A Muted Sharpness

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 earlier this month, once specialised in being the thinking man’s girl-next-door.

Utpal Dutt and Jaya Bhaduri in her Hindi film debut, Guddi (1971)

Some years ago, on a long taxi ride with a bunch of near millennials, the conversation veered around to Jaya Bachchan, nee Bhaduri, and I found myself in the shocking position of having to defend something I had always assumed was beyond doubt: Jaya’s actorly brilliance. This was despite the fact that by the 1980s, when films first started percolating into my consciousness, she’d already done her decade of top-notch performances, married Amitabh Bachchan, and given up her career for motherhood. But through my childhood and teenage years, if a film of Jaya Bhaduri’s was on television, or in the video rental parlour, it was always watched. And there was never any doubt that Jaya would make it worth watching.

In particular, my mother (not an easy-to-please viewer) had a soft spot for Jaya – and I’ve only recently begun to see that that admiration may have extended beyond her acting to a (subconscious) identification with her screen persona. If my mother was a North Indian girl growing up in Calcutta, Jaya Bhaduri was a Bengali girl from Jabalpur, and there was a recognisable set of elements that made up the bright girl-next-door aesthetic. This included tasteful, unfussy cotton saris, draped perfectly over well-fitted (but never too revealing) blouses; the thick straight black hair worn in a loose long plait, or a bun at the nape of the neck (unlike the fashionably bouffant-crowned Sharmila Tagore, or the more free-flowing hairstyles adopted by a Neetu Singh or a Zeenat Aman), the kaajal, bindi, large hoop earrings – and sometimes even spectacles!

Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 this April, made her screen debut in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), as part of a fine ensemble cast, playing the hero Anil Chatterjee’s teenaged sister. That very particular mid-twentieth century Indian image of youthful femininity: the school-going girl on the cusp of womanhood, enthusiastically learning to wear a sari and cook the family meal, clearly struck a chord with both viewers and directors. In the 1971 Bangla film Dhanyee Meye, she played Uttam Kumar’s sister-in-law. Though by then she had graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India as a gold medalist, Bhaduri’s first Hindi film role –the title character of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1971) – also had her playing a teenager, this time one besotted with films in general and Dharmendra in particular. So did her second: as the tomboyish child-bride Mrinmoyee in Uphaar, the Barjatya Productions version of Tagore’s short story ‘Samapti’ (filmed by Ray on Aparna Sen as part of his Teen Kanya triptych).

In Gulzar’s Parichay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, both 1972 releases, or later Chupke Chupke (1975), she remained the innocent young woman coming of age in the middle class family setting – whether as Didi to a gang of children, or the younger sister whose marriage is to be fixed. In Basu Chatterjee’s heart-warming Piya ka Ghar (1973), Jaya was the shy young bride catapulted into a crowded Bombay chawl by arranged marriage. Here the family setting was the new sasural: a loving but boisterous home full of card games and theatre rehearsals, cricket and silly jokes.
Another commonality in many of these early roles was her status as the favourite of a father/elder brother figure: Sanjeev Kumar in Parichay, Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, Raja Paranjape as her tauji Gauri Shankar in Piya ka Ghar, and later AK Hangal in the sensitive marital drama Kora Kagaz.


In all these depictions of girlhood, however, Jaya’s shyness encoded a certain sexual innocence, a quiet reserve that did not ever involve being coy or silly. This meant she could also be feisty or tomboyish or self-willed, like in Guddi or Uphaar, while always conveying something I can only call character. Whatever she did, we knew that deep down, she was a good girl. It’s that inner quality of non-frivolity that allowed her to so convincingly inhabit the streetsmart role of the memorable “chakku-chhuriyan tez kara lo” girl in Zanjeer (1973). Even when she is first being bought off as a witness by the villain’s henchmen and says something coolly cynical like “For this much money I could turn dumb for a lifetime,” we do not quite believe in her essential badness.

And of course the film makes sure she changes over to the right side of the law quickly, as well as moving from her street performer self to an appropriately sari-clad love interest for the policeman hero – Amitabh Bachchan, whose career as Hindi cinema’s ‘angry young man’ first took off with Zanjeer, and whom Jaya Bhaduri married in June 1973, the year of Zanjeer’s release. Whether Bachchan ever acknowledges it, he was the struggler who married a supremely talented actress at the peak of her powers – and within less than a decade, her career had ended while his, legendarily, carries on into the present.

That real-life narrative is not unusual for India, of course. What perhaps makes Jaya Bhaduri’s case remarkable is that there are at least two films in which she acted out versions of sympathetic fans imagined to be her real life: Abhimaan, in which marital tensions emerge from precisely the sort of unequal fame that Jaya and Amitabh had, and most bizarrely Silsila, in which a version of the love triangle of Rekha-Jaya-Amitabh played out on screen, and after which Jaya stopped acting for decades — only returning to the public eye as the mother figure of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa and more depressingly, K3G. Even her political persona has wife-and-mother written all over it. Perhaps some day someone in Bollywood will pluck up the courage to cast her in a version of the rest of her life.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

The dreamlife of angels

My Mirror column:

On the eve of the Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari’s 87th birthday on April 3, a look at two films on which she collaborated with director Basu Chatterjee: Rajnigandha (1974) and Swami (1977).

Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha (1974) was one of my favourite Hindi films long before I learnt that it was based on a famous 1960 short story by Mannu Bhandari, one of Hindi’s most well-known modern writers and an important participant in the Nayi Kahani literary movement of the 1960s. The short story, ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, has also been wonderfully translated into English by Ruth Vanita as ‘This is the Truth’, published as part of Vanita’s 2013 anthology ‘Alone Together’.

Even though it came into the world first, reading ‘Yahi Sach Hai’ for me involved working backwards from the 1974 romantic film I had grown up on. As always when a film colonises one’s imagination first, it is difficult to populate the literary work with people different from those that have impressed themselves on screen. My mind kept wanting to turn the Deepa of Bhandari’s story into the doe-eyed Vidya Sinha, and her Sanjay into the ever-smiling Amol Palekar. The imperative is strong because the cinematic adaptation really seems to ‘get’ Bhandari’s characters, deepening and broadening what we know about them and their context in ways that seem exactly right.

The film makes three fundamental changes. One, Sanjay gets a meatier role, with gossipy colleagues, office politics and a backstory for his wooing of Deepa. Two, Deepa’s old flame Nishith is renamed Naveen, with his “long hair like a poet” becoming “hippie jaise baal” in the case of the film’s Dinesh Thakur. Third, crucially, Deepa’s journey from Kanpur to Calcutta is brilliantly transformed into a Delhi-Bombay trip, with Delhi — and Sanjay — playing charming provincials to Bombay’s — and Naveen’s — sophisticated urbanity. Beyond these, however, Chatterjee remains faithful to the story, presenting us with what remains a rare Hindi film portrayal of a woman choosing between two romantic prospects.

When we meet Deepa, she is awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend Sanjay: a nice, chatty, predictable man who can turn even a romantic gesture like bringing flowers into a ritual: “Once I happened to mention that I like tuberoses very much, so he has made it a rule to bring a whole lot of them every fourth day...” She is totally convinced that Sanjay is her real love and that her teenage attachment to Nishith (Naveen) was an illusion — until she meets him again. The film takes Bhandari’s diary-like structure and transforms it into something breezily cinematic, with long shots of Deepa and Naveen enjoying the freedom of Bombay interspersed with close-ups of Deepa’s luminous face. “Proximity, distance and loneliness work to bring to the fore different emotions as the young female narrator convinces herself she is in love with one or the other man,” writes Vanita in her introduction. “Throughout the story Bhandari uses variants of the words sach, sachmuch (true, truly) as Deepa insists on the lasting truth and reality of states of mind that the reader increasingly perceives as fleeting.”

Recently, I watched another Basu Chatterjee film in which Mannu Bhandari had had an important role to play: 1977’s Swami, starring Shabana Azmi and Girish Karnad. Rajnigandha won a Filmfare award for Best Picture, Swami won it for Best Director, Best Actress and Best Story. The credit for the film’s story went to the long-departed and legendary Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. But as I watched a youthful, rather frisky Shabana Azmi — Saudamini, better known as Mini — forced to forego a long-time romantic attachment to her childhood acquaintance Naren (Vikram) in favour of marriage to the stable widower Ghanshyam (Girish Karnad), I was suddenly reminded of Rajnigandha. I haven’t read the Sarat Chandra story, but it seemed to me quite remarkable how much the clean-scrubbed smiling face of Sanjay in Rajnigandha resembled the always-radiant, patient Ghanshyam (Karnad) in Swami.

If we stay with that train of thought, then both films turn out to have parallels that go beyond two masculine types —and that seem to me possibly informed by Bhandari’s own particular concerns. The context in which Swami unfolds is very different from Rajnigandha — 19th century Bengal. But Mini, like Deepa, has had the privilege of an education and Naren, as the philosophical interlocutor of her youth, holds out the possibility of freedom to pursue her intellectual interests — just like Naveen and the job he helps her get in Bombay.

In Swami, too, the moment of truth is propelled by the arrival of the heroine’s previous lover, and in a moment of passion, she abandons the gentle stability of the husband she has been trying to accept as love for a remembered excitement that she once defined love as.

In Bhandari’s ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, Deepa gets the job of teaching in a Bombay college, but the letter Nishith writes to inform her of this makes none of the revived romantic overtures she is now expecting. The story ends with Sanjay’s arrival, who, looking at her distraught face, assumes that she hasn’t got the job. She falls into his arms gratefully, not telling him that she in fact has.

But this is more open-ended than the film version, where Deepa declares she doesn’t want the job and Sanjay’s promotion will ensure that her life is the one he creates for her — not the one she might have created for herself. As in Swami, the instability of romantic love and mental companionship is traded for the calm security of marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st April 2018.

Post Facto: The Brave New World of Brooklyn

Today's Post Facto column is about a book I recently fell in love with.

There are books you can read all the way through without knowing what you think of them—like some people. There are books that annoy you from the word go—also like some people. And there are the rare ones that reach out and touch you, surprising you with the warmth you feel towards them though you've just met. I knew Brooklyn was one of these by page 40.

I'd only heard of Colm Tóibín, I'm ashamed to admit, when he was nominated for the Booker Prize for The Testament of Mary in 2012, and even then I did not follow up on my curiosity. But on a recent visit to a bookshop, Brooklyn leapt out at me. Bookshops, one is sadly in danger of forgetting, can be magical places. Suddenly, instead of shadow beings to be conjured into being with the guilt-ridden clicking of my mouse, real creatures beckoned from the shelves, each displaying its particular attractions: lightness or heft, honest blues or mysterious purples.

I cannot say whether it was the faceless girl on the cover who intrigued me, with her summer dress stopped from billowing by objects on either side, or whether the lovely diner-style type in which it said 'Brooklyn' in gold letters triggered in me a subconscious nostalgia for a New York five decades before I lived there. All I know is that I put away my biases – 'a book about the Irish in the 50s must be a tragic tale of poverty and I don't feel like one of those', or 'oh, an older man writing a book that seems almost entirely about a young woman character, how good could that be?' -- and bought it. 

And a novel hasn't felt so right to me in ages. You feel like you know Eilis and everyone in Wexford—and by extension, what it felt like to live in an Irish small town in the 1950s. Tóibín has a way of making his characters come alive through the words they speak, and without the use of anything so trite as adjectives. One of the first people you meet in the book is Miss Kelly, who runs a grocery shop where Eilis works part-time. Here's a sample of Miss Kelly's dialogue, as she initiates Eilis into the job: “Now there are people who come in here on a Sunday, if you don't mind, looking for things they should get during the week. What can you do?”

But Wexford is only one of the novel's locales. The other, of course, is Brooklyn. It is a fairly standard story – the family needs money, and there's no proper job for Eilis in Ireland. So her mother and sister arrange to send her to America via the good

offices of an Irish priest who assures them that it's safe. “Parts of Brooklyn,” Father Flood replied, “are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish.”

And so they are. Before long, Eilis is ensconced in a Brooklyn lodging house run by the Wexford-born Mrs. Kehoe, where her co-boarders are Irish or Irish-American, and her social life is dominated by the Friday dances at Father Flood's parish hall.

And yet this is a brave new world, where things are certainly more mixed up than back home in Ireland. At Bartocci's, the department store where Eilis works as salesgirl, a new brand of stockings in Sepia and Coffee shades is a deliberate invitation to the hitherto-invisibilised clientele of “coloured women”. Eilis' night classes include a Professor Rosenblum, who makes “jokes about being Jewish”. And after she meets Tony, her experience opens up to what is clearly the other big community of Brooklyn immigrants: the Italians. One of my favourite scenes in the book is the first time Eilis is invited to dinner at Tony's, where among the first things his little brother does is to declare that “We don't like Irish people”. As you might expect of Italians, the fact that a family of six is packed into two rooms does not preclude the serving of a magnificent meal. To read Tóibín's description of Eilis puzzling over the bitterness of the coffee, and trying to eat her spaghetti “using only a fork, as they did” is to recognize the surmounting of cultural barriers I hadn't thought of.

The delineation of Eilis's coming of age, both her growing confidence and her fears, is wonderfully fine-grained. There is an enormous sense of quiet in this book, and yet we feel each moment of Eilis's anxiety. 

Massive changes are taking place in her life, and yet we see her searching for events she can put into the letters she writes home. There is too much she cannot tell. Most obviously, about Tony. Then she goes back to Ireland, and now she cannot tell Tony...

Tóibín is a writer of great emotional intelligence, laying out in deceptively unruffled manner a young woman's gradual recognition that the shape of the man she marries is the shape of her future. The choice between two suitors and the lives they represent is of course at least as old as Austen. But this made me think of Rajnigandha, Basu Chatterjee's 1974 film. Rajnigandha moves between Delhi and Bombay, while the story it was based on, Mannu Bhandari's 'Yahi Sach Hai', located itself in Calcutta and Delhi. Eilis's dilemma is made even deeper by the near-unbridgeable gulf between continents.

Eilis's combination of determination and naivete held my interest completely. She isn't perfect, but Tóibín's delineation of her imperfections is done with such tenderness as to draw you even closer to her. I can hardly wait to read Nora Webster.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 6th Sep, 2015.

Picture This: Working it out

My Picture This column for BL Ink this month:

When’s the last time you saw a Hindi film unfold at a crowded bus stop? Forty years after it was made, Chhoti Si Baat’s romance remains a rare picture of everyday, rather than epic, urbanity.

Basu Chatterjee’s Chhoti Si Baat (CSB, 1975) is still beloved as an icon of the so-called middle cinema: cinema about India’s middle class, made in a middle-of-the-road style that wasn’t either full-blown melodrama or so grimly realist that it let go of songs entirely. CSB was noteworthy for giving us one of the first middle-class heroines who goes out to work. And she’s not a rich man’s daughter who’s a lawyer or doctor or something grand, just a regular office worker, dealing with files and consignments, appointments and bosses. Vidya Sinha made her office-going seem so natural that I have never really paused earlier to think about how remarkable it actually was. In Bombay cinema, the office-going women of ’70s films, from Sinha in Chatterjee’s own Rajnigandha (1974), to Zarina Wahab in Gharonda (1977), or Ranjeeta in Pati Patni Aur Woh (1978), were still a huge exception.

Watching CSB today, one is struck by its creation of young middle-class characters who come without families attached. Both men and women inhabit the city completely, and independently. Arun and Prabha work in neighbouring South Bombay offices, and take the same bus route to work, with Arun walking besottedly behind Prabha or standing tongue-tied next to her in the queue. Much of the humour turns on the bus as metaphor. As soon as Arun finally plucks up the courage to speak to Prabha, a rival arrives to spirit her away — on his scooter. The metaphor is then taken to its logical conclusion: Palekar, irritatedly eyeing the scooter leave, decides to hail a taxi. It’s true: he needs to make his move faster, and a speedier, more impressive vehicle seems like the answer. But it’s not so easy to get out of the rut: the taxi gets taken by someone else.

The kabab mein haddi is Nagesh Shastri (Asrani in one of his finest roles). A colleague of Prabha’s, Nagesh threatens to upstage Arun with his table tennis competitions and authoritative ordering at the (recently closed) Samovar: “Chicken a la Poos, aur Peter se kehna Nagesh sahab ka order hain. Kya kahoge?” Infuriated by Nagesh literally driving away with the prize every morning, Arun decides to buy a scooter. In a hilariously deadpan scene, his local garage guys stage an elaborate ploy around an ancient motorcycle, and Arun falls for it. Next morning, Arun has a new biker look — sunglasses and flares — but the bike breaks down just as Prabha has climbed aboard, and Nagesh, of course, appears right on cue.

There is the hint here of the race between the hare and the tortoise, which inspired Sai Paranjpe’s 1982 Katha, with Naseeruddin Shah competing for Deepti Naval’s attentions with the tale-telling Farooque Shaikh. But Chatterjee’s film was a remake of the 1960 British comedy School for Scoundrels, where the race is more about the status games of modern life. The 1960 film started with the mousy Henry Palfrey arriving at Potter’s ‘School for Lifemanship’ just in time for the guru’s opening lecture: “Who then, you ask, are your opponents? Everybody in the world who is not you. And the purpose of your life must be to be one-up on them, because — mark my words — he who is not one-up is one-down.”

As Palfrey tells Potter his sad romantic predicament, we flash backwards to what turns out to be the origin of CSB’s Samovar scene: a snooty restaurant where the waiter refers to Palfrey as ‘Paltry’ and his bete noire Delauney gains the upper hand because he can read the Frenchified menu and order the wine by name rather than number. Delauney’s fancy sports car inspired Asrani’s yellow scooter, while Palekar’s motorbike stood in for Henry’s ramshackle ‘Swiftmobile’.

The film is finely adapted to its Indian setting. When Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar) trains Arun, it is in table tennis and chess rather than tennis. In both films, the art of winning at sport involves deliberately distracting one’s competition. The chopsticks replace the French menu as a restaurant hurdle. The art of wooing remains crucial: the firm handshake, and the even firmer hug are the same, though spilling wine on a dress becomes dropping a lighted match on a sari.

But this is no mere copy. Chatterjee uses a device more common in Indian films than elsewhere: he includes imaginary scenarios dreamt up by Arun, in which he is a much savvier, smart-alecky version of himself. The ordinary man’s dreams of romance come via popular cinema: while watching a film at Eros, Arun mentally inserts Prabha and then himself into a Hema Malini-Dharmendra song (Jaaneman, jaaneman). Other daydreams, too, are deliberately more filmi than the film we’re watching: in one hilarious scene, Arun is proudly in the dock for Nagesh’s murder, with Prabha weeping copiously in the courtroom.

CSB has other filmi cameos, like comedian Rajendra Nath as a fake guru, and Amitabh Bachchan as himself, arriving to seek the colonel’s advice on income tax — fantastically, wearing his real costume from Zameer (1975). Both films were produced by BR Chopra, and a Zameer poster appears memorably above the CSB bus stop: playfulness, but also some smart, free publicity?

Certain elements of office life are transplanted straight from 1960 Britain to 1975 Bombay: people listening to a match on radio, and the women’s shushing of our timid hero. But Palfrey is the boss; Arun is only rising through the ranks. What struck me most is the fact that Arun’s office — Jackson Tolaram and Co — plays a much greater role here than in the British original. More scenes are set in the office — including one that makes CSB the rare Hindi film to acknowledge that tailing a woman for days might count as stalking. Also, Arun’s very propensity for romance is located in an office ‘tradition’: the film opens with a comic visual history of the Jackson Tolaram bosses and how they wooed their wives. It’s almost as if, having deprived the protagonists of family, the film turns the office into something like it. For these migrants to the city, the office is home.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, Aug 28, 2015.

CineVoice of the Nation

My Mirror column:

Continuing my short history of the Indian film magazine in English: editor Burjor K Karanjia and his many publications.

In last week's column ("Stars, Scandals and Fandom", Jun 21, 2015), I began a short history of the English-language Hindi film magazine. Starting in the 1930s, I brought the story down to the 1970s, when a series of new magazines altered the tone and texture of Indian film journalism in English.

But in 1970, the highest-circulating English magazine about Hindi cinema was Filmfare. It was edited by the late Burjor K Karanjia, whose politeness, erudition and general gentlemanliness were legendary. Karanjia was an unlikely film journalist: a Parsi from Quetta, Karanjia qualified for the much-prized Indian Civil Service in 1943, but got quickly bored and decided to abandon a potential bureaucratic career to explore other options. 

In his memoir, Counting My Blessings (Penguin, 2005), he describes how his fascination with cinema, first kindled in his Wilson College years by a chance witnessing of Franz Osten directing the lovely Devika Rani on the sets of his film Always Tell Your Wife, grew into a serious interest in film journalism. Being from a moneyed family, the 27-year-old Burjor decided to enter the field by launching a magazine. (Burjor's brother Russi Karanjia had already founded the investigative news tabloid Blitz, to which Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet recently paid fictional homage.) 

Cinevoice, launched on June 7, 1947 at the Taj Mahal Hotel, in a glittering ceremony attended by many film grandees, was meant to "represent the industry's point of view" and fight its battles, while also being, in Karanjia's own words, "a journal that was clean, that was constructive and that had a conscience". Among the 'battles' waged in the pages of Cinevoice was a campaign "to plead for social recognition of the film community". It may seem difficult to imagine in our Bollywood-besotted era, but in those days, writes Karanjia, "film stars found it difficult to secure flats in decent localities in the city. No club, moreover, would admit film stars as members." Motilal, and later David Abraham, were the first actors to be admitted to the Cricket Club of India. Cinevoice also tried to gain film folk respectability by marshalling them into national political participation. He credits his colleague Ram Aurangabadkar with the idea of getting three contemporary actresses -- Nargis, Snehprabha Pradhan and Veera -- to attend the first All India Congress Committee (AICC) session held after Independence, and report on it for Cinevoice. 

Karanjia is also credited with instituting a system of film awards as early as 1949 - the Cinevoice Indian Motion Picture Awards (CIMPA) - and for programming a live charity show to raise money for "Kashmir Relief and Troop Comforts", called "A Nite with the Stars." Neither of these ventures quite took off independently, but both live shows with the stars, and film awards (which Karanjia managed to run with greater success as Filmfare editor), have proliferated to such a degree that our cinematic culture is unimaginable without either. Cinevoice did not last long, and neither did Karanjia's other self-funded journalistic venture, Movie Times.

But with the editorship of Filmfare came a certain stability. The magazine was a commercial publication that gladly put Hema Malini or Rajesh Khanna or a bikini-clad Sharmila Tagore on the cover, but also allowed Karanjia the space to do what he had set out to in Cinevoice: represent the voice of the film industry.

In the February 13, 1970 issue, while applauding the liberal attitude taken towards film censorship by the Khosla Committee Report, Karanjia's editorial called it out for equating commercial considerations with dishonesty, and wrote that the charge "betrays an ignorance of the many complex factors that have made film-making in India an adventure and a gamble, and that have attracted to it the wrong type of finance and the wrong type of filmmaker." 

Karanjia also combined in his person roles that today might seem impossibly divergent: he edited Filmfare for 18 years (and Screen for ten), while being Chairman of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC, later to become NFDC). The same February 13, 1970 issue of Filmfare, for instance, reported a press conference at which film director Basu Chatterjee discussed the film he had just finished shooting, with a loan from the FFC: Sara Akash. Chatterjee, the report noted, was a well-known Blitz cartoonist who had adapted Rajendra Yadav's Hindi novel into a film with an all-new cast and "a determination to steer away from songs, dances and other cliches of the Hindi cinema". 

The magazine quoted its own editor as having stated at the press conference that "Audiences, I think, are ready... The question no longer should be where these films will be screened, but what sort of films should now be made." The report went on: "The Corporation, he revealed, has already sent a proposal to the government for securing a network of theatres based not on opulence, but utility." 

As editor, he was credited with almost doubling Filmfare's circulation, and making a genuine effort to return the Filmfare Awards to their early prestige. He went on to write even sharper editorials for Screen.

Karanjia resigned from his position as FFC Chairman during VC Shukla's unsavoury reign as Minister for Information and Broadcasting during the Emergency, in January 1976 (though he did later become NFDC Chairman). But what distinguished BKK was a rare combination of traits: an enthusiasm for helping finance a new kind of cinema, but never being disdainful of commerce.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Jun 2015.

Lust for life: Thoughts on The Shaukeens

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column: a new comedy unwittingly tells us more about the chained spirit than the freedoms of the flesh.

Growing up in this country, it is hard to escape the influence of certain ideas. A man's life (and the addressee of varnashrama dharma is clearly a man) is divided into stages, ashrama, and sex is only approved within the bounds of marriage. Grihastha must be followed by vanaprastha. The householder, when his hair begins to turn grey, should ideally withdraw from the world and its material comforts and pleasures, and retire to the forest. If he has a wife, she may accompany him, but their relationship must be celibate. 

Even as life expectancy has gone up hugely and many more people live many more healthy, active years after sixty, the vanaprastha ideal still has a great deal of traction, beneath the frenzied search for youthfulness. So older people in India must negotiate a minefield of conflicting expectations and desires. As a society, we seem unwilling to come to terms with the idea that older people might want to have a sex life -- or any life that goes beyond grandchildren, pilgrimages and diabetes medicines. Insofar as it addresses the awkward silence around the issue, The Shaukeens is a film with an important point to make. 

The problem, then, is not the what or the when of it. It's the how. Like Basu Chatterjee's 1982 Shaukeen, on which it is modelled, Abhishek Sharma's The Shaukeens centres on three sixty-something old men who decide that their sex-starved state must be remedied. Perfectly fun premise, which could make for a perfectly fun film. But rather than approaching women close to their own age, our tharki buddhas (The Shaukeens' own words) elect to prey on young women. Even worse, just the one young woman. 

Tigmanshu Dhulia's script convincingly transposes the Bombay building complex milieu of the 1982 film (itself an adaptation of short story writer Samaresh Basu's original Calcutta setting) to present-day Delhi. KD (Annu Kapoor) is a confirmed bachelor with a glad eye and a smooth tongue, Lali (Anupam Kher) is a shoe shop owner whose wife has sublimated her desires in religion, and Pinky (Piyush Mishra) a lonely widower who runs his family masala business with tight-fisted crabbiness. They try an escort service, but strangely, the escorts reject their custom. Having ogled at yoga instructors and harassed a young couple making out in a park, the three friends are nearly arrested for hitting on an unsuspecting passer-by. In desperation, they plan a trip to Mauritius, where an AIRbnb arrangement gets them sharing a house with "earth child" Ahana (poor Lisa Haydon, condemned to forever reprise her Indian-origin free spirit act from Queen). 

A still from Basu Chatterjee's Shaukeen (1982)

The differences from the 1982 film are telling. KD, Lali and Pinky might be old friends, but the contest over the girl has them each slyly trying to pull the wool over each other's eyes. Ashok Kumar, AK Hangal and Utpal Dutt, who turned in such fine performances in the old Shaukeen, had a rather different equation -- an open-faced camaraderie which kept their machinations somehow at the level of a game. Hangal's pipe-smoking Anglophile Inder Sain (who's named his travel agency Anderson) actually sits them down to discuss how since they've stumbled onto this one young woman, each of them might as well have a go. But the other two get thoughtfully out of the way each time. 

The other shift is in the characterisation of the young women. Rati Agnihotri's Anita - an 80s free-spirit stereotype, the Goan girl who's likely Christian, and a crooner to boot -- hung around the old men because it was a way to be in the same space as her boyfriend, played by a brooding, long-legged Mithun Chakraborty. Haydon's Ahana has no such excuse. What she has instead is an attack of Akshaykumaritis, convincing our three oldies that they can get in her pants if they only get her a meeting with Akshay. The superstar, playing himself with a sense of humour, takes digs at everything, from the 100 crore club to the hankering for a National Award, and is not unwatchable. But robbed of a flesh-and-blood lover, Ahana must subsist on a fantasy diet of fandom and facebook likes -- and comes off as insufferably ditsy. 

The old Shaukeen was admirably frank about the travails of ageing -- where the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak - but it also captured something profound about the reluctance to let go of life. The song that played whenever Ashok Kumar had a shaukeen moment said it most lucidly: "Jeevan se yeh ras ka bandhan, toda nahi jaye". More recently, Gulzar expressed that strange mixture of hesitation and moh in his unforgettable Dil toh bachcha hai ji: "Daant se reshmi dor katti nahi." 

The Shaukeens is much less eloquent. But what simmers just beneath the surface is that these men are victims, too, crippled by a masculine code not of their making. How good a man KD is, we're told, that he didn't let on about being in love with his friend's sister, even as she spent a lonely divorced life. We're meant to empathise with KD's wasted years, without condemning the absurdity of the honour codes that he lived by. And as for the sister, what of her? For women above a certain age, sex couldn't possibly be on their minds. Could it? As Rati Agnihotri played out her appointed part as Kher's weepy wife, I thought I spied an amused look in her eye. 

She was the Anita of old, after all. Shaukeen 3, anyone?

Published in Mumbai Mirror.