Watching BR Chopra’s Naya Daur in Narendra Modi’s New India can produce a strange resonance — even as we look at it across the gulf of sixty years.
1957's third biggest Hindi hit might never have got made if BR Chopra had listened to Mehboob Khan. As actor Dilip Kumar tells the tale in his 2014 autobiography: "Mehboob Sahab read the story and found no meat in it for entertainment. He told Chopra Sahab it could be made into a fine documentary on the doomsday awaiting the labour force in the country once machines replaced them but, as a feature film, it was not a great idea."
The younger man listened carefully — he had, after all, gone to solicit the senior filmmaker's opinion —but made up his mind to go ahead with the film if Dilip Kumar agreed to come on board. Yash Chopra, BR's younger brother and then working as his assistant, remembered how that almost didn't happen, because Dilip Kumar was committed to working on a film by Gyan Mukherjee. But when that film fell through, Dilip Kumar said yes promptly — and then spent a month doing story sittings in his shack in Juhu with producer-director BR Chopra and the film's writer Akhtar Mirza.
Most people remember Naya Daur for staging the confrontation between man and machine in a climactic race between a bus and a horse-drawn tonga. But how was such a battle to be made believable? Dilip Kumar writes that he was himself unconvinced by the original idea that the bus was to be beaten "by some kind of manipulation". As Yash Chopra remembered it, it was the thespian who first gave writer Akhtar Mirza the idea of the horse-cart taking a short-cut to get to its destination — "something that was logical and convincing".
There is something charming about how the universe of popular Hindi cinema perceives and produces its own internal logic — and when it abandons it. In Naya Daur, for instance, the village, while standing in for the country, has no farmers. The on-screen populace is divided between tonga-drivers and karkhana-walas, men who work as woodcutters and carpenters in the wood-production unit owned by the kindly local landlord (Nazir Hussain).
Hussain's departure on a pilgrimage to Banaras leaves the village open to the heartless machinations of his city-returned son Kundan (Jeevan), who brings in first a wood-cutting machine that robs the sawmill workers of their jobs, and then a bus that takes away the business of the tonga-drivers. In the era of demonetisation and Digital India, sixty years after Naya Daur first released, there is something distinctly sinister about watching the thin-lipped Jeevan pronounce his decisions the sole route to progress and development, even as the technology he brings in rides roughshod over the lives of the labouring poor.
Dilip Kumar's delightful portrayal of the film's protagonist Shankar, too, shares this on again-off again approach to logic. Shankar is somehow both shy and flirtatious, hot-blooded and calm. He seems wonderfully logical in his arguments with the crooked Kundan, or his sister's father-in-law-to-be, but becomes totally beholden to fate when it comes to resolving the love triangle in which he, his friend Krishna (the future popular villain Ajit in an important early role) and his sweetheart Rajni (Vyjayanthimala) find themselves.
Since it is obviously not an option to simply ask the girl which of the men she would prefer to marry, the two friends arrange instead to gamble on fate — if Rajni places white flowers in the Shiva temple the next morning, she is Shankar's, and if the flowers in her pooja thali are yellow marigolds, she is Krishna's. Naya Daur may come off as a sort of socialist musical (its iconic song is the infectiously choreographed 'Saathi Haath Badhana', with lines of villagers digging the earth in unison). But it is embedded in a deeply religious milieu —the temple atop a hill, with its massive statue of Shiva, is the locale for both intense romantic moments and the sort of monologue between the hero and God that later became a fixture of Hindi cinema.
And yet, this faith — the powerful sense of a superior being who can be appealed to for the things that really matter — does not blind the film or its hero to how religion can be used for cynical purposes. The most remarkable instance of this in the film is when Kundan and his devious accomplice, the greedy village Brahmin, secretly conceal a statue of a goddess along the road that Shankar and the villagers are constructing for the race. When the trusting villagers stop digging to fold their hands in prayer, we hear the villains intone, "Yahan mandir avashya banega", it is hard not to feel a chill go down one's spine. Naya Daur had heroes capable of circumventing the cynical appropriation of religion and of technology. The ordinary people of New India might not be so lucky.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Sep 2017.
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| Dilip Kumar as the labouring Shankar in Naya Daur (1955) |
The younger man listened carefully — he had, after all, gone to solicit the senior filmmaker's opinion —but made up his mind to go ahead with the film if Dilip Kumar agreed to come on board. Yash Chopra, BR's younger brother and then working as his assistant, remembered how that almost didn't happen, because Dilip Kumar was committed to working on a film by Gyan Mukherjee. But when that film fell through, Dilip Kumar said yes promptly — and then spent a month doing story sittings in his shack in Juhu with producer-director BR Chopra and the film's writer Akhtar Mirza.
Most people remember Naya Daur for staging the confrontation between man and machine in a climactic race between a bus and a horse-drawn tonga. But how was such a battle to be made believable? Dilip Kumar writes that he was himself unconvinced by the original idea that the bus was to be beaten "by some kind of manipulation". As Yash Chopra remembered it, it was the thespian who first gave writer Akhtar Mirza the idea of the horse-cart taking a short-cut to get to its destination — "something that was logical and convincing".
There is something charming about how the universe of popular Hindi cinema perceives and produces its own internal logic — and when it abandons it. In Naya Daur, for instance, the village, while standing in for the country, has no farmers. The on-screen populace is divided between tonga-drivers and karkhana-walas, men who work as woodcutters and carpenters in the wood-production unit owned by the kindly local landlord (Nazir Hussain).
Hussain's departure on a pilgrimage to Banaras leaves the village open to the heartless machinations of his city-returned son Kundan (Jeevan), who brings in first a wood-cutting machine that robs the sawmill workers of their jobs, and then a bus that takes away the business of the tonga-drivers. In the era of demonetisation and Digital India, sixty years after Naya Daur first released, there is something distinctly sinister about watching the thin-lipped Jeevan pronounce his decisions the sole route to progress and development, even as the technology he brings in rides roughshod over the lives of the labouring poor.
Dilip Kumar's delightful portrayal of the film's protagonist Shankar, too, shares this on again-off again approach to logic. Shankar is somehow both shy and flirtatious, hot-blooded and calm. He seems wonderfully logical in his arguments with the crooked Kundan, or his sister's father-in-law-to-be, but becomes totally beholden to fate when it comes to resolving the love triangle in which he, his friend Krishna (the future popular villain Ajit in an important early role) and his sweetheart Rajni (Vyjayanthimala) find themselves.
Since it is obviously not an option to simply ask the girl which of the men she would prefer to marry, the two friends arrange instead to gamble on fate — if Rajni places white flowers in the Shiva temple the next morning, she is Shankar's, and if the flowers in her pooja thali are yellow marigolds, she is Krishna's. Naya Daur may come off as a sort of socialist musical (its iconic song is the infectiously choreographed 'Saathi Haath Badhana', with lines of villagers digging the earth in unison). But it is embedded in a deeply religious milieu —the temple atop a hill, with its massive statue of Shiva, is the locale for both intense romantic moments and the sort of monologue between the hero and God that later became a fixture of Hindi cinema.
And yet, this faith — the powerful sense of a superior being who can be appealed to for the things that really matter — does not blind the film or its hero to how religion can be used for cynical purposes. The most remarkable instance of this in the film is when Kundan and his devious accomplice, the greedy village Brahmin, secretly conceal a statue of a goddess along the road that Shankar and the villagers are constructing for the race. When the trusting villagers stop digging to fold their hands in prayer, we hear the villains intone, "Yahan mandir avashya banega", it is hard not to feel a chill go down one's spine. Naya Daur had heroes capable of circumventing the cynical appropriation of religion and of technology. The ordinary people of New India might not be so lucky.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Sep 2017.
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