A Portrait of the Doctor as an Angry Young Man

My Mirror column: the seventh in my series on Indian films about doctors.

What drives doctors to frustration in our cinema, and has that changed from Dr. Kotnis to Kabir Singh?

Amitabh Bachchan (right) as the dhoti-clad Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee
with Rajesh Khanna (left) as his patient and friend Anand Sehgal in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971)

Over the last six weeks, this column has looked at Indian films with doctor protagonists, beginning with Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), which V Shantaram based on Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, India's real-life medical missionary to China. In the last 75 years, we've travelled some distance from that uncomplicated patriotic doctor who chose duty to profession and country, over even duty to parents.

There have been, speaking rather broadly, two directions in which Indian cinema has taken doctors. In films like Ganashatru and Ek Doctor Ki Maut, made outside the industry framework, the good doctor remains a professional and patriot of the highest order. In these films, it is Indian society that no longer honours that selfless commitment to medical science. This chronological change is true as well of middle-of-the-road cinema. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha (1960), Balraj Sahni's rural doctor slaving away over his research could be imagined stumbling upon some good fortune by film's end. A decade later, none of the rural doctors in Vijay Anand's Tere Mere Sapne (1971) receive recognition or support. Even Dev Anand's 'original research' on a herbal cure for tuberculosis gets him fame only when an American university (Johns Hopkins, correctly) gives him a degree (a much darker version of this international vs national arc appears in Ek Doctor Ki Maut). Even as recently as an Udta Panjab, the good doctor's goodness is wasted on the world around her – ending in tragedy.

There is another cinematic trajectory (sometimes overlapping with the first), where the focus is on the frailties of doctors. Tere Mere Sapne, for instance, offered up one doctor in denial of his own illness, one alcoholic depressive doctor, and one doctor making money off rich patients to take vengeance on an unjust world. Bemisaal a decade later is much darker: the doctor now feels entitled to the good life – and the stakes of 'making money' are his patients' lives.

But some of the most interesting depictions are those that recognise that doctors, just like the rest of us, can have frailties -- even when they are more or less good. In 1971, the same year as Tere Mere Sapne, came Hrishikesh Mukherjee's most famous doctor movie: Anand. If his Anuradha had been routed through the doctor's perfect wife, Anand was routed through the perfect patient. Rajesh Khanna played Anand Sehgal, the sunny patient no-one wants to see die.

The film's narrative as usually understood as Anand's chatty warmth breaking through the hard, serious exterior of Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (a rather wonderful Amitabh Bachchan). That isn't untrue. But watching the film again, I realised that Anand expands on something I suggested in last week's column: the burden of stoicness placed upon doctors. When we meet Bachchan's Bhaskar, he is a man dispirited by his work: exhausted by having to practice in a country where many doctors are willing to treat the imaginary ailments of the rich for a fee, while mere medicine cannot cure what really ails so many patients – poverty. Bhaskar's exhaustion is often expressed as anger – a sneering contempt for the hypochondriac rich, and a helpless snappish rage in the face of the dying poor. What Anand does first is to recognise that rage as the doctor's anger at himself. But what he does next is to jolt Bhaskar out of that overwhelmed state, to frame the doctor's depressiveness and cynicism as self-indulgent – and insist that he live on the side of life, even while constantly having to look death in the eye.

In mid-2019, Indian cinema gave us another film about an angry doctor. Several films, actually – Sandeep Vanga's Telugu superhit Arjun Reddy was remade in several languages, all retaining the same essential plot, about a doctor who becomes a raging alcoholic – literally -- after his college girlfriend is forced by her family to marry another man. I saw the Hindi version, Kabir Singh, and like several reviewers, was struck by the hero's disturbing sense of ownership over his largely passive girlfriend, who seems only too happy to be owned.

Shahid Kapur as the titular protagonist Kabir Singh in the 2016 film about an alcoholic surgeon with anger issues

 

But what is relevant here is that Arjun/Kabir is portrayed as a brilliant doctor -- a surgeon, no less. The film might be seen to suggest, as incoherently as its hero's rages, that the external world – its rules of caste, gender and class, as well as institutional seniority – is a stifling hierarchy against which our hero 'rebels'. Kabir's uncontrolled anger, even when it hurts or endangers his friends, lovers, strangers or even patients, is greeted with awe much more often than censure. His rule-breaking is applauded, his depressive alcoholism is 'understood', even by women and men he treats badly. Anger is feted as self-expression, flaws are forgiven. Where, oh where, is an Anand to cut this Doctor Saab down to size?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 Nov 2020

The doctor as sufferer

My Mirror column, sixth in my series on films about doctors:

Based on AJ Cronin’s famous 1937 novel The Citadel, Vijay Anand’s medical melodrama Tere Mere Sapne (1971) casts doctors as the ailing ones

Like several of the films I've written about in recent weeks, Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne (1971) had as its protagonist not a doctor, but the medical profession itself. And thus, perhaps necessarily, several doctors. The director's brother Dev Anand may have supplied the film's star quotient (as the rather unimaginatively named hero Dr Anand), but within the film's opening ten minutes we meet three other doctors. These are the characters that actually give us the lay of the land

First up is Dr Anand's medical batchmate, who delivers the first line of dialogue in the film: “Jise tum aadarsh kehte ho, usse main paagalpan kehta hoon [What you call principle, I call madness].” He suggests establishing a moneymaking practice in the city together, but the idealistic Anand mocks him for being a businessman instead of a doctor - and leaves for a remote mining village. The second doctor we meet is the ageing Dr Prasad (the marvellous Mahesh Kaul), employed by the mining company for 35 years, but now so ill that he hires younger doctors as ‘assistants’ to work in his stead - while his paranoid wife attempts to keep his illness a secret. The third doctor is also interesting: Dr Prasad’s other assistant, one Dr Jagannath Kothari, played by Vijay Anand himself. A gynaecologist with a fancy degree from London, Jagan now spends most of his waking hours drinking himself into a stupor.

What is common to these very different characters – and what eventually comes to drive our hero as well – is money, or the lack of it. The idealists are led by the old Dr Prasad, who has spent a lifetime in the service of poor mine workers, but without being able to realise his dream of improving the medical facilities in the area. The unruly-haired Dr Jagan, meanwhile, is only on his way to middle age, but already embittered by the bureaucratic and other restrictions that kept a young doctor from rising in a socialist India [these are complaints about the system that continued to appear in later films I’ve written about, like Bemisaal (1981) and Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1989)]. Our hero arrives in the village full of reformist zeal, initially even managing to rouse Jagan out of his alcoholic self-pity - but his honesty and hard work are of no avail either in his career, or when he finds himself up in court against a powerful rich man.

Thus the corruption of the system – and we’re talking 50 years ago – is blamed for Dr Anand’s moral decline. Which is how the film leads us back to the first doctor it showed us, the one who has no compunctions about using his qualifications as a way to mint money. In the second half, it is his network of fashionable city doctors catering to the rich and famous that an angry Dev Anand becomes part of. “Aaj tak mere aadarsh hi meri daulat thhe, lekin aaj se daulat hi mera aadarsh ban jayegi [Till today my principles were my wealth, from now on wealth will be my principle],” he announces to his increasingly distressed wife Nisha (Mumtaz).

There are many things that relegate this film to its time: the paternalistic take on mine workers as easily misguided/corrupted; the dismissal of the village midwife as necessarily knowing less about delivering a baby than any doctor – even one not trained in gynaecology; the portrayal of Dr Prasad as the generous, open-hearted idealist at the mercy of a small-minded, penny-pinching wife.

But despite these, within its melodramatic dialogue-baazi, something still rings true. And again, as in Anuradha, which I wrote about last week, it is only a doctor who can manage to get through to another doctor. This is true of the pre-climactic scenes, featuring Dr Anand’s restoration to the milk of human kindness. But Tere Mere Sapne’s most moving scene might be between the ailing Dr Prasad and Jagan, his black sheep doctor employee. “Does such a capable doctor not recognise his own symptoms?” asks Jagan. And when the old man says he does, but has decided to wait for death, Jagan’s response is: “Yeh ek mareez baat kar raha hai, doctor nahi. [This is a patient speaking, not a doctor.]” This exhorting of the doctor to a special status recurs through the film, as for instance when a famous actress (Hema Malini in a fetching part) tells Dev Anand to cheer up because “if a doctor speaks like this, what will the patient do?”

The doctor in Hindi cinema, it seems, must not only carry the god-like mantle of giver of life, but hide his own emotional travails. The mantle is a veil.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Oct 2020.

How to treat a doctor

My Mirror column: 

As part of the ongoing series about doctors in our cinema, a look at humanitarianism and humility in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's earliest film about a doctor: Anuradha (1960)

Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni in a still from Anuradha (1960)

Almost exactly twenty years before Bemisal, which I wrote about last week, Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed another film about a doctor. Unlike Bemisal, Anuradha (1960) was about a good doctor, a great doctor, with a humanitarian vision to match his mastery of his profession. Balraj Sahni's Dr. Nirmal Chaudhury is the sort of medical man that Vinod Mehra's reformed avatar tries to become in Bemisal: deeply committed, cycling through his remote rural area, treating zamindar and poor alike – or rather, treating them differently, because he does not charge impoverished patients. Asked where the doctor is to be found, a local responds: “Doctor wahin hoga jahan gandagi hogi, jahan makkhiyan bhinhina rahi hongi, jahan 15-20 mareez baithe khaaen-khaaen kar rahe honge... [A doctor is found where there is dirt, flies buzzing around, and 15-20 patients sitting around coughing...]”

But Mukherjee's concerns in this film are more personal. Sahni's Nirmal is a lovely man who falls for Leela Naidu's Anuradha Roy, a well-off young woman who is not just beautiful but artistically talented, singing and choreographing her own performances (the film's delightful music is by the late Pt. Ravi Shankar). Having wooed and married her, however, Nirmal and she move to the village, and he becomes the classic workaholic husband: out of the house most of the time and preoccupied even when in. 

Sachin Bhowmick's script uses the figure of the distracted doctor to indicate a man who always has bigger things on his mind. Small details suggest this from the start: even when Nirmal is courting Anuradha, he almost misses the start of her show. Where could he be, wonders Anuradha's brother. “Doctors are always late,” says the woman he's with. That line presages what is to come: Leela Naidu's disappointed face as her husband fails to pay her the slightest bit of attention, or even keep his word about the rare promise of time together.

Nirmal is no fool. His passion for medical science apart, he has enough emotional intelligence to notice other men's connection or disconnection from their wives – but apparently not his own. Nirmal's patients include one man who is mocked because he acts out his wife's every illness, his body mimicking the symptoms that his mind so empathises with. (The man who does the mocking is the bus conductor for whom ignoring his wife is mardaangi: even if she throws the kitchen tongs at him.) Another patient never notices that his wife is ill until it is too late, and Nirmal berates him:“If you can't take care of her, why marry?”. But his blindness to his wife's malady is an unspoken analogy for Nirmal's own obliviousness to what ails Anuradha.

What, in fact, does ail Anuradha? Naidu, never much of an actress, with her stilted Hindi delivery, relies on her expressive eyes to portray the profound emptiness of the woman who has lost her music and with it, her identity -- gaining a marriage that offers her none of the companionship it seemed to promise. Her tiredness in the scene in which Sahni returns hours later than promised and goes straight to his home laboratory, intending to spend the rest of the night looking for a cure for a local water-borne infection, presages another put-upon wife's (Shabana Azmi) sorrow and bafflement and frustration with her preoccupied doctor husband (Pankaj Kapur) in Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

The problem, both films seem to suggest, isn't so much the drudgery, which might have been the same for any other woman in any other comparable household. It is the exhaustion that comes from cooking and cleaning and taking care of a man who is entirely oblivious to your presence – and yet expects everything to be in perfect order, so that he can carry out his duties without a hitch. The fact that these duties happen to be to humanity at large helps hide what is equally true – that they serve the doctors' own sense of self. That these blissfully patriarchal husbands happen to be good doctors, I'd argue, is meant to underline their indomitable egos, the unshakeable sense of higher purpose that tars their wives' completely legitimate domestic desires as petty and ungrateful and limited.

These men may start by loving a talented woman as an equal, but the woman inevitably finds herself reduced to being a doctor's wife. Even at the very end of Anuradha, when Mukherjee inserts a nascent women's rights speech -- about the good doctor's sadhana and tapasya being nothing compared to the devotion and penance of “our wives, our mothers, our daughters” -- that speech must come from a senior doctor (Nasir Husain). In Bemisal two decades later, Vinod Mehra's cockily unethical gynaecologist learns his lesson only from his doctor best friend (Amitabh Bachchan). Apparently, it needs a doctor to teach another doctor anything – especially humility.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Oct 2020.