Policeman, framed - an Ardh Satya poster

Around the time The Popcorn Essayists was at the editing stage, the great Manjula Padmanabhan gifted me a couple of posters she had designed for Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya in 1982, including a close-up of Om Puri's weary, haunted face, done in yellow and dark blue. Took the longest time to get around to having the poster framed (apart from anything else I was petty enough to wonder if I really wanted a 4 ft by 3 ft picture of Om Puri on a wall - so much for being a Critic and appreciating good art, focussing on form as much as content etc), but have done it at last and it looks super.

There's a bubble-wrap around the poster here (will put up a clearer photo later), but you get the gist of the drawing. It suggests the inner turmoil of Puri's character Sub-Inspector Velankar so effectively, with the dark strokes seeming to cast shadows across his face and exaggerating the lines on his forehead. Velankar looks scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the actual film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There is a poetic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.
 
(And while on the art of Manjula P, here is my proud appearance in her comic-strip Suki.)

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.

Cinemas of India: Dharavi, Party, Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda, Salim Langde pe Mat Ro

[With the theatrical rerelease of Jaane bhi do Yaaro - in the restored "Cinemas of India" print - scheduled this week, here is a piece I did for The Caravan around the time my book on the film was published. And below is the full text of my essay - also for The Caravan - about four other NFDC-restored films]

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It’s no secret that we in India have been largely indifferent to the preservation of our cinematic heritage. Prints of movies barely a few decades old are frequently in a dismal state, with the worst sufferers being low-budget, non-studio films that never had an extended theatrical run. There are cases of non-mainstream directors and actors not having access to their own seminal work. Naseeruddin Shah once told me that his only print of Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai was a battered video-cassette: “Come to my place if you want to see it, I’m not lending it to anyone.” The actor Pawan Malhotra interrupted an interview to plaintively ask if I had seen a disc of Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, which featured his best starring role.

Linked to this neglect is a more general apathy to how movies should ideally be experienced. Glossy DVD covers conceal faded, scratch-ridden prints of old films, with many scenes missing a few seconds of footage. Audio quality is often so bad it can make one weep (more than once, I have had to switch on the subtitles for Hindi films) and there are cases of shoddy recording where sound and visual are not synchronised. Cheaply rented pirated discs seem geared to functional movie-watching where the only purpose is to perfunctorily follow the bare bones of a plot, rather than to fully experience the visual and aural qualities of a film.

What a sight for sore eyes and a treat for straining ears, then, are the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs released by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in collaboration with Shemaroo. These well-restored prints of non-mainstream films (insert your label of choice: Art or Parallel Film, New Wave Cinema) produced by NFDC in the 1980s and early 90s represent what the movie-watching experience can be – the images are nearly spotless, the colours vivid, the audio clear. View a couple of them and you’ll find it difficult to go back to regular DVD-watching.

The Cinemas of India DVDs represent my first sighting of Salim Langde... as well as Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down and Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, at least in this format (they may have been floating about on that execrable third-world invention, the VCD). Some other films – Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, Arun Kaul’s Diksha – have been available, but have never looked this good before. And though the cult of Kundan Shah’s iconic comedy Jaane bhi do Yaaro grows each day, I hadn’t come across a DVD of it in the past two years (possibly the earlier Shemaroo edition was taken out of circulation to pave the way for this new, two-disc set containing an interview with the director).

But the real Holy Grail (and for me personally, the highlight of these releases) is the new print of Govind Nihalani’s superb 1984 film Party. Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, this cutting social satire may be the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. It is so well written and performed that it should stimulate even those who are ambivalent about its ideological position (namely, that art and politics are necessarily inseparable). And yet, it has been out of circulation for years.

In Party’s opening 20 minutes, we are introduced to various sets of people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his depressive, alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who seems constantly to be “performing”, even in private moments with her husband. Other guests include a theatre actor (Shafi Inamdar) who is more adept at separating himself from his roles (“The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me”), the faux-liberal Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others, and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly).

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced and confessions made, and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but bound in the traps they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the conversation converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now living with and helping the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure – reminiscent in some ways of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz – becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these people. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to amused indifference to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world?

Like nearly all of Nihalani’s work, Party is politically charged and explicitly idea-driven. It remains a startlingly fresh film in its big discussions as well as in its casual chatter about the literary world (Rushdie vs Naipaul, “brown-sahib” snobbery vs “vernacular” snobbery, the inattention to the female perspective in a male writer’s work). Importantly, though it is adapted from a theatrical work (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it), it is not just a static filming of a stage production. The use of space, the many lovely still compositions, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people – all these show a strong cinematic sense. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them.

This is a splendidly constructed, designed and choreographed work, and though it is driven by talk, it ends with a harrowing nightmare scene that is entirely wordless – a scene where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life, feeding off his own reputation; another who is in danger of doing the same) gaze into a distorting mirror and face their consciences. Mindful though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among the great Hindi films. 
(An extended version of this essay on Party is here)

****

If Party proposes that the true artist should be more than a detached observer with a splinter of ice in his heart, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda determinedly blurs the line between a storyteller and his tale, and between fact and fiction. Nihalani was once Benegal’s cinematographer and I can imagine Party and Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda having a conversation about art and artists, with the latter adopting a more relaxed, playful attitude towards the subject. It opens with a scene where a painting of a mohalla, as seen in an art exhibition, dissolves into the mohalla itself, and ends with a shot of the raconteur-in-chief Manek babu walking off into the mist of another story, much like Buster Keaton’s movie projectionist entering the screen in Sherlock Jr.

Benegal’s reputation as a leader of the parallel movement was formed in the 1970s with such films as Manthan, Nishant and Bhumika, but this film, made in 1991 (and based on Dharamvir Bharati’s novella), is one of his most accomplished works – a clever, self-referential comment on the nature of storytelling. This is partly achieved by the non-linearity of the narrative, which coils back on itself like a serpent swallowing its own tail; a scene might be repeated from a different perspective, giving it a marginally different timbre and altering our feelings about the characters.

Manek (Rajit Kapoor) doesn’t seem to be more than 25 or 26 but relates his stories as if they were personal experiences from a very distant time. His tales – about his encounters with three different sorts of women – link into each other in unexpected ways; they are driven by Vanraj Bhatia’s fine music score, and they all centre on romance and betrayal. But they are subject to varied interpretations, and one is always aware of an element of artifice – a sense that a story is being constructed in collaboration with the people who are listening to it. Manek wryly maintains that a good love story should be uplifting to society (“acchi prem kahaani samaaj ke liye kalyaankari honi chahiye”) and that stories like Devdas are “sentimental junk” because they lack a “moral”, but his own actions in his narratives are less than edifying; he portrays himself as limp-wristed, responsibility-shirking and cowardly.

A different sort of storyteller (one who constructs inner worlds to keep his own hopes alive) is the protagonist of Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi (1991). The film’s title refers to the famous Mumbai slum in which it is set, but a subtitle in the opening credits gives the word its literal meaning: “Quicksand”. This is a place where even an animal used to the desert might easily sink – and indeed, there is a strange early scene involving a runaway camel who dies in the slum!

“Bolne ko toh sabhi ret ke jaanwar hain – yahaan marne ko aaye hain” (“We are all desert animals who have come here to die”) says a voiceover by longtime resident Rajkaran (Om Puri), who works as a cab-driver. But Rajkaran is an essentially sanguine man looking to pull himself out of the mire – while his pragmatic wife Kunda (Shabana Azmi) brings in a steady income by working in a sewing mill, he has been saving to invest in a cloth factory, and he may have other tricks up his sleeve. I thought he bore a striking resemblance to Ayyan Mani, the resourceful protagonist of Manu Joseph’s fine novel Serious Men, about a chawl-dweller living by his wits.

Of course, Rajkaran has his Madhuri Dixit dreams to keep himself going, and Dharavi contains telling scenes where one cinematic idiom collides with another. The opening sequence winks at the mainstream-movie culture of the time with a clip from a fictitious film titled Shahar ka Shahenshah, starring Anil Kapoor as a slum-boy now returned to protect his childhood turf from machine gun-toting baddies. (When this onscreen hero proclaims “Yeh basti hamaari hai”, the real slum-children cheer. But soon real life takes over: local hoodlums set fire to the projection tent, which leads to a mesmeric shot of the “screen” bursting into flames with Madhuri Dixit’s red-sari-clad image still on it.) An amusing later sequence features Rajkaran and Kunda having a domestic squabble against a screen showing another (actual) Kapoor-Dixit starrer, Parinda (directed by Sudhir Mishra’s real-life buddy Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who had just crossed over into bigger-budget cinema).

Mishra’s film is about the human spirit refusing to be beaten back by heavy odds, but it is also full of lovely little visual touches that leap out at you when you watch them on this print. Bright red and green dupattas flutter outside the factory that Rajkaran dreams of buying (even the colour configuration seems to stand for the “stop-start” nature of his capricious project); an unexpected close-up of a large, cherry-red Ganesha statue is used as a punctuation mark after a conversation ends; an almost Scorsese-like sense of urgency is created by a constantly moving camera in the busy sequence where Rajkaran goes to negotiate with a middleman, with the latter’s four wives (dressed in different-coloured burkhas) wailing in a corner of the room; there is a simple yet startlingly effective shot of curtains in a room billowing slightly inward as a train passes outside the room where Rajkaran is sitting with his friends. And there are many striking shots from inside Rajkaran’s taxi, a picture of his Madhuri hanging in the front.

An underappreciated aspect of Mishra’s work is his penchant for black humour, which may have been fine-tuned when he worked as a young assistant producer on Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 1982. “I tend to search for the comic possibilities in even a very bleak situation,” he told me once during an interview. There are a few such touches here too, among them a shot of a just-discovered corpse with a transistor playing the song “Don’t worry, be happy”, and a gang-war scene where a man is slashed across his chest just in front of a board that has a crude romantic drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. None of this detracts from the essential seriousness of the film, though. The only flaw in Dharavi, I thought, was in the casting of the two leads. Nothing Puri or Azmi do here can be faulted, but they were both in their forties when the film was made – arguably too old for these parts – in addition to being established stars of non-mainstream cinema; the film may have worked better with less familiar faces in the roles.

****

Dharavi’s main narrative is interspersed with vignettes of slum children playing grown-up, usually by imitating the things they have been seeing in masala movies (in one scene little boys mock-pursue a little girl, who does her bit by mock-screaming “Bachao”). I was reminded of these swaggering children while watching Salim Pasha (Pawan Malhotra) and his cohorts in Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989). Malhotra is a small-built man with an unthreatening voice, but that is only one reason why Salim – who saunters about his district collecting hafta and committing petty crime – often comes across as a child pretending to be an adult. (He wears a canvas jacket and a fish-net vest, he talks the talk and struts the strut, but when a friend is murdered he vents his frustrations by shooting down fighter planes in a video game.) “Iss shaher mein gunda banna toh bachhon ka khel hai,” an acquaintance, the idealistic Aslam, tells him in a key scene, “Mushkil toh sharaafat se jeena hai.” (“In a city like this, it’s child’s play to be a hoodlum. What’s difficult is to follow the path of honesty.”) In a sense, then, Mirza’s film is a coming-of-age story: a young man growing to self-awareness, slowly turning his face away from what is the easy way out for someone born in his class and circumstances.

It begins with Salim introducing us to his basti and the people who are part of his life: his family, including a disapproving father and a sweet younger sister; the dancing girl Mumtaz (“chamakti Mumtaz”), whom he loves; a faux-philosophising, guitar-strumming firang called “Jani Hippie”; the local smugglers and policemen who are inevitably in cahoots. (“Dekho, smuggler ke kandhe pe kanoon ka haath,” someone wittily observes as a cop scrapes before a man he should be arresting.) There is a touch of documentary to these early scenes, but they also have a stylised quality: the opening-title sequence gives the city a bleached, otherworldly look, the camera tracks constantly, drawing us ever further into Salim’s milieu (and, by extension, his inner world).

Salim Langde... is an unevenly paced film – very breezy in places (with a couple of inspired comic skits such as the one where Salim’s buddies imitate the mannerisms of posh college-goers), but then juddering to a halt as a character (mainly the conscientious Aslam) holds forth on such matters as the bloody history of the subcontinent and the need for Muslims to embrace education. Much like Mirza’s capricious book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, it mixes compelling narrative with self-conscious preaching, and the ending is a little abrupt (though that may well have been intentional).

Hindu-Muslim riots are a humming presence in the background of Salim’s life: when local hoodlums encroach on each other’s territory, it becomes a metaphor for communal clashes and the splitting of the country along religious lines. (“Apna area! Unka area! Sab log ka area alag-alag ho gaya hai,” a character rues.) The drug-addled hippie invokes nuclear destruction and observes that India is a good place to die in; posters of Martin Luther King and a mushroom cloud share space on a cafe wall, while another wall amusingly has portraits of Gods separated by large advertisements for razor blades. The link between poverty and crime (with religion as a catalyst) is made abundantly clear, and our hero must find a way to choose between rokda and izzat. A question that was central to Dharavi is raised here in a slightly different context: “Hai koi tareeka gutter se baahar nikalne ka?” (“Is there any way to get out of this gutter?”) Like Rajkaran and Amrit – “heroes” of the other films mentioned above – Salim Pasha must try to balance personal integrity and ideals with his circumstances.

(Also see this post on Saeed Mirza's first feature film Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan)

****

Watching these films in succession, it strikes me that these print restorations are important for another reason: they help us overcome a mental block against discussing non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

Many viewers of my generation grew up seeing (or being forced to see) these films on monochrome TV sets and believing that they were meant to be edifying but joyless experiences. In some cases this impression spilled over into adulthood. These movies are characterised by stark writing, gritty performances and “real” emotions, we told ourselves, and surely such things can be appreciated even in dull colours and scratchy prints? (Looked at in one way, poor prints can even heighten the effect of such works by reminding us that they were made on low budgets – that this was the nuanced Cinema of Struggle, not the facile Cinema of Mass Entertainment.)

However, these restorations make it possible to appreciate the cinematic brio and imagination. They are reminders that directors like Nihalani, Benegal and Mishra were weaned on the vibrant international movements of the 1960s and 70s – the cinematic new waves in countries ranging from France and Japan to Germany, Czechoslovakia and the US. However “socially relevant” and “message-oriented” the films made in these movements were, the best of them were formally dynamic too. You’d have to be a real pedant (and, I would suggest, half-blind as well) to discuss Party and Dharavi only in terms of their content and ideas, without dwelling on how they do what they do. What makes them so good is a synthesis between depth of content and depth of execution.

For the Indian film buff who believes that aesthetic pleasure is vital to the movie-watching process (even when the movies themselves are “serious”) and who has been exposed to brilliant prints of international classics, these restorations are a first step in what will hopefully be a more rigorous approach to our filmic past. In the year that our cinema celebrates its centenary, it should not be too much to expect that movies only a few decades old should look the best they can.

A postscript: in the US, there has been discussion on movie websites about prints of some old noir films being “over-restored” to the extent that scenes that were meant to be shadowy had been rendered incongruously bright. Watching the Cinemas of India DVDs, I occasionally had similar misgivings. Jaane bhi do Yaaro’s director Kundan Shah once told me that the glow on the sides of the frame during the film’s Mahabharata climax was caused by the use of exposed film (this is itself a poignant reminder of the lack of resources available to the crew and a vital part of the mythology of the film). Perhaps I’m imagining it, but on the new DVD that glow seems reduced. It makes one wonder if technology has reached a point where the Cinema of Struggle can be digitally converted into the Cinema of Glamour!

The artist, the ivory tower and the world: on Govind Nihalani’s restored Party

The old man on stage is performing a scene from the play Natasamrat, about a once-great artiste now living in his inner world. “All the greats are within me!” he declaims, lurching about the stage, “Caesar, Othello, Ganpatrao Belwalkar.” A woman – clearly a fan of the actor – watches from behind a curtain, deeply moved. "Caesar" is stabbed – “Brutus, tum bhi?” – and falls to the ground. The scene ends, the audience applauds.

Backstage, the woman meets the actor and voices her admiration. “Kitni vedna hoti hogi, na?” she asks (“There must be so much suffering involved in this performance?”) “Vedna mujhe nahin hoti, jo character mujh mein hai, usse hoti hai,” he replies politely. The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me. Then he returns to the dressing room and removes his heavy makeup to reveal a much younger (and dare one say it, blander, less interesting) face beneath it.

Watching this scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party, I did a double take. The face beneath the mask is that of Shafi Inamdar, whom I mainly remember for his role as the husband in the 1980s comedy show Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, and for a series of workmanlike character parts in movies. It was one of those moments that give you a fresh perspective on a performer whom you have taken for granted.

But this is just one of many startling scenes in an extraordinary film. Party has been a holy grail for many of the movie-lovers I know, its long-time unavailability on DVD one of our abiding cinematic puzzles. Apart from being a cutting social satire, this is the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. And yet it has been out of circulation for years. (I heard from an acquaintance some time ago that Nihalani himself had been searching for a decent print; this is not difficult to believe.)

Well, it’s here now, in an excellent print – one of the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs, which are restorations of NFDC films made in the 1980s and 90s. These discs represent a very important step in film preservation in India and I’ll be writing a longer piece about them soon, but for now here are some thoughts on Party.

****

The sequence mentioned above is one of the establishing scenes of Nihalani’s film, but it also touches on a key theme: the divide between an artist’s work and his life. Is it possible for a character on stage to feel intense vedna while the actor playing that character claims to be untouched by the emotions (and afterwards peels off his makeup, puts on a shiny red kurta and leaves for a cocktail party)? Is it similarly possible for a writer to express a powerful social conscience and sympathy for the downtrodden in his work while otherwise leading a privileged life at a vast remove from the subjects of his writing?

Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, Party raises these questions from many different perspectives. In its opening minutes we meet the people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who is constantly “performing” – even in private moments with her husband – and seems incapable of distinguishing between art and life. (No wonder she interprets a line in Barve’s work about “khokhla pyaar” – hollow love – as a personal jibe.) Other guests include Inamdar’s theatre actor Ravindra, who is more adept at separating himself from his roles; the ostentatiously radical Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others; Damayanti’s melancholy daughter Sona (Deepa Sahi), who has a child out of wedlock; and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly even a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly). Meanwhile a group of young partygoers – led by Damayanti’s son Rahul – take over an upstairs room and dance to popular American music, mostly unconcerned with the goings-on downstairs.

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced, confessions made and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but caught in the images they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the talk converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure (whose simultaneous absence from and centrality to the proceedings is reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz) becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to mild annoyance (“This so-called social commitment has become fashionable”) to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world? “Hum likhte hain kyonke humein likhna hai” (“We write because we must”) Barve says, but Avinash insists that every work of art is a weapon and that art and politics are inseparable. “Do we want to live as artists or as human beings?”

Party is a startlingly fresh film both in these big discussions and in its casual chatter about the literary world. Two people debate the relative merits of Rushdie and Naipaul (and I admit to being amused to find that Naipaul had a reputation for being "bitter" even three decades ago). A minor character named Ila (played by Ila Arun) asks Barve why there is so little of the female perspective in his work, and though his reply is an apparently sensible one (he can only convincingly write about the things he knows), we are reminded of his distant, condescending attitude towards his wife. “You English speakers think too much of yourselves,” one person says, provoking the retort that there is such a thing as “vernacular snobbery” too. (Yet this party itself is clearly an aspirational setting where anyone not comfortable in English would be out of place. Bharat awkwardly says things like “She is drunken” just to make small talk and to fit in.) Opposing views are expressed on nearly every major topic. Damayanti (who basks in the reflected glory of artists without being one herself) is called a parasite, but the word becomes equally significant in another context – it can refer to a smug artist living off his early work and reputation, becoming fattened on fame without ever feeling impelled to seek fresh ground or question his own assumptions.

By now it should be clear that this is (like nearly all of Nihalani’s work) an explicitly idea-driven film: politically charged, full of reflection and counter-reflection. Being adapted from a major play in close collaboration with the playwright, it has the discipline and rigour of good theatre (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it). But these things perhaps make it important to clarify that this is definitely not just a static filming of a stage production. There is a strong cinematic sense in the use of space, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them. And there are splendidly orchestrated scenes such as the one where, during a conversation between Barve and Damayanti, the camera repeatedly cuts outside the room to watch the drunk Mohini moving around silently on the porch. Barve will make a key confession about himself at around the same time his wife is shocked by her own image in the mirror.

****

Driven though it is by conversation, Party ends with a harrowing wordless sequence where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life; another who is in danger of doing so) share a nightmare vision and face their consciences. The scene ties in with a motif in Nihalani’s early cinema: the voiceless person, someone who is either unable or reluctant to speak up. (See Om Puri’s Lahanya Bhiku in Aakrosh or the silent, suffering wife played by Deepa Sahi in Aaghat.) But it also takes us back to the very beginning of Party – to a lovely shot of Sona reading a letter written by Amrit, so focused on the text that she barely moves, the camera drawing tentatively towards her. (Watching the film a second time, one might consider the light gently streaming in through the silk curtains in the background and think about the irony of this poet-activist’s letter being read in such a refined, unthreatened bourgeoisie setting.)

“Bheenche huye jabre dard kar rahe hain,” says the voiceover (“My clenched jaws are aching”). “Kitni der tak dabaaya jaa sakta hai khaulte laave ko. Kisi bhi pal khopri crater mein badal jaaye.” (“How long can I stay silent and keep this lava inside me? My head feels like it could turn into a crater.”)

[This may be a good time to point out that the shuddh Hindi used in this screenplay is occasionally so dense and layered that you might need to watch some scenes a second time just to fully process what is being said.]

The voice is the familiar one of Naseeruddin Shah and a tinge of amusement enters it when he says “khopri crater mein badal jaaye”, as if to acknowledge the corniness of such an analogy in an otherwise austere monologue. But when the writer of this letter makes his brief appearance in the final seconds of Party, the words will be given a morbidly literal form. It is one of many times in this film where something said in a light vein subsequently acquires a much darker shade. In brightly lit, elegantly furnished rooms people clink glasses and make small talk, but there are storms raging, both in their hearts and in the world outside.

Party isn’t a movie that you can appreciate in just about any mood, but those who open themselves to it will be driven back to it a few times. It is so well written, constructed and performed that it should stimulate even those (I include myself here) who are ambivalent about its ideological position. Wary though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among Hindi cinema's great achievements. And now it has the print it deserves.

P.S. For anyone interested in recurring visual motifs in a director’s work, especially from one film to the next, here’s a little exercise: watch the very last scene of Party, note how a shuffling walk creates the sense of someone weighed down by heavy chains, and then watch the opening shot of the film Nihalani made immediately after it – Aghaat. (I wrote about Aghaat in this post.) The little "link" between the two scenes reminded me of other prominent inter-film connections, such as the similarity between the closing shot of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the opening shot of his next film A Clockwork Orange.