Ghosts of the old rich

[Never been too happy writing for “special” issues on short notice. It can be taxing to be told a day in advance that the paper is doing a “Billionaire’s Club” special this weekend, so could your column be on films about rich people – especially when I had already done this piece for the last such issue less than a year ago. But well, I complied. As long as one can complain a little afterwards]

The dominant image of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard – set during the Italian Risorgimento, when aristocrats began to be supplanted by the rising middle classes – is that of the old prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster in a super performance) wandering about his palace, contemplating the end of a world he once bestrode like a colossus. Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in a mansion, has even bleaker views of fading grandeur – a spider scuttling across a large portrait of royalty, a disused chandelier collecting cobwebs and dust. More recently, in Vikramaditya Motwane’s lush Lootera, set in the post-Independence years, another old zamindar tries to maintain his composure and dignity as the government reclaims treasures bequeathed to his ancestors by the East India Company 200 years earlier.

These are all gorgeous-looking films about once-rich people in the process of losing their privileges, being swept away in the face of a more egalitarian, less genteel world. In principle, the change depicted in these movies is a welcome one for anyone with liberal sensibilities – it symbolises the coming of equal opportunity, democracy, even soft socialism. One might ask then: how do these films succeed in evoking a quiet, melancholic sympathy for the fall of billionaires?

One answer is that human responses to such things are complex; regardless of one’s ideological position, it is possible to feel a small aesthetic pang about the withering away of grand havelis and the dispersing of valuables that seemed to belong together in a special treasure room. More important, these films are ultimately about people whom it is possible to relate to as individuals. The landlords and royals shown here may have benefitted from excessive privilege throughout their lives, but they also have admirable human qualities, such as a genuine love for music and the other arts, and we are privy to their finer emotions. And they were, after all, to the manor born. Having only ever known one way of life, they are now – at an advanced, vulnerable age – seeing that way of life slipping away. Even with the most meritocratic worldview, one can still feel for their private tragedies. Underlying this is the bitter pill of the knowledge that the beneficiaries of the new order – the people who deserve their place in the sun – can become just as corrupt and exploitative down the line; that change doesn’t mean a final victory of good over evil, and obscenely affluent people will always be around anyway.

Some films about the old rich and the nouveau riche uneasily circling each other are also doomed love stories, which adds to their human appeal – while reminding us that denizens of an old world can become like ghosts when the new world arrives. Lootera has a great shot of the disconsolate zamindar, shortly after he learns he has been “framed”, at the entrance of a tunnel dug by crooks who were posing as archaeologists – it is shorthand for a man in his grave, and it is the last time we see him in the film. Simultaneously his daughter is betrayed by a young man who is a symbol of modern times, and though the film does everything it can to convince us that they really do love each other, one constantly gets the sense that these two people don’t even exist in the same dimension – they come from such vastly different backgrounds, their destinies are so unlinked.

There is an even subtler relationship in Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. The tragic protagonist Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) – daughter-in-law of a zamindar family falling on bad times – forges an emotional bond with a lower-class man named Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), but there is never any pretence that this relationship has a future, or that they can even acknowledge romantic feelings for each other. Chhoti Bahu eventually comes to a tragic end, but even when she and her haveli are “alive”, there is something distant and otherworldly about them – much like the prince of Salina in The Leopard watching the young people dance around him, or like the zamindar in Jalsaghar looking into an unpolished mirror with a puzzled expression, perhaps wondering if he had imagined the great days of his past.

["March 4th" does seem an inappropriate date for a post about people trapped in time. Anyway, here are two old posts on films about relics of the past trying to stay relevant: Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. And an extended piece on Lootera here]

Death and the heroine: Vinod Mehta does Meena Kumari

Two years ago, an excerpt from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of Meena Kumari appeared in the anthology The Greatest Show on Earth. Reading it without context, I assumed Mehta’s book was a very personal project, which he was compulsively driven to write after years of fawning over Meena Kumari as a young man. His proprietary use of “my heroine” and “my tragedienne” to describe the then-recently deceased actress suggested this, as did the terms in which he celebrated her Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam performance: “Beautiful. How beautiful she appeared. For once the camera captured my heroine and did justice to a face that was now at its zenith […] Biting her man’s ear, ruffling his hair, caressing his neck, running her hands over his kurta, she created an environment of pulsating, titillating and mouth-watering sexuality.”

Now, reading Meena Kumari (republished more than 40 years after it first came out) in its entirety, the bench-posts shifted for me as a reader. It turns out the book was a commissioned project, and the repeated use of “my heroine” isn’t so much a marker of personal affection as a tic inspired by the New Journalism of Norman Mailer and others, which had so captured the young Mehta’s imagination. He is honest about this: it might even be said he takes introspection to showy extremes, repeatedly wondering about his own qualifications to write this biography; noting that having been away from India between 1962 and 1969, he was cut off from the Bombay film world for that period (though he had watched Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam just before leaving); and even admitting that his initial interest in the actress came via a larger fascination for another tragic, non-Indian movie star:

The source of my interest in Meena Kumari, I must point out, was not direct; rather it was nourished through another woman (white, naturally) who in my juvenile fantasy years exercised an erotic and emotional influence which I will not even begin to analyse. The woman was Marilyn Monroe and though my heroine and this woman performed thousands of miles apart, there were several parallels. Publically they had little in common; behind the scenes they were sisters. The same legendary physical powers, the same unfulfilled relationships, the same consuming irresistible wistfulness, the same self-destructive urges.

In this light, another of Mehta’s confessions is revealing. “The woman whose portrait I had been asked to sketch,” he writes, “interested me immensely – not while she was alive but once she was dead. I suppose this sounds callous, but it is true. In the timing and manner of her death my heroine assumed heroic dimensions.”

Which suggests a mild form of necrophilia underlying the relationship between the biographer and his subject. If that sounds morbid, there is something apt about it: consider how even Meena Kumari's defining role as Chhoti Bahu (which paralleled and foreshadowed aspects of her real life) involved her casting a spell of sorts on the film’s leading man from beyond her unmarked grave. When Mehta describes going to the actress’s grave shortly after her death and being shocked at how unkempt the Shia cemetery was, I thought of Chhoti Bahu’s sad fate – a melodramatic response perhaps, but an inevitable one when the line between a movie star and an iconic role becomes so blurred. And he is probably right that Meena Kumari would have seemed a less interesting figure to us today if she had lived to a ripe old age, not fully undone by melancholia and alcoholism but half-heartedly doing underwritten mother roles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Once you move past the disappointment of realising that this book is not a product of intense, no-holds-barred fandom, there are two things that work very well for Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography (as it has been re-titled). First, Mehta clearly worked hard on it as a journalist, researching meticulously, speaking to nearly all the key figures in his heroine’s life (a notable exception being Dharmendra, who granted him no audience despite repeated tries) and then trying to reconcile their often-contradictory stories into something resembling a narrative. The re-printing makes sense too: such an endeavour is arguably more useful today than it was immediately after the actress's death, when fans and voyeurs had easy access to many in-depth stories and interviews in film magazines.

Second, the author is a palpable presence in this book. Back in 1972, this apparently did not appeal to many readers and critics – in his new Introduction, he recalls some of the initial response: “I had produced an over-sentimental, maudlin life story compromised by the gratuitous insertion of my own personality into the narrative.” Today it should stand a better chance, partly because authorial presence in narrative non-fiction is more widely accepted and partly because Mehta himself – as one of the country’s leading magazine editors – is a person of greater interest now than he was then.

And given the way this book is written, that is no small matter, for his voice – a distinct, opinionated one, sometimes acerbic, often bombastic, mixing sympathy with snark – comes through on nearly every page. Even on the ones dealing with dry biographical facts: a section about Meena Kumari’s (or Mahjabeen Bano’s) early years as a child artiste includes the aside “Purely on a personal level, I find my heroine’s film name nondescript, sterile and flavourless [...] She deserved something better. I think we could all spend an intriguing evening finding substitutes for ‘Meena Kumari’.” Offering a sociological summary of the year in which she was born, he notes: “You could get nicely drunk for 84 paise (a bottle of beer costing 28), buy a kilo of sugar for 3 paise, smoke a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes for 10 paise, get a woollen suit stitched for Rs 3, find a decent whore for Rs 4. This then was the scenario.” And after quoting from her account of how helpful her much senior co-star Ashok Kumar was during the Parineeta shoot, he can’t resist throwing in a “Like me, you are probably wondering where the director was while these lessons were going on.”

The book’s first section, which takes up 140 pages, is mostly linear and contains the biographical meat: the early years in penury, the first dalliances with the movie camera in films by Vijay Bhatt and Homi Wadia, the rise to stardom as an adult with Baiju Bawra, the tempestuous relationship with her husband Kamal Amrohi, the anecdote about a dacoit-fan who asked her to autograph his hand with his knife, the years of alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour – all of it leading up to a bleak portrait of Room 26 in the nursing home where she had her “deedaar” (last audience), and rounded off by an anecdote about the non-payment of medical bills, which brought a depressingly farcical quality to the last act of her life.

Having got the chronological stuff out of the way, Mehta then moves on to more abstract things in Section Two, commenting on his own feelings about his subject (which, one assumes, must have deepened during the writing of this book) and then assessing her as an actress and as a person. I don’t myself agree that Meena Kumari was miles ahead of her contemporaries, including Nutan and Waheeda Rehman, but there is little faulting his ability to make and sustain an argument. If the book’s first section was sprinkled with very superficial analysis that suggested Mehta had not closely watched or re-watched many of Meena Kumari’s films (“the music was good, the direction showed promise and my heroine was magnificent”), here at last we get something deeper and more thoughtful. He notes some of her special qualities such as a respect for phonetics and the cadences of speech (“too many of our present-day stars speak from the area of the mouth; my heroine went down a little and from some mysterious inner reserve produced the sounds of music”). And again, he gets personal in a good way. (“I find nuances of sadness on a woman’s face fatally irresistible.”)

But the final segment – about “the woman” – is possibly the weakest, because Mehta is placed in the bothersome journalistic position of providing a summary, of neatly tying together a life’s strands into a Narrative (even though he has spent a large part of the book protesting that this cannot be done). What emerges here is a casual sentimentalism that is at odds with much of the rest of the writing. Take this contradiction at the very end: the line “I do not ask you to worship Meena Kumari” is followed immediately by “if you have [understood her], you must join me in proclaiming that she was not only a great actress but a great human being”. Sounds like a case of proselytising to me! The book is at its strongest when Mehta is tentatively exploring, conjecturing, wondering out loud – telling the reader it was impossible to collect even one “undisputed” fact about this woman, or decode her mystery – and at its weakest when he is pronouncing judgements as if from a position of objectivity.

As for the actual writing, it is uneven – fluid and spontaneous at times, self-conscious at other times; showiness and grammatical awkwardness run together in sentences like “She set foot on this earth, head first, in the early hours of 1 August 1932”. (When Mehta writes “I was coming in a taxi a few nights ago”, one hopes it IS a case of grammatical slackness!) But the honest curiosity, the willingness to go off on an entertaining tangent every now and again, make up for the flaws in the prose. More problematic is the condescending tone of passages like the following, which Mehta himself – four decades older and wiser now – must now be embarrassed about: “All right, she was a third-rate poet. But does Raakhee write poetry? Does Hema Malini write poetry? Does Sharmila Tagore write poetry? Did Vyjayanthimala write poetry? Meena Kumari was not only the greatest actress of the last 20 years, she was also the most literate.”

Still, there is something refreshingly contrapuntal about a book on the Great Tragic Hindi Film Heroine being written in a humorous (but also affectionate and probing) tone by a UK-returned 30-year-old hung up on Gonzo Journalism. Still among the most unusual entries in the sparse body of accessible writing on Hindi cinema, Meena Kumari is whimsical in its range of references: Mehta brings up foreign films (from the work of the comedian WC Fields to Anouk Aimee in A Man and a Woman) and literature (the Dharmendra-Meena Kumari relationship is likened to the one between Lady Chatterley and Mellors in D H Lawrence’s novel!). And this naturally means it is show-offish in places. But I’ll take a biography like this – however esoteric or indulgent it might get at times – over a dry, prosaic, impersonal one. We already have too much of that sort of film writing.

[A somewhat related post: a long review of Lois Banner’s biography of Marilyn Monroe]

On Bollywood's Top 20: a collection of oddly impersonal essays

[Did this review of Bollywood’s Top 20: Superstars of Indian Cinema (edited by Bhaichand Patel) for Business Standard. It’s another example of a book I would prefer not to have written about - and the exasperation and lack of interest probably comes through in the piece]

To begin with a small quibble, the “Indian” in this book’s sub-title is slightly misleading: this is a collection of essays – by different writers – on iconic Hindi-movie performers. But there are larger problems with this anthology. Given that its subjects are screen legends who have had an immeasurably complex influence (for better and for worse) on the lives of countless fans over decades, it would have been reasonable to expect some personal, passionate writing. Instead, much of it lacks warmth and has a mechanically journalistic tone.

Some of the pieces do begin in a way that suggests they will be firsthand accounts of a writer’s interest in a movie-star. (“When I was invited to write about Madhubala, I was delighted,” says Urmila Lanba, “Madhubala is one of my favourite actresses; my sister and I were only allowed to watch one movie a month and I recall we never missed her films...”) What usually follows, though, is a mix of gossip, second-hand reporting (with long quotes taken from various sources) and throwaway remarks on films that deserve to be written about with much more enthusiasm. Here, from S Theodore Baskaran’s essay on Nargis, is one example of what I mean:

In the Middle East [Awaara] played to packed houses. T J S George, Nargis’s biographer, points out that the duet in the boat scene was one of the best love scenes of her career. Her appearance in a bathing costume was pointed out as one of the highlights of the film. Apart from Prithviraj Kapoor, other cast members included Leela Chitnis and Shashi Kapoor. Helen, then an unknown junior artiste, made an uncredited appearance.

The paragraph is stilted and dull in ways that are too obvious to mention, but as a reader I would also have been interested in knowing what Baskaran himself thought of Nargis in those two scenes rather than learn what other people have “pointed out”.

It’s possible that I’m falling into the old trap of reviewing the book I wish had been written instead of the one that actually was. But my main objection is unevenness of tone: many of these essays veer between being chatty and casual and also trying to be comprehensive in a by-the-numbers, encyclopaedic way. In the Wikipedia age, I’m unsure what value there is in listing most of a performer’s movies with two or three trite sentences about each of them. And when you do commit yourself to providing such information, the fact-checking should be exemplary. Instead there are many careless errors. To mention just two, we are told that by 1954 “a whole new generation of actresses like Asha Parekh, Sadhana and Saira Banu had appeared on the scene and the era of colour films was also ushered in” (this is off by roughly a decade) and that Prithviraj Kapoor was over 30 years senior to Suraiya (22, actually).

That might sound like nitpicking, but when many similar instances of indifferent writing and editing pile up in a book, it’s a reminder that film literature in India is often treated flippantly even by those who engage deeply with cinema. I sometimes hear the defence that essays about mainstream Hindi films should be as accessible and egalitarian as the films themselves are. But in the same way as there are good Manmohan Desai films and bad Manmohan Desai films (how many movie buffs would put Ganga Jamuna Saraswati in the same league as Amar Akbar Anthony?), there are good and bad ways of writing accessibly about popular movies and movie-stars. (For a sample of intelligent, engaged writing in this vein, see Mukul Kesavan’s essay on Dharmendra.)

Of course, it would be silly to claim that there are no high points in such a varied collection. The pieces on K L Saigal and Devika Rani (by Vikram Sampath and Cary Rajinder Sawhney respectively) read smoothly because they make at least a perfunctory effort at a narrative structure. Jerry Pinto’s Waheeda Rehman essay characteristically combines thoughtful analysis with lightness of touch. Shefalee Vasudev’s piece on Madhuri Dixit, though overwritten in places (“Madhubala was mesmerising, Waheeda Rehman engrossingly attractive, Hema Malini the ultimate dream girl and Rekha sensational, but Madhuri – oh, she was something else. An incidental sum total of desirable parts of moh [allure] and maya [illusion]”), does take the trouble to examine the evolution of a star persona against the background of a changing movie-going culture.

The writers whose subjects had relatively short careers are at an advantage, since their pieces lend themselves to more focused analysis (in writing about Meena Kumari, for example, Pavan Varma can devote a generous amount of space to her key role as Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam), but I didn’t envy the task of those saddled with a really big superstar whose career has played out – wholly or partly – during the media explosion of the past two decades: what more is there to say about Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, for instance? Still, Sidharth Bhatia and Namrata Joshi manage a decent, professional job on these two subjects. Bhatia covers well-trodden ground (including Bachchan’s much-analysed shift from the Angry Young Man battling the system to “the settled establishment man” over the past decade), but his observation that the young Amitabh “was an angular personality”, easily cast in edgy or villainous roles, led me to contemplate an alternate universe where the actor might have made an adequate career playing intense second leads like he did in the early films Gehri Chaal and Parwana. And Joshi’s piece on Shah Rukh includes some intriguing thoughts on the private persona versus the public one, and on the cracks that have been appearing in a once-secure image (the essay was written before SRK’s much-publicised brawl with Shirish Kunder).

Also enjoyable is Avijit Ghosh’s wry dissection of Hindi cinema’s headiest, most enigmatic superstar phase – Rajesh Khanna’s dominance in the early 1970s. At one point, Ghosh writes of Khanna’s decline: “With half Rajesh’s acting ability, one-third his waistline and four times the discipline, Jeetendra comfortably ensconced himself as the director’s favourite for weepy socials or mindless entertainers made down South. Rajesh could only watch the water flow.”

This is a sample of the irreverence that comes with being a fan (the attitude that goes “these stars belong to us, we can say what we like about them”). One also sees it in the cheeky ending to Bhaichand Patel’s own (otherwise unremarkable) essay on Ashok Kumar – a reference to Kumar’s affair with Nalini Jaywant and the speculation that they “might have bumped into each other on their evening walks” in their old age.

More of this sort of thing could have made Bollywood’s Top 20 a better, more intimate book. More typical, alas, is the last paragraph of the Madhubala piece – of all things, a quote from Manoj Kumar in 2008, when the long-deceased actress had a stamp issued in her honour. “There can only be one Madhubala in one century,” Kumar said, “Every time I would see her, my heart would start singing ghazals.” This would be a moderately acceptable way to end the essay, but the quote continues thus: “I am happy and want to thank the department for their initiative.”

Yes, THAT is the closing sentence of a piece about one of Hindi cinema’s loveliest performers. Manoj Kumar is happy! He congratulates the postal department! It says something about the peculiarly distant tone of this collection and the sloppiness of its editing.

P.S. the accompanying CD of songs helps make up for some of the uninspired writing, but given this book’s cover price I thought it was naughty of Patel to describe it as “a free disc” in his Introduction.

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]

Ghosts and relics in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam

Two things prompted me to revisit the 1962 Abrar Alvi-Guru Dutt classic Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam this week. One was a viewing of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib Biwi aur Gangster, a reasonably well-made (and very well acted) film that takes some of the character types from the original and recasts them in a contemporary north Indian hinterland noir. The other appetite-whetter was an excerpt from a book that I badly want to get my hands on now – Vinod Mehta’s biography of (and unabashed fanboy tribute to) Meena Kumari, published shortly after her death in 1972. The chapter in question centres on Kumari’s iconic performance as the tormented Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, driven to alcohol (an unthinkable sin for a married Hindu woman in her milieu) in a last-ditch effort to make her husband stay at home.

(More about the Mehta book in a later post.)

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is one of Hindi cinema’s most vivid treatments of a transitional period in India’s social history – the dying days of the landed gentry, their decline (and their continuing mulish wastefulness in the face of that decline) contrasted with a working class that is making its way in the world through education and personal initiative rather than through inheritance squandered. This contrast is presented mainly through the character of Bhoothnath, a young lower-class man who becomes confidante and emotional ghulam to Chhoti Bahu, while being both fascinated and repulsed by what he sees of life in the mansion.

But the story operates on other levels too – as a reflection on the responsibilities thrust on women in traditional settings, for example. Chhoti Bahu is doubly condemned, stifled as an individual and saddled with upholding the family’s “honour” (something that doesn’t much concern the menfolk who sleep during the day and spend their nights outside with dancer-prostitutes, or otherwise pass the time getting pet cats elaborately married). The result is that when her facade breaks down, it’s intolerable for everyone around her. Her existence is necessarily one of extremes: when cast as the virtuous lady, which is her principal function, she is nothing less than Lakshmi incarnate; but when she transgresses even slightly, she becomes a creature fallen so far beyond redemption that her fate is to be murdered and buried without honour or ceremony in a secret grave.

One of the film’s saddest, and most telling, scenes for me is a little moment towards the end. Talking intently with Bhoothnath, Chhoti Bahu suddenly sees her husband’s older brother watching them from the foot of the stairs. She reflexively covers her head with her pallu and moves into a doorway out of his sight (as she has always been conditioned to do), but being drunk she staggers clumsily while doing this. No one watching her would be fooled about her condition, but appearances must be unthinkingly maintained.


There is an obvious comparison to be made between Chhoti Bahu and the film’s other main female character Jaba (Waheeda Rehman), who is allowed to have a mind of her own – and be a multifaceted person – without being judged for it. Educated, playful, moody, given to bantering and flirting with Bhoothnath but also capable of making a steely decision at a time of personal tragedy, Jaba is alive in a way that Chhoti Bahu isn’t.** And this is one reason why I can’t help thinking of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam as a ghost story, though its narrative is presented in realist terms.

One late scene links the heroine's skeletal remains with the ruins of the house she was entrapped in, but even when Chhoti Bahu and the haveli are both “alive” there is something otherworldly about them. The mansion – gloomy and claustrophobic – is like a purgatory for restive souls, from the nearly deranged badi bahu who obsessively washes her hands to the watch-keeper who yells that time no longer has any meaning in this place. Chhoti Bahu herself is a wandering spirit and her scenes with Bhoothnath seem almost to be set in a time continuum, with past and future in uneasy but sympathetic collusion. The relationship can be seen as a brief encounter between two people who belong not just to different classes but to different dimensions.

But of course, the past never really loses its grip on the present; in the film’s very last shot we see that the middle-aged Bhoothnath, though long married to the earthly Jaba, is still haunted – perhaps marked for life – by Chhoti Bahu’s memory. The scene reminds me a great deal of the closing shot of another major film made that same year in another part of the world – John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife in a train carriage together, emblems of a forward-looking world but forever beholden to a man who was a relic of a past age. Much like that film about the passing (and the simultaneous romanticising) of the Old West, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is a reminder that however much we progress or change, bygone worlds still cast a long shadow.

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** One of the achievements of Meena Kumari’s performance is that it doesn’t take much effort for us to imagine the very different sort of person Chhoti Bahu might have been – just as vivacious and independent as Jaba, perhaps – if her circumstances had been otherwise.


P.S. I had only a very dim childhood memory of this film (and it isn’t the sort of movie I would have found particularly interesting back then) - so a much better print would have been nice. If you look at the classy cover of Moser Baer’s DVD – with the words “Platinum Series” and “Collector’s Item” overlaid on crystal-clear stills from the film – you’d think this was some sort of beautiful restoration. Far from it. In addition to being scratch-ridden and jerky, with poor sound, parts of the print are so dark that you can barely tell what’s on the screen. One of my all-time favourite song sequences, “Bhanwara Bada Naadaan Hai”, with the stunningly beautiful Waheeda Rehman, is badly mangled. The picture quality in this YouTube video is good, but my DVD manages to darken almost the whole of the sequence so that all one sees of Rehman is an expanse of forehead. (It's a lovely forehead, but still.) Pitiful, really.

Dressing up a movie / Bhanu Athaiya's The Art of Costume Design

Even the most attentive movie-watchers – students of cinema, dedicated to exploring the nooks and crannies of the form – sometimes look at a film mainly in terms of its highest-profile elements: script, acting, cinematography. It’s when you spend some time on the sets of a movie, and watch the darn thing being monotonously assembled, that you begin to appreciate the small but vital cogs. 

In Kerala, at the location shooting of Anup Kurian’s The Hunter last month (earlier posts here, here and here), I had a chat with Sarah Eapen, the film’s costumes-in-charge. Sarah’s notebook was full of charts for each day of the shooting, subdivided by scenes and characters, with little icons representing different sorts of T-shirts, scarves and so on. (The scenes involving elephants and cows had little smileys drawn beneath them, because she didn't have to attire those lumbering beasts of the wild.) But her job wasn’t merely to take actors’ measurements and collect outfits. She had to read the script carefully and think about the characters’ personalities: would a flamboyant hitman wear a bright pink shirt without stripes? Would a young medical student use red nail-polish or a more sombre shade? On a small production like this one, she also had to keep an eye on aspects of art direction and continuity. For example, in a scene where two people bury a beloved dog, she decided to use an old tribal shawl to wrap the body in (it chimed with other tribal associations in the script) – but this in turn made it important to establish the shawl as part of the film’s mise-en-scène, so it was shown being used as a makeshift tablecloth in an earlier scene.  

And then there are the mundane tasks such as “ageing” newly bought clothes. Most of us don’t even think about these things while watching a film, but for a designer it entails creativity of a different sort – fraying the edges of trousers just so, ripping pockets delicately, even dipping clothes in tea and coffee to make them seem faded! Sarah, working with a very small budget, joked about how such things are taken for granted on bigger-budget movies, where they have “Ageing Departments”.  

A subsequent meeting with the veteran designer Bhanu Athaiya, Oscar-winner for Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, gave me a more historical perspective on Indian costume design. Still quite active at 82, Athaiya was in Delhi for the launch of her coffee-table memoir The Art of Costume Design, which combines informative text with sketches and photos of her work for films ranging from Shree 420 to Lagaan and Swades. 

“Until the 1950s,” she told me, “Hindi cinema had hardly any costume designers in the modern sense of the term. It was all worked out between the directors and the set directors, who would call in tailors and give them instructions. Once in a while, if there was a very special requirement, they would go shopping for clothes.” No wonder then that Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and other directors of the time were taken with someone like Athaiya, who had not only studied art but had also traveled widely enough to know firsthand about regional trends in clothing and design. “I had an understanding of culture,” she says with quiet pride. Directors would narrate a scene to her and she would make a sketch within an hour and show it to them.  

Given that Athaiya had artistic aspirations from an early age – she gave up a possible painting career in favour of costume designing for films – I was impressed by her pragmatic acknowledgement of costume design as something that must, first and foremost, fit the overall scheme of a movie. “It’s tempting for a talented designer to get carried away,” she says, “but the demands of the story are more important than designing beautiful outfits just to show off your abilities.”  

At the same time, when a costume designer is permitted a high level of involvement in the scene-by-scene planning of the film, the results can be subtly effective. Using brightly coloured outfits for cheerful early scenes and gradually moving to duller shades to reflect the darkening mood of a story (something she did in Raj Kapoor’s Henna, for example) can establish atmosphere and provide visual cues, even if viewers register it only at a subconscious level. Unfortunately, says Athaiya, the star system has begun to interfere with the integrity of her discipline (as it has with so many others). “In the old days the directors made most of the decisions,” she says, “and they were naturally concerned with the overall welfare of the film. But in the past 10-15 years the actors have become more dominant. They end up having their own way when it comes to costumes, even if it conflicts with the film’s needs.”  

As for the book – well, it’s very good to look at, with dozens of movie stills featuring Athaiya’s most iconic costumes: a fish-scale dress worn by Nargis in a dream sequence in Ek Tha Raja Ek Thi Rani (see pic), Sadhana’s form-fitting kurtas and churidaars in Waqt, Sunil Dutt and Vyjayanthimala’s period costumes for Amrapali, Waheeda Rahman’s bridal outfit in Reshma aur Shera. It’s priced at a steep Rs 2,500, but that’s the norm for a publication of this sort. The one thing I definitely didn’t like was the eight-page promotional spread for Tanishq Jewellery, blatantly inserted right in the middle, though it had no direct connection with Athaiya’s work. 

Some photos. Meena Kumari in Bengali sari in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam Mumtaz in a sari that was specially stitched and draped to give her freedom of movement for her dance in "Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche" (Brahmachari) Waheeda Rahman in Reshma aur Shera Some of Bhanu's sketches [Did a version of this for the Sunday Business Standard]