Sublime, meet surreal - thoughts on Chalti ka Naam Gaadi

A still from the classic comedy Chalti ka Naam Gaadi, wherein a signboard in the motor-repair shop asks the manic Kishore Kumar to “play safe”:

When I first saw that ad in the background of another shot, I thought it was for fuel, and this seemed inappropriate – surely this man, of all people, needs no external source of energy. But then I realised it was for brake fluid, which made sense – it’s as if the very set is beseeching him to slow down. Many a doughtier wall (not to mention writer, director or co-performer) must have made similar requests over Kishore Kumar’s career, to no avail.

In an essay about the “ugliness” of the male actor in Hindi cinema, and how this reflects life, Mukul Kesavan observed, “The first thing that strikes the eye gazing upon India is that the men can be nearly as ugly as sin […] Indian heroes look the way they do because desperate male audiences pay money to watch men like themselves succeed with beautiful women […] Hindi cinema is unfairly dismissed as escapism: it is, in fact, a great reality machine designed to remind Indian men of their good fortune and to reconcile Indian women to their fate.”

The piece is tongue in cheek, but even where it contains patches of real social observation, I don’t think you can apply it to one of the most unusual romantic pairings in Hindi-movie history: Madhubala and Kishore Kumar. Here’s the rub: in so many of the scenes these two did together, even with her ethereal presence on the screen, it is difficult to take your eyes off him. The clichéd way of describing them would be “the sublime and the ridiculous”, but it’s really more like “sublime and sublimer”.

To clarify, I don’t think Kishore Kumar was bad-looking at all, though there may be a psychological component to this (from early childhood, I have associated the man with so many wonderful things – initially as a singer, later as an actor – that my reptile brain would probably raise its drawbridge against the very suggestion that he was “ugly”). But one may safely concede he wasn’t anywhere near as beautiful as Madhubala. Someone who knew nothing about the two of them might, if they saw a still photo of them together, think of court jesters and fairy princesses, if not gargoyles and damsels.

It’s when that still photo resolves itself into the moving image that one discovers that the jester unbound is really the centre of the frame, while Madhubala is more often than not happy to be the gorgeous foil. And a good example of this is in the Chalti ka Naam Gaadi song “Main Sitaron ka Tarana” (a.k.a. “Paanch Rupaiya Baarah Aana”). The scene is built on a brilliant juxtaposition: the beautiful woman who poses like a classical statue worthy of adoration, a Galatea waiting for her Pygmalion; and the crackpot who is concerned with the practical business of getting the money she owes him. First Renu (Madhubala) glides about the room singing the self-exalting lines “Main sitaaron ka taraana, main bahaaron ka fasaana / leke ik angdaai mujhpe daal nazar bann jaa deewaana” and then Manmohan (KK) struts into the frame like a cockerel, giggling dementedly like Mickey Rooney’s Puck in the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Just watch:




Within the context of the film, this fantasy sequence is one of the breeziest depictions in 1950s cinema of the rich-girl-poor-boy theme, with its contrast between the privileged heroine who can afford to forget her purse in a garage and the hard-working mechanic who must get his mazdoori no matter what. Also note that it is presented as Manmohan’s dream as he lies sleeping in the back of Renu’s car: there is a subconscious recognition that she is an attractive woman, but at this early stage he is heavily conditioned by fear of his stern elder brother and the need to get his 92 annas. This will extend into their relationship later, where she is the desirous one taking the initiative, making romantic overtures, while he doesn’t quite articulate to himself what is going on between them.

I was surprised at how well Chalti ka Naam Gaadi held up after all these years, despite the fact that the film has an almost obligatory “serious track” about big brother Brij Mohan (Ashok Kumar) and his tragic thwarted romance – and such tracks can be the kiss of death for a lunatic comedy. But part of what makes that work is that the eldest of the Ganguly brothers plays his role dead straight right from the beginning. 
 
“Ashok Kumar was a charming man, but he had the physical presence of a cupboard wearing a dressing gown,” Kesavan writes elsewhere in that same essay. It’s a funny line, but not one I can agree with: AK was often miscast or made poor choices, especially from the late 1950s onward, but he was one of the giants of our cinema and I think he had wonderful presence in his better roles. Chalti ka Naam Gaadi may contain one of his most underappreciated performances (something that often happens when an actor associated with dramas or social-message films appears in an “inconsequential” comedy). He offsets the clowning about of his younger brothers, playing the straight man without ever becoming a foil (he is too canny and too much in control for that – that role falls to middle brother Anoop) and this adds layers to the chemistry between the siblings. 

I love little touches such as the one where Brij, apologising to Renu late in the film, says “Main boxer hoon, mera dimaag bhi boxer…” and then trails off. There are other “dramatic” moments like this that stop just short of becoming maudlin or dragging the film down, simply because the acting makes the characters believable irrespective of whether they are being funny or serious (or both). And of course, because Kishore Kumar is such a force of nature in nearly every scene he is in that some “brake fluid” is always welcome.

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 bekaar in the big city: on Bimal Roy’s Naukri

Parts of Bimal Roy’s 1954 film Naukri reminded me of two great scenes from films made in the silent era’s last days: the opening sequence of King Vidor’s The Crowd, with people and vehicles thronging the streets of New York and the rapt camera gliding up the side of a skyscraper, then moving in to reveal countless worker ants at their desks (see video below); and the equally kinetic shot in F W Murnau’s Sunrise where two town-dwellers, the Man and the Wife, get their first view of the approaching city through the windows of their tram. The couple, sullen, distrustful and occupying separate spaces in the vehicle (understandable enough given that one of them has recently plotted to murder the other!), must now huddle together as they dodge traffic and find walking space on the footpaths: this new place is so overwhelming that it unites them.




As Naukri’s title credits end, the camera cranes up to gawk at a tall building, presumably with offices and employment opportunities in it – an apt image for a film about the big city as a place of opportunity and terror. In fact, the protagonist Ratan (Kishore Kumar) will make two long journeys over the course of the story: first from his village to Calcutta, and later to the much more distant Bombay, where he will have to contend with people speaking to him in unfamiliar tongues (Marathi, Parsi). His horizons broaden, but he also becomes more isolated (though the film has a deus ex machina in reserve for him).

Naukri contains many things we now think of as clichés of a cinematic past (whether they were clichés in 1954 is another question): the beloved sister suffering from TB, the widowed mother, the sanguine young man convinced that he will soon get a good job (he is BA Pass with distinction, after all) and overturn his family’s fortunes, the arrival of a letter bearing exam results, the arduous journey that begins with tearful farewells and a bullock-cart ride to the railway station. But these were understandable concerns of the “social” cinema of the post-Independence decade, when so many films were about young people from modest backgrounds entering a new world and taking the tide at its flood, or becoming corrupted or cynical.

Ratan’s fantasy (expressed in the film’s first song “Chhota sa Ghar Hoga”) of having a small house under the clouds, with his sister sitting on a silver chair and his mother on a golden throne, turns out to be nearly as unworkable as little Sujata’s dream – in one of Roy’s best films – of visiting a magical kingdom. Arriving in Calcutta, he is disappointed because the job he thought was his has gone to someone else. Things are far from dire at this point – more chances will presumably come along soon, and meanwhile he is boarding in a small hotel with a genial group of other young men – and yet, for all his optimism, we are warned: past the twilight hour, the “Bekaari block” he is living in resembles a perdition where men who have been unemployed for months play cards, bicker, gossip, vent frustrations late into the night. One of them, clearly a terrible singer, does his riyaaz, and though the scene can be viewed in comic terms it has a dark side – the man is like a ghoul shrieking into the void.

I was intrigued by the way Naukri moved between documentary-like neo-realism and the more dramatic tropes of mainstream storytelling: this is very much a scripted, incident-driven story (with some nice use of songs - I especially like this one, with the young Iftekhar singing "Main collector na banu aur na banunga officer...apna babu hi bana lo mukhe, bekaar hoon main"), but there is also plenty of location shooting, including shots of Kishore Kumar clinging to crowded buses and negotiating the madness of south Bombay during rush hour – scenes that have a slice-of-life quality to them. For all these points of interest though, this is a patchy film. It's easy to engage with at a basic level: that is more or less assured by Kumar’s likeable presence in nearly every scene, and the fluid storytelling abilities of Roy and his talented crew (Nabendu Ghosh, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen among them). But I was often unsure what mood it was reaching for. 

Ratan is determinedly cheery to begin with (his philosophy of life is that he must keep smiling and hoping, because if he looks at his predicament too closely he might sink into permanent despair) – so much so that when a genuine tragedy occurs relatively early in the film, it is glossed over, to jarring effect. He recovers too quickly, gets back to his jovial ways and begins a romance with a girl (Sheila Ramani) in the “saamne waali khidki”. (A parallel is established between the young man’s search for “naukri” and “ladki”– it is clear that he needs a job if he is ever to become a householder, or even a responsible boyfriend.) But then, in film’s the final section, since a dramatic climax has to somehow be reached, misfortune atop misfortune piles up to the point where there seems no option other than a suicide attempt at the railway tracks.

This creates structural unevenness, and a related problem is that it requires the story to keep manufacturing hurdles for Ratan, which is sometimes done in ham-handed ways. At one point he writes a letter to his girlfriend, telling her he has to go to Bombay for a job, and foolishly attaches his appointment letter with it, without making a copy or even bothering to memorise or note down the company name and address. Of course, the letter falls into the hands of the girl’s irate father, who feeds it to the kitchen stove after giving it barely a glance. The intention here is to make us feel concerned about Ratan’s fate, but instead one feels like smacking him and saying “You idiot, what were you thinking?” (Given his pride about having passed with distinction, I was reminded of the Peter Medawar quote about the spread of secondary and tertiary education creating a population of people “who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”.) The situation also leads to an incongruous bit of slapstick comedy where Ratan has to work out what the long and convoluted name of the company is.

The stories that Bimal Roy used for his more reformist cinema lent themselves to a certain degree of didacticism anyway, but here a facile tone in some of the early scenes makes way for an excessively solemn one towards the end, and that mix didn’t really work for me. Other Roy films in a similar socially conscious vein – Sujata and Parakh, notably – do a better job of establishing a pitch and sticking with it. Naukri is still an engaging movie, but by the time we arrive at the solemn voiceover at the end, beseeching the viewer (apparently) to provide jobs to deserving young men, one can’t help feeling that Ratan’s misfortunes stem more from his own incompetence than from societal unfairness. I have read approving comments about Kishore Kumar playing a "serious role for once" in this film, compared to the "buffoons" he played elsewhere – but I think some of those intentionally comic characters would have handled certain situations more efficiently than poor Ratan does.

[Here's an earlier post about another film that combines documentary-like footage with dramatic storytelling, Jules Dassin's The Naked City]

Imitations of life

It took some hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined – and not just because Psycho is enormously dear to my heart, or because one likes to think that the world in which that film was made was necessarily a black-and-white world, or because I admire Stephen Rebello’s book on which this new movie is (very loosely) based. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades – not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.

A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base a judgement on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the Hitchcock role looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s – such as the quadruple chin and the studied downward curve of the lips – made me cringe a little (it isn't as blatant as the use of prosthetics to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt resemble Bruce Willis in Looper, but still). In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting of Hopkins (such a well-known actor, now almost as closely associated with the playing of diverse real-life figures as Charles Laughton was in an earlier time) in this part - one wonders if the motive was the creation of a lucrative casting coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.

In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played the title role in the biopic Chaplin, but - though Charles Chaplin was among the few movie personalities who was even more recognisable worldwide than Alfred Hitchcock - there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct association with. Which meant Downey Jr had some space to work out his own interpretation of the character, to not be shoehorned into familiar tics and mannerisms. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself” – he performed the same droll gestures (standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in the most deadpan manner) in the same starched three-piece suit that was presumably attached to his body when he emerged into the world, much like Karna’s kavacha. And this is the figure that Hopkins has been called upon to play. Saddled with such a character – someone who is a vital part of our recent pop-cultural mythology – even a fine actor can be reduced to a pawn.** (The real Hitchcock, who believed actors should be treated like cattle or chess pieces, may have enjoyed this.)

Watching Hopkins as Hitch – or Meryl Streep accumulating a bundle of carefully observed tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life figure, Margaret Thatcher – one sees signs of things to come. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence – and strong memories – of their real selves. And if these biopics are to be made as box office-friendly as possible, one can expect broad simplifications in scripts and shortcuts in portrayals.

A related component is that with important anniversaries looming around every corner, there will soon be no getting away from films about our cinematic past. Consider just the very near future: in 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind (75 years, in fact, of that cinematic annus mirabilis 1939), and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! What drama! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene – as compelling as anything in Gone with the Wind itself – where David Selznick first laid eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set, at a point when production was already well underway?) 

Two years after that, Citizen Kane will celebrate its diamond jubilee year, and so it will go. Critics often complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema – that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes films that are about his film-love – but it is entirely possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies. By that time mainstream filmmaking may be closed into a self-referential loop, with little room for anything external.

Yes, of course I’m being cheerfully alarmist. And yes, trailers can be misleading – it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a more shaded performance with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality, as opposed to caricature. But given that this is a commercial project meant for relatively painless consumption, I doubt it. I will watch the film, but with my fingers splayed over my face and violins shrieking in my head, much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960. In the age of meta-cinema, it is appropriate that a film about the making of a scary film should be... scary.

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** No wonder Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wanted to wait a while before taking on the daunting role of Kishore Kumar in a film. Who can blame him?

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

The Greatest Show on Earth - on all-inclusive, opportunistic Bollywood

When you’re reading the Introduction to an anthology, certain words can set off alarm bells. For instance, an editor’s claim that he wanted his collection to be “eclectic” is sometimes shorthand for “I didn’t want to spend much time on a careful selection process. Pretty much anything I found went in.” If you merely flip through the Contents pages of The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood – with 37 pieces divided under such headings as “The Stars”, “The Music and the Music-Makers” and “Ringside Views” – you might be tempted to level this charge at Jerry Pinto.

Once you get down to reading these excerpts, though, you're reminded that few people know the pulse of the true Hindi-movie enthusiast better than Pinto does; there’s little arguing with his claim that these pieces jointly reflect Bollywood’s “all-inclusive, opportunistic, outward-looking” identity. Were the subject of this book anything else, it would be difficult to imagine a reader who would be equally interested in two essays as tonally different as Susmita Dasgupta’s scholarly “The Birth of Tragedy” (in which Amitabh Bachchan’s career arc from rebellious anti-hero to symbol of order is discussed in terms of Dionysian and Apollonian values) and Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s shabbily written and edited trifle “Marrying Hema” (sample sentence: “This was the time when Dharmendra went out of his way to explain it to the industrywallahs, that people was reading more than they are expected to”). But a full-blooded lover of Hindi cinema can embrace both these pieces, and the many others that fall somewhere in between.

This assortment of previously published writings includes Kishore Kumar’s brilliantly surreal 1985 interview to Pritish Nandy (“I tried to dig a canal all around my bungalow so we could sail gondolas there...Why can’t I hang live crows on my wall?”) and R K Narayan’s almost equally surreal account of his experience as an irrelevant onlooker during the filming of his novel The Guide (“I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations”). Mukul Kesavan’s essay on the “Islamicate” roots of Bollywood (“Urdu didn’t simply give utterance to the narratives characteristic of Hindi cinema, it actually helped create them”) rubs shoulders with Naresh Fernandes’ poignant journalistic feature about a real-life Anthony Gonsalves and other Goan musicians who had an impact on Hindi-film music. Javed Akhtar discusses screenplay-writing in an engrossing interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, and in a short story by Salman Rushdie we meet a rickshaw-wallah with Bombay dreams. Khushwant Singh is mildly haughty about Bollywood stars while Bhisham Sahni describes his brother Balraj (today acclaimed as one of Hindi cinema’s first great actors) having to shake off his stiffness before the camera.

Most of the pieces mentioned above are very well written, but in other cases literary quality is beside the point. And on at least one occasion, banal writing is the point: the “Fiction” section includes a dreary excerpt from Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’s novelisation of Raj Kapoor’s film Bobby, which (going by Pinto’s note accompanying the piece) seems to have been included to demonstrate how flat such an endeavour can be compared to the actual experience of watching the movie. Reading the excerpt, I couldn't help recall Rishi Kapoor's expressive face register embarrassment, mild alarm and anticipation in turn during the birthday-party scene, and the words on the page seemed clunky and inadequate in comparison.

It’s natural to read such a collection in fragments rather than linearly, and this allows one to discover, in quick succession, essays that provide contrasting takes on the same person or incident. Thus Madhu Jain notes that “people forget Lata Mangeshkar was a sensual being and not just a disembodied, ethereal voice” (and that “she was the only woman to make Raj Kapoor dance to her tunes”), but Ashraf Aziz in “The Female Voice in Hindustani Film Songs” suggests that “Lata’s laundered voice appeals to the spirit rather than the senses – she infantilized the female voice”. And as if that weren't enough, Dada Kondke presents a pleasingly improbable view of the singer as Annie Oakley. (“Placing the gun on her shoulder and looking at the reflection in the mirror, she started drilling more holes into the tin can”.) But what the pieces reveal about their authors is often equally striking: note how a respected writer like Saadat Hasan Manto can display a bitchy and voyeuristic side when writing about a Bollywood figure (in this case Sitara Devi, portrayed as a sexual predator constantly sucking the life-blood out of the men who came under her spell).

Some of the excerpts are from high-profile publications such as Anupama Chopra’s Sholay book (the chapter that begins with the frisson-creating “Sholay flopped”), but there are also little treasures that you’d be hard-pressed to find in print these days. One of my favourite inclusions is from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of (and unabashed fanboy ode to) Meena Kumari, which suggests a rare form of intelligent yet personal writing on popular Hindi cinema that I had little idea existed at the time; it made me want to rush to a rendezvous with Mumbai’s raddiwallahs (which is where Pinto got the book from). I particularly enjoyed the way Mehta refers to the deceased actress as “my tragedienne” and “my heroine”. Anyone who has ever had similarly proprietary feelings about a Bollywood star or film will find The Greatest Show on Earth hard to resist.

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. An old post about Pinto's book on Helen is here]

Eena Meena Deeka, a patchwork on Hindi-film comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.