Letters to an audience

My Mirror column:

An evening with Gulzar, poet, lyricist, filmmaker, centred on a discussion of three of his films, offers clues to his sustained relevance.

The audience assembled at the India Islamic Cultural Centre auditorium on Friday evening would be any writer’s dream. I don’t mean in numbers (though it was packed: one middle-aged Bengali couple zoomed in on the last vacant seats in my row after circling the auditorium without success, risking the visible ‘Media’ signs with a throwaway “Dekha jabe”). I mean it in terms of the degree of emotional identification – one might call it attachment – to a writer’s words.

The organisers – HarperCollins Publishers, who had planned the event around three slim books they’ve published about three of Gulzar’s films, Angoor, Aandhi and Ijaazat – kicked off the evening by running short video clips from the films on a side screen. People laughed out loud in recognition as they watched the bhanged-out Deven Varma sway before a hypnotic bouncing ball in Angoor. When Sanjeev Kumar told Suchitra Sen he'd been reciting Urdu poetry in mushairas since the age of 12, the younger woman next to me mouthed Sen’s on-screen reply along with the actress.

 

Even before the event began, the room had begun to radiate an almost universal admiration, and something more intimate, something a little like love. By the time Gulzar walked on stage in his trademark spotless white kurta-pajama, we were primed for nostalgic happiness. He took his seat alongside Sathya Saran and Saba Mahmood Bashir, authors of the books on Angoor and Aandhi, respectively, and the moderator, publisher Udayan Mitra. Gulzar remains unbelievable spry for an 84-year-old, and when he rose to display the books for the camera, he raised them above his head. It was a quiet gesture, but one of childlike joy.

A conversation about the three films followed. “Aandhi had run 22 or 23 weeks when an article was published that said, ‘Watch the life of Indira Gandhi on screen’ and the film got banned by the government,” said Gulzar, recalling that the news reached him while he was in Moscow for a film festival. “We all know Mrs Gandhi's life. The film had no resemblance to it. But in that era, the only female politician an actor could use as a model for her performance was Mrs Gandhi.” The film bore the brunt of that, especially since it released when Mrs G was at her thinnest-skinned: Emergency was declared soon after.

Bashir pointed out, correctly, that Aandhi wasn't so much a political film as a personal film in which the protagonist happened to be a politician. And yet the film contains what might be one of Hindi cinema’s more political songs: “Salaam kijiye, aali janaab aaye hain, yeh paanch saalon ka dene hisaab aaye hain,” in which a trio of young men dog the footsteps of Suchitra Sen’s campaigning Aarti Devi. Like another lyric from another of his films, Mere Apne (1971), “Haal chaal thheek thhaak hai”, it is the voice of the citizen-voter raised in song, the gentleness belying the sarcasm. “The things I said then were comments on my time, but they are apparently more than relevant today,” said Gulzar, reciting these lines: “Kaam nahi hai varna yahan, aapki dua se sab theek-thhaak hai.”

He didn't flag the rest of it, but here is another stanza that seems even more chillingly appropriate: “Aab-o-hawa desh ki bahut saaf hai, Kaayda hai kanoon hai insaaf hai/ Allah miyan jaane koi jiye ya mare, aadmi ko khoon voon sab maaf hai.”

What the filmmaker-lyricist did want to flag about Aandhi was his keenness to create a female character who would “be equal to any male politician” – and some of that equality was channelled into her freedom to smoke and drink without being labelled a vamp. Sure enough, the shot of an ashtray next to her as she works, and in another scene, a glass of something alcoholic kept near her, caused a stir.

Ijaazat, in which a once-married couple – Rekha and Naseeruddin Shah – run into each other years later, in a railway waiting room, also had a rare female protagonist. “Heroine ki toh aakhir mein jaakar shaadi hoti hai,” said potential producers as they rejected the script. The film eventually got made, to our collective good fortune, and remains an unusual, affecting love triangle, as Saran pointed out, for its refusal to apportion blame.

Yet Gulzar retained an acute understanding of how far his audience would travel with him. Sometimes this disappointed his more radically egalitarian fans: one gentleman yesterday stood up to say that he had never understood why Rekha in Ijaazat and Aarti in Aandhi touched the feet of their respective husbands. Gulzar accepted the question as a legitimate one, but his answer was almost banal in its simplicity: “It was what the character(s) would do. It was natural to the character.”

Another such perspicacious moment came when he explained why he needed Shashi Kapoor to appear as Rekha’s second husband. He needed the audience to back her decision, not think “Usse toh wahi accha thha, yeh kahan chali jaa rahi hai”. There is something quite striking here, and it involves the writer working in the cinematic medium – he has a character he backs as an author, and yet he understands so clearly that the power of that character will depend a great deal on the Hindi film audience's relationship to particular actors. It might be this ability to stay with his audience, push people a little bit beyond themselves but never quite alienate them, that makes Gulzar that increasingly rare thing in our times: the writer who is popular but doesn't pander.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 June 2019.

Speaking English, Doing Desi

Last Sunday's Mumbai Mirror column:

'Convent' English, Hinglish and the non-filmi journalist: the last in a three-part series on the Indian film magazine.

Devyani Chaubal, columnist for Star'n'Style magazine

There was something strange about Indian film journalism, at least as it was conducted by English language journos writing about Hindi cinema. For the last two weeks, as I've written about how this world came into being, I've been trying to put my finger on what that was. Now I think I have it: the more magazines became about film stars, the less their writers needed to know about the films. In fact, the snob value that the Indian elite of the time attached to not watching Hindi films became the cachet of the English-language film journalist.

Film journalists who wanted to be taken seriously had long maintained a social distance from the film world. Last week, while writing on the venerable BK Karanjia who edited Filmfare for 18 years and Screen for ten without attending filmi parties, I stumbled upon Karanjia's own charmingly matter-of-fact explanation. Talking about the big bash Dev Anand threw when BKK became Filmfare editor, he recalled: "There was too much drinking going on, dinner was served at 4.00 a.m. and I had to attend office five hours later. That put an end to my partying."

But Filmfare was "the stuffy dowager", "a widowed aunt", as Shobhaa De's 1997 memoir put it. In the '70s, its place at the top was threatened by a host of upstart mags, staffed almost entirely by twenty-somethings. These included Stardust (launched in October 1971 with De as editor), Cine Blitz (started in Dec 1974 by Russi Karanjia's Blitz group, with BKK's niece Rita Mehta as editor) and Super (ran 1976 to 1982). Just before them came Star'n'Style (1965), and later Movie (1982) and Showtime(1984).

All these new magazines lived off filmland gossip -- and not the coy variety of it in which heroines "confessed" to sleeping with their teddy bears. The uncrowned queen of gossip columnists was Devyani Chaubal of Star'n'Style, known as Devi, and a bit of a publicity magnet herself. When she was famously assaulted by a sloshed Dharmendra for having written various things about his sexual appetite, Khushwant Singh, who enjoyed her "bitchy pieces", felt quite free to write a bitchy piece on Chaubal herself. "I wrote in my column that had I been in his shoes, I would have done exactly what Dharmendra had done to her," Singh wrote in his 2002 autobiography. Even when she was issued sexual threats by the drunken sons of an actor whose histrionic talent she had scorned, Singh's interpretation of Devi's teary retelling was bizarre: "I was not sure if she was really upset with the threats... or... looked forward to their being fulfilled". (All this despite - or perhaps because? - Singh had "the feeling that we were meant for each other"!)

Shobhaa De had her own mixed feelings. "With her paan-stained mouth, fair skin, curly strands of hair and voluptuous figure, Devi was irresistible to some men," De wrote in 1997. "It was her practice to hold court at parties, often sabotaging the host's efforts by staging a parallel soiree of her own in one corner of the lawn or bungalow... she was a high-profile star in her own right, unlike our schoolgirlish reporters speaking 'convent' English to all the 'Punjab da putters' who couldn't tell a compliment from a slur."

De's recognition of her staffers' "convent" English didn't reduce her disdain for Chaubal's own. Describing how Stardust's hit column "Neeta's Natter" was first written by a freelancer called Mohan Bawa, she writes: "Short, thickset and very camp... Bawa was also the only film journalist who wrote decent copy in grammatical English - entire sentences with punctuation marks. This was more than anybody could say about... Devi's 'Frankly Speaking'... written in catchy but clumsy Marathi-English."

The last comment is particularly fascinating, because Khushwant Singh liked Chaubal's columns for her "brand of Hindustani English (Hinglish)", and because De's own much-feted contribution to the new film journalism was also Hinglish. Namita Gokhale, who published Super, described Shobhaa (then Kilachand, nee Rajadhyaksha) in her marvellous 2011 essay "Super Days" as having "unleashed a whole new dhakar street vocabulary via Neeta's Natter". 

Namita Gokhale in the Super days.

Clearly there was a discernible difference - linguistic, but also social - between someone like Chaubal, who was, for instance, notoriously besotted with Rajesh Khanna, and these "convent girls" for whom Hindi filmdom held a horrifying fascination at best, and no interest at worst. De writes proudly that she watched only four or five Hindi films a year. Bhavana Somaya's parents, who disapproved of her working for a film mag (Super), were lied to whenever she had to cover a film party. Gokhale was fresh from literature at Delhi's Jesus and Mary College, and went back to books, but at least the stars had some frisson for her. De (like BKK, but more grandly) declares that barring two film parties, she "did not step into a film studio, attend a muhurat, visit a star home, or party with the film crowd", while editing Stardust. 

De is right that this "enforced distance" helped create a "credible level of objectivity". But there was more to it, as is made apparent by De's take on stars who "dared to show up at the Cat House" as "setting themselves up for further ridicule in... the magazine". De's description of "Shatrughan Sinha, with his broad Bihari accent and crude manner", or the drunken Sanjeev Kumar's crassness as that "of a grain-seller... a shop-keeper... a frustrated labourer" reveals how new English-language journalists often experienced their difference from the Hindi film world in class terms. And they felt no need to hide it. In fact, they wore their fluent English and "well-spoken" backgrounds like armour against the industry's perceived boorishness. Vinod Mehta once told me that his "England-returned" accent helped impress filmwalas for his Meena Kumari book.

It needed liberalisation to turn "Bollywood" into something Anglophone Indians could find cool. That transformation has coincided with the rise of the fully English-speaking star -- and perhaps, the disappearance of the snooty film journalist?

Straight-faced, not strait-laced: Remembering Deven Verma

My Mumbai Mirror column: 

Perhaps Deven Verma didn't get a chance to fully explore his range, but he was still among the most subtle comic actors Hindi cinema has ever produced.

Deven Verma did several non-humorous roles: from his first cinematic appearance in Yash Chopra's Partition drama Dharamputra (1961), to playing Sharmila Tagore's proposed husband in Anupama (1966) and a mental asylum inmate in the high-octane tragedy Khamoshi (1969). But he began his acting career as a funny guy – he had had some success with comic stage acts before Dharamputra – and it is as a comedian that he will be remembered.

Within the comic realm, Verma's characters seem at first glance to have been fairly varied. He was a good mimic, with a talent for accents and language, which he put to use in several films. In Thodi si Bewafaii (1980), for instance, he played Rajesh Khanna's good-hearted employer, a Dakhani Muslim optician with the jokily accurate name of Noor-e-Chashmis, and “Shaan Khuda ki” as his endearing takiyakalaam. Two of his three Filmfare-award-winning performances had the Kutchi actor playing a Gujarati-speaking seth: he was a book publisher called Parvin Chandra Shah with zero financial sense in Chori Mera Kaam (1975) and a businessman (again called Parvinbhai) saddled with a stolen idol in Chor ke Ghar Chor (1978). There were other repetitions in his career: he was a mamma's boy desperate to get married in Basu Chatterjee's Khatta Meetha (1977) – but he had played a version of that character earlier, in Anil Ganguly's Kora Kagaz (1974), where as the doofus Dronacharya, he worshipfully attempts to woo a half-amused and wholly dismissive Jaya Bhaduri.

So Verma did get typecast to some extent. But he was always immensely watchable—and very funny. His bhondu persona, played with a deadpan face, halting dialogue delivery and a deliberately bemused manner, is probably his most lasting legacy. It reached its acme in Verma's celebrated double role as twin servants (both named Bahadur) to twin masters (two Sanjeev Kumars, both named Ashok) in the charmingly funny Angoor, Gulzar's adaptation of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

Who can forget him as Bahadur 1, faced with the prospect of being shown up as an imposter in the house he's in, throwing its rightful resident Bahadur 2 off the scent by barking and growling like a dog from behind the front door? In this scene, as in several others, he made the ridiculous sublime. My most vivid Deven Verma memory from childhood is also from Angoor: the memorable bhang-addled 'Preetam Aan Milo' song, where he watches with glazed eyes as a ball that he hasn't thrown seems to bounce up a staircase, and emerges into a balcony to find a toad in rhythmic symphony with his song.

Angoor was a marvellously poker-faced take on the identical twins theme so ubiquitous in both Shakespeare plays and Hindi cinema—first it doubled the number of twins, and then in the climactic scene, had one Sanjeev Kumar say to the other one, deadpan: “Do you have a mole here on your shoulder? You don't? Oh, then we must be twins.” This is one of Sanjeev Kumar's funniest performances, but there are some scenes where Verma absolutely steals the show with his mastery of body language and timing. One such is a moment where he fails to stop himself from eating what he knows to be bhang-laced pakodas. “Nahi maanta?” he says to his hand as it moves stealthily towards the plate and starts to stuff pakoras into his mouth. “Toh phir kha. Kha ke mar!” At that moment, Bahadur 1 is himself split into two: the self that's dying of hunger, and the self that can't afford to get stoned. There is something fantastic about Verma's rendition that transforms the film's otherwise un-profound use of doubles into a momentary philosophical riff on the self.

As the two Bahadurs (one with rolled-up sleeves, the other not), Verma switches unerringly between being befuddled and trying to be crafty under duress. But even when carrying out one of his schemes -- like putting bhang into the pakoras he's made for the women of the house, or pulling a key out a sleeping Aruna Irani's cleavage – he is never sleazy or threatening.

This quality is also crucial to my other favourite Deven Verma role: as the comic mastermind Ravi Kapoor in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Rang Birangi. In a pre-NRI era, he played an America-returnee who decides to spice up the marriage of his boring friend Ajay (Amol Palekar) by getting him to flirt with his secretary (Deepti Naval). Ravi Kapoor specialises in hilariously bad lines: “Kill the cat on the first night, bacchu”, or “America mein pata hai secretary ko goad mein bitha ke dictation dete hain. Aur shorthand hi nahi, underhand bhi karte hain”. What makes this role remarkable is that Verma plays against type, and does so masterfully. The chubby-faced childishness that usually gave him an inoffensive, almost asexual air was here used as a kind of camouflage for the sexual chalu-ness of the man-about-town.

Maybe that was Deven Verma's secret—that you could not take him seriously. But perhaps that was also to do with the mild middle class comedies of which he was an indispensable part. Much as I love them, these sunny '80s films weren't beyond showing annoyingly stereotypical marriages, or everyday sexist jokes, say, about about working women taking away men's jobs. But it was still a time of innocence: men might be incorrigible flirts, but you knew they didn't have it in them to be truly slimy. Deven Verma died only last week. But the world he stood for died long ago.

A Star Fell From Heaven

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A recent biography of Hindi cinema's first superstar retraces the outlines of what could not be a more dramatically filmi life story. And yet things are never as meteoric as they seem.

A Stardust cover that asked 'Is Rajesh Khanna married?'

In one of the marvellous set pieces in Naseeruddin Shah's recent memoir, he describes how sometime in his final year in school in Ajmer, he was reading the fortnightly Screen in a barbershop when he came across "an ad for something called the Filmfare-United Producers Talent Contest". He promptly cut out the attached application form, though it wasn't at all clear where he would find the money for 'three cabinet size photographs; one front face, one profile and one full figure'. His ten-rupees-a-week pocket money certainly wasn't enough, and he never gathered up the courage to ask the couple of adults who might have helped. "[T]hat application stayed in my pocket, and the dreams in my head, as long as I was in school," writes Shah. 

Then, just after his school final exams, sitting in the same shop, he came across the results of the contest. Shah remembers comparing his teenaged reflection in the barbershop mirror with the winner's face in the magazine. "The man in the photograph already looked like a star: square-jawed with coiffed hair, perfect teeth, clear eyes and the confidence of having the world at his feet... I had to consciously check another strong attack of resentment at nature for not having given me a face like his. He was twenty-one years old and went by the name of Rajesh Khanna. And so that, as they say, was that." 

Shah's telling is true to his angular relationship with the popular Hindi film world: occasional fascination leavened with a long-lasting disdain for its self-referentiality and lack of respect for anything outside itself. Gautam Chintamani's just-published biography of Rajesh Khanna offers us another viewpoint on that Filmfare contest. This time we are situated not in some small-town schoolboy fantasy, but at the centre of the action. The who's who of the commercial Hindi cinema world -- including BR Chopra, Bimal Roy, GP Sippy, HS Rawail, Nasir Husain, J. Om Prakash, Mohan Saigal, Shakti Samanta and Subodh Mukherji -- had come together to form the United Producers' Combine, and the winner of the Talent Contest would be cast in the lead role in one film made by each of them. 

Jatin Khanna, pampered favourite son of a family of successful railway contractors who had moved from Lahore to Bombay in 1935, was then biding his time at the city's KC College while he did small-time theatre and waited for his big break. As the scion of a well-to-do family that was willing to support him financially, he was the sort of 'struggler' who drove a sports car to auditions and had a monthly allowance of a thousand rupees. He filled the form for a lark, and was shocked to reach the final round. Producer J. Om Prakash remembers that he asked so many questions about the scene he was given that GP Sippy told him, "Kucch bhi kar do." Khanna chose a monologue from a play he had done, and (though it sounds pretty damned awful), apparently managed to impress the pants off the judges, thus beating some 10,000 participants to the prize (including his closest contender Vinod Mehra, who lost by a single point). 

Chintamani does not say so, but competition seems to me to drive everything in Rajesh Khanna's life. Vinod Mehra does not appear again in the book, barring one brief mention -- one can only wonder whether two extra points might have changed the fate of this appealingly gentle actor, whose persona had none of the bombast or mannerisms that Khanna cultivated. (But then again, the film industry's big daddies picked the kind of actor they thought would be a star. And they were right.) But many other actors were competition for Khanna. Ravi Kapoor, his schoolmate in Girgaum and later at KC College, got his break before Khanna did, in V. Shantaram's Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne (1964), taking away the screen name Khanna wanted: Jeetendra. Another contemporary was Hari Jariwala, whom Khanna seems to have seen as a rival right from their theatre days till years later, when Jariwala had achieved acclaim as Sanjeev Kumar. Screenwriter Salim Khan remembers Khanna actually coming around to Mehboob Studios with a magazine in which Khan had named Sanjeev Kumar as among the brightest actors around, and demanding to know if he thought Kumar was better than Khanna. 

In his personal life, too, one-upmanship was crucial. Coming home after an angry break-up with long-time girlfriend Anju Mahendru, he told a visitor that he was looking to get married. The visitor suggested his teenaged daughter, then about to debut as an actress. Dimple married Rajesh soon after. The wedding was so much on the rebound that Khanna is said to have re-routed the wedding procession to go past Mahendru's house. 

The most legendary competitiveness, of course, was with Amitabh Bachchan. The biography repeats the well-known tale of Khanna, then at his height, mocking Bachchan as "manhoos" (unlucky) on the sets of Bawarchi, making Jaya Bhaduri angry enough to announce that only time would tell who was going to be the lucky one. We all know which way that went. The lanky newcomer Khanna took for granted in Anand (1971) had all but eclipsed him by Namak Haraam(1973). But it is not true that Bachchan's rise wiped out Khanna and his kind of cinema: Khanna began in 1966 with Chetan Anand's Aakhri Khat, and delivered hits like Souten and Avtaar till the mid-1980s. His career lasted much longer than the meteoric three years before Bachchan. As always with Rajesh Khanna, the legend was larger than the man.

An older column on Rajesh Khanna's appeal to women, here: 'Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him'.