Dilip Kumar exemplified an idea of India we've lost

My Mirror/TOI Plus column dedicated to the actor Dilip Kumar, who passed on this week:

Born in Peshawar and brought to Bombay, he was the true child of a country that revelled in its linguistic and regional variety, rather than craving to homogenise it.

Like the country it claims to represent, the public culture of Bollywood has a tendency towards hagiography. We like to anoint heroes, inflating even their minor talents into grand achievements, and painting an unrealistically spotless picture of their greatness. Bhakti leaves no room for considered evaluation of a person’s strengths and flaws, or even for placing someone in the context of his time, looking at how he may have responded to his professional and historical milieu. It is as if we have never got our heads around the relationship between the individual and society: Either the individual’s achievements are credited entirely to his being from x community or y institution, or else he is pronounced sui generis in some unbelievable way.

The actorly legend of Dilip Kumar is no different. The stories of his dedication abound - of his being a ‘method actor’ before Marlon Brando, or learning to play the sitar in reality from Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffar Khan for the 1960 film Kohinoor, or refusing the role that eventually went to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Some of these narratives say less about Dilip Kumar than about the Indian desire to lay claim to an actor who was the equal, nay superior, of anyone Hollywood could throw at us.

That path of global comparison, though, feels to me like a red herring - not because Dilip Kumar was not a fine actor, but because the style he developed was so specifically Indian. He may have been understated, using a mixture of gently caustic dialogues and brooding silences and dropping his booming voice to a whisper in the throes of love or pain, but there was never any doubting the intense ebb and flow of emotion under that surface. Dilip Kumar was drama – just conducted with dignity.

Still, it is true that he was among the first Indian leading men to step away from our previously theatrical histrionics – and I mean theatrical here quite literally; the exaggerated gestures and loud oratory were characteristic of the spectacular Parsi Urdu theatre, from which early Bombay cinema emerged. Actors like Motilal and Ashok Kumar were his predecessors in this change. Ashok Kumar, in fact, was the first actor he met at Bombay Talkies, telling him to “just do what you would do in the situation if you were really in it” – and young Yousuf took the big star’s naturalistic instructions to heart.

Despite a rocky start with the lost 1944 film Jwar Bhata (in which the outspoken FilmIndia critic Baburao Patel called him “the new anaemic hero” whose “appearance on the screen creates both laughter and disappointment”), by 1947, Dilip Kumar had made the screen his own.   

But to me, what made Dilip Sahab a true legend (and he was always called Dilip Kumar Sahab, making the PM’s condolence tweet calling him “Dilip Kumar ji” sound strangely off) was not his acting, or even his perfectionist attention to detail, or even his undeniable mastery of both voice and language. Though that last quality was shaping, both of him and the film industry he strode like a colossus for decades. Born in Peshawar in 1922 and brought to Bombay as a toddler by his fruit-merchant father, Dilip Kumar was a true child of that polyglot city -- and of an India that revelled in its regional and linguistic variety rather than craving to homogenise it.

Other than his renowned flair for Urdu (he told a young Tom Alter that the secret of good acting was “sher-o-shairi”), he was fluent in Hindi/Hindustani, Pashto, Punjabi, Marathi, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindko, Persian and the Awadhi and Bhojpuri dialects. You can watch the words roll off his tongue in old YouTube interviews, or read the many remembrances in which he made people feel deeply at home by speaking, literally, in their language. For 10 years from 1960 on, a special train ran annually from Bombay to Poona on which people bought tickets for the sheer pleasure of travelling with Dilip Kumar – but it seemed he took enormous joy in it too, talking to people in Tamil, Telugu, Konkani and all of the languages mentioned above. 

Which brings me back to the qualities that really seem to define Dilip Kumar: His warmth and integrity and feeling for people, across the bounds of religion and background and age. You didn’t need to know him personally to be able to see the strength of his relationships. It is enough, for instance, to read Rishi Kapoor talk about his father Raj Kapoor’s lifelong camaraderie with “Yousuf Uncle” - extending from their shared Pashto-speaking childhood to the superb playing-off of their personas in the hit love triangle Andaaz (1949), through the many schemes they hatched to raise funds for national causes, all the way to Dilip Kumar addressing an unconscious Raj Kapoor in his hospital bed just before Kapoor passed away in 1988 – as filmi as it gets, and yet real and deeply felt.

It is enough, also, to watch Dilip Kumar reach out, mid-speech on stage and hold the hand of the much younger Shah Rukh Khan, turning what might have been just another filmi commemoration into something memorable and intergenerational and true. Or Dharmendra, visiting for his birthday a few years ago, clasping his hands with a fraternal love you could not stage – or cradling the late thespian’s head after his death, tweeting “Maalik mere pyaare bhai ko Jannat naseeb kare”.

Dilip Kumar came of an age in a film industry that was, as anthropologist William Mazzarella points out, then in a rare period of organic synch with the nation-state. If filmmakers between the ’30s and early ’60s seemed to voice the hope and popular enthusiasm of the new nation, the nation could also see itself in the cinema. In 1955, the chair of a Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar could welcome Prime Minister Nehru as “the Director of one of the greatest films in history – the film of New India’s destiny…”.

Dilip Kumar was a great admirer of Nehru, whom he called Panditji, like so many of his generation. In his memoir, he speaks fondly of Nehru singling him out on a rare visit to a film set, and in later years, giving his 1961 film Ganga Jumna a hearing against decisions by Nehru’s own information and broadcasting minister BV Keskar. Screenwriter Salim Khan, writing at the end of Dilip Sahab’s memoir, makes the fascinating argument that the legendary pauses in his dialogue delivery were modelled on Nehru’s Hindi speeches, where the pauses were because he was translating from English in his head.

In 1962, Nehru only had to say the word for Dilip Kumar to agree to campaign for the Congress Party, for the great VK Krishna Menon. Kumar later served for a year as Sheriff of Bombay and as a nominated INC member to the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra from 2000 to 2006. This was also a man whom Pakistan had awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, leading Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray to cast public aspersions on his nationalism. And yet Dilip Kumar’s book makes a point of mentioning not only his hurt, but also the Thackerays’ later invitations to him and his wife Saira Banu.

In his grace and his depth of feeling, for India and the cross-subcontinental culture he spoke for, Yousuf Khan had few equals. Dilip Kumar exemplified an era, and his life and character seem to sum up what was best about it. He could only have emerged in a time and a place where we believed in stitching things together – not tearing them apart. Long may his memory live.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 10 July 2021.

The medical missionary

My Mirror column, the first in a series on films about doctors:

V Shantaram’s 1946 film about the legendary Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis sheds an odd light on the contemporary India-China moment and our pandemic year

2020 has been a year of medical heroism. It might be a good time to remember a heroic doctor from a very different period in the history of India and the world: Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, whose valiant medical service in Communist China from 1938 to 1942 is still enshrined in that country's public memory. On August 28, even as Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in a border conflict that remains far from being resolved, it was reported that a statue of Dr Kotnis was to be unveiled outside a medical school in North China named after him: the Shijiazhuang Ke Dihua Medical Science Secondary Specialised School. (‘Ke Dihua’ is Kotnis’s Chinese name.)

Kotnis is not often remembered in contemporary India, but barely four years after his death, his life and work were made the subject of a film by the great Indian director V Shantaram. Free on YouTube as well as available to stream on one subscription-based platform for world cinema, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani makes for interesting viewing for many reasons.

Released in 1946, a year before independence, Shantaram’s film commemorates Kotnis's as the ideal nationalist life: a life led – and lost – in the service of the nation. As one of the rousing patriotic songs from the film’s rather wonderful lilting soundtrack put it: “Jaan dene ka hi naam hai zindagi (Giving up your life is what living is really about)”. A film called The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis was clearly not shying away from either myth-making or propaganda.

What is fascinating to me, though, is that Kotnis’s nationalism is presented as what leads the youthful doctor to another country, where he helped their war effort. Heeding a Congress leader’s call for Indians to come to China’s aid during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mao Zedong had apparently made such a request of Jawaharlal Nehru), the young graduate from Mumbai’s Seth GS Medical College decided to join a five-member medical mission to China in 1938. Watching Shantaram’s film in 2020, it is impossible not to be struck by the way Indian nationalism in the 1940s could be so naturally folded into an internationalist milieu of cooperation between what were then two poor Asian countries in a still-colonised world. (Some villains do exist: fittingly for a post-Second World War Indian film, it’s the Japanese, who are called ‘shaitan’ but shown as buffoons, in the almost classic tradition of the war movie.)

Scripted by the great KA Abbas, Dr Kotnis opens with the handsome young doctor (played by Shantaram himself) returning from Mumbai to announce to his shocked parents that he has just pledged to serve in China. His ageing father, caught off-guard while proudly displaying the clinic he’d had made for young Dwarka in their hometown of Solapur, has a teary turnaround. It’s a remarkable propagandist scene, where Shantaram and Abbas take the figure of the obedient son and finesse the resonant Indian idea of filial duty into duty to the motherland. The sacrifice is dual, because Dwarka’s father too must give up his ‘budhaape ki laathi’. The Hindi phrase about children as the support of one’s old age is propped up by an actual laathi that Dwarka presents to his father – which falls symbolically from the old man’s hand as his son boards the ship to China. The dramatic foreboding has a reason: the father will die without seeing his son again, and Dwarka will never return.

Shantaram cast himself as Kotnis, and the actress Jayashree – who had become his second wife in 1941 – as Kotnis’s assistant Qing Lan (pronounced Ching Lan), whom he married and had a son with. The relationship between them is tenderly depicted, though it doffs its hat quite obviously to both nationalist propaganda and Hindi film romance. For instance, Qing Lan first meets the good doctor disguised as a boy, and there must be some singing and dancing before love can be declared. But it is striking for a mainstream Indian film in the 1940s to have a foreign, Chinese, heroine, who wears trousers and a shirt all through (except a sweetly comic interlude when she attempts to wear a sari during their wedding) and is as deeply devoted to her work as her husband is to his. It helps that Vasant Desai’s lively, memorable soundtrack is so superbly integrated into the narrative: I loved Jayashree’s ‘Main hoon nanhi nayi dulhan’, though it is clearly not a traditional song sung by Chinese brides, and one of the film’s enduring images for me is the sight of the good doctor watching lovingly as his pregnant Chinese wife sings a rousing song to lead the Red Army to its next destination: “Ghulam nahi tu, josh mein aa / Yeh desh hai tere, hosh mein aa”.

The Chinese-Indian relationship and the internationalist iteration of patriotism apart, the film is remarkable for the way that the medical profession is celebrated. Dr Kotnis’s heroism is no less integral to the national war effort than the Red Army general whose camp he joins – he is captured by the Japanese, endangers his own life to create a vaccine for a plague that breaks out among the Chinese population, and succumbs to epilepsy, but after having saved the general from certain death of his bullet wounds. An internationalist nationalism that talks about saving lives, rather than merely laying down one’s own or killing one's enemies: that's propaganda almost worth having.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Sep 2020

An Extraordinary Election

My Mirror column:

Three years after AAP won a historic mandate in Delhi is a good time to watch Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s documentary on Kejriwal and the rise of his party.

On 10 February 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party won the Delhi elections with an unprecedented 67 out of 70 seats, forming a state government that is still going strong. The barrage of repetitive messaging nowadays, on television and on social media, makes it difficult for anything or anyone in the public eye to remain fresh for too long.

Arvind Kejriwal has certainly suffered from our jadedness. But three years after the AAP’s historic win, watching Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s gripping documentary An Insignificant Man makes clear just how remarkable an achievement the AAP is.

Ranka and Shukla’s film (free to watch online) quickly places on record certain landmark moments: Kejriwal’s decision to leave his job as a tax official and become an activist, his participation in the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, and the formation of the party in November 2012. Then it takes us through the AAP’s first campaign, for the Delhi elections of December 2013.

History seen in retrospect can seem inevitable. But in 2013, for a party of political outsiders barely a year old, to fight an election in the nation’s capital, defeating the three-time-incumbent Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dixit while matching a rising BJP, seemed like a fool’s errand. Over and over, Ranka and Shukla zero in on this fact of Kejriwal’s being an outsider not just to politics, but to power as we have come to imagine it in post-independence India.

Early in the film, for instance, at a campaign meeting, a volunteer tells Kejriwal he’ll give up his job at Barclays Bank to help fight the election. Watching “such a small man – duble patle aadmi – exposing such powerful people, sahi mein bahut josh aa jata hai [one really feels inspired],” the man says. The implicit contrast with Narendra Modi’s strong man image – physically symbolised in the vision of his 56-inch chest – could not be more striking.

But as the film also makes amply clear, Kejriwal’s size and body language belies the strength of his opinions and the clarity of his political strategy. In one tense moment, an AAP candidate called Akhilesh has received two stitches for a head injury caused by being beaten up by the goons of a rival political party in the presence of the police. AAP volunteers say they did not fight back, only tried to protect themselves – and also protested outside the police station. “Don’t ever protest outside a police station,” says Kejriwal immediately. “That’s their battleground. Ours is amid the people. We have to pull them towards ours, not get drawn into theirs.” The unspoken metaphor is a profoundly Indian one: a kabaddi game.

In another great scene, Kejriwal meets a volunteer whose project is to get a thousand girls married off, free of cost. Kejriwal’s response is immediate. “First we suck the blood of the poor, then we make donations,” he laughs. “Say we get a thousand girls married. What if we increase their income instead?”

It is interesting that he does not take on the fact of gender frontally. He does not say to this man, “I don’t believe that getting girls married off is the solution to their lives.” Instead he challenges the wider approach of “daan-dakshina”: “Sure, systemic change is long-term work, but someone has to do it,” he smiles broadly. “On charity work, count me out... Jahan pe ladna-katna-marna hai, main aapke saath khada hoon.” In a society where most Indians are not about to support the idea of their daughters staying single, Kejriwal’s response struck me as shrewdly political – yet one that I don’t have trouble getting behind.

The AAP campaign places electricity and water charges – perhaps for the first time ever – at the centre of an election. Allegations of corruption against Dixit’s government are many, but the film zeroes in one particular Dixit letter that Kejriwal acquires a copy of, which prevented the 2010 head of DERC, Delhi’s electricity board, from reducing electricity prices for consumers. We watch as AAP’s core poll promises (700 litres of free water to each family, and the reduction of electricity bills by half) are deliberated within the party, challenged even by well-wishers. (They have since been met.)

The film tracks the difficulties of battling such entrenched interests. A long-time anti-corruption activist, a feisty young candidate called Santosh, whose work threatens the local powersthat-be, is knocked off her scooter by a car and dies in hospital. (Her death remains unsolved.) Then, right before the election, a video clip surfaces purportedly showing AAP candidate Shazia Ilmi agreeing to do a favour in return for money – the journalist who released it, Anuranjan Jha, later accepted it was “edited”.

Despite all this, an election in which the India Today ORG-MARG poll predicted only 6 seats for AAP ended with them getting 28. The BJP got 32 instead of the predicted 41, but decided to let AAP form a government, which ended up being dissolved by Kejriwal in two months on the issue of the stalled Lokpal Bill. It took until February 2015 for AAP to come back to power, with a much stronger mandate that has since made the party the focus of concerted, vindictive action by the Centre, with the office of the LG being used to block key Delhi government policies, including anti-corruption measures.

The film also reminds us of a political moment already almost impossible to remember, when a Sheila Dixit could dismiss a Kejriwal with the barest of courtesy. “What is Arvind Kejriwal’s status, except that he keeps talking about himself?” scoffs Dixit at one point. Even on election eve, she remains imperiously scornful, “Don’t speak to me of Kejriwal. Woh ek kahani thhi, khatam ho gayi. [That was a story, it has ended.]”

Whatever happens to the AAP in the future, at least that statement is not true.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Feb 2018.