On Krishna Shastri’s Jump Cut (and notes from a humour discussion)

Here’s a paradox. A panel discussion about humour, populated by people who are funny for a living, may very possibly not be funny itself. Because it involves analysing and intellectualising something that is often analysis-resistant. Understanding the workings of comedy, and the many ways in which different people respond to it, is no easy task. No wonder Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story, “Jokester”, suggesting that humour is part of a psychological experiment being conducted on us by Godlike extraterrestrials, to study human behaviour the way we might study rats in a laboratory.

Anyway, here is the funniest thing that happened during a humour-related talk I participated in at a Chandigarh lit-fest last year: a very angry man – an acquaintance of the deceased comedian Jaspal Bhatti – bobbed up and down in his seat, banged on the chair in front of him, shook his fists at us panelists, and declaimed through a quivering moustache, “I tell you, Bhatti was NOT a comedian! He was a starrist!”

Clarity alert: he meant “satirist”. But what was really amusing was the moral indignation on display – how keen he was to defend his friend’s sullied honour, and how convinced that the very word “comedian” was a gruesome insult (though Bhatti himself, I am sure, would have had no objection to being described thus). Just a few minutes earlier, the author Krishna Shastri Devulapalli and I had been speaking about how comedy is often a thankless, underappreciated job; about literary awards rarely shortlisting funny books; about the Oscars’ reluctance to nominate comic performances even though most actors will tell you comedy is so hard to do. And now here was someone from the audience unwittingly demonstrating the point – comedy was flippant, he implied, while “satire” was respectable because it suggested social conscience and purpose.

But any sort of comedy, if well done, has a clear-sightedness that most other modes of expression don’t have. “Humour assaults us with a slice of truth,” says a character in Manu Joseph’s The Illicit Happiness of Other People. A case can be made that if you simply look at the world and record what you see, you automatically become a comedian. During our session, Devapulalli read out a passage from his novel Jump Cut in which a man named Selva – originally from a village, now living in Chennai – is required to visit a fancy store selling women’s undergarments. As Selva gapes at a pair of flimsy panties, he considers the much more durable elastic on his own underwear, “which could be cut out to make a slingshot that could kill a squirrel at twenty paces if the need arose”. A thong seems to him like a hyped version of the “komanam” worn by old men in his village. Here is an example of a funny passage that is merely showing a particular man in a situation far removed from his everyday experience. We know the kind of store this is, we can picture the “black pant-suited” salesgirl who is described as having the same glassy expression as a mannequin, and even this seemingly lowbrow situation provides food for thought: the urban reader is allowed to temporarily step outside of himself and look at things through the perplexed eyes of someone who has not grown up in a world of high-priced brands, plush malls and supercilious salespeople.

Humour can be tied to nihilism – tossing a banana peel under the feet of human self-importance, mocking the idea that there is order in the world – but it can also facilitate empathy. The Illicit Happiness of Other People is about a sad man trying to understand why his 17-year-old boy killed himself, while Jump Cut is a story about another father-son relationship, as well as an ode to the “little person”, in both life and in a cut-throat movie-making industry. These synopses don’t sound funny, but both books understand that the profound and the ridiculous coexist in our lives, and they make the reader laugh while letting us stay emotionally invested in the protagonists.

Having had firsthand experience of Krishna Shastri's sense of humour in Chandigarh, I was surprised to find that Jump Cut wasn’t as full of wisecracks and clever one-liners as I had imagined it might be (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that sort of book). What unfolds instead is something more measured, where the idea isn’t so much to be “funny” from one paragraph to the next as to provide a light, slanted take on an essentially serious premise. The book has a prologue, set in 1992 Madras, where a boy named Ray and his sister watch the preview of a film that their father has worked on. The card they have been excitedly waiting for appears on the screen. “It says ‘Story, Screenplay and Dialogue by Vasant Raj’ in big letters that fill the screen, the drum-roll underlining their importance.” That’s the father’s name on the screen, thinks the reader, but then comes the deflating coda:

At the bottom of the screen, in barely readable letters, is the legend:

Associate: Raman

Then it is gone.

As this opening should make clear, there will be a tinge of melancholia throughout this story, even if it is largely hidden beneath the warm, good-natured tone of the writing. We never really get to “meet” the anonymous Raman in the narrative’s present tense, but the early chapters in which the adult Ray uncovers things about his deceased father are interspersed with short diary entries written by the dead man over the years: entries that reveal something of the inner world of a man who must have been taciturn and unobtrusive – a father who notices that his teenage son has a crush on a girl and also knows that he must never let on that he has noticed; a widower who drily notes that “the editor of real life can be quite abrupt” as he recalls how suddenly and randomly his wife was taken from him.

Jump Cut touched a chord for me because I have been thinking about the hidden or unnoticed cogs in the filmmaking process (some recent posts: on the documentary The Human Factor, about the neglected musicians who played in orchestras for Hindi-film composers; and about the actor MacMohan, who played Sambha in Sholay), and I liked the divide the book sets up between the grand, “filmi” narrative and the mundane, unglamorous way in which things usually happen in the real world.

That said, the real world can make fiction seem feeble at times. A few months ago a writer and stand-up comedian wrote a blog post about being asked to stop a show midway because he was “mocking Indians” in front of a non-desi audience. (The provocation? Relatively innocuous, and accurate, jokes about Indian drivers honking at traffic signals.) Reading that post, I pictured all the “serious men” huffing and puffing, getting all hot under their collar and chastising the poor comedian for offending their sentiments and for being “unpatriotic”. In a world where skins keep getting thinner, being funny for a living can be tricky. But the ability to laugh at yourself and at your holiest cows is one of the essential steps on the road to growing up, and this is a lesson well learnt in the company of skilled comedy writers – so what if they don’t win all those big literary awards.

[Here is a related post about "tasteless humour", with an anecdote I had thought of using at the Chandigarh lit-fest - the Punjabi audience may have appreciated it - before chickening out]

How I met Norman’s mother (a spot of movie tourism)

[Did this for Business Standard]

I’m not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me (though I’m not fascist about it either, like the people who believe the thing is a devil’s tool meant to suck their souls out through their eyeballs or something). Even when travelling in scenic places, I’d rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to stand in front of something and grin moronically at a lens.

Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinémathèque Française museum on a particular Friday afternoon last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates’s skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography in the premises. Nor does it explain why I then stood next to Maria the robot and made faux-dramatic poses in an attempt to replicate a famous scene from a 1926 film.

But these were special circumstances: Mrs Bates and Maria are important figures in my movie-watching career. The former is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which infected my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about films as art and sending me down a rabbit-hole of analytical literature about movies. The latter is one of the frosty legends of early film history, the automaton created by an evil scientist in Fritz Lang’s great silent film Metropolis. And so, having arrived in the city where people typically make a beeline for Notre Dame and Versailles, for Angelina’s hot chocolate and Berthillon’s ice creams, I prioritised a meeting with these two enigmatic ladies of the night. As Mrs Bates’s little boy Norman put it, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

Mother Bates makes her famous appearance in the climax of Psycho, in a creaky (by today’s standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman’s mummy is not a living, domineering harridan but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse. If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that my only mental picture of her would be as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing her in a glass cage at the Cinémathèque. Bathed in a beam of yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)

Looking at other artefacts – the starfish in the jar from Man Ray’s 1928 film The Sea Star, costumes from such movies as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast – was a strange experience too. Props and objects that have such immediate, vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau’s film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in “real-world” colour and they seemed garish, almost vulgar when set against the images from the film, playing on a screen above. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau’s film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don’t want to be reminded that it was put together by a cast and crew, who were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day’s news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.

Yet such experiences can also bring a new, more measured respect for the creative process – the processes by which everyday things are transmuted into magic and art, with long-term effects on people’s lives and personalities. (I would almost certainly not have become a professional writer if I hadn’t watched Psycho when I did.) Returning to Ma Bates: here is a wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in the cold light of day. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film’s lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and Bernard Herrman’s music score with its screaming violins added to the effect of the scene.

And now here she was more than 50 years later, outside of the film, in a boringly polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn’t completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Norman’s voice saying "I think we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out” followed by Mother’s cackle: “They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."

[The earlier post with the museum photos is here. And here is "Monsters I have known", my piece about horror-movie love for The Popcorn Essayists]

Revisiting J P Dutta’s Hathyar (and reflections on the bad old 1980s)

[Did a shorter version of this essay for the new issue of The Indian Quarterly]

Those of us whose cinematic consciousness was shaped in the 1980s tend to agree that, nostalgia aside, these were poor times for mainstream Hindi cinema. Actors did multiple shifts a day, zombie-walking through barely scripted potboilers (with the end results rarely indicating that they had succeeded in telling one character from the next, or that the films had expected them to). Production design was non-existent, comedy tracks appalling, and there were those ghastly closing shots where an assembly of surviving good guys stood together in a huddle beaming at the camera in the “mahurat” pose (after a few seconds of dutiful glycerine-shedding because one of their number had just sacrificed his life to save the day). Residue from the Angry Young Man films of the 1970s included the very worst of Amitabh Bachchan (from Pukar and Mahaan through Toofan and Jaadugar). In the immediate pre-liberalisation, pre-multiplex era, “Bollywood” operated in its own vacuum.

Today the DVD culture and the work done by NFDC has made it possible to see good, restored prints of the “parallel” cinema of the time, the best work of Benegal, Nihalani, Mishra and others. And so, for those of us of a certain age who like to think we take cinema seriously, it seems natural to focus our energies on revisiting those movies (which we were too young to appreciate when they came out) rather than waste time and effort trying to locate the few scattered gems that may have come out of the mainstream.

As I have written before on this blog, the first two years of the 1990s were when I became distanced from Hindi films (though a part of me loved the dhishum-dhishum and the familiar, reassuring structures) and sought nourishment elsewhere. I hadn’t read much film theory, had no concept yet of auteurs – like most young viewers, I mostly didn’t even think of films in terms of their directors. Yet, even at age 13, turning nastik and renouncing the mandir of Hindi movies, I knew that some of these films had a special energy in them and gave the impression that actual thought was taking place at the level of camerawork, scripting or performance; that an individual sensibility lay behind the whole. Mukul Anand was one such director (while Hum was the only film of his I whole-heartedly liked, there were stand-up-and-take-notice moments in nearly all his work, even in this tiresome thing called Khoon ka Karz). Another such director was J P Dutta, and one of my clearest memories from the summer of 1989 was watching Dutta’s Hathyar and sensing, without being able to articulate it, that I was seeing something more interesting than the regular action multi-starrer. Looking at tacky posters of Hathyar, with red-eyed Dharmendra and droopy-eyed Sanjay Dutt flaring nostrils and brandishing guns, you wouldn’t think it was any different from a dozen other khoon-aur-badlaa films that these actors were doing around the same time, but that would be an injustice to this layered work about the seductiveness of violence.

This month marks 25 years since the film’s commercial release. Though it has a tiny cult following among knowledgeable buffs, it deserves to be better known; along with the director’s earlier Ghulami, it is the high point of an erratic but important career. Dutta’s work has always been prone to flab and overstatement – something that is most obvious in the star-studded Kshatriya and LOC Kargil – but these 1980s films nicely balanced the large canvas with the intimate moment. They used sprawling vistas in ways that did justice to the conceit of the 70 mm screen, while inhabiting these vistas with well-defined characters who had interiority. Looked at from a distance, they can seem like standard uber-macho sagas, but on closer examination they turn out to be thoughtful critiques of violence and how that violence is related to a feudal, patriarchal tradition and passed down until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are strong roles for women as tempering influences or – in some cases – as facilitators for the more unsavoury aspects of tradition. And even while operating within the hyper-dramatic idiom of the commercial Hindi film, they successfully incorporated elements from outside that world. Ghulami has Mithun Chakraborty as a wisecracking action hero (whose trademark line “koi shaq?” was guaranteed to draw front-bench whistles) but also has a side-track featuring parallel-cinema stars Smita Patil and Naseeruddin Shah as husband and wife who weigh mutual respect against ideological differences. And in Hathyar, the voice of conscience is played by someone who usually worked in a very different corner of the mainstream – Rishi Kapoor, whose presence here, in one of his best roles of the time, is a tip-off that this won’t be your regular action film.**

Memory can play tricks on us when it comes to old movies, but the lullaby that bookends Hathyar’s narrative turned out to be exactly as I remembered it when I saw the film again recently. In the opening shot a little boy, initially seen in silhouette, sits on a rocking horse as his thakur father sings to him about a prince who roams the world on a flying steed and returns home when he is tired. (“Ek raja ke bête ko lekar / Udne waala ghoda…”) They are interrupted by an uncle – a more militant member of the thakur’s clan – who gives the child a toy gun, against the father’s protests. Our Avinash won’t grow up to be a coward, the chacha says pointedly. “Aaj kal sharaafat ko hee kaayarta kehte hain,” (“These days decency is mistaken for cowardice”) the father sighs, trying to take the gun away from his boy, but the child is already enthralled, he won’t let go – “Nahin, hum kheleinge” are his chilling words – and the framing of the shot (which dissolves into the adult Avinash’s arms holding a real rifle) makes it seem like the weapon is an extension of his hand. The circle begun by these scenes will be completed in the film's final sequence, set in a toy shop where Avinash realises that running his blood-smeared palms over a plastic globe is the closest he will come to having the world in his hands or flying to exotic lands on a magic horse.

In the casting of Sanjay Dutt as a gun-obsessed young man who becomes a pawn in games played by larger forces, Hathyar weirdly pre-echoes real-world events. In cinematic terms though, it is a forerunner to Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and other sleek, realistic city-crime films that would herald the multiplex era. Dutta’s early work was mostly set in villages and expanses of sunbaked desert where feudalism ran rampant and the line between rebel and daku, victim and aggressor, was erased. (Anyone who had the pleasure of watching Ghulami on a big screen – I have a dim childhood memory of this, though I may have nodded off during the Naseer-Smita scenes – will know how sweeping his visual sense was and how well he used these majestic settings.) But Hathyar was, literally, different terrain for him. Arriving in Bombay to escape village feuds, Avinash’s father is immediately confronted by violence and apathy of a different sort, though the hoodlums here are dressed in jeans and sneakers. “You said we’d move to the city to get away from the jungles, to live with civilised people,” Avinash’s mother (Asha Parekh in a good latter-day role) sarcastically tells her husband, “Well, here we are. Go and hug the cultured people you were so eager to meet.”

The ugly face of the metropolis is omnipresent – they see someone who has fallen off a train and died, and people being casual and indifferent about the tragedy – but new friendships and ties are formed too, and the city's “good” side seems to converge in the personality of one man, their principled and sensitive neighbour Sami bhai (Kapoor). Meanwhile, Avinash gets seduced by the Bombay underworld. This is partly circumstantial, but it could be a natural arc of his personality and upbringing: when we first saw him as an adult, back in the village, he was more interested in the deer at the end of his rifle than in his girlfriend Suman’s talk of romance and marriage; he dashed off while she was mid-sentence, in a scene that played like a variant on a famous episode from the Ramayana (and in this age of epic retellings and reexaminations, it might briefly make you wonder: was Rama’s pursuit of the deer Maricha driven as much by primal blood-lust as by the desire to fulfill his wife’s wish?).

In fact, one possible weakness of Hathyar is that it sometimes appears to blur two separate issues. The first involves the choices that face an unprivileged boy struggling to make ends meet and to support his mother in a predatory world. The second is his own apparent love of violence for its own sake, and the hint that he can prioritise it above his close relationships. At times the film seems undecided about whether to treat Avinash as an amoral sociopath with aggression running in his veins or as a pawn of fate, a cinematic descendant of Deewaar’s angry young man Vijay. But perhaps the two things aren’t mutually exclusive - perhaps what is being suggested is that if Avinash’s background and upbringing hadn’t been so rooted in casual bloodshed, it might have been easier for him to make the “right” choices later in life.

Hathyar doesn’t have the cool, organic sophistication of the gangster films that would come a few years later, such as RGV’s work, but there is an emotional directness in its key moments, and some very striking images, such as a shot of two people huddled together between trains passing on adjacent tracks shortly after the discovery of a dead body. Effective use is made of a minatory background score, and the scene that introduces the adult Avinash has the deliberate texture of gun porn, with loving close-ups of a shiny rifle being assembled, a hand stroking it, loading bullets, cocking it, taking aim. And watching such scenes, an old question in popular-film studies rears its head: is it possible for a powerful visual medium like cinema to meaningfully critique something even as it depicts it? If a film sets out to be a thoughtful commentary on violence but also contains well-executed action sequences – or soulful music to underline the protagonist’s personal dilemmas – does it compromise itself by making the violence “thrilling”?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Personally I don’t believe an objective distinction can always be made between films that are gratuitous/exploitative and films that are well-intentioned: directors and writers bring diverse sensibilities and approaches to the same material, and much depends on interpretation as well as on a viewer’s ability to distinguish between something that might temporarily be stimulating when viewed on a screen while being abhorrent or condemnable in the real world. But this aside, anyone watching Hathyar should be able to see that it accommodates a wide range of attitudes to violence and pacifism, cynicism and idealism.

Dutta’s best work (I’m thinking mainly of Ghulami and Hathyar – and perhaps Yateem, which I don’t remember all that well) sometimes reminds me of the cinema of Otto Preminger, in that it deals with intimate human stories within very large, multi-character frames (so large, in fact, that the films are constantly in danger of being dismissed as bloated epics by a viewer who hasn’t attentively watched them). Like Preminger’s Advise and Consent (a remarkably mature, multi-dimensional political film), Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder, these films present diverse points of view and life experiences without passing sweeping judgements – and yet without getting so fatalistic that they completely abjure notions of right and wrong.
 
In Hathyar, a poetic contrast is made between Avinash’s father putting his life into his toy statues, making something new and creative out of mud, and his son who kills people and watches their bodies fall in the mud. But lines are not clearly defined. There is the implication that the Gandhi-like men of integrity in this cut-throat world can “live by their principles” partly because someone less idealistic, more open to compromise, is looking out for them. And yet the film does this without glamorising those who chose the path of crime. All this adds up to a level of complexity that would point the way ahead to the more thoughtful, grounded screenwriting of the indie film culture.

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** One of Kapoor’s finest moments in the film – a triad of wordless gestures that take up just a few seconds – is a late scene where his character Sami bhai is beaten up by Avinash. Having offered no resistance, the dazed Sami bhai is now clutching a pole, out of breath. When he sees that Avinash is done and is about to walk away, he first holds his hands out in a “what, you’re finished?” gesture, then indicates “come, hit me some more, I’m still standing” and finally, as Avinash makes no move back, Sami – though still visibly shaken and reeling in a way that not many beaten-up leading men of the time seemed to be – waves his hands in an almost dismissive gesture, as if to say "This was the extent of your bravado? You have a lot to learn about real courage."

Stillness and tehzeeb - Nasreen Munni Kabir on Waheeda Rehman

Conversations with Waheeda Rehman, just published by Penguin/Viking, is the latest in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s series of book-length interviews with cultural figures; earlier entries include books on Gulzar, Lata Mangeshkar, A R Rahman and Javed Akhtar. Kabir has also made such documentaries as In Search of Guru Dutt and The Inner and Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan.


[A version of this Q and A appeared in Time Out Delhi]

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Your long interest in Guru Dutt’s career is well known. How central was Waheeda Rehman’s presence to that career, especially in classics like Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool?

My interest, I would say obsession, with Guru Dutt began in the early 1980s and it was obvious to me that Waheeda Rehman is essential to his films. Her characters are etched on the viewer’s minds because they provided the compassionate and caring presence that countered Guru Dutt’s melancholic hero. In Pyaasa, she is the nurturing mother figure whom the poet seeks at the end of the film, but to whom he never actually declares his love. In Kaagaz ke Phool, the doomed director Suresh’s love for Shanti (Waheeda Rehman) is important, but isn’t a strong enough force to save him from hurtling to self-destruction.

Although Guru Dutt is really the centre in all his films, Waheeda Rehman’s characters dominated the subplots. I say subplots because we mustn’t forget that she played second heroine in Pyaasa (Mala Sinha is the lead) and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (with Meena Kumari as the towering Chhoti Bahu). But Waheeda Rehman’s presence in both films is so vital that most people think of her as the lead heroine in Guru Dutt’s work.

That said, her contribution to Indian cinema is much more than her association with Guru Dutt — and so the idea of this book was to explore the other key films of her career, to learn something about her family background and to get to know her as the lovely and gracious person that she is both off and on screen.

In India we don’t have a tradition of long works of documentation such as this, and artistes are unaccustomed to such projects. How easy or difficult was it to get her to agree to this book?

It took years! I first met Waheeda Rehman in the 1980s, and it was sometime in the 1990s that I first talked to her about a book. She believed her story was not interesting enough — she is genuinely modest and keeps thinking herself as “lucky” rather than as someone who has special talent and therefore has a story to tell.

There is also the fear of offending others that makes most actors shy away from the idea of a biography. However, the subjects I have worked with know that I am more interested in their working life rather than their intimate romantic histories and long-forgotten spats. Kiss and Tell stories don’t interest me either, and to be honest I am the wrong person to look to if a reader wants that kind of book.

You mentioned the format — I was taken by the conversation between Billy Wilder and Cameron Crowe and thought this approach would work well in the Hindi cinema context and this led to my first conversation book with Javed Akhtar in 1999. It is a good way of recording personal stories. I think more should be done on the current generation of filmmakers. One day we won’t have much of any substance on them either.

What, to you, are Waheeda Rehman’s most distinctive qualities – as a performer and as a person?

I think her acting style is natural, unaffected and very modern. She exuded a dignity and grace, in the way that Balraj Sahni or Motilal did. When watching these actors you feel these were real people with heart and “tehzeeb”.

I also believe what dates a film the most, above photography or editing or costume, is the actors’ performance. If an actor is an old-style theatrical, over-the-top kind of performer – with flabbergasted rolling eyes or a shrieking voice — it makes today’s audience laugh, and even if the film is good the actor has killed it. No one could ever laugh at a Waheeda Rehman performance — even if her films are over 50 years ago, and belong to the black and white era (sadly now largely unappealing to the young) with social values long forgotten, her performance is contemporary in any era. This gives her old movies a timeless quality.

Some of her notable performances were in “silent” scenes – such as song sequences in Guide (“Tere Mere Sapne”), Khamoshi (“Woh Shaam kuch Ajeeb Thi”) and Teesri Kasam (“Duniya Banane Waale”) where someone else is singing. Would you say she was particularly adept at dialogue-less gestures and expressions?

In terms of her acting techniques, her dancing skills brought a lot to bear on her talent to “speak” through silent expressions. She herself talks of this, and I think this ability made her performances completely right for the cinema — because cinema should always “show” rather than “say”. Indian cinema’s dependence on verbose dialogue is a weak point, so knowing how to express emotions through the unspoken is a considerable gift.

She comes across as someone who was very outspoken from an early age – whether demanding a costume clause before signing her very first Hindi film at age 17 or insisting that she use her own name.

I think her background has something to do with her early confidence. When she spoke about her father, I got the impression that she was his favourite child. Her father was a District Commissioner in South India and had a standing in the community, and I am sure, even though she did not say it, her family must have moved among the elite of the cities where he was posted. As a result, she was probably not unduly impressed by status, fame and glamour, and so not intimated by the Hindi cinema world — she even mentioned in my book that she had not heard of Guru Dutt before meeting him, nor had she seen any of his films. She worked with the top stars of Tamil and Telugu cinema before coming to Mumbai, and so insisting on keeping her own name (she is most likely among the first generation of Muslim actresses who did not change their name), and insisting that her contract with Guru Dutt Films had certain clauses in her favour was perhaps not unsurprising, given the context of her life.

You note that apart from her roles in iconic films, she elevated many mediocre films. Did her discipline and single-mindedness make her an outsider in an industry where things were sometimes done in a shoddy, assembly-line way?

I think she brought dignity to her mediocre films but couldn’t really disguise their essential mediocrity. She probably acted in some films for financial reasons too. But she is indeed fortunate to have an important legacy of classics. If you were to organise a season of her work, you have a variety to choose from — besides Guru Dutt’s three masterpieces, there is also Guide, Mujhe Jeene Do, Teesri Kasam, Abhijaan and Khamoshi. This choice of classics is not on most actors’ CVs despite their huge fame and personal wealth.

The striking thing about Waheedaji is how content she is in herself. There is a stillness about her which is genuine.

How did she rate her experience with Satyajit Ray (in Abhijaan) compared to regular mainstream Hindi cinema where logic and “realism” were not of the essence?

Waheeda Rehman was delighted to work with Mr Ray. Remember she was the first Hindi film actress he cast and that felt like a great honour to her. The fact that his cinema was logical and realistic was a given, but what she got from that experience was the very meticulous method of his working. He was a towering figure in Indian cinema, and to work with him meant a lot to actors.

She also comes across as someone who wasn’t preoccupied only with her own contribution but was clued in to the mechanics and effects of filmmaking: suggesting that her own song in Pyaasa (“Rut Phire Par Din Hamaare”) be removed because it was “boring”, speaking about the way playback singing and acting play off each other. Did she ever want to become a director or do something else behind the scenes?

She did speak about wanting to direct but didn’t think she could. Maybe that generation of actresses did not have the confidence to try. But even today how many talented actresses anywhere in the world decide to direct? Even Meryl Streep has not ventured down that path.

Because Waheeda Rehman has a curious mind and likes to learn about how things are done, she came to have an understanding of the craft of filmmaking. That was a bit of a surprise to me because I had foolishly assumed that film technique did not interest women of her generation. I discovered that I was very wrong on that score.

The removal of her own song in Pyaasa is very much her. She isn’t obsessed by her own appearance in a film, but in how she contributes to the film as a whole.

These conversations touch on her acting career as well as on her personal life, but were there some things you simply couldn’t discuss in the interest of discretion (her rumoured relationship with Guru Dutt, for example) or topics that she was unresponsive to?

We did discuss her relationship with GD, but she said she preferred to keep her private life private. I respect that.

Your conversations with Gulzar-saab were mostly conducted on Skype. These conversations with Waheeda Rehman were done in person, but are there any inherent disadvantages in the Q&A format? Do you sometimes feel like you have to take everything the subject says at face value?

I think the Q & A format allows the subject to retain their voice. These conversations happen over months… at least twenty, two hours sessions with each subject. They aren’t really interviews that focus on the here and now and aim to be biographical in nature — so I try to include a wide range of subjects that touch on the personal and professional.

This may not be the best or only way of working, but I like it personally because I think the way people express themselves, their use of vocabulary, their telling of life experiences, their emotional reactions to the past and to people — all these things allow you to have a sense of the person. My aim is to make the reader feel they are in the room, listening into this conversation.

Photo: PETER CHAPPELL

Accepting things the subject says at face value has to be a given in this format. You have to believe them, as you would anyone to whom you ask a question. People tell you what they remember, even if past events are embellished and embroidered by passing time, you still get a lot of fact and recounting of experience. At least it’s a first-hand account. That interests me the most.

When I started work on Guru Dutt, everything I found out about him was based on hearsay. I never met him. I would have loved to read interviews with him.

All memory is subjective. But what is the truth when recounting an incident? Remember Rashomon?

You have done a great deal of work – through your documentaries, books, screenplay translations and talks – to help the archiving and documentation of our film heritage. Why has there been such neglect of our cinematic past? Why, for instance, aren’t there more incisive, well-researched books on some of our key moviemakers?

I think it took a long time for writers who write in English to take popular cinema seriously. There were people in the 1980s who wrote about Hindi cinema, but they didn’t interview film practitioners extensively about their work. That’s as far as I know. There is a ton of cinema journalism available throughout all periods, but most of it is reportage and accounts of the here and now. Not details about working methods or analysis of films and methods of filmmakers.

I think cinema was primarily seen as “entertainment.” And in the 1980s, Hindi cinema was regarded as down right low culture. Something you consume —meant for the masses. Post 1990s, Hindi cinema was regarded as an art and a most influential cultural force. Now there are a ton of books on Indian film, so we’re working in the right way for the future. The past? That’s gone. There isn’t enough recorded history of the most interesting film era (that’s the 1950s for me), nor the people who worked in that time. There are hardly any substantial film or print interviews. I mean you can’t find a singled filmed interview for example with Mehboob Khan or Sohrab Modi— isn’t that a terrible loss for film historians?

My biggest regret is not pursuing the conversational books I had in mind with Majrooh Sultanpuri, Vijay Anand and Raj Khosla, people who passed away not so long ago. In fact I did start a conversation with Vijay Anand but he was appointed as the Chair of the Censor Board and asked us to do it later. That later never came.

So I am confident these conversation books, including this one on Waheeda Rehman will have long-term value.

[Related posts: Guide and "Tere Mere Sapne", Khamoshi as a wildly uneven film]

Found in translation

[From my Forbes Life column - about some notable translations of books from regional Indian languages into English]

In Anita Desai’s short story “Translator Translated”, a lecturer named Prema is eager to translate an unassuming Oriya writer’s works into English so that they may reach a larger readership. But our view of Prema’s motives is altered when we learn she is a failed writer herself and that this could be a way of realising her suppressed ambitions. At one key point she exceeds her brief by taking liberties with the original text, and Desai underlines this transgression by changing the form of her own story; the narrative shifts from the third person to Prema’s voice.

The proprietorial translator exists in the real world too, of course. Recently I heard the veteran Tamil writer C S Lakshmi speak of her experience with translators who fancied themselves as critics, providing suggestions for changes to the original text, rather than focusing on their own work. But even when a translator has no hidden agenda, the process is a tricky one. A question that often arises is, what does being “faithful” to a text mean? Does it mean a literal, sentence-by-sentence rendition – which can result in stilted prose, given the inherent differences between languages – or should one set out to capture the "spirit" of the original? There are no easy answers – it usually depends on the nature of the writing, the envisioned readership, and the cultural assumptions involved. (As Lakshmi pointed out, the line “Someone touched me with cool hands” implies a pleasant experience when the reader is in Tamil Nadu, but when translated into an Eastern European language it may be changed to “someone touched me with warm hands” to achieve the same effect within a single sentence. However, making such a change can cause other problems within the narrative.)

During a panel discussion about translation in Delhi, the publisher Ritu Menon noted, half-jokingly, that the panel had only women on it “because translation has a long and difficult gestation period, with huge investment and slow returns”. In a country as culturally varied as India, the obstacles can be particularly daunting: as Geeta Dharmarajan pointed out during the same talk, we can’t give, say, an MT Vasudevan Nair to all our literate children in the way that the US can give Nathaniel Hawthorne to its students – “Bihari and Rajasthani children will have different behaviour types, different cultural reference points. And as a nation that is still going from the oral to the written traditions, how do we get illiterate people into the joy of the written world?” How to convey the subtle shifts in dialects within a particular language such as Bengali, wondered Anjum Katyal shortly afterward - "do we use a Cockney-fied English to indicate the differences?"

Despite these difficulties, there has lately been a surfeit of fine translations from the various Indian languages into English. Until a few years ago there was a dedicated but small band of translators, such as Arunava Sinha, who continues to bring a wide range of Bengali writings – from classics like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini to contemporary avant-garde works like Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart – to new readers. But the net is spreading wider now, and encompassing literature from across the country.

Given that the very act of translation from a regional language into English can be seen as a comment on the clout of Indian Anglophone writing, it is poignant that many of these books and stories are tales of marginalisation to begin with. A strong expression of the sense of neglect felt by non-English writers occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator here, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences.” The mollusc’s voice is being heard now: “Mangosil” appears with two other Prakash stories – about other forms of inequalities – in The Walls of Delhi, translated by Jason Grunebaum. The translation does contain the odd jarring note – phrases like “Isn’t this peachy?” feel out of place – but Grunebaum has clarified that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership.

A cheekier take on hegemony occurs in the Tamil Dalit writer Bama’s Harum-Scarum Saar (translated by N Ravi Shanker), about lower-caste Dalits' refusal to kowtow to their landlord “masters”. The rebellions here are not violent or dramatic (the circumstances of these people’s lives would permit no such thing), but the societal order is overturned in subtle ways, through rude speech and small acts of defiance: in one story, “Pongal”, the son of a labourer refuses to accompany the rest of the family on an obligatory gift-bearing visit to the landlord. The writing is conversational and salty (something the translation captures nicely), full of rhetorical questions (I knew people were there in the well, otherwise would I have jumped?) and phraseology that isn’t grammatical in the strictest sense but conveys the flavour of the setting.

Discussions about contemporary Indian fiction in English often touch on the lack of truly startling work that aligns stylistic experimentation with political engagement. One of the most formally provocative books I have read is P Sachidanandan’s The Book of Destruction (original Malayalam title Samharathinthe Pusthakam), about a man trapped in a series of surreal situations involving the bombing of a discotheque, a mysterious stranger whom he regularly meets during train journeys, and a tailor cannibalised by the people whose personalities have been shaped by the clothes he stitched; the human race is bound by the destructive impulse, says this hard-hitting critique of social conformity. But there are more linear, narrative-driven works available in translation too, many of them by Penguin’s Modern Classics imprint. These include fine translations of important Indian writers such as Yashpal (This is not that Dawn), Sundara Ramaswamy (Tamarind History) and Fakir Mohan Senapati (Six Acres and a Third). One of the imprint's lower-profile gems is the Telegu writer Chaso's Dolls’ Wedding, a collection of  deceptively unfussy stories that have spare “plots” but provide tangential entry points into people’s inner lives through an accumulation of detail: as an ancient great-grandmother tells tales of her childhood, the reader is made aware of the significance of what is not explicitly said; how the old woman appears dimly aware of, and resigned to, the injustices of her life.

Elsewhere, genre and popular writing are also reaching new readers. The Urdu scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi recently expanded his own novel Kai Chaand thay Sar-e Aasmaan into a multigenerational 19th century epic titled The Mirror of Beauty – a respectable “literary” venture, if there ever was one. But a few years ago Faruqi had indulged himself with a more light-weight project: translations of four “Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers written by the legendary pulp writer Ibn-e Safi in the 1950s. These adventures – with such titles as Laughing Corpse and Poisoned Arrow – “star” the imperturbable super-sleuth Colonel Faridi, his assistant Captain Hameed and a pet goat named Bhagra Khan, and are set in an improbably Westernised city with posh nightclubs, harbours and skating rinks. It is easy to dismiss such books as trivial, but their storytelling energies and plotting skills have influenced writers and artists for decades, and seeped into our popular culture, and in his translations Faruqi has combined his writerly strengths with the childlike enthusiasm of a fan who was mesmerised by Safi as a boy. That combination lies at the heart of so much good translation.

[Some earlier posts about fine books in English translation: Lal Singh Dil’s memoirs, Revathi’s A Hijra Life Story, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din, Geetanjali Shree's Khaali Jagah, Blaft's Tamil folk tales and pulp fiction, Syed Muhammad Ashraf's The Beast, MT Vasudevan Nair's Randaamoozham]