting of Sanjay Dutt as a gun-obsessed young man who becomes a pawn in games played by larger forces, Hathyar weirdly pre-echoes real-world events. In cinematic terms though, it is a forerunner to Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and other sleek, realistic city-crime films that would herald the multiplex era. Dutta’s early work was mostly set in villages and expanses of sunbaked desert where feudalism ran rampant and the line between rebel and daku, victim and aggressor, was erased. (Anyone who had the pleasure of watching Ghulami on a big screen – I have a dim childhood memory of this, though I may have nodded off during the Naseer-Smita scenes – will know how sweeping his visual sense was and how well he used these majestic settings.) But Hathyar was, literally, different terrain for him. Arriving in Bombay to escape village feuds, Avinash’s father is immediately confronted by violence and apathy of a different sort, though the hoodlums here are dressed in jeans and sneakers. “You said we’d move to the city to get away from the jungles, to live with civilised people,” Avinash’s mother (Asha Parekh in a good latter-day role) sarcastically tells her husband, “Well, here we are. Go and hug the cultured people you were so eager to meet.”

The ugly face of the metropolis is omnipresent – they see someone who has fallen off a train and died, and people being casual and indifferent about the tragedy – but new friendships and ties are formed too, and the city's “good” side seems to converge in the personality of one man, their principled and sensitive neighbour Sami bhai (Kapoor). Meanwhile, Avinash gets seduced by the Bombay underworld. This is partly circumstantial, but it could be a natural arc of his personality and upbringing: when we first saw him as an adult, back in the village, he was more interested in the deer at the end of his rifle than in his girlfriend Suman’s talk of romance and marriage; he dashed off while she was mid-sentence, in a scene that played like a variant on a famous episode from the Ramayana (and in this age of epic retellings and reexaminations, it might briefly make you wonder: was Rama’s pursuit of the deer Maricha driven as much by primal blood-lust as by the desire to fulfill his wife’s wish?).

In fact, one possible weakness of Hathyar is that it sometimes appears to blur two separate issues. The first involves the choices that face an unprivileged boy struggling to make ends meet and to support his mother in a predatory world. The second is his own apparent love of violence for its own sake, and the hint that he can prioritise it above his close relationships. At times the film seems undecided about whether to treat Avinash as an amoral sociopath with aggression running in his veins or as a pawn of fate, a cinematic descendant of Deewaar’s angry young man Vijay. But perhaps the two things aren’t mutually exclusive - perhaps what is being suggested is that if Avinash’s background and upbringing hadn’t been so rooted in casual bloodshed, it might have been easier for him to make the “right” choices later in life.

Hathyar doesn’t have the cool, organic sophistication of the gangster films that would come a few years later, such as RGV’s work, but there is an emotional directness in its key moments, and some very striking images, such as a shot of two people huddled together between trains passing on adjacent tracks shortly after the discovery of a dead body. Effective use is made of a minatory background score, and the scene that introduces the adult Avinash has the deliberate texture of gun porn, with loving close-ups of a shiny rifle being assembled, a hand stroking it, loading bullets, cocking it, taking aim. And watching such scenes, an old question in popular-film studies rears its head: is it possible for a powerful visual medium like cinema to meaningfully critique something even as it depicts it? If a film sets out to be a thoughtful commentary on violence but also contains well-executed action sequences – or soulful music to underline the protagonist’s personal dilemmas – does it compromise itself by making the violence “thrilling”?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Personally I don’t believe an objective distinction can always be made between films that are gratuitous/exploitative and films that are well-intentioned: directors and writers bring diverse sensibilities and approaches to the same material, and much depends on interpretation as well as on a viewer’s ability to distinguish between something that might temporarily be stimulating when viewed on a screen while being abhorrent or condemnable in the real world. But this aside, anyone watching Hathyar should be able to see that it accommodates a wide range of attitudes to violence and pacifism, cynicism and idealism.

Dutta’s best work (I’m thinking mainly of Ghulami and Hathyar – and perhaps Yateem, which I don’t remember all that well) sometimes reminds me of the cinema of Otto Preminger, in that it deals with intimate human stories within very large, multi-character frames (so large, in fact, that the films are constantly in danger of being dismissed as bloated epics by a viewer who hasn’t attentively watched them). Like Preminger’s Advise and Consent (a remarkably mature, multi-dimensional political film), Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder, these films present diverse points of view and life experiences without passing sweeping judgements – and yet without getting so fatalistic that they completely abjure notions of right and wrong.
 
In Hathyar, a poetic contrast is made between Avinash’s father putting his life into his toy statues, making something new and creative out of mud, and his son who kills people and watches their bodies fall in the mud. But lines are not clearly defined. There is the implication that the Gandhi-like men of integrity in this cut-throat world can “live by their principles” partly because someone less idealistic, more open to compromise, is looking out for them. And yet the film does this without glamorising those who chose the path of crime. All this adds up to a level of complexity that would point the way ahead to the more thoughtful, grounded screenwriting of the indie film culture.

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** One of Kapoor’s finest moments in the film – a triad of wordless gestures that take up just a few seconds – is a late scene where his character Sami bhai is beaten up by Avinash. Having offered no resistance, the dazed Sami bhai is now clutching a pole, out of breath. When he sees that Avinash is done and is about to walk away, he first holds his hands out in a “what, you’re finished?” gesture, then indicates “come, hit me some more, I’m still standing” and finally, as Avinash makes no move back, Sami – though still visibly shaken and reeling in a way that not many beaten-up leading men of the time seemed to be – waves his hands in an almost dismissive gesture, as if to say "This was the extent of your bravado? You have a lot to learn about real courage."

All aboard the Matinee Express (Gaadi bula rahi hai)

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

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

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

(Illustration by SOMESH KUMAR)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pros and cons of being a movie-star with very little ego

After watching the trailer for Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 – the Deol family film, which releases this week – I headed YouTube-wards to watch the song sequence from which the film gets its name: “Main Jat Yamla Pagla Deewana” from the 1975 film Pratigya. As a friend, a fellow Dharmendra fan, noted during a recent conversation, this is one of the most exuberant Hindi-movie scenes ever. “All the director had to do was put a liquor bottle in paaji’s hand, give him a large open space to goof around in, along with a jeep and a few other props, and tell him to invent whatever dance moves - or things that resembled dance moves - he felt comfortable doing. And the result was magic.”

Perhaps it can also be seen as an outtake from Dharmendra’s superb, boisterous performance as Veeru in Sholay, made a few months earlier. But watching the song, I was also reminded that for most of his lengthy career, Dharmendra had a remarkably unselfconscious screen presence. In much of his best work (and some of his worst work, but we’ll come to that), you get the sense of a man surprisingly bereft of ego; there is little trace of the self-absorption that has always been a prime quality of our leading men.

For decades, Hindi-movie heroes of all stripes have carefully nurtured their screen images. The personas might vary from Dev Anand’s upbeat urbaneness to Dilip Kumar’s studied bouts with tragedy, but most of them (even the ones we think of as “understated”) come with tics suggesting that the star-actor knows exactly what effect he is having on the audience, and is determined to milk it. Hence Raj Kapoor’s martyred smiles as his awara or Joker deals with life’s injustices, or Rajesh Khanna’s romantic head-bobbing, or the young Manoj Kumar’s painfully evident knowledge that his handsomeness was too much for any Eastman Color processor to bear, hence his face had to be in side-profile or covered by his hand.

Dharmendra had mannerisms too, of course, but one rarely feels that he had pre-conceptions about what he should be doing on screen – from the beginning of his career, he seemed willing to do almost anything he was asked, to subjugate himself to the film. And this willingness to be putty in someone else's hands is a double-edged sword for a movie star. Working under such men as Bimal Roy, Chetan Anand and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the 1960s, it could mean small but powerful character parts in movies of integrity. In slight but inoffensive thrillers like Saazish, it might entail "fighting and climbing rope ladders in his chaddies" (as Memsaab Story puts it in this post). But in the context of the direction his career took in the bad, bad 1980s (the “kuttay-kameenay” years), it became lack of discernment in role choices, complete disregard for personal dignity and sleep-walking his way through assembly-line multi-starrers with endless variations on the izzat and badlaa themes.

In the mid-1980s, I remember Rishi Kapoor getting praise for his self-effacement in playing secondary roles in woman-centric films like Prem Rog and Tawaif. Dharmendra was in a similar mould two decades earlier, a solid foot-soldier to strong heroines such as Nutan, Meena Kumari and Sharmila Tagore in such films as Bandini, Majhli Didi, Anupama (or even a tiny but important cameo in the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi). During this time, he was among our most likable romantic leads and even, depending on the film, something of a sex symbol. He then developed into a marvelous physical comedian and a convincing action hero (both qualities converging in the train-attack sequence in Sholay), but what worked so well in some of the early films soon made way for unthinking repetition. Well into his sixties, he continued doing C-grade action films made specifically for audiences outside the urban centres. (Just the other day, I saw him in this thing called Sultaan on TV, looking old and haggard but mechanically participating in badly choreographed fight scenes.)

It is a pity that such films may have marred the legacy of this underappreciated performer, but it is never too late for redemption. With the Yamla Pagla Deewana films containing many allusions to dialogues and scenes from his old movies, there are signs that Dharmendra may belatedly have developed a sense of self-importance, a meta-sense of his own filmic past. The man who so bashfully played "himself" in Guddi – as a star who is, aw-shucks, just a regular guy – may now, at age 78, be facing up to his legacy. And regardless of the quality of the YPD ego-projects, it is a legacy that deserves to be rediscovered.

[An earlier post on Dharmendra here]

50 shades of Ray (and other glimpses of a cinematic heritage)

[An essay I did for the Delhi Art Gallery’s splendidly produced catalogue to accompany the Nemai Ghosh photographic exhibition]

Writing about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee – a post-apocalyptic story made up almost entirely of still pictures – the critic David Thomson observed that this may be our perfect commentary on "the special way in which photographic images work with time to make the explosive equation of moving film”. In the film’s most spellbinding scene, lasting only a few seconds, the pictures on the screen “move” – the way they do in most regular movies – and a woman, hitherto seen only in photographs, comes alive before us. The result is a startling contrast between still images and images that, in Thomson's phrase, “work with time” – especially apt to a story that is about both time travel and the haunting, illusory nature of memory.

Motion pictures are, of course, a series of photos run together so fast that we can discover a narrative in them. And yet, when we think of our favourite movie scenes, we often think of specific shots frozen in time – shots that might be “unreliable” because they are idealised constructs of our brain, but which can capture something truthful and essential about a film. Similarly, a good photograph of a movie scene (or of a scene being filmed) can enshrine a moment for all time. It can reveal a good deal about what that movie means to its culture and about the circumstances in which it was made. At times it might even enable us to “play” a slightly different version of the scene in our head.

In the early days of filmmaking, the photographer loitering about the set was not always a welcome presence – actors were not usually happy about having to recreate a scene after the shot had already been taken. (The invention of the sound blimp, which allowed the still camera to do its work silently, placated many nerves.) But today, everyone agrees about the vital role played by a good still photographer, and Nemai Ghosh has been among the most dedicated and scrupulous of them all. His output would have been admirable in any place and time, but it acquires a special resonance in the context of a country that has never cared enough about its cinematic legacy. The story of preservation in Indian cinema has been a depressing one involving countless miles of deteriorating or lost film stock and an astonishing lack of written or pictorial records, even when it comes to major films. But Ghosh’s photographs are a wide-ranging documentation of movie memories, with a special focus on the work of India’s most widely celebrated filmmaker.

His association with Satyajit Ray – a life-changing one, by his own account – began during the shooting of Ray’s 1968 fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, which is among the best-loved of all Indian films. A chord was struck very early on. In his worshipful book Manik-Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh recalls the frisson of excitement he felt when the photographs he had taken were first presented to Ray, and when the great man looked up and said “You have done it exactly the way I would have, man, you have got the same angles!” Thus began a collaboration that lasted nearly a quarter-century (towards the end of which period Ray would write that Ghosh had been for him “a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen”).

A case can be made that the photographer missed out on some of the director’s best work. Not many film buffs would argue that Ray’s post-1968 output equalled the sum of what he had done up to that time: an oeuvre that included the three films of the Apu Trilogy as well as Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar, Teen Kanya, Kanchenjanga, Nayak and arguably his most formally accomplished film Charulata. The heart sinks a little to think of what Nemai Ghosh’s eye and camera might have achieved if he had had a chance to shoot the magnificently crumbling haveli of the zamindar in Jalsaghar; the large house in which Charulata feels restless and unfulfilled; the ghostly mosquito nets that are such a constant, haunting presence in Devi; the lovely vistas of Varanasi where Apu’s father Hari breathes his last in Aparajito; or even the nightmare scenes (the telephone, the skeletal hands and currency notes) of Nayak. Imagine some of the location shots he might have captured for Ray’s lovely short film “Samapti” (a segment of Teen Kanya), in which a city-educated lad (Soumitro Chatterjee) becomes gradually drawn to, and also a little repulsed by, a feral girl-child (played by the young Aparna Dasgupta, later Aparna Sen) in his village. Imagine the mists of Kanchenjanga as seen through Ghosh’s frame.

But such “what ifs” are exercises in pointlessness – and besides, the very fact that we can rue these things is a testament to the value of what actually did emerge from the collaboration. Consider the films Ray made between 1968 and 1991, and the range of themes, moods and time periods they cover. There is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and its much later sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe, two of our cinema’s towering achievements in whimsical, timeless fantasy. As companion pieces to these “light” movies, there are the detective Feluda films, Sonar Kella (based on one of Ray’s breeziest, most pleasing stories and shot on location in Rajasthan) and Joy Baba Felunath. On a grittier note, there is the Calcutta trilogy of Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya (and a key film that can be seen as a precursor to them, Aranyer Dinratri, about four men trying to escape city life by heading off into the forest for an excursion).  Then there is the period drama Shatranj ke Khiladi, Ray’s only feature-length Hindi film, based on Premchand’s story about nobles and Englishmen on the eve of the 1857 war of independence. The Government-produced Sadgati, a somewhat pedantic (by the director’s standards) examination of untouchability. Ghare Baire, an elegant adaptation of Tagore’s story about the personal and the political. And the comparatively lesser works of the final years – Ganashatru, Shakha Prashakha – which have their own merits but in which one also senses an artist stricken by poor health and beginning to wind down.

Every one of these films is represented – usually at incredible length – in Ghosh’s photography. “Incredible” because this was the pre-digital era and reels of actual film were being used up in the taking of these photographs; their number and variety tell us something about Ghosh’s personal dedication to his art, and about Ray’s capacity to inspire. And because many of the films are so iconic, these photographs provide us with some defining glimpses of our cinematic heritage. Through them, we get a tantalising picture: Ray as observer and chronicler of the many aspects of a culture, and Ghosh with his camera, observing the observer.

As the eye turns greedily from one picture to the next, a host of memories and associations come alive. Here is the filming of Ashani Sanket with the girl bathing in the river, an instant reminder of the haunting opening sequence of that movie with the fighter planes – “as beautiful as a flock of cranes” – passing overhead. Here, from the same film, is Soumitro as the young Brahmin in the bullock-cart, his director looking urbane and dapper next to him – the shot is an amusing reminder that some of the earliest Western critics who saw Ray’s work made the mistake of assuming that he was from an indigent, uneducated background himself and that the Apu Trilogy, with a young village boy making his way in the world, was an autobiographical story!

Here, from Shatranj ke Khiladi, are two noblemen as wastrels, looking on indolently as “interesting times” pass them by. An extraordinary photograph from this series has Wajid Ali Shah framed in a circle formed by the coiled tubes of a hookah; the image is a beautiful representation of a weak ruler trapped by history, and Amjad Khan – one of our most photogenic actors ever – is as tragically imperious here as he was terrifyingly imperious in his most famous role as Sholay’s Gabbar Singh.

Far removed in space and time from 1857 Lucknow, the great Bharat Natyam exponent Bala Saraswati (about whom Ray made a documentary, Bala) practises her art on a beach. And here is a more famous cinematic dance – precious shots of the staging of the extraordinary ghost-dance sequence from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, with the bright white background contrasting with sharp dark costumes for an otherworldly effect. These stills should send a frisson of excitement through anyone who recalls the atmospheric sequence, as should the candid photos of the film’s unforgettable old magician Barfi (imagine a goofier version of Tolkien’s Saruman, high on mishti doi) on the set.

Here too is a feel for real places: the protagonist of Pratidwandi captured against the background of his bustling – often impersonal – city. And vistas from Sikkim, the subject of Ray’s long-censored 1971 documentary. “We traversed the entire length and breadth of Sikkim, shooting at various places,” Ghosh noted in his book, “From schools to slums to palaces – nothing was left uncaptured on camera.”

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“Humanist” is a word often used – to the point of cliché – to describe Ray’s work; it usually denotes that there are few bad people in his films, that ill-fortune flows not from the actions of a villainous “type” but from circumstances acting alongside the whims of personality. But the word is also a reminder of the director’s interest in the possibilities of the human face. He was an illustrator long before he became a filmmaker, and his drawings and paintings show an intuitive understanding of people’s behaviours, gestures and inner states – some of which Ghosh must have picked up over the years. Even in Ray movies that have stylistic flourishes, the first images one usually thinks of are faces in a variety of moods. The dreamy-eyed inwardness of the young Siddhartha in Pratidwandi; the look of unabashed delight on Goopy’s face when he realises that the king of ghosts really has given him the boon of a magical voice; Soumitro’s expressive visage in a range of contexts, from period rural drama to urbane Feluda adventure; Amjad Khan’s sensuous, melancholy gaze as Wajid Ali Shah contemplates oblivion. And the women: the impish, knowing smiles of Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Dinratri and Seemabaddha; Shabana Azmi as the sullen wife in Shatranj ke Khiladi; the young Simi Garewal in one of her most atypical roles, as an inebriated tribal girl who catches the eye of a wanderer from the city.

Ghosh catches all these moods and countless others, but a striking aspect of his photos is how rarely they resemble the conventional ideal of a promotional still – something that has a long tradition in mainstream cinema in the West, with attempts being made to encapsulate the basic idea of a scene in one image and actors striking representative poses for the cameraman’s benefit. Much of Ghosh’s work, to the contrary, is characterised by the intimacy that can only occur when the still photographer has become an essential part of the unit – an unseen presence, silently observing and recording, with his subjects barely even conscious of his presence. There is an artlessness in these compositions that makes them an enormously effective record of the inner workings of an art form. (The exceptions are usually tied to the subject matter: so grand is the mise-en-scene of Shatranj ke Khiladi, for example, that many stills from that film inevitably look posed and self-consciously soaked in meaning.)

If Ghosh’s admiration for Ray, the tall (in every sense) Renaissance Man, can be seen on each page of Manik-Da, it is also clearly visible in his photos of the director. You can see it in the way Ray becomes the central, magnetic presence in nearly every frame, even when flanked by people like Akira Kurosawa and Indira Gandhi. You can see it in how the Gallic actor Gerard Depardieu – one of the most striking film personalities of his generation – seems almost to be dwarfed by Ray on the sets of Ganashatru. Without ever coming across as a minatory figure, Ray looms over actors and crew, a breathing redefinition of the term “larger than life”. We often see him behind the camera – though he did detailed storyboards for most of his films, he was also a very hands-on director on the actual set (not for him the Hitchcockian dictum “I never need to look into a camera”). An amusing photograph shows Soumitro and his director seated on adjacent sofas, making a “V” sign simultaneously though neither is looking at the other; a suggestion of the near-telepathic relationship that develops through long artistic collaboration?

Then there is Ray standing near a busy street, pipe in mouth, an expression of intense concentration on his face, while his beloved city’s trams pass in the background. Here he is taking his own photos of the women and children of Sikkim; with two other shining lights of world cinema, Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni, at the Taj Mahal; sitting on a ledge along a slope from a Rajasthani fort, eating lunch with the crew of Sonar Kella.

Different moods coalesce in many of these pictures. He looks affectionate but also a little distracted as a child actor throws his arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Standing on set, a microphone in hand, he seems benevolent and impatient at the same time, a kindly uncle set to turn into a martinet if his crew keeps him waiting for much longer. He hunches in the bonnet of an Ambassador car with his camera equipment and he stands pensively beneath a chandelier during a shoot (and manages to look equally dignified in both situations). Here is the man of letters, the product of 200 years of Bengali high culture, reading on the set while perched delicately on a makeshift bench; and there is the man of the world, playing blackjack in a casino during a break in the shooting of Hirak Rajar Deshe.

And everywhere, there is evidence of the multi-tasking auteur keeping a sharp eye on every element of the production process: looking down in deep concentration as he listens to his music performers; adding the finishing touches to an actor’s facial makeup. One lovely shot has Ray reading with two pairs of violins in perfect symmetry next to him; like the awed people who had the privilege of working for him or observing him at work, the instruments seem almost to be standing at attention, awaiting further developments.

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Viewing these images, one gleans the full meaning of Ghosh’s words “My experiences were but small pebbles that I picked up from the shores of a mighty ocean called Satyajit Ray.” Yet these words might also make one wonder: was the photographer a one-man Boswell, finding true creative inspiration only when touched by his idol’s presence? On the evidence we have, the answer is no. Many of the other film-related photographs he took – from Bengali and Hindi cinema – are just as stirring, in a number of ways.

They span both the mainstream and the non-mainstream, frequently giving us insight into what those categories really mean and whether they should be placed in neat opposition as they so often are. Thus, on the one hand, there are stills from such films as Gautam Ghose’s serious-minded Paar, about a villager trying to cross a river in spate with his pregnant wife and a herd of pigs. (That plot, along with the fact that the leads are Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah – who won a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for this role – tells you everything you need to know about what sort of film it is.) But at the other end of the spectrum, there is Amitabh Bachchan in one of his most unabashedly commercial roles, as “John Jani Janardhan” in Manmohan Desai’s extravagant Naseeb, caught in a climactic song sequence with the glamorous Hema Malini. And somewhere between these extremes is an international production casting a loving gaze at Indian poverty more than 15 years before Slumdog Millionaire: Roland Jaffe’s City of Joy with Patrick Swayze and Om Puri. Other highlights from this series include stills from the Rekha-starrer Utsav, directed by Girish Karnad, the very young Anil Kapoor with an outlandishly swank car in a film you probably haven’t heard of, M S Sathyu’s Kahan Kahan se Guzar Gaya, and rare pictures of a corpulent, middle-aged Shashi Kapoor as Feluda in Sandip Ray’s TV series – a sad reminder, perhaps, of the compromises required in making a commercial project.

It is the juxtapositions and contrasts that make these photographs so interesting. How tempting it is, for example, to set the Bachchan of Naseeb against the Bachchan of nearly a decade earlier – a 1973 photograph of Amitabh with Jaya Bhaduri, before they were married and when she was the bigger star: a time before superstardom and its attendant threats, before the cares of domesticity, children and political pressures. The photograph makes it possible to postulate an alternate future for the superstar-in-waiting – a future where this lanky, awkward-looking young man made a brief career playing intense second leads (as he once really did in films like Parwana and Gehri Chaal), and eventually faded away. In this other universe, Bachchan might not even have looked out of place as the young marketing manager in Ray’s Seemabaddha!

Photographs can confirm the dominant images we carry in our minds, but the best of them also erase labels by capturing people in unusual moods or contexts. Consider the shot of a badminton match involving that most macho of north Indian actors, Dharmendra, with that most coquettish of Bengali actresses, Moushumi Chatterjee. The image – which one feels tempted to label “Di and Paaji” – is from the set of a film titled Dawedaar, so obscure that despite being made in 1982 and having a high-profile cast, there is practically no reference to it online. By this time Dharmendra was well past his sell-by date and mostly doing macho roles in assembly-line films, but looking at this picture one is reminded of the reticent bhadralok characters he played in such 1960s films as Anupama and Bandini (made by those other prominent Bengali directors, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy).

Here and elsewhere, Ghosh’s photographs of movie stars are testaments to wide-ranging careers and other possibilities for the history of Indian cinema. There is the heady glamour of commercial cinema, but there are also unobtrusive, stripped-down contexts. Here is Shatrughan Sinha, wearing sunglasses and outfitted in the style of the flamboyant Hindi-movie hero of the early 1980s, but he is flanked by – of all people – Ray and Soumitro, and one almost fancies that the director is giving him a patronising look, as if to bring him down to earth. To view Utpal Dutt as the king in Hirak Rajar Deshe is to see an artiste evincing a very different personality from that of the comical-old-man roles he was playing in Hindi cinema at exactly the same time.
 
For the eclectic movie-buff, the experience of viewing these images is a strongly affecting one: the divides between different “types” of cinema (commercial and art, loud and unobtrusive) begin to fall away and one sees these films, their directors and actors as part of a single continuum – with subtle shifts along the line coming to define entire careers and influencing entire generations of movie-watchers. And Ghosh was around to capture so much of this. In much the same way that Ray’s cinema illuminated so many worlds (both internal and external), these photographs give us a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, complex view of Indian cinema and its many personalities.

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Here are two photos of the catalogue. (That “SR” in the second image represents Ray’s scrawl of approval on a series of photos.) 

[An earlier post on the Nemai Ghosh exhibition - with more photos - is here]