Remembering the Big-B starrer Coolie - an iconic film that became famous even before it was made - and mourning the death of the miraculous world of filmmaker Manmohan Desai.
It used to be a quiz question (probably still is): what happened in Bangalore on July 25, 1982, that nearly changed the fate of the Hindi film industry?
That 32-year-old event remains the industry's most famous accident: Amitabh Bachchan's injury during a fight scene on the sets of Manmohan Desai's Coolie. After an emergency surgery in Bangalore, Bachchan was flown to Mumbai in a specially re-jigged Indian Airlines plane and operated upon for a ruptured intestine. Bachchan's week between life and death was a week on hold in the nation's life, too - with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (also a family friend) postponing a foreign trip to visit him, while millions prayed for his survival.
Manmohan Desai, who arguably gave the Hindi masala movie its most entertaining, well-crafted form, was ever attentive to his audiences. He knew people would never forgive him for having Amitabh die in the movie when he had survived in reality. Reel life needed to echo real life. And so the film's ending was changed to have Bachchan's character recover from a final life-threatening battle, and greet his followers from a balcony that said 'Philomena Hospital', the hospital where he was first operated in Bangalore.
The film also marked Bachchan's return from near-death in another way, by retaining the infamous fight scene and inserting two freeze frames to let viewers in on the facts of the accident. "This is the shot in which Amitabh Bachchan was seriously injured," reads an accompanying text on screen in English, Hindi and Urdu, turning the film - at least for that instant - from fiction into documentary.
Both these moves were the logical culmination of the relationship between the star and his fans. The off-screen phenomenon was incorporated on screen, pushing forward the ongoing cycle of fandom.
Apart from displaying all the hallmarks of Manmohan Desai's cinema - bachpan mein bichhadna, amnesia, good poor people and villainous rich people, ridiculous but irresistibly goofy humour, the reuniting of families, and the ultimate power of destiny - Coolie was also Desai's overt overture to Muslims. He worked close to Bhendi Bazaar, Bombay's most iconic Muslim area, and claimed a lifelong love of Muslim culture. By casting the industry's biggest superstar as a poor Muslim railway porter, Desai also hoped to cash in on the Muslim audience, believed to be regular movie-goers.
What makes Coolie remarkable is that it does not just have a token Muslim hero: it is steeped in a Muslim milieu. The film opens with the loving husband Aslam (Satyen Kappu) presenting his wife Salma (Waheeda Rehman) with a green joda for Eid. Note that evil, too, is personified by a Muslim. When the villainous Zafar (Kader Khan, also the film's dialogue-writer) creates his artificial flood, Salma is swept away while doing her namaaz.
There is also a generous Desai-style sprinkling of religious signs - when the child Iqbal returns, sobbing and bereft, to his sodden shell of a home, a Quran falls into his hands, as if to suggest that God is looking out for him, even if no-one else is. The same Quran and a piece of Islamic calligraphy feature again, in a scene where Salma's memory and speech miraculously return after 20 years. There is also, of course, Iqbal's Billa No. 786, and the element that made Coolie unforgettable for children, an important part of Manmohan Desai's family audience - Allah Rakha the falcon, who magically comes to Iqbal's aid whenever needed. Desai has spoken of choosing the falcon because it was the symbol of the United Arab Emirates and would "appeal to the Muslims". There is also an iconic Haj sequence (and song), and a climactic scene at Haji Ali Dargah.
But while Coolie brims with Muslim religiosity, it also fits the Desai model of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai. Right from the first scene, the Muslim family is shown fraternising with a Hindu Maharashtrian family, and it is that Hindu coolie Nathu (Nilu Phule) who brings up the orphaned Iqbal. Later, in the stupendous happenstance that makes Desai's movies so satisfying, the adult Iqbal (Amitabh) becomes best friends with Sunny (Rishi Kapoor) - who, it turns out, is not just the son that amnesiac Salma has raised as her own, but also Nathu's long-lost child.
So the Muslim boy is raised by a Hindu father-figure, and the Hindu boy by a Muslim mother. There's also Rati Agnihotri's Christian heiress Julie, raised by Hindus. The message of all these foster children might have been that blood doesn't matter. But in fact, blood shines through - it is the biological son who will send his father on Haj, and the biological father who will give his alcoholic son his kidney.
And yet, the lack of blood ties between Amitabh and Rishi does not matter; the Muslim and the Hindu are brothers at heart, and there's an obvious nod to their having the same mother(land).
More powerful than this overt secular bhaichara, though, is the fact that Desai's own iconography seamlessly transcends religious specificity. When the unconscious Salma is being flown off in the evil Zafar's helicopter and Allah Rakha tries to stop him, the echo of the Ramayana - Jatayu battling Ravana to save Sita -- could not be more clear.
We definitely could not make a Coolie today. But this Eid might be the perfect time to revisit it.
No comments:
Post a Comment