Book Review: Rahi Masoom Raza's Scene 75

Behind the Scene

My review of the remarkable 1978 Hindi novel, Scene 75, recently out in Poonam Saxena's English translation:

SCENE 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza 

Tr. by Poonam Saxena 

HARPER PERENNIAL Rs 399; Pages 224

Sometime in the 1960s, acclaimed Hindi author Rahi Masoom Raza migrated from Ghazipur to Bombay to become a dialogue writer for films. In this slim, memorable novel, Raza combines his two identities, casting an acute eye on the 1970s film industry.

At one level, Scene 75 might be read as a fictional equivalent of Manto's Stars From Another Sky: From lesbian affairs to a domestic help servicing both mother and daughter, there's undeniably titillation here. And yet, Raza isn't quite a predecessor to Madhur Bhandarkar's preachy filmic unmaskings. Scene 75's tone is deadpan: "[E]veryone in the film world is a writer except for the writer himself. Never mind if they can't even speak proper Hindi, they are all writers. From Dilip Kumar to Raaj Kumar, everyone loves to write." Or: "The film got made but was never released because it didn't have a rape scene, it didn't have a fight between Shetty and the hero... there wasn't even a Padma Khanna cabaret number." But Raza's focus isn't filmdom as much as a cut-throat milieu that impels people to invent fake selves.

Bholanath Chopra earns Rs 192 as salary but inflates the figure to 1,092. His wife Rama frequents expensive sari shops, feigning the loss of a wallet at the final moment. Others have new selves thrust upon them: to work for Phandaji, "who was very secular but didn't eat anything that had been touched by a Muslim", the primary protagonist Ali Amjad becomes Gaurishankar Lal 'Krantikari'.

In Poonam Saxena's translation, Raza's prose retains the quicksilver quality of the raconteur, with backstories looping into each other. So Bholanath's quarrel with Rama sets us off on how the Chopras acquired their flat, which leads to Rama's admirer Sarla Midha and how she went from "simple, innocent Sarla" to a wife who "liked other men's wives".

Such juicy digressions, however, do not blunt Raza's sharpness, especially on the topic of communal feeling. "The [Chopras] were an educated family, and educated people know how to hide their bigotry," he writes, before explaining why Rama Chopra, 12-and-a-half when her family was forced to flee Pakistan in 1947, "believed she had every right to hate Muslims." The self-reinforcing fact of ghettoisation was "why no one told Rama that Muslims in India had been killed, just like Hindus in Pakistan." The clarity is even more devastating 40 years later.

Published in India Today, 23 Feb 2018.

The fictions of filmdom

My Mirror column:

Rahi Masoom Raza's biting 1977 novel Scene 75 is a brutally frank and funny account of the Bombay film industry -- and of our need to tell stories.

“Ali Amjad was saying that they should take Rajendra Kumar. Harish was saying that Rajendra Kumar was a fool. He didn't know how to act... Slowly their voices grew louder. Harish Rai was the director. Ali Amjad the writer... VD said, 'There's a new boy. Rajesh Khanna. You'll get him cheap...”

Four decades after it was first published, Rahi Masoom Raza's marvellous novel Scene 75 – just out in Poonam Saxena's pacy new English translation – can still plunge us headlong into the hectic, gossipy universe of Bombay filmdom. Raza's prose has the infectious quality of the born raconteur, somehow managing to combine circuitous, detailed backstories with new characters introduced -- and parted from -- at breakneck speed.

But unlike say, Ismat Chughtai's Ajeeb Aadmi -- a rather thinly disguised version of the unhappy Guru Dutt-Geeta Dutt-Waheeda Rehman triangle -- Raza does not place us at what we might think of the centre of the action. Yes, big names are dropped with elan, but it is not their lives that Scene 75 wants us to enter.

Real-life stars, producers, character actors, from Asha Parekh and Sanjeev Kumar to David and Manmohan Krishna, only provide the matrix of instant credibility for Raza's fictional protagonists, who are people on the fringes of the industry: aspiring screenwriters, starlets on the make, housewives desperate to wrangle film premiere invitations.

This is the seamy underbelly of Bollywood, fed on crumbs dropped by the rich and famous. Sometimes these crumbs are literal, like the supposedly jinxed royal bed from the set of a film called Adle-Jahangir that becomes the centrepiece of the flat shared by the book's four struggling friends -- or the transparent nightie deemed too small for Hema Malini that makes its way to Radhika, wife of the failing screenwriter Phandaji, and practically changes her life.

More often, though, they are tidbits of information that offer access to the filmi duniya. Scene 75 derives much of its juiciness from the interactions between various classes of hangers-on, who have different degrees of this access, and most of whom are pretending to have more than they actually do. So, for instance, we have the grave, revolutionary VD acquiring new skills of deception when it comes to showing a young Anglo-Indian woman called Rosy dreams of a future as heroine: 'Today BR Chopra made a pukka commitment to give you a break in his next film. And Nasir Husain said, “Bring her over right now, I want to sign her for my next film.” But he makes such escapist films. I won't let you work there...' VD's friends – particularly the book's central protagonist Ali Amjad, who seems partly modelled on Raza himself -- are upset with his bald-faced lies. 'Why are you showing the poor thing these false dreams?' Ali Amjad demands to know. VD's answer is a counterquestion that really has no answer: 'But why does she see them?' 

Why does she, indeed? Scene 75, especially as it moves towards its tragic denouement, emerges as a book full of cynical truths, truths which it would be unfair to describe as takedowns because they don't seem to contain malice (even when, as with the book's many lesbian characters, they bear the burden of prejudice).

But even as Raza's humour transitions from dark to pitch black, and his heroes mock themselves for their loss of idealism, I had the impression that Raza could not entirely condemn his fantasising characters. Because he understood their need for fiction.

That need for fiction appears over and over again in the book – whether in Bholanath Khatak's desire to make his wife Rama dress like Waheeda, or in journalist Pancharan Mishra turning of the cook-turned-screenwriter Ramnath into Ramanathan, complete with a detailed life-story.

“Because of his father's sudden death, Ramanathan had been unable to take his MA exam. The memory of his university days still filled Ramanathan with sadness. The glory of those tennis lawns, the revelries of the drama club...” “Everyone knew it was lies,” writes Raza. “But everyone had had similar things written about them, so no one bothered to check the truth.”

Earlier in the book, we encounter the wonderful Mai's Adda, where everyone from Sahir Ludhianvi to Raj Kapoor had drunk alcohol and eaten fried fish on credit. Fiction here runs like a rich vein through fact; if you cut off the supply of make-believe, it might kill us.

“Whenever one of her debtors became famous, Mai would hang his photograph in her adda and talk about him as if he were her own son...” When D'Souza buys up Mai's Adda, he lets Mai masquerade as if she is still the actual owner. Then when the real Mai dies, people can't quite adjust to life without a Mai -- so they begin to call Mrs. D'Souza 'Mai'. That desperate desire to keep up appearances is also at the crux of Ali Amjad's titular Scene 75, in which a character called Abulkhair's mother is dictating a letter to a munshi at a streetcorner. “Everyone is unwell. Why are you making me say that everything is all right?” says the munshi.

This then, might be the truth at the heart of Scene 75, and perhaps Raza's comment on our cinematic fantasies: When is a lie not simply a lie? When it's what we need to believe to live.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Feb 2018.