[Did a version of this for my DNA column]
“These films were made during the relatively short period in cinema history when the only way to see a motion picture was to gather in groups in a darkened theatre,” writes George Stevens Jr in the anthology Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The words (and the book itself) are an ode to a time when film-watching was not yet possible in the privacy of one’s home, and I thought about them a few months ago, while watching Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment in a mini-theatre; it was a reminder that despite my love of old Hollywood, I have seen very few of those films in conditions approximating a traditional theatre setting. And as a professional writer, one can feel like a bit of a fake pontificating about such movies despite being so removed in space and time from the way in which they were first seen (and intended to be seen).
I thought of Stevens’ words again at the Centenary Film Festival in Delhi last week, where I saw movies like the Navketan classic Baazi and Bimal Roy’s iconic Madhumati in a large hall in the Siri Fort Auditorium. Though the screen wasn’t covered end to end (most of the films I saw took up barely half the total screening space) and the prints weren't consistently good, it was still an experience to be valued. Early in Baazi, there is a terrific, symbolism-laden scene where the small-time gambler Madan (Dev Anand) is taken to a swish club and led ever deeper into a den of urban vice; as one door after another opens to admit him, new secrets come into view. I could relate to Madan’s wide-eyed expression: watching these films in this environment, I felt like I was walking through a time portal into a new and exotic place.
It was a place where you could see stars like Dilip Kumar rendered youthful again, on a big screen in a darkened hall, and imagine that this was how the original audiences saw them. You could gape at an opening-credits list that read like a roll-call of legends. (From Baazi: Guru Dutt, Balraj Sahni as writer, S D Burman and Sahir Ludhianvi, Zohra Sehgal in charge of “Dances”, and as assistants in small font size, V K Murthy, who would become one of our finest cinematographers, and Raj Khosla. From Madhumati: Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak as screenplay-writer, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee as editor.) Watching with the benefit of hindsight, you could engage in speculation too. To see an early, vulnerable Dev Anand – before his trademark mannerisms had been honed, and long before he went down the thorny road of self-parody – is to wonder: what if the audience hadn’t connected with this young man’s personality? What if Baazi had been a flop, Navketan had never got off the ground and Guru Dutt’s directorial career had been shelved? What would the history of Hindi film have looked like then? In a dark hall, these questions have a special immediacy.
To clarify, I’m not romanticising the theatre experience for the sake of it. Personally I like watching films on my own time and in my own space, many of my most cherished viewing experiences have been sans company, and there is a wider case to be made for the virtues of non-communal movie-watching. (In the US in the 1950s, home viewing begat a generation of movie students-turned-filmmakers who could appreciate personal, individualistic films without being distracted by other, possibly unresponsive viewers.) Nor was the Centenary Festival shorn of irritants. People walked in and out of auditoria, talking loudly, leaving doors open with light and sound flooding in. The emceeing before some screenings was over-earnest, there were prolonged and self-aggrandising speeches that sometimes led to delays.
And yet there was something special in the air. I felt it when a large section of the audience cheered loudly at the first appearance of the young Dev in his cap, scarf and old jacket – made up to look like a scruffy street vagabond but still an undeniable “star” presence – and when Rajesh Khanna burst through the door of the doctor’s clinic in Anand. Or when rows of viewers whistled at Johnny Walker’s drunken act atop a tree in Madhumati. Or when the man sitting in front of me began humming the opening notes of “Suhana Safar” in anticipation, during the montage of nature shots preceding the song.
Even watching the Fearless Nadia-starrer Diamond Queen – in a poor and poorly projected print – brought its own frisson. I overheard conversations between old people who had a dim memory of what Homi Wadia films were like (“lots of stunts”) but seemed to have forgotten about their remarkable blonde action heroine (playing a liberated “city-returned girl” who would have greatly intimidated Baazi’s Madan). A gentleman behind me, apparently knowledgeable, said a confident “Yes yes, Fearless Nanda” while reading out the opening credits for the edification of his companions.
There are other facets to watching old movies in this way. Performances which seem over-declamatory on TV can sometimes work better in a hall, because you feel like the actor is directing his gestures at a theatre full of people. It is closer to the experience of the stage, and one isn’t preoccupied with “naturalism” because this isn’t a mundane setting like your living room – it’s a special space that you have paid to be admitted into, where you perform the unnatural ritual of sitting quietly in the dark, like an audience at a magic performance, while pictures flash before your eyes at 24 frames a second. “Originally, the idea was to take yourself out of normal time to see a film,” the director Shyam Benegal told me during a recent conversation, “But when you watch a film on TV, you can be doing other things – chatting, eating, answering the door; you aren’t out of normal time.”
These screenings mostly took me out of “normal time”, but there were some unseemly ruptures in the fourth wall too. During a screening of Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, the sound vanished for a few minutes until someone yelled in the general direction of the projection room. Shortly afterwards, the framing went awry, and finally there was an alarming moment when the film seemed to dissolve and burn in front of our eyes mid-scene. (The effect was akin to what Ingmar Bergman did in Persona, deliberately fraying the reel to interrupt the film’s narrative. But formally inventive as Mirza's film is in its own ways, that definitely wasn't what was going on here.)
For a tense five minutes, some of us wondered if we had been unwilling witnesses to a crime against art – the grisly destruction of an important print – but the film resumed and we were sucked back into the illusion. Still, it was a sobering reminder of what has and can be lost. The centenary fest was a welcome initiative, but on the 100th anniversary of the first public show of Raja Harishchandra, the poor state of film preservation and careless attitudes to screening often beg the question "Dadasaheb Phalke ke bhoot ko gussa kyon aata hai?"
[With the theatrical rerelease of Jaane bhi do Yaaro - in the restored "Cinemas of India" print - scheduled this week, here is a piece I did for The Caravan around the time my book on the film was published. And below is the full text of my essay - also for The Caravan - about four other NFDC-restored films]
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It’s no secret that we in India have been largely indifferent to the preservation of our cinematic heritage. Prints of movies barely a few decades old are frequently in a dismal state, with the worst sufferers being low-budget, non-studio films that never had an extended theatrical run. There are cases of non-mainstream directors and actors not having access to their own seminal work. Naseeruddin Shah once told me that his only print of Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai was a battered video-cassette: “Come to my place if you want to see it, I’m not lending it to anyone.” The actor Pawan Malhotra interrupted an interview to plaintively ask if I had seen a disc of Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, which featured his best starring role.
Linked to this neglect is a more general apathy to how movies should ideally be experienced. Glossy DVD covers conceal faded, scratch-ridden prints of old films, with many scenes missing a few seconds of footage. Audio quality is often so bad it can make one weep (more than once, I have had to switch on the subtitles for Hindi films) and there are cases of shoddy recording where sound and visual are not synchronised. Cheaply rented pirated discs seem geared to functional movie-watching where the only purpose is to perfunctorily follow the bare bones of a plot, rather than to fully experience the visual and aural qualities of a film.
What a sight for sore eyes and a treat for straining ears, then, are the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs released by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in collaboration with Shemaroo. These well-restored prints of non-mainstream films (insert your label of choice: Art or Parallel Film, New Wave Cinema) produced by NFDC in the 1980s and early 90s represent what the movie-watching experience can be – the images are nearly spotless, the colours vivid, the audio clear. View a couple of them and you’ll find it difficult to go back to regular DVD-watching.
The Cinemas of India DVDs represent my first sighting of Salim Langde... as well as Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down and Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, at least in this format (they may have been floating about on that execrable third-world invention, the VCD). Some other films – Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, Arun Kaul’s Diksha – have been available, but have never looked this good before. And though the cult of Kundan Shah’s iconic comedy Jaane bhi do Yaaro grows each day, I hadn’t come across a DVD of it in the past two years (possibly the earlier Shemaroo edition was taken out of circulation to pave the way for this new, two-disc set containing an interview with the director).
But the real Holy Grail (and for me personally, the highlight of these releases) is the new print of Govind Nihalani’s superb 1984 film Party. Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, this cutting social satire may be 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. It is so well written and performed that it should stimulate even those who are ambivalent about its ideological position (namely, that art and politics are necessarily inseparable). And yet, it has been out of circulation for years.
In Party’s opening 20 minutes, we are introduced to various sets of 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 depressive, alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who seems constantly to be “performing”, even in private moments with her husband. Other guests include a theatre actor (Shafi Inamdar) who is more adept at separating himself from his roles (“The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me”), the faux-liberal Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others, and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly 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).
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 and confessions made, and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but bound in the traps 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 conversation converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now living with and helping the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure – reminiscent in some ways of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz – becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these people. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to amused indifference 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?
Like nearly all of Nihalani’s work, Party is politically charged and explicitly idea-driven. It remains a startlingly fresh film in its big discussions as well as in its casual chatter about the literary world (Rushdie vs Naipaul, “brown-sahib” snobbery vs “vernacular” snobbery, the inattention to the female perspective in a male writer’s work). Importantly, though it is adapted from a theatrical work (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), it is not just a static filming of a stage production. The use of space, the many lovely still compositions, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people – all these show a strong cinematic sense. 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.
This is a splendidly constructed, designed and choreographed work, and though it is driven by talk, it ends with a harrowing nightmare scene that is entirely wordless – a scene where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life, feeding off his own reputation; another who is in danger of doing the same) gaze into a distorting mirror and face their consciences. Mindful though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among the great Hindi films.
(An extended version of this essay on Party is here)
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If Party proposes that the true artist should be more than a detached observer with a splinter of ice in his heart, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda determinedly blurs the line between a storyteller and his tale, and between fact and fiction. Nihalani was once Benegal’s cinematographer and I can imagine Party and Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda having a conversation about art and artists, with the latter adopting a more relaxed, playful attitude towards the subject. It opens with a scene where a painting of a mohalla, as seen in an art exhibition, dissolves into the mohalla itself, and ends with a shot of the raconteur-in-chief Manek babu walking off into the mist of another story, much like Buster Keaton’s movie projectionist entering the screen in Sherlock Jr.
Benegal’s reputation as a leader of the parallel movement was formed in the 1970s with such films as Manthan, Nishant and Bhumika, but this film, made in 1991 (and based on Dharamvir Bharati’s novella), is one of his most accomplished works – a clever, self-referential comment on the nature of storytelling. This is partly achieved by the non-linearity of the narrative, which coils back on itself like a serpent swallowing its own tail; a scene might be repeated from a different perspective, giving it a marginally different timbre and altering our feelings about the characters.
Manek (Rajit Kapoor) doesn’t seem to be more than 25 or 26 but relates his stories as if they were personal experiences from a very distant time. His tales – about his encounters with three different sorts of women – link into each other in unexpected ways; they are driven by Vanraj Bhatia’s fine music score, and they all centre on romance and betrayal. But they are subject to varied interpretations, and one is always aware of an element of artifice – a sense that a story is being constructed in collaboration with the people who are listening to it. Manek wryly maintains that a good love story should be uplifting to society (“acchi prem kahaani samaaj ke liye kalyaankari honi chahiye”) and that stories like Devdas are “sentimental junk” because they lack a “moral”, but his own actions in his narratives are less than edifying; he portrays himself as limp-wristed, responsibility-shirking and cowardly.
A different sort of storyteller (one who constructs inner worlds to keep his own hopes alive) is the protagonist of Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi (1991). The film’s title refers to the famous Mumbai slum in which it is set, but a subtitle in the opening credits gives the word its literal meaning: “Quicksand”. This is a place where even an animal used to the desert might easily sink – and indeed, there is a strange early scene involving a runaway camel who dies in the slum!
“Bolne ko toh sabhi ret ke jaanwar hain – yahaan marne ko aaye hain” (“We are all desert animals who have come here to die”) says a voiceover by longtime resident Rajkaran (Om Puri), who works as a cab-driver. But Rajkaran is an essentially sanguine man looking to pull himself out of the mire – while his pragmatic wife Kunda (Shabana Azmi) brings in a steady income by working in a sewing mill, he has been saving to invest in a cloth factory, and he may have other tricks up his sleeve. I thought he bore a striking resemblance to Ayyan Mani, the resourceful protagonist of Manu Joseph’s fine novel Serious Men, about a chawl-dweller living by his wits.
Of course, Rajkaran has his Madhuri Dixit dreams to keep himself going, and Dharavi contains telling scenes where one cinematic idiom collides with another. The opening sequence winks at the mainstream-movie culture of the time with a clip from a fictitious film titled Shahar ka Shahenshah, starring Anil Kapoor as a slum-boy now returned to protect his childhood turf from machine gun-toting baddies. (When this onscreen hero proclaims “Yeh basti hamaari hai”, the real slum-children cheer. But soon real life takes over: local hoodlums set fire to the projection tent, which leads to a mesmeric shot of the “screen” bursting into flames with Madhuri Dixit’s red-sari-clad image still on it.) An amusing later sequence features Rajkaran and Kunda having a domestic squabble against a screen showing another (actual) Kapoor-Dixit starrer, Parinda (directed by Sudhir Mishra’s real-life buddy Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who had just crossed over into bigger-budget cinema).
Mishra’s film is about the human spirit refusing to be beaten back by heavy odds, but it is also full of lovely little visual touches that leap out at you when you watch them on this print. Bright red and green dupattas flutter outside the factory that Rajkaran dreams of buying (even the colour configuration seems to stand for the “stop-start” nature of his capricious project); an unexpected close-up of a large, cherry-red Ganesha statue is used as a punctuation mark after a conversation ends; an almost Scorsese-like sense of urgency is created by a constantly moving camera in the busy sequence where Rajkaran goes to negotiate with a middleman, with the latter’s four wives (dressed in different-coloured burkhas) wailing in a corner of the room; there is a simple yet startlingly effective shot of curtains in a room billowing slightly inward as a train passes outside the room where Rajkaran is sitting with his friends. And there are many striking shots from inside Rajkaran’s taxi, a picture of his Madhuri hanging in the front.
An underappreciated aspect of Mishra’s work is his penchant for black humour, which may have been fine-tuned when he worked as a young assistant producer on Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 1982. “I tend to search for the comic possibilities in even a very bleak situation,” he told me once during an interview. There are a few such touches here too, among them a shot of a just-discovered corpse with a transistor playing the song “Don’t worry, be happy”, and a gang-war scene where a man is slashed across his chest just in front of a board that has a crude romantic drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. None of this detracts from the essential seriousness of the film, though. The only flaw in Dharavi, I thought, was in the casting of the two leads. Nothing Puri or Azmi do here can be faulted, but they were both in their forties when the film was made – arguably too old for these parts – in addition to being established stars of non-mainstream cinema; the film may have worked better with less familiar faces in the roles.
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Dharavi’s main narrative is interspersed with vignettes of slum children playing grown-up, usually by imitating the things they have been seeing in masala movies (in one scene little boys mock-pursue a little girl, who does her bit by mock-screaming “Bachao”). I was reminded of these swaggering children while watching Salim Pasha (Pawan Malhotra) and his cohorts in Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989). Malhotra is a small-built man with an unthreatening voice, but that is only one reason why Salim – who saunters about his district collecting hafta and committing petty crime – often comes across as a child pretending to be an adult. (He wears a canvas jacket and a fish-net vest, he talks the talk and struts the strut, but when a friend is murdered he vents his frustrations by shooting down fighter planes in a video game.) “Iss shaher mein gunda banna toh bachhon ka khel hai,” an acquaintance, the idealistic Aslam, tells him in a key scene, “Mushkil toh sharaafat se jeena hai.” (“In a city like this, it’s child’s play to be a hoodlum. What’s difficult is to follow the path of honesty.”) In a sense, then, Mirza’s film is a coming-of-age story: a young man growing to self-awareness, slowly turning his face away from what is the easy way out for someone born in his class and circumstances.
It begins with Salim introducing us to his basti and the people who are part of his life: his family, including a disapproving father and a sweet younger sister; the dancing girl Mumtaz (“chamakti Mumtaz”), whom he loves; a faux-philosophising, guitar-strumming firang called “Jani Hippie”; the local smugglers and policemen who are inevitably in cahoots. (“Dekho, smuggler ke kandhe pe kanoon ka haath,” someone wittily observes as a cop scrapes before a man he should be arresting.) There is a touch of documentary to these early scenes, but they also have a stylised quality: the opening-title sequence gives the city a bleached, otherworldly look, the camera tracks constantly, drawing us ever further into Salim’s milieu (and, by extension, his inner world).
Salim Langde... is an unevenly paced film – very breezy in places (with a couple of inspired comic skits such as the one where Salim’s buddies imitate the mannerisms of posh college-goers), but then juddering to a halt as a character (mainly the conscientious Aslam) holds forth on such matters as the bloody history of the subcontinent and the need for Muslims to embrace education. Much like Mirza’s capricious book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, it mixes compelling narrative with self-conscious preaching, and the ending is a little abrupt (though that may well have been intentional).
Hindu-Muslim riots are a humming presence in the background of Salim’s life: when local hoodlums encroach on each other’s territory, it becomes a metaphor for communal clashes and the splitting of the country along religious lines. (“Apna area! Unka area! Sab log ka area alag-alag ho gaya hai,” a character rues.) The drug-addled hippie invokes nuclear destruction and observes that India is a good place to die in; posters of Martin Luther King and a mushroom cloud share space on a cafe wall, while another wall amusingly has portraits of Gods separated by large advertisements for razor blades. The link between poverty and crime (with religion as a catalyst) is made abundantly clear, and our hero must find a way to choose between rokda and izzat. A question that was central to Dharavi is raised here in a slightly different context: “Hai koi tareeka gutter se baahar nikalne ka?” (“Is there any way to get out of this gutter?”) Like Rajkaran and Amrit – “heroes” of the other films mentioned above – Salim Pasha must try to balance personal integrity and ideals with his circumstances.
(Also see this post on Saeed Mirza's first feature film Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan)
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Watching these films in succession, it strikes me that these print restorations are important for another reason: they help us overcome a mental block against discussing non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal.
Many viewers of my generation grew up seeing (or being forced to see) these films on monochrome TV sets and believing that they were meant to be edifying but joyless experiences. In some cases this impression spilled over into adulthood. These movies are characterised by stark writing, gritty performances and “real” emotions, we told ourselves, and surely such things can be appreciated even in dull colours and scratchy prints? (Looked at in one way, poor prints can even heighten the effect of such works by reminding us that they were made on low budgets – that this was the nuanced Cinema of Struggle, not the facile Cinema of Mass Entertainment.)
However, these restorations make it possible to appreciate the cinematic brio and imagination. They are reminders that directors like Nihalani, Benegal and Mishra were 
weaned on the vibrant international movements of the 1960s and 70s – the cinematic new waves in countries ranging from France and Japan to Germany, Czechoslovakia and the US. However “socially relevant” and “message-oriented” the films made in these movements were, the best of them were formally dynamic too. You’d have to be a real pedant (and, I would suggest, half-blind as well) to discuss Party and Dharavi only in terms of their content and ideas, without dwelling on how they do what they do. What makes them so good is a synthesis between depth of content and depth of execution.
For the Indian film buff who believes that aesthetic pleasure is vital to the movie-watching process (even when the movies themselves are “serious”) and who has been exposed to brilliant prints of international classics, these restorations are a first step in what will hopefully be a more rigorous approach to our filmic past. In the year that our cinema celebrates its centenary, it should not be too much to expect that movies only a few decades old should look the best they can.
A postscript: in the US, there has been discussion on movie websites about prints of some old noir films being “over-restored” to the extent that scenes that were meant to be shadowy had been rendered incongruously bright. Watching the Cinemas of India DVDs, I occasionally had similar misgivings. Jaane bhi do Yaaro’s director Kundan Shah once told me that the glow on the sides of the frame during the film’s Mahabharata climax was caused by the use of exposed film (this is itself a poignant reminder of the lack of resources available to the crew and a vital part of the mythology of the film). Perhaps I’m imagining it, but on the new DVD that glow seems reduced. It makes one wonder if technology has reached a point where the Cinema of Struggle can be digitally converted into the Cinema of Glamour!
A few posts ago, I mentioned the new NFDC “Cinemas of India” DVDs – fine restorations of long-neglected films which could, with a little more effort, become something akin to a Criterion Collection for Indian cinema. In the past few weeks I’ve been watching movies such as Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda and Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor ki Maut on prints that allow one to fully appreciate the visual flair of these films (they also help overcome a mental block against discussing “serious”, non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal, but more on that in a later post).
There is much to appreciate, visually and aurally, in Saeed Mirza’s first directorial feature Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978). For starters, it has one of the most skilfully crafted opening sequences I have seen in a Hindi film. The first images – little huts, fields, poor people minding their children – are from a village or a very small town. A woman lights a chulha and a minimalist music score begins; it’s little more than the gentle plucking of a string instrument, but the sound becomes more hypnotic the more you hear it. We see measurements being taken, cloth being dyed, posts being driven into the ground, threads stretched across them – and soon we realise that we are watching an intricately embroidered carpet coming into existence. Women and little children labour away at it.
As the soundtrack gets busier, we hear people talking in the language of the marketplace - trading, negotiating. From a shot of a wall with the finished carpet spread over it, there is a cut to the inside of a room with the same carpet on display; the camera tracks forward and we see we are no longer in the village, we are in a showroom in the city. This is where the product of all that hard labour will be sold at prices that the original craftsmen could scarcely imagine.
Other handicrafts come into view, a hand passes over the carpet, gently stroking it. Foreign tourists - we don't see their faces, only hear them - murmur to each other in wonderment. “It must be frightfully expensive!” a woman says; she makes soft sounds of pleasure as she runs her hand over a Kashmiri fox fur. A purchase is made, they leave the showroom; in long-shot we see a sweeper toiling on the road outside. And then the opening titles begin with an illustration of a man’s head gradually filling with red colour.
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When we first see Arvind Desai (Dilip Dhawan) – the son of the businessman who owns the showroom – he is in his car, watching a street show at a traffic intersection. Driving through his city, Arvind is the picture of a handsome, confident young man taking in the sights (and there are some great vistas of 1970s Bombay in these scenes, including advertising boards of the time and promotional material for Amar Akbar Anthony). But early appearances are misleading, for Arvind is neither confident nor happy: subsequent events show him to be a drifter, uncomfortable in his own skin and never quite certain of where he is going.
Though he seems concerned about social injustice, we see that he is unlikely to ever take a real stand against it; perhaps he perceives himself as being trapped by the world he was born into. Speaking to a dealer who is asking for a higher margin, Arvind shows sympathy for the “mazdoor log” whom he has never met. “Unhein zyaada nahin milna chahiye?” he asks, “Aap aur hum toh unhee ke banaaye huye cheezon pe zinda hain, na?” (“Shouldn’t they get more? People like you and I are existing on the things they make.”) He berates the middleman for being unwilling to reduce his own profit, and then suddenly snaps, “You’re worse than me.” It’s an odd, non-contextual remark, but it seems to come from the hidden depths of a man who is guiltily aware of his cushy existence.
Watching this film, I wondered: is Arvind the most passive “hero” in the history of Hindi cinema? He’s certainly a candidate, and his passivity is central to this intriguingly titled movie. (“Ajeeb dastaan”? Some viewers would say that nothing remotely interesting happens to him.) More than once, we see him going to visit someone (a friend, a cousin), sitting around for a bit without doing anything, then getting up and saying he has to leave because he has to be somewhere else. He spends time with his girlfriend Alice, but there is no hint of physical intimacy. Instead we see him visit a prostitute with a disfigured face, but here again it’s as if he is following a script – making a naive, half-hearted effort to “connect” with the underprivileged.
Trapped in a smart suit on office days – and looking like the typical heir apparent of a wealthy family – he wears a kurta when he goes to visit his “Leftist” friend Rajan (Om Puri), and this too seems like a self-conscious attempt to fit in with Rajan and his jhola-carrying crowd. But when they actually begin talking about such things as existential angst and the effects of industrialisation, Arvind seems unable to participate; instead he goes to the window and stares at passing trains, a dreamy little smile on his face. “I’m not intellectual like you,” he tells Rajan with a little laugh.
But what is he exactly? We see him strolling about indolently in a bookstore, as if needing to prove something to himself; he glances at a shelf containing titles by Russian writers like Solzhenitsyn, but he doesn’t pick one up. Is this how an intellectual manqué window-shops?
****
Arvind is good-looking, but in a vacant, callow sort of way - his expressions range from an unconvincing sternness (when he is dealing with a dishonest employee) to a bashful, boyish smile (when he is joking with Rajan). His voice is mostly flat and inexpressive. And there is a question to be asked here: to what extent are these qualities attributable to the rawness of Dilip Dhawan the actor? Dhawan was very young when he appeared in this film, his lack of experience occasionally shows, and perhaps this is why he comes off so well as a vulnerable young man who is uncertain of his place in the world. This could be a case of excellent casting or serendipity: a first-time director making a low-budget film gives the lead role to one of his colleagues from the film institute, and he turns out to be just right for the part.
Otherwise too, Mirza’s film has a compellingly off-kilter quality. It looks and feels like a movie made by someone who had recently graduated from the FTII, his head chockful of Antonioni and Welles and Godard and dozens of other cinematic possibilities. There is formal inventiveness here, and some of it works very well: I liked the many scenes where people walk in and out of little rooms or cabins in the claustrophobic showroom, doors closing behind them and briefly cutting off their voices so we only get an incomplete sense of what is being said. (The showroom, with its many hushed whispers, is like a temple of capitalism, and one can see why someone with Arvind’s delicate sensibilities feels suffocated in it.) I also liked the use of overlapping dialogue in a party scene populated by the swish set; it is disconcerting both for the viewer and for Arvind himself. At other times, though, I felt Mirza was simply imitating the techniques of other filmmakers to little effect: the Godardian jump-cuts when Arvind drives his car, for instance.
If you’re familiar with Mirza’s other work (including his writing), you’ll know that he can be irreverent and polemical in equal measure, and at the same time. This film is often drily funny about the relationship between the poor and the rich, a running theme being that the former are smarter and more dialled in than the latter think. Going by the indulgent glow on his face, Arvind thinks he is being kind to a street boy by asking him to keep a watch on his car and promising him employment, but the kid makes fun of him behind his back. Later, at a booze shop, when Arvind hurriedly walks away after handing over more money than he was supposed to pay, the shopkeeper (instead of being grateful for the “tip”) shakes his head and chuckles to his assistant “Saalon ko paise lene mein bhi takleef hoti hai.” (“These rich people find it irksome to even take their money back.”)
In the final analysis, though, humour and scorn are the only weapons that the poor have (and this too is a theme that recurs through Mirza's cinema). The film ends with the eyes of the helpless carpet-makers staring out at us as the soundtrack becomes percussive and angrier. That ending – with the drumbeats, the unflinching gaze and the silent accusation – might remind you of the final seconds of the debut film made by Mirza’s friend and colleague Kundan Shah a few years later. But it also seems to underline Arvind Desai’s status as a cipher - a well-meaning but inconsequential man - in his own story.
Here's a trailer for the NFDC DVD:
P.S. In Saeed Mirza’s book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother (which I wrote about here), there is an amusing passage about Mirza’s mother watching the preview of Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan and telling him “There was no story [...] I wish it had more drama.” I can sympathise with her – this is a slow, self-conscious film – but I think it’s possible to become so immersed in it that the question “what happens?” becomes irrelevant.
Filmmaker-scriptwriter Saeed Mirza is speaking with a friend when I arrive for our appointment at the India International Centre. The details of the conversation escape me, but it has to do with the ongoing month of Muharram and its attendant rituals. “So this can only be done on the ninth day?” Mirza is saying, “It can’t be, say, the 14th day – or the 5th day? I see.” The tone makes it apparent that he doesn’t see, but it’s only mildly sardonic, his eyes are sparkling and he’s quick to change the topic. It’s a moment that captures two things about the man: he’s iconoclastic, questioning, not particularly respectful of traditions that don’t make sense to him; but he’s disinclined to push the rationalist point too hard. As a staunch Leftist who admits to being spiritually influenced by Sufism, he understands the value of contradictions. And besides, how does a rationalist justify writing a book-length letter to a woman who has been dead for 18 years?
Mirza’s Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother has been billed as a novel, but this is an inadequate description. Though the first half includes a novella-length section where he reimagines the early lives of his parents and the unusual circumstances that lead to their wedding, this restless, engaging work is also part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-film script and a number of other things besides, with reflections on the injustices of history, the perceived clash of civilisations, and the importance of learning lessons from the past. All this combines to form a long letter addressed to Mirza’s mother, who died in 1990 – so that Ammi, though polemical in places, remains very personal, very conversational throughout.
In his preface, Mirza likens the book’s form to “miniatures set in a mural” and admits that he doesn’t know whether it will work for most readers. “My wife Jennifer felt it lacked cohesion after reading the first two drafts. She likes it better now, but she’s probably just saying that because she’s exhausted!” How did he settle on such an unusual structure? “This form was the only way I could encompass everything that was going through my mind,” he says, “The idea for the book came from the way certain words are casually bandied about in today’s world – words like ‘democratic’ vs ‘undemocratic’, “civilised” vs “uncivilised”, ‘rogue states’ vs ‘law-abiding states’, and so on. I wanted to look at how the meanings of these words have been lost or distorted.”
The longest section in Ammi is the tale of Jahanara Begum, a girl from a Mughal background, and Nusrat Beg, a Pathan, who meet in Quetta in the early 1930s. “Fictionalising the lives of my parents in this way,” says Mirza, “created a background for the parts that are more explicitly about my own family and childhood.” The result is an absorbing mix of fiction and non-fiction – it’s as if a line has been drawn down the book’s centre, separating the Nusrat-Jahanara story (which is abandoned at the point where the couple are about to start a family) from the autobiographical sketches of later years: the one about his parents’ stoical reaction when he unwittingly ate a ham sandwich in school, for instance. (“A sinner is someone who sins against people – not because he eats pork,” his mother hesitantly concludes after thinking things over for a while, though she quickly adds, “But in my house there will be no pork!”)
“That dividing line was important to me,” Mirza says. “The book’s structure begs the question: could this woman (Ammi) have been Jahanara? Could this man (my father) have been Nusrat Beg? I thought that would be an interesting way of telling a story. It also makes it more universal, rather than being a particularised account of a specific couple. There were many couples like Nusrat and Jahanara – people who came together from different backgrounds and who had to struggle with issues of faith, conservatism, the importance of education and freedom. These are ordinary lives and we tend to deny the incredible grace and dignity of the ordinary.”
More than anything, Ammi is a cry for inclusiveness, for being able to absorb various things from around the world while retaining the flavour of one’s own culture (and Mirza himself is quite capable of linking disparate things – like invoking the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” in the context of the story of the underprivileged Ekalavya). At one point, Nusrat asks the conservative elders in Jahanara’s family, “Do we want to live in a well from which we can see only a patch of sky or do we want to live outside the well and see the world?” Later, she tells him she decided to marry him because she didn’t want to live in a well, “even if seeing more of the sky would bring pain”.
“That frog-in-the-well analogy is a peculiarly Eastern one,” Mirza says, “and it’s a pity how the West, on the other hand, has been playing up this paranoia about everyone else being The Other. People like Samuel Huntington, with their insistence about the ‘clash of civilisations’, have helped to ghettoise minds.” It’s also a pity, he feels, that modernity (“another word that has lost its meaning”) is defined by the Western model. Ammi is full of pointers to the spirit of radical thinking in Islam, something Mirza feels has been suppressed or misrepresented. He includes stories about the scholars Ibn Senna and Ibn Rushd, who were among the world’s first freethinkers – holding that faith was not the only way to truth, maintaining their religious beliefs while at the same time daring to suggest that “the design of Allah needs to be studied further”. He discusses the great tradition of Arabic literature from a thousand years ago, which later found echoes in the works of many European masters. And he throws in parables about the legendary figure of Mulla Nasruddin, perpetually astride his donkey, “a genuine international folk hero...the classic Fool, who poked fun at royalty and pomp and protocol, who attacked mindless ritual and orthodoxy and everything that stifled the spirit of man”.
“I don’t think these aspects of Islam are in danger of being lost,” he says, “They exist in Turkey, on the Arab streets, but they don’t exist with the leadership, and they get misconstrued as being Islamist.” Is it difficult to be both a Muslim and a rationalist in today’s world? “It does become an issue at times, but I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “My mother took all my anti-religious talk with incredible equanimity. Liberals tend to scoff at spiritual-minded people, but I wonder if I would have been as tolerant if the situation were reversed!” Smiling, he recalls an incident from when he was just 10 years old. “My father and brother were climbing up the steps of a mosque and I suddenly decided that I didn’t want to pray. So I called out and told my father that I had stopped believing in God.” His father’s response was to look back for a moment and say, “Okay, but stay there until we return, don’t go near the road, there’s traffic about.”
Mirza is best known for his work in films: he was a major figure in what was known as the parallel-cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the writer-director of movies like Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho!, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and the co-director of the popular TV serial Nukkad. He’s starting work on a new feature next week, after a hiatus of more than a decade. “It’s time to get back to work,” he jokes, “I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years traveling – within India, in particular, learning about how different people live and think.” Some anecdotes from these travels have made it to the book, such as the ones about “the laughing, unpaid tea-garden workers”, “the young poet of the high mountains”, and the truck drivers who put a huge painting from the Sohni-Mahiwal story on the back of their vehicle, because “nowadays no one has time for true love. So much tension! How to earn money! How to get a job! So much fighting about religion! Since we have to travel around the country, we thought why not spread this message?”
“When you travel for 45,000 km on the smaller roads of this country, avoiding the highways,” says Mirza thoughtfully, “you realise how utterly insignificant you are, how foolish your arrogance is, how little you know of the world. In a sense this book is also my private apology to some figures from my past – like my Hindi teacher Sharmaji, whom we used to make fun of, even as he told us it was tragic that we knew nothing about the work of Premchand and other great Indian writers. Those of us who are more educated, and educated in a certain way, think we are philosophically superior to others – we don’t give enough consideration to someone who has come from a different background.” It’s clear that even at the age of 64, he’s eager to keep expanding his horizons, to escape the frog’s eye view.
P.S. The book's cover design has been done by the very talented Moonis Ijlal - here's an earlier post on his work.