Homing in, zooming out

My Mirror column:

Among 1957’s biggest Hindi hits was Musafir, a triptych of tales about a house and its succession of tenants, which inaugurated the career of Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

"Laakh laakh makaan, aur inmein rehne wale karoron insaan. In karoron insaanon ke sukh-dukh, hansne-rone ke maun-darshak -- yehi makaan (Lakh of houses, and crores of people who live in them. And the mute witnesses to these people's joys and sorrows –these very houses),” runs Balraj Sahni's voiceover as the camera pans across a cityscape, finally settling on one such makaan as the setting of this particular story.

What I just described is the opening sequence of Musafir, a triptych of tales about three different families, connected only by the house they rent in succession. The third film in my series of columns on the top Hindi hits of 1957, Musafir was the tenth highest box office grosser that year, and has several points of interest about it. For one, it was the directorial debut of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who had come to Bombay from Calcutta with Bimal Roy in 1950. Mukherjee had worked as Roy’s editor at New Theatres for five years, and in making the journey to Bombay at 27, he joined a group of young Bengali men with various kinds of cinematic ambitions. These included the actor Nazir Husain, writer Nabendu Ghosh, assistant director Asit Sen and dialogue writer Pal Mahendra. The second bit of trivia that makes Musafir interesting also relates to a young Bengali man — Mukherjee shares writing credits on the film’s script with the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.

From where we stand now, the raw, powerful Ghatak of Subarnarekha or Titash Ekti Nadir Naam and the warm, gentle Mukherjee of situational comedies like Chupke Chupke may seem to represent two unbridgeable poles of the Indian cinematic universe. But in the late 50s the world was young, the lines between the artistic worlds of Calcutta and Bombay, and those of 'art' and 'entertainment' were still permeable. Thus the man who would become one of the cinematic trinity of grandly ambitious Bangla high art wasn't so distant from the man who would come to stand for the mild-mannered, middle class Hindi comedy of manners. The year after Musafir, 1958, two films released – one was Bimal Roy's marvellous Nehruvian-era ghost story, Madhumati, which was written by Ghatak, and the other was Ghatak's own directorial venture, Ajantrik, in which it is another inanimate object – a car rather than a house – that is at the centre of the human stories Ghatak chooses to tell.

Musafir itself combines Mukherjee's lightness of touch and prodigious talent for characterisation with Ghatak's flair for the melancholy and for the recurring motif. Most of the film unfolds, as was Mukherjee's wont, within the four walls of a house. But Musafir also contains the sense of a streetscape – we view the house first from the chai shop window, and the chatty tea-delivery-boy (Mohan Choti) appears in each narrative. In fact it is he, along with the genially repetitive landlord (David), the gossipy Munni ki Ma, and the friendly neighbourhood drunk Pagla Babu, who stitches the film's three parts into a sociological urban whole.

Like Subodh Mukherjee's Paying Guest, which I wrote about two weeks ago, Mukherjee's first film deals with what was then a relatively new urban world, increasingly unmoored from feudal certitudes. The tenants who are anonymous until they aren't, family units whose legitimacy cannot be vouched for by foreknowledge, village elders or caste networks; nosy neighbours (like Munni ki Ma) who make it their business to establish the traditional 'rightness' of those who have moved into the area. In the first segment here, for instance, Suchitra Sen plays a new bride who yearns to be accepted by her in-laws despite her runaway marriage. The possibility of a nuclear family unit is one she rejects instinctively as inferior to the real thing.

Mukherjee's interest in these new populations, free-floating in space but not quite ready to give up on their connections to community, family, tradition – remained a persistent theme in his films in later years. Tenants, landlords and the negotiation of neighbourhood rules are central to his comedy Biwi Aur Makaaan (1965), and also to the Jaya Bhaduri-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Mili (1975). Both Mili and Bawarchi also begin by visually laying out the neighbourhood, and then using a voiceover to zero in on the one home whose internal dynamics we are to have the privilege of witnessing.

In Musafir, these dynamics seem to involve older men who, despite their 'good' intentions towards their families, are such sticklers for discipline/rules/

rationality/tradition that they end up tyrannising wives and daughters, as well as any non-conformist younger men – the young man who marries without parental permission in the first story; the jobless Bhanu (a very youthful Kishore Kumar) in the middle segment, who can't stop playing the fool; or the heart-stopping Dilip Kumar as the violin-playing tragic alcoholic of the last segment (clearly inspired by O'Henry's 'The Last Leaf'). The lawyer brother of Usha Kiron, or Nazir Hussain as the irascible father with money trouble, and Suchitra Sen's father-in-law in the first segment are all men determined to to be merciless, grown-up patriarchs who must be humoured like children – and one can see in their caricaturish excess the roots of Utpal Dutt's character in Golmaal, or Om Prakash's Jijaji in Chupke Chupke. 

Musafir has some rough edges, and its tonal shifts from tragic to comic are not always successful. But it is an interesting film, if only for the many ways in which it foreshadows Mukherjee's future filmmaking career.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Aug 2017

Driving in Many Directions

Today's Mirror column:

Ahead of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's birthday, a tribute to one of his finest, funniest films — 1975's Chupke Chupke.

Dharmendra, Asrani and Om Prakash in a still from Chupke Chupke (1975)

September 30 is Hrishikesh Mukherjee's birthday. So it's an appropriate week to remember the well-loved filmmaker, who left us in 2006 at the age of 84. In the nine years since, two of his finest films have already been remade: Rohit Shetty's cringeworthy Bol Bachchan (2012) was “inspired” by his sidesplittingly funny Gol Maal, while in 2014's Disney-Princess version of Khubsoorat, Ratna Pathak Shah replaced her mother Dina Pathak as the crusty matriarch, while Sonam Kapoor attempted to replace Rekha.

Our best-loved comedies are in the greatest danger. Sure enough, there has been talk of a Chupke remake. I will say nothing about the intended film except that it is to be written by Sajid-Farhad – who wrote Bol Bachchan's unspeakable script and made their directorial debut with the inaccurately-named Entertainment, starring Akshay Kumar and a dog – and directed by Umesh Shukla of OMG Oh My God fame, with Paresh Rawal playing Jijaji.

Since Chupke Chupke, for me, is that film of my childhood – one of the two videocassettes in my Nani's house, which I must have watched at least 15 times in three years – I thought it might be a good idea to write about it. Also because while everyone's been on about Sholay turning 40, Chupke Chupke, also made in 1975, has slipped quietly under the radar, as Hrishikesh Mukherjee films are wont to do. The neglect might also be a case of too many birthdays in the family: Mukherjee's Mili and Chaitali also released the same year. But my Happy Birthday column goes to Chupke Chupke.

Mukherjee adapted Chupke Chupke from the 1971 Bangla film Chhadmabeshi (meaning “imposter” or “disguised”). The Bangla film gave story credit to Upendranath Ganguly, screenplay credit to Subir Hajra (assistant director on Pather Panchali and Aparajito) and directorial credit to “Agradoot” (a remarkable collective of Bengali technicians who directed films together from the mid-1940s to 1989. But that's another story).

For Chupke Chupke fans, Chhadmabeshi seems to start in medias res, with the brother-in-law asking for a well-spoken Bengali driver to be sent from Kolkata to Allahabad. Hrishikesh Mukherjee added a sort of prologue: the film's first 20 minutes, which could at one level be seen as describing as “how the hero and heroine met”. But by introducing Dharmendra's Dr Parimal Tripathi as the sort who'd pretend to be a chowkidar in a dak bangla just so the real chowkidar could go see his sick grandson, the film not only makes its hero warmly appealing, it makes his later decision to turn up at Jijaji's house as the well-spoken “driver” Pyare Mohan Allahabadi more believable.

The film stretches the “servant” joke in several interesting directions. For instance, when the eligible Dr Tripathi sends his rishta to the winsome Miss Chaturvedi, the fact that he has no parents becomes an excuse to extend the moonhboli fictive kinship between the professor and the watchman: sweet old Chowkidar “Kaka” is dispatched – to ask for the Allahabad Brahmin girl's hand in marriage for the Allahabad Brahmin boy.

Of course, the whole premise of the film depends on the unanimity which it expects of its audience, on the fact that drivers and memsahibs shouldn't mix. As Sulekha (Sharmila Tagore) tells her husband coyly, “Shareef ghar ki ladkiyan raat ko chupke chupke driver se milne nahi jaati”. But there are also sly moments when the film tells its intended middle class audience how their class-tinted spectacles work to invisibilise people: Prashant (Asrani) doesn't recognise his old friend when he walks into his office in a driver's uniform. And during the entire deliberate affair she sets up with Pyare Mohan, Sulekha never fails to rib her increasingly suspicious Jijaji with “Driver insaan nahi hota hai kya?”

The kind of large joint family that Mukherjee made the basis of films like Bawarchi and Khoobsurat is here divided across cities. So Sulekha and her much older brother Haripad Chaturvedi (David) live in Allahabad, while her elder sister and her husband Raghav (Om Prakash) live in Bombay. The sense of joint family is kept alive even long-distance, however, in the banter between saali and jijaji. The wedding adds to this a network of old friends, largely composed of Dharmendra's old college mates – Asrani as Prashant, and Amitabh Bachchan as Sukumar. This is a world connected by trunk calls and telegrams, whether to invite friends for weddings, or to let relatives know when your train will reach. Much of the first half is driven by people yelling loudly into the receiver before finding themselves suddenly cut-off mid-joke “six minute over? Ok ok”.

The adoring saali cannot praise her brother-in-law enough: “Genius Jijaji. Chahte toh minister ban sakte thhe...” “Lekin saabun bechne lage?” asks Dharmendra witheringly. When Jijaji invites the newly-weds to Bombay, suggesting that a trip taken together will be good for “paarasparik antargyaan”, Parimal is quick to retort: “yeh Jijaji hain ya All India Radio?”

And so starts the film's other humorous premise: language. Famous for its linguistic playfulness (a trait which also characterised at least two other Hrishikesh Mukherjee films, Bawarchi and Khubsoorat) Chupke Chupke's nonstop shuddh Hindi jokes are also leavened by Mukherjee-style wisdom. “Making fun of a language is low, and I'm making fun of my mother tongue,” says Dharmendra guiltily at one point. “You're making fun of a man, not a language,” Haripad Bhaiya reassures him. “Bhaasha apne aap mein itni mahaan hoti hai ki uska mazaak kiya hi nahi jaa sakta.” 

In these times of quick offence-taking, it is a perspective sorely missed.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Triumph of Hinglish: How shuddh Hindi lost its groove

The second part of an essay published on Firstpost.

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s comedy classic Chupke Chupke (1975) language purist Raghavendra Sharma (Om Prakash) is given a taste of his own medicine in the form of deliberately abstruse shuddh Hindi thrown at him by his Hindi-premi Ilahabadi chauffeur Pyare Mohan (Dharmendra). Of course, in reality, no Hindi speaker ever talks of travelling by lauhpathgamini agnirath (the fiery chariot that travels on an iron path), smoking a dhoomra-shalaaka (smoke-emitting stick), or wearing a kanth-langot (neck-loincloth).

These super-Sanskritic words — said to have been coined by Hindi’s guardians to combat the onslaught of English words like ‘train’, ‘cigarette’ and ‘tie’ — have long been mocked in popular culture. As the late comedian Johnny Walker once famously said of Doordarshan, “They should not announce ‘Ab Hindi mein samachar suniye‘ (Now listen to the news in Hindi); they should say, ‘Ab samachar mein Hindi suniye‘ (Now listen to Hindi in the news)”

Yet in 1975, when the film’s dialogue writer (the wonderful Gulzar) made fun of shuddh Hindi for its distance from the speech of the common man, it was (like Dharmendra’s treatment of his jijaji) a gentle, almost affectionate form of trip-taking. For in the world of Chupke Chupke – the educated North Indian middle class world – speaking shuddh Hindi still had a certain cachet: a sense of national-cultural authority backed by Doordarshan, All India radio and school textbooks.

But by 2011, in the world of Bheja Fry 2, speaking Hindi without interruption marks Bharat Bhushan not as erudite or well-educated, but merely as ridiculous.

How has this come about?


Tyranny of the Hindi purists

It is clear that in post-globalisation India, English is an essential component of upward mobility. It is the only linguistic status-marker that counts. In this deeply screwed-up world, the adoption of English words into spoken Hindi is thus an indisputable way to display status – to establish yourself as not being a Hindi-medium-type.

But Hindi, too, has done its bit to aid the rise of Hinglish.

One of the crucial problems faced by India immediately after Independence was of creating a common language of communication and official discourse. If there was to be a national language, it could not be English, which was perceived as colonial and elitist.

In the shadow of Partition, the Hindiwallas in the Constituent Assembly managed to press their claim for the first official language of the Union to be Hindi, written exclusively in the Devnagari script (rejecting the original recommendation of “Hindustani written… either in Devnagari or the Persian script”). This Hindi was characterised by a Sanskritic uniformity that deliberately rejected the hybridity of the people’s vernacular.

“Pure Sanskrit words are used in the same form everywhere. Therefore only that language can be acceptable all over India which is rich in pure Sanskrit words,” declared the President of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, KC Chattopadhyaya, in 1949.

As Alok Rai decribes it, the years “between the unconsummated triumph of 1950 and the anticipated climax of 1960, when the enforced cohabitation with English… would come to an end” were spent by Hindiwallas like Dr. Raghuvira in grooming Hindi for its exalted “national” role. In 1960, the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology was set up, to provide an expanded lexicon that would match that of English.

While the non-Hindi regions’ staunch opposition to Hindi’s hegemonic claims meant that English could not possibly be dropped (it was retained post-1965 as “associate additional official language”), a lot of this new Hindi lexicon gained acceptability via the school system, bureaucratic use and state television: for example, words like ‘prayojak’ for ‘sponsor’.

But this strategy left stranded the poor who did not have a school education and whose spoken language never encompassed the high Sanskritic Hindi of the state. And it had no hope of gaining traction with the educated middle class in the rest of the country, who gained access and familiarity to Hindi mainly through the movies. On the other hand, there was the metropolitan elite – and increasingly, a wider middle class – who had easier access to that other status marker: English.

Official Hindi’s insistence on purity – a positive suppression of the Hindustani word in favour of the Sanskritic equivalent (I remember a succession of school Hindi teachers in ’80s Calcutta and ’90s Delhi insisting on samay instead of waqt, kathin instead of mushkil, deergh instead of lamba, with no explanation) – left the Hindi-speaking public two choices: they could either learn the Sanskritic words, or adopt words from English.

But as Rupert Snell has argued, the more Hindiwallahs coined ever-more-difficult words in higher registers, disdaining Hindustani, the more effectively they drove the Hindi-speaking public towards pre-existing English words, and therefore towards Hinglish.

And it is a vicious cycle: the more the literary custodians of Hindi retreat into an ever-more-shuddh Sanskritic bastion, the more the language of popular culture appears to them too informal, too uncouth.


The age of Delhi Belly

So Hindi today is a beleaguered bastion. The democratisation of the Hindi cultural sphere has been greeted by its upper-caste, upper-class custodians with deep ambivalence.

Is the audience for the mostly-English version supposed to be more comfortable with colourful language – more English abuses, but ironically also more Hindi swearwords – because they’re imagined as the younger and hipper ‘new India’?

On the one hand, they have to acknowledge that the spread and increasing visibility of Hindi owes much to the mass media. As lyricist Prasoon Joshi put it at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011, “Film aur vigyapan ki duniya ne Hindi ko nayi izzat bakshi” (The world of film and advertising has given Hindi a new respect). Another speaker on the JLF panel ‘Aisi Hindi Kaisi Hindi’ said, “If the language is now on the tongues of those who have never before pronounced a Hindi word, then something very powerful is happening.”

On the other hand, however, there is the recurring lament that this filmi and media Hindi has a severely depleted vocabulary and no longer accords importance either to the literary, or to what Javed Akhtar calls “the softer emotions”. “Tameez kam ho gayi hai, dignity has become outdated,” said Akhtar, talking of the changing Hindi film lyric.

Most Hindi sessions at JLF seemed disproportionately concerned with whether the Hindi of hit songs, films and popular blogs had, in the name of “janta ki bhasha”, opened the floodgates to crudity and vulgarity. “Nowadays it is being said that saala is not even a swearword,” said one speaker sarcastically, referring to Sudhir Mishra’s response to the Censor Board’s objections to naming his film Yeh Saali Zindagi.

The discussion of badtameezi has recently come to a head in the heated debates around the language of the film Delhi Belly. While some are celebrating the film’s unexpurgated dialogues, complete with swearwords, many are either appalled at the Censor Board, or dismiss the film’s colourful language as a juvenile shortcut to cheap laughs.

What’s fascinating, though, is that the original dialogue of the film – described by its producers as 70 percent English, 30 percent Hindi – has been deliberately “toned down” in the “all-Hindi” version. “This was a conscious decision taken to make the Hindi version more acceptable to a wider adult audience,” said Aamir Khan’s spokesperson.

What conclusion can one draw from the producers’ decision? Is the audience for the mostly-English version supposed to be more comfortable with colourful language – more English abuses, but ironically also more Hindi swearwords – because they’re imagined as the younger and hipper ‘new India’? Or are they assumed to be more evolved simply because they’re English-speaking?

Hindi blogger Mihir Pandya has pointed to a crucial moment at which the English dialogue veers from its Hindi version. The original dialogue in the build-up to the ‘Ja Churail’ fantasy song is: “Yeh shadi nahi ho sakti, because this girl has given me a blow job – and being a 21st century man, I have also given her oral pleasure.” The dialogue in the ‘100 percent Hindi’ version is “Yeh shadi nahi ho sakti, kyonki is ladki ne mera choosa hai – aur badle mein maine iski li hai.” So in Hindi, oral sex can be spoken of when performed by a woman, but when a man returns the favour, it is erased to say “I took her”?

In a panel on Imperial English at JLF, writer Mrinal Pande spoke of how Hindi had never given her the freedom to speak of sex that English had. If the gatekeepers of Hindi – even in the world of popular cinema – are able to keep at bay what might be truly radical to shield Hindi’s denizens from the very possibility of transformation, then is it any wonder that they should turn to English?

The first part of this essay is here.