Driven From Home - I

My Mirror column (24 May 2020):

It’s time to revisit Bimal Roy’s 1953 neorealist melodrama, Do Bigha Zamin, which remains one of the earliest and most moving depictions of the urban migrant in Indian cinema

Another poster for Do Bigha Zamin (1953), designed by the artist Chittaprosad

A poster advertising Do Bigha Zamin in the 15 May, 1953 issue of Filmfare contains eight moments from the film etched into memorable black-and-white linocuts by the artist Chittaprosad. Linocut 5, at the centre of the page, foregrounds a young boy, barefoot, a palm held up to his face, as if he's just been slapped. The blank wall to the right is occupied by “Vote For” graffiti, above which is a strategically-placed poster of a gun-toting gangster, captioned “Criminals”. Behind the boy, the Indian city is pared down to its essentials: a mailbox, a lamppost, tall buildings -- and two other children: one polishing shoes under a streetlight, and the other being marched away by a uniformed policeman.

If you have never seen Bimal Roy's era-defining film -- or even if you have -- now is the time to revisit it. Perhaps in this cruel summer of 2020 you will see, as I did, that it is not some timeless tale of a single hard-working farmer stripped of his land by feudal exploitation, but a very particular postcolonial Indian story, in which Shambhu's dispossession is caused much by pre-modern landholding structures as by modern-day legal injustice (perhaps you'll hear the mocking laughter of the lawyers in the courtroom scene, as the non-literate Shambhu's oral calculation of his dues is superseded by the zamindar's duplicitous figures, for which Shambhu's own fingerprints become legal 'evidence'). Perhaps you'll see that this is a film as much about the city as the village, and that while it pinpoints the shortages and shortcuts that already marked the lives of India's urban poor, it is also, like the early cinema of Raj Kapoor, KA Abbas and others, filled with the warmth of nascent urban communities. Perhaps you'll see, like the great Chittaprosad did, that as crucial as the film's adult tragedies are the moral dilemmas of Shambhu's little boy Bachhua (played by Ratan Kumar, a much-favoured child actor of the time, who was soon to be seen polishing shoes again in Prakash Arora's 1954 film Boot Polish, produced by Raj Kapoor). Perhaps you will notice the film's depiction of 1950s Calcutta, with its white colonial buildings gleaming in the sunlight and its neon signs for Kodak and Polar and Castrol and KC Das glittering through the nights, and the poor homeless people who sleep under them – and think about whether the city currently suffering the debilitating effects of Cyclone Amphan is any different.

Bimal Roy, who had begun his career as a camera assistant at Calcutta's New Theatres, moved to Bombay in the early 1950s with a team of talented crew members that included such future stalwarts as Salil Choudhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He had already made his directorial debut in Bengali with Udayer Pathe, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen describe in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema as “introducing a new era of post-WW2 romantic-realist melodrama that was to pioneer the integration of the Bengal school with that of De Sica”.

Do Bigha Zamin, Roy's Hindi debut, was crucial to continuing that trajectory, and it is unsurprising that it took him back to Calcutta. The film reveals a very particular constellation of influences, reflective of the time and the people who came together in it. The core idea, of a peasant robbed of his small plot by an avaricious zamindar, came from a Rabindranath Tagore poem in Bengali, called 'Dui Bigha Jomi'. The poem was turned into a short story by Salil Choudhury, which also formed the basis of Satyen Bose's Bangla film called Rickshawala. Choudhury's story was reworked into a 24-page screenplay by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (also credited as Editor and Assistant Director), which became a Hindi film with the assistance of Paul Mahendra's Hindi dialogues.

The IPTA connections were also important here. Launched in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association was informally affiliated to the Communist Party of India, and had links with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was a nationwide network composed of travelling musical and theatre groups focused on reclaiming and working with vernacular folk traditions in various parts of the country, particularly Bengal, Telengana, Kerala, and later also Assam, Punjab, Orissa and urban centres like Mumbai. “For a brief period following WW2 and in the early years of independence,” write Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, “virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA activities...”. Salil Choudhury was a self-taught composer who had been a peasant activist in Bengal, and began his musical journey scoring for IPTA plays. Bimal Roy's own Udayer Pathe also drew heavily on IPTA style. Sahni, too, was a regular IPTA actor, and had previously played a peasant in the IPTA-backed film Dharti Ke Lal (1947).

The Tagore poem does not contain the spectre of the factory as the zamindar's reason for land-acquisition. In it, the dispossessed farmer becomes a mendicant's assistant. But the film -- informed as much by Vittorio De Sica's visuals of a father-son duo grappling with the city in Bicycle Thieves as by the Indian left's understanding of the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation -- turned its protagonist into a rickshaw-puller on the streets of Calcutta. 

The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 May 2020. 

The Romantic Realist

My Mirror column:

KA Abbas, who left us 30 years ago this June 1, spent a lifetime seeking to turn the dross of city life into fictional gold.

The opening scene of Bambai Raat ki Baahon Mein has the hero Amar Kumar (Vimal Ahuja) wading carefully into a swamp, his eyes fixed to the viewfinder of his camera. He takes a few shots – people washing in the dirty water, or attempting to clean their clothes on the edge. When he’s done, some locals ask if he has observed the poverty and pollution in which they are living. “Yes, I saw, and the eye of my camera also saw.”

KA Abbas wrote and directed Bambai Raat ki Baahon Mein (‘Bombay in the Arms of Night’) in 1967, creating a romantically-named suspense thriller charged with his characteristic ethical quandaries – here in the shape of a journalist who finds himself in an ethical dilemma. Amar’s expose of the pitiable condition of workers in Daleriawadi catches the eye of the factory owner Seth Sonachand Daleria, who invites him to Delhi and tries to buy him off. What Daleria offers Amar is much more than a bribe: he holds out the salary and perks of what is essentially a corporate communications job – a free house, free car, and tickets to New York, London, Paris.

The scene between Amar and the usually mild-mannered AK Hangal as the wily Daleria is one of the best things about the film – partly because Abbas, who would have known Hangal personally from the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), could see him as a slightly sleazy old man long before Shaukeen (1981), and as a seasoned businessman long before Garam Hava (1974). But also because of the wryly convincing detail with which Daleria sets up the terms of Amar’s quandary: “Beinsaafi sirf mill mazdooron ke saath hi nahi ho rahi, tum jaise kaabil journaliston ke saath bhi ho rahi hai. Itne acche lekh likhne wale ko sirf 500 rupaye mahina? Usmein se bhi 50 rupaye income tax aur provident fund mein kat jaate hain... [Injustice is not being done only to the factory workers, it is also being done to a capable journalist like you. Only 500 rupees a month to a writer of such fine pieces? And of that too, 50 rupees goes to income tax and provident fund...].”

It is no coincidence that Abbas spent much of his working life as a journalist. Born in Panipat as the great-grandson of Muslim poet and reformer Mohammad Altaf Hussain Hali, Abbas started bringing out a university newsletter while still a student of law at Aligarh Muslim University, while also writing articles and letters to the editors of various publications -- “using different pseudonyms to avoid identification,” according to his translator-editor Suresh Kohli.

Law did not work out, and he moved to Bombay, taking a job at the Bombay Chronicle. Even after he started to write plays (beginning with IPTA’s Zubeidaa) and then film scripts (starting with Dharti Ke Lal, also IPTA, and like Zubeidaa, involving Balraj Sahni), Abbas remained committed to journalism, writing what used to be the longest-running weekly column in India: 'The Last Word', in Russi Karanjia's Blitz. The column also appeared in Urdu under the title Azad Kalam (‘The Free Pen’), which is the name of the newspaper at which Amar works in Bambai Raat.

Although he was the director of 14 features, Abbas’s directorial abilities were uneven and most of his films sank at the box office. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this, until a few years ago, I thought of him as primarily a scriptwriter for Raj Kapoor films, including one of my all-time favourites, Shree 420.

A film that captured the Nehruvian zeitgeist like few others, Shree 420 also centres around an honest hero whom the big city tempts sorely, a young man torn between his genuine feeling for Bombay’s poor and the attractions of the high life. Watching Bambai Raat for the first time at an Abbas retrospective at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi this week, I could see the same dynamic in action quite clearly. There are other recognisable tropes – the evil capitalist is called Seth Sonachand in both films, while the young lovers find romantic fulfilment in the 10 paise ki chai on the street. The high life – and the lowness of that high life – is embodied in the figures of various women, and often mocked for its hypocrisy: in Bambai Raat, there is a “Dance, Dinner and Fashion Parade” organised to raise money for the Bihar famine, under the shadow of an exceptionally fine linocut of starving peasants, likely by the great artist Chittoprasad.

Despite its noirish aspirations – rain-slicked streets, fast cars, chases, party girls and even the stylish debutante Jalal Agha as a tragically hopeful party boy — there remains something prosaic about Bambai Raat. Abbas was well aware of his limitations -- but didn’t see them as such. In his autobiography he wrote: “My forays into the sanctified field of literature and even into the rarefied field of cinema have been described, and dismissed, as only the projections of my journalism... But good, imaginative, inspired journalism has always been indistinguishable from realistic, purposeful, contemporary literature.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 May 2017.

Note: Two other recent columns on journalists and journalism in Hindi cinema, here and here. 

A Political Actor

My Mirror column:

Balraj Sahni would have turned 104 on May 1. What made him such an unusual figure in Indian filmdom?

Measuring a film actor's contribution ordinarily means enumerating his screen appearances: "In a film career spanning 25 years, Balraj Sahni acted in over 125 films." But Balraj Sahni was no ordinary actor. Delivering the 1972 convocation address at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Sahni stated the above fact - but far from sounding proud, he expressed regret at the "the special conditions of film making in our country" that had enabled it. 

"In the same period, a contemporary European or American actor would have done thirty or thirty-five. From this you can imagine... A vast number of books which I should have read, I have not been able to read. So many events I should have taken part in have passed me by... the frustration increases when I ask myself how many of these... films had anything significant in them?...Perhaps a few."

There are few people in any field, let alone the Indian film world, who can speak with such astonishing honesty about their careers or their industry. And Sahni's perspicacity went together with grace.

"[A] great many of our films are such that the very mention of them would raise a laugh among you... even though some of you may dream of becoming stars yourselves," said Sahni in the same address. "It is not easy for me to laugh at Hindi films. I earn my bread from them. They have brought me plenty of fame and wealth. To some extent at least, I owe to Hindi films the high honour which you have given me today." (That last sentence might betray a subtle sarcasm: PC Joshi, respected Communist Party of India (CPI) leader and Sahni's old friend, has written of how CPI(M) students at JNU had threatened to protest because "the university was being disgraced by inviting a film star to deliver its convocation address".)

Otherwise, Sahni's speech was exemplary: asking students to think about the great questions of their time, in a style that was lucid but not dumbed down. Reading it forty-five years later, in the week of Sahni's 104th birth anniversary, I am struck not just by the quality of his thought - asking sharp questions about the meaning of freedom, at a national level and an individual one, that no-one seems capable of asking even in 2017 - but by his keenness to reach out to his audience. That desire to communicate may well have been what united the disparate parts of Sahni's life: wanting to make other people think along with him.

After graduation, he may have considered teaching and journalism as a possible route to this. He and wife Damayanti spent 1937-39 in Santiniketan, with Sahni teaching Hindi at the university and absorbing whatever they could from what was then a uniquely fertile artistic environment. He also worked briefly in journalism in Lahore; then, in a year spent at Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, he helped edit a journal called Nai Taleem. When he sailed to war-time Britain, it was to work as a Hindi radio announcer at the BBC from 1940 to 1944. In Britain, the young couple arrived at two decisions - one, to join the Communist Party (it was Damayanti who joined first), and two, to return to India and work as actors.

Soon after their arrival in Bombay, they discovered the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). At the first meeting Sahni attended, K.A. Abbas - then an acquaintance -- dropped a bomb by announcing that the next IPTA play, Zubeidaa, would be directed by Sahni.

The association with IPTA was to last for many years. Writing, directing and acting in plays that drew upon Indian folk forms - jatra in Bengal, tamasha in Maharashtra, nautanki in Uttar Pradesh -- but delivering progressive messages turned out to be something Sahni was very good at. IPTA also produced a film called Dharti ke Lal (1946) - directed by Abbas, with a script based on two Bangla plays by Bijon Bhattacharya about the Bengal famine and a Krishen Chander story. Sahni was an Assistant Director, as well as playing the elder brother who struggles to keep the family land from being sold.

Balraj Sahni in Waqt, as the still-in-love Lala Kedarnath

Sahni soon became a popular actor, appearing in more mainstream films. He never developed anything like a star persona. And yet, the roles he played did perhaps have something in common. In Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen, he played a character very different from but sociologically akin to Dharti ke Lal - afarmer who had lost his land to the moneylender and been forced to work as a rickshaw-puller in the city. The alienation of labour from land and the miseries of forced migration have never been more powerfully embodied in an actor's face.

In unlikely milieus like Dharti ke Lal and Do Bigha Zameen, he had already offered glimpses of the loving, even companionate, long-term marriage. And then there is Yash Chopra's Waqt, where his romancing of on-screen wife Achala Sachdev as his Zohra-Jabeen remains a fixture for singing uncles.

But in several other films (Amiya Chakrabarty's 1955 Seema, Shahid Latif's 1958 Sone ki Chidiya and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1960 Anuradha), Sahni played the idealistic man who places a larger social cause above a woman's emotional needs - and his own. His last great role - in MS Sathyu's Garm Hava - also showed us a man torn between the personal and the political. Perhaps that was where his strength lay: in knowing how deeply those two things are intertwined - and being able to convey the hurt when they insisted on pulling apart.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 May 2017.