Disenchanted Nights

1957’s second-highest Hindi grosser is much watched but little understood. Pyaasa may have been filled with poets and poetry, but it’s true, bitter subject was money.

Pyaasa started life as a story idea called ‘Kashmakash’ (‘Dilemma’), which Guru Dutt first put to paper in 1947 or ’48, when he was just 22. It was nine years later, once he had established a name with films like Baazi and Mr & Mrs 55, that Dutt returned to his tale of a struggling poet. By then he had his team in place: writer Abrar Alvi (clearly responsible for a great deal of Pyaasa’s script, although he is credited only for dialogue), lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, and cinematographer VK Murthy — all of whom reached deep into themselves to transform Dutt’s germ of an idea into one of Indian cinema’s abiding gems.

Casting our eyes back sixty years, it seems remarkable that this melancholy piece of filmmaking, with a hero afflicted not just by romantic or familial tragedy but by a near-total disenchantment with the world, could become the second-highest Hindi grosser at the box office. We clearly had a greater appetite for tragedy then – and greater empathy for a hero who dreamt of escaping the material condition.

The film opens with the young poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) lying serenely in a garden, composing beautiful verse as he looks at the flowers and bees around him. Suddenly he rises anxiously, and we see him dwarfed by the dark shadows of trees. In the next scene, he must rescue his folder of nazms from a smalltime magazine office: his responses to the poverty and exploitation around him have found their way into the dustbin. “Aapki bakwaas koi shaayari hai? Pad gaye bhookh aur berozgaari ke peechhe latth leke! (Is this rubbish of yours poetry? You’ve taken a stick and gone after hunger and unemployment!),” mocks the smarmy old sherwani-clad editor, before waxing lyrical on what ‘proper’ poetry should be: “Gul-o-bulbul pe sh’er kahiye, jaam-o-suraahi pe sh’er kahiye... (Write a couplet on the flower and the nightingale, write one on the goblet and the wine flask...)”

Vijay scorns this unctuous injunction and walks out with his poems. But preserving this independence of mind, the film suggests, is not easy – especially if the body needs to be preserved first. A penniless Vijay tries his hand at manual labour, placing a dhoti-clad gentleman’s purchases in his car and earning a coin for his services. But when he presents the coin as payment for a meal, it turns out to be fake. Later, hopeful of having his poems published, he accepts ajob as an assistant in a publishing house, which sometimes requires him to serve in the home of the boss, Mr Ghosh (Rehman). It is worth noting here that Dutt and Alvi display an unreconstructed middle class horror at the idea of the educated young man performing menial labour – a horror amplified in women’s eyes, whether the ex-lover watching Vijay serve drinks, or Vijay’s mother imagining him having to take care of himself.

Poetry may lie at the centre of the plot, but Pyaasa’s driving theme is money. Whether it’s a poet or a sex worker, the world seems intent upon making them sell themselves. While suggesting this analogy, the film thankfully also recognises how deeply one’s freedom is inflected by class. At one end of the scale are those whose survival depends on finding clients, for which they might have to resort to deception: the streetwalker Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) sings a seemingly romantic song only to lure Vijay, whom she assumes is a potential customer; the maalishwala Abdus Sattar (Johnny Walker) is often seen tricking people into a head massage. These are people on the margins, and the film does not judge them – in fact it offers what might be among the most acute depictions of a streetwalker’s life in the scene where Gulabo is thrown out of a moving car, and when she demands her money, thrown into the jaws of ‘the law’: a beat havaldar.

It is much harsher on the middle class woman – Meena (Mala Sinha), who has left Vijay for the security of marriage to a richer man (Rehman). Vijay pronounces her shallow and greedy; only VK Murthy’s remarkable camerawork that allows us to see her position with any degree of empathy. In the scene where she talks to Vijay in the lift, she ends by saying agitatedly, “Arrey, main toh bhool hi gayi, mujhe toh upar jaana hai” — and we watch the elevator doors close over her made-up, bejewelled visage: the rise to the top for a woman like her involves giving up her freedom. In another scene, Murthy takes an almost operatic pleasure in showing us Meena as the memsahib in the white limousine, emerging hurriedly from this lap of luxury when she sees Vijay in the distance. But in Murthy’s framing, the liveried Sikh chauffeur who opens the car door also bars the memsahib’s path to her old love.

The film adopts a properly romantic stance, with the hero picking obscurity and freedom over worldly fame and wealth. In a society where the only good poet is a dead poet, Vijay literally chooses social death.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Sep 2017.

Book Review: Modern love, ’50s style

Published in BL Ink:

What was Hindi cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ all about? A new book wants us to take off our nation-focused spectacles and open our eyes to how the ’50s Bombay film world shaped the modern Indian idea of romance.

Film scholar Aarti Wani shows how the public conversation around star pairs shaped our response to their onscreen romances. Seen here are Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, with colleagues Dev Anand and Raj Khosla
(The Hindu archives)

The Hindi cinema of the 1950s has received so much attention, both scholarly and popular, that it seems an over-ploughed field. But film scholar Aarti Wani has written a book that casts fresh light on this familiar terrain. Rather than looking again at the ways in which 1950s cinema spoke to — and of — India’s new nationhood, Wani examines the models it constructed of romance. In fact, she argues, “the category of the national”, while explicating several aspects of post-Independence Hindi cinema, such as the creation of a national geography through travel and landscape, or of a moral economy based on a certain portrait of tradition, has failed to “account for the 1950s films’ overarching investment in romantic love.”

Wani’s principal argument is that love and romance were Hindi cinema’s fantasy of the modern in the ’50s. She starts with an obvious but important point — while romance was the ubiquitous narrative content of ’50s cinema, there was very little space for romantic love in the lived experiences of most Indians who watched these films. Of course, such an imbalance has existed with regard to literary depictions of love long before cinema. Sudipta Kaviraj has suggested that novelistic depictions of love “create an impression of commonplaceness of such action and behaviour”, whereas in fact, love relationships continued to be extremely rare in the society that was being described in these novels.

This modernity was signalled, among other things, by the fact that in contrast to films from later decades, ’50s Hindi films were marked by the relative absence of family. Most ’50s heroes had no father or mother, that is, no parental family. And most ’50s heroines, Wani argues, either had non-oppositional, even supportive, families, or they were shown with villainous fathers/father-figures from whom they needed to be rescued. Films like Awaara, Devdas and Mughal-e-Azam are exceptions. Very few ’50s film protagonists lived in joint families — thus freed from the “crippling family ties that would thwart romantic aspirations in real life”.

This cinematic vision of romantic love, Wani’s argument continues, was entwined with the experience of urban modernity; the city functioning as a site of “unexpected meetings and romantic encounters between strangers”. In contrast to love affairs in rural settings, which often had tragic ends — Arzoo(1950), Deedar (1951) or Devdas (1955) — the urban fabric seemed to allow for young men and women to choose and court potential partners. The primary locale for these filmi encounters, of course, was Mumbai (though Calcutta did feature in films like Pyaasa and Howrah Bridge).

The urban modern was closely tied to spatial exploration. Pointing to the many romantic connections made aboard trains, in taxis and buses, and in garages, Wani makes a rather lovely point: that romance in the ’50s film did not need transportation to an exotic or foreign location — “the dream remained eminently quotidian”. Of course, women and men — even those on the silver screen — did not have equal access to these city spaces, especially in a host of films that played up a noirish iconography, in which gambling, bank heists, thefts, kidnapping and even murders were deployed as sources of excitement. Still, Wani analyses some very interesting films — like 1958’s Solva Saal, starring Waheeda Rehman, and 1957’s Gateway of India, featuring Madhubala — in which the frisson is produced by the female protagonist’s adventurous, even dangerous, brush with diverse spaces in the city.

The other female figure identified with the cosmopolitan spaces of the city is, of course, the club singer/dancer. Wani notes that the role of the vamp/gangster’s moll in ’50s films was not reserved for particular actresses as it later became. The actress singing in a club might be the leading lady of that film — think Madhubala in Howrah Bridge — Geeta Bali, Sheila Ramani and Shakila all had roles that spilled across these boundaries.

Madhubala as a nightclub singer in Howrah Bridge (1958) was the film's heroine

Perhaps the most remarkable reworking of the split between the ‘heroine’ and the ‘other woman’ is in Pyaasa. Guru Dutt crafts a melancholic critique of the city as a calculating, inhospitable place based on the opposition between two female figures. But here the prostitute Gulabo (Rehman) is the true romantic, an appreciator of poetry, while the college-educated bourgeois woman (Mala Sinha’s Meena) is the faithless, money-minded one. (In a related aside, Wani points to the rising anxiety about women marrying for status rather than love, a fear expressed in mid-’50s films like Mr and Mrs 55 and Paying Guest.)

Wani’s next section, about the role of the song in the creation of a modern Indian romantic sensibility, is the book’s weakest. Several classic songs — ‘Yeh raat yeh chandni’ from Jaal, ‘Dum bhar jo udhar moonh phere’ from Awaara, ‘Do ghadi woh jo paas aa baithe’ from Gateway of India — are analysed in detail, and these analyses are usually interesting, if long-winded in a predictable academic way. Wani spends several pages, for example, on the framing of the Christian Maria in the Jaal song, and while I found fascinating the antecedents she claims for this character (in Ramamoorthy’s analysis of the interracial ’30s ‘Modern Girl’), I was often stopped in my tracks by sentences like “The spectacle of nature that frames the drama of this seduction marks Maria’s sexuality as natural” or “Maria’s performance, her expression, gestures and movement, along with the black and white mise-en-scene of the night saturated by the insistent sounds of the song give spatiality to desire that is cinematically spectacular and provides parallel moments of pleasure and identification”.

The rest of this section makes a shifting set of arguments about how space is used in the ’50s film song. Among Wani’s most specific claims is that duets were very rarely sung in a closed room (“which in fact offers a spatial setting for its possible consummation”). More broadly, she argues that romantic songs made for a fantasy in which the ‘public’ sphere could be occupied “for non-public, personal ends”. Moving onto songs of sorrow, she seeks to map songs sung by the heroine onto closed spaces and those by the hero onto open spaces — “a river bank, a sea shore, on a bench in a park, or on a rooftop”. I was less persuaded by Wani’s claims about how sound spills out of “the edges of the frame”, making songs in general a way of destabilising our perception and experience. Her conclusion seems particularly strange, using as it does a quotation on Hollywood “producing a new common sense about how love looked and what was required to overcome the manifold dangers that threatened it” to make her point about the film song. None of this is wrong, but it feels terribly unspecific. Perhaps the problem is songs are too slippery to stay put in neat analytic boxes — Wani herself goes from categorising the song as “a conduit of narrative meaning” to something that stakes claims “in excess of what the narrative allows”.

The final third of the book is where Wani abandons her laboured shot-by-shot analytic technique for a lively weaving together of film texts with journalistic and anecdotal texts about stars who had attained cinematic and public status as romantic pairs. Drawing on Neepa Majumdar’s pathbreaking work Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (2009), which locates the phenomenon of stardom in ’40s India within the context of a deep social ambivalence about cinema, Wani scrutinises how Bombay film stars in the ’50s were anointed as experts on love and romance — being asked to write articles and answer readers’ questions.

Returning to her framing argument about the rarity of love relationships in Indian society at the time, she suggests that stars began to be seen as authorities on the subject both because they performed love on screen and because they were among the very few people with any real-life experience of love affairs. Wani’s study of 1950s film journalism in English, Hindi and Marathi is attentive to detail, distinguishing between the different registers — sympathetic, gossipy, or judgemental — in which the stars’ love lives were produced as artefacts for public consumption.

Finally, Wani zooms in on the four legendary star-pairs of the decade — Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman, Nargis-Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand-Suraiya and Dilip Kumar-Madhubala. Her mapping of the contours of their real-life affairs onto some of their famous cinematic romances produces some of the most fascinating readings of these films. In moving beyond the official narrative on screen to the unofficial knowledge of stars’ lives which, without a doubt, informs the way we watch films, Wani offers an immensely productive lens with which to look at Hindi cinema. Work on Chiranjeevi and his fans, by SV Srinivas, offered a complex and thoughtful reading of film texts in the light of stardom and fan-expectations. Wani’s work is an allied but original project.

Despite its sometimes meandering and repetitive prose, Fantasy of Modernity is a thoughtful and enjoyable book, which contains several careful readings of films and offers a persuasive way of looking at both ’50s cinema and 20th century Indian ideas of romance. The many typographical errors — misspelled proper names, like ‘Ashish Nandi’ instead of ‘Ashis Nandy’, or ‘Chidanand Dasgupta’ instead of ‘Chidananda’, recurring errors like “libratory”, and completely erratic Romanising of Hindi lyrics (what should be spelt ‘anbujh’ is instead spelt, on the same page, alternately as ‘anbooz’ and ‘anbhujh’) — are extremely unfortunate distractions from an otherwise rich and immersive read.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 11 June 2016.

In her own name

My BL Ink column for February:

Waheeda Rehman turned 78 this month. Nasreen Munni Kabir’s book-length interview is a treat for fans of the veteran actress.

If Raj Khosla had had his way, there might never have been a star called Waheeda Rehman. At the meeting where the debutante actress was to sign her contract with Guru Dutt Films, Khosla — the director of CID (1956), her first Hindi film — declared that her name was too long. But the quiet 17-year-old was no pushover. “My parents have given me this name and I like it,” she answered. “I won’t change it.” Khosla, Rehman remembers, “got all het up” (“He was a Punjabi, you know, and they can get all excited.”) When he pointed out that ‘everyone’ had changed their names, from Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) to Nargis (Fatima Rashid), Meena Kumari (Mahjabeen Bano) to Madhubala (Mumtaz Jahan), she was adamant: “I am not everyone.”

The name stayed. On February 3 this year, the bearer of the name turned 78.

Sixty years after CID, it is impossible to imagine Hindi cinema without Waheeda Rehman. The innate self-possessed quality that helped her resist a filmi naamkaran also gave her the confidence to venture happily into roles more timid heroines might have run from. She seems to have had no compunctions starting out as a vamp (CID’s Kamini is the villain's moll, though she has a change of heart), or later, accepting the role of Rosie in Guide — a woman who leaves her neglectful husband for another man and a life as a dancer, and later leaves the lover too — or playing the mother of Amitabh Bachchan in Trishul (1978) when she played his wife in Kabhie Kabhie just two years earlier. (It’s also remarkable that in both these films, her characters are unwed mothers.)

Yet the reticent actor has never spent much time impressing the undeniable fact of her ‘difference’ upon us. The documentary filmmaker and writer Nasreen Munni Kabir took nearly a decade to persuade her to be interviewed. Although Kabir asks no tough or critical questions, the book that resulted —Conversations with Waheeda Rehman (2014) — is charming and thoughtful. Rehman firmly refuses, as she has done all her life, to speak of her relationship with Guru Dutt — whom she refers to throughout as ‘Guruduttji’, using the first half of his formal name, Gurudutt Padukone. But about almost everything else, she is quietly candid, turning a considered eye upon the industry as it once was. Her starting salary from Guru Dutt Productions was Rs.2000 a month, later increased to Rs.3500. “For Solva Saal, my first film as a freelancer, I received Rs.30,000. The highest I ever earned in my career was 7 lakh for a film.”

One of her recurring subjects is her relationship with dance. She started to learn Bharatanatyam as a nine-year-old in Rajahmundry. An asthmatic child, Rehman's first guru said dancing might help her lungs expand, and her mother “started regarding the dance lessons as a kind of treatment”. Her father, a government employee, not only disregarded the criticism of relatives who felt dance was not an appropriate activity for Muslim girls, but in fact encouraged the young Rehman and her sister Sayeeda to take the stage at for an official function in honour of Governor General C Rajagopalachari, just after Indian independence.

Rehman’s recall of how films were made in her time, especially of song-picturisations, is sharp: the innovative tracks created for the camera to film the circular shot at the end of her famous ‘snake dance’ in Guide, or the re-shoot of the ‘Chaudhvin ka Chand’ song in new colour technology, during which she had to dip chamois leather in an ice bucket and dab it on her face to keep the studio lights from burning her skin. She also makes striking general observations: the fact that male actors weren’t really required to dance in her time, or how film dances were often a melange of styles, with movements tailored to suit the frame.

There are several interesting accounts of male colleagues’ protectiveness: Rehman (the character actor) in the post-Pyaasa phase, ushering her and her mother out of parties where people were likely to drink till late; Raj Kapoor at the end of the Teesri Kasam shoot angering an assembled crowd at Bina Station by refusing to let them see Rehman, because “Why should they look at a woman anyway?”; senior lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri telling her she shouldn’t have taken a taxi alone all the way to Madh Island. Rehman does not say it in so many words, but the safeguarding of virtue was clearly crucial to a suitable public persona. Almost all her mentions of costumes, for instance, have to do with not wearing something inappropriately revealing.

Female colleagues appear as close friends. Nargis is seen in several of her personal photographs, including a remarkable one with her and Sunil Dutt at the Berlin Film festival, 1973, beaming as they sit on either side of Satyajit Ray — the same Ray Nargis criticised in 1980 as having grown famous by showcasing India’s poverty to the world. In more recent holiday pictures, we see the oft-discussed Bollywood girl gang which has sadly lost two members since the book’s release — Asha Parekh, Sadhana, Shammi, Helen, Nanda and Waheeda Rehman herself.

Kabir’s book-length interview suggests many possible follow-up conversations. It would be a joy if Rehman were persuaded to have them.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, Feb 12, 2016.

Bhanu Athaiya Interview

‘Before My Designs for Waqt, Women Wore Dumpy Salwars’ 

Bhanu Athaiya, 83, was born Bhanumati Annasaheb Rajopadhye in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, the third of seven children. After graduating from the JJ School of Art, she found her niche as a costume designer in Hindi cinema, and has never looked back, winning India’s first Oscar in 1982 for her costumes in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. She spoke to TRISHA GUPTA on the eve of launching her memoir, The Art of Costume Design, describing her five decades in the Mumbai film industry. Excerpts:

How did you end up working as a costume designer in Mumbai films?

I had a two-page spread in the popular magazine Eve’s Weekly where my brief was to draw inspiration from Indian heritage. My fashion illustrations were noted by directors and film stars. They asked my editor to set up a boutique, where I started to design dresses. That boutique was visited by everyone from Kamini Kaushal and Nargis to Ramanand Sagar. It was Kamini Kaushal who gave me my first assignment. I started by designing her personal wardrobe, and soon went on to design her costumes in films like Shahenshah and Chalis Baba Aur Ek Chor

How did you meet Guru Dutt?

Guru Dutt’s sister was studying with me in JJ School. My illustrations had made me famous. I had also presented my paintings at the Kala Ghoda Artists’ Centre alongside MF Husain and Krishen Khanna. Guru Dutt asked me to design costumes for CID.

How did costume design in cinema work when you started?

The director had a clear idea of what he wanted, and the art director and he would brief the tailors. Actors would also join in. I became a bridge between director and actor.

Who were the directors you particularly enjoyed working with?

Guru Dutt had the sensitivity to do what was needed. Like during Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, he felt I should make a trip to Calcutta. So I visited the old mansions, and met people, and shopped. The films I did for Guru Dutt were based on reality. Raj Kapoor, in contrast, demanded something unique. One had to be more creative: Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the Prem Rog dream sequence, which was an Arabian Nights fantasy. Or Henna’s Pakistani gypsy. Hindi cinema makes all kinds of demands. Songs, dream sequences, rain sequences — all these give scope to a costume designer.

Any clothes or ‘look’ that you created that became particularly popular?

Waqt (1965) brought in the form-fitting salwar kameez and made it the rage. Before that, women had been wearing broad kurtas and dumpy salwars. Then Mumtaz’s sari in Brahmachari (1968) — the orange stitched sari that was wound round her body so that every twist revealed something — that was copied even by designers. In Nikaah, I gave the nawabi look a contemporary spin, focussing not on embroidery but on Hyderabadi pearl jewellery.

Has Hindi cinema’s approach to costume design changed?

The costume designer should design the whole look of a film. Like in Lagaan, I created the costumes across the board, from the villagers to the British elite. In the Oscars, that is a rule – that all costumes must have been designed by one person. But in most films here, even to - day, actors’ clothes are taken care of by costume designers and someone else fills the gaps. Stars come and say, ‘Get my dresses designed by so-and-so’. The 1980s brought in a lot of fashion designers into cinema. But designing for a star and designing for a character – that is a different cup of tea.

Published in Tehelka magazine, 2010.