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.

Bombay Confidential

My Mirror column:

In a murder mystery set in the film industry 40 years ago, the crime writer HRF Keating tapped into our preoccupation with tinsel town.

Fiction writers are strange creatures. The British crime writer HRF Keating famously did not visit India until he had written nine books featuring the Maharashtrian policeman Ganesh Ghote. Keating didn’t originally intend to stay with Ghote longer than a a couple of books. His first Ghote mystery, The Perfect Murder (1964), won him a gold dagger for fiction from the Crime Writers' Association and commercial success (especially in America). In response to readers’ demands, he obliged, writing nine Ghote novels by 1974, becoming anointed India expert of sorts. 

In 1976, with his tenth book featuring the Bombay-based detective, Keating finally took the plunge into what might be the city's most obvious real-life locale for intrigue – the film industry. Forty years down, Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote's take on Bombay's commercial cinema in the 1970s is perhaps more interesting for Indian readers than it was then. Especially if we treat it not as some sort of documentary evidence of what the industry was like, but of what about this world -- and our relationship with it – seems to have struck a Western outsider.

Keating won points from me with his very first paragraph: “The Deputy Commissioner was reading a filmi magazine. There was no mistaking it. Inspector Ghote had come hurrying into his big airy office in response to a crisp summons on the intercom and he had caught him in the act.”

The scene is set consummately, establishing Ghote's position in the Crime Branch bureaucracy – as well as Hindi cinema's position in the Indian cultural universe. I gesture to the crucial fact that Hindi cinema was, for the ’70s Indian elite, still very much a guilty pleasure — a low-brow taste that many partook of, but that anyone in any position of seriousness preferred not to be seen indulging in publicly. (For years, even filmmakers working on the edges of commercial Hindi cinema made such tongue-in-cheek references to its popularity – Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, which cast Jaya Bhaduri as a teenager besotted with the iconic Dharmendra (playing himself), was a dissection of the Indian public's besottedness with popular cinema. A film like Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor parodied Hindi movie romance both in letter and spirit. Guddi, if I remember right, also actually begins by gently mocking a figure of authority – a school teacher – for being immersed in a film magazine.)

The book's plot has Ghote called in to investigate the mysterious death of an ace actor during the shooting of a Hindi film adaptation of Macbeth (something that took another thirty years to happen in reality: Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool). Ghote's character may be a bit off sociologically, but in his disavowal of any knowledge of Hindi cinema and his simultaneous desire to claim familiarity with Macbeth, I think Keating cottons onto something about the split cultural self of the Indian elite. Popular Bombay cinema in the '70s – and its most famous denizens – had a great deal of money and influence and a hold on millions of people, but our Anglophone elite only thirty years after independence was reluctant to grant it any cultural capital.

The book is also interesting as a portrait of a pre-liberalisation economy, in which of course the film world is a shaping influence and participant. We hear of the parallel black money economy in which everyone receives shadow payments, we hear familiar terms like Dearness Allowance and Vigilance and we also hear of how the secret desires of a pre-liberalisation elite are catered to — the importing of cosmetics, “foreign television sets and watches with digital face”, the making of blue films on the sly in Bombay, the smuggling out of the films and the smuggling in of the girls in them.

Keating gets many details right – some extras are described as Ghati women, there is a “tall Pathan chowkidar”. Still he falters often when it comes to words and names. The murdered actor is called Dhartiraj, a rendition of Prithviraj that feels terribly unidiomatic; the Macbeth film, in a rather obvious inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, is titled ‘Khoon ka Gaddi’ when it should grammatically be ‘Khoon ki Gaddi’; his use of phrases like “Choop chaap” and “Ek dum” can seem colonial and bizarrely dated. But Keating is clearly interested in linguistic specificity – from the very first paragraph he refers often and without annotation to the “filmi duniya”; he revels in using Indian words like raddiwallah and crorepati; he devotes a section to explaining “chumchas”. And all through, he renders dialogue in an excessive but heartfelt Indian English: “Wining and dining, booted and suited,” “Madam, if you are wanting to see me, I am altogether at your...”, or “But, excuse me, to make a film in bits and pieces only, is that truly possible?”

But to return, in conclusion, to Ghote: whether he is meeting Seth Chagan Lal, the beady-eyed moneybags with threats as cold as his cash, the swaggering Ravi Kumar or the almond-eyed screen goddess Nilima, Ghote finds himself unable to behave authoritatively. It is as if, in his unbidden transformation from stern law enforcer to obliging supplicant, he embodies our relationship to the filmi duniya. However much we might scorn the silver screen, it taps into some part of us that's secretly helpless.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 July 2017.

The hero and the human

My BL Ink column on 7 May, 2016:

A Satyajit Ray classic that turned 50 this week, Nayak seems to come from a universe that is unrecognisably distant from the one which creates films like Fan

Satyajit Ray’s film Nayak (The Hero) turned 50 yesterday. Released on May 6, 1966, it was an unusual one for Ray in several respects. For one thing, it was only his second original film script (although he had been directing for over a decade by then). For another, it featured the contemporary Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar, whom Ray had never worked with before, and who represented the sort of cinema of which Ray quite clearly saw himself as the antithesis.

But of course it made perfect sense — pragmatic as well as cinematic — to cast a superstar in the role of a superstar. Nayak centres on 24 hours in the life of Arindam Mukherjee, a hugely popular film star who is — somewhat grudgingly — on his way from Calcutta to Delhi to collect a National Award. What is remarkable — and risks making the film unbelievable today — is that Arindam makes this journey by train, and entirely without an entourage.

That this premise was a trifle contrived even in 1966 is made clear by the film’s initial scenes, when the star’s agent-cum-secretary points out that he’s left it too late to get a seat on the plane, or a reserved private coupé on the train. But putting the dapper, jaded Arindam on a long train ride allows Ray the perfect situation in which to combine his three stated objectives: scrutinising the life of a film star, looking into the behaviour of fans, and making a film about a train journey.

Right from the start though, it is clear that we are in a universe almost unrecognisably distant from the one which creates a film like Fan. Arindam’s arrival on the train causes a flutter of excitement, but he is not mobbed. He shares a compartment with a family, sits in the dining car by himself, ruffles a little girl’s hair. The India of 1966 contains neither swarming paparazzi nor phone-flourishing selfie-seekers. The train’s upper-middle-class clientele does contain some Arindam fans — though Ray, with seemingly irrepressible snideness, makes clear that this is a part that can only be played by children or somewhat foolish women. These may make the occasional autograph request, but on the whole the star is left to conduct his business — under their curious gazes.

The thing about Nayak that appears truly unimaginable in 2016, however, is the number of passengers who treat Arindam and his world with disdain. Their reasons for abjuring cinema combine the moral with the aesthetic. One doddering old gent, whom even the film star recognises from his name as “the one who writes letters to The Statesman”, loses no opportunity to lecture him on the immorality of actors and alcohol (especially since they go together). Another successful boxwallah type turns up his nose at the sort of person he must share space with — admittedly, upon having read the news of Arindam getting into a brawl at a party. (These old men reminded me of a story about my Nana, who spent a whole plane ride in the ’60s wondering why the gentleman next to him seemed miffed when he cordially asked him what he did. It was Rajendra Kumar.)

Even without the moral censure, there is a pervasive sense in Nayak that films — at least popular Indian films — are not art, not serious or, at any rate, not worthy pursuits for the intelligent person. And the film star, despite his fame and riches, recognises his suspect status when asked for an interview by the non-gushing Miss Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore, her seriousness signalled by her spectacles), he is quick to assume that she doesn’t enjoy Bengali films. And she is quick to retort: “Bastabikatar ektu abhaab (A slight lack of reality).”

It isn’t just realism, however, that can cure film actors of what ails them. In one of Nayak’s rather heavy-handed flashbacks, a youthful Arindam grapples with his mentor Shankar da’s resistance to the very idea of film acting. The theatre, says Shankar da, is where an actor has a real audience; in a film, he is but a puppet in the hands of the director. This notion of the film star as a puppet appeared just a few years later in another film made by a Bengali — Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1970). There, it was Dharmendra who played himself, and Utpal Dutt (as the film-struck Jaya Bhaduri’s psychologist uncle) who offered a long exposition of how little the ‘hero’ actually participated in the heroics on screen.

The humanising of the hero — which is also part of the point of Guddi — is, in Nayak, both more intimate and more brutal. It plays out, at one level, as the classic romance narrative: the emotionally repressed hero suddenly finding a girl he can speak to freely. And superimposing that narrative onto a star-journalist interaction is an astute form of cinematic wish-fulfilment. Tagore’s character first buttonholes Arindam both out of curiosity and for professional gain. She runs a women’s magazine called Adhunika, which ordinarily doesn’t feature cinema, but an interview with Arindam, she knows, would be a big hit. But the more clearly she sees Arindam’s feet of clay, the less she is inclined to expose him.

Watching Nayak today, the film seems a little let down by its most dramatic bits — Arindam’s dreams (or rather nightmares) are too literal and too stagey at the same time, and his recounting of errors seems harsher than necessary. But it remains a striking portrait. Not so much of the star or the fan, but of that hazy figure we may have lost to history: the Non-Fan.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 7 May 2016.

Good Fans and Bad Fans

My Mirror column yesterday:

Watching Fan made me think about the lives of Indian film fans, both on and off the silver screen.

Narcissism is integral to stardom. But in Fan, Shah Rukh Khan has gone where no superstar has gone before: he has played, in the same film, two versions of himself. As Aryan Khanna, the superstar, he looks like his contemporary self (and the footage supposedly from Aryan's early years in the industry is Khan's own). As Gaurav Chandna, the fan, Khan presents a persona that echoes his own screen self from an earlier era, the crazed young stalker of Darr and Baazigar.

The figure of the film fan has appeared in Hindi cinema before, but in every previous instance I can think of, fandom has been a route to romantic fantasy. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi (1971) cast debutant actress Jaya Bhaduri (who had just graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India) as a schoolgirl besotted with Dharmendra. Bhaduri's Guddi is a charming mix of precocious and innocent - confident enough to use filmi acting as a way of tricking the adults around her, and yet so dumbstruck by Dharmendra's screen image as to decide that she will be a lifelong adoring Meera to his unseeing Krishna.

Mukherjee's tone is gently pedagogic about the psychological impact of films on society - there's the sly scene in the beginning where the teacher tells Guddi's class to produce a "paanch pannon ka lekh" on 'Janta ka swabhaav, us par cinema ka prabhaav' and then promptly opens her copy of a Hindi film magazine to read while they write it. Dharmendra plays himself, with his friend Gulzar's script enabling him to add to his public persona this additional layer of the socially concerned film star who goes out of his way to undo the impact of his reel life on his fans' real lives. Gulzar and Mukherjee want us to see Guddi's emergence from fandom as a painful but necessary coming of age.

Fandom is an infantile state of being in the 1999 release Mast, too - just not one from which escape is encouraged. Instead director Ram Gopal Varma creates an infantile star to match the infantile fan. The schoolboyish Kittu (Aftab Shivdasani) runs away to Bombay to meet his idol Mallika (Urmila Matondkar). When he discovers that the superstar is actually a sweet, sad orphan kept under lock and key by her evil mamaji, the scene is set for the ultimate fan fantasy - the fan rescues the star, and she recognises him for the wonderful creature he is, and they live happily ever after.

Rajat Kapur's 2003 Raghu Romeo also features a crazed fan 'rescuing' his heroine. But if Mast entered entirely into the fan's imagination, Kapur's film is a sharp and often hysterically funny takedown, presenting the fan as someone unable to differentiate image from reality. Vijay Raaz, playing the eponymous Raghu with a perfect hangdog expression, kidnaps an uppity television star (Maria Goretti) ostensibly to save her from a hitman. He keeps the actress in captivity for days, driving her up the wall by insisting on treating her as the pious housewife she plays in the daily soap he watches obsessively. Many things happen, but Kapur's resolution to Raghu's fixation with 'Neetaji' involves not just her clear romantic rejection of him, but also her screen death.

Fan is different from these, because Gaurav's relationship with Aryan cannot be subsumed easily under the category of romantic love. He does not only love Aryan -- he wants to be him. Fan's premise is much closer to the real-life phenomenon of organised fandom in India, which is overwhelmingly made up of all-male fan associations focused on male stars. Many such fans model themselves on their heroes; those who manage 'duplicate' status can sometimes build a career out of performing the star's hit dances, just as Gaurav does in the film. It is a strange combination -- a mode of self-promotion that the fan presents as altruistic support of the star. (One such group of Salman Khan lookalikes in Nagpur featured in the insightful 2014 documentary Being Bhaijaan.)

Narcissism apart, Fan plays too much to its imagined audience of fans, with unending chases and fisticuffs between the two SRKs making the film drag. But its plot taps astutely into what the film scholar SV Srinivas, in his superb book about the Chiranjeevi phenomenon, has described as "conditional loyalty". "The fan is a loyal follower and devotee only if the star lives up to the expectations the fan has of him..." writes Srinivas. "This [sense of entitlement] results in a situation in which fans become the guardians of the star's image and resort to drastic actions in his name."

The irrationality of fans -- usually jobless young men -- is linked to potential criminality: black-marketing tickets, rioting or 'rowdyism'. Srinivas documents attempts by Telugu stars to school the fan into becoming "a responsible admirer committed to socially purposeful activities". It is this spectre of the criminalised fan that Fan summons up. It makes some token gestures towards suggesting the star's fallibility as a human being. But by presenting Gaurav as an infantile fan gone rogue, the film becomes another part of the pedagogic machinery by which SRK the star wants to 'reform' his fans.

Gaurav spends his whole life duplicating his hero, and when his hero finally talks to him at length, it is only to lecture him about living his own life. But Gaurav, it seems, can only step away from Aryan by dying. Is death the fan's one original act?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 April 2016.