More on musical sequences: the pleasures of “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”

[A sequel to the last post, and part of an irregular series about musical sequences in Hindi cinema]

In this post I mentioned one of my favourite recent discoveries, the long song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” from the 1968 film Aashirwad. As far as I know, it is among the only Hindi-movie scenes to make extensive use of the Lavani dance form with its many hallmarks, including sexually aggressive gestures by the performers and banter involving the audience. The full video is below. You might need to watch the song a couple of times to really appreciate it, but it builds in energy, and I especially like how it goes from the 3.45 mark onwards.




Some context: music is central to this film. The lead character Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is the son-in-law of a rich zamindar, but he is also a lover of classical music and never feels happier, more relaxed and more in touch with his finer emotions than when he is practicing with his “guru”, an old villager named Baiju (played by the poet/actor Harindranath Chattopadhyay). In the scene in question, Jogi Thakur, Baiju and their friend Mirza saab go to watch a performance by a visiting dance troupe and end up participating in a musical battle of wits.

Some things I like about the sequence:

– One of the big themes in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema over the decades – in films as varied as Anuradha, Mem Didi, Abhimaan and Rang Birangi – is how men and women move tentatively towards parity in a relationship. This is often expressed in humorous terms, with music as a conduit: for instance, Mem Didi has the dance number “Hu Tu Tu” in which a group of women face off against a group of men during a celebration, singing about the politics of marriage, each group jokingly claiming victimhood for itself. In “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, music becomes an equalizer, blurring roles and mannerisms: the women on stage whistle lewdly, make crude “male” gestures such as scratching under their armpits to mimic a monkey (“Kyun Sikandar, banoge bandar?”), mock their audience (“Aisa lagta hai jaise hum gadhon ke gaon mein aa gaye hain”). And the watching men participate in the performance with a childlike delight, shedding the baggage that they might otherwise carry of being privileged observers or patrons. In both directions, gender is being transcended. (Within the narrative of the film, we have already seen a reversal of traditional roles: Jogi Thakur is a caring father and in general more humane and sensitive than his wife Leela; the implication is that this is because he is more in touch with his artistic side, while Leela – a thakur’s daughter – has grown up obsessed with money and power.)

Music is also an equalizer on another level in this film: it removes class and caste lines. The “guru” is the lower-class Baiju, who recoils in embarrassment when Jogi Thakur tries to touch his feet; for me you are the real Brahmin, says the upper-class man, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. In this scene, the two men sit together on the floor and sitting with them is a Muslim friend; the unforced bonhomie is a direct result of their love for music and the performing arts.

– It took me a couple of viewings to "get into" the song, but I like the way the music shifts register, from the languid, sweet melody when the women describe “Radha” and “Jamuna”, to the strident, challenging notes when they demand the answer to their riddle. And the wordless dance movements near the end, where the dancer conveys a possible answer to Jogi Thakur’s riddle purely through gestures rather than words; the viewer is allowed to interpret her movements, it isn’t spelt out.

– Ashok Kumar’s voice may be rough-hewn and nasal, but how appropriate it is for this song, and how much it adds to the authenticity of the scene. In a regular Hindi-film song – the sort that one can think of in dreamlike or symbolic terms, as taking place outside normal time and space – it isn’t so disconcerting to suddenly have an actor’s voice being replaced by that of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi. (Of course, viewers who are new to Hindi movies do take some time to adjust to this.) But “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” is very much a “realistic” part of the film’s narrative – an actual performance with real Lavani dancers performing on a stage with real musical instruments being played. Given this, how pleasing it is to hear the lead actor sing in his own voice (one of the most recognisable voices in the history of Hindi film, going back to the first decade of sound). Chattopadhyaya, all of 70 years old, does his own singing here too, just as he would in the lovely “Bhor Aayee Gaya Andhiyara” in Bawarchi.

– The sequence is beautifully acted, both by the dancers (especially the lead, whose name I don’t know) and by Kumar and Chattopadhyay, who seem so comfortable with the setting, so genuinely pleased by the opportunity to do something like this on screen. I particularly love the two-second scene near the end where Jogi Thakur, about to reveal the answer to his riddle and seal his triumph, looks back at Baiju and Mirza (who are out of the frame) with an impish, childlike smile; Kumar’s expression is pitch perfect, and so “musical” as well – it has its own beat and rhythm.

– How the answer to the final riddle overturns our expectations – expectations that arise from the innuendo-laden nature of the performance, as well as the naughty way in which Jogi Thakur asks his question. But though the mood here is one of fun and games and laughter, the riddle takes on somber echoes later in the film. “No one gets to see his own wife as a widow,” Jogi Thakur points out gleefully, and the words foreshadow what will soon happen to this jovial man: he will go to jail and effectively be “dead” for his wife and little daughter.

If anyone has further thoughts on this sequence, the film, and on Lavani in general, do weigh in.

Aashirwad, “Rail Gaadi” and the vitality of the well-done song sequence

[From my DNA column]

The use of the song in popular Hindi cinema – its disruption of narrative, its apparent lack of “logic” – often invites snobbery from those who have a narrowly defined view of realism in art. But a great song – combining rhythm, lyrics and singing to optimum effect – can reach emotional depths and express poetic truths in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Similarly, a well-filmed musical sequence can work within the context of a movie to deepen our attitudes to the characters and situations. And an advantage of being a movie buff in the YouTube age is being able to watch old song sequences almost on demand – to view them either as short films in their own right (much like MTV videos) or as part of the larger work.

The vitality of some of these scenes – even in generally mediocre movies – is remarkable. At times it is like the film has entered a magical realm, the music inspiring the unit to transcend their own efforts and move beyond the commonplace of standard, plot-oriented storytelling. Little wonder that even Satyajit Ray, who was famously snarky about many aspects of popular cinema, wrote in an essay: “It is surprising how much thought goes into the cinematic handling (‘picturisation’, as the term goes) of these numbers […] Songs are now choreographed. It is not uncommon these days to have each line of a lyric sung against a different scenic background. This is – and I am not being facetious – a daring innovation, wholly cinematic and entirely valid if it is related in style to the rest of the film.”

In 1968, the year of Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, the man who played the delightfully goggle-eyed magician Borfi in that film also appeared in - and sang in - the Hindi movie Aashirwad. Harindranath Chattopadhyay (credited here simply as Harindranath) is the genial old musician Baiju, who becomes guru to the protagonist Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar), and one of the film’s highlights is the long, teasing song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, where Jogi and Baiju watch a performance by a Lavani dance troupe, answering riddles and posing their own. This is an energetic, innuendo-laden jugalbandhi between women and men, superbly acted by Kumar and Chattopadhyaya – who are palpably enjoying themselves – as well as by the dancers. (That’s another thing: we sometimes take our song sequences so much for granted that we overlook the amount of performing skill that can go into them.) Incidentally Jogi’s final question, which stumps the women, has a minor thematic link to what happens later in the film – an example of an apparently superfluous musical sequence being organic to the story.

Harindranath also wrote the words for the most famous song in Aashirwad, one that trivia buffs – even those who haven’t seen the film – know well. This is the “Rail Gaadi” number, sung by Ashok Kumar in his own voice for a group of little children. Rooted though it is in the cadences of semi-classical Indian music, the song’s rapid-fire style has won it a reputation as a precursor to modern rap and hip-hop; among cineastes, “Hindi cinema gave the world its first rap song” is a proclamation made with nearly as much pride as “India gave the world the concept of Zero”.

But what I was unprepared for when I watched “Rail Gaadi” on YouTube recently was its visual language. Around the one-minute mark, as Kumar launches into the song’s fastest movement, racing through the names of train stations (“Mangalore Bangalore / Talegaon Malegaon / Khandwa Mandwa”), the camera begins a series of super-fast zoom ins and zoom outs – going from a medium shot of the actor to an extreme close up and back in the time it takes to snap your fingers; the visuals are mimicking, or trying to keep pace with, the music. There were many creative song sequences in 1960s Hindi cinema, but offhand I can’t think of another one that employs this effect to the same degree. (Even the vibrant “Yahoo!” sequence in the Shammi Kapoor-starrer Junglee feels a little staid in comparison.) The quick zooms are like an anticipation of similar techniques in such MTV videos as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Give it Away” more than 20 years later.






This is particularly notable because the film’s director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, was hardly a major stylist at this point in his career. In his earliest films in the late 50s, Mukherjee (perhaps influenced by his association with Bimal Roy) did show a certain visual flair, but by the time Aashirwad was made he had settled into the more functional, character-oriented storytelling that would make him such an endearing figure in the “Middle Cinema” of the 1970s. Yet here he and his lensman T B Seetharam are, using an unusual cinematic language – positively avant-garde by the standards of the time – to match a song’s energy.

It is the sort of scene that can make you rethink your ideas about cinematic form. After watching it, I revisited a markedly different type of song sequence, the gentle “Kuch Dil ne Kaha”, from another Mukherjee film of the time, the 1966 Anupama. In this scene, Anupama (Sharmila Tagore) – a reticent, emotionally repressed girl – is singing to herself, unaware that she is being watched by the film’s hero Ashok (or by us). Accordingly the camera is respectful of her shyness and her need for solitude. It maintains a decent distance, there are many long takes and slow tracking shots as we are put in the position of the watching Ashok: intrigued, paying attention, but taking care not to be intrusive. This sequence is just as placid and sober as “Rail Gaadi” is vigorous, but in both cases the stylistic choice is apt for the character and the mood – and these are just two among countless examples of how songs can be enriching presences in the unique storytelling engine that is the mainstream Hindi film.

[An earlier post about visual language in another Hindi-film song sequence, “Bachpan ke Din” from Sujata. More on song sequences soon]

On the appeal of pre-historic special effects

(Continuing thoughts from the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde transformation scenes mentioned in the last post)

The discussion about whether movies are “better” or “worse” today vis-a-vis an earlier time is a pointless and irresolvable one, subject to shifting benchmarks, individual tastes and hard-line biases that run both ways, from the Golden Ageist syndrome (the past was always a better place than the present / old songs were so melodious, today it’s all noise) to contemporary chauvinism (old movies are awkward and creaky / black-and-white is boring). But one area where something resembling consensus is possible is when assessing technological improvements. Though I haven’t seen the new Superman film yet, I have no trouble accepting that it is probably much more visually fluid – and a grander aesthetic experience – than the 1978 Superman; and this despite the fact that I have irrationally defensive feelings about the latter, having grown up with it.

However, agreeing that technology is objectively superior today – and that more things are now possible in movie-making, things that would have been regarded as magic a hundred years ago – is not the same as saying that modern CGI is always more effective than techniques used in the distant past. As I have written before about films like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried or the original King Kong, the use of a papier-mâché dragon or stop-motion animation can give a fantasy or horror film a primal, viscerally stirring quality, because it feels otherworldly and removed from our regular experience – whereas modern computer effects by their very nature make everything crystal-clear and even commonplace, so that the image of a giant monkey fighting a giant dinosaur, or a Balrog battling Gandalf on a narrow bridge, becomes as credible as a weekend outing to the local mall (assuming of course that you think of malls and their zombie patrons as real-world things).

Personally I feel a thrill every time I see “special effects” in a very old film because one gets a firsthand sense of human minds working with a young medium, trying to supersede the limitedness of available resources. Almost since its inception, cinema has adapted literary works that contain supernatural elements – see this 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland – and some of the early filmmakers seem like masochists setting themselves impossible tasks rather than simply using the motion-picture camera to record everyday things (which would have been a worthy enough pursuit, given how new the technology was). Today, with an adequate scale of production, it is possible to create a convincing visual representation of just about any story, no matter how outlandish the setting. But 110 years ago, just figuring out how to show the disembodied head of the Cheshire Cat in such a way that it looked like a halfway-alive thing (as opposed to a cardboard cut-out pasted on the set) would have required intense brainstorming.

In 1910, Thomas Edison’s studio made a 12-minute-long version of Frankenstein, which is extant today and can be found on YouTube. The film is as jerky and theatrical to modern eyes as you might expect, but there is genuine inventiveness in a couple of scenes, including one with a large mirror in which the Monster eventually disappears (raising the question of whether he was a figment of his creator’s imagination or perhaps an alter ego). For the difficult scene in which Frankenstein’s unworldly creation comes alive, the filmmakers put a life-size wax replica of a skeleton in a big vat and set fire to it so that it slowly dissolved and crumpled (meanwhile someone out of sight moved its arms around a bit). They then played the film backwards, so that one gets the impression of something hideous being forged out of fire until it sits upright, a ghastly mockery of the human form.

Much of the pleasure of watching this scene comes not from its visual appeal (though if you’re in the right mood, it does have a creepy appeal) but from imagining the problem-solving process: the discussions that these pioneers of film must have engaged in decades before the advent of computer technology (or anything else that we would think of as “special effects” today), the other things they might have tried and failed miserably at, the possibility that they needed to build multiple wax figures and experiment with the intensity of the fire because the first few attempts didn’t work. How random and slapdash it seems to us today, yet how vital it was to the writing of movie grammar, and to the creative growth of a medium that was often dismissed at the time as having no artistic future because it was simply a bland reproduction of reality.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Elbow on knee, heart in film - Rouben Mamoulian on the natural and the true

In my short list of “books to keep on a desert island”, one place is permanently reserved for the anthology Conversations with the Great Movie-Makers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As a reader this book is always a work in progress for me, a living, shifting thing: I might set it aside for months on end, then dip into it again for just a few minutes and emerge with a new treasure. Even the familiar passages are worth revisiting over time because the filmmakers’ insights – and the diversity and occasional contradictions in their views – become more meaningful as you watch more of their films. (If that desert island didn’t have a DVD player and an electricity connection, this book would lose much of its appeal.)

There are dozens of quotes I’d like to share from Conversations, but for now here is something by Rouben Mamoulian, who made one of my favourite movies, the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This is Mamoulian, speaking at a seminar, on stylization, realism and what literary critics sometimes refer to as “poetic truth” (as opposed to literal truth).

I’ve always believed in stylization and poetry. Even on the stage, things are stylized – every movement, every grouping. If you preserve the psychological truth of the emotions and thoughts of the actors, and combine that with physical expression that is utterly stylized and that couldn’t happen in real life, the impact upon the audience is one of greater reality. Perhaps that’s why they call it surrealism [...] Done correctly, stylization carries greater reality in its impact on the audience than everyday kitchen-sink naturalism can ever achieve.

[...] Stylization is really an extension of feeling and thought, a sharper way of showing that thought. Let me all ask you a question. You probably know “The Thinker”, the great statue of Auguste Rodin. Will you show me how he sits? Let’s see.

Without exception all of you are wrong. It never fails. His man is sitting, believe it or not, with one elbow on the opposite knee. It’s not natural or comfortable, but aesthetically and artistically it has a focus. It has design and rhythm and power. So, what is unnatural becomes true, and you can apply this idea to any kind of a scene. You can put everything upside down or reverse it, provided what it does is sharpen. In your desire to express love or hate or doubt, whatever it is, you ask yourself “How can I express this more acutely?” Then you’ll wind up with a gesture that is not natural, but perfect as an expression of that thought.

As you'd expect then, Mamoulian’s version of the Jekyll-Hyde story is a brilliantly stylized work, and one of the most impressive-looking movies of its time. The first two or three years of the sound era were a generally poor time for visual inventiveness, because movie-makers already had so much on their hands dealing with problems caused by primitive recording technology. (Remember this scene in Singin’ in the Rain?) But Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a testament to what Mamoulian says elsewhere in the seminar: “My interest in the camera was always in the marvellous things you can do with it – with the angles, the dollying, the dissolves, the props, and the framing”. The film was also remarkably imaginative when it came to special effects, as in the famous transformation scenes where Fredric March’s Jekyll slowly, painfully becomes the simian-like Hyde.

Below are two videos of these scenes. The first one has a couple of cleverly disguised cuts as the camera moves from Jekyll’s face to his hands and back again, but the first 25 seconds provide an unbroken view of his face appearing to darken and change.


This must have been astonishing for audiences of the time, and the secret of the transformation was revealed only years later: different layers of coloured makeup had been applied on March’s face, and matching light filters were used at the beginning so that the makeup wasn’t visible on black-and-white film; as the scene progressed, the filters were changed and the makeup came into view, “magically” casting shadows on the actor’s face. It's a great example of problem-solving in an era when the computer effects of today were barely imaginable.

This second video has another transformation scene (beginning around the 55-second mark with the camera adopting Jekyll’s POV as he looks into a mirror). Here again, you can see March’s face changing colour, but the rest of the scene is equally notable for its use of the disorienting, rotating camera and a proto-psychedelic soundtrack that anticipates what Pink Floyd and others would be doing in underground clubs 35 years later.




But I’ll give the last word to Mamoulian again – here he is on the use of sound for this scene:

I asked, “What kind of sound can we put with this? The whole thing is fantastic. You put a realistic sound and it will get you nowhere at all.” So again, you proceed from imagination and theory and if it makes sense, do it. I said, “We’re not going to have a single sound in this transformation that you can hear in life.” They said, “What are you going to use?” I said, “We’ll light the candle and photograph the light – high frequencies, low frequencies, direct from light into sound. Then we’ll hit a gong, cut off the impact, run it backward, things like that.” So I had this terrific kind of stew, a mélange of sounds that do not exist in nature or in life. It was eerie but it lacked a beat, and that’s where I had to introduce rhythm. We tried all sorts of drums, but they all sounded like drums. When you run all out of ideas, something always pops into your head. I said, “I’ve got it.” I ran up and down the stairway for two minutes until my heart was really pounding, took the microphone down and said, “Record me.” And that’s the rhythm of the big transformation. So when I say my heart was in Jekyll and Hyde, it’s literally true.

On Habib Tanvir, Shyam Benegal, and a truthful thief

Given that Shyam Benegal is one of our most respected directors, I’m a little surprised by the under-the-radar status of his second feature film, the 1975 Charandas Chor. This version of Habib Tanvir’s famous play about an honest thief was done in collaboration with Tanvir – before the play itself had acquired its final shape – and I think it is one of Benegal's most enjoyable movies and one of Hindi cinema’s sharpest satires. But it is often overlooked, perhaps because it was made for the Children's Film Society and therefore seen as being geared to a non-adult audience. I have read Benegal profiles that refer to Ankur, Nishant and Manthan – cornerstones of the Indian New Wave – as his first three films, with no mention of Charandas Chor. (See the second sentence of this Wikipedia entry, for starters, and the “Feature Films” subhead.) Even Dibakar Banerjee – a voracious movie-watcher and a big Benegal fan – had not seen the film when I spoke with him last year, though he was certainly familiar with Tanvir’s play. (Banerjee noted that the play contained a precedent for the Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! theme of a thief’s career becoming a comment on the society around him.)

The neglect notwithstanding, Charandas Chor is a notable film on many levels. It represents a rare meeting between cinema and folk theatre (with vital contributions by musicians and actors of the Chhatisgarhi Nacha troupes who worked with Tanvir) and is a document of one of our most significant modern plays in a nascent, transitional form – but it is also recognisably a film, cinematically imaginative and dynamic. It was one of Govind Nihalani’s most impressive early outings as a cinematographer, as well as the feature debut of the young Smita Patil, as a beautiful princess who is besotted by the bumpkin Charandas.

Despite the seriousness of its themes, its form is that of a playful entertainment from the very first image, a medium shot of a doleful-looking donkey, its tail apparently wagging in tune to the folk-song on the soundtrack. While this animal plays a functional part in the narrative (it belongs to a dhobi who will become Charandas Chor’s sidekick), the ass motif is integral in a wider sense: many of the side-characters, including a “chatur vakeel” (clever lawyer), are depicted in illustrations as donkeys that Charandas will get the better of (or expose as hypocrites). The film's episodic structure is quickly established too, with Charandas (Lalu Ram) encountering the dhobi Buddhu (Madan Lal), who wishes to become his chela. The scene employs the language of an enlightened guru addressing his disciples: asked to impart his gyaan of thievery, Charandas replies, "यह कला है, बेटा - बड़ी साधना से मिलती है।" (“This is an art, son – it requires practice and rigour.”)

But this being a parable about the duplicities of social structures – including the ones rooted in class and religion – we also meet a “real” guru who, as Charandas observes, has an even more efficient money-making gig going. “आपका धंदा बैठे बैठे, और आमदनी ज़्यादा" (“You sit and do nothing, but earn more than me”) he tells the sadhu with genuine reverence in his eyes. This lampooning of authority figures extends across hierarchies: for instance, a view of temple idols shorn of their ornaments (making them look bald, comical and most un-Godly) is echoed by a shot of three unclothed policemen drying their uniforms by the riverbank. Through most of these episodes, the chor maintains his essential dignity and his moral compass while the “law-abiding” world is revealed as hollow, rotting or plain naked.

There is so much to enjoy here, for children and adults alike. There is Nihalani’s black-and-white photography (inferior Orwo film had to be used due to import constraints of the time, but the occasional graininess goes well with the subject matter and the bucolic setting) and his imaginative use of zooms, particularly effective in chase sequences that evoke the silent cinema's Keystone Kops. Also the Nacha music, which continually comments on the action, and wonderful lead performances by village actors from Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, including the emaciated Madan Lal – one of Tanvir’s favourite actors – who played Charandas on stage but plays Buddhu in the film.

Inter-titles are used like chapter heads, and Tanvir himself reads them out in his nasal voice, fumbling over big words the way a child might. ("बुद्धू का चोरी के दाव... दावपेंच सीखना।") In a funny little cameo, he also appears as an absent-minded judge who might have dropped in from Alice in Wonderland, holding large scissors and a walking stick instead of a gavel***. And there is the casual drollness of such exchanges as the one where Charandas, miffed by the princess’s show of largesse, proudly tells her “मैं चोरी करता हूँ, दान नहीं लेता" (“I steal, I don’t accept alms”) while the sadhu standing behind her pipes up "दान लेना तो मेरा काम है, बेटी" ("Taking alms is what I do").

*****

A few months ago I briefly spoke with Benegal about Charandas Chor, particularly the divergence between his version and the one that Tanvir finalised for the stage. One important difference was the ending: in both film and play Charandas is put to death, but in the film a humorous epilogue shows him plying his roguery in the afterlife, where he steals Yamraj’s buffalo and presumably sets off on a fresh round of adventures. (This narrative circularity is of course common to many myths or fables; one might also recall the last scene of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, with the rake coolly strolling into the far distance as a TV news reporter blathers on.) But Tanvir’s later modifications to the play made it bleaker and more hard-hitting, with a conclusion that allowed his hero to maintain his integrity – to die for the truth he holds so dear, while the world around him continues on its merry path. “He turned it into a sophisticated tragedy,” Benegal told me, “whereas my film was a moral story done as a comedy for children.” The playwright also opted for a sparer, more minimalist idiom, removing the part of Buddhu along with other extraneous elements, including that zany courtroom scene.

But film and play have one important thing in common: Tanvir and Benegal were both influenced by Brechtian alienation, wherein the audience is asked to be intellectually aware of the issues raised in a story, rather than becoming emotionally immersed in it or “forgetting” the constructed nature of what they are watching. In her book Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre, Anjum Katyal observes that Tanvir made atypical use of Indian folk music: while our folk theatre tends to use songs in a didactic way (explicitly telling the audience what is good or bad), Charandas Chor follows the Brechtian technique of having two songs express contradictory ideas (e.g. one might say “Charandas is not really a thief, he is a good man, there are bigger thieves in society” while another goes “he is a dangerous thief, protect yourself from him”) and letting the viewer weigh each stance and consciously work out his own attitudes.

Many of Benegal’s later films, notably Arohan (which begins with Om Puri directly addressing the camera, speaking about the subject of the film and introducing the other actors) and Samar, would use similar distancing techniques. One sees it also in Nihalani’s directorial ventures such as Party or Aghaat, where self-conscious, expository dialogue takes the place of naturalistic conversation. The film of Charandas Chor doesn’t do this to the same degree (it was, after all, made for children and needed something resembling a conventional narrative flow) but it does draw attention to the storytelling process through its titles, illustrations and voiceovers. At one point the images on the screen even shake and rupture – as if there were an error in the projection – and Tanvir’s sharp voice asks “Kahin film poori toh nahin ho gayi?” In its own way, this entertaining “children’s movie” is very much a companion piece to the meta-films in the new art cinema of the 70s and 80s.

P.S. For anyone interested in Tanvir, the English version of his unfinished memoirs (translated by the multi-talented writer, historian and dastangoi Mahmood Farooqui) has just been published. I haven’t yet read it, though I intend to (it only covers Tanvir’s life up to the 1950s, I think). Anjum Katyal’s study of his life and career, mentioned above, is strongly recommended too.

P.P.S. A few months ago I discovered that Charandas Chor was on YouTube in a good print, and despite my reservations about watching movies on a computer screen I grabbed this available option. Unfortunately the YouTube video was removed a few weeks ago. But perhaps this indicates that a fresh print of the film will soon be made available on DVD. One can hope.

*** The stammering judge in Charandas Chor is probably an extension of the role Tanvir played in the 1948 IPTA comedy play Jadu ki Kursi, which also had Balraj Sahni in an acclaimed lead performance.

The pros and cons of being a movie-star with very little ego

After watching the trailer for Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 – the Deol family film, which releases this week – I headed YouTube-wards to watch the song sequence from which the film gets its name: “Main Jat Yamla Pagla Deewana” from the 1975 film Pratigya. As a friend, a fellow Dharmendra fan, noted during a recent conversation, this is one of the most exuberant Hindi-movie scenes ever. “All the director had to do was put a liquor bottle in paaji’s hand, give him a large open space to goof around in, along with a jeep and a few other props, and tell him to invent whatever dance moves - or things that resembled dance moves - he felt comfortable doing. And the result was magic.”

Perhaps it can also be seen as an outtake from Dharmendra’s superb, boisterous performance as Veeru in Sholay, made a few months earlier. But watching the song, I was also reminded that for most of his lengthy career, Dharmendra had a remarkably unselfconscious screen presence. In much of his best work (and some of his worst work, but we’ll come to that), you get the sense of a man surprisingly bereft of ego; there is little trace of the self-absorption that has always been a prime quality of our leading men.

For decades, Hindi-movie heroes of all stripes have carefully nurtured their screen images. The personas might vary from Dev Anand’s upbeat urbaneness to Dilip Kumar’s studied bouts with tragedy, but most of them (even the ones we think of as “understated”) come with tics suggesting that the star-actor knows exactly what effect he is having on the audience, and is determined to milk it. Hence Raj Kapoor’s martyred smiles as his awara or Joker deals with life’s injustices, or Rajesh Khanna’s romantic head-bobbing, or the young Manoj Kumar’s painfully evident knowledge that his handsomeness was too much for any Eastman Color processor to bear, hence his face had to be in side-profile or covered by his hand.

Dharmendra had mannerisms too, of course, but one rarely feels that he had pre-conceptions about what he should be doing on screen – from the beginning of his career, he seemed willing to do almost anything he was asked, to subjugate himself to the film. And this willingness to be putty in someone else's hands is a double-edged sword for a movie star. Working under such men as Bimal Roy, Chetan Anand and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the 1960s, it could mean small but powerful character parts in movies of integrity. In slight but inoffensive thrillers like Saazish, it might entail "fighting and climbing rope ladders in his chaddies" (as Memsaab Story puts it in this post). But in the context of the direction his career took in the bad, bad 1980s (the “kuttay-kameenay” years), it became lack of discernment in role choices, complete disregard for personal dignity and sleep-walking his way through assembly-line multi-starrers with endless variations on the izzat and badlaa themes.

In the mid-1980s, I remember Rishi Kapoor getting praise for his self-effacement in playing secondary roles in woman-centric films like Prem Rog and Tawaif. Dharmendra was in a similar mould two decades earlier, a solid foot-soldier to strong heroines such as Nutan, Meena Kumari and Sharmila Tagore in such films as Bandini, Majhli Didi, Anupama (or even a tiny but important cameo in the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi). During this time, he was among our most likable romantic leads and even, depending on the film, something of a sex symbol. He then developed into a marvelous physical comedian and a convincing action hero (both qualities converging in the train-attack sequence in Sholay), but what worked so well in some of the early films soon made way for unthinking repetition. Well into his sixties, he continued doing C-grade action films made specifically for audiences outside the urban centres. (Just the other day, I saw him in this thing called Sultaan on TV, looking old and haggard but mechanically participating in badly choreographed fight scenes.)

It is a pity that such films may have marred the legacy of this underappreciated performer, but it is never too late for redemption. With the Yamla Pagla Deewana films containing many allusions to dialogues and scenes from his old movies, there are signs that Dharmendra may belatedly have developed a sense of self-importance, a meta-sense of his own filmic past. The man who so bashfully played "himself" in Guddi – as a star who is, aw-shucks, just a regular guy – may now, at age 78, be facing up to his legacy. And regardless of the quality of the YPD ego-projects, it is a legacy that deserves to be rediscovered.

[An earlier post on Dharmendra here]

Trains in Indian cinema - an essay

The new issue of the magazine The Indian Quarterly is in bookstores now. I have an essay in it about the use of trains - as harbingers of love, tragedy, development and action - in Indian cinema. Had fun writing it, and reviving my own memories of "Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai", Half Ticket, The Burning Train, the chook-chook song from Aashirwad, the train as a hypnotic black serpent in the Apu Trilogy, and many other films. Do look out for the magazine. (There isn’t an updated website for it yet, but you can see some of the pieces from the first issue at this link. The Facebook page is here, and subscription information is available at theindianquarterlyATgmail.com.)

P.S. Somewhat related – here is a piece I did about the 1973 film 27 Down, about a man who measures his lives in train journeys. And here is an old post about The Burning Train (also known as The Turning Brain for the effect it has been known to have on audiences’ minds).