Faulaadi mukka - on Naseeruddin Shah's autobiography

[Did a version of this review of And Then One Day… for Open magazine]

Naseeruddin Shah’s account of his life up to age 32 – or 33, since Shah himself is unsure whether he was born in 1949 or 1950 and says this allows him to be “whichever age it suits me to be on any particular day” – is one of the two best books I have read by, or even about, an Indian actor. The other one is Dev Anand’s ego project Romancing with Life. That might sound like a flippant comparison (and it may even be a little insulting to And Then One Day..., which is unquestionably the “better written” book in the generally understood sense of that term). Could two performers be more different? One was a larger-than-life movie star who spent decades embracing his own fame and “connecting” with his adoring fans; the other is a non-starry actor who determinedly eschews larger-than-life-ness, prioritises finding a character's inner truth, and says he turned a corner in his career when he became conscious of his own arrogance.

But the memoirs have this in common: you can almost hear each man saying the words as you read along. Anand’s book was florid, often narcissistic, always sanguine about how others viewed him (even as he continued to make embarrassing films in his last years) and founded on a certainty that his story HAD to be told in his own special way; that he had a moral duty to live up to the Image. Shah’s is hard-hitting, caustic, constantly aiming for self-awareness, and often uncertain and self-deprecating in the process. “What this book will mean to anyone I have no clue but I had to get it out of my system,” he writes drily in his preface. It is a moot point how “honest” a memoir can ever be, but both these approaches are utterly authentic, and both are true to the subject’s personality.

The elliptical title “And then one day”, with its sense of neither a clear beginning nor a clear end but a story constantly in progress (the words don’t refer to a single episode in Shah’s life), is apt for a book about someone who expects never to stop learning things about himself and his craft. Which doesn’t mean Shah is averse to narrative-creation. Trying to explain his passion for acting, he writes, “It does seem like an aberration of behaviour to want to be someone else all the time, and I think it happens to people who, like me, can find no self-worth early in life, and thus find fulfillment in hiding behind make-believe.” Describing being back-stage before a performance, and the opening of the curtain, he says: “Suddenly the womb was gone and I was staring into a black void.” And here is the rationalist mesmerized by a childhood memory of an actor (or was it a clown, or are they the same thing?) looming above him on a platform: “I have since steadfastly believed that the only magic that happens in this world happens on the stage.”

The question of employing a ghost-writer probably never arose. Shah has shown himself to be a fine essayist before (as in a piece he did about actors in Bimal Roy’s cinema, for an anthology) and his interest in writing is palpable almost from the start of this book, when he describes his first school St Joseph’s College as a version of Transylvania, “with the brooding atmosphere of self-denial clinging to it […] Nainital’s rains, gusty winds and frequent mist probably reminded these Irish adventurers of home, but all it needed was rider-less carriages and giant bats flying around at dusk to complete the picture”, and himself as a pre-teen afflicted by a stammer during a class play. It was here that his lifelong love for cinema began, mainly through regular screenings of American and British movies, but also a dubbed Sivaji Ganesan-starrer that he hated; it would be a while before he was more properly introduced to Indian films.

In these early chapters he writes about a conflicted relationship with his father (one that would see a form of closure only years after the latter’s death), a series of academic failures, the raging of hormones in a time “before prudery became fashionable”, a first sexual tryst at age 15 when he was still ignorant of masturbation (“I must be one of very few guys who had sex before learning to worship at the altar of Onan”) and the advent of marijuana in his life. Scattered through these sections are many things that are relevant to understanding his long and winding journey to becoming a professional actor. (He could imagine himself in the roles of an NDA cadet or a doctor – “I could probably make a great impact white-coated and stethoscoped, striding down a corridor issuing curt instructions to my assistants” – which were professions that his parents would rather have seen him take up in “real life”.) Some bits – accounts of property-related bloodshed in his extended family, or an early, failed trip to Bombay where he got to play an extra in two movies – are meandering and repetitive, held together mainly by his wry, unsentimental narration. But by the time he arrives at the National School of Drama (NSD) in the late 1960s – a period that coincides with a rushed wedding to a woman 14 years older – and later at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the narrative has coalesced and the “David Copperfield kind of crap” (the first chapter head, channeling JD Salinger) has made way for a portrait of a young man on the cusp of self-realisation.

Reading this book, one usually gets the impression that Shah is organising scattered memories, articulating them for himself, without thinking about his importance as a public figure or the impression any of this will leave on fans or detractors. There is a breathlessness in the writing, there are long paragraphs with few visual breaks (the sort of thing writers and publishers are often cautioned against in an attention-deficit age, but which works very well here) as well as parenthetical asides (describing a homecoming and a tonga ride in Ajmer, Shah mentions that the horse “would invariably crap on the way” and then adds, apropos of nothing, “an ability I’ve always envied, to be able to do that while running full pelt”). To select a passage at random, here is part of an account of a nerve-wracking physics exam: “There was a question on the Wimshurst machine (if I’ve got the name right and an astrophysicist I know assures me I haven’t), an object the size and shape of a knife-sharpener’s wheel with what looked like a number of cut-throat razors attached to it in circular fashion. I had spotted the accursed thing in a physics lab and had always left it well alone, as evidently had the rest of the class. What it is used for I still couldn’t tell you but I managed that night to chew the cud and ingested enough information to regurgitate it all on to the paper the next day and scrape through by the skin of my whatsits.” Anyone who has spoken with Shah will recognise the voice immediately – it is almost exactly as he might tell the same story in a tone that manages to be eloquent, casual and sing-song at once, with a few effective pauses sprinkled through the telling.

He doesn’t skimp on the admiration when discussing such personal heroes as Geoffrey Kendal – who combined humility and purity of purpose with a missionary-like zeal for teaching Shakespeare – or mentors such as Shyam Benegal and the FTII professor Roshan Taneja. But there is also casual irreverence, whether disclosing his love for corny old Dara Singh films with such titles as Fauladi Mukka or his regard for the eccentric Raaj Kumar, “not for his acting which was dreadful, but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career and sent all Follywood for a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it”. He is frank, even cutting, about various people he knew or worked with over the years – from Satyadev Dubey to Peter Brook – but reserves some of the sharpest barbs for himself, describing his inability to be a father to his first child Heeba (“I played the part of the obnoxious adolescent to perfection […] I completely shirked my share of the duties, while idiotically attempting at the same time to assert my rights as a husband”), realising at the FTII that he had allowed himself to become complacent as an actor (“The thought would hit me like one of Delhi’s hot winds that in these three years I had grown only in my conceit”) or dismissing his own work in such key films as Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (“I had gone all Elvis Presley and James Dean when it was street cred that was required. Mine is an immature, self-adulatory performance”).

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One of the most affecting things in this book – all the more so because Shah himself doesn’t get maudlin about it, though much of it must have been deeply upsetting when it happened – is his account of a friendship with an actor named Rajendra Jaswal. They were so close in NSD and later in FTII that they were treated as a single person and even referred to as “Jaspal / Shah”, but the intensity of the relationship had ugly repercussions, as Jaspal – a talented actor undone by his own insecurities – became pathologically obsessed. Things came to a head with a murderous attack in a dhaba around the time Bhumika was being shot, culminating in a surreal scene – more “filmi” than anything in the movies Shah was doing at the time – where clueless policemen smack a wounded Naseer about before taking him to the hospital.

So dramatic is this story (in terms of its inherent content, not the telling) that I briefly wondered if Jaspal – about whom an initial online search revealed nothing – was an invented doppelganger, a sort of sly literary device incorporated within the text of an otherwise “honest” memoir, used to comment on the perils of too much closeness and identification (things that Shah himself is wary of as an actor – he has little patience with the theories that demand “immersion” into a character). The story is true though, and it’s tempting to compare “Jaspal / Shah” to the Mozart-Salieri story, except that would amount to romanticising a dismal tragedy – and anyway, Shah has never been anything like the archetype of the genius possessed with God-gifted brilliance, conquering the world one symphony (or performance) at a time. As he repeatedly indicates himself, hard work, passion and constant curiosity got him where he is, along with a measure of that essential but often-unmentioned factor, sheer good luck (perhaps things would have been tougher for him if he hadn’t been a fluent English-speaker, or if his FTII years hadn’t coincided with the beginning of Benegal’s feature-film career and the emergence of a new kind of cinema).

Even after becoming a “star” in the parallel-film circuit, Shah continued his efforts to find inner truth as a performer, which led to a disillusioning stint with the theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, complete with a bizarre workshop in a forest, much pretentious talk about reaching the “primal state” and (there is a neat, circular irony here) a variation on the personality cults he was constantly trying to escape in the big bad world of Bombay cinema. (“This had the smell of proselytizing and prophet-building.”) And so, poignantly, And Then One Day... closes by recounting a series of failures or uncertainties: the disenchantment with Grotowski; the falling through of Shah’s dream of playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s film; an apprehensive reunion with the daughter he hadn’t seen for 12 years, at precisely the point (though this isn’t underlined for the reader) where he is preparing to shoot Masoom, in which his character must take responsibility for a son he has never met before. Though his relationship with Ratna Pathak, whom he married in 1982, brings emotional security, the impression as the narrative ends is that of a man, and an actor, still trying to find his way forward.

****

For me, the main value of this book is that it provides a fuller, more elaborate view of Shah’s sharp, searching mind than one gets from the interviews that usually appear in media – and this is particularly important for someone whose default mode is to be strongly critical, even rude. The short newspaper or TV interview can never do such a person justice, and indeed Shah has sometimes come across as one-dimensionally condescending in such interactions. (The journalistic tradition of condensing and using quotes as sensational headlines adds to that image.) By writing a book entirely on his own terms, giving himself this much space to expand on his opinions and set them against a larger context – even at the cost of some rambling – he shows a more measured side to his personality.

There are many glimpses here of Naseeruddin Shah the curmudgeon (and who would have it any other way?) but there is also a clear sense of where those qualities stem from. During a conversation a few years ago, I inwardly bristled when Shah snapped “This Auteur Theory, it’s bloody rubbish!” (That’s a silly remark, valid only as a response to the straw-man idea that “the director is the sole author of a movie”). Yet when you read the details of his strife-ridden time at the FTII – the struggles of actors who were treated as outcasts by the establishment, not given the same basic respect due to every other element of filmmaking – it becomes easier to understand his anger and frustration towards self-important directors. Or when you hear of his later experiences in the film industry – being peremptorily summoned for a meeting by big-money producers, for instance, and informed that he had been selected to play a role in a big film, which would naturally mean abandoning midway the “small and inconsequential” project he was working on.

Shah is upfront about doing certain films purely for money, but I have always been a little foxed by just how bad he has been in some of his commercial ventures. Take the 1992 Tahalka – in a film packed with dreadful performances trying manfully to outdo each other, his is arguably the worst, less credible even than Aditya Pancholi’s. Yet there may be a part-explanation here: “My attitude to Hindi cinema turned even more condescending, possibly because I couldn’t see myself fitting in in it[…] the thought that I was not qualified to be the lead in popular movies pinched greatly, so this reaction was very possibly my defence mechanism working in advance to counter the rejection I anticipated […] Being so appallingly bad in my early commercial movies was not entirely my fault. The only two who could make the schmaltzy Hindi film dialogue and ersatz situations believable were Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, and I was nowhere in their league. Being effective in popular movies requires a certain kind of sensibility and an unshakable belief in them, neither of which I possessed.” It is the sort of admission that has sometimes been made even by actors - such as Waheeda Rehman - who had far more success in commercial cinema than Shah did.

It is possible to disagree strongly with some of Shah’s opinions (such as his dismissal of popular films, his contempt for the personality-driven acting that has been an essential, vitalising part of movie history for over a hundred years, his scoffing at critics who read meaning into Sholay and “other equally shallow films” – as if serious, considered analysis must be reserved only for the works of Ray or Fellini or the obviously highbrow artists – and, on a lighter note, his description of Asha Parekh as a “perky sex bomb”!) while at the same time being glad that someone of his stature, someone hard to ignore, is willing to be an enfant terrible in an industry so intent on self-congratulation, so full of political correctness and celebrity-adoration. More than once, he expresses doubt about the wider appeal of this book, implying it is a selfish exercise, “an exorcism”, something he hopes his children might read “if they wish to understand me better”. Which could be a euphemistic way of saying (and this is not generally speaking a book of euphemisms) that he gives a flying so-and-so whether or not you, dear reader, find any of it useful. But that candour, and the sharpness of thought and expression that accompanies it, is what makes this memoir so readable in the first place. So don’t trust the crabby old man trying to short-sell his authorial gifts – trust the tale instead.

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EXTRA!!

Here is a long interview I did with Naseer in 2010. And pasted below is a piece I wrote for The Sunday Guardian that same year, shortly after meeting Naseer on the sets of Anup Kurian’s The Blueberry Hunt (a film that has been long completed but never released, in large part because of its star – but that is another story, and best not told here).

****

I’m standing outside the cafeteria of a guesthouse in the hills of Kerala, expecting to see Naseeruddin Shah any minute. An old man walks by, slightly hunched, dressed in jeans and a windcheater, his hair arranged in a set of white dreadlocks. No light goes off in my head until one of the film’s co-producers shouts across, “Weren’t you looking for Naseer? There he is!”

The missed connection could partly be the result of my being a little distracted, but even so there’s something apt about the moment. Apart from being one of our finest actors, Shah is an immediately recognisable figure in both mainstream and non-mainstream cinema, but you’d expect a first encounter with him to be unobtrusive. It ties in with his grounded approach to his craft.

We are at the shoot of Anup Kurian’s The Hunt, in which Shah plays a recluse named Colonel who lives in a mountain retreat, growing marijuana and fending off (potentially dangerous) trespassers. The dreadlocks were his idea and they aren’t just a flamboyant accessory; they are right for the character. “Colonel is an enigmatic figure leading an unconventional life, and the hair adds to the sense of him being an outsider in this setting,” he says.

As it happens, Shah is not the sort of performer who makes elaborate use of masks and disguises to change his features from one role to the next, but he has something subtler and, in many ways, more impressive: a chameleon-like quality that enables him to slide into a character, to become a different person almost before you realise what’s happened. A friend who saw him as Mahatma Gandhi in the play Mahatma Vs Gandhi observed that he almost seemed to have shrunk physically when he was on the stage and that it was startling to see him later, outside the theatre, talking with friends.

I witness a similar metamorphosis one evening in his room in the guesthouse, during a scene reading. Shah lounges on the bed, cigarette in hand, looking even more hippie-like now that the Rastafarian locks are complemented by a sleeveless blue shirt and pyjamas. With him are Kurian and actor Vipin Sharma; the scene being rehearsed is a tense encounter between Colonel and Sharma’s character Sett. They read the lines, banter lightly, focus on words and inflexions, discuss character motivations. Anup laughs a little nervously when Naseer improvises the word “behenchod” into one of his Hindi lines, Naseer points out that part of the dialogue will have to be altered because the scene it refers to was never shot. It’s all very laidback so far; an uninformed outsider walking into the room would think this was a group of friends having some fun over drinks.

But then Kurian suggests that the scene can be performed with Colonel pressing his gun to Sett’s back, pushing him ahead so that they are walking and saying their lines simultaneously. Something flickers in Shah’s eyes. “Good idea,” he says, he puts away his cigarette and they start reading again, but this time Shah says his lines with much greater vitality than before. Now he’s holding an imaginary gun and waving it around, the words are spoken at twice the speed as before, and Sharma responds, as one performer often will to another during an intense scene; suddenly there’s an electric charge in the room and I get a very real sense of what the scene will look like the next day, when they play it for the camera.

In the cafeteria over dinner, we behold the actor as raconteur, polymath and jokester, holding everyone’s attention without making an obvious effort. He regales us with stories, anecdotes, acting some of them out – not in a self-conscious, “look at me, I’m putting on a display” way but as if it’s the most natural thing to do; why content yourself with describing when you can show? We talk about cinema and other things. When I chance to mention Monty Python’s Life of Brian, he roars into life with an imitation of the Roman centurion’s Cockney accent: “Yes? Crucifixion? Out of the door, line on the left, one cross each.”

One often reads about actors who internalise a role or immerse themselves into a scene so thoroughly that it can take hours, or even days, for them to come “out of character”. Shah isn’t like that, and in fact he enjoys taking little digs at the pompousness that often accompanies discussions of acting theory. (“Some people like to say ‘charakter nikaalna hai’, par character ‘nikalta’ kaise hai, yeh baat mujhe kabhi samajh nahin aayi!”) “Chalo, let’s do some out of-focus acting now,” he jokingly tells Vipin Sharma, when they are informed that an evening shot taken in fading light will be slightly out of focus.

One evening I watch him perform an abstract, wordless scene where his character, wounded by a bullet, has a vision of three tribal singers and follows them through a forest. The camera rolls, Shah staggers past us as if in a trance, eyes glazed, hand clutched to his abdomen. But almost the second the camera stops rolling he snaps back to normalcy, joking about the faux-artiness of the scene and the grand old time Film Institute students will have reading meaning into it. There are no Method Actor hang-ups here.

“Most acting theories are tedious,” he likes to say. “There’s nothing mystical or grand about the process, it’s a craft like any other.” This casualness seems like a subterfuge when one watches the wrenching scene from Parzania where, as the father of a little boy missing in communal riots, he conveys his anguish by twisting his head in despair as if that would help him get all the bad thoughts out of it. Or his pitch-perfect turn as the blind professor in Sparsh, where he eschews the upturned-eyeball look that passes for “playing blind” in much of our cinema and instead uses careful movements to suggest an unsighted person’s reliance on his sense of hearing. Surely pulling off roles like these requires a high degree of natural skill allied with an uncanny talent for putting oneself in someone else’s head? But no, he says. Observing and imitating – and lots of practice – are the cornerstones of a performance.

Perhaps he imitates better than most others. Perhaps it really is that simple.

Teachers creepers, said Naseer sir

It was Teachers' Day today, at least in India. To mark the occasion, here are a couple of passages from the new Naseeruddin Shah memoir. This one about a much-feared class-teacher named Miss Winnie Perry:

If you were to ask any junior student of fifties Sem about Miss Perry, it’s an even bet she still figures in his nightmares […] She would gleefully play along with our whispered suspicions that she went home on a broomstick, and when in really severe mode she used the handle of a feather duster for chastisement.

Even if you know Mister Shah isn’t the sort to bother with such trifling things as being polite, you might be blindsided by the chapter's ending:

Sometime in the mid-nineties, I learnt she was in a home for the aged in Lucknow. I wrote her a letter, I don’t know why, and she replied saying she remembered me, but I doubt if she did. I heard later that she’d suffered a brutal death at the hands of an intruder. I don’t suspect it was one of her students.

There's something moving though about that letter-sending bit and the "I don't know why". I think it captures the push-pull relationship so many of us have with teachers we didn’t like – or even despised – in our school days, but whom we remember with a distant nostalgic fondness later in life when we can see them as frail, diminished and incapable of wielding hegemony over us, and perhaps understand some of the disappointments they must have suffered with students over the years.

In a similar vein, this bit about a Brother D F Burke, who was responsible for many memorable movie screenings in the school – something Naseer remains grateful for – but who was also famous for doling out physical punishment:

My prayer for him is that in the big projection room in the sky he has the most comfortable seat and an unending store of his favourite movies for all eternity. That, and I also hope he keeps getting rapped on the head with a hard knuckle every now and then when he least expects it.

And to round things off, this classic teacherly Naseer song, which will warm (or scald) the cockles of your heart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting Nikhil Bhagat: a former actor remembers his brush with fame

[Did a version of this piece for the March issue of The Caravan]

On an unusually chilly Kolkata evening this January, at the inauguration of the Apeejay Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, I chanced to witness a little reunion. As guests gravitated towards the event's keynote speaker Shyam Benegal, the tireless festival director Maina Bhagat brought her 49-year-old son across to say hello to the filmmaker. “You haven’t changed at all, sir,” said Nikhil Bhagat, a wide, boyish smile peeling the years off his face. Trim, youthful-looking, Bhagat himself hadn't changed all that much since 1985, when he played a small but important role in Benegal’s classy ensemble film Trikaal. The year before that, aged barely 20, he was the rebellious football player Raghu, locking horns with a discipline-seeking sports coach in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray.

20-year-old Nikhil Bhagat with co-star Neena Gupta during the Trikaal shoot in Goa

Not many actors can claim to have made their only two films (playing key roles in both) with directors of the stature of Benegal and Jha, and then to have slipped conclusively out of the movie world. Nikhil Bhagat’s star had shone briefly in the firmament of “parallel” cinema: this article by Avijit Ghosh on the Times of India website notes that he “induced nationwide hysterical squeals from pretty young things” after the Hip Hip Hurray release. He was nominated for a Filmfare Award as best supporting actor for that film, losing to the more experienced Anil Kapoor in Mashaal. And yet you will be very lucky to find a photo of him on Google Images today. (Even the official Shemaroo DVD cover of Hip Hip Hurray has pictures of others who had smaller roles in the film, but none of him.)

Having coincidentally watched both movies over the past year (I wrote about Trikaal here), and perhaps swayed by dramatic filmi narratives myself, I had wondered if a tragic tale lay behind his enigmatic disappearance. All such thoughts dissolved that evening at the Victoria Memorial. Bhagat is still handsome, well-turned-out, and apparently comfortable in his own skin. But speaking with him then, and on the phone afterwards, I could tell he was unused to being interviewed; he struggled to make sense of his movie stint, admitted to its randomness.

He was studying in St Xavier’s College in 1983 when Prakash Jha made a hurried Calcutta trip to scout for an athletic young man who could play football. The college put up a notice, 19-year-old Nikhil went with some friends to the hotel where Jha was staying (a couple of hundred students must have showed up in all) and nearly left after a while (“who’s going to wait so long?”) – but before he knew it he was in a final shortlist of three, and then Jha, who had already got permission from the college, was telling him to pack his bags for Ranchi. For Nikhil and his flummoxed parents, who hadn’t even known about the auditions, everything happened in a blur. He had just enough time to collect a pair of contact lenses from the one optician in the city who dispensed them at the time.

He spoke very little Hindi and his voice would have to be dubbed by someone else (friends would later tease him about this, his mother Maina told me), but Jha had clearly seen in him a combination of rugged insolence and vulnerability that would suit the role very well. Raghu is a posturing, cigarette-smoking teen who is confused on the inside. (“Don’t butt your head against a wall before your horns have even grown,” the coach, played by Raj Kiran, witheringly tells him; their clash is the earliest representation of what would become a recurrent theme in Jha’s cinema, the channelling of masculine energies into leadership, with positive and negative consequences.)

Later, Benegal saw him in Hip Hip Hurray and got in touch, and Trikaal happened. Nikhil would also work briefly with Benegal on his TV series Yatra, set on trains travelling the length and breadth of India. “My role got over quite fast,” he told me, “but I was on that train journey almost throughout the shoot, for two months.” (He has a small part in this episode.)

With Shyam Benegal

It would be an overstatement to say that those two films reveal a brilliant performer (and it would be unfair to expect that much from someone who only had brief experience of acting in school plays, and none at all for the camera). What they do show is a callow young man with definite screen presence, someone who might – with experience and nurturing – have gone on to big things. In Trikaal – a more sophisticated, better-directed film than Hip Hip Hurray – he already looks maturer, a little more at ease in front of the camera, even though he might have been lost in the large ensemble cast. He has a striking entrance scene too: Naseeruddin Shah’s narrator, introducing the viewer to figures from his past, says “Aur woh main, 25 saal pehle” and the camera picks out Nikhil, standing amidst a crowd at a funeral wake, the hint of a cocky smile on his face as he looks towards Anna, the girl he has a crush on.

There is something ingenuous and unrehearsed about Nikhil’s recollections of his acting stint. He couldn’t relate to Raghu, he says, but having watched movies like To Sir with Love, he knew about such character types and played it by instinct. He had never serenaded, or sung a lament for, a girl himself, but “you know, at that age one does have experience of raging hormones” – and so he lip-synched through a memorable little scene in Trikaal where Remo Fernandes strums a guitar next to him while Maqsood Ali – later famous as Lucky Ali – watches from a distance; with hindsight, this is a touching image of three young people with very different futures in the entertainment industry.

With Remo Fernandes in Trikaal

Nikhil's closest firsthand brush with his own celebrity came when Hip Hip Hurray was released in a Calcutta hall and friends spread the word that he was in the audience. “The crowd became unruly and I ended up sitting in the manager’s office until they had dispersed.” That apart, the St Xavier’s boy lived in a world far removed from the Bombay film industry, and he sounds nonchalant even when he speaks about the Filmfare nomination – “I was aware of it, but there was no real question of going to Bombay for it.” He had college to finish.

Belatedly, after graduating, he did go to Bombay for a while to try his luck, but soon realised, first, that public memory was short - "I hadn't struck when the iron was hot" - and second, that he lacked the inner drive needed for this profession. “You have to be either passionate about acting or desperate to become a star, and I was neither. I am a private person, and was unwilling to push myself beyond a point.” Besides, the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream cinema was sharper then: most serious movie buffs today know of Trikaal’s cinematic worth, but in 1985 it fell under the radar of most audiences; having it on his resume wasn’t going to get him auditions. There were missed opportunities too. Ketan Mehta called him for an interview for Holi – the film that would mark the debut of a youngster named Aamir Khan – but Nikhil couldn’t go because the floods in Kolkata that year made travel impossible for five crucial days.

For 25 years now he has worked in leather exports – he is now the director of Orbit Leathers – and says that while life has had its ups and downs, “as in any business”, he has no regrets. “How many people become film stars anyway, even if for a very short period? And those who do often end up living in golden cages, without the freedom to be normal people.” In fact, one doesn’t have to look far for cautionary tales about stardom and the dream factory: consider the sad story of Nikhil’s Hip Hip Hurray co-star Raj Kiran, who was last heard to be recuperating from a mental breakdown in the US. And then remember the rousing final scene of that film, the proud coach handing the baton of progress to the transformed Raghu.

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The photos above are courtesy Maina Bhagat. And here are two pictures of Nikhil as he is today:

 

Candle-lit memories: time and light in Shyam Benegal's Trikaal

“If the most important subjects of film are light and time,” wrote Peter von Bagh in this excellent essay about one of my favourite movies, “I can’t think of a more poignant work than A Canterbury Tale.” I was reminded of these words while watching Shyam Benegal’s 1985 film Trikaal, especially its first half-hour. Time and light can be said to be central motifs of Benegal’s film too (though perhaps not in the exact sense as von Bagh meant in that essay). One of its main themes is the continuing hold of the past on the present, even as an old and tradition-bound world makes way for a newer, brasher one: set in the Goa of 1960, on the verge of being “liberated” from the Portuguese, it is the story of a family trapped between a grand history and an uncertain future. And at a formal level, its most striking quality – one that consistently enhances the narrative – is Ashok Mehta’s camerawork and use of lighting, among the best I’ve seen in a Hindi movie. (Even on the standard-issue DVD I watched, this is a splendid-looking film; I can imagine how much more satisfying it would be in a restored Cinemas of India print.)

Mehta, who died just a few months ago, was a highly respected cinematographer, noted for his work on Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Girish Karnad’s Utsav and Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (the last had a magnificently show-offish nightmare sequence shot in black-and-white and featuring three generations of the Kendal-Kapoor family). In Trikaal he composed some stunning interior shots using candlelight, which plays a big part in crafting the film’s dominant mood: that of an intimate chamber-drama in which groups of people play out their mini-tragedies and mini-comedies in an enclosed, isolated setting. The lighting brings a distinct character to an ancient house full of secrets, and creates a world that seems older than it actually is (offhand I can’t recall if there is a single scene in this film that even acknowledges the existence of electric lights).

In fact, the assuredness of Mehta’s camerawork – and its importance to the film – is obvious right from the opening sequence, in which we see a man journeying (almost literally) into the past. The middle-aged Ruiz Pereira (Naseeruddin Shah in a small sutradhaar role) is revisiting his Goan village Lotli after 24 years, and the taxi – his time machine, so to speak – passes vistas that are new to him, including bland cement buildings and roads built for the recent Commonwealth conference. Music, photography, acting and writing combine to very good effect in this fine establishing sequence. As the cab moves from open, sun-lit roads to canopy-shaded ones, shadows play across Ruiz’s face and long tracking shots from inside the car give us his dreamy-eyed view of his “watan”. (Shah’s subtle performance in this short role allows us to see the years falling away from Ruiz’s face; as the cab draws into Lotli he looks rapt and boyish.) Vanraj Bhatia’s lilting score is a reminder that the Benegal-Bhatia artistic collaboration is among the most underappreciated in our cinema. And there is Shama Zaidi’s dialogue. “Mera gaon jaise Ming daur ka khubsoorat phooldaan hai,” Ruiz muses, “Uska itihaas, uspe naksh kahaani samajh mein na aaye toh keval ek sundar naazuk guldaan hi lagega. Usski poori sanskriti ahista ahista mitt jaayegi. Beetay dinon ki yaad ki tarah.” (“My village is like a Ming dynasty bouquet. If you don’t understand its history, the story inscribed on it, it will only look like a beautiful, delicate cluster of flowers. The culture associated with it will gradually fade away, like old memories.”)

Leaving behind the markers of a modernising world, Ruiz instructs the driver to take the old, rough road and soon arrives at a haveli now fallen to ruin. Well-travelled, clearly a man of the world, having lived in Bombay and worked in the Merchant Navy, he is nonetheless nostalgic about the world of his youth, and much of that youth was spent around this house, which belonged to the Souza-Soares clan. As he enters the darkened hallway, the light around him changes, becoming lush and warm, and the film elegantly glides into the old days.

In a long, amusing sequence we are introduced to the events and people of 24 years earlier (including Ruiz’s own younger self). We learn that the family patriarch Erasmo has just died and that his widow Dona Maria (Leela Naidu) refuses to face reality, continuing to listen to loud music in her room while her family and acquaintances bustle about in confusion. Dona Maria’s shrill daughter Sylvia (Anita Kanwar) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she realises that her daughter Anna’s engagement might fall through because of the long mourning period. And watching quietly from the sidelines is Melagrania (Neena Gupta in one of her best roles), the illegitimate child of the dead man, now working as a maid for Dona Maria.

Soon after the funeral, the callow, blandly beautiful Anna (Sushma Prakash) begins a clandestine relationship with a distant cousin of the family, a fugitive named Leon (Dalip Tahil), who is hiding in the cellar. If Anna is the face of the future, her grandmother has a tendency to cling obsessively to the past (while not completely making her peace with it: there is a bizarre subplot in which the old woman is confronted by ghosts from her family’s closets, victims of a tortured colonial history). But the divide between old and new ways of life also manifests itself in class tensions. Though on cordial terms with the family, young Ruiz and his uncle – the local doctor – are clearly outsiders; Ruiz is attracted to Anna, but there is no question of him being allowed to ask for her hand. (Melagrania, a sort of “half-breed” between the upper class and the servant class, is much more accessible to him.) I thought Ruiz’s relationship to the family was comparable to that of Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – a man who is an outsider in terms of perceived status but who is destined to cope more efficiently with the coming modern world than this family can.

Trikaal doesn’t quite live up to the assuredness of its opening 20 minutes. There is a hurried, incomplete feel to it, as if a couple of key scenes were accidentally left on the cutting table; there are more subplots than the film’s narrative can accommodate, we don’t get enough time with all the characters, and perhaps because of this some of the acting seems uneven or not fully realised. It isn’t as tightly constructed an ensemble movie as Party, which was directed by Benegal’s friend and former cameraman Govind Nihalani a year earlier. But there are things to recommend it, even apart from its visual quality. The scenes involving Dona Maria’s ambivalent relationship with Melagrania are particularly effective (Benegal has always been a sensitive director of women) and there are many interesting people in the large cast, including the under-used Ila Arun, a melancholy-looking youngster named Maqsood Ali (who would go on to singing fame as Lucky Ali a decade or so later), Jayant Kripalani as the perpetually drunk suitor of another Souza-Soares girl, and the rugged Nikhil Bhagat (whose only other major role was in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray) as the young Ruiz. Remo Fernandes and Alisha Chennai show up too as a couple of local musicians.

Though the film’s ending was a little abrupt for my liking, I liked how the bookending scenes featuring the older Ruiz were used – how they have the effect of summarily cutting the past off from the present. There is something poignant about the fact that he never encounters an older version of any major figure from the past (which is something one might have expected in a narrative like this). He makes enquiries, gets token information about what happened to this or that person, but he doesn’t actually meet anyone again – there is no closure in that sense. And this allows the viewer to leave with the feeling that the spirits of all those people are still bickering and mourning and making toasts and partying in that creaky old house. In the lovely, ghostly light of Ashok Mehta’s thick candles.

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P.S. heavily made up in the role of Dona Maria’s mousy son-in-law Lucio is a difficult-to-recognise K K Raina – shuffling about in a hunched posture, with false teeth that have an embarrassing tendency to pop out during times of stress. I spent half my viewing of the film wondering which classical movie monster Lucio reminded me of – Nosferatu? No, not quite – and then at last I had it: Fredric March as Mr Hyde in the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

(I’m not being facetious: it isn’t simply a matter of physical resemblance but of a certain nervous ferocity in both performances. No intention of offending people - or monsters - with false teeth or overbites, or taking anything away from the conceptualisation of the Lucio character, which I thought was quite effective.)

The artist, the ivory tower and the world: on Govind Nihalani’s restored Party

The old man on stage is performing a scene from the play Natasamrat, about a once-great artiste now living in his inner world. “All the greats are within me!” he declaims, lurching about the stage, “Caesar, Othello, Ganpatrao Belwalkar.” A woman – clearly a fan of the actor – watches from behind a curtain, deeply moved. "Caesar" is stabbed – “Brutus, tum bhi?” – and falls to the ground. The scene ends, the audience applauds.

Backstage, the woman meets the actor and voices her admiration. “Kitni vedna hoti hogi, na?” she asks (“There must be so much suffering involved in this performance?”) “Vedna mujhe nahin hoti, jo character mujh mein hai, usse hoti hai,” he replies politely. The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me. Then he returns to the dressing room and removes his heavy makeup to reveal a much younger (and dare one say it, blander, less interesting) face beneath it.

Watching this scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party, I did a double take. The face beneath the mask is that of Shafi Inamdar, whom I mainly remember for his role as the husband in the 1980s comedy show Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, and for a series of workmanlike character parts in movies. It was one of those moments that give you a fresh perspective on a performer whom you have taken for granted.

But this is just one of many startling scenes in an extraordinary film. Party has been a holy grail for many of the movie-lovers I know, its long-time unavailability on DVD one of our abiding cinematic puzzles. Apart from being a cutting social satire, this is the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. And yet it has been out of circulation for years. (I heard from an acquaintance some time ago that Nihalani himself had been searching for a decent print; this is not difficult to believe.)

Well, it’s here now, in an excellent print – one of the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs, which are restorations of NFDC films made in the 1980s and 90s. These discs represent a very important step in film preservation in India and I’ll be writing a longer piece about them soon, but for now here are some thoughts on Party.

****

The sequence mentioned above is one of the establishing scenes of Nihalani’s film, but it also touches on a key theme: the divide between an artist’s work and his life. Is it possible for a character on stage to feel intense vedna while the actor playing that character claims to be untouched by the emotions (and afterwards peels off his makeup, puts on a shiny red kurta and leaves for a cocktail party)? Is it similarly possible for a writer to express a powerful social conscience and sympathy for the downtrodden in his work while otherwise leading a privileged life at a vast remove from the subjects of his writing?

Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, Party raises these questions from many different perspectives. In its opening minutes we meet the people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who is constantly “performing” – even in private moments with her husband – and seems incapable of distinguishing between art and life. (No wonder she interprets a line in Barve’s work about “khokhla pyaar” – hollow love – as a personal jibe.) Other guests include Inamdar’s theatre actor Ravindra, who is more adept at separating himself from his roles; the ostentatiously radical Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others; Damayanti’s melancholy daughter Sona (Deepa Sahi), who has a child out of wedlock; and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly even a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly). Meanwhile a group of young partygoers – led by Damayanti’s son Rahul – take over an upstairs room and dance to popular American music, mostly unconcerned with the goings-on downstairs.

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced, confessions made and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but caught in the images they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the talk converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure (whose simultaneous absence from and centrality to the proceedings is reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz) becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to mild annoyance (“This so-called social commitment has become fashionable”) to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world? “Hum likhte hain kyonke humein likhna hai” (“We write because we must”) Barve says, but Avinash insists that every work of art is a weapon and that art and politics are inseparable. “Do we want to live as artists or as human beings?”

Party is a startlingly fresh film both in these big discussions and in its casual chatter about the literary world. Two people debate the relative merits of Rushdie and Naipaul (and I admit to being amused to find that Naipaul had a reputation for being "bitter" even three decades ago). A minor character named Ila (played by Ila Arun) asks Barve why there is so little of the female perspective in his work, and though his reply is an apparently sensible one (he can only convincingly write about the things he knows), we are reminded of his distant, condescending attitude towards his wife. “You English speakers think too much of yourselves,” one person says, provoking the retort that there is such a thing as “vernacular snobbery” too. (Yet this party itself is clearly an aspirational setting where anyone not comfortable in English would be out of place. Bharat awkwardly says things like “She is drunken” just to make small talk and to fit in.) Opposing views are expressed on nearly every major topic. Damayanti (who basks in the reflected glory of artists without being one herself) is called a parasite, but the word becomes equally significant in another context – it can refer to a smug artist living off his early work and reputation, becoming fattened on fame without ever feeling impelled to seek fresh ground or question his own assumptions.

By now it should be clear that this is (like nearly all of Nihalani’s work) an explicitly idea-driven film: politically charged, full of reflection and counter-reflection. Being adapted from a major play in close collaboration with the playwright, it has the discipline and rigour of good theatre (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it). But these things perhaps make it important to clarify that this is definitely not just a static filming of a stage production. There is a strong cinematic sense in the use of space, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them. And there are splendidly orchestrated scenes such as the one where, during a conversation between Barve and Damayanti, the camera repeatedly cuts outside the room to watch the drunk Mohini moving around silently on the porch. Barve will make a key confession about himself at around the same time his wife is shocked by her own image in the mirror.

****

Driven though it is by conversation, Party ends with a harrowing wordless sequence where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life; another who is in danger of doing so) share a nightmare vision and face their consciences. The scene ties in with a motif in Nihalani’s early cinema: the voiceless person, someone who is either unable or reluctant to speak up. (See Om Puri’s Lahanya Bhiku in Aakrosh or the silent, suffering wife played by Deepa Sahi in Aaghat.) But it also takes us back to the very beginning of Party – to a lovely shot of Sona reading a letter written by Amrit, so focused on the text that she barely moves, the camera drawing tentatively towards her. (Watching the film a second time, one might consider the light gently streaming in through the silk curtains in the background and think about the irony of this poet-activist’s letter being read in such a refined, unthreatened bourgeoisie setting.)

“Bheenche huye jabre dard kar rahe hain,” says the voiceover (“My clenched jaws are aching”). “Kitni der tak dabaaya jaa sakta hai khaulte laave ko. Kisi bhi pal khopri crater mein badal jaaye.” (“How long can I stay silent and keep this lava inside me? My head feels like it could turn into a crater.”)

[This may be a good time to point out that the shuddh Hindi used in this screenplay is occasionally so dense and layered that you might need to watch some scenes a second time just to fully process what is being said.]

The voice is the familiar one of Naseeruddin Shah and a tinge of amusement enters it when he says “khopri crater mein badal jaaye”, as if to acknowledge the corniness of such an analogy in an otherwise austere monologue. But when the writer of this letter makes his brief appearance in the final seconds of Party, the words will be given a morbidly literal form. It is one of many times in this film where something said in a light vein subsequently acquires a much darker shade. In brightly lit, elegantly furnished rooms people clink glasses and make small talk, but there are storms raging, both in their hearts and in the world outside.

Party isn’t a movie that you can appreciate in just about any mood, but those who open themselves to it will be driven back to it a few times. It is so well written, constructed and performed that it should stimulate even those (I include myself here) who are ambivalent about its ideological position. Wary though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among Hindi cinema's great achievements. And now it has the print it deserves.

P.S. For anyone interested in recurring visual motifs in a director’s work, especially from one film to the next, here’s a little exercise: watch the very last scene of Party, note how a shuffling walk creates the sense of someone weighed down by heavy chains, and then watch the opening shot of the film Nihalani made immediately after it – Aghaat. (I wrote about Aghaat in this post.) The little "link" between the two scenes reminded me of other prominent inter-film connections, such as the similarity between the closing shot of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the opening shot of his next film A Clockwork Orange.