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.)

50 shades of Ray (and other glimpses of a cinematic heritage)

[An essay I did for the Delhi Art Gallery’s splendidly produced catalogue to accompany the Nemai Ghosh photographic exhibition]

Writing about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee – a post-apocalyptic story made up almost entirely of still pictures – the critic David Thomson observed that this may be our perfect commentary on "the special way in which photographic images work with time to make the explosive equation of moving film”. In the film’s most spellbinding scene, lasting only a few seconds, the pictures on the screen “move” – the way they do in most regular movies – and a woman, hitherto seen only in photographs, comes alive before us. The result is a startling contrast between still images and images that, in Thomson's phrase, “work with time” – especially apt to a story that is about both time travel and the haunting, illusory nature of memory.

Motion pictures are, of course, a series of photos run together so fast that we can discover a narrative in them. And yet, when we think of our favourite movie scenes, we often think of specific shots frozen in time – shots that might be “unreliable” because they are idealised constructs of our brain, but which can capture something truthful and essential about a film. Similarly, a good photograph of a movie scene (or of a scene being filmed) can enshrine a moment for all time. It can reveal a good deal about what that movie means to its culture and about the circumstances in which it was made. At times it might even enable us to “play” a slightly different version of the scene in our head.

In the early days of filmmaking, the photographer loitering about the set was not always a welcome presence – actors were not usually happy about having to recreate a scene after the shot had already been taken. (The invention of the sound blimp, which allowed the still camera to do its work silently, placated many nerves.) But today, everyone agrees about the vital role played by a good still photographer, and Nemai Ghosh has been among the most dedicated and scrupulous of them all. His output would have been admirable in any place and time, but it acquires a special resonance in the context of a country that has never cared enough about its cinematic legacy. The story of preservation in Indian cinema has been a depressing one involving countless miles of deteriorating or lost film stock and an astonishing lack of written or pictorial records, even when it comes to major films. But Ghosh’s photographs are a wide-ranging documentation of movie memories, with a special focus on the work of India’s most widely celebrated filmmaker.

His association with Satyajit Ray – a life-changing one, by his own account – began during the shooting of Ray’s 1968 fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, which is among the best-loved of all Indian films. A chord was struck very early on. In his worshipful book Manik-Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh recalls the frisson of excitement he felt when the photographs he had taken were first presented to Ray, and when the great man looked up and said “You have done it exactly the way I would have, man, you have got the same angles!” Thus began a collaboration that lasted nearly a quarter-century (towards the end of which period Ray would write that Ghosh had been for him “a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen”).

A case can be made that the photographer missed out on some of the director’s best work. Not many film buffs would argue that Ray’s post-1968 output equalled the sum of what he had done up to that time: an oeuvre that included the three films of the Apu Trilogy as well as Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar, Teen Kanya, Kanchenjanga, Nayak and arguably his most formally accomplished film Charulata. The heart sinks a little to think of what Nemai Ghosh’s eye and camera might have achieved if he had had a chance to shoot the magnificently crumbling haveli of the zamindar in Jalsaghar; the large house in which Charulata feels restless and unfulfilled; the ghostly mosquito nets that are such a constant, haunting presence in Devi; the lovely vistas of Varanasi where Apu’s father Hari breathes his last in Aparajito; or even the nightmare scenes (the telephone, the skeletal hands and currency notes) of Nayak. Imagine some of the location shots he might have captured for Ray’s lovely short film “Samapti” (a segment of Teen Kanya), in which a city-educated lad (Soumitro Chatterjee) becomes gradually drawn to, and also a little repulsed by, a feral girl-child (played by the young Aparna Dasgupta, later Aparna Sen) in his village. Imagine the mists of Kanchenjanga as seen through Ghosh’s frame.

But such “what ifs” are exercises in pointlessness – and besides, the very fact that we can rue these things is a testament to the value of what actually did emerge from the collaboration. Consider the films Ray made between 1968 and 1991, and the range of themes, moods and time periods they cover. There is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and its much later sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe, two of our cinema’s towering achievements in whimsical, timeless fantasy. As companion pieces to these “light” movies, there are the detective Feluda films, Sonar Kella (based on one of Ray’s breeziest, most pleasing stories and shot on location in Rajasthan) and Joy Baba Felunath. On a grittier note, there is the Calcutta trilogy of Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya (and a key film that can be seen as a precursor to them, Aranyer Dinratri, about four men trying to escape city life by heading off into the forest for an excursion).  Then there is the period drama Shatranj ke Khiladi, Ray’s only feature-length Hindi film, based on Premchand’s story about nobles and Englishmen on the eve of the 1857 war of independence. The Government-produced Sadgati, a somewhat pedantic (by the director’s standards) examination of untouchability. Ghare Baire, an elegant adaptation of Tagore’s story about the personal and the political. And the comparatively lesser works of the final years – Ganashatru, Shakha Prashakha – which have their own merits but in which one also senses an artist stricken by poor health and beginning to wind down.

Every one of these films is represented – usually at incredible length – in Ghosh’s photography. “Incredible” because this was the pre-digital era and reels of actual film were being used up in the taking of these photographs; their number and variety tell us something about Ghosh’s personal dedication to his art, and about Ray’s capacity to inspire. And because many of the films are so iconic, these photographs provide us with some defining glimpses of our cinematic heritage. Through them, we get a tantalising picture: Ray as observer and chronicler of the many aspects of a culture, and Ghosh with his camera, observing the observer.

As the eye turns greedily from one picture to the next, a host of memories and associations come alive. Here is the filming of Ashani Sanket with the girl bathing in the river, an instant reminder of the haunting opening sequence of that movie with the fighter planes – “as beautiful as a flock of cranes” – passing overhead. Here, from the same film, is Soumitro as the young Brahmin in the bullock-cart, his director looking urbane and dapper next to him – the shot is an amusing reminder that some of the earliest Western critics who saw Ray’s work made the mistake of assuming that he was from an indigent, uneducated background himself and that the Apu Trilogy, with a young village boy making his way in the world, was an autobiographical story!

Here, from Shatranj ke Khiladi, are two noblemen as wastrels, looking on indolently as “interesting times” pass them by. An extraordinary photograph from this series has Wajid Ali Shah framed in a circle formed by the coiled tubes of a hookah; the image is a beautiful representation of a weak ruler trapped by history, and Amjad Khan – one of our most photogenic actors ever – is as tragically imperious here as he was terrifyingly imperious in his most famous role as Sholay’s Gabbar Singh.

Far removed in space and time from 1857 Lucknow, the great Bharat Natyam exponent Bala Saraswati (about whom Ray made a documentary, Bala) practises her art on a beach. And here is a more famous cinematic dance – precious shots of the staging of the extraordinary ghost-dance sequence from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, with the bright white background contrasting with sharp dark costumes for an otherworldly effect. These stills should send a frisson of excitement through anyone who recalls the atmospheric sequence, as should the candid photos of the film’s unforgettable old magician Barfi (imagine a goofier version of Tolkien’s Saruman, high on mishti doi) on the set.

Here too is a feel for real places: the protagonist of Pratidwandi captured against the background of his bustling – often impersonal – city. And vistas from Sikkim, the subject of Ray’s long-censored 1971 documentary. “We traversed the entire length and breadth of Sikkim, shooting at various places,” Ghosh noted in his book, “From schools to slums to palaces – nothing was left uncaptured on camera.”

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“Humanist” is a word often used – to the point of cliché – to describe Ray’s work; it usually denotes that there are few bad people in his films, that ill-fortune flows not from the actions of a villainous “type” but from circumstances acting alongside the whims of personality. But the word is also a reminder of the director’s interest in the possibilities of the human face. He was an illustrator long before he became a filmmaker, and his drawings and paintings show an intuitive understanding of people’s behaviours, gestures and inner states – some of which Ghosh must have picked up over the years. Even in Ray movies that have stylistic flourishes, the first images one usually thinks of are faces in a variety of moods. The dreamy-eyed inwardness of the young Siddhartha in Pratidwandi; the look of unabashed delight on Goopy’s face when he realises that the king of ghosts really has given him the boon of a magical voice; Soumitro’s expressive visage in a range of contexts, from period rural drama to urbane Feluda adventure; Amjad Khan’s sensuous, melancholy gaze as Wajid Ali Shah contemplates oblivion. And the women: the impish, knowing smiles of Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Dinratri and Seemabaddha; Shabana Azmi as the sullen wife in Shatranj ke Khiladi; the young Simi Garewal in one of her most atypical roles, as an inebriated tribal girl who catches the eye of a wanderer from the city.

Ghosh catches all these moods and countless others, but a striking aspect of his photos is how rarely they resemble the conventional ideal of a promotional still – something that has a long tradition in mainstream cinema in the West, with attempts being made to encapsulate the basic idea of a scene in one image and actors striking representative poses for the cameraman’s benefit. Much of Ghosh’s work, to the contrary, is characterised by the intimacy that can only occur when the still photographer has become an essential part of the unit – an unseen presence, silently observing and recording, with his subjects barely even conscious of his presence. There is an artlessness in these compositions that makes them an enormously effective record of the inner workings of an art form. (The exceptions are usually tied to the subject matter: so grand is the mise-en-scene of Shatranj ke Khiladi, for example, that many stills from that film inevitably look posed and self-consciously soaked in meaning.)

If Ghosh’s admiration for Ray, the tall (in every sense) Renaissance Man, can be seen on each page of Manik-Da, it is also clearly visible in his photos of the director. You can see it in the way Ray becomes the central, magnetic presence in nearly every frame, even when flanked by people like Akira Kurosawa and Indira Gandhi. You can see it in how the Gallic actor Gerard Depardieu – one of the most striking film personalities of his generation – seems almost to be dwarfed by Ray on the sets of Ganashatru. Without ever coming across as a minatory figure, Ray looms over actors and crew, a breathing redefinition of the term “larger than life”. We often see him behind the camera – though he did detailed storyboards for most of his films, he was also a very hands-on director on the actual set (not for him the Hitchcockian dictum “I never need to look into a camera”). An amusing photograph shows Soumitro and his director seated on adjacent sofas, making a “V” sign simultaneously though neither is looking at the other; a suggestion of the near-telepathic relationship that develops through long artistic collaboration?

Then there is Ray standing near a busy street, pipe in mouth, an expression of intense concentration on his face, while his beloved city’s trams pass in the background. Here he is taking his own photos of the women and children of Sikkim; with two other shining lights of world cinema, Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni, at the Taj Mahal; sitting on a ledge along a slope from a Rajasthani fort, eating lunch with the crew of Sonar Kella.

Different moods coalesce in many of these pictures. He looks affectionate but also a little distracted as a child actor throws his arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Standing on set, a microphone in hand, he seems benevolent and impatient at the same time, a kindly uncle set to turn into a martinet if his crew keeps him waiting for much longer. He hunches in the bonnet of an Ambassador car with his camera equipment and he stands pensively beneath a chandelier during a shoot (and manages to look equally dignified in both situations). Here is the man of letters, the product of 200 years of Bengali high culture, reading on the set while perched delicately on a makeshift bench; and there is the man of the world, playing blackjack in a casino during a break in the shooting of Hirak Rajar Deshe.

And everywhere, there is evidence of the multi-tasking auteur keeping a sharp eye on every element of the production process: looking down in deep concentration as he listens to his music performers; adding the finishing touches to an actor’s facial makeup. One lovely shot has Ray reading with two pairs of violins in perfect symmetry next to him; like the awed people who had the privilege of working for him or observing him at work, the instruments seem almost to be standing at attention, awaiting further developments.

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Viewing these images, one gleans the full meaning of Ghosh’s words “My experiences were but small pebbles that I picked up from the shores of a mighty ocean called Satyajit Ray.” Yet these words might also make one wonder: was the photographer a one-man Boswell, finding true creative inspiration only when touched by his idol’s presence? On the evidence we have, the answer is no. Many of the other film-related photographs he took – from Bengali and Hindi cinema – are just as stirring, in a number of ways.

They span both the mainstream and the non-mainstream, frequently giving us insight into what those categories really mean and whether they should be placed in neat opposition as they so often are. Thus, on the one hand, there are stills from such films as Gautam Ghose’s serious-minded Paar, about a villager trying to cross a river in spate with his pregnant wife and a herd of pigs. (That plot, along with the fact that the leads are Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah – who won a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for this role – tells you everything you need to know about what sort of film it is.) But at the other end of the spectrum, there is Amitabh Bachchan in one of his most unabashedly commercial roles, as “John Jani Janardhan” in Manmohan Desai’s extravagant Naseeb, caught in a climactic song sequence with the glamorous Hema Malini. And somewhere between these extremes is an international production casting a loving gaze at Indian poverty more than 15 years before Slumdog Millionaire: Roland Jaffe’s City of Joy with Patrick Swayze and Om Puri. Other highlights from this series include stills from the Rekha-starrer Utsav, directed by Girish Karnad, the very young Anil Kapoor with an outlandishly swank car in a film you probably haven’t heard of, M S Sathyu’s Kahan Kahan se Guzar Gaya, and rare pictures of a corpulent, middle-aged Shashi Kapoor as Feluda in Sandip Ray’s TV series – a sad reminder, perhaps, of the compromises required in making a commercial project.

It is the juxtapositions and contrasts that make these photographs so interesting. How tempting it is, for example, to set the Bachchan of Naseeb against the Bachchan of nearly a decade earlier – a 1973 photograph of Amitabh with Jaya Bhaduri, before they were married and when she was the bigger star: a time before superstardom and its attendant threats, before the cares of domesticity, children and political pressures. The photograph makes it possible to postulate an alternate future for the superstar-in-waiting – a future where this lanky, awkward-looking young man made a brief career playing intense second leads (as he once really did in films like Parwana and Gehri Chaal), and eventually faded away. In this other universe, Bachchan might not even have looked out of place as the young marketing manager in Ray’s Seemabaddha!

Photographs can confirm the dominant images we carry in our minds, but the best of them also erase labels by capturing people in unusual moods or contexts. Consider the shot of a badminton match involving that most macho of north Indian actors, Dharmendra, with that most coquettish of Bengali actresses, Moushumi Chatterjee. The image – which one feels tempted to label “Di and Paaji” – is from the set of a film titled Dawedaar, so obscure that despite being made in 1982 and having a high-profile cast, there is practically no reference to it online. By this time Dharmendra was well past his sell-by date and mostly doing macho roles in assembly-line films, but looking at this picture one is reminded of the reticent bhadralok characters he played in such 1960s films as Anupama and Bandini (made by those other prominent Bengali directors, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy).

Here and elsewhere, Ghosh’s photographs of movie stars are testaments to wide-ranging careers and other possibilities for the history of Indian cinema. There is the heady glamour of commercial cinema, but there are also unobtrusive, stripped-down contexts. Here is Shatrughan Sinha, wearing sunglasses and outfitted in the style of the flamboyant Hindi-movie hero of the early 1980s, but he is flanked by – of all people – Ray and Soumitro, and one almost fancies that the director is giving him a patronising look, as if to bring him down to earth. To view Utpal Dutt as the king in Hirak Rajar Deshe is to see an artiste evincing a very different personality from that of the comical-old-man roles he was playing in Hindi cinema at exactly the same time.
 
For the eclectic movie-buff, the experience of viewing these images is a strongly affecting one: the divides between different “types” of cinema (commercial and art, loud and unobtrusive) begin to fall away and one sees these films, their directors and actors as part of a single continuum – with subtle shifts along the line coming to define entire careers and influencing entire generations of movie-watchers. And Ghosh was around to capture so much of this. In much the same way that Ray’s cinema illuminated so many worlds (both internal and external), these photographs give us a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, complex view of Indian cinema and its many personalities.

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Here are two photos of the catalogue. (That “SR” in the second image represents Ray’s scrawl of approval on a series of photos.) 

[An earlier post on the Nemai Ghosh exhibition - with more photos - is here]

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)

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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.

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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)

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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 strange fate of a passive man: on Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan

A few posts ago, I mentioned the new NFDC “Cinemas of India” DVDs – fine restorations of long-neglected films which could, with a little more effort, become something akin to a Criterion Collection for Indian cinema. In the past few weeks I’ve been watching movies such as Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda and Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor ki Maut on prints that allow one to fully appreciate the visual flair of these films (they also help overcome a mental block against discussing “serious”, non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal, but more on that in a later post).

There is much to appreciate, visually and aurally, in Saeed Mirza’s first directorial feature Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978). For starters, it has one of the most skilfully crafted opening sequences I have seen in a Hindi film. The first images – little huts, fields, poor people minding their children – are from a village or a very small town. A woman lights a chulha and a minimalist music score begins; it’s little more than the gentle plucking of a string instrument, but the sound becomes more hypnotic the more you hear it. We see measurements being taken, cloth being dyed, posts being driven into the ground, threads stretched across them – and soon we realise that we are watching an intricately embroidered carpet coming into existence. Women and little children labour away at it.

As the soundtrack gets busier, we hear people talking in the language of the marketplace - trading, negotiating. From a shot of a wall with the finished carpet spread over it, there is a cut to the inside of a room with the same carpet on display; the camera tracks forward and we see we are no longer in the village, we are in a showroom in the city. This is where the product of all that hard labour will be sold at prices that the original craftsmen could scarcely imagine.

Other handicrafts come into view, a hand passes over the carpet, gently stroking it. Foreign tourists - we don't see their faces, only hear them - murmur to each other in wonderment. “It must be frightfully expensive!” a woman says; she makes soft sounds of pleasure as she runs her hand over a Kashmiri fox fur. A purchase is made, they leave the showroom; in long-shot we see a sweeper toiling on the road outside. And then the opening titles begin with an illustration of a man’s head gradually filling with red colour.

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When we first see Arvind Desai (Dilip Dhawan) – the son of the businessman who owns the showroom – he is in his car, watching a street show at a traffic intersection. Driving through his city, Arvind is the picture of a handsome, confident young man taking in the sights (and there are some great vistas of 1970s Bombay in these scenes, including advertising boards of the time and promotional material for Amar Akbar Anthony). But early appearances are misleading, for Arvind is neither confident nor happy: subsequent events show him to be a drifter, uncomfortable in his own skin and never quite certain of where he is going.

Though he seems concerned about social injustice, we see that he is unlikely to ever take a real stand against it; perhaps he perceives himself as being trapped by the world he was born into. Speaking to a dealer who is asking for a higher margin, Arvind shows sympathy for the “mazdoor log” whom he has never met. “Unhein zyaada nahin milna chahiye?” he asks, “Aap aur hum toh unhee ke banaaye huye cheezon pe zinda hain, na?” (“Shouldn’t they get more? People like you and I are existing on the things they make.”) He berates the middleman for being unwilling to reduce his own profit, and then suddenly snaps, “You’re worse than me.” It’s an odd, non-contextual remark, but it seems to come from the hidden depths of a man who is guiltily aware of his cushy existence.

Watching this film, I wondered: is Arvind the most passive “hero” in the history of Hindi cinema? He’s certainly a candidate, and his passivity is central to this intriguingly titled movie. (“Ajeeb dastaan”? Some viewers would say that nothing remotely interesting happens to him.) More than once, we see him going to visit someone (a friend, a cousin), sitting around for a bit without doing anything, then getting up and saying he has to leave because he has to be somewhere else. He spends time with his girlfriend Alice, but there is no hint of physical intimacy. Instead we see him visit a prostitute with a disfigured face, but here again it’s as if he is following a script – making a naive, half-hearted effort to “connect” with the underprivileged.

Trapped in a smart suit on office days – and looking like the typical heir apparent of a wealthy family – he wears a kurta when he goes to visit his “Leftist” friend Rajan (Om Puri), and this too seems like a self-conscious attempt to fit in with Rajan and his jhola-carrying crowd. But when they actually begin talking about such things as existential angst and the effects of industrialisation, Arvind seems unable to participate; instead he goes to the window and stares at passing trains, a dreamy little smile on his face. “I’m not intellectual like you,” he tells Rajan with a little laugh.

But what is he exactly? We see him strolling about indolently in a bookstore, as if needing to prove something to himself; he glances at a shelf containing titles by Russian writers like Solzhenitsyn, but he doesn’t pick one up. Is this how an intellectual manqué window-shops?

****

Arvind is good-looking, but in a vacant, callow sort of way - his expressions range from an unconvincing sternness (when he is dealing with a dishonest employee) to a bashful, boyish smile (when he is joking with Rajan). His voice is mostly flat and inexpressive. And there is a question to be asked here: to what extent are these qualities attributable to the rawness of Dilip Dhawan the actor? Dhawan was very young when he appeared in this film, his lack of experience occasionally shows, and perhaps this is why he comes off so well as a vulnerable young man who is uncertain of his place in the world. This could be a case of excellent casting or serendipity: a first-time director making a low-budget film gives the lead role to one of his colleagues from the film institute, and he turns out to be just right for the part.

Otherwise too, Mirza’s film has a compellingly off-kilter quality. It looks and feels like a movie made by someone who had recently graduated from the FTII, his head chockful of Antonioni and Welles and Godard and dozens of other cinematic possibilities. There is formal inventiveness here, and some of it works very well: I liked the many scenes where people walk in and out of little rooms or cabins in the claustrophobic showroom, doors closing behind them and briefly cutting off their voices so we only get an incomplete sense of what is being said. (The showroom, with its many hushed whispers, is like a temple of capitalism, and one can see why someone with Arvind’s delicate sensibilities feels suffocated in it.) I also liked the use of overlapping dialogue in a party scene populated by the swish set; it is disconcerting both for the viewer and for Arvind himself. At other times, though, I felt Mirza was simply imitating the techniques of other filmmakers to little effect: the Godardian jump-cuts when Arvind drives his car, for instance.

If you’re familiar with Mirza’s other work (including his writing), you’ll know that he can be irreverent and polemical in equal measure, and at the same time. This film is often drily funny about the relationship between the poor and the rich, a running theme being that the former are smarter and more dialled in than the latter think. Going by the indulgent glow on his face, Arvind thinks he is being kind to a street boy by asking him to keep a watch on his car and promising him employment, but the kid makes fun of him behind his back. Later, at a booze shop, when Arvind hurriedly walks away after handing over more money than he was supposed to pay, the shopkeeper (instead of being grateful for the “tip”) shakes his head and chuckles to his assistant “Saalon ko paise lene mein bhi takleef hoti hai.” (“These rich people find it irksome to even take their money back.”)

In the final analysis, though, humour and scorn are the only weapons that the poor have (and this too is a theme that recurs through Mirza's cinema). The film ends with the eyes of the helpless carpet-makers staring out at us as the soundtrack becomes percussive and angrier. That ending – with the drumbeats, the unflinching gaze and the silent accusation – might remind you of the final seconds of the debut film made by Mirza’s friend and colleague Kundan Shah a few years later. But it also seems to underline Arvind Desai’s status as a cipher - a well-meaning but inconsequential man - in his own story.


Here's a trailer for the NFDC DVD:




P.S. In Saeed Mirza’s book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother (which I wrote about here), there is an amusing passage about Mirza’s mother watching the preview of Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan and telling him “There was no story [...] I wish it had more drama.” I can sympathise with her – this is a slow, self-conscious film – but I think it’s possible to become so immersed in it that the question “what happens?” becomes irrelevant.