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.

All That Glitters

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

As flamboyant and luxurious as the Art Deco era it's set in, Bombay Velvet ends up being all shine and little soul.

A little boy comes to Bombay, his mother earns a living as a sex worker, he becomes a small-time crook. Then his mother runs away with his ill-begotten stroke of luck (gold biscuits, no less), and he decides to become a big-time crook. The steep rise of the local hoodlum unfolds against the backdrop of the spectacular growth of the city itself, and is clearly meant to echo it. Like Ranbir Kapoor's Johnny Balraj, we're shown a Bombay that thinks it can do better -- be larger, get grander, become what The Roaring Twenties (the James Cagney film referenced here) would call a "big shot". 

With Bombay Velvet, director Anurag Kashyap, too, has made the big filmi film he wanted to make, complete with old-movie childhoods for the hero, heroine and hero's best friend. But sadly, neither this, nor the spectacular visual recreation of 60s Bombay (on an immaculate set in Sri Lanka), nor the sensational jazzy soundtrack, can make this film the epic it wants to be. 

The primary problem is that the characters do not compute. When we first see our hero, he's a cute little boy with an uncanny resemblance to Ranbir Kapoor, shyly, slyly watching another little boy do the dirty: deliberately bumping into a rich man walking past, so as to swipe his wallet. By the time we see them next, roles seem to have been reversed - shy little Balraj has become the mop-haired, ambitious, stop-at-nothing Ranbir Kapoor, while the expert pickpocket Chiman has become his silent sidekick. We never learn quite why Chiman has lost his panache and signed it over to Balraj. The heroine, meanwhile, makes her entry as a little Goan girl with a golden voice. We skate too smoothly over Rosie's journey from singing in church to sleeping in a rich man's bed, and even more quickly over her escape to Bombay, where she works glumly in a beauty parlour by day and sings Geeta Dutt songs -- even more glumly -- in a bar by night. 

And then everything changes again, faster and more inexplicably than before: Balraj fails at a robbery and acquires an unexpected Parsi benefactor, a man called Kaizad Khambatta who is a bootlegger, real estate shark and tabloid editor rolled into one -- Karan Johar, playing himself with a fake touch of evil. Balraj is quite literally picked up from the Bombay streets and thrown up to an enviable position at the city's Art Deco acme. Anointed Johnny, he becomes the manager of a nightclub that is the emblematic centre of everything that 60s Bombay is: Bombay Velvet, a stunningly re-imagined version of the city's real-life Eros Cinema. Meanwhile our nightingale has acquired a Parsi benefactor, too. Jamshed Mistry is Khambatta's oldest rival, and he, too, runs a newspaper. And sure enough, Rosie, too, gets a position as singer at Bombay Velvet. 

So our hero and heroine are ostensibly all grown up, the stage is set for their epic love story - but they seem like they're just play-acting. Other than a single song picturisation ("Dhadaam-dhadaam"), Anushka Sharma's performance as Rosie has neither oomph nor dard nor Goan-ness. There is more 60s sexiness in Raveena Tandon's minute-long appearance as Rosie's nightclub replacement than there is in Sharma's acres of silken costumes. 

As for Ranbir, he imbues Johnny with hotheaded angst, but we never quite get why Johnny's so angry, either with the world or with Khambatta. We're told he willingly gets his face beaten in every night in the boxing ring, even when he's got a job managing the fanciest club in town. But we never really see why. This is a hitman with many murders to his name, pathologically violent - and yet his fights with his girlfriend are almost childish, with none of the brute force one imagines. And to paint this character as a victim, as the film wants to, would take much more doing. Sharma and Kapoor are talented actors, but they clearly don't yet have it in them to transcend themselves. Satyadeep Mishra, playing Chiman, is perhaps the one actor with a major role to convincingly inhabit it. 

But if the depth of the performances is too little, the spread of the canvas is too wide. Like Dibakar Banerjee in the recent Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, Kashyap and his team of writers (including the historian Gyan Prakash, whose non-fiction book Mumbai Fables is the seedbed of this film) clearly have no dearth of detail. This is Prohibition-era Bombay, where Indians can't get a drink unless they're with a foreigner. It is also Art Deco Bombay, when the young and chic (like Rosie) are moving into multi-storeyed buildings that line the city's seafront. It's the last stage of Back Bay Reclamation, new commercial buildings are being planned, the government is in cahoots with builders and tabloid magnates against mill-workers and union leaders. The film is punctuated with fake tabloid headlines interspersed with real news, and what plot there is revolves around photographs - a 'revealing' advertisement, a blackmail photo that stays secret, and another that gets splashed on the front page. But in trying to capture multiple urban worlds - leisure, commerce, media, politics, crime - the film loses its grip on all of them. 

Bombay Velvet could have been a big shot. But it misfired.